The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [42]
Eddie nodded. ‘I’ll have your contacts list by the time you get back.’
Lucinda was at home, sewing frantically for her degree show. Outside their flat, the relentless sun of that relentless summer had turned the grass a brittle yellow. But she was inside, toiling over her patterns, her fabrics, her little electric machine. He pictured her in the light through the muslin drapes she had run up for their windows. And Seaton felt a surge of love for her as she answered the phone with her slight, northern formality. She was living for this bloody show of hers. He loved her. He did. And he would help her all he could. He spoke in a hushed voice in the presence of the other newsroom reporters as they clattered fingers on their typewriter keys and smoked and pretended not to listen to anything worth listening to.
‘No printer,’ Lucinda said.
‘Fuck.’
‘She printed all her pictures herself. Many of them were private commissions and the fact that she printed them, that they were never in the hands of a third party, was apparently a prerequisite of the commission itself.’
‘How do you know that, Lucinda?’
In Lambeth, there was a silence. In Hackney, the newsroom clattered and scraped with busy chairs.
‘What?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It’s anecdotal. Some of her work was very risqué by the standards of the time, apparently. And some of the subjects rather well-known. Why?’
‘How can you know so much about this woman? And so little?’ Lambeth was silent again. So was the newsroom. ‘I’m sorry,’ Seaton said. He replaced the receiver on its cradle and looked at the pinboard on the wall next to his desk for inspiration. It was covered in clippings and flyers. There was a signed print of Henry Cooper pushing over a pile of pennies on behalf of some charity next to a grinning pearly queen in a Shoreditch pub. There was a leaflet for the Save Wapping campaign. There was Princess Di in puffball sleeves at a bedside in Homerton Hospital. Children face-painting; fund-raising fire fighters, a headline claiming pharaoh ants were terrorising a Clapton estate. No inspiration there.
He went and got Eddie’s completed list and did a ring around. And he discovered that Pandora Gibson-Hoare had been a member of several photographic bodies and associations. But all of them, when the people he spoke to obligingly went to look, had her last address as the house in Cheyne Walk where she had lived in the period when the Café Royal picture had been taken. Seaton located and rang the number for the Chelsea Arts Club.
‘Oh dear,’ said the elderly female voice on the end of the line. ‘We don’t keep records that far back. But I do remember her, vaguely. And I remember that she lived in Chelsea. She had a rather grand address, in Cheyne Walk.’
He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He’d been on this only two hours, which was no time at all. But he had a bad feeling about it, a feeling of discouragement. When her body had been found, according to the one obituary, she had been officially described as being of no fixed abode. It meant she had been destitute. London in the 1930s was a grim place to be homeless, a cruel place to try to find refuge in without the money to pay a regular rent. So many of the population were poor. Not genteel poverty but the relentless, widespread, worsening desperation of the Great Depression. Compassion was scarce and charity almost totally arbitrary. It had required the welfare state to provide a proper safety net. But, more importantly, it had required the welfare state to provide individuals with a paper trail it was possible to access and research and follow. And that had not been established until 1948, eleven years after the death of the woman whose trail was looking colder to Seaton by the minute.
He got up and offered to make a round of teas. He ran into Mike from photography in the staff kitchen.
‘How was the furry felon?’
‘Hirsute. Felonious.’
Seaton nodded, washing cups. Mike had a superior vocabulary to anyone on the writing side of the staff. But tabloid writing was all about the words you