and above all, a fluffy cloud sailed through a wash of cerulean blue.
When Frances went to see the building it was a humid, gray, and overcast day. The air was laden with dust; it was a Friday, and the site was deserted. The project had reached that stage in the life of a building when it presents a picture less of construction than destruction; her first impression was of a bomb site. The brick looked raw; a confusion of pointless-looking wires snaked out of holes in walls. Some parts seemed almost finished; others were just foundations.
“You have to try to imagine what it will look like when we get the marble cladding,” Andrew said. “It’s supposed to be white, translucent, a sort of sheen, that’s the idea, so that it looks less solid than it is. But I haven’t seen the marble yet. I hope we don’t end up with the kind that looks like old paint with brown cracks. The kind, you know, that they’ve got on the Bugshan hospital.”
“Yes, I know.” Frances threaded her fingers into the mesh of the security fence. “I may be wrong, but isn’t there a lot more actual wall than in the artist’s impression? It seemed to be made entirely of glass.”
“Mm.” Andrew frowned. “There were certain impracticalities in the basic design.” He cheered up. “The mosque will be over there.”
“It’s going to have its own mosque?”
“Oh yes. Every public building needs one. And there’s going to be a heliport on top. At the center will be a courtyard, with a fountain rising out of a base shaped like an incense burner. There are sixty-four fountains in Jeddah, and this will be the biggest. If you come here—”
Her loose sandals full of grit and dust, she skittered toward him over the clawed-up ground. He touched her shoulder lightly, turning her to see. “If you look over there, that’s going to be the Minister’s private entrance.”
“Can’t he go through an ordinary door?”
“No, he doesn’t seem able to.”
“What about trees, are you having trees?”
“There are ten thousand flowering shrubs on order. They’re going to be planted out along the street frontage, approximately where we’re standing now. You don’t know what a treat it is, to work without the penny-pinching you get everywhere else. This architect, he’s an Egyptian, I did think at first that he’d got carried away, but they’re prepared to back it, they’ll put the resources in. You have this confidence, you see Fran, that when it’s done it’ll be absolutely right.”
“What about sculptures? Are you having sculptures?”
“Yes, there’s a big one planned for the south side. It’s a model of the solar system.”
“Working, is it?”
He squeezed her arm. “It’s going to be great. You’ll see. The architects in Cairo have ordered this scale model, about tabletop size—they’re having it built specially in Los Angeles. I can’t wait to have it, it should have been here before I came. Then, you see, I’ll be able to get it over to people what it’s going to look like.”
“I wish I could see it, when it comes. But I can’t go to your office, can I?”
“I’ll try to sneak you in, some weekend. During Friday prayers is the best time, when everybody’s at the mosque.”
What a lot this building meant to him. She looked up into his face. “It will be splendid. I’m sure.”
“Yes … but even so, I wish I’d been here a few years back, when it was really boom conditions. They’re not building so much now, and not the space-age stuff, all those novel shapes. It’s all socalled Islamic architecture now. There’s no challenge in it, anybody can build some piffling little archways round a courtyard. Now this Egyptian, he’s the right stuff; he’s got all the little nods to the religious element, but he’s got a sense of adventure as well.”
“Andrew—” she swiveled a glance over her shoulder, uneasy—“there’s a policeman across the road, he’s staring at us.”
“Yes, better go, I suppose.” Andrew seemed unable to tear his eyes from the stacked-up pipes, the piles of builders’ rubble.
“Do you know something, Fran—this will be the last of the best. Now the oil price is coming down they won’t build on this scale again. I should have come here years ago.”
He looked wistful as he said it, as if a golden age had passed. Construction sites were the pleasure gardens of his mind. As she picked her way over the ruts and gullies he put out a hand to help her, despite the policeman’s presence. There was a great ditch between the site and the road. She teetered over it across a plank; Andrew followed.
