Fabulous. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

He found him buyers though, the desirable kind. Single professionals. High net worth individuals. Metro-cosmopolitans. People whose job descriptions – consultant, content-provider, start-up strategist, marketing guru, director of comms – gave nothing away about what they actually did. A shop opened on Wapping High Street selling second-hand spectacle-frames in white Bakelite – the kind that golden-age Hollywood stars wore. You could have them made up to your own prescription, with photo-sensitive lenses. The greasy spoon turned into a cupcake café, and then a tapas bar, and finally settled down to being a gluten-free bakery. They started serving non-alcoholic pink prosecco in the pub. The bike-boys who arrived nightly at Cinnamon Wharf to deliver ready-meals featuring swordfish carpaccio and coriander-roasted salsify would pause if they saw Acton tapping in the security code, a couple of cool youngish people in black nylon jackets at his back, and give him a high-five.

      I liked him, I really did. And not just because he cut me in on a bit of extra for the second-floor flats. I’m solid and he was flash. I like being shaken up a bit. People are always surprised when they meet Sophie. No one expects me to have a wife with teal-striped hair. What they don’t get is that my winter tweeds and summer seersucker are fancy-dress too. Only in my case the artificial persona is Mr Trad. I polish my performance. I have a gift for dullness, for the fusty-musty. It has been useful to me, both professionally and in reconciling me to those aspects of my early life that I have no plans to revisit, not in conversation, not even alone and in silence in the long early-morning hours when I lie rigid, willing myself not to toss and turn. I have made myself into a lump of masonry – safe and sound and durable, no damp patches or shoddy construction. Having done so successfully, I enjoy being around gimcrack and glitter and trompe l’oeil.

So … the parties. Those Sunday nights. When the weekend’s big push was done, there’d be trays of oysters delivered direct from Whitstable, and iced mint julep and vodka shots in gold-etched Moroccan glasses, all laid out in the empty penthouse at the top of Cinnamon Wharf. A dedicated lift went straight up there. You’d step out and, beyond the roof terrace’s glass balustrade, the river’s darkness would be all around, black water heaving almost imperceptibly, reflecting the hectic orange and magenta of a city at night.

      Eliza came the first time. She was an excellent agent – proactive with sellers, confiding and cosy with buyers – but it’s not always easy being the only woman on a team. I get that. On Tuesday morning (none of us customer-facing lot worked Mondays) she went into 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.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ