The Restoration of Otto Laird

by Nigel Packer

  ‘Does your brother not agree with you about anything?’ Otto once asked Cynthia, shortly after meeting Anton for the first time. He had been somewhat shocked by the sharpness of the exchanges between them. ‘I thought for a moment I must be in the House of Commons.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she answered with a smile. ‘It’s a kind of game between the two of us, although at the same time we’re perfectly serious in our views. Maybe it’s just the way some middle-class siblings in this country express their love for each other. It’s all that is left over once our natural affection has been drilled out of us at school.’

  Otto knew from previous conversations that Cynthia, like her brother, had undergone a strict education. She sometimes described herself, with a hint of a smile, as a ‘victim of the British public-school system’. To Otto, this sounded like an exaggeration. Cynthia’s privileged upbringing appeared to him to have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it had furnished her with her perfect diction and cut-glass accent, a sound that affected Otto like music. It had also given her impeccable posture and natural grace, self-confidence and knowledge in a wide range of academic subjects. Not to mention a number of practical skills: fixing a carburettor, skinning rabbits without flinching, rolling a cigarette in the fingers of one hand.

  On the other hand, Cynthia’s background appeared to have left some less positive traits, perhaps going some way towards explaining her somewhat troubled character. Her personality combined warmth and frostiness in equal measure. She was capable of showing great vulnerability; breaking into tears unexpectedly, or hugging and kissing Otto in public with an intense, almost passionate affection. Yet she was also capable of sudden retreats into coldness, of closing off emotionally, quite unexpectedly, and sometimes within moments of these outpourings of warmth. To Otto, Cynthia seemed to be locked in a constant battle with herself – these differing impulses wrestling for ascendancy. Was she essentially a warm and passionate person, whose natural affection had been checked by the coldness and formality of a British public-school education? He sometimes believed this to be the case. At other times, however, it appeared to him that her tendency towards outbursts of emotion had in fact been exaggerated by that education; that in attempting to suppress those very qualities, it had somehow made them flower all the more, and to a degree that was not always healthy.

  In some respects, the dual nature of Cynthia’s personality embodied, for Otto, the dual nature of England itself – a country that combined an innate conservatism with an impulse towards free-spirited anarchy. The two sides of its character (militarism and Kipling on the one hand, the Diggers and the Beatles on the other) seemed caught in permanent creative tension; the latter both fighting against, yet feeding off, the former. That Cynthia generally embraced the anarchic side of the divide appealed greatly to Otto. The unpredictable moments of conservatism he accepted from her without question, because he loved her and they were a part of her originality.

  Anton, however, Otto did not love, and at times he found his brother-in-law’s tirades against socialism, trade unionism and anti-war protesters, not to mention his sarcastic and somewhat personal asides, a little irksome. All the more so, perhaps, because some of these personal asides – and in particular Anton’s unerring knack for pointing out inconsistencies in Cynthia and Otto’s own lives; what he once called, with a friendly beam, ‘saying one thing and doing another’ – carried more than a grain of truth. His remarks about their new home in Hampstead – traditional, expensive, perhaps a shade ostentatious, the kind of house that wouldn’t look out of place in Purley, Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells – again hit the mark.

  He felt himself inwardly flinch at Anton’s observation.

  ‘We can get to work in the attic later on,’ Otto said. ‘Let’s have a beer in the garden first.’

  He and Cynthia worried, sometimes, about their increasingly lavish lifestyle, which did not sit comfortably with their political convictions. During their early years together, they had earned very little, although they did have access to money thanks to a trust fund set up for Cynthia by her businessman father. She always referred to this account, somewhat enigmatically, as ‘the source’, largely because she was embarrassed by its existence. After gaining recognition with their design for Marlowe House, they expanded Unit 5 to Unit 12, and took on an increased number of projects from around the world. While Unit 12 remained a collective, however, with everyone taking an equal salary just as before, an unforeseen and at first peripheral source of income had made the Lairds, over the past few years, very well-off indeed.

  Cynthia, at weekends, had started jotting down in her notebook a few designs for textiles. They were abstract patterns, based largely on studies from nature. It was a hobby, as much as anything, something to distract her while Otto was reading or relaxing to some records. Upon seeing the drawings, a friend in the home furnishings industry suggested launching a limited edition of curtains, using them as a basis. The reception they received was so positive that the production run continued. Soon the line was extended to include wallpaper, tablecloths and bed linen. Demand for the designs grew at such a rapid pace that Cynthia was forced to put her architectural work on hold. Suddenly she found herself, entirely out of the blue, cast in the role of ‘Britain’s queen of interior design’, as one magazine had put it at the time. She hoped one day to return to her first love of architecture, although this now looked increasingly unlikely, as the success of her business spiralled, and with it the new-found wealth that she and Otto enjoyed.

  Before the move to Hampstead, they had spent almost ten years in Cynthia’s flat on Marchmont Street. Being so close to the West End was a major plus in those earlier days, and it was a relatively short walk from their home to their office in Fitzrovia. But with their growing success and the expansion into new premises on Portland Place, not to mention their plans to start a family, Otto and Cynthia – who by now were well into their thirties – decided it was time to move away from the heart of London into a bigger space further out.

  They bought the house in Hampstead on an impulse. As Anton had noted, it was a departure, stylistically, from what might have been expected of them. Nevertheless, Hampstead, like Bloomsbury before it, was an area with a slightly bohemian reputation, even though its particular brand of bohemia carried a more expensive price tag.

  They settled down onto the garden chairs with beers and Anton in tow.

  ‘So how long to go now, Cyn?’ asked Anton. ‘I’ve lost count.’

  ‘Three months,’ she replied.

  ‘July, eh? Well, I’m pleased for you. We both are. Gayle talks about it all the time. We were beginning to wonder if you two would ever get around to having children. I thought that maybe Marx had forbidden it, or something.’

  ‘Would you like some nuts?’ Otto interrupted, with a hint of irritation. ‘I can get you some from the kitchen.’

  ‘That sounds nice, old chap, thank you.’

  When Otto returned to the garden a few minutes later, the sun had broken through the clouds.

  ‘Thanks for coming to help out today,’ Otto said, placing the bowl of nuts before Anton. ‘We appreciate your coming over … really.’

  ‘Couldn’t leave Cynthia and yourself all alone to sort out the unpacking,’ Anton said. ‘Not when the bun is browning so nicely in the oven.’

  Otto looked confused. After fifteen years in England, he was still coming across new phrases all the time. He was about to head back to the kitchen when Cynthia rested her hand on his arm.

  ‘Otto’s already done most of the unpacking,’ she said to her brother. ‘But if you can help out with a few bits and pieces we’d be grateful. There are one or two heavy items he could use a hand with, and the lawn could do with a trim…’

  As he looked again at their old front garden, overflowing now with plants and flowers, Otto tried to remember the tightly mown patch of grass it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, a few tastefully planted flower beds around its periphery ha
d been the only concession to colour. It was odd, Otto noted, that when he looked back at that period now, he could no longer see it as it had been in reality, but only through the home-made Super 8 cine films he had taken at the time. He didn’t see Daniel as the flesh-and-blood child, gap-toothed and blue-eyed with a jet-black bowl fringe, but as a grainy and flickering figure zooming in and out of focus; a flash of white, or of burnished gold, haunting the washed-out frame. Technology seemed to be intruding upon past reality, intervening in Otto’s powers of recall. Even his memory was being forced through its prism. The situation was similar regarding his earlier memories, from the 1940s and 1950s – sepia-tinged now, thanks to the surviving film and photographs, and captured again in their immediacy only with considerable imaginative effort.

  Otto could see, in his mind’s eye, Daniel as he played on the old blue swing, or as he kicked a giant football around the front lawn. But it was the film that Otto now saw – not the memory. The home movie had been taken in order to preserve that memory, yet the memory itself had gone. If anything, the home movie had become a barrier to that memory, not its aid. The odd colours of the footage, by turns saturated or ghostly pale, together with its grainy quality were no longer indicative of a primitive and faulty technology. They had become the period in question; they defined it in its essence. Thanks to the development of Super 8 technology, Otto thought, the entire period of the 1960s and 1970s would forever have the texture of deteriorating film stock.

  While outwardly, for the Lairds, the early years spent in this house had been among their most fulfilling, there had also been a number of underlying tensions in the marriage; tensions that Otto had perhaps glossed over in the light of subsequent events. They emerged for him now, like small weeds among the abundant flowers of the garden, troubling the domestic idyll he had created in memory. It was painful, but he knew he must face it openly.

  No more lies, he thought. Not at this late stage of the game. Know thyself, Otto, if you can bear to …

  The unexamined life must be placed beneath the microscope; the evidence sifted afresh. It was time for that now. No more romanticising of his own past. If old age brought wisdom, it was because it also brought honesty – the laying aside of the ego, of all mental as well as bodily vanity. It threw its unforgiving light upon the misdemeanours of the past, and demanded a closer inspection.

  Cynthia, he accepted, had not been happy then, for a longer period than he had previously allowed himself to admit. He could see that clearly now, once he had penetrated in his imagination beyond the images seen so often in those old home movies: of her pushing Daniel back and forth on the swing at what appeared to be unnaturally high speeds; her smile wide, her auburn hair shining and her pale-blue eyes laughing. When he slowed down the frame to a freeze in his memory, the pain behind her eyes was clear enough. She had suffered from post-natal depression, and the lines on her previously youthful face had deepened during the five years after Daniel was born.

  Watching him grow from an infant to a young boy had been a source of joy but also distress for her. The sheer speed of time’s passing had brought with it mixed emotions. The loss of one stage of her son’s development was compensated by the arrival of the next, but it left in its wake a residual sadness. In no time at all, the new-born infant was gone – replaced at first by a toddler, and later by a child. Cynthia must have felt a strong sense of life passing at this time. Her own mortality must have been thrown into relief by the rapid transformations of her son. And at some point, Otto now realised, that feeling must have panicked her. Unable to express it to him, or perhaps even to herself, she had sought escape in other ways – they both had – and for a while it had jeopardised everything.

  Otto never did establish for certain which of them was first to lapse into an affair. But for a number of years these affairs had not only defined their marriage but almost broken it in the process. There was, for example, the liaison between Cynthia and a younger member of the team at Unit 12 (soon to become Unit 11). Otto had never worked out exactly when it started. He suspected later that it might have begun after that party, the one they had thrown at the house one evening to celebrate the contract for the public library building in Helsinki.

  He remembered glimpsing Cynthia in conversation with him in the hallway; leaning back against the wall in her burgundy dress, a flash of teeth between the sips of wine, her full lips lingering on the glass. He remembered, too, his own slight pang of jealousy; feeling older, suddenly, than he had before. He felt envious at the intimacy of their expression, the way she drank in the young man’s smile, his strong jaw and sinuous frame in an open-necked denim shirt – a hint of chest-hair bleached by salt and sun – resonant of exercise and good health. He recalled Cynthia brushing aside her long fringe, in order to gift him her face. Immediately after then, it must have been. Or maybe it had already started by that time. Otto didn’t know. He had avoided the details. Even later on, near the end of Cynthia’s life, when she had wanted one afternoon to tell him everything; for him to tell her everything, too.

  It doesn’t matter, he had said to her. It’s just life, passing … nothing more. None of it is important any more.

  But even at the time he knew that he was sparing himself the additional pain – of his own confessions, as much as hers. And why did those affairs happen? The usual mid-life vanities. Boredom, frustration, a sense of time slipping quickly away. A need for some new-found excitement, started and then gone much too far. And then, in hindsight, there were the mundane pressures of working life. Those, too, had played their corrosive part.

  Eighteen

  ‘What do you think of that?’ Cynthia asked the seven-yearold Daniel, as he tore the latest gift from its wrapper.

  The small wooden boomerang, covered in bright abstract patterns, shone with a coat of glossy varnish, fresh from the workshop. Daniel gazed at it, overawed.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy – it’s amazing.’

  Otto smiled down at him benignly.

  ‘You’re welcome. I’ve missed you all these days.’

  Cynthia smiled at Otto.

  ‘We’ve both missed you, too. And how is the project progressing?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Slow. Difficult. Still lots of problems to iron out.’

  A frown creased Otto’s brow as he loosened his tie. He rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Would you rather not talk about it?’

  ‘No, I’m happy to discuss it. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s my job. I’m just a little fatigued, that’s all. I didn’t sleep on the plane.’

  ‘Oh no. That problem again?’

  ‘And we were delayed for an age at Singapore. They might at least have let us off to stretch our legs. How much smaller can they make those bloody seats? My knees were nearly higher than my head.’

  Cynthia touched his shoulder with a smile.

  ‘No wonder you’re so…’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You know…’

  ‘I just need time to rest and get my head back into place. Maybe then I’ll feel a little more human.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a nap before supper? Or a hot bath, maybe?’

  ‘I’ll go and run one.’

  ‘Pour yourself a brandy as well.’

  ‘Good idea. Do you want one?’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine.’

  Daniel tugged at Cynthia’s skirt and held out the boomerang to her.

  ‘What’s it do?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, when you throw it in the air it turns around in a circle and comes right back to you. Then you can catch it and throw it again.’

  ‘Really? Wow.’

  ‘Shall we go and give it a try? Out in the back garden? Supper won’t be ready for at least another hour.’

  She took Daniel’s hand and they made their way towards the french window. Otto, who was opening the drinks cabinet on the other side of the living room, called across to her.

  ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  She halted and turned.
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  ‘What?’

  ‘Trying it out in the garden. I’m not so sure that you should.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Cynthia and Daniel hovered by the window.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Otto asked.

  The sharpness in his own voice surprised him.

  ‘No, not really,’ Cyn replied. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us.’

  An edge had entered her voice in response.

  Not again, both Cynthia and Otto thought, simultaneously.

  He could have let it go, but he chose to ignore the warning signs. Besides, they had just spent a fortune on some new double glazing.

  ‘There are windows everywhere. The neighbours have just built a conservatory. You can’t go recklessly flinging a boomerang around the garden. An accident of some kind is inevitable.’

  Daniel was studying the boomerang.

  Cynthia’s cheeks flushed a little.

  ‘We won’t “recklessly fling” anything, Otto. I’m not a hooligan, and neither is our son. We’re just going to have a little practice, aren’t we, Daniel? See what happens if we give it a little throw. It’s only a child’s boomerang – which won’t go very far – and the garden, as you know, is rather large. Don’t worry. We’ll be careful.’

  She walked away and slid open the window. Otto persevered.

  ‘Nevertheless, I think it’s a risk. Even if you don’t break any windows, you might damage the boomerang.’

  Cynthia, halfway through, laughed.