Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  Vern thinks it through again, carefully, and then types up a couple of documents to take away with him, pecking at the keys with two fingers. Before he goes, he spreads out the ledgers Kath is most likely to need and pours all the water in the kettle over them. The ink floats off the columns in smears and eddies. Take that, sweetheart. On the way out, he locks up, breaks off the key in the lock and posts the stub back through the letterbox. You can pay for a locksmith and all. Right: a fry-up, and then to work.

  An hour later, and even the solid savoury ballast of sausage bacon egg beans and a fried slice is not quite able to keep him in good heart. He’s over on the bit of infill estate that patched the bomb damage on one side of Bexford Rise, about two thirds of the way up, and not far from his hulk of a house, which he plans to look in on later. The needling rain is still falling from the low clouds, fine-bore, penetrating. It has penetrated Vern’s brolly. It’s one of those cheap fold-up ones. It isn’t made for a sustained downpour and, crumpled and dainty in a big man’s hand, it doesn’t have the coverage either. His head is merely damp, but his shoulders are soaked. The electric blue of his suit has turned to dark, glistening purple. The extra, wet weight ensures that, though his hands are numb, the rest of him is perversely hot. Overflow from blocked drainpipes sends sheets of wet creeping down the brickwork of the blocks.

  So far, no one has answered the door in the row of maisonettes facing the big houses on the Rise. It must be working-age families in here, mostly, and they’re the least likely takers for his proposition. He wants the ill, the old, the lonely. But he thought he’d better work through the maisonettes before heading up to the more probable bets on the seventh floor, the level at which building societies start refusing to lend. A maisonette would be a bigger pay-off than a flat, if he could get one. All this he expected; but it’s still dispiriting to stand there in the wet at door after door, getting his trustworthy smile ready, for no result.

  The sixth and last door, however, has signs of life behind it and when he knocks it’s opened, by a stringy, harassed-looking man of about his own age.

  ‘Yeah?’ he says. Or begins to say. While the word is still in his mouth, a huge voice from upstairs breaks in.

  ‘Oi! If you’re limping down the street, in new boots so tight they squeak, and your clothes are magnifeek—’

  ‘Gary!’ shouts the guy in the doorway, turning back towards the stairs. ‘Gary! What have I bloody told you, and bloody told you, about turning down the bloody music?’

  ‘When the rhythm starts to speak, from Pacifeek to Atlanteek, move yer aching plates of meat—’

  ‘GARY! Turn off the fucking music!’

  ‘ONE GIANT LEA—’

  And the music stops, or at any rate dwindles so sharply it counts as silence compared to what it was before.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ says the man, rubbing his hand wearily on his face. ‘What?’

  ‘Teenagers, eh?’ says Vern, sympathetically. But before he can get any further, the man in the doorway leans forward and peers at him closely.

  ‘Good grief,’ he says. ‘It’s Vermin Taylor.’

  ‘You what?’ says Vern.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry. Shouldn’t stick you with a school nickname: not fair. But it is you, isn’t it. Vernon Taylor, right?’

  ‘Do we know each other?’

  ‘We went to the same primary school. Halstead Road?’

  ‘That’s right. But, so – who are you?’

  ‘Alec Torrance,’ says the bloke, and sticks a hand out. Vern shakes it cautiously; and now, knowing what he’s looking for, when he stares at the face in front of him (frazzled, unshaved) he can see a younger version superimposed or maybe coming up from beneath.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘yeah … You were the cheeky little bugger, weren’t you? The one who was always winding up whatsisname, the head.’

  ‘Henry Hardy.’

  ‘That’s right. Yeah, you used to leave his aitches off on purpose, didn’t you?’

  ‘’Fraid so, yeah.’

  ‘And he’d turn red, and he’d go—’

  ‘At least try to speak properly, boy!’ says the man on the step.

  They smile uncertainly.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Vern.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Torrance.

  But the moment fades quickly away. Bringing the past closer also brings closer the kids they were, the fat boy facing the smart-arse. They didn’t like each other then, and there’s no reason they should like each other now. Vernon hasn’t forgotten being Vermin Taylor, or forgiven it. He’s glad to see that the clever little bugger has grown up to be a bit of a mess. Home in the middle of the day; bedraggled; shouting at his kids; clothes one step up from pyjamas. Definite whiff of failure there. Perhaps this needn’t be a wasted conversation. And the angry bear who was baulked of his wish to mash and to shred earlier makes himself felt. He rises and stretches, somewhere down in Vern, and lets it be known that there’d be some predatory satisfaction in having it be the smart-arse that gets squeezed in the urgent pursuit of recapitalisation.

  ‘So, what are you up to, then, these days?’ asks Vern, with a different friendliness. ‘Between jobs?’

  ‘Nah, I’m in the print. Always have been. Typesetter on The Times. Only, you know, we’re out – well, not technically on strike, but it comes to the same thing. Have been for nearly a year.’

  Oh. ‘Must be tough,’ says Vern. ‘Hard times, eh?’

  ‘’S all right,’ says Torrance, bridling slightly and palpably rejecting the sympathy. ‘Mind you, I’m not a very good prospect if you’re selling something. Are you selling something?’

  ‘I am not a fucking brush salesman!’ snarls Vern, with no warning to himself that he might be about to lose his temper, no appreciable interval between manipulative calm and totally losing it. Zero to rage in nought seconds.

  ‘Whoa!’ says Torrance, hands up in front of him, eyebrows shooting up too. ‘You’re the one standing on my doorstep, mate.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Vern into the hand he has clapped across his face. Big pink clamp, gripping the squidgy mask that is refusing to behave.

  Torrance, who had taken hold of the door and was in the process of stepping back to close it, pauses and hesitates.

  ‘And I thought I was having a shit day,’ he says. ‘Here … d’you wanna come in and have a cup of tea? You’re all wet.’

  Ordinarily, Vern would have discarded with scorn any such hideous display of pity – particularly from some up-himself, overpaid, feather-bedding, Spanish-practising, never-taken-a-business-risk-in-his-life tosser of a Fleet Street Bolshevik. But today he finds himself squeezing obediently through a dark little hall hung with coats and into a narrow little kitchen with a table jutting out from the wall that just has room for four chairs round it. Titchy-boom titchy-boom comes the thread of music from upstairs, and Torrance casts an exasperated glance at the ceiling. Rain still wanders down the window over the sink and the view outside is soggy murk. But what Vern notices is that the place, though small, is tidy. Everything is where it belongs. There are biros in a jar next to a phone on the wall. There are photos from family holidays up on a corkboard, and a note about someone going to the dentist. The washing-up has just been done, presumably by the Bolshevik, and the kitchen smells of washing-up liquid and Vim: clean smells, the smells of things working as they should. It looks like the land of lost content, to Vern.

  ‘Sit down, take the weight off,’ says his host.

  ‘I’ll get the cushions wet,’ Vern says.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Now, here are some Kleenex, and I’ll just put the ke—’

  ‘My wife threw me out this morning,’ Vern tells the tabletop.

  ‘Oh, mate! Oh, mate. Right, scratch the tea.’

  Torrance fetches down a tumbler and a whisky bottle from a cupboard, and pours Vern a couple of golden fingerfuls. Then he sits down himself opposite, props his forehead on splayed fingers, and clearly prepares to listen.

  But Vern doesn’t know how t
his goes. He slurps the whisky, and it does warm him, but he has no idea how to put the mass of today’s misery into acceptable form; into any form, really, for as well as the problem of keeping the private stuff private, about the business, there’s the underlying difficulty of knowing how to turn any of this stuff into a story in the first place, this stuff about trust, about finding you had no ally.

  ‘She,’ he tries. ‘I thought,’ he tries.

  Torrance waits. But nothing else is forthcoming. A puzzled little crinkle appears between his eyebrows.

  ‘Well,’ he says eventually, coaxingly, ‘what is it you do do, Vernon?’

  ‘Property,’ says Vern.

  ‘Really?’

  More silence.

  ‘I wouldn’t of thought there was much for you round here, then? I mean, it’s all council, isn’t it. Or – ah, I get you. It’ll be that malarkey going on on the Rise you’re into, I suppose?’

  ‘What malarkey?’ says Vern, wanly.

  ‘You know – the Saab and Volvo brigade moving in. Hugo and Jocasta. Our new middle-class neighbours who just love the lovely Georgian architecture. Them, right? No?’

  ‘What, on the Rise?’

  ‘Yeah, go and look, must be four or five houses, now. But, mate—’

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ says Vern, surging to his feet and jogging the little table.

  ‘Al … right, but …’

  Torrance, baffled, follows him to the front door; tries one last time as Vern unfurls the comedy umbrella.

  ‘Wasn’t there something you wanted?’

  ‘Nothing you’d be interested in,’ says Vern firmly. ‘Thank you. That was very … kind.’

  That was very weird, Torrance’s face is saying plain as pie as the door shuts. But Vern turns away and hurries through the puddles to the alley at the end of the row that leads through to the Rise. It’s still raining, but the needles are turning to drizzle, supplemented by heavier splatters of local drops, where a breeze is beginning to stir the big trees of the Rise and to push at the grey cloudbase.

  He comes out by the railings, and there they are, the dark hulks of the Rise, marching up on their long slant as far as he can see to left and right. They go all the way from Lambert Street and the park down at the bottom up to the leafy crown of Bexford Hill. There must be, what, seventy or eighty of the things – grand dwellings once, for bankers and brokers and lawyers and doctors and prospering merchants, promising light and space and a vantage point above the dingy anthill where the fortunes had been made to pay for them. Two hundred years later and almost all of them are what Vern has always taken them to be: run-down, mislocated, impractical nightmares, too big to repair or to do anything with except cram with the least demanding of tenants till the day comes for demolition. Everywhere you look there’s ingrained soot, cracked stucco, streaks of water damage, black bricks bulging or showing cracks where the pointing has fallen out. The railings have all been missing since they were taken away during wartime drives for scrap, the areas are choked with rubbish. There’s the scaly grey of old, old dirt on the windowpanes.

  But Torrance is right. Trotting uphill and down again, Vern spots one, then another, then another, of the houses he was talking about. These ones do indeed have parked outside them an elderly green Saab, a mossy Audi, a silver Volvo estate missing one of its hubcaps: not glamorous, not conventionally posh, yet unmistakably the vehicles of the artsy bourgeoisie. The Saab has two bottles of wine and a sack of cement on the back seat. And the cars correspond to houses with scaffolding on them, with paint-stripped or partially paint-stripped front doors. One of these has ground-floor windows brilliantly lit, through which you can see walls painted a fresh white, hung with little grey rectangles of pictures. Another seems dark, and Vern has strolled up the front path to take a squint before he sees flickers of yellow inside, and finds he’s looking at a bearded guy in overalls stripping wallpaper by the light of, yes, three candles in a knackered old paint-dripped candelabra, an actual fucking candelabra, the light fitting overhead hanging down broken by its wires.

  None of it gives the impression of work with much of a budget behind it. It’s enthusiastic amateur stuff. The Saab-drivers are doing middle-class homesteading out here in the wilderness of Bexford. Which means, which must mean, that they love all this; that they positively want the wonky eighteenth-century grates, and the cracked oak floorboards under the geological sediments of lino and plywood and underlay, and the bowed old lath-and-plaster behind the layers of cheap wallpaper. Want it enough to do for themselves, on the cheap down here, what they wouldn’t be able to afford if it had stayed posh, if it had remained in good nick over the centuries, as in, say, Belgravia. Which means, Vern thinks, that for every out-and-out bearded architectural fanatic willing to do the job on their own account, there might well be, in fact there almost certainly must be, a whole bunch of slightly less fanatical people with the same tastes, who’d pay to have a house like this sorted out for them.

  He stares so hard at the man in overalls, thinking this through, that in the end he feels Vern’s gaze, and turns, and jumps, finding an oval blue spectre looming in the wet darkness of his doorstep. Vern nods, and goes away to stand instead on the doorstep of the building he already owns. The umbrella gets in the way, so he folds it, and just ignores the rain as he stares upwards, trying to see something desirable here, something precious. The house looms above him, a crumbling black cliff. Old, old, old, say his own reactions, meaning by that: chewed up by time, used up by time, in a funny way contaminated by time, as if all the lives lived in this heavy rookery for humans, first the posh ones with the wigs and the ball dresses, then all the ever-poorer clerks and labourers and flotsam from around the world, with their coughing children, and their meals cooked on gas rings in dirty corners, have made it impossible for there ever to be a fresh start here, a new beginning, there being so much living and dying already ingrained here, stuck to surfaces like grease, laid down in scungy thicknesses. There’s something else too, a horrible rumour that sometimes things – objects – exist on a longer and slower cycle than the living one, that sometime they outlast us, overshadow us, will still be standing when we are removed as mortal rubbish, however much we’d prefer it to be the other way round, with our frayed possessions discarded but our skins immortal. Ugh. He wouldn’t live here. He’s definitely going to a B&B. But: antique, antique, antique is what he has to train himself to think, he supposes. He had better read up on what the incomers want, in case he cleans away some grubby old thing they cherish. Or get someone to explain it to him. Perhaps that’s been the error of his businesses all along. He kept wanting to make things happen, when he should have found something that was happening anyway, and just gone along with it.

  But he will need capital, if he’s going to start buying up and doing up the Rise, and Deakin is his best quick source for it, he reckons. So as the rain dies away into drips, and a knot of brightness begins to untie in the clouds, he’s back over in the flats, working his way along the concrete walkway of the seventh floor, knocking and knocking and knocking, until eventually one opens, and there stands a beautifully confused-looking pensioner in his undershirt.

  ‘Hello,’ says Vern warmly. ‘I represent … Featherstone Investments. How would you, sir, like to make two thousand pounds, right now?’

  Val

  Mike gets headaches. Bad enough ones that they lay him out for half a day at a time, unable to bear the light. The brewery is starting to complain about the shifts he’s missing. Today’s a Saturday, though, so he isn’t needed for work, and he lies in the bedroom at half past ten in a mess of sheets, with his eyes closed tight even against the tiny leaks of November daylight that make it through the slit in the curtains. It’s so dim in there by ordinary standards that it takes her eyes a minute to adjust when she takes him in a mug of tea. (White, three sugars.) There are violet shadows under his eyes, marks of weakness for once instead of the bruises and black eyes he brings home which are strength’s proud badges:
or the monstrous swelling of half his head he brought back that one time that someone hit him with a hammer. He looked like a jack-o’-lantern then, and like one was grinning, still grinning. But now a pain has taken hold of him that he didn’t choose and no one inflicted, and it has subdued his face to gentleness. You can see, as well as the delicacy of the coloured skin under his eyes, the tiny crow’s-feet lines coming at their corners. Like her, he’s thirty-nine, and in these moments when he can’t help himself, it shows. Impossible not to feel tenderness, or something like tenderness, standing over his animal length in the sheets, and seeing all that force temporarily laid low. He is the only beautiful thing in her life, as well as being the cause of all the ugly ones. When she makes a clink putting down the mug on the side table, he mumbles ‘Thanks, Mum.’ Then she goes back to the living room to go on cutting corned-beef sandwiches under the portrait of Hitler.

  She did manage to coax him to the doctor’s about the headaches. Unfortunately the doctor they got, Dr Sharma, was a young Asian woman. Mike was in his work clothes, but she could still read his tattoos. They glared at each other.

  ‘I see you work in a brewery, Mr Stone,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you by any chance drink to excess?’

  ‘This is crap,’ said Mike. ‘I’m not letting her put her hands on me.’

  ‘Believe me, I have no desire to.’