An Absence of Natural Light (3 page)

Rebecca had told him that. Rebecca, whose perfume clung to his fingers now, had told him that when he'd first toured the flat a little more than three weeks ago.

Something caught his eye, on the floor by the far wall, eighty feet away from where he stood. It was a single sheet of paper. It hadn't fluttered, because there was no breeze. The air was confined by four high walls and their heavy ceiling and was completely still. He'd seen it, because in common with most world-class ball players, Tom Harper's eyesight was almost preternaturally good. He'd seen it also because it didn't belong there. He hadn't been down there since Rebecca had shown him the basement. If the sheet of paper had been there then, he'd have noticed it. They both would.

He walked across the room, wincing from a twinge in his right knee inflicted by all the walking he'd done, in the leather-soled shoes with no give, that he'd worn on the date. He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to one in the morning. And it was completely silent now except for the quiet clack of his shoe leather and the steady sound of his breathing. His heart and lungs still had him down as an athlete. His breathing was calm and deep but the pace of his pulse, usually funereally slow, was fast enough for him to feel it jump.

He squatted down, feeling his knee again, picked up the piece of paper and stood and studied it. It was white and plain, as if torn from an A4 notebook, and a sleeping cat had been smudgily sketched on it in what Tom assumed to be charcoal. He'd been quite good at art at school. But he hadn't been as good as whoever had sketched the cat, catching its slumber and character in a few deft, confident strokes. Whoever had done the drawing hadn't signed it. So it remained anonymous.

He took the sketch upstairs with him and put it on the large desk he'd bought from John Lewis, on which perched his little laptop and at which he'd started to sit recently to do his autodidact thing. He yawned. He was slightly baffled but not scared, which he now knew for certain he had been earlier. His pulse was slowing. The night had provided him with a range of unexpected emotions. He'd go to bed, but before he did so, he went to find the key, helpfully labeled on a hook in the kitchen's utility cupboard, and made sure to lock the basement door.

‘There are no keys other than the set and spare set you were given, Tom. The building has no concierge. We certainly didn't retain a set. The drawing must have been there all along and we must simply have missed it.'

‘How many people did you show the flat to before me?'

‘I showed around three prospective buyers. It's a prestigious address and in retrospect it was quite competitively priced. It wasn't on the market for very long.'

‘You'd have seen the drawing.'

‘Except I didn't, just like I never heard any music. What did you do when you left me last night?'

‘Walked, then listened to a cabbie put me to rights all the way from Horseferry Road to Laburnum Crescent on why we didn't win the title last season. Then I paid him, got inside, heard the music, found the picture and went to bed.'

‘And now the picture's gone?'

‘Yes, it's gone.'

Rebecca was silent for a moment. She said, ‘Did you go for another drink, after seeing me home?'

‘No. And there's something else. I've remembered where I'd heard the music, why it sounded familiar. It was the soundtrack to a car ad on the telly a couple of years ago. That one filmed in Paris at night? All moody café exteriors and gleaming cobblestones?'

‘Miles Davis,' she said, ‘“So What,” from the album
Kind of Blue
.'

‘Boody hell, Rebecca. Is there nothing you don't know?'

‘Not much, Tom. Blame a history degree and the curse of a good memory.'

‘Why would an estate agent do a history degree?'

‘It was the other way around, and you're not qualified to offer careers advice.'

‘When was
Kind of Blue
recorded? When did it come out?'

‘I'm stronger on Metallica than Miles, to be honest. I think maybe the early 1960s. It was a long time ago, that's for sure.'

Tom was quiet.

‘Are you still there?'

‘Just wondering who was living here then, listening to Miles Davis, sketching their sleeping cat.'

‘That's a creepy thought.'

He looked around. He was barefoot on the deep pile of one of the rugs he'd had strewn over the polished wood. His skin was still glowing from the needling heat of the power shower in the wet room upstairs. His hair was damp against the nape of his neck. He could smell the complex fragrance of the cologne he was paid to wear, freshly dabbed on; top-notes of bergamot, whatever the fuck bergamot was. Sunlight bathed most of the room, but the locked door to the basement, when he looked across, was cast in deep shadow. In a way it was easy to imagine it as the entrance to another world entirely. He wondered for a moment whose world it had been, whose world in some curious, dimly remembered way it still remained.

‘Do you want to see me again?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘Short notice, but how about Sunday lunch?'

‘I'm tied up today, Tom. I could meet you tomorrow evening?'

‘Perfect,' he said. He broke the connection. Perfect it wasn't, because he wanted to see her today. He was used to getting his own way: the legacy of what he'd accomplished and who, until very recently, he'd been. Maybe this new life would mean more compromises. In fact, he was certain it would. He'd need to develop the maturity to accept his future disappointments graciously. If he didn't, no woman of Rebecca's quality would be likely to stick around.

The following evening Rebecca came to Absalom Court for dinner. One of the few non-footballing accomplishments of which Tom Harper was confident was his ability to cook. Melody had insisted on Sabatier knives, Cuisinart cookware, granite worktops, a walk-in fridge and substantial physical all-round dimensions. That was about entitlement, though. To her, good food was what restaurants were for. But training every day gave Tom a ravenous appetite and proper nutrition prolonged footballing careers. So he learned how to cook just out of his teens and discovered he really enjoyed it.

The food was a delightful surprise, the décor, Rebecca thought, a relief. She'd once heard the interior of a top footballer's house described as looking as though the owner had been given a million pounds to spend at Woolworths. Woolworths was history, but she'd seen some of the customized cars Premiership stars drove in pictures on gossip pages and they made it glaringly obvious that, in most cases, their bad taste knew no bounds.

They ate in the kitchen, at the dining table in the area opposite the business end of the room with its range and rotisserie and hung row of gleaming copper pans. He'd turned the lighting down and it was dark beyond the kitchen window and there was no hint of traffic noise to suggest where they were. Being in his company – alone in his company – was still slightly surreal, but she was getting used to it. He was in jeans and a polo shirt and she was glad she'd come casually attired. They were listening to a duets compilation by a singer Rebecca hadn't heard of named Kate Rusby. Kate was singing the song playing just then with Paul Weller. Tom had told her he liked folk music, plugging the player in.

‘You're at home in a kitchen,' Rebecca said, after he'd served up and opened the bottle of wine she'd bought and they'd sat down to eat.

‘I'm more at home in this one than in the one we had in Cheshire,' he said. ‘That's the size of a tennis court. This is practical. What's that word for when things you need to manipulate are built on a human scale?'

‘Ergonomic.'

He smiled and sipped from his glass. She'd bought a bottle of Blanc de Blanc. Melody, she thought; Harmony, Chardonnay. It wasn't quite free-association, they were the sort of names Rebecca associated with footballers' wives.

‘There you go again' he said, ‘knowing everything.'

And she felt for a moment vindictive, snobbish. He'd taken her coat in the sitting room and gone to hang it up and she'd noticed the books in the bookcase and on his impressively large desk, all of them spanking new, the volumes on the desk open, their leather Waterstones bookmarks brightly signalling where he'd got to in the flare of brightness from a studious-looking Anglepoise lamp.

‘This is absolutely delicious,' she said, which was true as well as a change of subject. He'd concocted a Chinese dish unappetizingly described as chicken rice. The result looked mundane served up but the preparation was complex and the flavour nothing short of wonderful. He'd done a huge dish of it, which was just as well because she knew she'd be asking for seconds when she'd devoured what was on her plate.

‘Heard any more jam sessions from those dead jazz musicians in your basement?'

He shook his head. ‘They're not all dead,' he said. ‘I did a bit of research.
Kind of Blue
was recorded in New York in 1959. The drummer from the sessions is still alive, though Miles himself is long gone. That's the first track, “So What,” the one I heard. I'm embarrassed to say it's incredibly famous.'

‘Only if you're into jazz,' she said. ‘It's a specialist subject.' She nodded at the sound bar on the work-surface parallel to their table. ‘I'm sure you know more than most people do about folk music.'

‘I probably do. But
Kind of Blue
was an immediate hit with both the public and the critics. Modal jazz, apparently, a departure from bebop for Miles and the band he put together for the sessions. All improvised, which is astonishing when you think it's possibly the best-loved jazz album ever made.'

Rebecca just ate, listening. She'd known all this, but didn't say that. After all she hadn't known Kate Rusby from Ruby Tuesday before sitting down tonight.

‘So why did you do this research?'

‘I wanted to know when that album was likely to have been played down there, in the basement of what's now this flat.'

‘You've just said it's possibly the best-loved jazz album ever made. That makes it timeless.'

‘No,' he said, ‘it's of its time. That's the point, I think. The vinyl would have had to be pressed and put in its sleeve and then shipped across the Atlantic and only specialist record shops in London and maybe Liverpool and Bristol, the port cities, would have stocked it. Its period would have been the early 1960s. And it would have been an import and so quite exotic as a choice back then. If there's a point being made in my hearing it, that's the point being made.'

Rebecca swallowed what she was chewing. She placed her knife and fork to either side of her plate. She picked up her glass and sipped wine, sips rather than gulps, but she'd almost emptied her glass by the time she put it down again and spoke. She said, ‘Do you honestly think you're being haunted?'

He held her eyes with his. This was no longer a novelty to her. It was characteristic of his openness and honesty and it made her realize, as the wine swam into her system, just how much she didn't want him hurt any more than he'd already recently been.

‘The truthful answer is that I don't know,' he said.

‘Isn't it much more likely that a former team-mate is playing a practical joke on you?'

‘They're not here, though, they're back in the North. I can think of a couple of practical jokers in the squad, but no one who'd take this much trouble.'

‘We should go down there when we've finished eating, take a look.'

‘I was hoping you'd say that.'

‘I'm staying with you tonight, Tom.'

‘I was hoping you'd say that, too.'

They got up straight away by unspoken common consent because eating was only pleasurable when there wasn't a hollow of anxiety ballooning in your stomach. That was how Tom felt as he went to fetch the key, and the expression on her face told him that was how Rebecca felt too. They walked from the kitchen to the sitting room in silence. The key made a lot of noise as its teeth bit into the ratchets of the old mortis lock mechanism, the tumbling rasps reverberating off the hard surfaces of the walls.

At the bottom of the stone steps, he switched on the pearly globes to reveal a pristine space in a silence so complete it struck him as profound. There was no ambient noise from the street, no muffled soundtrack of neighbouring lives through the sturdy walls, no thunder of aircraft engines on their commercial flight-paths juddering down from the skies above.

He stole a sideways look at Rebecca, who was searching the floor with her own eyes, but seeing nothing other than stone because there was nothing else to see. She frowned and sniffed.

He asked her, ‘Can you smell something?'

‘My imagination,' she said, shaking her head.

Tom thought any phantom scent would have to be quite strong to register, competing with the garlic and hot chillies and pungent spices of the meal they'd just eaten. And the beer he'd drunk with it, of course. And the wine she'd drunk. He breathed in slowly through his nostrils nevertheless and savoured the air, but it smelled completely innocent to him.

Rebecca looked at him and he returned the look, and she smiled and he saw the tension leave her shoulders and an anxious vertical line fade to nothing on her forehead. She lifted her arms and placed a hand on each of his shoulders and he noticed, for the first time, that she was only an inch or so shorter than he was. Heels might come into the equation, he thought. But then he forgot about the equation altogether, because she leaned forward and kissed him.

‘Let's go upstairs,' she murmured. ‘Frankly, Tom, we've got far better things to do.'

They spent quite some time doing those better things, only making it to his bedroom spent and ready for sleep after midnight. Rebecca climbed naked between ivory cotton sheets remembering that she'd speculated on black satin aboard a king-sized four-poster with a faux imperial crest above the headboard. The thought made her snort a stifled laugh and, drowsing beside her, he heard it.