F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘I’ll tell you when I get back,’ she said.

‘How’s Big Mick?’ I’d almost forgotten to ask.

‘I honestly don’t think I’ve ever admired a man more.’

‘Blimey.’

‘Your good self excepted.’

‘Of course.’

Sleep came eventually that night. But it was shallow and dream-ridden when it finally arrived.

I met my father at his Mayfair house to give him back the swipe key the following afternoon. I made no mention of what had occurred aboard the Dark Echo . I had retreated furtively from Hadley’s domain, reasonably sure that no one there had seen me. No one there with a right to be there, no one living, had seen me, at any rate. Harry Spalding had seen me, I felt. And I had heard Harry Spalding. I’d caught only the merest glimpse of him in the snakelike recoil of his reflection. But I had heard him speak in the decades-dead voice he still possessed.

Hearing him was enough. But I did not really want to dwell on that. Nor did I want to think about his companion, the woman I’d seen. My father would have believed none of it, which is why I did not tell him. Events earlier in my life had put paid entirely to his faith in me where matters spiritual were concerned. And for good or bad, Harry Spalding was a spiritual matter. I was already reasonably sure of that.

‘You look like hell,’ my father said. He didn’t. He looked rumpled and sated and smug.

‘Find Chichester congenial?’

He ignored the question. He poured me coffee from a silver pot. It always surprised me that he remembered how I took it. He hadn’t made the coffee, of course. The pot had been wheeled in on its trolley by his housekeeper.

‘Why the Dark Echo , Dad? Why that damned boat in particular?’

He smiled. But the smile was entirely for himself. ‘My own childhood, Martin, was very different from that which I was able to provide for you.’

This was not promising. I sipped my coffee. I would take solace in the coffee, which was excellent. ‘I know that, Dad.’

‘Please. Don’t interrupt.’ He stood and walked over to one of the tall windows. ‘My mother, your grandmother, did her best. But they were tough times, unforgiving decades in which to be a working-class widow with an infant child to provide for.’ He paused, over by the stately windows of his extravagant home. And he allowed his impoverished and sometimes humiliating childhood to return and haunt him afresh. ‘Christmases were particularly grim. I was a bright boy and that tormented my mother. I believe she suffered agonies of guilt over all the things her poverty denied me. They were austere times, of course. But my schoolmates were a privileged lot. The comparisons were inevitable, and the privation stark and obvious and sometimes, I’ll admit it, shaming.’ He cleared his throat.

‘There were junk shops, second-hand shops, pawn shops all over the neighbourhood of Manchester in which we lived then. For people like ourselves these places functioned, in a way, as banks. The shoes you sold them were security against the money they gave you for the shoes until you could afford to buy the shoes back. And the difference between what you received and what you paid was the interest. And the interest was marginal, a compassionate matter, usually, of just a few pennies added to the principal sum.’

He paused again, head bowed, remembering. My father still grieved for his mother almost with the raw pain with which he grieved for mine. And she was in his heart and memory now, I could tell.

‘Of course, these shops did sell things. Zinc bathtubs would hang from pegs. There would be racks of second-hand bicycles. And in those days, perhaps surprisingly, most coveted among their stock were books. It would have been 1963. I would have been eleven years old. The wireless meant the BBC and a universe alien to the one I inhabited. Television was vastly beyond my mother’s means. But I loved books. I was a religious attendee at the local lending library. I thirsted for knowledge and sensation. And lending libraries were free.’

He turned to me. He was a silhouette at the window. My father, the self-made millionaire, a nimbus of light around his greying head, stood remembering.

‘There was an educator in the 1930s. A man named Arthur Mee?’

I shook my head. The name meant nothing.

‘Mee compiled a children’s encyclopedia. By the time I encountered it, it was already thirty years out of date. But its volumes were packed nevertheless for the child I was with exotic and spellbinding vistas of a world for which I was not just eager, but greedy. There was a picture of a giant redwood in one volume, a tunnel bored through its immense trunk big enough to accommodate a car. In another volume, some brave soul had pictured a brown bear, twelve feet high as it reared up in the posture of a man. There were giant marlin and power station turbines and tidal waves and the electronic microscope and the maelstrom and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And I awoke on Christmas morning at the end of 1963 and my mother had bought me eleven volumes of the set of twelve from a barrow outside a Piccadilly junk shop with the money she’d scrimped and saved for me.’

It was guilt that made him talk like this, that prompted this bathos to which he was inclined. His mother, worn out, had died before he’d made the money that would have made her dotage comfortable.

‘Come, Martin.’

I followed him. He led me to the library where he took a key from a bureau drawer and opened a locked display case. Behind its carved-oak and scrolled-glass doors I saw Arthur Mee’s encyclopedias on their shelf, his name on their worn, blue cloth spines.

‘There are twelve volumes here, Dad.’

Beside me, he nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder. He was providing me with the human touch he needed for comfort at the mention of his mother. ‘I sourced the twelfth. It’s the same edition, printed in the same year. I wanted the full set, with full integrity.’

I looked up at my father’s education in the wider world, his bookbound travels, his dreams and aspirations bound in blue cloth. There wasn’t a lot to say.

He reached for a volume, thumbed out a spine. Volume six, it was. He held the spine of the heavy book in the palm of his hand and it fell open. I took a step back and looked at the open pages.

And I saw a picture of Harry Spalding’s schooner rounding a buoy in brilliant sunshine on sun-dappled water at an angle dictated by taut sails that seemed to threaten disaster and promise triumph at the same exultant moment.

‘ Dark Echo ,’ my father said. There was an inset picture on the page of text facing the full plate of the racing boat. It was a grinning Harry Spalding in whites and blazer with a trophy in his grip and his blond hair a halo of gold on his head. He possessed none of the lupine menance of his Jericho Crew snapshot. He looked elegant and boyish and almost bashful at the attention accorded his win. He aped the style and character of the personality people wished him to be, almost to perfection. It was all I could do not to recoil.

‘When I saw these pictures, Martin, I swore that I would own and sail this boat. And I do and I will. And nothing will stop me. And I hope to God you have the compassion to indulge an old man’s vanity in fulfilling that dream.’

I said nothing.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I sipped from my cup. The coffee it contained was cold.

I could hear the faint hum in the library of the humidor that kept my father’s cigars fresh. In the parking garage twenty feet beneath our feet, some fellow from Cracow or Kiev would be waxing the bodywork of the Bentley and the Aston Martin. But later in the afternoon, his old boxing trophies would be taken from their place of pride and faithfully buffed. And suddenly, I understood my father’s retirement. At fifty-five, he had capitulated to the dreams of his childhood. He would indulge and fulfil them now, because he had the time and the means. He would not be deterred, either. He would act on these infantile whims with an iron will.