The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [127]
‘My father called Jones a peerless talent, the best golfer he had ever seen, the greatest player ever to hold a club between his hands.’
The bag was black and felt and had a tasselled drawstring. She loosened the string. ‘He saw greatness, at Hoylake, my uncle told me once. And then, very quietly, he told me about the miracle called Peter Morgan with whom he’d been to school.’
She pulled the cloth free and let it drop to the floor. He saw that she held a small chalkboard in her hand. She gripped it by its wooden border in her fingers, delicately, so that her fingers did not touch the slate itself. She brought it across the room to him, into the light, holding it up, turning it between both hands to show what it displayed to best effect.
It was calculus. Four lines of dense equations had been scrawled across the slate. The chalk in which the equations were described was so old it had yellowed. The oil mixed with the chalk in the pressing process, to stop it crumbling on use, had decayed and yellowed to a faint stain on the black stone. Examining the characters, Seaton saw that it wasn’t really fair to call the equations scrawled. The numbers and signs were bold and confident, the work of a small hand hurrying to keep pace with the intellect dictating what it described. He was looking at the work of a mind functioning at cyclonic speed and power.
‘He was good at football and cricket. He stole apples from Bradley’s orchard,’ Seaton said.
‘Yes. And this. He was this too,’ Mary Reeve said.
‘Was it recognised?’
‘Oh, they came from far and wide to court him. Doctor Carter from Cambridge and a fellow from Trinity College and even a chap from the Sorbonne. Professor Covey came up from Oxford at the wheel of a Delage.’
Seaton almost staggered on his planted feet. ‘Malcolm Covey?’
‘He took some of the boys for an ice-cream. He took my uncle. They were treated to double scoops, lashed with rasp-berry sauce. But you couldn’t buy Peter Morgan with a cornet, my uncle said. He was intent on medicine, was Peter. The boy was Edinburgh-bound.’ Mrs Reeve turned and bowed and picked up its shroud and clothed and put the relic back in the drawer of her uncle’s bureau from which she had taken it.
There was a clock in here, too. But it wasn’t quartz. Seaton could hear the swing of its pendulum. He looked at it now, following the sound. It was mounted above the bureau and he could see the pendulum flicker in its glass-fronted chamber. Its face was porcelain, numbered with roman numerals. Its hands showed the wrong time. It had stirred itself into life, as old clocks in old rooms were sometimes apt to do.
‘What happened to Marjory Pegg?’
Mrs Reeve stiffened with her back to him. ‘She took her life. She loved Peter as a cherished son. She hoped for eight tormented months in the silence following his departure from here and then she could endure the torment no more.’
‘You said your uncle’s life was curtailed. It’s a strange word to use.’
‘But precise, Mr Seaton. Peter had seven classmates. Two were killed in the war. One died at Normandy and another later in Borneo. But none of the seven ever married. And needless to say, none ever fathered a child.’
‘I see.’
She laughed. ‘I doubt it.’
‘Why did you change your mind, Mrs Reeve? About talking to me?’
And now she turned. ‘When you left the church I climbed the tower to watch your departure. I didn’t really trust you to leave, I don’t think. And I saw you among the graves. It was clear you had lost your way in finding them. And then you discovered Robert Morgan’s grave. I saw you kneel and cross yourself. I think you wept, Mr Seaton. I saw you wipe your eyes with the heel of your hand.’
‘It could have been rain.’
‘It could. It could indeed have been rain,’ she said.
Twenty-Eight
The rain itself cascaded on the half-mile back to the Penhelig Arms. It was twenty past ten and the last lamb casserole had long been and gone. It didn’t matter. He still wasn’t hungry.