Fabulous. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
the glass box that was Acton’s office, and pulled the blinds down as though what she had to say shouldn’t be seen, let alone heard. After that she transferred to Lettings. Acton always treated her with the most perfect politeness. Behind her back though, especially when Diana was about, he referred more often than was really called for to the Manningtree Road debacle. Maybe Eliza missed a trick there, but I thought it was small-minded of him. It was ages ago and, anyway, let’s face it, we all let slip an opportunity now and then.
By the time summer kicked in he’d stopped calling us his boys. He called us his dogs. Sundays, he’d invite clients, those he thought would be titillated by it – single men, the sort who wanted dimmer switches in the wet rooms. Mostly though, it was just us. ‘I’m whistling up the pack,’ he’d say to whoever was leaving the office with him.
To begin with, each time, it was all pretty raucous – everyone feeling that shiver as the pressure came off while the adrenalin was still way up there, and then the giddiness as the alcohol hit. Later, as the first of us started talking about the last train home, the atmosphere would shift and a different lot would be filtering in. Very young, all of them, very thin, female and male and some you couldn’t be sure about. Their English was as uncertain as their immigration status, but they weren’t there to make conversation.
I knew where they came from. Acton had helped them get access to an old gasworks in the Lea Valley. It was due for repurposing. He had his eye on it. Squatters were useful when you wanted to bring down an asking-price. And a few skinny junkies, once you’d given them the run of the en-suites in the unsold fourth-floor flat so that their hair smelt good again, and their piercings sparkled against pearly skin, lent quite a frisson to a party. The last-train lads stopped looking at their watches and by the time the dancing started the two packs were moving as one, spreading out on to the roof terrace. It looked as though you could dance off the edge and once the kids had started bringing out their pills and powders there were plenty of us there, on that airy dance floor, who weren’t sure of the difference between down and up, between tiger-striped river-water and wine-dark sky.
It was an illusion of course. Perfectly solid breast-high panels of reinforced glass all around the roof’s perimeter. Acton might play at being Dionysian but he wasn’t about to risk a criminal negligence action. He had the greatest respect for the law of the land, as well as a thorough knowledge of the ways in which it could be circumvented. Besides, he was fully aware of what Rokesmith might do to him if he devalued the man’s property by allowing some stray to die on it.
I don’t believe he ever laid a finger with sexual intent on any of those hapless, gormless, spineless young things. What he liked was to observe what happened when the two breeds mingled. He’d step out onto the terrace, and sometimes I’d see him standing at ease by the sliding/folding doors – quiet, legs straddled, watching the dancers silhouetted against the luminous river. What was he hunting? Sex had something to do with it. Doesn’t it always? But that wasn’t really his primary interest. Power, I’d say.
One evening in September I was showing a couple of Russians around the river-view flat on the third floor at Cinnamon when I saw Eliza step out of the lift, look around like she’d got off at the wrong floor and get back into it. A week later, during a viewing with a client who liked to go house-hunting before breakfast, I saw her again in the lobby with someone I didn’t know, hair scraped back, face shiny, wearing yoga pants. My client was going on to work. I was driving back to the office. I offered Eliza a lift.
I didn’t ask. As far as I was concerned, Eliza could help herself to any set of keys that took her fancy, any time of the day or night. Subject to proper procedure. Provided she checked them out. Perhaps one of the purchasers was sub-letting. I wasn’t sure what Rokers (as Acton had taken to calling the freeholder) would say to that, but it wasn’t for me to interfere. It was she who seemed to feel she owed me some clarification. She jogged every morning from her flat in Limehouse, she said, and she liked to zip up to Cinnamon Wharf’s roof for half an hour’s meditation before taking a shower in the penthouse – we still weren’t showing it – and walking on in to the office. Evenings, same thing in reverse.
‘Did you know Eliza is up on the roof at Cinnamon most days?’ I asked Acton in the wine bar a day or two later. We were celebrating the sale of the last of the fourth-floor flats. Acton liked a caipirinha. His drinking was probably a bit out of control but that wasn’t my problem.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ve clocked her in the place a few times.’ He didn’t seem to want to take it any further, so we left it there.
Acton’s partner William called me one day, and asked if we could talk. I liked him. He was gentle and patient. He lived pretty close – Acton had got him buying into the Kensal Rise golden triangle before it really took off – so we met on a Monday with our dogs in Tiverton Gardens. Sophie’s dog, really, not mine. A graphic designer can carry a photogenic spaniel into work with her. An estate agent not so much: dog hair on a suit doesn’t look good. Anyway, our flossy little beast was running round in large circles with William’s French bulldog when he began to cry. He hadn’t seen Acton for a month he said. He just wanted to know, was he all right?
People think, because I’m kind of passive socially, that I’m observant and considerate and wise. This isn’t true. I really don’t care much about other people’s emotional lives. I’d had no idea they’d broken up.
‘Six weeks ago,’ he said. ‘And frankly it doesn’t make much difference. He hadn’t really spoken to me for nearly a year. I mean talking yes, but not really to me. Like I existed. You know?’
I said something fatuous about going through a bad patch.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s over. But I wanted to know if he was all right. It got so weird. The way he started to stare at me all the time.’
‘Staring. Like how?’
‘Well, he was entitled, wasn’t he. Lovers are allowed to look at each other. He saw me naked all the time. So I don’t know why it freaked me out. Watching my mouth while I was eating. Watching my arse when I was bent over the dishwasher. Watching my hands when I was ironing. Too interested. There were a few times I was taking a shower and when I’d finished I’d see him there in the bathroom, like he’d sprung from nowhere, and I’m telling you that is one small bathroom. Just standing there. If he’d been waiting to drag me back to bed – no problem. But we didn’t do much of that, the last few months. His choice, not mine.’
I thought of Acton on the roof, watching a load of mismatched couples with their hands all over each other. I thought of the way, in the office, his eyes followed Diana around.
Here is Acton’s idea of a party. Oysters, cocktails – yeah yeah yeah. All that. Dancing, naturally – he had a serious pair of speakers. Mac’n’cheese, coming up hot and ready, a jaunty little red-and-white striped trolley trundling out of the lift wheeled by an enormous man whose employer had made enough from party-catering to buy Flat 2 on Floor 3. We ate it from brown cardboard boxes with wooden forks. No plastic – the firm sponsored all sorts of enviro-friendly eco-housing ventures. ‘What for?’ I asked Diana. She looked blank. ‘The built environment,’ she said, ‘and the natural environment are partners, not rivals.’ No flicker of irony. She must have forgotten about … well … things we’d all decided not to talk about any more. Not until someone called us out on them.
Diana didn’t come to the hunting parties. That would have been unthinkable. Diana is the soul of rectitude. She doesn’t do silly.
More dancing. Karaoke. Those faun-like waifs drifting through the crowd like they were weightless. One or other of us boys catching one of them, like closing your hand on a will-o’-the-wisp. Couples slinking off into corners. The music dimming. People flat on their backs on the terrace’s decking, heads resting on each other’s shoulders and bellies, telling each other their self-pitying little life stories, or reminiscing about deals they’d done together, or just talking the kind of rubbish that made their bodies shake with laughter until everyone was linked in a communion of shared mirth, and that’s about the time it would become seriously Actonian. Because Acton’s