by F. G. Cottam
Her search revealed only one other mention of Spalding in the Post. It was a page-two filler. It said:
American playboy Harry Spalding has rented a mansion for the summer in Birkdale’s prestigious Rotten Row. Flamboyant millionaire Mr Spalding had previously been resident at a luxury suite in the nearby Palace Hotel.
It was interesting that in just a few weeks, he had gone from being a heroic yachtsman fabled for his sporting prowess, to a mere playboy. Was his behaviour so degenerate? The disdain of the press virtually dripped off the page. The impression was of a man barely in control of himself.
Lastly, she sourced the piece in the Post she had first seen and shown to Martin months earlier, detailing Jane Boyte’s release from arrest. She printed it off and compared the photograph there to the picture of Jane, the aviator, on the beach between the brothers Giroud. One picture had been taken willingly in benign and jolly circumstances. The other seemed by comparison a stolen moment in a blighted life. Jane was still glamorous in the second picture. She was perfectly tailored and fiercely beautiful. But the joy had vanished from her face. And Suzanne sensed that this absence of mischief, of the defiance that characterised her expression elsewhere, had to do with more than just the ordeal of her arrest. A woman who had moved in Michael Collins’ political orbit was not a woman to be traumatised by twenty-four hours in a Liverpool police cell. Jane had been much tougher than that. She had been resilient, steely. But something had happened to her. The carefree adventuress pictured on the sands in her flying outfit had endured some dreadful ordeal. And the outcome had been a bleak and dispiriting one.
Aboard Dark Echo
We made good time on that first day out from Southampton. By sunset we were well west of the coast of Ireland, the last land we would see before America a receding smudge on the glittering sea to our rear. I was at the wheel. My father was seated on the deck beside me, studying a chart in the fading light. He had anchored the chart with coins, a penknife and a brass pocket compass, and was quite unaware of himself. I was anything but. The luminescent glow of the descending sun played like Klieg bulbs on his ageing film star features. In his seaman’s sweater, with his wind-whipped hair, with his eyes the same bright emerald as the stole Delaunay had worn for the boat blessing, my father looked magnificent.
His appearance was a little short of the truth. Perhaps that was why I studied him with such care. We had both been obliged to take a medical in the prelude to our voyage. Mine had been a fusspot formality, I think. My father’s had been a necessity. Rich men can take risks. But risks, when self-inflicted and physical, are only taken reluctantly with rich men by their insurers. I came out okay, probably having my father to thank. If you box and you allow yourself to get out of shape, you make a beating in the ring pretty much inevitable. I never wanted to take that beating. I did not box any more and hadn’t for a long time, but the cautionary habit of keeping in shape had stayed with me and I still trained fairly hard and pretty regularly. I was healthy and fit.
Dad did not come off quite so well. Why would he? He was fifty-five to my thirty-two. He had toiled to build an empire, accrue a fortune. He had suffered the grief of his wife’s premature death and the disappointment of a son who was, simply, a disappointment. As I had also very recently discovered, he had endured the loss of a baby daughter. And he had kept that loss a secret to himself. And all this had inflicted high blood pressure on my father. And there were, too, incipient signs of diabetes. He was a long way from being an invalid. But without treatment, he would tire easily and he was at moderate risk of a stroke.
Since the medical and the diagnosis, he had obediently taken the blood pressure pills prescribed. He had cut down on his whisky and port consumption and he had even, to an extent, laid off the cigars. His health was okay. But though he was reminiscent of some cinematic god, there in the lambent ocean dusk, what he really was, despite all of his looks and charisma, was a fallible and fast-ageing man facing a formidable and unfamiliar challenge.
‘What’s on your mind, Martin?’ he said, without looking up. ‘Wondering how long the old man’s got? Wondering when you will finally inherit?’
I laughed. He wasn’t that far off in a way, though money had been the last thing on my mind. ‘I was thinking about Chichester, Dad. I’m baffled as to why you find the place so . . . seductive.’
He got to his feet, gathering his chart. His face was flushed now in the last of the descending sun. But it was only the light, I was sure. He was too shameless to blush. ‘It’s a nice place. It’s very picturesque.’
‘I’d have thought it a bit staid and old-fashioned for you, Dad.’
‘It’s not staid and old-fashioned at all. It’s very handsome.’
‘All a bit antique and parochial, though, isn’t it, Chichester? All a bit chinzy and, well . . . drab?’
He rolled his chart and looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Martin. I happen to think the charms of Chichester utterly delightful. I’m also fond of Edinburgh and find Bath quite ravishing.’
‘Now you’re just boasting.’
‘I’m in retirement. I have to occupy my time. If you were to marry that gorgeous girl so inexplicably devoted to you and start a family, I could do what respectable men of my age do.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Dote on my grandchildren.’
He turned and walked to the hatch and went below. He had never mentioned the possibility of my starting a family before. Perhaps his revelation about Catherine Ann had brought it to the forefront of his mind. He was serious, though. It was why he had gone where I could no longer see and study him. Just as he was shameless about his Chichester trysts, so he was genuinely embarrassed about his sudden confession that he wished for a grandchild to spoil and love.
I engaged the auto-steer and followed him below, a bit stunned by the implications of what he had said. And I thought I heard a low growl coming from the direction of the sail store. It sounded like a large and antagonised dog. Remembering Spalding’s dog, I listened hard, still for a moment. Toby, it had been called. It was a bull mastiff and had a vicious temper. With a shiver, I remembered the odd experience in the Lepe boatshed. I paused and listened. But all I heard was the churn of water under the hull, the slap against the prow of small waves, the pull and sigh of rigging above. I smiled to myself. Dogs did not live to the age of ninety. It must have been a snarl unkinking in the anchor chain, something like that. Old sailing boats were noisy at sea by definition.
I paused outside the door of my father’s cabin. I wanted to continue our conversation. I felt flattered by the idea that he wanted me to extend the family, by the notion that there was a fund of love in him waiting to be spent, lavished, on a son or daughter of mine. It meant that he was finally and completely over the disappointment of my failed vocation. And he wanted Suzanne to be the mother of his grandchild. I had known he liked her. I realised then that he probably loved her. She was kind and clever and amusing and independent and she made his only son happy. It occurred to me, too, that she was the same age as the daughter he lost would have been. I wondered how often, looking at Suzanne, that thought had occurred to him.
I could hear opera music from behind his cabin door – the Germanic stuff, of course – a Heldentenor wailing sonorously about a water nymph or some such, no doubt with a spear in his hand and a helmet with horns on his head. His sturdy torso would be clad in burlap sacking, cinched by a sword belt. I shook my own head, grinning, and lowered the fist I was about to knock with, deciding to leave him to it. There would be plenty of opportunity for us to discuss personal matters, the important, intimate stuff of life. There was no hurry. It was not as though we could escape one another’s company aboard the boat for very long. Perhaps that had been my father’s motive in inviting me, or among his motives. We were close. I was close to him, because I chose not to compete with him. But in his business life, generous with everything else, he had been a miser with his time. Now
we were to spend a fair bit of it together and I was pleased at the thought. But there was no rush, so I left him to his Wagner in his cabin and went back on deck.
It was almost fully dark. The weather was very clear. I could see the lights of no other vessels but, looking up, could make out the faint twinkling of the first stars. In practical terms, crossing open sea was much less demanding of seamanship than sailing around the coast of Ireland had been. Along a coastline there were currents, riptides, sandbanks and submerged rocks. Fog was a hazard and the seagoing traffic heavier. There were trawlers to avoid as they turned for their home ports after a night’s fishing in the dawn murk. But traversing an ocean, out of sight or reach of the safety of land, aware of the profound depths beneath you and your isolation, brought psychological pressures that vastly outweighed practicalities.
Awed at that moment, as full darkness descended, I was also aware of just what freedom a boat represented. It was a very exclusive sort of freedom, of course. It helped to have a wealthy father to endow you with the privilege. Ironically or not, that was something I had in common with Harry Spalding. In having this boat built, Spalding had engineered his freedom, his licence to sail the oceans, to roam the world unaccountably, a rich stranger in its remotest ports and harbours. You had to wonder what his motive had been. Because it had not very likely been a simple love of the sea, had it? What had Spalding done with all that freedom?
I shivered. It was cold without the sun. And the answer to the question I had just asked myself was that we would never know. The Dark Echo’s log had been destroyed. And with it had perished any hope of uncovering Spalding’s secrets. I shivered again, and it was not just the wind off the dark sea and its chill that made me do so. I did not want to discover Spalding’s secrets. What I knew already suggested they were sadistic and insane. The boat was a better legacy than her first master had deserved. My father and I would surely put the freedom she gave us to more innocent use than he had. If we had not already earned our berths aboard her, then over the coming days we would surely do so.
I heard a noise again then, a kind of keening howl that sounded like a dog. I tried to tell myself it was a whale. There were whales in these waters. There were other marine mammals capable of barks and cries that would carry on the wind, distorting, for miles. There were porpoises and seals. But it seemed to have been coming from the direction, under the deck, of the sail store.
I engaged the auto-steer and went below. There was a sheath knife in my cabin and I ducked in there to grab it. I had not heard a rat. But what I had heard had not sounded friendly or well disposed. So I opened the hatch to the sail store with the knife in the grip of my right hand. I switched on the row of wire-bracketed lights that lit the long, low space. I could see no dog. I could see no movement. All I could see was pale folds of Dacron and loops of neatly coiled ropes and block tackles depending from hooks screwed into that section of the bulkhead. But there was a smell. It was sour and feral. And to me it smelled canine. It put me in mind of the wolf enclosure at the zoo in Regent’s Park, near the football pitches, before they got rid of it. That same smell had drifted over the pitches from the wolf enclosure, when the wind was right. I looked again. A big dog would have left hair and strings of drool, wouldn’t it? There was nothing. I turned out the lights and relatched the hatch. It was my imagination.
But I was slightly spooked. So after putting the knife back, I went and knocked on my father’s cabin door. Supper would be my pretext. I’d offer to cook something, ask him what it was he wanted to eat before retiring to his berth.
The opera was very loud. He had poured himself a large measure of whisky. A cigar smouldered in an ashtray and the air in the cabin was yellow with the fug of smoke. He had the guns out of the cabinet. They were on his desk. He was cleaning and loading them. One, a semi-automatic rifle, had been disassembled and the action lay in pieces on a swatch of oily cloth. The ammunition – the shells and cartridges – was coiled in thick bandoliers and spilling from white cardboard boxes of bullets. My father eyed me down the sights of a carbine held one-handed and took a drag on his Havana. He did not look very grandfatherly.
‘Readying yourself for World War Three, Dad?’
‘You need to be prepared, Martin,’ he said. ‘We are in an environment that could turn hostile.’
‘Way to go,’ I said. It seemed to me a life raft might prove more useful.
‘Sit down, son.’
There were high splotches of colour on his cheeks and forehead.
‘Have you taken your medication, Dad?’
He waved the question away and the smoke from his cigar piroutetted lazily. Someone in the chorus in the opera hit a long, lamentable note. Unless the sound was the ghost of Spalding’s dog, keening for its master. A substantial wave hit us then and the boat juddered and I had to steady myself by gripping the edge of my father’s desk. One of his ammunition boxes toppled and brass-jacketed bullets spilled out on to the desktop, some rolling from the desktop on to the floor.
‘I said sit down.’
I pulled a chair across obediently and sat.
‘All that talk earlier, about Chichester.’
‘A joke, Dad. Just a bit of innuendo. It wasn’t meant sarcastically. You seemed to take it well enough.’
‘You need to know something.’
He was going to make a confession. I really did not want to hear it. The Catherine Ann revelation had been bad enough. I had not really recovered properly from the shock of that and wanted nothing more just then from my father’s stash of family secrets.
‘I was never unfaithful to your mother. Never. Never once. Neither in thought nor in deed did I ever stray from or betray her.’
There were tears in his eyes. He looked at the burning tip of his cigar, as though the bright glow of that could give him consolation. Then he sniffed and ground it out in the glass ashtray beside the guns. ‘My romantic life might seem like some sort of adult infantilism to you, as sometimes I’ll admit it does to me. But I never played around while your mother was alive and I think it important that you know that.’
My dad, who had never seemed infantile to me but only ever truly admirable, was crying. I got up and walked around the desk, around its murderous litter of armaments, and pulled him to his feet and hugged him. And he shook with grief for his lost wife and his dead daughter in my embrace.
Eight
The seminary was a vast neo-Gothic pile built from granite on the crags topping cliffs at the edge of the sea. Approaching it in her hire car along a road that twisted as it rose, Suzanne thought the place utterly forbidding. The weather did not help. It was late afternoon, but gloomy enough for her lights. Her headlamps picked out white and spectral bits of scrub and scree in a desolate landscape. Everything seemed contrived to diminish the scale of the merely human. The sky above the turrets of the building was wide and angry with cloud. She thought that Martin’s short-lived vocation must have been very powerful at its outset. This was the least inviting place to which she had ever come. You would need to be resolute in your choice of a life serving God to think of living here.
Cars were directed to an area at the left flank of the seminary, overlooking the sea. The ground here was flattened and surfaced with cinders. She got out and walked to the cliff edge. The sea was turbulent, wind-whipped, its white caps ominous as they shivered into being and then slid away to nothing again on the surface of the black water. There were no ordinary cars parked alongside hers. The three other vehicles in the car park were all of a utilitarian character. There was an old Jeep and two Land Rovers. They had seen a lot of mileage. One of the Land Rovers had a trailer attached with a tarpaulin over it.
Lights dotted the building as she approached. But most of its windows were dark in the gloom. Some of the lights flickered, as though from candle flames. Most of them were yellow. But the effect was remote rather than cosy, lights in narrow arches and window slits doing nothing to illuminate or brighten generally the huge warren of stone
. Suzanne glanced at her watch. It was still only just before five. She was punctual. The calendar was approaching the longest day. It would not get dark for almost five more hours. But it felt like dusk. As she got to the main entrance, rain began to splash from the sky in cold and heavy drops.
Delaunay received her in his office. It was far less austere a place than she had expected, passing though the grim corridors and along the enclosed stone staircases that led to it. And she herself was led. She would never have got there if she’d been merely directed to where she was eventually taken. The seminary was a labyrinth. In its chilly vaults, she thought she understood better one or two of the aspects of Martin’s character that had remained locked away throughout their relationship. This place would have appealed to the side of him given to melancholy and silence. And his secrecy, too. The part of Martin that was closed to her would find something attractive about this great Catholic tomb hewn for the living.
But Delaunay’s room was panelled in wood and enjoyed plush upholstery. There were paintings on his walls far too handsomely framed to be mere reproductions. There was a rich smell of leather from the bindings of the many books on his shelves. There was a laptop computer at the centre of his desk and he had a laser printer and a hands-free phone there, too. But the impression was still overwhelmingly of the past. Images of Christ crucified and dying under his crown of thorns had once been common throughout the Christian world. In the early twenty-first century, that was no longer the case. But there were several such stark reminders of God’s sacrifice of his son for mankind in Delaunay’s place of work and, Suzanne supposed, his place of prayer and contemplation. Altogether, it looked like a chamber from a more august and pious time.