The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  Seaton smiled. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Stand me another Coke. Tell me what’s on your mind,’ Mike said. He looked at his watch.

  The thing was, for a moment, he’d been there. He’d been on the strew of pebbles by Shadwell Stair, the body under a tarpaulin at the edge of a grey tide of lapping scum, barges passing in low procession pulled by squat long-funnelled tugs billowing smoke into a low November sky. He’d smelled the river, the damp gabardine of policemen’s raincoats, the sour pickled odour of waterlogged flesh, breathed the air, heavy with its burden of sulphur and soot. It had been raining. It had been raining in London on the morning the fact of Pandora’s death revealed itself.

  With effort, he dragged himself back. Back to Arthur’s. Back to the heat, to the here and now. ‘Got much on this afternoon?’

  Mike grimaced. ‘I’m actually thinking of calling it a day, after the furry felon. Bringing the curtain down on a brilliant career. I might as well go out on a high. A man at the top of his game should know when he’s peaked. I mean, the mad monkey. Come on, professionally speaking, it just doesn’t get much better than that.’

  ‘It could be worse. It could be a pile of charity pennies toppled in a pub.’

  ‘Depends who’s doing the toppling,’ Mike said. ‘Last Tuesday night in the Anchor and Hope it was a woman who used to be in Pan’s People.’

  They were both silent for a moment. Seaton picked up his fork and then put it down on his plate and pushed away his plate of uneaten food.

  ‘So what are you doing this afternoon?’

  ‘The most boring sodding job on the planet,’ Mike said. ‘I’m taking the camera bodies in for a service. It means I’ve got to drive to sodding London Bridge.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘In this bastard traffic. In this bastard heat.’

  ‘Isn’t there somewhere more local?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. But Eddie insists on using the same place the company has used since about the turn of the century.’

  ‘Tradition,’ Seaton said. He was half-rising, fishing in his pockets for coins to pay for the lunch.

  ‘More than that,’ Mike said. ‘It’s always been renowned as the best place, with the best technicians, used by the best photographers. Which is great if you’re handling Hasselblads and Leicas and your work is featuring in National Geographic, but a bit wasted when you’re generally pointing the lens of a 35-mil Pentax at a grinning Syd James opening a garden fête. Or taking a mug shot of a delinquent primate.’

  Seaton sat down. He took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table and offered Mike his pen. ‘Write down the name of this place, would you?’ he said.

  Mike took the pen. ‘You’ll have trouble finding it. The entrance is an unprepossessing little green door with no number in a ramshackle brick building dwarfed by the brutalist monstrosities erected in the sixties to either side. It’s staffed entirely by gnomic Swiss lens-grinders and ancient tinkering Scots. The average age there must be about ninety. They make Eddie look boyish and carefree, the staff at Vogel and Breene.’ He laughed. ‘What do you run to anyway, Paul? A Kodak Instamatic?’

  ‘It’s not for me. It’s for my girlfriend. It’s for Lucinda.’ Lucinda owned a good camera. Mike knew she did.

  ‘She should have kept the guarantee,’ he said, writing down an address. ‘These people might be old-fashioned, but they’re far from cheap. They’ll charge her a term’s grant just to take the lens cap off.’

  Seaton nodded. He took back his notebook and pen. Pandora Gibson-Hoare had used Leica cameras. She hadn’t been destitute and so may have owned them still at the end of her life. She had stopped working professionally. She had stopped having her pictures published. But what if she had continued to use her cameras? Or merely to have owned them? Wouldn’t she have had them serviced, if only out of force of habit? And wouldn’t the company that serviced them have had an up-to-date address for her?

  ‘Thanks,’ he said to Mike, in Arthur’s café, the June heat sending a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades. He looked at their plates. ‘I’ll get this one. This one’s on me.’

  He phoned as soon as he got back to his desk, asking, as Mike had advised him to ask, for Young Mr Breene.

  ‘Young Mr Breene is about a hundred and seventy years old, but he’s reasonably cordial. He doesn’t have a first name, obviously. No one there does. But if you’re deferential enough and try not to sound too young, he might condescend to book Lucinda’s camera in before this time next year.’

  He had the newsroom to himself. The other reporters generally went to the pub around the corner for lunch and had a pint and played pool and listened to The Clash on the jukebox while the bread hardened around the ham and cheese in their sandwiches and rolls.

  At London Bridge, Young Mr Breene was summoned to the telephone. There was a cough and then an elderly voice with a hint of Aberdeenshire.

  ‘How can I be of assistance?’

  ‘I am putting together a story about the pioneer photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare.’

  There was a pause. ‘Are you indeed.’

  ‘It’s for a magazine called The Face.’

  But Young Mr Breene was unfamiliar with The Face.

  ‘I wonder, did Miss Gibson-Hoare ever have her equipment serviced by Vogel and Breene?’

  There was another, long pause. ‘Why would you wonder that?’

  ‘There’s a peculiar quality to her work.’

  Young Mr Breene chuckled. ‘That was her eye, Mr Seaton. Her talent. It had nothing whatever to do with her choice of camera or of film.’

  Seaton swallowed.

  ‘You sound very certain of that.’

  ‘The prototype of the 35-millimetre Leica was created in 1913. The Great War prevented it from going into production. It was 1924 before the camera was ready for mass production and the following year before it became widely available throughout the world. Miss Gibson-Hoare bought two of them. And you are right to suppose that we serviced them for her. In fact, I believe we still have one of them here.’

  Seaton’s heart was audible to him against his chest wall. ‘Am I right to think she lived in Cheyne Walk?’

  ‘In Chelsea, yes,’ Breene said, and Seaton’s heart descended to his stomach. ‘But not in Cheyne Walk. That wasn’t the address we had for her towards the end of her life.’

  ‘Could you tell me where she did live?’ He could hear the boys from the pub clattering up the stairwell, could smell the beer-and-tobacco-smoke pub smell that would cling to their clothes and hair and breath for the rest of the afternoon.

  Young Mr Breene had paused again. ‘You want to know where it was that Pandora Gibson-Hoare resided. Now why on earth would you want to know that?’

  ‘I just want to paint the fullest possible picture, Mr Breene. To do that, I need to be in possession of all the detail I can accrue.’

  ‘I see. Well, I don’t profess to see the use of the information, but I don’t see it can do any harm to tell it to you. That said, I won’t give you the detail you seek over the telephone. Come here personally. Ask for me. Present your press credentials. Do that, and I will furnish the address.’

  Thirteen

  The following morning, Seaton did something he had never done before and rang into the office sick. He’d spent the small hours lying awake next to a sleeping Lucinda as light gathered in the sky and filled the room with a milky luminescence that gradually grew into dawn. At five thirty, he’d had to steal carefully out of bed and make himself a cup of tea. He drank it, looking out of their sitting-room window down at Lambeth High Street and the chink of Embankment, visible to the right where the edifice of the old government office building opposite ended and Lambeth High Street intersected with Lambeth Bridge Road. He’d never known himself feel remotely so excited by any professional pursuit.

  What did he honestly hope to find?

  If the flat had been provided by a friend or lover, there might be some legacy of Pandora’s left behind. There
might be a cache of letters shedding first-hand light on her work and the reason it so abruptly ceased. There might be half a dozen little cylinders of yet-to-be-developed film containing pictures no one had ever seen. He thought this unlikely, 35-millimetre stock probably having perished to nothing after better than four decades of neglect. But there might be prints. And that was his greatest hope. She might have shot whole stories that she edited out of what the world thought of as the Gibson-Hoare cannon. And commenting on the rediscovered work would give Lucinda’s dissertation real distinction.

  Two small worries nagged at Seaton as he sipped tea and looked out over the deserted dawn intersection of streets. The first was that, in all likelihood, he would find nothing at the new address. The building could have been bombed in the Blitz or bulldozed during the wholesale redevelopment of London in the 1960s. How likely was it that, even if they survived, a set of furnished rooms would still harbour such fragile and reclusive keepsakes? It would be unlikely he’d find anything at all other than a suspicious and hostile landlord or a clueless tenant occupying impersonal space on a short let. Or a company let; because Chelsea wasn’t any longer the bohemian haven it had been before the war. It was a succession of coveted postcodes and record-breaking property prices. If he found nothing, he would have to rely on the sparse facts and thin conclusions of Edwin Poole as the basis for work that would inevitably be undermined by the insubstantiality of its spun-out speculations.

  And this brought him to the second, honestly more troubling, of his two concerns. Because he knew that this pursuit was about more now than helping Lucinda, however important that had been to him when he’d originally had the idea. As soon as he’d looked at the Gibson-Hoare pictures in the Poole monograph, he’d been hooked, hadn’t he? Or perhaps it was the plea for help in her frightened eyes in the picture taken of her at the Café Royal. He wanted to know what troubled vision of the world informed her disquieting work. He wanted to know what it was had made her stop working with such abruptness, when her reputation was at its apparent height. He wanted to know the reason she had hidden subsequently from her former life. And she had been hiding, hadn’t she, if poverty could not be blamed for forcing her into obscurity? And finally, Seaton wanted to know the reason for that ghastly suicide. He knew now that he would ask Bob Halliwell if he could see the artifacts taken from her corpse at the Whitechapel mortuary. It couldn’t remotely help with the framing of Lucinda’s fraudulent dissertation. He could think of no reason for doing it beyond his own prurient curiosity. But if it took a big bribe, a litre of Chivas, he’d do it now, he knew.

  From their bedroom next door, he heard Lucinda sigh in her sleep. And then he thought he caught sight of a shape, dark in space and light, through that chink in the buildings that gave a glimpse to the far right through their window of the Embankment. From where he looked, to his right, at the intersection with Lambeth High Street there was Lambeth Bridge Road, which at this hour was still empty of traffic. On the other side of it was the ornamental garden fronting the church of St Mary’s at Lambeth. And beyond that was the Embankment itself.

  Embankment was where now he saw a tall figure in what he could have sworn was a black top hat, staring directly back at him. He saw with surprise that the still figure was dressed formally in a black morning suit. And then, with a movement so spasmodic and sudden it made Seaton clatter the lip of his tea mug hard against his teeth, the man raised his top hat and Seaton saw that its brim trailed crêpe tails of mourning ribbon, before it was put back on his head and he turned and started to walk eastward, out of sight. But he was followed. Horses, a team of four black-plumed horses followed him into view, pulling a glass carriage hearse at the solemn funereal pace the figure had set. It progressed silently, the clop of hooves and trundle over the road of iron-bound wheels sounds that would not carry over the three or four hundred yards of distance that separated Seaton from what he saw. The whole weird procession passed out of his limited view of it through the window in no more than a fraction of time, a couple of seconds. It was twenty-eight minutes past six. It was no time for a funeral procession of such stately flamboyance. It was no time for any kind of funeral procession at all.

  He’d dismiss it, he decided, as one of London’s passing enigmas. There was much about the complexity and ritual of the city he did not understand. But for a junior reporter on a local London newspaper, he felt he was doing okay with his latest story. True, it was about as far off-diary as a story could get. And, as Bob Halliwell had said, he was pursuing it forty-six years after the fact. But he was making significant progress. Lucinda sighed again, dreaming he supposed, stirred from deep sleep into listlessness by the encroaching light, her warming skin and dormant senses roused by the rising heat of another day. He felt a stir of excitement grip his belly as he made the decision, then, to call in sick and call in at the premises of Vogel and Breene at London Bridge. He stroked his chin. He would shave and iron his crispest shirt. He wanted to make the best impression he could on Young Mr Breene and suspected that manners and appearance would be important in accomplishing that. Lucinda moaned and uttered a word he couldn’t make out in her sleep. She didn’t waken, but the one lonely word sounded anxious, he thought, afraid. He went and opened the bedroom door a chink and looked at her lying there in the diffuse light of a summer morning gathering strength and intensity through her home-made muslin drapes.

  He loved her. He wanted her. What was new in him, he knew, was that he felt for her. He thought it was a shame the way that taking a degree tested people at such a tender age. He was only three years past the ordeal himself. But he didn’t think Trinity College had provided quite the pressure with modern literature that St Martin’s did with its fashion course. He could understand the stress she must be suffering and he sympathised with a depth of emotion and a tenderness so real and novel to him that he knew it must be love.

  This glorious summer was going by as Lucinda, lovely, toiled and fretted over her little electric sewing machine in the flat. But it would be over soon. And Stuart Lockyear had called her degree collection brilliant. And Stuart wasn’t one for pointless flattery. She’d done it all in shades of yellow and cream and taupe; pleated flowing dresses and bias-cut, calf-length skirts worn under waisted jackets. Already, Whistles had ordered three keynote garments from the collection for their flagship store in Marylebone. And the buyer from Harvey Nichols was said to be interested, too. The auguries were good. Seaton closed the bedroom door softly on Lucinda and stroked his chin again and went into their small bathroom to shave so that he would look the part when he rang in sick and went to London Bridge for his audience with Young Mr Breene.

  At some stage of his life, Breene had been badly burned. The skin of his neck above his tie knot was pink and smooth in rivulets like spoiled wax. His eyelids were lashless and had an almost oriental cast to them. Seaton guessed that his own eyelids had been burned off, lost to the fire that had consumed most of his facial features and replaced by skin prised and shaped from painful grafts. His nose was short, almost comically arbitrary, the nostrils crude, and he had no lips at all. He didn’t blink. Under his shock of still thick and unruly hair, his face looked at first glance like that of a badly put-together child. A wood counter separated them. He lifted a section of it and beckoned Seaton through. Seaton held out his hand and Breene shook it and the gash under his nose stretched across his teeth in what Seaton supposed was a smile. His grip was strong. If his hands had been burned, they had recovered their strength and aptitude. They must have done, for the man to be able to handle the intricate task of camera repairs.

  ‘Tea or coffee,’ he asked when they got to his office. His office made it plain to Seaton that Young Mr Breene did not concern himself with the day-to-day mechanics of calibrating shutter speeds and repairing light apertures. It was too big, too well-appointed. There were some good Scottish landscapes on the walls. There were pictures of Breene with various civic dignitaries at events Seaton supposed had been organised by the L
ondon Chamber of Commerce or the Lord Mayor’s office. There were signed prints of photographs taken by Beaton and Bill Brandt and even Cartier-Bresson. There were half a dozen golfing trophies in a glass display cabinet. And there was a view from two high broad windows cut into the side of the building out over the river, London Bridge a resplendent curve of stone and painted iron to the left in the light of the ascending sun.

  ‘Coffee would be very welcome.’

  ‘But first, your credentials,’ Breene said. He sat down behind the mahogany splendour of his desk in a swivel chair. Seaton, still standing, took out his NUJ and IOJ cards and the laminated pass with his picture on it the Met Police Press Bureau insisted you carry. Breene leaned over and looked. ‘A very nice likeness. But you’re not English, are you?’

  ‘Dublin.’

  ‘A wonderful city, Mr Seaton. Sit, please.’

  Seaton sat in one of the two straight-backed chairs facing Breene’s desk. He put his press credentials back into his wallet. Breene pressed an intercom switch and leaned into the machine. ‘A pot of coffee, Mary, when you have a moment. Two cups. Thank you.’

  He smiled his ragged smile again. ‘You don’t mind staring, Seaton, which is to your credit. How do you think I got to look such a sight for sore eyes as I do?’

  ‘I’d say you were in the cockpit or fuselage of an aero-plane when it came under enemy attack and caught fire. You baled out, which is why you can still smile and appreciate coffee. You baled out, or your pilot got you down. But you were badly burned.’

  ‘Very good. You’ve an instinct for what you do.’

  ‘Not really. I live near the Imperial War Museum. I’ve spent a couple of idle Saturdays in there.’ Seaton regretted the use of the word ‘Idle’ the moment it came out of his mouth. But Breene didn’t look offended. ‘May I ask about the specifics?’