The House of Lost Souls (30 page)

Seaton was nearing the edge of the sea. He could hear the dull percussion of waves breaking under the rain. And there was a boat, a rowing boat with oars, beached above the tideline when he reached it. It belonged to the house. He was confident the house would have no further use for it.

And then he sensed and turned and saw her.

Pandora stood twenty feet away, poised and beautiful, watching him. Her hair was an abundant glossy tumble around her face and spilling over the ermine collar of her coat. She stood there, tailored and immaculate. And he was aware in the yearning pull of the breeze of the scent she wore. He had always known he would one day see her, like this. The certainty had insinuated itself over the passing years. He had half-known it on a sultry summer day in Arthur’s café at Dalston, sharing lunch with Mike Whitehall a lifetime ago. He’d been even surer, when he reached the clearing where Fischer’s guests had duelled on his first clueless blundering visit to the house in Brightstone Forest. Had he really seen her that day? If so, she had been but the remotest suggestion of herself on the very perimeter of his vision. Now, she was its only subject. And he could fully see how she had left a trail of broken hearts and bewilderment in her wilful, singular wake. Her hair wisped at its edges in the wind from the sea and her coat collar ruffled as though stroked invisibly. Her mouth was dark rapture sculpted into flesh. She moved her head and he caught the lustre of pearls around her pale throat. Pandora nodded to him once and smiled slowly.

Seaton smiled back. And she was gone.

He rowed himself off the beach with his ruined hands. He could endure a lot of pain. It was one of his recent surprising discoveries about himself. Out beyond the beach, the sea was flat. The oars slapped water against the boat with the rhythm of his pained and steady rowing. He was headed for the red flash of a navigation buoy. When he reached that, out beyond the headland, he would see the lights of Portsmouth wink across the Solent. He rowed in rhythm and pain, purging his lungs with the salt freshness of the sea. And eventually, he heard the hollow boom of water against the metal sides of the buoy. He heard the pull and sigh of its moorings. The rain had stopped and the cloud had thinned and he saw algae green in phosphorescence on the great welded cone of the buoy, floating now in front of him. He steered around it, the oars heavy and cumbersome in the raw grip of his hands. But the current was aiding his progress. In a moment he would round the point and see Pompey and light. He had endured a considerable period of his life in darkness. But the light was close now and Paul Seaton felt he might have earned the right, at last, to live in it.