by Nigel Packer
If you are wondering why I am telling you all this, it’s because there is no one else alive in whom I can confide such thoughts. Anika is off-limits. She doesn’t really approve of my being here in London and has made it quite clear that she has no wish to discuss it further. Besides which, as someone who is ‘post-war’ in every respect, she is probably too young to comprehend my viewpoint. Of all my living friends, you are closest to me in age, and the one most likely to understand my perspective.
Since our little talk is going so well – no sign, yet, of any dissent on your part – I’d like to ask you a rather delicate question. It regards a matter that has puzzled me for years. You were an architect, when I first knew you, and a damned good one at that. Your work on any number of projects in the 1950s was simply outstanding. So given the success you had already enjoyed, your undeniable intelligence and talent, why on earth did you give it all up shortly afterwards in order to become a composer? It’s an especially pertinent question, I feel, since your gifts in this field have always been – how shall I put this? – less apparent. I understand the similarities between these two great disciplines: the establishment of rhythm, of pattern, of balance and logical form; the sense of an unfolding (in architecture, of space – in music, of time). But despite all this, I don’t understand why you abandoned completely the discipline that better suited your gifts and devoted yourself to one for which you have no obvious talent. Was the architectural endeavour too quiet for you? Did buildings not make enough noise? I sometimes suspect as much, judging by the infantile shrieks and clangs of some of your more challenging musical compositions. Or was it simply that you lost your mind, perhaps in a delayed reaction to the nightmare of war the previous decade? I have sometimes thought that, too, I must admit; for example, while watching you conduct your own five-hour opera, ten years ago during the festival in Darmstadt.
You looked extraordinary down there in the orchestra pit: the tics and the mutterings, the tossing of the head, the fluid expressions of fury and beatitude, lust and piety, playing in endless succession across your face. Then there were your huge, waving arms, your enormous shock of white hair, backlit and glowing like some mad explosion. Did you know the effect your hair had on the audience up in the gallery, distracting them constantly from the events on stage? Of course you did. Maybe you even arranged the lighting accordingly, to make yourself the radiant centre of attention. As a vain man myself, I cannot help but recognise the quality in others.
What you did not appear to recognise, however, was the effect your music had on the audience that evening. Did you really not notice? All the yawning and coughing? The checking of watches? The endless shifting about in our seats? Anika and I were clearly guilty on that last count. Three hours into the performance, she leaned across and told me that her buttocks felt like a boxer’s face – and by that point we hadn’t reached the interval. Even the orchestra and singers seemed a little confused, but then one can hardly blame them. There was the bizarre and stuttering overture, the meandering arias, the explosive, discordant choruses that went off like grenades, making us jump from our seats (at least they gave poor Anika’s buttocks a momentary respite from their torture). Forty skilled musicians in search of a tune – that was how your opera felt to me. And I’m afraid they didn’t find one, all evening long.
As for the plot, to this day I have no idea what I was watching. Wolves, bears, some people in togas – and then an astronaut appearing on stage? The relief at the end was palpable. You could see it in the fixed grins of the few members of the audience who remained.
But the only person who seemed oblivious to the sheer awfulness of it all was you, my dearest Laszlo. Beaming in delusional triumph, you bowed extravagantly and waved to the gallery, despite the sparse and embarrassed ovation you received. And then you returned for a curtain call with the auditorium nearly empty.
I know my criticism of your music seems harsh, but please don’t think of me as uncultured. I’m no musical reactionary, I assure you – not stuck entirely in the classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I enjoyed the musical experiments of the post-war avant-garde – of Stockhausen, Ligeti and Boulez. They were, after all, our cultural bedfellows. What they, and you, produced in sound, I suppose I produced in concrete. The intellectual currents in which we swam were much the same. I only wish that your own work hadn’t left me quite so cold. When not cold, I must confess, then rather terrified.
Your music is unlistenable, incomprehensible. Yet still you persist with it after all this time. Part of me admires that persistence; another part believes you require treatment for it. You are eighty-four years old now, Laszlo – when are you going to give up? Apologies for not mentioning this to you sooner, but honesty on the epic scale is never easy. To put it bluntly, how does one tell an old friend that the past fifty years of his life have been an utter waste of time?
Yet, if it’s of any comfort to you, and I sincerely hope that it shall be, I find myself in exactly the same position. Just look at my sad repertoire of dysfunctional buildings: leaking, creaking, longing to pull themselves down, standing evocations of alienation and violence – and those are just the ones I’d like to save. No, I’m hardly in a position to discuss legacies.
Am I too, then, guilty of a monumental waste of time? Is there really any difference between the two of us?
As I mentioned before, the prospect of returning to Marlowe House makes me uncomfortable. How to explain the period of experimentation from which this building sprang – the vision of the future we all held back then? And how to square that vision with the conditions in which its residents must live? It won’t be easy. I’m not relishing the prospect – I’ve no idea what sort of reception I’ll receive. I only wish I had a fraction of your self-belief when it comes to facing my public. But then again, your folly at Darmstadt was inflicted on us for one evening only. My folly at Marlowe House has been inflicted on its residents for decades.
Yet we both did our best, I think – misguided and foolish though posterity might judge our efforts to have been. And, in our flawed and rather egocentric ways, I also hope that we managed to be courageous. Are we not kindred spirits, then, we two old crazies? Products of the twentieth century’s collective nervous breakdown? That century has passed now, and the work we produced (even we, ourselves) are its museum pieces … its living exhibits.
We’re an endangered species, you and I: the last of the old-fashioned Modernists. We need to stick together while we can. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to continue our correspondence. Then, like living bookends, separated by the quiet and calming distance of the page, we can ruminate on all our glorious failures.
Otto
He didn’t bother reading the letter through again. Folding and sealing it into an envelope, he scrawled Laszlo’s name across the front and then promptly threw it into the waste bin. Otto never posted any of his letters, nowadays. They seemed to serve a purely interior purpose.
‘Anyway, Laszlo would never forgive me if I sent it,’ Otto said to himself. ‘He’s as touchy about his opera as Pierre is about fucking Foucault.’
The sound of these last two words pleased him, so he repeated them aloud several times to himself as he washed. The acoustics of the bathroom gave the alliteration an extra resonance. Soon the phrase had developed into a little tune. It was only when he heard a faint knocking sound on the other side of the wall, accompanied by a muffled reprimand, that he realised it was probably time to cease his singing. Glancing at the clock, he saw with horror that it was approaching one-thirty. Sheepishly, he turned off the lights and made his way silently to bed.
Ten
Otto stood on the windswept forecourt, looking up at the imposing mass of Marlowe House, and leaned a little more heavily on his cane.
‘My goodness,’ he said, the words almost carried away by the sharp gust that ruffled his overcoat and hat.
He paused awhile, aware in his peripheral vision of the camera slowly circling him. Yet h
is focus now was all upon the building. He stepped back a pace, then another, craning his neck in order to scan the upper storeys. It was a grey day, bitter. Chip wrappers and other detritus swirled about the public space. Otto held on to the top of his homburg and squinted upwards.
‘My goodness…’
The clean lines he had once studied from his seat at the Oval cricket ground remained unmistakable. But the concrete now was streaked and badly weathered. Seen on a summer’s afternoon, perhaps, with the sunlight falling at a rakish angle, emphasising the form of the building while darkening out the details, Marlowe House could almost have been the same structure he had known in the mid-1960s. But in the flat and even light of this cold autumn morning, overcast and devoid of all covering shadow, the extent of its decline was clear to see.
Some windows were smashed; others boarded up. A large drainage pipe leaked its contents, the greenish water oozing over the concrete like a slug’s trail. Dense graffiti covered its lower reaches, including the giant circular columns that held the structure aloft. One of these, Otto noticed, was singed around its base. Charcoal and other debris, the remains of a small fire, lay close against it.
He saw that scaffolding had been erected across the middle storeys, but he struggled to establish its purpose. Perhaps there was some issue with the lifts on this side of the building.
Chloe stepped forward and spoke off-camera.
‘What do you think?’
Otto, who had forgotten momentarily that she was there, glanced at her.
‘It doesn’t look good,’ he said, composed and thoughtful, but with no great wish to expand further. ‘Not too good at all.’
He set off on a tour of inspection, carefully studying each side of the building in turn. The picture was uniformly grim. He stopped now and then to disturb with his cane the loose piles of litter that surrounded its walls. Burned pieces of tinfoil, cartons, food wrappers; a crumpled copy of a lifestyle magazine, the smiling face of the celebrity on its cover scratched out by a fingernail or coin. Patches of weed sprouted here and there, in an area that had once been carefully landscaped.
Returning once more to his position before the entrance, Otto turned on his heel to survey the whole scene. The gritty breeze tugged at his coat and trousers. From behind one of the columns, a couple of children peered out, their faces half curious and half hostile.
Otto looked over at the one-time sculpture garden in a corner of the grounds. It was clearly no longer a garden, serving instead as a dumping ground for unwanted mattresses and cardboard boxes. It also lacked sculptures. Just two of the original eight remained. They were balletic, humanoid figures in the style of Henry Moore, and their heads had been sawn or broken off with what must have been considerable effort on the part of those responsible.
Having absorbed the picture as best he could, Otto turned to look at Chloe, who was watching him from out of range of the circling camera. He appeared lost.
‘Okay, cut,’ she told the film crew. ‘I think we have enough for the establishing shots.’
Chloe walked over to Otto, who was staring up once more at the façade.
‘That was excellent, thank you,’ she said.
‘Really?’ he asked.
‘Yes, really.’
She was already anticipating the final edit, some plaintive classical music, piano or harpsichord, the circling viewpoint, running counter to the swirling of the litter. Otto, shot from below, his noble face pensive, elegant in his overcoat and homburg, his cane pressed into the ground before him, turning now himself, to a different tempo, and surveying the crumbling ruins of his Utopia.
‘Would you like to take a break?’ she asked. ‘There are some chairs in the van, and there’s coffee, too, if you would like some.’
‘I would … thank you.’
‘We’re just going to set up elsewhere, and then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few questions about your first impressions.’
‘That sounds fine.’
‘We’ll then take you up to your flat, but please let me know if you feel tired at any point. We want to make this experience as pleasant as possible for you.’
‘I feel okay at the moment, but if that changes, I’ll let you know.’
They were walking towards the van, Chloe with a woollen hat pulled down over her ears. She disappeared inside while someone brought out a chair and a coffee for Otto.
Lowering himself down and warming his hands around the mug, he noticed that several of the film crew were texting or talking on their mobile phones. As someone whose grip on technology had steadily loosened with the years, Otto felt increasingly bewildered by the gadgets he saw around him. With every new development of the past three decades, he had fought an uphill battle to keep pace with all the changes. From microwave ovens and Betamax videos to compact-disc players and digital televisions, each had proved increasingly difficult to master. Finally, he had given up entirely, to the extent that the current generation of gadgets – the ones named after fruits, and such – were objects both of mystery and fear to him.
Just twenty-five years, he thought, since Cynthia’s passing, yet already it feels like a lifetime – such has been the scale and pace of change.
Cynthia had never owned a mobile phone or used the internet: she long pre-dated the rise of social media. She barely even understood what a personal computer was. So where were the objects through which she communicated with the world? Where was the typewriter on which her fingers had played, the large red telephone on which she spoke to her friends? Such things were now the preserve of museums, as silent as the grave.
When someone dies, you lose them twice – the first time suddenly and the second more slowly. At first the person goes, then the objects and even the ideas that helped define them in life.
And what would Cynthia make of the world today, he asked himself – how would she have coped with all these advances in technology, with the wider changes in society and politics?
I expect she would feel as disorientated by it all as I do, which, I must admit, would be rather comforting to hear.
Otto’s thoughts turned to the interview with Chloe. How should he approach this? What were his initial thoughts on being at Marlowe House once again? He was shocked by the level of deterioration, and concerned at the effect this must have upon the lives of the residents. The atmosphere here reminded him in some respects of the London he had encountered when first arriving in 1951. He still remembered vividly the bomb damage, the poverty, the palpable sense of exhaustion, written onto the faces of the people he passed in the narrow streets near his digs.
But then we seemed to be moving beyond all that.
As he looked once more at the desolate scene before him, a cheery and well-spoken voice from an old newsreel returned momentarily to haunt him. It was accompanied by a piece of generic, Swinging Sixties-style music; all twanging guitars and sunny, optimistic chords.
* * *
‘The tower block has become a common sight in Britain’s cities during recent years. These concrete giants are sprouting up everywhere. But whether you love them or loathe them, you just can’t ignore them – not when they come as big as this! Meet Marlowe House, all twenty-seven floors of it, a newly completed tower block in south-east London. One of Europe’s largest residential buildings, it is now home to hundreds of local authority tenants.
‘And here we see some of them, pictured this week at the official opening. They look delighted, don’t they? Take this young family, for instance – they’re positively bursting with pride. And as you can see, they’re eager to take us inside for a look around their brand-new home. Oops, mind that step there, young ’un. That’s right, Dad, you help him up. Here we are, inside, and just look at what we find. State-of-the-art facilities, central heating, a sparkling new bathroom with hot and cold running water. An inside toilet, too, the first this family has ever had. And how about that lovely new kitchen? No wonder Mum and Dad are looking so pleased…’
* * *
Chloe stepped down from the van and walked over to Otto.
‘When you’ve finished your coffee, would you mind making your way over to that patch of waste ground?’
She pointed to the mattresses and piles of cardboard boxes.
It used to be a sculpture garden, Otto wanted to tell her.
But he couldn’t seem to summon up the energy.
* * *
The interview did not go well. Otto realised, too late, that he had taken it all too personally. The poor condition of the building, of Cynthia’s building, had affected him on several different levels. Physical decay was a sensitive subject with Otto. He was surprised at just how irritated he sounded. The clarity of thought shown a few minutes earlier, while sipping his coffee, disappeared in front of the cameras.
Chloe began, ‘Now you’ve had some time to think it over, what are your thoughts on the condition of the exterior?’
‘It’s a disgrace. An utter disgrace. How on earth was it allowed to deteriorate so badly?’
She seemed to get the wrong end of the stick.
‘You blame the residents?’
‘Of course I don’t blame the residents! Why does everybody always blame the residents!’
‘The local authorities?’
‘It’s not that simple. Maintaining a tower block such as this one is no easy task, given the parameters within which they have to operate. There are complex forces at work here. Social. Economic. Political. The problems are systemic. They always have been. I can’t just point the finger at some individuals and tell you it’s their bloody fault … much as you would like me to, I’m sure. What I can say is that something has gone badly wrong!’
Chloe looked at him, a little hurt by his brusqueness and patrician tone. He apologised and recovered some of his composure.
‘I’m sorry. I’m tired … I’m not sleeping terribly well. And I’m afraid this whole matter is rather close to the bone for me.’
