The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [54]
Early on a Tuesday afternoon, Lucinda wouldn’t be home. She would be at college, still frantically putting together the finishing touches to her degree show. It seemed to Seaton a superhuman amount of work for one student to accomplish on the timetable and the grant. But it was the same for everyone on the degree course. The standards set were the reason St Martin’s had such an exalted reputation. And he was taking care of her dissertation. At least she didn’t have to worry about that any longer.
He shivered, realising he’d reached the point, about forty feet from the steps leading up to the bridge, where he’d seen the odd incongruous funeral cortège not long after first light that morning. There were low-walled rectangles of grass here, where the Embankment widened, decorative features for the tourists to sit on at the weekend and enjoy the view and their cornets when the ice-cream van parked here. He walked between two of them, out to the side of the road, where the iron-rimmed wheels of the carriage hearse had trundled a few hours ago. The heat was intense. Molten bubbles of tar glistened in the sun in odd places where the road surface had been hastily patched in repair. But the weird apparition from this morning had left no physical evidence of its passing. He looked across towards Lambeth High Street, to their block of flats, finding with his eyes the window he had watched it all through, the window looking blackly back.
He picked up his kit from home and walked along Lambeth Bridge Road to Fitzroy Lodge. And alone in the gym, he skipped eight five-minute rounds as the game’s deities looked down on him from the fight posters decorating the walls. He needed to dissipate some energy. There were Hagler and Hearns and Leonard and Duran tacked up there on the walls. As trains trundled above through the weary heat on the lines in and out of Waterloo, he watched the timer on the wall tick by the rounds and skipped.
It was still only three thirty when he finished at the gym. He dumped his gear in the flat and walked along Lambeth High Street to the Windmill pub. He thought Lambeth High Street as ill-named a thoroughfare as he’d ever come across. It carried no traffic. It was bordered along one side for most of its length by a large green of parched yellow grass and indolent trees with a jumble of old tombs and headstones half-buried by bushes and thorns at its eastern boundary. You had to go down Old Paradise Street or Whitgift Street, through the railway arches to Lambeth Walk, to encounter shops. He didn’t know how Lambeth High Street had ever earned the sobriquet. They had early photographs taken there hung on the walls of the pub. Victorian children with the bruised pallor of poverty stared at the camera from bedraggled awnings. It had looked no busier then. The biggest difference in that black and white world had been the mud in the gutters and between the cobbles on the road.
In the couple of months he’d lived there, the Windmill had become not just Seaton’s local, but his pub of choice. Most of the regulars during the day were firefighters from the station that neighboured the pub, coming in for a homeward-bound pint at the end of their shift. There were office workers at lunchtimes and in the early evenings from the government building opposite the block in which he and Lucinda lived. And in the evenings proper, there were eight or ten locals who propped up the bar with expressions made stoical by the sheer entrenchment of their nightly beer ritual.
Seaton ordered a cheese and ham roll and a pint of Director’s bitter and went to sit and eat and drink on the bench on the pavement outside the pub. Opposite, at the western limit of the green, was a small walled public garden containing a single cherry tree. The bloom had gone from the cherry tree now. He bit into his roll. The butter was fresh and the ham moist and tender in his mouth.
It was a lovely spot, this. It had almost the seclusion of a secret place. He loved its quiet, so close to everything. He had spent hours in the