Fabulous. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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      Diana had been surprised when he proposed that the entire sales department should pool their commissions. That wasn’t normal, not in our outfit. She suspected that he was exploiting us, but he was subtler than that. He wanted us to love him more than we envied him. You couldn’t imagine him getting his knees muddy, but he had a football coach’s appreciation of group dynamics. When you think about it, team spirit isn’t altruism. It just makes sense. One of the reasons he closed the most deals was that he kept the best properties for himself (‘What my clients pay over-the-odds for is exclusivity,’ he said), but another was that he was a brilliant salesman, seducer, beguiler, fiddler with the minds of the credulous. We all found him irritating: but we were all thankful for the luck of being on his team. It was down to him that I felt able to propose to Sophie that year, down to him that we got together the deposit for our flat in Harlesden. And, yes, it was Acton who spotted the flat in the first place and told me it was under-priced and that we should swoop. Sometimes a good leader lets a bit of profit pass, because to have your underlings indebted to you – that’s gold.

Diana had known him since he was in nappies. He was her best friend’s kid brother and the two girls, babysitting, would pootle around the bathroom while he watched them with a small boy’s sly judgemental eyes. When they put on face-masks he cried. When they wiped them off again he chuckled, and danced a little foot-to-foot shuffle to celebrate their resumption of their normal selves. They made healthy carrot and hummus snacks for themselves – because they were teenaged girls and wanted to be clear-skinned and lovely – and he ate them. They cooked cocktail sausages and oven chips for 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.

You’d have thought by that time there wouldn’t have been any Victorian warehouses left undeveloped, but that just shows how wrong you can get. You had to go further out if you wanted affordable, naturally. But if money was no object there were still buildings whose owners had been playing a waiting game. There was one that came up in Wapping. Cinnamon Wharf. Acton was on it from the start. In fact he got it. And that’s where the parties happened.

      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.

Acton ran too, but he didn’t have a pedometer, or a thingummy on his phone that informed him how many calories he was consuming. Instead he had a map that he’d somehow got hold of (he had a friend in the planning department, every canny agent does) that showed him where buildings stood empty, where an application had been refused, where a freeholder was struggling to pay council tax. He’d sprint off in the right direction, nostrils aquiver, but once he was turning into the street he’d lollop along, laid-back, easy does it, a harmless young fellow with an interest in architecture, just keeping an eye out for a wrought-iron balustrade or fine tracery on a fanlight. Curious, yes, but not intrusive. Appreciative, not predatory. If there was somebody about he’d pause and hold his foot up to the back of his thigh, doing a bit of a stretch as anyone might, and ask some idle questions. Such unusual brickwork on that doorway. Bet that building’s seen some things in its time. All converted into swanky studios now, probably? No? Owner must be pretty relaxed to let it stand empty. Oh. Sitting tenants? Poor guy.

      And so he found Cinnamon Wharf.

Two hundred years ago that part of London was the end point of a journey from the other side of the earth. The merchants and ship-owners who lived in the handsome houses around Wapping Pier Head wanted pepper on their coddled eggs and nutmeg on their junket. Their daughters stuck cloves into oranges at Christmastime, in a neat tight knobbly pattern, and suspended the prickly balls in their closets, making their gowns aromatic. And what the merchants and their girls wanted, they reckoned others would want too, and would buy. The bales of sprigged calico and ivory-coloured muslin unloaded in Limehouse were scented by the spices that had travelled across the world alongside them in the hold. Prices were exorbitant, and fluctuated. With the arrival of every homing cargo they halved or, in the case of the more recherché cardamom, quartered. Shrewd traders stored sacks-full of the shrivelled seeds to await the next shortage and its advantageous effect on profit. By the time John Company ceded control of the spice-trade to the Queen-Empress’s government the north shore of the Thames was walled, from Tower Bridge to Shadwell, by high buildings whose brick had blackened by the end of their first winter, and whose timbers were so imbued with the fragrant oils seeping out of the sacks that to walk along Wapping High Street was to imagine yourself in the southern oceans, where sailors used to navigate between islands by sniffing the perfumed breeze.

      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.’

Acton said, ‘I’m delighted to meet you at last, Mr Rokesmith.’ He’d done his research.

      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.

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