City of the Mind
‘Can I ask you something?’ said Matthew.
Rutter spread his hands, expansively.
‘How actually do you deal with a … recalcitrant tenant?’
Rutter sucked in his cheeks. ‘Simplest is you raise the rent, where you can. Five or six hundred per cent. That usually does the trick. If there’s some silly bugger nonsense about fixed rent tenancies then you got to be a bit persuasive. The tenants find there’s always difficulties with the water and the electric. People don’t like being without water and electric. If they go on being awkward you can always move in some kids with ghetto blasters.’ Rutter laughed. ‘People soon get pissed off with that, too. Specially older people. Or there’s dogs – couple of big bastards that’ll bark their heads off.’
‘I see,’ said Matthew. ‘Quite simple, really.’
‘Mind, you don’t need all that, usually. That’s just for the odd silly bugger who wants to be obstinate and cause trouble.’
‘In which case, you really have no choice.’
Rutter’s expression changed. ‘I don’t think I like your tone of voice, Mr Halland.’
‘Frankly, I’m not enthusiastic about yours. Tell me – do you ever get … how shall we say? … the slightest twinge of doubt about your methods?’
‘I don’t think I’m going to waste any more time on you,’ said Rutter. He reached out and rang a bell. ‘You wouldn’t be any use in my outfit, I can see that.’
‘Do you, though?’ continued Matthew. ‘Idle curiosity … but at this moment it seems important.’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ snapped Rutter. ‘It’s each for himself in this fucking world, isn’t it? If you haven’t learned that by now then you’ve got a problem. I’m a reasonable bloke so long as people are reasonable back. I don’t mess about, that’s all. You don’t get where I am today by messing about, I can tell you that.’ The voice, now, had appeared and stood waiting. ‘Mr Halland has to leave now.’
‘Evidently not,’ said Matthew, moving towards the door. The voice, who clearly knew a loser when he saw one, stood aside, wearing an expression of fastidious contempt. ‘It’s been interesting to meet you, Mr Rutter.’
‘Get lost, would you?’ said Rutter. Matthew followed the voice out, past the risen Christ and the Lalique and the airy little gilded sofas, down the marble steps, across the gravel (the Rottweilers keening now somewhere offstage) and, at last, into his car.
Five
‘I don’t believe it!’ said Alice Cook. ‘You’ve invented him. There can’t be people like that!’
It was her birthday. They were dining in Soho; a celebration proposed by Matthew, who felt vaguely guilty that most of their meetings seemed to take place in Alice’s bed. This was probably an accurate reflection of the nature of their relationship, but still perturbed him from time to time. It did not seem to bother Alice, though she had seized with enthusiasm on the dinner suggestion.
‘Apparently there are.’
‘The police ought to do something.’ said Alice vaguely. ‘D’you know, we’ve got a woman in the hospital who was attacked by a Rottweiler. Eight stitches in her leg and broke her arm when it knocked her over. She said she …’
Alice’s world was purely referential. It was composed of people she knew or had heard of, places she had been to, things that had happened to her. This quite often made conversation difficult, Matthew found. Alice flew off in a sequence of tangents, pouncing upon the one identifiable reference in a statement to make it the prompt for an anecdote or rejoinder of her own. The effect was somehow disorienting. Dialogue did not progress in the rational and indirectly narrative manner that it should, but leapt all over the place in a way that was unsettlingly inconclusive. It was not so much that you never exhausted a subject, but that it never really left the starting post. The threat of abstraction, in particular, had Alice running for cover. Right now, Matthew wanted to talk about the nature of evil. His encounter with Rutter had left him, in some perverse way, exhilarated. He felt like a naturalist who had been afforded a rare sighting of some creature whose existence he had always doubted.
‘It’s like talking to a Martian, in a way,’ said Matthew. ‘Because you realize you can’t make any basic assumptions about how he feels. There’s presumably a whole range of emotion he doesn’t know about at all – fiddly stuff like compunction, and vicarious distress, and compassion, and moral outrage.’
‘Mmn … Anyway, this woman said all she was doing was visiting a friend, and she opened the door into the hallway of these flats and this animal …’
One knew all about it in the abstract, Matthew thought. One knew the effects. Hitler. Stalin. Large-scale historical evil was somehow familiar and, if not comprehensible, at least capable of analysis. On home ground, one had been inculcated in childhood into the simple matter of sorting out right from wrong, of passing judgements. Bullies at school were to be held in contempt. You did not lie or cheat (if you did you would undoubtedly be exposed). You did not kill, steal, blaspheme, say malevolent things about people behind their backs, fiddle the income tax, torment animals, or fornicate. You were considerate of the crippled and the mentally subnormal, you gave money on flag days, you offered your seat on buses to women and elderly men. You assumed that most others behaved the same, and condemned those who demonstrably did not. As you grew older you made certain adjustments to this canon (blasphemy, fornication, flag days …) but by and large it continued to condition how you behaved, and expected others to behave.
Which was what made meeting a man like Rutter simultaneously shocking and fascinating. It was brought sharply home to you that you shared the world with those whose every assumption was quite alien. Rutter moved daily through the same city, observed the same landscapes, saw sun and stars and moon, and the processes of his mind were more mysterious than those of some Amazonian tribesman reputedly ignorant of the contemporary world. Infinitely more mysterious, since Rutter was a product of the contemporary world just as much as was Matthew.
‘You and I,’ he said to Alice Cook ‘are capable of petty dishonesty, ill temper, the odd burst of malice, plus jealousy, envy, greed and all that sort of stuff. But I doubt either of us could manage to beat up children or animals, or mug old ladies.’
Alice giggled. ‘You don’t make us sound very nice. Incidentally, I saw Susan this week. We had a good old natter. She’s got a bloke, it seems.’
‘Really?’ said Matthew. Quite cool, quite non-committal. Rutter evaporated, along with the nature of evil. Susan is seeing some man. Sleeping, presumably, with some man. He tested his feelings: a little tenderness there? A twinge of pain under pressure?
‘Mmn. I dunno how long it’s been going on. Someone she met at work. So I told her we’re fucking.’
‘And what did she say?’ enquired Matthew, after a moment. A moment in which he came close to disliking Alice Cook.
‘Nothing much. I got the impression probably she thought it was a good idea.’ Alice reached out to tap his arm, companionably. ‘So I thought – good. I’d feel uncomfortable if I thought she minded. But you two are so sensible and no nonsense about the break-up. I mean, with some people it’s open warfare for ever after, and that’s really awkward if you know them both.’
‘One tries not to be socially inconvenient.’
‘Don’t be sarky,’ said Alice. She yawned. ‘Whoops! Sorry … A good meal always has that effect on me. You’d better take me home.’
And so, presently, they are out in the London night. It is a blaze, a swirl of light and colour, sound and smell. They pass from the intimacies of the Soho streets to the frontier of Charing Cross Road, streaming with people and traffic. Matthew takes Alice’s arm; an advancing gang of tipsy youths divides around them, goes whooping into the tube station. Everyone is talking, shouting. Language hangs in the night air and throbs in giant lettering above shops and theatres. A column of buses stands pulsing in a traffic jam: Gospel Oak, Putney Heath, Clapton Pond, Wood Green. Matthew and Alice pause on the pavement an
d he thinks of the city flung out all around, invisible and inviolate. He forgets, for an instant, his own concerns, and feels the power of the place, its resonances, its charge of life, its coded narrative. He reads the buses and sees that the words are the silt of all that has been here – hills and rivers, woods and fields, trade, worship, customs and events, and the unquenchable evidence of language. The city mutters still in Anglo-Saxon; it remembers the hills that have become Neasden and Islington and Hendon, the marshy islands of Battersea and Bermondsey. The ghost of another topography lingers; the uplands and the streams, the woodland and fords are inscribed still on the London Streetfinder, on the ubiquitous geometry of the Underground map, in the destinations of buses. The Fleet River, its last physical trickle locked away underground in a cast iron pipe, leaves its name defiant and untamed upon the surface. The whole place is one babble of allusions, all chronology subsumed into the distortions and mutations of today, so that in the end what is visible and what is uttered are complementary. The jumbled brick and stone of the city’s landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time. Language takes up the theme, an arbitrary scatter of names that juxtaposes commerce and religion, battles and conquests, kings, queens and potentates, that reaches back a thousand years or ten, providing in the end a dictionary of reference for those who will listen. Cheapside, Temple, Trafalgar, Quebec, a profligacy of Victorias and Georges and Cumberlands and Bedfords – there it all is, on a million pairs of lips every day, on and on, the imperishable clamour of those who have been here before.
‘Come on!’ cries Alice, tugging him into the road between bus and taxi, and he is jolted back into his own skin and on towards Covent Garden where he has his car tucked up a convenient alley. Alice’s thigh rubs against his; he is walking with a comely woman to whom, before long, he will make love. Alice is merry. She chatters, laughs, pulls him back to hover before a shop window: a display of esoteric toys – quivering plastic octopuses, a luminous green dinosaur, a paper mobile skeleton that bobs and turns behind the glass. ‘I want one,’ cries Alice. She is lit up, infused with the spirit of the night, an element of the crowd.
And Matthew, all of a sudden, is desolate. He is surrounded by people, and entirely alone. He is brushed by the indifferent glances of a hundred strangers, and looks upon them with equal disregard. Alice Cook is beside him, but he does not love Alice, nor does she love him. He is consumed with his sense of loss, of solitude. There comes surging forth the memory, not of Susan, but of love. Once, he lived within a safe warm capsule of requited feeling; now, he is adrift.
Nothing matters, he thinks, but other people. There is nothing else, for any of us. They have reached his car. He stops, and leans for a moment against a wall of blackened brick, searching for his keys. The smell of food gushes from the back door of a restaurant; the pavement blooms with scarlet rubbish sacks. He feels the harsh cool surface of the brick against his shoulders, and the weight of the place.
The child lies on the bed, in the cold gloom of the room. She can hear the sounds of the street beyond: cart wheels, barking dogs, the wordless maundering of a drunk man, women bawling at one another. It could be day or night.
The child is ill. She is suspended in a timeless black sphere of pain, and fear, and solitude. She swims from a fevered chaos into anxious clarity, and back again. Sometimes she knows her own name – Rose, Rose, Rose – and then she dissolves back into a blank and spinning existence that knows of nothing but its grief. Then, she is no longer in the room; she is untethered, everywhere and nowhere, now and for ever, a concentration of distress that is the world.
And then she arrives back upon the bed, and sees the square of the window, with the six broken panes (she can count, she can count to ten, and back again) and the brown paper that buckles in the wind, and the red rag stuffing up a hole. She sees the wall beside the bed, where the plaster is cracked in the shape of a horse’s head. She sees the dark outline of the fireplace. She starts to sob, the child: a fragile human sound that should soak into the bricks and lie there for a hundred years, to be heard again, and again, and again.
Matthew dreams. In his dream, as in all dreams, he has escaped the imprisonment of normal expectation. He is in Docklands, but is unsurprised to see that the place consists of buildings made of some translucent and subtly incandescent material, neither glass nor stone nor steel. He does not know the name of this substance, but is aware that he has himself designed many of these monolithic structures and indeed remembers doing so. As he looks at the great glowing place, spread out before him from some vantage point, he recalls quite clearly the hours at the drawing-board, he feels the pencil in his hand, he recovers precise details of design – the disposition of windows, the curve of an entrance door, a problem with load and stress.
And now, again without surprise or query, he finds himself passing into a different landscape, slipping into some other dimension, just as Alice steps unquestioningly from one square to another beyond the Looking Glass. Now there are fields around him, a pastoral scene with hedgerows, grazing cows and a muddy lane. But there are also, in some of the fields, curious stepped constructions reminiscent of Mayan pyramids, around which toil small, bent and curiously clad figures, some sort of unfamiliar peasantry. Carts process along the muddy lane. His response, now, has changed. He is no longer a detached observer but is in search of information. He perceives that he is in some foreign place, and is anxious to discover where. He accosts a man driving a cart (crudely made, and drawn he sees by oxen) and puts a question. But before the man can reply Matthew’s attention is distracted. He has seen a distant hill upon which sunlight pours from a cleft in opalescent masses of cloud. And on the hillside, quite clearly visible though a mile or two away, is a girl. The girl in the red coat, the girl from the sandwich bar. He can see her face, her brown hair that lies in wings against her cheeks. He sees her smile at him across space.
And, inexorably, the dream folds once again and he has stepped elsewhere. He is on a shore now, beside a storm-ridden sea. Waves are rolling in, bringing with them great slabs of pack-ice which break up into smaller pieces, the slabs piling up over each other like cards being dealt. And Matthew watches this, reduced again to a pair of observing, recording eyes.
He woke. The green figures on his digital clock flickered at three fifteen. He surveyed the dream, fresh and clear in his mind, and identified its component elements. The landscape of fields and curious stepped pyramids, the muddy lane and the carts was prompted, he perceived, by Rutter’s reference to Brick Lane. Matthew’s subconscious, clicking away in his sleep, had supplied the information that this name derived from the road’s ancestral function as channel for London building brick, brought from the brick-fields to the north and east of the city. The subconscious, labouring on, had then come up with what it considered to be an appropriate landscape, borrowing the Mayan image when short of something more authentic. Matthew could not recall ever having seen a brick-field.
The seashore with overlapping slabs of pack-ice was a recreation, he recognized, of a photograph he had seen recently in a book of photographs of the London Blitz. He had stood for a long while in the Charing Cross Road branch of Waterstone’s, mesmerized by those haunting pictures of St Paul’s rising from billowing smoke, of a bus upended in a crater, of a woman being dragged from a cliff of rubble. Other, odder scenes: a bearded Sikh sleeping in a stone coffin; a rescue worker lifting skulls from debris. And there had been one picture, forgotten until now, of a row of bomb-damaged suburban houses, the slates cascading from their roofs like spilled playing cards. Tiles, cards, slabs of ice. Such is the mind’s capacity to translate one image into another, to make random connections.
The incandescent version of Docklands was a little more tricky. A reflection, Matthew decided, of one of those illustrations of cities of the future in architectural textbooks and journals that he had studied in his student days – projections of another time that carried w
ith them a curiously dogmatic confidence and precision.
And the girl of the hillside? Oh, that is clear enough. No difficulty about deciphering an image for yearning, for hunger, for seeking the inaccessible. The girl, though, is a real girl. Was a real girl – vanished now into the city, as irretrievably as into a dream.
And so he drifts back into sleep, in pursuit of that hillside, that sense of promise.
*
‘I saw this fellow Rutter. We’re not taking him on.’
The board meeting had reached the stage of reviewing clients under discussion. ‘Why not?’ enquired Tony Brace.
‘He’s a crook,’ said Matthew shortly. He outlined his meeting with Rutter. There was a stir of interest.
‘Good grief,’ said Tony. ‘Rachman stuff. I didn’t realize all that was still going on.’
‘Evidently it has a new lease of life.’
‘Well … Judiciously phrased letter, I suppose, saying that unfortunately we don’t feel the project is quite in our line.’
‘I feel more like shooting him a bit of his own invariably elegant phraseology and telling him to fuck off. Anyway, he said as much to me. After offering me a job.’
There were some grins, around the table. ‘I hope you hesitated long enough to find out what the inducements were,’ said Alex Brinton, a recent and junior member of the firm. Matthew, who thought him bumptious and disliked his slavish adherence to any new fad of architectural fashion, gave him a curt glance. ‘I’m afraid not, Alex. I’ll put you in touch, if you’re interested.’
‘Mind you,’ said Tony, ‘I’ve no doubt we’ve dealt with clients in the past whose business methods might not bear too close inspection. But clearly this boyo is out of the question. Sorry to have exposed you to such a disagreeable experience, Matthew.’
‘Not at all. It had a certain awful fascination.’
He had become conscious, in the months since he and Susan separated, and indeed in the time before, of how distress blurs the distinction between private and working life. There was an uneasy and disturbing analogy here with happiness. When he had fallen in love with Susan it had taken up all his time. He had drawn up the designs for a primary school while thinking of nothing but her. He had gone daily to work, attended meetings, held consultations with clients, driven from site to site, and thought all the while of Susan. He had seen his drawing board, his desk, his telephone, other people, through the palimpsest of her face. And now that he endured the bleak process of the death of love, he found that its exigencies were the same. It was no longer possible, as in more tranquil passages of life, to separate the working day from personal life. The one spilled uncontrollably into the other, so that as he talked to a site architect, or dictated correspondence, he would be visited suddenly by his preoccupation, he would lose the thread of what he was saying, fall silent.