Dark Echo

Echo enterprise.

The most noteworthy thing about that maiden voyage was a dream I had aboard. When we moored at Dun Laoghaire I went ashore and walked to Sandycove for a swim at the Forty Foot in the approaching twilight. My father stayed aboard. He and my mother had honeymooned in Dublin and I think going ashore would have reminded him too vividly and made him melancholy.

I dreamed of Harry Spalding and Michael Collins. They were both uniformed, resplendent in their respective uniforms, standing on the rocks at sun-up above the Forty Foot. Light, reflected off the water below the crag on which they stood, glimmered on their brass buttons and belt buckles and caressed the polished leather of their boots. Neither man had employed a second. And there was no arbiter there to officiate and no doctor with a black surgical bag. They were alone. But they were there, I knew, to fight a duel. I could see that the protocol was to be strictly observed. Collins whistled with nonchalant composure as he screwed the stock on to his Parabellum pistol. Spalding grinned at him as he loaded the big Colt pistol carried in the holster on his Sam Browne belt. Then they were ready. They cocked their respective weapons. I could see their breath on the frozen air as the pair of them stood in profile, facing one another. It was winter again in my dream of the Forty Foot. And ghosts breathed air like the living. The crash of their pistol reports woke me before I could see whose honour was satisfied, whose satisfaction gained in this strange, parodic conflict.

Suzanne turned down flat my suggestion of a romantic dinner at a good restaurant on the eve of my departure for America. She said that it was too formal a farewell altogether and might bring bad luck on the voyage. Better just to go to the Windmill for a drink after our usual supper, she said. And this surprised me. I had not appreciated that she had any serious faith in luck, good or bad. I had assumed she was not in the slightest superstitious. She always struck me as a black and white sort of person, drawn to certainty, repelled by any kind of ambiguity. But then, nobody really knows anyone as well as we like to think we do. It’s one of our human failings to assume we know a person intimately. It gives us the confidence and security with them that we naturally crave. And the more we value their presence in our lives, the more inclined we are, I think, to this venal little sin of self- deception.

Anyway, to the Windmill we went, where the conversation was stilted and the silences charged. I think she wanted to say something to me, but whatever it was remained unsaid. We stuck with the reassurance of platitudes. I complimented her on the Collins series. The second episode had been shown by then. The critical reaction had been overwhelmingly positive. But maybe that was the wrong thing to mention, because her freelance contract at the BBC would be up in a few weeks and she had just been told it was not going to be renewed. The producer of the Collins series was an unforgiving man when it came to a grudge and his contribution to her regular three- monthly review had been a spiteful assessment that clinched the outcome.

What we mainly did that night was sit in silence, occasionally sip at our drinks and listen to Marvin Gaye, Billy Paul and the like sing their maudlin 1970s soul ballads while I searched for the inspiration of something consolatory to say and, I suppose, she longed for the consolation of a cigarette.

We did not make love that night. And this is something that I very bitterly regret. I was always aroused at the tremble of the mattress springs when Suzanne slipped her lithe, lovely body under the duvet. That night was no exception. But there seemed some obstacle between us and it seemed both complex and impenetrable. To my shame and eternal disappointment with myself, I feigned sleep until sleep finally came, leaving me with the convenient rush of the morning and barely time for a kiss before departure. And the thing was, I loved her so much. And the thing is, I still do and will die loving her.

We set out, my father and I, aboard the Dark Echo from Southampton Harbour. There was no fanfare. There was no weeping at the quayside, and no scarves fluttered as we hauled anchor and cast off. Plymouth might have been a more appropriate point of departure, it occurred to me, since my father had once compared himself to Drake. Plymouth was nearer our destination. But the comparison had not really been very serious. I watched the quay shrink in our wake with my father at the wheel and our efficient little engine propelling us through the thick maritime traffic towards open water. Then I thought I saw someone standing, as though watching us. It was a diminishing and solitary figure with a pale, still face under a head of wind-blown, strawberry curls. Frowning, with my father fully occupied at the wheel, I turned from the stern and went to his cabin and took the telescope from his desk. I clattered back up the companionway, drew the telescope and trained it on the still, small figure on the dock. And he raised his head as though looking straight back at me. It was the man we had called Peitersen, a priest’s collar above the black of his soutane, his hair blowing, freed of its woolen watch cap, in the wind at the edge of the sea.

It’s said that human beings have no memory for pain. I think it might be similarly true that we have no memory for fear. My fear of the Dark Echo had become remote from me by the time we embarked upon our transatlantic voyage. It had been to do with the winter, in my mind. And it was the summer by the time we finally cast off and left land behind. It was the time in the world of light and warmth. There had been signs still that things were not altogether right with the boat and with our ambitions aboard her. There had been Peitersen’s enigma and Suzanne’s suspicion and hostility. But, as I say, I think our memory for fear is like our memory for pain. We progress from timid to bold without thought for survival or sanity in our greed to live and enjoy sensation and adventure to the full.

Seven

Suzanne began her pursuit in earnest, on the trail of Harry Spalding, the day that Martin and his father set sail from Portsmouth Harbour. ‘There’s no room in my life for ghosts,’ she had said to Martin, before her clandestine trip to the French farm way back in April. But even in the spring, that had been a lie. Suzanne had been obliged to make room in her life for a ghost. She had been forced to accommodate one. It was why she had come to believe in their existence. Martin was wrong about that. She believed before ever seeing the barn owned by Pierre Duval. It was why she had feared that the danger to Martin and his father was so real.

She had told Martin about her brief brush with the other-worldly in the room with the skylight at the Dublin safe house, on her return from the trip back in March. She had told him straight away. But that had been only the start of it. And what followed, she had kept to herself. Her own ghost had come to her in the seclusion of her small study in the Lambeth flat one damp evening a few nights later. Rain had wicked cosily against the panes of the window. But the window had, of course, been closed against the cold. So when she became aware of the mingled scents she was detecting, she knew they could not be penetrating from outside. Anyway, they smelled warm. They smelled as if they had been generated in warmth and, she also thought, in some warm and distant spirit of conviviality.

What Suzanne smelled was a mingling of Irish stout and sweet, strong tobacco. Sometimes there was a hint of boot and metal polish, too, about the smell, a whiff of leather and cologne. Sometimes there was the sharp odour of wet wool drying, as though in from the teeming Dublin streets before the heat of a fire or stove. But the scent seemed mostly composed of Guinness and Sweet Afton cigarettes on the breath and clothing of someone sitting not far away and perhaps studying her. It did not frighten her. But the ghostly scrutiny did make her feel somewhat self-conscious. It would arrive and then it would be gone. The presence would become faint and then vanish.

He came quite frequently after that first occasion. She never saw him. But she knew very well who it was. She did not know why he came and she never tried to converse with him. She felt in a curious way he had the right to come and study her. She had studied him. It occurred to her after his first visit that his famous life was soon once again to be held up to the glare of public scrutiny. And she had played an influential part in determining what details people would see and hear and learn about him. But she had developed a deep admiration for his character and achievements over the course of her research. So, although she did not know why he came to visit her, she did not fear his ghost. She felt no coldness or sense of menace from beyond the grave. She knew that this flawed, vain, sometimes ruthless man had been, in his generous heart, as good as Harry Spalding had been bad.

He came to her for the last time on the evening of the most miserable day of her professional life. It was the day after Martin’s departure for America and she had cried herself to sleep before the presence awoke her. Her mouth felt gummy and dry from cigarettes and wine. Her eyes were raw. And she felt his still, patient presence watching, beside her.

She had been exposed at work. Someone from the Yale University alumni archive had returned a call she had made and left a message concerning Spalding. The producer of the Collins documentary had been told. She was being paid during her notice period out of the depleted balance of the Collins series budget. She was supposed to be