Annabel was wearing a black velvet jacket with very tight black trousers and a white silk shirt. Her shining coppery hair contrasted beautifully with the dramatic velvet, and I wanted to stroke her from head to foot. It’s so long since I’ve stroked a woman. I didn’t, of course. We were both on first-date alert, watching and listening for danger signals, registering the interesting facts that we live and work so near to each other and are both interested in art and music. I had to fight my prejudice against people who work in finance and was agreeably surprised to discover that she loves Bach and Mahler and often goes to concerts at the Wigmore Hall. Over the meze we talked about the Cézanne exhibition and the ‘Rebels and Martyrs’ exhibition at the National Gallery about the romantic image of nineteenth-century artists. She turned out to be a lot more knowledgeable about the arts than I am about finance.
I heard Nina’s voice as she disapproved of an item on the news about a contender for the Turner Prize. ‘Pictures should awaken our reverence and admiration.’ I shook my head impatiently to remove Nina and turned my attention back to Annabel.
‘So how do you see yourself? As a rebel or a martyr?’
‘Neither. I’m too old to die young like Chatterton, and I can’t really kid myself that my shopping mall in Dubai shows a unique artistic vision.’
‘So you’re not destined to perish under the blows of the world like Gauguin?’
‘I hope not. Do you like Gauguin?’
I must have sounded condescending because she said defensively, ‘People in the City aren’t thick, you know. We just need to make a crust.’
Her crust is better buttered than mine. Last Christmas she bought a flat around the corner from me, in Devonshire Place, out of her Christmas bonus. As we ate our delicious musakka we exchanged emotional histories. My version, of course, mentioned only Kate and no time slips; young women who work in the City can’t be expected to understand temporal misfits - not that I understand myself what happened with Nina.
Annabel split up from her boyfriend, an economist, six months ago, and before that had a long affair with a married banker-wanker, as she put it.
We both admitted to dreading Christmas.
‘Every year Kate and I fight over who has Ben for Christmas Day and Boxing Day. I don’t know why we do it. It’s so destructive, and Ben hates it. Last year he opened my expensive presents in floods of tears and then sat marooned in a sea of wrapping paper, wailing.
When I asked, rather irritably, what was the matter, he sobbed, ‘I just want to be a proper family again.’
Improper, unhappy families. Annabel doesn’t have any kids, but her parents are growing old disgracefully.
‘They used to be boring, but that was OK - I mean you expect your ageing parents to be bores, don’t you? Then last year when she was sixty-five Mum ran off with a Polish carpenter twenty years younger. I mean literally ran. They met when they were both doing a charity marathon. So poor old Dad was left alone after forty years of marriage, and he just fell apart.
‘I went up to Shropshire to see him and found him living on digestive biscuits, surrounded by dog and cat turds. So I cleaned up a bit and told him to get a life. Then a month later the police phoned me to say a man in his seventies had been found wandering naked on a golf course near Bridgnorth, and it was my dad. He’d set off as usual one Wednesday morning to play golf, as he has every week since he retired, and then he just forgot who he was and where he was supposed to be going. My dad used to be a solicitor - he thought it was a scandal if my brother went out without a tie - so there he was stark naked on a golf course clutching his mashy niblett, or whatever you call it, and I had to go up there on the train and collect him.
‘He has Alzheimer’s, apparently. Just can’t cope with the house any more, so we’ll have to find him a home. I’ve looked at a couple, but they were awful, I wouldn’t leave a dog there. Which is another thing. They’ve got two dogs and cat, all ancient and decrepit. They’ll have to be put down now. Mum doesn’t want to know. She’s going off to an ashram in India with her Polish carpenter to blow our inheritance, so me and my brother keep having to take time off work to look at pricey gaols for the gaga. Have you got any mad relatives?’
‘My parents died a few years ago. Quite considerate of them, although not very good news for me, genetically speaking. I sometimes think my ex is crazy, but she isn’t really, just permanently angry. I have a wonderful seven-year-old son I don’t see enough of, and that’s about it.’
We smiled at each other over the second bottle of wine and went back to talking about concerts we might go to together, as if we had used up our ration of personal history.
On the pavement outside the restaurant we exchanged an experienced kiss. My tongue pressed against her lips and stopped at her teeth, those elegantly capped cliffs that guarded the warm cavern of her mouth. Annabel’s inner self, uncharted territory I hope to discover some day. There be mermaids and dragons. I hope not. I’d like a sensible, unmysterious love affair, and Annabel’s straight back and tempting buttocks suggested that is possible.
I slept well - no dreams of Nina, thank God. There is one that I have dreamed so often it has become part of my inner landscape. I enter a tiny room, and she is there, dressed in a long black dress, smiling at me with unbearable sweetness. The room swells into a circular ballroom. We are dancing there, waltzing. I perform steps I don’t know to music I have never heard. There are other couples dancing there, dressed in mid-Victorian clothes, and we are watched intently by a man with glittering eyes who draws us. Nina’s body is warm and real, and I bury my face in her hair, inhaling her reality. I reach out to touch her face and try to raise her chin to kiss her. But I am never allowed to. She evades my dreamlust, and I wake up alone, exhausted, as if I had danced for centuries.
But this morning I woke refreshed, early enough to have time to walk to work. I love to avoid the rush-hour by cutting through the secretive back streets to the City.
Joggers and cyclists passed me, intent on their own escape from public transport and traffic jams. I crossed Oxford Street and strode through Soho and Covent Garden to the Strand, enjoying my walking pace, fast enough to get to work but slow enough to gaze up and appreciate the details of buildings. My long sight allows me to see curious chimneys and carved gutters and eccentric windows, all the embellishments that earlier ages had time for. Old houses look so solid and confident, yet so many of them are accidents, the lucky winners of a lottery of dreams. How I would love to build one great folly to be remembered by, but how far away from it I feel now.
Ghoulishly, I fantasized about some great apocalypse, a fire or a war, that would destroy most of London and give me the opportunity to fill the skyline with my own vision: towers jutting with terraces and roof gardens and garden squares in a car-free city with a 24-hour transport system, including commuter boats zipping along the river and canals. I’d like to see brick and stone everywhere instead of brittle glass and dismal concrete. Of my more imaginative plans, not one has materialized. Every building that does go up is the cemetery of architects’ hopes, murdered by committees. London devours visions and spews them out again as profits for billionaire developers.
Crossing the shoppers’ paradise Covent Garden Market has become, I remembered that after the war there was a plan to build a huge music-and-drama centre there. The Strand reminded me of Inigo Jones’s elegant New Exchange, a kind of seventeenth-century department store that never did get built. I passed the newly restored and cleaned Somerset House with its riverside terrace and ice-skating rink. Like all illustrious buildings it has reinvented itself for a new generation, callously outliving its original architect.
After the Great Fire, Wren wanted to replace all those crazy courts and alleys off Fleet Street with great avenues and piazzas, which might have resulted in a duller city. Great architects are tyrants. There is a kind of democracy in muddle and inconsistency of style. In the forgotten streets behind Fleet Street London seems to juggle with its real and i
magined pasts. It isn’t fashionable for an architect to be as interested in the past as I am. Perhaps that was how Nina happened. Perhaps I’m too open to other people’s dreams.
I’m lucky to work in the City because I have to confront its voracious heart several times a week. St Paul’s looks so sure of itself and inevitable, but it might easily have been quite different, sur mounted by a giant pineapple or a triple dome. Or it might have had to double as an observatory for Wren and his fellow astronomers. Thirty-six years Wren invested in St Paul’s, and I’ve always wondered if he resented it .
I moved to this company two years ago when it became impossible for Kate and I to work in the same office. We’re the London branch of a large American company, but hardly any of our clients are in this country. My office is on the tenth floor of a glass tower. We scurry around our open-plan office like the ants in a glass box I had as a child, highly visible to each other and to anyone looking out of the surrounding windows.
This morning at eight thirty most of my colleagues were already at work. I’m nostalgic for the days when architects produced exquisite drawings at easels, but now, of course, we all work at computers in a vast open space littered with plans and models. To discourage us from going out and wasting corporate time we have a breakfast bar, a sweet and doughnut counter to snack on and a pizza, burger and salad bar for lunch. It’s all free and good; sylphs who come to work here rapidly become fatties. I helped myself to coffee, toast, peanut butter and a doughnut and carried them over to my desk, grunting at my colleagues, who grunted back. We compete to demonstrate total absorption in our work, for we are well paid and know that jobs here have hundreds of applicants.
My design team is working on the shopping mall in Dubai that is due to reach the ribbon-cutting stage in two years. The morning passed quickly. I had my usual lunch, quiche and a salad, then settled back to contemplate the logistics of incorporating a mosque and parking space into the basement. At first, when an oval appeared behind my underground car park, I thought my eyes were tired and took a break.
Twenty minutes later the oval had a nose and a mouth. It was a sketch of a face, as if a drawing from an earlier age was contemplating my slick computer graphics and subtly disapproving of my efforts. Over the next half-hour the face developed a frame of dark curls and large deep-blue eyes that looked straight at me with a quizzical smile echoed in the curve of her lips. Nina had escaped from my head and pursued me to work. Feelings swept over me like a tornado as I sat there staring at my computer screen: terror, longing for her and indignation that she had so much power over me. I was afraid that my odd behaviour would be noticed and labelled as unprofessional and inappropriate, those kiss-of-death adjectives that could lose me my job. I have to finish my plans by Friday and can hardly complain that a woman who died in the nineteenth century won’t let me work or ask Bob, our IT guru, to delete a ghost.
I sat there, paralysed, while my colleagues worked around me and the short December afternoon faded. The lights came on in our office and blazed in a hundred other glass boxes. Here we all sat in illuminated cross-section, transparent to each other and to ourselves. There was no space for a shadowy inner life, and I didn’t know what to do with mine. Torn between my desire to preserve Nina’s face for ever on my screen and my fear of looking crazy, I did nothing.
‘You OK, Jonathan?’
It was Marty, a sweet-natured, very bright Canadian postgraduate who fancies me. After Kate I never want to have an affair with a colleague again, so I’m wary of her, although she is attractive.
‘I’ve got a headache.’
All the women groaned. It’s a standing joke in our company that the men are hypochondriacs and the women soldier on. But as soon as I said it it became true; my conflicting thoughts and emotions clarified into a tangible symptom, and I met it with some relief. If I was ill perhaps I was not mad.
Marty got up to come over with some Nurofen, and I panicked. What if she were able to see Nina, or Nina could see Marty? I logged off, clicked on ‘shut down’ and watched as Nina’s face faded, perhaps for ever. I felt as if I had abandoned and betrayed her.
Marty stood over me with water and pills. I enjoyed her solicitude and the moment when her breasts touched my shoulder. ‘You’re so pale, honey. Want to lie down?’ We have a sleeping capsule in the office so that we can stay here on the occasional nights we have to work late.
‘I’ll be fine. I’ll just take a break.’
I walked over to the enormous window. The transition from day to night is beautiful here; I love to gaze out at all those other sparkling windows and feel part of the City’s greed and dynamism. Over to my right the illuminated breast of St Paul’s merges with the darkness, and the elegant span of Foster’s bridge carries matchstick people over to Tate Modern. Seen from the tenth floor it is like a working model of a city, and I feel like a spoiled child allowed to play with it. The jagged skyline with its thousand years of architecture energizes me and gives me a dangerous illusion of power.
But my London was not there. Far below me, yellowish fog swirled and black smoke belched out of hundreds of chimneys into a filthy sunset. I had the feeling that if I opened the window I would be poisoned by the fumes and touched the window ledge to make sure I was still standing in my office, anchored in my time.
Down there the darkness squirmed with serpentine crowds and blobs of soft light. The great dome of St Paul’s still dominated the view over to my right, but most of the buildings were unfamiliar. There were gaslit shops with awnings, and the crowds pouring out of them looked squat and dumpy, bundled up in heavy clothes like people in a Bruegel painting. Dozens of elegant spires and the black masts of ships on the river rose to the dirty sky. The horse-drawn traffic down there was chaotic and ferocious. I watched as a cabby climbed down from his perch and flogged a horse that was trapped between two carts and refused to budge.
Behind the triple glazing I could imagine but could not hear the whinnies and clatter and shouts and roar of the streets. I didn’t feel that I was looking down at a different London. It was like the room behind my own where I once saw Nina in a dream, if it was a dream. I’ve always felt it there, that older London, just behind the brittle shards and cheese graters of my own. I have spent my whole life flirting with nostalgia, romanticizing the past and longing for it. But now that it had finally come to claim me I was afraid.
Time sickness made my stomach lurch. I felt so dizzy that I had to stagger backwards to a chair where I sat with my head in my hands, afraid to look back at the window, thankful to be back in the now I have so often resented and despised.
‘What’s the matter, Jonathan?’
‘Lie down.’
‘Go home.’
I tried to speak, but my voice felt remote, as if I had left it over at the window. I took a deep breath and tried again, remembering that my colleagues were watching me and would discuss any eccentricities the minute I left the office. This time words came out.
‘I think I will. I’ll get the plans finished at home and bring them in tomorrow.’
The glass lift was its usual sleek self, shooting me down like blood in a syringe. The atrium soared and shimmered in the dark; more glass. It’s as if we build our fragile world as the perfect target for the terrorists who fuel our paranoia.
On the crowded pavement I was relieved to see the familiar streets and buildings around me and told myself my hallucinations had been caused by an approaching migraine. I suffer from migraine only every few years, but the last one, just after Kate left, lasted for three days and forced me to lie in a darkened room. Like a Victorian invalid.
I promised myself an easy journey home, on the Central Line from St Paul’s to Oxford Circus, before the rush-hour started. I would buy some mozzarella-and-tomato salad and a portion of lasagne from my favourite Italian restaurant, lie down on my comfortable sofa and listen to my new CD of Bach’s Mass in B-Minor.
But somehow my feet turned away from the station, to the other side of St
Paul’s and down the shallow steps on to the Millennium
Bridge. In 1942, when the ruins were still smoking, there was a plan for a riverside stairway leading to St Paul’s, and a committee chaired by Lutyens discussed the idea. This bridge was yet another visionary idea that finally materialized long after the architect who first imagined it was dead. When I’m in a good mood this is an inspiring thought, but most of the time it’s just depressing.
My head cleared in the cold air. London’s bridges always attract me like magnets; they are the wings of the city where its exhausted limbs rise up to elemental freedom in the water and the sky. Tonight the scintillating darkness was particularly seductive.
I felt compelled to cross the river. Walking is a kind of drug, a medicine for lost souls; it was good to move forward into the darkness and to feel connected with the crowds surging in both directions over the bridge. I inhaled the view: trains glittering across the river, cranes bisecting the sky and the operatic medievalism of Tower Bridge. Boats and helicopters carried inexhaustible Londoners onwards. Ahead was the Globe like an Elizabethan toy and the industrial campanile of Tate Modern. At the end of the bridge an enterprising girl violinist was playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, and a smell of caramelized peanuts rose from the bleak expanse in front of the gallery to join the histrionic music.
I turned right and followed the human river that flowed parallel to the Thames. Now Wren’s dome was opposite me, supplanting three centuries of later architecture on the skyline. Strings of lights were reflected in the dark water, and the trees were illuminated for the Christmas I dreaded. At first, although I had nowhere to go, I walked fast, infected by the purpose of the anonymous crowds.
Nina In Utopia Page 22