The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [3]
He shuddered in the rain seeping through his clothes and flesh and dampened bones. And he turned away and raised the collar of his own coat hopelessly, about to head for home on foot, with no great distance to travel and everything in the world to try to come to terms with. Except that the music stopped him before he was able to take a step. Seaton stood, quite unable to move, his skin crawling with gooseflesh, listening at the river’s edge to the mournful drift of the song. The melody was old, even elderly. And it was familiar. In a high tenor, with the crisp enunciation of an evening around the wireless, a voice from sixty years ago was singing ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’.
If I turn around, I’ll see a Thames party boat, Seaton thought, antic figures partying through the glass and condensation in the lights of its long cabin. It was November, after all, and the run-up to Christmas had begun and the works celebrations were already beginning to occur.
Except that he knew in his heart he wouldn’t turn around and see anything of the sort. There wasn’t any party boat. He could hear the shellac of the old recording crackling with static under the needle of an antique gramophone as the song grew louder from behind him through the rain. The song was playing for an audience of one. The last thing he wanted to see was whatever sight might accompany it. And instead of turning around, he found he was able to move his feet away from the river and the sound, and so he answered in his mind the question posed by the title and lyric, instead. I don’t know who’s kissing her now, he admitted to himself. All I know is that it isn’t me and won’t be, ever again.
The feeling of foreboding aboard the bus had been very strong. And when he got home, the message light was flashing on his phone. He got messages very seldom. And so he dismissed all thought of rationalising that gabardine-clad corpse he thought he might have sighted in the river.
Home to Seaton was a one-bedroom flat on the top floor of a seven-storey block in Waterloo. The building was dilapidated, served by a single, piss-haunted lift that seldom functioned for more than a few consecutive days without breaking down. Tonight, though, it was working. He unlocked his door, trying not to be depressed by the smell of stale occupancy familiar to cheap spaces indifferently let. He could see the phone message light blinking out of the corner of one eye as he closed the door behind him. It cast a green, intermittent glow from the sitting room. The wind was stronger up here and he could hear rain spatter hard against the sitting-room window. The view through that window was the principal reason he had taken the flat. The location had appealed for sentimental reasons. The rent had been an important factor. But what he could see from a window the width of the sitting room had been the clincher. He had ignored shabbiness verging on squalor for the sake of his view.
He walked on into the room, past the beckoning phone, looking out and down at the night. The block was at the southern end of Morley Street. Seventy feet beneath where he stood, a neat boundary garden with a low perimeter wall gave on to St George’s Road. Directly opposite, there was a terrace of four-storey Georgian houses. Immediately to the left, the bulk of the Catholic cathedral massed and brooded. A block beyond the terrace, over to the right, he could see the dome of the Imperial War Museum, cleverly lit by its floodlights through the stir of trees surrounding the old building. To the rear of the cathedral, the lights of a bar were a small patch of yellow brightness across from the museum grounds. It was a failed pub, gaudily repainted and rechristened Zanzibar. Seaton went there some evenings. He had preferred it when it had been a pub. But the beer was cold and the staff were friendly enough. This area was strong with associations still familiar from his happy past. Usually, he took great comfort in them.
Behind him, the