The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  I sat for what seemed ages, letting myself be part of the gentle hiss of the urban sanctuary of parkland. After munching and swallowing had ceased, and once again I had become aware of my breathing and of gravity, I felt ready to make my way to Victoria Station to meet Mum. I had shared the entire café during that time with only four other people. It was the height of season and I wondered what would happen to the leftover pickles, walnuts, bacon, beef, brie, and beetroot at the end of the day.

  When I reached the edge of the park I started straight down Grosvenor Place, but as I was early I decided to backtrack and walked down Chester Street, along Wilton Mews, Wilton Street, to Upper Belgrave Street where I found myself lingering, looking across Eaton Square and wondering… It struck me that the colonnaded buildings in the square were bigger grander versions of what Lloyd Lewis’s terrace had meant to be before its developer had run out of money – or succumbed to cholera. Except that the Eaton Square ones had been smeared with white stucco, like icing on an architectural cake designed to hide the imperfections beneath. The Georgians had been inveterate building bodgers. Of course, Lauren might not live there. She might have a garret, or even a basement which perhaps smelt of the Embankment.

  I was glad I’d got to Victoria Coach Station early because Mum’s coach was already sweeping in across the petrol-infused tarmac of the station floor. After Green Park, the air was unbreathable, and the reverberation of concrete and glass almost unbearable. The door of the coach opened and I could see Mum standing in the aisle shuffling slowly along; she hadn’t seen me. She looked so small, and when she eventually appeared on the steps I noticed she’d bought herself a new dress. A dusty pink it made her look older than her sixty-seven years.

  With her feet once again on tarmac she was full of the journey, knew all about the younger woman she’d been sitting next to, and appeared to have made friends for life.

  ‘I like your new coat.’ She’d bought a lightweight coat which she immediately donned as if to demonstrate its capabilities. It was azure – its finish even looked like the texture of the powder crushed from natural stone, and unlike the dress, it suited her.

  ‘… Debenhams!’ she whispered, as if it were a cut above… ‘… Soft touch – feel!’

  I took her luggage from the bus driver.

  ‘We’ll get a cab.’

  Mum would never call them by that name. She always said ‘taxi’ with the emphasis on the first three letters as if it represented a tithe she was being forced to pay to some powerful landowner. As she said it her breathing became short – partly the onset of heart disease, but also fear of the cost.

  Once inside the cab she sat bolt upright, her eye never leaving the price meter, as if she were subjecting the meter needle to her will in order to prevent it from rising. She’d done the trip once before so knew where she was going – sort of.

  Dad had died five years ago, so she’d been through the merry widow stage and had now begun to feel vulnerable – as to what the rest of it all, life, was going to be like. Unsurprisingly, travelling was the problem for her, and no wonder when it consisted of a five-minute taxi drive from her house to the coach pick-up, a four-and-a-half-hour coach ride, followed by an hour’s taxi ride to my flat.

  The cab chugged its way along Chelsea Embankment, north to Earl’s Court, and west down Cromwell Road heading for Hammersmith, and beyond that W4. During the journey Mum hadn’t a clue where we were, but she had an eye, and she also had a sixth sense of place.

  ‘Isn’t that where we got stuck in traffic last time? …Was that where we got held up by that Gay Pride march?’ Sometimes she’d get it wrong… ‘Aren’t we near Flanagans?’

  ‘No Mum, that was Baker Street,’ …but more often than not she would get it right.

  She held a firm belief that life in the Provinces was far more fast-moving and livelier than in London where – for the duration of her stay – seventy per cent of her time seemed to be spent sitting in the back of a taxi while she worried about the fare.

  My experience chimed with that of my mother, but in a different way and for a different reason. If there were people in London who held liberated views on life then there were far more who were the most myopic people I’d ever met. London – I’d decided – possessed the most cliquey, most set-in-their-ways, and the most socially and professionally parochial minds possible.

  ‘Fancy a nice electrical contract in NW3?’ I’d offered a Battersea born and based contractor.

  ‘Nah mate, fouzand pahnds just for driving over the river we want!’

  But attitudes were changing. There was a multicultural society emerging, which was industrious. People from the Asian subcontinents, the Middle East, and very often it was the Poles – not the sons and daughters of the wartime émigrés, it was folk from the Polish People’s Republic who Lauren had drawn my attention to. People who were coming over to better themselves, would work at anything, would travel anywhere. Were open all hours, open to new thinking… and of course open to exploitation, but that was another story.

  When we arrived at the flat I made a cuppa to be going on with, and cooked chicken livers with onions. This was the kind of food my mother felt at home with, and it was the kind of food I felt at home preparing. She insisted on peeling potatoes, chopping the carrots and slicing the green beans. Afterwards she didn’t want to watch television. ‘Why, when I have this beautiful view to look at?’

  I’d bought the flat two years previously, my first purchase. Two bedrooms, it was long and thin – like a one-sided railway carriage – and south-facing. There were parquet floors, a tiny ‘U’-shaped kitchen, and a bathroom with white chunky-angled fittings and yellow and black tiles. I loved it.

  It was on the third floor of a large four-storey – what estate agents called a ‘mansion block’. Invariably I would leave my kitchen window open – probably not the most secure routine but, as there was a vertical gas pipe, it had saved me when I’d been locked out on at least one occasion. There were six hundred flats arranged in a triangle around a green space containing cherry trees. I’d discovered that they’d been built in 1938 and had been constructed with underground air raid shelters. You could see the concrete entrances in the sides of the earth redoubts, and I supposed that they’d blocked them up after the war.

  It was a forgotten world which no longer seemed to belong in the 1980s. For a start, its location was odd, isolated from surrounding roads by two railway lines and the Great West Road which seemed to imprison it in a kind of W4 Bermuda triangle. The nearest shops were ten minutes’ walk, which didn’t matter to Mum so long as she knew where, and as long as there was a café where she could find people to talk to, she would be happy for the few days she would be staying.

  Mum stared at the sun setting over the cherry trees, unpacked some of her things, stared at the cherry trees now ghosted against the dusk, unpacked the rest of her things, stared out into shadow upon shadow, and finally retired to bed. I’d told her that she might hear my voice on the telephone. ‘Oh, that’ll be nice,’ she replied, perhaps assuming that at last I had acquired a girlfriend. She didn’t know about Denise, and I wasn’t prepared to tell.

  Though Mum was in awe of London, she would sleep soundly in the knowledge that she was with her only son who was making his way in the world, and who had done far better than taking the job at Swifts. Living with her in the one-ended terrace until he got married and living in the Barrett house that she had always hoped he would inhabit. She’d been right about art college, and Dad had been wrong.

  I took my notebook out of my attaché case, stared at the telephone number. It didn’t ring the faintest of bells, but I could see by the prefix it wasn’t the same location as the Lloyd Lewis house. I picked up the ivory-coloured plastic receiver, dialled and heard it ring out. I tensed. After five rings I felt myself relax, nobody was going to answer. On the sixth ring, there was a click.

  ‘Hullow?’
The voice was male, its speech rounded, its resonance breathless.

  I’d been so keen to try the damn thing I’d forgotten to anticipate what might happen next. I hadn’t planned anything.

  ‘Patrick?’

  I waited a second too long before reacting and whoever it was put the phone down. What a fool! I quickly worked out a patter, rehearsed, and dialled again… Again, the click, but this time all I heard was what might have been the drag on a cigarette, and its long exhaling… or was it merely the faint fizz of the space which is the telephone line between caller and recipient?

  Seventeen

  It was 11.30am and I was sitting on the tube gazing through the open doors of the stationary train – at a poster advertising a forthcoming film The Company of Wolves – as the train paused at Knightsbridge. I’d changed from the District Line at Hammersmith and my plan was to get off at Green Park, walk down St James’s Street, and along Pall Mall where I was to meet Patrick at 12.15, at his club.

  The day was going to be an interesting one; lunch with Patrick, he then had a further meeting at his club while I would return to the office and work on GI Group until 6.00pm when Mum would arrive at Lloyd Lewis Associates. The intention was that I would show her round, we would have a modest bite to eat at the local Pizza Express and then return – via taxi – to W4.

  ‘Pulse!’ Patrick had raised his finger as if he were about to tell me the facts of life. ‘… Now you will be bringing your gal-lant mama to see me upstairs for a glass of wine.’

  It was an order, and I knew that Mum wouldn’t be missing it for the world. I tried to insist that she take a taxi from W4 to the Lloyd Lewis house but she was adamant that she would go on the bus. The mere notion of spending an hour occupying the same space as someone else, and being prevented from a continual flow of chatter by a glazed screen was not acceptable to Mum… And of course, there was the cost. With her pensioner’s bus pass the entire journey would be free. The fact that it would mean three different buses and take at least two hours was immaterial. There would be friendships to be forged on the lower deck; it would be like a round-London sightseeing tour without all the twaddle.

  As I sat on the tube I reran in my mind last night’s telephone fiasco. I’d tried directory enquiries and of course they’d refused to give me the address without a name. They had however told me it was a Dalston prefix. I had a mental picture of the assortment of dingy properties over shops on the Kingsland Road and imagined a hardened killer in one of them, screwing and unscrewing the telescopic sights on his rifle… Or perhaps an oily brake-tampering mechanic lurking – even a smooth ex-public-school Armani-wearing assassin, listening to Beethoven on his state-of-the-art Duo Omega G2 loudspeakers. There were smart-ish properties in Dalston, here and there.

  I knew where Patrick’s club was because I’d walked past it many a time long before I’d even known him. I’d never been in because I’d never known anyone who was even remotely likely to possess such a membership. Patrick had given me instructions of how to get there, what to do, and in such purposeful and painstaking detail as to resemble a father explaining to his four-year-old the difference between nursery school and junior school.

  I’d also never been in there because, although I admired the symmetry and proportion of that kind of architecture, to me it exuded exclusivity, formed a barrier of remoteness, and signalled a social divide. It was like the difference between the architecture of the ‘closed’ Scala Theatre Milan, and that of the ‘open’ Royal Festival Hall of London.

  I was wearing a dark suit, dark tie, and as I mounted the steps leading up to the oak-panelled front door I felt reasonably confident that I would fit in. The porter, a man dressed just like me, seemed curious that I didn’t have a mackintosh even though the sky outside was cloudless. I was asked to sign in by a registrar, also dark-suited, and scrutinizing me as if I were in the act of using a false name. There was a category – ‘to see…’ The seated registrar could read upside down.

  ‘Mr Lloyd Lewis will be with you shortly.’ His voice had the timbre of utmost misery.

  I tried not to, but I realized I was pacing up and down on the black and white chequered marble floor, as if I was a pawn being alternately placed and withdrawn by a hesitant chess player. I had to admit to myself that not only was I nervous, I was bursting with preconceptions and prejudice. The two men who had just ‘processed’ me were – to my mind – examples of humanity repressed by the Establishment, and forbidden to show even an atomic nudge of self-expression… Though ha, ha! I wasn’t about to let myself fall into that cliché of a class argument, I was about to smash a myth and to smash a myth you first needed to follow one – i.e. that Establishment meant stuffy, repressive, and exclusive, while Alternative meant liberated, expressive, and inclusive.

  The reception staff of Indie and avant-garde clubs and record companies I’d met and worked alongside had exhibited just as many signs of repression, were just as full of prejudice, pointless rules, and snobbishness. There was no real difference between the girls at Brazzers, the staff of Rap 52, or Dickson’s Railway Arch club, and these men. All had their petty resentments and looked at the people they served as if they hated their guts. ‘… Duty and loyalty’ to their employers? I don’t think so. They behaved as if they were medieval serfs who had convinced themselves that they were irreconcilably tied to the land. ‘There’s been a social revolution you know!’ That’s what I’d wanted to say to them all, calmly, and with my face close to theirs, but of course never had done.

  Patrick appeared, soundlessly at the foot of the stairs, his mouth in a daffodil-shaped trumpet as if he’d just been told the funniest joke of the year and he couldn’t wait to pass it on. His face was looking particularly pink and smooth as if since our last encounter it had undergone one of its dermal renewals. He was wearing his usual navy blazer, grey worsteds, and horizontally striped tie, and looked as if he’d been here all his life, whereas I – suddenly feeling overdressed in my suit – felt decidedly conspicuous.

  ‘I’ll take you on a little tour; then we’ll have a pre-lunch drink.’ He said it as if his aim was to lure me into investing in, or buying something. He was evidently confident that he was about to give me an experience I had never had before, and in a way, he was right.

  I was glad to get out of the entrance lobby and away from the misery of porter and registrar. As I followed Patrick across shoe-clicking marble onto noiseless carpet I could smell a concoction of wood, silver polish, and well-worn soft furnishings with no more than a drizzle of Jeyes Fluid.

  He was a few feet ahead of me, and as we passed from dark low lobbies into a towering space which was blindingly lit from above by a huge glazed roof he broke into a rhythmic skip which ended with a stamping-like dance on the marble floor. He resembled a little girl pretending to ride a horse.

  It was undoubtedly an impressive space; colonnaded, and more than double-height with its glass roof bulging skywards as if it might burst and shatter at any moment. It reminded me of pictures of the courtyards in northern Italian palazzos I’d seen in books, only this one was roofed over. It was a temple but minus its nude muscular heroes. Other than the odd distant tap of shoe on stone, and even more distant bump of closing doors, it was devoid of sound.

  ‘We’ll come back here and have our little drinks upstairs.’ Everything seemed to be ‘little’ now; little drinks, little dance, little girl, ‘a wee bitty’. He waved his hand indicating chairs and table partly visible through the curvaceous stone balustrade above. Everything seemed to have a slight yellow tinge to it; the paintwork on the plaster walls, the marble columns, the lighting – I couldn’t tell which, or all, or whether it was just me beginning to feel slightly queasy.

  It might have been no more than my frame of mind, but so far nobody seemed to have made the slightest effort to put me at my ease. It would have been easy to suggest that Patrick was merely enjoying showing off, but I had the distinct sens
e that something more complex was taking place.

  He was establishing rules, setting up barriers, defining the space between the two of us. But even if there was space between us I had a curious feeling that I was not safe. As long as I remained within the range of his magnetic force he seemed to be willing me along; onto soft deep-carpeted floors, and through rooms of various sizes and proportions. We appeared to be travelling in a large circle – presumably around the central glazed atrium. One space we entered seemed to stretch the entire width of the building. There were armchairs and low tables, some in alcoves and placed in groups, but the majority appeared to be in pairs. The chairs had high backs and unusually deep ‘ears’ so that the heads of anybody sitting in them could not be seen unless they leaned forward. Several chairs were occupied and I could see pairs of grey or blue worsted-clad legs.

  ‘You’ll be catching sight of one or two people who may seem familiar.’ Patrick assured me, nodding, coughing, and fixing me with his black pupils as if he were indulging in some clandestine language.

  It was true; as we passed the seated pairs I had fleeting glimpses of faces from the world of politics, and I had the feeling that though many intense conversations may have been in progress, the voices I could actually hear were no more than a hushed murmur. Still labouring under the force of my prejudices I sensed an atmosphere of dishonourable decay, this was a place where people gathered to eat meals which would be almost certainly of little merit while discussing people they largely already knew. It was as if the whole room were held in perpetual conspiracy by citizens of the super subtle.

  I followed Patrick back to the main lobby and up two flights of stairs, through the atrium and onward. He opened yet another oversized polished and panelled door.

  ‘This is the library.’ He said it as if it were the only one in existence in the world. ‘There are seventy-five thousand books.’ Like the atrium it was deserted and to my surprise, full of well-worn architectural and interior design clichés. Who had copied who I wondered? Sometimes even the real thing could look bogus. We moved on to the dining room to which we would no doubt be shortly returning, and I was surprised to see those gold dining chairs – the ones you see everywhere that you can hire for events ranging from Bar Mitzvahs to Afghan weddings; I would have expected something more authentic on Pall Mall.