City of the Mind

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CITY OF THE MIND

  Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in History at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and six grandchildren, and lives in London.

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; and Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award.

  She has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List.

  By the same author

  FICTION

  Going Back

  The Road to Lichfield

  Nothing Missing but the Samovar and Other Stories

  Treasures of Time

  Judgement Day

  Next to Nature, Art

  Perfect Happiness

  Corruption and Other Stories

  According to Mark

  Pack of Cards: Collected Short Stories 1978–1986

  Moon Tiger

  Passing On

  City of the Mind

  Cleopatra’s Sister

  Heat Wave

  Beyond the Blue Mountains

  Spiderweb

  The Photograph

  Making It Up

  Consequences

  Family Album

  NON-FICTION

  The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  A House Unlocked

  PENELOPE LIVELY

  CITY OF THE MIND

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For Adam and Diana

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by André Deutsch 1991

  Published in Penguin Books 1992

  Reissued in this edition 2010

  Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1991

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-190996-7

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  One

  Night. Lights on. The lights that glide in jewelled columns, red and white, that make glowing caverns of the windows opposite, that rake the bedroom ceiling in long yellow shafts. And in the sky, the dead and dancing sky, there are a million yesterdays. ‘Why are there stars?’ the child asks her father. He shakes his head, pulls the curtains to, and goes. It is late; she should sleep. And in any case he has no answer.

  London; Monday; eight-thirty. Matthew Halland, delivering his daughter Jane to his estranged wife, waited in the car, engine running, until he saw the front door open. He sat watching, one hand on the gear lever. He glimpsed Susan. He saw the door close. He accelerated away, carrying the child with him in his head – the sound of her voice, that downy cleft in the back of her neck, the small milky crag of her new front tooth. She was eight years old, and amazed him. And then as he turned from the side street into a busier one, as the traffic gripped and slowed him, as he halted for the lights, she began to slip away. The twinge of loss was swallowed in a rising tide of impatience – twenty to nine, the morning at his throat. The city had him in its current; yesterday withdrew. He switched on the car radio, rummaged with one hand in his briefcase. He made plans and decisions – get to Blackwall in time for a good look round before the site conference, have a session with Jobson about that staircase at Cobham Square. Jane returned for an instant – her sleepy voice, ‘Why are there stars?’ – and simultaneously he caught sight of the moon, a pale morning moon hanging above the city, sinking, drowned out by day. And at once time dissolved and he flitted to a moment when, as a boy, he saw the surface of the moon through a telescope, pitted and shadowed, a tangible landscape. That same moon, then and now.

  And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today, and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to the other. He is in London, on a May morning of the late twentieth century, but is also in many other places, and at other times. He twitches the knob of his radio: New York speaks to him, five hours ago, is superseded by Australia tomorrow and presently by India this evening. He learns of events that have not yet taken place, of deaths that have not yet occurred. He is Matthew Halland, an English architect stuck in a traffic jam, a person of no great significance, and yet omniscient. For him, the world no longer turns; there is no day or night, everything and everywhere are instantaneous. He forges his way along Euston Road, in fits and starts, speeding up, then clogged again between panting taxis and a lorry with churning wasp-striped cement mixer. He is both trapped, and ranging free. He fiddles again with the radio, runs through a lexicon of French song, Arab exhortation, invective in some language he cannot identify. Halted once more, he looks sideways and meets the thoughtful gaze of Jane Austen (1775–1817), ten feet high on a poster, improbably teamed with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Frederick Handel, all of them dead, gone, but doing well – live and kicking in his head and up there guarding the building site that will become the British Library. And then another car cuts in ahead of his, he
hoots, accelerates, is channelled on in another licensed burst of speed. Jane Austen is replaced by St Pancras.

  Thus he coasts through the city, his body in one world and his head in many. He is told so much, and from so many sources, that he has learned to disregard, to let information filter through the mind and vanish, leaving impressions – a phrase, a fact, an image. He knows much, and very little. He knows more than he can confront; his wisdoms have blunted his sensibility. He is an intelligent man, and a man of compassion, but he can hear of a massacre on the other side of the globe and wonder as he listens if he remembered to switch on his answering machine. He is aware of this, and is disturbed.

  The city, too, bombards him. He sees decades and centuries, poverty and wealth, grace and vulgarity. He sees a kaleidoscope of time and mood: buildings that ape Gothic cathedrals, that remember Greek temples, that parade symbols and images. He sees columns, pediments and porticos. He sees Victorian stucco, twentieth-century concrete, a snatch of Georgian brick. He notes the resilience and tenacity of the city, and its indifference.

  He sees, too, that the city speaks in tongues: Pizza Ciao, King’s Cross Kebab, New Raj Mahal Tandoori, Nepalese Brasserie. And he hears another clamour, a cacophony of sound that runs the whole gamut from Yiddish to Urdu, a global testimony reaching from Moscow to Sydney by way of Greece and Turkey and remote nameless birthplaces in Ireland or India or the Caribbean. The resonances of the place are universal. If the city were to recount its experience, the ensuing babble would be the talk of everytime and everywhere, of persecution and disaster, of success and misfortune. The whole place is a chronicle, in brick and stone, in silent eloquence, for those who have eyes and ears. For such as Matthew. Through him, the city lives and breathes; it sheds its indifference, its impervious attachment to both then and now, and bears witness.

  He climbs the heights of Pentonville Road, listening to Manila, seeing the fretwork of wrinkles on an old man’s neck, the tiny horned plaits on the head of a black baby, suspended between intimacy and invisible distance. He is exposed to everything: to what is here, and not here, to what is no longer here but only in the mind. And now it is nine-fifteen and he is impatient, restless at the hindrance of metal, tarmac and humanity that lies between him and his office, between him and the day ahead. He drums his fingers on the steering-wheel, achieves another hundred yards, halts and drums again. At the Angel crossroads he contemplates the airy wasteland of orange cranes, scaffolding, hoardings and battered buildings clinging to their last days of existence, everything coming down and going up simultaneously, it seems. He notes a late Victorian façade – red terracotta Gothic arches, capitals with acanthus – what has it been? Bank? Pub? Glassless, backless, one-dimensional, it has weeks or months left, at most. Its columns are plastered with torn posters: Uriah Heep, The Dog’s d’Amour, Boxing: Anthony ‘The Terminator’ Logan, Jazz & the Brothers Grimm. In front of it two children cling to balloons like silver cushions, a man with Rasta hair crowded into a roomy beret waits to cross the road. For thirty seconds Matthew is at one with all this, and everything that it implies, and then he is off down City Road. The moment is gone, irretrievable, and with it the conjunctions, the jigsaw of time and reference.

  He liked to be at his office by nine-thirty, and today was not. At twenty to ten he dropped his briefcase beside his desk, shuffled through the mail, reached for the phone, scowled sideways as the door opened.

  ‘Matthew, I’d just like to …’

  ‘I’m not here.’

  ‘Forgive me, I must be hallucinating. I’ll come back when you are.’

  ‘I’ve got a site conference at Blackwall. I’m off again at once. I only came in to collect stuff and make some phone calls. This afternoon, Tony, OK?’

  ‘I’ll come to Blackwall with you,’ said Tony Brace. ‘Too long since I took a look. Knock on my door when you’re ready.’ He went.

  The architectural firm of James Gamlin and Partners occupied the top three floors of a renovated nineteenth-century warehouse in Finsbury. On the ground floor was a row of shops – stationers, newsagent, locksmith, dry cleaners – and a dental surgery. The partners, five of them, along with associates and other staff, made regular use of the stationers and newsagent but would only have patronized the dentist (grimy windows of opaque green glass, eroded brass nameplate) in desperate circumstances. Up aloft, in their empire, all was sweetness and light, the carpets smelt new, the pot plants, sprayed twice daily by the receptionist, gleamed with well-being. The chairs for waiting clients were of discreetly good design; on the walls were striking black and white photographs of the firm’s most valued projects. The junior members worked in an open-plan area, bright, light, airy, quietly humming and clacking with new technologies. The partners, such as Matthew and Tony Brace, had individual offices. James Gamlin, once an enfant terrible of post-war architectural innovation and now something of a grand old man, was in semi-retirement and tended only to pay infrequent and interfering visits which required tactful handling and a certain amount of self-control all round.

  Matthew made three phone calls, had a word with his secretary, gathered up papers and alerted his colleague.

  ‘Why the interest in Blackwall? I thought you hated the place?’

  ‘It has a certain awful fascination.’

  Tony, one of the original partners, specialized in restoration and conversion. His interest in the firm’s big commercial developments, of which the Blackwall site, in Docklands, was perhaps the largest they had ever taken on, was tinged with genteel disdain, but sensibly pragmatic. James Gamlin and Partners had to make a living.

  ‘I want to see how they’re dealing with that sill detail in the cladding on the upper levels,’ he explained, as they got into the car.

  ‘The fixing fillets spring back if you’re not careful. Quite exciting. They nearly had a nasty accident last week.’

  ‘I hope everybody’s insurance is in order.’

  And so long as it is, thought Matthew, striking out into City Road again, give or take the odd Irish navvy is really of no consequence. Not that that is what Tony means at all – he is no more cold-blooded than the rest of us, merely prudent. Well, there hasn’t been a fatality on a Docklands site yet, and if and when there is, it won’t be the first sacrificial blood shed in this city. He saw for a moment, in the mind’s eye, a sequence of bodies toppling from buildings, squashed under brick and stone and timber – Roman slaves, squat medieval peasants, eighteenth-century labourers. Uninsured, poor sods.

  ‘Maybe we should have tucked a spare criminal under the foundations.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A Roman custom. To placate the gods.’

  ‘How very unpleasant,’ said Tony, after a moment. Matthew, who had known he would say that, or something similar, accorded himself five points on a private scoring system. He both liked Tony and was intermittently exasperated by him. The conjunction with workmates is a curious one – associates as randomly achieved as neighbours or relatives-in-law, and frequently as crucial to well-being. You spent more time with the people you worked with than with your friends. Or with your child. Matthew had known this man for ten years, day in, day out; he knew his opinions on everything, the extent of his wardrobe, the way he combed his hair. He knew his way of life. Tony Brace lived in Richmond, in circumstances of impeccable domestic content. Matthew and Susan had visited, in the early days of their marriage; driving home, they had mocked the décor and the connubial complacency. Thinking of this, Matthew felt ashamed, and faintly envious.

  They were moving now through one of the city’s most turbulent areas of metamorphosis. Gaunt shells of nineteenth-century buildings, delicately shrouded in green netting, stood alongside huge spaces bright with the machinery of construction: yellow cement-mixers, orange bulldozers, immense elegant cranes in yellow, red, green, blue – dinosaurian monsters unleashed to wreak their mechanical will upon the London clay.

  ‘Bishopsgate Jurassic,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Sorry?’ br />
  ‘Nothing. An association that sprang to mind. Silly, really.’

  ‘Oh, I see – the bulldozers. Yes, they are rather, aren’t they?’

  They were stationary again, at a big junction, at the hub of things, crowded by cars, buses, pedestrians nipping through where they might, crowded by brick and stone and concrete and by glass which soared here into the sky. A sky loaded with rain, against whose grey surface there shone on one side the white spire of a church, across which crawled, soundless, a glinting aircraft.

  ‘This city,’ said Matthew ‘is entirely in the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect. Without you and me it hasn’t got a chance.’

  ‘It seems to me to be managing quite well. This bloody traffic is real enough. What time did you say your meeting was?’

  ‘Eleven. I’ll be all right. What I mean is that significance is in the eye of the beholder.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be taking a right at these lights?’

  ‘I’m going to try some creative back-street work. Now, for example, what does that wall mean to you?’

  ‘Well – Georgian brick. Probably once the churchyard wall, now gracing the private car park for this office block. A rare survival given that all this was flattened in the Blitz.’

  ‘Exactly. And here you are bearing witness for the wall, so to speak.’

  ‘Are you sure this is going to get you back to Aldgate?’ said Tony.

  ‘With any luck it will.’ Matthew swung round a corner and into the traffic again.

  ‘It’s this interesting combination of silence and eloquence. Depending on what the viewer happens to know. And the tenaciousness. That particular stack of bricks occupied the same space in, maybe, 1740. The same bricks, in the same place, looked at by different people. That, to me, makes a complicated nonsense of the passage of time.’

  ‘Talking of which, it’s past ten-thirty. There’s no left turn at the end here – had you realized?’