The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [59]
The lock surrendered easily and he opened the trunk inhaling Pandora’s scent, what was left of it, the smell of her ghost, perhaps, but hers, he knew, as old perfume and tobacco and perhaps the dust from her skin rose and filled his nostrils and lungs with an odour from a dead time. He was reminded of leather and cinnamon. There was candle wax and expensive soap and something underlying it all, harsh and indescribable. He thought about the Café Royal picture, then. And the thought came into his mind that the sourness he smelled might be the sweat of fear, secreted fifty years ago.
The thought startled him.
Something scurried in the corner, in the shadows and concealed space behind the stacked paintings, and Seaton was reminded of the mouse droppings he’d smelled in the gloomy vestibule of the house. He listened for it to repeat, poised leaning over the trunk, for the skitter of rodent claws. But all was quiet again. He was so tense, he realised, he was forgetting now to breathe. He pulled in a deep breath and knelt down and put his hands into the trunk and pulled from it three slithery silken piles of old frocks and scarves and underskirts and stockings and camisoles and put each pile on the floorboards next to him.
It felt wrong, doing this. Not sacrilegious exactly, but a spiritual violation nonetheless. Seaton thought it might be the vestiges of child Catholicism that made him feel it. But this was Pandora’s intimacy, in this box, protected by her suicide, now trespassed on, by him. One of the piles of her things subsided and spread over the floorboards in a slither of elderly satin and stitched ornamental beads. The rodent in the corner chewed at paint and canvas, quietly, so as not to be heard.
A scatter of heavier, more solid items lay on the bottom of the trunk. There was a tarnished silver cigarette case and a pair of opera glasses in a case of Morocco leather. There was a flattened cloche hat and two pairs of shoes with faded French embossing still visible on their footbeds. He didn’t recognise the label. Many of the old, pre-war labels would have perished with the fall of France. But the shoes were immaculately crafted. There was a pewter brandy flask, this tarnished, too, with a dog’s head engraved on one side. Seaton thought it might be a spaniel. Encased in a velvet box, he found a Cross fountain pen with her initials engraved in the gold of its clip. There was a cigarette holder, made of tortoiseshell and densely stained with tar. And there was a litter of coins: French francs and centimes and an English shilling and a twelve-sided threepenny bit.
Restoring this pile of junk into contents now neatly packed, Seaton was forced to ask himself precisely what it was he thought he was doing. Suicides did not deliberate, did they, about their legacies? People driven by the compulsion to destroy their own lives did not, by definition, consider their existences worthwhile. So why would a suicide contrive to leave anything worthwhile behind? The cold fact was that they wouldn’t. And the answer to the question of what he was doing was, surely, that he was wasting his time, intruding on a lost and private life by sifting through its sad detritus. He should stop.
He shook his head. He breathed in another deep lungful of dusty air. He reached for the trunk lid to close it. And it almost was closed, when he paused and opened it fully again. He leaned carefully over the contents and stretched out his palms and felt around the smooth insides of the trunk itself. And doing so, he felt the subtle protrusion of the thing concealed under its fabric lining, under the lock mechanism, thinking, now this is more like it.
His fingers had found a flat, solid shape. It measured about seven inches by five and protruded about an inch