The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [100]
Covey smiled. It was an impossible smile to read on a man Seaton now knew he would never really warm to. That was partly because of the horrible circumstances that had brought the doctor into his life. He would always associate the man with grief and terror. But it was also because Covey gave nothing of himself away. It was clear that, whatever else he wanted, he didn’t care especially whether or not he was liked. Fuck it, Seaton thought. He was tired, exhausted, truth be told. The hypnotism had worn him out. ‘What do you think?’
‘About your running-water theory?’
‘About any of it.’
Covey was silent. The smile held. ‘I think that you’re as sane as I am,’ he said, eventually.
Seaton was in the hospital for just over eight months. In all that time, Lucinda Grey never came to visit him. He was greatly saddened and hurt by this. But he was also relieved. In order to leave the hospital with any hope of genuine recovery, he knew it would be necessary for him to leave his old self behind. Some decisions about the curtailed life he would lead had already been made on his behalf.
He had been summoned to the county court and had a judgment against him now over an unpaid Access bill for the sum of a hundred and twenty pounds. So he was blacklisted and, without the collateral of property, had no means of getting credit. And he had been sacked from his job, so he was unemployed, his reputation sullied in the only profession he possessed the skills to practise. He was homeless. Perhaps least importantly, but not to his vanity, he was diminished physically. The muscle had shrunk off his frame in the enforced idleness of the hospital and he felt almost insubstantial when he saw in a mirror the puny apparition he’d become. (The briefest of glimpses, this. Paul Seaton no longer possessed his past, preening attachment to mirrors.) So a lot had been done to him without his having felt he’d determined any of it.
But he was obliged to do the rest of what would need to be done. He would have to relinquish all his old pretensions, routines, associates, ambitions; his old persona in its full entirety. And he knew that it would make it much easier to deal with his new diminished existence if he made it possible to believe in his heart that he would never see Lucinda Grey again. He had to store Lucinda, as he had to store his brother, safely in the locked refuge of his memory. There, he could treasure both of them without incurring the risk of further pain. There, they could continue to live. Only there, really, could he hope to have them at all without incurring the risk of his madness coming back again to overwhelm him. And it would overwhelm him, this time. A fresh rejection from Lucinda, a single sighting of his brother’s grinning spectre, and he knew he would be fit only for the deeper and more private recesses of the hospital, with their padded walls and their stiff leather constraints.
On the day of his release, he signed for his belongings at the admissions desk. A porter took him to where they had been taken from the flat, at some time after his own untidy departure from Old Paradise Street, and stored. It was a bad moment for him, this. He signed for a suitcase full of optimistic clothing and his typewriter and tennis racket and a case of albums he knew he would never be able to listen to again. In an envelope there were ticket stubs he’d saved, as souvenirs, after they’d been to see the singer Carmel, on a spellbinding Soho night in Ronnie Scott’s. There was a snapshot of Lucinda, taken at a table aboard a boat that served as a floating pub on the Thames. He raised the photograph to his lips, remembering the heat of the sun on his back as he’d taken it, recalling the perfume of her skin and the lost texture of her lips on those occasions they had brushed against his. There hadn’t been enough of them, of those