An Absence of Natural Light

F.G. Cottam

One

Two

Three

A Note on the Author

She saw him straight away. He was seated in the far corner of the coffee shop wearing a charcoal suit and a grey flannel shirt open at the collar. She assumed from the size of the cup that he was drinking a flat white. His attention was focused on a small titanium-clad laptop next to it.

People at adjacent tables were self-consciously ignoring him, except for a couple of kids too young for tact who were just staring at him open-mouthed. He was more usually pictured in daylight, in his club colours or in the strip of the national team. It was slightly odd too to see him in repose because, in life, Tom Harper had always seemed to her to be in vibrant motion. But the dark hair that splayed to his shoulders and the photogenic cheekbones were familiar from the ads for a pricey brand of cologne and the recent poster campaign for Jaguar's sportiest range of cars. He was unmistakably him.

He sensed her approach and stood to greet her, a courtesy that came as a slight surprise. He smiled and held out his hand.

‘Rebecca Green,' she said, ‘Carter, Procter and Green.'

He said his name as they shook hands and she was surprised for the second time in not much more than a second. Celebrated footballers weren't famed for making eye-contact. The three or four she'd encountered professionally had seemed almost desperate to avoid it. Harper's eyes, by contrast, held hers with a look that seemed friendly and even curious. Maybe it was a northern thing.

‘It's Tom,' he said.

‘Then it's Rebecca.'

‘I'd bet no one calls you Becky.'

‘Then you wouldn't lose your money.'

‘Would you like something to drink?'

‘An Americano, please.' She shrugged her bag off her shoulder and pulled out the chair facing his, aware that people were openly staring now, the grown-ups as well as the kids. He slid past her and went to order her drink and the heads of his uninvited audience shifted, slack-mouthed. He seemed unaware of them. He moved in the spaces between tables on his way to the counter with a liquid grace. Rebecca was only aware of this, she conceded to herself, because like everyone else, she had turned to watch him too.

‘I thought you were Merseyside based,' she said, when he'd delivered her coffee and sat back down.

‘My career was Merseyside based.'

‘Transfer?' She frowned. She didn't pay particular attention to sports stories but given his profile, thought she'd have heard something.

He sipped coffee and shook his head. ‘Knee, medical advice. I'd jeopardize my health permanently if I ever played again. So it's over.'

‘God, just like that? I'm so sorry.'

‘I'm philosophical. Every pro lives with the risk. In any moment of any game you could push off awkwardly and your cruciate or Achilles could go.'

It was slightly contradictory, meeting someone this famous for the first time. His voice and his face were so familiar and yet he was a total stranger to her. She recognized characteristics in the man opposite her without knowing him at all. She smiled. She said, ‘I'm no authority on the game, but you're not exactly noted for doing things awkwardly.'

He shrugged. ‘Or you could fail to ride a bad tackle. You only need do it once.'

‘Is that what happened to you?'

‘Mine's more mundane, just years of wear and tear. Like I said, I'm philosophical. I'm twenty-eight, Rebecca. It's been a good career.'

‘It's been a stellar career.'

He grinned at that. ‘Flattery's not necessary. I'm pretty much sold on the property unless the interior's a complete disaster.'

‘It was fully renovated two years ago and the spec's pretty high.' She gulped down the last of her drink. ‘But never take an estate agent's word for anything, Tom. Come and have a look for yourself.'

She'd read up on him in the two hours between his cold call to their office at noon and the appointment they'd agreed for 2pm. She knew that he'd been married young to a girl he'd met at school. Her maiden name had been Melody James. Rebecca had thought Melody was the perfect name for a footballer's wife. It had that pretty, vacuous quality she thought its owner would more than likely possess. But her impression now, driving through the Fulham rain to the property Harper wanted to view, was that the man in her passenger seat didn't quite fit the stereotype she'd expected.

The Harpers had no children, which was unusual in the footballing world. They almost all had them, and they had them young. That slightly made sense of Tom thinking about buying a fashionable address in a central location rather than a spacious house somewhere more secluded. Maybe the Harpers hankered after the bright lights of the big city. Maybe he'd just found a way to occupy an empty afternoon and was wasting her time. She didn't think he was, though. He'd already said he was sold on the property and, from what she'd read earlier, he could certainly afford it.

‘Tell me about the place,' he said.

She knew the history because she was a Green employed by Carter, Proctor and Green and her father, Michael Green, who had worked his way into his partnership role before retirement, had schooled her in the essentials of selling high-end properties. Provenance is important, he'd told her very early on in her own career; buyers on the point of parting with substantial sums of cash care about a building's pedigree.

Absalom Court wasn't particularly high-end by the firm or by the market's current standards but she knew about the block's history because she had respected her dad and because it mattered to Rebecca to be good at her job.

Built to a pretty lavish standard and with the period's signature Deco flourishes in the early 1930s, she told Tom. Home in that decade to a celebrated actress and a front-bench MP and a popular big band leader, among other well-heeled residents. Bomb damaged in the latter stages of the Blitz, which seemed to set off a long period of decline until, by the late 1950s, it had become an address of necessity as much as choice for some of the area's more down-at-heel artistic types; people with bohemian pretensions, but not a lot in the way of rent money.

In this period the whole block had come to be owned by one of the Rackman-type landlords the Government legislated against in the early 1960s. He sold the freehold and it became student accommodation. Then in the early Eighties it was bought by a developer who tried to find the capital to refurbish and restore the property to something approaching its original character. But it remained student accommodation until the housing boom of the late 1990s, when it was bought by a venture capital fund as part of a west London-based development portfolio. Finally refurbished two years ago when the last of the tenancies they'd inherited had lapsed and they had vacant possession.

‘There are ten flats in all,' she said, fishing for the keys in her bag as they walked back along the side of the building. ‘Each flat has two bedrooms and is built on three floors, two above ground and a substantial basement area.' She saw the For Sale sign shudder in the rain as they reached the corner and then the building's facade, its post bracketed against the block's low exterior wall. ‘How did you find this place?'

‘On the internet,' Tom said. Despite the rain, despite the fact that he was wearing no coat, he had stopped walking. He was holding his little laptop in his right hand. Its metal casing glimmered dully, streaked now with rain. ‘Something happened here. What happened?'

‘Happened in what way?'

‘Affluent residents might have fled the bombs in the war, Rebecca, but they would have come back after it ended. Why did they leave permanently, the actress and the band-leader and the rest? Why did they sell up? Was there a murder or something?'

Rebecca sucked her teeth. There was no point concealing the building's past. Her potential buyer had every right to know. She said, ‘In 1944, one of the residents of Absalom Court was exposed as a German spy and arrested and interned for the duration. In 1947, he was tried and hanged. I think it attached a bit of a stigma until people forgot.'

‘Did he live at number 7?'

‘That's the number you wore on your shirt,' she said. ‘Are you superstitious?'

‘Not by the medieval standards of most of my former team-mates, I'm not. With me it's just ladders and magpies. And the number thirteen, obviously.'

‘Obviously.'

‘Did he?'

‘No. He lived at number 2. And he died in prison, at Wormwood Scrubs.'

Tom nodded.

‘You don't sound like a typical footballer.' They'd reached the front entrance, a pillared and bronzed portico immaculately restored, the high double door studded with green lozenges of ornamental glass.

‘You want me to use all that “end of the day” phraseology?'

‘I'd just sort of expected it.'

He grinned. ‘Well I won't disappoint you.' He paused. Then, ‘At the end of the day,' he said, ‘it's 11.59.'

Rebecca laughed; it sounded louder than she'd expected it to in the gloom and the rain. ‘Come on,' she said, ‘I'll show you inside.'

There was nothing to see, really. The ceilings were high, the windows large enough to allow a generous daub of the day's exterior grayness to enter rooms flawlessly plastered and floored with oiled teak except for the bathrooms and kitchen, where they trod on black, white-veined marble. It was quiet thanks to double-glazing and the block being back off the road and the fact that Laburnum Crescent was exactly that, a gentle and genteel semi-circle that wasn't really a route to anywhere.

‘I'll take it,' he said.

‘Just like that?'

‘Yes, unless you tell me Lars Ulrich lives next door.'

‘No heavy metal neighbours to speak of,' she said. ‘Everyone here's very quiet and the walls are extremely thick.'

‘Then I'll take it.'

‘Won't Mrs Harper want a say?'

‘Mrs Harper has just had a decisive say in ending our marriage. I was served the papers a fortnight ago. I opened them lying in a private bed at a clinic in Colorado that specializes in sports injuries. I'd been told an hour earlier that I'd never play football seriously again.'

‘Quite the double-whammy,' Rebecca said.

‘Not really,' Tom said. ‘Neither piece of news was a complete shock.'

‘Do you mind if I ask you what went wrong?'

‘I told you, wear and tear.'

‘I meant with you and Melody.'

He was looking directly at her. His eyes weren't completely gray. There was a faint green lustre to them that film didn't pick up, so subtle it was only detectable in life. She thought in sunlight his eyes would be quite mesmerizing. Tom Harper didn't look to her very worn and torn at all.

‘You're probably thinking pole-dancer,' he said.

‘I'm thinking nothing of the sort. I've already said you don't come across as typical of the breed.'

‘I was no longer the person she fell in love with, is the truth. I was on the way to becoming someone she'd never have fallen for. Probably I'd already got there. When I got the papers, the penny dropped that only the past had been keeping us together.'

‘And the future was going to be different?'

‘Inevitably, yes, because of the injury.'

Rebecca was silent.

‘And now I'm buying this flat. I'm going to be living here.'

‘I'm sure you've bought lots of expensive things.'

He looked around. He glanced down at the laptop he was still holding. ‘You don't understand what it's like. You get given a lot of stuff and paid to use more stuff through endorsement deals done by your agent. I've never bought a car or a suit or a wristwatch. I've never even taxed or insured myself to drive a car. The club employs people who take care of that sort of thing. They want you focused solely on your football, so it makes sense to them. They book your holidays because they want you in safe destinations with no risk of injury or scandal.'