The next day Matthew found the windscreen of his car smashed. He did not think too much of this, attributing it to vandalism or a stone flung up by a passing vehicle, until he arrived home one evening the following week to be confronted by a pile of excrement on the mat inside his front door. Then he made the connection. He cleared up the mess, grimly, and telephoned the police, who were sympathetic and offered various practical recommendations. Matthew screwed up his letter box, arranged for the postman to leave his mail with a neighbour, and parked his car several streets away from the flat. He did these things in a condition of impotent rage. It was as though a furtive, dirty hand were reaching into his life. He found himself staring with suspicion at every unrecognized passer-by in his street.
Sarah Bridges leaned towards him, frowning slightly. ‘Sorry?’
‘I’ve made a mistake with this place,’ shouted Matthew. ‘I apologize. I hadn’t realized it was like this.’
The restaurant rang with noise. It was a subterranean complex of converted cellars with whitewashed brick barrel vaulting and sawdust-strewn floors. Conversations, laughter and the clink of cutlery reverberated off the low ceilings, creating a pervasive clamour which virtually drowned out individual remarks. At the next table a gang of carousing financiers, average age apparently around twenty-five, punctuated raucous chat with collective bellows of mirth.
Sarah smiled and said something which looked like ‘Never mind.’ Or possibly ‘It’s fine.’ Or neither of those. The occasion was moving in the direction of disaster. They were reaching the end of the meal, on a conversational course which proceeded in fits and starts, with interludes of misapprehension or defeated silence. Matthew felt as though they were vessels bleeping morse at each other through a blizzard of atmospherics. He sank into a dismal frustration.
‘… past failings?’ enquired Sarah.
‘Sorry? How will I make up for past failings?’
Earlier, he had caught her glancing at her watch. Now, thank heaven, she laughed. ‘I said, how are you getting on with your glass engraving?’
‘Oh, that …’ said Matthew in relief. ‘The preliminary sketches are ready, apparently. I’m going down to have a look at them on Thursday. Then she’ll start on the real thing.’
‘Will you have some sort of unveiling ceremony? When it’s in place.’
‘I really hadn’t thought. It’s a nice idea.’
The financiers brayed in chorus once more. Sarah shrugged and smiled. Matthew resisted an urge to throw everything on the table at them, and summoned the waitress instead.
‘Coffee?’
‘I really must be back at the office by half past,’ said Sarah.
‘Two coffees,’ he instructed the waitress. ‘And you might mention to our neighbours that they would benefit from a few lessons in restrained and considerate behaviour in public places.’
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Never mind. Two coffees, please. And the bill.’
‘Please let me pay this time,’ said Sarah Bridges.
‘No. If anything, this place should pay us for coming here and acting as crowd.’
The candle-lighting and the sawdust on the floor were presumably a confused attempt to hitch the place to its utilitarian past. In the shadowy recesses of further vaults too small even to accommodate a table or two, racks of wine bottles carried on the storage theme. Damp, rats and effluent had been ingeniously displaced by romantic murk.
The financiers departed in a horde, with a hideous racket of chair legs grinding on the stone floor. Matthew peered at the bill, put down some notes, and looked across at Sarah Bridges. ‘Well …’ he said, glumly.
‘Well … I’ll have to go, I’m afraid. It’s quarter past.’
They emerged blinking into the daylight. ‘I’m sorry about that place,’ said Matthew. ‘One of my colleagues claimed it was good. His head shall roll.’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’ She was poised for departure.
‘So … Thank you for coming, anyway.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll give you a ring some time, shall I?’
‘Yes, do,’ said Sarah Bridges. Dismissively? An absence of enthusiasm there, surely?
She smiled, he smiled. And then she was gone. Leaving him with the sour taste of anticlimax. Those who resist expectations are spared much. Forget it, he thought. Serves you right for unjustifiable optimism. Life isn’t like that, as you well know. She was a mere illusion, in any case.
The leaves were falling. There was a bite to the air. Down at Blackwall, Frobisher House had roared up to its full height, a brilliant turquoise cliff sprung from the mud. In Cobham Square there were once again floors, and doors, and plastered walls. Matthew’s drawing-board was occupied by the stark, neat outlines of buildings as yet unsanctioned, which might be snuffed out at this conception stage, or survive to climb also into the London skies. He worked as he had always done, with absorption and commitment, given over to the demands of some technical problem or the stimulus of an idea or an interesting solution. He moved from the isolation of pondering a new project to the give and take of site conferences or meetings with clients.
And in tandem with all this there ran the preoccupations of his own life, so that Jane, Susan, Sarah Bridges, Rutter, love, loss, indignation wove through the days. He would look about him at the ceaseless performance of the city, millions of people propelling the place forward in a fit of collective absence of mind – buying, selling, building, servicing, while concerned with more important things. Public life fuelled by private passions. The immortality of the whole ensured by the transience of the many.
He was awoken in the small hours by the telephone. When he answered the caller rang off. He went back to bed. Half an hour later the same thing happened again. He left the phone off the hook.
Returning from the corner shop, he saw that the man was still there, leaned up against a battered Ford, glancing occasionally along the street.
Matthew hesitated. He tucked his newspaper under his arm, took a firmer grip on the milk carton and bread loaf, and stepped forward. Level with the man, he stopped and swung round.
‘What are you doing there?’
‘What you mean – what am I doing? I’m waiting, aren’t I?’ A credible exhibition of mounting outrage.
‘I think you or one of your chums put a brick through my car window,’ said Matthew. ‘Plus a couple of other idiocies. I think you’re working for Rutter. So you’d better tell him that the police are onto it. And onto you too. Got that?’
And the outrage, now, is even more credibly overtaken by bewilderment, quickly chased by indignation. ‘Look, you’re off your rocker, mate. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t know no Rutter. I’m waiting for my wife to come out of the dentist’s surgery. So just bloody well piss off and leave me alone, will you?’
And Matthew saw that he was speaking the truth. He gabbled a humiliated apology, and slunk back to the flat. Thus springs paranoia.
Thirteen
Matthew stood beside Eva Burden and considered the three sketches. A wash of sunshine flooded down onto them through the big window so that the paper was golden and the pencil lines seemed to ripple in the watery light.
‘The middle one. I like them all, but that’s the one.’
‘Good,’ said Eva Burden. ‘I hoped you’d say that. It would be my choice, but I always let the client have the last word.’
‘It’s quite uncannily like what I had in mind. Except that I didn’t really know what I had in mind.’
She laughed. ‘My goodness, I wish everyone was so easy to please. My delightful vicars are always wanting more feathers to the angels’ wings, or a nicer expression for the Virgin.’
‘I think it’s perfect. The whale is absolutely right.’
‘What you are seeing, of course, is flat and dead. The real thing will have light – another dimension.’
‘I can’t wait. It’s going to be far too good for the building, I su
spect.’
‘You shouldn’t be so dismissive of your own work,’ said Eva severely.
‘It’s impossible to feel very proprietorial. That sort of thing is architecture by committee.’
‘I suppose so.’ She leaned over the sketch, frowning. ‘I still wonder if we shouldn’t have had a human figure somewhere. Frobisher himself, maybe?’
‘I think not. If anyone, it should have been the Eskimo.’
‘The Eskimo?’
‘They brought one back. As a trophy.’
‘Poor fellow. An involuntary immigrant, like me. What happened to him?’
‘He died, it seems. Almost at once.’
They had believed that the captive would perish on the voyage, for he was grievously sick of a fever. They shut him in the hold and brought food and water to him, for it were well that he should survive as testimony of their landfall at Meta Incognita, and a proof of the savagery of that terrible place. And when at last the perilous journey was completed, and the ship safely berthed in the Thames, they brought the captive up and set him upon the wharf in his boat made of skins, as a spectacle for the populace. Many people came running, and were astonished by the savage, and indeed thought at first that he was some brutish monster, half man half fish, until the sailors pulled him from the boat and stood him upon his feet. Whereupon they marvelled at his features, and at his garments made of skins and furs, and mocked him that he would not speak.
For from this time on the captive was silent, who before had spoken and chanted in his own outlandish tongue and had learned some few words of English. He looked about him all ways, at the people and at the place, and when his eye fell upon some oxen that drew a wagon he shrank back and looked fit to faint from fright, whereupon the people mocked him the more. But speak he would not.
In the following days they set him upon a cart, with his boat, and brought him into the city and paraded him about the streets, for an entertainment and that the people of London might marvel at the resolution and feats of navigation of Martin Frobisher, and reflect upon the strangeness and barbarity of that empty quarter of the globe. The captive made no resistance, but suffered them to lead him about, and when the populace stared, and shouted, and made to touch him to see if he be flesh or no, he did not flinch but seemed like a man in a trance, as though his soul were elsewhere. But then all of a sudden he rose up, and stood, and began to sing in his own tongue. He looked upwards to the sky, and sang with a great voice, and shortly after that he expired and died. Which was a great annoyance to the admiral, who was minded to keep him for the rest of his natural life, as a token and a trophy.
‘No,’ said Matthew. ‘I don’t think a human presence would be appropriate. It’s just right as it is.’
He sees that he has left the world and come to a place which is nowhere, peopled with devils and monstrous beasts. And presently he is beyond fear, beyond despair; he no longer perceives this terrible nowhere nor hears the screaming of the devils. He goes away, deep into himself, back into the proper unity of man and space. He denies the sequence of days and weeks that have led him to this horror, and turns within to find what is true, and right. He summons up from the depths of his being the images of all that he knows – the land, the creatures, the people – and prays to them to draw him back. He refuses this nowhere, he rejects it, he turns away from the dictations of time and seeks within his own head the securities of place. First he sees a picture, many pictures. And after a while these pictures start to drown the unreality around him, and as they do so he begins to speak. He sings to the world of which he is a part, and from which he was snatched but to which he now returns. He sings, and celebrates the land, and thus he becomes a part of it once more.
*
‘Right,’ said Eva Burden. ‘I shall get going, then. Let’s have a drink to celebrate. White wine? Or are you a beer man?’
‘White wine would be fine.’
They stood at the window. The river gleamed in the dusk, the far bank a tier of lights, the bridges strung with jewels. A ferry passed, blazing like a fairground, throbbing with music.
‘Parties,’ said Eva Burden. ‘This is not a serious river any more. It is for dancing and eating. It no longer leads anywhere – never mind to the Arctic.’
‘Even my eight-year-old daughter complained of the absence of real boats.’
‘Of course. It is a poor degraded thing, the river. In danger of losing its identity. Its suggestion of elsewhere. That bothers me quite a lot. Immigrant mentality, again. You worry about that for yourself. Until you discover that it can never be quenched – your own personal elsewhere. You are stuck with it – for better and for worse. For the rest of your life you will have an invisible point of reference, known only to you, making you different. Dear me – what is it about you that sets me off always talking about my origins! It’s something I seldom do, believe me.’
‘Well, please don’t stop. I find it enthralling.’
‘You’re one of those who are naturally curious, that’s what it is. One senses it. Those who are prepared to receive. You would have made a good immigrant yourself – success depends on perception and versatility. But for all the protective colouring you may take on, there will always be that secret elsewhere. Sometimes when I walk about this city I feel that one should see thousands of mirages – Caribbean islands and Indian villages and shimmering intense snatches of Turkey or Greece or Poland or wherever. The place is not just itself – it is a reflection of the rest of the globe. All of us who carry this cargo of private association. But here I go again … being obsessive. And in any case it’s true of everyone, whether you come from Watford Junction or Hong Kong. You become part of the urban stew and add to it your own little bit of flavour.’
‘Some flavours are more pungent than others. I think you’re entitled to pull rank. Speaking as one who grew up in Watford, or thereabouts. When I was young the most desirable attribute going was a foreign girlfriend.’
‘Really? You surprise me. I don’t think that was the case in my day. Or maybe I failed to exploit the one natural advantage I had.’
‘Italian was best,’ said Matthew. ‘I imagine Sophia Loren had a lot to do with that. With French a close runner-up. German I think suggested intellectual potential which the average youth found daunting. Intense Scandinavians did well, presumably because they never said anything much.’
‘And what about you? What did you go for?’
‘I was too diffident to try my luck very often. I aspired briefly to a Parisienne, but was much too callow for her, and soon got the push. I settled eventually for a girl from Gloucestershire.’
‘Your wife?’
‘Not any more, I’m afraid.’
Another carousing ferry passed in a blaze of light and sound. ‘I was married very briefly,’ said Eva. ‘Since then my relationships have been with women, and none of those very lasting. Perhaps that’s another thing about immigrants – a tendency to remain alone.’
‘Come now – that’s flatly contradicted by the facts. Most immigrants congregate, and breed vigorously. It’s the natural, expedient thing to do.’
She laughed. ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s just me. But don’t get me wrong, I prefer it that way. I’m perfectly happy, after my fashion. Except for the problems that beset anyone. I’ve had another offer for this place. Fairy money. All those noughts. It makes me feel like a millionaire. Except of course that it would cost me almost as many noughts to buy a studio somewhere else. But I dare say I shall go. Soon these parts will be unrecognizable – a nowhere, like the river.’
Driving away from Eva Burden’s studio, Matthew carried with him the image of the glass engraving. He was startled by how closely her sketch realized his own idea – a ship that was not quaintly archaic nor over-stylized, the sense of vigour, of ingenuity and purpose. There was more creative satisfaction, he found, in having transmitted a concept to someone else than in the completion of a building. He considered this, as he picked his way west and north th
rough the city, until the reflection was pushed aside by something else.
He had begun to think repeatedly of Sarah Bridges. The process, though, was not so much one of thought as of a protracted interruption of his proper concerns, an unrelenting assault upon the routine processes of the mind. She floated now from the crowds at an intersection, while he sat waiting for the lights to change, and smiled upon him until the traffic behind was blaring indignation. At other times her face superimposed itself upon his drawing-board, so that he sat in a trance, no work done. Her voice blotted out whole passages of conversations, like some sort of atmospheric interference, leaving him at a perpetual disadvantage. He lay awake at night, and when eventually he slept he experienced fervent dreams in which she did not feature but which seemed prompted by obsession.
He recognized the affliction, and greeted it with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. He had not expected ever to feel this way again, and did not know whether to laugh or cry.
He was at his desk in the office, starting to go through the mail.
‘There’s a parcel just come. Shall I open it?’
‘Yes please, Debbie.’
Half a minute later his secretary let out a shriek. He sprang to his feet, looked over her shoulder, and snatched the box from her.
He slammed through the door, out through the reception area and down the stairs. Before he dropped the lot into the dustbin he had time to observe that the rats were shrouded in clingfilm and neatly laid head to tail, like sardines in a tin, a curious piece of delicacy. Coming up the stairs again, he wondered fleetingly if they should have been preserved as evidence. No. His word, and Debbie’s, would have to suffice.
The office was in an uproar. Debbie was being consoled by colleagues. The senior partners had emerged from their offices, and were standing around in bewilderment.
‘I’m extremely sorry about that, Debbie. Are you all right?’
Debbie, stalwartly, declared herself quite recovered.