The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [35]
There was a Stockman in the sitting room of her small second-floor flat. It was partially clothed in ruched pinned silk that looked blood red in the moonlight through the window but faded to something between terracotta and taupe when Lucinda switched on a standard lamp. The floor of the room was littered with pieces of dress patterns and swatches of cloth and sketches of clothes. She could really draw, he noticed. There was an electric sewing machine on a table with a pedal underneath. Her other furniture comprised an expensive-looking hi-fi and a small vinyl-covered sofa he thought he remembered having seen in the window of Practical Styling.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about the mess.’ She took off her jacket and hung it across the Stockman’s headless shoulders. ‘Would you like a drink?’
He could hear music coming from one of the flats of the floor above. The somnolent UB40 cover of ‘Red, Red Wine’. He looked at his watch. It was just after one in the morning. She took a record from its sleeve and put it on her turntable. Julie London began to sing ‘Cry Me A River’.
‘Do you have any beer?’
‘No boy drinks, I’m afraid,’ she said. She stood with her jacket off and her hands on her hips and her weight on one leg. Her breasts were small and high against the fabric of her blouse. Julie London was quietly histrionic through the loudspeakers. ‘There’s Chartreuse or Armagnac,’ she said.
Chartreuse. The green drink she’d been drinking in the Wharf.
‘Armagnac would be grand,’ he said.
‘Grand,’ she said.
‘It’s what they say at home.’ He felt foolish.
‘In Dublin’s fair city,’ she said. ‘Where the girls are so pretty.’
But he had never in truth seen a girl in Dublin with the looks on Lucinda Grey.
After a week, he moved in with her. Her flat was small, it was true, but they didn’t want the space to be apart. When they weren’t attending clubs and parties, they would sit through the lightening evenings on one of the wooden benches outside the Windmill pub nearby and sip beer opposite a peach tree that blossomed pink all through a perfect May. They rented videos, still a novelty, from the newsagent’s shop on Lambeth Walk. They rented Hammett and One From The Heart and laughed their way through Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and Trading Places. They played tennis together in Archbishop’s Park on one of the two public courts surrounded by high elms and beech trees. At the end of the month, they hosted a ridiculously intimate cocktail party. Girls from Lucinda’s course wore paste jewellery and cocktail frocks and their hair piled and sculpted in gelled and sugared confections. Kid Creole cavorted on the stereo.
‘It won’t last,’ Patrick murmured, drinking a vile concoction called a Dark and Stormy, which Greg Foyle was dispensing from a steel shaker misty with cold in the heat of the tiny kitchen. ‘I doubt if your doomed romance will see out the summer.’ But he smiled as he said it. And Paul knew the remark must have seemed absurd, even to him.
Ten
During the day, Lucinda attended college and Paul worked at the second job he’d ever had, as a crime and local government reporter on a local London paper called the Hackney Gazette. He was a stringer for the Evening Standard and for the TV news magazine programme London Tonight. And he had proposed a feature to the features editor of The Face. And The Face had accepted his proposal. The world seemed so alive with novelty and hope that some mornings the light and hurtle of London seemed to gasp with it, having to catch up with itself, with its own gathering thrill and momentum. Life was a movie, of course. He was at that forgivable age of self-obsession. And he felt like his role was shifting in it from an extra to one of the principals. He didn’t