by F. G. Cottam
When he came to, it was daylight and he saw he’d slept in a foetal crouch on the forest floor. He sat up and the grass and wildflower stems were flat on the earth where the weight of his body had lain. He was caked in dried blood from his numerous cuts. His injured knee was purple and grotesque. His cracked rib prevented him from pulling in a decent breath and his tongue felt swollen in his mouth from thirst. Pain beat through him like a pulse. He looked at his watch and the date wheel told him it was Sunday. Groggily, he made the calculation. He’d been asleep for thirty hours. He wasn’t really surprised. His body had been bashed about, but his mind had needed the distance. He felt he had probably spent some of that period in shock. His body hurt but his mind felt stripped, raw.
He tried not to think about what had happened. He tried not to speculate on the state he would be in now if he had awoken in darkness and not bright morning sunshine. His world had shifted. His world was a different place suddenly, slippery and ambiguous and infinitely more dangerous than he could ever have imagined, or feared. His perceptions would never be the same and he knew that dread would always follow him now, would be with him like some grave medical condition newly and devastatingly diagnosed. He’d been very ignorant about the world. And already, he felt an intense nostalgia for the bliss of the ignorance he had so recently lost.
He could not dwell on it. He had to push it all away from him. He looked at the soft impression his sleeping weight had left on the ground. He grasped grass in broken blades between his fingers and lifted them to his face and smelled their torn summer sweetness. He had to exist in the here and now. He had to think practically. He had to do that to preserve his sanity. And his practical problems, right now, were considerable.
Everything had been in the bag torn from his back. His NUJ and cheque cards and cash were in his wallet. So was his return ticket for the ferry. One of the two good suits he owned had been folded on top of a pair of Bass Weejun loafers in his grip. All that stuff was gone forever. And, of course, Pandora’s journal was gone. He couldn’t discover it now, in the Fischer house, as he’d planned. Like her final role of film, it was lost. Worse, he could not prove it had ever existed. And with its lost existence now, was lost any proof of the film.
He had nothing on him. He patted the pockets of his shorts as if to prove the point. Nothing. But in the breast pocket of his track top he found, where he had forgotten he’d put it, the key to the lock chaining the hired mountain bike to its tree on the other side of the hill. The adventure shop had kept his Access card as security for the bike. The card would get him back to London. But first, he had to find the bike.
And before that, he had to wash away the blood covering him. He limped towards the sound of the stream. He took off his clothes and walked into the cool, clear water. He crouched in the stream so that the water covered his head. He felt the current tug at his skin and hair. And when he emerged from the stream, with the blood cleansed from him, he felt the temptation extended by the warm earth and wildflower smell of the bright day to believe that what had happened had been only some dark turmoil of the mind. It was so much easier just to consider it all no more than a lurid dream. And he might have surrendered to that temptation, if the ground all about, under the trees, had not been still thickly carpeted with the fallen feathers of startled birds.
Twenty-One
It was after eight o’clock on Sunday evening when Seaton finally reached the door of the flat on Old Paradise Street. And there was a policeman standing outside it. Lucinda must be at college, he thought, dumbly, as the police officer removed his helmet and looked into a space over Seaton’s shoulder with an expression of awkwardness and pain.
‘It’s Mike, isn’t it?’ Seaton said, thinking absurdly of water wings. The police officer turned his helmet in his hands and licked his lips. ‘I’m here about your brother, Patrick, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there’s been a tragic accident.’
A researcher from London Tonight called him on the Monday. Someone from a number for the Hackney Gazette had called Social Services in Hampshire claiming to be from the programme. Hampshire Social Services had complained. Seaton didn’t deny it was him. And so his retainer was cancelled, the first dent put in his reputation. The second followed a couple of hours later, when the features editor of The Face called.
‘What’s this nonsense about us doing a piece on some flapper photographer no one remembers or cares about?’
Seaton didn’t know what to say. He was not equipped to defend himself, could not have done so even on a normal day. And this was far from that.
‘It’s the last time you’ll take our name in vain, Paul.’
On the Tuesday he opened the letter from the Gazette terminating his contract. The reason given was failure to meet proper professional standards. He stood accused of harassing an elderly resident of Chelsea in pursuit of a free-lance commission when he was supposed to be sick in bed with the flu. It was a question of integrity. It was a question of loyalties and where and with whom they lay. He was of course entirely at liberty to consult his union about the decision at his own convenience. There were channels of arbitration open to him. But Seaton knew, folding the letter, that as far as the Gazette was concerned, those channels would forever, now, remain closed.
On Tuesday evening, Lucinda broke down in the flat in front of him. He didn’t know whether it was grief for his brother or panic over her unwritten dissertation that provoked her tears. He began to cry himself. He’d felt numb since the Sunday evening, when they had taken him to Gospel Oak to identify Patrick’s body formally. He hadn’t cried when he’d broken the news to their mother over the phone. In grieving for his brother, now, he felt he was grieving for his own lost life. He tried to touch Lucinda and she flinched away from him and he knew that he would never earn her forgiveness after this betrayal of her trust. She might not know it herself, yet. But he did. He knew it. It was the end of everything.
‘You talk about Pandora in your sleep, Paul.’
‘She’s dead, Lucinda.’
‘You talk to Pandora in your sleep.’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘You should have told me about her journal.’
‘She’s dead, Lucinda.’
Lucinda sobbed through bruised eyes in front of him. ‘Oh, Paul. It would have been better if you’d deceived me with somebody living.’ She lifted her hand to her face, as though to try to conceal this breach of her habitual composure. He saw how red and ragged her fingers and nails had become with all the sewing she’d been toiling over in the days and nights of recent weeks. He felt his heart lurch towards her. But his feet didn’t shift him from where he stood.
He tried to write the dissertation for her. It wouldn’t come out on to the page making anything approaching sense. After one four-hour session at the typewriter he read the sheets pulled from the roller and saw that he’d written twelve hundred plodding repetitious words about the Lindbergh kidnapping. The German carpenter who got the blame and the chair was innocent, he read. The English novelist Dennis Wheatley had snatched the Lindbergh child. Of course. Göring had given Lindbergh a medal, he remembered, vaguely. The Nazis had honoured the great aviator in Berlin before the outbreak of war.
He screwed the sheets of typing paper into balls and threw them in the direction of the waste bin. He looked at his watch. But it was useless. He was beyond concentration, beyond reason too, truth be told.
His beard started to grow, unkempt, after he saw Pandora’s dead reflection staring at him over his shoulder in the shaving mirror. She’d been in the water a while by then and she didn’t look so good as she had, svelte on the grass at the Fischer house duel. It grew quickly in the heat of summer, his beard. After five days he had almost the full set of a sea captain to thoughtfully stroke.
He waited for his brother’s funeral. They liked to bury their dead quickly and get on with their grieving, back at home. But the British were reluctant to release the body and he was obliged to wait to escort it
back to Dublin and their waiting mother. There was an autopsy report. There were statements taken from his circle by the police. Patrick had been drinking. Well, Patrick was always drinking, wasn’t he? They’d all retired to a pub on Parliament Hill for a couple in the heat of the late afternoon and then gone back into the ponds for a last dip. This according to an account given the police by Mike. There were lifeguards at the ponds. And they were vigilant. But the pond they swam in was deep and surrounded by trees bowed out over the water in full summer leaf. And Patrick had suffered cramp and drowned. There were no injuries. None if you discounted death, at least. His body had been found partially snagged in weeds two feet under the surface, sunk by the negative buoyancy of his waterlogged lungs. What had he said to Mike? The ponds at Hampstead were for strong swimmers. But Patrick had been broad-shouldered, strong as a bear, the most formidable in the water of the whole lot of them.
Bob Halliwell called him. He had no idea how Bob had acquired his home number. Their number certainly wasn’t in the book. He might have got it from Mike Whitehall, or Tim Cooper, or Terry Messenger. Or he might have got it from none of them.
After offering commiserations, he asked if Seaton still had any interest in seeing Pandora’s stored valuables.
‘I don’t think so, Bob. I’m finished with all that.’
Halliwell paused on the other end of the line. ‘I’ll tell you this anyway, Paul.’
Bob Halliwell had never called him Paul before.
‘I think she was murdered. I think she was cut and put into the river. The police surgeon who carried out the autopsy was a drinker and a locum. And there’s something not right, something too pat and hasty about the coroner’s report.’
‘You pursuing any suspects, Bob?’
‘One character witness at the coroner’s inquiry who laboured the point about her being depressed.’
‘Edwin Poole.’
‘Right. Her cousin. A Lloyds underwriter. Murder is almost always committed by a family member. That counts for all classes of society. Though I don’t think he did the deed himself. She was cut once, deeply, fatally. And, in my humble view, professionally. And then she was put into the water.’
Poole. Poole who had written Pandora’s anodyne monograph. Poole, who had introduced her to Wheatley in the first place at that glittering long-ago ball.
Bob’s voice came on the line again. ‘Edwin Poole never committed a recorded crime in his life. I should state that he had no criminal record and was never at any time officially suspected of involvement in his cousin’s death. But he was known to be a man of dubious character. That’s what he was referred to as, confidentially, in the phraseology of the time. No form to speak of. But in my considered opinion, if you’re looking for a prime suspect, he’s in the frame.’
‘Poole was a satanist, wasn’t he, Bob?’
‘Yes, Paul. Yes, he was.’
Seaton was crying. Not about Poole or Pandora. He tried to do it silently, but he thought perhaps Bob Halliwell could tell.
‘Take care of yourself, mate. Let’s not bother about that Scotch.’ Halliwell cleared his throat. ‘You drink it. You drink it for me.’
He knew what he had seen now in his dreams, in his imaginings in recent weeks, all that spectral stuff he thought he’d seen and heard at the edge of what was really there on the neighbouring streets outside. He’d seen scenes from Pandora’s funeral, organised and paid for by Edwin Poole, her murderer; her body interred by a bogus priest after much ironic pomp in unconsecrated ground.
Patrick’s body was released and he travelled to Ireland for his brother’s burial. He was grateful for the rain. He did not think he could have endured seeing his brother go into a grave in sunshine. But the lowering sky wept with them and the strength of his family was a small consolation to him at the edge of an abyss of loss he could not really begin seriously to contemplate. Paul Seaton loved his younger brother very much. I love you so much, Patrick. He did not yet possess the necessary strength even to put his thoughts and feelings about his lost sibling into the past tense.
He got back and carried on with what was left of his diminishing life. There were telephone calls. The actor Franchot Tone called, pretending to be Stuart Lockyear. And Jack Kerouac called, persuasive in the guise of Gregory Foyle. They were good lads, the best. But they were Patrick’s friends, rather than his, in truth. And because they were wary of his loss and tentative, he was able to put them off. Mike Whitehall called. And because Mike was his friend and colleague, too, and wouldn’t easily be put off, he called round. He parked his company Talbot Samba in the courtyard and was persistent on the knocker while Seaton hid crouched behind the front door and held his hand over his face so he wouldn’t give himself away, laughing at remembered jokes Mike had made about the comic qualities of the car. When he thought his visitor had gone, Seaton opened the door and found Mike had left a book there, on the mat. It was one he had borrowed from Seaton after picking it off the shelf on the night of the cocktail party. Returning it must have been the pretext for his visit. Mike was the sort of person who liked a pretext. The book was an illustrated history of boxing. Seaton sat down against the door jamb and flicked absently through the pages, pausing when he came to the section dealing with the life and career of Harry Greb.
A letter arrived from Lucinda. He could not make out where the stamp had been franked.
Dear Paul,
I want to say most importantly how deeply sorry I am about Patrick. He was lovely and talented and I know your heart will be broken at this terrible loss. Everything anyone says will sound like a platitude to you, but one day you might take some consolation in the happy life he led. He was full of joy and lived well on it. Most people fritter away their lives. His was always well-spent.
Please don’t think badly about what happened over my degree. A third is not the end of the world. It hasn’t stopped my collection from selling to some very prestigious stores. I only mention this at all because I don’t think it will do you any good right now to blame yourself for my not doing better. You offered to help with the best of intentions. But the suggestion was one I should never have entertained. Cheating is cheating. I was prepared to cheat and have paid the price. It’s a small price. My conscience tells me that a better degree would have been totally counterfeit in the circumstances.
I won’t be coming back while you’re in the flat, Paul. Please, please take your time finding somewhere else to live. God, I feel rotten saying this. But pretending things have not gone bad between us will be of no help to you. George in the Windmill will take the keys to the flat from you when you’re ready to give them up. In the meantime, talk to your friends, Paul. They love you and you need them now. Take care of yourself.
Goodbye and God bless,
Lucinda
Four days after Lucinda’s letter arrived, Seaton drank two pints of Director’s in the evening in the Windmill and then threatened to break the landlord’s jaw if George didn’t surrender her new telephone number and address. Half a dozen firefighters were in the pub from the neighbouring station at the end of their shift and they overpowered him and threw him into the street. He limped over the road to the green, aware that his bad knee was getting no better. He sat down in the small paved square with the single bench and the dusty cherry tree. And it was then that the full implication of what he’d seen at the Fischer house first really hit him.
She had failed. She had not got Peter out of their clutches. The boy and the sacrifice had been real. His own experience on the Isle of Wight had been real. He had been lured and pursued and almost torn to pieces by the beast they had successfully spawned in their ceremony after the horn banquet. In their contempt, they had let her go. She had spent the ten years left to her in remorseful obscurity and then died a violent death. That was the story of Pandora Gibson-Hoare. That was the story, anyway, of its outcome.
They had done it.
The boy had died and beast been conjured. Summoned. Born.
Over the
road, outside the pub, he saw an ambulance pull up. Its lights were very dull, flashing in the metallic cast of the early July evening. George had left the sanctity of his bar and was talking to the ambulance crew and gesturing over the road towards where he sat. He didn’t think he had ever seen George in daylight before. The ambulance crew were nodding and looking at him, their eyes indistinct in shadow cast by their uniform caps. Perhaps they were here for the cherry tree. Its bloom had gone, after all. He wished they would turn that fucking siren off, though. He wanted ‘Me And Mrs Jones’. He wanted ‘Abraham, Martin And John’. He wanted ‘Harvest For The World’. What he didn’t want, was a fucking ambulance siren. He put his head in his hands and started to cry. He was crying a lot, lately. They had done it, he thought, entirely overwhelmed by the realisation and its implications. They had slaughtered and spawned and he had felt the hot breath of the beast and barely escaped its fury. He bowed forward from the waist and grief and dread cleaved him and he fell to the paved ground and they were on him with straps and fastenings and he saw the disapproval on the watching faces of Hagler and Hearns from their grim and sweating gym posters up above him now in some dim memory as he didn’t resist and surrendered, instead, entirely to them.
Twenty-Two
Paul Seaton was never actually sectioned. His status remained that of a voluntary patient during the whole duration of his time at the hospital. Afterwards, he could never really understand this. It was the era of the thrilling new notion of care in the community. He thought, in retrospect, they should have had him shuffling through streets with bin bags on his feet as soon as the winter arrived. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t just pump him full of some sedative and parachute him into Kilburn, say. There were plenty of mad Dubliners on the streets of Kilburn. One more wouldn’t have made the blindest bit of difference.
