The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [33]
‘Who is the tall blonde in the pleated dress?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. Well, fine other than the terminal illness they broke the news to me about this afternoon.’
‘The tall girl with the green eyes.’
Patrick sipped beer.
‘The straw trilby is a mistake.’
‘Makes me look like Felix Leiter. The CIA man in the Bond novels.’
But Seaton’s eyes and attention were again on Lucinda Grey.
‘Sinatra wore a hat like this on the cover of “Come Fly With Me”.’
‘Makes you look like a Yank tourist,’ Seaton said.
His brother thought about this and shrugged.
‘In a Norman Wisdom film.’
‘She’s a bit of an enigma,’ Patrick said. ‘A blonde of the glacial persuasion.’
‘So you can’t even introduce me.’
‘If I could, then obviously, I wouldn’t.’
Seaton pondered this, wondering was it a double bluff. He decided it wasn’t.
‘I can only tell you she’s on the fashion course,’ Patrick said. ‘And she keeps herself very much to herself.’
‘Evidently.’
Seaton didn’t get to speak to Lucinda Grey that night. He went with his brother to the Mud Club and the Wag, where they played Kid Creole and Animal Nightlife and where the air smelled intensely of the smoke of Marlboro Reds and hair gel and brilliantine and dance sweat and where everyone, as Seaton got drunker, looked like they were extras in a film set in Cuba before Batista was overthrown and Che Guevara and Castro set the long-prevailing fashion in the hot unruly places of the world for jungle fatigues. And some-time after midnight he picked up a black dental receptionist from Woodford Green whose style was somewhere between Carmen Miranda and the model in the Bounty Bar television commercial current just then. And he took her home and forgot almost entirely about the fashion student with iridescent green eyes from earlier in the evening in the upstairs bar at the Cambridge. He almost forgot her. But he didn’t quite.
And then he saw her again the following week at a club called the Wharf, which occupied a derelict warehouse building on an empty stretch of the Thames near the Shadwell Basin. It was the era of warehouse parties, word-of-mouth and flier events like the Dirtbox, floating notoriously between vacant tenements in King’s Cross, with its sound systems and zinc bathtubs full of ice cubes and tins of Saporo beer. But the Wharf had a gentler and more contrived atmosphere of tidal drift, almost of permanence. And its clientele reflected its status in contrivances of their own.
There was a boy in a matelot shirt and a canvas yacht cap like a Jean Genet caricature on the door. A scar blunted the bridge of his nose and his tattooed arms were sinewy and tanned. The spring was hot that year, warm already with the intense promise of the burning summer to come. The club was lit by yellow oil lamps, and starlight cast on to its ceiling in pale ripples reflected through the windows from the river below. Patrick was there with friends from St Martin’s. Stuart Lockyear was there. And Greg Foyle, whose pictures would one day sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were seated at a table on the other side of the dance floor and Patrick said something to Greg and Greg looked at Patrick and Paul knew from the look that his brother was very drunk.
He saw the mysterious girl from the fashion course, Lucinda Grey, sipping a viscous green drink from a shot glass in a flamboyant huddle of people by the bar. He became aware of the music, as the final