Fabulous. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Fabulous - Lucy  Hughes-Hallett


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him and – because they were teenaged girls and perpetually ravenous – they ate them faster than he could. They all dressed up together in his mother’s clothes, the big girls prancing and preening in the mirror, with Prince playing, and the fat toddler tangling himself up in satin blouses that felt like cool water against his eczema. And then they shared hot water, getting in the bath together – little Acton propped and corralled by four skinny girl-legs, his eyes closed to savour the bliss of it, his eyes snapping open again to examine the sleek pale-and-rosy oddity of other people’s flesh.

      Diana told Sophie about those times once, when they met by chance at the gym. But she wouldn’t have told me. She always plays by the rules. A senior manager does not invite a team member to imagine her in an informal domestic situation. Unprofessional.

      Anyway that was all ages ago. When he applied for the job Diana left the decision to HR, and when he got it, unaided by her, she said, in front of all of us, ‘I’ve known Acton for ever, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’ll be for ever in this job. As you’ll all be able to tell him, what counts here isn’t who knows who, it’s who sells what.’

      He sold. And he rose.

      Hunting parties, he called them.

      How did he get it? Like this.

      We all ran. Everybody ran. From 12.30 to 2 p.m. the Embankment was a narrow arroyo with a stampede on. It looked like there’d been a fire in a city-sized gym, and men and women, grim-faced and sweating, were fleeing for their lives, with nothing on but lycra and nothing precious saved but their earbuds.

      I’m a bit of an oenophile. In my daydreams professional men, wearing silk socks and silk ties and three pieces each of good suiting, treat each other to lunch – luncheon – in wood-panelled rooms where the meat comes round on trolleys, and solicitous waiters press them to take a second Yorkshire pud or another ladleful of gravy with their bloody beef. That’s the setting for the proper savouring of a good burgundy. That’s the way our great-grandfathers did it. God knows how anyone got anything done in the afternoons. Now I drink my wine after work, by the glassful, standing up in a bar, with a sliver of Comté to complement it. The gratification of fleshly appetites during business hours is out. Lunchtime, like the rest of us, I’m out mortifying the flesh.

      And so he found Cinnamon Wharf.

      You see, we estate agents aren’t all as weaselly and money-mad as we’re cracked up to be. It’s possible to feel the romance in London real-estate. And, so long as none of us ever lost sight of what we were there for, Diana was quite happy to hear us introduce a bit of history into our sales pitches. As long as the bathrooms and kitchen facilities were slap up to date, buyers could get quite excited about old-timey glamour.

      Acton hung around and hung around and one day he was doing shoulder rotations outside the front door of the empty warehouse when a Bentley drew up, holly-green, so high off the ground there were fold-down steps for the passenger door. Headlights the shape of torpedo-heads mounted on the sides to add to its already prodigious width. Cream-coloured leather seats. Must have been seventy years old but looked box-fresh. The driver went round and opened the back door and a wizened little man got out. He needed the step.

      He said, ‘You can stop doing that. I know what you’re after.’

      It all slotted into place. Acton put Rokesmith together with a contractor, and soon the Wharf had begun to smell, not of a Christmas-special latte, but of fresh plaster.

      The flats were super-big. That was Acton’s idea. He said, ‘People buy a loft-style apartment because they want to pretend they’re in downtown Manhattan with Jackson Pollock throwing paint around downstairs and Thelonius Monk jamming on the roof. They want places to party in. They want rusty iron beams and pockmarked floor-planks a foot wide. And what do they get? Bijoux little pods with wet rooms, because there’s no room anywhere big enough for a bathtub. Places where you have to get on your hands and knees to look out of the window, because those idiot developers keep cramming in more floors. I tell you, Mr Rokesmith, if we can give them what they really want, you’ll be a rich man.’

      Rokesmith was amused. It was ages since he’d met anyone who’d pretend not to know that he was already about as rich as it was possible to be.

      They sold the flats one or two at a time, always holding back the biggest one on the top floor. ‘We’ll make this the coolest address in town,’ said Acton. ‘They’ll be tearing each other’s fingernails out to get it.’ Rokesmith didn’t like that kind of talk. Violence was serious. Casual allusions to it offended him. Acton didn’t always read him right.


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