F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘Who’s that?’ my father asked.

‘That’s Peitersen. From America. And he might be your saviour,’ Hadley said. ‘And if he can persuade you of what he has in mind, I think he might also turn out to be mine.’

Four

My father treated Peitersen to breakfast at a café a mile or so along the road. His intentions concerning the Dark Echo announced to the owner of the boat, Hadley seemed much more relaxed. The cliché about weight and shoulders visibly applied to him as he grew and straightened on his dock. Whatever malign forces he thought ranged against him, he clearly felt mollified once his decision had been voiced publicly. Obviously we would have to wait for a window in the appalling weather before the craft could be towed away. But not another minute’s work would be done on her there.

As Peitersen approached and Hadley did the introductions, my father retreated from indignant fury back into his usual mode of old-school courtesy. It was a tactical retreat, rather than a capitulation. He could have ruined Hadley in the courts, of course he could. He could have carried out his threat. But it would have delayed his real purpose and defining mission, which was the restoration and relaunching of the boat. I rocked in the wind on the greasy cobbles paving that stone rampart at the edge of the sea. The smell of brine assaulted my nostrils and cruel mutilation hung from a steel rope in front of my eyes. And I was suddenly aware, for the first time, of the depth of the delusion which had overcome my dad. From what he had said on the road to the Hamble, all the Dark Echo really lacked was competent PR. She needed a maritime Chis Bonington to talk up her seagoing strengths and racing achievements and perhaps the aesthetic merits of her design. There was no such thing as an unlucky boat. There were only the unlucky and sometimes tragic individuals occasionally to be found on board. Busy boatyards were places where accidents would inevitably occur. Storage facilities were sites in which bored security staff would sneak a smoke and leave a burning stub to spark a blaze. Sea mammals did not have the wit to avoid the churning screws of a Wight ferry, particularly when their skewed sonar had sent them hundreds or even thousands of miles off their true course.

Nothing would deter him. Everything was explicable. Faith in his stern and almighty God was the only mystery my father allowed into his life. He was not about to see it challenged now by the fear in others of what he sneered at as witchcraft. He would restore Dark Echo at whatever terrible cost she claimed. And he would embark aboard her on his transatlantic voyage. And I would have to go with him, not because I was any longer flattered by the invitation, but because I loved him so much and sensed the slippery, brooding danger and could not let him face it on his own. If I did that, I would lose him, I was sure. I did not want my father confounded by terror and madness. And I did not dare to face the loss of him.

These were my thoughts on the quay at Hadley’s boatyard. And they seemed perfectly fitting to the circumstances. The headless dolphin swayed and dripped some viscous stuff on to the cobbles. Out on the Solent a ship’s horn sounded, withered and deformed by the wind. Hadley’s men were grey and pinched and flapping at the extremities of their clothing under a grey sky. My father, magisterial under his mane of silvery hair, looked doomed. And the boat he had bought brooded like a secret under its ragged canvas wrapping.

But Peitersen entirely changed the mood, once we got to the café. He was buoyant and energetic and focused. His eyes were as bright with enthusiasm as the double row of brass buttons on his pea coat. He had, for want of a better word, a style about him. He talked only in terms of sunny practicalities. We would tow Dark Echo aboard a flat-decked, seagoing barge as soon as we could charter the vessel and the tug to pull it, and got our weather window. He had a provisional berth for her already in mind. There was a small boatyard we could lease short-term about five miles along the coast. It was not state of the art, like Hadley’s place. It was not resourced to create Viking longships for the directors of epic films. But it possessed all the necessary facilities to make Dark Echo seaworthy once again. And, he said, tucking into his full English breakfast, to make her once more proud and beautiful.

Talk like this would, I knew, have no trouble in seducing my father simply because it voiced his most ardent dreams in the kind of phraseology he would have chosen to use himself. But I was unconvinced. I studied Peitersen. He was not so young as his lithe movement had promised from a distance aboard the boat. There were lines around his eyes and a suggestion of scragginess at the neck. His tumbling curls of strawberry-blond hair were youthful enough with his watch cap taken off at the table to eat. And he had a tan that suggested the tropics and took a few years off him as well. But the man I had first thought to be about thirty-five was probably in reality more like fifty years old.

‘You don’t believe she’s an unlucky boat, Mr Peitersen?’

‘Jack will do,’ he said to me, smiling. His teeth were very white against the unseasonal depth of his tan. ‘And no, I don’t, son. I think she’s a boat has had more than her fair share of unlucky owners. But that’s been her misfortune. And her fortunes are about to change.’

I looked at my father. The smile he now wore was broad, almost beatific. Peitersen could play him, alright. And the two of them had only just met.

‘How do you explain the dolphin, Jack?’

He looked at me. His eyes were blue-grey and as bright as his grin. He was very alert. I thought that if his hands were as quick as his mind, the restoration of my father’s boat would take no time at all.

‘I wouldn’t presume to,’ he said. ‘It’s arrogant for a man to try to justify the mysteries of the sea. I can tell you that, to my mind, the dead creature signifies nothing beyond itself. I wouldn’t speculate on why it swam here or how it perished. I prefer to deal in nails and timber and tar and rope. I can make Dark Echo respond to the lightest touch of her tiller. I can squeeze eighteen knots out of her under full sail. I prefer to deal in practicalities rather than to dwell on superstition, son.’

I nodded. I really didn’t like him calling me son.

‘I don’t believe in curses. I stick to what I know.’

‘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.