The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [116]
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