The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  Seaton kept only two things from his past. The one was his brother, of course. The other was his boxing. He’d boxed as a youngster, scrupulously and well, learning at and then competing for the St Theresa’s club on Dublin’s northside. He enjoyed the rigour, maybe even the pain. The discipline of it seemed to seep into his soul. So he kept up his road-work when he moved to London and, in Lambeth, he ran laps of Archbishop’s Park and trained at the Fitzroy Lodge club housed in a railway arch on the corner of Hercules Road. Two nights a week and on a Saturday morning he would skip and hit the bags and work the speedball and do floorwork on one of the canvas mats. The club was run by a thin chain-smoking trainer called Mick. Mick’s office was a plywood and Formica den poised on a shaky balcony above the floor and twin training rings. Now and then he would emerge from its bitter Benson & Hedges fog to ask Seaton to spar with one of his prospects. So it was that Paul Seaton kept his body hard, attending his church of choice, honouring vanity and faith, always doing his regular penance.

  On a Friday, his habit was to leave the Gazette office on Kingsland Road never later than four. He would head up West, meet his brother, have a Friday-night drink with the boys. But he’d taken to doing this early, curtailing it, besotted as he was with Lucinda Grey. So he’d meet the boys and then seek out Lucinda later, in the Dive Bar or the Cambridge or the Spice. She wasn’t hard to find. And it didn’t matter how packed with other people a place was. She was impossible to miss.

  So it was at five o’clock on a Friday early in June, he sat drinking Lambrusco from a big two-litre bottle bought from an Italian deli on Old Compton Street. They were on the flat roof of the St Martin’s building on Charing Cross Road and London undulated around them through heat ripple and the smells of softening tar and street cooking and pollen from the flowers and leaves of summer trees in the squares. Hank Williams sang, keening and plaintive on a tape playing on Foyle’s paint-spattered beatbox. Seaton sat on the low wall surrounding the roof, at a spot above the open windows of their studio. Now and then, the smells of oil and turpentine rose to clash and coalesce on the hot breeze. It was very hot. The sun was very bright above them. They all wore Ray-Bans, except for Foyle, whose habit it was to narrow his eyes and squint into the light.

  ‘I saw a rehearsal for Lucinda’s degree show this morning,’ Lockyear said. Lockyear was dressed entirely out of Lawrence Corner, in a khaki shirt with pleated pockets and voluminous Desert Rat shorts. With his blond slicked-back hair, Seaton thought he looked like Franchot Tone in Five Graves To Cairo. ‘Her show was really good. The knob of the donkey, as they say in fashion circles. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she gets a first.’

  ‘I’ll be surprised if she gets a pass,’ Foyle said, who looked like Kerouac, like Kerouac would like to have looked, in his 501s and his print shirt and the haircut he still had then.

  ‘Some disparity there, boys, between a fail and a first,’ Seaton said.

  ‘I’d forgotten about the dissertation,’ Lockyear said. ‘Greg’s right. It’s a shame, because her degree collection is really strong.’

  ‘The knob of the donkey,’ Patrick said, nodding, sipping Lambrusco from a plastic cup. He was looking towards where the Post Office Tower undulated through heat ripple, from this distance like some frail and improbable movie prop.

  ‘Every silver lining has a cloud,’ Lockyear said.

  Foyle was nodding, agreeing with him. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘A damn shame.’

  ‘What are you all talking about?’

  His friends looked at Seaton and at one another. It was his brother who said, ‘Her dissertation. She hasn’t done it. She’s asked for and been given an extension on it and she still won’t get it in by the deadline. If she doesn’t, it’s an automatic fail. I can’t honestly believe she hasn’t told you.’

  ‘Well, she hasn’t.’

  They looked at him, trying not to.

  ‘What’s it on?’

  ‘Pandora Gibson-Hoare,’ Foyle said.

  The name meant something to Seaton. There was some old, almost involuntary memory there which stirred at the name, but remained opaque as his mind struggled through heat and wine drunk too early in the evening. Something he’d read or seen, some forgotten association stirred in the dimness of recollection but would not reveal itself. He gave up. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ Patrick said.

  ‘She was a photographer,’ Foyle said. ‘Portrait and fashion photography. She was one of the pioneers in fashion. But she did all her meaningful work very young. And she died young.’

  ‘Inconsiderate of her,’ Patrick said. ‘Dissertation-wise.’

  ‘She’s pretty obscure,’ Foyle said. ‘Hard to research. I’ve heard Lucinda hit a wall with her. It wasn’t laziness. Lucinda just got stuck.’

  Seaton climbed down to the roof. He looked up at the sky, at vapour trails expanding and distorting miles up in the blue void. And he looked back to the group, noticing how clean-cut and absolute was the blackness of the shadows they cast on the flat surface of the roof. Hank Williams sang a song of dusty heartbroken longing on Greg Foyle’s beatbox. Beyond them, London toiled in the early-evening heat. You could look out from here across its shimmering topology and feel its energy and promise running through you like a charge. Pandora Gibson-Hoare. For some reason the name itself evoked in Seaton images of cars with running-boards and roofs of taut canvas and waxed bodywork sleek under black rain. He saw a convoy of them, the headlights yellow through an avenue of whispery trees. He could smell tobacco and cologne in the dark spaces behind the windscreen, see the motion of curved mudguard as the wheels they housed bounced and shivered over uncertain roads.

  ‘It’ll be a shame if Lucinda fails her degree,’ Lockyear said.

  ‘A travesty,’ Foyle said, swallowing wine.

  ‘Lucinda won’t fail her degree,’ Seaton said, dragging himself back into the here and now. And he knew that she wouldn’t. Because he wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  The extension gave her a deadline that was still a fortnight away. He reckoned if he took one of the two weeks’ holiday he was owed, it would be more than enough time. But he reckoned without Lucinda’s principles, her integrity and her embarrassment at his finding out in the way he had about what she saw as a shameful academic and intellectual failing. Pride had made it a secret between them. He wondered that she could have hidden something so worrying, so well. But he only wondered briefly. Mostly he was just determined to help her. And not, honestly, just for her. Research and writing was what he did, after all. He wanted to help her, but he wanted to impress her, too.

  He didn’t say anything until the following day, the Saturday, until after they had played tennis. They didn’t go for a drink after tennis on the Saturday. They had booked the court for the late afternoon. And the Windmill didn’t open on a Saturday evening. So they walked home and drank tea in their small sitting room with the window wide. Lucinda wore the white pleated tennis dress she had played in, her hair held back from her face by a white band. On anyone else, a dress for tennis in the park would have seemed to Seaton like an affectation. On Lucinda, it seemed the only possible attire. Her hair was still damp at the hairline with heat and effort as they sat and drank their tea.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the dissertation?’

  The colour drained from Lucinda’s face. So pale did she become that he noticed with surprise that pale-green eye shadow sculpted the shape of her eye sockets between the lashes and the brows. He hadn’t been aware that she wore make-up in the daytime. She laughed, ‘I didn’t tell you because there is no dissertation to tell you about.’

  ‘Why isn’t there?’

  Lucinda looked down at her hands. They were resting in her lap. She raised one and peeled the band from her head and freed her hair and shook it so the damp ends clustered in dark-blonde points around her face. ‘I chose the wrong subject,’ she said. And Seaton could hear how upset she was in the way her accent had reasserted itself i
n her speech. Her words sounded flat and northern. ‘I thought I was going to write something brilliant about a forgotten artist. I’ve ended up chasing a ghost.’

  ‘I can help you.’

  Faintly, there was the familiar sound of music, ‘Red, Red Wine.’ from the flat upstairs.

  ‘Help me do what? Cheat?’

  ‘Help you get the degree your talent merits.’

  She looked distressed. He had never seen her look so distressed. She looked trapped, in the heat, in the room, in his scrutiny.

  ‘Show me her pictures,’ he said, saying it to deflect attention from Lucinda, to get her out of the glare of her own exposure. She went over to a shelf above the television they had bought and took down a slim book with stiff card covers and handed it to him. Then she left the room. He could hear her fumbling in the bathroom cabinet for her asthma inhaler as he held the book between his fingers.

  It was a monograph. The author was a man named Edwin Poole, his name etched in a typeface reminiscent, Seaton thought, of the Bloomsbury Group. Past the contents page, Poole had written around twelve hundred precise words about the photography of Pandora Gibson-Hoare. There followed twenty plates of formal portraiture taken in a rigid monochromatic universe that smelled of dust and remoteness rising in the heat of the bright June day from dead and brittle pages. There was a picture of a doleful escapologist burdened by chains on a bridge on the Seine, the river and city made recognisable by the skeletal tower in the distance behind the manacled figure. There was a picture of a circus clown, seated on a drum in a sawdust arena, the pompom buttons on his tunic absurdly large, somehow pathetic under such detailed scrutiny, what looked like blood sprinkled and dotted in the area around his giant feet. There was a picture of a ballerina poised in the wings of a lit stage. Her limbs were sinewy against the white flounce of her tutu and her face cadaverous under her black drawn-back hair as she sucked on a cigarette screwed into a tortoiseshell holder. A New York cop held the butt of a heavy revolver between finger and thumb with the disgust a man might display holding the tail of a suspended rat. A corpse was bundled in an overcoat at his feet. You could only guess at the sex of the apparent crime victim from the smallness and paleness of the one hand visible under the bulk of the coat. Seaton recognised the great French boxer Georges Carpentier, pictured eating a cream bun at a café table with brilliantine in his hair and a long gash over one eye coarsely stitched. There were some studies of a female cabaret artist with a fat python and one of a conjurer displaying a decaying smile and a glass orb that seemed to hang by magic in the air above a card table. A man posed half in shadow on the deck of a liner. There was no convenient lifebelt displayed to give the name of the ship. But Seaton recognised the subject as the English occultist Aleister Crowley. He was smiling at something. Or for the camera. Elsewhere, at an atelier, an audience of frosted women studied a thin mannequin pinned by fussing seamstresses into a gown.

  There was power in Gibson-Hoare’s pictures, Seaton thought, but mostly it was the fascination the viewer felt at the sight of death, rather than any intrinsic quality in the work. There was something compelling about extinction, and these pictures, of course, documented a vanished world. It was what all the subjects had in common. They were gone. It was not a world, though, anyone was likely to feel much nostalgia or sense of loss for. It was too sad and grotesque for that. Maybe that was her art, her gift, to get not just under the gilt and glamour but beyond the nostalgic cosiness that characterised so many old photographs. Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s vision was not cosy or quaint. It was stark and unsettling. This was no sepiatinted series of artful reminiscences. Her world was not one Paul Seaton would have liked to have lived in. It was not one he would have even liked to visit, he thought, as he closed the thin book, wondering what on earth it was could have intrigued Lucinda about the woman’s work.

  He read the monograph again. Edwin Poole had surprisingly little to say. His point seemed to be that Gibson-Hoare was technically accomplished in a way that few women photographers of the period were. And that she eschewed emotion in a way that few women photographers were capable of doing. Seaton was left with the view that the argument was more a way of dispelling the author’s prejudices than shedding any light on the artist under discussion. If Gibson-Hoare qualified as an artist. On this evidence, Seaton wasn’t sure that she did. Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography predated this stuff by more than fifty years and was just as technically accomplished. And if you wanted the triumph of narrative over emotion, you could do a lot worse than look at Lee Miller’s war photographs. And Lee Miller had been all woman. He looked at the contents page again as Lucinda came back into the room, changed out of her tennis clothes and carrying two mugs of tea for them. Poole’s monogram had been published in 1937.

  ‘Her cousin,’ Lucinda said, sitting down. ‘There was just a decade between them. He had no artistic pretensions of his own. He was twenty-seven and something important at Lloyds of London when her messy suicide looked like it might hurt his career.’ She sipped tea. ‘So he produced this, at his own expense, and had a few hundred copies printed.’

  ‘It’s pretty worthless.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s quite valuable. It was printed by some Bloomsbury offshoot on a press set up by Lytton Strachey.’

  ‘I meant it’s worthless as a source.’

  Lucinda nodded. They both sipped tea. It was strong and malty. Like her vowels, her tea had a northern character. ‘Most of her best work is in the British Museum.’

  ‘So she did do good work?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She did great work. For a period.’

  ‘What were you hoping to find?’ He was aware that in saying this he was putting Lucinda’s efforts into the past tense. And she must have noticed because, for a moment, she didn’t reply.

  ‘More than exists in the public domain. Pandora painstakingly learned photography, the craft and science of it, to meet some artistic need or yearning in her that wasn’t being satisfied. She certainly didn’t need whatever income or profit her work could provide. And women photographers were regarded as dilettantes, so she wasn’t after status. She was an artist. And then she stopped.’

  ‘And you were seeking to explain why she stopped? To solve the mystery? That was the thrust of your dissertation?’

  ‘No, Paul. I think there’s a cache of work, somewhere. I think there’s important work of hers still to be discovered. And, stupidly, I was hoping to be the one to find it.’

  Seaton put Poole’s book on the floor and held out his free hand and took hers and was gratified to feel his grip returned. ‘Does this conversation mean you’re going to let me help you?’

  ‘Help me cheat, you mean?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucinda said. ‘I suppose it does.’

  Later, Seaton walked to the newsagent’s shop on Lambeth Walk and rented An American Werewolf In London. And they wound back the tape and watched the scene when the two hapless Americans seek refuge in the Slaughtered Lamb three times, laughing more with every viewing.

  ‘I’ll bet you had a crush on Jenny Agutter,’ Lucinda said.

  ‘Ah, come on,’ Seaton said. ‘There’s barely a man alive didn’t have a crush on Jenny Agutter.’

  Later, they walked into Kennington and met Stuart Lockyear and Patrick at the Black Prince pub where a singalong was staged on weekend nights. And Patrick sang ‘Blueberry Hill’, improvising the words because he didn’t know them, scat-singing in the end, Seaton watching his brother perform, weeping tears of laughter, with a Guinness in one hand and the other over his eyes, only daring to look through the gaps between his fingers. And Patrick finished to a standing ovation and, at closing time, Seaton and Lucinda walked home under a high moon, the pavements still warm from the heat of the day, the sky paler over where they knew the river reflected the moon, the two of them happy, he thought, to have survived their first row without really having had to row at all.

  Eleven

  On the Su
nday, he asked Lucinda to give him all her notes, the whole file, everything she had on Gibson-Hoare. It was a scant archive. There was a photocopy of a Times obituary and Xeroxes of some of the fashion plates kept at the British Museum. There was an ancient copy of Vogue containing a spread of fashion pictures she had taken on what appeared to be a touring-car and picnic theme. Brogued shoes and flat caps accessorized tweed and gabardine in pictures that cried out to be in colour. But colour in those days would have meant hand-tinting. Another feature, this one in Harper’s Bazaar, was a swimsuit story shot on what looked, from the intensity of light, like the Riviera. Beautiful people lounged on chairs and a diving board against the bleached cement of a deco pool. You could see her skill in this shoot, in the tactile way she handled skin and light, like a sculptress with her camera.

  Finally there was a photograph of Gibson-Hoare herself. She wore her dark hair woven in plaits around her head, under a glistening tiara. There were pearls around her neck in a thick rope. And her shoulderless dress, sewn with beads, winked and glistened in the light from a chandelier. The picture was a group shot and had been taken at a table at the Café Royal. Café Royal insignia embroidered a curtain behind the smiling group. All the figures in the shot with her were male. There were five of them, they were in evening wear, and Seaton recognised two. One of the two was Crowley again, smiling again, his deep eyes holding an expression entirely at odds with the bland ordinariness of his other facial features. Also recognisable was Oswald Mosley, younger and thinner in the face than he became when he was notorious, but still unmistakable.

  Seaton turned the photograph over. The names of the individuals in the group were pencilled on to the back of the print. Lucinda was leaning over her sewing machine, biting through a length of cotton thread. She tilted her head in a way he found funny when she did it, like a cat, worrying at something.