Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘But he made a mistake.’

  ‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘He made a mistake.’

  I’d turned the wipers off when he had begun to speak because their noise was intrusive. Now rain bleared the windscreen. There was no other traffic on the road. There were no pedestrians braving the downpour. I could hear rain drum on the roof of the car. I felt sad and fearful of what was about to be revealed to me.

  ‘You were not an only child, Martin. You had a younger sister. She was born just before you reached your second birthday and she was very premature. She survived for only a few days.’

  I nodded. I had not expected this. I was not prepared for a revelation of this sort. ‘Why did you never tell me?’

  ‘I’ve never possessed the strength to talk about your sister at all. And your mother kept silent on the subject, I think to spare me from the ordeal of being forced to do so.’

  ‘What was my sister’s name?’

  ‘Catherine Ann. Ann for your mother.’

  ‘And Victor Draper didn’t know.’

  ‘He lived there,’ my father said, nodding at the empty space between the villas to his left. ‘I had him exposed as a fraud by a team of private detectives. Ruined, I believe he skulked off to Australia. When he was forced to sell his house I bought it myself and had it razed to the ground.’

  ‘Why have you told me this now?’

  ‘I didn’t stop with Draper, Martin. I tried to reach your mother through other mediums with reputations just as exalted as Draper’s had been. All were charlatans. I’m telling you this because if it had been possible to contact your mother, I would have succeeded in doing so. There are no such things as ghosts. There is God—’

  ‘Then there is Satan.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there is no spectre of Harry Spalding to prowl the boat that used to belong to him. The dead do not mingle with the living. They don’t communicate with us. They live as they did only in our memories, which is where I should have had the good sense and moral courage to allow your mother to rest.’

  Catherine Ann. There had been four of us. ‘It’s why you always light four candles. After Mass.’

  But he did not reply to that. He did not need to.

  Catherine Ann. She would have been thirty or thirty-one now. Roughly the same age as Suzanne.

  ‘What about Peitersen?’

  My father smiled. It was a grim smile. Confession had exhausted him. ‘A crank, which was my first instinct when Hadley showed me his letter. He’s some boat enthusiast who read a stringer’s report on the auction of the Dark Echo, probably on the internet. You’ll remember I gave an interview to a press reporter at the sale. Working on a restoration project of that magnitude and pedigree was probably a dream come true for the man who called himself Jack Peitersen. It was just our good luck that he was competent as well as keen.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘I’m spending tonight aboard the boat, Martin. It’s why I packed an overnight bag. I’d be grateful now if you could take us on to Lepe. You can drive back to London afterwards if you wish. If Suzanne is amenable, you can stay on the boat with me. Or you can spend the night in a hotel. There’s a comfortable room in a very well-appointed hotel of your recent acquaintance that’s paid for until June.’

  ‘I wish you’d told me about my sister before now.’

  ‘I’ve arranged a little ceremony for tomorrow at the boatyard that it would be as well for you to attend. You can get down from London in time for it because it won’t take place until about midday. But it would be less arduous for you, travelwise, to stay.’

  ‘I wish you had told me about my sister, Dad.’

  ‘I do, too, son. I wish it with all my heart.’

  We stayed that night aboard the Dark Echo. We ate dinner first at Peitersen’s hotel and I drank steadily throughout the meal. The kitchen there no doubt justified its excellent reputation. But the food I ate was ashes in my mouth after my father’s earlier revelations. I was tired, too. It took almost three hours to drive the 160-odd miles from Westcliff to Lepe. Altogether that day I had been behind the wheel for a total of around five hours. I was in no fit state to drive after dinner and we had to leave the car and take a minicab back to the boatyard. I think that my father also drank too much. Alcohol is less than ideal as an anaesthetic. It leaves you with a sore head and a dry mouth and it depresses you. But it’s easily accessible and doesn’t harbour any nasty surprises. I’d had enough of nasty surprises for one day and craved and indulged, over dinner, the easy numbness of drink.

  I couldn’t have recalled what I ordered on surrendering the menu to our smiling waiter with the words just out of my mouth. And our conversation over dinner was a dim, inconsequential blur. My father prattled about navigation and communication systems and networks. He talked about patching through and piggybacking and other telecoms arcanery. I thought about the nursery my parents would have decorated and furnished for my lost sister, Catherine Ann. I thought about her painted crib. I pictured the toys they would have bought and the tiny items of clothing and the dreams for her they must have cherished together. I wondered how much the keeping of the secret of her death had contributed to the cancer that had grown and flourished in my mother’s chest and killed her. In the poignant secrecy between my parents of Catherine Ann, I thought I understood something of what had driven my mother to an early death. And I thought I understood something, too, of what had driven my father through his subsequent life. But perhaps these insights were owed only to the illusory clarity of drink.

  I did not dream that night in my cabin aboard my father’s boat. Or if I did, I did not remember the dream. I slept soundly in a berth so comfortable it bordered on the luxurious. My quarters on the Dark Echo made a quaint joke of conditions aboard the Andromeda. I woke once in the night that I remember, just to take a swallow from the bottle of Hildon water by my bunk that I had scrounged from the hotel. We’d taken bottles of water and toothbrushes and fresh towels. The hotel treated my father in the way he was always treated; like some visiting potentate. And in the morning, when I knocked on his cabin door and he admitted me, that’s what he looked like, too. He looked glamorous again and vibrant. He had recovered himself. With a fresh surge of grief for the sister I had never known, I knew then standing in his cabin aboard his boat, that my dad would never address the subject of his daughter willingly again.

  We left the yard for breakfast at the hotel at about a quarter to eight. As we got into the car I saw a pair of transit vans pull up at the gate. One was blue and had the name of a security firm stencilled on its side in yellow capitals with a logo underneath of a portcullis wreathed in barbed wire. Three men got out of it, two from the cab and one from the rear with a German shepherd on a short chain lead. The three men were all well built and unsmiling and dressed in smart black tunics.

  ‘Your Chesney anecdote alarmed me,’ my father said. ‘I’ve taken fresh precautions.’

  The second van contained six men wearing a mixture of overalls or jeans with chambray shirts and puffa jackets. One among them, I assumed, was their foreman and showed some papers to the first group. They stood a little nervously while the dog was allowed to sniff at each man and learn his scent. Then the gate was opened and, carrying their boxes of tools, they approached the boatshed.

  ‘We need to be back here by noon,’ my father said. It gave us plenty of time. ‘From now on, Martin, the only sardonic laughter you will be hearing around the Dark Echo will be mine.’

  An item of mail was brought to our table at breakfast. It was carried on a silver salver by Marjena, who gave a little bow of her head on delivering it to my father. It was a sealed A3-sized Manila envelope and his name and the address of the hotel were written on it in a careful hand. The writing reminded me of the column of figures I’d seen on the desk blotter in Peitersen’s office. Some of the letters had a similar character, as though described by the nib of the same ink pen. My father took the letter and thanked the girl and then held it
out to me across the tabletop.

  ‘Open it, Martin.’

  I used the knife from my side plate. Before I did so I examined the postmark. It was a bit blurred and indistinct, but the letter had been sorted at the big central office at Mount Pleasant in London. When I slit the envelope, a small collection of banker’s drafts slid out on to the tablecloth. I knew what they were. They were the monthly payments my father had been making to Peitersen. And they had remained uncashed. He had used the expenses account for the payment of other men and he had bought materials from that fund, too – I had seen the invoices at the yard. But he had taken nothing for himself. I opened the envelope with my thumb and saw that there was a note in it, still stuck at its edge to the gum that had closed the corner of the flap. I freed and unfolded the note and read it aloud.

  She’s ready, Magnus. You could tinker and fret over her for ever, but she’s ready. Rig the sails when they arrive. It’s a job a vessel’s master should oversee himself. Give her a week’s sea trials off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. Or take her across the Irish Sea to Dublin and back. It will take a voyage of that nature to determine whether you and the boy are ready for her. But she’s ready for you, Magnus. And I wish you God Speed aboard her.

  The note was not signed. My father raised his eyebrows and took it from me and read it himself. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket. He reached for the banker’s drafts and aligned them in his hands with a shuffle, then tore them in half and dropped them on to the table. He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and signalled by rising from his chair that it was time for us to leave.

  His helicopter had arrived by the time we got back to the boatyard. It sat on the hard sand from which the early tide had retreated with Tom, my father’s regular pilot, smoking one of his little brown cheroots and lounging in his aviator glasses at its side. I did not have long to wonder why they were there. Monsignor Delaunay stood at the edge of the sea in his Mass robes, his bright stole flapping in the breeze, his biretta secured to his head by the finger of a raised hand as he looked out over the Solent towards Cowes. It had been better than a decade since I’d seen my favourite seminary Jesuit last, but I recognised immediately the huge neck, the incongruous power in his Olympian shoulders and back. He must have sensed our arrival, because he turned and then saw and approached us. And I saw that God, or Providence, had been good to him in the intervening years. He was greyer at the temples, thicker about the jowls, perhaps. But he had not really aged very much.

  ‘Martin!’ he said, and he opened his arms and embraced me, lifting me clean off the sand. ‘I’ve come to bless your father’s boat,’ he said.

  But I had guessed that for myself.

  ‘Have you seen her, Monsignor?’

  ‘I have, Martin. And she is a work of art.’

  ‘Speaking of which, there is one of your ancestor’s paintings aboard her.’

  He laughed. It was a real pleasure for me to see him. Much of my nineteen months in Northumberland had been purgatory. All the best bits, in my memory of that time, involved this formidable priest. ‘My claim to kinship with that particular Delaunay is a mite tenuous,’ he said.

  He duly blessed the boat. This simple service passed without incident. He murmured the liturgy and sprayed the holy water with the flick of a brush. I assisted by holding the ornate silver vessel into which he dipped the bristles. He did it thoroughly. Even the sail store received a sprinkle. When I opened it, it contained no wormy canine odour, no trace of Spalding’s phantom dog. Afterwards, he went to the building I still thought of as Peitersen’s office and changed into the suit he must have worn on the outward journey from the seminary. He emerged with an old-fashioned canvas grip in his hand. It contained his vestments and his vial of holy water. It had been a long way to come and whatever my father’s powers of persuasion, the trip had been made at very short notice. I was touched.

  My father suggested a pub along the coast that did an excellent lunch. They also kept a comprehensive, even esoteric range of single malts. He had remembered that Monsignor Delaunay was partial to a whisky. We should set off in a few minutes, he said. It would be the perfect preparation for the Monsignor’s return flight. Then he strode off across the sand to say something to Tom, whose own lunch lay in a refrigerated bag aboard the aircraft.

  ‘It’s very good to see you, Martin.’

  ‘And marvellous to see you, Monsignor.’

  He studied me. He still had a smile on his face. But he knew me, knew the workings of my mind and conscience. For a year and a half, he had been my confessor. I doubted there was a living soul apart from Suzanne and my father who knew me better. And my father’s insight into my character was probably obscured somewhat by my almost constant efforts to impress him. Of all the men I’d met, perhaps Monsignor Delaunay knew my true nature best.

  He gestured back towards the boathouse. ‘When you return from this adventure, you might think about marriage and a family, my lad.’

  I blushed. I was living in sin. Evidently he knew I was.

  ‘It’ll be the making of you. It will fulfil the woman you love. And it will provide your father with more pleasure than anything, once he gets this Conradian adventure accomplished and out of his system.’

  I said nothing to that. I looked down at the drying sand as the wind gently scoured the pattern of tidal retreat from its surface. Then I looked back up again. The monsignor was still smiling. In the unforgiving light on the beach, his teeth were tea-stained. He would play the whisky priest for an hour in the pub for my father. But what he really drank was tea. And what he was really about was faith and penance and conversion. He had never in his life held a woman to him in the dark part of the night for consolation. And he never would.

  ‘The boat is benign, Martin. She’s a gorgeous toy, fashioned from wood and brass and steel. She’s an extravagance, a rich man’s indulgence. But your father is a great and compassionate giver to good causes. And a boat is only a boat. Retain sufficient of your faith to know that such constructions cannot be cursed. And now she is blessed. Enjoy your voyage. Delight in your father’s company. I will pray you come home safe and sound.’

  It was as much as he could say. We were going to try to cross the Atlantic in a vessel built ninety years ago. He could neither guarantee our success nor our safety. On the wilderness of the water, at the mercy of the tempest, that was God’s responsibility and choice. He said he would pray for us. He promised it.

  I wonder now was he ever telling me the truth about anything.

  The sails duly arrived during the following week. They were Lee sails from Hong Kong and they were made from Japanese Dacron. We could have gone for the purist approach, done an Andromeda by rigging her with authentic canvas. But canvas tears in storms and, unless you have someone aboard with the skills to repair sails, it isn’t worth the risk. The modern alternatives are easier to haul, altogether tougher, and they dry out quicker, too.

  My father suffered no purist agonies over the Dacron sails in the way he had over the engine. But the sails were ordered after the engine and, I think, as the date of planned departure drew nearer, his natural pragmatism came more into play. He was a risk-taker, but not compulsively so. The demands and challenges of the voyage were daunting enough. There was no debate either over our auto-steer equipment. It was electronic and dependent for its intelligence on computer chips. You plotted your course and the boat followed it. In the event of strong currents or shifts in wind direction, it was self-correcting. Essentially, it meant that we could both sleep at night, at least for a few overlapping hours. It meant that we could eat dinner together. The alternative was for one of us to be a permanent slave to the wheel. Captain Straub might frown at the employment of such technology. But when his schooner took to the seas, it did so with a crew numbering a minimum of six, not two.

  I still worried about Peitersen. With the boat snug in the fitting-out berth, her head rigger was moved to abseil down from the top of the mainmast and say to me that she was as p
unctilious a restoration job as he had ever seen. I’d no grounds to argue with his expert judgement. But it nagged at me that Peitersen had taken no payment for the job. Regardless of his bogus identity, if the work was honestly carried out, surely he had deserved some kind of recompense for doing it so well? Jack Peitersen’s taking no payment seemed to me to be every bit as symbolic as Frank Hadley’s superstitious refusal to say out loud the Dark Echo’s name. I did not know the significance of it. But I had an uneasy feeling that I might one day find out.

  Our voyage, intended to take us to Dublin and back, was little short of a triumph. We caught the Celtic Sea in a calm and gentle disposition. So uneventful was the voyage generally, that when we anchored in Dun Laoghaire Harbour, my father suggested an ambitious extra leg to the trip. At dawn the following morning we swung north out of the harbour and set a north-easterly course. We hugged the Irish coast as far as the North Channel and continued north until we passed Rathlin Island, taking us out into the Atlantic, into the storm latitudes. Once out far enough we turned west, for Erris Head. And then we sailed a southerly course all the way along the West Coast of Ireland, swinging homeward only when we reached Mizen Head and Cape Clear.

  We were gone five days rather than the two originally intended. I called Suzanne to warn her about the change in plan. She sounded strange, different. It could have been an atmospheric thing affecting my mobile. But I don’t think it was. I think it was frustration. I knew that she had come to loathe the whole Dark Echo enterprise.

  The most noteworthy thing about that maiden voyage was a dream I had aboard. When we moored at Dun Laoghaire I went ashore and walked to Sandycove for a swim at the Forty Foot in the approaching twilight. My father stayed aboard. He and my mother had honeymooned in Dublin and I think going ashore would have reminded him too vividly and made him melancholy.