Dark Echo (26 page)

I paused outside the door of my father’s cabin. I wanted to continue our conversation. I felt flattered by the idea that he wanted me to extend the family, by the notion that there was a fund of love in him waiting to be spent, lavished, on a son or daughter of mine. It meant that he was finally and
completely over the disappointment of my failed vocation. And he wanted Suzanne to be the mother of his grandchild. I had known he liked her. I realised then that he probably loved her. She was kind and clever and amusing and independent and she made his only son happy. It occurred to me, too, that she was the same age as the daughter he lost would have been. I wondered how often, looking at Suzanne, that thought had occurred to him.

I could hear opera music from behind his cabin door – the Germanic stuff, of course – a
Heldentenor
wailing sonorously about a water nymph or some such, no doubt with a spear in his hand and a helmet with horns on his head. His sturdy torso would be clad in burlap sacking, cinched by a sword belt. I shook my own head, grinning, and lowered the fist I was about to knock with, deciding to leave him to it. There would be plenty of opportunity for us to discuss personal matters, the important, intimate stuff of life. There was no hurry. It was not as though we could escape one another’s company aboard the boat for very long. Perhaps that had been my father’s motive in inviting me, or among his motives. We were close. I was close to him, because I chose not to compete with him. But in his business life, generous with everything else, he had been a miser with his time. Now we were to spend a fair bit of it together and I was pleased at the thought. But there was no rush, so I left him to his Wagner in his cabin and went back on deck.

It was almost fully dark. The weather was very clear. I could see the lights of no other vessels but, looking up, could make out the faint twinkling of the first stars. In practical terms, crossing open sea was much less demanding of seamanship than sailing around the coast of Ireland had been. Along a coastline there were currents, riptides, sandbanks and submerged rocks. Fog was a hazard and the seagoing traffic heavier. There were trawlers to avoid as they turned for their home ports after a
night’s fishing in the dawn murk. But traversing an ocean, out of sight or reach of the safety of land, aware of the profound depths beneath you and your isolation, brought psychological pressures that vastly outweighed practicalities.

Awed at that moment, as full darkness descended, I was also aware of just what freedom a boat represented. It was a very exclusive sort of freedom, of course. It helped to have a wealthy father to endow you with the privilege. Ironically or not, that was something I had in common with Harry Spalding. In having this boat built, Spalding had engineered his freedom, his licence to sail the oceans, to roam the world unaccountably, a rich stranger in its remotest ports and harbours. You had to wonder what his motive had been. Because it had not very likely been a simple love of the sea, had it? What had Spalding done with all that freedom?

I shivered. It was cold without the sun. And the answer to the question I had just asked myself was that we would never know. The
Dark Echo
’s log had been destroyed. And with it had perished any hope of uncovering Spalding’s secrets. I shivered again, and it was not just the wind off the dark sea and its chill that made me do so. I did not want to discover Spalding’s secrets. What I knew already suggested they were sadistic and insane. The boat was a better legacy than her first master had deserved. My father and I would surely put the freedom she gave us to more innocent use than he had. If we had not already earned our berths aboard her, then over the coming days we would surely do so.

I heard a noise again then, a kind of keening howl that sounded like a dog. I tried to tell myself it was a whale. There were whales in these waters. There were other marine mammals capable of barks and cries that would carry on the wind, distorting, for miles. There were porpoises and seals. But it seemed to have been coming from the direction, under the deck, of the sail store.

I engaged the auto-steer and went below. There was a sheath knife in my cabin and I ducked in there to grab it. I had not heard a rat. But what I had heard had not sounded friendly or well disposed. So I opened the hatch to the sail store with the knife in the grip of my right hand. I switched on the row of wire-bracketed lights that lit the long, low space. I could see no dog. I could see no movement. All I could see was pale folds of Dacron and loops of neatly coiled ropes and block tackles depending from hooks screwed into that section of the bulkhead. But there was a smell. It was sour and feral. And to me it smelled canine. It put me in mind of the wolf enclosure at the zoo in Regent’s Park, near the football pitches, before they got rid of it. That same smell had drifted over the pitches from the wolf enclosure, when the wind was right. I looked again. A big dog would have left hair and strings of drool, wouldn’t it? There was nothing. I turned out the lights and relatched the hatch. It was my imagination.

But I was slightly spooked. So after putting the knife back, I went and knocked on my father’s cabin door. Supper would be my pretext. I’d offer to cook something, ask him what it was he wanted to eat before retiring to his berth.

The opera was very loud. He had poured himself a large measure of whisky. A cigar smouldered in an ashtray and the air in the cabin was yellow with the fug of smoke. He had the guns out of the cabinet. They were on his desk. He was cleaning and loading them. One, a semi-automatic rifle, had been disassembled and the action lay in pieces on a swatch of oily cloth. The ammunition – the shells and cartridges – was coiled in thick bandoliers and spilling from white cardboard boxes of bullets. My father eyed me down the sights of a carbine held one-handed and took a drag on his Havana. He did not look very grandfatherly.

‘Readying yourself for World War Three, Dad?’

‘You need to be prepared, Martin,’ he said. ‘We are in an environment that could turn hostile.’

‘Way to go,’ I said. It seemed to me a life raft might prove more useful.

‘Sit down, son.’

There were high splotches of colour on his cheeks and forehead.

‘Have you taken your medication, Dad?’

He waved the question away and the smoke from his cigar piroutetted lazily. Someone in the chorus in the opera hit a long, lamentable note. Unless the sound was the ghost of Spalding’s dog, keening for its master. A substantial wave hit us then and the boat juddered and I had to steady myself by gripping the edge of my father’s desk. One of his ammunition boxes toppled and brass-jacketed bullets spilled out on to the desktop, some rolling from the desktop on to the floor.

‘I said sit down.’

I pulled a chair across obediently and sat.

‘All that talk earlier, about Chichester.’

‘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.

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.’