The Restoration of Otto Laird (24 page)

The birth of a child, for many fathers, is an experience bordering on the spiritual. Otto's memory, in later years, was more of a nightmare fairground ride. He recalled only fragments, such as gripping Cynthia's hand more firmly with each renewed scream (his own palm as trembling and sticky as hers), closing his eyes now and then, whenever his head started to spin out of control, and then opening them – to focus, if possible, on the bay window and the swaying oak tree outside. Occasionally, he would glance down for a glimpse of something purplish and messy, before averting his eyes again to the window. His overriding sensations once it had finished were of relief, both baby and mother having emerged bloodied but in good health from their ordeal, and an awestruck admiration for Cynthia's limitless resistance to pain. Upon seeing her, wan and drained, cradling the sleeping baby in the glow of the bedroom lamp, he had undergone his moment of revelation. But that was later, after the clean-up, once the image of the trauma and viscera had faded.

Daniel was not an especially happy baby, as testified by the albums full of photographs showing a furious, red-faced creature either just recovering from one explosion of rage, or about to launch into another. He suffered greatly from colic during the early months of his life, rendering sleep a sweet memory for his bleary-eyed parents, who took it in turns to walk the infant around the bedroom, gently bouncing and rocking him in their arms in a bid to help wind him. There was a particular rhythm that appeared to work each time, though he struggled so much that it sometimes took a while for him to find it. At weekends, the family walked on Hampstead Heath: at first pushing Daniel in his pram, then watching him move on unsteady legs as he chased after pigeons and toppled onto his hands. Sometimes he would be surprised to tears; at others, distracted by his parents' intervention into laughter.

Like his mother and father, Daniel was a sharp-minded child, observing the world around him with a keen and penetrating eye. Sometimes, Cynthia would catch the tube down with Daniel to the office on Portland Place. He would sit at Otto's work desk, flooded by the light from the window, and practise drawing pictures of houses, frowning in concentration and his tongue protruding slightly from the corner of his mouth.

As Daniel grew to school age, Otto felt conscious that he was playing a more peripheral role in his son's life than he would have liked. Whenever Otto returned from one of his frequent trips abroad, the boy always ran to hug him with a naturalness that brought a tightness to Otto's throat. Yet he sensed that an inevitable distance was growing between them. He felt, even when Daniel was seven or eight, a certain formality on both their parts that, as the years passed, would grow ever more entrenched.

I tried to overcome it, but it's so difficult to alter these situations, once the pattern has been set. Could I have done more, to remove the barriers that grew into adulthood?

What Daniel felt and thought, his hopes, dreams and concerns – these were largely the preserve of his mother. Circumstances, somehow, had conspired to shut Otto out. Like many others of his generation, he had played the role of a father without ever quite being the real thing. That he appeared unable to do anything about this had frustrated him immensely at the time. He was glad to see, with later generations, that the situation had begun to change.

*   *   *

Many moments from Daniel's childhood returned to Otto throughout that evening. Yet for some reason it was the kite that wouldn't leave him. If only there had been more memories like that one.

Looking up, he saw Daniel, at the age of five or six, hovering on the threshold of his study in Hampstead. He was waiting, as usual, to be noticed and invited inside.

‘Daniel. Hello. How nice it is to see you.'

Otto took off his spectacles and smiled at his son, laying the partially constructed kite to one side.

The little boy ran into the study and hugged him.

‘Hi, Daddy.'

‘How did you get on with your sums?'

‘Okay. Full marks. What are you doing?'

‘I'm making a kite.'

‘For who?'

‘For you.'

‘Really?'

The look of delight on Daniel's face prompted Otto to ruffle his hair.

‘I thought we might take it to Grandma and Grandpa's house, the next time we visit. We're going there in a few weeks' time. Remember how windy it gets in those hills during the winter?'

Daniel nodded.

‘The scarf.'

‘That's right. It's where Mummy's headscarf blew away last time. That's what gave me the idea to build you this.'

The kite gradually took shape over the course of the next few days. Daniel popped into the study two or three times an evening to see how it was progressing. Cynthia, too, glanced in periodically.

‘It looks lovely,' she said. ‘Good enough to hang on a wall.'

‘It's been a fascinating challenge. So different, technically, to what I usually do, yet with certain underlying similarities.'

When completed, the kite had a highly elaborate shape. The wire frame and pieces of fabric formed a delicate series of interconnecting folds.

‘Like paper screens inside a Japanese house,' Cynthia told him, admiringly.

‘Let's hope it's a little more aerodynamic than they are.'

They were to find out, two weeks later, on a raw and blustery afternoon in the Chilterns.

The three of them stood at the top of a hill, overlooking a field of furrowed clay.

‘Do you think it will work?' Otto shouted to Daniel and Cynthia.

He had his doubts. The structure was fragile; the wind that day was high, howling in over the fields towards them.

‘Let's try, Daddy,' cried Daniel, in his duffel coat and galoshes, the scarf his mother had knitted for him pushed up around his ears.

Otto handed the kite to him and gently explained what to do.

‘By the edges … that's it. Try not to press too hard. Lift it up, right in front of you, and then, when I give the word, you can let it go up into the sky. Okay?'

Daniel nodded and dutifully held out the kite, while Otto took the spool and wound out the string. He continued speaking as he moved backwards.

‘Perfectly still. Won't be a minute … let's see if this contraption can fly.'

Cynthia, moving closer to Daniel, wrapped him in her arms and kissed the top of his head.

‘Ready, darling? This is going to be fun.'

In her arms, Daniel trembled in anticipation. The kite in his hands trembled, too. Otto, his tall body visible over the curve of the hill, appeared to be nearly ready.

‘Okay? Hold it up now, high as you can,' he called.

Daniel lifted his arms. The kite flapped and struggled as he gripped it between his fingers.

‘The wind wants to take it away, Daddy,' he shouted.

‘Not just yet, a few more seconds.'

Otto adjusted his glasses.

‘Okay, when you're ready,' he called.

‘Let's count down together,' Cynthia whispered to Daniel.

‘Three … two … one … GO!'

Daniel loosened his grip on the frame, and the kite sprang eagerly from his grasp, twisting and turning in a series of leaps, mounting the sky as if it were a staircase. He and Cynthia cheered as they watched it go, laughing and clapping their hands. Their laughter then redoubled as they looked across at Otto, who fought to keep control as the kite ascended.

‘Oh no,' he shouted, raising another wave of laughter, as the spool escaped his grasp and bounced away across the grass.

‘Catch it, Daddy!' shouted Daniel.

‘Catch it, Otto!' shouted Cynthia.

He tried to chase it down, a grin upon his face, waving his arms and shouting in a way he knew would amuse Daniel. But his smile began to fade as the spool continued to unravel. The kite rose ever higher into the sky. Gaining ground, Otto reached down to grab the elusive spool, but toppled forward onto the grass at the vital moment. Looking on, helpless, he watched it lifting from the earth to follow into the slipstream of the soaring kite. Within a few more seconds, his masterpiece was vanishing over the hills and out of sight. It was an entirely new experience and somewhat disconcerting. That sort of thing didn't happen with his buildings.

‘Oh damn,' he exclaimed to himself, as the laughter in the background turned to gasps. ‘That thing works a lot better than I anticipated.'

Racing back to the car, they set off in pursuit of the kite. Yet scanning the skies through the windscreen, they could see nothing but fast-moving clouds. All afternoon they drove through the narrow lanes, stopping to peer over gates and into hedgerows. But no glimpse of a broken frame, or a twisted piece of fabric, appeared to solve the mystery of its escape.

As the hours passed, Cynthia and Otto became increasingly worried that Daniel might become upset. Yet he remained in good humour and remarkably philosophical, telling them not to worry as darkness fell and they had to abandon the search.

‘It was born to be free,' he explained to them over tea that evening, quoting a line from his favourite wildlife film.

Otto built a replacement kite for Daniel the following weekend, its design a good deal less ambitious than the first. But it was a replacement in name only. While it soon lay forgotten, somewhere at the back of a cupboard, its predecessor became a family legend. They never forgot its disappearance. It remained a running joke between them for years.

‘Where do you think your kite might be?' Cynthia or Otto would ask Daniel, closing his book of stories and tucking him down for the night.

‘Passing Mars or Jupiter,' he would say. ‘Maybe it has reached the Milky Way.'

And he would smile his gap-toothed smile at the very thought of it.

Twenty-Three

Dear Daniel,

I have recently become aware – and this is something to do with age, I think – of all the harm I've caused in life to those I love. Not just the major incidents, but the tiny emotional injuries, inflicted unthinkingly, day after day, and accumulating over a lifetime into something more significant.

I realise now that the pain I inadvertently caused you goes back far into your childhood. I realise that my analytical turn of mind, while serving me well in a professional capacity, made me somewhat ill-suited to be a good father. With the occasional exception (remember your kite?) I must have appeared to you as a cold and rather distant figure. Even adults found me intimidating, so heaven knows what it must have been like for a sensitive boy to be faced with such a personality over the breakfast table each morning. In retrospect, I wish that I could change all that, but sadly I cannot. So I am writing in order to acknowledge my mistakes, to apologise for my emotional coolness. I have to repair at least a part of the cumulative damage.

If the roots of our estrangement can be traced back to your childhood, my behaviour during your adult years has only deepened the division. Firstly, my lack of emotional support towards you following the death of your mother: what a friend once correctly described as my ‘running away from reality to the mountains'. What I did was unforgivable. You were still a young man at the time – just twenty-one – and I effectively left you to cope with your sense of bereavement alone. It must have been extremely difficult for you. You were in the midst of your studies, you were dealing with the usual emotional pressures of being young and not yet settled in life. And then you had the additional burden of coping with your mother's illness and death, the nature of which was of a singular, quite breathtaking cruelty. And you had to do all this with minimal support from me, other than the occasional letter or phone call to your digs, because I had disappeared into the French Alps to become a recluse. The timing could not have been worse.

In explaining my actions to you now, I'm not seeking to elicit sympathy, merely to establish a degree of understanding. Furthermore, I hope that by revealing to you my feelings at that time, you may at some point feel inclined to reciprocate the gesture. I would welcome that very much.

As you know, within a few months – almost a few weeks – of your mother's death, I had effectively retired from the architectural practice she and I had formed with our colleagues almost thirty years before, sold up our family home in Hampstead and rented a wooden chalet on the slopes of the Chartreuse Mountains. I took my leave from colleagues and friends without passing on address or telephone number. Looking back, the thing that amazes me most is that I was able to do all this without appearing to raise a single suspicion that I had, in fact, completely lost my mind (there are benefits, I suppose, to having a natural air of authority). I now believe this is exactly what did happen.

We have never really discussed this before, and I apologise for probing old psychological wounds, but the last few days of Cynthia's life – if that is a suitable word to describe her condition at that time – were not easy ones. All of us hoped for a good death, a peaceful one, for your mother. It was, at that time, the only hope we had left. But I'm afraid even that small mercy was denied her. You had, of course, returned to Cambridge by this time, having reached the point of emotional exhaustion after those weeks of waiting in the hospice.

I'll spare you the details, but her final hours were difficult. Cynthia struggled, I'm afraid. And, in the months that followed, well, I suppose I struggled, too. It was the nature of the ending – the brutality of it. After she had fought the disease so bravely, for more than two years, to see it take her in such a pitiless fashion appeared callous beyond belief. It seemed to me almost like a glimpse of evil; certainly, like the end of all hope. And then mixed up with it was this terrible sense of relief – a relief that her great suffering was finally over, and with it a sense that time hung suspended, in one endless moment of trauma. It was logical, I suppose, that I should have felt this way. I imagine that you did, too. But it left me with a deep sense of shame, nonetheless. I believe, with hindsight, that these various factors must have tilted me over the edge.