‘That’s six-fifty, then,’ the man grinned. ‘I could have offered to put it on the slate, of course. I thought you were going to ask for her address.’
‘Did you?’ said Matthew coldly. He took out his wallet, paid, and returned to the car.
‘Sorry to be so long. Here you are – beef with mustard. We’ll chew as we go, if you don’t mind. I told Jobson I’d be there by two.’
When Matthew was a child he had watched the trains go by. He had hung over the fence at the bottom of the garden, waiting. The slow processional thump-thump of goods trains. The thrilling roar of the express. The busy to and fro of the commuter trains, with people’s heads in profile and sometimes an observing pair of eyes, meeting his for a fraction of a second. The trains charged north; Doncaster, Newcastle, Edinburgh. He learned to recite the litany of names, thought of them as other Londons, up there, out there, with nothing but the shining railway track between. The row of houses was too close to the line, so that strangers stared casually at the intimacies of their back gardens: washing, children’s toys, seedlings in a greenhouse. At night, the windows rattled. Matthew’s parents, patiently, doggedly, scrimped and counted and put enough by for the move to the leafy suburb for which his mother had always yearned. Turn that light off; don’t scuff your shoes; money doesn’t grow on trees. When at last the move came his parents were breathless with the achievement, scarcely able to believe their luck. They tiptoed reverently around the pebble-dashed semi in the quiet side-street, with its tiled fireplace, primrose bathroom suite and varnished front door with stained glass yacht in a porthole inset, while Matthew mourned the trains.
He was the only child: their pride, their worry. Fresh vegetables, cod liver oil, clean shirts. Sedate people, cautious, alarmed by excess. Matthew excelled; he did well at school, was noticed, began to stray. He loved them, and fumed to be off. Nowadays, when he went back to that house, to his mother, he saw his childhood as though through the wrong end of a telescope: brilliant and diminished. The same people, the same place; his mother’s lopsided smile, the oak settle in the hall, that vase. He saw himself: minute, unreachable. He saw his father: distinct, continuous, gone. His widowed mother sat in the same chair in which she had once knitted him school jerseys and pulled him towards her to measure the sleeve; he could feel her hands and his own irritation. He took Jane to visit her and she drank from the Mickey Mouse mug that had been his. You travelled through time and space to find that the world had caught up with you. ‘Where is Grandpa?’ asks Jane. Grandpa is behind the glass of the photo on the mantelpiece, in his Royal Ordnance Corps uniform, in 1944, alongside the clock that they gave him when he retired from thirty years with Cooper Brothers of Enfield (clerical division). You cannot step twice into the same river, and yet you do. It has carried you away, and yet you stand on the bank, looking at the point of your own departure.
They had wanted him to be a doctor. Our son the doctor. He was a clever boy, and ought to do good in the world. They had a puritanical streak, and mistrusted display. They had brought him up to finish what was on his plate, speak nicely to the neighbours and get through his homework. Now he filled the house with Beatles music, had a girlfriend with her skirt barely covering her behind, and said he wanted to study architecture. They couldn’t think where they’d gone wrong. Peering down the telescope, Matthew saw the shimmer of discord, of distress. From far away, his father’s voice admonished: money never brought happiness to anyone, when you’re born with brains you’ve a duty to make use of them. He associated architects with builders, with brash commerce, with turning a quick penny. His mother, looking in the opposite direction, saw artists starving in garrets, unemployment and ruin; she remembered the paintbox given one Christmas, and blamed herself. Matthew said (to his father) that architects seldom got rich, so far as he knew, and (to his mother) that it was more to do with maths and science than with art. Today, he found it difficult to trace the origins of the decision. A certain aptitude at draughtsmanship, an interest in how things are made (he had always liked taking objects apart, for the pleasure of reassembly). A gathering fascination with the variety and manipulation of landscape. He began to scrutinise buildings to see how they were put together and what they were made of. He saw that there are triumphs and disasters, and that someone is responsible. The idea formed that there was no reason why that someone should not be himself. Hitherto, almost the only architect he had ever heard of was Sir Christopher Wren. He was a rational youth and doubted if he was going to build cathedrals – you only had to look around you to see that the demand is not high – but the world has other needs. He improved his knowledge of the profession, identified the bottom rungs of the ladder, and pointed his life in a certain direction.
The first building on which he worked after he qualified was a school, the second a hospital, and his parents heaved sighs of relief. Also, he was patently hard up, and seemed likely to remain so. Their fears had been unfounded. The world needs schools and hospitals; our son the architect. (‘That Docklands,’ says his mother. ‘Someone’s making a mint of money down there, if you ask me. What d’you want to get mixed up with that for, then, Matthew?’ She has a point. Oh, indeed she has a point.) And besides, the emphasis was changing, year by year. At the time, you were not aware – but peering down the telescope Matthew saw his parents move from the centre of the frame, shunted sideways, grown smaller. That watershed had been reached and passed, when one generation makes way for another. He and Susan, now, were the central figures and, presently, Jane. His parents sat on the periphery, commenting.
Susan. Wearing not a miniskirt because by then the fashion had changed, but something trailing and multicoloured, with overtones of the Far East – to which Susan, hailing from Gloucestershire and Sussex University, has never been. The telescope showed this garment, and Susan’s fair straight bobbed hair (longer these days, caught back at the nape, an older woman’s style) and her grey thoughtful eyes (which, today, seldom meet his, as they face each other on the doorstep, making necessary arrangements, no more and no less). The telescope showed her stepping up the path towards the varnished front door, on that first visit, observing, assessing. Matthew’s parents, too, had assessed. They had perceived before ever she spoke that she was from an alien world, scenting differences from afar; courteous, uncompromising and wary. ‘She’s a nice girl,’ Matthew’s mother said later, but did not amplify.
His mother, who had her priorities right, and for whom, in the end, first things came first. Never mind that there’d always been the odd reservation (‘Susan has her own way of doing things, I know that’); when the chips were down she could only anguish. Her eyes had pleaded, when he and Susan had visited in those last disintegrating days of their life together, when the pretence was being kept up that all might yet be well. Love one another, said his mother’s eyes, be reasonable and love one another. To which he could only reply: we cannot. I’m sorry – dear God, am I not sorry? – but we cannot.
He had taken Jane, on a whim, to see the house from which he had watched the trains go by. Ignoring all British Rail’s admonitions, they had scrambled over the fence at the end of the row of houses and made their way along the cindery strip of no-man’s-land that separated the gardens from the track. ‘Here,’ he had said. ‘This one.’ And they had gazed down the long funnel of the garden. The back door had acquired a glassed-in porch, the coal-shed was gone, and the scabby apple tree. Jane was interested only in the hutch beside the back porch, in which something moved: ‘It’s a rabbit. They’ve got rabbits. Did you have a rabbit?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said Matthew. ‘Why not?’ ‘Rabbits cost money.’ ‘Not much money. About two-fifty. Not as much as gerbils.’ ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees,’ said Matthew. And then the train came, and they turned and flattened themselves against the fence, and Intercity hurtled past in a blur of red and white, aimed at King’s Cross, at the city, at the heart of things.
It is 2.21, and Matthew Halland is at last reaching Cobham Square. It is also, in an
other sense, 1823, when the square was built, and when a considerable tonnage of bricks was hauled from brick fields not too far away and assembled into walls of Flemish bond, some shrouded in stucco, some not, most of which still stand precisely as they were constructed. Matthew drives around the square impatiently searching for a parking slot. It is 2.25 (and still 1823) when he finds one, locks up, and hurries towards the north side of the square, whose Flemish bond, stucco, porticoed entrances, fanlights and Coade stone surrounds are encased in scaffolding and green nylon netting. The pavement is an obstacle course of cement mixers and skips; a large notice across the front of the scaffolding declares that Gresham Associates regret the inconvenience caused, mentioning also that 25,000 square feet of office space will be available, leasehold, in the spring of next year. Graffiti have been spray-painted along the foot of the notice: SKINS OK KEV AND SID WOZ ERE TERRY 14/3/89. Matthew, who is a connoisseur of graffiti, notes them: nothing very recondite, though the CND sign is new and quite rare, and DOZY MARGE interestingly cryptic. The scrawled fantasies and assertions of a disembodied crowd, shouts of defiance and of egotism, the silent insistent clamour of an invisible horde, not quite unheard, not quite extinguished, their purpose eerily fulfilled. They were indeed here, once, and are still.
For this is the city, in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday, nor tomorrow, merely weather, and decay, and construction. And the passage of hoofs, wheels and feet, the path of fire, the blast of bombs. The city digests itself, and regurgitates. It melts away, and rears up once more in another form. People die, and die, and die again, and from the graveyard float forth reminders and warnings and recommendations. They sift through the place in their millions, leaving this sediment of brick and stone, the unquenchable testimony of their existence by way of pediments and cornices, statues of men on horseback and women in draperies and admirals on the tops of columns. And initials gouged into balustrades or words sprayed onto a wall.
*
‘Sorry. I was held up at our Docklands site.’
‘Ah,’ said Jobson. ‘The never-never land. If you ask me that whole set-up’s a …’
‘Bubble that could burst. Oh, I dare say. And a lot of people are making a mint of money.’
‘Including James Gamlin and Partners.’ Jobson laughed, explosively, making passers-by turn their heads. He was a big man, huge in his working boiler-suit, with a voice that could carry up five floors. He ran the site on towering energy and an invincible technical knowledge. Matthew respected him and sparred with him.
‘True. But I’d rather do this sort of thing, on the whole.’ The two men stood in front of the scaffolded terrace, looking up to the roof-line where a man unloaded Welsh slates from a pulley. ‘That slate came, then?’
‘In the bloody end it came. The first lot they sent was rubbish – all had to go back.’
‘The original roof probably came from the same quarries,’ said Matthew.
‘That so? Well, what we’re putting up now will see out the next hundred years. More than I can say for your glasshouses down in Docklands.’
‘You could well be right. Which is what’s satisfactory about this sort of job. My mother used to do something with clothes called making over – turning collars and cuffs inside out, putting in new elbows. We’re making over.’
‘We’re making money, too,’ said Jobson, and roared again. ‘Making money for other people, that is.’
‘We’re also keeping the place ticking over. Why don’t we just pull the lot down and start again, after all?’
‘Because of the bloody planning laws.’ Jobson, momentarily distracted, broke off to interrogate a driver unloading timber. ‘Talking of which, we’ve got a real headache with that stair balustrade – you’d better come and have a look.’
Matthew continued to stand in front of the building. ‘This is a pile of bricks. Carefully arranged bricks, I grant you, but a pile of bricks none the less. You may call it a late Georgian house with a neo-classical portico and Coade stone dressings. Others might just call it a house. A Martian would call it a pile of bricks, if he had got as far as identifying a pile or a brick. You can take it to pieces in order to build something else with the bricks. You can pull it down in order to use the space it occupies for another building. Or you can give it a new significance because you have stopped thinking about it as simply a pile of bricks. This is what we’re doing.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think of it as,’ said Jobson. ‘My bloody wage-packet, that’s what. And so do you – never mind all that hoo-ha.’
‘Oh, quite. So did the lot who ran up this square. The likes of you and me. The last thing they had in mind was immortality, I should imagine.’
‘They didn’t do a bad job. Though they could have left out the Coade stone – looks like bloody fossilized brains, if you ask me.’
‘It was the last word in architectural chic, at the time. OK – let’s have a think about that balustrade, for starters.’
They went into the building, which vibrated to a heavy drill somewhere overhead. Cement flooring was being relaid. Dust hung in clouds. ‘Another thing,’ said Jobson. ‘I’m not happy about that party wall at the far end. I want to have it out after all – it looks dodgy as hell to me. Of course all this lot were war-damaged. Those two at the end were a pretty ropy job. Anyway … what do we do about this ruddy balustrade?’
The problem with the balustrade, constructed in 1823 along with the building, is that it is not acceptable to the planning office at the Town Hall. It has been indeed, for many a long year, an illegal balustrade. Its elegant curved iron uprights are two inches further apart than the maximum permitted distance; a child could get its head through there. Jobson runs up and down with a steel measure, irritably demonstrating. ‘Inch and a bloody half, more like. Why the silly bastards can’t turn a blind eye …’
‘Just nip out and find us a passing child,’ said Matthew. ‘Two years old or so will do nicely. Of course, children were considered more expendable in the nineteenth century. Look, I’ll go along to the Town Hall tomorrow and see if I can talk them round. If not …’
They stand, the two men, in the dust-hung shell of the building, debating the problem of the balustrade. The place has been stripped to its bones, reduced to a frame of brick which still shows, on the inside, the soot-stained column of old fireplaces. The embattled staircase sweeps down from the first floor, which survives only as joists and makeshift boarding. Here and there you can see right up through four storeys to the roof. A West Indian is pouring concrete for what will one day be once more the entrance hall; reggae music crashes from a cassette player. Someone has scrawled the date in the wet concrete – 10/5/89 - and a crude cartoon outline of a horse’s head; the West Indian, maybe, who wears a T-shirt on which capers a pink horse wearing a daisy-chain. His logo, perhaps, his sign, his ‘I am here.’ He looks up at Matthew, and grins. And Matthew, grinning back – a mute exchange in the throbbing screeching building – hears an echo beyond the din, receives the silent signals of the place.
Coming into the square, Jim Prothero sees that the trees have almost lost their leaves. He stands for a moment, tired at the end of his day, the noise of the print works still ringing in his ears, and sees the sparse branches, with the small blunt buds from which, eventually, spring will come. The world is turning still, here in the dishevelled stricken city. There is glass over the road, where windows were blown out last night, and a crater in the next street where the UXB fell a month ago, but the leaves are falling.
The front door of the house stands open; the entrance hall is a clutter of prams and bicycles. Twenty people live here, or did, stacked above and alongside each other in the tall house whose big rooms have been sliced up and pared down to meet the requirements of the age. The Protheros’ kitchen is graced with half of an ornate plaster ceiling rose, the rest of it swallowed up into the flat next door. The place is a rabbit-warren of plaster-board partitions and dark passageways; the panel of bells at the en
trance bristles with scruffy hand-scrawled name-cards. People come and go, these days; those who have fled lend their flats to relatives, friends, acquaintances. Dozens pass through, stop over, disappear. Goodness knows who may be here, on any one night; a warden’s nightmare, as Jim often thinks.
The stairwell is dark, the windows boarded up where the glass blew out last month. He gropes his way up, smelling cabbage from old Mrs Hanson’s and something rank from the O’Connors and then toast from his own front door. Mary is giving the child her tea. And he sees, for an instant, in the mind’s eye, before ever he goes in, the two of them, his people, his world, and is uplifted.
And later he sits on the sagging cretonne sofa with his wife, and lets the day ebb from him. Another hour, and he must go off down to Aldgate, to his warden’s post, but this brief hinge between day and night is his, is theirs. It is quiet. Somewhere a wireless chatters; a solitary car passes. The child is painting; her brush swishes on the paper. They watch her – amused, admiring. ‘I’m thinking a horse,’ the child says. Her tongue sticks out in concentration, she scowls over the sheet of grocers’ paper and the tray of poster paints. She is attempting the impossible. She is trying to translate what is in the head, that essence of horse that she knows so well, into line and shape. She is having trouble with scale: head is eclipsed by body, the ears have grown disproportionately. The legs are a large problem: there must be four, but how to dispose them? In a row? She dabs angrily with the blue-loaded brush (and why should a horse not be blue?). There is something amiss with legs-in-a-row; the horse in the child’s head and the horse she has created do not tally. She cries out in frustration, unable to translate the moving, shining, kicking maelstrom of horses-in-the-head into this wilful recalcitrant horse upon a sheet of paper. She is in the grip of an ancient, abiding and crucial predicament. The distant wireless is playing brass band music; the light is fading, her father has moved to the window, and stands looking again at the drifting leaves.