What Suzanne thought about all this, I honestly don’t know. I think she thought the rapprochement between myself and my father a good thing. I think she thought six months hence too long a distance away, at least at the outset, to fret unduly over. I suppose she assumed that we would possess at least a basic competence between the two of us when we finally embarked. The Dark Echo was a racing schooner, more than capable of covering the distance between Southampton and New York in three weeks. And when all was said and done, the sea was a great deal safer in the age of satellite phones and sonic distress buoys than it had been eighty years before, in Spalding’s Roaring Twenties. She busied herself with research into the groundbreaking documentary series centred on Michael Collins and the Irish struggle for independence. And she kept any reservations she might have had about the venture to herself.
You might wonder where I found the time to indulge in this little jaunt with all the preparation it required and the money that was needed to fund the training. A generous allowance from my father would be any stranger’s fair assumption. But it would not be the truth. My dad was always generous with me. But I was always independent, particularly so after my mother’s sudden death. At both of the universities I attended, I worked for the college radio station, organising guest interviews and fund-raising drives and on-air competitions and so on. After my eventual graduation, I got a similar job working with a regional station in Kent, only now there was a salary involved. Next, I got a job at a London commercial station. If there was any career plan, it was probably to wind up working in radio programming for the BBC. I’ve always loved the power and potency of the spoken word and have always preferred radio to television because it frees the listener’s imagination somehow in a way that television, with its reliance on pictures and its terror of dead time, can never really replicate.
So there I was, fully intending to evolve over time into some Reithian figure of the twenty-first century. Except that fate intervened when I and a colleague at the London station dreamed up a game-show format we had the wit to copyright. The game became a huge airtime hit. The format translated effortlessly to television. And the game became a hit all over the world. It didn’t earn me the sort of wealth my father had generated through business. But it did bring me enough money not to have to worry about where the mortgage payments were coming from for the flat for a couple of years.
I finally gave up full-time work two years ago. Retirement at thirty would, to be honest, have been a depressing prospect. But I had an ambition to write. In the last two years I’ve written and had published two children’s books. Sales have been modest, but they’ve earned a bit of praise. I like the challenge of writing for enigmatic little people with minds that are difficult to unlock. I can think of little more worthwhile for a writer of fiction than firing the imagination of a child. One not too distant day, I hope that Suzanne and I will have children of our own. Or perhaps, now, better altogether to say that one day I hoped we would. I hoped we would have children of our own. It’s only realistic, in the current circumstances, to put everything into the past tense. Harry Spalding’s baleful curse has imposed that necessity.
The Dark Echo’s reputation as an unlucky boat was vague to all of us. I’d heard something from my father when he’d first mentioned his interest in the vessel, but couldn’t even recall exactly what. When I challenged him on it, admittedly not very aggressively, he’d reclined in his club chair and said something about sailors and superstition, and had then gone back to the more compelling business of reviving his dead cigar. Even Suzanne was really no more forthcoming. She had heard of the boat, she said, in connection with some act of violence at some gathering in the late 1930s of casino gamblers off the coast of Cuba. But, gently pressed, she could not remember the name or the nationalities of the people involved, or even the port concerned. ‘Maybe that’s the curse of the Dark Echo,’ she said, joking. ‘Maybe it afflicts its victims with amnesia and they keep coming back for more.’ She pulled a ghoulish face and shook her hair like a banshee. And incredible though it now seems to me, we both of us laughed.
The first mishap at Frank Hadley’s boatyard was mundane enough. The surviving portholes had been carefully removed. Those not beyond restoration were to be bathed in acid to remove the corrosive stains and then brought back by polishing to their original lustre. But first, the shattered fragments of glass needed to be chiselled out of them. Even this job was done fastidiously, though, because the porthole glass, each individual circular pane, would have to be moulded and cut and polished by a craftsman. It was important not to damage the soft brass housing while removing the tough glass chips and shards.
An apprentice glazier cut himself chiselling out porthole glass. Nobody thought anything of it. But the wound became infected. The boy developed a high temperature and was taken to hospital where his condition swiftly worsened. He was admitted. And then he was moved to a critical bed with a vicious case of septicaemia. He was young and strong, a Sunday footballer on the brink of a semi-professional career. But he did not look any kind of athlete when the ventilator was required for him in his hospital bed, his gashed hand a grotesque, swollen thing suspended above a body so stricken with paralysis that it could not breathe for itself.
The boy recovered. The swelling subsided and the infection receded. After a week, he was allowed home. But he did not return to his work on the portholes of the Dark Echo in the workshop of a glazier’s business subcontracted to Hadley’s boatyard. He telephoned his old boss and said that he would never cut glass again. Nor, he swore vehemently, would he ever again allow glass to cut him.
The second accident took place at the boatyard itself and was much more serious. A carpenter was planing a length of replacement deck planking. It was hardwood, of course, high-grade teak sourced at great expense by my publicity-conscious father from a sustainable source. Either the wood hadn’t quite been seasoned properly and had retained sufficient moisture to stick under the blade, or there was a knot in the burr that had gone unnoticed. But the carpenter, of course, was using original tools. And fashioning hardwood, however skilled you are and however honed your tools, requires a degree of physical force. Either way, the blade of the plane shattered and a steel splinter pierced the carpenter’s eye. It was a nasty injury, an agonising disfiguration that cost him fifty per cent of his sight and would impair his ability to do high-spec work for the rest of his professional life.
So far, so unfortunate. But the third accident, a shocking tragedy, sort of put the seal on things. And this one happened with my father actually present at Frank Hadley’s boatyard.
They were pulling the root of the old main mast from its foundation at the centre of the hull, raising it clear of the superstructure through the deck. It was an operation a little akin to removing a rotten tooth. The mast itself was not rotten. But it was broken and beyond repair and had to be replaced. A crane had been positioned to pull the root cleanly out of the boat. Hawsers had been lashed to the mast laterally to keep it steady and stop it swinging dangerously once free of the hull. The last thing that was wanted was for it to become a sort of battering ram, smashing the craft it had so staunchly served for so long.
Somehow one of the hawsers was allowed to slacken and it looped around the arm of one of the men on the deck, severing the limb when it came under tension and tightened again as cleanly as a wire will cut cheese, just above the top of his biceps. Work was stopped immediately, of course. The emergency services were called and first aid was swiftly administered by those present. Frank Hadley was a model employer and two of his people on the scene knew all about first aid and the recovery position. But the man with the severed arm writhed on the deck of my father’s boat until he died of shock after four or five terrible, gory minutes.