The Restoration of Otto Laird

by Nigel Packer

  She agreed with him on that last point. They must channel their concerns more positively. In February 1958, at Cynthia’s instigation, they attended the inaugural meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, held at Central Hall in Westminster.

  * * *

  The darkest moment of that era came a few years later, in October 1962. Cynthia and Otto were on a camping holiday in the Lake District when news broke of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Over the course of the next two weeks, before the resolution of the dispute, a war between the USA and Soviet Union appeared inevitable. Everyone knew that it would quickly become a global confrontation. They also understood, in disturbing detail, just what the effects of a nuclear strike would mean.

  During the daytime, in that difficult fortnight, they took long walks together in the hills. They wanted to take their minds off events elsewhere, to feel themselves fully alive. In the evenings, they sat nervously beside the campfire, wrapped in thick jumpers and waterproofs, listening to the news bulletins on a transistor radio. Their mood became increasingly sombre as the crisis deepened. The USA was demanding that the Soviet Union remove its weapons from Cuban soil. The Soviets showed no signs of acceding. Both sides, it seemed, were becoming more intransigent with every day that passed.

  ‘Surely the instinct for survival will win out,’ said Otto, as they listened to the war of words intensify on the radio. ‘Sanity, at some point, must prevail. Somebody has to back down.’

  He sounded, from the tone of his voice, as though he were trying to convince himself as much as Cynthia.

  She said nothing for a while. A slight mist wreathed the fields and trees, causing the glow from the campfire to thicken in the twilight. The wet grass breathed its scent into the evening air.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ she said at last. ‘Do you really think they’ll act sanely in the face of all this? There’s so much fear, such paranoia, on both sides.’

  Logs cracked and splintered in the fire. They looked out into the murky twilight, at the vast and looming shapes in the distance. Even the mountains themselves seemed suddenly vulnerable.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Otto. ‘Fear makes people do terrible things. All rationality disappears before it. It’s there within our recent history.’

  He sounded especially thoughtful as he said this.

  Cynthia noticed that the reflection from the fire had transformed the lenses of his spectacles into two miniature flames. She slid an arm through his, their waterproofs squeaking noisily.

  ‘It’s the scale of it all that’s so hard to comprehend,’ she said. ‘The scale of what will happen if these things are finally used. Not just to our own generation, but to many afterwards. The environmental devastation, radiation poisoning lasting centuries, maybe millennia. It’s almost impossible to grasp.’

  Otto was staring intently into the fire. All words of solace had deserted him. Cynthia paused before speaking again.

  ‘As a girl I used to try, sometimes, when out walking in the countryside with my family, to peel back the layers of time – to imagine the long-term development of the landscape around me. I did the same thing yesterday, when we went walking up in the hills. Going back one hundred years or so is never a problem. At that stage, I’m only just moving beyond the curve of a human lifespan, so to some extent I feel able to empathise with life as it was lived back then.

  ‘Moving back further in time, it becomes more difficult. Standing stones. Burial cairns. When trying to find my way back into prehistory, all sense of understanding starts to fade. I can’t imagine what life was like, what it must have felt like to be a human being. Their worldview would have been completely alien to us.’

  A fat log burst in the wind-ruffled flames as Cynthia pursued her train of thought.

  ‘Once I try to go back even further, into deep time, geological time, to the sculpting of the landforms beneath my feet, then my imagination fails me completely. All those thousands, millions of years become meaningless – an abstract number only. I can’t connect them to my own tiny existence. It’s the same, I suppose, when trying to look any distance into the future. It’s hard enough to picture oneself not existing, let alone the planet itself. I can’t imagine how bad things would be … for whoever, or whatever, followed us. My empathy can’t reach that far ahead.’

  Otto noticed that she was shivering slightly, and not only from the autumn chill. He drew closer to her in the firelight, trying to better protect her from the stirring easterly wind.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow things will be better,’ he said, finding his voice once again. ‘Maybe tomorrow they’ll finally come to their senses.’

  * * *

  Throughout the 1960s, they participated in a number of antinuclear demonstrations. On one occasion, they joined a sit-down protest before the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall. Otto was concerned about Cynthia taking part, as she was already four months pregnant with Daniel. Fearing a strong response from the authorities to this act of passive resistance, he tried to persuade her not to attend, but she had insisted.

  ‘It’s even more important now that we take part, isn’t that obvious?’ she asked him.

  There was a hint of impatience in her voice as her hand rested on her belly.

  Otto, however, remained worried. During the protest, he sat shielding her as best he could, while police officers waded into the crowd and dragged protesters away. Cynthia sat firm when two young officers approached them with purpose, but Otto quickly relented. Climbing to his feet and holding out a hand to ward off the policemen, he announced in a firm voice that his wife was pregnant, causing them to hold back self-consciously while he gently helped her up.

  ‘You should act more responsibly, given your condition,’ said one of the officers, as he tried to clear a path for Cynthia through the crowd.

  ‘And so should they,’ she responded angrily, pointing towards the MoD building, before recovering herself and thanking the officer for his help.

  Following a thaw in Cold War relations, the profile of the anti-nuclear movement dimmed somewhat during the 1970s. But in the early 1980s, with a renewed heightening of East–West political tensions, fears of a large-scale nuclear conflict revived. Otto and Cynthia listened at the dinner table with a sense of déjà vu, as Daniel voiced his concerns.

  ‘One push of a button by one of these maniacs in power, that’s all it will take,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll be gone … everyone.’

  Glancing at each other, Cyn and Otto wished that they could somehow put their teenage son’s mind at rest, but they didn’t quite know what to say to him. Otto thought of offering some comforting platitude, about nothing having happened in the three decades since the Cold War began. But the words seemed to stick in his throat.

  ‘I know that look,’ Cynthia said to Otto afterwards. ‘I felt exactly the same thing, twenty years ago. It’s strange to see it in Daniel’s eyes, too.’

  In October 1983, she marched alongside her son and a group of his friends at a demonstration in central London, attended by an estimated one million people. Later that night, back home in Hampstead, as they lay in bed in the near-moonless dark, Cynthia described the scene to Otto, who had been unable to go due to work commitments. The top of the swaying oak tree was just visible outside, a softly moving shadow against the window.

  Expressing surprise at the size of the protest, Cynthia reflected on the cyclical nature of the peace movement. It had now reached, perhaps even surpassed, the scale and intensity of the early 1960s.

  ‘The old campaigns, the old causes, they never disappear completely,’ she said. ‘They simply wait their moment to return.’

  ‘The old campaigners, too,’ replied Otto. ‘I haven’t seen you this fired up in years.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Definitely. I would say that your views now are more radical than when you were in your mid-twenties. It’s refreshing to see, as it is precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen as one grows older. I must admit I can sens
e my own energy levels decreasing somewhat, now that we’re both turning fifty. I don’t have quite the same vitality as before. Yet yours just keeps increasing.’

  ‘Growing old gracefully has never much appealed to me,’ Cynthia admitted. ‘This might be one more mid-life crisis, or it might be the beginning of wisdom, I’m not sure which.’

  Her voice in the darkness sounded fainter as they talked on. It was the end of a long day for her, Otto told himself. Yet it was that hour of the evening when Cynthia’s thoughts ran deeply, even as she struggled in her fatigue to express them.

  ‘I was thinking a little about it today,’ she continued, ‘during the middle of the demonstration. I was watching Daniel as he walked ahead with his friends. They were trying to stop their banner from blowing away in the breeze. It was flapping loose from one of its poles and at one point it managed to wrap itself around his head. The others were laughing and trying to rescue him from the folds. He looked clumsy, as he struggled to escape, but also determined, like a young version of you. And I thought while watching him wrestle with that banner that he’s the reason I’m growing impatient with those in power.

  ‘Do you remember all those years ago, when we sat beside our tent in the middle of the Lake District and waited to hear if the world would end? I said something about lacking the empathy to see far into the future? Well, I was wrong. They were the words of a young woman, a childless woman. Because all that changes once you have children. Your vision grows, somehow. Your empathy extends into the future … into their future. I can feel that future now, not as dry abstraction, but as physical reality. In my bones. I feel it pass via us through Daniel and his children, on down through the generations, and I feel how precarious it all is.’

  Otto touched her shoulder in the darkness and waited for her to continue.

  ‘It sounds vague, I know. Mystical, almost. But I don’t know how else to express it. I feel more urgently these days that we must start to put things right. For Daniel’s sake, and the others who follow. Because unlike before, I can sense their potential. I feel it, pressing down on me like a weight of responsibility. The empathy is difficult to bear, sometimes – it’s like a genetic ache. But it’s where all this new-found energy of mine has come from.’

  These last words widened into a lengthy yawn, prompting Cynthia to break into a smile as she turned on her side towards Otto. He smiled, too, and stroked back the greying hair from her face. As they settled down to sleep, their limbs entwined instinctively in a complex but effortless arrangement; three decades of intimacy, enshrined in a single gesture.

  While Cynthia slept, Otto lay awake a little longer, thinking the day over while listening to the rise and fall of his own breathing. Or was it Cynthia’s breathing? He had to pause a moment to make the distinction. As with so many other aspects of their life together, the rhythm of the two had become almost inseparable.

  Twenty-Seven

  Emerging from Russell Square tube station, Otto absorbed the early afternoon scene. It was unambiguously sunny, the streets thick with tourists, making their way to and from the British Museum.

  So here he was, then: the spot where it had all begun, and where it had more or less ended. The Alpha and the Omega, the A and the Z, separated by a few squares and streets.

  The site of the old café where he had first spoken to Cynthia lay a few hundred yards to the west. But this was not what Otto had come to Bloomsbury to see. Turning south, he walked to the last destination on his inner map of memories: the leafy space of Queen Square. There he settled on a bench, rested his cane beside him and drew a deep breath.

  * * *

  The evening of 22 June 1985 began like any other. A concert was being given in front of Kenwood House, a former stately home on Hampstead Heath. Like hundreds of other people, Cynthia and Otto had taken along a picnic to enjoy the music and the Saturday-evening sunshine, locating themselves on a spare patch of grass on the hill overlooking the stage. Several friends were there with them, plus Anton, his wife Gayle and their youngest daughter Jessica – sitting and chatting around the large chequerboard blanket they had brought with them. Daniel was unable to join them that evening. He was inter-railing in Europe with some friends after completing his first year of study at Cambridge.

  Anton was holding forth to Otto. There was nothing malicious in his tone, but he was becoming rather heated all the same; something to do with the Miners’ Strike that had ended a few months earlier. It was a thorny subject between them. Gayle looked uncomfortable as she listened, glancing down at the stage below them and willing the orchestra to begin. There was some Mozart on the programme that evening, plus Tchaikovsky and Handel – the light-hearted, crowd-pleasing pieces rather than the great ones.

  Their group was animated and lively, the babble of voices and bursts of laughter indicating a frisson of excitement at the thought of the concert to come. Cynthia, however, was quieter than usual, kneeling and pouring the red wine carefully into a row of plastic beakers. Otto had suggested that they cancel that evening, because of her headache, but Anton and his family were coming up especially from Surrey, and so she had taken some aspirin from the bathroom cabinet and told him with a smile that she would be fine. She didn’t look fine, though. Very pale, he remembered thinking. The black rings that had recently appeared beneath her eyes were deeper than in previous days. Her lips looked thin and white.

  As Anton continued speaking to him, Otto noticed in the corner of his vision that Cynthia was swaying slightly, as if to an unheard rhythm. And then the long topple forward, almost in slow motion, her face landing heavily among the plastic beakers and the wine spreading over the rug. A sound, too – almost a sigh – as she did so. There was a momentary silence, shock, slight confusion among the frozen group. And then a stirring into life, a low hum of concern, the hands fluttering around Cynthia as Otto and Anton kneeled by her side. Someone reached for a bottle of water. They assumed that she had fainted from the warmth and believed this would be sufficient to revive her. But suddenly she was moving, a kind of convulsion, her body shaking violently as she lay face down on the blanket. And at that moment everything changed. A sense of fear began to take hold, their voices raised now, questioning. What do we do? We need help here – please help us, what do we do? People were looking over from the surrounding groups, some getting to their feet and coming over to see. One, a doctor, middle-aged, took charge. He bent over Cynthia, saw the foam coming from her mouth.

  ‘We need an ambulance,’ he said, ‘and quickly.’

  But they were a long way from an ambulance – there was no ambulance.

  ‘We’re in the middle of the fucking Heath,’ Anton said.

  And then Jessica was sprinting for a phone box, or to get help wherever she could. Others from their party, too – and people they didn’t know – running for help because it was all that they could do. And the convulsions were getting worse.

  Otto heard his own voice. ‘Cyn,’ he was saying, ‘Cyn.’

  But he almost didn’t recognise it was his own voice speaking.

  The doctor, sounding urgent, said: ‘Help me turn her, we have to turn her over.’

  Anton then said: ‘She’s dying … I think she’s dying,’ and because he had used that word the clamour around them heightened.

  Gayle tried to calm Anton, who was starting now to shout, and the wine from the blanket was running down Cynthia’s face as they turned her over and it was the tongue, the doctor explained, he must stop the tongue from sliding back and blocking the windpipe. Otto’s eyes were blind with fear and there was a pounding in his ears but he was holding her head still, just as the doctor had told him, and Anton was helping, too, while the doctor worked his fingers inside her mouth. Gayle was sobbing, and everyone around them was looking and yet not looking, and then suddenly people with yellow bibs appeared, running up the hill towards them. There was an ambulance on site, they said, and they lifted her carefully, as instructed by the doctor, and Cynthia appeared to resist and struc
k one of them in the face with a flailing arm, but it was the convulsions, the doctor said, keep carrying her down there, keep going.

  Otto was walking quickly beside her as they carried her down the hill. Anton and Gayle were following and the crowds were parting before them and the music was starting now, the stage looming straight in front of them, and they were playing the introduction to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, which used to be a favourite of Otto’s mother, and they were at the ambulance and lifting her inside and the doctor was instructing them and Otto was getting in. Just the husband, someone said, but then Anton climbed in as well and then the doors were shutting behind them and they were driving away very quickly. They couldn’t see Cynthia, because the paramedics were all around her, but they could hear her moaning and Anton’s eyes were large and staring, and they could hear the sound of the siren but it was strange and muffled in a way Otto had never heard before, because this time he was on the inside of it.

  One of the paramedics spoke to them and his voice was calm but it didn’t make Otto feel calm and he was replying to the paramedic but he didn’t know what he was saying, and then they were pulling up at the Royal Free Hospital and the doors were opening and they were wheeling her out fast and through the doors of the entrance. Otto and Anton followed but they could only just keep up and then someone came to speak to them and the crowd of medics with Cynthia at their centre disappeared into the distance. The doctor in the white coat with the clipboard was asking them questions with a controlled urgency and they were answering and the doctor went away and they were offered somewhere to sit but they just kept pacing and pacing, neither saying anything for minutes at a time, and this was unusual because Anton was normally such a talkative fellow and besides they were always arguing, and then they looked up and someone else in a white coat was coming down the corridor towards them, a woman, but different to the one before, a different young woman who looked as though she was going to say something to them and stopped before them and opened her mouth to speak.