The following day, as the weather had improved, they decided to eat lunch together on the rooftop terrace. Anika had prepared two mushroom omelettes, served as Otto liked them with a sprig of parsley and a salad of green leaves. With the clouds of the previous day deserting the wide sky, the autumn sun had regained its strength and now emitted a heat that was almost Mediterranean in its intensity. Even this late in the year it could surprise unwary hikers, but Anika understood its moods and sat wearing a wide-brimmed hat for protection. Otto chose to sit in the shade.
The strong afternoon light gave the surrounding hills an insubstantial quality, their liquid shimmer contrasting with the raw physicality of the Alpine giants across the valley. With the change in light and visibility (a celestial telescope, finding its range), Mont Blanc and its companions appeared much closer than the day before, their white peaks outlined with shocking clarity against a topaz sky. The lake below, a deeper blue, lay sunken in its own haze.
Anika and Otto sat quietly, their eyes half closed in the languid warmth, and listened to the spirited scraping of the year’s last cicadas. Sometimes, the Lairds enjoyed a leisurely glass of wine with their lunch. A fragrant white from the Valais was their current favourite. But they both had things to do that afternoon, and Otto couldn’t spare the hour or two needed to sleep it off. He sipped a glass of sparkling water instead.
‘What time’s your tennis lesson?’ he asked.
Anika had recently joined a new club in town and was currently working on her topspin. She was keeping herself busy following her retirement from a desk job at the United Nations.
‘Three-thirty,’ she replied. ‘You won’t be needing the car?’
She raised her sunglasses as she spoke.
‘Not today. It will take me a couple of hours at least to get through all that paperwork. I’ll go later in the week.’
Otto’s current passion was eco-housing. Once a week he drove to Lausanne to conduct some research at the institute of technology. But a large pile of correspondence awaited him in his study, and he decided he could delay it no longer. Shortly afterwards, drawing up a chair at his mahogany desk, he ran a hand forlornly through the thick wad of letters and listened to the Bentley pulling away over the gravel. He paused to remove something from his pocket – the egg, now wrapped in his handkerchief – and slipped it into a drawer. At least one had been saved from the wrecking ball.
He wearily lifted a letter from the pile and looked at the postmark on the buff envelope. Paris: the 10th arrondissement. It was from Pierre, his old friend at the Sorbonne. Otto had always been a voluminous writer, exchanging regular letters with influential friends from academia and the arts. Often he used this correspondence as a sounding board for his never-ending flow of ideas. In recent years, however, he found that he had less and less to say. Now he was starting to regret his former wordiness. The letters were becoming a chore, but he didn’t know how to halt them. He couldn’t just admit that he had given up on thinking. To his academic friends, it would be like admitting that he had given up on breathing.
‘Should have kept your mouth shut all these years,’ he muttered to himself, taking a paper knife and slicing open Pierre’s letter.
As ever, it was composed in perfect English. The handwriting was microscopically small and claustrophobically spaced. Thirteen pages of the stuff. Otto sighed, flicked briefly through its contents and noted the references to the usual suspects: Foucault and his panopticon, Lefebvre and space production. It was like some game of academic tennis, this ferocious hitting back and forth of different names and systems of thought. Pierre and Otto were in the depths of a discussion about the architecture of control, its uses by various political regimes as a way of securing and maintaining power. It was an important topic, but one with little bearing upon Otto’s current field of research. It was a misunderstanding between them, really; a sign that, with the passing years, Pierre and he were steadily drifting apart. The themes of their discussions were broadly the same as they had been many decades before. But Otto, at least, had moved on.
Pierre still thought of Otto as a pioneer of the ‘Brutalist’ style of building. He remembered him as the energetic and committed young socialist who saw in architecture – the art of arranging space – the means to contribute to both social and personal liberation. Architecture in those days was a political act, no less. Otto and many others at the time believed that by creating large housing estates it would be possible to ensure that everyone lived in a clean, safe and comfortable environment. The well-kept public spaces would encourage interaction and neighbourliness; the uniform size of the apartments would abolish notions of hierarchy. People from all backgrounds, he had argued, would eventually want to inhabit these estates. They would become a microcosm and a foretaste of the society to come: peaceful, progressive, egalitarian, and free from all physical and social division.
That was more than fifty years ago and things had, of course, worked out differently. Otto himself had also changed. Unlike some of his fellow travellers, he hadn’t abandoned his ideals completely in the rush to embrace Neoliberalism, a trend that began as a trickle in the late 1970s and became a great flood after 1989. But he had let those ideals quietly slip. He had laid them carelessly aside, one day, and conveniently forgotten where he had left them. Now all he wanted was to build unobtrusive houses in the Jura hills and tend to his broken body, grabbing moments of happiness where he could. And if most days he barely had the energy to walk down the hill in order to fetch a baguette from the local store, then battling the worst excesses of capitalism was clearly no longer on the agenda.
Pierre, on the other hand, remained up for the fight. His energy could be terrifying – even now, when he was well into his seventies, it showed no signs of dissipating. He regularly worked eighteen-hour days, while writing a new book, and three times a week ran the circumference of the Bois de Boulogne, usually clocking up a time of less than three hours. Politically, Pierre remained deeply immured in the spirit of 1968 – he had played no small part in the events that unfolded in Paris that May. He knew about the long-term waning of Otto’s political commitment, but there were passages in their correspondence when he remained convinced that the small red flame in his old friend’s heart had not yet died out entirely.
Otto would not have agreed.
He doesn’t realise how far it’s gone, he thought, noting with a slight sense of shame Pierre’s tireless activism, and then remembering his own recent afternoon spent communing with an egg.
It’s not his fault – I’ve kept it all from him. The Bentley, the golf clubs, the beneficial tax arrangements, the underpaid cleaner from the developing world who visits twice a week and tends to our expensive mess. I’m hopelessly bourgeois now, I’m afraid. I’m the class enemy – perhaps I always was.
But then he knew how hard it was to really change people. He had seen it in others and experienced it in himself. All those noble intentions, abandoned to self-interest. Cynicism, winning out each time.
It’s such a struggle, trying to keep up the struggle. I don’t know how Pierre manages to do it.
Otto had learned his lessons the hard way. Throughout his career, he had encountered the brute forces of capital on a regular basis, and he knew the machinations of which it was capable. He had come up against its iron laws many times, when fighting to maintain the integrity of his projects, and usually he had lost. Apartments in his own Taylor House, for example, developed as a serious experiment in social housing, now sold for large sums of money to wealthy young people with a taste for ‘retro’ and ‘urban grit’. The building had even featured on some TV property show: Angelo had sent him the link. The imbecile of a presenter called it ‘funky’, whatever that meant.
No, Otto thought. Everything has become a commodity nowadays; and maybe every person, too. All of us have become commodities to each other. The profit motive has entered every sphere of life, and its hegemony is complete.
He was among those who had seen this coming – he had fought against its spread for decades. Finally, sometime in the mid-1980s, he had thrown in the towel, sickened by the grasping cynicism of the emerging generation. Cynthia’s loss had been the final straw, sapping the last of his once steely resolve. And so he had fled to France, where he hid himself away in the mountains, buried in perfect seclusion until he encountered Anika one day in a hillside café overlooking Lake Annecy. She had approached him as he sat nursing a coffee at a terrace table and asked if she could borrow his binoculars. And then, much to his surprise, life had begun again.
But how could Otto explain all this to Pierre? How could he explain the long and tortuous journey that had brought him to his hillside villa in the Jura?
Pierre’s a sociologist at the Sorbonne, Otto thought. The man lives in a time capsule.
Lectures, seminars, late-night discussions at literary cafés – Otto had seen it all first-hand during his visits there in the 1970s. And from the tone of Pierre’s letters it was clear that nothing much had changed. Otto knew the slow, eternal rhythms of academia. He also knew that, for all their brilliance and fine intentions, the people who inhabited that world were as far removed from everyday reality as the average rock star. Otto loved Pierre like a brother. They had been through a great deal together in the old days. But he no longer wanted to read his long and rather boring letters about Foucault. Or reply to them, for that matter. Otto’s powers of recall were not what they had been, for one thing, and he struggled to keep up with all the changes in terminology, especially now that his voracious appetite for books had waned. There were moments when he didn’t have a clue what Pierre was writing about. Well, now was the time to draw a line. He must put a stop to it, once and for all, and either re-establish their friendship on a sounder footing, or abandon it altogether.
He picked up his pen.
Dear Pierre,
Thank you very much indeed for your latest letter. I should say at the outset that I agreed with everything you said – something of a first, I know. Your argument was beautifully crafted and I have little else to add. In our games of intellectual head-tennis, you take game, set and match every time. You’re a clever old bugger, aren’t you?
Sorry if my opening remarks appear flippant – I realise you were probably expecting a more considered response. But I’ll have to ask you to show some compassion and forgive an old friend his crassness. I’m rather frail these days, you see, and losing my mental sharpness. Many of your more subtle arguments are simply lost on me. These are my shortcomings, of course – not yours. I’m sure that your discourses remain as lucid as ever. But my mental energies are somewhat depleted nowadays, and those that have been left to me are largely dispersed in concerns more pressing than a long meditation upon architecture as a tool of political control. I have to deal with this pain in my gut, for a start, and I also find myself teetering on the brink of mysticism – an odd thing for a man of science, I realise, but I’m trying to work it through.
In short, I’m no longer the coherent and articulate figure of old, bursting with a passionate commitment to social transformation and global justice – the person you befriended in the late 1950s, in other words. My ambitions these days are more modest ones. I want my stomach to hurt less, I want Anika to be happy and I want to design a building that’s as perfect as an egg. That’s about it. Oh yes, and I want to try to save Marlowe House from destruction. That’s the rundown tower block in south London, by the way, not the mystifyingly fashionable one out west. They announced a few days ago that they plan to demolish it.
I know you’ll welcome my attempt to fight this decision, but I feel duty bound to confess that the reason I’m trying to save Marlowe House is not because of the high ideals it once represented. I could pretend that’s the reason – it would certainly make me appear nobler in my intentions. But any such claim would be less than honest. No, I want to save Marlowe House for other reasons. For itself, and for myself. Because I think it’s a good building and I’m still rather proud of it, despite the decades of neglect, its terrible reputation for crime … and three generations of yobs, pissing in its stairwells. Yes, despite all these negatives, I still think that Marlowe House is a building worth saving. It probably has something to do with Cynthia as well. I haven’t really thought about that one, but I expect it’s the case. She played a large part in its design, after all, and I think she would probably have wanted me to do something. Finally, I’m doing it just to keep myself occupied, to wake myself up a bit, and maybe ward off some of this encroaching senility. I know there’s something not quite right with my mind, these days, although it’s so hard to tell what exactly, when one is living on the inside of these things.
I danced with a butterfly recently, you know. Can you imagine? An elderly man, prancing round the forest like a wood nymph. I nearly gave myself heart failure. And I’ve started taking my clothes off at inappropriate times. Poor Anika got a terrible fright the first time it happened. So I think it’s pretty obvious that something is amiss. I find myself in an odd situation, mentally. Is it like this for everyone at a certain age, do you think? So little serious work has been done on the psychology of ageing. I find that there are moments of great clarity, even wisdom of a kind. But there are also moments of terrible confusion – perhaps that’s the price for those of wisdom. And I keep thinking about the past. It swamps me, sometimes; more vividly than I’ve ever known before.
So, you see, it’s important that I keep myself busy, although not – I regret to inform you – by reading any more Foucault. I hope that doesn’t upset you. Do you think we could write about other things instead? How is your body bearing up these days, for instance? Do you still get laid, now and then? Do you regret your failed marriage to the violinist? Are you as frightened of ageing as I am? My guess is that you must be, judging by your behaviour. Racing round the Bois de Boulogne like a man possessed. You ought to be careful at your age, you know. They’ll find you dead under the trees, one of these days, and think you were up to no good.
Anyway, I hope you don’t mind the rather candid tone of this letter. I realise it’s somewhat out of keeping with our usual discussions, but please don’t take any offence, because absolutely none is intended. I’m attempting to save our friendship, not destroy it. It’s been so many years since we spoke honestly to each other. I think now is the time to scrape off this crust of formality that has developed between us, and get back to basics while there is still time. We used to have so much fun together, do you remember?
I hope to hear from you soon, old dear, and sorry once more for my rambling thoughts. Look after yourself and good luck with the launch of the new book. Friday week, isn’t it?
With deepest affection,
Otto
He read the letter back to himself, correcting one or two grammatical errors as he did so. Should he send it? If he was going to, then he must do so quickly, before he had a chance to change his mind. Pierre was an unpredictable fellow, and there was no telling how he might react to Otto’s irreverent tone. It was decades since they had spoken like this, before the accolades and awards began to weigh them down with their own self-importance. Pierre might laugh delightedly, with that deep, infectious bellow of his. Or he might catch the first flight over and punch Otto’s lights out.
Sod it – just send it to him, thought Otto. I can walk to the postbox this minute. I’m feeling well enough today. Then I’ll come back and write some more, now that I’m in the right frame of mind.
He was already planning how to tackle the next letter on the pile. It was from his old friend Laszlo – an architect turned avant-garde composer. But just as he was searching out his jacket in the hallway, the telephone rang in his study.