Take No Farewell - Retail (14 page)

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

‘Nothing.’

‘I thought—’

‘What do you want, Mr Staddon?’

‘This letter—’ I held out the envelope. ‘It’s for Consuela.’

She stared at it with an expression that I could have believed for an instant was one of horror. ‘For Consuela?’

‘Yes. It’s very important. And urgent.’

‘I’ll see she gets it.’ She reached out numbly and took it from me.

‘Lizzie, are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, Mr Staddon. Quite sure.’ And, so saying, she closed the door.

I stood there in the silent corridor for a minute or so, puzzling over what had occurred. Lizzie was normally cheerful and ebullient. Even her brother’s imprisonment had not seemed to depress her unduly. Why she should be sobbing her heart out in secret was beyond me. Clearly, however, she did not wish me to know the reason. And my business with her was concluded. She would deliver the letter to Consuela. I knew I could rely upon her for that. There was not another sound from beyond the door. To remain where I was would soon become dangerously conspicuous. So I turned and crept away.

Who was he, that selfish, conceited young man who strode down the drive of Clouds Frome and out along the Stoke Edith road one brilliant July morning thirteen years ago? What right did he think he had to trample the dreams of others underfoot in pursuit of his own? Even now, the answers sear my conscience. If only I could halt him in his tracks and shake him till he understood the consequences – every one of them, the great and the small – of what he had done.

But I cannot. I cannot change or modify a single aspect of the past I have bequeathed to myself. It is mine and nobody else’s. And so is the guilt that goes with it.

It was warm in the sun as I sat on the deserted platform at Stoke Edith station, waiting for the train that would bear me back to London. Another scorching day seemed guaranteed. I was impatient to set off, but much of my recent anxiety had fallen away. My course was set now, my boats were
burned.
I had left a message for Consuela. I had posted a cheque to Hermione. I had taken my leave. And now, albeit with an effort, I would set aside all that Clouds Frome had meant to me. In time, with Thornton’s commission to fill my thoughts, I would forget it altogether. Consuela’s name would never pass my lips, her face never stray across my memory. For a bad conscience is the best of all amnesics, proof against every kind of reminder. Except the one kind fate had reserved for me.

Chapter Five

ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS OF
the years immediately before the Great War will probably dwell, when they consider the landmarks of London, on Webb’s east frontage for Buckingham Palace or Burnet’s King Edward VII Galleries for the British Museum; Selfridge’s department store, perhaps, or Blomfield’s elevations for the western side of Piccadilly Circus. These soar obediently above the streets of the capital, waiting and deserving to be admired. Somewhere, in an obscure footnote, it may be mentioned that Ashley Thornton, the hotelier, commissioned the relatively unknown Geoffrey Staddon to build a grand hotel on Russell Square, which, in conception and execution, won many plaudits. On the other hand, it may not. For the Hotel Thornton labours under the profound disadvantage of no longer existing.

How strange it is – and yet how fitting – that the two buildings of which I was most proud were to be denied me: Clouds Frome, because I did not dare to return to it, and the Hotel Thornton, because there was nothing to return to. Exile and nullity seem now to share and shred between them all the hopes and achievements of my youth. And I have no right to complain.

It was all so vastly different when, in the autumn of 1911, I commenced work on the Thornton project and saw, in my mind’s eye, no limit to the wealth and renown it might lead to. Consuela – and what I had done to her – was consigned to a locked cellar of my memory. I never heard from her after
leaving
Clouds Frome. There was no reproachful letter, no anguished telephone call, no outraged visit. I did not hear from Victor either or any member of his family. I was invited to no more weekends, enlisted in no more celebratory events. I was not even sent a Christmas card. And for all of this I was grateful.

The Hotel Thornton consumed my thoughts and energies. It became a forcing-house for my ambition, a vaulting steel-and-stone statement of what I could achieve. And in the process it altered me. The treachery I had shown towards Consuela was the first budding of a shameful ruthlessness. Nothing and nobody, I secretly believed, should be allowed to stand in my way or share the credit for my work. Thus Imry’s contributions to my designs were to be suppressed and the builder’s suggestions for improvements ignored. The project was to be mine and mine alone. When it was finished, the praise was to be for me and nobody else.

In Ashley Thornton I had found a patron ideally suited to my purposes. Too busy presiding over his existing hotels to interfere much in the construction of a new one, he was nonetheless an enthusiastic advocate of my ideas before his fellow-directors. At first, I was suspicious of him. Later, I came to like and admire him. Later still, I understood him. But understanding, as in most cases, did not come soon enough.

It was at a reception in one of Thornton’s other London hotels – the Palatine – that I first met his daughter, Angela, later to become my wife. We argued, as I recall, about the coal miners’ strike that was then on, which places the encounter in March 1912. She seemed to me then a woman of firmly feudal opinions, handsome rather than beautiful, but undeniably attractive in her combination of clear-eyed Englishness and feline sensuality. She was twenty-seven years old, vivacious, self-confident and altogether a challenging proposition. I began to cultivate her in the full knowledge of how useful such a connection might be. Before long, however, I realized that a genuine affection was
developing
between us. Was it ever love? I am not sure. We dignify too many dalliances and unions with that word. Perhaps it is fairer to say that she saw in me an appealing alternative to the empty-headed young men she was generally introduced to and that I saw in her the intelligent and socially accomplished wife I had convinced myself I needed. By the autumn of 1912 we had become engaged, much to Thornton’s professed satisfaction. We were married at the village church near his Surrey home on 21 June 1913, with Imry as my best man and a vast gathering of Thornton’s friends, relatives and business associates in attendance.

When I recall the day now, it is as an event I witnessed but did not participate in. The sun shone obligingly. Angela looked more delicately entrancing than I have ever known her to, before or since. Thornton turned the reception into a gaudy and extravagant celebration of his own success. And I? I smiled and spoke my lines and conformed to the image most of the guests had of me: the talented architect whose artistic laxities would soon vanish under the supervision of his wife and the benign influence of his father-in-law.

We honeymooned on the Italian Lakes and returned to 27 Suffolk Terrace, the house Thornton had bought us as a wedding present. There Angela devoted herself to the life of an expensively maintained metropolitan wife: collecting fine furniture and fashionable clothes; cultivating an awesome number of similarly placed wives in Kensington, Knightsbridge and Bayswater; entertaining them and their husbands to dinner at least once a week; organizing bridge parties with equal frequency; and riding every few days in Hyde Park. It did not take me long to understand that in this new life she had acquired for herself I was merely one ingredient, important but not indispensable.

I should never have expected anything else, for Angela’s attitude was, after all, only a mirror image of mine. We both had what we wanted: the sort of spouse the world seemed to require of us, one conferring status, companionship, respectability and a sparing allowance of conjugal passion.
Almost
as if it were part of a pre-determined timetable, Angela became pregnant within three months of our marriage, delivering the grandson her father earnestly desired a few days before our first wedding anniversary in June 1914.

By then the Hotel Thornton was complete. With impeccable timing, my father-in-law was able to announce the birth at the grand opening ceremony. The Princess Royal cut a tape and all present toasted hotel and baby in the same breath. The architectural press had commented favourably on my work and prestigious new commissions could now be expected. I had a son to dandle on my knee and a professional reputation verging on celebrity. I had nothing to complain of and everything to look forward to. All seemed right with the world.

But all, as we now know, was far from right with the world in the summer of 1914. The war, when it came in August, was not the brief and glorious adventure we had been led to expect. And the lives of everyone, even those far from the mud of Flanders, became bogged down in the grinding conflict that followed.

Imry insisted on volunteering for front-line service at the earliest possible opportunity. He also insisted that, as a husband and father, I should stay behind and manage the business. And so I did, faithfully believing the myth that it would all be over by Christmas. It was not, of course, and the start of 1915 saw the first Zeppelin raids over the south coast. I thought little of them. They were mere flea-bites by comparison with the hardships our troops – Imry among them – were enduring in France. By Easter London had come within their range, but still I failed to see what they portended.

On the night of 23 October 1915 a German bomb scored a direct hit on the Hotel Thornton. The structural damage would probably have been repairable but for the fire that immediately followed the explosion. The building was gutted and it is a miracle that no more than seventeen people lost their lives in the conflagration. When I visited
Russell
Square the following morning, it was to confront the crumbling, smoking shell of what I had spent nearly three years creating. I would not wish the experience on any architect. The months of toil; the drafts and re-drafts; the measurements and projections; the trials and revisions; the disputes and difficulties; the vision and its accomplishment: all laid waste in a night by fire, smoke and water. The sense of futility such a disaster imposes can never be shaken off. The fear that it may happen again corrodes the creative impulse and saps the determination to succeed. Why aim for perfection when it can so easily be snatched away? Why assume that what you build will endure or be remembered?

Worse was to follow, in my case, than the shock of destruction. At the inquest into the seventeen deaths, the coroner uttered some ill-informed remarks about the design of the hotel encouraging the spread of fire, remarks which the press chose to amplify. Suddenly, my name was associated not with a fine hotel but with a scandalous fire-trap. And there was nothing, given the vague nature of the accusations, that I could do to refute them. Thornton boldly promised to re-build after the war and to employ me as architect, but I detected a calculating insincerity in his assurances. The hotel would never be re-built and, even if it were, I would not be its architect. Thornton would be respected for standing by his son-in-law, but everybody would know what he really thought. The good name of Thornton Hotels would be preserved, but that of Geoffrey Staddon, A.R.I.B.A., would be irredeemably sullied.

I suppose it was frustrated rage at the injustice of press reaction to the fire that prompted me to enlist in the Army. Certainly it was not a late flowering of patriotism, given what Imry had told me about the imbecilic conduct of the war. He was invalided out early in 1916, suffering from the cumulative effects of mustard-gas poisoning, and this allowed me to pass what little business we had left into his hands. I obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers and found myself, by the autumn of 1916, not in France as I had
anticipated,
but in Egypt, applying my architectural training to bridge-building and barrack construction. And there I was to remain for the duration of hostilities, fulfilling a minor and unhazardous role in Allenby’s strategy for the defeat of the Turks. I never fired a shot in anger, never took my place in a suicidal advance and never saw an enemy soldier who was not already a prisoner.

I did reach France in the end, but only after the Armistice, as a member of the forces assigned to reconstructing roads and railways and repairing buildings damaged during the long years of bombardment. It was vital work, of course, but irksome. All any of us wanted, once the war was over, was to go home.

My chance to do so came sooner than I had expected and in circumstances more dreadful than any I could have envisaged. Letters from Angela had told me that a virulent strain of influenza was sweeping London, but I thought little of it, even when she reported that Nora, our maid, had fallen ill. Then, early in March, came a letter informing me that our son had caught it and, within hours, a telegram summoning me home urgently. He had developed pneumonia and his life was feared for.

Edward Matthew Staddon. Born 18 June 1914. Died 10 March 1919. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.’

Scarcely a week has passed since his death when I have not found my homeward steps leading me to Brompton Cemetery and the sorrowful stone cherub standing above the plaintive inscription. Angela stopped going within a year and excised his name from our conversation at the same time. She removed his photograph from the drawing-room, threw away the last of his toys and took down the framed certificate of his baptism from the nursery wall. I do not blame her. There is no reason why she should wish to join me beside his tiny grave on winter afternoons when the light of all the days, not just one, seems to be failing about me.

I have spoken to him more in death than in life, adjusting my tone and vocabulary as the years have passed to the age he would have attained, telling him secrets I can entrust to nobody else, seeking his advice on problems only he must know I have. Little Edward, so young and blameless, whose large blue eyes seem even now to rest upon me. Did you die for me? I sometimes wonder. Did you suffer on my account?