by Nigel Packer
‘The building?’
‘Yes, but not just the building.’
Chloe said nothing; seeking, through silence, to nudge him towards elaboration. But he wouldn’t go any further.
I am not, he thought determinedly, under any circumstances whatsoever, going to mention Cynthia.
‘You said there are complex issues involved. Could you explain that statement further?’
‘I’m not entirely sure I can. How much time have we got?’
She didn’t realise he was asking literally, and so didn’t reply to his question.
‘Not much time, I imagine,’ he continued, thinking aloud. ‘You’ll need a soundbite, I suppose. Something short, snappy and quotable. Unfortunately I’m not accustomed to that sort of thing.’
Forty years before, when Otto had been a regular in front of the cameras, television had been a very different beast. Invite some thought-provoking guests into a studio, sit them down around a table and give them a couple of hours to engage in an in-depth discussion. Then broadcast the results to the nation. But no one had the patience for that level of engagement any more: there was no time now for complexity or nuance. One must simplify the argument to the point of banality, or else say nothing at all. What is more, one must do it while perched like an idiot on a burned-out bloody mattress.
He tried to explain.
‘It’s hard to condense the arguments, when it comes to economics and politics. It takes a lifetime of study to begin to grasp the detail. Take Das Kapital, for instance. It runs to more than a thousand pages. I got about halfway through, but never finished it.’
He smiled.
‘At home, in Hampstead, we used to keep it on a shelf in the downstairs toilet, along with a copy of Ulysses. I’m afraid I never finished that, either.’
Otto had lost Chloe completely, not to mention himself. The chance to make an important point was disappearing. Sensing this, he leafed back urgently through the faded pages of his memory. What was it Angelo had said to him a few weeks earlier, when they were speaking on the telephone? Something about used-car lots and a crumbling social fabric. It was pithy and rather good. Just the kind of thing that was needed now, in fact. But he couldn’t remember any of it, once the moment of truth had arrived. All thoughts of his own seemed to flee.
They should have asked Angelo to do this, not me.
‘I’m sorry … just a moment … it’s my memory, you see – oh, bugger it!’ he said.
Chloe raised her eyebrows in response.
Otto felt tired. His stomach was hurting. Worse still, the building looked so bloody awful, gazing out sadly through eyes of fractured glass.
‘I understand you’d like Marlowe House to be given a listing,’ Chloe said to him.
He brightened a little and turned once more to face her.
‘Yes, that’s right, we would.’
‘It was an important building in its time, wasn’t it?’
Otto had spoken eloquently on this subject on many occasions. Now, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them.
‘Apparently it was important, yes…’
He lapsed once more into silence.
Chloe was surprised at his failure to take her prompt. Otto was shocked himself. This was his moment to state the case for saving Marlowe House: the reason he had travelled to London at all. So why didn’t he grasp the opportunity? It was something to do with the state of its fabric. The sight of it had totally knocked the stuffing out of him. And then there were the strained faces of the children, peering out from between the columns. That was the kind of detail he hadn’t expected. So when his time came, he felt uncomfortable about singing its praises. How could he argue for saving a building that was leaking its lifeblood before him?
Anyway, a small voice inside him seemed to say, it’s all right for you, Otto, you don’t have to live here. You live in a nice big villa in Switzerland.
With the guilt and confusion pressing down, he found that he couldn’t say a word. Instead he stared intently at the ground and twisted the handle of his cane.
Chloe gave him a second chance.
‘It has some innovative features, I understand … architecturally?’
Otto raised his head and looked the façade up and down.
‘Yes,’ he said, without great enthusiasm, lifting the cane and pointing upwards. ‘As you can see, it’s rather tall.’
Chloe waited, but nothing more came. The silence burned in both their ears.
With a crushing sense of defeat, Otto lowered the cane and placed it beside him on the mattress. Noticing the other tower blocks in the distance, he added as an afterthought:
‘But of course, one must remember, Marlowe House has shrunk a great deal in the years since it was built.’
This was the final straw. It was becoming rather painful. Chloe’s professional manner softened back into familiarity.
‘I think we’ve done enough for today. You probably want to unpack. Shall we carry on with this tomorrow when you’re feeling more refreshed?’
Eleven
That night, Otto struggled to sleep. It had been a hectic day, filled with unfamiliar people and sensations, and he found it all more overwhelming than anticipated. There was the filming outside Marlowe House and the rather disastrous interview. He had barely been given time to unpack, then it was off to a restaurant for a meal with Chloe and the film crew.
A more pleasant occasion than our dinner the other evening, he thought. No giddiness at all this time. I appear to have conquered the doppelgänger issue.
On his return to Marlowe House, a polite young cameraman showed him to the door of his twelfth-floor apartment, wished him good night and took his leave. Otto, in his tiredness, forgot just where he was, and stood for some minutes staring out into the gloom of the hallway. He couldn’t work out how his hotel in Marylebone had fallen into sudden disrepair; or why its porter was now so scruffily dressed. Once the penny had dropped, and the events of the day returned to him, he shut the front door quickly and went inside.
With his head still reeling from the glass or two of wine he had drunk at dinner, he decided he would have a quick shower and retire to bed immediately. But the strangeness of the mattress and the smell of fresh paint that pervaded the apartment meant that sleep, that night, was slow to arrive. When it did it was a sleep of surfaces; insubstantial, devoid of depth. His dreams, too, mirrored waking. They were more like thoughts, near-conscious memories of the day’s events and their associations. Cynthia’s typewriter, the swirling litter, the howling of the wind between the columns. The smell of paint, in Otto’s half-sleep, became a kind of texture on his skin. Then he turned on his side and entered another form of awareness.
He saw Daniel, translucent, on the first day of his life, passed up into his arms by the exhausted Cynthia.
My goodness, Otto thought, looking down at the baby through an unexpected prism of tears. He’s so fragile … a butterfly’s wing … a raindrop.
He saw the same boy at five, his mouth stained with chocolate, grinning and grimacing as the spit-dampened tissue passed across his face. And then the older boy, on his eleventh birthday, sitting at the table in his wicketkeeper’s gloves, trying in vain to eat dinner with a knife and fork.
In the holidays, one year, they flew a kite in the fields behind his grandparents’ house, Daniel and Cynthia shouting their encouragement while Otto struggled to keep it under control. He could picture Daniel laughing, his head thrown back in pure delight, a gesture he had inherited from his mother.
No sign of that laugh, though, all those years later, as the studious young man boarded the train up to Cambridge. Daniel was shaking Otto’s hand, as they stood upon the platform, and thanking him for his support through the years. Cynthia, a little tearful, threw her arms around her son, while Otto hoisted the case up into the carriage.
One year on, he saw the embrace outside the entrance to the hospital; the look of shock in Daniel’s eyes, reflecting his own disbelief.
&nbs
p; And then, much later, the middle-aged man, a more distant figure, an occasional voice on the telephone.
You should have done more to support him, not run away into the mountains, Otto’s conscience whispered deep into his soul.
Eventually he woke, if that was the right word to describe the experience. It was more an acknowledgement that sleep had failed to take him; a shrugging forth into alertness.
He climbed out of bed and walked without hesitation through two rooms and a corridor to the kitchen. It was only once he had got there, removed a glass from the cabinet and filled it with cold water that he realised he had done so without switching on any lights.
How did I do that?
He had barely even noticed the apartment so far. The tour he had taken with the film crew had passed in a blur. Furthermore, the apartment was large (three bedrooms, the biggest available in Marlowe House), with a rather complex configuration of interconnecting rooms for him to negotiate. Yet somehow he had made it to the kitchen, in darkness, without a moment’s hesitation. True, the place was sparsely furnished, which meant that there were few obstacles to strike him on the way, but still he was rather taken aback by what he had just achieved.
Even in the villa in Switzerland that would have taken some doing, and we’ve lived there eighteen years.
It also struck Otto that in total darkness he had known the exact whereabouts of the kitchen cabinets and sink, still in their original positions from the 1960s.
I know it all, he told himself, a little shocked by the discovery. It’s still in there.
Turning on the light switch (again he knew its position), it dawned on him that while walking through the apartment he had drawn upon a very precise mental floor plan, seeing each room as though from above. Clearly he must have retained a subliminal mental copy of this plan, unawares, since the early 1960s. There were four types of apartment in Marlowe House, and upon inspection Otto found that each one remained clear in his imagination, together with numerous other details about the layout.
He sipped his glass of water.
It’s strange, memory’s labyrinth. I can’t remember something Anika told me five minutes before, and yet I remember this, all of it, the entire bloody building, as though it were laid out before me in a technical manual.
What a contrast to a few hours earlier, when he had struggled to find a single word to say about Marlowe House. Reinforcements had arrived, but far too late.
Switching on more lights, Otto began to explore the apartment.
We worked damned hard on those plans, though. Cynthia and I … the whole team at Unit 5. Months – years – of hard work went into its making. No wonder the details sank in so deeply.
‘To me, the key to this whole project is light,’ Otto heard a voice say.
How much younger he had sounded in those days.
‘The competition brief is to develop residential housing in a densely built-up area. The chief challenge for us, in such a setting, will be to optimise the amount of daylight available to every resident.’
* * *
In their office in Fitzrovia, at the less fashionable end of London’s West End, the members of Unit 5 sat around the desk on which Otto was perched. In rolled-up shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, he flicked back his fringe from his eyes and handed out some plans.
‘We want to lift people upwards, away from the grime,’ he continued. ‘We want to bring them fresh air and a sense of openness. Give them something they have never had before. Views, space, calm…’
He remembered, as he spoke, the washed-out faces of the passers-by in the streets of 1950s Lambeth; the cramped and airless terraces many inhabited.
‘If we begin our project from a single principle – the principle of light – then I believe that everything else will fall into place. Whatever proposal we submit will be based upon an inherent logic. Form will follow function, if you will.’
The others talked through Otto’s preliminary thoughts, making comments and suggestions as they felt the need. Unit 5 was a democratic set-up, based upon socialist ideals. In theory, everyone in the collective had an equal voice in its running. In practice, there was a certain unspoken hierarchy within its ranks. With their burgeoning reputations, and their constant flow of new ideas, Otto and Cynthia found that their suggestions often held sway.
In the weeks that followed, the members of Unit 5 considered several alternative designs. One, suggested by Otto, looked like a series of concrete cubes, placed at angles, one on top of the other; in the manner of a child’s toy bricks, imperfectly aligned.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Cynthia, as Otto showed them all a pencil sketch. ‘It looks impressive, technically, but it feels a little cold to me, a little too precise in its execution.’
She passed the drawing round to the others at the table. They gave a low murmur of agreement. Glancing at Otto, she noticed the look of disappointment on his face.
‘Sorry, O,’ she mouthed to him silently.
‘A passing thought, nothing more,’ he said. ‘What would you suggest instead?’
‘Something more fluid,’ she replied. ‘More organic. Easier on the eye. Rather than a design based on the right angle, on pure geometric forms, why don’t we look to the softer lines of nature for inspiration? The tower block as a flower, for example.’
The other members of Unit 5 nodded their approval.
Cynthia began conducting a painstaking programme of research. She borrowed dozens of library books, which formed a small structure in themselves as they stood piled on her desk in the office. She studied photographs of sunflowers – their fat heads turned towards the sun, of seashells, trees and curling leaves, before considering the human form. Ballet dancers, athletes and figures depicted in classical sculptures. Cynthia was trying to capture the grace of natural forms; the fluidity and economy of movement. Finally she turned for inspiration to the fluttering movements of fabrics. One day she arrived at the office with a headscarf she had bought on a trip to Istanbul, pinning it with clothes pegs to a washing line she had strung across the centre of the room. To everyone’s amusement, she took the fan from her desk and positioned it before the piece of fabric, studying and sketching it in pencil as it rippled and revolved in the currents.
Otto also took up his sketchbook, visiting the parcel of land that was the location for the development. Like an astronomer from the ancient world, dressed incongruously in morning suit and a large sunhat, he sat each day atop a pile of rubble, studying the movement of the sun across the sky. Hour after hour, he drew the changes of light and shadow on the surrounding buildings, noting carefully the times within the margin.
The final design they submitted for the competition had a classical simplicity. Everyone was happy with the proposed structure, twisting slowly upwards through its levels like a piece of fabric caught in a gentle breeze. The proposal fitted well with Unit 5’s aesthetic. All of them disliked unnecessary flourishes, or what Otto once called ‘attention seeking’. He, like the others, favoured a certain austerity of form. While the six other designs submitted for the competition tended towards the brazenly futuristic, the team at Unit 5 had opted instead, the judges decided, ‘for a technically complex yet outwardly graceful form, allied to a highly sensitive exploitation of light and space’.
It had won them the competition, and cemented their professional reputations.
* * *
Drawing back the living-room curtain, Otto noted again the width and height of the window – it was almost like a glass wall – and the depth of the balcony outside. He thought then of the ‘principle of light’ that had guided so much of their work on this and subsequent inner-city housing projects. He knew the underlying reason for his impulse to maximise light and space. Cynthia understood it, too, although the subject was never spoken about directly. During the two years Otto and his family spent hidden in a cellar in Antwerp’s diamond quarter, they were shut away for much of the time in near-total darkness, with only the thin light of candles to
see by. For a few short hours each day, however, they were able to go outside into the courtyard to snatch a glimpse of natural light, which the young Otto would absorb with an intense and never-forgotten yearning.
He retreated from the thought. Now really wasn’t the time. Tomorrow there would be a full day of filming, and he wanted to face the experience with the clearest possible head. Besides, there was something else he ought to do, before retiring for the night.
Twelve
Dear Anika,
I’m afraid I’ve been less than honest with you in explaining my reasons for coming here to London. This note is my attempt to set the record straight. Not that it will ever reach you. It will go into the bin, I suppose, like every other letter I write, nowadays.
It is twenty-five years since I last set foot in this city, and almost as long since I reflected on what occurred here. But London has never left me, Anika, in all that time. It has never left me free to dwell in peace. And so I must revisit them, those places and memories – the various events that help explain me.
This compulsion to revisit the past, I now realise, is not the consequence of my journey here, but its cause. It is the reason I am here at all, above and beyond the documentary and our belated attempts to save this broken building. I suspect you already know this, that you grasped the truth of it long before I did. That strange look in your eyes, whenever I mentioned my trip, now makes perfect sense to me. I understand your concern, the cause of your unease, aside from general worries about my health. Yet these other concerns, I want to assure you, are entirely without foundation.
What I’m trying to say, in my convoluted fashion, is that this journey into my past, into the past I shared with Cynthia, is in no way a reflection upon you and me. It worries me that you might see it that way – that you think of me as restless or dissatisfied. My feelings for you today are as strong as when we first knew each other. And goodness, what you meant to me, back then!
Your friendship in those early days was a constant balm to pain. The love that blossomed between us was an unexpected flowering. And what was it that drew me so strongly towards you, beyond your more obvious attractions? It was your voice, I suppose – to me the most beguiling of your qualities. I heard you, in fact, even before I saw you, on that afternoon in Talloires, in the hills above Lake Annecy, when a random series of events caused our paths to cross. I was there on a simple whim, an impulse to see the outside world again. You were there for lunch with the Dutch ambassador, a lunch that was unexpectedly cancelled.
