The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [62]
A couple walked by, tourists speaking softly in Italian. Big Ben, off through the tangle of trees to his left, boomed the quarter-hour. Office staff at the end of their working day were playing a scratch game of football in the gloaming somewhere on the green behind him, using traffic cones for goals. Dimly, he was aware of their shouts and cajoling. There was passing traffic, faint on Millbank. He heard the river-water lap, the lazy wake of a passing boat.
He held a notebook in his hands. Its cover was blue, marbled board and it measured about eight inches by five. Its pages were lined, flimsy, each page covered by neat hand-writing in black pencil. There was some mildew spotting on the rear cover of the book but when Seaton flicked through it he saw that the pages were intact, whole, complete. On the inside front cover, there was a hand-drawn map of a section of the southwest coastline of the Isle of Wight. Seaton recognised the Needles, stretched out to the west beyond Freshwater Bay. The coastline from Freshwater to Ventnor had been described in this small sketch with superb detail and draftsmanship. The map ventured inland, to scale, only as far as Brightstone Forest and Calbourne and Chillerton, where it stopped. At the northern border of Brightstone Forest, a circular mark had been made. Underneath this mark, the cartographer had identified the spot with two words. Fischer’s House.
Seaton had known the package did not contain photographs. The dimensions had been wrong for prints of the period, along with the solidity and density and weight, something he sensed even before removing the oilskin wrapping. But he felt elated, much more than disappointed, at what he had discovered. He flicked through the notebook. She had numbered each of the pages, two hundred of them, neatly in their top right-hand corners.
Behind him, the footballers were putting on their track tops now and picking up their bags in the aftermath of their game. The good-looking Italian couple had drifted off. A breeze soughed in the high branches of the trees at the edge of the river. In the last of the light, in the creeping twilight, Seaton turned to the opening page of Pandora’s journal and began to read.
6 October, 1927
The crossing was ghastly. There was a lurching sickening swell on the Solent and the boat we crossed aboard was small and thrown about by the pitch and toss of the waves. There are steam ferries for the summer excursionists, apparently. But they stop their runs early in September. There’s a mailboat after that and the mailboat books passengers. But Fischer, with his talent for the clandestine, wanted everything necessarily hush-hush. Dennis, of course, revelled in it. He was in the artillery in the war. But he was a sailor before that for a year, a time he describes, I think with irony, as his time before the mast. He was very nostalgic about
Portsmouth. Pompey, he called the town. He insisted on taking us to a harbour bar there after dinner on the evening before we crossed. We walked from the restaurant. The streets were full of sailors. They looked very picturesque in their blues but were uncouth with drink and there was violence in the air. A drunk ranting in the bar Dennis took us to made a loud remark about Jews with his furious drunken eyes on Fischer. He stood over our table and glowered. He was a powerful fellow, massive through the chest and shoulders, his sleeves rolled to reveal the sort of forearms I’ve seen before only on circus strongmen. Except that the flesh of the sailor’s arms was heavily etched with tattoos. The name of each ship in which, I presume, he had served was inked along smooth hambones of muscle. Dennis