The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [92]
‘What’s this nonsense about us doing a piece on some flapper photographer no one remembers or cares about?’
Seaton didn’t know what to say. He was not equipped to defend himself, could not have done so even on a normal day. And this was far from that.
‘It’s the last time you’ll take our name in vain, Paul.’
On the Tuesday he opened the letter from the Gazette terminating his contract. The reason given was failure to meet proper professional standards. He stood accused of harassing an elderly resident of Chelsea in pursuit of a free-lance commission when he was supposed to be sick in bed with the flu. It was a question of integrity. It was a question of loyalties and where and with whom they lay. He was of course entirely at liberty to consult his union about the decision at his own convenience. There were channels of arbitration open to him. But Seaton knew, folding the letter, that as far as the Gazette was concerned, those channels would forever, now, remain closed.
On Tuesday evening, Lucinda broke down in the flat in front of him. He didn’t know whether it was grief for his brother or panic over her unwritten dissertation that provoked her tears. He began to cry himself. He’d felt numb since the Sunday evening, when they had taken him to Gospel Oak to identify Patrick’s body formally. He hadn’t cried when he’d broken the news to their mother over the phone. In grieving for his brother, now, he felt he was grieving for his own lost life. He tried to touch Lucinda and she flinched away from him and he knew that he would never earn her forgiveness after this betrayal of her trust. She might not know it herself, yet. But he did. He knew it. It was the end of everything.
‘You talk about Pandora in your sleep, Paul.’
‘She’s dead, Lucinda.’
‘You talk to Pandora in your sleep.’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘You should have told me about her journal.’
‘She’s dead, Lucinda.’
Lucinda sobbed through bruised eyes in front of him. ‘Oh, Paul. It would have been better if you’d deceived me with somebody living.’ She lifted her hand to her face, as though to try to conceal this breach of her habitual composure. He saw how red and ragged her fingers and nails had become with all the sewing she’d been toiling over in the days and nights of recent weeks. He felt his heart lurch towards her. But his feet didn’t shift him from where he stood.
He tried to write the dissertation for her. It wouldn’t come out on to the page making anything approaching sense. After one four-hour session at the typewriter he read the sheets pulled from the roller and saw that he’d written twelve hundred plodding repetitious words about the Lindbergh kidnapping. The German carpenter who got the blame and the chair was innocent, he read. The English novelist Dennis Wheatley had snatched the Lindbergh child. Of course. Göring had given Lindbergh a medal, he remembered, vaguely. The Nazis had honoured the great aviator in Berlin before the outbreak of war.
He screwed the sheets of typing paper into balls and threw them in the direction of the waste bin. He looked at his watch. But it was useless. He was beyond concentration, beyond reason too, truth be told.
His beard started to grow, unkempt, after he saw Pandora’s dead reflection staring at him over his shoulder in the shaving mirror. She’d been in the water a while by then and she didn’t look so good as she had, svelte on the grass at the Fischer house duel. It grew quickly in the heat of summer, his beard. After five days he had almost the full set of a sea captain to thoughtfully stroke.
He waited for his brother’s funeral. They liked to bury their dead quickly and get on with their grieving, back at home. But the British were reluctant to release the body and he was obliged to wait to escort it back to Dublin and their waiting mother. There was an autopsy report. There were