Three twenty-eight (and 1823) as Matthew Halland gets back into his car in Cobham Square, and starts the engine, gazing as he does so at the great trunk of one of the planes which soar from the garden in the centre: Platanus X hispanica Muenchh, the London plane, an immigrant, appropriately, first reaching this country in the late seventeenth century. And doing well, thrusting its roots down into the sour London soil, living off brick dust and cinders, drinking up lead emission and carbon monoxide. Platanus X hispanica Muenchh has seen off smogs and soot and will no doubt learn to cope with acid rain – the archetypal adaptor and survivor, taking advantage of its own convenient attributes of a short season in leaf and a glossy leaf surface easily washed clean by rain. Matthew, though, is thinking not of this but that its trunk has the subtleties of an abstract painting – a Braque perhaps – with its patching of peeled bark, yellow, fawn, grey and brown. He looks at the trunk of a tree and is referred at once to a different image, another set of signals; one vision triggers another, in the complex and unique network that is within his head. He is not especially interested in Braque, and cannot recall where or when he last saw a Braque painting – but there it is. The London plane has done its stuff, has served as the prompt whereby the physical world is not just itself but the shadow of a thousand things, is unique to each of us, is a code, a key, a chronicle.
And so, his head filled with Braque, with a Georgian stair balustrade, with Martin Frobisher, with stars and the moon, with his parents, with his child, Matthew slots himself once again into the moving city. He has travelled already today, through time and space, is so many hours older (has grown hair, has sloughed skin), has covered so many miles of tarmac, has set eyes on so many hundred fellow beings, has exchanged words or glances with a few. He heads now for his office, to clear up the day’s work, to finish with time in which he is at the disposal of others and enter time that belongs to him.
Thus, seven hours later, he rolls off the body of Alice Cook and lies beside her: spent, somnolent. ‘Drink?’ enquires Alice, companionably, too soon, and Matthew pulls himself together, remembers his manners, and replies that yes, he will have a quick drink. It is late; he will not stay the night; he never does. Alice would not wish it, and nor does he. He lays a hand on her thigh – to propitiate, to quell – but Alice is already bouncing from the bed, into the bathroom, fixing herself up, heading for the kitchen. She will bring him a whisky, with too much water in it.
Matthew dresses, in Alice Cook’s bedroom. He has known Alice for many years. She was a friend of Susan’s and still is, probably, in a tenuous way. It would never have occurred to him, back then, to make love to Alice, and he only does so now, if the facts are faced, at her suggestion, and out of apathy, availability and need. Alice is a physiotherapist: brisk, self-sufficient and unimaginative. Matthew likes her and, in a curious way, envies her. Alice, at this moment, pouring drinks in the kitchen, is not experiencing the twinge of bleakness that Matthew is experiencing. Alice has short black curly hair, a trim body in the best of health, and many friends to whom she talks noisily on the telephone (sometimes from the bed, when Matthew is in it). She is probably happy. Matthew appreciates Alice’s body – indeed at times he lusts after it – but there is a businesslike quality to her lovemaking that has always disturbed him; it is as though she were ingesting a glass of tonic wine. As soon as he has gone, Alice will fall into a deep, untroubled sleep until her alarm wakes her at seven.
Alice returns, with the whisky (which has too much water) and a fruit juice for herself. She sets her alarm, talking about a power struggle between doctors at the hospital at which she works. Matthew drinks his whisky, while putting on his socks. Alice has got back into bed. Matthew has never told Alice that he loves her, nor has she required it. What is between them is not love, but something cordial, mutually sustaining, that can be taken up or relinquished at will, without obligation. It is better than nothing, and entirely unsatisfactory to any who have known better.
Three
‘Frobisher House?’ said the client. ‘I’ll talk to my Board. I don’t see why not – it might be quite a nice gimmick. And a nautical theme for the décor. Yes, I like it.’
The client had a name, of course: Charles Sanderling. Matthew thought of him, though, more than of most, as The Client. Their relationship was bleached of any personal flavour. At a working meal such as this one, in a Covent Garden restaurant, they would carry out a ritual three-minute exchange about weather, or current events, and then proceed to business. Business, today, had come to an end, along with the lunch.
‘Brandy?’ enquired Sanderling. ‘No? Nor me. Two coffees. Rather quickly, if you could.’ He had a face as thin as a chopper across which glimmered now, for the waitress, an admonitory smile. Matthew could see, outside, the shining bulk of his chauffeur-driven car, partly blocking the narrow street. Sanderling’s time was parcelled out in quarter-hours, bespoken weeks ahead; you could feel its value, as the minutes ticked by in his company. It could not be wasted, nor treated lightly with unproductive conversation. Behind Sanderling was a Group, a hierarchy of other men and women with lightly tanned faces, groomed, polished and glowing with good health, conveying a sense of impregnability and purpose. And behind the Group was money, pure and simple, flickering in green figures on VDUs, stacked up in columns on print-outs, assessed and quantified in sheets of newsprint.
A few nickels of which were disposed of now, as Sanderling signed the bill. He held the door open for Matthew: ‘Can I drop you anywhere?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Matthew, as he always did, and as Sanderling had known he would. The car slid away into Drury Lane and Matthew walked off in the opposite direction, heading for Soho and Meard Street where he had to look at a couple of decaying Georgian houses under consideration by a potential client for a restoration venture.
First, though, he would allow himself time for a stroll around and a few small shopping errands. He liked Covent Garden. You could not but warm to an area that had so successfully been reborn. The place teemed with people, on this warm spring afternoon. It was international, multicultural, eclectic – it was all the things you were supposed to be, in this day and age. It was ecologically-minded (he could have bought a T-shirt that said Protect the Rain Forests, or an umbrella protesting against Acid Rain) and deeply involved with organic foods. Matthew’s first purchases were a half pound of goat’s cheese from Somerset and some of the unpasteurized yoghurt favoured by Alice Cook. He could also, a hundred yards away, have indulged rather more dubiously in a dried sea-horse or a large conch shell. For of course Covent Garden was also doing what it had always done: selling things. And you sell what people will buy, be it environmentally beneficial eatables or the mummified remains of an endangered species. You could buy, here, Japanese teapots, Indian dhurries, Tibetan prayer wheels, baskets from Hong Kong, silverware from Mexico, clothing from everywhere. You could buy a Margaret Thatcher toby jug or a Ronald Reagan mask or a Michael Jackson poster. You could buy a £500 leather jacket or a £2,000 gold necklace or a tropical fish (Golden Gourami – £3, Lemon Tetra – five for £3.50). Matthew bought a Chinese kite for Jane. He considered and rejected a bamboo flute from the Philippines. He browsed in a bookshop and came out with novels by Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino. He heard half a dozen languages spoken, brushed against French schoolchildren, Scandinavian girls with backpacks, American matrons. He went into the map shop in search of the Ordnance Survey sheet for the Sussex Downs (he intended introducing Jane to the pleasures of long-distance walks, before too long) and was sidetracked by an elegant reissue of the Victorian street map of the city. He turned the pages over, seeking out familiar territories. Here was the Isle of Dogs: East India Dock, Canary Wharf, Millwall. And here was Covent Garden: the precinct, Seven Dials, the same grid-pattern, the same names – Shelton Street, Parker Street, Macklin Street.
He made a quick foray down into the precinct, listened for a couple of minutes to violinists playing a Mozart duet in the forecourt,
bought a half pound of Colombian coffee beans. And then was transfixed for a moment by a flower stall – blooming with colour and scent, a luxuriant symposium of tulips, irises, mimosa, gypsophila, lilies, stocks. And, in the front, little posies of violets. ‘I’ll have one of those,’ said Matthew for no reason at all, except that the violets seemed to bear some freight of reference. And walked away down Floral Street with violets in his hand.
She can smell violets. And dung and sewage and the strong pervading stench of unwashed humanity. But these are the nameless components of the element through which she moves, churning fickle stuff which is also smoke and fog and rain – rich, raw, cruel and inescapable. She is less than four feet high, and close to the gutter, which is to her advantage. She can dart for a fallen potato, or a cabbage leaf. She can snuff the buns on a baker’s tray and, once in a while, snatch one up with a quicksilver, heart-thumping movement. She can scour the mud and the garbage for that other miracle of a dropped coin. There is treasure, down here.
Up above there is the driving purpose of the place: the logjam of carts, beasts, men and women. The stacks of cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, rhubarb, oranges, lemons; the fragrant caverns of stocks, wallflowers, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley, mignonette. A catalogue of elsewhere; a chronicle of suggestion.
The child does not know of elsewhere. She could recite the litany of names – language bombards her, she drinks it in without inspection, it is a feature of her element, like the fog or the dirt – but they are sounds, and that is all. They evoke faces and places: the orange-seller who will give her a rotten fruit, that corner of the market where she is struck by gusts of wind laden with the scent of stocks.
She is a pair of eyes and ears, concentrated upon survival. She is also a yawning belly, ice-cold hands and feet, and a crawling skin, but since she has known nothing else she disregards these, in so far as it is possible, just as she disregards the rain, the mud, the noise of wheels and hoofs. She knows that her name is Rose, and she knows the year, and sometimes the month, but she does not know how old she is. She knows only that she has always been here, and supposes that she always will be.
Matthew turned into a stationer’s in Long Acre for a pen. Waiting at the cash desk, he glanced up and saw, looking in at the window, the girl from the sandwich bar. Or was it? For, once he had paid and hurried out into the street, with a curious upsurge of pleasure, still clutching his violets, there was no longer anyone in sight who resembled her. He stood for a moment searching the street. So? A million to one chance, that the city throws two people thus together twice. And what if it had been? But there was again, for a few seconds, that glimpse of sunlight.
Waiting to cross Charing Cross Road, he forgot her. He walked up Romilly Street gazing at the white clock-tower of St Anne’s Soho. The weathervane swung, glinting gold. The former churchyard was screened off by high hoardings, beyond which bulldozers roared. Matthew stopped to peer through the peephole in the woodwork, to find himself eyeball to eyeball with a helmeted construction worker, who opened the gate. ‘Looking for someone?’
‘No. Just curious.’ There was a wasteland of mud, the bulldozers backing and biting. ‘What’s all this going to be?’
‘Paved precinct. Shops and that. We’re taking the bodies out.’
‘Bodies?’
‘Churchyard. Thousands of them.’
‘Where will they go?’
‘They’re to be re-interred in a big cemetery out Wembley direction.’
‘Ah,’ said Matthew. ‘Glad to hear it.’
He headed on into Soho, moving within fifty yards from one landscape to another, crossing one of those invisible frontiers which section the city off into areas, each with its own flavour, its own climate. Festival of Erotica. Eros Books. Pastrami Bar. Double Act Bed show. Cheapo Cheapo Records. Over-18 Cinema. The whole place smelled of food: roasting chicken, frying onions, garlic. Pigeons picked over refuse outside a take-away kebab bar. The classier restaurants displayed menus framed with the reverence due to masterpieces of calligraphy. On a corner stood a derelict in a grimy raincoat, his skin dirt-veiled, blackened trainers on his feet, plastic carrier bag in his hand: See Buy Fly – Amsterdam Airport Shopping Centre.
In Berwick Street market Matthew made further purchases: an avocado and a mango. He hovered in front of a shop selling outrageous toys, and eventually plumped for an imitation dog turd, which would suit Jane’s present scatological turn of mind. Outside the shop a balloon skeleton jounced in the wind, white bulbous limbs with stark black painted ribs, skull, femurs and tibia.
He was by now quite laden. The violets were becoming something of a problem. He shifted them from hand to hand, tucked them in one of his carrier bags, where they got squashed, and then took them out again. He had arrived in Meard Street, and stood in contemplation of the Georgian houses, which clung precariously to life, displaying cracks, subsidence, decay of every kind. He took out a pad and made some notes. He thought about eighteenth-century brick, about steel pinning, about money.
One of the houses was in use as offices. A middle-aged woman came out, riffling through a handful of letters, her face puckered in a frown of harassment and concentration that reminded Matthew suddenly of his mother. He stepped forward and held out the violets: ‘Please may I give you these?’
She stared at the flowers, then at him. ‘Look, what are you after?’
‘I’m not after anything. I’d just like you to have these violets.’
‘You’re some sort of nut, aren’t you?’ said the woman angrily, and walked off.
Well, if you accost women in the middle of Soho, even today, you are liable to be misconstrued. He put the violets back into the carrier bag and set off for the tube station.
When he was eight or nine his father had warned him against strange men. They had been walking past the little cluster of shops on the main road, and his father paused suddenly outside the tobacconist: ‘If a bloke ever offers you sweets and that, Matthew, you just push off sharp, do you understand?’ Matthew, perplexed, had asked why anyone should do such a thing. Random generosity, in his experience, was rare. ‘Because,’ said his father, succinctly. And the matter was closed. When Matthew raised it with cronies at primary school the general feeling was that the sweets might be poisoned; all accepted this as a natural hazard, without questioning why people should wish to poison children. Matthew, conditioned by the black and white vision of his parents, divided the world into good and bad, but badness was a simple matter of theft, telling lies and making an exhibition of yourself. Beyond, admittedly, was a grey area of unspoken and mysterious transgression hinted at by the headlines and photographs in the sort of newspaper banned from the house. Somewhere out there people were sticking knives into naked torsos, defrocked clergymen raped chorus girls. It was all unmentionable and as remote as the lives of that other élite featured in newspapers: the rich. For this was the 1950s. Lady Docker stepped from gold-plated Rolls Royces, aristocratic brides beamed at admiring crowds from the porch of St Margaret’s, Westminster. As Matthew grew up he was to see both these obscure but titillating worlds become tawdry realities. There is vice, he realized, and there is sex, and the two are by no means necessarily linked. There are indeed the rich, who are distinguished from others only by fatter wallets. He learned cynicism, discrimination, and indignation. His parents, to be fair, had always been possessed of all three. They were offended by gratuitous display of any kind, by fecklessness and by obscenity. Their defence had been to ignore, with dignified contempt, those aspects of society of which they disapproved. If you read a decent newspaper the naked torsos and rapist clergymen were no threat; the Lady Dockers of this world would no doubt get their comeuppance if left to their own devices. ‘If you keep your nose clean, young Matthew,’ his father advised ‘you’ll find everything usually works out all right.’
Perfectly respectable counselling, father to son. It does not, of course, take into account the brutal intrusions of public events or the more insidio
us influence of a person’s own inner drives. Matthew, requiring more of life than had his parents, and taking a more pugnacious attitude towards reversals, came up against both. In the Sixties, as an adolescent, he fell briefly prey to the tawdry aspect of a permissive climate and played about with drugs. In the Seventies, he became more worthily involved with the climate of the times and demonstrated against the American involvement in Vietnam. The first episode was unsuspected by his parents. The second irritated and perplexed them. ‘The Yanks’ll go their own sweet way,’ said his father. ‘Them and the Russkies. The best any of us can hope for is to keep out of it. What do you think you’re going to achieve?’ His mother pointed out that he was allying himself with people who had thrown marbles under the hoofs of police horses, which could not be right. Matthew, trying to meet both objections and remain on good terms with his parents, tied himself into knots.
If you spend your entire adult life within the confines – or the freedoms – of a politically stable country in peacetime the demands and challenges of history tend to be eclipsed by those of private life. Matthew’s taste for public affairs was sharp enough, along with his capacity for outrage, but by the time he was thirty work and home life had him by the throat. He parted company, acrimoniously, with the first architectural firm for which he worked, feeling his ideas to be insufficiently appreciated. ‘Are you being bolshie, Matthew?’ enquired his mother suspiciously. ‘You’ve always been a bit that way.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘They are.’ His father, with a sudden and uncharacteristic abandonment of caution, backed him up. So, less surprisingly, did Susan. Matthew landed a better job elsewhere.