City of the Mind
He went over what had happened, again and again. He tried to pinpoint his transgressions, her mistakes. He tried to see who had done what, and why. He tried to isolate moments at which it might have been possible to halt the process, to cheat what now seemed some hideous unstoppable onset of disease. He set about charting the way in which their marriage had begun to die, in some kind of determined therapy.
‘I don’t always like museums,’ says Jane doubtfully.
‘You’re going to like this one,’ Matthew promises. ‘Actually you’ve been there before – ages ago.’ This is dangerous territory, but must be trodden; he forges ahead. ‘You liked the butterflies and the humming-birds.’
She ponders. Then … ‘I remember! And I got the shell book and when Mum and I went to the loo there was a lady lying down because she was ill.’
‘That I wouldn’t know about,’ says Matthew. ‘And I dare say she’s recovered by now. Anyway, this time there’s a special exhibition about dinosaurs. You like dinosaurs, don’t you?’
‘Do you like dinosaurs?’ she enquires, after a moment.
‘Definitely,’ he replies.
‘Then so do I,’ says Jane.
And, indeed, the Natural History Museum is doing them proud, they discover. Not only are there dinosaurs, and Chinese dinosaurs at that, but there are also earphones to be hired, and a taped commentary. Hooked up to this apparatus, they pass into the stagy, softly-lit world of the dinosaurs, where the great skeletal forms pose against backgrounds of sand and rock, bathed in a golden glow, while a confiding voice pours out information. From time to time the flow is interrupted by periods of electronic sound approximating, they are told, to the mating calls or aggressive cries of dinosaurs. Jane is entranced by these; she turns up the volume on her set and wriggles in delighted fear. The voice steers them from mamenchisaurus to shunosaurus, inviting them to consider the bone formation, to observe the size of head and length of neck, to make deductions about diet and habitat. These are Jurassic dinosaurs, relatively late in the scale of things, sub specie aeternitatis; Matthew and Jane are given a brief run-down of dinosaur chronology, their attention is drawn to a chart on the wall. The earliest dinosaurs of all were short-legged creatures resembling the modern crocodile. There was that Christmas, thinks Matthew, when we quarrelled on Christmas Eve and hardly spoke till New Year. And then at Easter she went on holiday without me, to the Dordogne, with the Hammonds. It strikes him – momentarily – as odd that a confirmed agnostic should chronicle his life by religious festivals.
Scientists are unable to agree about the reasons for the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is possible that there was some global catastrophe – perhaps the earth was struck by a meteor – or there may have been an ecological disaster. If I had asked her not to, thinks Matthew, if I had said, no, please don’t, please let’s go together to Cornwall, to Spain, to anywhere. But I didn’t. I said, yes, that seems a good idea, why don’t you? There is controversy also as to whether the dinosaurs were hot- or cold-blooded. Undoubtedly many dinosaurs were swift-moving creatures, not sluggish like the reptiles of the modern world. And then when she came back we had somehow stopped sleeping together, without any decision, without anyone rejecting or prevaricating, we just weren’t making love any more.
Some dinosaurs, such as the big herbivores, probably moved around in herds, thus giving themselves a greater chance of defence against the flesh-eating predators. And at about that time I knew that I no longer wanted to, and nor presumably did she. We weren’t quarrelling any more. We weren’t talking very much. It was then that Jane began to notice. It was then that she used to say the things that she said.
In the Gobi Desert clutches of dinosaur eggs have been found, and fossil nestlings in the nest, suggesting that dinosaurs may have been good parents who tended their young. And now Matthew feels his eyes swim with tears, appallingly, which spill out and gush down his cheeks. He reaches for a handkerchief, and sees Jane’s face turned up to his, in curiosity and horror. Matthew blows his nose, with abandon. ‘I seem to be getting a cold,’ he announces. ‘What?’ says Jane. He shifts her earphone; ‘I seem to be getting a cold.’ ‘Oh,’ says Jane. She looks at him again, with a different expression. ‘Ssh,’ she admonishes. ‘It’s making baby dinosaur noises now. Listen.’
And so they passed from Permian through Jurassic to Cretaceous. The dinosaurs, roped off, spotlit, frozen in eternal postures, are like iconic objects of reverence in some church or cathedral, past which file the decorous viewers. At one point a vast thigh bone is displayed upon a plinth with a notice inviting visitors to touch; many do so, with the same casual ritual reverence accorded to a holy statue or relic. The exhibition concludes with a display of dinosaur historiography – there are charts and printed commentaries explaining the progress of palaeontological enlightenment. Jane, here, loses interest. The tape is silent; she pulls off her equipment and starts to make enquiries about the cafeteria, to which Matthew does not immediately respond. He is studying a row of portraits with accompanying biographical details – the sombre bewhiskered faces of the founding fathers of the science: William Smith, Dean William Buckland, Gideon Mantell. Richard Owen 1804–1892: anatomist, palaeontologist and compiler of the catalogue to the Hunterian Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons.
‘Please …’ moans Jane, on the point of expiry.
‘All right, all right,’ he says. ‘Philistine. Greedy little philistine.’
Six
We see the city stratified. Decked out according to the times, furnished with costumed figures, with sedan chairs or hansom cabs. A chronology, a sequence.
Whereas the city itself, of course, is without such constrictions. It streams away into the past; it is now, then, and tomorrow. It is as anarchic as the eye of a child, without expectation or assumption. It is we who are tethered to circumstance, not the world we inhabit. Thus Matthew, at the junction of Kingsway and High Holborn, waiting to cross the road, registers buses, taxis, Midland Bank, Thomas Cook Travel, Lunn-Poly, K Shoes, and is not much interested in any of these. Being Matthew, he notices the tops of buildings rather than the bottoms – architectural flights of fancy by way of cornices and window mouldings that have ridden out the winds of change down below. He is also momentarily intrigued by a telephone engineer perched on the edge of a crevasse in the road, hauling out an armful of cables in primary colours, the city’s mysterious intestinal life. His attention is caught by a drove of Japanese businessmen with precisely identical briefcases, by a bag lady outside a jeweller’s window, ferreting inside a rubbish sack. And then the lights change and he joins the surge across the street.
He passes from this vortex into the calm oasis of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he has to visit a conversion site. Kingsway is one of the city’s frontiers; within a few hundred yards Matthew has passed from the spendthrift hedonistic climate of Covent Garden to the sobrieties of Lincoln’s Inn. He is conscious of the effect, as though he were manipulated by his surroundings; he slows his pace, looks around, becomes less pressed for time. Indeed, he is tempted for a few minutes into the gardens at the centre of the great square, where people sit on benches reading newspapers. A flock of pigeons lifts and wheels across the frontages of the Soane Museum and adjoining houses, their wings catching the sun in a sudden brilliance of silver, grey and white. An empty plastic bag dances over the tarmac of the tennis courts like tumbleweed.
Matthew pays his visit to the site, which is a straightforward enough renovation of a late eighteenth-century house for a firm of solicitors. The job is in fact under the supervision of Tony Brace, who has sought Matthew’s opinion on a couple of minor problems. Matthew sizes up the situation and has a chat with the foreman. The site is new to him, but it is not the professional aspect which preoccupies him. The problems, in any case, are pretty mundane. He stands with the foreman at one of the glassless windows and looks out at the great green leafy square, where office workers are bared to the sunshine. It is shirt-sleeved, cold drink city summ
ertime. There is the thwack of tennis balls from the courts at the side of the gardens, babies ride regal beneath canopies, girls wear blowing cotton skirts. Matthew absorbs all this, but notes more carefully the majestic façade of the Royal College of Surgeons, with its great classical portico. The foreman, seeing the direction of his gaze, makes a joke about convenient neighbours to have, in case of accidents. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ says Matthew. ‘I should imagine they’re all theorists, in there.’ He is looking at the trees now and observes that the London plane reigns here too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – ancient majestic specimens with immense boles of trunks, knotted, misshapen, like the limbs of monstrous pachyderms, huge grey ribbed feet standing foursquare in the grass. He stares at them, and past them at Dance’s Ionic columns, and the city performs its conjuring trick. It folds in upon itself; once, twice.
‘They got the shock of their lives. They didn’t know where they were, you see – just told there was someone under there, a caretaker or someone, there’d been a direct hit, half an hour before. So they started digging and next thing they knew, they were pulling out these skulls and bones. It was the specimens. Anatomical specimens. They were still at it when I came by – and there was no one buried after all, the caretaker had gone to the shelter. They’d got them all stacked up across in the gardens when I was there – a proper shambles. No end of stuff. Animal bones, too. Bits of elephant and rhino and God knows what all. And fossils. They were joking about it by then. Makes a change, they were saying. You can give me another cuppa while you’re about it, love.’ He looks across the table at his wife, and sees her with relief, with gratitude, as though she were given to him afresh after each of these inferno nights. ‘You took Lucy down the shelter? I still think it’s maybe time you and she should go to your Mum. It could be anywhere now, these nights – not just the docks and the City. All right, all right … I don’t want you to go, either. What was I saying?’ And he wipes a hand across his grimy face. His hair is full of plaster dust; he carries the last hours with him still, in every sense. ‘Those Heavy Rescue blokes … People had brought tea out to them and they’d set up one of these specimens with a mug in his hand. A skeleton. Propped up on a bench in the gardens. That gave me a shock, I can tell you. I thought – that’s a bit off, isn’t it? And then I thought, no, you’ve got to get a laugh where you can these days. They’ve got the worst job of all, those blokes. They start digging into a building and they don’t know what they’re going to find. It can be like a butcher’s shop in there. One of them comes out and you can read in his face what he’s seen. And the whole lot can come down on top of them any moment. They know that. And still they go in, if they think there’s a chance of someone being alive. So you can’t blame them making a bit of a joke of it, when they find it’s just bones.’
The jawbone of an ichthyosaurus is laid upon the desk in front of him. He draws, with small meticulous strokes of the pen, and makes notes. He reads the history of the world in terms of vertebrae, tibia, teeth and claws. Under his hands, the sauria lift from the rock. When he contemplates a stone, he sees the shadow of the creature it conceals. When he looks out of the window he sees the pigeons that rise from the trees as knots of fragile flying bone, he sees a running dog as a sequence of ingenious hinges. He has worked all his life with death and knows that life arises from an accumulation of decay.
The ichthyosaurus is giving trouble. He frowns and peers. He does not hear the maid knock, and then come in to stoke the fire, to bank it up with another scuttleful of gleaming Carboniferous, mined last month in Northumberland, docked at Tilbury. Nor, presently, does he hear his wife, who is obliged to lay a hand on his shoulder to gain his attention. ‘My dear,’ she says. ‘The men are here with the rhinoceros. Where should they put it?’
The foreman is asking, with a touch of irritation, about some ceiling mouldings. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Matthew. ‘I was distracted by the view.’
He concludes his business, and walks out again into the sunshine. It is lunch-time. The square is dotted, now, with sandwich-eaters, which puts thoughts into Matthew’s own head. It occurs to him – if indeed it had not occurred before – that he is a few minutes’ walk from that convenient sandwich bar.
And so he finds himself once more in front of the glass case laid out with food, and the deft fellow who juggles with slices of this and dollops of that. He grins at Matthew in recognition; one of those who never forget a face.
Matthew gives his order. The man slices and spreads. Matthew fishes change from his pocket, sorts out coins. ‘By the way,’ he says, quite casual, quite unconcerned. ‘Last time I was in there was a young woman … She’d come out without her purse.’
‘Yup!’ says the man, grinning further. ‘I remember. You stood her her lunch. Looking for your money back?’
‘Not at all,’ says Matthew stiffly. ‘I simply wondered if you’d seen her again … if she’s a regular. It occurred to me later that in fact by an odd coincidence I think I know her … didn’t recognize her at the time for some reason … thought I ought to get in touch.’ It does not sound at all convincing, it sounds worse and worse. The man grins the more. Matthew flounders on, trails away, turns in fury and embarrassment to counting out coins from the change in his pocket.
‘She’s not what I call a regular,’ says the man. ‘But she has been in, couple of times. Works round here, I dare say.’ He is leering, now. ‘Give her a message for you, shall I? If she shows up again.’
Matthew hesitates, unprepared. What to do? He is humiliated, trapped into feeling like some conspiratorial adolescent. And anyway, would any sensible girl …? He dithers, and then decides. What does it matter? What would be lost? It is all fantasy, anyway. He takes out a business card, writes on the back, finds an envelope in his briefcase and puts the card inside. The man watches with amusement, takes the envelope and places it with elaborate care on a shelf behind him. He hands Matthew his sandwiches. He pockets, as instructed, the change for the five pound note which Matthew has hastily substituted for his handful of coins – a move aimed towards shifting the balance of power in Matthew’s favour. This, however, does not really work. ‘Cheerio,’ says the man. ‘Good luck. Do my best for you.’ Matthew, muttering something indefinite, slinks out into the street.
He is now in possession of two rounds of prawn and avocado sandwiches, tidily wrapped in a paper napkin. If you have a sandwich in your hand you are in need of somewhere pleasant to eat it, so it makes perfect sense to head back to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Besides, this is what anyone else would do who worked in the area and was in the habit, on a fine day, of buying a sandwich for her lunch (and not necessarily, after all, always at the same place – the area abounds in convenience food bars).
And so Matthew patrols the paths, casting furtive but systematic glances at each bench. It’s possible. All things are possible.
He draws a blank. As he had known he would. He finds a vacant bench and sits down to enjoy his lunch and contemplate the frontage of the Royal College and those impressive specimens of Platanus X Hispanica Muenchh.
He is able, at last, to return to the ichthyosaurus, invigorated by the distraction and the anticipation of a rare treat, but able to put it immediately out of mind. He is a man capable of total concentration. He retreats once more to the Jurassic while, at the end of the corridor, his wife surveys with resignation the rhinoceros; born somewhere in India, 1820, died London Zoo, 1845. The creature is recently defunct, and the smell is not good. Mrs Owen returns to her husband’s study to request that he smoke cigars about the place.
‘Have we just come here because it’s raining?’ demands Jane. ‘Or because we wanted to anyway?’
‘Both,’ replies Matthew.
The climate, in its petulant way, has served up rain for the weekend, always a problem. The city has switched its mood, gone are the shirtsleeves and the blown summer skirts; the place drips and glistens. But Matthew, expert and resourceful, has, as always, something in reserve.
> ‘We could have gone to a film,’ mutters Jane.
‘This is a sort of film,’ says Matthew. ‘You wait and see.’
For wait they must, along with everyone else, in the straggling unruly queue for admission to the Planetarium show. Meanwhile, they can take in astronomical displays of various kinds while a plummy recorded voice holds forth about the search for the secret of the universe. There are waxwork figures of the great physicists and astronomers, swept in turn by strobe lighting as the voice gives a rundown of their aspirations and achievements. Einstein, wearing a brown jersey and grey flannels, sits perched on a large glass disc, staring without expression at the polyglot and cosmopolitan crowd that shuffles past, eating sweets and sucking Coke through straws. Matthew finds this scene intolerably dispiriting.
At last they are seated in the darkened auditorium. Jane perks up. And when the display begins she is appropriately awed. Above them, the artificial heavens glimmer and sparkle, emphasized now here, now there, according to the subject matter of the commentary. The disembodied voice has a hollow resonance that makes it a pervasive whisper, confiding wonders to the rustling audience. ‘I like it,’ hisses Jane. ‘Good,’ says Matthew, composing himself to listen.