I looked at Dennis. His complexion was flushed and sweaty and his eyes still gleaming from witnessing the Egyptian woman’s pain. He is a sadist, of course, which I had forgotten. I looked at the other faces in the room; all drunk or intoxicated in some way, except for the duellists, sullen and sober at separate ends of the table, each hoping, I suppose, that sobriety now would give them an advantage handling sharpened steel come morning. I looked at the assembled throng in their tuxedos and ball gowns and felt the pearls turn to paste around my dry imposter’s throat, because I wasn’t one of them.
And I’m not. And I never can be. Whatever Fischer’s platitudes aboard the boat, I won’t collude in the murder of a child. Absurdly, I found myself resenting Fischer for lying on the boat about the rickets. The child is sound-limbed. Thin, pale, terrified, but apparently healthy. Sound-limbed or crippled, it hardly signifies. I cannot be party to the murder of a child. I cannot.
While I was thinking this, I saw Crowley lift his head and look at me. He was sitting in a club chair over in one corner with a wine goblet rested between his fingers on one of its arms. He had on an oriental skullcap, to conceal his scalp where the hair no longer grows to cover it. He turned the goblet deliberately and one of his feet tapped in its buttoned spat, on the floor. It tapped as though with infinite patience. And then it stopped. And he smiled. And of course, he knew.
8 October, 1927
I walked down with Dennis for the duel. My fever was worse and he commented on how pale I looked. We passed Giuseppe in his shirt sleeves, raking gravel on the drive in the unrelenting rain. His bare forearms were hambones of muscle as his hands gripped the shaft of the rake. He looked at me on hearing my voice and gave me a tight smile, his eyes deferential and sad. Tarpaulins have been stretched over the parked cars on the drive and they look like the corpses of great machines, silent and still in their burial shrouds. Only one car lay uncovered, the rain spotting like dew and dribbling on the flats and curves of its black body, unable to settle on the polish.
Not everybody walked down for the duel. A few casualties from the night before were presumably still oblivious in their beds at 10 a.m., the appointed hour. Some came down wearing overcoats over their pyjamas. The pornographer from Rotterdam came and the two industrialists from Antwerp and Lille who like to play cards against one another came. The Danzig shipyard magnate came to watch as well. The casino owner from Marseilles appeared. Perhaps he had taken bets on the outcome. They made a dull troupe, pasty, bloodshot, smelling of last night’s liquor and cigars as they wheezed and gossiped, trailing through the wood. None of the other women attended.
Fischer was taking few chances with the thirteen for his coven, judging by the protective clothing armouring the two swordsmen. Their torsos were plated in heavy leather and their sword arms covered in quilted padding down to the gauntlet each wore. Their legs were unencumbered, though, and they stretched and thrust with their weapons in skilled confident preparation. Their swords were rapiers; antique but deadly, undulled by age as they tore the damp air in practice strokes with a ragged swishing sound. Fischer called the duellists together and made them put on goggles and then helmets such as motorcyclists wear. They seemed very calm. They avoided looking at one another directly, but each made a joke to Fischer as he gave them their instructions and checked the edges of their blades and the buckles on their body plating and I heard him twice bark his harsh, spontaneous laugh in response to what they said to him in jest.
The duelling ground was a flat clearing covered with deep green grass in the seclusion of trees about three hundred yards from the house. I noticed Crowley wandering in the trees with apparent indifference to the spectacle. He had on an embroidered tunic such as the warlock Merlin might have worn. It trailed his feet. I realised with dull certainty that I was afraid of him now. He frightens me more than Klaus Fischer does. In Brescia I had been seduced and foolish. I looked at him gliding through the bracken and ferns and dead leaves of the forest floor and knew with a sinking heart that he had killed his comrades on that mountain all those years ago. They had been sacrificed, for something, on the Singalila Ridge. Crowley and Fischer are the same. Power is all with them. No price is too exacting.
Fischer’s man appeared and unscrewed the top from a flask and I smelled hot buttered rum and the rich full smell of it almost obliged me to vomit on the ground in the nausea gripping my stomach from the fever that persisted in me. He gave the protagonists a silver cup apiece and, with their free hands, they raised the cups and drank. Their drinking hands were impressively steady, given what they were about to do. But the aviator had killed in the war, garlanded for killing. And the film producer looked, too, like the kind of man who could snuff out another’s life without compunction.
I think the war has much to do with it. It is nine years since the war ended but it casts a long shadow on the world we live in. Life became so cheap as to be permanently debased. Faith was destroyed. Now, sensation and novelty are all. If the times we live in were a man, he would be a corpse, a frenzied, ersatz existence galvanised into him only by odd jolts of electricity. What were those lines of Eliot’s? I had not thought death had undone so many.
The duel itself was over fairly quickly. It could have lasted only two or three minutes. It was fought at astonishing speed, with a ferocity to which the leisurely preamble had given no clue. The clash of steel was a bright dissonant sound in the still of the morning. Both men were clearly expert, but the American was nimbler and wounded the German to end the contest with a slash to the neck that sent arterial blood in a crimson spray across the grass. The German staggered, dropped his sword, pulled off his gauntlet and held out his hand to his opponent. His wound was bleeding copiously, but he ignored it, breathing heavily still from the exertion of the fight, honour satisfied. You could actually hear the blood droplets raining on the grass at his feet in the silence of the forest with the rhythm of his pumping heart as the German’s face paled to pewter and the life pumped out of him. He staggered again. Fischer will not have his coven after all, I thought. Göring still had his hand extended. The American closed and shook it and said something I didn’t catch, his tone conciliatory, the insult forgotten, all now a pantomime of manly fraternal concern. And the German smiled. And then Crowley was there, from nowhere at the German’s side, as sad-faced Giuseppe gathered the discarded weapons from the ground, and Crowley was doing something I couldn’t make out with his hands and a black handkerchief around the area of the wound. And the bleeding stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. It froze on the air and shrank and vanished from the grass. And spots of colour appeared like small pink commas in the German’s cheeks. And his breath, which had been ragged, began to regulate and deepen.
Ja, he growled to Crowley, still weak. Ja. Gut.
And I heard Crowley say to him, you’ve lost blood, perhaps as much as a quart of it. Drink milk and porter. Eat red meat. Have the meat served to you rare. Rest and you’ll be fine by this time tomorrow. And with an arm on Fischer’s shoulder, the wounded German led our lurid procession back to the house for breakfast. I was at the rear, trailing Giuseppe, with his burden of discarded duelling armour and bloodied antique weaponry. My own blood pounded against my temples and there was bile, sour in my throat. I badly needed a cigarette but knew that smoking one would make me feel even worse than I did. I looked around, wondering vaguely where it was they were keeping the boy, their sacrificial. All my thoughts were becoming vague, my mind wearied by the persistent heat and sickness of infection.
And Crowley was suddenly in front of me, the vista darkened by his looming shape, his eyes on fire, the strange whorls and patterned stitching of his tunic like a maze through which my own eyes travelled and were lost. And I felt him take my injured thumb and slip from it the bandage I’d improvised, gluey now and cloying with decay. And he put my thumb into his mouth and sucked. He sucked the infection out of me. I felt the poison lifted out of me. There’s no other way to describe the feeling. And I shivered and was we
ll again.
Eighteen
In the Windmill on Lambeth High Street, the bell tolled for last orders. Through the little speakers on their shelf behind the bar, Marvin Gaye lamented his good friend Abraham. An inch of Director’s bitter sat neglected in Seaton’s glass. He slipped Pandora’s journal into its oilcloth and put it in his jacket pocket. He drained his pint and walked the short journey home.
Lucinda was seated on the sofa, her legs drawn up under her, sketching with charcoal on a pad. The hi-fi was playing. Seaton recognised the Cowboys International album. It was an old favourite of hers, a record she played a lot. But the volume had been turned very low. She was listening to it more for the comfort of sound than for the music. She was playing it for company. There was a shot glass of Chartreuse at her elbow, casting a green shadow across the arm of the sofa in the streetlight coming through the half-pulled blind behind her.
‘How was the pub?’
‘Empty.’
‘Just you and your cider-drinking blonde, then?’
‘And the landlord.’
‘Cosy.’
‘It was. Very.’
‘The Windmill on a Tuesday night. Nobody can say you don’t know how to impress a girl.’
‘No.’
She straightened her arms and held the sketch out from her body and tilted her head to look at it. Seaton was aware of how lovely her eyes were, narrowed to focus on the quality of her work. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something serious?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Do you really think you are going to be able to come up with the goods on my written project, Paul?’
‘I’m across it, Lucinda.’
‘Don’t baffle me with Irish phrases.’ She smiled at him over her sketchpad.
‘I’m taking all of next week off,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the thing cracked, all right.’
‘Your brother rang,’ she said. ‘A group of them are going swimming up at Highgate Ponds on Sunday, if the weather doesn’t break.’
‘The weather won’t break,’ Seaton said. He tweaked a fret of the blind, which hung entirely still against the open window. ‘This heatwave will go on forever.’
‘But despite that you still put your jacket on. To go to the pub.’
‘Because I need somewhere to put my wallet,’ he said, taking off his jacket and going to hang it on a hook in their short hallway, only too aware of the weight and indiscreet bulk of Pandora’s journal in the left-hand pocket.
‘Come here, Paul.’
He sat down beside her. ‘Are you going to interrogate me about the cider-drinking blonde?’
She put down her pad. She stroked his hair, his cheek. She kissed him. Her lips tasted sweet and slightly sticky with Chartreuse. ‘I just want to thank you for doing what you’re doing for me. Taking the week off next week and everything. It’s so good of you. So kind.’
He kissed her neck. Inhaling, he could smell her perfume and skin and against his face could feel the fine subtle touch of her dark-blonde hair. He was intensely aware for a moment of the texture of her skin and hair and the delicate weight and warmth of her. He opened his eyes, which he hadn’t realised he’d closed. On the other side of Lucinda, the green shadow of her glass rippled with iridescent movement on the arm of the sofa in the glow of the sodium light on the street outside. And there was the single clop of a horse’s hoof, iron-shod, out there below against the night road. A mounted policeman, he thought, not really thinking about it at all. He was thinking about the grace and presence of Lucinda Grey, the thin straps of her slip, satin against tawny summer skin.
‘I love you,’ he said.
And he did.
Seaton sweated through the following day, always expecting an irate catastrophic phone call from an indignant resident of Moore Park Road. But it never came. His sick day had left him twice the routine work to do. So he was busy. And it was the Wednesday of Hackney borough’s full council meeting in the evening, and he was on the roster to attend and cover it. They began at 7 p.m. and lasted often until the early hours. Two reporters would generally take the meeting in shifts. Seaton took the first shift because he lived furthest away. They were acrimonious and turbulent events, full of theatre and indignation. But most of it was political pyrotechnics. The Labour-led council were a long way to the left and radical enough, but most of the jaw-dropping decisions were taken at committee level. That’s where the headlines were to be found, not at full council meetings, but buried amid the routine and dross of the committee-meeting agendas. Two of the staff reporters, Terry Messenger and Tim Cooper, had a real talent for rooting out and following up this stuff. They weren’t just talented either, they were dogged and tenacious. Seaton knew, if he was honest, he was too lazy to apply himself properly to it. He preferred crime. Crime was easier. Even when it wasn’t entirely black and white, it was easier to extract a story from a crime than from the obfuscation and shrill rhetoric of local politics. Nevertheless, he had to go. Something sensational could happen; an assault, walkout, boycott, demonstration. There was often violence in the public gallery. This stuff was meat and drink to the Gazette and they would never take the risk of missing it.
Before leaving the office for the Town Hall, he called Bob Halliwell.
‘Micky Boy! How’s the land of the leprechauns? Where’s my bottle of Scotch?’
‘There’s a case of Chivas with your name on it, Bob, if you can answer in the affirmative to the following request.’
Halliwell was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had dropped an octave. He said, ‘You want to see Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s effects.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Because I’m a copper, Mick. And not the clueless arse-hole you sometimes seem to think you’re dealing with. That’s probably how I know you’d like to see the autopsy report, as well.’
‘Is there any chance?’
‘Because you’ve tickled my curiosity about this, I rooted it out and read it myself, yesterday. It’s pretty routine stuff. Pretty dull.’
‘Was there nothing that struck you as unusual?’ Seaton held the phone against his ear, waiting for the policeman to decide what to tell him.
‘The body had one unusual feature. It concerned her hands. She was missing her right thumb from the second knuckle. It had been amputated. Crudely.’
* * *
He didn’t pick up the journal again until the Thursday evening. Lucinda was at a degree-show rehearsal, staged in the early evening at college. Patrick and Greg and the boys were using it as an excuse for a drink. As though they ever needed an excuse. They planned to attend the rehearsal and then go with Lucinda and a couple of her fashion course friends to a new bar opening in Soho. David Haliday had painted friezes on the walls and had been given a handful of invitations for them guaranteeing free drinks.
‘I’m happy to go with Patrick,’ Lucinda said to him. ‘But I’d rather you came.’ She liked Patrick. She never, or rarely ever, these days called him the Fat Rockabilly any more.
‘I need to get on with that stuff I’m writing,’ Seaton said.
‘Martyr.’
‘It won’t write itself.’
‘Give her my love.’
He got home from work on Thursday and went and trained at Fitzroy Lodge in the early evening heat for an hour. He trained under the grim ferocious gazes of Hagler and Duran, looking down from the walls. Then he took the journal to the Windmill.
8 October, 1927
I’m going to describe how Dennis and I met. It was at a ball not long after my father’s death. Among the many things of my father’s I inherited, but had no use for, was my father’s wine cellar. Someone at the ball winced at tasting a bad vintage and I remarked that I had several hundred better bottles sitting neglected under Mayfair, to any of which they would be welcome. It was a stupid shallow witticism made to Edwin Poole, a young distant cousin of mine who is something in the banking or insurance world. He said he knew a man, a name at Lloyds and a wine dealer,
who could help me dispose of the cellar profitably and, of course, with discretion. Then he took me over to meet Dennis, who was holding forth about the singer Bessie Smith and the devil’s music generally at a table on the other side of the room. He was slightly drunk and very cheerful, not handsome, but attractive enough in the bland open-faced sort of way common to chaps from his background. He wore campaign ribbons from the war and a monocle. He seemed too young for the monocle, screwed into his eye socket with the phoniness of a stage prop. He was after a sort of dignity, or gravitas, I thought. But in the terminology becoming fashionable then, I saw the monocle, and the ostentation of the war ribbons, as signs of insecurity. In that company, his insecurity seemed attractive rather than a weakness. He was a young man making his way in the world. And he seemed impressively knowledgeable about the devil’s music called jazz.
When he met me at my father’s house, I was surprised to learn that he had actually known my father. He had sold him wine. Extraordinarily, they had been on first-name terms. He kept referring to my father as ‘Mr Gibson-Hoare’ out of politeness and deference to me. But twice he slipped in conversation and referred to him rather fondly as ‘Sebastian.’
We were in my father’s cellar, when I noticed that he was wearing a bracelet. It struck me straightaway as an extraordinary piece of jewellery for a man. It was made up of tiny bronze runic figures shot through with a fine silver chain. He must have observed me looking at it. But he didn’t react in the slightest to my doing so. I wondered was it some obscure insignia worn by a sommelier. Perhaps he was a master of wine, or something. Though for so Gallic a qualification, a medallion on a ribbon seemed more fitting. I wondered was he perhaps a member of the Freemasons, or some other secret society. Maybe he held some exalted rank. They all had their signet rings stamped with obscure crests, their amulets and hidden tattoos; toys and clandestine trademarks. Secret societies were very fashionable just then. Secret societies and psychiatry were the contrasting crazes of the moment.
The House of Lost Souls Page 17
