The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [37]
‘Well, she hasn’t.’
They looked at him, trying not to.
‘What’s it on?’
‘Pandora Gibson-Hoare,’ Foyle said.
The name meant something to Seaton. There was some old, almost involuntary memory there which stirred at the name, but remained opaque as his mind struggled through heat and wine drunk too early in the evening. Something he’d read or seen, some forgotten association stirred in the dimness of recollection but would not reveal itself. He gave up. ‘Who is she?’
‘Fucked if I know,’ Patrick said.
‘She was a photographer,’ Foyle said. ‘Portrait and fashion photography. She was one of the pioneers in fashion. But she did all her meaningful work very young. And she died young.’
‘Inconsiderate of her,’ Patrick said. ‘Dissertation-wise.’
‘She’s pretty obscure,’ Foyle said. ‘Hard to research. I’ve heard Lucinda hit a wall with her. It wasn’t laziness. Lucinda just got stuck.’
Seaton climbed down to the roof. He looked up at the sky, at vapour trails expanding and distorting miles up in the blue void. And he looked back to the group, noticing how clean-cut and absolute was the blackness of the shadows they cast on the flat surface of the roof. Hank Williams sang a song of dusty heartbroken longing on Greg Foyle’s beatbox. Beyond them, London toiled in the early-evening heat. You could look out from here across its shimmering topology and feel its energy and promise running through you like a charge. Pandora Gibson-Hoare. For some reason the name itself evoked in Seaton images of cars with running-boards and roofs of taut canvas and waxed bodywork sleek under black rain. He saw a convoy of them, the headlights yellow through an avenue of whispery trees. He could smell tobacco and cologne in the dark spaces behind the windscreen, see the motion of curved mudguard as the wheels they housed bounced and shivered over uncertain roads.
‘It’ll be a shame if Lucinda fails her degree,’ Lockyear said.
‘A travesty,’ Foyle said, swallowing wine.
‘Lucinda won’t fail her degree,’ Seaton said, dragging himself back into the here and now. And he knew that she wouldn’t. Because he wouldn’t allow it to happen.
The extension gave her a deadline that was still a fortnight away. He reckoned if he took one of the two weeks’ holiday he was owed, it would be more than enough time. But he reckoned without Lucinda’s principles, her integrity and her embarrassment at his finding out in the way he had about what she saw as a shameful academic and intellectual failing. Pride had made it a secret between them. He wondered that she could have hidden something so worrying, so well. But he only wondered briefly. Mostly he was just determined to help her. And not, honestly, just for her. Research and writing was what he did, after all. He wanted to help her, but he wanted to impress her, too.
He didn’t say anything until the following day, the Saturday, until after they had played tennis. They didn’t go for a drink after tennis on the Saturday. They had booked the court for the late afternoon. And the Windmill didn’t open on a Saturday evening. So they walked home and drank tea in their small sitting room with the window wide. Lucinda wore the white pleated tennis dress she had played in, her hair held back from her face by a white band. On anyone else, a dress for tennis in the park would have seemed to Seaton like an affectation. On Lucinda, it seemed the only possible attire. Her hair was still damp at the hairline with heat and effort as they sat and drank their tea.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the dissertation?’
The colour drained from Lucinda’s face. So pale did she become that he noticed with surprise that pale-green eye shadow sculpted the shape of her eye sockets between the lashes and the brows. He hadn’t been aware that she wore make-up in the daytime. She laughed, ‘I didn’t tell you because there is no dissertation to tell you about.’
‘Why isn’t there?’
Lucinda looked down at her hands. They were resting in her lap. She raised one and peeled the band from her head and freed her hair and shook