The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [84]
‘Is the building still there?’
There was a pause. ‘Why? Is London Tonight doing a piece on Isle of Wight architecture, now? Building conservation? Who exactly are you, mate?’
‘Is it still there?’
‘So far as I know, it is. Derelict. Boarded-up and forgotten. It’s a madhouse full of rats. Now fuck off, mate, whoever you are. You’re a fucking timewaster and I’ve got more important things to do.’
He made a booking at a guest house in Ventnor. It wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t have time to shop around. Terry Messenger or Tim Cooper or someone was coming up the stairs as they told him his name and work phone number were enough to secure the booking and he dropped the receiver on to the cradle.
The afternoon was his. He was owed an afternoon or morning in lieu, for covering full council.
He’d told Lucinda he was going, the previous night, as she undressed, tipsy after the Soho bar launch. She’d nodded, immediately accepting of his story of how he’d learned that the Klaus Fischer in the Café Royal photograph had owned a house on the Isle of Wight where he was famed for his hospitality. There might be pictures of their gatherings on its walls, he’d told her, amazed at his own accelerating capacity for voicing the convincing lie. There might be something there to flesh Pandora out. Sober, she might have asked how he expected to be given access to the place. Sober, she might have asked how he could be confident that there would be anything of Pandora there, forty-odd years after her suicide, for him to find. But she wasn’t sober. She just nodded and smiled with the slight diminishing of focus with which drink softened her eyes. And she didn’t ask.
He knew his absence would be no loss to Lucinda. It was the last weekend she would have to prepare for her show. She would be working throughout all of it. She was probably relieved he was going to be out of her way for most of it. She didn’t look relieved when he told her. But she seemed relieved when the moment came for him to go in the morning. It was concrete proof that he was working on the still-unwritten project. He was a fast writer who researched and wrote for a living. He was a professional carrying out what was, in essence, an amateur assignment. But there was only a week to go until the essay’s submission.
Now, he had his overnight things in a canvas grip underneath his newsroom desk. And folded snugly among them was the journal. He didn’t really need to take it. But he hadn’t dared leave it behind, where Lucinda was sure to stumble on it in their tiny flat. And he couldn’t leave it in the Gazette office, which until a few moments earlier had been his original plan. There were far too many curious eyes and probing fingers on an idle Friday afternoon in the newsroom for that to be a sensible thing to do. He occupied the couple of remaining work hours making desultory routine calls and meandering rounds of tea. At one o’clock, he made the formal note of his absence in the big diary on its tilted lectern with the Biro chained to the lectern for the purpose. And he closed the diary on his entry and nodded and waved his goodbyes to the rest of the office.
His crossing could not have contrasted more greatly with that described in her journal by Pandora. He took a train from Victoria to Portsmouth and a ferry from Portsmouth Harbour to Fishbourne. Portsmouth itself would have been unrecognisable to her, bombed into dereliction by a war she had chosen not to live to have to endure. It had been rebuilt cheaply in concrete and glass with scant regard for its history, the hulking imperial fleet she had described long towed away and broken up for scrap. Seaton’s passage, enjoyed on the promenade deck in the open air, was a blue playground of smudged sails and trailing wakes out of a Dufy painting. Only the Solent forts, austere and monumental, marred the bobbing, Enid Blyton mood of the sea.
He walked the mile from the dock at Fishbourne to Wootton Creek and rented a mountain bike from an adventure