by David Brooks
American friends he made on board persuaded him to stay several weeks in San Francisco, so as not to have to travel eastward through the coldest and bleakest part of the northern year. He visited San Luis Obispo, Carmel, Monterey, and stayed on. It was almost spring – the northern spring of 1924 – when he set out for Chicago, crossing the country at a leisurely pace by Pullman, amazed first by mountains such as he’d never seen in Australia, then by desert and, beyond it, such an abundance of crops and fields and wood and water as made him think the United States must be the richest and luckiest land on earth. The need for money kept him several months in Chicago, in a part-time job in the engineering firm of his father’s friend George Beeman, also a friend and mentor to some of the most interesting architects in the country. But the summertime charms of the windy city faded as the autumn progressed. Jasper Wright, the one real friend he had made there, left for Barcelona to visit Antoni Gaudi, about whom he could not stop talking, and Beeman himself left for Savannah. Daniel, thinking it better to make for London before a second winter set in, set out by train for Cleveland and Buffalo, thence to snake down through the stately mock-classical towns of New York. In Ithaca he shared, out of a sudden loneliness, a brief, pointless and furtive infatuation with the beautiful, soon-to-be-married daughter of a professor of engineering at Cornell. In Utica, a week later, in a room of the Grand Hotel, he woke from a long and deep sleep to find the semi-darkness of just before dawn strangely belying the late hour on the clock-face, and looking out, cued by a preternatural rushing sound in the sky, found that a huge flock of birds had fully blocked out the sun.
Only twelve months later, at a luncheon in London, a barrister he had just met was to recall that it had been in Utica or thereabouts that John James Audubon, the great American ornithologist, had seen in the 1820s, one of the last great migrations of passenger pigeons that had apparently darkened the sky for hours. But the passenger pigeons were all gone, he would say, or very nearly gone, wiped out by hunters: he doubted there were enough left to block out a streetlamp. And by then, anyway, Daniel had seen the great avenues and teeming commerce of New York City, had crossed the Atlantic in early winter, had seen an iceberg as big as North Head, a field of sea lions so large he could not see the edge of it, and met a young woman who – this would have pleased his father – had quite wiped Hazel Parish from his mind.
Isobel Hartley was capricious, wild, spoiled, brittle, experimental. She had picked him up in a fit of petulance, probably unaware, until it was too late, of quite what she was doing. In a way, as will sometimes happen when one is backing away, she had stepped over an edge and started to fall.
Daniel had gone to Oxford for a weekend of fresher air. London, while it was providing him, through a friend of Selwyn Debbs, his old professor, with a sinecure as an all-but-redundant step-and-fetch-it for a firm of Haymarket architects, had also begun to depress him with its grime, its shuffling crowds, its unrelenting greyness, its resignation to rain – all unalleviated by his hole-in-the-wall accommodation in Vauxhall or Mrs Heartburn, his nosy, xenophobic and irrepressibly opinionated landlady.
Thoroughly overcast, gusty, with the occasional downpour of freezing, wind-driven rain, it had been a bracing afternoon for someone trying, homoeopathically, to clear their mind and conscience from the hangover of ten centuries of claustrophobic architecture. He had spent upwards of an hour – when not touring, rather resentfully, the Bodleian Library or the Radcliffe Camera – waiting out the showers in uninviting college entranceways or under trees in one or another of the shivering parks, by turns thanking God for the sunny openness of his own time at Sydney University and wondering bemusedly at the evident need of that university’s founders to emulate such a cramped, monstrous and psychologically bullying place as this. Perhaps, he reflected in one of the few moments of windless calm – stepping over puddles in the courtyard of New College, at once marvelling reluctantly at the gargoyles and pitying their evident desperation to escape the stone blocks that were entrapping them (were they students, terrified of the next exam? the tortured spirits of the age? or simply claustrophobic colonials like himself, gasping for air?) – it was not, after all, the best time or mood in which to visit. Nothing quite like waiting out five faceless days in London to have one’s two days of freedom blotted out by the same bad weather.
There seemed no alternative but to head back early to the city, consoling himself with the thought that he had at least saved the cost of a room overnight, and grit his teeth to the work again until the season and his finances allowed him to move on. London was not cheap. His money had lasted well enough, but only with constant watching, constant awareness of the price of things, constant pursuit of less expensive alternatives. On the worst days he was half inclined to wire his father for more, just to get himself out of the place, but that wasn’t really an option – pride was involved, not to mention his father’s still-embarrassed finances. Paris, in any case, was probably just as grey, though surely it must have better food.
Realising that he had just missed one train, and that it was well over an hour until the next, he opted for a pint of ale at a pub near the railway station, the one place he had seen since his arrival where there seemed to be any liveliness at all. The bar was crowded – all men, most of them undergraduates and most of them, as far as he could tell, younger than he, although with a self-assurance that struck him instantly and that almost repelled him at the same time as he found himself envying it: the confidence of the possessors, of those-at-the-heart-of-the-world. But there was the hour to kill, and a fire blazing, and with luck a corner somewhere where he could pretend to read a paper or to be thinking deeply and independently while he drank.
At the bar when he ordered, a gregarious young man – he didn’t look much more than a boy, and by the shine on his brow had probably had more beer than he could handle – assailed him about his accent:
‘You’re South African, aren’t you? I can always tell!’ and had already begun to elaborate on his own uncanny powers of deduction when he realised he had been answered in the negative:
‘Australian! Really? We have several other Australians here. Do you know Benchley?’ and despite the fact that he seemed, so far, to have nothing to offer but negatives, Daniel found himself led clumsily from the bar – perhaps it was to meet Benchley, it was never explained – into a lounge at the side where there was a second fire and people were sitting at tables, some of them eating, some of them apparently drinking tea rather than alcohol. The boy-man pulled a spare seat to an already crowded table and, asking Daniel’s name, attempted to introduce him. Some of the group paid attention, others not. Within seconds he found himself abandoned by his would-be host, who had been called over to the other side of the table by another, larger, more drunken boy-man who was now shouting earnestly in his ear – the noise here was less than in the bar, but still made conversation difficult – and subjected, instead, to a series of excited questions shouted toward him by a striking young woman, two people further around the table to his right. Where was he from? When had he come? How long was he going to be here? How had he arrived? What was America like? Had he been to New York? What was he doing in London? Where was he staying? How much of England had he seen? He voiced his answers as best he could, but again and again the gist was lost on either side and it was not long before the man of the couple, sitting between them, conscious of the difficulty and doubtless tired of being talked across, had offered with somewhat less than good grace to exchange seats with the young woman, and they were able to talk a little more freely.
A momentary distraction caused by the departure of two others of the group enabled him to pull out his watch and realise that he had again missed a train. Not unduly worried – he had a vague recollection of a later train on the timetable – he had asked the young woman, having learnt by now that her name was Isobel, what it was that he could get for her, and went to the bar for another drink. When he returned she was deep in apparent argument with the fello
w she had initially been sitting with. Daniel could not hear it all and tried not to listen, but it was evident that it involved him in some way, and her right to talk with whomever she chose. He was embarrassed and thought to make his departure, sorry to think that he would not be able to say goodbye to her, but before he could make any move on his own account he found himself being told, quite firmly, that they were leaving, he and she, and that Hugh – presumedly the dark-haired young man now fuming in the seat beyond her – could stay here all night if he could find anyone who would put up with him. There seemed nothing else he could do, all things considered, but allow himself to be led out by the arm.
Outside, he tried to apologise for any problem he might unwittingly have caused, and to explain that there was a train he must shortly catch, that he must get back to the station to consult the timetable.
‘Nonsense!’ she exclaimed with a broad smile, as if the contretemps had in fact meant very little to her. ‘I am picking you up and I can’t believe that you are resisting! When do you absolutely have to be back in your horrid little flat in Vauxhall?’
‘Not until tomorrow night, I suppose, really, but –’
‘Then don’t be silly: you can come home with me and catch the afternoon train from Aylesham tomorrow,’ and, seeing a certain confusion in his features – in fact a certain stunned disbelief in what she might be proposing – ‘Relax. I’m not propositioning you. I’m staying with my aunt in Leedon. She has plenty of spare beds – about thirty, to be exact – and I’m sure she’d love to meet you. She used to be in love with an Australian. And you’d be very foolish indeed to miss the chance to see Buckinghamshire in a bright red Hispano Suiza.’
With that she took his arm again and led him down the now lamplit street to a long, low-slung two-seater the likes of which, it was quite true, he had never ridden in before. The weather had cleared while they were inside and although it was still cold she insisted that they travel with the hood down. She took a jacket and gloves for herself out of the dicky-seat, a blanket for him and a scarf for each of them, and for almost three hours, cold as it was, they talked, or rather shouted, animatedly and almost continuously under the stars as they negotiated the wet and rutty roads of west Buckinghamshire, stopping at one point to clamber over some Palaeolithic mound-formation in the dark, at another to visit a stone angel over a grave in an ancient churchyard, before pulling up, at around ten o’clock, on the wide, poorly groomed circular drive-way of a large country house, miles, it seemed, from anywhere, greeted by three large, mixed-bred, aged and vociferous dogs.
Isobel’s aunt, apparently, was in the business of taking in strays, canine as well as human. Daniel was hardly surprised. By this time he had learnt that Isobel had recently left her home in Laverton – her mother and two younger sisters – once and for all, after an argument that would be very hard to repair. He had learnt, too, that her father, a retired captain and a hero of the Great War, did not live at home but in Venice, and that he had not only left his first and favourite daughter the sportscar but had settled upon her a large and independent allowance. He had learnt that her aunt’s house, Tilden Hall, had been a recovery hospital during and for some months after the War, and that since then, accustomed to rehabilitating shell-shocked young men – one of whom had been the Australian corporal with whom, although he was at least ten years younger, she had fallen quite desperately in love – this aunt had run a kind of summer guest-house for indigent dominioners studying at Oxford and elsewhere, and would not be averse to a lonely young architect from Sydney. He had even learnt the names of the dogs.
Daniel returned a fortnight later, and again after the next; then, on the aunt’s invitation as often as Isobel’s, in the month following missed only one weekend, on each occasion coming out on the Friday evening train and returning on the Sunday afternoon. Beryl Fox-Wharton had not only showed little surprise when Isobel had first delivered him to her, but had taken an immediate and particular liking to him, giving him the run of the house and grounds, whether Isobel was there or not, and arranging contacts for him in London. He and Isobel went on long walks with the dogs if the weather permitted, or long drives in the Hispano Suiza, and in the evenings would play cards, charades or board-games after dinner – there was always another young man or two, from one or another of what Beryl would still, if with a pretence of irony, call The Colonies, and sometimes a further invitee of Isobel’s. One Saturday night Isobel and an old school friend, Ann Cartwright, took Daniel and a young man from Toronto to a dance in Aylesham, and when they returned, all four, in their pyjamas, held a midnight feast with whatever they could find in the kitchen, washing it down with a bottle of champagne. After Ann had retired – the Canadian having fallen asleep on the couch – he and Isobel, with another bottle, stayed up talking until almost dawn before going to bed, as they always did, separately and chastely at opposite ends of the house. Another night, a warm one in mid-summer, they took a bottle of fine Italian wine, sent by her father, up onto the roof terrace and were so enthralled by the huge full moon that they gathered their separate beddings and slept there side by side. She woke him, after the moon had set, so that he could see the stars, and for an hour before they fell back to sleep again they lay there telling off their star names. He told her about the Southern Cross, Aldebaran, Canopus, Arctorus, said he hoped one day he could show her.
It was assumed that they would marry. Indeed each of them, as it transpired, had nursed this thought long before either dared mention it. The rift with her mother appeared to have mended of its own accord – Isobel had a propensity for exaggeration – and Daniel was eventually taken down to meet her. They had intended holding off telling her their plans until they knew how she felt about him, but on the lunchtime on Sunday, shortly before Isobel was to drive him to the train, Isobel’s mother asked them outright when they were going to marry, since it seemed so evident that they planned to do so. Isobel must seek her father’s permission, she said, but with or without it she would give them her blessing. Daniel had already written to his father, and imagined that he would have, by cable, either an explosion or a blessing within the month. In the end it was approval from both fathers. Captain Hartley wrote that he could not come to the wedding, but he sent a generous sum of money and insisted that at their earliest convenience – their honeymoon? – they use some of it to visit him in Venice. Martin Freeman also sent money, joking that he might be gaining a daughter but was still losing his bank account, and insisting that they take the first available ship after the wedding.
In the end it was something of a compromise. After a small wedding in the village church in Laverton in the late spring, and a much larger reception at Tilden Hall, they headed for the south of France. It was there in Arles, three weeks later, on the morning they were due to depart for Aix, that they read in the English-language newspaper of the strange death of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona two days before – run over by a trolley-car, mistaken for a beggar and sent to a paupers’ hospital. Daniel told Isobel of Jasper Wright’s obsession the summer previously, and the little that he himself knew of Gaudi’s work: the flamboyance, the strange, fluid forms, the daring. At her urging they made a sudden change of plan, and almost before he knew it were on the train south-westward.
The whole of Barcelona was gearing for the funeral. There was not a room to be had. Even the Ritz-Palace turned them down. The American embassy, staffed by a duty officer, seemed to have no record of a Jasper Wright. They were on the verge of taking the night train back in the direction they had just come when a last try, at a tiny hotel on the Rambla, turned up a cramped turret room so crudely appointed that they guessed it had been made habitable only minutes before in the attempt to wring as much out of the situation as possible. The next day they watched the cortege inch down the avenue, the route so crowded that they did not go out until early the following morning when, unable to sleep, they made their way toward the Sagrada Familia – at whose half-completed spires, the hotelier told them, the archite
ct had been looking when he walked backwards into the oncoming tram.
Not even Chartres had prepared him. The four main towers, when Daniel turned to them, rose to an extraordinary height in the sky; the smaller towers beside them offered baskets of brightly painted fruit to the heavens – the whole place a harvest festival, a carnival of the senses, a reverie in stone. For almost two hours, though there grew about him an immense crush of people, his mind and senses exalted. His eyes moved over the pale surfaces as hands might have moved. He would have liked to explain to Isobel how it seemed to him like nothing so much as a wonderfully protracted version of the extraordinary moment when he had first seen, first touched her nakedness – but instead nursed it to himself, turned the idea over and over in his mind, even as the train moved over the plain toward the Pyrenees.
Later in his life he would think of it as one of those moments when he had seemed on the edge of some great mystery, some revelation, that might explain everything, but had not been able – he was never able – to catch hold of it or drag it into words.
Gordon Hartley met them at the station. Anyone less like a retired captain Daniel had yet to see, unless that captain was an English Wild Bill Hickock or General Custer. He was tall, dressed in a cream-coloured suit, had a voluminous grey moustache, long grey hair tied back with a black ribbon, wore a wide-brimmed brown fedora and carried a silver-handled cane. As he moved toward them on the platform it was clear that he was lame.
Isobel and her father embraced long and silently, and so tightly that Daniel felt himself at one and the same time moved and strangely unsettled. She had been nervous for days, increasingly on edge as they approached the Italian border and crossed Tuscany. The evening before, staying in Verona in part out of romantic impulse on his part, in part to avoid reaching Venice in the dead of night, they had had their first real argument, although argument was perhaps not the best word for a thing in which so few words were involved. When, in bed, he had tried to make up – thinking he must have done something wrong, though not knowing what – she had looked at him in sudden affront, as though he had no reason or right to touch her – as though, so far away was she at that point, she had momentarily forgotten who he was. Now it seemed he could almost understand, if the feeling that one is witnessing the reason is tantamount to having it, which is not always the case.