F. Cottam - Dark Echo

It was then that I noticed the mirror. The small brass-bound mirror in which I had caught Spalding’s reflection on my first terrible visit to the boat was back were I had seen it then. It had been mounted in its original place on my father’s cabin wall.

‘I need you on the deck, now, Dad. We’ve got to try to turn her about. We have to assert control over her. Either you’re the master of this vessel or you’re not. I believe you are.’

‘So I am, by God,’ he said. He thumped the table. His jaw jutted. He held my eyes steadily. He sounded as though he meant it. Had I succeeded in rekindling the pride that remained in him? It was his cherished dream, after all, that had descended into this waking nightmare. Perhaps he had remembered Monsignor Delaunay’s blessing. Whatever, with what seemed like fresh hope and newly summoned defiance, we went above.

The fog had thickened. And it seemed the Dark Echo had gathered speed. I wrestled with the wheel, but she kept heading back to the same slyly insistent course. We raised our sails to try to put about by harnessing the wind. It was what you did aboard a sailing boat. But there was no wind to harness. The sails sagged in the windless mist like shrouds. We dropped a dragging anchor, just in an attempt to slow her down, to arrest the impetus of the vessel. The anchor chain merely strained and groaned against the capstan as her speed through the still water further increased.

‘It’s as though we’re only provoking her,’ I said.

‘It’s him we’re provoking,’ my father said. He was standing beside the deck compass. ‘If we continue on this heading, in four or five days we shall reach the Irish coastline. There we will founder. Unless we can stop her, on her present course, she will either run aground or break up on the rocks off the coast of County Clare.’

I could see the boat in my mind, dashed to pieces in the boiling surf under the great, indifferent ramparts of the Cliffs of Moher. Was that to be our fate?

We stood there beside one another on the deck, mist prickling our skin, salt in our lungs, all silence except for the water trailing the stern of the seventy tons of wood and metal aboard which we were now no more than hostages. Or prisoners. Despite my father’s cryptic mention of Spalding, I did not feel that his ghost shared our voyage. I felt rather that my father and myself were the only people left in the world. And the sense of isolation and our helplessness in it was terrible.

‘I’m going below, Martin. I can do nothing here.’

‘You can do nothing there.’

‘I can get drunk,’ my father said.

I did not answer him.

‘I’m going below.’

I went below myself. I turned on the computer, but my email would neither send nor receive. So I started to write – which had become almost a compulsion with me – and, I thought, might provide more comfort for the moment than the bottle in which my father would be seeking his consolation.

I began writing this account on the evening of the day all those months ago at Bullen and Clore that my father bought the boat. I have kept at it faithfully over the days and weeks and months since then. I brought it aboard the Dark Echo on a disc. And I transferred the file to my little white laptop. Writing it, as the account grew, I’d often wondered what it was for. It seemed part diary, part chronicle and part confession. Reading it back, sometimes the tone of it seemed to me a bit pompous or hysterical. Its singular virtue was truth. Every word of what I’d written – and now continued to write – was a true account of what had taken place. And now I did at last know what its function was to be, always assuming that little bit of luck or providence required. I was not confident about this part. Luck seemed an element in desperately short supply aboard the Dark Echo .

I was interrupted by a roar from my father’s cabin. It could have been a cry equally of pain or triumph. But whatever it was, it was inspired, I was sure, by more than just whatever it was he was choosing to drink. I got up from my chair, walked towards the stern and knocked loudly on his door.

‘Come in, Martin.’

There was a sea chest sitting at the centre of his desk. It was old and iron-bound and water-stained. And my father was breathless from the exertion of putting it there. I looked around the cabin. He had removed a wall panel from about waist height on the starboard side. I could make out the struts and rivets strengthening the bulkhead in the shadowy gloom of the gap.

‘I heard a rattling,’ he said. ‘I decided to investigate. This must have belonged to Harry Spalding.’

Or the Waltrow brothers, I thought. I swallowed. Or Gubby Tench. But it couldn’t have belonged to any of them, could it? The man who called himself Jack Peitersen would surely have found it during the refit. And that had been only the boat’s most recent overhaul. Surely this box could not have lain there undiscovered for eighty years? My father clearly thought it had. Just as he thought he had heard it rattling in its snug cavity, with the boat on a straight course over water as smooth as glass.

‘There’s a toolbox in the sail store, Martin.’

I nodded. I knew there was.

‘Go and fetch a crowbar or a jemmy.’ The padlock on the trunk was made of brass. It had tarnished, of course. But it had not corroded. I went and got the jemmy and came back and forced the lock. I lifted the lid of the trunk. It opened on a foul stench of marine decay. This long-dead odour could not have accrued over a matter of weeks. It was years, decades, since the interior of the trunk had been exposed to light and air.

I had to stand away to let the stink dissipate for fear that I might gag and vomit. The smell was nauseatingly strong. When it had weakened a little, diluted to pervade the cabin, I took a step forward again and looked into the trunk. It contained a badly tarnished rectangular wooden case. There had been padding put around the case and it had rotted to a putrid black paste. That was the source of the awful smell.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s an old-fashioned sewing machine,’ I said. I had seen them in antique shops, even in the houses of people who liked their homes stuffed with chintz and curios.

But I was mistaken. When I lifted the heavy box free of the trunk and set it down on my father’s desk and took off the lid, it was not a sewing machine at all. It was a record player. It was one of those primitive machines that plays recordings cut into wax cylinders. And there were three such cylinders in the box with the machine, carefully laid into a velvet bed grooved to house them. I realised that the cylinders were also to blame in part for the foul smell rising to pervade my father’s cabin. The wax had corrupted somehow and had a clinging, fetid reek.

‘Put one on,’ my father said. ‘Let’s hear what we have, Martin.’ His voice sounded sane and calm. He was quite serious. He had stumbled upon a mystery. And now he wanted to explore it.

‘They won’t play,’ I said. ‘The wax has become unstable, you can smell it decomposing. What do you think that vile stink is?’

‘Put one on.’

‘The machine will have long seized up, Dad. You can’t possibly expect it to play.’

‘Then I’ll put one on myself,’ he said. He shouldered me out of the way. His hand hovered over the cylinders and he selected one. The lights in the cabin flickered, then, dimming. I looked up at one of the portholes. The fog was bruise-coloured. You could not tell if it was night or day. He put the recording in its cradle at the top of the machine and dropped the needle and began to turn the handle. I knew what would happen, before the handle turned, when he dropped the needle on to the wax. It slotted down as smoothly as if the machine had been routinely cleaned and lubricated only yesterday.