Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘I can see that.’

  The grin hadn’t left his face. ‘How?’

  ‘Because you’ve eaten every scrap of your eggs and bacon and sausage. But you’ve left your black pudding intact.’

  He looked at his plate. ‘You’re telling me that stuff’s edible, Martin, then I’m obliged to take your word for it. But only because you seem such an honest boy.’

  My father slapped the table in a show of mirth. It occurred to me that his optimism was probably the reason he’d made such a success of his life. It seemed unsinkable.

  ‘Don’t like him, do you?’

  We were in the Saab, on the way back to London.

  ‘He’s supercilious. He’s patronising. And I think there’s more to him than meets the eye.’

  ‘I hope there’s more to him than there was to Frank Hadley,’ my father said.

  The new boatyard was on the other side of Southampton Water, between Calshot and Lepe, just beyond the point and the old Calshot lifeboat station. My father had agreed to pay for Peitersen to stay for the duration at a country hotel in Exbury. The hotel was old but very comfortable, with an excellent restaurant. But Peitersen had said he expected to bed down most nights in the yard. He said with the coming of the spring and warmer evenings, it would be comfortable enough and the most practical way of making sure we did not slip behind the schedule agreed. Of course, such talk was music to my father’s ears.

  ‘You know, Martin, you don’t have to share this voyage.’ His voice was gentle.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You might not wish to come. Suzanne might not wish you to go. I’d understand totally if you pulled out now. It would give me three months to find someone to help me crew and three months is ample time.’

  ‘I’m coming, Dad. Nothing would stop me.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. He reached across and gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘I’m delighted that’s how you feel.’

  We got our window in the weather the following day. I did not go down to witness the events. It was bright and balmy, helicopter weather, so my services as a chauffeur were not required. Peitersen chartered the tug and a barge he’d put on standby, and the Dark Echo was winched aboard the barge and secured there without incident. She was unloaded, again without incident, at the new yard after a short journey over innocent blue water. My father told me over the phone that evening that the conditions had made the turbulent grey weather of the preceding weeks seem like some weird Wagnerian dream. Frank Hadley hadn’t been present for the extrication of the vessel from his dock. ‘Didn’t ask where he was,’ my father said. ‘Probably busy having his dolphin stuffed.’

  ‘Peitersen?’

  ‘Competence personified. He’s a boatman to the soles of his sea boots, Martin. And he has the gift of leadership. Men do as he asks, almost before he has to ask them.’

  I nodded, which is a pretty stupid thing to do on the telephone, where only words and vocal expression count. But I did not like Jack Peitersen and did not think that I ever would.

  But he was true to what he had said in his airmail letter to Hadley. There were no more gruesome accidents. April brought a prolonged spell of warm spring weather and the small team of craftsmen he assembled made solid progress. There was debate over whether to fit an engine and, if so, what type to fit. I did not participate in this. My father was reluctant to have the boat powered by anything but wind. Peitersen thought it was only a matter of practicality that would have no real impact on the aesthetics of the boat and would make it far easier for inexperienced sailors like my father and myself to get her in and out of harbour without mishap. He said the engine was only one of a number of innovations that would improve the boat’s performance without compromising her integrity. The others were a state-of-the-art land to sea communications system, a satellite navigation system and sonar as a precaution to prevent us running aground or tearing the hull on submerged rocks or coral banks. All of these would be battery powered.

  My father pondered at length on the merits or otherwise of the engine. It would be an exaggeration to say that he agonised, but not so very much of one. Spalding, the war hero and racing champion, had not required an engine. Peitersen apparently laughed when this point was made and said that if the small clean marine turbines of today had existed then, his great-grandfather would have fitted one to the Dark Echo as a matter of course. My dad told me the clincher in eventually agreeing to the engine was that it did not prevent the boat from qualifying for official status as a genuine vintage schooner. But I think the clincher was the weight he accorded Peitersen’s opinion, as the man’s influence grew as a consequence of his obvious expertise and the impressive progress he was making generally with the boat.

  There were two big set-pieces in the restoration my father was very keen for me to attend. These were the fitting of the replacement main mast and the attachment to the fore-deck of the capstan, chain and anchor. Both were scheduled to be fitted early in May. My theoretical seamanship was impressive enough by now and I knew my way out of Whitstable and around the Isle of Sheppey on an actual yacht under sail. But I began to believe that I really needed first-hand experience aboard a schooner of similar vintage to the Dark Echo. It was a prerequisite if I was going to get aboard my father’s boat with any genuine sense of competence.

  I did an internet search and found a holiday company that allowed you to masquerade as a nineteenth-century seafarer aboard a variety of restored boats. Theirs were all far more spartan than my father intended the refurbished Dark Echo to be. You slept in a hammock and bathed in a barrel of rainwater on the deck, and oil lamps provided the only illumination in the cabins once the sun dipped below the horizon. Even the rations approximated authentic provisions of the period. It was mostly biscuits and beef jerky and dried fruit. You ate fresh only what you could catch on a line. It all sounded very Joseph Conrad. And it sounded exactly the type of immersion in the culture of pure sailing I required.

  There was a schooner voyage planned for the end of April. Maybe it wasn’t so much Conrad as Erskine Childers, in the detail. The vessel embarked from Rotterdam and journeyed through the North Sea to East Friesland and its belt of islands off the coast of Lower Saxony. It was a dank, windswept, even desolate part of the world. That said, I knew it only from Childers’ description in his novel, The Riddle of the Sands. We were to anchor off the island of Baltrum and stay there for a couple of nights to enable the birdwatchers among the makeshift crew to indulge their masochistic habit. Then it was back to Rotterdam and a hop along the coast to Antwerp, where the vessel was due a refit. She was called Andromeda, and she had originally been registered as a British boat, her keel having been laid on the Clyde in 1878. Winston Churchill had been a mewling toddler. The telephone had not been invented. I was to trust my life in the North Sea to a boat built a full ten years before Jack the Ripper began his short season of atrocities.

  It seemed a very good idea. Navigation in the tricky shallows off the string of islands where we were headed was notoriously difficult. The tides were swift and the currents strong. Sudden and overwhelming fogs often descended. And there was the elemental force of the North Sea itself. I would learn a lot.

  ‘Will you bring me something back?’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Scurvy, probably,’ I said, ‘given the diet we’ll be living on.’

  And she laughed. She did not mind me going. The trip coincided with what would probably be her last Michael Collins-inspired journey to Ireland. The previous week, curiosity had overcome her and she had asked if she could visit the Lepe boatyard and see the Dark Echo for herself. We drove down and deliberately surprised Jack Peitersen. I didn’t want him having the time to prepare anything phoney in the way of a reception for Suzanne.

  He seemed genuinely delighted to see us. Where Suzanne was concerned he was full of a courtly New England charm that bordered on flirtatiousness and that she seemed to enjoy. The wraps were off the Dark Echo on a sun-dappled day and her brasses gleamed and her portholes tw
inkled and dazzled in the brightness. She smelled of freshly planed wood and paint and varnish newly applied. And in the spacious master cabin, there was the rich, rising aroma of wax polish and oiled hide from the luxurious upholstery my father had specified.

  She seemed a completely different boat from the one aboard which I had endured my earlier moments of terror. Everything was clean and sound and new. Climbing aboard her in plain daylight, in the company of Suzanne and Peitersen, made the earlier experience seem hallucinatory and unreal. I knew suddenly what my father meant, calling the whole weird interval at Hadley’s boatyard Wagnerian. But now the portentous gloom had gone. The steps on the companionway had been replaced. They were firm and well sprung under my feet. And descending them, I felt no fear or trepidation whatsoever. My one anxious glance went to where the mirror had hung on the wall of the master cabin. But there was no sign of it now. I saw Suzanne sneak one or two quizzical looks my way, but any anxiety she may have felt on my behalf was unnecessary. The physical reality of what I was seeing aboard the Dark Echo, the bright splendour of her, forced the earlier experience to recede in my mind like a bad dream eventually does.

  Since our surprise visit to the Lepe yard, Suzanne and I had barely discussed the matter of my father’s voyage. She had asked a couple of questions about Peitersen. I’d responded to the second of these by asking if she fancied him or something. Then I’d had to dodge the book she’d thrown at me. And she hadn’t asked again. But it was as though for her, too, the Lepe trip had provided a sort of assurance. We did not talk about it. But the experience, the reality of the refurbished Dark Echo, just seemed so wholesomely far removed from the vision of Harry Spalding I’d described to her, endured aboard a canvas shrouded wreck. It seemed even more remote from the lurid mysteries of the brothers Waltrow and the gambler, Gubby Tench. In the aftermath of the Lepe visit, those events seemed far more symptomatic of their morbid and hysterical time in history than of the boat itself.

  She had her bag over her shoulder, her coat over her arm. A strand of hair had fallen over her face when she had bent down to pick up her bag. She blew it away with a puff of breath. She stood there – slender, resolute and gorgeous.

  ‘Will it be emotional? Saying goodbye to Michael Collins?’

  She smiled, looking at the floor. The smile seemed wistful. ‘There’s no room in my life for ghosts.’

  I crossed the distance between us and embraced her and kissed her goodbye.

  ‘There’s no room in either of our lives for ghosts.’

  She grazed my cheek with her fingers. ‘I love you, Martin.’

  ‘Thank God you do.’

  The weather on the Eastern Friesland voyage was dismal. The Andromeda stank of fish oil and rotting hemp rope and brine-sodden wood. Her sails were mildew-splotched and she had a stew of ancient filth in her bilges too thick for any pump to remove that made her sluggish in the water even under full sail. She had a tendency to wallow and creaked alarmingly when subjected to the conflicting pressures of wind and current.

  There were eight of us aboard, so she was overmanned. I spent a lot of time at first being superfluous to requirements, watching the sea over the ship’s rail at the stern for want of anything better or more instructive to do. But it was instructive, watching the waters of the North Sea. They were restless, churning, never still. I’d always considered the sea supine, except in a storm. But that was because I was almost wholly ignorant of it. It was a living element, debating with itself, seemingly in turmoil over what to do with its profound depth and awesome energy. At night it seemed calmer. But the night traffic on the surface of the sea made it dangerous if you were not alert.

  Vomit was added to the horrible cocktail of smells about two hours after dawn on the second day out when we hit a heavy squall that brought with it a four-foot swell. We roped in the sails. The boat bucketed through the waves and I could feel the old timbers judder with impact under my feet. I knew it would take a lot more than we were heading into for the Andromeda to break up and founder. She’d been built for this weather, and worse. On the other hand, she was a venerable craft. And though authenticity was all very well, she did not seem to have been very well cared for.

  The sea was a sullen green colour under a pewter sky. The wind blowing from Arctic Norway was a needling blast that numbed any flesh not covered. The deck was awash with rain and sea spray. I was wearing oilskins over trousers and a sweater woven from oiled wool. My sou’wester flapped, trying to tear itself from my head. And I found myself grinning. I was enjoying this, the being out and exposed to something so elemental. Elsewhere, men were out in this trying to catch fish, or deliver cargos, or rehearse for wars. I had no such responsibility and could just revel in the moment.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned. It was Captain Straub, the Andromeda’s master. Out of my reverie, I looked around. We were the only two people above the deck. ‘I see you’ve got your sea legs,’ he shouted. He grinned at me through his beard, which was grey and waterflecked. He was Dutch and his accent was very strong.

  ‘I think I was born with them, Captain.’

  ‘Then you’re lucky,’ he said. ‘Would you care to take the wheel, Mr Stannard?’

  ‘I’d be delighted, Captain.’

  ‘Just keep her on a straight course.’

  Straub probably fancied a smoke or needed a pee or something. We were too far out from land for me to run her aground and it takes two to orchestrate a collision at sea and the bloke at the wheel of the other vessel would be competent. Nevertheless, I felt a grown-up thrill of accomplishment at being entrusted with the wheel. It meant the boat was in my hands; I was responsible for the other seven souls aboard her. The pleasure I felt brought home to me how little I had actually accomplished in my life. But that realisation did not spoil the pleasure itself. It was hardly a surprise, a revelation. We live in an age of diminished accomplishment. For the moment, I thought that steering a seventy-ton schooner through a storm would do pretty well for me. It was physical work. Despite the gearing between the wheel and the rudder, I could feel the force of the swell and the weight of the boat through my arms. There was a binnacle compass on a column next to the wheel. I wiped droplets of water from its domed glass cover and took a reading. I knew where we were and I knew where we were going.

  Land announced itself the following afternoon in ragged grey humps on the grey horizon. Grey, too, were the faces of our birdwatchers, gaunt with retching, glad to get into the rowing boat lowered from the side into the choppy sea, heading for something firm under their feet when we anchored off Baltrum. I watched them go but had volunteered to stay aboard. I would have a cabin to myself. The wilderness of sand and reeds and rare birds where my shipmates were headed offered no real attractions.

  Captain Straub stayed aboard, too. That evening, we dined together at his table. He was a resourceful cook. He made a sort of casserole from barley and boiled bacon and shallots. We washed it down with Weissbier and afterwards had some truly delicious Dutch cheese and his excellent brandy. It was a long way from weevil-ridden ship’s biscuits and salted herring. It was altogether a very civilised route to scurvy.

  When we had finished eating, the captain rolled a cigarette from a large pouch of tobacco and sat back in his chair and I looked around me, from where I sat, at his cabin. Hunger and conversation had prevented me from properly examining my surroundings any sooner. Straub’s cabin was not as large as my father’s aboard the Dark Echo. Nor was it anything like so sumptuously well appointed. But the really remarkable thing about it was that there was nothing present in it that could not have come from the late nineteeth century. We had dined by the light of candles. An oil lamp hung from a hook above a small table under the starboard portholes. He had navigation charts rolled on a table where his sextant also reposed. He had a slide rule for his calculations, the ivory from which it had been made yellowing from decades of secretions from human hands. We had taken our depth soundings on approaching the island with a plumb l
ine at the bow. Straub had a berth rather than a hammock and the cabin was warm from a wood-burning fire. It was a cosy enough refuge from the elements. But it seemed out of its time and would have unnerved me had I been there alone and not in company.

  Straub stood and put a coffee pot on a paraffin burner on the table under the lamp. He lit the burner with a wooden match. I noticed that the boat was still beneath us. The sea had calmed. I saw that there were tendrils of fog drifting now beyond the glass of the portholes.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Captain?’

  He had his back to me still. I saw him stiffen almost imperceptibly and then I heard him chuckle thickly. ‘I knew that question was coming. And yet I let it surprise me.’ He turned. Straub, too, could have been an artefact from the nineteenth century; a human artefact, with his hewn features and his powerful shoulders and the iron-grey bristle of his beard. He raised his arm and the tip glowed in the gloom of the cabin as he drew heavily on his cigarette. He nodded towards the warming pot. ‘We shall wait for our coffee, Mr Stannard. And then I shall tell you a story about a ghost.’

  We settled into our chairs with the coffee and the brandy bottle on the table between us. Against the portholes, the fog now pressed in a pale and solid blanket. The boat rested at anchor, entirely still. There was no wind and the sea outside was motionless and silent. He had been captain of the Andromeda, he told me, for twelve years. He had been her master for a year when he first saw her phantom.

  ‘We were in the Atlantic Ocean, Mr Stannard. The Americans are, some of them, great and fastidious sailors of yachts. I had a party of five aboard, all of them skilled and hardy.’ He chuckled again. ‘None of them birdwatchers, I fancy.’

  I smiled to encourage him to continue and sipped his strong, good coffee.

  ‘We were about four hundred miles east of Nantucket Island and steering an easterly course, though the location hardly signifies. It was September and darkness had descended an hour since. I was over there,’ he gestured towards his chart table, ‘calculating our average speed because one of the fellows on board had made a query about it. And I looked up and he was sitting where you are now.’