Dark Echo

Epilogue

I almost lost the arm. It was touch and go for while, but the surgeon was skilful and persistent and he saved it. The physiotherapy was even more painful and boring than the first time I managed to hurt it. But the muscle recovered and the skin grafts took and eventually I healed. The arm would never punch with the speed and impact it had once possessed. But I hoped and prayed my punching days were over and could be forgotten.

I thought my father’s recovery would be trickier. I had not known until we got aboard the boat how debilitated grief had made him. His spirit had been damaged and diminished even at the outset of the voyage. Retirement gave him the time to dwell, I think, on the people he had loved and cherished in his life and lost. His latest marriage had disintegrated. Chichester was only a superficial thing, a diversion that did not really divert him at all from the pain and solitude that he felt. He bet everything on the boat providing him not just with a challenge but with a new way of living. He bet everything. And, of course, he lost.

I thought that a return to business, even a partial return, might be beneficial for him. Or I thought that he might take a more active role in a charity. He has always been a generous giver to the needy. He could have taken on a more structured role in representing one of these good causes. It would have been a positive thing to do. Virtue is its own reward, as the saying goes. But it did not work out like that, because he found a new vocation. He still Chichesters off on his libidinous trips to Bath, or Edinburgh, or even Chichester itself, from time to time. I’m pretty sure he does. His housekeeper finds the first-class rail travel tickets in his suits when she searches the pockets before they go to be cleaned and pressed. But this pursuit no longer has the importance in his life for him that it did.

It’s coming up for two years since Suzanne and I were married by Monsignor Delaunay. We married as soon as my arm had properly healed and my face had stopped looking like something had stampeded over it. She fell pregnant almost straight away. Our son is called Michael. I like the name. I like simple, traditional names. And Suzanne, who has given up on ghosts, nevertheless feels that some debts have to be acknowledged and properly honoured.

Magnus Stannard is a grandfather. That’s his new vocation. He has taken to the role with energy and infinite joy. His grandson is the reason for his recovery. Delaunay was right in predicting that, what seems like a lifetime ago. It would be stretching a point to say that good has come from bad. But we have survived something very bad and have gained something better than merely good. It is all anyone can hope for. It is our truest and most enduring hope. We all endeavour, in our lives, to emerge from darkness into light.