The House of Lost Souls by F. G. Cottam

and bias-cut skirts and tailored jackets and hats.
    They formed separate groups, or orbits, the students in the Cambridge in those days, in that year. So those on the graphics course were deliberately monochromatic in black Levis and white Hanes T-shirts under their MA -1 flight jackets, the girls among them distinguished only by their peroxide rockabilly quiffs. The girls on the painting courses wore rah-rah skirts or jeans purposefully distressed with artfully torn sweats over tight white singlets, while the boys all dressed in the Jackson Pollock ensemble of jeans and plaid shirts and denim jackets. Footwear was crucial. To a man and woman, the graphics lot wore Doc Martens. The painter girls wore clumpy black engineer boots. The would be Pollocks wore Jackson’s Bass Weejun loafers carefully saved-for and purchased on their pilgrimage to an American-owned clothes shop called Simmons, in Covent Garden. Flip on Long Acre had made authentic Americana generally cheap. But the Flip merchandise came over tightly packed aboard container vessels to be pressed back into life when it arrived. So, of course, they didn’t sell the shoes.
    Seaton was there to see his brother, Patrick, dressed tonight in a zoot suit and painted silk tie because they planned to go to a club and didn’t intend either to queue or to pay the entrance fee. If you were picturesque enough, it was a time and London, and particularly Soho, was a place where that could be done. The suit looked good on Patrick, who was broad-shouldered enough to carry the cut. Seaton was less convinced by the straw trilby tilted back on his brother’s head. As Patrick walked towards where he stood, Seaton saw that his brother had adopted a swaying sailor’s gait. You made yourself up, in those days, at the age they were. Some people were someone different every single night of the week.
    ‘Who is the tall blonde in the pleated dress?’
    ‘I’m fine, thanks. Well, fine other than the terminal illness they broke the news to me about this afternoon.’
    ‘The tall girl with the green eyes.’
    Patrick sipped beer.
    ‘The straw trilby is a mistake.’
    ‘Makes me look like Felix Leiter. The CIA man in the Bond novels.’
    But Seaton’s eyes and attention were again on Lucinda Grey.
    ‘Sinatra wore a hat like this on the cover of “Come Fly With Me”.’
    ‘Makes you look like a Yank tourist,’ Seaton said.
    His brother thought about this and shrugged.
    ‘In a Norman Wisdom film.’
    ‘She’s a bit of an enigma,’ Patrick said. ‘A blonde of the glacial persuasion.’
    ‘So you can’t even introduce me.’
    ‘If I could, then obviously, I wouldn’t.’
    Seaton pondered this, wondering was it a double bluff. He decided it wasn’t.
    ‘I can only tell you she’s on the fashion course,’ Patrick said. ‘And she keeps herself very much to herself.’
    ‘Evidently.’
    Seaton didn’t get to speak to Lucinda Grey that night. He went with his brother to the Mud Club and the Wag, where they played Kid Creole and Animal Nightlife and where the air smelled intensely of the smoke of Marlboro Reds and hair gel and brilliantine and dance sweat and where everyone, as Seaton got drunker, looked like they were extras in a film set in Cuba before Batista was overthrown and Che Guevara and Castro set the long-prevailing fashion in the hot unruly places of the world for jungle fatigues. And some-time after midnight he picked up a black dental receptionist from Woodford Green whose style was somewhere between Carmen Miranda and the model in the Bounty Bar television commercial current just then. And he took her home and forgot almost entirely about the fashion student with iridescent green eyes from earlier in the evening in the upstairs bar at the Cambridge. He almost forgot her. But he didn’t quite.
    And then he saw her again the following week at a club called the Wharf, which occupied a derelict warehouse building on an empty stretch of the Thames near the Shadwell