The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  He turned and walked over to one of the bookcases and put a hand into a pocket-slit sewn into the side of his soutane. The hand emerged with a pair of spectacles. He unfolded their wire arms and put them on, and fingered spines along a bookcase shelf. It was obvious to Mason that, even with the spectacles, he was searching blind, waiting for his index finger to recognise the texture and breadth of the spine he was seeking. It only took a moment, really. His hand stopped and he pulled out a small volume with marbling on its cover. The sight of it made Seaton gasp audibly. Mason felt a stab of sympathy for the Irishman. For him, this was turning into a night of revelation.

  ‘Yes,’ Lascalles said to Seaton. ‘As you have observed already with your sharp eyes, she was in some ways a creature of habit. She always bought the same notebooks in which to inscribe her thoughts. You need to read this, Paul.’ The priest’s voice was gentle again, compassionate. ‘Reading this will answer questions I have not.’

  Twenty-Five

  6 October, 1937

  I do not accord that date any particular significance. It is exactly ten years since a rather younger and vastly more innocent version of myself last committed thoughts and events to paper. They were trite and shallow thoughts and they were terrible events. And I have written down virtually nothing since. But the anniversary is not what prompts me to pick up my pen this morning and detail my intentions. That date is no more, really, than a grim, slightly troubling coincidence.

  Yesterday, for the first time in months, I read a newspaper. It was in a dentist’s waiting room in Weymouth Street. It was a routine appointment and I had forgotten to bring along something to read. Punch has never been greatly to my taste and I have come to loathe the fashion magazines. So it was the day’s paper or it was nothing. And I came across an opinion piece, which focused on the situation in Germany. The members of the Führer’s inner circle were each described, in detailed and highly flattering terms. Göring was there, of course, resplendent in a uniform I imagine he designed himself. The author of the article was an English historian with a professorship at Oxford. Like many academics, he seemed fascinated by the notion of the man of action. He described Göring’s feats as a member of the Red Baron’s Flying Circus in the war. And, of course, the tone was eulogistic. He wrote of Göring’s prowess as a huntsman. And he refuted indignantly the persistent rumour that the Reichstag fire in ’33 was started not by the Communists, but by Hitler’s loyal acolyte Hermann Göring. All in all it seemed to me a shallow sycophantic piece.

  I don’t care about the Reichstag fire, or the part Göring may or may not have played in setting it. An act of arson cannot be blamed or credited for what has happened in Germany. The Nazi Party would have come to power regardless. There was a relentless inevitability about their rise. They are like a whirlwind which certainly Germany, and perhaps the whole world, will reap.

  But I looked at the picture of Göring, gloating and imperious. And I thought about Wheatley, with all that acclaim and wealth his books are now bringing. Fischer; the Hollywood mogul; all of them have prospered. And I allowed myself to think back to the terrible events of ten years ago. And the recollection brought in its aftermath a compelling need in me to find out finally something about the poor doomed boy they abducted. Alive, he would be coming to maturity now. But his adulthood was stolen from him. He is dead, because they killed him. What sort of character was he? What sort of man would he have become? I saw dignity and courage in the very little I was allowed to see of him. But I felt the need, now, overwhelmingly, to know more.

  This wish to learn who Peter was seemed both respectful and appropriate. And it came upon me with the weight of obligation. Guilt is a powerful emotion, but I have lived with guilt, insidious and futile, for a decade. This was a vastly stronger and more positive urge.

  A day has barely gone by that I have not thought about how close we came to escape. But after reading the newspaper yesterday, after seeing Göring strutting in his cape and boots and baubles of high office, I began to wonder finally, too, about the possibility of retribution. They should be punished for what they have prospered so obscenely from. One day, they will each be called to account for their crimes before God. But they should be punished now, in the secular court, exposed and condemned as the murderers of an innocent child.

  Child abduction is not a common crime in England. It was not a common crime ten years ago. There is every likelihood that when Peter was taken, the police were alerted to his disappearance. An eight-year-old could not simply be allowed to vanish in this country in 1927, regardless of how impoverished his family circumstances might have been. A mother will not quietly relinquish her son. It goes against nature to do so. My wretched life has made me a reluctant authority on abomination. For a parent willingly to give up their infant to malevolent strangers would be exactly that. So it is likely the police were alerted. And when a preliminary search proved unsuccessful, an investigation would have begun. And that would surely have meant a report in the press. I don’t mean a story in a national newspaper like the Daily Herald, which printed yesterday’s apologist drivel about the Nazi High Command. But it would be the public duty of a local newspaper to report a local disappearance, give a description, perhaps even, if one existed, print a photograph of the child gone missing.

  I know that the obvious thing to do would be to hire a private detective to help me in my search. Seeking professional help is surely the most sensible course. But the thought of involving some grubby ex-detective, more used to spying on adulterers, to exposing squalid assignations for evidence in divorce cases, seems altogether abhorrent. The circumstances involve too much unreconciled grief, too tragic a loss, for me to be willing to engage a paid mercenary to assist me. If I’m to do it at all, I’m to do it on my own. My sources must be the Public Records Office and the British Museum, where I believe there is kept a copy of every publication ever printed in the British Isles. My strongest clue is Peter’s accent, which in the precious few words we exchanged, I am sure, betrayed the Celtic lilt of Wales.

  My first obstacle is a very practical one. I have no pass allowing access to the British Museum Reading Room. I am not a student or a scholar or a paid researcher. It is a decade since I can claim to have practised any profession. There are, ironically, examples of my own work in the great archive I seek to search. But I could not get through the door to ask to look at them, even in the unimaginable event that I should wish to do so. This is a difficulty. But I am resolved now and will not be deterred.

  6 October, 1937, later

  At four o’clock today I walked the distance from the flat to St Luke’s Church in Chelsea for an hour of instruction. It was a sooty autumnal afternoon of wet pavements and lingering tobacco smoke. The shop windows along the King’s Road were yellow and dim in the dampness. Men made anonymous by their uniform garb of grey mackintosh and felt trilby walked women on precarious heels. The streets seemed improbably busy for a Wednesday. The shop displays seemed dowdy and undeserving, too lacklustre to draw trade. But, of course, the bustle is all illusion. Many tread the streets because they have no jobs to go to. All they are spending is shoe leather in their melancholy efforts to occupy unwanted time.

  The road traffic pointed north was stationary. There is something splendidly democratic about a traffic jam. I saw a Delage with headlamps the size of soup plates and the streamlined body of a panther idling behind a filthy coal wagon that shook with every revolution of its decrepit engine. The coalmen sat on the back of the wagon, smoking vacantly amid the sacks of coal and coke and bags of slack, their faces and hands stained black like those of a minstrel troupe. The owner of the Delage sat behind his driver, reading the financial pages and making swift calculations on an abacus placed on the arm of his seat. He was jowly in his astrakhan coat collar, almost regally patient in the jam. I shivered. The coal-wagon minstrel troupe had reminded me momentarily of Al Jolson, the American film star, the celebrated lead in The Jazz Singer. They had innocently brought to mind the circum
stances in which I first became aware of the film.

  A milk cart was responsible for the hold-up. Its horse had apparently bolted and turned the cart, sending zinc milk churns tumbling and spilling over the macadam. Milk ran and dissipated, the colour of weak coffee in the gutters, by the time I passed this spectacle, the nag now still, flanks steaming innocently in the rain as an ostler stroked its head and a policeman gathered details from the poor milkman into his notebook under the cover of his rain cape. Car horns hooted behind them, but they did so despondently, as if reconciled. I crossed the road where I always cross it, by the bakery. Catholicism will forever now, I think, evoke in me the smell of freshly baking bread. This is a good thing. I can think of few smells better fitting the liturgy. And those others I can think of are meagre or sad, while bread is comforting.

  Monsignor Lascalles provided the answer to my problem concerning access to the Reading Room. I did not tell him why I wanted the card. On completion of my instruction, when I am accepted into the faith, I might ask him to be my confessor and tell him everything. I would need to be resolute to do so. Whatever his training, whatever his experience, I know that in confessing to him, I would lose a friend and disillusion a virtuous man. My weakness with my instructor is that I want him to like me. Vanity and intuition together insist that he does. He was a man before he was a priest and with his sinewy strength and saturnine handsomeness, the man inside the soutane is still starkly apparent to me. He is serious concerning the instruction and sometimes even grave. But afterwards he is relaxed and smiles and he has the fatalistic humour singular to the French. I do not want to disappoint him. And yet I think it inevitable that, one day, I must.

  I explained my dilemma as we drank coffee in a vestibule in a wing adjoining the consecrated part of the church. Here, a woman must still keep her head covered. But a guest is allowed to smoke. So I smoked gratefully under my mantilla. The Monsignor does not smoke. He smoked in the war, he told me, when everyone did. But he has since given up the vice. I suspect smoking is only one of many small pleasures his vocation has compelled him to relinquish.

  I told him I wanted to gain entry to the British Museum in order to conduct a private research project. But that I needed urgent access, rather than having to wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. I phrased it to him this way deliberately. The French have a familiarity with bureaucracy that makes most of them detest it. He seemed to ponder for a moment. The Monsignor’s face has a lean highborn look, well-suited to thought. And then he brightened and smiled.

  His Eminence the Cardinal employs two voluntary researchers, he told me. One of them is a woman. Both possess just such a card.

  Won’t the subterfuge involve lying, Father?

  He cocked his head and his eyes twinkled. He has grey eyes. There is no real softness to them but, like their owner, they can be kind. The name on the card is that of Susan Green, he said. You have committed no sin I can readily call to mind if the guardians of the Reading Room assume the name is yours. I shall see the card is delivered to your home in the morning.

  7 October, 1937

  I have found him. I am sure it is him. If so, they chose shrewdly. I left the museum already making plans in my head for my journey. There are garages in Great Portland Street where any respectable person with the means can hire a reliable car. The journey will be fairly arduous, along remote roads I have never driven. But I was a good fast driver in the days when I owned a car and drove regularly. To think, the woman I once was owned a red Bugatti. When I look back at myself in those days, at what I did and hungered for, I gaze disdainfully upon a person I barely recognise. But she was me. And I am responsible for everything she did. Buying the Bugatti was, I suppose, the very least of it.

  Now, my sensibly shod feet and the Underground are usually sufficient to get me about. I’m parsimonious with taxis, shameless when it comes to taking buses and trams. Humble pursuits help in our attaining a state of grace, the Monsignor says. Having left the museum building in Bloomsbury, almost without thinking, I began to walk in the direction of Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, where I knew I would be able to buy the maps to plot my journey in detail.

  Even on a wet autumn in early evening, I generally enjoy Charing Cross Road. When I reached it, the lights in the long and ramshackle row of bookshops on its east side were burning brightly under flapping canvas awnings that almost stretched the width of the pavement. A chestnut-seller stood with a burnished uplit face above his glowing brazier. Even with the swelling evening traffic, I could hear the bellow of the costermongers at their stalls a block away off Cambridge Circus. Foyles, across the road from me, was a bright yellow palace of books in the fading light. There is something thrilling about coming across the spectacles of London like this, something that even the most jaded Londoner can appreciate. And ordinarily I would have felt the familiar excitement of it myself, emerging upon it from the austere and gloomy streets of Bloomsbury. Except that I couldn’t, because I had the very strong intuition that I had been followed there from the museum.

  I had reached the edge of the kerb. I was obliged to wait for a lull in the hurtling traffic. A red bus carrying a sweeping advertisement for Gillette Safety Razors in silver and green across its top deck braked in front of me to allow passengers on to the tailboard from a bus stop to my right. Now I was trapped. For an absurd moment I imagined a heavy hand on my shoulder and the whisper of Cockney authority confiding, Madam, we know you’re not Susan Green. I even turned around. But all I saw was the oblivious march of September pedestrians in raincoats under raised umbrellas. When I turned back again, the bus had pulled away and Foyles beckoned.

  I will set off tomorrow morning. I have telephoned to arrange the car and they are going to fill the tank with petrol and the radiator with water and check the tyres and the engine tonight. I have arranged to pick the vehicle up at 8 a.m. They were very enthusiastic for me to try their latest model. I told them I didn’t care a jot about the manufacturer or year so long as the car is reliable and its colour black. I want to be as inconspicuous as I can be. At the risk of falling from the Monsignor’s grace, I know that nature contrived to make me a conspicuous woman. It might be committing the sin of pride to allude to this. But really, I think it is only stating a fact. I have never required a crimson sports car to turn the heads of either sex.

  Perhaps I should have told them that I do not wish to hire a German car. After Foyles this evening, I walked down past Sheekey’s fish restaurant and along Bedfordbury for the Strand and Embankment Underground station. There was a boy at the station entrance, hawking the Evening News. I glanced at the front-page headline. President Roosevelt has made a speech calling on American Nazis to be more tolerant of other political groups. But tolerance is not a part of the Nazi ideology. The iron broom Hitler talks so fondly about, leaves a trail of blood when he uses it to sweep. Tolerance to them is no different to weakness. That is why appeasement is such a paradox. It can only encourage what it delays and seeks to prevent.

  Rather than going straight into the station and taking my District Line train, I walked across to the Embankment and watched the river for a while. I have always loved the river. The night was gorgeously clear and the Thames was at full tide, its oily surface lapping against the mooring rings which depend from the mouths of sad bronze lions’ heads, set in the stone of the bank and grown green in their watery toil. I watched a pugnacious tug pull a long line of barges filled with bitumen or coal upriver while its steersman puffed on a pipe and sipped at something fortifying from a metal flask in his wheelhouse. The sail of a barque sucked light like a vacuum sucks air as it passed blackly across the gas lamps and braziers illuminating the wharves of the far bank. At Cleopatra’s Needle, I stopped and turned back and watched as engines departed Charing Cross Station for points southeast across the river bridges with jubilant screams on their steam whistles and firefly sparks dancing in their furious manes of smoke.

  The Germans will bomb London. That is what a man from
the Ministry of Defence said on the wireless a few evenings ago before he was forced to resign from his job for the crime of ‘warmongering’. Thus was a civil servant disgraced and deprived of his pension for the crime of telling the truth. I know of two bad men who will profit from the war. Göring, of course. And Fischer, the monster whose factories manufacture the bombs they will use to disfigure and even destroy the city I live in and so cherish. Perhaps I can help heap disgrace on them both before war breaks out. And in the meantime, I can boycott German automobiles. A feeble joke, but it made me smile, just now, as I wrote it. I had forgotten how fulfilling sharing one’s thoughts in secrecy can be. When I complete my instruction and convert to Catholicism, I am sure I shall be one of those awful women who attends confession every week.

  Before going for my train, I sat on a bench at the side of the river and smoked a cigarette. And I was possessed again by the odd feeling of being watched I had felt earlier on Charing Cross Road. Then it passed and I was able to enjoy my vice if not in a state of grace, then at least in the great capital’s magical state of crowded seclusion.

  10 October, 1937, London, dawn

  I am exhausted and yet quite unable to sleep. I reached home in the small hours after a journey I can barely remember. All I can think of is what they looked like when they caught us in our attempted escape, cold and bedraggled on the beach, lost and looking for a ferryman to pay or a boat to steal so that we could make our escape from Wight. I had given Peter my coat by then to cover the rags they kept him in and to try to keep his undernourished body warm. We had been looking, of course, for the boat beached by Wheatley. But I had not been able to find my way back to it in the sea mist that descended to wrap the island following our flight. They loomed out of the vapour, three men in overcoats and evening wear, silk mufflers around their throats and top hats giving them menacing height in the gloom. They were laughing and one of them, Crowley I think, was wearing a monocle. Smell is a very acute sense on an empty stomach and they smelled of cigars and camphor and brilliantine and the smell made me retch thin bile on to the sand. And they laughed louder, pulling my coat from the thin shoulders of the boy, throwing it at me, turning with him, taking him away for the last time.