‘Well, we’ve had the occasional disgruntled client in our time,’ said Tony Brace, ‘but I never thought anyone would go quite this far.’
Someone else proposed that the supporters of the Prince of Wales had perhaps taken exception to the design of Frobisher House.
‘That’s not particularly amusing,’ snapped Matthew. He had started to shake, he discovered. Tony put a hand on his arm and steered him into his office, where he listened with incredulity to Matthew’s explanation.
‘How many, Mr Halland?’
‘I didn’t count,’ said Matthew tersely. ‘Several.’
‘In a state of decomposition?’ continued the policeman, sympathetically. It was a different one. Police Constable whatever was away on leave now. His successor was equally avuncular and unruffled.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sending a car round. If you could just tell the men which dustbin.’
‘Is that really necessary?’
‘They’ll have seen worse, don’t you worry. And we need the wrappings.’
‘All right,’ said Matthew. Fat lot of good that’ll do, he thought. Anonymous sheet of brown paper. Arbitrary postmark. Unidentifiable handwriting. The policeman was now giving advice about how to handle future mail items.
‘And what do I do if it’s a bomb next time?’
‘I doubt that. Jokers like this usually stick to this sort of thing. It’s kept at a nuisance level. Low-grade aggro rather than anything that’s going to provoke a full-scale criminal investigation. That’s invariably the case, in my experience. For your peace of mind.’
Matthew sighed. ‘And for how long does it usually go on? In your experience.’
‘Till they get tired of it, or till something else takes their eye. They’ve not got long attention spans, people like this. They’re like children, in one sense.’
‘They make all the children I’ve ever come across look like models of civilization. But I don’t know why we keep talking about “they”. I’ve told you who’s behind this. Have you people talked to this man Rutter?’
‘I understand the response was much what might have been expected.’
‘And so?’
‘We’re pursuing the matter, Mr Halland.’
‘On a rather more important level,’ said Matthew. ‘What about the Spitalfields fire?’
There was a slight pause. ‘Ah. Yes. The last I heard, the boys down there aren’t too sure on the arson angle. There’s some evidence it may well have been accidental.’
‘Is that what you’d all prefer to think?’
Another pause. Affronted, this time. Or pained.
‘All right. Forget I said that, if you’d rather. Thanks for your advice. I’ll direct your men to the appropriate dustbin.’
Matthew rang off. Debbie put her head round the door. ‘Coffee?’
‘That would be very welcome, Debbie.’
He went to the window and looked out at the complex grey expanse of this city in which people were engaged in doing unspeakable things to one another. Children were being beaten up, old ladies mugged. Men and women stuck knives in total strangers, or violated those they knew best. You were looking upon a landscape of secret carnage. Given which, it seemed a bit craven to be whining about a few dead rats, some shit and a broken windscreen – positively finicky, indeed. The problem was, of course, that you were looking also at a landscape in which coexisted a horde of people who knew little of one another, who rubbed shoulders in the streets, stared into one another’s eyes in the tube, and saw nothing of each other’s lives. Here was a place in which some were driven beyond the limits of endurance while others wondered how to spend their evening, in which one man admired the summer flowers while another walked the same streets howling his despair at shuttered houses. We react to what happens to us in terms of our expectations. Those who have not hitherto been exposed to jungle law tend to respond squeamishly when they get a taste of it. Out there, thousands live by quite other arrangements than polite behavioural codes favouring mutual consideration and fair play. The city has many points of view, and many climates. The official creed proscribes shoplifting, crashing the red lights and driving while under the influence. For many, these are accepted practices. Fraud, theft and homicide are outlawed, but remain a standard means to a livelihood for some. You could grow up assuming that the world would treat you well, or knowing that there wasn’t a hope in hell that it would do any such thing.
Debbie returned with the coffee. ‘Tony told me about this man. I think it’s shocking. How can they let people like that get away with it?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Debbie. Some sort of attempt is made to see that they don’t, I suppose.’
‘God, when I opened that box … I mean, how does anyone come by a load of dead rats in the first place?’
‘Evidently there are those for whom it’s a standard commodity.’
Each day he sat in front of the telephone, considered dialling Sarah Bridges’ number, and did not do so. When at last he took the plunge he could not tell if her voice was welcoming or cool. Striking a note of casual camaraderie, or so he hoped, he suggested a meeting. She agreed. He put the phone down in a state of elation, and anxiety. He feared that she might have accepted out of boredom, or indifference.
All over London, the plane trees were losing their leaves. Pavements were littered with the flattened yellow shapes and overhead the simplified branches hung out the black spheres of the seed pods against the white autumn skies. Matthew saw that time was passing and felt relief. He took Jane to St James’s Park, where they fed importunate wildfowl and counted the different species. Jane, too, was preoccupied with the passage of time, for her own reasons.
‘I’ll be eight and a half next week.’
‘I know.’
‘Why don’t people have half birthdays as well as whole ones?’ she continued after a moment.
‘Because their parents can’t afford it,’ said Matthew promptly. ‘And it would make the real birthday less interesting.’
‘Something can’t be interesting if you don’t know it’s ever going to happen.’
‘You know quite well when your birthday is. April.’
She was silent for a few moments. ‘That’s just a thing you say.’
And he perceived for an instant the perpetual now of childhood, the interminable present from which, eventually, we escape and which we can never retrieve. We cohabit with these mysterious beings who occupy a different time-zone, who share our days and move with us through them, but whose vision is that of aliens – anarchic, uncorrupt and inconceivable. We talk to them in our language, impose on them our beliefs, and all the while they are in a state of original harmony with the physical world, knowing nothing and seeing everything. They roll with the planet, wake and sleep; their time is essential time, before it has become loaded with significance.
It was a day of wind, sending squalls across the lake, spinning the fallen leaves. Blowing Jane’s hair across her face. There was an odd tacit agreement between Matthew and Susan that Jane’s long hair should not be cut. Fair and fine, it reached now below her shoulder blades and was usually done in a plait or lifted up into a ponytail. Matthew was maladroit at both these operations and frequently wondered at his own reluctance to propose chopping it short. A primitive feeling perhaps that such an action would be to discard a part of her, to undervalue her process of growth, to reject the past. Jane herself appeared indifferent, except when the hair bothered her, as now.
‘My hair’s getting in my eyes.’
‘I’ll tie it back.’
‘Plait it,’ she requested. ‘Please.’
They sat down on a bench. ‘Tighter,’ said Jane. ‘You’re doing it too loose.’
‘You know I’m not much good at this.’
She considered. ‘You’re good at other sorts of things.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Is everyone good at something?’
He saw the drift. Jane did not, so far, excel
in any particular direction. She held her own at school, but did not shine; she was not athletic.
‘Most people find out eventually what they like doing, and that’s often what they’re good at as well. Sometimes it takes a long time – not till they’re grown up.’
She was silent for a while, watching a park attendant sweeping up leaves from the paths. ‘And you can do things well or do them badly. That man’s clearing up the leaves well, isn’t he?’
Again, he perceived the train of thought. ‘Yes.’ The apt parental clichés trooped into his head; he picked his way past them. ‘Better than I could, I suspect.’ The plait was now done, for better or worse, and Jane’s preoccupations had taken another sideways shunt.
‘What are ducks good at?’
‘They have to be good at being ducks – better at getting food than other ducks, or escaping from enemies.’
‘What happens if they don’t?’
‘They starve, or get killed. Unless they’ve got themselves a cushy meal-ticket like St James’s Park.’
‘Is it still like that anywhere for people?’
Jane had been doing a project on prehistoric man at school; Matthew, knowing this, was able to interpret the question.
‘Not exactly. Well, up to a point.’ Deep in what’s left of the Brazilian rain-forests. In Brixton, or Whitechapel, or parts of Liverpool or Manchester or Bradford. He decided, cravenly, to wind up the conversation. ‘Look, I think we’ve had enough of this park. I want to go to Cobham Square to take a look at how they’re getting on. I’ve been too busy to go there this week.’
‘It’s Sunday. They won’t be building it.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I can still get in.’
In Piccadilly she wanted to ride on the top of the bus, and in Regent Street she had to be downstairs, in the front seat. Everything matters; each decision is of moment. For those who live in essential time, every minute is equally weighted, as though it were the first or the last. Everything that happens is fresh, to be examined and assessed. Without the wisdoms and the tarnished vision of experience, each incident is ripe with threat or promise, nothing can be taken lightly, all that arrives is potent. Tragedy threatens when the front seat in the bus is occupied, but then the occupants get off at the next stop and the sun shines once more. A linguistic conundrum on an advertisement is succeeded by an unidentifiable species of dog, and that is swept aside by the splendour of a burst water main at Oxford Circus. Matthew, sharing these events in muted fashion, glimpsing the potential but unable to escape his own distracting commitment to the tyrannies of time, saw again that she lived differently, and unreachably. It is children alone who experience immediacy; the rest of us have lost the ability to inhabit the present and spend our time in anticipation and recollection.
At the bottom of Tottenham Court Road they abandoned the bus to walk the rest of the way. Here, Jane’s attention was caught by a street trader from whom – after anguished indecision – she bought a green and pink plastic windmill. And then they struck out across country, past the British Museum, the Senate House, and so to the space and sobriety of Cobham Square, where Matthew’s site was in shrouded silence, freed from the drills and the cement mixers.
‘Are we going inside?’
‘Yes. But you’re to stay right by me. It’s full of holes and leaking electricity.’
There is an entrance door now, fitted up with locks to which he has the keys, and within there is space, a great echoing emptiness of airy floors, the shell of the 25,000 square feet of office accommodation that will launch this terrace into the next decade of use and prosperity. There are windows, the original windows looking onto the plane trees and the unlovely frontage of a Fifties block of flats erected to replace the blitzed south side of the square. There is the brick and stucco façade, there are the porticos and the Coade stone dressings, but within is space alone – new anonymous untroubled space, an acreage of untrodden floors, virgin planks laid upon newly sawn beams and steel joists fresh from the rolling-mill, walls on which the plaster is still damp, labyrinthine intestines of pipes and cables. The buildings have been stripped down to the bone, and are reborn. Somewhere behind that surface of new plaster the brick records the soot-stained spine of fireplaces; the stone staircase sweeps down where it was first installed. But that is all.
Matthew patrols, noting problems, checking what has been done and what has not, scrutinizing a reconstructed cornice, seeing the solution to a problem. He allows Jane to scratch her name and the date low down in one corner of a plastered wall. They stand together for a moment at the window and watch the life of the square – children playing, an old man reading on a bench. And then they leave. Matthew locks and double-locks, and they are out into the autumn afternoon again, into the dusty sunshine.
They walk to the corner, where the far side of the square leads onto a busy thoroughfare. They pause at the kerb. Jane is holding her windmill up to watch it spin.
A sudden gust snatches it from her hand. It flies into the road. And in one unconsidered panic-stricken movement she is after it. There is the blast of a horn, the screech of brakes; the white van swerves, blasting and screeching. It sweeps round her, it brushes her anorak, the wind of its passage lifts her hair. A woman gives a stifled cry; heads turn. The van is gone, and Matthew has pulled Jane back onto the pavement. He is trembling; his heart seems to thump his ribs. He stands clutching Jane’s shoulder – now, this moment – and sees another moment, another life, streaming away into infinity. He lives, in that flash, the whole of it – her broken body, the ambulance, the hospital, the faces of strangers, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and the rest of life.
And then he is shouting at her: ‘How many times have I told you …’ She stares at him in horror, at his strange raw face, and bursts into tears.
He puts his arm round her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s all right. But …’
‘I didn’t mean to …’ she wails.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know. It’s all right.’ And they cross the road, his arm tightly round her, as though she were ill, or he were.
Fourteen
These nights are twenty-four hours long, or one, or a few minutes. Time, like the city, is blown apart, wrenched into a shattered parody of itself. Jim leaves the square in twilight and returns at dawn. Sometimes, it is as though he had been gone an eternity; at others he is convinced that the world must have spun in some mad acceleration. On duty, at the warden’s post, or tramping the streets, there is time as lethargic as the movement of limbs under water, inching onward in slow empty hours. And there is time displaced by action, when the helter-skelter demands of danger, anxiety, life, death, fire, water, the noise, the voices, the sights and smells are such that when at last you subside for a moment, take stock, hitch yourself to the natural continuities, you find that the furious sequence of events was telescoped into five minutes, or half an hour. In twelve hours nothing happens; in ten seconds, a street explodes into fire and dust.
And you cannot reach back, now, into the age before it all began. A few months ago. That time is behind glass, innocent and impregnable, as distant as the previous unblemished city, which seems some strange imagined incarnation of today’s splintered, pockmarked, cratered, dusty, smoking labyrinth of distress. The place mutates each night. With each new day there is a new landscape – streets that have become a wasteland of rubble, into which whole houses have slid in a torrent of brick and matchstick timber, a yawning void where there was that pub, that shop, that café. He has to find new routes for his bike, to outwit the diversion signs, the bomb craters. He rounds a corner to see a carcass where yesterday there was a church, a boarded-up hole where last week he called on a friend. And rumour has it, always, that there is worse beyond. Down in Limehouse the Army trains for street-fighting in the ruins that were homes. In Poplar there is a UXB so large, so deep, so dangerous that a whole district is cordoned off. The Tower has had a direct hit. They got Battersea power station. The city has fragmente
d in another sense also; it has split up into a confederation of villages, within which people huddle, sniffing the acrid winds from elsewhere, guessing, hoping, waiting. Each day you remain unscathed is a day gained; the bomb that falls a mile away has not fallen on you.
‘There’s cloud coming up,’ says Mary. She is looking out of the window, as she does each evening before he leaves. He joins her and sees a bank of grey to the east.
‘Good. Maybe we’ll have a quiet night.’ Starlight is to be feared. The full moon most of all.
They stand for a moment. The child is out there in the square, playing with other children. Skipping. The parents watch the white twitch of the ropes in the twilight; they listen to the high thin sound of the accompanying chant. Then he turns to go.
‘Tell her to come in, will you?’
He nods. He kisses his wife. He goes out of their door and down the stairs, through the familiar strata of other people’s landings, the whiff of their dinners, their prams and bins and bikes. He disentangles his own bike from the cluster in the hallway, puts his clips on, wheels it down the steps.
He calls to the child. She grins, and goes on skipping. He calls again, and this time sees her pull a face, wind up the rope, start to move towards the pavement. He waves. She waves.
And then he is on the bike and launched upon his navigation of the city, picking his way across boundaries, from one village to another, out of the relatively stable streets of his own area down through Coram’s Fields, Gray’s Inn, Holborn and into the devastated wastelands of the City. He rides fast, to beat the black-out and the ebbing light, whisking down unimpeded ways, selecting short cuts and avoiding known hazards. He passes through streets in which every building is skeletal, a symmetry of gaping glassless windows, and others where a single masonry façade stands amid the shells of shattered houses. There is a strange intimacy about these ruins – the staircases tripping down naked walls, the stark fireplaces, a column of washbasins, the pastel colours of wallpapers. You stare, record, and do not think too hard.