The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [115]
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