F. Cottam - Dark Echo

So Spalding had possessed a sense of humour, or at least a sense of irony. The incident itself must have been very serious back in those cap-doffing, forelock-tugging days for the police to have been called and for a millionaire guest to have been told to pack his bags. The clear implication was that the maid had been paid off. Suzanne assumed her injuries had been quite serious. In 1927, twenty-one years before the National Health Service was introduced, a hotel chambermaid did not qualify for hospital treatment unless it was a medical necessity.

Suzanne had wondered about Harry Spalding’s attitude towards what was then called the fairer sex. She knew that he had been dumped by a girlfriend in Marseilles or Rimini or somewhere on arriving in Europe. Now she wondered if he had dumped her in the harbour. All she had to go on was the feral look he was giving Jane Boyte in the photograph she’d seen earlier of the US bankers invited to Ireland by de Valera’s government. Had that been the source of some friction between Spalding and Collins? Had Spalding made a crude pass at Jane, or made her the victim of one of his practical jokes? Collins was notably chivalrous and quick to defend any woman he considered insulted. There were five or six recorded incidences of him leaping to a woman’s defence, the most famous being when he came close to punching Lord Birkenhead at dinner in London during the treaty negotiations in 1922 over a perceived insult to his hostess, Hazel Lavery.

But it didn’t matter, did it? It was neither here nor there in helping Martin and his father if they were in peril on the sea. Suzanne thought that she was making progress on the subject of Harry Spalding. Detail was accruing, a picture emerging. But she felt that she would have to wait until late the following afternoon and her audience with the Jesuit in Northumberland before there would be any real further enlightenment.

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.