But Matthew, now, is on another level, caught up by his own perception, his fancy, by the reflections in his head of all that is around him. He is, for a few instants, disembodied – aware of himself as subsumed within the crowd, the horde of humanity that has sifted through the city, and died, and been reborn. He is both sobered, and uplifted. He is alone, and at the same time less alone. He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us. Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now. We bear it in our heads and on our backs; it is our freight, our baggage, our Old Man of the Sea. It grinds us down and buoys us up. We cannot shuffle it off; we would be adrift without it. We both take it with us and leave ourselves behind within it – flies in amber, fossilized admonitions and exemplars.
He swings the car left (Tony, at his side, bleating on unheard), registers but hardly sees a girl in a red coat, a helmeted wet-suited figure on a motorbike (Pony Express), the rearing black horse logo outside a bank. He thinks only of eyes seeing, million upon million pairs of eyes, recording the same world, the same images. He thinks of all these conjunctions of knowledge and experience, these collisions of what is known and what is felt which flame within the head to create a private vision, but a vision which is coloured by the many visions of other people, by fact and error and received opinion and things remembered and things invented. We can see nothing for itself alone; everything alludes to something else. And Matthew is caught now by the allusion of these streets, as he glances at that blackened brick wall, at the remnant of a Victorian façade amid the office blocks.
Before him is a canyon of fire. The man hesitates – even he, who has trodden the inferno of these streets for hours. He sees the firemen at work on a building at the far end: a figure swarming the black ramp of a ladder, the silver arcs of water against the stark façade and at the windows that bloom with flames. He sees glass shower to the ground; he sees the gas main shooting up in a geyser of white fire, the pavements which creep with scarlet tongues. He sees a tailor’s dummy sprawling from a shattered shop front; he sees the defiant white horse of a pub sign; he sees the blackened carcass of a car.
He tilts his warden’s helmet down to shield his eyes and walks into the furnace, picking his way through shattered glass, rubble, the tangle of the firemen’s hoses. Further down the street, a roof sags, collapses with a roar, and a fountain of flame shoots fifty feet into the sky; a blizzard of orange sparks showers upon him. He shelters for a moment in the lea of a phone box, wipes his burning eyes. He is beyond reaction, beyond thought, he is responding simply to each minute as it comes, to the demands that each minute brings; direct someone to a shelter, visit and encourage those already in another, mark and report a UXB, locate and report each new outbreak of fire. But there are no new outbreaks now – the City is one single fire, from Old Street to Cannon Street, from Moorgate to Aldersgate, the flames jump now from one building to another, they need no bombs to feed them (though the bombs still come, he hears at this moment the great thud of an oil-bomb, and the ground seems to lift beneath him). Above are huge incandescent clouds, choking orange smoke rolls all around, one building spouts flames that are green and blue, another has set free a flock of great black birds, charred sheets of paper that come flapping and dying down the street. The whole place crackles, spits and roars, elemental and unleashed; only the rhythmic throb of the pumps and the clanging fire bells are the faint and desperate reassurance of order, of sanity, of human control.
This is the worst yet. It has risen, the infernal crescendo, since early evening. A bugger of a night, a right pasting we’re getting, the bastards have pulled the plug on us all right: there is no language yet to confront it. People are grim-faced, too busy, afraid, exhausted, to assess, to do anything but what has to be done. He has seen sights tonight that will be with him to the end of his days. A four-storey building with roaring crimson windows which suddenly bulges outward and collapses like a house of cards. A cat carrying a kitten, silhouetted against firelight, picking its way along a window ledge. The spire of St Bride’s lit from within like a lantern.
He leaves the shelter of the phone box and heads on towards the firemen, to whom he must report the urgent need for more pumps in Cheapside. The black figure at the top of the ladder is still playing a hose into the furnace that yesterday was a bank; the others are damping down a neighbouring building not yet fully ablaze, two men together fighting the heavy brass branch, from which, as he approaches, the fountain of water suddenly dies to a trickle. They curse and swear in frustration; the hydrants are running dry. The man on the ladder is swarming back down, the superintendent is shouting instructions – they will back off, shift to another hydrant. The warden delivers his message; the superintendent bawls back above the din: ‘Tell them I can’t bloody do anything for them – I need everything I’ve got on this lot.’ And then for a moment the group of men stands silent, beaten, staring at the building in front of them whose bricks glow, etched in sparks – a building with arched ecclesiastical windows, constructed in the 1860s, maybe, a home to commerce, to insurance companies and to accountancy firms and to banks. The firemen are smoke-blackened, red-eyed; water streams from them, cascades down the waterproof hoods attached to their tin hats which always make the warden think, wildly, inappropriately, of beekeepers. He was a country boy, once, in some other incarnation. And now is Jim Prothero, a thirty-five-year-old print-worker and part-time warden, husband and father. And in the midst of it all there comes into his head, suddenly and wonderfully, a vision of his child – her snub nose, her spare bony little body. There’ll be an end to all this, he thinks with sudden clarity, one way or another. It’ll be over, in the end.
‘What?’
‘I said I hoped things were going reasonably for you on the domestic front.’
Matthew edged the car into the flow of traffic round Tower Green. He recognized from the delicacy of Tony’s tone that they must have entered a different conversational territory. This was condolence time: older man to younger.
‘Not too bad,’ he said briskly. ‘The flat was pretty ropy when I took it on, but I’ve slapped paint around and so forth. And it’s a decent size. Jane’s with me there every other weekend.’
‘Still, you must miss that house. Lucy was saying the other day how nice you and Susan had made it.’
Not the most apt of comments, thought Matthew. Bricks and mortar and furnishings are the least of what one misses. Well meant, though, I don’t doubt.
There was a silence. They were in Whitechapel Road now; tower blocks cohabited with the struggling remnants of the old East End. Asian Supermarket; Bangladeshi Welfare Association; The Horse and Jockey. A new development like a clutch of shining white silos rose above a grubby nineteenth-century terrace.
‘No chance of a … rapprochement?’ said Tony.
‘None whatsoever, I’m afraid.’
Tony sighed. In sorrow or disapproval? ‘Pity. There it is, then. Do bring Jane to see us sometime.’
‘It was simply that the marriage ran out of steam, you know,’ said Matthew. He felt provoked to further comment, was exasperated with himself even as he spoke. ‘Went dead. I don’t have anyone else in mind, and nor does Susan, so far as I know.’
‘Oh, quite,’ said Tony. ‘One hadn’t supposed … Not that it makes the situation any better, I imagine.’
No, it certainly doesn’t. Too right it doesn’t.
‘As I say, we’d love to see Jane. She might enjoy the deer in Richmond Park.’
‘I’m sure she would.’ The deer, the river boat, you name it. This city is laid out for entertainment; that is its function. On alternate weekends we sample the city, Jane and I; parks, museums, funfairs, the zoo. We are instructed and amused. Millions are spent on our edification and our enjoyment. A good deal is spent by me. There must be no time to brood, to regret, to question. And in any case we are both energetic people and inquisitive by disposition. It is just as well I am not obliged to spend this precarious section of my l
ife in the middle of Dartmoor.
‘I must say,’ said Tony, ‘nothing would induce me to live down here.’
They are entering Docklands, the land of promise, the city of the new decade, of the new century. It is a landscape of simultaneous decay and resurrection; glass, steel and concrete rear from the mud and rubble of excavation. The meccano outlines of cranes preside as far as the eye can see, the completed buildings are monolithic glass structures in whose serene surfaces of smoky grey and greenish-blue there float the soft mountain ranges of the clouds. Below them, the few surviving terrace houses of Limehouse, of Poplar, of Shadwell seem to crouch in some other time-band. The docks themselves still glint pewter in the sunshine – that ancient sequence of inlets and harbours: East India Dock, Surrey Docks, Canary Wharf, Millwall. The names alone have resonances that range over time and the globe – the spice trade, India, tea, rice, copra, jute, clippers and schooners, frigates and men o’ war, whales, coal and timber. This place is hitched to Bombay and Calcutta, to Singapore and Hong Kong, to Jamaica and Trinidad and Greenland and Suez. In the empty waters lies the beached carcass of a barge, defunct at the feet of the bright cranes. Commerce has always presided here; the place has always looked forward, round the next corner, into the next decade, as men have turned a shrewd gaze upon the world and seen where to put their faith and their investments. Fortunes have been made from pepper and timber and rum and silk and from exploitation. The figures toiling now on scaffolding and catwalks or down there in the mud have a long ancestry. A place of work; a place of wealth.
Matthew viewed it with increasing ambivalence. He had been involved with the Blackwall project at every stage, sometimes with excitement, at others in exasperation. He thought it an effective, efficient and not uncomely building. But now, as it began to rear into the sky, shooting its scaffolding and its concrete up thirty storeys over a matter of months, he found himself thinking incessantly of change and flux, of people as pawns, of the city as some uncontrollable organic force. Sometimes it seemed to him as though the building rose despite him, despite all of them, that to commit a pattern of lines to a drawing board had been to unleash an unstoppable power. Which was, at a mundane level, true: the requirements of contracts, penalty clauses, insurance policies, labour agreements committed the builders to an inexorable, predestined course.
They arrived at the site and parked the car. Heading for the site offices Matthew said, ‘Incidentally, I’ve got a name for this place. I’m going to put it to the client. Frobisher House.’
‘Sounds quite nice. Why?’
‘Because Martin Frobisher, the Elizabethan seaman, set sail from Blackwall to find the North-West Passage. It’s one of the epics of Arctic exploration. We’ll have a ship done in glass engraving for the main entrance doors.’
‘You’d better get going on it,’ said Tony. ‘They’ll be unrolling the carpets in a week or two, by the look of things.’
‘That’s the whole point of fast-track.’
Down here, at ground level, there were walls and floors. Up in the sky, they were still pouring concrete. Five hundred workers, on shift-work round the clock; at night the machines continued to roll under arc-lights. Sixty million pounds and one year; the scale of late twentieth-century construction. The building was a great scaffolded tower glinting already with a patchwork of the turquoise glass that would eventually encase it, adorned with thick blue tubes down which roared spasmodic streams of dust and rubble from the invisible activity thirty floors up. At its foot, cement mixers endlessly churned in a wasteland of mud, heaped girders, timber, piping, monstrous cottonreels of coiled flex, a mountain of sand. Cranes swung with slow majesty. A man wheeling a barrow up a ramp seemed an archaic figure, out of place, a throwback.
Down in the site offices, Matthew became involved with the clerk of the works in a wrangle about non-delivery of essential materials. Tony Brace vanished with the site architect for a conducted tour. When they returned the wrangle was resolved, in so far as that was possible, and the site architect proposed a trip to the top of the building in the contractors’ lift.
There is wind up here, that you would not have suspected from down below. It tilts their plastic helmets and induces a sudden surge of elation in these three men, who have seen all this before, but are struck with wonder, lording it over the city, which reaches further than the eye can see, swallowed eventually in haze on this bright spring morning: the tower blocks snapping light back at the sun, the muddle at their feet, the old symmetries of streets, tiny creeping cars and buses. In the distance the Tower; beyond it the complex density of the heartlands, punctuated by spires, by soaring columns, a rainbow in pink and grey and white on the skyline. It is a world – entire, complete.
They point out landmarks, exhilarated and possessive. It is they, after all, who have made this possible – this new occupancy of space, this new claim upon London. They have added their mite – their tonnage of steel and concrete. The site architect is talking technology. Tony Brace peers into the haze in search of known points of reference.
But Matthew’s eyes are upon the river. He looks down at the wide, glittering and empty roadway. He sees it reaching away to Tilbury, to the sea, to the rest of the globe. Reaching into time and space.
‘The stars are given by God,’ says the uncle. ‘That men may find their way across the seas. Look, boy.’ And he lifts the child upon a stool. ‘Look carefully. Hold it thus.’ And the child holds the glass to his eye and sees a spark leap from the dark blue backcloth of the evening sky, and then another, and another. He steps back from the instrument, and the sparks vanish. There is just the sky, and the river, upon which craft are scattered like insects on a pond – twelve-legged, six-legged, and the two-legged skiffs that jostle in their dozens. But the boy gazes only at those with wings, the great, bellying butterfly wings that fill with wind, that take the vessels scudding downstream and out of sight.
Two
‘If you ask me,’ said Tony Brace, ‘this whole thing is a bubble that will burst. Docklands. I can see it empty in ten years’ time. But it’s no skin off our nose, I dare say.’
‘No doubt they said the same thing about the Bedford Estate, in its day. Stick streets and squares out there in the fields! You must be out of your mind! I’ll drop you back at the office, shall I? I’m going straight on to Cobham Square.’
‘I’m somewhat peckish. Aren’t you?’
‘I’ll stop off and get us a sandwich,’ said Matthew sternly. ‘It’s going on for half past one already.’ Tony, a fastidious eater, sighed. Matthew, to placate and distract, made an enquiry about his colleague’s own current project, an elegant and ingenious restoration and conversion of a disused late Victorian school building to a restaurant and wine bar. He half listened as Tony expanded upon the difficulties and solutions, thinking of the sour blackened brick of the place (scoured clean to a pristine rust once more), of pinafores and breeches and slates and a cramped, didactic but well-intentioned educational process. From books to claret; from learning to commerce. He thought of the unstoppable force of profit, of wealth flooding down decade by decade, a stream becoming a river, gushing through the city over centuries, bricks ripped down and rising again to the greater gain of Grosvenors and Bed-fords, families fattening on houses and shops. People die, but money never does. Most people spend much of their lives thinking of nothing else; the stuff itself, indestructible, pours mindlessly onwards, throwing up streets and factories, obsessing both those who control it and those who crawl through stunted lives for lack of it.
‘The problem is the windows. One wants to keep that leaded glass, but the light’s bad. I’m toying with the idea of some kind of skylighting.’
Matthew pulled in to the kerb. ‘Here we go. What do you want?’
‘Beef,’ said Tony resignedly. ‘With mustard. Ham, failing that. Two rounds.’
The sandwich counter was busy. Matthew had patronized it on other occasions for its efficiency and the convenient yellow line on which to pa
rk. A youth was giving a complicated order for, evidently, an entire office. A young woman in a red jacket waited her turn; Matthew took his place behind her. The order became ever more diversified and extensive. The girl in red half-turned, her glance met Matthew’s, they exchanged smiles of complicity and endurance. She had short brown hair that lay in neat wings against each cheek, clear skin with a warm flush, an interesting tilt to the nose; white open-neck shirt, hands thrust into the pockets of the red jacket, a gold chain round the neck. All this Matthew registered with vague detached appreciation, thinking about wealth and poverty, about the light of the nineteenth century falling through leaded windows upon pinafored infants, about the sandwich order (two rounds of beef with mustard, one cheese and pickle, one egg and tomato). He saw a good-looking young woman with a smile that intensified the sense of solitude within which, these days, he lived. It was like seeing sunlight on a distant, inaccessible hillside. He looked sharply beyond her into the street, at passers-by, at the traffic, at Tony waiting in the car. And when he turned back the smile was no longer directed upon him but upon the man behind the counter, to whom she was giving her order. Tuna salad; just one round.
‘One-fifty.’
She fished in her skirt pocket; froze. ‘Oh God – I came out without my purse.’
Matthew stepped forward. ‘Please let me, then. Stick it on my order,’ he added, ‘Beef with mustard twice, please. Cheese. Egg and tomato.’
‘You can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s one-fifty.’
‘I shall think of it as one-fifty particularly well spent,’ said Matthew.
‘I can’t accept one-fifty from a total stranger.’
‘I don’t know why not, really. Plenty would.’
Her sandwich lay on the counter, neatly wrapped. She hesitated, then picked it up. And smiled. The sun blazing now on that hillside, gold upon green. ‘Thank you very much then. It’s very nice of you. Goodbye.’ And was gone – visible briefly stepping away down the street, then blocked by others, cut down to a glimpse of red, until she vanished, swallowed up by the city, quite gone.