The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘The sea,’ Seaton said, in the Saab. ‘They find it more difficult to summon their mischief, near the sea. They’re fierce fond of music, so they are. And, of course, they love to have their little joke. But at the edge of the sea…well, it’s always been safe. Safer, at least. Not entirely safe, nowhere is. But certainly safer. Until now.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me what’s going on,’ Mason said. ‘You are. Aren’t you?’

  ‘You look about ready to beat it out of me, captain.’

  The Irishman had that right. ‘If I had to, I would,’ Mason said. ‘But I don’t need to. Because you came here to tell me. Didn’t you?’

  ‘We can’t do much about things, about the prevailing circumstances, until I do.’

  Mason waited. Eventually Seaton said, ‘Any of that Joseph Conrad meets Rider Haggard Congo bullshit true?’

  ‘Not Congo,’ Mason said. ‘It wasn’t the Congo. It was the Ivory Coast.’

  ‘Just a yarn spun to buddy the two of us up? A grand tale, captain. But that Kheddi stuff was nonsense, wasn’t it?’

  Mason seemed to tighten under his sodden clothes. He dripped rain and indignation. ‘Blarney isn’t my style, Seaton,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to say that every word of it was true.’

  Wind rocked the car in a savage upward gust despite the buttressing shelter of the sea wall and, a moment after, a wave pounded like a canon battery against the wall itself and hit the fabric roof of the Saab in a heaving spatter of brine. They saw it gush down the windscreen, a living element, foam-flecked, shaped in sinewy cascades of black water. The radio was quiet now. Roy Buchanan, who had hanged himself in a police cell in America in 1988, had apparently returned to his troubled rest.

  ‘It began twelve years ago,’ Seaton said. He had extended his hands and his fists were tight on the wheel and his knuckles white in light that glowed like phosphorescence through the dripping car windows. ‘That’s when it began for me. It’s all my fault, really. Everything that’s happened can be brought back to me. And yet, you know, it began with the noblest of intentions.’

  Mason crushed the orange ember of his cigarette between finger and thumb. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Come back to the house on Wavecrest and tell me all of it.’

  Nine

  He met Lucinda Grey in the upstairs bar of the Cambridge pub one sunlit evening in the warm spring of 1983. When he walked into the bar, Crystal Gayle was singing ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ on the jukebox. He remembered that. It could have been Van Morrison singing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ or Julie London singing ‘Cry Me A River’ or Nina Simone singing ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. The upstairs bar at the Cambridge had just about the best jukebox of any pub in London. But it was Crystal Gayle. And Lucinda’s eyes were neither brown nor blue. They were green and remarkable, appraising him from the other side of the bar when he walked in. Closer, he could see that the pupils of her eyes were encircled at the inner limit of the green by iridescent flecks of gold. Her dress was gold, too – raw silk, slubbed and pleated. And her hair was the colour of dark honey, cut into a heavy bob.

  It was a flamboyant year in a flamboyant decade and most of the crowd in the bar were students from the St Martin’s School of Art building a hundred yards along Charing Cross Road. It was bright in the bar in the early evening through the big windows overlooking Cambridge Circus. Dressed for the night, in the late daylight, the fashion course students were self-consciously poised and picturesque in their buttoned shoes and bias-cut skirts and tailored jackets and hats.

  They formed separate groups, or orbits, the students in the Cambridge in those days, in that year. So those on the graphics course were deliberately monochromatic in black Levis and white Hanes T-shirts under their MA-1 flight jackets, the girls among them distinguished only by their peroxide rockabilly quiffs. The girls on the painting courses wore rah-rah skirts or jeans purposefully distressed with artfully torn sweats over tight white singlets, while the boys all dressed in the Jackson Pollock ensemble of jeans and plaid shirts and denim jackets. Footwear was crucial. To a man and woman, the graphics lot wore Doc Martens. The painter girls wore clumpy black engineer boots. The would be Pollocks wore Jackson’s Bass Weejun loafers carefully saved-for and purchased on their pilgrimage to an American-owned clothes shop called Simmons, in Covent Garden. Flip on Long Acre had made authentic Americana generally cheap. But the Flip merchandise came over tightly packed aboard container vessels to be pressed back into life when it arrived. So, of course, they didn’t sell the shoes.

  Seaton was there to see his brother, Patrick, dressed tonight in a zoot suit and painted silk tie because they planned to go to a club and didn’t intend either to queue or to pay the entrance fee. If you were picturesque enough, it was a time and London, and particularly Soho, was a place where that could be done. The suit looked good on Patrick, who was broad-shouldered enough to carry the cut. Seaton was less convinced by the straw trilby tilted back on his brother’s head. As Patrick walked towards where he stood, Seaton saw that his brother had adopted a swaying sailor’s gait. You made yourself up, in those days, at the age they were. Some people were someone different every single night of the week.

  ‘Who is the tall blonde in the pleated dress?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. Well, fine other than the terminal illness they broke the news to me about this afternoon.’

  ‘The tall girl with the green eyes.’

  Patrick sipped beer.

  ‘The straw trilby is a mistake.’

  ‘Makes me look like Felix Leiter. The CIA man in the Bond novels.’

  But Seaton’s eyes and attention were again on Lucinda Grey.

  ‘Sinatra wore a hat like this on the cover of “Come Fly With Me”.’

  ‘Makes you look like a Yank tourist,’ Seaton said.

  His brother thought about this and shrugged.

  ‘In a Norman Wisdom film.’

  ‘She’s a bit of an enigma,’ Patrick said. ‘A blonde of the glacial persuasion.’

  ‘So you can’t even introduce me.’

  ‘If I could, then obviously, I wouldn’t.’

  Seaton pondered this, wondering was it a double bluff. He decided it wasn’t.

  ‘I can only tell you she’s on the fashion course,’ Patrick said. ‘And she keeps herself very much to herself.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  Seaton didn’t get to speak to Lucinda Grey that night. He went with his brother to the Mud Club and the Wag, where they played Kid Creole and Animal Nightlife and where the air smelled intensely of the smoke of Marlboro Reds and hair gel and brilliantine and dance sweat and where everyone, as Seaton got drunker, looked like they were extras in a film set in Cuba before Batista was overthrown and Che Guevara and Castro set the long-prevailing fashion in the hot unruly places of the world for jungle fatigues. And some-time after midnight he picked up a black dental receptionist from Woodford Green whose style was somewhere between Carmen Miranda and the model in the Bounty Bar television commercial current just then. And he took her home and forgot almost entirely about the fashion student with iridescent green eyes from earlier in the evening in the upstairs bar at the Cambridge. He almost forgot her. But he didn’t quite.

  And then he saw her again the following week at a club called the Wharf, which occupied a derelict warehouse building on an empty stretch of the Thames near the Shadwell Basin. It was the era of warehouse parties, word-of-mouth and flier events like the Dirtbox, floating notoriously between vacant tenements in King’s Cross, with its sound systems and zinc bathtubs full of ice cubes and tins of Saporo beer. But the Wharf had a gentler and more contrived atmosphere of tidal drift, almost of permanence. And its clientele reflected its status in contrivances of their own.

  There was a boy in a matelot shirt and a canvas yacht cap like a Jean Genet caricature on the door. A scar blunted the bridge of his nose and his tattooed arms were sinewy and tanned. The spring was hot that year, warm already with the intense promise of the burning summer to
come. The club was lit by yellow oil lamps, and starlight cast on to its ceiling in pale ripples reflected through the windows from the river below. Patrick was there with friends from St Martin’s. Stuart Lockyear was there. And Greg Foyle, whose pictures would one day sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were seated at a table on the other side of the dance floor and Patrick said something to Greg and Greg looked at Patrick and Paul knew from the look that his brother was very drunk.

  He saw the mysterious girl from the fashion course, Lucinda Grey, sipping a viscous green drink from a shot glass in a flamboyant huddle of people by the bar. He became aware of the music, as the final notes of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Amsterdam’ faded. It was the version of the song sung in English by David Bowie. And in its histrionic aftermath he recognised the first bars of ‘Bad Day’, a new song sung by the English torch singer Carmel McCourt. She came from Manchester and she lived in Paris. Her songs were becoming very popular in the clubs that year. He breathed in the smell of the place; the mingled aromas of tar and timber and tobacco and dank night river. And he walked over to Patrick’s table and Greg poured him a drink from one of the bottles of Lambrusco they were sharing.

  ‘You’d be on the scent,’ his brother said to him. Patrick blinked, but the blear remained across his eyes.

  Paul sipped wine.

  ‘In the hunt,’ Patrick said. ‘The chase. The game’s afoot, is it not?’

  ‘Don’t sound so disapproving. It’s hypocritical. You’d shag anything with a pulse.’

  Patrick appeared to ponder this. ‘Wouldn’t necessarily insist on a pulse,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to over-egg the pudding.’

  Paul laughed. And from the other side of the room, he saw Lucinda Grey smile at him above the shot glass held poised beneath her lips. She raised an arched eyebrow and, with the fingers of the hand not occupied with the glass, she beckoned him across.

  ‘Your fat rockabilly friend looks drunk.’ She sipped her drink and looked at him over its turning rim. The drink was iridescent, like her eyes.

  Seaton looked back to his group. And back again at Lucinda Grey. She had her arms folded across her chest and the posture pulled the leather sleeves of her jacket, taut and soft. It had a mandarin collar, the jacket, and her neck was long under her jawline, the hair cut close, razored to a velvet nap above the hollow at the back, rising above her collar.

  ‘He isn’t fat. And he isn’t a rockabilly.’

  Patrick, who was powerfully built but cherubic of cheek, had made the fatal mistake of wearing a letter jacket with some collegiate logo displayed across its back in his first week at art school. It had cost him thirty-five quid at Camden Market. And it had cost him any shred of credibility. He’d been the first to admit, afterwards, that this particular item of Americana had been a misjudgment. But despite the peach zoot suit he’d teamed with a hand-painted tie tonight, despite the careful strokes of eyelash dye he’d brushed into his pencil moustache, he’d been the Fat Rockabilly, at least in the third person, ever since.

  ‘You’re right,’ Seaton said. He sighed. ‘The Fat Rockabilly’s definitely had a few too many tonight.’

  She lived in a hard-to-let council flat. She’d queued all night outside County Hall to get the tenancy, she told Seaton. It was in a walk-up block on Old Paradise Street, just on the south side of Lambeth Bridge. She told him this as he walked her home along the river an hour after meeting her, an hour after speaking to her for the first time. They passed an anchored barge in the darkness and the smell of gunpowder drifted up off the breeze on the river. It was one of the fire-works barges used in the GLC’s sporadic extravagant displays. A party boat wallowed by, over near the far bank, its lights pearly now through thickening mist and the voice of Boy George, thin and tremulous, singing ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ over its sound system.

  He looked at her. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She was tall and slender in her black leather jacket and a cream silk blouse and a black calf-length skirt that hugged her hips, and there was something in her hair, brushed back from her face, that gave it an oily, intricate gleam when they passed under the bright globes, every few yards, of the Embankment lamps. Her skin was very pale and her mouth full under deep red lipstick. The Culture Club song carried over dark water and light jigged through mist on the distant boat. And Seaton smelled the scorch of dead rockets and burned-out Catherine wheels and his skin pricked and his heart hammered in his chest with the hurtling joy of life and youth and possibility. He’d never felt so alive. His life was a brimming adventure. A sensation accelerated through him and he took it for sexual anticipation, for lustful excitement. But it was more than that, he realised. It was a pure untrammeled anticipation of all the life he had to come. Later, he would remember this moment often. Later, much later, this moment and the remembered joy of it would come to visit him, unbidden, all the time.

  There was a Stockman in the sitting room of her small second-floor flat. It was partially clothed in ruched pinned silk that looked blood red in the moonlight through the window but faded to something between terracotta and taupe when Lucinda switched on a standard lamp. The floor of the room was littered with pieces of dress patterns and swatches of cloth and sketches of clothes. She could really draw, he noticed. There was an electric sewing machine on a table with a pedal underneath. Her other furniture comprised an expensive-looking hi-fi and a small vinyl-covered sofa he thought he remembered having seen in the window of Practical Styling.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about the mess.’ She took off her jacket and hung it across the Stockman’s headless shoulders. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  He could hear music coming from one of the flats of the floor above. The somnolent UB40 cover of ‘Red, Red Wine’. He looked at his watch. It was just after one in the morning. She took a record from its sleeve and put it on her turntable. Julie London began to sing ‘Cry Me A River’.

  ‘Do you have any beer?’

  ‘No boy drinks, I’m afraid,’ she said. She stood with her jacket off and her hands on her hips and her weight on one leg. Her breasts were small and high against the fabric of her blouse. Julie London was quietly histrionic through the loudspeakers. ‘There’s Chartreuse or Armagnac,’ she said.

  Chartreuse. The green drink she’d been drinking in the Wharf.

  ‘Armagnac would be grand,’ he said.

  ‘Grand,’ she said.

  ‘It’s what they say at home.’ He felt foolish.

  ‘In Dublin’s fair city,’ she said. ‘Where the girls are so pretty.’

  But he had never in truth seen a girl in Dublin with the looks on Lucinda Grey.

  After a week, he moved in with her. Her flat was small, it was true, but they didn’t want the space to be apart. When they weren’t attending clubs and parties, they would sit through the lightening evenings on one of the wooden benches outside the Windmill pub nearby and sip beer opposite a peach tree that blossomed pink all through a perfect May. They rented videos, still a novelty, from the newsagent’s shop on Lambeth Walk. They rented Hammett and One From The Heart and laughed their way through Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and Trading Places. They played tennis together in Archbishop’s Park on one of the two public courts surrounded by high elms and beech trees. At the end of the month, they hosted a ridiculously intimate cocktail party. Girls from Lucinda’s course wore paste jewellery and cocktail frocks and their hair piled and sculpted in gelled and sugared confections. Kid Creole cavorted on the stereo.

  ‘It won’t last,’ Patrick murmured, drinking a vile concoction called a Dark and Stormy, which Greg Foyle was dispensing from a steel shaker misty with cold in the heat of the tiny kitchen. ‘I doubt if your doomed romance will see out the summer.’ But he smiled as he said it. And Paul knew the remark must have seemed absurd, even to him.

  Ten

  During the day, Lucinda attended college and Paul worked at the second job he’d ever had, as
a crime and local government reporter on a local London paper called the Hackney Gazette. He was a stringer for the Evening Standard and for the TV news magazine programme London Tonight. And he had proposed a feature to the features editor of The Face. And The Face had accepted his proposal. The world seemed so alive with novelty and hope that some mornings the light and hurtle of London seemed to gasp with it, having to catch up with itself, with its own gathering thrill and momentum. Life was a movie, of course. He was at that forgivable age of self-obsession. And he felt like his role was shifting in it from an extra to one of the principals. He didn’t want a starring part, his ego wasn’t that big. But, he thought soberly, Lucinda might be destined to occupy one. And he thought his own might be a telling cameo.