Copyright

Dedication

For Dan, with love

Author’s Note

Each of these modern stories is a variation (a very free one) on a much older tale.

The original fables are summarised at the end of the book.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Author’s Note

6  Contents

7  ORPHEUS

8 ACTAEON

9 PSYCHE

10 PASIPHAE

11 JOSEPH

12 MARY MAGDALEN

13  TRISTAN

14  PIPER

15  The Fables

16  By the Same Author

17  About the Author

18  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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ORPHEUS

There was no forewarning.

She was in the park with her friend.

Every Wednesday they went, with their dogs. ‘What do you say to each other?’ he asked. She couldn’t answer. But he knew that they talked all the way round.

Once he went looking for them. There was something he was worried about. Something that couldn’t wait until she got back, at least that’s what he thought. He saw them coming towards him between the silver birches and she was talking, hands in the pockets of her old velvet coat, head down watching her feet, talking non-stop. When she looked up and saw him she waved, and after that it was her friend who was talking, looking at him, as she did so, in a way he thought rude. When they came up to him he explained about the thing. Was it the heating? He wanted her to hurry home with him, but she didn’t seem to care about it. She wasn’t a worrier the way he was. Sometimes he found her insouciance maddening.

Anyway, that was a while ago. But then she was out with her friend again and the earth cracked open and an arm reached up from the chasm and dragged her down.

The friend, she was called Milla, came and rang the doorbell. He could hear her over the intercom but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. He could have just pressed the little button, but he didn’t want her coming in for some reason – he’d get annoyed with Milla, the way she was always wanting his wife to go out with her and leave him on his own – so he took his keys like he always did, in case, and went down the stairs quite slowly. Through the stained glass he could see Milla jerking around, and he could hear the bell ringing and ringing upstairs in the flat. He opened the front door. He’d probably been asleep. That would be why he hadn’t noticed she was late back, and why he wasn’t sensible enough to let Milla in with the little knob.

Milla said, ‘Oz, I’m so sorry. Oz, Eurydice’s … She’s in St Mary’s. I’ll take you. Let’s go and get your coat.’

The terrible arm dragged Eurydice out of the light. She, who had always slept with a lamp left on in the corridor because darkness pressed against her eyes and smothered her sight. She, who would fuss about restaurant tables, who always wanted the one by the window. She, who would shift her chair around the room throughout the day, dragging it six inches at a time to be always in the patch of sunlight. She sank into blackness. She was obliterated.

Milla didn’t see it happen. Oz saw it as they drove to the hospital. He saw it over and over again. He saw the hand slipping itself around Eurydice’s knees as a snake might wrap itself around its prey. He saw it descend on her from above and lift her by her hair so that the skin of her gentle face was pulled tight over sharp bones. He saw it grasp her around the hips and heave her up, head and feet flopping down undignified. Fee Fi Fo Fum and down she goes. Into the crevasse she went, into the valley of death, into the foul mouth.

Where is she? He kept asking and asking. Milla was patient with him. Milla said, ‘She’s in St Mary’s. We’re on our way there. We’ll see her very soon.’ ‘I know, Oz, I do too, but the doctors are with her. We just have to sit and wait.’ ‘I don’t know how long, but the nurse will tell us as soon as she can.’ ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea, shall I?’ ‘Don’t drink it yet, it’ll be hot.’ ‘I’ll wait outside. Here. This gentleman will help you.’ ‘She’s in the Greenaway Ward. We’ll see her in a minute or two.’ ‘In here.’ ‘She’s here, Oz. Look. Here she is.’ But Eurydice was gone.

What had been left lying among the pliable blades of coming daffodils was something as frail and pretty and futile as the feathers from a plucked bird. He was grateful to Milla for caring so much about it. He knew she was right – the conventions governing human civilisation required them to pick the remnant up, and rush to find help for it, and keep watch by it – but it was no longer Eurydice, no longer his wife. He saw the hands, dry and pale, with the tiny wart at the base of the third finger on the right, and her grandmother’s pearl ring on the middle finger on the left, and the broken nail she had complained about as she was putting on her scarf to go out that morning and the nail caught in the woolly stuff. They were her hands, but she had left them, along with her thinning hair and scaly elbows (I’m like an old tortoise, she said, when she felt them) and the ankles which still, when she wore black tights or even more when she was bare legged in summer, were worth showing off. These things had been hers, but they failed to contain her, to keep her safe.

Gluck has him singing at the moment of loss. A lament, generalising from the particular, meditating upon lovelessness and how it annuls life’s meaning. Stuff like that. Monteverdi was wiser. Monteverdi asks him only to sing a word that is barely a word even. ‘Ahimè’. A sigh. A sigh which brings the lips together, which says mmmm’s the word from now on for evermore, and then relents into that plangently accented vowel.

He had a remarkable counter-tenor voice. The critics said Suave Silvery Ethereal Limpid. When he was young he was afraid women would think he was gay, or weird, because his voice was as ungendered as an angel’s, but he needn’t have worried.

All that afternoon he sang. He felt too shaky to stand but his powerful lungs drew in air and converted it into music. He was a clarion. Milla tried to hush him but he didn’t even know that he was singing, so how was he to know that he should stop? They gave him a chair and placed him by the bed where they said Eurydice was lying, but she wasn’t there.

He could see her neck, and the softly puckered skin where it met her shoulders. He knew that part of her so well – so well – but this afternoon it was no longer hers. She’d left it behind, as she left clean hankies in the pocket of his coat when she borrowed it. Her favourite mug, the colour of violets, upturned by the sink. Clues as to her presence. He tried to tell one of the nurses how touched he was to see that piece of her neck, how much it reminded him of her, but the nurse thought he was worried that she might be cold, and pulled up the blue blanket so that even that memento of her was hidden from him.

The face was a perfect replica of her face. He touched it very lightly from time to time and felt the warm dryness of it, and he ran his fingers over her eyelids, and felt the fluttering movement beneath, just as though she was still there.

Milla left and other people came. A young couple, Eurydice’s nephew and his wife. They said to each other, ‘Shouldn’t we take him home?’ When he heard that he sang louder and for a while they let him be. When it was night, though, they led him down the long luminous corridors and out into the spangled dark.

They fed him and stayed the night in the spare room, her workroom, and when he sat up in bed and sang again the young woman came, wrapped in Eurydice’s cashmere shawl, and lay down on his bed beside him and held his hand and said, ‘You need to sleep. Sleep now. In the morning we’ll see if we can bring her back.’ He couldn’t remember how to sleep but he lay down when the niece made the pillows right for it, and then the singing moved from his chest to his mind, and all night his head rang with sounds as clear and dazzling as sunlit seawater seen by one swimming an inch or two under.

For most of his life he had been a middle-aged person’s kind of artiste. He sang, with his friend Marcia accompanying him, at the Maltings, the Wigmore Hall, places like that. He used to wear formal dark clothes, or sometimes, for Handel, silk frock-coats and breeches. He liked the costumes. He took a luxurious pleasure in the heaviness of lined and interlined satin. He enjoyed being someone other than himself. Then he accepted an invitation to sing with a group of clever young people who told him how much they admired him. He hadn’t much liked the music but he let his voice glide like quicksilver over the rough ground of the drums and sharp peaks of the electric guitars. Less than a week from first approach to recording studio, but afterwards strangers began to talk to him in shops. They were amazed, they said, by what he could do with his voice. As though they had no idea how often he’d done far better things, as though they had never heard of coloratura. ‘Enjoy it,’ said Eurydice. ‘Don’t grouch.’

There was a concert in Hyde Park. He wore ear-plugs – his hearing was precious. He stood at the back of the stage harmonising softly until it was time for his aria (they didn’t call it that). His voice, amplified, offended him with its coarseness. With the lights changing colour in his eyes, he couldn’t see. But he could sense the shuffle and sway of thousands of people on their feet. This is dangerous, he thought. He detested demagoguery. Afterwards he shut himself away to work on Purcell.

The next morning he woke early and slipped out of the flat without waking the young couple, even though the niece was still stretched out on his bed. When your life’s work is making exactly calibrated sounds and fitting them together in sequences whose tempi and tones you modify and adjust and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, when you do that, day after day, your ear constantly straining to detect and eliminate the subtlest infelicities, you learn not to clatter about.

People were always taking his arm, but they did so to steer him, not because he needed to be propped up. He had piano-player’s shoulders and the leg muscles of one who could stand stock still throughout a recital. He let himself be steered. He’d learnt long ago that it was wise to abdicate power over tedious matters to another. To Eurydice. But that didn’t mean he was feeble.

There were a lot of elderly men around the hospital. They hovered near it. They stretched out on benches under the concrete overhangs. They leant against its walls to smoke. They went tentatively into the halls and waiting areas. As they ventured indoors they were wary but this late on in the night shift no one had the will to shoo them away. Or the heart. There were chairs in the hospital, and there was light. Hard plastic chairs and harsh shadeless light, but beggars can’t be … Once inside they could attend to their feet. Their feet were of great concern to them. They cosseted them. They swaddled them in cloth. They went into the washrooms and anointed them with warm water and disinfectant gel. Some of them had big trainers, shiny white shoes made for athletes, but here nobody sprang, nobody leapt.

He went among them, another suppliant. He passed softly through the dim entrance hall. The floor was hard, so that to walk on it was to make noise. The low ceiling was insulated with white stuff that swallowed the noise up. Sound. Smother. A closed system. He nodded to the gatekeeper, a woman who glanced at him briefly and saw that he was admissible, and let him go by. He was, as he always was, neat, and he stepped carefully over the slick grey ground.

He went upstairs to where they had said she was, to the bed where her abandoned body had lain, but there was nothing there. Not an empty bed even. Nothing. On other beds women slept, pale, their hipbones and feet making ridges and peaks in the thin cellular blankets. They snored or muttered and tiny sharp lights blinked.

‘You’re looking for your wife.’ A nurse. Male. African. Very large.

‘She was here.’ He no longer felt certain he had come to the right place.

Amidst the dimness the nurse sat in a cone of light.

‘There were concerns. She’s under observation. She’ll be going to imaging shortly.’

‘Can I see her?’

‘Best to wait here, sir. She’ll come back here.’

All that day he sat in the ward, by the window. The nurse gave him his chair again and brought him a plastic pot of yoghurt. The sun rose showily, unfurling streamers of lurid orange cloud while the sky faded. No sound from the outer world passed through the sealed glass. Visitors arrived. A Frenchman, with clever eyes and pendulous doggy jowls, came and sat beside his thin wife, and the two of them worked together on a crossword. A woman whose soft arms and shoulders billowed around her apologised and apologised. Sorry for the trouble. Sorry for the moans she couldn’t help but make. Sorry for the retching that from time to time possessed her. The nurses tended to her, unshaken alike by her pain and the pointlessness of her sorry sorry sorry.

Milla found him. ‘We were frantic. We didn’t know where you’d got to.’ As though he might have been anywhere else but here. Here, waiting for Eurydice. Here, watching by the crack down which she had been dragged into the underworld. Milla bustled about and asked questions, and went on a long excursion into another part of the hospital and returned to tell him what he already knew. Concerns. Imaging. Wait here.

Milla was really very good. He’d always liked being taken charge of by bossy people. When Eurydice seized his hand long ago and said, ‘You. You’ll dance with me, won’t you?’ and looked in his face so that he knew at once that she could see him, all of him, and found parts of what she saw absurd and other parts precious, he had said ‘Yes’, said it with every fibre of his being, every droplet of his being, every inter-molecular current and electro-magnetic charge and neural pulse of his being, with all the ardour that was in him, with his whole heart.

Milla was walking towards him, with two people he didn’t know, both in uniform. She squatted down beside his chair, rocking awkwardly on her high heels. Why on earth did women wear those things? Eurydice never did.

Milla said something. Her mascara had smeared all around her eyes. What she said was incomprehensible.

The floor gaped open and down he flew.

God almighty, what a racket.

He’d had a scan once. He’d taken off his proper clothes and, dressed in a penitent’s thin smock, had been borne away into the white enamelled throat of a machine. The noises it made were rhythmic and various. It roared and chugged and emitted long dragging sounds that had no trace of voice in them, because a voice can belong only to a being, and this thing was devoid of intention, devoid of life. He hadn’t been afraid then, just very lonely because Eurydice hadn’t come with him, and he’d been collected enough to think, You could do something with this. This is interesting. Why hasn’t a composer picked up on this? Perhaps someone has. This is imaging. This is the sound of a thing which looks at you without passion or compassion or even dispassion and – oddly enough – it’s musical.

Now, as he descended into the rocky innards of the earth in search of his Eurydice, he heard that music amplified a thousandfold. He heard matter grinding itself as it shifted. Ancient masses cooling, heating, expanding, collapsing. The fearsome noise of the inanimate on the move. He sang into it. His eyes were open on absolute darkness. He felt speed but could measure it only by the pressure of air against his chest, and by the void he sensed opening behind him like unfurled wings. Into the darkness he fired his voice. The uproar of rock and magma gave him his baseline. His song arced over it, flashing.

From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, and all that time he saw no one, and breathed air that smelt of coal, and there was no dew, only clamminess, and then he was in a room, or a cavern – a finite space at least with black walls, and shaded lights that set the blackness glittering – and there was Eurydice, not the limp and pitiful residue that had lain in the hospital bed, but Eurydice herself, smiling at him with her slightly crooked mouth.

‘This is a bit drastic,’ she said. She disliked theatrical gestures.

‘I had to come,’ he said. ‘I’m no good without you.’

‘Hey ho,’ she said, and he could see her bracing herself to resume the business of being loved.

There were other people there, two of them. Doctors presumably. When Orpheus stepped forward to take Eurydice’s hands something prevented him, an obstruction in the air. The man said, ‘This isn’t really possible you know.’

The other one, the woman, came and took him by the arm. Her face looked red and blotched, cross, but when she touched him he felt that her hands were kind. It was something he had discovered in his dealings with the medical profession, the efficacy of the laying-on of hands. ‘The thing is,’ she said, in a reasonable voice, ‘you’re actually still alive. It’s most unusual.’

Eurydice watched and smiled but she didn’t move towards him. There was something vague about her, or maybe it was only that his eyes had been so exhausted by darkness that what they saw was half blotted out. The woman led him over to where the man was and they all three sat, and Eurydice was there with them – there, but not entirely there.

‘I can’t do without her,’ said Orpheus.

‘A lot of people in your situation feel that way,’ said the man.

‘We’re not denying the existence of grief,’ said the woman. ‘We know how challenging it can be, especially to those who are of a certain age.’

‘My life is founded on her love,’ said Orpheus. ‘On loving her.’

The woman stroked his hand.

‘You have friends,’ said the man. ‘You have intellectually stimulating work. You have an adequate level of financial security. I know these things may seem paltry in the light of what has happened, but our experience tells us that you will gradually recover your enthusiasm for them.’

They both talked like that. They offered counselling. They spoke at length about the importance of maintaining social contacts, about taking walks on a regular basis and eating sensibly. All the time he was looking at Eurydice and she was looking at him. She seemed amused. Often at parties they would catch each other’s eyes like this – he signalling ‘Time to go?’ and she signalling back ‘Come on, you old spoilsport. Give it a bit longer.’ She was clearer now, fully in focus, but he could see the blackness of the rock-face through her insubstantial frame.

‘You’ll find a regular sleep-pattern is vitally important,’ said the man. ‘We can help you there. Hypnotics are really very effective nowadays and the adverse side-effects are negligible.’

‘Have you ever considered taking a cruise?’ asked the woman.

Orpheus didn’t answer them. He didn’t look at them. He fixed his eyes on Eurydice’s and he took a breath and he sang.

They flew. The music lifted them. He could no longer see her but that was only because the darkness was, once more, absolute. She was definitely there. He could feel the soft secret parts of her body that he knew as no one else did, the valleys flanking her hip-bones, her earlobes, the backs of her knees. The sense of them was on his fingertips. He could smell her hair. Her being warmed his back. Always, when he woke in the morning, he knew before he opened his eyes whether she was still in the bed. It wasn’t that they slept entangled as they had when they were young. Their bed was wide, and they kept to their own sides of it, but always there was that warmth which is not only bodily – the warmth of another person’s presence. Breathing makes a sound, but it also makes a vibration in the air. She was there. She was following him. Her following powered his flight and his song powered hers.

My song is love unknown

He sang hymns in the bath. He used to sing them on his bicycle before his knee seized up. His singing life had begun in church when he was a child. The lady who drove the library van smiled at him from the choir stalls and he thought she was inviting him to fly up with her, so when she sent her voice looping above the others – high, higher – he followed her with his own. Afterwards his parents apologised – Honestly, I don’t know how he even knows the descant – but the library lady smiled again and said to the vicar, ‘I think we’ve found our soloist for “Once in Royal”, haven’t we?’ He didn’t know what she was talking about. He was seven years old. After that he sang with the lady every Sunday. The most useful part of my entire education, he’d tell interviewers. Forget about God; we have to keep the churches open so young people get a chance to sing.

But O! my Friend,

My Friend indeed,

Who at my need

His life did spend.

He had no intention of spending his life for Eurydice, or anyone else for that matter, but he had to get her out of there, and himself. They had to keep rising. In the dark room he had held her gaze, because he thought that his seeing her made her visible. Now, with the same dogged fixity, he concentrated his will on a point of light an immense distance above them. He was tired. He couldn’t remember why he was in this dark place, why his wife was clinging to him, so heavy, so heavy, but he knew he must keep his eyes on that light, must keep his voice sounding out, however dry his throat or short his breath, must keep ascending on a stream of silver sound – limpid, ethereal, suave as upwardly flowing milk – leaping towards the light.

He was so angry when they resuscitated him that the nurses – two men – backed off momentarily, accustomed as they were to dealing with the desperate, before buckling-to again and holding him down. Milla said, ‘We nearly lost you too. Can’t have that, Oz. What would poor Dodie do?’ Dodie was the dog. He hadn’t given her a thought. Milla must have handed her over to some friend or neighbour. What the fuck made her think he cared buggeration about the dog? He couldn’t give a shit about the dog. He’d never liked it.

A nurse said, ‘Don’t let him upset you, love. It’s shock. And the dementia. He’ll be the perfect gentleman again once he’s calmed down.’ He heard as from a long way off. He fought. He shouted. He wanted them all to be upset.

He had so nearly made it. His song had amazed him, so beautiful it was, and so potent. As deep water will not accept a bladder full of air, as it forces it back up to rejoin its own element, so the darkness had repulsed him. With music streaming from his mouth he was luminous. He was swept back up into the light. But he was swept alone. His power to save Eurydice depended on his being independent of her. He mustn’t turn to her for help. He mustn’t turn at all. But, with his attention fixed on the gleam, he had forgotten whom he was carrying. Tossing in the current of song he became bewildered. He didn’t know what he was doing here. He knew there was something he needed to worry about. Was it the heating? Something like that. He took his eye off the circle of light. He looked around. He had lost his sense of purpose. He needed a clue, a cue. He looked back.

The darkness had thinned. He could see dimly. He could see Eurydice. She was wearing a headscarf tied under the chin, the way she used to when he first knew her. Again, there was that warmth. She looked exasperated as she caught his eye and then he could see her bracing herself again. She moved her hands as though she was smoothing out a tablecloth. She said, ‘Never mind, darling.’ He surged on, helpless, while she drifted and spun a while, and then began to sink, so slowly that she seemed to be barely moving, back into the murk.

‘You couldn’t have saved her,’ said Milla. ‘Nobody could.’ Oz knew that. He was a rational human being, except when he was tired or flustered. He knew that a hospital was a place from which one couldn’t count upon returning. He just wished that he could have died too.

His voice was not what it had been of course, but it was still a marvellously affecting instrument. A group of young women who performed folk songs a capella invited him to join them on tour. On stage they deferred to him. In the B-and-Bs they fussed over him, and made him hot drinks and lent him their pashminas to wrap around his throat. Reviewers were snide. ‘What’s happened to him?’ asked his agent. ‘Has he lost his marbles?’ ‘Well yes, he has,’ said Milla. ‘He’s also lost his wife.’

ACTAEON

He was quite a bit younger than me, than most of us actually, but he called us his ‘boys’. Looking back on it, I’m surprised no one protested, not even Eliza. ‘Let’s do it, boys,’ he’d go, at the end of the Friday meeting. ‘Let’s nail those sales.’ When we went for a drink (which we did weekly, it was the next piece of the Friday warm-up), Acton talked like a human being, an English one from suburban south London, but in the meeting room he spoke as though he’d picked up his entire vocabulary from Business and Management manuals, and like his parents (nice people, mother a greengrocer, father a nurse, proud of him) were part of Chicago’s criminal aristocracy.

Americans think British voices are darling. The British think American voices sing of potency and success. Acton was phoney through and through, but we didn’t care. We relished the smoothness of his act. Estate agents aren’t crooks, contrary to popular belief – I mean not many are – but we are all performers. We were accustomed to seeing each other, on heading out to meet a prospective buyer, pop on a new persona while picking up the keys. We knew, when Acton was bullshitting, that he was doing what he had to do, and the great thing was, if he succeeded, we each got a cut.

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.

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.

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, so we left it there.

Acton’s partner William called me one day, and asked if we could talk. I liked him. He was gentle and patient. He lived pretty close – Acton 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 the time they came back from their evening run, so perhaps happenstance didn’t have that much to do with his being there.

Other versions were broadcast around the office in a babble of whispers.

‘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 low and our weight well forward. The little gizmos slung around our necks allow her to find us swiftly should we stray.

Our eyes switch sideways to check each other’s proximity – we don’t like to be isolated. We know the hindermost and the leader are both easy prey. Acton was our leader once. Look what happened to him.

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