The auction took place in a dismal teak and mahogany room with high windows bleared by fog and rain. The room smelled of damp and turpentine. It felt chillier in there than it had outside. There were only two concessions in the room to modernity. On one wall hung an old and faded Pirelli calendar. According to the calendar, we were enjoying April of 1968. Boy, weren’t we just! And there was a telephone on a desk by the auctioneer’s podium. It was the old-fashioned kind, though, black and enormous and perhaps fashioned from Bakelite. Even in 1968, this instrument would have been borderline antique. The telephone was manned by a clerk in a cheap suit and plastered-down hair. The auctioneer was old and austere-looking. There were half a dozen people seated in the room, none but my father among them looking anything like someone with the means to be a potential buyer. And there was a boy with a notebook who did not remove his raincoat, whom I took to be from the local newspaper. The Dark Echo had little in her history to connect her to Pompey. The keel had been laid in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1916. But late and diminished in her long and sometimes illustrious life, here she had turned up. Bullen and Clore were a local firm. The boy might get a single column on a newspage about it. It might make a decent colour story or a snippet on a diary page. There was no photographer accompanying this cub reporter. Cheaper and more dramatic to use an archive shot of the vessel in splendour under full sail, I supposed.
I was right about the people there. There wasn’t a single bid from the floor other than the bids made by my father. And my father did have to bid quite tenaciously, against someone on the telephone who seemed really to want the boat very badly indeed. My father went way above the reserve. But he was nothing if not stubborn, and his pockets were nothing if not deep, and he wanted the boat badly himself and he was not a man accustomed to coming second at anything. So he paid vastly over the odds and, when the gavel came down, turned and gave me a 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 Dark Echo in its vast canvas shroud. But he didn’t even look at her. He looked straight ahead, the trepidation increasing to make a pale leer of what he probably thought was still his practised grin of triumph. My father was afraid, my instinct told me. He had taken my arm the way a frightened toddler might for comfort grasp his own father’s hand.
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.’