Desire Line (32 page)

I can be there anytime. Still satisfied with my own showing! Though it marked the end of childhood. Born to two parents here, then a young boy with Eurwen but cared for by Josh, I fell in love with the town— and lost it, dropped into a sort of domestic crypt.

Boars Hill, south west of Oxford, used to be the Village of the Dons. On its outskirts Pryorsfield that Eurwen and I got to at dusk, a winter afternoon, shocked the fresh-out-of-Rhyl kid. For a start, it reared up singly out of gravel and gardens without the usual
offices
. And surrounded by thick planting, the curve of the drive was enough to let the building play Surprise! by jumping out at the visitor, me today, in the back of a taxi. Eurwen dragged our bags onto the gravel in front of a house that not only seemed massive, it was. Neck-locking tall. Overwhelming. I wasn't even sure it was a house. The rustic pediment supported three brick storeys and a fourth in the form of a crenellated turret, all hollering about the Science Of Construction to a boy who lacked the concepts but was learning to look. That crenellated bartizan, for instance, burst from
a corner
and I could as easily balance a riding helmet on my nose! To do Pryorsfield real justice there's no point trying to take my ignorance back. Once inside (hanging on Eurwen like Frightened Monkey) the interior was High Gothic maintained over all ten principal rooms. That anyone connected with us owned it was a miracle.

I'd give anything to take the tour again now. Every door at entry level was shot through with enough iron to ward off an axe. Ceilings were coffered, arches pointed, corbels in various locations were monks' heads to rub in the Pryorsfield name, and no two alike. (Favourites? At the end of the kitchen corridor where a comic pair of them had pulled Satisfied versus Queasy expressions for a hundred and fifty years.) But the most eccentric feature is delivered straight away by the newel post of the central staircase. The Pryor himself, life size in oak, in a standing pose. And unbelievably menacing. The carver had gone to town on the robes, cutting so deep you could push a whole child's hand under the fold of cloth that kept his face permanently obscured yet terrifying in the half light—

I can never think of Fleur's kind words, or Eurwen's howling list of complaints without seeing the Pryor's silhouette, his hood drooping forward at me, a macabre fingerpost in the last of the light. It marked the start of an apprenticeship. I put Pryorsfield on to grow up in and it never chafed. I tried to overwrite previous Yori and if I can't remember running mad along the landings or bringing a friend home to build a den in the laurels with, it was because watchful Yori had crept in too. Not unhappy, either of us. And from Geoffrey and Fleur before it was too late I got the idea of Family as a rattle of coins. No need to search your pockets to count them, your entrance fee's covered. These were my great grandparents I was living with, and virtual strangers apart from the yearly pilgrimages. They were towering to my short, grey-white as paper to my putty-coloured, conversational to my tongue-tied.
Aged
. Worth spying on. Opening a window or the letters they still got, all their movements were deliberate and similar. You'd suspect them of knowing they had an audience, were a double act because either they'd grown alike or been the same in lots of basic ways. I look back and it's easy to think brother and sister and forget they were a couple. (I'd seen couples). Creakier than the wooden Pryor, they were at least on my side if he came alive, stamping upstairs and the knife hidden in one baggy sleeve flashed— but long before that happened, I'd learned to disrespect him and pat his head for luck.

Whatever Eurwen told them that first afternoon, we were in.

Straight off, Fleur began on spoken Japanese. She didn't even try Eurwen with joining us— and later, when I got to understand him more, I could imagine Geoffrey's response as something along the lines of ‘If you're considering the future, he'd be better off with Chinese.' She just did it, her large (for a woman's) mouth probably aching with the alien shapes it was forced to make.
Konnichiwa!
she greeted me, back from climbing the Jarn Mound
*
that Pryorsfield backed onto. I was more impressed by a man-made hill than practising tongue-twisters but, Going out again?
Ja mata ne!
She was better at it, tried harder and ignored Eurwen's eye rolling and giggles that made a turncoat of me when I copied her because despite everything no one could resist Eurwen. Any rare time she wanted me, I was hers. But Fleur found Tomiko again— without warning there in Gramps Geoffrey's study, where white walls made the screen a huge iris. Not today though. It contains an upper body in ink-spattered shirt and above, a face with our oldfriend the comet scar. Only blinking gives away Not a picture— really there! ‘Your father wishes to speak to you, Yori,' Fleur says and taking her husband's arm walks out of the room. And I can say, ‘Hello
otosan
,' and afterwards Fleur explains why it seemed to give him no pleasure. Sorry
chichi
to put you at more distance with wrong word

And Sara lived along side us. In the Turret Room on the south west corner a sample of her belongings lay ready for The Homecoming. Shelf after shelf of books brought over from Tackley Close by Geoffrey. A recorder in its case and an obsolete electric typewriter sat on a kidney-shaped dressing table attracting dust. Her academic gown hung in the cupboard, regularly shaken out and aired. And not the common Bachelor of Arts with its rabbit fur Eurwen hated, but the full scarlet silk, lined with navy. This was, Fleur explained, only for Doctors of the University. I'm allowed to try it on when I get older which goes to prove how the creepiness some people might think all this 
involved wasn't my experience. Her things were safe to handle even if her name was hardly spoken out loud. Absolutely normal. But the tension that flowed out of the room must've been felt by somebody. Eurwen became scarcer— at meals or for evenings in the sitting room with its huge furniture, brand new screen (bought when we arrived probably) and the piano only Fleur could play. One day when I was ten she didn't come home at all.

Which is why I owe my profession to Fleur and Geoffrey. Eight years at Avonside taught me a lot but not much that passed for education. (I'd arrived on my first day in Rhyl infants knowing how low to bow to my teacher— it could only go downhill after.) So F and G took my schooling in hand and found a tutor (several tutors) when Bradwardine turned its nose up at me. Even then to fill the gaps Fleur had to pitch in, not just with Japanese. Geography, history and music, of course. And Fleur's Music God, Bach. I can't play or sing but thanks to her I'm not immune to people who can. At the age of fifteen (Eurwen's when she ran off) J.S. Bach walked 183 miles from Eisenach to Lüneburg to get his first paid work. Worth finding out, I thought. Maths came via Geoffrey. ‘You may not know a hawk from a handsaw,' he began – the one and only time he baffled – ‘but the numbers don't care.' He was right and there's not a day I'm ungrateful.
Before we can build first we have to measure it.

Because I liked to sketch Fleur brought in Mr Dennis— probably quite young but just another grown-up to me. But too scared of children to work in schools any more. First lesson was how to hold the 6B pencil. ‘The Relaxed Tripod Grip,' he whispered. Hours went by practising the foreshortening of a white egg at rest on a windowsill. Then a speckled egg. ‘Next week, a Conference pear!' He carried on coming, never getting any less scared-looking, always flushed and jittery inside his wool jacket like he'd been chased up Boars Hill by his ex-students. You couldn't not like the man. Though I got ahead of him quickly, I hid it to keep up the sessions. So neither Mr Dennis nor I ever went to school again. Eventually, ‘What would you like to do with your life, Yori?' Fleur asked in her bland way. One slow Pryorsfield afternoon it seemed a question like, ‘Biscuit or cake?'

‘I don't know. What things are there—' You can see I wasn't promising material at this age ‘—sort of?' Not much in Gramps Geoffrey's bare study can distract. The rest of the house is filled with Fleur's clutter – so clever of her to choose this location with its laquered desktop like a virgin snowfield. His screen is blank— and since me arriving here he's had the stained glass insets in the mullion removed. Professor Severing is observing me under strong natural light. I could be a new set of figures. ‘Geoffrey and I were thinking, design maybe— or architecture?'

‘Architecture,' I said.

University of Western England took me at eighteen to study Built Environment with Planning. In Bristol. Me at St Clement's or any other Oxford college? No. The night before I left, Fleur called me into the Turret Room. The single bed's blue cover as far as I knew had never been sat on and I chose the rhomboid lid of the window seat now. From the tight squeeze of the book shelves Fleur took down the signed copy of
A First
and gave it me with overflowing eyes. ‘It's what Geoffrey wants,' she said and I nodded, Thanks. But once in Bristol, I wasn't in any hurry to start it. Every week I talked to Geoffrey and Fleur. It could've been oftener, me missing Pryorsfield, but they said they didn't expect it, a sort of command. I acquired friends, which was a novelty. Was drunk— once. And had first sex with an Indian girl, Kailash who drew me by the rope of hair bisecting a narrow waist and amazing hips I followed into the student refectory. Her actual features were almost insipid unlike her character I found. (We'd go on to last three point five years in two separate sessions, during which I learned everything about her. We shared a top-floor studio flat in the Montpelier district and cycled to A History of Conservation classes in one of the worst, leakiest new buildings I've ever entered. We travelled by train to inspect many award-winning projects in Southern England, including Slough's Pink Pyramid before it disintegrated and had to be demolished. Kailash addicted me to lists and when she visited Pryorsfield was admired by Geoffrey for her cleverness but not by Fleur. By the end, Yori One was still attracted while Yori Two was ready to set out for the South Pole if it'd shake her off. Anyway, during this period I never thought about Sara, and about Eurwen only when Tomiko mentioned her name. And I looked forward not back. The past was Josh and Eurwen and Tomiko loving and hating each other and my father leaving, which I could see wasn't only because I ate catfood on a Rhyl doorstep. And finally there was Eurwen's flight back to Pryorsfield, with excess baggage, me. Avonside was just an in-betweener, a father and daughter and child trapped by ‘a rabbit hutch of a house' and as a structural engineer will tell you, in any explosion it's the containment does the damage.

The Past. Tomiko in his ancient city of Kochi can give the impression he's transmitting from centuries ago. His existence is supported by a complicated mesh of stress deflectors and mental ties and self-imposed guidelines. I went through a teenage phase when my father really got on my nerves – ‘Today's
koan
was gardening,' my brat-self told Fleur, ‘like it's clearing away nature to make a garden that represents, you know, nature. Rock, pool, light and shadow—'

‘Oh and those were his
exact
words?' she asked. You had to love Fleur.

Geoffrey and Fleur also tended to try and leave the past alone but then their choice was taken off them. They became part-of by dying within a few months of each other just after I graduated and there was no going back to Pryorsfield, ever. Unlike Eurwen, I couldn't have sold the house. Slap in the middle of a lavish plot, so afforested we might have been in mid-Wales, it was only seven kilometres from central Oxford— and worth a high-end Casino Pigalle win. Faster than a tropical funeral according to Kailash, the total annihilation of Pryorsfield followed the sale. I didn't go to watch. But now I wonder if it was something Geoffrey and Fleur secretly planned? To lance the Turret Room abscess. Instead my First Class Great Grandparents left me other resources to take back to Bristol or to Kochi or Singapore or the British Antarctic Territory or anywhere that appealed. Or a place I'd dreamt about in every vista, layout and reworking imaginable from the time I was eight years old and was still doing it right up to the last uneasy night I'd ever spend in Josh's cobalt blue house.

In Westport I'd described Rhyl for Josh. ‘They'll have to flatten Avonside. Foryd Harbour's a shambles— you've seen?' Of course he had. The flood gave us something to pass the time, a safe topic away from Sara, while the Artell's battery charged. I caught him out relishing mayhem at a distance, something I could almost identify with. But next day the sight of Rhyl was a huge jolt all over again. And the sheer ugliness worsened. Nearly four months gone and areas cleared in the first flush of activity were buried again under mounds of rubbish from other locations. One Monday morning Glenn and I watched skips arranged along the length of the promenade being filled with spoil. Impossible not to try to sort the rubble by eye – sections of original cast-iron were quickly covered with concrete fragments reduced by much handling. I'm about to turn away when there it is, a recognisable Metplas bin (intact-looking from here). I'd sourced them from a small fabricator in Liverpool. Weather-resistant to European Standard EN 840-1-9-7. Impossible to topple, as I boasted to Tess and made her giggle. No sign of her now just when I wanted to tell her, Consider how it was— growing up in sight of the Jarn Mound and a load of trees but hankering to build things yourself.
Finally
back to the place needing it most, in free time you draw, you model, you run simulations— while in working hours? Traffic flow in the Morland Park, Fairfield Ave area needs re-routing. A few doomed trees can go
here.
Bins for the promenade have to be guaranteed bird-proof. In Abbey Street you do a modest drop-in centre which opens a full month before The Wave puts a mailed fist through its glass front. (‘Here a smoky quartz atrium suggests a cliché-ridden attempt at openness while at the same time incorporating a pragmatic nod towards client confidentiality.'
Publicnubuildnewsletter.org
)
With Gramps and Fleur dead and Pryorsfield flattened, I was twenty-eight and had money I kept quiet about for practical reasons. I thought I had no ties. If Libby Jenkinson's ground floor was intended as a temporary bolthole, when we were hit I was still there.