Fabulous. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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      ‘William says they haven’t done it for, like, years.’

      ‘I mean it’s not a crime to like watching.’

      ‘Sex clubs, you have a whole room full of people, don’t you?’

      ‘That’s different. That’s consensual.’

There was the lubricious version: ‘I wouldn’t have minded an eyeful of that.’ The righteously indignant: ‘We owe it to all our female clients …’ The sheepish: ‘Well, come on – we’ve all had some fun up there.’ The collusive: ‘Best not rock the boat. I mean, good old Acton …’ The prurient: ‘What do you mean, on her knees?’ The legalistic: ‘Strictly speaking, they were all in breach of our agreement with Rokesmith.’ There were many variations on the creeped-out version. For everyone, suddenly, the picture of Acton, gloating over the entangled fauns, had ceased to be funny. And then there was the abject, frankly scared-shitless-of-losing-our-jobs afraid: ‘We have to tell Diana, don’t we? I mean if she hears and nobody’s spoken up …’

      And then came the twist, ‘Haven’t you heard? Diana knows. Diana was there.’

      There. Where? In the shower too? How? What doing? How positioned? On her knees?

      To start with I imagined the trainer as one of those small-skulled, tremendously muscled, encouraging young men you see moving their clients’ limbs around in a physiotherapeutic kind of way in the park on a Sunday. When someone said, ‘No no, Doris is all-woman,’ the story’s significance suddenly switched. To watch a lusty woman having it off with an ideal embodiment of masculinity – that’s one thing. That’s to be a boy cheering on another boy at play. But to trespass into a women-only get-together, that’s different. That’s a no-no. That’s sweet poison. Imagine it. Three women. My mind swerves away.

William texted me: ‘Can we meet?’ When we did, he said, ‘I want you to know that Acton wasn’t a voyeur. Not that kind of a one anyway. I don’t think he ever even looked at porn. He didn’t want to watch sex. He just liked looking at bodies. At my feet, my hands, my elbows, the dip in my back, the way my neck meets my shoulders. He liked the look of naked flesh, that’s all.’

      He seemed very agitated. It mattered to him that I understood. But to me peeping is peeping. I respected Diana. If she and Eliza, or she and the trainer, or all three together, were having it away, or not, that was their business. That wasn’t the point. The transgression was Acton’s.

      One of the first things I learnt as a child was not-seeing. Shut your eyes and count to twenty. Shut your eyes and hold out your hands. Shut your eyes while Daddy’s undressing. Shut your eyes while I just … Don’t look until I tell you. Nothing to worry about. I’m just … Don’t look.

      As I said, there are things from which I have chosen to avert my eyes, though they are – in a very profound and distressing sense – my own. Promiscuous looking – idly curious, lubricious, or simply appreciative – I see it as a pernicious liberty to take.

      Diana called us in one by one. We were all intimidated by her, but we didn’t fully have her measure. We mistook her reserve for uptightness. She didn’t muck in, so we tended to ignore her, deferring instead to her chosen deputies, Acton among them. We hadn’t really understood how she’d run us. Now she showed her power.

She handed us teeth. She stroked our fingers until the claws grew. She stiffened our jaws until they clenched like pliers. She lengthened our spines and hardened our skulls and made our eyes into laser guns and our noses into missiles. She growled at us until we growled back, maddened by our own subservience. She let it be known that we were her pack now, and there was to be no mercy for mavericks. She invoked Rokesmith and the likely consequences of his displeasure – should anything go wrong in that direction – for our end-of-year bonuses. I squirmed and whined. I’m not proud of the way I behaved that week, the tales I bore to Diana as though they were duck she’d shot down and I was her retriever, the confidences I betrayed, the mean little niggling ways in which I tried to tell her that it was her hand I wanted fondling my ears and rubbing my tummy when I’d pleased her, that it would be her voice I obeyed when it told me to go fetch.

      She said that Rokesmith had found a buyer for the penthouse. ‘Thanks to Eliza,’ she said. ‘Yes, she’s back in Sales. She’ll be heading up the team from next week.’ We got the picture.

      Acton didn’t come in on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, but Friday he was there again. ‘There’ll be one last party,’ said Diana. ‘In the penthouse. Before completion. Tomorrow in fact.’ When Rokesmith wanted something done, the lawyers got a move on.

      Diana wasn’t there herself. She didn’t work weekends. Saturdays, she was in Richmond Park with her other hounds. She didn’t need to be present in person. She’d trained and instructed and starved us, and she’d showed us the lure with Acton’s scent on it.

      It began with teasing. Acton was very smartly turned out. He wore one of those tight-buttoned shortish jackets that set off the amplitude of a man’s backside. All the better to sink your teeth into.

We all knew that one of the kids had been found dead in the gasworks. Overdose. You could have seen it coming. No one’s fault but her own, but still … We made jokes about gas masks and gaslight and gas chambers. They weren’t funny jokes. They weren’t meant to be. Acton laughed anyway. He was full of bonhomie. He could always turn it on.

      He was onto the third caipirinha when he sensed the shift. He said something disparaging about a client, one we’d all had to deal with, one of those time-wasters whose idea of Saturday-morning fun is to go sightseeing around property way out of their price range. We didn’t laugh. It wasn’t that we liked the woman – she treated us all like she’d learnt at her mother’s knee that all estate agents are dishonest spivs whose vocabulary is risibly limited to words like ‘comprising’ and ‘utility room’. It wasn’t because we’d never jeered at her ourselves that we denied him his laugh. We kept quiet because we were all pointing, every sinew tight, each right-side forefoot lifted ready and each muzzle trained on the chosen prey.

      Acton put his drink down and his eyes swivelled a bit. He struggled on with his anecdote. He mentioned a shower attachment. He uttered the words en suite. It was as though it was a code word, a command like Attaboy or Rats. Beneath our summer-weight jackets our hackles rose. We crowded him. We barged and jostled. We made a half-circle with Acton as Piggy-in-the-Middle, hemmed in, with the glass panels behind him, and behind them nothing but the purple air.

Mr Rokesmith seemed to rather relish the media coverage of Acton’s plummet, and of the party preceding it. An orgy, they called it, which was absurd. It’s not as though anyone’s clothes were off. ‘No harm done,’ said Rokesmith, ‘apart from the demise of your young friend. Sorry about that. Smart fellow.’

      The sale went ahead. Contracts had been exchanged, after all. People who want to live on that stretch of river like to be reminded of the East End of their imagination, of opium dens and mutilated prostitutes and Ronnie Kray saying, ‘Have a word with the gentleman outside, would you, Reg?’ If you want Kensington, you know where to find it. But Wapping, well, it’s got a bit of a frisson, hasn’t it? Even if rowdiness at an estate agents’ office party doesn’t quite cut it in the glamour-of-evil stakes.

      Diana assured the police we were all exemplary beings – docile, obedient, team-spirited. We weren’t charged with anything. We were good boys. We got our bonuses.

      She still calls us her pack. We are still let out for exercise at lunchtime. We run together along the Embankment. Our muscles work fluidly beneath our elastic skins. We keep our heads СКАЧАТЬ