An Absence of Natural Light (2 page)

‘No skiing, I‘ve heard.'

He shook his head and smiled. ‘No, Premiership footballers aren't allowed to ski. But it goes deeper than that. The club found me my first digs. They sorted my bank account and life-insurance and driving lessons. Then they moved Melody and me into a nice little house and then when I started playing regularly for the first team and committed to a five-year contract, they arranged the purchase of the big house I called home until a fortnight ago. There's loads of grown-up, take-responsibility stuff I've just never done.'

‘Grown-up, take-responsibility stuff can be pretty boring,' Rebecca said.

‘Yeah, but it's still a novelty to me. Buying this place is just the beginning.'

‘Starting a new life?'

‘More a case of giving the only one I've got a bit more depth.'

‘Will you need help arranging a mortgage? There are independent financial advisers we can recommend, totally impartially.'

He grinned at that. ‘I'm what I think they call a cash buyer,' he said.

He was as good as his word. The sale went through smoothly. She didn't hear anything from Tom Harper for three weeks after completion and didn't realistically expect to ever again when, on a Thursday afternoon, he called her on her mobile. She'd forgotten that she'd given him her card as she'd dropped him off that rainy afternoon near Esher, where he'd been staying as a guest of one of his old international team-mates while he house-hunted in London.

She'd insisted on driving him there rather than have him endure a journey by taxi or train. She'd never made an easier sale and was in a buoyant mood and there was the surprising fact too that she'd found herself enjoying his company.

‘Why don't you have a car?'

‘Melody wants the Jag and the Mercedes. I've no interest in contesting.'

Rebecca nodded, thinking about the poster campaign he'd featured in. ‘Will Jaguar give you another one?'

‘Now I'm on the scrap-heap?'

‘I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself.'

‘I'm just being realistic. At best I'm damaged goods.'

‘I hope it works out for you Tom, I really do.'

‘Thanks. I'll give you a call in a few weeks, once domestic bliss has had a chance to set in, let you know how it's all going.'

She'd laughed at that and not really imagined that he would, until he did.

‘I'd like to ask you out for a drink, maybe for a meal if you could tolerate my company for longer than it takes to down a glass of wine.'

‘How do you know I'm single?'

‘I know you're not married, Rebecca. If you were you'd wear the ring to prevent the hassle someone who looks like you is bound to get from clients like me.'

She said, ‘I've never met another client quite like you.'

‘Is that a good or a bad thing?'

‘Stop fishing.'

‘I've only spoken face-to-face to about five people since I moved here and four of them were crewing a furniture van.'

‘I'll put you on hold,' she said, ‘while I get my violin.'

‘I really, really like the flat. I feel like I'm due a celebration and for obvious reasons, I'd like to celebrate with you.'

‘If I say no?'

There was a pause. Then he said, ‘I've still got the number of the bloke who switched on the gas supply, I suppose. He's bound to look more fetching outside of his overalls. Plus, he follows the club I played for.'

‘You're very funny.'

‘Except I didn't call just to amuse you.'

‘I'm not a one-night stand, Tom.'

He was silent on the end of the line. She thought he might have broken the connection and endured an unexpected surge of disappointment. Then he said, ‘Melody was the first woman I shared a bed with and I never entertained a single unfaithful thought throughout our marriage.'

‘I believe that, Tom. But now you're thinking as a single man.'

He was silent again. Then he said, ‘Yes, Rebecca, I am.'

‘I'm free on Saturday,' she said.

‘A drink?'

‘We'll start with a drink. I'm actually pretty confident I like you enough for dinner.'

‘Three whole courses?'

‘That might be pushing your luck.'

They went to a pizza restaurant she knew at Gabriel's Wharf on the South Bank. It wasn't far from her own flat on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge. She chose it because it wasn't The Ivy or the Chiltern Firehouse where he would have spent eight or ten times more. Other diners wouldn't have approached him for selfies at either of those places because they were either way too cool or because they were as famous in their own way as Tom Harper was. But he was only approached a couple of times in the pizzeria and he was gracious about it. He was a gracious man, unless he just wanted his dinner guest to think he was.

That was an uncharitable thought. Rebecca hadn't always been so wary. She was wary now because of her past mistakes in thinking the best of men who hadn't in the end turned out to be very good, or nice, or honourable. She felt justified in being cautious with someone as good-looking and successful as the man who'd invited her out. He was absurdly eligible. She thought him almost dangerously attractive. But she needed to be careful not to try to make him pay for her past misjudgments when he'd done nothing at all to hurt her. It was tricky. She thought she'd almost blown it over the phone.

They had been served their puddings, were on the cheese and biscuits and coffee, technically their fourth course, when he mentioned the music.

‘You know that joke I made about Lars Ulrich?'

‘He isn't in London, Tom. Honestly he's not. He went from Denmark on a sports scholarship to America as a student. He was a tennis prodigy and basically he formed a band and just stayed. That was in Southern California. He lives in New York now.'

Tom was staring at her. ‘Christ,' he said, ‘what a mine of unexpected information you are.'

‘It's my guilty secret,' she said. ‘I like Metallica.' She pointed at her iPhone on the table between them. ‘Lars is drumming on about half the tunes on my playlist.'

Tom looked at the phone. He said, ‘Anyway, you're right, it isn't him.'

‘What isn't?'

‘The music I've been hearing at night. It's very faint and it's not every night and it sounds like it's coming from downstairs.'

‘Well it no doubt would be if you're hearing it in bed.'

‘No. I hear it sort of drifting up, usually when I'm in the sitting room. Like I said, it's very faint, almost like an echo more than an actual tune. It's jazz, sort of mournful, a trumpet as the lead. It must be coming from a neighbour's basement.'

Rebecca frowned. ‘I wasn't lying to you when I said those walls are very thick.'

‘I'm sure you weren't. In fact I know you weren't, from when I had the survey done. The surveyor kept commenting on the building spec. And it's faint like I said, barely audible. I kind of wish I could place it, but I'm no authority on jazz.' He took a sip of his beer and blinked and looked at her brightly and said, ‘That's me all over, just an ex-pro player beating on the doors of the knacker's yard, ignorant as they come, knowing bugger-all about anything except kicking a ball, which I can no longer do.'

‘What is it you'd like to know more about?'

He was still looking at her. He looked out of the window to his right, to the glittering night vista of the river, with its black water and reflected, floating shimmers of Embankment light. He turned back to her. ‘Everything, Rebecca,' he said. ‘All of it.'

He walked her home along the river. Thirty seconds into their progress she hooked her arm through his and leant into him. It was late by now and dark but there was enough light from the orbs atop the ornamental lampposts for them to see and be seen. People approached them going the other way, some of them double-taking as they recognized the man she was with. Of course they did; he'd led his country as well as his club and had played all over the world. Millions had seen him from the tiered seats of stadiums. Hundreds of millions had watched him on their TV screens.

The run of elaborate lights to their left were known as the dolphin lampposts. This was a misnomer because the fish coiled around their cast iron bases were apparently modeled on sturgeon. They didn't look like sturgeon to Rebecca. They looked mythic, she thought, wondering whether any of this was known to Tom and deciding probably none of it was. Did it matter? It did, only, though, because knowledge mattered so much to him.

‘Do you know what an autodidact is?'

‘No. I don't. I'm guessing it might be something to do with sleepwalking.'

‘That's a somnambulist.'

‘Show-off.'

‘An autodidact is someone who educates themselves by reading the contents of a library alphabetically. They learn everything, just by ploughing indiscriminately through the whole bloody lot.'

‘Good word.'

‘It's what I imagine you doing, at night, in that sitting room of yours, as the phantom jazz creeps up the stairs.'

He stopped, obviously offended. She wondered if the wine had loosened her tongue further than it would have gone completely sober. He shrugged himself free of her and she blinked and was about to mouth an apology when he turned to face her fully and lifted his hands and cupped her head in the cradle of his fingers, his thumbs light against her cheeks. And pulled her to him and kissed her, properly.

‘There,' he said when the kiss eventually broke.

‘Why did you do that? Was it to shut me up?'

‘Because I wanted to, because I've wanted to since you walked into Costa that afternoon three weeks ago with your hair all damp from the rain and I saw you for the first time.'

He kissed her again. And they kissed a third time at her front door before she closed it and he turned for his virtuous journey home, still able to taste her, wishing the sensation would last longer than he knew it would.

Tom heard the music again that night. He got to the flat only after midnight. He'd walked back along the Embankment and over Lambeth Bridge and hailed a cab on Horseferry Road. Jaguar had said they would give him another car, which had been good for his ego but had done nothing much to affect his daily routine. After three weeks in London, he'd concluded you drove in the centre of the city only if there was absolutely no alternative.

He got in tired. He felt excited – no, elated – about what had happened with Rebecca. He could still smell her perfume on his fingertips. In Colorado he'd been about as convinced that there was life after football as he thought a committed atheist might be about life after death. He'd wanted something new and different. He'd just doubted he was really equipped for it. It had seemed daunting, unimaginable, really. Then this had gone and happened.

The music droned, almost imperceptibly, on the edge of his hearing, but he thought it had got fractionally louder and more solid than the first time he'd become aware of it. Then it might almost have been imagined; now it was undeniably there. He thought he recognized it, probably from a car or coffee commercial using the soundtrack to give what it was selling an aura of sophistication. It was naggingly familiar. Maybe he had heard it in a posh boutique with Melody on one of those endless weekday afternoons as she'd tried on a series of expensive outfits in what he was thinking of increasingly as his old life.

He just didn't know. Jazz was unexplored territory. He'd been hurt by Rebecca's earlier autodidact line because he had actually done a bit of that recently. The problem was that there weren't just gaps to fill in his knowledge and experience of the wider world. There were chasms to try to bridge securely and then attempt to cross.

It was definitely louder. His beatnik neighbour must have cranked up the volume on his stereo. It had to be one of those proper, old-fashioned stereo systems too. The wattage on the speakers you plugged an iPhone into was too feeble to fire the sound through walls like these. Except that it sounded, actually, as though it was coming not from next door on either side of him, but from his own basement. The tune was leaking through the doorframe at the top of the basement staircase. He looked across to where that hung. The sound was brassy and mournful and insistent. With a surprised swallow of trepidation, Tom knew that he was going to have a look.

The stairs on the other side of the door were stone and led straight down. The door had to be pulled rather than pushed open, he supposed as a safety precaution. You were forced to take a step back to make room for it so the stairs on the other side couldn't come as a nasty surprise. He naturally expected the music to become louder and gain in clarity when he opened the door and shifted the obstruction, but it didn't. It actually seemed to fade, in a way that seemed calculated and therefore slightly menacing.

It's late, he thought, I'm tired. And the tune had become barely audible again. He switched on the stairway lights, industrial in character, ovals of frosted glass bracketed with loops of blue painted metal. They looked the business, those lights, when he switched them on; fit for a power station or a submarine, except that they didn't actually do their principal job of providing much light.

He hadn't known what an autodidact was. He hadn't known what somnambulism was either. But there was another word on the tip of his tongue he thought would describe the music he could no longer hear but had heard recently enough to have a clear memory of. He began to descend the steps. The word was syncopation. It described the way jazz instruments blended to improvise a tune. The music he had heard had been syncopated. He thought it was probably an old recording, something taped from a live session done in a studio, dingy with cigarette smoke, a lifetime ago.

He had no sense there was anyone at all in the basement. It was dark beyond the stairs but he couldn't hear a sound down there now. He'd had the upper rooms furnished, but had done nothing yet with this substantial, stone-flagged space. The darkness was still and quiet and the sense of menace he'd felt on the other side of the basement door had receded. He reached for the switch at the bottom of the steps and the lights came on, brightly: pearly glass orbs he'd been told had been designed to provide light without casting shadows.