The stars are distant in both space and time. Even the closest of the celestial bodies is more than four light-years away from us on planet Earth. When we look at the night sky we gaze at the brilliance of the past. How can feelings die? thinks Matthew. And which of us contracted the disease first, Susan or I? Or did we infect one another? I remember that once I could not wait to get home to her at the end of each day, and then somehow it was no longer thus. Once she wanted only to do what I did, go where I went, and then somehow she was always elsewhere.
The word planet means a wandering star. In ancient times astronomers believed that the planets moved around the sky, unlike constellations such as Orion and Cassiopeia. A marriage is not a relationship, it is a unit. Not she and I, but we. Our combined interest was paramount, not hers or mine. When we disagreed, it was a matter of interest and diagnosis, not of resentment. The names of the constellations are of great antiquity and commemorate mythological beings and events. The constellations are composed of stars, many thousands of times larger and brighter than our own sun. She was the centre of my world, and I of hers. Once, I wanted always to tell things to her first, and then I began to realize that she was not really listening. Betelgeuse, the great star in the constellation Orion, is a red giant and has a diameter which could contain the entire orbit of the Earth around the sun. If, at that point, we had said to each other, something terrible is happening, could we have been saved?
‘Beetle juice,’ whispers Jane. ‘Remember?’
‘I remember,’ says Matthew.
But what I remember is not a narrative sequence, that this happened and then that and then that, leading eventually to this. I remember an expression on her face that was new to me; I saw a stranger look at me out of her eyes. I remember an evening when I did not want to go home to her, when I drove around to put it off. I remember a weekend when she was away and I knew that I was relieved, that I felt as though a load were gone.
Red giants are stars at an advanced stage of evolution, which have swollen up and will eventually collapse. Our own sun, in around five thousand million years time, will become a red giant. White dwarfs are dying stars with very great density. When a massive star collapses it creates the phenomenon known as a black hole.
I know now that the loss of feeling is the worst loss of all. Susan still exists; I see her and speak to her. But she is gone, quite gone, as though she were dead. She died when we ceased to love one another. I have to suppose that her experience is similar, that she sees me, equally, as an absence.
Our own galaxy takes the form of a flattened spiral and measures about a hundred thousand light-years from side to side, with a thickness of some twenty thousand light-years. But it is only one among many countless millions of galaxies, out there in the immensities of space.
All of which, thinks Matthew, should wonderfully concentrate the mind, and place one’s own puny concerns within a proper context. Unfortunately, it does no such thing. Or, perhaps, fortunately. The achievement of thought and sensibility, after all, may be unique to this planet. Planet Earth, I should say. This fellow could mention that small point.
The great Andromeda galaxy is more than two million light-years away from us and is the most distant object in the heavens visible to the naked eye.
‘Do you think Andromeda is a nice name?’ whispers Jane.
‘Quite,’ Matthew whispers back. ‘A touch pretentious for everyday use, perhaps.’
In front of them, a head turns to scowl censoriously. The display of light and sound has now gone into an elaborate convulsion intended to suggest the death throes of a star. Our own sun, the commentator observes, will in its turn meet just such a fate. And in the meantime our galaxy, along with the countless million others, hurtles for ever onward and outward into the darkness of the expanding universe.
The lights come on. The audience gathers up its plastic bags and its cans of Coke and straggles forth once more. ‘I liked that,’ says Jane. ‘I liked the bit when the star got born and then died. Which bit did you like best?’ Matthew agrees that that was indeed impressive and they go down the stairs discussing what they have seen.
And so, presently, they find themselves in a Wimpy Bar where Jane falls silent over the ice-cream list, always a demanding matter. Matthew watches her: the scowl of concentration, the lips faintly moving as she works through the text. She is wearing a blue hair-clip today, and her fair hair is more than usually dishevelled. Matthew, looking at her, sees her face as a spectrum of references. Her lowered eyelids have a hint of Susan, there is something in the relation of nose to upper lip that recalls his mother, in her jawline there is an eerie echo of himself. There she is, a unique being, displaying in each feature, each tendency, her connection with various others. She is indeed unique – a fusion of characteristics and capacities that can never be recreated. If I die tomorrow, thinks Matthew, I shall continue to walk the earth a little longer, there.
‘Don’t look at me,’ says Jane, squirming. ‘It’s rude to stare at people, anyway. Can I have a vanilla with chocolate hazelnut sauce?’
There had never been a particular moment when he had thought, I want a child. When he and Susan were first married they felt themselves to be too hard up and inadequately housed to consider a baby. Susan was exhilarated by her work as a researcher for a television current affairs programme. Their life was complete as it was: rich and promising. They became more prosperous, and moved from a flat to a house. And somehow, without the matter ever having been discussed, they shifted to a position where a pregnancy would not be disastrous. Susan talked of working part-time. One day she mentioned that she was no longer taking the pill and Matthew, to his surprise, felt a curious uplift, a surge of something that could only be described as excitement. And when she announced that she had missed a period he knew that what he was experiencing was an outburst of triumphant joy such as he had never known.
He saw the birth. He saw Jane emerge from between Susan’s thighs, a blotched and bloodstained bundle that made him gasp in shock, relief and something else that he could not identify until, later, he held her in his arms. And then he knew that there is a conspiracy. Half the world is walking around in possession of an insight of which the rest have but an inkling. He had thought himself an expert on love, and saw now that he was only a beginner. He held this little creature – at once infinitely strange and intensely familiar – and glimpsed the rest of his life, and hers. He saw that nothing would ever be the same again, for better and for worse.
‘Can we go soon?’ says Jane. ‘I’ve finished. Why haven’t you drunk your coffee? Are you cross about something?’
The years of her infancy were the best of all. They were good parents, they realized. Susan was a calm mother, unruffled by the small crises of babyhood, patient and interested. They shared the chores, relished this mutual concentration of concern. It did not begin then. The corruption of their marriage did not spring from the child. Later, when they knew that there was no more to be done, they held on for her, and her alone.
‘Please let’s go.’
They leave the Wimpy Bar, and set forth for what is now called home. Jane discusses alternate means of transport and rejects the tube, of which she is not fond. A child of the city, street-wise in every sense, she is an expert on buses. We can take a 30, she tells Matthew, and then change. Matthew acquiesces. She shoots a look at him – a look tinged with anxiety. She is a child acutely tuned to adult moods; she has had to be. She slides her hand into his. ‘Love you,’ she says, offhand, her face averted. After a moment she adds, ‘I love Mum, too.’
‘Of course you do,’ says Matthew.
And so they ride through the city, father and child, seeing, each, a different place. Jane, with the liberation of childhood, without rationality or expectations, sees an anarchic landscape in which anything is possible and many things are provocative. She wrestles with language, scans advertisements, shop-signs, logos on vans and trucks. She pays professional attention to other children, in the way
that animals are most sensitive to their own species. She searches out the things that tether her to a known world – a bus with a familiar destination, a hoarding that proclaims her favourite brand of chocolate, Volkswagen cars that are like her father’s. Hers is a heliocentric universe, and she is the sun. She is fettered by a child’s careless egotism, but freed from adult preconceptions. She does not know what to expect, and can therefore assess what she sees in its own terms. She does not interpret, and therefore can construct her own system of references. The Arabic script on the windows of the Bank of Kuwait becomes little dancing figures. The caryatids outside the church in Euston Road are ladies wearing bath towels with books on their heads. For her, the city is alternately mysterious and familiar, baffling and instructive. She tests her own capacities against the view from the window of the bus; she rhymes and puns, she counts, she classifies. She plays games with words and sounds, she flexes her imagination, she takes the place as she sees it and twists it to her own ends.
Matthew, wiser but inflexible, sees much more and much less. The caryatids, for him, carry a freight not of books but of classicism and all that it implies; he sees so much that the figures themselves are almost obscured. The Bank of Kuwait provokes complex and flying thoughts that run from oil-happy potentates to the date of the Koran. Sometimes he sees nothing at all; the place flows past his eyes as a meaningless panorama while he is intent upon the random sequences within his own head. And then something seizes his attention and he is jolted from the prison of his own concerns and becomes once more – for a second, for minutes on end – responsive and reflective; he joins up with the city and becomes a part of its streaming allusive purpose. He puts a date to a building and sees from what it derives, and how; he looks at faces and sees beyond them to cultures and to histories. The city feeds his mind, but in so doing he is manipulated by it, its sights and sounds condition his responses, he is its product and its creature. Neither can do without the other.
Seven
Great architectural concepts are often inspired by sheer utility. London’s trademark is undoubtedly the terrace house. Not as executed by Nash but in its humbler manifestations from Clapham to Islington. There can be few more sensible and elegant solutions to the problem of how to concentrate a lot of people into a small area. Matthew, in his daily peregrinations of the city, had become a connoisseur of its various forms, from cheap and basic to lavishly ornate. He had lived for many years in an example of what he thought of as the north London Romanesque size two model, and had been responsible for the renovation of several terraces of the more grandiose estates, such as his current area of responsibility at Cobham Square. He was intimate with the terrace house; he knew the secrets of its construction and of its evolution, but at the same time he retained his pleasure in its effect. The calm perspectives of the terrace, he saw, provide the essentially domestic mood of this city. Whether utilitarian in stock brick or lordly in shining white stucco, it supplies that image of order, of sobriety and of grace which is the essential feature of the London landscape. Here is an efficient machine for living which is also a creative element in the design of a city.
No single architectural genius, of course, can be accredited with the terrace house. Most of them must have been run up by practitioners of varying efficiency who knew a good idea when they saw one. Which is how most architects work. Matthew had abandoned fairly early on in his career the notion of becoming an innovative and controversial star of the profession. It was not that he felt he lacked either the talent or the nerve, but that he knew himself to be short on entrepreneurial gusto and the requisite gift for public relations. In a sense, he couldn’t be bothered. This last was patently a deficiency. There is nothing especially honourable about being satisfied with a career as an also ran. It would indeed have been rewarding to know yourself responsible for some seminal instance of contemporary building – some frequently cited university or theatre. Nor would Matthew have been daunted by public obloquy; he rather enjoyed a fight. It was more that the neutrality and anonymity of work within a practice bestowed its own freedom and flexibility. You could be a jack-of-all-trades; you turned your hand to anything and everything. You were out there on the front line.
Contemplating the front line these days, though, driving through Docklands and down at Blackwall, he faced disillusion. The tower block may well have been inspired by utility, but few would claim it as a great architectural concept, at least as expressed in these parts. Manhattan is one thing. The Isle of Dogs looked set to be something else altogether. With rapidly diminishing enthusiasm he watched the turquoise walls of Frobisher House climb up into the summer skies. He still thought the design as satisfactory as could have been achieved within the terms of the commission. He found some of its companion developments agreeable and a few positively appealing. Others were boring or downright disastrous, but even so his quarrel was not with individual buildings. What had gone wrong was both simpler and more cataclysmic. A city is an organic growth and here the profoundly arrogant assumption was being made that you can bulldoze the past, replace it with new constructions and expect the result to be anything other than the semblance of a place.
It was in such a mood that he left Blackwall one day at the end of a site conference. There was a stack of work awaiting him back at the office, he knew, but on a sudden whim he decided to stop off at Spitalfields first. The place had been much in his mind since the encounter with Rutter; it was time he took a look at whatever was going on down there these days. The excuse, if one were needed, could be to pay a call on a colleague, Graham Selway, who lived in and worked from one of those painstakingly restored Georgian houses in the streets around Spitalfields Market.
And so Matthew moves from the sturm und drang of Docklands to the haphazard solidities of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Here is a complex, coded landscape, reassuring in its sense of determined occupancy, an area which has ridden out three centuries of market volatility, an industrial oasis which has cut its cloth – quite literally – to suit the times. Which has mopped up wave upon wave of immigration, from Huguenots to Jews to the Bengalis of today. Which has moved from silk-weaving to cotton and calico and eventually to the viscose, nets and cords offered now on the shop-front of a wholesale textile importer. Skin Centre; Sadik Fashion; Sani and Salim – Bulk Distribution and Sales Offices for Home and Export Markets. A window full of saris displayed on doe-eyed model figures. Another one brilliant with racks of children’s party dresses of satin and lace in peach, lime green and fuchsia pink, with accompanying miniature lace parasols and gloves. A pervasive smell of curry – Bengal Cuisine, Imran Restaurant, Halal Meat Groceries and Provisions. This is a world in which business and domestic life are carried on still cheek by jowl; people live here as they would have lived in the eighteenth century – or, of course, as they would live in Dacca or in Calcutta. People move about purposefully – the men with their white skull caps, neat fringes of beard, white cotton tunics, the women in saris, the quick dark children.
But it is also, Matthew sees, a makeshift place, a poor place, a place clinging on by a toenail – the streets cobbled together with corrugated iron and plywood, bristling with For Sale signs. He pauses to watch a lorry being raucously unloaded in a confusion of English and Bengali. The warehouse beside which it is parked has a façade which has been perfunctorily renovated so that the windows are now picked out in oriental style; behind the keyhole shape lies the Romanesque outline of the nineteenth century, and at one end an exposed inner wall shows a column of Victorian fireplaces. Buddleia springs from decaying roof tops; in the hinterlands behind buildings untidy yards can be glimpsed full of broken crates, trolleys and rusting machinery. In some streets a row of weavers’ houses, painstakingly revived, face dereliction opposite – embattled sites where a reconstructed past and an inexorable future are fighting it out amid the estate agents’ signs and the concrete mixers. And as Matthew looks down the shaft of a street or alley it seems to him that always two dominant outlines mee
t the eye: the white spire of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church and the gleaming blue glass of a new office block with the long arm of a crane stark against it.
He turns from Brick Lane into Fournier Street, and there on the corner is the Huguenot church, the most potent symbol of the versatility of this place. Once Protestant, then a synagogue, and now, of course, a mosque: London Jamme Masjid. And above the sign is a sundial, topped with a little arched pediment framing the date 1743. The sundial’s arm is surrounded by Roman numerals; Libra Sumus, says the lettering above. The sun is out; a shaft of shadow points to the numerals. Matthew consults his digital watch, and yes indeed, there is agreement between time then and time now, with an effort of adjustment for the anachronism of British Summer Time.
Matthew ponders the façade of the mosque for quite a while, until forced onto the narrow pavement by an imperious lorry. He walks on. Here, in these streets beneath Hawksmoor’s spire, the houses are poised on the brink of extinction or transition. Occasionally a sari-framed face glances out from an upper window; a chalked sign outside a door says ‘Part-time cutter wanted’; a sewing-machine whirrs. But all along the pavements the skips are lined up like small craft hitched to a harbour wall, piled high with splintered wood and chunks of plaster. Some buildings are boarded up, others are already stripped to airy skeletons, corseted in scaffolding, throbbing with Radio One. A thin tenacious frame of brick will soon be all that is left to hitch this place to its origins – a stubborn and eloquent outline.
Crossing Commercial Street, picking his way through the squashed tomatoes and decaying fruit spewed out by the market, Matthew heads for the heartlands of restored Georgian Spitalfields, where frontages are dressed with canaries in cages and, allegedly, the more fastidious residents scorn electricity and live by candlelight. Lorries, vans and fork-lift trucks clatter through the narrow streets in which, here and there, the cobbles have been uncovered. This is the front-line all right; here the warring factions of unbridled progress and entrenched nostalgia face each other across the barricades. There is hardly anyone about; the canaries sing piercingly; drills blast from behind shrouding that apologizes for the inconvenience caused during refurbishment. It is as though people have gone away and left the place to itself, for the opposing forces to get on with hostilities on their own. It is, as it stands, a shrine to opinion and to conflict.