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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.
If it had been up to Eliza, it’s unlikely there would have been any kind of stink. She is a very self-contained and self-reliant person and I believe she would have dealt with the issue discreetly. She’d told me once, when another agent got their dirty little mitts on a prime site with planning permission that we should have had exclusive, ‘Not for me to butt in but, just saying … The only way to keep a secret is not to tell people. Not to tell anyone. You boasted about it, didn’t you, to some friend of yours who’s got nothing to do with the biz, so you thought it was safe?’
It was true. I had.
‘Remember,’ she said. ‘No one.’
So when she noticed the way Acton was hanging around she kept quiet, but one morning, when they were in the penthouse, her personal trainer saw that Acton was out on the roof terrace. Seeing. And Eliza didn’t say ‘Keep your mouth shut’ because that would only have aggravated the thing. And the personal trainer mentioned it to Diana, and that was that.
‘One’s not quite enough.
Two leaves you wanting more.
Three is a disaster.
Acton’s on the floor.’
He’d had his three caipirinhas but he was still upright, chanting that doggerel in the bar we all frequented. I took his arm and got him into the backroom where I’d been sampling a Chablis with a solicitor who shared my interests. Griddled scallops to go with. She was an attractive female solicitor, but there was no need for Sophie to know that. Anyway, she pissed off home as soon as Acton started hollering.
‘Get a grip,’ I said.
‘What’s to grip?’ he said, subdued now, maudlin. ‘I’ve got nothing to grip onto. I’m lost. All those bitches are coming after me now. View halloo. Tally ho. With super-bitch leading the pack.’
Diana? Eliza?
All or any of them. Acton’s self-pity had transformed all women into bloodhounds.
‘And which of you rotten curs is going to help me?’
I took him home. William was waiting by the door. I’d called him. ‘I don’t have a key any more,’ he said, ‘but if he needs me …’ We had to wrestle Acton’s key ring from him while he babbled out his grievances against the ungrateful world. William lifted him over the threshold and begun shushing him as a parent shushes a wailing brat.
So what had happened? There are, as there always are, several ways of understanding the story. All the variants added up to one thing. Acton had been where he should not have been. He had seen what he should not have seen.
Bluff no-nonsense version … Woman, imagining herself alone in an empty flat (except for personal trainer of course), takes shower. Man happens by and sees what he shouldn’t. Blushes all round. No harm done.
But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, Eliza wasn’t alone in the shower. For another, she and the personal trainer had both seen Acton loitering on the roof terrace a couple of times before, around the time they came back from their evening run, so perhaps happenstance didn’t have that much to do with his being there.
Other versions were broadcast around the office in a babble of whispers.
‘William says they haven’t done it for, like, years.’
‘I mean it’s not a crime to like watching.’
‘Sex clubs, you have a whole room full of people, don’t you?’
‘That’s different. That’s consensual.’
There was the lubricious version: ‘I wouldn’t have minded an eyeful of that.’ The righteously indignant: ‘We owe it to all our female clients …’ The sheepish: ‘Well, come on – we’ve all had some fun up there.’ The collusive: ‘Best not rock the boat. I mean, good old Acton …’ The prurient: ‘What do you mean, on her knees?’ The legalistic: ‘Strictly speaking, they were all in breach of our agreement with Rokesmith.’ There were many variations on the creeped-out version. For everyone, suddenly, the picture of Acton, gloating over the entangled fauns, had ceased to be funny. And then there was the abject, frankly scared-shitless-of-losing-our-jobs afraid: ‘We have to tell Diana, don’t we? I mean if she hears and nobody’s spoken up …’
And then came the twist, ‘Haven’t you heard? Diana knows. Diana was there.’
There. Where? In the shower too? How? What doing? How positioned? On her knees?
To start with I imagined the trainer as one of those small-skulled, tremendously muscled, encouraging young men you see moving their clients’ limbs around in a physiotherapeutic kind of way in the park on a Sunday. When someone said, ‘No no, Doris is all-woman,’ the story’s significance suddenly switched. To watch a lusty woman having it off with an ideal embodiment of masculinity – that’s one thing. That’s to be a boy cheering on another boy at play. But to trespass into a women-only get-together, that’s different. That’s a no-no. That’s sweet poison. Imagine it. Three women. My mind swerves away.
William texted me: ‘Can we meet?’ When we did, he said, ‘I want you to know that Acton wasn’t a voyeur. Not that kind of a one anyway. I don’t think he ever even looked at porn. He didn’t want to watch sex. He just liked looking at bodies. At my feet, my hands, my elbows, the dip in my back, the way my neck meets my shoulders. He liked the look of naked flesh, that’s all.’
He seemed very agitated. It mattered to him that I understood. But to me peeping is peeping. I respected Diana. If she and Eliza, or she and the trainer, or all three together, were having it away, or not, that was their business. That wasn’t the point. The transgression was Acton’s.
One of the first things I learnt as a child was not-seeing. Shut your eyes and count to twenty. Shut your eyes and hold out your hands. Shut your eyes while Daddy’s undressing. Shut your eyes while I just … Don’t look until I tell you. Nothing to worry about. I’m just … Don’t look.
As I said, there are things from which I have chosen to avert my eyes, though they are – in a very profound and distressing sense – my own. Promiscuous looking – idly curious, lubricious, or simply appreciative – I see it as a pernicious liberty to take.
Diana called us in one by one. We were all intimidated by her, but we didn’t fully have her measure. We mistook her reserve for uptightness. She didn’t muck in, so we tended to ignore her, deferring instead to her chosen deputies, Acton among them. We hadn’t really understood how she’d run us. Now she showed her power.
She handed us teeth. She stroked our fingers until the claws grew. She stiffened our jaws until they clenched like pliers. She lengthened our spines and hardened our skulls and made our eyes into laser guns and our noses into missiles. She growled at us until we growled back, maddened by our own subservience. She let it be known that we were her pack now, and there was to be no mercy for mavericks. She invoked Rokesmith and the likely consequences of his displeasure – should