The Restoration of Otto Laird (18 page)

It was the kind of backhanded compliment Otto had come to expect from Anton. He was fond of his brother-in-law, but in the ten years they had known each other Otto had never quite established an effective method for engaging in conversation with him. Otto always felt caught off guard by Anton's particular kind of sarcasm, affectionate but slightly barbed, and could never find the right tone with which to respond. He feared either causing offence, by being too blunt in his comeback, or giving the impression that he had himself taken offence, by being too polite. Treading the line between the two was no easy task. In time, after several failed attempts, he discovered that the best solution was to smile politely and leave all the talking to Cynthia, who seemed to know much better than he what she was doing.

‘Yes, well, when you've finished your little tour of inspection perhaps you could put all that military training of yours to good use,' Cynthia said to Anton. ‘There's a rats' nest in the attic that needs terminating.'

Anton, who had trained at Sandhurst and spent some years in the army before taking up a career in the City of London, was quite different in character to his sister. Their tastes, their interests, their ideas on culture and politics – everything seemed to run in contradistinction. There were times when Otto had the impression that Anton's entire personality was defined on the basis of what his older sister was not; a childhood impulse for contrariness, got completely out of hand. Even their looks differed greatly. She was petite and delicate, with an auburn bob and a taste for flowing garments that grew ever more extravagant as the 1960s progressed. He was thick-set, ruddy and fair-haired, usually wearing a bespoke tailored suit, or – at weekends – a starched white shirt and pressed beige slacks. His style, it seemed, was unvarying. Whatever Anton wore, however, he always looked to Otto like an officer in civvies; someone who would never feel at home unless buttoned up in blazing red and standing to attention.

‘Does your brother not agree with you about
anything?
' Otto once asked Cynthia, shortly after meeting Anton for the first time. He had been somewhat shocked by the sharpness of the exchanges between them. ‘I thought for a moment I must be in the House of Commons.'

‘Don't worry,' she answered with a smile. ‘It's a kind of game between the two of us, although at the same time we're perfectly serious in our views. Maybe it's just the way some middle-class siblings in this country express their love for each other. It's all that is left over once our natural affection has been drilled out of us at school.'

Otto knew from previous conversations that Cynthia, like her brother, had undergone a strict education. She sometimes described herself, with a hint of a smile, as a ‘victim of the British public-school system'. To Otto, this sounded like an exaggeration. Cynthia's privileged upbringing appeared to him to have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it had furnished her with her perfect diction and cut-glass accent, a sound that affected Otto like music. It had also given her impeccable posture and natural grace, self-confidence and knowledge in a wide range of academic subjects. Not to mention a number of practical skills: fixing a carburettor, skinning rabbits without flinching, rolling a cigarette in the fingers of one hand.

On the other hand, Cynthia's background appeared to have left some less positive traits, perhaps going some way towards explaining her somewhat troubled character. Her personality combined warmth and frostiness in equal measure. She was capable of showing great vulnerability; breaking into tears unexpectedly, or hugging and kissing Otto in public with an intense, almost passionate affection. Yet she was also capable of sudden retreats into coldness, of closing off emotionally, quite unexpectedly, and sometimes within moments of these outpourings of warmth. To Otto, Cynthia seemed to be locked in a constant battle with herself – these differing impulses wrestling for ascendancy. Was she essentially a warm and passionate person, whose natural affection had been checked by the coldness and formality of a British public-school education? He sometimes believed this to be the case. At other times, however, it appeared to him that her tendency towards outbursts of emotion had in fact been
exaggerated
by that education; that in attempting to suppress those very qualities, it had somehow made them flower all the more, and to a degree that was not always healthy.

In some respects, the dual nature of Cynthia's personality embodied, for Otto, the dual nature of England itself – a country that combined an innate conservatism with an impulse towards free-spirited anarchy. The two sides of its character (militarism and Kipling on the one hand, the Diggers and the Beatles on the other) seemed caught in permanent creative tension; the latter both fighting against, yet feeding off, the former. That Cynthia generally embraced the anarchic side of the divide appealed greatly to Otto. The unpredictable moments of conservatism he accepted from her without question, because he loved her and they were a part of her originality.

Anton, however, Otto did not love, and at times he found his brother-in-law's tirades against socialism, trade unionism and anti-war protesters, not to mention his sarcastic and somewhat personal asides, a little irksome. All the more so, perhaps, because some of these personal asides – and in particular Anton's unerring knack for pointing out inconsistencies in Cynthia and Otto's own lives; what he once called, with a friendly beam, ‘saying one thing and doing another' – carried more than a grain of truth. His remarks about their new home in Hampstead – traditional, expensive, perhaps a shade ostentatious, the kind of house that wouldn't look out of place in Purley, Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells – again hit the mark.

He felt himself inwardly flinch at Anton's observation.

‘We can get to work in the attic later on,' Otto said. ‘Let's have a beer in the garden first.'

He and Cynthia worried, sometimes, about their increasingly lavish lifestyle, which did not sit comfortably with their political convictions. During their early years together, they had earned very little, although they did have access to money thanks to a trust fund set up for Cynthia by her businessman father. She always referred to this account, somewhat enigmatically, as ‘the source', largely because she was embarrassed by its existence. After gaining recognition with their design for Marlowe House, they expanded Unit 5 to Unit 12, and took on an increased number of projects from around the world. While Unit 12 remained a collective, however, with everyone taking an equal salary just as before, an unforeseen and at first peripheral source of income had made the Lairds, over the past few years, very well-off indeed.

Cynthia, at weekends, had started jotting down in her notebook a few designs for textiles. They were abstract patterns, based largely on studies from nature. It was a hobby, as much as anything, something to distract her while Otto was reading or relaxing to some records. Upon seeing the drawings, a friend in the home furnishings industry suggested launching a limited edition of curtains, using them as a basis. The reception they received was so positive that the production run continued. Soon the line was extended to include wallpaper, tablecloths and bed linen. Demand for the designs grew at such a rapid pace that Cynthia was forced to put her architectural work on hold. Suddenly she found herself, entirely out of the blue, cast in the role of ‘Britain's queen of interior design', as one magazine had put it at the time. She hoped one day to return to her first love of architecture, although this now looked increasingly unlikely, as the success of her business spiralled, and with it the new-found wealth that she and Otto enjoyed.

Before the move to Hampstead, they had spent almost ten years in Cynthia's flat on Marchmont Street. Being so close to the West End was a major plus in those earlier days, and it was a relatively short walk from their home to their office in Fitzrovia. But with their growing success and the expansion into new premises on Portland Place, not to mention their plans to start a family, Otto and Cynthia – who by now were well into their thirties – decided it was time to move away from the heart of London into a bigger space further out.

They bought the house in Hampstead on an impulse. As Anton had noted, it was a departure, stylistically, from what might have been expected of them. Nevertheless, Hampstead, like Bloomsbury before it, was an area with a slightly bohemian reputation, even though its particular brand of bohemia carried a more expensive price tag.

They settled down onto the garden chairs with beers and Anton in tow.

‘So how long to go now, Cyn?' asked Anton. ‘I've lost count.'

‘Three months,' she replied.

‘July, eh? Well, I'm pleased for you. We both are. Gayle talks about it all the time. We were beginning to wonder if you two would ever get around to having children. I thought that maybe Marx had forbidden it, or something.'

‘Would you like some nuts?' Otto interrupted, with a hint of irritation. ‘I can get you some from the kitchen.'

‘That sounds nice, old chap, thank you.'

When Otto returned to the garden a few minutes later, the sun had broken through the clouds.

‘Thanks for coming to help out today,' Otto said, placing the bowl of nuts before Anton. ‘We appreciate your coming over …
really.
'

‘Couldn't leave Cynthia and yourself all alone to sort out the unpacking,' Anton said. ‘Not when the bun is browning so nicely in the oven.'

Otto looked confused. After fifteen years in England, he was still coming across new phrases all the time. He was about to head back to the kitchen when Cynthia rested her hand on his arm.

‘Otto's already done most of the unpacking,' she said to her brother. ‘But if you can help out with a few bits and pieces we'd be grateful. There are one or two heavy items he could use a hand with, and the lawn could do with a trim…'

As he looked again at their old front garden, overflowing now with plants and flowers, Otto tried to remember the tightly mown patch of grass it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, a few tastefully planted flower beds around its periphery had been the only concession to colour. It was odd, Otto noted, that when he looked back at that period now, he could no longer see it as it had been in reality, but only through the home-made Super 8 cine films he had taken at the time. He didn't see Daniel as the flesh-and-blood child, gap-toothed and blue-eyed with a jet-black bowl fringe, but as a grainy and flickering figure zooming in and out of focus; a flash of white, or of burnished gold, haunting the washed-out frame. Technology seemed to be intruding upon past reality, intervening in Otto's powers of recall. Even his memory was being forced through its prism. The situation was similar regarding his earlier memories, from the 1940s and 1950s – sepia-tinged now, thanks to the surviving film and photographs, and captured again in their immediacy only with considerable imaginative effort.

Otto could see, in his mind's eye, Daniel as he played on the old blue swing, or as he kicked a giant football around the front lawn. But it was the film that Otto now saw – not the memory. The home movie had been taken in order to preserve that memory, yet the memory itself had gone. If anything, the home movie had become a barrier to that memory, not its aid. The odd colours of the footage, by turns saturated or ghostly pale, together with its grainy quality were no longer indicative of a primitive and faulty technology. They had
become
the period in question; they defined it in its essence. Thanks to the development of Super 8 technology, Otto thought, the entire period of the 1960s and 1970s would forever have the texture of deteriorating film stock.

While outwardly, for the Lairds, the early years spent in this house had been among their most fulfilling, there had also been a number of underlying tensions in the marriage; tensions that Otto had perhaps glossed over in the light of subsequent events. They emerged for him now, like small weeds among the abundant flowers of the garden, troubling the domestic idyll he had created in memory. It was painful, but he knew he must face it openly.

No more lies, he thought. Not at this late stage of the game. Know thyself, Otto, if you can bear to …

The unexamined life must be placed beneath the microscope; the evidence sifted afresh. It was time for that now. No more romanticising of his own past. If old age brought wisdom, it was because it also brought honesty – the laying aside of the ego, of all mental as well as bodily vanity. It threw its unforgiving light upon the misdemeanours of the past, and demanded a closer inspection.

Cynthia, he accepted, had not been happy then, for a longer period than he had previously allowed himself to admit. He could see that clearly now, once he had penetrated in his imagination beyond the images seen so often in those old home movies: of her pushing Daniel back and forth on the swing at what appeared to be unnaturally high speeds; her smile wide, her auburn hair shining and her pale-blue eyes laughing. When he slowed down the frame to a freeze in his memory, the pain behind her eyes was clear enough. She had suffered from post-natal depression, and the lines on her previously youthful face had deepened during the five years after Daniel was born.

Watching him grow from an infant to a young boy had been a source of joy but also distress for her. The sheer speed of time's passing had brought with it mixed emotions. The loss of one stage of her son's development was compensated by the arrival of the next, but it left in its wake a residual sadness. In no time at all, the new-born infant was gone – replaced at first by a toddler, and later by a child. Cynthia must have felt a strong sense of life passing at this time. Her own mortality must have been thrown into relief by the rapid transformations of her son. And at some point, Otto now realised, that feeling must have panicked her. Unable to express it to him, or perhaps even to herself, she had sought escape in other ways – they both had – and for a while it had jeopardised everything.