The House of Lost Souls

by Cottam, F. G.

  ‘It’s all in the attic. One floor up. There’s a ladder. I won’t go up there myself, it’s a few years since I’ve had the required agility. So you’ll be climbing solo, as it were. But you’re welcome to take a look if you so wish.’

  Her stuff was in a trunk. It wasn’t damp up here. Light entered through a single pane of glass. The skylight looked welded to its frame and was spotched on its exterior with rain stains and years of pigeon shit. But the illumination it allowed was a help as well as a relief. The attic wasn’t as crowded as Seaton had expected. The house had a flat roof and it was a relatively large and regular space. He’d expected a jumble of Gibson-Hoare’s antiques, a rejected arsenal of rusting weaponry and old keyboard instruments, perhaps. But there wasn’t much and it all looked personal. A few pictures were propped against one wall. There was an oriental frieze on articulated lacquered panels showing a stork in a rocky stream. There were some elderly 78s in faded paper sleeves in a gilt rack that had tarnished badly. Her trunk stood in the furthest corner from the light, hide-bound and studded with ornamental bronze rivets, her initials picked out in mother of pearl above the lock mechanism. She’d been fond of pearls, he remembered, looking at the lock, fingering the key to it Gibson-Hoare had given him. She’d worn a rope of them thick enough to pull an ocean liner out of dock.

  The lock surrendered easily and he opened the trunk inhaling Pandora’s scent, what was left of it, the smell of her ghost, perhaps, but hers, he knew, as old perfume and tobacco and perhaps the dust from her skin rose and filled his nostrils and lungs with an odour from a dead time. He was reminded of leather and cinnamon. There was candle wax and expensive soap and something underlying it all, harsh and indescribable. He thought about the Café Royal picture, then. And the thought came into his mind that the sourness he smelled might be the sweat of fear, secreted fifty years ago.

  The thought startled him.

  Something scurried in the corner, in the shadows and concealed space behind the stacked paintings, and Seaton was reminded of the mouse droppings he’d smelled in the gloomy vestibule of the house. He listened for it to repeat, poised leaning over the trunk, for the skitter of rodent claws. But all was quiet again. He was so tense, he realised, he was forgetting now to breathe. He pulled in a deep breath and knelt down and put his hands into the trunk and pulled from it three slithery silken piles of old frocks and scarves and underskirts and stockings and camisoles and put each pile on the floorboards next to him.

  It felt wrong, doing this. Not sacrilegious exactly, but a spiritual violation nonetheless. Seaton thought it might be the vestiges of child Catholicism that made him feel it. But this was Pandora’s intimacy, in this box, protected by her suicide, now trespassed on, by him. One of the piles of her things subsided and spread over the floorboards in a slither of elderly satin and stitched ornamental beads. The rodent in the corner chewed at paint and canvas, quietly, so as not to be heard.

  A scatter of heavier, more solid items lay on the bottom of the trunk. There was a tarnished silver cigarette case and a pair of opera glasses in a case of Morocco leather. There was a flattened cloche hat and two pairs of shoes with faded French embossing still visible on their footbeds. He didn’t recognise the label. Many of the old, pre-war labels would have perished with the fall of France. But the shoes were immaculately crafted. There was a pewter brandy flask, this tarnished, too, with a dog’s head engraved on one side. Seaton thought it might be a spaniel. Encased in a velvet box, he found a Cross fountain pen with her initials engraved in the gold of its clip. There was a cigarette holder, made of tortoiseshell and densely stained with tar. And there was a litter of coins: French francs and centimes and an English shilling and a twelve-sided threepenny bit.

  Restoring this pile of junk into contents now neatly packed, Seaton was forced to ask himself precisely what it was he thought he was doing. Suicides did not deliberate, did they, about their legacies? People driven by the compulsion to destroy their own lives did not, by definition, consider their existences worthwhile. So why would a suicide contrive to leave anything worthwhile behind? The cold fact was that they wouldn’t. And the answer to the question of what he was doing was, surely, that he was wasting his time, intruding on a lost and private life by sifting through its sad detritus. He should stop.

  He shook his head. He breathed in another deep lungful of dusty air. He reached for the trunk lid to close it. And it almost was closed, when he paused and opened it fully again. He leaned carefully over the contents and stretched out his palms and felt around the smooth insides of the trunk itself. And doing so, he felt the subtle protrusion of the thing concealed under its fabric lining, under the lock mechanism, thinking, now this is more like it.

  His fingers had found a flat, solid shape. It measured about seven inches by five and protruded about an inch proud of the trunk lining. He sat back on his heels to gather himself. He took everything out of the trunk again, careful not to let any of the solid objects thump against the floor. He lifted the trunk slightly and angled it to the light. The lining was faded and worn and running threadbare in a line around the lip of the trunk. But it was intact. Whatever was concealed beneath it had been hidden there for a very long time.

  He squeezed sweat out of his eyebrows with his thumb. A moment ago, he had been on the brink of giving up, the trunk lid a fraction of an inch away from being closed and locked forever on Pandora and her mysteries. Except that he hadn’t been about to give up. Not really, he hadn’t. The closing of the trunk lid had been a gesture made to common sense and common decency. But it had only been a gesture. He couldn’t have given up, not until all hope was exhausted. His instinct simply wouldn’t have allowed it. A sensation ran through him like a strong and vibrant current. Asked, he would have called it the thrill of vindication. But what it actually felt like, up there in the heat and the dusty light, was triumph.

  He heard music, then, the notes drifting upward from two floors below as Sebastian Gibson-Hoare played the piano. The effect of it was instant on the rodent sharing the attic with Seaton. There was an explosion of sound over in the corner and the canvas of the paintings stacked there seemed almost to ripple with shock in its aftermath. Then nothing, the creature having apparently fled. Seaton recognised the tune, which was ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?’. And even as his fingers scrabbled for purchase against the fabric lining the trunk, he thought what a very cultured method Sebastian Gibson-Hoare had of pest control.

  It was a nonsensical thought and its intrusion into his mind almost caused him to laugh out loud. He was giddy with excitement. He was damaging property that wasn’t his. He was humming the tune to himself at a speed that kept forcing him to loop back to the melancholy tempo set by Gibson-Hoare at the piano downstairs. The old cloth gave with a rent like a gasp of asthmatic breath and he held up into the daylight a flat package tightly wrapped in oilskin bound with twine. As he lifted his jacket, as he pulled his shirt free of his belt, he could feel the sweat glossy on his back in the heat, and the enormity of his crime. He tucked his shirt back in over the package, his find held snug against his spine by the tension of his belt. He closed and locked the trunk and then turned it around so that the lock faced the wall and the hinges faced the room. As though such a childish ploy could conceal the theft. But then, how could you be accused of stealing something no one living had even known was there? He pulled the trunk back around to its original position, wiped his hands on his trousers and took a deliberate breath. He buttoned his jacket. It was an absurd thing to do in the heat, so he unbuttoned it again. The song on the piano had wandered into ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’. The light in the attic had subtly diminished. Gibson-Hoare could really play the piano. It must be talent, pure and simple, he thought. The man would never have possessed the application for painstaking practice. Seaton looked at his watch. He’d been up there only fifteen minutes. He climbed down the ladder carefully, closing the hatch softly above himself as he descended.

  It was a quarter to
seven when he was shown cordially out of the house, Gibson-Hoare almost apologetic that the visit hadn’t been a success, but managing to suggest subtly also that Seaton’s expectations had been naïvely optimistic. ‘History isn’t as convenient a calling as journalism, my boy. Your sources tend to lie beyond the reaches of a contacts book. And my distant cousin was precisely that, wasn’t she? Pandora was elusive both by nature and design.’ He shrugged. They shook hands. And doing so they brought to its conclusion what Seaton supposed for Sebastian Gibson-Hoare had been an amusing, if forgettable, interlude.

  Sixteen

  He had to find a phone box. On an average Tuesday, he’d have been home half an hour ago. By the time he got home, he’d be well over an hour late. Lucinda wouldn’t exactly be tearing her hair out, might well be working late herself at college, but he had to oblige her with the courtesy of a call. He saw a phone box at the crossroads, diagonally opposite the small newsagent’s and shrine to Chelsea FC he had visited that morning.

  Fishing for change, with the number dialed and the receiver against his ear, his eyes wandered over to the shop’s busy facade. In his pocket, he fingered a ten-pence piece. And he saw the shape of the big Irish proprietor, standing perfectly still behind the glass of his window.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hello, you.’

  Except that he wasn’t standing perfectly still. He was standing on the one spot right enough, with his arms hanging at his sides. But he seemed to be swaying, ever so slightly, gently rocking from side to side.

  ‘You’ve got a murder mystery to crack and you won’t be home till midnight.’

  ‘Jesus. You’re psychic.’

  Lucinda laughed. The sound was music, after the hacking laughter of Gibson-Hoare. ‘Is she tall and blonde? Your murder mystery?’

  And Seaton had to laugh himself. ‘Listen, she doesn’t have me forking out for Chartreuse or Armagnac every time I go to the bar.’

  A hundred yards away the Irishman was a dark shape, swaying ever so slightly behind the glass of his shop. Seaton was aware of the bump of what he’d stolen, pressing and unfamiliar against the small of his back. Across the road the Irishman’s face was in shadow, you couldn’t really make it out. But his mouth seemed to be hanging open as he swayed and watched. It was hot and close in the phone box, but Seaton shivered. The pips went and he shoved another coin in the slot.

  ‘I suppose she drinks cider,’ Lucinda said, ‘out of the can.’

  ‘In the street,’ Seaton said.

  ‘In the gutter. What time will you be home?’

  ‘Nine at the latest.’

  ‘Your dinner will be in the dog.’

  ‘We don’t have a dog.’

  ‘I’ll go out and pick up a stray.’

  The Irishman had lifted one arm and seemed to be pointing his finger in the direction of the phone box. Seaton blinked sweat out of his eyes. You couldn’t really tell. He wasn’t much more than a hulking swaying silhouette behind the busy display and reflection of the glass.

  ‘Where are you really, Paul?’

  ‘Just doing a shit boring job with Mike. All around the houses for no more than an extended photo caption, probably.’

  ‘Poor you,’ Lucinda said.

  He didn’t have a clue as to why he had just lied. He had surprised himself with the lie, with its casual conviction. Ordinarily he was a hopeless liar. At least, he was when he cared about the person he was lying to.

  ‘See you about nine, then.’

  ‘See you then.’

  He pushed open the stiff phone-box door and turned his back on the strange apparition haunting the shop over the road. He’d decided he would get the Underground to Embankment station and then walk to the Victoria Embankment Gardens and examine the package, sitting on one of the benches there. He wanted to see what he had in daylight and in the open air. He needed to be away from Gibson-Hoare’s house, away from him and any other potential witnesses to his theft, before he did it. In the gardens he would be almost home, practically within sight of home, but on the other side of the river from where he lived. Lucinda sometimes walked along the river, but she never crossed it on her walks. He could go and examine what he had, undiscovered, there.

  It was a favourite spot with him. He sat on one of the row of benches facing the Embankment wall and the river beyond. He sat in the shade of one of the great trees that bordered the green and the path. Some of the trees trailed leaves from branches so burdened by their own weight that they bowed and dipped beneath the surface of the river at high tide. The tide was high as Seaton sat. And he could hear the soft lap of water and leaves on the other side of the wall. The package lay now on the weathered black wood of the bench, next to him. The twine knotted around it looked still taut but, he knew, would have been weakened by time. He picked the package up and hefted it, smelled the yellow oilskin and the faint must of what it protected and concealed. He tested and snapped the twine between finger and thumb and let it unravel, and unwrapped the oilskin and let the contents into the light for the first time in what he knew must be close to fifty years.

  A couple walked by, tourists speaking softly in Italian. Big Ben, off through the tangle of trees to his left, boomed the quarter-hour. Office staff at the end of their working day were playing a scratch game of football in the gloaming somewhere on the green behind him, using traffic cones for goals. Dimly, he was aware of their shouts and cajoling. There was passing traffic, faint on Millbank. He heard the river-water lap, the lazy wake of a passing boat.

  He held a notebook in his hands. Its cover was blue, marbled board and it measured about eight inches by five. Its pages were lined, flimsy, each page covered by neat hand-writing in black pencil. There was some mildew spotting on the rear cover of the book but when Seaton flicked through it he saw that the pages were intact, whole, complete. On the inside front cover, there was a hand-drawn map of a section of the southwest coastline of the Isle of Wight. Seaton recognised the Needles, stretched out to the west beyond Freshwater Bay. The coastline from Freshwater to Ventnor had been described in this small sketch with superb detail and draftsmanship. The map ventured inland, to scale, only as far as Brightstone Forest and Calbourne and Chillerton, where it stopped. At the northern border of Brightstone Forest, a circular mark had been made. Underneath this mark, the cartographer had identified the spot with two words. Fischer’s House.

  Seaton had known the package did not contain photographs. The dimensions had been wrong for prints of the period, along with the solidity and density and weight, something he sensed even before removing the oilskin wrapping. But he felt elated, much more than disappointed, at what he had discovered. He flicked through the notebook. She had numbered each of the pages, two hundred of them, neatly in their top right-hand corners.

  Behind him, the footballers were putting on their track tops now and picking up their bags in the aftermath of their game. The good-looking Italian couple had drifted off. A breeze soughed in the high branches of the trees at the edge of the river. In the last of the light, in the creeping twilight, Seaton turned to the opening page of Pandora’s journal and began to read.

  6 October, 1927

  The crossing was ghastly. There was a lurching sickening swell on the Solent and the boat we crossed aboard was small and thrown about by the pitch and toss of the waves. There are steam ferries for the summer excursionists, apparently. But they stop their runs early in September. There’s a mailboat after that and the mailboat books passengers. But Fischer, with his talent for the clandestine, wanted everything necessarily hush-hush. Dennis, of course, revelled in it. He was in the artillery in the war. But he was a sailor before that for a year, a time he describes, I think with irony, as his time before the mast. He was very nostalgic about

  Portsmouth. Pompey, he called the town. He insisted on taking us to a harbour bar there after dinner on the evening before we crossed. We walked from the restaurant. The streets were full of sailors. They looked very
picturesque in their blues but were uncouth with drink and there was violence in the air. A drunk ranting in the bar Dennis took us to made a loud remark about Jews with his furious drunken eyes on Fischer. He stood over our table and glowered. He was a powerful fellow, massive through the chest and shoulders, his sleeves rolled to reveal the sort of forearms I’ve seen before only on circus strongmen. Except that the flesh of the sailor’s arms was heavily etched with tattoos. The name of each ship in which, I presume, he had served was inked along smooth hambones of muscle. Dennis actually stood, I think intent on facing off the fellow. But Fischer merely chuckled and murmured something to Dennis. Dennis sat back down. Deprived of confrontation, the sailor spat on the floor between his spread feet and walked away. Fischer took a carton of toothpicks from a waistcoat pocket. My God, I thought, he isn’t so ill-bred, surely, as to start picking his teeth in our company. He tapped a toothpick from the carton and fingered it. They were of the wooden disposable kind. He grinned. But instead of lifting the toothpick towards his mouth, he looked over to where the sailor railed, now, among his shipmates. And Fischer held the little wooden spear between his fingers and, with his grin turning savage, snapped it. And forty feet away, the sailor convulsed, stricken, his agonised howl keening through the drunken hubbub so loudly that it wholly silenced the place.

  Dennis ushered us out. He conjured a taxi from somewhere and it took us back to our hotel. They tried to persuade me to have a nightcap with them when we got there but there was nowhere in the hotel a woman could enjoy a drink in male company respectably. Instead, I left them to it over billiards in a games room and retired, sleepless, uncomfortable with Fischer’s mirth in our cab over the bar-room insult, and his retribution.