Blow the House Down

by John Blackburn

  ‘A further query, Sir George.’ Wade had once pointed at a drawing. ‘The balconies extend fifteen feet out from the main frames and we consider that the cantilever beams might be increased in diameter.’

  ‘Then you have not considered very deeply, Colonel Wade.’ Strand had frowned, bent his bulk over the table and picked up a pencil. ‘You have ignored the factors of both stress and balance, gentlemen, so gather round and let me demonstrate.’ He had chuckled while scrawling out the formula, and they had drawn back humbled and satisfied.

  George Strand was a genius. All over the world his works testified to that. The Morn River bridge in Queensland; the Natal hydro-­electric scheme, the Kingsport docks in South Wales, the Elgar Memorial Hall in London. But he was old, a giant whose strength had been sapped by a stroke. The stroke had come after the plans were completed and approved, but could there just possibly have been an earlier attack? Certainly Strand had not been eager to undertake the design of the Heights. He had said he was needing a rest, and also that he disapproved of Mallory’s multi-­racial schemes. Only when Mallory had promised that the council would give him carte blanche up to a certain budget had he accepted the contract. If Strand had been ill and made one all-­important error that had gone undetected, the Heights might be the death-­trap that Erich Lansberg suspected.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Janet, but I think Pinter’s probably right and you did imagine the vibration. All the same, there can be no harm in making a phone call.’ Paul crossed to the desk and picked up the telephone. An image of Strand at work occurred to him while he dialled the number and listened to the ringing tone. An old, self-­confident man bent over a drawing-­table to study the productions of his own mind and assure himself that they were perfect. Strand would have frowned at any miscalculation he discovered, and then nodded, and made the necessary adjustment. But at some point could a spasm of intense pain have racked his body, concentration and self-­criticism vanished and a structural flaw been allowed to remain?

  But what difference would that have made in the long run? Strand might be Victorian in his political views – an opponent of social equality and the Welfare State – but he was a servant of the twentieth century where his profession was concerned. Paul shook his head again as he waited for the phone to be answered.

  He had been thinking in terms of the engineers of earlier days: the great lonely eccentrics who behaved like eastern potentates and made mistakes which no one dared to point out to them. Lardner, who had ignored the factors of wind pressure in locomotive performance; Isambard Kingdom Brunei miscalculating piston speeds; the unfortunate Sir Thomas Bouche, whose bridge had been a national wonder till it fell into the River Tay. Though men might fear to criticize George Strand, machines did not. The computers would have discovered any error in his design.

  No, not necessarily, because present-­day designs had been found faulty only when it was too late. The Princess Victoria had sunk, the Vagont dam had failed, Ronan Point was being rebuilt.

  ‘Lady Strand?’ A woman had answered at last, her voice sounding tense and unhappy. ‘It’s Paul Gordon here. Might I have a word with your husband for a moment?

  ‘What? I see. I’m very, very sorry.’ Paul was still staring towards the wind tunnel while he listened. ‘I’ll ring off at once, but please accept my good wishes for his recovery.

  ‘Well, that’s that, Janet.’ Paul replaced the phone. ‘The old boy has had another stroke and is in a coma. His wife sounded as though she thought he might not recover. The poor kid’s very young, you know. She was his secretary, and they’ve only been married about two years.’

  Paul walked back to the tunnel and rested his hands against the plastic body. Just a model, he thought, but less than two miles away the building it represented towered five hundred feet above the town. A building to which workmen were already putting the finishing touches, and very soon the tenants would move in. A building which had been designed by a sick and possibly dying man.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Luke, can’t you work on that junk out in the street or somewhere?’ Molly Virgil looked at her husband with deep affection beneath her frown, but there was no doubt that he was a great hulking brute who took up far too much space. Their single room was cramped enough without him squatting in the centre of the floor and trying to mend the engine of his motor scooter, and in a few minutes’ time their children would be home from school and clamouring to be fed.

  ‘You’d no right to bring such a thing in here. Look at all that oil on the lino.’

  ‘Why should we care, Moll?’ Luke was squinting at the dismembered carburettor. ‘It’s not our lino and soon we won’t have to walk on it no more.

  ‘Yeah, that’s the trouble. This needle’s been stickin’ and not letting the gas through properly.’ He got up and carried the unit over to the sink. ‘Just another two weeks, Moll, and then goodbye to bloody Shelley Street. No more living like pigs in one room – no more havin’ Ma Baxter’s miserable pan glowerin’ at us every time we pass her on the stairs.’ He glanced through the window while he washed the needle housing in detergent.

  ‘Three bedrooms we’re getting, honey. A lounge and a big kitchen where you can sit out and watch the world go by thirty-­five storeys below you. Just you come and look at those great white towers, woman. Like a fairy palace in the sky waitin’ for us.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter, Moll?’ He turned and stopped smiling as he saw her expression. ‘You’re not hankering to stay on in Shelley Street surely?’

  ‘No, Luke, I don’t want to stay here.’ She crossed over to him and her slim black hand gripped his arm. ‘But I was talking to Mary Magenda this mornin’ and she scared me, Luke. She said it was all wrong for black and white folk to live like that; joined together, but in separate blocks, and we’d be punished for it.’

  ‘Then don’t you talk to Mary no more, Moll. Johnny Magenda is one of them “Black Lion” bastards and you know what they are. Just trash who want to stir up trouble between decent folk.’

  ‘You’re right, honey, but whenever I look at them things I get the horrors.’ Her grip tightened and she craned up over his shoulder. ‘Different races livin’ in ’em, Luke, and so tall – huge like mountains. Don’t that make you think of another big building?’

  ‘Can’t say it does.’ Luke scratched his head with an oily finger, puzzled by her tone but still pondering on the carburettor. ‘Ah, you mean Ronan Point, Moll? That building in London that got damaged by gas?’

  ‘No, nothing modern like that, Luke. I mean the tower in the book; the Tower of Babel.’ She nodded towards a Bible on the table. ‘Maybe that Alderman Mallory is not the good man they say he is, but too proud like King Nimrod and he’s made his building too tall. You’ll say I’m crazy, honey, but sometimes I get thinking that one day the Lord will stretch out His mighty hand and push the whole thing over.’

  2

  Joe Pinter was in a foul mood. He had missed the first half of the football match which had been tense in the extreme, but excitement had dwindled in the second, and the game ended in a frustrating draw. On the way to the station he had been hailed by a Manchester crony and sent his sons home without him on an earlier train, so he could yarn about old times over a few pints. But the beer had been flat, his old friend had become boring, and when he boarded the Randel­wyck Pullman, Pinter’s annoyance towards Paul and Janet returned. Before long a chance travelling companion was to push his feelings into words.

  ‘Mr Joseph Pinter? Do you mind if I join you?’ The man was travelling from London. He was grotesquely fat, with a pale sagging face, and he kept nodding and smiling like a vast china Buddha.

  ‘Naturally I know of you, sir. You have been in the news lately and I am a newspaperman.’ He had transferred a musty hat and a suitcase on to the rack facing Pinter and squeezed his huge belly behind the table.

  ‘Yes, indeed, I have heard a great deal about you. Mr Joseph Pinter, the borough engineer of Randel­wyck, and one of the triumvirate resp
onsible for that remarkable structure, Mallory Heights. I am most honoured to meet you.’ He produced a card stating that he was John Forest of the London Daily Globe.

  ‘I would have been calling on you next Monday, as it happens, Mr Pinter. As the Heights are soon to be opened, my editor felt a human interest story might be appropriate. The feeling of the future tenants and the men who have given them their future, those great prime movers in the scheme: yourself, Alderman Mallory and Sir George Strand.

  ‘Now, what is your poison, sir?’ He crooked a great, flabby hand at the attendant and ordered Guinness for Pinter, Curaçao for himself and cigars for both of them.

  ‘How proud you must feel, Mr Pinter, to be the founder of a dream in steel and concrete which will give hope to future generations.’ Forest’s physical appearance might be repulsive but his charm was boundless. Before they had left the Manchester suburbs, Pinter almost began to believe that his part in creating the Heights was as important as Strand’s or Mallory’s.

  ‘But the responsibility – the sense of liability must have been tremendous, Mr Pinter. We have almost half an hour before we reach Randel­wyck, so would you tell me about your feelings? The building has been passed by the Ministry and praised throughout the world, but there must have been worrying occasions now and then; incidents that caused you anxiety. This is purely off the record, of course. I would never print a word without your permission.’

  Pinter was not a fool, and he knew that the Globe was a sensation-­seeking paper. He should have realized that Forest would never honour his promise if a good story was involved. But so great was the man’s charm that caution went to the winds, and you couldn’t really blame him. As one of Forest’s colleagues had remarked, ‘Old John’s a grand type. You’d still trust the fat bastard if you felt his hand in your pocket.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a terrible thing to have a lot of responsibility, Mr Forest,’ he said. ‘To feel the weight of duty, like the captain of a ship must do. And when a man’s own secretary goes off her rocker, he’s got every right to be fed up.’

  ‘I should certainly say so. A good secretary is a pearl beyond price, in my opinion. Just how did the lady’s mental balance go astray?’ Forest leaned back in his seat, sipping his liqueur, smiling and listening and now and again prompting. And every word he heard was tucked away in his head for future reference. By the time he had finished the Curaçao he knew he was on to a good thing.

  ‘Damned young whippersnapper is that Paul Gordon. Drinks too much – always in the Black Horse saloon bar of an evening. He listens to that drunken kraut at the Mayor’s party and then fills my lass up with morbid rubbish till she starts imagining things. Told me that he had a hunch Lansberg was telling the truth and there was something wrong with the Heights. A hunch, mark you, Mr Forest. Well, hunches may do for punters and racecourse tipsters, but they’ve got no place in civil engineering.

  ‘Thanks, I could use another drink if you’re having one. That fellow Lansberg acted like a bloody journalist, bent on trouble-­making. If he hadn’t fallen in front of the van, I’d have wrung his neck for him myself.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry I said journalist, Mr Forest. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘Of course not, Mr Pinter, and, as it happens, what you said is quite correct. Now, what can I remember about the good Dr Erich Lansberg?’ Forest frowned while he thanked the attendant for their fresh drinks.

  ‘A roving reporter might have been the way to describe him. Lansberg held a chair at the Rosa Luxemberg University in East Berlin, but very rarely sat on it. A trouble-­maker if ever there was one. A propagandist whose mission it was to travel around the world finding fault with every building enterprise he saw, and compose articles persuading his fellow comrades that their own miserable development programme was adequate.’

  ‘That was what the bastard was up to?’ Pinter gulped over his Guinness. ‘You mean that to make trouble he intended to get up at that London conference and suggest Mallory Heights was unsafe? Just wait till I tell Paul Gordon this. You’re sure of your facts, Mr Forest?’

  ‘Certainly. Two years ago Lansberg was deported from Sicily when he reported that a new housing estate outside Palermo was not even fit for animals to live in.

  ‘On a visit to South America he criticized an office block in Nuevo Leon, and stated that the Perora dam in Brazil would have been condemned by any Communist authority. After visiting Norway, several East German newspapers published his views that the Hegensfiord bridge was a death-­trap.’

  ‘And he’d have said the same about the Heights.’ The train was travelling fast and Guinness slopped on to the table when Pinter lifted his glass.

  ‘It would take a young fool like Gordon to believe the swine.’ Though Pinter would never have admitted it even to himself, he was very fond of Janet, and jealousy played a good part in his dislike of Paul.

  ‘Gordon goes and puts such lies in Janet’s head, and she’s been working too hard lately. No wonder the poor lass started seeing things when she ran the wind tunnel. She was all alone in the building and it was bloody hot at lunch-­time.’

  ‘The wind tunnel? You haven’t told me about that, Mr Pinter. I presume Miss Janet is the erring secretary.’ Forest was looking through the window. They were crossing open moorland and dusk had begun to fall. Through the gloom he could see a cluster of lights on the horizon. There might be another story there, he thought while he listened to Pinter. The lights belonged to Fentor Park, the Ministry of Defence research establishment. A lot of Americans worked there and a large demonstration had been planned against it in a fortnight’s time. If the Globe and its friendly rivals could build up tension efficiently they might have some attractive rioting to report.

  ‘My word, if Janet and Gordon did pay a call on old Strand he would have given it to them hot and strong, Mr Forest.’ Pinter stubbed out the butt of his cigar. ‘Silly, neurotic girl, screeching down the phone that she’d seen the model vibrate. I had to go rushing over to the office and miss the first half of the match.’

  ‘Too bad, Mr Pinter.’ More lights were closing in and the train was slowing for the steep descent into Randel­wyck. John Forest had already planned the rest of his evening. First he would look in at the public house Gordon was supposed to frequent. If he drew a blank, this Miss Fane should be in the telephone directory; it would not do for him to ask Pinter for her address. Finally, a long session on the phone with his news editor. Imaginary or not, the Globe would jump at the story of that model moving.

  ‘You can say that again.’ Pinter looked at his watch, and then at the city closing around them. ‘Dead on time as usual. Damned good service these Pullmans, and, whatever you southerners may say, Randel­wyck’s an up-­and-­coming town, if ever there was one.’ The carriage slid alongside the platform and he drained his glass and stood up.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed our chat, Mr Forest, and thanks for the drinks. Probably see you around, eh?’

  ‘You will indeed, sir.’ Forest had paid the attendant, but made no move to rise. ‘You go along, Mr Pinter. My bulk is not suited for pushing through crowds. A very good night to you.’

  He nodded warmly, waited for the carriage to empty and then heaved himself to his feet, collected his belongings and lurched down the corridor – a vast, ungainly man in a baggy suit and an old, shabby hat. Beneath the hat lay a brain like Pandora’s box, full of mischief to trouble the earth.

  ‘Seven o’clock already, luv, and no newspaper yet.’ Jack Baxter kept himself in good shape and he laid down the dumbbells with which he had been performing his daily dozen. ‘I suppose one of those sodding Virgils has swiped it out of the letter box again. Damn the black bastards. I do like a bit of a read before I get off to work.’

  ‘No, it’s not them this time, Jack.’ Hilda was pouring out his mug of tea. ‘The newsagent told me his boy was too scared to come into the building any more and he’d be leaving the papers in the porch. You start your breakfast and I’ll nip down and fetch it for you.’r />
  ‘Ta, luv.’ Jack was a hearty eater, but he tucked into his bacon and egg without relish. Though he didn’t blame the paper boy in the slightest, it was just another of the irritations which had made life intolerable for decent people since the niggers had poured into Shelley Street.

  Soon they’d be shot of them, thank Christ. Just a few more days and then goodbye to Shelley Street. No more blasted music, and cooking stinks, and grinning black faces, unless one wanted to meet Spades on those bridges which Alderman Mallory claimed would bring neighbours together. Jack Baxter had no wish for togetherness, and in his opinion do-­gooders like Mallory could take running jumps at themselves. White was white and black was black and that was all there was to it.

  Though there was no denying that a grand flat had been allotted to them. Almost at the top of the south tower, with a balcony from which you could look right down the valley and far out to sea. Three bedrooms and a big lounge; they could have Fred and June and the kids to stay now and then; a proper kitchen-­breakfast-­room for Hilda.

  Poor old Hilda, he thought, taking a swig of the near-­scalding tea. She’d got into a proper state of nerves about living so high up. Not to worry though: Hilda was coming to the time of life when women got nervy. After a couple of days in the flat, she’d forget such silliness and be as happy as a queen.

  ‘Ah, thanks, luv.’ He didn’t look up when she came into the room. ‘Anything exciting today? Any nice, juicy murders on the front page?’

  ‘Maybe an attempted murder, Jack. Something that should make you apologize to me, for once.’ She placed the paper before him and her voice was bitter.

  ‘Look for yourself, lad. You may be a building trade foreman, but just you read what this says and then tell me I’m not right to be worried.’

  ‘Take it easy, Hilda.’ Jack bent over the headlines of the Globe. What he saw made him push aside his plate and frown.