Authors: Nicci French
'Will it be like this?' I asked. 'Sitting in your kitchen, drinking coffee and chatting?'
'No. As you say, this is just a chat and we're deciding on the rules. When we begin we've got to, as it were, run out on the pitch and start to play. In my view, if this is going to work properly it has to be ritualised, it has to be something outside your normal social life. So, if you want to go ahead, then the next time you come it will be different. It will be in the room that is used for therapy.' He used the word 'therapy' as if it were an unwieldy term that had been foisted on him. 'It won't be a social occasion. We won't be drinking coffee, we won't really be chatting. You'll lie on a couch, not because that is a psychoanalytic prop, but exactly because it shouldn't feel the way we are today, comfortable, getting on, looking face to face. Now, I'd like you to think about what you want to do, and then phone me.'
'I know what I want to do. I want to go ahead. If I'm not happy with what's going on, then I assure you I'll stop.'
Alex smiled and held out his hand.
'I suppose that's as much of a commitment as I'm going to get from you. All right, it's a deal.'
Seven
From signing divorce papers in triplicate at my solicitor's and rejecting the idea of marriage counselling, I cycled on a cold clear day north through London to the site of my hostel, the very thought of which already caused me a pang. The original idea had been for an entirely new building which would house fifteen Section 117s, that is, mentally ill patients discharged from hospital but still requiring some sort of supervision, if only to make sure they took their medication. I'd provided an elegant, functional and cheap design which, to my not very great surprise, had been rejected out of hand. If my career continued like this, I'd soon have designed as many unbuilt buildings as Piranesi, or Hitler. Plan B was to convert a building that had been a squat and had spent the last two years without a roof.
When I arrived, two men and one woman in suits were already standing outside. My friend, Jenny, from Social Services, was looking harassed, as usual. She introduced me to Mr Whittaker from Health and Mr Brady from Housing.
'How much time have you got?' I asked.
'About minus ten minutes,' said Jenny.
'All right, you get the quick tour. Things would be made easier, by the way, if I didn't see new faces every time I had a meeting.'
I took them up to where the roof wasn't and we worked our way down, all the way from the putative trussed rafters to the redeemed basement, sketching out the primary reconstruction, the basic repairs, the fire escape on the rear elevation and the deft adaptations I had made to the common spaces and passageways to give the house what amounted to an extra floor.
'There we are,' I said, as we stood on the front step, 'not only a work of genius and practicality but a work of genius and practicality that will virtually pay for itself.'
Mr Brady smiled uneasily. 'You may have a point there, and I only wish the auditors' calculations took your argument into consideration.'
'Don't worry, Mr Brady,' I said, 'we'll all be rewarded on Judgement Day.'
Mr Brady and Mr Whittaker exchanged glances. There's something disconcerting when planning officers start looking younger and better dressed than you do.
'Jane, it's an ingenious design. We're very pleased. There
is
one problem, which is that we're facing a fifteen per cent cut across the board, which we're having to enforce uniformly on all our projects, so we hope that you'll be able to incorporate that. Apart from that it's absolutely satisfactory.'
'What do you mean, "apart from that"? You've got a bargain basement scheme already. You accepted our tender.'
'Subject to, you know... et cetera et cetera.'
I took on my official tone. 'Mr Whittaker, you will surely confirm that this hostel will be a net saver of money once you stop fifteen people at a time going into bed-and-breakfasts or staying in long-term beds.'
'You know as well as I do, Jane, that that is theoretically true but irrelevant in our accounting terms.'
'Shall I just leave the roof off for the next fiscal year? After all, spring isn't all that far away. On the other hand, why bother with a house at all? Perhaps I could arrange for a skip to be delivered to the road outside. If there's any money left over, you could paint your new council logo on the side and the crazy people could stay in that. You could send their medication by mail. What do
you
say about this, Jenny?'
Jenny looked fraught. I realised I was behaving like one of her clients.
'Jane, this isn't helpful,' said Mr Brady. 'There's no point in trying to score points against us. We're all on the same side. The simple, hard fact is that the choice is not between producing a compromised version of your plan and your original. It's between the compromise and nothing, and even that may be a struggle. You should see what's happening in other departments. Tressell Primary School up the road may only be opening four days a week next term.'
'All right, I'll make the cuts and I'll also make sure that if I have a schizophrenic collapse while doing it, I'm safely out of the borough. So, when shall we four, or duly appointed representatives of we four, meet again?'
'I'll call your secretary, Jane,' said Mr Brady. 'Thank you for being so relatively reasonable.'
I got back on my bike and cycled as fast as I could until I felt the muscles in my thighs burning, mentally shedding little details and finesses of my hostel plan as I went.
My next unwelcome task on this day of unwelcome tasks was to visit my father, who wanted to show me some plans. I wasn't going to see him alone. I'd mentioned the invitation to Paul on the phone and he'd insisted on coming along, ostensibly to see how our father was, but I suspected that it had something to do with his film. At least I'd get a lift. I dropped the bike back at the house and waited for Paul to arrive, which gave me the excuse to smoke two cigarettes. Then we drove down to Stockwell with Paul constantly complaining that this was the very worst time to drive south and that we would have been quicker on the Northern Line and I replied that nothing at all is quicker on the Northern Line which resulted in a silence all the way to Blackfriars Bridge.
My father was born in 1925. He's sixty-nine. He's an old man. I know that intellectually, but don't usually feel it. After all, he was hardly older than I am now when
Sergeant Pepper
came out and that doesn't seem all that long ago to me. I was fifteen. I was almost not a virgin. He's always seemed the same age. But when Dad opened the door to Paul and me, I really did feel that a gap was opening up between us, that he looked frailer, greyer, stiffer around the shoulders, the liver spots on his hands were more shockingly prominent. But as I hugged him and looked more closely at him I saw that he was still handsome. He had more hair than his son, and it covered more of his head as well, and I brushed my hand through it, neatening it with what I hoped seemed like affection.
'Tea for you both?' he asked.
'You go and sit down and I'll make it,' I replied. 'I've brought a jar of lemon curd so if you've got any bread, we can have some of that on toast.'
Dad and Paul went into the living room, a cluttered space full of books and papers between four dark red walls. The kitchen, though, was more like a Quaker's meeting house, with rough plaster, whitewashed walls and uncomfortable wooden benches. A discordant note was introduced by the low-voltage spotlights in the ceiling, which in my experience are principally used for commercial premises and are entirely unsuitable for a kitchen, especially one which is as poorly wired as Dad's. Ever since I can remember, long before Mum died, Dad has been going to look at the wiring but the implications of what he might find have always been too alarming. Instead, he's forever adding to it. Everywhere you look, there is a spaghetti of flex tacked along the wall.
When I carried the tray of tea and toast into the living room, Dad was sitting in his armchair and Paul, perched on a footstool, was leaning conspiratorially towards him. The gloom in which they were plunged was a further product of Dad's lighting strategy dating from the mid-seventies, based on the concept that you don't light rooms, you light 'spaces'. The result was that the flexes were removed from the ceiling rose in every room in the house and horrible chrome lights were fixed in corners. The house was now made up of spaces of light and spaces of darkness and Dad and Paul were now sitting in one of the spaces of darkness. When I got close enough to see, I recognised the determined gleam in Paul's eyes : he was researching. There was even a notebook poking out of his jacket pocket.
'Has Paul mentioned he's going to do a documentary on the family, Dad?' I asked cheerfully, slamming the tray down.
Paul sat up and scowled. 'I was going to, Jane,' he said. 'Give me a chance.'
A trail of yellow worked its way down Dad's chin. 'Why?' he asked. 'What's so interesting about us?'
Paul took a deep breath and laid down his piece of toast. 'That's a very good question,' he said, and Dad looked faintly surprised. 'When I talk about my family - which, of course, is interesting to me - then I am also, for the viewer, in some ways allowing them a new way to think about their own family, their own childhood. Every family is different, and yet every family is similar.'
'Is that a quotation?' I muttered. Paul ignored me.
'When I talk about our family - you and Mum and Jane and me - and when I talk about the Martellos, because, of course, I can't leave them out, what are the things that I'll be addressing?' He wasn't waiting for a reply so I picked up his piece of toast and bit into it hungrily. I'd missed lunch. 'Nostalgia. Closeness and estrangement. Possessiveness and jealousy. The idyll of childhood. The pain of growing up. The hopes that parents have for children. The resentments that children feel about their parents. All these things and more can be explored through one family. I hope that you'll want to help me?'
'Enough of this nonsense,' Dad said. 'Drink your tea, Paul, I want to show Jane something. Come over here.'
He led me over to the desk in the corner. Drawings and large old books were piled high.
'How's your project going?' he asked.
'Which one?'
'I don't mean at the Stead. The hostel.'
'It's becoming a torment.'
'I'm sorry, Jane. Anything I can do to help?'
'Yes, kill everybody in the housing department.'
'It's half the job,' Dad said abstractedly. 'I asked you here with an ulterior motive. I thought you might cast an eye over this.'
'What is it?'
'This is going to be the project of my old age. I'm going to restore the interior of this house.'
'What to?'
'To the basic structural and decorative order of the interior as it was originally conceived in the mid-1880s. You can see I've done some preliminary drawings. The basic fabric is original anyway. The main work will be restoring the partition in this room and on the first floor.'
Paul was standing behind us now, looking over my shoulder. 'You mean you'll be blocking up the bits you knocked through in the sixties,' he said.
I gave Paul a kick but my father continued as if he hadn't heard.
'The cornices and some roses will need to be restored, of course, but fortunately we can take mouldings from those which survive.'
'I'm staggered,' I said. 'But isn't it going to be rather expensive?'
'I'm going to do it myself.'
'You're not.'
'I am. Pat Wheeler has said he'll help out.'
I didn't know what to say, but I didn't need to say anything because my father was talking animatedly. He shuffled through his preliminary drawings and specifications. He talked of sash pulleys, sealers and firebacks, plaster dabs, angle beads and door furniture. Le Corbusier had been born again as William Morris. Paul teasingly asked if he was going to have gas illumination and the central heating removed. My own feelings were mixed, not only because of the impracticality of the plan but because it seemed like a scheme in which my father was systematically removing himself from his own house. At the end of the reconstruction, if he ever reached the end, the interior would have been stripped of every innovation and ideal that my father had lived by. I mumbled something about respect for the past and my father gave a heavily sarcastic laugh.
'We all have different ways with our past. I hope I'm going to restore it and preserve it. Is that better than making a television documentary about it?' He gave a sharp look at Paul, whose face was reddening.
'I'm surprised to see you so starry-eyed about restoration,' Paul replied. 'You always used to write about buildings in their social context. What's the point of recreating a Victorian family house in the 1990s? Are you going to start riding around on a horse as well? My attitude to the past is to re-examine it in terms of today.'
'Natalie,' father said bluntly.
'What?' said Paul.
'You know what,' said father. 'Natalie's been dug out of the ground and you're turning it into a TV documentary, and you'll want us all to talk about how we feel about it, won't you? I suppose you'll want me to talk about your mother's death as well. Who else will contribute? Your two wives? Poor old abandoned Claud?' Now it was my turn to flush with anger and mortification. 'And what about Alan and Martha? Martha won't say much, she's always hugged her griefs close; but Alan - I can just see it - the angry old man looks back on his life and reviews it. He'll be good value all right. Is that what you want, Paul, a family of TV personalities?'
Paul looked shocked, but excited as well. He had caught a whiff of what his programme might be like. He replied in his best programme-proposal mode, 'The programme will be made with the utmost respect and integrity.'
Father turned his back on Paul and began talking about opening and reconstructing a square pargeted brick flue. I wondered whether clay flue linings mightn't be better but he brushed me aside.
'I'm not giving up just because of an old man's need to strike poses. Have you ever heard anything as ridiculous as that half-arsed restoration? Has Dad gone senile?'