I glance through the application pack. Some of the questions are decidedly strange. I can see how asking what possessions you want to bring or what fixtures and fittings you might change is relevant, but what about:
23. Would you sacrifice yourself to save ten innocent strangers?
24. What about ten thousand strangers?
25. Do fat people make you feel: (a) sad; (b) annoyed?
I’d been right earlier, I realize, when I used the word integrity. These questions are some form of psychometric test. But then, integrity isn’t a word estate agents need very often. No wonder Camilla had looked bemused.
Before I fill it in I Google “The Monkford Partnership.” The first link is to their own website. I click, and a picture of a blank wall appears. It’s a very beautiful wall, made of pale, soft-textured stone, but a little uninformative, even so.
I click again and two words appear:
WORKS
CONTACT
When I select “Works” a list fades onto the screen:
SKYSCRAPER, TOKYO
MONKFORD BUILDING, LONDON
WANDERER CAMPUS, SEATTLE
BEACH HOUSE, MENORCA
CHAPEL, BRUGES
THE BLACK HOUSE, INVERNESS
ONE FOLGATE STREET, LONDON
Clicking on each name brings up more pictures—no words, just images of the buildings. All are utterly minimal. All are built with the same attention to detail, the same high-quality materials, as One Folgate Street. There isn’t a single person in the photographs, or anything that even hints at human occupancy. The chapel and the beach house are almost interchangeable: heavy cubes of pale stone and plate glass. Only the view beyond the windows is different.
I go to Wikipedia.
Edward Monkford (b. 1980) is a British techno-architect associated with the minimalist aesthetic. In 2005, along with data technologist David Thiel and two others, he formed the Monkford Partnership. Together they have pioneered the development of domotics, intelligent domestic environments in which the house or building becomes an integrated organism with no extraneous or unnecessary elements.[1]
Unusually, the Monkford Partnership accepts only a single commission at a time. Their output to date has thus been intentionally small. They are currently working on their most ambitious project so far: New Austell, an eco-town of 10,000 homes in North Cornwall.[2]
I skim down through lists of awards. The Architectural Review called Monkford “a wayward genius,” while Smithsonian magazine described him as “Britain’s most influential starchitect…A taciturn trailblazer whose work is as unshowy as it is profound.”
I skip to “Private Life.”
In 2006, when still largely unknown, Monkford married Elizabeth Mancari, a fellow member of the Monkford Partnership. They had one son, Max, in 2007. Mother and child were killed in an accident during the construction of One Folgate Street (2008–2011), which had been intended to serve as the family home as well as being a showcase for the fledgling Partnership’s talents.[3] Some commentators[who?] have pointed to this tragedy, and Edward Monkford’s subsequent lengthy sabbatical in Japan, as the formative event behind the austere, highly minimalist style that made the Partnership’s name.
Returning from his sabbatical, Monkford abandoned the original plans for One Folgate Street—at the time still a building site[4]—and redesigned it from scratch. The resulting house became the recipient of several major awards, including a Stirling Prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects.[5]
I read the words again. So the house started with a death. Two deaths, in fact; a double bereavement. Is that why I felt so at home there? Is there some kind of affinity between those austere spaces and my own sense of loss?
Automatically I glance at the suitcase by the window. A suitcase full of baby clothes.
My baby died. My baby died and then, three days later, she was born. Even now, it’s the unnatural wrongness of it, the horror of that casual inversion of the proper order of things, that hurts almost more than anything.
Dr. Gifford, a consulting obstetrician despite being barely older than I am, had been the one to look me in the eye and explain that the baby would have to be born naturally. The risk of infections and other complications, plus the fact that a cesarean is a major surgical procedure, meant it was hospital policy not to offer one in cases of prenatal mortality. Offer—that was the word he used, as if having a baby by cesarean, even a dead one, was some kind of treat, like a free basket of fruit in a hotel. But they’d induce me with a drip, he said, and make the whole thing as fast and painless as possible.
I thought: But I don’t want it to be painless. I want it to hurt, and to have a live baby at the end of it. I found myself wondering if Dr. Gifford had children. Yes, I decided. Doctors married young, to other doctors usually, and he was far too nice not to have a family. He would go home that night and describe to his wife, over a pre-dinner beer, how his day had been, using words like prenatal mortality and full term and possibly bit grim. Then his daughter would show him a drawing she’d done at school, and he would kiss her and tell her she was brilliant.
I could tell from the set, strained faces of the medical team as they went about their work that even for them, this was horrible and rare. But whereas for them professionalism could provide some sort of refuge, for me there was only an overwhelming, numbing sense of failure. As they attached the drip with its cargo of hormones to get me started, I could hear the howls of another woman, farther down the maternity ward. But that woman would walk out with a baby, not an appointment card to see a bereavement counselor. Maternity. Another strange word, when you thought about it. Would I even be a mother, technically, or was there some other term for what I was about to become? I’d already heard them saying postpartum instead of postnatal.
Someone asked about the father and I shook my head. No father to contact, just my friend Mia here, her face white with misery and worry as all our carefully laid birthing plans—Diptyque candles and water pools and an iPod full of Jack Johnson and Bach—were discarded in the somber rush of medical activity; not even mentioned, as if they’d only ever been part of an illusion that all was safe and well, that I was in control, that childbirth was barely more taxing than a spa treatment or a particularly fierce massage, not a deadly business in which outcomes like this were perfectly possible, even to be expected. One in two hundred, Dr. Gifford had said. In a third of cases, no reason was ever found. That I was fit and healthy—before the pregnancy I’d done Pilates every day, and run at least once a week—made no difference; neither did my age. Some babies simply died. I would be childless, and little Isabel Margaret Cavendish would never have a mother. A life would never happen. As the contractions started I took a gulp of gas and air and my mind filled with horrors. Images of abominations in Victorian formaldehyde jars swam into my mind. I screamed and clenched my muscles, even though the midwife was telling me it wasn’t time yet.
But afterward—after I had given birth, or given death, or whatever it should be called—everything was strangely peaceful. That was the hormones, apparently—the same cocktail of love and bliss and relief every new mother feels. My daughter was perfect and quiet and I held her in my arms and cooed over her just as any mother would. She smelled of snot and body fluids and sweet new skin. Her warm little fist curled loosely around my finger, like any baby’s. I felt—I felt joy.
The midwife took her away to make casts of her hands and feet for my memory box. It was the first time I’d heard that phrase and she had to explain. I would be given a shoe box containing a snippet of Isabel’s hair, the cloth she was swaddled in, some photographs, and the plaster casts. Like a little coffin; the mementos of a person who had never been. When the midwife brought the casts back, they were like a kindergarten project. Pink plaster for the hands, blue for the feet. That’s when it finally started to sink in that there would be no art projects, no drawings on the walls, no choosing of schools, no growing out of uniforms. I hadn’t only lost a baby. I had lost a child, a teenager, a woman.
Her feet and all the rest of her were cold now. As I washed the last bits of plaster off her toes at the tap in my room, I asked if I could take her home with me, just for a while. The midwife looked askance and said that would be a bit strange, wouldn’t it? But I could hold her for as long as I wanted, here at the hospital. I said I was ready for them to take her away.
After that, looking at the gray London sky through my tears, it felt as if something had been amputated. Back at home, raging grief gave way to more numbness. When friends spoke to me in shocked, sympathetic tones about my loss, I knew of course what they meant, and yet the word also felt deadly accurate. Other women had won—victorious in their gamble with nature, with procreation, with genetics. I had not. I—who had always been so efficient, so high-achieving, so successful—had lost. Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat.
And yet, bizarrely, on the surface everything was almost back to the way it had been before. Before the brief, civilized liaison with my opposite number in the Geneva office, an affair played out in hotel rooms and bland, efficient restaurants; before the mornings of vomiting and the—initially awful—realization that we might not have been quite as careful as I’d thought. Before the difficult phone calls and emails and the polite hints from him about decisions and arrangements and unfortunate timing, and finally the slow dawning of a different feeling, a feeling that the timing might be right after all, that even if the affair was not going to lead to a long-term relationship it had given me, unmarried at thirty-four, an opportunity. I had more than enough income for two, and the financial PR firm I worked for prided itself on the generosity of its maternity benefits. Not only would I be able to take off almost a whole year to be with the baby, but I was guaranteed flexible working arrangements when I came back.
My employers were just as helpful after I told them about the stillbirth, offering me unlimited sick leave; they’d already arranged maternity cover, after all. I found myself sitting alone in a flat that had been carefully prepared for a child: the Kuster crib, the top-of-the-range Bugaboo, the hand-painted circus frieze around the spare bedroom wall. I spent the first month expressing breast milk that I poured down the sink.
Bureaucracy tried to be kind but, inevitably, wasn’t. I discovered that the law makes no special provision for a stillbirth: A woman in my position is required to go and register the death, and the birth, simultaneously, a legal cruelty that still makes me angry whenever I think about it. There was a funeral—again, a legal requirement, though I would have wanted one anyway. It’s hard to give a eulogy for a life that didn’t happen, but we tried.
Counseling was offered, and accepted, but in my heart I knew it wouldn’t make any difference. There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it. I needed to work. When it became clear I actually couldn’t go back to my old job for another year—you can’t just get rid of someone who’s doing maternity cover, apparently; they have rights just like any other employee—I resigned and started working part-time for a charity that campaigns to improve research about stillbirths. It meant I couldn’t afford to go on living where I was, but I would have moved anyway. I could get rid of the crib and the nursery wallpaper, but it would still always be the home where Isabel isn’t.