Dark Echo

accent was very strong.

‘I think I was born with them, Captain.’

‘Then you’re lucky,’ he said. ‘Would you care to take the wheel, Mr Stannard?’

‘I’d be delighted, Captain.’

‘Just keep her on a straight course.’

Straub probably fancied a smoke or needed a pee or something. We were too far out from land for me to run her aground and it takes two to orchestrate a collision at sea and the bloke at the wheel of the other vessel would be competent. Nevertheless, I felt a grown-up thrill of accomplishment at being entrusted with the wheel. It meant the boat was in my hands; I was responsible for the other seven souls aboard her. The pleasure I felt brought home to me how little I had actually accomplished in my life. But that realisation did not spoil the pleasure itself. It was hardly a surprise, a revelation. We live in an age of diminished accomplishment. For the moment, I thought that steering a seventy-ton schooner through a storm would do pretty well for me. It was physical work. Despite the gearing between the wheel and the rudder, I could feel the force of the swell and the weight of the boat through my arms. There was a binnacle compass on a column next to the wheel. I wiped droplets of water from its domed glass cover and took a reading. I knew where we were and I knew where we were going.

Land announced itself the following afternoon in ragged grey humps on the grey horizon. Grey, too, were the faces of our birdwatchers, gaunt with retching, glad to get into the rowing boat lowered from the side into the choppy sea, heading for something firm under their feet when we anchored off Baltrum. I watched them go but had volunteered to stay aboard. I would have a cabin to myself. The wilderness of sand and reeds and rare birds where my shipmates were headed offered no real attractions.

Captain Straub stayed aboard, too. That evening, we dined together at his table. He was a resourceful cook. He made a sort of casserole from barley and boiled bacon and shallots. We washed it down with Weissbier and afterwards had some truly delicious Dutch cheese and his excellent brandy. It was a long way from weevil-ridden ship’s biscuits and salted herring. It was altogether a very civilised route to scurvy.

When we had finished eating, the captain rolled a cigarette from a large pouch of tobacco and sat back in his chair and I looked around me, from where I sat, at his cabin. Hunger and conversation had prevented me from properly examining my surroundings any sooner. Straub’s cabin was not as large as my father’s aboard the Dark Echo. Nor was it anything like so sumptuously well appointed. But the really remarkable thing about it was that there was nothing present in it that could not have come from the late nineteeth century. We had dined by the light of candles. An oil lamp hung from a hook above a small table under the starboard portholes. He had navigation charts rolled on a table where his sextant also reposed. He had a slide rule for his calculations, the ivory from which it had been made yellowing from decades of secretions from human hands. We had taken our depth soundings on approaching the island with a plumb line at the bow. Straub had a berth rather than a hammock and the cabin was warm from a wood-burning fire. It was a cosy enough refuge from the elements. But it seemed out of its time and would have unnerved me had I been there alone and not in company.

Straub stood and put a coffee pot on a paraffin burner on the table under the lamp. He lit the burner with a wooden match. I noticed that the boat was still beneath us. The sea had calmed. I saw that there were tendrils of fog drifting now beyond the glass of the portholes.

‘Do you believe in ghosts, Captain?’

He had his back to me still. I saw him stiffen almost imperceptibly and then I heard him chuckle thickly. ‘I knew that question was coming. And yet I let it surprise me.’ He turned. Straub, too, could have been an artefact from the nineteenth century; a human artefact, with his hewn features and his powerful shoulders and the iron-grey bristle of his beard. He raised his arm and the tip glowed in the gloom of the cabin as he drew heavily on his cigarette. He nodded towards the warming pot. ‘We shall wait for our coffee, Mr Stannard. And then I shall tell you a story about a ghost.’

We settled into our chairs with the coffee and the brandy bottle on the table between us. Against the portholes, the fog now pressed in a pale and solid blanket. The boat rested at anchor, entirely still. There was no wind and the sea outside was motionless and silent. He had been captain of the Andromeda, he told me, for twelve years. He had been her master for a year when he first saw her phantom.

‘We were in the Atlantic Ocean, Mr Stannard. The Americans are, some of them, great and fastidious sailors of yachts. I had a party of five aboard, all of them skilled and hardy.’ He chuckled again. ‘None of them birdwatchers, I fancy.’

I smiled to encourage him to continue and sipped his strong, good coffee.

‘We were about four hundred miles east of Nantucket Island and steering an easterly course, though the location hardly signifies. It was September and darkness had descended an hour since. I was over there,’ he gestured towards his chart table, ‘calculating our average speed because one of the fellows on board had made a query about it. And I looked up and he was sitting where you are now.’

I had gone cold. The coffee was hot in my cup and the fire still warm in the captain’s grate. But I had gone cold under my heavy sweater, with my belly full in that cosy refuge. ‘Who was?’

‘A man in a brown uniform and a steel helmet with a bandage covering the lower half of his face. I say a man. A boy, really. Fright in his young, tormented eyes. A soldier of eighteen or so with mud on his puttees and a rifle that looked too big for him resting across his lap.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He didn’t do anything. He just looked at me.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was gone.’

I felt only relief that Straub’s spectre had not been Harry Spalding. There was no reason, of course, why it should have been. But ghosts and logic were not easy companions in my mind and what I felt was relief, pure and unadulterated. Spalding had been a soldier. But Straub’s visitor had been innocent. And Spalding had never been that. Straub had seen someone else.

He did all the usual things, he told me, made all the usual excuses for himself. He was tired. He was sleep- deprived. He was suffering from stress and probably slightly drunk. He was too imaginative for his own good.

‘The truth was, of course, that I was none of those things.’

‘Did you see the ghost again?’

He nodded. ‘Very occasionally. And very sporadically. I’d say no more than once a year and sometimes the interval has been as long as eighteen months.’

‘And the manner of the sightings?’

‘They never differed.’

‘So you don’t know who he is.’

‘About five years ago I did some research into the history of the Andromeda. This had nothing to do with the question of my ghost. People come aboard the vessel and ask questions and my knowledge of her history was not as complete as it could and should have been. She’s a venerable old lady of the sea, Mr Stannard.’ He picked up his brandy glass and took a swallow and then refilled both our glasses and took out his tobacco pouch again. ‘She has a colourful past.’

I’ve met some garrulous storytellers in my time, compulsive raconteurs. My father is chief among the men I’ve known enthralled by the sound of their own voices holding an audience. But Captain Straub was not one of them. Sitting at his table in his cabin on that fogbound sea, I felt he was telling me this story not because he wanted to, but because he felt compelled.

‘I learned that she was commandeered after one of the enormous, catastrophic Allied offences launched during the latter stages of the Great War. Her home port at that time was Whitstable, on the eastern coast of Kent in England.’

‘I know Whitstable.’

‘She sailed to Calais. She raced to Calais. But the effort was to prove in vain. The battle casualties she picked up had been gassed. None of them could breathe properly. All of them suffered in agony.’ He lit his cigarette and gestured to the portholes. ‘On the return voyage a fog descended. It was a thick fog, impenetrable, much like this. I suppose the fog impeded the breathing of those poor wounded boys even further. Not one of the young soldiers