Patrick Parker's Progress (43 page)

Edwin said, 'You knew Patrick Parker once, I think? You mentioned that once to me.'

Sometimes he was
quite
the opposite of vague. Usually when you didn't want perceptiveness.

Perhaps she had told him - once - when she was still angry about being left at home while he played The Good Husband. 'Yes,' she said. 'He was a family friend. I grew up with him.'

'Ah
’
said Edwin.
‘I
see.'

She waited. He nodded. Yes, yes, he would attend the evening. Audrey relaxed. She allowed herself the pleasure of considering what to wear, how to behave, should she have a new hairstyle, perhaps? All the foolish things that she knew to be foolish yet seemed important, exciting. So what if she was frivolous? So what if the prospect of a beautiful dress and change of hair appealed to her? She called it, without bitterness she hoped, dressing the puppet.

And then the most bizarre and enraging thing she could ever imagine happened. Madame Bonnard scuppered her. Again. In an amazing rally, Edwin's apparently not-so-senile wife decided that she would go to the Ball. Madame Bonnard would rise from her bed and accompany her husband to the Grand Opening.

Audrey palpitated. Edwin apologised. But he was intractable. It was the honour of it. 'You could have fooled me
’
said the surprised Audrey. He flinched but remained firm. One did not dishonour one's wife in one's public duty. It would, perhaps - almost certainly - be the last such occasion they would attend as man and wife. Propriety should be extended to Madame Bonnard to the last. Audrey, dearest Audrey, must understand this as she had always understood.

Dearest Audrey shouted. 'I thought it was The Last, The Last Time -' She turned her back on him and refused to answer any further questions. Edwin therefore returned to his other home. He seldom did so now, seldom needed to, but whenever anything difficult occurred, home he went. His going reminded Audrey, obliquely, that he still held all the cards. She was a dab hand at piquet, bezique, chemin-de-fer - but she could not compete with a Full House.

So - Dearest Audrey sat there - blinking back the tears, rage, frustration and self-pity commingled. But she knew better than to argue. She calmed herself. She welcomed Edwin back. And she waited for the right moment to suggest that Edwin could get her an invitation in her own right so that she might just slip through the evening anonymously. Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
fascinated her - always had. Edwin said that he would take her in due course but that he did not think it would be seemly for her to go to the Grand Opening. She could not be anonymous nowadays, she was too well known as his companion. That if his wife knew, and most likely she would find out, she would be offended. That the President himself would attend with his wife, rather than the woman he had lived with for all these years and who had borne his three children. If the President maintained a protocol, then Edwin must maintain it too. And he repeated that it was not seemly. Wives, it appeared, had a way of clinging on.

A little bit of the dam broke. 'Edwin,' she said. 'What we have just done in my bedroom is not seemly. Shall we also dispense with that in case it offends?'

'My dear,' he said with mocking gallantry, a touch of the old Edwin emerging (he could be intransigent, oh how he could be), 'if that is what you wish - and it is certainly not what I wish - I will go from your life immediately.'

And in the usual way of proceeding, she ran to him and tucked her arm though his and kissed him and said, "That is not what I meant. Not what I meant at all.' She always submitted to the way of things. But this time - bloody well bugger it
and
my arse - she would not. More ways to skin a cat, as her dear old mother used to say. She closed her lips with a smile.

By way of consolation Audrey was presented with a handsome, clothbound, limited edition copy of the catalogue. She wondered, but without much hope, if she was acknowledged in the Foreword. She was not. She therefore wrote the Director a thank-you note and ended it with her congratulations on the exhibition and a desire to know wherever he had found such a clever idea. He did not reply.

So far as Gallic opinion was concerned, the success of the previous 'Turner and His World' exhibition laid to rest the ghost of Waterloo. The new exhibition, 'Tribute to Genius:
Brunel
and his World' would cause an even greater sensation. The British, if they thought about him at all, considered
Brunel
to be an English Victorian through and through. But this exhibition would show that he was Normandy Man to his backbone. The Anglo-French detente of the European Union was parchment thin, tightly drawn, prickable by the first tiny pin of rancour. And rancour there would be. For if the Curator's Turner exhibition was limited to the visual arts - and it was well known everywhere but in England that the English were visually illiterate and therefore might not feel quite so proprietorial - this time, in his capacity of Director, the exhibition would include
everything.
Even original lengths of the famous - or notorious - seven-foot-gauge rail. And of the huge, dramatic chains that held down the
Great Eastern.
Japanese money had seen to that. There would be artefacts, books, paintings, photographs . . . Let the Modernists squeal, said the Director. The Louvre was an ancient institution. '
Brunel
and his World' fitted it supremely well.

Their cousins across the water trembled yet again. But there was no way out of it. La France had been very generous in the matter of lending works for both a Toulouse-Lautrec and a Renoir show in London and Birmingham (sell-outs, obviously, as the French shrugged to themselves, since even the Philistine English had heard of
them)
so it would look nothing but mealy-mouthed if British institutions refused to comply with French requests now. The Cultural Establishment of the British Isles was privately biting its knuckles. It wished it had never gone for the easy options of Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, and it wished - above all it wished that it had thought up and executed the
Brunel
idea first. But It Had Not. To the French was the victory. Again.

The exhibition took the halfway stage in the century as the closing point of the Great Victorian Enlightenment. The moment, the Director averred, when the British took too much Empire with their brandy, and lost out to the rest of the world, could be pinpointed to a quotation from Walter Bagehot's letter to his father, written in 1851, year of the Great Exhibition in London, year of Louis Napoleon's
coup d'etat
in Paris, the discovery of which delighted the Director. For the young Walter was visiting Paris and observed the street fighting and wrote to his anxious parent that, 'If you go calmly, and look English, there is no particular danger
...'
This statement, maintained the catalogue, was the high point of the golden age, after which the great days of benign politically inspired social reform were at an end. After that the Victorians descended into absurdity - Doers became gentlemen and Did no longer. The exhibition would celebrate the days before men allowed themselves to become imprisoned in the petty notion that there was a superior purity to science and maths known only to initiates, and that visual art and literature were inferior, feckless, non-absolutes. Darwin was allowed in since, even though he published
The Origin of Species
in 1859 - he was working on it throughout the preceding decade. The French could be very fair like that.

Audrey, who was feeling very sorry for herself, and angry, as she looked through the catalogue, smiled a little sourly to note the lack of the feminine in all this. Presumably some Victorian women were also not imprisoned by this inferior, feckless thinking? It seemed not. Apart from a little sensitive and ground-breaking botany and whatnot, women did not climb the trees, they planted them. Women did not build the bridges - they sketched or painted them once they were designed, built and functioning. And the only drawings of buildings women drew were of the sweet, domestic variety - with rose bushes in the garden and the sun glinting warmly on the bricks. Why didn't they do something about it? she wondered. It was a wondering that made her feel quite uncomfortable.

The Director concluded that 'Looking back to a Golden Age of Paternalism and Intelligently Applied Generosity and the sacrifice of self for the common weal seemed entirely wise.
Brunel
was just such a man. Whence comes such another
...?'

Audrey thought she knew one such another who thought he might just be whencing it right now.

In bed alone one evening, shortly before the Grand Opening, Audrey sat up surrounded by books on
Brunel
, the
Brunel
exhibition catalogue, and her new
Architecture Today
with a picture of the Great Man on its cover. Together with a picture of the other, more recent, Great

Man. And she was reading everything avidly and sulkily. The latter, she felt, even though she was now a supposedly mature woman, was allowable under extreme provocation. Patrick Parker. Designer. Smiling his toothy smile, told the world of the ziggurat bridge links between the new tower and the old palace. Blah, blah, blah, she thought. Blah. Since her mother's death she no longer received any information or cuttings about him so she studied his photograph carefully. He looked, she thought, well cared for and not so old as his years, but certainly not as young as she looked by comparison. This pleased her. Even though, she thought, feeling sorry for herself again, even though it seemed to be all the ammunition she had.

Patrick was also quoted in the catalogue as saying 'At the very best, Modernism is free of its chains. I look to the past for my inspiration in the future.
Brunel
, in particular, is a very great hero of mine and he would applaud this celebration of the first half of the nineteenth century in England. I am honoured to design the bridges that will link and lead you around the exhibition. Thus proving that the design of buildings and great structures is the most enduring and international of all the plastic and graphic arts. This building is neither Museum as Shrine, Museum as Temple, nor Museum as Spectacle, but a living, organic building in which the exhibits are as important as the spectators and the building is a beautiful, fulfilling space. I think the Babylonians would have liked it. And its international, cross-cultural relevance is clearly recognised by the fact that after Paris it will travel to Tokyo, and Yokohama, the new heartlands of futuristic design investment.' Blah.

Babylonians? He had never mentioned
them
before. She lay back on her several pillows and gazed at the ornate mouldings in the ceiling - cherubs, flowers, fruit and frolicking naked ladies - and she smiled to remember how Patrick would have hacked them all off, smoothed the surface, painted it all white or perhaps cream. And she would have agreed. Well - she liked the cherubs and the fruit and the frolickers (indeed, since Edwin was hardly Lochinvar in the saddle nowadays, she had quite a lot of time to study and grow fond of them all). She smiled to herself, and closed her eyes, and made a mental note to look up the Babylonians. Patrick's ego, she thought, might one day be Patrick's downfall. She also thought, remembering long ago, that sometimes, when he got too much on his high horse, what Patrick needed was sex. The only way to stop him - she yawned -was sex, sex, sex. The one thing she was very good at. Which set, in her sleepy, sulky mind, an idea. Cinderella shall not attend the ball, she thought, as she drifted into oblivion, but someone else might. The shadow of Delphine Bolle made her shudder for a moment with the memory of the humiliation, and then drifted away again. It need not be like that. She would think of something, she would. And with that comforting thought she was soon, very soundly, asleep.