The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [48]
He’d dismiss it, he decided, as one of London’s passing enigmas. There was much about the complexity and ritual of the city he did not understand. But for a junior reporter on a local London newspaper, he felt he was doing okay with his latest story. True, it was about as far off-diary as a story could get. And, as Bob Halliwell had said, he was pursuing it forty-six years after the fact. But he was making significant progress. Lucinda sighed again, dreaming he supposed, stirred from deep sleep into listlessness by the encroaching light, her warming skin and dormant senses roused by the rising heat of another day. He felt a stir of excitement grip his belly as he made the decision, then, to call in sick and call in at the premises of Vogel and Breene at London Bridge. He stroked his chin. He would shave and iron his crispest shirt. He wanted to make the best impression he could on Young Mr Breene and suspected that manners and appearance would be important in accomplishing that. Lucinda moaned and uttered a word he couldn’t make out in her sleep. She didn’t waken, but the one lonely word sounded anxious, he thought, afraid. He went and opened the bedroom door a chink and looked at her lying there in the diffuse light of a summer morning gathering strength and intensity through her home-made muslin drapes.
He loved her. He wanted her. What was new in him, he knew, was that he felt for her. He thought it was a shame the way that taking a degree tested people at such a tender age. He was only three years past the ordeal himself. But he didn’t think Trinity College had provided quite the pressure with modern literature that St Martin’s did with its fashion course. He could understand the stress she must be suffering and he sympathised with a depth of emotion and a tenderness so real and novel to him that he knew it must be love.
This glorious summer was going by as Lucinda, lovely, toiled and fretted over her little electric sewing machine in the flat. But it would be over soon. And Stuart Lockyear had called her degree collection brilliant. And Stuart wasn’t one for pointless flattery. She’d done it all in shades of yellow and cream and taupe; pleated flowing dresses and bias-cut, calf-length skirts worn under waisted jackets. Already, Whistles had ordered three keynote garments from the collection for their flagship store in Marylebone. And the buyer from Harvey Nichols was said to be interested, too. The auguries were good. Seaton closed the bedroom door softly on Lucinda and stroked his chin again and went into their small bathroom to shave so that he would look the part when he rang in sick and went to London Bridge for his audience with Young Mr Breene.
At some stage of his life, Breene had been badly burned. The skin of his neck above his tie knot was pink and smooth in rivulets like spoiled wax. His eyelids were lashless and had an almost oriental cast to them. Seaton guessed that his own eyelids had been burned off, lost to the fire that had consumed most of his facial features and replaced by skin prised and shaped from painful grafts. His nose was short, almost comically arbitrary, the nostrils crude, and he had no lips at all. He didn’t blink. Under his shock of still thick and unruly hair, his face looked at first glance like that of a badly put-together child. A wood counter separated them. He lifted a section of it and beckoned Seaton through. Seaton held out his hand and Breene shook it and the gash under his nose stretched across his teeth in what Seaton supposed was a smile. His grip was strong. If his hands had been burned, they had recovered their strength and aptitude. They must have done, for the man to be able