An Absence of Natural Light

by F. G. Cottam

  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.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘If you knew everything about me you’d get bored very quickly.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ He yawned. ‘Does everyone call you Rebecca?’

  After a pause, she said, ‘Everyone but my dad. My dad called me Reeba. You can’t call me that.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘So you’ll just have to use my full name.’

  ‘It seems a bit formal.’

  ‘Formality, Mr Harper, can be a good thing.’

  Rebecca awoke once during the night. For a fraction of a second she didn’t know where she was and then she did and mapped a path mentally in the darkness to the en-suite. She’d flushed the loo and washed her hands and was tiptoeing back into bed beside Tom’s recumbent shape when she heard a noise that sounded human. It sounded like a single, short bark of laughter and it sounded as though it was coming from downstairs. It was husky, and as angry-seeming as it seemed amused. It made Rebecca scamper slightly, back between the sheets where she could spoon herself around the sturdy body of the man sleeping next to her.

  It could have been anything, she rationalized, as sleep reclaimed her. It could have been a backfiring car or a scavenging fox or a cawing bird on the sill beyond the window. Night sounds weren’t trustworthy. Wind and space distorted and amplified them. She surrendered to unconsciousness soon after thinking this, wearing on her face a smile that an almost perfect evening had put there.

  Work meant that she had to be up early the following morning. She made a pot of coffee and drank a mug of it in the sitting room, noticing that the wire bin beside Tom’s desk was crammed with Amazon packaging. He’d shelved the contents, DVDs, stuff too old or staid to be readily available for streaming, she assumed. She browsed the titles. He had Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. There were two Simon Schama series: A History of Britain and Power of Art.

  He came down the stairs fifteen minutes after she did. She hadn’t expected at all to see him awake. She’d intended to leave him a note. She’d assumed footballers were late risers. It wasn’t as though he had a schedule to keep. She thought if the DVDs were any indication, he’d likely be planting his shapely rear on the sofa in front of his flatscreen and watching the Discovery Channel until tea time, probably with a pad, making notes.

  He kissed her on the cheek and went and poured coffee from the pot and came back and she said, ‘Busy day?’

  ‘Gym this morning,’ he said. ‘You can’t just stop. I wouldn’t want to lose fitness and it’s dangerous, just stopping, apparently, can give you an enlarged heart.’

  ‘So it’s a coronary issue, nothing to do with the six-pack, or the buns?’

  He smiled at that.

  ‘What about your knee?’

  ‘It’s only lateral movement the injury restricts. I can run, ride a stationary bike, skip rope, all that.’

  ‘But you’ll never ski, not now.’

  ‘No, Rebecca,’ he said, ‘I’ll never ski.’

  He’d come down in his jeans, his hair tousled and his torso bare, completely unselfconscious, she thought, as a man with a body like his had every right to be. It probably wasn’t that, though. He’d spent a lot of his life half-naked in changing rooms. He was comfortable with it. And anyway she had on his dressing gown which was white, made of heavy cotton toweling and warm. It smelled of his cologne.

  ‘I’ll take a shower,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘You are my guest.’ He looked away from her, out of the window towards the still-dark cres
cent and said, ‘Any regrets about last night?’

  She said, ‘Not unless you’re sorry.’

  He looked at her. ‘I couldn’t be happier,’ he said.

  She was stepping out of the shower when she remembered that solitary bark of husky laughter from the previous evening. She was pretty sure it had come from inside the flat and she was equally sure it had been a human emanation. That didn’t sit very well with her, because she couldn’t rationalize it now. She’d done that when she’d heard it, because the alternative had been uncomfortable and even scary. Wide-awake and sober though, Rebecca wasn’t really into self-deception.

  She wouldn’t mention it to Tom, she decided. Mysteries could be completely harmless. They weren’t necessarily sinister, were they? But her hearing that sound had followed the basement jazz he’d heard and the sketch that had appeared and then apparently vanished. These oddities seemed to be increasing. Tom was going to cuddle up with Simon Schama and his History of Britain. Rebecca thought she might do a bit of digging closer to home, concerning the history of the property itself.

  He’d put on a tracksuit by the time she’d readied herself for work. She looked at her watch. It was 7.15 a.m. Her car was in his parking space. She asked where his gym was and he told her, and she offered him a lift there since it was as good as on her way to the office and she thought saying goodbye on his doorstep might be slightly awkward. She really didn’t do one night stands and that’s what this was, until it proved to be otherwise.

  ‘I still think it’s brutally early for the gym,’ she said, at the wheel of her car, en route.

  ‘Full day,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ She was unconvinced and knew she sounded it.

  ‘I’ve got a meeting in Bloomsbury this afternoon,’ he said, ‘Great Ormond Street Hospital. I set up a charitable foundation, football-based, most of the Premiership sides contribute financially and there are exhibition games staged and a lot of the lads put in guest appearances on the wards when they can. Players get a bum rap. Most of them are genuine guys, pretty solid, generous with their money and their time.’

  It was the most she’d ever heard him say at once. She said, ‘It seems very empathetic, doing all that for sick kids when you’ve never had any of your own.’

  ‘My brother’s lad was my godson as well as my nephew,’ he said. ‘Leukemia took David when he was six. Before David passed away, I got to know the hospital quite well.’

  They were there. She pulled up, he grazed her hair with his knuckles and reached across and kissed her on the cheek. She said, ‘You’re a good man, Tom Harper.’

  ‘I’m just lucky,’ he said, ‘and my luck seems to be holding.’

  She smiled at him. ‘You think so?’

  He said, ‘I’ve met you, haven’t I?’

  Two

  Even after Absalom Court largely declined into a run-down warren of student conversions, there’d been two residents left over from its more affluent period on ninety-nine-year leases that still had some way to go before they expired. They were a Mrs Georgia McConnell and a Mr Arthur Fleetwood. But Mrs McConnell had died in the winter of 2011, and Mr Fleetwood had been offered a care-home by the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham when he’d been judged too elderly and infirm to continue to live safely alone.

  Before the restoration, number 7 had been three separate self-contained flats one above the other. The cat sketch encouraged Rebecca to think art student, if she was going to entertain Tom’s only half-serious theory that a ghost was responsible for the unexplained phenomena. Rebecca thought he might be completely serious if he’d been awake to hear that husky bark of sardonic laughter she’d heard the previous night. But she didn’t identify any art students in the records. In the 1960s, in the period when students would have had Kind of Blue rotating under the needle of their Dansette record players, all the conversions were let to students from the London School of Economics.

  With her lunch hour of research freelancing almost up, Rebecca called the LSE. She got through eventually to an alumni archivist. She’d thought they might employ such a person because their alumni were so distinguished. They boasted a long list of global movers and shakers. And there was Mick Jagger, who could still shake a bit when the moment called for him to do so. She remembered he’d studied at the LSE.

  She explained that she was researching the history of an address at Absalom Court on Laburnum Crescent for someone who’d just bought a property there and was interested to discover what he could about its past. She was told that there was no problem with her trying to identify who from the school had been resident there, if anyone had. It wasn’t confidential or privileged information. But she’d have to do it herself, physically going through the archive, in person. She could do that by appointment after presenting the credentials to prove who she was. The rider was that there was no absolute guarantee she’d find what she was looking for. Records of that nature were sometimes incomplete. Rebecca made an appointment for the following afternoon.

  Tom called her that evening, just, he said, because he enjoyed listening to her voice. Rebecca had become used to guarding against real intimacy by using such obstacles as texting and Facebook and Twitter, the same way everyone did. The spontaneity of conversation over a phone in real time, one comprising pleasure rather than business, had become a novelty to her. She finished the call thinking that her earlier suspicion that she might have had a one-night stand was unfounded.

  He called just after 8 p.m. She was about to turn in for a rare early night, when her phone rang and it was him again.

  ‘I’ve just been down to the basement.’

  ‘More Miles Davis?’

  ‘This was more personal than Miles.’ He was speaking quietly, as he hadn’t earlier, the way someone would if they were concerned about being overheard.

  ‘Jesus, Tom. You’re scaring me.’

  ‘You’re in the clear there. You’re about seven miles away.’

  ‘Do you want to come over?’

  ‘It’s late, Rebecca. And I’m not so freaked out that I’m going to scarper like a frightened child. Nothing’s actually gone bump in the night, so far.’

  Except that it has, she thought, but you were fast asleep when it did.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  He was silent. Then he said, ‘I thought I could smell cigarette smoke. It wasn’t a strong smell, more like the memory of smoke than smoke itself, just a vague hint really, but it was coming from the basement. Up close to the basement door it got strong enough to smell like it might be French tobacco. I played for two seasons with a winger from Rheims. Some of the French and Italian lads smoke, just like the English boys drink. It was smoke from a Gauloise. I was sure of it.’

  Rebecca nodded to herself. She was familiar with that smell. When she’d smoked, for most of those years, she’d smoked Gauloises.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I unlocked the door and went down there. The smoke didn’t get any stronger. In fact it weakened a bit or got a bit diluted because it was mingling with something else, another smell altogether.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘It was perfume.’

  ‘No sign of anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No more drawings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there music?’

  ‘No, there was just this empty silence and the mingled smells.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Yeah, two things.’ He was almost whispering now. ‘When I signed the contract to promote that cologne, I was invited to meet a top perfumer, one of the guys with a nose insured for a million Euros who mixes the stuff. They had all the great scents there, in this reception room full of velvet and gold brocade, lined up in jewelled bottles for me to sniff at. I had to be polite, feign interest, only reasonable with what they were paying me. Anyway I smelled it there and recognized it just now in the basement. It’s by Guerlain and it’s called Shalimar. I’d bet my life on it.’

  ‘I used t
o wear it,’ Rebecca said and her own voice sounded hollow in her ears. She’d worn Shalimar habitually, back when she’d smoked a pack of Gauloises a day in her wild student days, before she’d ever dreamed she’d sell people the homes they were going to live in, or sleep with a famous footballer.

  ‘You said two things.’

  ‘When I got back up here just now, I switched on my laptop. I wanted to read a bit about Shalimar, see how long it’s been around and what it costs to buy and what sort of women would have been likely to have used it.’

  ‘Whether it’s of a piece with Kind of Blue, you mean.’

  He didn’t answer that. He said, ‘My screensaver’s changed. It was a shot of Gordon Banks saving point blank from Pelé in the 1970 World Cup. People still say that’s the greatest save a goalkeeper’s ever made.’

  ‘I saw that, last night, on your desk.’

  ‘It’s been replaced, by a charcoal sketch of a cat. It’s identical to the drawing I found in the basement except for one tiny detail. Now it has a set of initials in the bottom right hand corner.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘You’d find them familiar. They’re yours, Rebecca.’

  ‘I didn’t sketch the cat. I didn’t tamper with your laptop either.’

  ‘Happy to put it all down to coincidence?’

  ‘No, and neither are you. What do you intend to do?’

  ‘I’m not being threatened here, I don’t think. I don’t think whatever’s happening is a deliberate effort to scare me. I’m bloody sure now it’s not one of the lads or a bunch of the lads playing a practical joke. It’s more like something’s being hinted at, or I’m being teased.’

  Rebecca thought about the laugh she’d heard the previous evening: husky, abrupt and more hostile each time she recalled it.

  ‘I’m going to have a very large whisky,’ Tom said. ‘Then I’m hoping to have a peaceful night’s sleep.’

  ‘If anything happens, call me,’ Rebecca said. Like I could do anything useful, she thought. But he didn’t call and eventually, she went to sleep herself.