The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [32]
Mason waited. Eventually Seaton said, ‘Any of that Joseph Conrad meets Rider Haggard Congo bullshit true?’
‘Not Congo,’ Mason said. ‘It wasn’t the Congo. It was the Ivory Coast.’
‘Just a yarn spun to buddy the two of us up? A grand tale, captain. But that Kheddi stuff was nonsense, wasn’t it?’
Mason seemed to tighten under his sodden clothes. He dripped rain and indignation. ‘Blarney isn’t my style, Seaton,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to say that every word of it was true.’
Wind rocked the car in a savage upward gust despite the buttressing shelter of the sea wall and, a moment after, a wave pounded like a canon battery against the wall itself and hit the fabric roof of the Saab in a heaving spatter of brine. They saw it gush down the windscreen, a living element, foam-flecked, shaped in sinewy cascades of black water. The radio was quiet now. Roy Buchanan, who had hanged himself in a police cell in America in 1988, had apparently returned to his troubled rest.
‘It began twelve years ago,’ Seaton said. He had extended his hands and his fists were tight on the wheel and his knuckles white in light that glowed like phosphorescence through the dripping car windows. ‘That’s when it began for me. It’s all my fault, really. Everything that’s happened can be brought back to me. And yet, you know, it began with the noblest of intentions.’
Mason crushed the orange ember of his cigarette between finger and thumb. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Come back to the house on Wavecrest and tell me all of it.’
Nine
He met Lucinda Grey in the upstairs bar of the Cambridge pub one sunlit evening in the warm spring of 1983. When he walked into the bar, Crystal Gayle was singing ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ on the jukebox. He remembered that. It could have been Van Morrison singing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ or Julie London singing ‘Cry Me A River’ or Nina Simone singing ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. The upstairs bar at the Cambridge had just about the best jukebox of any pub in London. But it was Crystal Gayle. And Lucinda’s eyes were neither brown nor blue. They were green and remarkable, appraising him from the other side of the bar when he walked in. Closer, he could see that the pupils of her eyes were encircled at the inner limit of the green by iridescent flecks of gold. Her dress was gold, too – raw silk, slubbed and pleated. And her hair was the colour of dark honey, cut into a heavy bob.
It was a flamboyant year in a flamboyant decade and most of the crowd in the bar were students from the St Martin’s School of Art building a hundred yards along Charing Cross Road. It was bright in the bar in the early evening through the big windows overlooking Cambridge Circus. Dressed for the night, in the late daylight, the fashion course students were self-consciously poised and picturesque in their buttoned shoes and bias-cut skirts and tailored jackets and hats.
They formed separate groups, or orbits, the students in the Cambridge in those days, in that year. So those on the graphics course were deliberately monochromatic in black Levis and white Hanes T-shirts under their MA-1 flight jackets, the girls among them distinguished only by their peroxide rockabilly quiffs. The girls on the painting courses wore rah-rah skirts or jeans purposefully distressed with artfully torn sweats over tight white singlets, while the boys all dressed in the Jackson Pollock ensemble of jeans and plaid shirts and denim jackets. Footwear was crucial. To a man and woman, the graphics lot wore Doc Martens. The painter girls wore clumpy black engineer boots. The would be Pollocks wore Jackson’s Bass Weejun loafers carefully saved-for and purchased on their pilgrimage to an American-owned clothes shop called Simmons, in Covent Garden. Flip on Long Acre had made authentic Americana generally cheap. But the Flip merchandise came over tightly packed aboard container vessels to be pressed back into life when it arrived. So, of course, they didn’t sell the shoes.
Seaton was there to see his brother, Patrick, dressed tonight in a zoot suit and painted silk tie because they