‘I should think that leaves out a fair amount.’
She chuckled. ‘It does indeed. When I first started to draw all I did was guns, tanks, aeroplanes falling from the sky, burning buildings. It has taken a long time to get to butterflies and saints.’
When they show the captive a picture of the City of London, that he may know from whence they come, he displays no interest. But when they show him the portrait of a man he tries to talk to it, and is angry that the image remains silent. He picks up the paper and turns it over, to find where the man is hiding. He can wrestle, climb, and use an oar, but he cannot write or read and looks upon the compass as a toy.
But it has substance now, this Meta Incognita. No shape as yet, but substance – the inhospitable reality of a barren coast washed by freezing seas, mountains on which the snow lies all summer, and a citizenry of flesh, fowl and a kind of men, one of whom they will take back with them to London, as a token of possession. If, by God’s will, they escape from this fearful place.
And in the meantime they must dig for gold. The storms howl down upon them every few days, the bays and inlets start to become thick with ice, and there are those of the company so fearful that the ships will be gripped, grounded, trapped here to face the winter in which all would surely perish, that they argue for departure. He will have none of it. He rants and bawls and sets the miners to dig for gold. He has that great wild silent world ringing with the sound of their pickaxes. They drive and blast their way into the rock; they scrape and scrabble and drag the ore from the ground to be piled into the holds of the ships.
‘I like church commissions best,’ she said. ‘Funny, isn’t it, for a Jew. I like doing memorial windows at cut-price for little country churches where they raise the money with fêtes and jumble sales. I’ll go down there and work on site, for people like that. Some romantic concept of the essential England. And here am I living all my adult life in the middle of London. That’s what I really know of England. Immigrants’ England – bricks and tarmac. That’s where I feel at home now. I’m a fish out of water in a country village, but I still think that must be the real England. So I go and make cut-price saints for churches. We immigrants are funny people. But my lot were exceptional, I suppose. Most immigrants are forced into it by something – we were flung, and by our own parents, poor souls. My God, did I hate this country when I was eight years old! Cold, wet, with food I could not eat and a language I could not understand. And then, by some mysterious process that you don’t even notice at the time, what is appalling becomes familiar and eventually essential. I hardly ever go to Germany. When I do I am uncomfortable, for reasons over and above the obvious ones. I have to hurry back here. I need London voices and dirty streets and drunks in the tube and bodies in the river.’ She laughed. ‘And other things. But the point is that you have been digested. The city has taken you over, in a sense.’
The weather becomes daily more treacherous. The wind roars out of the north and the great slabs of drifting ice are closing in upon the ships. He can no longer withstand the urging of his fellows. The holds of the vessels are now filled with ore, and they have with them other tokens by which to prove the existence of this Meta Incognita – viz. the skin of a great white bear, the horn of that strange fish known as a sea unicorn, rocks, plants, skins of birds and beasts, and the captive man.
The anchors have been raised, and now it is each for himself. The ships must fight their way singly across the ocean, trusting to God and to the skills of their navigators, to the certainties of the lodestone, the tables of calculation, the moon and the stars: the Frances of Foy, the Dennis, the Gabriel, the Thomas of Ipswich and the rest of them. He, the admiral of this fleet, has given instructions that if any vessel should fall into the hands of an enemy then all maps, charts or other references to the newly discovered lands shall be thrown overboard. Equally, upon arrival at the home port of Dartford Creek in the Thames River, all the ore upon each of the ships shall be handed over for delivery to the admiral, and any person taking or keeping to his use any piece of ore shall be apprehended as a felon.
Thus shall the purpose of this great endeavour be fulfilled. And now he commends himself, and all of them, to God, and looks his last upon that barren and brutal land, that obstacle to the road to Cathay, that intransigent barrier within which lurks the north-west passage and, by the Grace of the Lord, enough gold to enrich Her Majesty, the nation and himself.
‘So …’ she said, ‘I shall go and have a look at the site, and then get going on some rough sketches. Both with whale and without whale. Which we can mull over together and decide on the final version. All right?’
‘Sounds fine. I’ll look forward to it.’
She extended a hand, with unexpected formality: a small, firm, dry paw. ‘Goodbye, then, Mr Halland.’
‘Matthew,’ he said. ‘Please. And thanks very much. I’ve got a feeling you’re going to provide the touch of class this building needs.’
She laughed. ‘I don’t know about that. Let’s see how it turns out first. But you’ve given me an inspiring subject.’
He drove to the Blackwall site, through the tumultuous and discordant landscape of Docklands, thinking of this odd, dogged woman and the small oasis of purpose and conviction she had created there beside the river. Images traced on glass. He thought of the qualities of glass: hard, brittle, reflective. Immensely durable, easily broken, wonderfully versatile. A window or a mirror; a vessel or a screen. Once a cherished and valuable commodity; now one of the cheapest materials going.
And London, he saw, was turning into a glass city. The stuff snapped and glittered all around him, climbing into the skies in columns of smoky grey and aquamarine and turquoise. Sometimes the façades were mirrors of silver or copper, throwing back their surroundings – the movement of traffic, the complexities of other buildings, the flowing clouds. Enigmatic, uncommitted presences; an architecture of deception. All around, glass was soaring above the old structures of brick and stone, dwarfing them, distorting them so that they swam shrunk and misshapen in the shining surface of the new city.
*
‘Would you like to be rich?’ Matthew asks Alice Cook.
‘God, yes.’
‘No – think about it. I’m talking about what is inappropriately called serious money. Money that doesn’t really exist. Figures on paper. Ballast. Not our kind of money, that you buy a new car with, or have a more expensive holiday than last year’s.’
‘An Alfa Romeo,’ says Alice. ‘That’s what I’d like. And a month in the Bahamas.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. You’d lose all your friends and feel like a fish out of water. What you want is an extra few thousand a year and a bit off the mortgage. Like me. We’re beginners, where money is concerned. Non-starters. The rich are different. I used not to think that, but I’m changing my mind. It’s a question of purpose. We could be rich if we wanted to be.’
‘Then kindly tell me how it’s done.’
‘I don’t know. If we really wanted it we would know, you see, that’s the point.’
‘Are there rich architects?’
‘Of course. You see?’
‘Mind you,’ says Alice. ‘You’re not exactly skint. You’ve got a nice flat. And a car that’s done less than twenty thousand and you’re prepared to lay out fifty quid for a dinner. What was that place called, that you took me to on my birthday?’
‘Alice, you prove my point with every word. You don’t want to be rich and you wouldn’t know how to. You lack the vision. Like me. Like, thank God, most of us. Which is what lends an awful fascination to those powered by financial lust. It’s as though you were without any sexual impulse whatsoever and had to try to fathom why other people carry on as they do.’
‘I’ve got an aunt like that,’ says Alice. ‘My mum swears she’s never done it and never wanted to. And if you met her casually you’d think she was perfectly normal.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ says Matthew. ‘You may have no talent fo
r serious money, but if you’ve got a bit to spare I’ll give you a tip where to put it, right now. Buy some shares in Pilkington’s. Pilkington’s Glass.’
Jane was given two pounds pocket money every week. Susan gave her one pound on Tuesdays and Matthew supplied a further pound on Saturday. When he was her age he had had a shilling, of which he was required to put sixpence in his piggy bank. The ethos of his upbringing made him feel guilty that he made no such requirement of Jane – but how could you rationally recommend such a course with inflation running at nearly ten percent? On the other hand, children should be taught the virtues of thrift, foresight and financial restraint just as much as that of rational response. Interestingly, Jane appeared to have some kind of natural inclination to save. She liked to be paid in assorted coins, and would hoard at one time ten-pence pieces, at another twenties. These lived in a raspberry yoghourt container and when they had accumulated to her satisfaction she would take them out and spend the lot on a carefully considered item. There seemed to be some totemic significance to the coins being all of one kind; the whole procedure apparently had a ritual quality over and above the process of amassing enough cash for a special purpose. Occasionally, and with faint unease, Matthew wondered if his child was displaying embryonic signs of financial obsession. Were the cherished piles of ten- and twenty-pence coins the precursors of twitching green figures on a VDU? On the whole, given her expressed view of wealth, he thought not.
Jane thought that rich people were probably nasty and poor people likely to be good. She thought that you were justified in taking money away from rich people to give to poor people. Rich people tended to bury their money in secret places or hide it under the bed whence it would be stolen by thieves and serve them right. Poor people, on the other hand, were prone to astonishing runs of luck. They stumbled across bags of gold, befriended beggars who turned out to be millionaires, or married into the aristocracy. Consequently – identifying of course with the poor – one should always keep one’s eyes skinned and be charitable. This archaic and judgmental view of the world, which seemed to owe nothing whatsoever to the society in which Jane was being reared, derived, Matthew realized, from the allegorical morality of fairy tales. It said a lot for the power of narrative. Here was a code set up for the comfort and edification of a long-defunct peasantry operating quite satisfactorily among the children of the consumer age. Or is it that it is only children who are able to retain a vision of the world not as it is, but as it ought to be? Matthew, a punctilious parent, had dipped at one time into works on child psychology and had been struck by the salutary tale of the psychologist who told to a group of seven-year-olds the story of the robber who stole a pot of money from a poor old woman. The robber ran away with the money across a wooden bridge over a river. The bridge collapsed and the robber fell into the river and was drowned. When the children are asked, Why do you think the bridge broke?, they do not reply, Because it was rotten, or Because the robber was a heavy man, but Because the robber did a wicked thing.
In the early years of his career Matthew had been involved with the designs of a school, a hospital, a housing estate in a new town and a shopping precinct. Useful and necessary projects – though the shopping precinct leaned perhaps in the direction of Mammon. Nowadays, visiting the Blackwall site, watching Frobisher House take shape by the day, its brilliant, polished tower rising from the mud, that time seemed of a different age. If school and hospital building went on anywhere these days, James Gamlin and Partners were not concerned. Which was of course an effect of the turn his own career had taken, as much as a sign of the times. Professional efficiency and a degree of restlessness had taken him to one kind of firm rather than another. ‘You’ve no one but yourself to blame,’ his mother might have said. He had preferred to work in the front line, to go where the potential seemed to be. And thus, inexorably, as it now seemed, had been propelled towards Docklands. He had pursued the Blackwall contract, indeed, along with his colleagues, had felt challenged and invigorated in the early days of negotiation and then of work at the drawing-board. He still felt frissons of satisfaction at a technical problem overcome, or at having been proved right in some prognostication. But the initial excitement had given way to a sort of weary cynicism. The only thing that really interested him now at Blackwall, he realized, was the glass engraving.
Ten
Matthew’s post was seldom promising. It would slither through the letter-box as he was getting himself some breakfast and lie there on the mat in a brightly-coloured drift until he saw fit to pick it up and sort through the accretion of unsolicited envelopes in search of something that might have been intended for him personally. A large number of the missives pressed extensions of credit or goods which he did not want – an American Express card or a set of ceramic thimbles in a velvet-lined case. A few sought his help in saving the environment or alleviating the condition of famine victims, but very many more flourished the lure of free gifts and lucky numbers. To find the gas bill, or a bank statement, lurking amid this vociferous clutch was to feel favoured with a touch of intimacy. A real letter was a rarity.
It was with a certain wonder, therefore, that he came across the hand-written envelope. Unfamiliar writing; a non-committal WCI postmark. He delayed opening it for a few seconds, with an instinct to damp down expectations.
A single folded sheet of paper: the message quite brief, no form of address – just ‘I owe you a sandwich.’ A phone number. And a signature. Nice and clear: Sarah Bridges.
One had of course been completely mistaken. She is not a nasty little bitch at all and has never been windsurfing or war-gaming in her life. One knew that, of course, really, all along. She is …
The phone rang. He leapt to it. ‘Matthew? It’s Tony. I thought I’d better remind you we’ve got the meeting with the Belgian group at ten. You did take the papers back with you, didn’t you? I couldn’t lay hands on them last night.’
Yes, he said. Yes, I’ve got the papers, and yes, I’ve remembered. One eye on the clock – God, nearly nine – the other scanning his desk.
He darts around the flat, snatching things up. Those papers, car keys, jacket. A minute later he is in the car, starting up the engine. It is a quite extraordinarily agreeable day. Sunshine, a light spicy wind. Banks of lilac cloud.
‘Sounds delightful,’ said the client benignly. ‘I’ll look forward to seeing the finished version. You say this woman does small stuff, too? Maybe she could turn us out some decanters for the board room.’ He made a quick note on the little gilt-edged pad that lay always beside his plate. ‘Were your langoustines good? I’m always daunted by all those legs.’
‘Very nice.’ The langoustines, at £16.50 a throw, had indeed been delicious, and the legs a minor inconvenience. They had moved on to the lemon sorbet now, and Charles Sanderling was skimming through the pile of papers at his side, in case there was anything he had forgotten to discuss. He had not enquired the cost of the glass engraving; a mere bagatelle, in relation to the ultimate bill for Frobisher House.
They finished the meal. Sanderling returned the papers to his briefcase. ‘I shall be away for the next few weeks. If there are any problems call my office – they’ll be in touch with me, of course. My wife is insisting on a spell in the Caribbean – apparently I am considered to be on the verge of collapse.’ He glimmered the thin smile across the table at Matthew, indulgent and a touch amused. It was the first time a wife had ever been mentioned. Children? No, one would not enquire. Somehow the thought of trading fatherly reflections instead of the ritual two and a half minutes on the weather or the political climate was not appealing.
Sanderling dropped his credit card onto the bill. ‘So, apart from the possibility of having to invoke that penalty clause, there don’t seem to be any major hassles pending. You going away yourself?’
‘I’ll probably go down to Devon for a week or two.’
Sanderling looked faintly perplexed. Possibly he didn’t know where Devon was. He ushered Matthew ahead o
f him out of the restaurant. Once in the street, the chauffeured car appeared, as though at some concealed signal; perhaps the driver spent the lunch period going round and round the block. Sanderling glimmered again, got in, and could be seen immediately at work on the car phone.
Matthew decided to make a quick detour to the Covent Garden precinct to stock up with coffee beans.
He is, as usual, distracted. He buys the coffee; he dips into the Penguin Bookshop for a few minutes; he listens to a group of Malaysians playing reedy, plangent music on some esoteric kind of wind instrument. He wanders past windows displaying skimpy impractical clothes at remarkably high prices, covets for a moment a Chinese silk kimono with dragon motif, but comes quickly to his senses, settles for a jar of honeycomb. The place is dizzy with people, of course – buying and selling, getting and spending. Most people, though, by the look of things, do not want sober goods like honeycomb or coffee beans (and both of these, come to think of it, one could quite well get by without); they want thatched cottage teapots and Union Jack tea-caddies and shell-embossed photo frames and silver lurex tights. There are droves of them, old and young, drawn from far and wide, apparently, in search of these delights. And why not? It is a good place, Covent Garden. Not a great good place perhaps, but a place where people are at ease and enjoying themselves.
He makes his way up James Street, through the crowds. There is such a throng, indeed, that when he is forced to a halt it is a few seconds before he is aware that a girl is addressing him – a dishevelled girl in jeans and T-shirt, clutching the handle of a push-chair in which sleeps a small child. The girl is asking for money, he at last realizes, she is saying that she has nothing with which to buy food for herself and the baby, that she has nowhere to live, that she slept rough last night. She is begging, in other words.