The Fourth Haunting by F G Cottam

Author:F G Cottam [Cottam, F G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Fair to call Samantha my childhood sweetheart? Corny, but true. We were 16 when we met and from the lofty heights of adulthood, 16 seems a long way short of maturity. The relationship didn’t survive the physical separation of university, I often thought in retrospect mostly because neither of us really had the faith that it would. After graduation, she went back to Toulon, where she’d spent her year in France. And back into the welcoming arms of the Frenchman she had met there during that year. They lived in his rented flat, from what her father told me. For a couple of years, she worked teaching English as a foreign language to French businessmen at a school set up by the chamber of commerce in that vibrant port city.

Then came a change of direction I would never have anticipated. I had known Samantha was clever but had never thought her a particularly artistic person. We had toured galleries together, but only in that vapid way young people do when they don’t have the money to fund more self-indulgent distractions. I had never heard her voice a strong opinion concerning art.

She became a ceramicist. She began making objects out of clay. They weren’t implements, either. They were figures, or figurines; clowns, tramps, ballerinas, opera divas, acrobats, soldiers, musicians. They were immediately successful, both domestically and internationally. She staged exhibitions in Toulon and Paris. Her work became hugely sought after in Japan. Shrewdly, she added a Samurai warrior to her repertoire that became a best-seller. Music industry people and film stars in Hollywood collected her work. Disney did an animated series inspired by her most popular clown figure. The deal struck over that was very lucrative for Samantha.

I learned all this from a story in the Southport Visiter carefully clipped out of the paper and sent me by my mum. At the time I got it, the contrast in our fortunes could not really have been greater. I was renting a shitty Lambeth flat and scraping a living freelancing for magazines. My finances were horribly precarious. I felt like someone about to fall from a tightrope. It occurred to me, reading the piece, that a tightrope walker might be a popular figure to add to Samantha’s profitable roster of little clay imaginary people.

Reading that Visiter feature on my ex-girlfriend might have been what made me decide to break my promise to Helena Donovan and not just visit the island and the Fischer House, but rent a videocam, splurge my scant savings on a ferry ticket, and spend the night filming there. If it wasn’t the reason for doing it, it was certainly the catalyst. I swapped tightrope walking for a throw of the dice. And in a sense, the die settled on two sixes.

************

I met Samantha again only by accident. I was on the treadmill at the expensive gym on Millbank my new-found prosperity had enabled me to join. One of the staff members came in suited and booted, showing someone the facilities.

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