Further to her right, beyond the old machines, a film about the history of Southport was showing on a projection screen mounted up on the wall. Images, grey and sunny at the same time, showed the great days of the outdoor pool and the flower show and the bandstand next to the town’s large cenotaph of dignified Portland stone. Water shimmered and roses bloomed in this monochrome world of long ago. She stiffened as she saw a scene from the 1920s. Black sedans prowled the length of Lord Street, sleek as panthers. Women in furs and cloche hats walked arm in arm and discussed the intrusion of the camera, smiling at it. She did not see Harry Spalding. She did not recognise any of the women as Jane Boyte. Fingering the old penny in her pocket, unaware that she was doing so, Suzanne sat down on the chairs before the screen and waited for the film to reach its conclusion and loop back again to its beginning.
Aboard Dark Echo
Night had fallen again by the time I awoke. I looked at my watch. The date wheel told me I had been asleep for a full twenty-four hours. I dressed in an incredulous rush and climbed to the deck. A fog had descended and under it the sea wore the still torpor of a lily pond. I had been forced to reduce to nothing the amount of sail we were carrying in the squall of the previous evening. Everything had been hauled in. Now I saw to my irritation and disappointment that nothing had been done to raise sail since. There was no wind. Every inch we carried should have been up in a bid to keep us moving, however sluggishly, on our course. Then I became aware that we were moving. The engine was not being used. But we were in motion, the Dark Echo travelling as though being tugged through the water, at a speed sufficient to leave a wake churning under the fog at our stern. We felt to be doing about ten knots. I walked to the wheel. The auto-steer was on, of course. I took a bearing from the binnacle compass next to the wheel. It was impossible. With no wind and no power and under no sail, we were doing about ten knots on a south-easterly course. We seemed to be in the grip of a current. And still more than a thousand miles off the coast of America, we were coursing swiftly back in the direction we had come.
My father must have done something to the auto-steer, I thought. But even if he had, I couldn’t understand from where the Dark Echo was deriving this propulsion. She weighed seventy tons. What freak force under the covering of the fog could be urging her on at such a rate? I needed to gather my thoughts. Nothing in my recent maritime schooling had prepared me for something so odd as this. The auto-steer had suffered a malfunction. That was clear. It might or might not be repairable, but for now there was no option. I had to switch it off. I had to take the wheel. I had to turn us swiftly about and raise sail and sit out the fog and, if necessary, the night. The North Atlantic was a very large expanse of ocean. We had plentiful supplies of food and water aboard. But we could not afford to lose our momentum. We had to keep going. It was what vessels under sail were obliged to do. If you failed to do that you became not just becalmed but helpless and you risked disaster and tragedy.
I realised then how hungry I was. I had not eaten anything substantial for well over twenty-four hours. Where was my father? What was he doing? I felt as though I faced this sinister crisis entirely alone. I was hungry and thirsty, too. And I was close to clueless about what was going on with the boat, still slipping urgently through the fogbound sea in the wrong direction under my feet. With a loud curse, I locked the wheel. I had to eat. I had to rouse my father. I would wrestle with the boat’s steering but could not do it without sustenance. He could make me a mug of soup. It was the very least he could do.
There were voices coming from his cabin. I knew he was the only person in there. But he was reading and reciting stuff and doing it in character. I stood outside his door and listened. There were snatches of Imagist and Vorticist poetry. There was some Wyndham Lewis and fragments of T.S. Eliot and what I thought I recognised as E.E. Cummings and part of a story by Ford Madox Ford. It was all of a piece, really, all from the same decade and most of it having originated among the expatriates in Paris. He began to recite that line from the Hemingway short story, the one that begins: In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.
I knew it as the first line of the story ‘In Another Country’. It was familiar to me as the first line of what my father had often said he thought was the most beautiful paragraph of prose fiction written in English in the twentieth century. And I wouldn’t have argued with him. It was vivid and it had this melancholy cadence and it really was very beautiful. But he was reciting it over and over, behind his cabin door, like a mantra. And like a mantra, with repetition the words seemed to lose their sense of meaning altogether and become an abstract, inconsequential jumble of sounds.
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.
And behind his door he laughed and the laugh was sardonic, almost a chuckle. And it was delivered in a high, viperish register that did not sound at all like the rumble of my father’s familiar laughter. And I thought that perhaps Harry Spalding was behind the door, sharing his desk and a joke with my dad, perusing the contents of my father’s gun cabinet with judicious expertise and the hole still jagged and dripping in his head from his self-murder.
I almost slapped myself, then. It seemed as if my father was losing his mind. If I followed, then both of us were lost. I was very afraid, listening to what I was hearing from behind that door, the snatches of nonsense, the weird logic of its period somehow dictating it was not, any of it, entirely random. In his mind, he was in the 1920s. He was in the decade of Lindbergh and Dempsey and Carpentier and Bricktop and Al Capone.
And Harry Spalding, of course. Who Suzanne had insisted was the Devil himself.
If I succumbed to panic now, then I would not be able to save my father. Both of us would be lost. Under me, I thought I could feel the boat gathering speed and impetus. I stole away from the cabin door towards the galley. I would have to get my own food. I had to eat or I felt I would faint. Though now, of course, I found my appetite was entirely gone.
‘Martin?’
I did not reply.
‘Martin? Why don’t you join our little salon? We’re devoting ourselves to a cultural evening.’ More laughter, this time muffled, as though the mirth were contained by a stifling hand. ‘It’s all very intimate and not at all formal. You’re more than welcome.’
Was this how people sounded when they went mad? Was I sharing this wilful, disobedient boat in the middle of an ocean with a madman? When I got to the galley I realised I was sobbing. Tears dripped from my face on to surfaces still with the showroom sheen of newness on them. We had been at sea less than a week and were victims of catastrophe. The situation was hopeless. It was hopeless. But it was not terror that made me weep, and it was not self-pity either. It was grief for my father, believing him lost.