Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Are you here to tell me off ?’ she says.

  ‘Nope,’ he says. ‘Everyone gets a call now and then which gets to them personally; it just happens, it’s inevitable. And yeah, you went way over the line, but you didn’t do it self-indulgently, you didn’t do it at the caller’s expense, you were still thinking about looking after her, and in the end it was all right. If you ask me, you took a bigger risk with the tea thing. You could have lost her right then, you know.’

  ‘I just thought she needed to do something, something really ordinary, so she could concentrate on that instead of panicking?’

  ‘Yes, and it worked, but you did send her away from the phone.’

  ‘I won’t do it again.’

  ‘Really? That might be a pity. I’m just saying, use your judgement, and be aware. That’s all.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Mmm,’ says Father Tim. He blows out smoke again, and they look at Bexford waking up: delivery vans backing, shutters rattling up, the smell of frying bacon coming from somewhere.

  ‘So, if this isn’t a bollocking …’

  ‘Well. No. Um. This was more in the nature of … a religious observation,’ says Father Tim, studying the glowing end of his cigarette and for the first time looking faintly embarrassed. ‘I know I don’t talk about God much, but one of the things He’s very good for is confession. I heard the end of your call, and it sounds as if you’ve been carrying some hard, hard stuff for a long time. And I wondered if I could tempt you to come and join us on Sunday morning, and see if that might help?’

  ‘Me, get religion?’ says Val.

  ‘Ooh, that makes it sound very untempting, doesn’t it? As if it’s some kind of unpleasant thing to wear. Or maybe an illness. “Poor her, she’s got religion.” No. To me it’s more … a way of thinking about what’s going on for you?’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Father, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh well, your loss. Ours too, of course.’

  He doesn’t push it, and they smoke the rest of their fags in companionable peace. Then Father Louis pulls up in an elderly car, waving a fragrant paper bag.

  ‘Croissants!’ cries Father Tim, and jumps up from the cold stones as if he’s twenty. He looks back as he opens the car door.

  ‘D’you want to join us?’ he calls. ‘Louis always over-caters.’

  ‘No thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m having breakfast with my sister.’

  Vern

  The dinner jackets are like school uniform. They make all the men look the same. You can’t tell – at least from a distance – which penguin suits come from M&S and which from Savile Row. All the display, and all the competition, and all the shadings that tell apart different kinds of wealth, are in the clothing of the women. That blue velvet frock and discreet string of pearls, which clearly does multi-purpose duty for formal occasions: sensible, old-fashioned county posh. The watered-silk Italian jacket and paisley-print scarf: Hampstead. The drop-waisted ivory flapper dress, a beautiful recreation or conceivably vintage: City money. The hourglass magenta satin thing with matching fascinator: recent ascent to the big time, and here a bit of a faux pas. It would have been better suited to Ascot. Vern likes looking but he has no one female on his arm to identify him in turn. He glides along the garden terrace, massively monochrome between the fuchsias, and offers no assistance to the onlooker in working out that his dinner suit is indeed tailor-made (as it kind of has to be, given how egg-shaped he has become) but tailor-made by Manny Perlstein in the arcade behind Bexford station. He descends the brick steps, one leg at a time, and sets forth solitary and self-contained across the lawn towards the ha-ha. No wife beside him: he never wanted to remarry, after Kath, and these last few years he has preferred to handle that whole side of life on a straightforward cash basis. No daughter either. This isn’t Sally or Becky’s kind of thing, and he gave up trying to invite them years ago. He is, however, followed at a discreet distance by a waiter. Who, once Vern has selected a picnic spot under a pretty flowering tree, with a view towards the Downs in one direction and the new opera house in the other, sets him up with lawn chair, folding table, linen and cutlery, and then proceeds to serve upon it the first of many courses.

  ‘Hello,’ says Vern affably, tucking his napkin into his collar. The party next to him are having a more conventional déjeuner sur l’herbe, a middle-aged man and two middle-aged women of the County Posh genus sitting on a rug around a hamper, sharing a bottle of Moët in plastic flutes. They watch, fascinated, as the waiter cooks Vern an omelette on a silver spirit lamp. The blue flame is almost invisible in the June sunlight, but the smell of butter and chervil saturates the air. Vern sips at Pouilly-Fuissé.

  ‘I say,’ says the man on the rug, ‘that looks splendid.’

  ‘Well!’ says Vern. ‘Why not push the boat out, I say.’

  ‘I thought we had,’ says one of the women. ‘You know, bubbly and nibbles. But, gosh. It looks like you’ve pushed it out a lot further!’

  ‘I don’t do it every year,’ says Vern, factual rather than apologetic. ‘Wouldn’t have been a lot of point last year, fr’instance; place was still a building site.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the other woman, sounding ever so slightly surprised, now that she has clocked his accent properly. ‘Are you a regular?’

  ‘Haven’t missed the opening day of the Festival for, oh, twelve years,’ says Vern. ‘You?’

  ‘Now and again,’ she says. ‘Not as faithful as you, by the sound of it. But then we always have to drag Rory here away from Twickenham, don’t we, darling?’

  ‘Is that right,’ says Vern. He finishes the omelette and moves on to foie gras on toast triangles, with a salad of chicory and endives.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ the man is saying, jutting his square chin. ‘Lovely day out here, obviously: but I have to say, I know it’s heresy, but I have to say, I’ve never really got the point of opera?’

  He says this comfortably. He says it as if, his whole squarechinned life long, he has been saying confidently stupid things, and the world has reliably responded by saying, good point, Rory old man.

  ‘No, I don’t expect you have,’ says Vern. And since he sounds just as genial saying it, it takes a minute before it sinks in; before the man looks away, and his wife flushes. Vern beams down at them, and applies himself to the creamy unction of the pâté, the bitter crunch of the leaves. But something about the confidence of Vern’s rudeness, his comfort as he dismisses them, turns out to have generated a reaction in good old Rory like a Labrador rolling over. He waits politely till the pâté is replaced by beef Wellington on a chafing dish, and the waiter is uncorking a half-bottle of claret, and then clears his throat with an attention-seeking noise, low and submissive.

  ‘D’you mind my asking what line you’re in?’ he says.

  ‘Property,’ says Vern.

  ‘Commercial? We do a bit—’

  ‘No, historic buildings.’ Vern sucks his fingertips, wipes them on his napkin, and pulls out a pair of gold half-moon spectacles through which he considers his neighbours. Probably not candidates to participate in the regeneration of architecturally significant South and East London. They look as if they are very firmly rooted in the Old Rectory, Little Fuddling, and likely to stay there. But you never know; maybe they have London-based offspring with a yen for architraves, and the kind of City job required to pay for them. Vern’s empire is still centred on Bexford Rise and its counterparts in Camberwell and Dulwich, but he has recently been doing more in Spitalfields and Shoreditch, from which his clients can walk to their dealing desks. Next will come Borough, all being well. He’s got his eye on a run-down eighteenth-century square just in the shadow of the Guy’s Hospital tower block, all black brick and white sills, which should respond beautifully to Vern’s rigidly cost-controlled, by now standardised spruce-up and restoration job. He should be able to get a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of value out of each house there, easy. And from there, the foot commute to the City he can offer wi
ll be a stroll across London Bridge. Seagulls, HMS Belfast, the Tower, St Paul’s doing its famous thing on the skyline: it’s amazing how much his business model is based on selling back to people a sanitised, touristic version of the grimy old city. He’s a tour guide, he’s a set-dresser. He’s a pediment pimp. He’s Mary Fucking Poppins. But he’s not knocking it. It works. He fishes in his wallet and passes across a business card. THE FEATHERSTONE ESTATE, it says, and then in italics: Conserving the Georgian Capital. He had them run up on a hand press by one of his anchor-tenant nutters, a man who takes his eighteenth-century lifestyle so seriously that he cleans his Persian carpets by scattering tea leaves on them, and plays the harpsichord in an actual wig. ‘The face is Baskerville, of course,’ the nutter said, ‘but you’ll like this, Mr Taylor: it’s original lead t—’ ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Vern. Thick cream card and a slightly wonky handcrafted quality, to press the pleasure buttons of the upper middle class: that was all he needed to know. And indeed, when he hands it over now, Rory the rugby-lover takes it as reverently as he could wish.

  ‘D’you know, I think I’ve heard of you?’ says Rory. Impossible for someone like this, notes Vern, not to talk as if they’re conferring something, even in self-abasing mode.

  ‘We get a few write-ups,’ Vern agrees.

  ‘Yes – something in one of the colour supplements, just recently.’

  ‘The Observer.’

  ‘Yes; extraordinary stuff. Pictures of a chap who doesn’t believe in electric light …?’

  ‘That was the one. S’matter of fact, he printed those for me,’ says Vern, gratified.

  ‘Did he; did he.’

  ‘Oh, do leave the poor chap alone to eat his lunch, darling,’ says Rory’s wife, smiling tightly.

  ‘Sorry, of course I will. Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll just keep this. You see, we have had rather a good year ourselves, thanks to Lloyd’s, and we’ve, you know, wondered about the possibility of a – a little pied-à-terre, perhaps.’

  ‘Have we wondered that?’ his wife asks, showing her teeth.

  ‘Yes, we have. So maybe I’ll be in touch!’

  Vern’s mouth is full of bloody beef fillet and flaking crust. It’s possible, of course, that this is one of those Hooray Henry men who is idiotic about everything except money, and that Rory through luck or skill has attached himself to one of the few syndicates at Lloyd’s which hasn’t run into trouble underwriting asbestos or hurricane risks. But from what Vern hears, it’s far more likely that the Old Rectory in Little Fuddling has already been inadvertently gambled away, and Rory simply doesn’t know it yet. Vern nods gravely, and swallows. The sun brightens the distant hills, dapples his tablecloth, and picks out all over the emerald-green grass the sombre or resplendent figures of his prey. He finishes the beef, and moves on to a lemon mousse, accompanied by a pipkin of Sauternes. Then, of course, the cheeses.

  Vern has booked himself a box. Lately, ordinary-sized seats have come to feel rather constricting. And in any case, the point of today is as much to show off the new opera house as it is to unveil the new production on its stage, so why not get the effect at its best? As the five-minute bell goes, he wades his way patiently around a curving corridor of blond wood and finds his door. Oh yes, a very successful treat for the eyes. He has bought himself an elegant compartment at the foot of a vertical wall of other elegant compartments, a pigeon loft for opulence, and filling with the soft becking and cooing of wealth at play. The auditorium is deep, and very steeply raked, with the seats for those of slightly less wealth rising in semicircle stacked above semicircle. As a builder – as a builder obliged by his business model to spend his time among old stuff, and cunning simulations of old stuff – Vern enjoys how unashamedly new the look is. The wood is pale and fresh, the gold paint is bright, the exposed red bricks aren’t pretending to be anything but straight from the kiln. He prefers out-and-out modern himself, in steel and glass, like his own flat; but this will do nicely, this is a lovely job, and when he’s nudged the comfortably broad armchair around to face front, and settled there with his arms crossed over his belly, he’s floating just above the orchestra, mere feet from the front apron of the stage. The company will be singing to him. The lights will go down, and he will eat the music up.

  And it is a really good production, that’s instantly clear. Mozart is not Vern’s favourite – he prefers something a bit more blatant and stormy – but this version of The Marriage of Figaro does the light/heavy mixture of the story beautifully. It’s a bedroom farce, and it’s about true love; it’s got jumping out of windows, and heavy-duty redemption; it’s a romp, and it wants you to take the love lives of servants as seriously as those of counts and countesses. It goes from silly to heartfelt and nimbly back again, and all of those strings doing their pinpoint golden thing under Vern’s feet, for the baton of the man in the white jacket, are the right sound somehow for the mobile moods of it. Actually buoyant, possibly sad! say the violins. Possibly buoyant, actually sad! reply the cellos. Whatever you feel, the woodwinds put in, it will be quite clear. Though subject to change! the violins reason. Though subject to change, the woodwinds concur.

  Figaro the valet is a wry, quick, handsome, curly-headed bass, pulling faces and nipping up and down ladders. Susanna the maid, his intended, is a self-possessed soprano, a bit too skinny for Vern’s taste but lovely, no question. The Count, their master, is being played by a German baritone who is very good at a kind of sulky, spoiled sarcasm. His neglected wife the Countess has slightly more old-school plunging-nightgown heft to her, and Vern enjoys the scene where she sighs throbbingly amid her bedsheets. But all four of them are acting properly, not just trudging to their marks and letting go with the vocal cords, the way some big names used to when Vern started going. All of them have faces alive and communicative, all of them are witty. All of them are singing from somewhere fully inside the story of how the Count, who proudly abolished droit du seigneur in his domains, now wants it back again so he can have his way with Susanna on her wedding night. Laughter and indignation and fear chase each other through choruses in which they harmonise their disagreements while they’re having them, shaking off technical difficulty like someone smilingly brushing a sleeve. It’s glorious, it’s masterly. And the set, like an extra compliment to Vern in his box, is made of the same architecture as his London houses, reduced to lines and planes and airy gestures.

  Why, then, with all this clever beauty laid out for him to banquet on, does Vern feel a thread of unhappiness tightening inside him, a faint faint signal, growing stronger, that something is wrong? Why, then, glancing back at the rapt and glimmering tiers of faces in the darkness, does Vern feel that, alone among the enchanted, he is being subtly got at by the pleasure he paid for? It’s not an abstract disquiet, this. It’s not just a thought in his head. It’s physical. He feels it as a gripe in his gut, an ache in his neck, a dull twinging in the nerves of his arms. In fact he wonders for a minute if he could be having a heart attack – which is indeed a fear of his. But nothing hurts in his chest, he has no pins and needles, nothing is afflicting him on his left side particularly, which is where they say you feel it. He remains solid. He is clad in slab armour. So what can be wrong, he thinks angrily. What can be wrong when nothing is wrong. Check the inventory: everything is all right. He is rich. He has the world where he wants it. He has a Bentley parked outside. He can afford to buy himself any pleasure. He is surrounded by delicacies, none forbidden. Death is still far away (surely). Yet something makes him ache; something coming from the stage. Perhaps it’s Cherubino’s song. Cherubino the page, played by a girl whose thighs look good in breeches, does comedy philandering mostly, like a for-laughs teenage version of the Count; but in Act Two he turns plaintive.

  Ricerco un bene fuori di me,

  non so chi’l tiene, non so cos’è

  he sings, and up on the proscenium, where the subtitles are projected, the English text spells out

  I seek a blessing outside myself,

/>   from whom I don’t know, or what it even is.

  Is it that? Certainly the misery eases when the song ends, and Mozart glissades back into farce mode. Cherubino hides in a cupboard; Cherubino jumps out the window; Figaro pretends it was him; just when he seems to be getting away with it, enter a comedy gardener. All’s well again, or at least better. But then, as the act ends, the Count comes bursting in with a pack of assorted minions, and suddenly Susanna, Figaro and the Countess are on the far side of the stage facing off against the Count and the minions, singing against each other like two opposing gangs. And the mysterious grip on Vern is back, the mysterious alarm. Over there, the forces of love singing their heads off, over here the gathered musical army of … what? Spite, vengeance, age’s anger with youth, and at the head of it, on the Count’s face and in his voice, a despairing greed. Perhaps it would be better if Vern were seeing it from the opposite cliff face of boxes, so it didn’t seem as if the lovers’ army were all singing at him. Perhaps that’s it: he booked the box in the wrong place, and now he is on the wrong side.

  When the interval comes, Vern stumps to the garden, stumps to his waiter, ignoring the paper lanterns in the trees, ignoring the revellers, and those who happen to glance at his face step out of his way. He sits and waits to be served. This time, when the food starts coming, he eats as if he is entombing something. Burying it under shovels-full; spoons-full; forks-full. Mozart can fuck himself with all his fine balances. Vern eats the turbot. Vern eats the cream sauce. Vern eats the pheasant. Vern eats the morels. Vern eats the Roquefort. Vern eats the grapes. Vern eats the truffles. Vern eats.