The House of Lost Souls (11 page)

‘We’re in the business of repair and maintenance rather than restoration here,’ Breene said. His Scottish accent sounded much stronger when he spoke now. ‘You’re looking at a Leica One from 1925, Mr Seaton. It may appear a little weathered. But it’s perfectly serviceable.’

It was what it was, unmistakably, but it looked old, from a remote time, and sat with the mute power of a relic on Young Mr Breene’s wooden desk.

Breene peeled off the gloves and left them on his desk blotter and went and stood over by one of the windows overlooking the river. His doing so didn’t noticeably diminish the quantity of light in the room. The morning was very bright and Breene made a small dapper figure, his hands clasped behind his back now, against the great Victorian pane.

Seaton made no attempt to touch the camera. A part of him wanted to pick it up and heft and study it, feel the cold weight and mass of the metal and glass in his palm; sniff it, smell the scent of the thing, scent the ghost of its dead owner. But he knew that to do so would be some kind of gross violation in Breene’s fastidious mind. He thought that the strengthening accent was a sort of clue, that there was a reason the man in the room with him had been taken back in time. In his mind, he did the maths. Breene had been twenty-six in 1943, so twenty at the time of the Gibson-Hoare suicide. And, Seaton would have bet money, studying then at university in Edinburgh. The accent wouldn’t have survived so intact the great English seats of learning. He would have been seventeen years old and undoubtedly at school when the camera had been brought in to Vogel and Breene. But it was worth a try. Something had pulled his mind and emotions back across the decades. It was why he stood now with his back to Seaton. He was hiding the changed expression his feelings had inflicted on the pink ruin of his face.

‘You knew her, didn’t you, Mr Breene?’

Breene’s shoulders stiffened under his suit coat. He cleared his throat, but replied still facing the window.

‘You were too modest earlier, Mr Seaton. You do have an instinct for what you do. It’s quite profound. And what you’re doing has nothing to do with a fashion feature in a magazine I’ve never heard of. Does it?’

Touché
, Seaton thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it does not.’

There was a long silence before Breene said anything more. In the silence a horn wailed from a boat on the river and became faint as it passed underneath them and faded away. ‘My grandfather was one of the founding partners of this business and was followed into it by his son, my own father. And my father would bring me here as a child in the school holidays sometimes to learn something of it. Typically, I would spend the morning at some attraction like the Tower or Tussaud’s. And then I would come here and tinker and absorb information during the afternoon in that easy way children have. Anyway, it was the Christmas holidays. December. I remember it was cold for London, had been snowing, though it didn’t really stick. I was about ten—’

Which meant 1926 or ’27. The glory years for Pandora Gibson-Hoare. Her golden period.

‘She arrived, late one afternoon, in full evening wear. She had on a cloche hat and a fur stole and there hung a rope of pearls around her neck heavy enough to tow a barge. She left a Bugatti, a convertible, with its engine running on the pavement outside. A Bugatti! I believe it was a Number 38. This was at dusk. The lights of the car were left on. No traffic wardens in those times, Mr Seaton. Not for the likes of Miss Gibson-Hoare. She walked in trailing perfume and pink gin and tobacco. I was in the reception area, which was bigger then. Better appointed. It was considered important in those days to maintain a grand entrance and we did, with ornamental pots and much panelled wood. All gone now, of course, in these days of utilising space efficiently. All ripped out after a visit from the time-and-motion people back in the nineteen sixties during the folly of the efficiency drive instigated by myself.’

Seaton looked at the camera on the desk. He imagined the throaty purr of an Italian roadster on the pavement outside, its headlights yellow orbs fierce with glamour as night descended on the staid city.

‘Our vestibule was quite something in those days. And she was quite something in it, shaking the snowflakes from her gray mink stole, glittering, it seemed to me, under our crystal chandeliers. She was quite tall and very slender, the very epitome of the fashion at the time, far more beautiful, my father commented more than once, than any of the celebrated models she photographed. I remember she caught my eye and smiled at me. I was at the desk, practising fair-copy, trying to perfect my copperplate just by duplicating by hand the entries into the service log we kept in those days on the front desk. She was wearing lipstick. It wasn’t red, it was wine-coloured, the stain on her mouth. And she smiled at me, revealing perfect teeth.’

‘Why was she here?’

‘She had apparently dropped a camera into the sea. She had been getting out of a speedboat or launch at a jetty and dropped her camera. The water wasn’t deep and the camera was retrieved. But it had been fully immersed in salt water and needed stripping and the parts cleaning properly to allow everything to dry out.’

‘Did she arrive driving the car herself?’

And Breene’s shoulders stiffened again. ‘What you mean is, was she alone, Mr Seaton. And the answer is that she wasn’t. There wasn’t a chauffeur. But she didn’t arrive alone. There was a chap with her, some flashy fellow in evening wear and a silk scarf and a pair of buttoned spats. Like her, he was tall. I remember he had on an astrakhan coat and carried a cane. He didn’t really look at anything, had this restlessness about him. I think they must have been on their way to a party or reception somewhere, the way they were attired.’

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

And now, finally, Young Mr Breene turned around. And Seaton really could see him as the alert and curious child he’d been.

‘She really was very beautiful. She had pale skin and dark eyes and auburn hair with the gloss of silk about it when it shook and caught the light. She was a remarkable creature, even to a child such as I was. But you’re right, it’s something else I remember most vividly. As they left, the fellow winked at me. It was a wink full of lasciviousness, a look almost entirely lost on a little boy. And he stuck out his tongue. And his tongue convulsed and cavorted between his teeth like some chopped pink eel, unaware of its death. And then he walked out with her across the parquet. Except that he more glided than walked. It was a curious affect, or trick, he possessed. As though his feet didn’t actually touch the floor. To this day, I don’t honestly think they did.’ He laughed. ‘And to this day, Mr Seaton, spats give me the shivers.’

‘We’re largely spared spats, these days.’

‘Thank the Lord.’

‘Who was he?’

Breene indulged in one of his silences, before answering. ‘I asked my father. And my father told me he was thought by some to be the wickedest man in the world. And I didn’t ask anymore. I left it at that.’

Seaton said nothing.

‘We don’t all share your curiosity, you see.’

‘Why weren’t you more curious? Why aren’t you?’

Breene looked across to the camera reposing on his desk. ‘Because curiosity killed the cat. And the cat had nine lives. And that’s eight more than I’ve ever been able to boast.’

Seaton nodded. He remembered then what Young Mr Breene had said about the mantle of arrogance. About how comfortably, on the young, the mantle of arrogance could fit.

‘Come. Since it was what you came here for, I’ll give you that address.’

He went there straightaway. He looked it up in his heavily thumbed and dog-eared
A to Z
in the bright sunlight on the street outside Vogel and Breene and then jogged towards London Bridge tube with only a glance at his watch. It was eleven fifteen. He’d been with the old man over an hour. It had seemed less at the time, but he was in a hurry now to recover the vestiges of an enigmatic and elusive life. And he could not wait to do so.

It was just after midday when he crossed Fulham Broadway at the junction to the right of the station exit and walked up Harwood Road, the Town Hall building on his left a high jumble of stained ornamentation in the unforgiving light and still-rising heat of the day. Left again into Moore Park Road and the traffic sounds from the junction he’d crossed seconds earlier retreated into something like a rumour. He didn’t know this part of London at all. He was relieved to see that Moore Park Road comprised two facing terraces of three-storey Victorian houses. The angle of the sun cast the road between the terraces into shadow. It was suddenly cool, as well as quiet. There were odd parked cars. But there was no road traffic moving. At the end of the block, at the first intersecting road, he saw there was some kind of shop. There was a pub next to it, the sign obscured by hanging baskets of flowers and plants that, even from here, he could see the dry summer had defeated. But the road itself had been spared bomb damage, redevelopment and other urban catastrophes. It was intact. He started to study the numbers over the knockers on the doors.

Ten minutes later, his knuckles tender from rapping on solid oak, he walked into the shop a block down the road. The knocker on the door he wanted had been too stiff with clumsily applied paint to make much noise on impact. It suggested whoever lived there didn’t get many visitors. But his hammering fist hadn’t aroused anyone either. And there was no bell to ring. The curtains had been drawn and when he’d stooped and tried to look through the narrow letterbox, the interior had been dark, with a dank odour somehow discouraging to the notion of life, let alone domesticity. The smell had reminded him of the smell of the high-rise slums he sometimes had to go to with Mike Whitehall, doing conditions stories on damp or cockroach infestation on Hackney’s neglected estates. It was the smell of squalor. It seemed odd to encounter it now, here. This wasn’t the opulent riverside Chelsea of Cheyne Walk; that was obvious. The parked cars had some mileage on them and there were patches of graffiti celebrating the Second Division heroes of Stamford Bridge here and there on walls. But most of the addresses looked well-maintained, smart in the discreet way prosperity usually manifests itself among people used to being prosperous.

‘How’s it going,’ he said absently, walking into the newsagent’s shop, fishing for change, his mind on his summer thirst and the Diet Coke that would quench it.

‘You’d be a Dublin man, I’m thinking.’

Seaton looked at the figure behind the counter. He’d expected an Asian proprietor, because in London that was what you almost always got. The man behind the counter was flanked by Chelsea FC pennants on one side and a giant colour poster of the centre forward Kerry Dixon rising for a header on the other. His shop was like a small shrine to the Blues. Except for one sly little shield tacked to the rear wall, visible above his left shoulder and bearing the three-castle crest of the Dublin gaelic football team. You’d have to know what it signified even for it to register, so discreetly placed was it. But Seaton knew it all right. The proprietor himself was blue-eyed, long from the girlish lower lip to the tip of the chin, dark curly hair tumbling down his forehead as far as his eyebrows. And his waistline was winning the battle to force his tucked-in shirt out over his trousers. He looked like all of Paul Seaton’s uncles rolled into one and the thought made Seaton smile.

‘You’d be a Dublin man?’ he repeated.

There was a way to play this. ‘I wouldn’t be after coming from anywhere else, now. Yourself?’

‘Ah,’ the newsagent said. ‘There’s not a town to touch it. Not at all. Nowhere.’

‘Not even London?’

‘Oh, London’s a grand place, right enough. Sure it’s grand. There’s only the one thing London’s lacking.’

‘It’ll never be home,’ Seaton said.

‘As long as I live and breathe,’ the newsagent said, ‘it’ll never be home.’ He sighed. There was a silence.

‘And the Guinness,’ Seaton said.

‘Right enough,’ the newsagent said, nodding his head. ‘And the Guinness, too.’

He spread his hands across the newspapers and magazines on his countertop. The ritual greeting was complete. Dublin had been duly honoured. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘What is it you’ll be wanting?’

He sounds to me, Seaton thought, like I must sound to Lucinda.

‘You don’t happen to know the people live at number eighteen?’

The Dubliner stared at him. ‘Ah, man. You wouldn’t be a copper, now. Would you?’

Seaton pulled out his NUJ card. ‘It’s a routine thing.’ He nodded to a wall rack hung with papers folded to show their mastheads and the first line of their front-page banner headlines. ‘We’ve got to fill ’em. For you to sell ’em.’

‘You’re looking for a scruffy old guy. Lives there alone. Tall, wears a beard. We deliver him the
Telegraph
daily. He also takes the
Racing Post
and
Punch
.’

‘Deliver? The man doesn’t live more than a minute away.’

‘He’s a recluse, so he is.’

‘What time does he get home?’

‘Sure, he’s home now.’

Seaton looked at his tender knuckles. He didn’t think anyone was that reclusive.

‘You’d be better knowing what time he comes round,’ the newsagent said, grinning. ‘It’s fair to say the feller takes a drink. I’d say he drinks well into the small hours. I’ve never seen him surface before five in the afternoon, when he’ll sometimes brave the light for a pint of milk. But you’re better catching him around six. The later you leave it, the better the humour he’s apt to be in.’

Seaton looked at his watch. It was only twelve thirty. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

‘Semi-skimmed,’ the Dubliner said.

‘What?’

‘The milk.’

‘That’s grand,’ Seaton said. He was at the door, had the door held open, when the obvious occurred to him. ‘Would you happen to know the feller’s name?’

‘Gibson-Hoare,’ the Dubliner said.

But he pronounced the latter part of it, whore.

There was nothing else for it but to go back home to Lambeth. He couldn’t entertain himself window-shopping in the King’s Road for five and a half hours. He had to stay out of North London altogether unless he was spotted, fit and mobile, when he was supposed to be bedridden with a stomach bug. He’d get a district line train to Embankment and walk over Hungerford Bridge. Then he’d walk along the South Bank, under Waterloo Bridge, under Westminster Bridge, up the steps at Lambeth Bridge, across the road and home. He’d take a glorious stroll along the summer river, trying to calm himself, trying to contain his swelling sense of excitement and anticipation before returning to Moore Park Road by later simply reversing the route.

Early on a Tuesday afternoon, Lucinda wouldn’t be home. She would be at college, still frantically putting together the finishing touches to her degree show. It seemed to Seaton a superhuman amount of work for one student to accomplish on the timetable and the grant. But it was the same for everyone on the degree course. The standards set were the reason St Martin’s had such an exalted reputation. And he was taking care of her dissertation. At least she didn’t have to worry about that any longer.

He shivered, realising he’d reached the point, about forty feet from the steps leading up to the bridge, where he’d seen the odd incongruous funeral cortège not long after first light that morning. There were low-walled rectangles of grass here, where the Embankment widened, decorative features for the tourists to sit on at the weekend and enjoy the view and their cornets when the ice-cream van parked here. He walked between two of them, out to the side of the road, where the iron-rimmed wheels of the carriage hearse had trundled a few hours ago. The heat was intense. Molten bubbles of tar glistened in the sun in odd places where the road surface had been hastily patched in repair. But the weird apparition from this morning had left no physical evidence of its passing. He looked across towards Lambeth High Street, to their block of flats, finding with his eyes the window he had watched it all through, the window looking blackly back.

He picked up his kit from home and walked along Lambeth Bridge Road to Fitzroy Lodge. And alone in the gym, he skipped eight five-minute rounds as the game’s deities looked down on him from the fight posters decorating the walls. He needed to dissipate some energy. There were Hagler and Hearns and Leonard and Duran tacked up there on the walls. As trains trundled above through the weary heat on the lines in and out of Waterloo, he watched the timer on the wall tick by the rounds and skipped.

It was still only three thirty when he finished at the gym. He dumped his gear in the flat and walked along Lambeth High Street to the Windmill pub. He thought Lambeth High Street as ill-named a thoroughfare as he’d ever come across. It carried no traffic. It was bordered along one side for most of its length by a large green of parched yellow grass and indolent trees with a jumble of old tombs and headstones half-buried by bushes and thorns at its eastern boundary. You had to go down Old Paradise Street or Whitgift Street, through the railway arches to Lambeth Walk, to encounter shops. He didn’t know how Lambeth High Street had ever earned the sobriquet. They had early photographs taken there hung on the walls of the pub. Victorian children with the bruised pallor of poverty stared at the camera from bedraggled awnings. It had looked no busier then. The biggest difference in that black and white world had been the mud in the gutters and between the cobbles on the road.

In the couple of months he’d lived there, the Windmill had become not just Seaton’s local, but his pub of choice. Most of the regulars during the day were firefighters from the station that neighboured the pub, coming in for a homeward-bound pint at the end of their shift. There were office workers at lunchtimes and in the early evenings from the government building opposite the block in which he and Lucinda lived. And in the evenings proper, there were eight or ten locals who propped up the bar with expressions made stoical by the sheer entrenchment of their nightly beer ritual.

Seaton ordered a cheese and ham roll and a pint of Director’s bitter and went to sit and eat and drink on the bench on the pavement outside the pub. Opposite, at the western limit of the green, was a small walled public garden containing a single cherry tree. The bloom had gone from the cherry tree now. He bit into his roll. The butter was fresh and the ham moist and tender in his mouth.

It was a lovely spot, this. It had almost the seclusion of a secret place. He loved its quiet, so close to everything. He had spent hours in the evenings here with Lucinda, as the light had lengthened over the late spring, after tennis usually, before the approach of her degree show had robbed him of her time.

Faintly, through the window behind him, he could hear the familiar tape the landlord seemed to favour most often, playing through bookshelf speakers perched behind the bar. The tape was a soul compilation. It had always seemed to Seaton a particularly melancholy collection of songs. Now, he heard the Isley Brothers’ ‘Harvest For The World’ segue into Billy Paul singing ‘Me And Mrs Jones’. He sipped bitter and chewed on the fresh bread of his roll and looked at the thinning blossom grown pink and dusty on the tree in the garden opposite while Billy Paul sang his hymn and, Seaton thought, probably his requiem to his clandestine lover and their affair. And then it was Marvin Gaye and ‘Abraham, Martin And John’. The song had been a big hit for Smokey Robinson in America. But nobody could sing as plaintively as Marvin Gaye about promise wilfully lost.

Seaton didn’t know whether the landlord had compiled the tape or bought it. He’d been tempted to ask, half-resolving to seek it out and buy it for himself. But he’d decided it was better heard at, and associated with, the pub. It wouldn’t have sounded the same at home. Through the window, now, it had a melancholy charm you couldn’t duplicate, heard above the conversation of the lunchtime stragglers, against the occasional ring of the till, faint through a summer window, all the more poignant for the fragile way in which it carried to his ears.

Seaton sipped beer and listened to the loop-tape, faint through the pub window, and looked at the cherry tree in the little public garden opposite through drowsy heat. He considered the time on the face of his wristwatch. It was a quarter to five. It was about time to go. He drained the last of his beer and brushed his lap for crumbs. And he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin from his sandwich plate.

In the future, he would often look back to this exact moment, sometimes with the nostalgia and grief and self-pity mingling so intensely in him he wept at the recollection, considering it to be for him the last departing day of what he would have called a normal life. He knew, in his heart, the sentiment was self-deceiving, the creeping damage already by then at least partially inflicted. He didn’t really enjoy his moment that day outside the pub as he had so often in his recent past. He lacked the capacity for relaxation. The excitement in him over the address in Moore Park Road was too urgent and compelling to allow it. He swallowed his food and drank his beer without savouring either. But, like everyone else, Paul Seaton sometimes took refuge and comfort in a lie. When all was said and done, he was only human.