Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  She doesn’t know. She isn’t thinking about it. She likes him. And it must show on her fascinated face, because he steps out of the fight, and lightly, swiftly up towards her, slipping the comb into his breast pocket and dusting dab-dab, dab-dab at his peacock lapels, ignoring as if it no longer had anything to do with him the cries rising behind him, and grinning at her still.

  ‘All right?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ she says. ‘Headache’s gone.’

  ‘See you got rid of yer bloke, too.’

  ‘He’s not my bloke,’ says Val.

  ‘Does he know that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Val. ‘He definitely does.’

  ‘Then,’ says Mike, ‘then …’ Big build-up.

  ‘What?’ says Val.

  ‘Then, milady …’

  ‘What?’ says Val, laughing.

  ‘D’you fancy some chips?’

  ‘Might do,’ says Val.

  ‘Ah, hard to get, eh?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she says, looking at his gazelle eyes. ‘Really not.’

  Mike, who has been sauntering next to her, bending at waist and wrist and neck in a mannered way that somehow still looks dangerous, stops.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he says. She tells him. ‘I like that,’ he says. ‘Proper old-fashioned. None of that Yank shit.’

  He reaches out his long hand with its neatly trimmed nails to her face. Very lightly, he taps the middle of her forehead, and then the end of her nose, and then the divide of her lips.

  ‘What’s that in aid of, then?’ says Val, and saying the words opens her mouth, lets his nail and his cuticle and his warm dry skin come a tiny way in, resting there on the pillow of her lower lip. Police vans go by; seagulls ice cream carts gabbering families a grunting bus.

  ‘I’m laying a finger on you,’ says Mike.

  She licks the square end of the finger with the very tip of her tongue. Mike blinks.

  ‘Come on, then,’ he says. And he takes hold of her. But he doesn’t put an arm round her waist or kiss her or hold her hand or anything. He grips her elbow, absolutely definitely, and he guides her, absolutely definitely, off the busy esplanade and up the first side street and off it into a quieter street of little shops, and off that into an alleyway between pebble-dash walls which has got nothing in it but some bins.

  ‘What?’ she says, breathless, half-laughing. ‘What’re we—’

  But he just puts his hands on her shoulders, absolutely definitely, and pushes her down onto her knees in front of him, on the ground by the bins.

  ‘Yeah?’ he says.

  She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be agreeing to. This is weirdly unlike the known behaviour of interested men. All the others have wanted to touch, to turn handsy, to get in close and slide damp anxious mitts inside her clothes. Neville-the-louse was all hot breath in her ear. But Mike, for whom she has a yes that for the first time might have matched a man for handsy greed, leans back, away from her and out of reach, with his blue shoulders back against the pebble-dash, and his beautiful face averted, and his legs braced, as if he only wants to come near her with the one part of him, the one point of attachment where the pleasures of bank holiday Monday have dilated him and driven him out to meet her. He brings his hips forward and puts a hand on the back of her head and – oh. He wants to push something into her head.

  It doesn’t take very long. It’s salty, like blood, but with a flat taste, like iron.

  Mike produces a matching handkerchief to give her, and zips himself up.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ he says. ‘Now, what about those chips?’

  Vern

  Maybe he should have gone for the Café Royal? Vern quails as the taxi door opens, and it suddenly seems a long way across the pavement to the steps of Tognozzi’s, and a total toss-up whether McLeish will even get the point of the kind of understated, cripplingly expensive, visited-by-the-Queen poshness that this place represents. Footballers know about the Café Royal. They get taken there with their wives by the management when they win the Cup. There’s gold leaf, and bottles of bubbly going fwoosh, and a picture for the paper. It’s their idea of quality, isn’t it – of the high life? Yeah, he should have taken him there; or to do a bit of that kind of nightclubbing where posh meets gangland. Except that subbing McLeish to play baccarat in Soho would mean, potentially, anything happening, at God-knows-what kind of expense that Vern couldn’t afford. This is all carefully costed, carefully budgeted and scraped together: his one shot at creating the impression of careless, glad-handing wealth. It’s much too late to rethink now. Just don’t cock it up, he tells himself. Bulky in powder blue with dazzling white cuffs, attended by an aggressive cloud of aftershave, he bustles to the restaurant doorway, McLeish in tow.

  ‘Reservation for one o’clock. Name of Taylor,’ he tells the maître d’ lurking just within. And he doesn’t try to posh up the voice, to hide the South London in it. Nah, the opposite. Vern can do officer-class if he wants. It was one of the unexpected perks of national service, that, getting to listen from the kitchens as an assortment of Ruperts and Hugos in the officers’ mess modelled the vowel sounds of the Home Counties over and over again: but here and now, elocution is definitely not called for. What’s needed is the upward bounce of common-as-muck talent, utterly unapologetic, shoving into the sanctum with its elbows out. Look at him! He could be … a barrow-boy photographer shaking up fashion! A lairy young advertising genius! A record company A&R man with his finger on the beat pulse! A junior film producer dashing into the West End from Pinewood! An exec on the rise in commercial telly! He is none of those things: but, as Vern reminds himself under his breath, they don’t know that.

  ‘Certainly, Mr Taylor,’ says the flunkey, having located the name in a bookings book like the kind of photograph album you’d have if your surname was pronounced Chumley or Fanshaw. ‘Mario will take you down. Enjoy your lunch, gentlemen.’

  ‘Spiffing,’ says Vern flatly, and takes a step or two after the more junior flunkey who is leading the way to the spiral stairs. But, he realises, he has somehow shed McLeish, and when he looks back, from the opulent dimness of the stairwell to the portal fringed with the silhouettes of petals dangling from window boxes, where the daylight of St James’s glares, he sees his guest hesitating just outside. McLeish is glancing up at the facade with his shoulders hunched, doing that unnecessary fiddling with his jacket buttons that always means nerves. Maybe this isn’t the wrong choice after all, if he can read this place well enough to be afraid of it. And now Vern can give him the pleasure of stopping being afraid of it.

  ‘Come on, Joe!’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘They won’t eatcher!’ And McLeish follows, with a slight duck of the head as he pierces the marmoreal force field of the maître d’ but a promising, faint, half-guilty smile on his face.

  The downstairs of Tognozzi’s is a long subterranean vault, with traces of the art deco jazz den it used to be pre-war, when aristos and blackshirts and aristos who were blackshirts did the charleston down here on glass-smooth parquet. But Mayfair good taste has flowed over it since, like a bland and floral tide. It’s all white linen now, with little bunches of freesias on the little round tables. Vern feels big as the waiter fits them into little gilt chairs not far from the foot of the stairs: but then Vern feels big everywhere. It’s just a fact of life. He waited and waited for growing up to turn him into one of those gracile kids with the spindly legs, but no matter how tall he got, and he’s six-two now, he expanded in proportion. At any height, he was always going to be a big, square block of meat, with sharp little eyes in a face as wide as a shield. He goes to the old gym on the Bexford High Road now, not so much for the sparring, which just makes him sweat and pant, as for the hours on the bag and the speedball. He couldn’t chase someone up the street but if they’d consent to get in reach he could flatten ’em. And his size has this going for it: it confers a bit of presence, of authority almost, and thus compensates for his age somehow. People don’t see he’
s twenty-three. They see he’s considerable.

  The waiter brings them red menus that also look like heirlooms of the Chumley-Fanshaws. McLeish gives off new signs of alarm as he grips his. The menu’s in French, of course. But, again, God bless the Army Catering Corps; God bless watching sergeant-chefs laboriously typing out the mess dinner menu in the Limassol heat. M-i-l-l-e-f-e-u-i-l-l-e-s with sweaty fingers.

  ‘’S amazing the fuss they make in these places, innit?’ says Vern, deliberately. ‘I mean, that top one’s liver, and then it’s a steak, and then halibut, and then a lobster.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says McLeish, and his wrists relax, and his quick black eyes stop darting anxiously about. ‘Yeah …’

  ‘I dunno why they can’t just say so.’

  ‘Right, right,’ says McLeish. ‘You know, I’ve never ate a lobster.’

  Fuck, thinks Vern, acutely conscious of the finite contents of the wallet in his left trouser pocket.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he says. ‘Now’s your chance. They’ll do a lovely job of it here, with all your special French sauces for it, and the special cutlery to get in through the shell and that.’ Held breath.

  ‘Nah,’ says McLeish. ‘D’you know what, I’ll just have the steak.’

  ‘Good plan. Me too,’ says Vern. He calls the waiter. ‘Two entrecôtes, please, medium rare, and we’ll have a bottle of the sixty-two Côtes du Rhône. If that suits you, Joe?’

  ‘Fine, yeah,’ says McLeish; and now that the crisis is past, and the waiter is safely receding, and it’s clear that he’s not going to be caught out failing to understand something, he leans back on the tight little golden throne and spreads his big thighs, and cracks his neck-bones, and lifts his long jaw, and looks about himself, prepared to be entertained. A good-looking lad: black brush of hair, and blue-white London Scots pallor in his skin. ‘It’s quite something down here, isn’t it?’

  ‘It surely is,’ says Vern. ‘More dukes and duchesses than you can shake a stick at in here. Nob central. And they get famous people and all coming in.’

  ‘Yeah?’ says McLeish. ‘Like who?’

  ‘Well, there’s you,’ says Vern, grinning.

  ‘Shut up!’ says McLeish, and of course he’s right; he’s not famous in any way that would compute or even register in a place like this. He’s a second-string striker in a fourth-division club, and the Millwall only signed him ten months ago. For a little less than a year he’s experienced a strictly local and limited celebrity down in Bexford, New Cross, Bermondsey, where dockers will buy him pints at the price of telling him in exhaustive detail every single foot the team have put wrong this season, and their daughters will give him the eye on Saturday night. But he likes it, this piss-taking by Vern with a dash of flattery thrown in. And he’s got used enough, you can see, to the little bit of extra female attention that here too he’s glancing around, probably automatically, to see if he’s causing any flutters. Nothing doing: the younger ones of the ladies lunching in Tognozzi’s today are sleek Mayfair types in their thirties, with their court shoes and their collarless jackets and their thoroughbred knees pressed together slantwise as they laugh. All McLeish’s optimistic gaze gets back is an occasional display of nostril. Well, that’s not quite true. A couple of nancy-boys on the other side of the staircase who look as if they’ve just woken up are enjoying him, but best not to point that out.

  ‘All right, the Queen, then.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘Yep. Real and royal.’

  ‘Blimey,’ says McLeish.

  ‘And you. Her Majesty – and you.’

  ‘Shut up!’ says McLeish. He is nineteen years old. ‘My mum’ll have a fit when I tell her that.’

  ‘Good,’ says Vern benignly, the bestower of mum-worthy boasts, the founder of the feast.

  And, right on time, the waiter is back with a bottle which he splashes into the wine glass on Vern’s side for testing – sagacious nod – and then there’s the ceremonial pouring, the filling of the water glasses, a ritual of crystal vibrations and gurgles in the face of which McLeish falls silent again.

  ‘Cheers,’ says Vern firmly. They knock glasses together.

  Then, while McLeish is cautiously sampling his mouthful, Vern leans forward, drops his voice and says:

  ‘She might’ve sat in that very chair. You could be right on top of the royal arse-print.’

  McLeish chokes and ducks his head.

  ‘Steady on,’ says Vern. ‘Don’t cough up the vino. It’s a quid a bottle.’

  ‘You can’t bloody say that,’ hisses McLeish. ‘Not … here.’ He is definitely blushing, and he is darting looks out to left and right as if the Posh Police will imminently step out of the shadows and grab him.

  ‘I bloody can,’ says Vern. (Though he is himself observing strict volume control, and keeping an eye out for trouble.) ‘And what’s more, I bloody should.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ says Vern, leaning back so that his powder-blue lapels and his gleaming bri-nylon shirt, collar size 19, and his turquoise silk tie, together fill McLeish’s vision like a cliff face of confidence, ‘that all this stuff down here – these people – this place – it’s all very nice, but it’s basically over. It’s the past, innit. And I’m not bothered about the past. I’m for the future. Look around’jer. Who’s the future, down here, eh? I’ll tell you, it’s not bloody them. It’s us. Who’s the future? We are.’

  The look he gives McLeish is fierce and full-on. It’s the one the speedball in the gym has been on the receiving end of. The boy squirms, but he also swells. He’s excited.

  Enter the steaks. They come with button mushrooms, round and rubbery, which McLeish abandons when the first one he tries to capture bounces off onto the tablecloth, trailing juices. But the meat yields tenderly to the knife, and emboldened by Vern’s speech he ignores the mushroom, chews, swigs the red wine, and actually makes the next move himself.

  ‘So, you’re gonna be opening restaurants, then, Vern?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Vern. ‘Something a bit more modern than this, I can tell you. Light and air and none of the oh-I-say-how-quaint, if you know what I mean?’

  McLeish nods, grins.

  ‘But that’s Phase Two. I’ve got to build up to that. Conquer the world in stages, that’s the plan. First comes bricks and mortar. Houses – you can’t go wrong with houses, ’cause everyone needs them, right?’

  He takes out his wallet and passes McLeish a large cream-coloured business card. GROSVENOR INVESTMENTS, it says, the most solid-sounding name he could think of, with the address of an office over a chip shop on East Bexford Hill.

  ‘You’re gonna build houses?’ says McLeish.

  ‘Well, not yet. Buy ’em and rent ’em out, that’s the plan.’

  ‘You mean you’ll be a landlord?’ McLeish sounds disappointed. More than that – disapproving. ‘My dad says landlords are all bloodsuckers. Like that Rachman? I saw in the paper where he was setting these great big dogs on little kiddies?’

  ‘No no no no,’ says Vern swiftly. ‘All that’s over. The new law they just done, that’s finished all that stuff off; cleaned it right up.’ Also, incidentally, the Rent Act has put paid to the kind of fly-by-night building societies from which it would have been much easier for someone like Vern, starting up without any capital, to get his hands on mortgages. But he doesn’t say that. He says: ‘That’s my opportunity, you see. All the crooks and the bloodsuckers, they’re out of the landlord game, because you can’t make money out of it any more.’

  ‘But … don’t you wanna make money out of it?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Vern says. ‘Yes, I will. Because I’ve got an angle. Think of Bexford High Street, think of the New Cross Road. Think of the middle of Deptford and Lewisham. How many houses there have got a flat upstairs and a shop downstairs? I’ll tell you: thousands of them. Literally thousands. You can buy them dirt cheap. And who gets the rent from the shop, as well as the rent from the flat? The landlord
. Doesn’t matter if the old dear upstairs is only paying pennies, bless her. Because the Rent Act doesn’t cover the downstairs, it doesn’t make the rules for shops. So the money coming in from the shop, right, that’s your little gold mine; and it pays for buying the whole property, and then the next one, and the next one, and the next one, till before you know it you own the whole bloody street.’

  ‘I dunno,’ says McLeish uneasily. Vern can practically see the thought he’s having. He’s picturing Bexford’s array of sad butcher’s shops, seedy corner groceries, shonky second-hand furniture dealers and mildewed newsagents, and finding it a stretch to believe there’s any kind of gold mine to be found in any of them. ‘I thought it would be something a bit more, you know, new. Something, like you said, more – er …’

  ‘It is,’ Vern insists. ‘What this is is the start. On an ordinary street, in an ordinary shop what no one else has seen the potential of. But then, yeah, then comes the exciting stuff. Then comes the shopping centres, and the office blocks, and the – the bloody skating rinks, and the casinos. And the skyscrapers!’

  ‘In Bexford,’ says McLeish. ‘You wanna build skyscrapers, in Bexford?’

  ‘Why the bloody hell not?’ says Vern: and then they’re both laughing, but it’s good laughter, it’s audacious laughter, and the ghost of a glorious skyline south of the river lingers in the air.

  The waiter appears without being asked, and pours the rest of the wine into their glasses. He takes his time, with some fancywork where he twists the bottle to catch drips, and flourishes his white cloth about the place. McLeish cools, sits more anxiously again. ‘Would you two gentlemen like another bottle?’ says the waiter. No, bugger off. ‘No thanks,’ says Vern, waving him away with a big pink hand.

  ‘So you see’ – plunging on before the mood can be lost – ‘it starts small, it starts practical, but it is the future we’re talking about. My future; maybe yours too. Because, a lad in your position, you’ve gotta be asking yourself what comes next, right?’