Not a Very Nice Woman Read online

During that late afternoon Grey thought he had learnt more about architecture than he would from a late night up with the Open University; though given his teacher’s idiosyncrasies, current state of mind and years out of the game, he wasn’t sure how much of it would have held as current thinking. Thus far on their jaunt Derek Waldron had waxed lyrical on the merits or otherwise of an infant school, a row of large detached houses, and most memorably on a just-put-up fast food restaurant whose front and sides were made entirely of glass:

  ‘Imagine it at night lit like a beacon: you’d be drawn to it like a moth to a lightbulb, wanting to be inside the glow.’

  Derek’s injuries seemed wholly superficial, he walking and talking with boundless energy. They approached the Hills estate, which was always going to be their destination, not along a main road but rather a side street of older, terraced homes, so as to contrast with the newer development ahead.

  ‘Note how straight the road is we’ve just walked along, and those around it, how simple to know where you are and where you want to get to, how easy to offer directions to a stranger that would keep them going for miles. Yet compare that with this.’

  Before them across the main road and in sharp contrast with the terraces’ clean lines was an apparently randomised mess of grass and path and untended hedge, surrounding houses squat like cinder-blocks. The men were stood on slightly higher ground this side of the main road, and so it gave the slight impression of being on a viewing platform, able to take a large chunk of the Hills estates in en masse.

  ‘When I come this way, Inspector, it reminds me of my nephew with his LEGO blocks, as if the architect had thrown a bunch of them up in the air and set the position of the buildings on where each block fell. You see the architects wanted to break up the Victorian streetplan, as Modernists in painting had broken up the sweeping brushstroke and in music had made melody atonal. These were the Cubists of their field, and they saw themselves that seriously.

  ‘And so you can take in a view like this and see no house in line with any other, no street squarely joining with another.’ Waldron paused at this favourite spot a moment longer, before leading the Inspector toward the main road to cross it.

  ‘Indeed a lot aren’t even Streets – note all the Walks and Groves and Avenues.’ They were entering the estate proper now. ‘You see, it was another aspect of the planners’ idealism that large parts of the estate were built without spaces for parking – see where the Council have had to lower the kerbstones, where lawns have been slabbed over, where fences on strips of public land are pulled up and cars are parked in the mud. All this because the designers believed in the dream of clean and fast and safe state-subsidised public transport, servicing the public to the degree that people wouldn’t want cars.’

  Grey’s guide pointed to a concrete space lined with graffitied garages, obscured by a fence and some odd-shaped maisonettes,

  ‘And where there was parking, like here, it was in collective plots and banks of garages tucked away behind trees or houses – the naïveté of these designers that they so believed in the social spirit they wished to foster in their estates that they didn’t think crime would fester in such hidden spaces, or that people wouldn’t want the simple reassurance of being able to keep an eye on their own car from out of their own window.

  ‘Come on, we need to get somewhere in this direction – if we can figure out our way!’

  Grey felt a strong inclination not to follow, and not only because of the recent death and dramas he had been involved in along the route they were taking. The fact was that for all the bright hazy atmosphere of the afternoon this was still the Hills, and that for his being in plain clothes a policeman still stood out a mile here. He began to wonder if the charm of taking such a walk wasn’t wearing off? He was also aware that for all Derek’s apparent energy, his aged guide was only one day out of hospital, and that by the time they got back the round trip would have been a long one.

  It was after school hours, and at the corners of buildings already gangs of youths were forming, watching only with curiosity for now the copper and the old guy with his patchwork of injuries passing through their borough. Derek didn’t even seem to notice them – perhaps he often came this way, though this time able to voice the theories usually kept inside? He was evidently still concerned with the mindset of those town planners nearly forty years ago,

  ‘Without intending it they made a haven for crime and despondency. I saw your reticence back there just now, Inspector, your unwillingness to follow this way. You’ll know yourself how unpoliceable such places are, the spaces they offer for vice to dwell, for vandalism, for the mugger to lay in wait along these pathways or hide from the police if being chased.

  ‘And what of the other crime? An even worse one if possible, the true offense such estates commit against their population: the psychological effect on people of being stranded in a place where you literally cannot see a way out: where you can’t see a main road or a bus route even from the end of your street; where it’s hard to direct a taxi or visitor to within half a mile of your house or flat; where those who’ve lived here all their lives can still get lost; where what you see around you is the collapse into squalor of a built environment not maintained and a planted environment literally gone to seed.

  ‘To live here is to have an address you keep a secret for fear of how people judge your area; to feel yourself abandoned by life and holding the belief that you’ve been left to rot, that you’ve been told by your nation that you aren’t worth any better and that they have no other use for you. To live here is to feel left in a maze that you can never get above roof-level to see your way out of, a place where the ground seems to rise in all directions, where there’s no horizon line.

  ‘The planners thought the simple application of modern social principles could make a better world, when all they did was make a more confusing one. With best intentions they consigned a generation to a lesser life than they might otherwise have had. People were buried in these estates, Inspector, literally buried – lost in the mire and never scrambling out.’

  The relentlessness of Waldron’s argument began to grate on Grey, the way a conversation can when you want to go quiet awhile yet someone else is on a favourite topic: it wasn’t always healthy to offer free reign.

  ‘But they were products of their times,’ said Grey. ‘What else could they do, how else could they build?’

  ‘You’re right of course; and at least they gave good room-sizes, believed people deserved the space to swing a cat. And what have we got now instead? New estates of blinking Hovis houses, a retreat into a non-existent past, people clustered up in plasterboard cells, peeking out through tiny thick-framed windows. There are times when I feel I’m not sad to leave the future to the young.’

  It was still only spring, and the sun for all its brightness was fading. Grey didn’t want to be here without colleagues once it was gone. This wasn’t cowardice or fear of attack, only that an officer being here without an obvious purpose and not in sufficient force could unsettle people, prove agitative, and create a scene requiring officers and cars and blue lights that took all evening to calm down.

  They reached the Prove site, and there for some reason was a patrol car still guarding that patch of cordoned tarmac. Like a traveller in a far-off land making a vital connection, Grey made for them and requested they radio for a second car to come and pick them up. He was told that there was no other patrol in the area, and so they would have to wait for the next one to leave the station. Grey wondered if being transported in the back of a squad car wouldn’t be a little too close for comfort for Waldron, given his recent fears of incarceration? But it was either that or a taxi, and Grey couldn’t see it made much difference which.

  As they stood by the car waiting, Waldron, the afternoon guttering, sped up the narrative as if this was the last chance he’d ever get to say the rush of things suddenly on his mind,

  ‘This was what Stella was fighting for; not against the notio
n that people needed homes, not just exercising some personal NIMBY reaction, but expounding the belief that this was a bad design, a bad estate; and that a new spirit of social collective goodwill may indeed illuminate such a place, and let those living there be the first ever generation not plagued by the old social ills, but the odds were always going to be against it; and that this was no ones fault, not a failure of hope or skill, just the realistic understanding of one not caught up in the spirit of her times. She knew this was a bad design, and that the money would never be found to build it well or to keep it up properly; and for that the visionaries and utopianists of her age hated her.

  ‘The same people thought the classroom could become a playroom, that the feelings of the children were more important than their grumpiness at hours spent having knowledge implanted in their heads, not even the tiniest concession allowed for the ends of the finest education system the world had ever known to justify its means. Again Stella was out of step.

  ‘And that was what you bought me here for really, wasn’t it, to ask about Stella and Charlie.’

  Grey had by now quite forgotten. He took out the document he had found on his desk earlier and passed it to Waldron,

  ‘Do you recognise this? A researcher found it for my Sergeant when we were following up the Council connection, before we learnt about Patrick Mars. I found it on my desk this morning. It’s a copy of the Councillors’ Directory, Nineteen Seventy-four, including a piece, “In honour of the contribution made by the recently retired Councillor Mrs Stella Mars”, written by “Mr Derek Waldron, Assistant to the Town Planning Officer.”’

  The author held it in his hands, ‘I‘d forgotten writing this.’

  Grey took it back and read from the photocopy:

  ‘“…Though young and relatively new to local politics, Councillor Mars invigorated the Chamber with her enthusiasm and with the passion of her arguments, leaving no one in doubt of her commitment to do the best she could for the people of the town, even when her ideas of how to achieve this common good differed greatly from those proposed by her fellow Councillors.

  ‘“In both her personal and professional dealings these recent years she has been a beacon, a model of how a Councillor, indeed how any citizen, can conduct themselves with dignity and purpose. As such she has been a credit to the democratic process and the civic life of the areas she served. Southney Council, indeed Southney itself, have been illuminated by her presence and will be the lesser for her leaving public service. We can only wish her well.”’

  The man flushed.

  ‘It reads like you greatly admired her.’

  ‘I just though it was a shame, how she left: we’d all heard the rumours of the separation, her leaving the family home. The other Councillors seemed glad to see her gone, free to force their plans through. Someone had to write it.’

  ‘And Charlie?’

  ‘He wouldn’t gloat, he wasn’t bad like that.’

  ‘But you were on her side?’

  ‘I wasn’t really anything back then. It was my job just to bring the right plans to the meetings and to take them away again afterwards. It shouldn’t have been me writing this.’

  ‘I’m sure we’d all like something like that written about us.’

  ‘We can hope.’

  ‘It sounds like more than a professional admiration. And no one guessed your feelings?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Even after reading that?’

  ‘Oh, no one reads those things, and they were glad she was gone. Only I missed her.’

  ‘Look, forgive me for saying this, and I get why you couldn’t do anything back then with her being married and all; but couldn’t you have pursued it once you were both at the Cedars? Both single, both alone… You could have told her, you could have broken through the ice.’

  ‘That wasn’t ice around her, Inspector. It was permafrost. She wouldn’t have wanted it, trust me: that calm she had cultivated was her only comfort, and raising feelings she imagined belonging only to her past would have shuddered that calm away.’

  The man shook his head, the memories now returning,

  ‘I saw him once, Samuel Mars, with Patrick. We came out of the Council Chamber at the end of a long meeting and he was parked outside, which was unusual, waiting to take her home. As we spilled out Samuel opened his door and stood up, looking over, but I don’t think Stella saw him at first. She was talking with Charlie, who might have offered her a lift, as they were walking to his car. This was old Charlie, charming Charlie, and no matter how they went at each other in meetings they were always civil outside of the Chamber.

  ‘I think little Patrick had gotten out of the car too and called out “Mum”, and she turned around, still laughing at some joke of Charlie’s, and saying, “Don’t worry, Charlie, my boys are here, they’ve come to collect me!”

  ‘There were lots of us leaving, you couldn’t blame her for not immediately clocking the pair of them; but in those very few seconds of not being noticed, something happened to Samuel. Perhaps he thought she’d already kept him waiting long enough, perhaps he was embarrassed at not being spotted, I don’t know; but the look he gave her, full of burning fury: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man look at a woman that way before or since. I don’t suppose there was any more laughter at the Mars house that evening. I wonder now actually whether that wasn’t one of the last times…’

  ‘You know,’ he changed tack suddenly, ‘no one bothered to find out where she went, why she stopped coming to the meetings. Someone should have, don’t you think? And I was as guilty as anyone.’

  ‘Where is that squad car?’ asked Grey, it getting decidedly dark on the estate. The officers in the car they were leaning against now had the interior light on to catch up with the forms they were filling in.

  ‘Poor Charlie,’ Waldron went on, ‘met his end not twenty feet from where we stand; and as for Patrick… he didn’t stand a chance, did he, not with a father like that. I don’t regret what I did, you know.’

  ‘No, I sense that. So, if Samuel made Patrick bad, then what made Samuel?’

  ‘Who knows, he was certainly old enough to have stored up some bad experiences. Maybe something from the War? And as for why a woman like that would marry such a man, well I’ve often thought back to those times, to remember how things were, how we thought back then, whether women really did need to marry a man, any man, just for social standing.’

  ‘It’s not all bad then, the future. Some things get better.’

  Grey was attempting to lighten the tone; yet Waldron was struck by another memory,

  ‘I think Patrick had another family once, a darker-haired wife, and kids.’

  ‘Yes, he had.’

  ‘I saw them once in town. He looked right at me, the dad – Patrick – he was the spit of his father, the same eyes. And I’m told now his daughter was the girl I saw on the stairs?’

  Grey nodded.

  ‘Do you know the difference between Spanish concrete and British?’ Waldron suddenly brightened, glad to get himself back on more familiar ground. ‘Damp, we have it and they don’t. In sunny climes concrete bleaches white, makes ivory of every public building…’

  Grey didn’t see much evidence of such crystal kingdoms here.

  ‘In Britain the rain gives concrete the look of sodden cardboard, while being almost purpose built to give bad health to anyone living in those walls, as much an incubator for bronchitis and pneumonia as asbestos is for its related conditions. Quite conclusively the worst thing the Romans ever did for us; and that’s even before we get on to stylistic concerns, not all of which prevailing wisdom I share incidentally.’

  ‘Well, it sounds like you’ve seen what it can be like abroad.’

  ‘I have. And there’s much to applaud in our estates of that era too – after all, something must keep drawing me back to here – Just look at it!’ He raised his arms as if to embrace the whole of the Hills. ‘The chaos of the place, the wildness of the greenery al
l around, the way the different materials age – you’d be a fool not to be thrilled by the daring of it all, the ripping up of the rulebook, the occasional flashes of architectural lunacy.’

  He pointed to a row of little buildings facing just away from them, the nearest seeming to form out of its unmown lawn as the trunk of an oak does from the forest floor, the structure – the same for all in the row – intentionally featureless but for windows that, like in a child’s drawing, were small and different-sized and pushed up into the corners and along the edges of the building’s face, leaving an expanse of uniform brickwork at its centre,

  ‘Look at those lopsided eyes – madness; and how little light you’d get inside. I’m not sure if it’s a lunatic or a sadist who thought people ought to live in such objects.’

  That theme exhausted, he moved on,

  ‘But of course, there’s the strong community spirit here too – though forged more through solidarity than hope – which Campbell Leigh, and Charlie before him, have done much to channel wisely. You know what the irony of it is though?’ asked Waldron as they both looked across the courtyard now to the short block of flats that Charlie had been found beside, its structure a mix of glass, tiles, concrete and the same red bricks of the shopping centre that Grey had earlier noted glowing in the sun. ‘That the upkeep of these buildings is so expensive once the rain gets into the concrete reinforcing, that in a hundred years there might not be very much of it left. Imagine that, the predominant style of the whole Late-Twentieth Century absent from the architectural record.’

  Waldron was rattling away now almost on autopilot, these obviously long-held and oft-rehearsed set-pieces,

  ‘There are some who love these buildings and estates for political reasons, that they represent the only time socialistic principles guided architecture…’

  By now though Grey was zoning out. He heard a car engine coming by, then moving away, then getting louder again as it negotiated the unintuitive route towards them.

  ‘…where every house was as large as every other, every tenant treated the same, all run by the state as one grand scheme! Like socialism itself I suppose, another experiment that cost a fortune and failed in wet climates. Ha, forgive me, my little joke. And there it is, the unwritten first rule of architecture, that every building looks better on a sunny day.’

  With that the car finally found its way around to them, and stopped to take them home.

  The End