The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [122]
Twenty-Seven
Aberdyfi was a shallow rank of terraces rising with the steep incline of the land and facing the mouth of the Dyfi estuary. Penhelig, where Peter had actually come from, was a cluster of dwellings tacked on to the southern end of the village. Everything was of a type, of a period, as though the place had drowned in sepia or become cursed and frozen in time. It occurred to Seaton that this was because the village was in Snowdonia. Since the establishment of the National Park, it would have been impossible to build anything new. It would have been illegal to demolish anything not completely derelict. It was a fact he thought might help him in his search for secrets from the past. Aberdyfi quite deliberately celebrated the past. It was where the village lived and, when the tourists came in the summer months, thrived. The place seemed, more than anything, a monument to itself. The present was circum-scribed, here, tolerated only if it did not necessitate physical change.
Peter had been baptised and raised in the Anglican Communion, in what was, in his childhood, the newly established Anglican Province of the Church in Wales. His school had been a church school. His birth had been registered in the Parish of St Luke’s. And Seaton had spoken to the vicar from a British Museum payphone to arrange a face-to-face talk and to seek permission to take a look around his church. He’d lied about the reason. A cold call did not invite discussion about an infant tragedy. He’d relied on his rusted talent for invention to find a pretext.
He walked along the seafront to Penhelig under the drum of insistent rain. Cloud in a grey mantle concealed the peaks of the hills to his left. To his right, he passed a cluster of small fishing boats and yachts in Aberdyfi harbour. Craft sat still at anchor. It was very quiet under the rain. There was not enough breeze even for their rigging lines to slap the masts of the boats dragged up above the tideline on the sand. Within a few minutes of disembarking at the station, Seaton was completely soaked. He had not been so drenched since the evening he had got off a London bus, shivering with presentiment, on Lambeth Bridge. That was the night he’d met Malcolm Covey in Zanzibar. In the rain on the Aberdyfi seafront, it seemed an awfully long time ago. In calendar time, it was still less than a week.
He dumped his overnight bag on the bed in the room he’d reserved by phone at the Penhelig Arms. It was a nice room. It was more of Covey’s cash. The inn was sited on the coast road and his small window faced the grey rain-stippled estuary.
St Luke’s was an ascent up a steep tree-lined lane that yellowed to a wash of gravel and gurgled in the ditches flanking the lane as he climbed. The church was high above Penhelig and lost from sight in a fold of hills until he saw the slate spire, almost upon it. The door to the church was open and lit from its porch in the general gloom of trees and sky. There was no priest, though. The Reverend Madden had been called away to see a sick parishioner. Seaton was met instead by a Mrs Reeve, who explained this to him. He had long ago, as part of his training in his old profession, disciplined himself against writing off people as types. But he had Mrs Reeve down straightaway as the sort of spinster who fusses around church flowers, spraying beeswax on pews, cleaning the font.
‘You’ll be the writer, Mr Seaton,’ she said.
He had Covey’s fake accreditation dampening in his coat pocket. But it had no useful application here. And writers didn’t need qualifications. They just needed subjects to claim to be writing about.
Mrs Reeve had a cloth between her hands and her hair pulled back in pins away from her face. She was middle-aged, all spectacles and bland parochial disapproval. And then she smiled, and it seemed to him as though the summer sun came out.
‘Writing a book about Marjory Pegg, are you?’
‘Researching one.’
‘By all accounts the woman was a saint, the work she accomplished at the school. Can I get you a cup of tea, Mr Seaton? Or