The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [75]
‘Cosy.’
‘It was. Very.’
‘The Windmill on a Tuesday night. Nobody can say you don’t know how to impress a girl.’
‘No.’
She straightened her arms and held the sketch out from her body and tilted her head to look at it. Seaton was aware of how lovely her eyes were, narrowed to focus on the quality of her work. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something serious?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Do you really think you are going to be able to come up with the goods on my written project, Paul?’
‘I’m across it, Lucinda.’
‘Don’t baffle me with Irish phrases.’ She smiled at him over her sketchpad.
‘I’m taking all of next week off,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the thing cracked, all right.’
‘Your brother rang,’ she said. ‘A group of them are going swimming up at Highgate Ponds on Sunday, if the weather doesn’t break.’
‘The weather won’t break,’ Seaton said. He tweaked a fret of the blind, which hung entirely still against the open window. ‘This heatwave will go on forever.’
‘But despite that you still put your jacket on. To go to the pub.’
‘Because I need somewhere to put my wallet,’ he said, taking off his jacket and going to hang it on a hook in their short hallway, only too aware of the weight and indiscreet bulk of Pandora’s journal in the left-hand pocket.
‘Come here, Paul.’
He sat down beside her. ‘Are you going to interrogate me about the cider-drinking blonde?’
She put down her pad. She stroked his hair, his cheek. She kissed him. Her lips tasted sweet and slightly sticky with Chartreuse. ‘I just want to thank you for doing what you’re doing for me. Taking the week off next week and everything. It’s so good of you. So kind.’
He kissed her neck. Inhaling, he could smell her perfume and skin and against his face could feel the fine subtle touch of her dark-blonde hair. He was intensely aware for a moment of the texture of her skin and hair and the delicate weight and warmth of her. He opened his eyes, which he hadn’t realised he’d closed. On the other side of Lucinda, the green shadow of her glass rippled with iridescent movement on the arm of the sofa in the glow of the sodium light on the street outside. And there was the single clop of a horse’s hoof, iron-shod, out there below against the night road. A mounted policeman, he thought, not really thinking about it at all. He was thinking about the grace and presence of Lucinda Grey, the thin straps of her slip, satin against tawny summer skin.
‘I love you,’ he said.
And he did.
Seaton sweated through the following day, always expecting an irate catastrophic phone call from an indignant resident of Moore Park Road. But it never came. His sick day had left him twice the routine work to do. So he was busy. And it was the Wednesday of Hackney borough’s full council meeting in the evening, and he was on the roster to attend and cover it. They began at 7 p.m. and lasted often until the early hours. Two reporters would generally take the meeting in shifts. Seaton took the first shift because he lived furthest away. They were acrimonious and turbulent events, full of theatre and indignation. But most of it was political pyrotechnics. The Labour-led council were a long way to the left and radical enough, but most of the jaw-dropping decisions were taken at committee level. That’s where the headlines were to be found, not at full council meetings, but buried amid the routine and dross of the committee-meeting agendas. Two of the staff reporters, Terry Messenger and Tim Cooper, had a real talent for rooting out and following up this stuff. They weren’t just talented either, they were dogged and tenacious. Seaton knew, if he was honest, he was too lazy to apply himself properly to it. He preferred crime. Crime was easier. Even when it wasn’t entirely black and white, it was easier to extract a story from a crime than from the obfuscation and shrill rhetoric of local politics. Nevertheless, he had to go. Something sensational could happen; an assault, walkout, boycott, demonstration. There was often violence in the public gallery. This stuff was meat and drink to the Gazette and they would never