The House of Lost Souls (23 page)
Except for his sister. She was the exception to his soldierly rule. He loved his sister very much. He loved her more than he loved anyone. He loved her innocence and possibilities and the incandescent brightness of her nature. She was a one-off, was Sarah. When they made her, they broke the mould. He knew that a big part of his love for her was selfish, because the thought of facing the world without a blood relative left living was a terrifying one. It meant familial destruction, stark isolation. It gave that dark word, loneliness, the depth of an abyss. His mates loved him, if they loved him, through his deeds and wisecracks. Sarah just loved him. And he loved her. And it wasn’t entirely a selfish love. It couldn’t be. Because Nick Mason knew that he would give his life protecting hers.
Sell, he thought, rather than give. Sell was by far the more accurate term. And not cheaply, either. It had started to snow again and he looked upward and blinked against the heavy flakes drifting down against vaunting walls. Nick Mason would never have given his life. That was alien to his nature. But he would sell it for his sister’s sake. And he knew that whoever tried to take it would be obliged to pay a painfully heavy price.
He sighed. It was a nice thought to go back in on, that, after the satisfaction of his fictional cigarette. It sounded just the right note of defiant machismo Paul Seaton would have expected from him. He suspected that Seaton didn’t rate him, thought him little better than a boorish stereotype. But that was okay. He didn’t really rate Seaton, not in a fight, he didn’t. Seaton’s bottle had gone a long time ago. It wasn’t his fault, but it was a fact, nevertheless. Seaton was shot. They were going to have to go to the Fischer house and confront the thing that held the three surviving girls in thrall. Theirs was a desperate enterprise, compelled by need but with scant chance of success. Mason could feel in the reluctant recesses of his soul that this was going to be much more dangerous than his encounter in Africa had been. And he knew in his soul that he had only been the victor then by a breath.
What worried him more than the frailty of his ally, though, was the Havana-loving enigma, Malcolm Covey. Covey possessed an oily omnipresence. He was slippery and clever. And the vague unexplained ambiguity of him was disconcerting. Mason had started to feel a faint menace at the mention of his name. He would have to ask the priest about Covey. Seaton could be appallingly stupid, for someone reasonably bright. But there were no flies on Monsignor Lascalles. Not yet, there weren’t. He turned a circle on the balls of his feet, taking in the heights of gloomy stone and the pale void of falling crystals above them. He pulled in a breath that stiffened his lungs with cold, and followed his own fading footprints back inside.
He met with silence on his return. But it was a companionable silence, there in the library. He knew that Seaton and the priest knew that he had not escaped its enclosure for a cigarette. But he knew equally that in the scheme of things, his small deception mattered to neither of them.
‘Something else happened, didn’t it, Father? Something else happened in Wheatley’s dugout that you didn’t tell us about.’
‘It was unimportant, Nicholas.’
‘Tell us anyway. Knowledge is power.’
Lascalles smiled. ‘Faith, my son,’ he said, ‘is power.’
‘Nevertheless.’
The smile twitched on the priest’s face in mellow firelight. The flames from the grate were fading in their fierceness now. But Lascalles’ expression showed that his memory burned bright and undiminished. ‘His dugout was sturdily revetted. There was a cot with an army blanket, the card table between us and the chairs we sat in. He had books on one of two shelves. Cans of bully beef and coffee and his whisky bottle sat on the other. In the corner, on an upturned packing case, was a Victrola phonogram. In other circumstances, the scene might have seemed almost what you English describe as cosy. But even without the other factors present, the pervasive smells of cordite and lice powder, and the small breach in the roof planking from a recent mortar attack, would have prevented that smug illusion. And something else. Something shared the table he sat at, next to the cards displayed from his pack. It was a Webley revolver, the grips missing and the cylinder torn out of it. He must have been wearing the weapon when he was hit. There it lay, like some skeletal relic, mute proof of the power of an explosion no one mortal could have survived.
‘I wore the uniform of a captain during my secondment during the war. On entering Wheatley’s quarters, I had taken off my cape. There had been no invitation to do so. But I had been anxious to occupy as much of my subject’s time as possible. Anyway, the garment was hung on a peg. As I rose to put it back on, Wheatley did not, as would have been common courtesy among men of his rank, rise with me. He stayed slumped in his chair. Abruptly, the Victrola began to play.’
Seaton said, ‘Do you remember the music, Father?’
‘I recognised it instantly. I did so despite my incredulity. You must remember that, in 1917, gramophones were very primitive contrivances. Certainly they did not possess the capability to turn themselves on.’
‘What was the music?’
‘An obscure song by a Vatican composer, written in praise of the Almighty, rightly infamous as one of the few songs recorded by the last surviving castrato.’
Seaton said, ‘Did it sound normal?’
The priest scoffed. ‘If a castrato ever sounded normal. And then for a few bars only. The melody became corrupted by a sort of syncopation. I was fastening the collar of my cape, effecting to ignore this sinister pastiche. Satan’s little joke, you see. Choral music corrupted into what even I recognised as the American craze. It was music meant to be sacred, played as ragtime.’
Mason looked up at Lascalles. ‘You’ve been an adversary of the devil for a long time,’ he said.
But Lascalles did not comment on the observation. Instead he said, ‘Are you not curious about your baptism?’
‘I think I’ve guessed most of it. When my father was trading in Africa, I think he became involved in magic. Juju. Powerful magic. It’s why the house by the sea he bought in Whitstable is not the safe sanctuary from disturbance Paul thinks it ought to be. I think you saved my soul and I expect my father was grateful. But you believed he passed something to me. Let’s call it a capability. I think you have followed my career. Christ alone knows what influence was put to use to enable you to do it, but that’s what you’ve done. And I think what happened with the Kheddi was a sort of audition. You summoned me there. It was your little test.’
‘Not mine. Yours. And you passed it.’
‘Bullets killed the Kheddi, Father.’
‘Bullets fired from your gun. It was not bullets that destroyed the demon, Nicholas. You did that.’
‘I’m not as good at guessing games as Nicholas is,’ Seaton said. ‘I haven’t had the same expert grounding in subterfuge as our intrepid soldier boy. I can’t guess who Malcolm Covey is. Or what part he really plays in all this. I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me.’
Lascalles looked at him. And Seaton felt a flush of embarrassment. Absurdly, he’d felt jealous when the priest had referred to Mason as ‘my son’. And Lascalles had done it twice. He felt childishly resentful of the history the two men shared. He felt excluded. And now he felt that Lascalles could see his resentment written plainly on his face.
‘Klaus Fischer died in Buenos Aires in the spring of 1983,’ Lascalles said. ‘He had reached the age of eighty-eight. It was a long life. Such a man would have compelling reasons for going to his death reluctantly. But die he eventually did, twelve years ago, peacefully it was reported, in his sleep. Five months after his death, you were visited in hospital by a man who seems to have shared many of Fischer’s characteristics.’
Seaton nodded.
‘Not in his dotage, of course. But in his formidable prime. Think of the girth, of the flamboyant attire and the cigars. Think of that teasing expertise on the subject of the occult. Did he enjoy music?’
Seaton thought about this. ‘I only went once to his home. I was renting a bedsit in Dalston, scraping together the fare to get me away to the States. I was obliged to list my address with the hospital and he must have got it from them because one morning the postman delivered a note from him inviting me round for tea. As I say, I went only the once. He owned a large flat in a mansion block in Victoria. He showed me his listening room. He possessed a stereo system that must have cost him several thousand pounds.’
‘It’s impossible,’ Mason said.
‘Jesus,’ Seaton said, ‘the hypnotism.’ He had remembered the words of Pandora’s journal, the hypnotic power she had witnessed in Fischer, confined to the boat cabin with him on their wretched crossing. He put his head in his hands. And the priest crossed the distance to him and put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
‘
Courage
, my son,’ he said. It is not your fault. Nothing prepares us for such encounters.’
Mason said, ‘You really think it’s him, Father?’
Lascalles shrugged. ‘I can tell you only this for certain. Before 1983, there is no record of the existence of a Doctor Malcolm Covey.’
‘They’re so clever,’ Seaton said.
And Lascalles frowned. ‘There is no “they”, Paul. We face only one adversary.’
‘I’ve seen them, Father. They have tried to do me harm.’
‘Manifestations.’
‘Is Covey a manifestation?’
‘Paul,’ the priest said. ‘I would say you are named in honour of the appropriate saint.’ Steel had replaced the avuncularity in his voice. Both of the men in the room with him tensed. It was very late by now, approaching two in the morning. But Father Lascalles seemed to be strengthening with the hours rather than having his age betray him with fatigue. ‘Fischer burns in hell,’ he said. His voice was like a file reducing iron. ‘They burn in hell, all of those who served him at the time and in the place we are discussing. Covey may or may not be a man. But he is a mere servant, a puppet. We face the foe we have faced since the Fall. Him only. To forget this fact would be fatal for both of you.’
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.’
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 circumstances 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.