‘Right!’ enthused the Producer, his eyes moist with the possibilities. ‘Those production values! Technically speaking, Triumph of the Will stands up; it’s a hell of a movie. Give me extras from the old school who’ll really go for it, give me a monster-monster budget — and anything is possible.’
‘We ascend,’ the Minister dropped his voice to a cathedral whisper, ‘in an open-fronted elevator (“a vertical ghost-train”, it has been called); climbing silently through all the strata of wartime desolation: fire-raids, rubble, water jets, Mass Observers, nigger bands in smoky cellars. We re-experience the primal energies of conflict — so cruelly denied to many of us in this comfortable world, where all our enemies have been defeated. Then, at the summit, in the hush of the final chamber, we come upon a still-life tableau of striking simplicity. A sunken pit ringed with plain wooden stools, and a table on which the waxen corpse of the Consort has been laid out, among all his ribbons and honours; his favourite golf clubs bound like a bundle of rods (fasces): the symbol of a lictor’s authority. We back away in awe. From the portholes, we kneel to look down over the battleground of the city, the sun-capturing towers of Canary Wharf, the silver helmets of the crusaders of the Thames Barrier.’
‘I see it, I see it!’ the Architect cried out, with all the agony of a convert. ‘You’re reviving Speer. I’ve thought for some time — though one has been reluctant to admit it — he’s quite a respectable figure, once you remove him from the sleazy milieu in which he operated. In fact, he seems to have more genuine “bottom” than many of his fellow Neo-Classicists working not a mile from here in the deregulated sector. Acting as muse to a carpet-chewing dictator may, in the long view, prove a worthier calling than fudging some pastiched Byzantine cladding for a cartel of grinning orientals. Isn’t Speer’s the very stuff that HRH has been advocating all along? (More havoc from the socialist planners than the Luftwaffe?) Speer had that unifying vision, the epic sense of scale, without which there is no polis. In time he may very well be recognized as a minor master, and given a retrospective at the Hayward.’
‘The overriding object,’ the Minister had clamped his case, and was preparing to depart, ‘is to shift the river axis. The City of the Future must be a phoenix rising out of the ruin of docklands. Abort the flattering urbanities of Canaletto, the pastoral fancies of Turner: we must assert the primacy of William Blake and his “Hiding of Moses” (page twenty-four in the brochure). Twin pyramids honouring the swamp, a curve of water guarded by a lioness; the precise hieratic steps of material progress. I leave it with you.’
And he bounced from his perch. His perfectly pink head, level with the tabletop, passed among the peaches and pineapples like a runaway sweetmeat, an exotic blancmange. Professor Catling, spoon in hand, stared longingly after his rapidly diminishing form; a trickle of drool starting from the corner of his mouth.
III
The move into the Bow Quarter hit Sonny Jaques like a jolt of mainline adrenaline. Here he was — in the heartland — aligned with the feral energies of the heroic and legendary East End. Scrap the ear-stud (lose that Kit Marlowe boy-prince image), shave the skull, climb into Chagall’s bleached blue jacket, and an aircrew cap. Look at me, Ma: worker/artist, Constructivist poet articulating the inchoate scream of the masses.
The Quarter also promised a kidney-shaped pool, an indoor jogging facility, and a panelled library, stacked to its girder-enforced fake ceiling with all the latest blood ’n’ boobs videos. Sonny pumped iron. It kept Kathy Acker looking good — and he was ten years younger! There she was in Time Out. But he was going to make the cover. (He hadn’t decided yet if a tattoo would be construed as bourgeois narcissism, proletarian solidarity, or a brand of brotherhood with the primitives of the Third World. Would it help to pull the chicks?)
The buzzword was realpolitik; clear-eyed, stand-up-and-be-counted, a streetgang of warriors. For less than £150,000 you could purchase a few cubic feet of the old Bryant & May match factory, a kiosk tricked out in the style of a blue-ribbon transatlantic liner (tourist class, natch). Or, more accurately, as if the set for such a vessel had been tastefully vamped in plasterboard, chrome, and plastic mouldings for a Noël Coward revival (Sail Away?) This former cathedral of industry was now partitioned into a series of mock-deco hutches: waiting rooms for some futurist dentist. And everywhere the gaunt spectres of the sulphur-jawed skivvies were invoked in sepia-tinted prints. The Bow Quarter was a shrine to the authentic. Volunteer inmates were barricaded against the outside world, eager to turn a blind eye to the railway, and the ramps of petrol-burning lemmings who dirt-tracked within yards of the perimeter fence. (If this is the Bow Quarter, who needs the other three-quarters?)
Sonny paced between fridge and window; where he gazed, olive carton in hand, ruminating, upon the squadron of builders’ skips that packed the inner courtyard. It was time to put a flame under a few dozing projects. Obviously, Spitalfields was burnt out (caned by the supplements) — but Bow was effervescently marginal, a desert crying aloud for re-enchantment.
‘I think we’ve got a genuine lever here,’ Sonny lectured. I had agreed to meet him, not because I had any expectation that our film project could be resurrected, but because I felt that the Bow Quarter itself would stand a little research. It was a fortress for New Money, not for the seriously wealthy river-spivs. These proper people, the traditionally liquid, had staked out Wapping, years ago, while the here-today-gone-tomorrow boys ravished the Isle of Dogs, laundering their blagswag: leaving such previously despised outposts as Bow to small-change tobacconists, hairdressers, media hustlers, and oral-hygiene mechanics.
‘Francis Smart has flitted — the producer who once met your mate, Eric Whatsisname — so Hanbury’s script is on the spike. It’s in limbo. It won’t be cancelled, but it won’t be cleared either. Forget the kill fee. There’s no fizz left. They’re putting Hanbury out to grass in Dorset, Open University rap, the Valium beat. Smart has cashed in his credits. Now — this is strictly off the record — I don’t want to read it in Private Eye, you must promise…’
‘Oh, naturally,’ I replied, smirking with insincerity, ‘I know the rules.’
‘Well, what happened was — the old fart let some Oxford chum run a graveyard series on “The Chivalry of War”; twenty episodes, bottle-necking Sunday nights. Hours of dreadful stock footage, voice over, rostrum trawls across The Rout of Ran Romano; flutes and drums, talking heads; purple, cabbage-skinned passed-over brigadiers thumping maps — and young Lochinvar poncing about in tailored sour-cream fatigues around every battlefield he could think of from Carthage to Marathon, Bull Run to Saigon. The expense sheet’s been framed: it’s a legend. And in exchange, quid pro quo, Smart gets a sabbatical year, recharging the batteries among the dreaming spires. He’ll shuffle back at the end of the cricket season to see if there’s anything on the boil at the Palace: tread water until the knighthood comes through. Might put in for Controller of Channel 4, or cop the Arts Council as a consolation prize. Then there’s always The Times. And the antiquarian bookshop.’