The House of Lost Souls (12 page)

In Chelsea, this time, the door was opened, answering the stiff knocker almost straightaway.

Sebastian Gibson-Hoare was tall and thin and middle-aged, and flamboyantly undressed for the late afternoon in a Chinese silk print dressing gown. He opened his door in a cloud of competing odours. Under cologne, his breath was a mingling of brandy and the liquorice smell of French cigarettes. The cologne was Vetiver and he had on far too much of it. His breath was all the richer because he was panting. Looking past him into the hallway, Seaton supposed it was descending the stairs that had winded him so. They were steep. On the other hand, he’d been coming down them. With the long tobacco-stained teeth his smile revealed and his thinning combed-over hair, the effect of him altogether in the daylight should have been shambolic and terrible. But it wasn’t, somehow. Maybe it was his smile, which was easy and disarming. Perhaps it was his height and build, which gave his greeting gestures a sort of easy elegance.

‘A cold caller,’ he said. ‘How novel. Now, your patter may be persuasive and I might even be in dire need of double glazing or complete sets of encyclopedias. But I ought to warn you, I’m an undischarged bankrupt.’

Seaton said nothing. He thought there was likely more to come.

‘And I’m an unrepentant bankrupt, too,’ Gibson-Hoare said.

Seaton said nothing. He’d had a speech prepared, of course. But it didn’t now seem to suit either the man or the circumstances. He lifted his hand to reach into his pocket for his wallet and his press card but then let it drop again. Officiousness did not seem the right route, to his instinct, to this man’s real whereabouts, or confidentiality.

Gibson-Hoare sniffed. And he introduced himself. And the two of them, on the threshold of his house, shook hands. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘You’d better come in and tell me why I’ve so mysterious a visitor.’

His sitting room was at the top of the stairs. Before they ascended, Seaton took in what detail he could of the gloomy entrance hall as his eyes tried to adjust after the brightness of the day outside. At the far end was a kitchen, one side of a beaded curtain in the doorway pulled back to reveal the chipped enamel of an old stove. To the right was a doorway, curtained off by a heavy brown drape. That led to the cellar, Seaton supposed, going on the faint smell of damp clinging to the velvet curtain fabric. He could smell mouse droppings, too, the overall atmosphere of decay, of squalor, he’d sensed peering through the letterbox depressing now he was inside the place.

But there was nothing squalid about Gibson-Hoare’s sitting room. It was large and light through two handsome windows and richly coloured with original art and the scattered plush of rugs and cushions. His furniture was clearly antique and very substantial. The room was spacious enough not to be cramped by the presence of a Steinway piano. The lid was lifted over the keys and from the patina of wear on their ivory, it was obvious that the piano was frequently played. Gibson-Hoare seemed to like antique weaponry. A pair of duelling pistols had been mounted in a glass-fronted case on one wall above a row of swords. He owned a claymore and a cutlass, but the rapier appeared to be his weapon of choice where cold steel was concerned. His booze occupied cut-glass decanters in the bottom half of a large globe of the world, the upper hemisphere pulled back on a hinge in readiness. Each decanter wore a silver necklace with an engraved plate telling you what it contained. Seaton knew next to nothing about antiques, but it was obvious there was a lot of valuable stuff here. Either its owner was lying about being a bankrupt, or the bailiffs assigned to his case were criminally negligent.

‘Tea? Or something stronger?’

‘Tea would be grand.’

Seaton thought he was probably about sixty years old. If he was, then almost everything he owned here pre-dated him. When he served the tea, the sleeve of his dressing gown rode up to reveal the rectangular case of a Rolex wristwatch with an age-mottled face, hanging from a gold bracelet with too many links for the thinness of his wrist. What else had he inherited, Seaton wondered. A cache of pictures? Personal memories shedding light on the life of the enigmatic relative he may well have known as a child and adolescent?

He sipped tea. Sunlight warmed the room through the windows. Dust motes rose in Vetiver-scented air. He wondered how to begin. ‘You’re very trusting, Mr Gibson-Hoare. This being London and all.’

‘No I’m not, my young friend. I’m not trusting at all. You’re very presentable. You’ve a charming brogue and honest Irish eyes, but you wouldn’t have got through the door without what Young Mr Breene told me about you when he was considerate enough to call.’

‘He called you after my visit this morning?’

‘He called me after you telephoned him yesterday. Without my permission, he wouldn’t have given you this address. A firm doesn’t thrive like Vogel and Breene has over the years without manifesting some measure of professional integrity.’

Or discretion, Seaton thought, wondering what the man in front of him would have made of Breene’s description of his one childhood sighting of Pandora. And more to the point, of her date, on that winter evening long ago.

‘There’s no cache of pictures for you to discover, Mr Seaton. Antiques is the business I’ve dabbled in during those infrequent periods of my life when I’ve summoned the necessary energy for trade. I know a little about commerce, something about collecting, a fair amount about art. Copyright would be mine by ownership and default. With Horst prints selling as posters in every branch of Athena, I know what such pictures could be worth, potentially. I know what the originals might fetch at auction. But they don’t exist.’ He sipped tea. ‘If they ever did, they’re long perished.’

‘Did you know her?’

Gibson-Hoare laughed. He threw back his head and his teeth were stained brown against thinning enamel. ‘Goodness me. Why don’t we get right to the heart of the matter?’

He was lonely. He might or might not be queer as well, Seaton thought, but the key to it was the loneliness. He didn’t see many people. And he enjoyed company, after his peculiar fashion. Seaton felt suddenly depressed, deflated. Because he knew now that Gibson-Hoare had not known Pandora. If he had, he would have answered rather than avoided the question. It would have given him more to say. It would have provided him with the company for longer in which to inflate and indulge his reminiscences.

‘She was a distant cousin,’ he said. He took his teacup over to the globe and took the stopper from a whisky-coloured decanter and poured an inch or so into his tea. He stirred it and sipped. ‘I never met her. I never even knew about this house until I inherited it in 1963. But in the twenty years I’ve been here, if there had been hidden treasure, I’d have found it by now. All I have discovered is damp. And rodents, latterly. I’m keeping the death-watch beetles and woodworm at bay, but it’s altogether a terrible fag, domesticity.’

Seaton said nothing. He didn’t think inheriting a London house a plight he could sympathise with wholeheartedly.

‘She had no talent for it.’

‘For what?’

Gibson-Hoare chuckled his throaty smoker’s chuckle. He rummaged for cigarettes in a pocket of his dressing gown and found the packet. ‘Thought that would get your attention. For domesticity.’

‘How do you know?’

He proffered the pack with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. Seaton smiled and shook his head. Gibson-Hoare lit up with a large silver lighter shaped like a swan he took from the table with the tea things on it. He exhaled smoke, blue in the dusty sunlight in the room.

‘I didn’t meet her. But my late neighbour did. And he had some rum things to say about the hours she kept. And the noise she managed to generate. Always at night, apparently. She was a disruptive little soul, was our Pandora.’

‘Did she occupy the house alone?’

Gibson-Hoare smoked and picked something imaginary from between his teeth with a thumbnail. ‘I can’t imagine what possible business that can be of yours.’

‘None of it is my business, sir. And viewed one way, this visit, uninvited, is an intrusive and wholly unnecessary interruption.’

Gibson-Hoare frowned and smoked. Pacing back and forth across his rugs, he looked to Seaton like a character from one of those plays John Osborne’s work a mile down the King’s Road had made obsolete decades ago.

‘Viewed another way, my being here could be the first small step in the rediscovery of someone whose work should never have been forgotten. Pandora was a pioneer. She possessed technical brilliance and the courage to be original. Even Mr Breene commented on what a singular and gifted eye she had. And I’d say he’s an experienced judge, fairly grudging in his praise.’

Gibson-Hoare sat down. The frown had lightened to a more thoughtful expression. But he still didn’t speak.

‘These things have their own momentum, so they do. Who knows? If you can summon the necessary energy, in a year’s time you might find yourself curating a retrospective exhibition of your late cousin’s work.’

Gibson-Hoare looked skyward and Seaton read the look as one of patronised exasperation and feared he’d probably gone too far. But then he said, ‘There are some of her things here, still. One characteristic of families like mine is that we never throw anything away. I can assure you there are no photographs. Those she destroyed herself, I was told. And with some enthusiasm, apparently. That according to my late neighbour, who watched her light the brazier in the garden one December afternoon and was forced the following morning to complain about the acrid smell of the smoke as it still smouldered through a shower of rain. There are no photographs. But there are some clothes and other artifacts. You’re welcome to look at them if you think it will help you paint a more vivid picture than the one you have.’

Seaton thought of the smell that had permeated the thick velvet drapes concealing the cellar steps, contaminating the hallway even in the current heatwave with the clammy languor of damp. He wondered how much of a stomach he would have for rummaging through mildewed coats and mould-spotched dresses; the rotting gladrags of a suicide. Her camera had been a relic, sterile, pristine between Mr Breene’s white cotton hands. And he had coveted its touch. Her decaying ephemera, folded into closets at the bottom of the basement steps, seemed altogether less beguiling.

In his mind, Seaton visited again the stretch of river where the tide had abandoned Pandora. He could smell the sodden wooden supports of the landing stages behind where the group of them stood in the still, chilly absence of breeze. Small stones slithered in the mud and puddles of oil slick dumped by river vessels, under their leather-shod feet. In the mist on the water a foghorn sounded blindly and the police doctor opened his bag between his feet with a click of its lock and a waft of surgical spirit from the small bottles and wound rolls of lint and shiny instruments within. The doctor plucked his fob watch by its chain from his waistcoat pocket and made a verbal note to a plainclothes man of the time. The man nodded under his trilby and looked briefly at the body, uncovered now. He took off his hat in a gesture of respect for the dead. And he looked at the wound, bloodless and wide after its time in the water, dividing the flesh of her throat.

Out towards the centre of the river, there was a sudden commotion like the rumble of a storm and the surge of a cascading unseen torrent. It was a fire boat, the water pulled up through its pumps and pushed through the brass tips of its hoses, the noise the scream and impact of the deluge steepling down and crashing against the surface of the Thames. They were practising out there, rehearsing. They were preparing for the conflagration that would come with the looming war. Pandora Gibson-Hoare had elected to miss the performance. She was missing even this sombre rehearsal for it.

‘Cold feet, Mr Seaton?’

‘What?’ He blinked. He sipped at his tea, which had grown cold. His host had lit a fresh cigarette and was at the centre again of his blue aura of French tobacco smoke in the light bathing his sitting room. ‘Not at all,’ Seaton heard himself say.

‘It’s all in the attic. One floor up. There’s a ladder. I won’t go up there myself, it’s a few years since I’ve had the required agility. So you’ll be climbing solo, as it were. But you’re welcome to take a look if you so wish.’

Her stuff was in a trunk. It wasn’t damp up here. Light entered through a single pane of glass. The skylight looked welded to its frame and was spotched on its exterior with rain stains and years of pigeon shit. But the illumination it allowed was a help as well as a relief. The attic wasn’t as crowded as Seaton had expected. The house had a flat roof and it was a relatively large and regular space. He’d expected a jumble of Gibson-Hoare’s antiques, a rejected arsenal of rusting weaponry and old keyboard instruments, perhaps. But there wasn’t much and it all looked personal. A few pictures were propped against one wall. There was an oriental frieze on articulated lacquered panels showing a stork in a rocky stream. There were some elderly 78s in faded paper sleeves in a gilt rack that had tarnished badly. Her trunk stood in the furthest corner from the light, hide-bound and studded with ornamental bronze rivets, her initials picked out in mother of pearl above the lock mechanism. She’d been fond of pearls, he remembered, looking at the lock, fingering the key to it Gibson-Hoare had given him. She’d worn a rope of them thick enough to pull an ocean liner out of dock.

The lock surrendered easily and he opened the trunk inhaling Pandora’s scent, what was left of it, the smell of her ghost, perhaps, but hers, he knew, as old perfume and tobacco and perhaps the dust from her skin rose and filled his nostrils and lungs with an odour from a dead time. He was reminded of leather and cinnamon. There was candle wax and expensive soap and something underlying it all, harsh and indescribable. He thought about the Café Royal picture, then. And the thought came into his mind that the sourness he smelled might be the sweat of fear, secreted fifty years ago.

The thought startled him.

Something scurried in the corner, in the shadows and concealed space behind the stacked paintings, and Seaton was reminded of the mouse droppings he’d smelled in the gloomy vestibule of the house. He listened for it to repeat, poised leaning over the trunk, for the skitter of rodent claws. But all was quiet again. He was so tense, he realised, he was forgetting now to breathe. He pulled in a deep breath and knelt down and put his hands into the trunk and pulled from it three slithery silken piles of old frocks and scarves and underskirts and stockings and camisoles and put each pile on the floorboards next to him.