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СКАЧАТЬ 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 were the only parties I’d ever been to where everyone, every time, ended up sitting in a circle like a pack of cubs. Not the boy-scouty kind of cubs. We weren’t tying knots or memorising Morse code. We were watching those damaged young people, entwined in a kind of circlet of bone-white flesh. And in the centre Acton, fully clad, his thighs straining the cloth of his silky Armani trousers as he sat with his knees up, corralled by skinny limbs, his round eyes (without his specs they looked even rounder) watching us watching the kids and watching Acton watching.

I have two tableaux I keep stacked away at the back of my mind. One dates from my childhood, and I’m not taking it out to look at it again now. Put away childish things. There’s a hand down some trousers, and a nauseating smell and a voice saying, ‘Keep going. Keep going. There’s nothing to worry about, boy. I’ve got my eye on you.’ The other scene is set in the penthouse and it’s a lot pleasanter to contemplate. I’m with a gaggle of nymphets, three gawky Bambis with dark eyes and fluttery hands. It’s true the one with her head in my lap seemed to be crying, but they were a snivelly lot. I didn’t see the harm.

      If it had been up to Eliza, it’s unlikely there would have been any kind of stink. She is a very self-contained and self-reliant person and I believe she would have dealt with the issue discreetly. She’d told me once, when another agent got their dirty little mitts on a prime site with planning permission that we should have had exclusive, ‘Not for me to butt in but, just saying … The only way to keep a secret is not to tell people. Not to tell anyone. You boasted about it, didn’t you, to some friend of yours who’s got nothing to do with the biz, so you thought it was safe?’

      It was true. I had.

      ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘No one.’

So when she noticed the way Acton was hanging around she kept quiet, but one morning, when they were in the penthouse, her personal trainer saw that Acton was out on the roof terrace. Seeing. And Eliza didn’t say ‘Keep your mouth shut’ because that would only have aggravated the thing. And the personal trainer mentioned it to Diana, and that was that.

      ‘One’s not quite enough.

      Two leaves you wanting more.

      Three is a disaster.

      Acton’s on the floor.’

      He’d had his three caipirinhas but he was still upright, chanting that doggerel in the bar we all frequented. I took his arm and got him into the backroom where I’d been sampling a Chablis with a solicitor who shared my interests. Griddled scallops to go with. She was an attractive female solicitor, but there was no need for Sophie to know that. Anyway, she pissed off home as soon as Acton started hollering.

      ‘Get a grip,’ I said.

      ‘What’s to grip?’ he said, subdued now, maudlin. ‘I’ve got nothing to grip onto. I’m lost. All those bitches are coming after me now. View halloo. Tally ho. With super-bitch leading the pack.’

      Diana? Eliza?

      All or any of them. Acton’s self-pity had transformed all women into bloodhounds.

      ‘And which of you rotten curs is going to help me?’

I took him home. William was waiting by the door. I’d called him. ‘I don’t have a key any more,’ he said, ‘but if he needs me …’ We had to wrestle Acton’s key ring from him while he babbled out his grievances against the ungrateful world. William lifted him over the threshold and begun shushing him as a parent shushes a wailing brat.

      So what had happened? There are, as there always are, several ways of understanding the story. All the variants added up to one thing. Acton had been where he should not have been. He had seen what he should not have seen.

      Bluff no-nonsense version … Woman, imagining herself alone in an empty flat (except for personal trainer of course), takes shower. Man happens by and sees what he shouldn’t. Blushes all round. No harm done.

      But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, Eliza wasn’t alone in the shower. For another, she and the personal trainer had both seen Acton loitering on the roof terrace a couple of times before, around СКАЧАТЬ