High Rise (1987) (2 page)

On the balcony diagonally above him one of Laing’s neighbours, Charlotte Melville, was setting out a tray of drinks on a table. Queasily aware of his strained liver, Laing remembered that at Alice’s party the previous evening he had accepted an invitation to cocktails. Thankfully, Charlotte had rescued him from the orthodontic surgeon with the disposal-chute obsessions. Laing had been too drunk to get anywhere with this good-looking widow of thirty-five, apart from learning that she was a copywriter with a small but lively advertising agency. The proximity of her apartment, like her easy style, appealed to Laing, exciting in him a confusing blend of lechery and romantic possibility—as he grew older, he found himself becoming more romantic and more callous at the same time.

Sex was one thing, Laing kept on reminding himself, that the high-rise potentially provided in abundance. Bored wives, dressed up as if for a lavish midnight gala on the observation roof, hung around the swimming-pools and restaurant in the slack hours of the early afternoon, or strolled arm-in-arm along the loth-floor concourse. Laing watched them saunter past him with a fascinated but cautious eye. For all his feigned cynicism, he knew that he was in a vulnerable zone in this period soon after his divorce—one happy affair, with Charlotte Melville or anyone else, and he would slip straight into another marriage. He had come to the high-rise to get away from all relationships. Even his sister’s presence, and the reminders of their high-strung mother, a doctor’s widow slowly sliding into alcoholism, at one time seemed too close for comfort.

However, Charlotte had briskly put all these fears to rest. She was still preoccupied by her husband’s death from leukaemia, her six-year-old son’s welfare and, she admitted to Laing, her insomnia—a common complaint in the high-rise, almost an epidemic. All the residents he had met, on hearing that Laing was a physician, at some point brought up their difficulties in sleeping. At parties people discussed their insomnia in the same way that they referred to the other built-in design flaws of the apartment block. In the early hours of the morning the two thousand tenants subsided below a silent tide of seconal.

Laing had first met Charlotte in the 35
th
-floor swimming-pool, where he usually swam, partly to be on his own, and partly to avoid the children who used the 10
th
-floor pool. When he invited her to a meal in the restaurant she promptly accepted, but as they sat down at the table she said pointedly, “Look, I only want to talk about myself.”

Laing had liked that.

§

At noon, when he arrived at Charlotte’s apartment, a second guest was already present, a television producer named Richard Wilder. A thick-set, pugnacious man who had once been a professional rugby-league player, Wilder lived with his wife and two sons on the 2
nd
floor of the building. The noisy parties he held with his friends on the lower levels—airline pilots and hostesses sharing apartments—had already put him at the centre of various disputes. To some extent the irregular hours of the tenants on the lower levels had cut them off from their neighbours above. In an unguarded moment Laing’s sister had whispered to him that there was a brothel operating somewhere in the high-rise. The mysterious movements of the air-hostesses as they pursued their busy social lives, particularly on the floors above her own, clearly unsettled Alice, as if they in some way interfered with the natural social order of the building, its system of precedences entirely based on floor-height. Laing had noticed that he and his fellow tenants were far more tolerant of any noise or nuisance from the floors above than they were from those below them. However, he liked Wilder, with his loud voice and rugby-scrum manners. He let a needed dimension of the unfamiliar into the apartment block. His relationship with Charlotte Melville was hard to gauge—his powerful sexual aggression was overlaid by a tremendous restlessness. No wonder his wife, a pale young woman with a postgraduate degree who reviewed children’s books for the literary weeklies, seemed permanently exhausted.

As Laing stood on the balcony, accepting a drink from Charlotte, the noise of the party came down from the bright air, as if the sky itself had been wired for sound. Charlotte pointed to a fragment of glass on Laing’s balcony that had escaped his brush.

“Are you under attack? I heard something fall.” She called to Wilder, who was lounging back in the centre of her sofa, examining his heavy legs. “It’s those people on the 31
st
floor.”

“Which people?” Laing asked. He assumed that she was referring to a specific group, a clique of over-aggressive film actors or tax consultants, or perhaps a freak aggregation of dipsomaniacs. But Charlotte shrugged vaguely, as if it was unnecessary to be more specific. Clearly some kind of demarcation had taken place in her mind, like his own facile identification of people by the floors on which they lived.

“By the way, what are we all celebrating?” he asked as they returned to the living-room.

“Don’t you know?” Wilder gestured at the walls and ceiling. “Full house. We’ve achieved critical mass.”

“Richard means that the last apartment has been occupied,” Charlotte explained. “Incidentally, the contractors promised us a free party when the thousandth apartment was sold.”

“I’ll be interested to see if they hold it,” Wilder remarked. Clearly he enjoyed running down the high-rise. “The elusive Anthony Royal was supposed to provide the booze. You’ve met him, I think,” he said to Laing. “The architect who designed our hanging paradise.”

“We play squash together,” Laing rejoined. Aware of the hint of challenge in Wilder’s voice, he added, “Once a week—I hardly know the man, but I like him.”

Wilder sat forward, cradling his heavy head in his fists. Laing noticed that he was continually touching himself, for ever inspecting the hair on his massive calves, smelling the backs of his scarred hands, as if he had just discovered his own body. “You’re favoured to have met him,” Wilder said. “I’d like to know why. An isolated character—I ought to resent him, but somehow I feel sorry for the man, hovering over us like some kind of fallen angel.”

“He has a penthouse apartment,” Laing commented. He had no wish to become involved in any tug of war over his brief friendship with Royal. He had met this well-to-do architect, a former member of the consortium which had designed the development project, during the final stages of Royal’s recovery from a minor car accident. Laing had helped him to set up the complex callisthenics machine in the penthouse where Royal spent his time, the focus of a great deal of curiosity and attention. As everyone continually repeated, Royal lived ‘on top’ of the building, as if in some kind of glamorous shack.

“Royal was the first person to move in here,” Wilder informed him. “There’s something about him I haven’t put my finger on. Perhaps even a sense of guilt—he hangs around up there as if he’s waiting to be found out. I expected him to leave months ago. He has a rich young wife, so why stay on in this glorified tenement?” Before Laing could protest, Wilder pressed on. “I know Charlotte has reservations about life here—the trouble with these places is that they’re not designed for children. The only open space turns out to be someone else’s car-park. By the way, doctor, I’m planning to do a television documentary about high-rises, a really hard look at the physical and psychological pressures of living in a huge condominium such as this one.”

“You’ll have a lot of material.”

“Too much, as always. I wonder if Royal would take part—you might ask him, doctor. As one of the architects of the block and its first tenant, his views would be interesting. Your own, too…”

As Wilder talked away rapidly, his words over-running the cigarette smoke coming from his mouth, Laing turned his attention to Charlotte. She was watching Wilder intently, nodding at each of his points. Laing liked her determination to stick up for herself and her small son, her evident sanity and good sense. His own marriage, to a fellow physician and specialist in tropical medicine, had been a brief but total disaster, a reflection of heaven-only-knew what needs. With unerring judgment Laing had involved himself with this highly strung and ambitious young doctor, for whom Laing’s refusal to give up teaching—in itself suspicious—and involve himself directly in the political aspects of preventive medicine had provided a limitless opportunity for bickering and confrontation. After only six months together she had suddenly joined an international famine-relief organization and left on a three-year tour. But Laing had made no attempt to follow her. For reasons he could not yet explain, he had been reluctant to give up teaching, and the admittedly doubtful security of being with students who were still almost his own age.

Charlotte, he guessed, would understand this. In his mind Laing projected the possible course of an affair with her. The proximity and distance which the high-rise provided at the same time, that neutral emotional background against which the most intriguing relationships might develop, had begun to interest him for its own sake. For some reason he found himself drawing back even within this still imaginary encounter, sensing that they were all far more involved with each other than they realized. An almost tangible network of rivalries and intrigues bound them together.

As he guessed, even this apparently casual meeting in Charlotte’s apartment had been set up to test his attitude to the upper-level residents who were trying to exclude children from the 35
th
-floor swimming-pool.

“The terms of our leases guarantee us equal access to all facilities,” Charlotte explained. “We’ve decided to set up a parents’ action group.”

“Doesn’t that leave me out?”

“We need a doctor on the committee. The paediatric argument would come much more forcefully from you, Robert.”

“Well, perhaps…” Laing hesitated to commit himself. Before he knew it, he would be a character in a highly charged television documentary, or taking part in a sit-in outside the office of the building manager. Reluctant at this stage to be snared into an inter-floor wrangle, Laing stood up and excused himself. As he left, Charlotte had equipped herself with a checklist of grievances. Sitting beside Wilder, she began to tick off the complaints to be placed before the building manager, like a conscientious teacher preparing the syllabus for the next term.

§

When Laing returned to his apartment, the party on the 31
st
floor had ended. He stood on his balcony in the silence, enjoying the magnificent play of light across the neighbouring block four hundred yards away. The building had just been completed, and by coincidence the first tenants were arriving on the very morning that the last had moved into his own block. A furniture moving van was backing into the entrance to the freight elevator, and the carpets and stereo-speakers, dressing-tables and bedside lamps would soon be carried up the elevator shaft to form the elements of a private world.

Thinking of the rush of pleasure and excitement which the new tenants would feel as they gazed out for the first time from their aerial ledge on the cliff face, Laing contrasted it with the conversation he had just heard between Wilder and Charlotte Melville. However reluctantly, he now had to accept something he had been trying to repress—that the previous six months had been a period of continuous bickering among his neighbours, of trivial disputes over the faulty elevators and air-conditioning, inexplicable electrical failures, noise, competition for parking space and, in short, that host of minor defects which the architects were supposed specifically to have designed out of these over-priced apartments. The underlying tensions among the residents were remarkably strong, damped down partly by the civilized tone of the building, and partly by the obvious need to make this huge apartment block a success.

Laing remembered a minor but unpleasant incident that had taken place the previous afternoon on the loth-floor shopping concourse. As he waited to cash a cheque at the bank an altercation was going on outside the doors of the swimming-pool. A group of children, still wet from the water, were backing away from the imposing figure of a cost-accountant from the 17
th
floor. Facing him in this unequal contest was Helen Wilder. Her husband’s pugnacity had long since drained any self-confidence from her. Nervously trying to control the children, she listened stoically to the accountant’s reprimand, now and then making some weak retort.

Leaving the bank counter, Laing walked towards them, past the crowded check-out points of the supermarket and the lines of women under the driers in the hair-dressing salon. As he stood beside Mrs Wilder, waiting until she recognized him, he gathered that the accountant was complaining that her children, not for the first time, had been urinating in the pool.

Laing briefly interceded, but the accountant slammed away through the swing doors, confident that he had sufficiently intimidated Mrs Wilder to drive her brood of children away for ever.

“Thanks for taking my side—Richard was supposed to be here.” She picked a damp thread of hair out of her eyes. “It’s becoming impossible—we arrange set hours for the children but the adults come anyway.” She took Laing’s arm and squinted nervously across the crowded concourse. “Do you mind walking me back to the elevator? It must sound rather paranoid, but I’m becoming obsessed with the idea that one day we’ll be physically attacked…” She shuddered under her damp towel as she propelled the children forward. “It’s almost as if these aren’t the people who really live here.”

§

During the afternoon Laing found himself thinking of this last remark of Helen Wilder’s. Absurd though it sounded, the statement had a certain truth. Now and then his neighbours, the orthodontic surgeon and his wife, stepped on to their balcony and frowned at Laing, as if disapproving of the relaxed way in which he lay back in his reclining chair. Laing tried to visualize their life together, their hobbies, conversation, sexual acts. It was difficult to imagine any kind of domestic reality, as if the Steeles were a pair of secret agents unconvincingly trying to establish a marital role. By contrast, Wilder was real enough, but hardly belonged to the high-rise.