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 sout
h 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 t
he 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.
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