The Restoration of Otto Laird

by Nigel Packer

  ‘This is life, Otto, not the other stuff.’

  The model plane lifted into the air with difficulty, circling above them once again. Otto watched the shadow of a cloud as it drifted over the wheat fields. Absently, he stroked Cynthia’s hand.

  ‘What do you think?’ she eventually asked him.

  A quiet life in the country was something Otto had never considered before. Yet the idea, now that she mentioned it, seemed revelatory. They could live somewhere peaceful, design and draw each day. They would be able to walk, and talk, sit quietly together in the evenings. In terms of the space and creative freedom, it would be like a return to the old days, before their lives became complicated by success.

  Cynthia smiled, even before Otto had spoken. She sensed the spark of excitement, kindling in his eyes.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Yes, why ever not? I hesitate only because your suggestion is so unexpected. But, thinking on my feet now, I would say that you are right. We don’t need to carry on at breakneck speed. Why should we? We’ve achieved all that we wanted, in a professional sense. And we come to the countryside as often as practicable these days. That alone must tell us something. Besides, I must admit that I do find London tiring lately. Rattling along with thousands of others on the Northern Line each morning.’

  ‘Tired of London, but not of life. Samuel Johnson was talking nonsense. There’s inspiration to be found in new beginnings.’

  Cynthia’s enthusiasm was becoming infectious to Otto, just as it had been throughout their lives.

  ‘It will complete a circle,’ Otto said. ‘Not just for you, for both of us.’

  He was remembering their first trip to the Chilterns together, as students, thirty years before.

  Their plans began to solidify in the following weeks and months: they discussed them together with a mounting sense of anticipation. They even spent a weekend looking at cottages. But the longed-for move to the Chilterns never took place.

  * * *

  Otto stood and waited for the lift to arrive. The dilapidated state of Marlowe House no longer seemed to oppress him. Memories of Cynthia, of the stolen years together that followed their reconciliation, brought with them a new-found sense of peace.

  There’s always hope, he told himself, as the doors slid open and he stepped over the shards of broken glass littering its floor. Even in the bleakest of surroundings, even when all appears lost.

  Twenty-Five

  Back in his apartment, Otto discussed with Chloe his final thoughts on revisiting Marlowe House. He was determined to get it right this time. The cameras rolled as they talked.

  ‘Would you do things differently, if you were designing the building again today?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  ‘What would you change?’

  ‘The apartments themselves seem to have stood the test of time, judging by the one in which I’ve spent the past few nights. But the public spaces would definitely need to be reconsidered. The lifts, the corridors: their condition is very poor. Personal safety is clearly something of an issue.’

  ‘But you still believe it deserves to be saved? Given a listing, perhaps?’

  ‘I do. I had my doubts initially, I must admit, when I arrived and saw its condition. It needs some investment, some attention and care, there’s no question at all about that. But I still think it’s worth saving.’

  ‘And your reasoning for that?’

  ‘A simple one, really. The residents want to stay here; some of them, anyway. They want to remain in the building that’s their home.’

  ‘You mean Ravi and Mrs Pham?’

  ‘And a few more people, I hope. Our sample was unscientific, I realise, but it’s all I have to go on. For them, at least, Marlowe House is clearly important; a repository of memories and associations. Mrs Pham has lived here half her life; Ravi for all of his. If the demolition goes ahead as proposed, they will take away more than a structure.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Memory is such a complex matter. It’s not just mental, but physical. It’s embedded in the landscape itself. Buildings are deeply interwoven with people’s experiences – with their sense of identity, if you like. It’s something of which I’ve become acutely aware myself in recent days.’

  ‘But not everyone feels positive about Marlowe House. Joe, for instance, and some of the others we’ve spoken to.’

  ‘Clearly, its fate is a matter of indifference to some. For others, it no doubt evokes feelings of hostility. You were kind enough not to introduce me to any of them! But on balance, naturally, I support those with an emotional attachment to this place. And that’s because, in the end, I share that attachment myself.’

  ‘Will that kind of argument be enough to save the building?’

  ‘No, not a chance. We need hard-headed, pragmatic arguments in order to win this battle. Technical, legal, financial. Property is such a minefield, these days. The developers are circling, there’s money to be made. But fortunately, given my fuzzy state of mind, there are other people who can deal with these hard realities much better than I. Hopefully, Angelo and the others will succeed with the campaign.’

  ‘You don’t appear to regard yourself as very important in all this. Surely you retain some influence. Don’t you think that the people who decide these things will value your opinion?’

  ‘Not really. I’m just here to raise a few questions. But I certainly don’t expect my views to be taken seriously. Not at my time of life. Don’t worry – you look concerned. I’ve grown used to it by now. Though it is, perhaps, the hardest part of growing old.’

  Otto smiled, a little sadly, and Chloe signalled with her hand for the cameras to stop filming.

  ‘Thanks. That’s it. I think we have all the material we need now.’

  ‘It’s over?’

  ‘Yes. We’re finally done. We’ll move on to post-production in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when we’ve got a date for the broadcast.’

  ‘Do you think we have any chance?’

  ‘Of saving it, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you don’t know, Otto, then how could I? But I hope you do. It’s a remarkable building.’

  He looked at her, a little surprised, and wondered if she meant it. This was the first time she had expressed an opinion on the subject.

  ‘It’s sad to see it in such a bad way,’ she added. ‘But I’ve seen footage of Marlowe House from its heyday, remember? I admire the vision architects showed back then. They were made of different stuff, your generation.’

  ‘Why, thank you,’ Otto said.

  Chloe, having embarrassed him, decided to change the subject.

  ‘Can we give you a lift somewhere? Arrange a cab to take you to the airport? Sorry to rush you, but we have another appointment at twelve.’

  ‘It’s kind of you, but I plan to stick around a little longer. My flight doesn’t leave until this evening. There’s somewhere I’d like to visit first. So if it’s okay with you, could I pop the key back through the letterbox when I leave?’

  ‘Sure. I don’t see why not.’

  * * *

  A short while later, Otto stood on the wind-blasted forecourt, lifting his hat to Chloe and the others as their van sped away into the distance. Seconds before, they had shaken his hand and wished him well for the journey home. He wondered, briefly, just who they might be filming that afternoon. Other lives, half captured. Other stories, partially told.

  After pressing down his restless homburg, its brim flapping mournfully like a flightless bird, Otto rubbed particles of grit from his eyes. Through the main doors of Marlowe House, the occasional resident came and went. One of them, a tough young man with close-cropped hair, wearing blood-red sports gear, produced a skipping rope and began exercising on the opposite side of the forecourt. On the back of his sweatshirt were the words Mikey J, printed in silver lettering. Laying down the rope, the young man shadow-boxed for a minute or two, then embarked on a series of sprints a
cross the forecourt. Passing close by, he nodded absently to Otto, who touched the brim of his homburg in response. Fifty years earlier, in a more neighbourly age, they might well have engaged in some pleasant conversation. But that was not how society operated, nowadays.

  Otto looked once more at the forecourt. If the interior of the building was decrepit enough, it took an even greater leap of the imagination to equate the environs of Marlowe House with what had existed back in the 1960s. The sculpture garden was not the only element ravaged by time. With an effort, he tried to reassemble the landscaped grounds, raising them mentally from among the weeds and broken paving. A sculpted concrete arch, he recalled, once framed the approach along the main gravel pathway. But the arch, like the pathway, seemed to have disappeared completely. It would take an archaeologist to find any trace of it now.

  Whatever happened to it? Did it fall down of its own accord? Seems unlikely; it was constructed of reinforced concrete. Was it stolen, maybe? Broken apart by vandals? Where on earth could it have gone?

  Otto wandered over to a patch of grass in the vicinity of where the arch had once been, and dabbed at it with his cane. Bending down, he scooped out handfuls of earth in order to reveal the solid surface he had detected beneath. His fingers uncovered a low concrete base. Another, he discovered, lay some yards to its east. From the cleanness of the cuts across both surfaces, he assumed that the arch must have been removed in some official capacity. But no other clues to its fate remained.

  Can fifty years of wear and tear really bring about this much change? he thought. It feels like the work of centuries.

  With a shake of his head, he abandoned the remains of the arch to walk around the columns that supported the main structure. On one of them, a spray-painted image caught his eye. It looked like a cluster of vine leaves, or they could have been the leaves of a cannabis plant, curling upwards from the base to eye level.

  It could almost be a classical ruin. But then again, maybe not. Perhaps that is being a shade too optimistic! Who knows, though? Maybe in the fullness of time such parallels will sound less fanciful.

  Time and distance always brought a certain romance, even to the least likely of locations. And Otto remembered that Pompeii, too, had its graffiti; some bawdy, some political and some nonsensical. When was it they had visited again? Once, in the mid-1960s, and again in the spring of 1981. Herculaneum, too. Mount Vesuvius. The Archaeological Museum in Naples. Now that was some city, with its high and cooling alleyways, sheltered from the glare of the afternoon sun. The narrow, crumbling tenements, linked by the criss-cross lines of washing, hung out like gossip above their heads by signoras with work-thickened arms.

  And where else did they visit in that part of the world? The Amalfi coast – the hillside towns of Positano and Ravello. It was the usual tourist trail, but not so well trodden on the first of their visits. Less packaged up, back then. And every few days they would take the train to visit the ruins of Pompeii. With notebooks in hands, they sketched out the proportions of the buildings, the width and positioning of the windows, the public spaces and street plan. And then, as a break some days, when the midday sun became too much to bear, they sought shade at the House of the Vettii. The fresco near its entrance seemed to fascinate the jostling groups of tourists, who laughed out loud or stared in amazement at the outsized appendage of Priapus.

  The carriages of the Circumvesuviana were scrawled with similar images, but no one took much notice of those. Riding the local train back to Sorrento, with the sun touching the sea beyond the mottled windows. Cynthia, back at the hotel, sketching in crayon the deepening blues of bay and sky. Otto, watching her work in the window, his long body stretched out on the bed. And as dusk came on he had studied his upturned toes, encrusted in dust, dissolving …

  So there were aspects of humanity that remained the same, despite time’s constant remaking. Perhaps, in the next millennium, tourists would flock in their thousands to see the ruins of Marlowe House. Maybe they, too, would queue in line to see the random obscenities on its walls. First things first, however. The immediate priority was to stop that demolition.

  Pacing around the columns, which glistened in the chill from the overnight rain, Otto studied carefully the spacing between them – measured out with the help of his cane. He saw again the long months they had spent studying the laws of classical proportion, firstly in textbooks and then later, when they had the money, during their travels across southern Italy.

  We tried to recapture some of that here, he thought. The play of light and shadow between the columns as one walked through them.

  It was a nice idea, but in retrospect a bloody silly one. They didn’t really take account of the conditions here in London. All that miserable English weather, reducing everything, buildings and sky, to a muddy and colourless grey. He was sure there must be moments, though, in the heat of a midsummer’s day, when their classical shadow-play was occasionally revived. A momentary trick of the eye for the casual passer-by, transported, almost without noticing, into the shady folds of a Roman forum. It was pleasant to entertain such thoughts, however far removed from reality they might be. It made the decay and desperation of this place a little easier for him to bear.

  He wondered, then, just what Anton would have made of Marlowe House in its present condition. Anton always referred to his sister and brother-in-law as the ‘patron saints of lost causes’. No doubt he would see its current state as a vindication of his views.

  A more personal thought suddenly troubled Otto’s conscience.

  I should have supported him, too. He was in a bad way.

  Once or twice, in the weeks following Cynthia’s death, there had been tensions between the two men. Otto became irritated by Anton’s sentimentality, by his tendency to deify his late sister, to speak about her in hushed and reverent tones: ‘as if she were Joan of Arc’, as Otto described it to a friend.

  Anton’s eulogies were his own way of dealing with the sense of devastation. But in seeking to come to terms with Cynthia’s loss, he had rapidly turned his sister into an alabaster idol, removing all nuance and complexity from her personality. In a few short weeks he had transformed her into a character from myth – and so banished her, without meaning to, into the distant past. It was something Cynthia herself would have found ridiculous. At the time Otto found it difficult to keep the impatience from his voice whenever Anton launched into one of his lengthy lamentations, and they had more or less lost contact with each other after that.

  I regret that now – my irritation with Anton. It was unfair of me to treat him so. None of us was exactly thinking clearly then.

  It must have been ten years now since Anton died. Otto had sent flowers but felt too awkward to attend the funeral. He wished he hadn’t lost touch with him after moving away. Maybe they could have been of some help to each other at that time.

  Another image sprayed onto a column distracted Otto from these thoughts.

  I haven’t seen one of those in years.

  He stepped forward to take a closer look. It was an inverted Y shape with an extended stem, set within a circle: the symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Halting before it, he reached out a hand and lightly touched his fingers to the perimeter of the circle. The sight of it alone was enough to evoke the atmosphere of the late 1950s, back in the days before Daniel came along.

  Twenty-Six

  The threat of the bomb hung over everything at that time. The arms race appeared to be spiralling out of control. At a personal level, as they had married not long before, this was among the happiest periods of Cynthia and Otto’s lives. But gradually they felt a shadow creep across their consciousness and conscience. The prospect of a nuclear conflict was becoming ever more real.

  One evening at the apartment in Marchmont Street, Cyn was reading John Wyndham’s novel The Chrysalids when she put it down and joined Otto on the sofa. Shaping herself around him, she pressed her face close to his. Glancing up from his own book, he saw that she looked
pale and disturbed.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  Nuzzling her nose against his cheek, she ran a hand through his thick mop of hair, admiring its pure black colouring in the light from the reading lamp.

  ‘Let’s never have children,’ she said.

  Otto flinched in surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Let’s never have children.’

  He moved his face back fractionally to inspect hers.

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  She nodded.

  Otto felt caught off guard – embarrassed by the sudden intrusion of this weighty subject into an evening of quiet reading. His mind was still focused on his own book, a rather dense new work by the philosopher Theodor Adorno, and it took him a moment to find his bearings. When he did, his tone was conciliatory.

  ‘Clearly it’s not something we’ve discussed a great deal, and we have plenty of time ahead of us in which to make an informed decision. Nevertheless, I must admit … I had hoped that, one day, perhaps, you know…’

  Cynthia felt guilty about her unprovoked lunge. She had put poor Otto on the spot. John Wyndham’s descriptions of a post-apocalyptic world had wrought a strange effect upon her. She smiled an apology, but could not deflect the sadness from her eyes. Now she kissed Otto on the lips and hugged him to her. This sudden display of ardour shocked him. There was nothing romantic or sensual in the gesture. She seemed close to tears.

  ‘Of course, a part of me hopes to have children,’ she said unsteadily, ‘but I’m really not sure, any more. Not because of us, but because of the world – the direction everything is heading. I’m not sure it would be fair of us to bring them into this.’

  Having recovered himself, Otto recalled the book that Cynthia was reading. Earlier, he had leafed through some of its pages.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, slipping an arm around her shoulder. ‘But let’s not give up just yet. We are young and we have plenty of time to think the situation over. We also have time to make a difference.’