‘I saw him once, Samuel Mars, with Patrick. We came out of the Council Chamber at the end of a long meeting and he was parked outside, which was unusual, waiting to take her home. As we spilled out Samuel opened his door and stood up, looking over, but I don’t think Stella saw him at first. She was talking with Charlie, who might have offered her a lift, as they were walking to his car. This was old Charlie, charming Charlie, and no matter how they went at each other in meetings they were always civil outside of the Chamber.
‘I think little Patrick had gotten out of the car too and called out “Mum”, and she turned around, still laughing at some joke of Charlie’s, and saying, “Don’t worry, Charlie, my boys are here, they’ve come to collect me!”
‘There were lots of us leaving, you couldn’t blame her for not immediately clocking the pair of them; but in those very few seconds of not being noticed, something happened to Samuel. Perhaps he thought she’d already kept him waiting long enough, perhaps he was embarrassed at not being spotted, I don’t know; but the look he gave her, full of burning fury: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man look at a woman that way before or since. I don’t suppose there was any more laughter at the Mars house that evening. I wonder now actually whether that wasn’t one of the last times…’
‘You know,’ he changed tack suddenly, ‘no one bothered to find out where she went, why she stopped coming to the meetings. Someone should have, don’t you think? And I was as guilty as anyone.’
‘Where is that squad car?’ asked Grey, it getting decidedly dark on the estate. The officers in the car they were leaning against now had the interior light on to catch up with the forms they were filling in.
‘Poor Charlie,’ Waldron went on, ‘met his end not twenty feet from where we stand; and as for Patrick… he didn’t stand a chance, did he, not with a father like that. I don’t regret what I did, you know.’
‘No, I sense that. So, if Samuel made Patrick bad, then what made Samuel?’
‘Who knows, he was certainly old enough to have stored up some bad experiences. Maybe something from the War? And as for why a woman like that would marry such a man, well I’ve often thought back to those times, to remember how things were, how we thought back then, whether women really did need to marry a man, any man, just for social standing.’
‘It’s not all bad then, the future. Some things get better.’
Grey was attempting to lighted the tone; yet Waldron was struck by another memory,
‘I think Patrick had another family once, a darker-haired wife, and kids.’
‘Yes, he had.’
‘I saw them once in town. He looked right at me, the dad — Patrick — he was the spit of his father, the same eyes. And I’m told now his daughter was the girl I saw on the stairs?’
Grey nodded.
‘Do you know the difference between Spanish concrete and British?’ Waldron suddenly brightened, glad to get himself back on more familiar ground. ‘Damp, we have it and they don’t. In sunny climes concrete bleaches white, makes ivory of every public building…’
Grey didn’t see much evidence of such crystal kingdoms here.
‘In Britain the rain gives concrete the look of sodden cardboard, while being almost purpose built to give bad health to anyone living in those walls, as much an incubator for bronchitis and pneumonia as asbestos is for its related conditions. Quite conclusively the worst thing the Romans ever did for us; and that’s even before we get onto stylistic concerns, not all of which prevailing wisdom I share incidentally.’
‘Well, it sounds like you’ve seen what it can be like abroad.’
‘I have. And there’s much to applaud in our estates of that era too — after all, something must keep drawing me back to here — Just look at it!’ He raised his arms as if to embrace the whole of the Hills. ‘The chaos of the place, the wildness of the greenery all around, the way the different materials age — you’d be a fool not to be thrilled by the daring of it all, the ripping up of the rulebook, the occasional flashes of architectural lunacy.’
He pointed to a row of little buildings facing just away from them, the nearest seeming to form out of its unmown lawn as the trunk of an oak does from the forest floor, the structure — the same for all in the row — intentionally featureless but for windows that, like in a child’s drawing, were small and different-sized and pushed up into the corners and along the edges of the building’s face, leaving an expanse of uniform brickwork at its centre,
‘Look at those lopsided eyes — madness; and how little light you’d get inside. I’m not sure if it’s a lunatic or a sadist who thought people ought to live in such objects.’
That theme exhausted, he moved on,
‘But of course, there’s the strong community spirit here too — though forged more through solidarity than hope — which Campbell Leigh, and Charlie before him, have done much to channel wisely. You know what the irony of it is though?’ asked Waldron as they both looked across the courtyard now to the short block of flats that Charlie had been found beside, its structure a mix of glass, tiles, concrete and the same red bricks of the shopping centre that Grey had earlier noted glowing in the sun. ‘That the upkeep of these buildings is so expensive once the rain gets into the concrete reinforcing, that in a hundred years there might not be very much of it left. Imagine that, the predominant style of the whole Late-Twentieth Century absent from the architectural record.’
Waldron was rattling away now almost on autopilot, these obviously long-held and oft-rehearsed set- pieces,
‘There are some who love these buildings and estates for political reasons, that they represent the only time socialistic principles guided architecture…’
By now though Grey was zoning out. He heard a car engine coming by, then moving away, then getting louder again as it negotiated the unintuitive route toward them.
‘…where every house was as large as every other, every tenant treated the same, all run by the state as one grand scheme! Like socialism itself I suppose, another experiment that cost a fortune and failed in wet climates. Ha, forgive me, my little joke. And there it is, the unwritten first rule of architecture, that every building looks better on a sunny day.’
With that the car finally found its way around to them, and stopped to take them home.
