F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘You did your best, son,’ he said, rising to go once the bleeding had stopped. ‘You did your best. You lost only because he wanted it more.’

It was a truth as plain as it was devastating.

Years later, I heard that my father had subsequently given Winston Cory a job. More accurately, he had given him the sinecure that enabled Cory to train properly when he stepped up to international competition as reigning English champion. He held this fictitious position for a couple of years, apparently. He put the fact on record, thanking my father publicly, in a profile published in The Times when he came back from the Olympic Games with the silver medal he won there. But this isn’t a story about pugilism. It isn’t a story about Winston Cory, who broke my nose in the years before he turned professional and made his name and his not inconsiderable fortune out of it. It’s a story about a boat, the man who came to acquire it and his son. It’s about other things, too, other considerations and repercussions. But even at the time of writing this, I’m rather less sure about precisely what they might turn out to be. So let’s just call it the story of a boat and the man for whom that boat became an obsession.

I think my father’s retirement came as a surprise to everyone except himself. When I really consider it, I think it may have come as a surprise even to Dad. From the outside, the announcement was abrupt and shocking. To me, profit and publicity and the power and attendant adulation of his business success had been his rich, boiling lifeblood. So his retirement seemed less the abdication which it was described as, and more a sort of suicide. And his explanations for it had the forlorn style and scant logic of an attendant suicide note.

The only way I can rationalise it is to compare it to when a great champion quits at the top of his game. So Bjorn Borg walks to the courtside, and tosses his racquet on to his bag and peels off his headband, and even as the sweat of spent effort dries on his twenty-six-year-old body, he knows the flames fuelling the fire of his competitive soul have somehow been doused and he’s had enough, for ever, of the effort required to triumph. I remember that. I’m thirty-two years old. I was six then, and like many boys of my own age, idololised the great Swede. He lost to the French left-hander Henri Leconte in a nothing tournament and the will to win just perished in him as he walked off the court.

Except that it happened to my dad when he reached the age of fifty-five and he announced to a stunned business press that he was relinquishing all commercial commitments in order to retire and sail a vintage boat. He would sail it to America, he said. He would sail his old schooner eventually around the world. But the Atlantic would provide sufficient challenge, he said, for the maiden voyage.

You have to picture the room. The announcement was made in the gilt and leather banqueting chamber at Stannard Enterprises. My father was flanked by the men hand-picked to sustain and expand the empire. But he was already history, bought out by the same conglomerate of venture capitalists whose advances he had scorned for years. The room seethed with pinstripe and polish and bold silk neckties and testosterone and it buzzed in the pockets of the seated reporters with the incoming email on their BlackBerries. The atmosphere was odd, my father’s secretary later told me. And not only because she was the one female present. My father had been generous down the years with business tips for these men, many of those tips lucratively acted upon. They were, Sheila said, like well-dressed beggars summoned one last time to the table of a king traditionally munificent with the scraps from his feast.

Eventually, the fact that he really intended to do as he said sank in. They realised that he wasn’t joking. One waggish reporter, perhaps familiar with Magnus Stannard’s inexperience as a sailor, suggested Southampton to Cowes might be a more appropriate challenge. Laughter ensued. But the laughter was feeble. And it stopped altogether when my father raked the room with the stony sweep of his gaze.

‘So far, I’ve lived every one of my dreams,’ he said into the silence. ‘Which is why you’re all scribbling notations and I’m sitting here.’

They were stilled.

He smiled. It was his humble, self-deprecating smile. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if I’m realistic, there’s a case for starting on the Norfolk Broads.’

They laughed. They roared with laughter. He had forgiven them.

His eyes brightened and softened under their brows. ‘Boys,’ he said. ‘Boys. Where the hell has the fun ever been, merely in being realistic?’

Sheila told me the hardened business hacks rose as one to give him a standing ovation. It was spontaneous, she said, and fierce and prolonged. And there were tears in the room.

I did not need to ask if my father was among those who shed them.

The auction where he paid too much for his folly of a wreck was held at the boatyard of Bullen and Clore, just outside Portsmouth, on a cold and misty morning in January. My father requested I attend but, of course, we didn’t travel down to Portsmouth together. I drove where he flew. He didn’t even ask me to meet him at the heliport, preferring to take a taxi to the sale. When he arrived, without retinue and punctually, I was already there, cold and damp and bored from my tedious vigil on the dock.

Bullen and Clore; to me the name had been suggestive, when I’d first heard it, of a firm of Victorian undertakers. But when I got there, I saw that interring was actually the reverse of what they did. They specialised in salvage. Their business was summoning to an undead state the corpses of the shipping world. They raised and reclaimed sunken craft, or they rescued abandoned boats, or they provided refuge and repair for the terminally damaged and the derelict. In their domain of piers and pilings by the sea, you could hear the sound of great and mysterious chains, moaning at the pull of stupendous tides. Amid the iron hulks and sodden timbers, you could half imagine Isambard Brunel in his stovepipe hat, slipping on leather-shod boots in the ooze in the hours before his catastrophic stroke. The mist that day bled out all light and colour, rendering the scene at Bullen and Clore in the grainy sepia of a bleaker age.

The boat concerned in the sale was in dry dock. And it was a hull, more than it was a boat. I knew from my father’s description that she was a two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner. Or she had been, in her prime. Time and neglect had torn the low roof from the area where the living quarters should have risen from the deck. Of the foremast, there was nothing remaining. And a storm had snapped the main mast. Its root rose thickly from the deck, cleaved in splinters about eighteen inches above a two-foot brace of corseting iron, the whole broken column about eight feet proud in total from the point where it emerged. That this damage had been done by elemental violence and not the deliberation of a boat-breaker’s chainsaw was somehow a comfort.

My father slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Gets to you quickly, doesn’t she?’ he said. Mist was pearling like dew on the wide shoulders of his coat and his breath already stank richly from the day’s inaugural cigar. As usual, though, he was right.

It was the lines of her that did it. Even out of the water, she had this sweep of imperious elegance. The timbers of her hull were stained but sound-looking, apparently intact. Her deck, with its brass rail, was a low-sung hymn to grace. She was so beautifully proportioned that, even as a wreck, she seemed somehow poised and dignified. Maybe it was also that she was redolent of the wealth and glamour of the man who had commissioned and raced her. I knew from reading the literature in the sale catalogue that Dark Echo had been Harry Spalding’s boat. But really, it was her lines. Even with her brass tarnished and her portholes canted or sunk altogether, you could imagine her under full sail on a glittering sea with the whitewashed walls of Cap d’Antibes or somewhere a brilliant promise under the sun on the horizon. It was quite something to picture that, standing on wet cobblestones in the prevailing gloom of Bullen and Clore’s monochrome wharf on a winter day. But even beached and wrecked, even then, suspended above the ooze from ropes and chains, Dark Echo seemed to possess the power to summon dreams.