I can still see the madman now, sprinting down the lake, trimming his sails, trying to cover my wind and beat me around every buoy. Only when I had defeated him three times in a row did he take me out on Long Island Sound and teach me the real thing in a two-man dinghy.
I don’t think I’m a boastful person, so maybe you will trust me when I say that sailing was the one thing for which I had a natural gift. Apart from deceit, of course. So much so that one Saturday, sitting on the upturned hull, Bill told me he thought I had a chance of going to the Olympics.
Knowing I always kept myself apart from others, he had the good sense to suggest one of the solo classes – a Laser – and worked hard with me every weekend. It didn’t matter in the end – when I was about sixteen, lost and angry about life, having nothing else to rebel against, I gave it up. I told him I wasn’t going to sail again, and I thought in my naivety and cruelty that the look of disappointment on his face was some form of victory. A hundred times I must have thought of ways to take it back, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand that an apology is a sign of strength, not weakness, and the opportunity vanished with the summer.
As I stood on the drive after so many years and looked at the lake again, I realized why I had come back. He was dead but I wanted to talk to him.
I made my way up to the old house. Marquees for the silver-service lunch stood on the lawns and the doors into the house were roped off – only committee members and VIP guests with passes were making it past the security guards. Getting inside might have presented a problem for even a highly trained agent, but not to someone who had spent their childhood in the house.
At the back of the service buildings I found the door into a gardeners’ change room had been left unlocked, moved through it quickly and entered the cavernous garage.
On the wall on the far side, I reached above a set of workshop shelves and hit a button hidden under a row of power sockets. A section of the shelves creaked open – an underground passage led into the house. Built by Bill’s father, ostensibly to access the garage in icy weather, its real purpose was far different.
According to the old housekeeper, the colonel – having conquered Europe with the Sixth Army – came home and launched a similar campaign with the maids. He established his headquarters on the daybed in his study, a room which offered a long view of the drive and gave that week’s subject plenty of time to get herself dressed, head down the passage and into the garage before the colonel’s wife reached the front door. The housekeeper always said the plan was so good her boss should have made General.
I paused in the passage and listened for any sound from the study. Nothing, so I turned the handle and stepped through the door concealed in the room’s antique panelling.
Grace would have had a coronary. Gone were her priceless English antiques and the Versailles parquetry, replaced by plaid couches and a tartan carpet. Over the old fireplace, acquired from some chateau, where her finest Canaletto had once hung, was a portrait of the owner and his family, staring at some far-off point as if they had just discovered the New World. The only possible improvement would have been if it were painted on black velvet.
Ignoring their heroic gaze, I crossed the room and opened the door into the entrance hall. I heard voices – all the good and the great were congregating in the formal living rooms – but the two gorillas at the front door had their backs to the interior, so they didn’t see me head up the stairs. At the top, it was one of those moments.
The raider hadn’t turned his decorator loose on the first floor, so the years promptly fell away and my childhood was all around me. I walked down the beautiful corridor – I think I said it was the quietest house I had ever known – and opened the door at the north end.
The layout of the rooms was unchanged, the weight of the past almost palpable – a large sitting room, a bathroom, walk-in closets and a bedroom overlooking the woodland. There were a dozen other similar suites in the house, and it was obvious the raider’s family had never used this one.
I stood silently for minutes without end, just remembering, until at last I perched on the bed and looked at a seat built into a bay window. Whenever Bill came to talk, he always sat there, his face framed against the copper-beech trees in the woods behind. Slowly I let the focus of my vision blur, and I swear it was as if I could see him again.
In my heart, I told him all the things I had never been able to say in life. I said he had cared for me when he’d had no obligation of blood or friendship to do so and I told him that, to my mind, if there was a heaven, there would always be a place for someone who did that for a child. I confessed that whatever good was in me came from him but the acres of darkness were all my own, and I told him that he was forever in my thoughts and there wasn’t a day went by when I didn’t wish I could go sailing again to make him proud. I asked for his forgiveness for not being the son he had so desperately wanted and, after that, I sat in stillness.