The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [55]
Faintly, through the window behind him, he could hear the familiar tape the landlord seemed to favour most often, playing through bookshelf speakers perched behind the bar. The tape was a soul compilation. It had always seemed to Seaton a particularly melancholy collection of songs. Now, he heard the Isley Brothers’ ‘Harvest For The World’ segue into Billy Paul singing ‘Me And Mrs Jones’. He sipped bitter and chewed on the fresh bread of his roll and looked at the thinning blossom grown pink and dusty on the tree in the garden opposite while Billy Paul sang his hymn and, Seaton thought, probably his requiem to his clandestine lover and their affair. And then it was Marvin Gaye and ‘Abraham, Martin And John’. The song had been a big hit for Smokey Robinson in America. But nobody could sing as plaintively as Marvin Gaye about promise wilfully lost.
Seaton didn’t know whether the landlord had compiled the tape or bought it. He’d been tempted to ask, half-resolving to seek it out and buy it for himself. But he’d decided it was better heard at, and associated with, the pub. It wouldn’t have sounded the same at home. Through the window, now, it had a melancholy charm you couldn’t duplicate, heard above the conversation of the lunchtime stragglers, against the occasional ring of the till, faint through a summer window, all the more poignant for the fragile way in which it carried to his ears.
Seaton sipped beer and listened to the loop-tape, faint through the pub window, and looked at the cherry tree in the little public garden opposite through drowsy heat. He considered the time on the face of his wristwatch. It was a quarter to five. It was about time to go. He drained the last of his beer and brushed his lap for crumbs. And he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin from his sandwich plate.
In the future, he would often look back to this exact moment, sometimes with the nostalgia and grief and self-pity mingling so intensely in him he wept at the recollection, considering it to be for him the last departing day of what he would have called a normal life. He knew, in his heart, the sentiment was self-deceiving, the creeping damage already by then at least partially inflicted. He didn’t really enjoy his moment that day outside the pub as he had so often in his recent past. He lacked the capacity for relaxation. The excitement in him over the address in Moore Park Road was too urgent and compelling to allow it. He swallowed his food and drank his beer without savouring either. But, like everyone else, Paul Seaton sometimes took refuge and comfort in a lie. When all was said and done, he was only human.
Fifteen
In Chelsea, this time, the door was opened, answering the stiff knocker almost straightaway.
Sebastian Gibson-Hoare was tall and thin and middle-aged, and flamboyantly undressed for the late afternoon in a Chinese silk print dressing gown. He opened his door in a cloud of competing odours. Under cologne, his breath was a mingling of brandy and the liquorice smell of French cigarettes. The cologne was Vetiver and he had on far too much of it. His breath was all the richer because he was panting. Looking past him into the hallway, Seaton supposed it was descending the stairs that had winded him so. They were steep. On the other hand, he’d been coming down them. With the long tobacco-stained teeth his smile revealed and his thinning combed-over hair, the effect of him altogether in the daylight should have been shambolic and terrible. But it wasn’t, somehow. Maybe it was his smile, which was easy and disarming. Perhaps it was his height and build, which gave his greeting gestures a sort of easy elegance.
‘A cold caller,’ he said. ‘How novel. Now, your patter may be persuasive and I might even be in dire need of double glazing or complete sets of encyclopedias. But I ought to warn you, I’m an undischarged bankrupt.’
Seaton said nothing. He thought there