F. Cottam - Dark Echo

‘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.

He thanked the pale novice who had brought her there and then shook her formally by the hand. He was, as Martin had said, enormous. Her hand was completely enveloped in the grip of his, and his arms inside his soutane were as broad and dense-looking as those of a shot-putter or a power-lifter. He had not acquired muscles like these in the gym. She was certain of that. He was one of those men born strong, his future muscular power determined even as he grew from something tiny in his mother’s womb. The word for what he possessed physically was almost archaic, Suzanne thought. But it was accurate. And it was ‘might’. Monsignor Delaunay was mighty. His handshake, though, was gentle. And in his demeanour he seemed almost abashed.

There was a leather sofa at the opposite end of his room from where his desk was placed, and it was to this that he guided her. He took her coat and hung it on a corner stand. He gestured for her to sit. But he did not sit himself. He offered to have tea or coffee fetched, but she declined both. He offered water and, when she nodded acceptance, poured her a glass from a carafe on a small circular table. Then he stood before her with his hands clasped behind his back. She sipped from her glass. The water was very cold. She wondered was it drawn from a well – they might have their own. It had not come from a bottle left to stagnate for a month under fluorescents.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’

‘When I tell you what I have to tell you, you’ll agree it was the very least I could do.’

She sipped water, wondering how bad this could be. She had left her cigarettes in the glove compartment of the car. Then again, you weren’t allowed to smoke in church. And she was unacquainted with the protocol. Everything here might be a church, the way that embassies shared the status of sovereign states.

‘May I call you Suzanne?’

‘Of course you may, Monsignor Delaunay. I’d like you to. And I’d like you to tell me the truth about the man who masqueraded as Peitersen.’

‘He is one of us, Suzanne.’

‘A representative of the Catholic Church?’

‘A priest.’

‘He did not seem very much like a priest.’

‘Nor was he meant to.’

‘For example, he really does know about boats.’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘I might take that cup of coffee off you.’

‘You must feel free to smoke.’

‘Damn. I mean, darn. I left them in the car.’

Delaunay smiled. ‘It may shock you to learn that there are priests who indulge that vice, Suzanne. What I mean is, I can probably cadge you a pack of Marlboro Lights.’

Peitersen, whose real name was Sean McIntyre, was a Boston Irishman who never knowingly entertained a religious thought until he was forty-five years old. His family business was building fishing boats. The business went back five generations. He broke with tradition and began building racing yachts after racing them himself as a teenager and realising that his own makeshift improvements to the basic design made any yacht he raced both significantly faster and easier to handle, too.