smile much more complex than the familiar smirk of triumph I’d expected to see. There was something odd in the smile I could not readily identify. Now, looking back with the clarity of hindsight, what I think flawed my father’s smile that morning was an instinct almost wholly alien to him. I think, now, what cramped that victorious smile was an unfamiliar hint of trepidation.
This was immediately followed by another surprise. ‘I’d be grateful if you would drive me to the heliport, Martin,’ my father said. I nodded, rose and buttoned my coat, fingered the keys to my car and walked over and waited by the open office door while he granted a few quotes – gracious and witty, I was sure – to the lad from the local rag.
Out over on the dry-dock wall a man was supervising a team with a crane and hawsers, hitching a huge protective tarpaulin over the teak and oak cadaver for which my father had just paid a king’s ransom. There, the fog was thickening. There were fifty feet of abyss between the wet cobbles on which the men stood and the bed of the dock, and they moved with deliberation. The man in charge wore a seafarer’s cap and a reefer jacket over filthy overalls. The mist rolling off the sea was making a belligerent ghost of him as he barked instructions and pulled on the stub of cigar in his mouth, turning the burning end of it into a faint, fiery smudge of orange. He was unaware of me watching him, I think. When the task was done and his team of men turned away and retreated, enveloped by the grey air, he paused and looked at the still, enormous shape of the craft in its shroud. And he tossed the butt of his smoke over the wall of the dock into the mud far below and he crossed himself, once and deliberately, like a genuflecting Catholic at Mass. It seemed an incongruous thing to do, after the cursing and shouting that had chorused the task just completed. I thought perhaps it was just some obscure nautical tradition of which, like all nautical traditions, I was ignorant. Then he, too, was gone, swallowed by the fog. Bullen, if it wasn’t Clore, I thought. Undertakerly reverence from one of the salvage bosses about to benefit from my father’s ill-spent wealth. Then my father was at my side, taking my arm, a third surprise, for our walk to where I’d parked the car. Our route took us right past the
By the time I had driven the distance to the heliport the fog had thickened to an extent that made taking off impossible. Even Magnus Stannard could do nothing about the official grounding of all flights.
‘I’ll drive you, Dad,’ I said. I did not want the first day of his retirement proper sullied by any suggestion of defeat. I was a good driver. Even he would accede to that fact.
He looked at the Saab. And he sighed. ‘I wish I’d bought you a better car,’ he said. ‘Remind me to sort you out a Jag or something.’
‘I like my car. The Saab’s fine,’ I said.
‘Fine if you’re a Swede,’ he said, getting back in. ‘Fine if you follow the gospel of self-deprecation. Which the Swedes, as Scandinavians, have no recourse but to do.’
‘As I remember,’ I said, ‘you chose the Saab for me.’
He laughed at that. He laughed, easily. We were getting on. I could still fuck it up by ramming someone’s bumper in ten yards of soupy visibility on the motorway. But we were getting on, me and my dad. I felt a flush of pleasure. Gripping the wheel, God help me, I felt pride.
We dined together that evening. Suzanne was on a research trip to Dublin so I had nothing planned and no excuses to make to anyone. My father phoned his secretary on the journey back to London to make the necessary excuses to his most recent wife. Maybe a text message was too intimate a form of communication for my father. Maybe it was too modern. Obviously phoning her himself was totally out of the question. The early signs were not looking encouraging and, without taking my attention off the opaque view through the windscreen, I made a bet with myself that she would last no longer than her two immediate predecessors.
‘I miss your mother,’ my father said a minute later. His voice was weary with the burden of grief it always carried when the subject of Mum came up. ‘God, Martin, I miss her so.’
‘So do I,’ I said, which was the truth. I drove on in silence. But though it was not easy, it was not in any way an awkward silence. It was simply that there was nothing further to be said on the matter. A dozen years on from her death, the loss of my mother felt no less shocking or abject. I could not resent him for words spoken straight from his heart. Nor could I offer a shred of consolation.
His mood improved over dinner. He seemed to recover something of himself after the first few sips of champagne.
‘What do you know of Harry Spalding?’
‘One of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.’
My father frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know. He was a Dick Diver type, I suppose.’
‘Dick Diver was a character from Scott Fitzgerald.’
‘I know. But you know what I mean, Dad. He was one of those rich American expats who decorated the Riviera in the 1920s.’ I wasn’t entirely ignorant on this subject. It was a favourite literary sub-genre of Suzanne’s. As if to prove the point, I said, ‘There were any number of Harry Spaldings. Rich, feckless, sporting and with light artistic pretentions. Gerald Murphy would have provided the template. They summered in the South of France and wintered at Zermatt. Spalding played polo and won trophies at regattas aboard his celebrated boat.’
‘You seem very well informed.’
‘It was in the sale catalogue at the auction today.’
‘Bullen and Clore are not historians, Martin. They are scavengers, the rag and bone men of the sea. Let me tell you about the real Harry Spalding.’
My father wasn’t some tiresome autodidact. He was a scholarship boy who had shone very brightly, taught by the Jesuits at Ampleforth. But he had missed out on university and the consequent intellectual insecurity sometimes made him seem pompous when discussing academic subjects or in the cultural arena. He was inclined to be dogmatic, pious and pedantic. That said, Suzanne reckoned he possessed a first-rate mind and she had better credentials than anyone else I knew to be able to pass accurate judgement. But I had to wait for my lecture on the real Harry Spalding, because a waiter had stolen across the restaurant floor and stood at my father’s elbow ready to take our order.
We were dining at the Kundan in Horseferry Road. It is an Anglo-Indian, about as discreet and expensive as a restaurant can get. Its core customers are high-ranking civil servants, senior parliamentary backbenchers and legal staff on hefty Whitehall retainers. My father had been coming here for years. In all that time, I doubt the menu had changed at all. I was reminded again that, for a man who set such store by certainty, the sea voyage he planned seemed wildly cavalier, really out of character. I remembered his expression, then, earlier on in the day, as we’d passed the shrouded boat.
It transpired that Harry Spalding was a hero of the Great War. He had started out as a lieutenant, leading a platoon of the infantry ‘doughboys’ from the States through the latter stages of the fighting in France and Flanders. Woodrow Wilson was the peace-loving American president who finally committed his country to the conflict. And he really was ardent about peace, dreaming up the League of Nations after the armistice to try to ensure that nothing like the war he embroiled his nation in would ever be repeated.
But the American troops in the field were far more influenced by the philosophy and fighting ethos of Wilson’s less pacific predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had actually led a cavalry charge in the war against Cuba early in the century. He was belligerent, tough and unhesitating in his belief that, where American interests were concerned, might was always right. Teddy Roosevelt it was who established the huge forts where America’s fighting forces learned their tactics and became battle-hardened. It was he who saw to it that the soldiers were properly paid and equipped with the best boots and the warmest blankets and the latest weapons technology.
When the call came in 1917, the Americans had to face veteran German divisions who had held their trench lines through four years of assault and counter-assault. But they were fit and confident and well drilled. They fought with courage and distinction. Even in an army that generally excelled, however, Lieutenant Spalding’s exploits became the stuff of legend.
‘Eventually, he was promoted to major and asked to lead a hand-picked team of fellow assault fighters,’ my father said. ‘In many ways, this outfit was the precursor of what today we call Special Forces. Rank was not an issue among these men. Class was not an issue. Spalding’s own background was immensely privileged. He was the favoured son of one of the wealthiest families in American banking. But he was chosen on merit for his role in the
