by Mavis Cheek
True, his father happened to be passing beneath his window at the time, which was unfortunate. 'You might have killed me,' Patrick yelled at him.
To which Isambard, feeling very shaken but he wasn't going to tell his dad, replied that if it had happened it would have been an act of Extreme Fate because Patrick was so seldom there that the likelihood of hitting hirn in the garden with anything would have been miraculous.
Oh no. Isambard Kingdom Parker had no reason to go up to Coventry for his Nana's funeral. His Nana was dead, so she wouldn't know, and he was too old to play the 'supportive son to the famous dad' role. He'd done that all his life, the clean and brushed son, holding hands with his clean and brushed sister, posing for the cameras for the Sunday supplements and looking up admiringly at whatever it was his youthful, dynamic father had just finished. Squirming with embarrassment and not knowing why.
And then in his teens he did know why. By naming his son after -in his opinion - England's greatest builder of bridges I. K. Brunel, his father thought he had founded a new dynasty. In the press interviews, of which there were many given the drama of his son's name, Patrick said he was sure that little Isambard Parker would follow in his father's footsteps. But he never did anything practical about it. He never invited Isambard to sit with him and draw, he never invited Isambard to come on site with him, he never even showed him the basic draughtsman's skills. The few times he did complete a little drawing of an idea it was either lost long before his father came home, or if he showed it to him he said, 'No - this bit wouldn't work, and that elevation is misdrawn,' or similar. The only thing his father did to include him in his life was to summon him and Polly when the cameras were out. As Isambard grew up he watched his father change from Patrick Parker iconoclastic Whizz Kid, to Patrick Parker International Man of Vision - and now (he watched only from the sidelines) finally into Sir Patrick Parker Distinguished Member of the Design Establishment.
It was around the final stage of The International Man of Vision (when it was announced that Patrick would do something amazing -apparently - for the Louvre) that Isambard gave up. He refused to pose with his mother and father and sister for a press photograph that was later captioned 'Ziggurat Man' and when he went up to university he grew his hair long and he wore ripped jeans and he told his Head of Department that he would not be coming back the following term. When his Head of Department brought up the subject of his being The Man of Vision's son, Isambard flicked his hair, turned his back and walked out. It felt good to go. Like a burden slipping from his shoulders.
His mother alternately wept and went cold-eyed, cajoled and shouted, but his father refused to speak to him. This was not altogether a noticeable punishment since his father seldom spoke to him anyway. When he did resume speaking again it was to say contemptuously, 'No wonder you couldn't stay the course. What do you expect if you choose a bloody geography degree?'
The pity of it was that Isambard really liked geography. But he was not going to tell his father that. 'Cool, Dad,' he said, and walked away.
The telephone finally ceased. Been going all the previous evening and then off and on all morning. He stretched and yawned on the greasy settee. Thank God for that. At the other end of it, Isambard knew, sat his sister Polly. Furious. Furious because she was the one left nursing their mother. Furious because he would not ease everybody's mind and travel up to Coventry to be with his father. And furious just because she always was. Furious. He could scarcely remember a time when Polly wasn't angry as hell.
Anyway, it must all be over up there now. Nan would be buried and his father would be on his own and sorting things out. Good. He was glad his mother had flu. Serve his father right. 'Patrick Parker's Muse dies' made Isambard feel sick. That he could turn even Nan's funeral into a Parkerfest. Her fault though. It was always My Famous Son and what My Famous Son wants comes first...
The continuation of their mother - you children should be quiet, you children should be grateful, you children should be proud. Isambard wondered what his grandfather had been like. He did not remember him at all - not surprising - and if he ever asked about him no one was interested. But Isambard had a model of a signal box, made by his grandfather. It was beautiful and perfect and he found it in the shed with a lot of other old junk. No one else wanted it so Isambard took it home. Polly had a tendency to drama and said that she wanted one, too. She cried and carried on as she always had, ever since she was born. Real little attention grabber. To shut her up his father had said he would make her another - but he never did. He was too busy being Great. Then as now. Isambard prayed to whichever god might do the trick, that his father would not win the competition for this Millenium thing, the Queen's Bridge. It meant so much to him. If he lost it perhaps he would then understand what it was to feel irrelevant. He did not deserve the happiness that he had never given to others. The telephone rang again. Isambard put his hands over his ears. 'Bugger off, Polly,' he said. And turned up the volume on the television.
Polly puts down the phone and turns to her mother.
'I'm not trying Izzy again,' she says. 'And you should stop worrying about Dad. Don't ring him any more either. He's not a baby. He's been round the world on his own, he's built his bloody bridges on his own - surely he can handle Nana's funeral without falling apart.'
'Take my temperature again.' 'It won't have come down since the last time.' 'I could be up there tonight. Otherwise he'll be sleeping in that house all alone.'
Polly shoves the thermometer into her mother's mouth. 'Wouldn't be the first time he's slept up there without us. He never used to let us stay in the house with him anyway so I don't see why you're worrying now.'
'Polly -' she says.
'Don't try to talk or you might bite it - then where would poor Daddy be if Mummy swallowed the mercury?'
All Peggy could do was look at her daughter with a mixture of fear and reproach. Something she had done for the last few years, ever since Polly experienced her Damascene moment of understanding: which was that in the great, turning wheel of the Parkers' life, she was irrelevant. Isambard was not irrelevant, until he decided to make himself so by dangling razor blades from his ears and trashing his room. But Polly was always irrelevant. Even her name was significantly insignificant. At least Isambard was called Something. Even if that was as far as it went. At least Isambard was supposed to have a role. Even if he let them down. When Polly took a doll apart to see what made it work (it had a voice that said 'Wash Me', 'Feed Me', 'Change Me') she was told off for being destructive, she was puzzled. Very quietly she went and put it back together again.
'Good gracious,' was all her mother said when she saw it. 'Good gracious.'
But no one could be bothered to answer Polly's question, which was, 'How do you find out about how things work unless you take them apart?'
Then it happened. One morning she woke to the smells and sounds of her mother's cooking and baking in the kitchen below. It was her birthday. But when she went downstairs she was told to make herself useful as this was the day her father had invited some Important People to lunch. Polly's birthday took second place to that. When she asked where her birthday present was, her mother, flustered and anxious, said that she Just Hadn't Had Time. The whole was compounded the following year when Polly asked to see her birth certificate. Her father had not registered her birth for weeks. When she asked why there was such a delay she was told that her father had been too busy From that day forward Polly decided that she Just Did Not Have Time either. She would look at her mother brushing her father's hair to tidy it before sending him out into the world, or constructing a dish for him to tempt his demanding palate, and she would curl her Up and continue to be Bloody Awful.
Hence her mother's expression of fear and reproach now. Peggy did not quite know what she had done wrong for Polly, but she knew that she had done something. Patrick simply thought his daughter ill-behaved. All he asked of her was that she was respectful and quiet, which was not very much, in his opinion.
'One hundred and two,' she says, with cheerful satisfaction. 'You're not going anywhere.' 'Oh!'
‘I mean it. I want to get back to work, Mum. And if you go on like this you'll have a relapse and then I'll just have to leave you to it and then when Dad gets back he'll have to do the nursing bit... Can you imagine how much he would love that?'
That went home all right, Polly was pleased to see. She'd learned how to manipulate this lot.
Mrs Parker, mother and wife, was suddenly quite stiTl and quite sUent. Given her Coventry origins it did not occur to her that a nurse could be hired. If you were ill you stayed in bed at home and family nursed you. To be nursed by Patrick was a very terrible thought. He would never forgive her. Problem was, Polly was not really much good as a nurse either. She was not, really, much good at anything of a domestic nature, something which quite surprised her mother. No. Polly's life revolved around her flat in Peckham and her horse and her boat. She earned a lot of money in the City, which was nice, and she no longer tried to take things apart to see how they were made or to ask all those eternal questions about how buildings stayed up, which was a blessing. The down side was that if you asked Polly to come over and cook a meal (as they did once when Peggy sprained her wrist falling on the ice) she came over with greasy takeaways. Her joke to her Dad, being 'Take it away - or leave it -' He was not amused.
As she rattled the thermometer back into its glass Polly felt divided on the subject of her mother's illness. On the one hand she wanted her to get better so that she could go back to her enjoyable life - on the other she wanted her to linger on so that her father really suffered. Their father couldn't shit without their mother, was what Polly and Isambard used to say. In the end the darkness won.
'How he must be hating coping up there all alone,' she said to Peggy. 'But you've just got to stay in bed until you are better. And that -' she rubbed her hands '- is that.'
It is after this conversation, when Polly has gone downstairs to watch a bit of television, that Peggy Boxer As Was thinks she will telephone Patrick again. She is a little fuzzy about their previous conversation - he wants his post sent on - she remembers that - there's an important letter he's waiting for - but there seemed to be something else - about Florence. About not liking her? She felt so ill she couldn't quite work it out. Perhaps she was a little short-tempered? It is the influenza. She will apologise.
She dials.
The decision has been made. The envelope containing the letter of congratulations with its Royal Coat of Arms has been delivered. The chosen will not know if they have been chosen until they open that envelope.
The young woman in the scruffy Dickensian loft who has just begun to make a name for herself in the world of serious design and who is more or less unremarkable-looking, having gone through orange hair and piercings, travels back across London in the dusk.
All she wants to do is to reach home, make herself a cup of herbal tea (she still adheres to some of the ways of the old country, Grandmother's recipes), and relax with her shoes off. Everything else can wait. She gives her all when she is working and it takes it out of her. Today she has been interviewing passers-by with her small tape recorder. She is meticulous about discovering what people really want and need. Most of the interviewees she encountered were out and about doing their shopping. She asks them what they think they would like from a bridge. Their answers confirm her own assumptions - but she is careful always to back these up with research. Now she knows she was right. Good. Grandmother's footsteps.
She walks through the door to her apartment, which is also her studio, and which looks out on the river but from the south side, and she bends to pick up the post. She takes it through to the kitchen area and puts it down. Tea first. She slips off her shoes.
4
After the Funeral
The accepted way of looking at bridges at any one time merely represents the most dominant viewpoint, which has overruled other interpretations, and the rules we apply when assessing structures are adjusted to the continually shifting themes of design. Matthew Wells, 30 Bridges
Patrick stood in the bleak hallway. If he had ever thought he could stage-manage the occasion of his mother's funeral, he knew better now. Most of what happened once they were out of the church and in the damp sunshine was a blur of confusion. Most of what happened when they were inside the church was a blur of confusion, too. Faces twitching, eyes looking downwards, shuffling feet on the gravel, no one wanting to look at him except Father Bryan who seemed incapable of not doing so. Now he knew the man really was mad. If he said once back at the house how marvellous, marvellous the occasion was, he said it half a dozen times. And it certainly said something for the power of suggestion because after a while everyone seemed to believe that it had been - marvellous. Beautiful, was what the despondent women from the Mothers' Union called it, Florence's companions in bitter bane. The secular doyens and doyennes of the church who cleaned it and beflowered it and lived their lives by its rotas took it all with ponderous solemnity, as did the librarian who hid the books that she felt should not appear on the shelves. By the time they all left he felt that he had been to Hell and Back, twice.
‘I never want to go through that again,' he said to Audrey as he closed the door on the last of them. And she, quite rightly, pointed out that unless Florence had a second coming it was unlikely. At which they both laughed. Which was highly inappropriate but a blessed relief after all that mournfulness.
'Lilly,' he said. 'How on earth did she hear about it?'
Audrey said she had probably read about it in the paper.
'If that woman can read it would be a miracle’ he said irritably. 'My poor mother.'
Audrey knew that what he meant was, 'Poor me.'
They stood in the depressing hallway, under the dingy light, and he smiled at her. She smiled at him. 'I'm glad you came’ he said. Despite the low-wattage bulb, or maybe because of it, she looked much younger than he might have expected.
‘I don't have to go yet’ she said, when he asked. 'I'll stay'
'Good’ he said, meaning it. 'Now for a serious drink and a chance to talk . . . I'm not going anywhere either.' He opened the kitchen door, she followed him. 'And if I have to accept one more person's condolences ...' He ran his hands through his hair (thinner now, she noticed, but still a good colour) and picked up a bottle. 'A drink and a chance to be alone ...'
And then the telephone rang.
Which obviously amused Audrey highly. 'Oh Sir Patrick! Saved by the bell’ she crowed, and laughed and laughed. 'Or you never know what we might have got up to after all these years.'
He did not feel saved at all. He felt interrupted. Audrey was a completely different person from the one he'd known all those years ago. Sophisticated. Alluring even, despite her years (and he could talk). He liked her. He liked being with her. They went back a long way and he was looking forward to spending some time with her - perhaps closely with her. And having a decent glass of something. And now the bloody telephone.
It was his wife.
'Ah’ he said. 'Peggy.'
Behind him the laughter ceased.
'Who was that?'
'What?'
'Laughing.'
'Well - the funniest thing. Guess who came to the funeral?' 'I'm not much in the mood for guessing games.' As if she did not know. 'Who?' 'Little Audrey' There was a silence.
'Audrey. Audrey Wapshott. Remember her?' ‘I certainly do. What's she doing still there?'
'Oh - we were talking about old times.' 'What about them?'
We used to be quite good friends. From childhood. Our mothers...'
‘I know, I know’ said Peg
gy sharply. ‘I remember.'
'Do you?' he said, surprised. Anything that took place more than a few years ago and that did not directly include his world of design he found hard to retain. Not enough room in the head for small stuff like that. Even Paris, which he would have liked to remember in every detail, and occasionally tried to, had faded.
Peggy said, 'I'm coming up.'
'No need’ he said quickly.
'I thought you wanted me there. I thought you wanted me to bring you your post . . .' This last, she realised, sounded very lame. ‘I thought you didn't know how you were going to cope on your own.'
He was about to say, 'But I'm not on my own’ but even he realised that this would not be sensible.
'Let me speak to Polly’ he said.
"There's no need -'
'Now’ he added, commandingly.