Kelly’s sleep was dreamless, without travel to exotic cities or futures. She seemed only to have closed her eyes for a minute, but when she opened them again it was early morning. She didn’t know the time, but it was just starting to get light; a soft glow of brightness seeped in through the window. The model of the house was as she had left it, though it looked somehow bleaker in the cold half-light.
She knew there was no chance of her sleeping again so she got up, pulled on some clothes and left her house. She got in the car, slammed one of her own tapes into the player and started to drive. The roads were empty and her head was still full of confusions and drink from the night before. Her concentration was patchy and she didn’t know where she was driving to, but when she saw the sign for Monkwich it seemed as good a place as any other. The sky was big and distant, and the land fell flatly away from her on all sides. When she came to the coast she parked in the empty muddy car park, then went down to the beach. The tide was going out and the strip of sand at the water’s edge was wet, so that her feet left shallow but distinct tracks as she walked along. Automatically she began looking for stones with holes through them, but soon gave up the idea.
Before long she sat down on the sand and saw, lying a few feet away, a child’s bucket, the kind used to make sand castles. She picked it up, wondering whether it had belonged to a kid who was really upset to have lost it, or whether it had been thrown away in some fit of wastefulness and indifference at the end of the holidays.
She found herself kneeling on the beach and absentmindedly filling the bucket with sand. It was clammy and solid, and it got under her nails, but it felt good. And when she tipped the bucket out she found she’d made an almost perfect little tower: solid, smooth, nicely proportioned. She repeated the process several times, and before long she had built a little circle of towers, the beginning of a city. She dug in the sand with her hands, creating canals and rivers between the towers and she moulded a ring of city walls around them, and then she moulded little igloos, and an amphitheatre and a couple of pyramids.
She moved on to the decoration, pressing stones and bits of shell and feather into the sand walls. By the time she’d finished her task the sky was a light, cold, optimistic blue and a pale sun had bobbed up beyond the horizon. She stood up, brushed the sand from her hands, then from her knees. She surveyed what she’d done, and concluded that it looked a complete mess. It had no style or design or flair. It was dismal and pathetic. A child would have done better.
Slowly and with a carefully honed appetite for destruction she brought the heel of her boot down into the centre of the nearest sand castle. She watched it start to split and crumble, and then she put her full weight on it until it was completely flattened. More swiftly she did the same to the next tower and the next, until none was left standing, then she dragged her instep across the boundary walls and the other structures so that they collapsed and filled in the canals and rivers.
A voice behind her said, ‘Having fun?’
She didn’t have to turn round to know it was Dexter. Just the sound of his voice was enough to bring on feelings of anger and nausea.
‘Look what the tide washed in,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t the tide brought me here,’ he said.
‘Then what the hell did?’
‘I got up early. I borrowed a bike from the landlord at the Phoenix. I went to your house. When you weren’t there I had to think of where you might be. I figured you wouldn’t be at Sizewell, and I didn’t think you’d have gone to Thorpeness. I thought you might be here. I was just guessing. But I guessed right.’
‘You’re such an intuitive bloke, aren’t you, Dexter?’
She turned her back on him and walked away from the ruined sand city, heading further along the beach. The sun was now glinting off the dome of the nuclear power station visible just a few miles up the coast.
‘Please give me a chance,’ Dexter said miserably. ‘I’ve been up most of the night. I couldn’t sleep.’
He tried to put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder. It was done hesitandy and it wasn’t threatening, but Kelly revolved like a weathervane and as she spun she lashed out with her clenched fist and landed a punch right between Dexter’s eyes. His mouth dropped open in pain and surprise, and he toppled over backwards, landing oafishly on the sand.
Kelly was at least as surprised as Dexter and she had to fight the urge to kneel beside him and ask if he was all right. But she did notice that he’d dropped something he was carrying ‘ a black leather portfolio that had fallen away from him and was in danger of being soaked by an incoming wave. Without thinking, she retrieved the case and held it out to him, but Dexter wouldn’t take it.
‘Now that I have your attention,’ he said groggily, ‘I want you to listen for just one minute. Just one minute.’
Kelly didn’t want to listen, but it was true, he did have her attention, and it was surprisingly hard to walk away from a man you’d just knocked to the ground.
‘First,’ he said, ‘whatever you think about my original motives for coming here, they changed the moment I met you.’
He paused to catch his breath, but Kelly was aware there was something rhetorical about it too. It was a device to make sure the next thing he was about to say stood alone and was given its full importance.
‘It’s true, I am a fan of your father’s work,’ Dexter said. ‘And that doesn’t make me a monster. I’ve been interested a long time, longer than I ever realized. And I think I’ve made an important discovery. You know the famous article that referred to your father as the greatest modern English architect who never built a building.’
‘Of course I do,’ Kelly said.
‘Well, he was wrong. Your father did build something.’
Kelly stared at him. Had he really said that?
‘Open the portfolio,’ Dexter said.
She looked down at the leather case in her hands and realized she was trembling. She fumbled with the zip until she’d got it undone all the way, and then she stopped, hesitated, unsure that she wanted to open it up and see what was inside. She had no idea what it might contain, but whatever it was she thought it was likely to be scary and threatening. Perhaps her father had built something terrible – a torture chamber, a slaughter house – or something truly banal and trivial – a gazebo or a petrol station. But she spurred herself on. She had to see what had to be seen.
The portfolio contained a sheaf of clear plastic display pages and inside each one was a glossy eight by ten photograph. They were black and white images, very crisp and sharp, very professionally done, and they showed a building in various states of completion. First there were the foundations being dug, then poured, then a frame being erected, then walls and sections of roof being put in place. Only very slowly did the building take shape in the pictures; and at the same pace Kelly realized what she was seeing.
The house being built in the photographs was a full size version of her childhood doll’s house, her birthday present, her talisman, her final, undisclosed secret. The last few pictures showed the finished article, the completed building, the model that had become actuality.
The photographs were cleverly taken and dramatic. Low viewpoints and wide-angle lenses made the house look grander and more startling than she suspected it really was. But there was no doubt that this was a part of her past, her imagination made solid. She realized it must also be an even larger part of her father’s past and imagination.
She sat down on the sand beside Dexter. The world was swirling, and the sound of the sea had suddenly become deafening.
‘Did my father really design and build this? You’re certain?’
She had to be sure there wasn’t some mistake, that it wasn’t perhaps a house by another architect that her father had simply reproduced to make her doll’s house.
‘I’m sure,’ Dexter said. ‘I have documentation.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I was waiting for the right moment.’
‘After you’d fucked me?’
‘That was never part of the plan.’
‘So what was the plan exactly?’
‘To get close to you, to win your confidence, get you to talk about your father, then spring this surprise on you and see how you’d react.’
‘Was this supposed to be some sort of psychological experiment?’
Dexter looked ashamed. ‘Maybe I thought I could get an article out of it, get something published in one of the less academic architectural journals. Maybe I thought it was a way of making my own reputation.’
‘You’re such a piece of scum, Dexter, you know that?’
‘I’m not so bad. Really.’
She looked at the photographs again, lingering over some interior shots. These were spaces that she had previously only imagined, but it seemed she had imagined them quite accurately. The rooms were consciously stark and bare, very interior decor mag, very unlived in; finished but not humanized. Builders were visible in the early photographs: sixties characters with bare chests, long hair and headbands. And yes, it seemed to be in some foreign unfamiliar place, obviously not England. The light was harsh and bright, there were faded mountains in the distance.
‘You must be quite a researcher,’ Kelly said. ‘How the hell did you ever manage to track this place down? Where is it?’
‘I’ve known it most of my life,’ Dexter said. ‘I’ve lived in it. It belongs to my family. It’s the vacation place I talked about, in the desert, in California.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Kelly.
‘My father always liked to think of himself as some sort of patron of the arts,’ Dexter explained. ‘He had too much money. He liked to commission young up-and-coming artists and designers, though he wasn’t much older himself. Somehow or other he met your father at just at the right moment. I guess he must have been fresh out of architecture school, and my father employed him and told him to build whatever he wanted. We called it the “Cardboard House”, I was never absolutely sure why. I think it was some sort of reference to an essay by Frank Lloyd Wright, something about organic architecture.’
‘This is too much,’ Kelly said. ‘This changes everything.’
‘I don’t think my father liked the finished house very much. There was some sort of dispute about money or materials or earthquake regulations. He said the building was ugly and too hot, that sort of thing, but when I was a kid I didn’t care about all that stuff. To me it was like a fun house.’
‘You liked living there?’
‘I loved it.’
‘But why didn’t my father acknowledge it? Why did he keep up the pretence that he’d never built anything?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dexter said. ‘I was sort of hoping you could help me with that.’
Kelly didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Tears were running down her face, dripping from her cheeks on to the clear plastic display pages. She tried to wipe them away with sand-stained fingers. Dexter watched her and wanted to help. He wanted to put his arm round her but he was now far too wary to risk an attempt at consoling her.
He said, ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘You have no idea, Dexter,’ said Kelly. ‘You really have no idea.’
‘What do you want to do now?’
‘I think I want to show you my doll’s house.’
‘Huh?’