by Hugh Mackay
‘But of course we –’
Freya silences him with an outstretched hand.
21
A Misalliance
Had Richard known that this particular duo was meeting, hidden away like a pair of conspirators in a coffee shop not fifty metres from the offices of Urbanski, his antennae would have been twitching with nervous energy. Briggs and Noakes? The loathsome Briggs, and that pretentious little prat Noakes? Shameless opportunists, the pair of them.
Had he known, Richard would certainly have assumed it was about Madrigo, since that was Noakes’s only imaginable point of contact with Briggs. His speculations would have included the possibility that the odious Noakes was trying to ensure he received appropriate credit for his tweaking of Richard’s ‘boring’ facade of the building. Or perhaps Richard might have imagined something more treacherous than that: he might have feared that Noakes was hinting at some accommodation of Briggs’s money-grubbing attempts either to increase the price of the apartments or to cut corners on their quality. Either of those compromises would represent, to Richard, a denial of the whole point of Madrigo; a tarnishing of its powerful symbolism. As far as Richard could tell, neither Noakes nor Briggs had even the faintest inkling of how significant Madrigo could be for the reputation of Urbanski (to say nothing of Richard’s own reputation). ‘Revolutionary’ would be the word everyone would use, provided the project retained its integrity.
But Richard didn’t know they were meeting. He was, at that time, enjoying himself – indulging himself – by tinkering with some amendments to the sketches he had prepared for Lincoln the Hunter’s renovations, convivium and all. Since there seemed to be no budgetary constraints, he was beginning to think he should recommend a total demolition and rebuild, after all.
*
‘Master Noakes,’ said Briggs, rising to meet his young guest. Everyone said Noakes was a wunderkind, but Briggs had seen no evidence of it and saw none now. For an architect, the man seemed to lack any sense of personal style. To Briggs, he looked scruffy, almost unkempt. The man was a wimp, Briggs had concluded, and that rather suited his purposes.
‘Ah, Mr Briggs,’ said Noakes, adopting the same tone of playful courtliness. Everyone said Briggs was a ruthless monster, but Noakes, so recently humiliated by the experience of being rescued from the waters of Camp Cove by the willowy wife of Richard Brooks, was in a receptive mood: if Briggs wanted to see him, then he certainly wanted to hear what Briggs had to say. The thought of starting his own firm was never far from the mind of Philip Noakes, and his harbour adventure had renewed his enthusiasm for the idea. It seemed likely he would never live down the perception among his Urbanski colleagues that he was a comical – even farcical – figure. Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, someone had captured the whole frightful episode on their mobile phone, and the footage had been enthusiastically circulated around the office. People had taken to referring to him as ‘Fish-food Phil’ – a tasteless reference to the vomiting, he supposed – and one quite junior person had asked him, with a disrespectful smirk, ‘Do you think you’d be safer on the ground floor?’ Occasionally, as he stepped into the lift, he would hear someone behind him give a muffled shout: ‘Man overboard!’ Even ‘Going down?’ seemed to be said with an edge, when someone was holding the lift door for him. The fact that he had been rescued by a woman was taken to be a particular sign of weakness. Noakes’s attempts to dismiss such comments as sexist failed to convince even the women in the office.
The embarrassment of the event itself now seemed as nothing compared with the persistence of all this childishness. Noakes knew his swift rise to the rank of partner had provoked feelings of jealousy among some of his colleagues, but he had not previously experienced any actual hostility. It was as if his unfortunate accident had provided an excuse for people to unleash their hidden feelings towards him, under the guise of light-heartedness. It was all very tedious.
‘I need your advice, Master Noakes.’
This was more like it. This was the level of seriousness Noakes had been hoping for; the level of deference he felt was appropriate to a partner in the firm, no matter how new or how young.
‘It’s about Freya. That gorgeous woman who plucked you out of the harbour.’ As he said this, Briggs couldn’t restrain a smile, though he didn’t quite laugh.
Noakes’s heart sank. What now? He nodded at Briggs.
‘I need to be sure of your discretion in this matter,’ Briggs went on. ‘I think something I did might have been seriously misinterpreted by Freya, and quite possibly by Richard, too.’
Noakes nodded again.
‘The thing is, I have the greatest respect for Richard. As I’m sure you do. Everyone does.’
Noakes kept nodding. ‘Everyone,’ he agreed mournfully.
‘The thing is . . . well, look, the thing is, I wrote an email to Freya praising her courage and her skill – you’d agree with that assessment, I’m sure, Master Noakes.’
Noakes said nothing.
‘And I invited her to meet me for a drink.’
Noakes’s eyebrows rose involuntarily, but he still said nothing.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Briggs went on, ‘but, you see, the thing is, it actually wasn’t like that at all. I really did want to praise her courage. There was no sleazy hidden agenda, I assure you. Well, perhaps a hidden agenda, but not a sleazy one.’
Noakes scarcely knew where to look.
‘You think I’m a sleaze? Is that what you mean by that shifty bloody look? You think I wanted to fuck the wife of my architect? Really?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just that . . .’
‘Come clean, Master Noakes.’
‘Well, the fact that you’re raising this with me. I mean, I imagine you can see yourself how a thing like that could be misinterpreted. I mean, I –’
‘If you had written to the woman in those terms, it wouldn’t have been misinterpreted.’
‘Well, I –’
‘It was misinterpreted because of prejudice. Sheer bloody-minded prejudice. I’m a developer. You know – a developer. So naturally I’m a rapacious bastard in my personal life as well as my business dealings. Isn’t that right, Master Noakes? Rapacious, wouldn’t you say? Is that what you think? Is that what Richard thinks?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course not,’ Briggs said, mimicking Noakes unkindly. ‘Master Noakes, let me come to the point. I wrote to Freya in the hope of having a quiet conversation with her about Madrigo, and about Richard’s blinkered approach to it. I had thought she might be able to raise some of my concerns with him more delicately – more diplomatically – than I seem to be capable of. My wife, God bless her, in the years before I lost her to that well-known wife-stealer called Alzheimer . . . she never hesitated to draw attention to my lack of diplomatic skill. All the subtlety and charm of a pre-fab granny flat, she used to say. The pre-fab granny flat was a sore point between us, but let’s not go there.’
Briggs paused and looked away. Noakes was astonished to see a single tear slide down his cheek.
‘So, okay,’ Biggs said, refocusing, ‘I admit I miscalculated. Trying to be subtle. I shouldn’t even try. Never works for me. Anyway, that’s water under the bridge. Sorry, you probably don’t like water metaphors. The thing is, I clearly offended the lovely Freya – or at any rate alarmed her – so that avenue of approach is closed.’
Noakes, meanwhile, sensed an opening. ‘Tell me more about your Madrigo concerns.’
‘Isn’t it obvious? The whole thing has been arse-about from the start. I didn’t dream up this development and then go hunting for an architect. Richard dreamed up the project – it’s like a personal crusade with him – and then came to me, begging me to finance the thing. As if I’m some kind of fucking philanthropist. Don’t get me wrong, Master Noakes – I’m all in favour of stylish, low-cost housing . . . it’s just that every job has to be profitable or I’m history. Do you have any idea what it costs to put someo
ne in a halfway-decent nursing home for ten years, with the prospect of another ten or even twenty to come? Any idea? Of course you don’t and may you never have to find out. Anyway, I’m a pretty modest developer, in the scheme of things, not some big corporation. It’s just me, basically. I take it one job at a time. I budget with great care. I’m less reckless than I might seem to you. Richard latched on to me because he and I have the same approach to that killer combination of beauty and utility, and we pulled off a couple of very nice knock-down-and-rebuilds together. Gave him a sniff.’
‘A sniff?’
‘He thought I might be a soft touch when it came to his big dream. I like his dream. I love his dream. You’ve seen the concept. You’ve worked on it, haven’t you? Lovely. Terrific. Game-changer. But the margin has to be there or I’m cactus.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’ Noakes was beginning to irritate Briggs. There was something not quite right about all this barely suppressed eagerness.
‘It sounds as if you might want me to say the sort of thing to Richard you were hoping to get Freya to say. Am I right?’
‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, Master Noakes. You’re a colleague, not a wife. Totally different approach. Totally different strategy.’
‘Of course.’
‘Richard’s position – Richard’s vision – has to be respected.’
‘Of course.’
‘The thing is, since I wrote that email, there’s been a certain awkwardness between Richard and me. A certain tension. I want your help in easing it. I want you to be my Johnny-on-the-spot. Understand?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘How should I put this? A watching brief. Check the figures. Check the costings. If I have to pull out, I have to pull out.’
‘I thought you’d –’
‘Already signed on? Nothing is settled. We have a sort of agreement. An understanding. Nothing more.’
‘You want me to make my own appraisal of the project?’
Briggs eyed Noakes with increasing distaste. He was beginning to think a direct approach to Richard might be best. But the Freya thing had certainly come between them. And, sure, he had rather relished the prospect of spending an hour with a young and very attractive woman, quite apart from the business in hand.
‘Appraisal? Hardly that. But we need to cut down the scale, and Richard doesn’t seem to hear me when I say that. I don’t want to walk, but I don’t want to be the bunny, either. Richard thinks the promise of a plaque on the building will get me over the line. A reasonable profit margin is what will get me over the line. As things stand, the risk is unacceptable.’
‘Maybe you should just tell Richard that. Or maybe I could work up some costings for a scaled-down version. Something you can put in front of Richard.’
‘Or maybe I’ve made a big mistake raising this with you. Richard can be a difficult bugger sometimes, but I wonder if you’re half the man he is.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing about Richard.’
‘No disloyalty now.’
‘No disloyalty.’
‘What?’
‘He’s an admirer of rationality. Logical argument. He’s suspicious of emotion – his own and anyone else’s. We all know we can win Richard over with the facts, but we’ll leave him cold with more woolly attempts at persuasion.’
‘Woolly?’
‘Fuzzy. More feelings than facts.’
‘But I’ve explained my reservations to him.’
‘He needs facts. He needs evidence that Madrigo could still be a standard-bearer without breaking the bank.’
‘Curious that a man who, as you say, is suspicious of emotion is so emotionally committed to this thing. That’s not entirely rational, is it?’
‘I said he was an admirer of rationality. I didn’t say he was rational.’
‘Say no more, Master Noakes. I think we understand each other.’
22
Coming Home –
11th Variation – ‘An Uncertain Smile’
My favourite homecomings are those when Freya greets me at the door and unleashes her most uninhibited, her most enchanting smile – a smile that lights up her face and melts my heart, every single time.
It’s such a welcome contrast from the more usual sight of Freya sitting at the convivium table, hunched over a musical score or tapping away on her tablet. I can’t help it: when she sits with her back to the door like that, I am always reminded of that dreadful day when I came home to find my mother in such distress, sitting just like that, hunched just like that, with her shoulders shaking just like that.
Ah, but Freya’s smile. Those bright white teeth, perfectly shaped, perfectly spaced; those full lips, generously parted; sparkling eyes, crinkled nose; the single dimple in her right cheek; chin raised, as if she’s expecting to be kissed.
And yet, over the years, I’ve learnt to be wary of that smile.
I’ve seen her beam it an audience as if she’s giving them herself as well as her music, only to have her tell me later she was dying inside because she knew full well the quartet hadn’t done their best and she used her smile as a kind of compensation – like the charm of the conman, perhaps, though she didn’t put it like that.
I’ve seen her win her mother over with a smile that seemed utterly conciliatory, only to hear her in the car on the way home fulminating – raging – against her mother’s stupidity, or duplicity, or complicity with Fern over some plot to rein in Felicity or, worse, some strategy for getting Mike to toe some line or other. The smile was a weapon, consciously deployed, she seemed to be implying. She knew its power.
The same thing with Daniel – ‘winning him back’ was how she once put it to me; getting him to see things her way, or at least to accept her way even if he didn’t agree with it. Melting his resistance with that smile when she ran out of arguments or patience. Manipulation, pure and simple, and very impressive in its way.
At one level, I couldn’t object, could I? Beauty and utility. The smile could be a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it could be a device that worked. But once I came to understand the way she used that smile, I had more of a sense of its utility than its beauty: it didn’t enchant me as it once had; it didn’t go straight to my soul, bypassing my brain.
Once that happened, the smile began to worry me, to irritate me – even to unnerve me.
I realise that any ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ is likely to be a face that sank a thousand others. There’s always a shadow.
But I confess to a gnawing sense of disappointment. Not a sudden thing, but a gradual awakening to the idea that I, along with everyone else, had read more – or perhaps less – into that smile than was ever there.
Ever there? Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the smile began its career innocently enough – I’ve seen it in embryo in photos from her childhood – and only took on this manipulative aspect as it dawned on Freya that she had this magical source of power at her disposal.
The thing is, I’d still rather have it shining on me than not. Even a grin is welcome these days.
23
Lincoln the Hunted
You’ve called Lincoln the Hunter. Leave a message, and keep living the dream.
‘Lincoln, this is Richard Brooks from Urbanski again. I emailed those sketches to you, as you asked, along with our indicative quote. Both very rough – the sketches and the quote. I put hard copies in the post, as well. That package should have reached you last week. I’d be interested in your response. Give us a call when you have a mo.’
You’ve called Lincoln the Hunter. Leave a message, and keep living the dream.
‘Richard Brooks here, Lincoln. No pressure. Just interested to have your reaction to the drawings, and our rough quote, of course. Very rough. I’ve had one or two further thoughts about the convivium. I really think it could be transformative – not just of the house, but of your whole lifestyle. I’m not exaggerating. For the boys as well as you and Hermione. I’m looking forward to me
eting Hermione. I wonder if we could arrange our next meeting at a time when she might be able to join us.’
You’ve called Lincoln The Hunter. Leave a message, and keep living the dream.
‘Richard, again, Lincoln. I’ll shoot you an email.’
From: Richard Brooks
To: Lincoln the Hunter
Subject: Convivium for you and Hermione
Hi Lincoln,
Just checking you received the concept sketches and our preliminary quote. All subject to detailed discussion and further refinement, of course.
Please call or email, just to confirm that you have received the material, and to indicate when we might next meet. Ideal if Hermione could also be present.
Richard
From: Lincoln the Hunter
To: Richard Brooks
Subject: Automatic reply: Convivium for you and Hermione
Thanks for reaching out.
Unavailable this week. All good.
Live the dream!
Lincoln the Hunter
You’ve called Lincoln The Hunter. Leave a message, and keep living the dream.
‘Lincoln, Richard Brooks again. I sent you an email. I’ll leave you in peace. I might try to make contact with Hermione through the hospital. I just need a please proceed or a please back off. I hope you’re okay.’
*
‘St Walburga’s Private Hospital. How may I direct your call?’
‘Hi. My name is Richard Brooks. I’m trying to reach Dr Hermione Hunter. I understand she works there. I’m doing some architectural work for Dr Hunter and her husband, and I am having difficulty making contact with them. Is there any way you can put me in touch with her?’
‘Is this a private call, Richard?’
‘Well, yes, it’s not medical, if that’s what you mean. I’m just wanting to make contact and –’