barely human. It was a sound in utter contrast to the character of his words. Perhaps he was only impersonating a man. He was as unnatural, I think, as the fog that had announced and then delivered him. Last I heard the nailed soles of his boots, slick on the spilled blood of my comrades on the cobbles.
Of course, I knew what he had come there for, Destain said.
And the men at the captain’s hospital bedside, the grim deputation from the Vatican watching the infection kill him, lowered their eyes as he and some of them crossed themselves.
And so I knew that he would, indeed, burn in Hell. One day and for ever, I knew that the smiling American would come to know damnation.
Martin
One
It was wholly in character for my father to buy a thing cursed. He didn’t give a damn for dubious reputations. He believed in nothing he hadn’t seen for himself or could not prove. Price was never a consideration either, I don’t think, in determining what he chose to acquire, except when set very high. Then, his rapacious appetite for ownership could make a thing impossible to resist. Rarity tempted him. But he was a man, I think, without superstition and I’m sure, even thinking upon it now, devoid of remorse or even the subtler sentiment of regret. His famous nerve had enabled him to build his fortune. Every day that fortune swaggered and grew, his instinct gained a sort of strength and vindication. He was confident and fearless and his decisions were never reneged upon. Bidding at auction for the wreck of an unlucky boat was nothing to him and winning the auction was nothing short of what he would have expected. But what happened next surprised everyone. Perhaps it even surprised my father. I wish I had asked him. I fear I will not now ever get the opportunity. I don’t know, though. When I think about what has happened subsequently, maybe that’s actually a blessing.
I inherited neither my father’s courage, nor his addiction to risk. And without his visceral need to make money, I have always been unproven in that accomplishment, too. By the age of seven or eight, I knew I was destined to be a disappointment to him. I did not share his reckless energy. I was a dreamy, reflective child. And so the precious hours away from business conquest that he devoted to his only son were understandably frustrating for him. In his time spent with me, he could transmit his will to compete to the arena of competitive games. He did it willingly, with relish and focus. But I never cared about who won our chess matches. He would murder me, across the board, and I would grin in goofy admiration. I can only imagine how it must have galled him.
One day, when I was about eleven or twelve, he took off his jacket after another predictable whitewash over a game of Scrabble or dominoes and rolled his sleeve and planted his bristling forearm from the elbow on the table top. I was looking at the bulging strength and sinew of the limb, wondering afresh at where a business tycoon like my dad acquired the muscle, when he said, ‘Give me your hand.’
Dutifully, I clasped his palm. It was hard and calloused and dry. And it was another massacre as he slammed my knuckles against the polished oak. He fixed me with eyes of ageing emerald green and said, ‘You’ve the strength of a butterfly, Martin. And about the commensurate will.’ He rose, tiredly for my father, slowly. He took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped the stain of my weakness from his palm. ‘When you can defeat me, you will have earned my respect,’ he said. ‘And who knows? Perhaps you will have earned your own.’
My father had boxed as a boy. More accurately, he had fought. His had been the sort of childhood poverty that announces itself in shoes with composite cardboard soles and clothing sourced through charity and invigorated through flat-iron steam and repeated darning. His appearance did not wash at the educational establishments his brains and a subsequent scholarship achieved for him. He was duly picked on. He was bullied. Out of necessity, he discovered he was handy with his fists. From being jumped in school lavatories and the dark corridors of dormitories, he progressed to the crested vest and ringside cheers of organised bouts. His old trophies, cheap things of plate nickel, are now priceless treasures, holy relics of his fabled past, taken from their cabinet in the library of our family home and faithfully polished by his housekeeper every day.
When I was twelve years old, he dragged the old priest who had trained him out of his seminary and devout retirement to train me too. Had he wanted a champion pugilist for a son, he could have afforded the greatest boxing trainer who ever lived. He could have got Brendan Ingle from Sheffield or Enzo Calzaghe from Wales. He could have gone to America, lured Angelo Dundee out of Los Angeles or sent to Boston for the Petronelli brothers, for Christ’s sake. But though the old man wanted me competing, it was even more imperative to him that I would do so on the same terms as he had. So by virtue of the fact that he was still alive, of course, my own coach had to be Father O’Hanlon.
The priest appeared very old and impossibly grey, cajoled by my father back into his elderly tracksuit. The collar was frayed and the elastic perished at the wrists and ankles. The canvas of his plimsolls was the same parchment grey as his complexion. He looked fraught and reluctant under his threadbare, combed-over hair. I was dutiful on the hook and jab pads, half-hearted on the heavy bag and downright sloppy on the speedball. And at the end of the floorwork he put me through I sat next to Father O’Hanlon on a bench as steam expired off my shoulders through a blanket he’d given me against the cold in the empty gym one Cumbrian night.
A wizened hand clapped me on the shoulder. Its fingers gave the meat of me a squeeze. ‘If your old man had possessed a fraction of your talent, son, he’d never have earned a penny on the markets,’ O’Hanlon said.
I was intrigued by this claim. ‘Why, Father?’
O’Hanlon slapped me on the thigh. ‘Because he wouldn’t have needed to. Because he’d have earned his fucking fortune in the prize ring.’
But things are never that simple. Life is not the movie we all wish in our most ardent and secret dreams it should turn out to be. I trained hard and scrupulously under O’Hanlon. And beneath his impoverished gym attire, I still hold he was as shrewd and thorough a trainer as any fighter could wish for. Under his fastidious tutelage, I reached the national finals of the ABAs. And, modesty aside, I did it without engaging in wars. I reached the final probably the hottest favourite to take the middleweight title for a decade. My father was ringside that night of course, his arm adorned by his most recent wife. He winked and she glittered at me as the opening bell sounded. And for two rounds everything followed my script as I creamed a switch-hitter from West Ham by the name of Winston Cory.
The haymaker from Cory that broke my nose and dumped me on the canvas on my backside in the third was the first punch I never saw and the last I ever took in an honest fight. I made the count, though. I was back on steady legs at the count of four. I knew already, from all my rounds of sparring with bigger boys, I could take a decent punch. I felt far more indignant than hurt. But I was haemorrhaging blood and they had no choice but to stop the bout. So I’d lost. Cory had won. I turned to my corner, to Father O’Hanlon, who looked at me the way a saviour must look when losing a promising soul to damnation.
In the movie version of this story, I know, of course, what happens next. The old man, unable to endure the taint of loss, shuns entirely his defeated son. He leaves his gorgeous floozie shivering at the kerbside waiting for their limo while he bursts into the winner’s dressing room full of bonhomie and boisterous congratulation. He slaps backs and proffers cigars. Manly and magnanimous, he is the life and soul of the sweaty little victory celebration.
But it didn’t happen like that in life. In fact, my father came in to me as my corner people struggled to staunch the bleeding and splint my nose. He took off his coat and dabbed at the damage with a towel. Blood from me sprayed and flecked at the starched white of his dress shirt. He did not seem to notice, or mind. His touch was so tender and solicitous that I almost wept at the unexpected intimacy of him there.
‘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
