‘So you’re happy then?’ Angelo asked Otto, once they were ensconced in the taxi and crossing over Blackfriars Bridge once more. He was surprised at how straightforward it had all seemed.
‘Yes, they seem very nice. I can’t say I’m exactly relishing the prospect, but I’m sure they’ll make it as painless as possible.’
‘Good … good…’
Angelo glanced over at Otto, but he was looking out of the window, his body turned slightly away. Now wasn’t the time for a post-mortem on the evening’s proceedings.
A few minutes earlier, as they climbed into the back of the taxi, Angelo – buoyed by the evening’s success – had asked Otto if he would like to take a detour via Marlowe House.
‘We needn’t get out, or even stop,’ he had told him. ‘Just take a peek before the filming begins.’
But he had misjudged the mood.
‘It’s late,’ Otto said, ‘and I’m feeling tired. I’d rather just get back to my hotel, if you don’t mind. I’ll see it again, soon enough.’
Angelo sensed that something was wrong, but Otto’s seniority and the peculiar dynamics of their relationship – close in some ways, distant in others – meant that he couldn’t possibly ask him outright. So he spent much of the cab journey trying to work it out for himself.
At first, he wondered whether Otto was unhappy about being in a taxi with him at all. Angelo had secretly promised Anika that he would see Otto safely back to his hotel. Perhaps Otto had guessed that some arrangement had been made. He certainly seemed a little put out when Angelo insisted on sharing a cab with him. Otto was fully aware that Angelo’s house in Dulwich was in the opposite direction to his Marylebone hotel.
Or perhaps Otto still harboured secret doubts about the television programme.
Have I pushed him into this? thought Angelo. Just a little?
The problem with Otto was that he was such a powerful personality, so innately strong-willed, that it was easy to forget, sometimes, that he was now elderly. Anika was right in many ways. She didn’t see Otto as Angelo did, as a gifted architect and a man of near-superhuman qualities. Because she was not part of the profession herself, and hadn’t known Otto until his best days were behind him, she saw him for what he currently was: her weak and vulnerable husband, who had very nearly died on the operating table a few months before. Angelo had always thought of Anika as a bit of an obstacle; as someone who didn’t quite appreciate or understand the man she had married. Yet he had been unfair to her.
I’m the one with the skewed perspective, he thought. She sees Otto as he is, not as he was. She sees the person and not the reputation. I really must make more effort to see it from her side.
Then Angelo thought of Daniel. Was it he who was bothering Otto? In all their discussions of recent weeks, Otto had never once mentioned Daniel; even here, in the city where his son was born, and where he still lived with his own young family.
Angelo glanced over at Otto, who remained staring out of the window. The rapidly passing street lights played across an inscrutable face, fluttering between light and darkness in a roll of moving stills.
They were entering the heart of the Square Mile. There was some interesting architecture in this part of town. Otto looked out for examples now to distract himself from other thoughts. St Paul’s, the Old Bailey, the meat market at Smithfield. He glimpsed a fragment of Roman wall as they swung around a corner of the Barbican. Otto was consciously emptying London of all emotional content, regarding it in purely professional terms, with the detached eye of the connoisseur.
As they reached the busy West End, his attention broadened from individual structures to the scene as a whole. From the back of the cab it seemed to be a city of shape-shifters. Buildings, traffic, streets and people became hybrid, animate beings in perpetual flux. At night, he thought, new evolutionary orders seemed possible; all types of matter appeared equally alive. The brightly lit advertisements were clearly in rudest health, the species best adapted to this strange primordial world. The figures moving beneath them were at a lower stage of development: submerged beneath the neon’s glare; drifting through the murky depths in states of flickering consciousness.
Otto suddenly spoke, his gaze not stirring from the window.
‘Where’s Marchmont Street from here? I’m afraid I’m a little lost.’
Otto had moved into Cynthia’s apartment there the day after they were married at a local registry office. The summer of 1956. He had almost no possessions. The books that filled his rented room were all loans from the college library. On the day of the move he condensed his life to the size of two small suitcases, which Cynthia helped him carry across from Russell Square tube station.
‘Marchmont Street? It’s some way behind us. We passed it a while ago.’
Angelo was about to ask if they should turn around, but he sensed that this was not what Otto wanted. Instead he sought to draw him out of himself.
‘What was the apartment like?’ he asked.
‘Small, functional, prone to draughts and cold. It was located above a small grocery shop. I would pop downstairs in my dressing gown and slippers whenever we needed milk or bread.’
Even now he could hear the heavy jangling of the bell; smell the fresh spices as he pushed open the door.
Angelo waited to see if Otto would expand any further, but he was gazing once more out of the window. A reflective silence returned to the cab. This time, Angelo allowed it to settle.
* * *
In his hotel bedroom, Otto lifted his suitcase onto a chair. He was feeling tired and not especially looking forward to the lengthy routine of preparing for bed. With a yawn, he removed the various items that were needed for his nightly ablutions. After taking off his clothing, he gathered up the materials and headed for the bathroom.
Back at home, the lighting was dim and discreet, allowing him to wash in a welcome soft focus. It was bright enough for him to see what he was doing, yet hazy enough to allow him to avoid the graphic detail. When he switched on the bathroom light now, however, and saw himself naked in its full-length mirror, Otto gasped in shock. The bathroom itself was luxuriously appointed: large sunken tub, marble tiles and a bidet. But its lighting was the stuff of nightmares. By creating a strong chiaroscuro effect, bathing parts of the room in a lurid brightness while hiding others in shadow, it threw his body into pitilessly stark relief. Not only did it emphasise every nook, cranny, scar, wrinkle, sag, vein, liver-spot and blemish on his grey and collapsing body, it elevated them all to some kind of hyper-reality.
‘Well,’ said Otto, transfixed and repulsed by his own reflection, ‘there’s nothing beautiful about this raw material.’
He was amazed at his own skin, which appeared to have acquired the shade and texture of beaten concrete. For one surreal moment, he saw himself metamorphose into one of his own buildings; one in urgent need of heavy maintenance.
When did this happen? he asked himself. I know my body is on the downward slide – it has been for the past forty years or so. But I didn’t realise things had sunk quite this low.
Were the lights at home in the villa really that flattering? Or had the ones in the hotel bathroom been installed by a sadist? There was no sign now of the dashing silver gentleman in the blue blazer and cravat. What a cruel illusion that had turned out to be.
Fighting back squeamishness, Otto began to study the scars from his operations, then the other marks and blemishes recording a long, long lifetime of accidents, injuries and illnesses. He had taken quite a battering. The knots and weals remained etched upon his flesh, as deep and vivid as a Dürer woodcut. Each one represented a different memory – a different crisis or trauma in his life. Otto ran his fingers across these marks in fascination, recalling each incident, when he could, and wondering how on earth he had managed to get this far at all. He marvelled at the resilience of the human body, of the human beings who suffered these blows and still kept bouncing back. All was laid before him here, nothing now was hidden. In the unforgiving light of the hotel bathroom, Otto had become a living map of almost a century of pain.
Twenty minutes later, he re-emerged from the bathroom. It was too late to call Anika – he would do it in the morning. He put on his pyjamas – yes, hide it all away now, please – and climbed into one side of the large double bed. Stretching behind him, he rearranged the pillows to his satisfaction, then set and checked the alarm clock that would wake him far too soon.
Perhaps they should list me, he thought, reaching out to the bedside light to welcome darkness.