City of the Mind

  ‘I never cared for them, if you really want to know,’ says his mother. ‘Your dad brought them back one Christmas, pleased as punch. I never let on. It can’t hurt him now, and there’s better ways of remembering a person.’

  There is mine and thine, and then there is ours. And then eventually, mine again. Objects tend a marriage. They are its toys, its talismans. They chart its progress. Once, Matthew and Susan bought a chair together. They were not married, but soon would be. The chair was in the window of an antique shop: a Victorian nursing chair, high-backed with neatly curving arms. A simple, agreeable, useful object. Susan said, ‘That’s pretty’, and Matthew said, ‘I’ll buy it for you.’ And she said, ‘No. We’ll buy it for us.’

  Thus, the chair. Which sits today in his flat, pushed into a corner, homeless, adrift. From time to time he notices it; sometimes it is merely a familiar chair and at others it is so invested with meaning that he has to turn away.

  When things had reached a point of no redemption, when both of them knew that there was nothing further to be tried, or done, Susan said, ‘What are we going to do about the house?’ Not, I am leaving you, or, You must go. And he looked at her, bleakly, understanding and accepting, and replied, ‘I’ve no idea.’

  The house has passed into other hands. It is a party now to other people’s intimacies. Matthew wishes it well. Occasionally he finds himself in the street, and notices that the front door has changed colour, or that it has sprouted window boxes; there is something vaguely reassuring about that. The house has distanced itself, and so it should.

  In the parcelling out of objects the Victorian nursing chair fell to him, almost by default, it seemed. Neither of them, in any case, much cared. Like auctioneers, dispassionate and brusque, they surveyed the clutter of their lives, their life; they catalogued and apportioned. You have that, they said, and I’ll have this. There were no arguments; all was scrupulously fair, remorselessly polite. Are you sure? they enquired of each other. Don’t you want the gilt mirror? Or the Kitaj lithograph? Or the Provençal plates? Or the Beardsley prints or the fake Tiffany lamp or the khelim rug? No, no, they assured each other, you have it, I don’t mind. Who cares? they did not say. What does it matter, now? What’s the point? All this is just glass, wood, metal, cloth, paper, paint. So much lumber. They dismantled the place, shovelling books, cushions, pots, pictures into boxes and bags. They did it with deliberation and without comment. They ignored, or pretended to ignore, the shimmering haze of reference that hung over each object, intelligible only to themselves, shared and yet profoundly private. Matthew, shoving the Provençal plates into a plastic carrier bag, hardly bothering to shroud them in newspaper, sees Susan in a blue cotton sun dress, with a pink tinge of sunburn across her shoulders, turning to him in a shady street in Avignon, pointing at a stall. He smells garlic, dust and flowers. He feels the ghostly pluck of desire, and cringes.

  Carrying the Kitaj lithograph down the stairs, stowing it carefully into the back of Susan’s car, he stands again with the picture held up against a wall. ‘Left a bit,’ says Susan. ‘No, to your right now.’ He feels something on his legs, glances down, and sees Jane’s starfish baby hands spread against his trousers. ‘Standing!’ cries Susan. ‘Will you look at this!’

  And what did Susan see, or hear? Their eyes did not often meet, during those days. They came and went like removal men, passing one another on the stairs, working as a team when necessary for the handling of some large or delicate item. They spoke little, and were careful not to brush against each other. And as the house emptied, it began to echo. The rooms that were becoming shells rang with the hollow sound of their footsteps on uncarpeted floors. The place expanded, grew lighter, as though, relieved of its cargo of furnishings, it breathed more freely. Sunshine flooded through the curtainless windows and lay in slanting geometric shapes across the boards that Matthew had once stripped and stained. Dust balls shifted lazily in the draught; cobwebs swung from the ceilings. The walls were marked with the pale squares of their pictures, the ghostly imprint of their cupboards and chests. Coming upon Susan unexpectedly in one of the bare rooms, Matthew saw her, too, for an instant, as a precarious presence on the brink of extinction. She stood at the window, looking out, wearing jeans and a checked shirt, the person he knew best in the world, and had once loved most, and he seemed to see through and beyond her to a thousand other moments, a thousand other Susans. And then she turned, saw him, snatched herself from whatever had been in her own head, put on the dispassionate mask they both, now, wore with one another: ‘We’ve forgotten the cupboard under the stairs. We’d better get going on that next.’

  And so his mother would send the red horses to the church jumble. It can’t hurt her husband now. She is quite right, of course; she was always a rational woman. To continue to live with a picture she had always disliked would be mere sentiment, a secondary emotion, and she has no need for that. There are better ways of remembering a person. His mother, of course, was secure in the stability of love, tolerance, forbearance or whatever had been the substance of marriage. She had to endure bereavement, and loneliness, but not the cruel betrayal of feeling. She can do what she likes with the red horses. They have not the power to turn the knife as does, from time to time, the Victorian nursing chair, for Matthew.

  *

  ‘I looked at those Meard Street houses,’ said Matthew. ‘Who is this bloke Rutter, anyway? We don’t know him, do we?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Tony rose from his desk to fetch a file. ‘No, we don’t. He’s a developer. Address in Hampstead. Wrote out of the blue wanting an opinion on Meard Street. I did ask around a bit. Apparently he’s been operating in the Bristol area and surfaced here recently. Buying up stuff all over the place. D’you mind if I pass him on to you? I’m up to the eyes at the moment.’

  Who isn’t? thought Matthew, with irritation. He took the file. ‘If I must.’

  ‘He’s talking about Spitalfields, too. I thought that might be rather up your street. You’ve got a penchant for that area, haven’t you?’

  ‘My penchant,’ said Matthew tartly ‘– if that’s the right word – is for its interesting historical associations, not for tricking out old houses as pastiche reproductions of the past, if that’s what this fellow is after. In any case, there’d be a hell of a lot of problems with Meard Street.’

  ‘Better have a word with him. Suss him out. He might make a change from Blackwall and the Group.’ Tony’s grin was both guilty and propitiating, as well it might be.

  ‘Mr Rutter is not available. He would like to see you here tomorrow evening, at about nine-thirty.’

  The hell he would, thought Matthew. ‘Mr Rutter seems rather difficult to reach. I wanted a preliminary word.’

  The voice was male and so thickly London as to seem almost parodic. It was also tiresomely inflexible. ‘Mr Rutter is not available. He’ll see you here tomorrow at nine-thirty.’

  ‘So you said. That’s not entirely convenient. I prefer to hold business meetings during the day.’

  There was a pause. Some heavy thinking, evidently, was going on. ‘Mr Rutter will send a car.’

  ‘Transport is not the problem,’ said Matthew. ‘I’d prefer another time, that’s all. Perhaps Mr Rutter could get in touch with me when he’s more available and we can …’

  The voice cut in, still, apparently, on automatic course. ‘Mr Rutter will see it’s worth your while.’

  Matthew laughed. The parodic effect was now of a different order. ‘I’m delighted to hear it. My firm operates a fixed fee system, as it happens, but never mind.’

  A further pause. Heavy breathing, now. ‘Mr Rutter will expect you at nine-thirty.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Matthew. Annoyed, but mildly intrigued.

  There was a high wall, in which was set a pair of double steel gates with, alongside, a bell and entry-phone. Matthew pressed the bell and at the precise same moment a halogen light snapped on and very large dogs began to bark from just inside the gates. The e
ntry-phone quacked.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ said Matthew. ‘On account of those damn dogs. And kindly don’t open the gate until someone’s got them under control.’

  The entry-phone quacked again, and fell silent, unlike the dogs, who continued to bay and presently to fling themselves against the gates. Matthew eyed his car and fingered the keys in his pocket. The gates shook and clanged as the dogs hurled themselves against them and bounced off again. The Post Office presumably visited Mr Rutter by helicopter. After a couple of minutes the baying was interrupted by curses. Some kind of terminal struggle took place, with shouting matched by throaty growls, and the gates swung open. One thickset man in an indefinite uniform (olive green blouson, jackboots, peaked cap) stood there while another was trying to haul away a pair of Rottweilers on steel chains and looking as though he might not succeed.

  ‘Mr Rutter’s waiting for you.’ So that was what the voice looked like. Of Italian extraction, built like a side of beef.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Matthew. ‘I’ll just wait till your colleague’s got those things out of the way.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do nothing.’

  ‘I see. Purely ornamental.’

  Spotlights blazed onto a garden reduced to alternating sections of grass and paving, with a few glass fibre urns and troughs dotted around. The whole frontage of the house was bathed in a glaring white light. It was a Thirties mansion constructed in uneasy imitation of a southern American plantation house, with a flight of steps sweeping up to a semicircular pillared portico, and ranks of green shuttered windows. A Rolls with smoked glass windows was parked on the gravel drive up which Matthew and his companion now advanced.

  The front door stood open. A circular hall, floored in black and white marble, curving staircase with marble balustrade. Much gilt furniture. Large, dark, Italianate oil paintings on the wall. An ascending Christ, striking a distinctly false note in this Hampstead Alcatraz.

  ‘Mr Rutter’s expecting you in the library,’ said the voice, with a hint of impatience. One was not, evidently, being given a tour of inspection. Matthew wrenched himself away from an immense silver-gilt seventeenth-century ewer displayed in uncomfortable juxtaposition with a collection of Lalique glass vases. Either Mr Rutter was strikingly eclectic in his tastes, or he needed a new art acquisitions adviser.

  The voice tapped at a pair of panelled doors, paused, opened, and stepped aside, with a nod at Matthew.

  It was indeed a library, lined from floor to ceiling with ranks of new-looking leather-bound editions of this and that. Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Connoisseur. Whitaker’s Almanac. Mostly that. Marble busts on pedestals. Goethe? Surely not? A distinctly pleasing Dutch painting over the fireplace. Oriental carpeting. French windows giving onto further floodlit sterile expanses of garden.

  And Mr Rutter, seated behind a leather-topped desk of gross proportions and tricked out with all the appurtenances of modern business – fax machine, VDU, elaborate telephonic arrangements. There was also a large television, let into one of the bookcases. Rutter rose, hand outstretched. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Halland. My people been looking after you all right? Take a seat.’

  Mid-forties, unseasonal suntan, the voice again aggressively of London. South of the river, to Matthew’s experienced ear. A square skull that somehow suggested distant Slavonic connections. Spanking white silk shirt with gold cuff-links and grey suit that managed to be both expensive-looking and ill-fitting.

  They faced each other, in leather armchairs. ‘Drink?’ enquired Rutter. ‘Shampoo suit you?’

  ‘Sorry? Oh … yes, fine.’

  A bell was rung. The voice appeared, almost immediately, with champagne in an ice-bucket, and glasses. Matthew looked over Rutter’s shoulder into the garden, where one of the Rottweilers was defecating onto a shaven lawn, and spotlights glared from the perimeter wall.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Rutter.

  ‘Cheers. Quite an impenetrable spot you’ve got here.’

  Rutter waved a dismissive hand, weighted with gold signet rings. ‘There’s a lot of villains about in these parts.’

  Matthew nodded understandingly. An eighteenth-century longcase clock ticked sombrely from a corner of the room, a deeply incongruous sound. Rutter stared impassively at Matthew; the ball, it seemed was in his court.

  ‘I’ve had a look at those Meard Street houses, Mr Rutter. Just from the outside. As you must know, they’re listed buildings – there’d be a lot of problems with a conversion, they look pretty dodgy, but of course that sort of thing is always …’

  Rutter waved the hand again. ‘I’m not taking Meard Street. I’m not interested any more. I’m tired of playing silly games with listed stuff. Property in central London – it’s a case of build from scratch or forget about it, far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Then I wonder why …’ Matthew began.

  ‘There’s other things we can do business about. Maybe. I’m thinking of Spitalfields.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Matthew. ‘Plenty of listed stuff there.’

  ‘Not that rubbish. Brick Lane area. That’s where the clever money’s going now. Bishopsgate’s played out. Docklands is a waste of time.’

  ‘Really?’ said Matthew. ‘I see. A lot of the Spitalfields area is tenanted, you know. Bangladeshi textile businesses, cafés, small shops, that sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s not a problem.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We’ve had a lot of experience with tenanted property,’ said Rutter heavily. ‘It’s never a problem, go about it the right way.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Matthew, now, was impassive.

  ‘You just got to use a little persuasion, haven’t you? Make them be reasonable.’

  ‘In my experience,’ said Matthew, ‘many sitting tenants are elderly people.’

  ‘Right. So you got to see they move on, haven’t you?’

  ‘If they’re old ladies of eighty, moving on might present difficulties. Where to … that sort of thing.’

  There was a pause, in which Rutter appeared to be considering. ‘Well, basically, that’s their problem, isn’t it? I mean, I can’t get too fussed about that, can I?’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said Matthew. ‘You can’t afford to get bogged down in detail, I do see that.’

  Rutter gave him a hard look. ‘You wouldn’t be taking the michael, would you, Mr Halland?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Right. That wouldn’t be a sensible thing to do. I’m a straightforward bloke to deal with, but I’m touchy. OK?’

  ‘Absolutely. Sensitive – I imagine that’s the word.’

  The next pause was loaded. Rutter stared at Matthew. ‘I’m not sure about you, Mr Halland,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know I’ve got the right man.’

  ‘To be absolutely honest,’ said Matthew, ‘I rather share your feelings.’ He put his glass down and stood up.

  Rutter remained seated. ‘I’ll tell you something else. You’re no sort of businessman. You’ve not even heard what I got to suggest.’

  ‘I’m an architect. Though as a firm we are indeed in business, as you rightly point out. Incidentally – I wonder why you picked on us?’

  ‘My people made some enquiries. You’ve got good contracts. You’re on the up. You’d be surprised what I know.’ Rutter now rose. He tapped Matthew on the arm, with a curiously disarming gesture. ‘I even know what you done, yourself.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ said Matthew. ‘All the same …’

  ‘Thing is,’ continued Rutter, ‘I had a bloke working for me but he got silly – tried to pull off the odd job for himself on the side, that sort of thing, so I had to get rid of him. He did the Arnold Park development for me in Bristol, and Haverfields. You know those?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I don’t normally deal with firms like yours. I use my own people. But as I say there’s a vacancy at the moment. It’s a question of the right man coming along. How much are you pulling in, with James Gamlin?’

&nb
sp; ‘I’m not looking for another job,’ said Matthew. ‘If that’s the point of your question.’

  ‘And I’m not offering you one. Though you never know. I got the feeling we may not be on the same wavelength.’

  ‘I think that’s a distinct possibility,’ said Matthew.

  ‘My people say you’re into conversions and new stuff, both. Spitalfields I see as a mix, depending on the circs. Sounds the sort of thing you ought to be able to handle.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, from a professional point of view. I fancy the difficulty would be one of … what shall we say? … social delicacy.’

  Rutter studied Matthew. ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘I feel that I – we – might not be entirely happy about your approach to those unfortunate enough to end up, however temporarily, as your tenants.’

  Rutter gave himself some more champagne, waving the bottle at Matthew, who shook his head. ‘You’re a sentimental bastard, are you?’

  ‘I suppose that’s one way of putting it. One could also call it morally fastidious. Or just plain law-abiding.’

  ‘Those old ladies in Bristol was due for redevelopment, in any case. That fucking newspaper reporter was talking off the top of his head. They ought to be grateful, in the long run. There’s different ways you can look at tenancy situations. Often as not, people don’t know themselves what’s best for them. They get it stuck in their heads any change is a bad thing – know what I mean? And another thing – you’ve got to look at what’s good for the country. You can’t have valuable inner city development sites standing idle.’

  ‘Of course there’s the difficulty that a person may not think of their bedroom, or their corner shop, or their garment factory as an inner city development site.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Rutter. ‘And those Bangladeshi sweatshops down there are for the chop anyway. Their turnover’s ridiculous, half of them. They don’t realize it, but you’re doing them a favour.’