Patrick Parker's Progress

by Mavis Cheek

  What she saw as she looked about her increased her determination. All the British Development Corporations so far set up to help the regeneration of the inner cities had ruined their efforts with poor design - there was talk of competitions - there was talk of a woman being among those chosen to be part of the team in the proposed London Docklands Development - but when it came to it, Apsu doubted the woman would be in the forefront.*

  The room was about ten metres square and quite plain, with a long white chamois sofa next to the low window that looked out over Paris.

  *Author's note: She wasn't.

  There were three straight-backed chairs behind a plain white desk at the far end of the room, and multi-coloured metal stacking chairs around the edges. At the windows there were pale grey blinds. It was all very cool, very Rennie. There was also a water machine that made little bubbling noises. Evidently, since no sounds penetrated beyond this, the room was virtually soundproof. 'Perfect,' she said again. She turned the lamps on low and pulled the blinds down one by one. Patrick took off his jacket and threw it nonchalantly over his shoulder, to show how casual he was. Madame Koi thought he might be sorry for having done that, later.

  Patrick was staring very fixedly at the water machine. State of the art. He knew every inch of it. Somehow it seemed to offer safety. Whatever was happening, and something definitely was happening, it would certainly be a very strange interview. But then, Nexus Tokyo was known to reflect the wilder world of design. Influential though, certainly influential.

  Madame Koi shuffled her way to the sofa and sat down, straight-backed and formal.

  ‘I have a proposal,' she said.

  It did not matter what happened in this room, she decided, nor what he thought, nor what he did. And that was the point. Once she had cared and now she would show herself that she did not. He could spit in her eye and walk away and it would not matter one jot . .. But she knew him well enough. He would not. She chose Nexus Tokyo because it was one of the world's most prestigious international design magazines. And because she knew he would probably float upside-down in a vat of rancid butter to get his blessed Babylonian ziggurats featured.

  'Would you like to come and sit here?' she said. 'Otherwise we shall be shouting at each other. I'd like you closer.'

  He had indeed moved further away from her and nearer to the water machine. It bubbled away at him softly.

  'Proposal?' said Patrick.

  'Yes, Mr Parker, a proposal.'

  'Call me Patrick,' he said.

  "Very good,' she laughed. 'And you must call me Koi-Koi.'

  What Madame Koi - Koi-Koi - suggested as her proposal was quite extraordinary. Patrick found himself focusing really hard on the water dispenser throughout the telling of it. It was like something out of the sixties, an Event, a Happening, the sort of thing they all thought was so cool when they were young and green and nine parts stoned. But he had clocked up half a century now and it didn't seem to go with the dignity of age. On the other hand -

  Isambard himself, of course, would be whizzing in his grave - but Patrick would put up a stout defence of him. You bet he would. For the Koi-Koi woman had suggested that it would be interesting and entertaining (you could say that again) to run a piece deconstructing his hero Brunel. And - for the sheer hell of it - why didn't they have some fun along the way? When she offered a man some fun, she implied, it was seldom refused. Patrick saw the point. He listened to her suggestion in a kind of embarrassed wonder. For Madame Koi proposed that, during the interview, every time she managed to undermine one of Patrick's testimonials to his hero Brunel, Patrick would remove an article of clothing. Every time he managed to counter her sophistry and win the point for Brunel, she would remove an article of clothing. She called it the Brunel Strip.

  'Brunel's reputation is unassailable,' he said.

  'Shoes and socks count as one,' she said laughing. 'Do you agree?'

  He smiled, folded his arms and nodded.

  'Good,' she said. "Then let battle commence.'

  They settled themselves at each end of the sofa and Madame Koi began.

  ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel was invited, as you know, to design a bridge at Balmoral for the newly married Queen. For her and her beloved Albert to drive out of their private grounds in their carriage and pass across on to the public thoroughfare. Yes?'

  Patrick nodded. 'And very fine it is too.'

  Madame Koi coughed with irritation. 'Queen Victoria was a happy young woman in love, both with her country and her husband - and she was very feminine. She wanted something light and pretty and decorative. What he built for her - wagging his patronising finger and saying I Know Best - was a single span, wrought-iron, plate-girdered box.'

  'It was modern. It was a little revolution,' Patrick said, feeling quite comfortable in his clothes.

  'It was slightly cambered - a Utile too cambered for the carriage -and very springy.' She tapped his arm playfully. 'Very springy, Patrick. Too springy for Her Majesty you remember. Every time she travelled across it wobbled so much she thought it was going to fall down. She had palpitations. Mr Brunel would not budge. That is what he designed for her, and that is what she got.'

  'Your point?' asked Patrick comfortably. ‘I hope you are not suggesting that a man should compromise his design principles just because he has the patronage of the Royal House of Hanover and Brunswick?'

  She smiled, pityingly. 'He misjudged his client. Even a whore knows that you can't ignore the client's wishes entirely. And certainly not if the client happens to be the Queen of England. That is not clever - that is arrogance.' She licked her lips and looked him straight in the eye, and pouted. ‘I believe,' she said sweetly, 'that faux pas is worthy of a shoe and a sock at the very least.'

  Patrick was amused enough to oblige her by removing both his shoes and both his socks. After all, he would not be removing much more.

  'Look,' he said comfortably, 'Brunel was a genius. He showed the way when everyone else was taking that desiccated Ruskin's line. He overruled the old-fashioned ideas and produced a little gem of modernity. Geniuses do not fail. They forge. Even with that little bridge he was merely showing the way forward, rather than looking back -' He wriggled his bare toes at her as if to say with them, QED.

  'But surely,' she said, leaning forward and speaking in a strangely husky voice that went to somewhere around the centre of him, 'a man of real genius would know how to compromise?'

  'Our job is to influence, not to stand still.'

  'Sometimes,' she said, 'you get there faster by taking little steps.' 'Hah!' said Patrick.

  She remembered: he always said that when he was lost for a reply. Good.

  He crossed his legs defiantly. His feet looked white and familiar and just a little silly poking out from under his dark blue trousers. She leaned down and ran her fingertips over them. His toes moved involuntarily. 'Sweet,' she said.

  Patrick shivered. 'Little steps?' he said. 'You were saying?'

  'Quite simply, Patrick, your Mr Brunel cut off his nose to spite his face. Because he didn't please the Queen she never used him again. End of Patronage. Very silly, very stubborn man.'

  'Hah!' he said again.

  'Never again was there a Royal Commission. Imagine what that meant in those days of Royal Patronage and Empire and the highest watermark of British Industrialisation. With Prince Albert at the forefront. And Brunel turns his back on it. No further commissions for England's greatest living designer? How could that be?'

  "That could be, my dear girl, because Victoria and Albert were the Hausfrau and her Herr. He saw through them.'

  It was the 'dear girl' that did it. She'd have those trousers off him or die in the attempt. She smiled and shifted a little further down the length of the sofa so that she was more lying back than sitting up. She put one arm behind her head, Maya-style - and an elbow popped out. Patrick, she saw, was now very confused about the sexual nature of elbows.

  'I think this is what happened,' she said. Then she paus
ed and ran her fingers up and down her funny bone, which had an interesting effect on her own erectile tissue and, from the look of him, on Patrick's too. They both - clearly - were Up For It.

  She said, suddenly snappish, making Patrick jump. 'Now. Pay attention.'

  Patrick said, quite crossly, ‘I am.' He was, providing he stopped watching those little sliding fingers.

  ‘I think,' she said, 'the Queen and Prince Albert drove out of the Balmoral Estate on to the bridge. First, she did not like the heavy, masculine look of it, given the light and decorative quality of the Gothic Revival, and, second, when they drove across it - it wobbled. That is recorded in the State papers. So there are two things wrong. First she does not like the look of it, and second she does not feel safe travelling on it. So they go back into the Castle and up to the boudoir and she bursts into tears. She's probably pregnant because she always was. And she asks Albert how he could possibly have misread her desires so ... As for that scruffy, self-opinionated little man, Brunel, We (the royal We) will never use him again. Understood? And Albert, a little shaken at his usually docile wife's reaction, agrees quickly enough. So Isambard Kingdom, and perhaps the nation, loses out just because he will not compromise for a queen - and, of course, a woman. That's him out in the cold.'

  'That is the job of genius,' said Patrick. 'Confrontation. One stands up for one's beliefs and one will not budge. It moves things forward.'

  'It also causes wars’ she said crisply. 'A little compromise now and again is no bad thing.'

  He was not going to let her get away with that. Brunel's honour was at stake. She was now pressing her knee into the side of his knee with - interesting results. But - temporarily - Brunel won.

  'What about the Great Exhibition of 1851?' he said smugly. 'He was at the very heart of the committee that set it up.' Patrick folded his arms and jutted his chin in a gesture reminiscent of his mother.

  Madame Koi - reverting to Audrey Wapshott for a moment - very nearly forgot herself and said so. But Madame Koi swiftly stepped in and disaster was averted. 'That was self-aggrandisement’ she said. 'He designed a most awful brick and domed building which no one liked and when Paxton came along with his creation of glass and metal, the wonderful Crystal Palace, Brunel acknowledged it was better than his idea, that it was more beautiful, but he still tried to get his ugly old thing built. He even put it in writing that he was going to.'

  Patrick's jaw was still bowsprit. She reached out and with the very tip of her finger pushed it back into place. Then she leaned into the cushions behind her and folded her arms and said sternly, 'Remove your tie.'

  'Now wait a minute’ he said. 'I've just proved that Brunel went on to do something major for the Crown after all.'

  'Oh, no, you haven't. That was before the Balmoral Bridge, silly. And it never got built. There was nothing afterwards, nothing at all.' She smiled. 'Tie off, please, and you can remove your belt as well -for arguing.'

  'But-'

  'Careful’ she said in that peculiarly husky voice, 'or I'll have your trousers, too.'

  ‘I think’ he said, enjoying it all despite himself, 'that it's time I took an item or two off you. And what you must understand, my little Koi-Koi’ (his little Koi-Koi went a fetching shade of peony) 'is that Brunel was a ground-breaker. Bridges that he built to last for twenty or thirty years stood for a hundred. He cocked a snook -'

  'Pardon?' she said quickly, leaning forward, pressing his thigh for a moment with her fingertips. 'Cocked?' she pouted.

  No, thought Patrick. No. No. No. I will defend him. 'You just have to hand it to Isambard, and therefore to me, that his bridges were splendid creations and finely built. Now. Off, off, off.'

  'Very well’ she said. 'I will.'

  And without further ado she leaned forward and unhooked the back of her mock obi. Its heavy silk slithered to the floor. Followed, one after the other, by her little dragon shoes. And there were her toes, too, only with perfect crimson nails, and a clear desire to make up to his own, less spectacular set. 'I give you those for free, also’ she said softly.

  Patrick took a deep breath. He tried to calm himself with pictures of Brunel's achievements but it was like being told not to think of hippopotamuses - you couldn't think of anything else. He pictured the Boxford Tunnel. Oh dear God, no, that was long and dark and to be entered. Chepstow Bridge then? But that was all about trusses - King Truss, Queen Truss: Truss, Truss, Truss... The SS Great Eastern? Good God, no - not that - for it was built with screw and paddle-wheel. As for the bridge at Maidenhead with its wide and sensual curving egress - he must not think about it, he must not, he must not, he must not...

  A vague, creeping sense that something very ridiculous was happening inched its way around him, but he was here in his professional capacity, and professional he would be ... For now.

  ‘I see myself in a long line of bridge builders that Isambard set free. We make structures on a par with the Colossus. Grand markers in history which exist because of the very nature of the architecture and engineering that produced the structure. In short Brunel showed that his bridges, in particular, were of themselves. Just as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline said that the paint and the canvas are the reality and not a vehicle for a narrative visual conjuring trick - and just as Gabo sculpted truth to materials and form -'

  Madame Koi seemed to stifle a yawn at this point. 'What made you want to be a builder yourself?' she asked. And closed her eyes.

  He told her all about being born into a firebombed city. How it made a deep impression on him. That it was as if some Muse guided him.

  She yawned again. And wrote a note or two on her pad. As she wrote she said, 'Your mother was a great support, I think.'

  'She was’ said Patrick. He tried very hard not to picture his mother at this moment, for obvious reasons. 'She encouraged me to be myself.' He thought she muttered, 'You can say that again' into her notebook. 'I'm sorry?' he said.

  She ignored the question. 'And your father?'

  'Absolutely not. Just a ticket collector at the railway. Nothing.'

  Audrey, who re-emerged, nearly threw the pad at him. Madame Koi was more polite. 'Sometimes we don't know where we get our influences from until we ask ourselves.'

  'Not my dad,' said Patrick. 'Definitely'

  She yawned again.

  It really was very off-putting. 'You should go to bed earlier,' he said waspishly.

  'I did,' she said. 'That's why I'm tired. It was a - very - active night. And you?'

  Patrick blushed. Patrick had also had a very active night, but not of that variety. Patrick had sat up in his hotel bed with Peggy by his side and she had been wondering - nearly all night it seemed to him -what she should wear the next day and whether Audrey Wapshott would be there. What was left of the night he then spent calming her down after he said, innocently enough, that he hoped she would be there, that he would like to see her again, see what she was getting up to - that he had a very soft spot for her. He only realised Peggy was upset when the bed started shaking.

  Which meant that Peggy arrived here tonight looking windswept and acting like a hunted animal. How odd it all was since Audrey was so very long ago.

  'You cannot deny,' he said, desperately, 'that Brunel brought modernism into industrial design.'

  'You mean, away with the painting of cathedrals so that we may see the shape of the stones

  'Without him there could have been no Aare Bridge at Aarburg, for example -'

  'Ah yes,' said Madame Koi. Her eyes were shining now, and she rubbed her foot hard against his. "The Aare. Maillart and his transverse frames set into the - mmm - haunch - of the arch. So sexy, these terms, are they not?' She leaned forward. 'And if I am not mistaken,' she said in a low and rather wonderful voice, 'that was how he stiffened the platform, was it not?' She put her fingers to her mouth again and sucked the very ends of them delicately. 'I am,' she said, 'very warm. I would like to remove my robe. Have you nothing more to say on his behalf? Shall we talk, for
example, about structure?'

  He took her notebook from her and dropped it on the floor. 'Well, I think women's bodies are wonders,' he said, gallantly. 'Perhaps the finest structures in the world.'

  Oh please, she thought. But she smiled encouragingly. 'Isn't it true to say that bridges reflect your sexuality? All that outward and upward thrust - yes? I mean,' she said, 'in the matter of your bridges. 'You build them Big, Mr Parker. You like them monumental.'

  'Call me Patrick,' he said. He stroked her arm. Goosebumps rose. He went on doing so. 'And you are right. There is so much sky to thrust up to, there is so much water to span, so many banks to abut ... Brunel certainly knew that.'

  She retrieved her notebook and wrote something down. He wanted to know what it was. She laughed and said it was confidential. What she had actually written down was 'Bugger Brunel', which relieved her feelings. She smiled again, this time as if she was seeking his confidence. 'Mr Parker - Patrick - women have not traditionally built bridges. I wonder if you have a theory as to why this might be?'