Fabulous

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. Power, I’d say.

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.

Did I say he was hunting for power? I’m wrong. It was far more complicated than that.

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.