News Where You Are

46

They stood leaning against the car looking at the exterior of the Renwick Building.

‘So what number is it, Dad?’

‘What do you mean — what number? On the street?’

‘No, on the list. What number is it on the list?’

Andrea touched Mo’s arm. ‘Being listed doesn’t mean it’s on a list. Well, it does, but I mean not that kind of numbered list. It just means that it’s protected — for now anyway.’

‘But if there was a list.’

‘What kind of list?’

‘Like … the hundred best buildings in Birmingham. What number do you think it would be, Dad?’

‘I don’t know, Mo. Ninety-nine maybe.’

Mo shook her head fervently. ‘No way, man.’ She’d started saying that a lot recently. ‘It’d be in the top twenty — definitely. I think it would be number seventeen at least.’

Frank nodded. ‘Hmm, the seventeenth-best building in Birmingham — that has a ring to it.’

‘Will there be a sign to say that it’s listed with your dad’s name on?’

‘I don’t think so. Lots of buildings are listed; they don’t have plaques.’

‘I can’t believe there won’t be a sign. What’s the point in being listed?’

‘It just protects the building.’

‘So no one can ever demolish it? Ever?’

Frank hesitated. ‘Well, you can’t say forever and ever. But it means it’s very difficult to get rid of it.’

Mo looked at the top of the building. ‘I think in four hundred years people will be coming here for day trips. They’ll have question sheets to fill in about the name of the man who built it and the shapes of the windows like we had to do at Aston Hall. Maybe they’ll have to colour in a picture of your dad! I bet loads of them will look at the building and say, “Wow! What a great building. I wonder if he had any grandchildren.” And they’ll try and imagine me, but they won’t be able to because I’ll be so long ago and mysterious.’

Andrea nodded. ‘Mo the Mysterious, that’s what they’ll call you.’

Mo liked that. She walked up and down the street in front of the building, inspecting the block as if it was her ancestral home. Frank was glad it was a Sunday and none of the office workers were around. He worried that Mo might have tried to charge them admission.

Andrea turned to Frank. ‘Do you think your father would have been happy?’

‘I don’t think he’d have been too thrilled about the seven that were razed to the ground.’

‘But at least this one will remain.’

‘I’m not sure even that would mean that much to him. I think he lost interest in individual buildings towards the end of his life. He didn’t seem to think they counted for much.’

‘I suppose everyone becomes disenchanted.’

‘No, he wasn’t disenchanted. The opposite, really — he was more fervent than ever, but his ambitions had moved on. He was obsessed with the new town he was planning. He felt he’d always been limited by his environment, by history, by other people’s ideas and mistakes. With the new town, he was going to start from scratch. It’s all he thought about.’

‘We should take Mo. She’d love that. She’d think she was the Lady Mayoress.’

‘Take her where?’

‘To the new town. You’ve never shown me, either. Darnley’s only in Worcestershire, isn’t it?’

Frank said nothing.

‘I mean I’ve seen the model; it’d be good to see the disappointing reality.’

Frank was silent for a few moments. ‘The reality is more disappointing than you imagine. We can go and visit Darnley New Town any time you want, but it has nothing to do with my father.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He never got the contract. It went to the Langdon partnership.’

Andrea stared at Frank. ‘But … you’ve spoken about it so much, his obsession, his endless work on it.’

‘It feels like he did build it. It dominated our lives for so long, dragging on and on. Endless public meetings and consultations and planning applications. He seemed to be perpetually presenting his plans. It was a long drawn-out beauty contest and they eventually narrowed it down to my father’s company and the Langdon partnership. They had to go away and develop the plans further before the decision was finally made. It had been a huge investment of time and energy for him. I mean he’d never been around much, but he seemed to leave us completely. Even when he was physically there at the dinner table his eyes never seemed to fix on us. It’s hard to believe that it all came to nothing.’

Andrea was quiet for a while and then said, ‘But I suppose he was used to that kind of thing, I mean for a practice like his that must have happened all the time — losing out to competitors.’

Frank shook his head. ‘Not to my father it didn’t — not often, anyway. In Birmingham he was the golden boy; he seemed to get everything he tendered for. I think he’d started to take it for granted that he always would.’

‘He took it badly, then?’

Frank could see quite vividly his toy town lying in pieces on the floor of his father’s study. ‘Yes, I think he did.’

‘Did he say much about it?’

‘He didn’t have much opportunity. He died a month later.’

Andrea looked at Frank: ‘God, Frank — I never realized.’

He shrugged: ‘Maybe they weren’t connected.’

‘But you obviously think they were.’

Frank looked over at Mo who was now poking the pond in front of the building with a twig.

‘I’m not sure that in the wake of losing his next big thing it might have occurred to my father that he had anything left to live for.’

Andrea reached out and squeezed Frank’s hand.

‘I’ve been wondering recently why I wanted to try and save this building. What would it matter if all his buildings disappeared? I mean lots of people die and seem to leave no trace — like Michael Church. But when you go back and scratch at the surface you find the people who knew him and who he’d meant something to or who he impacted in some way. He left traces. Then at the other extreme there are people like my father who leave behind this very tangible, physical legacy. Concrete proof that he existed, but if all his buildings went, what traces of him would remain?’

Andrea frowned. ‘Well, you remain.’

‘Yes I do, but he looked straight past me … and Mom. He’d grown bored of us long before. He was focused on the future; he was never really there with us in the house, in our lives. When you take away his works and all his talk about his works, he just slips through the fingers.’

Mo was walking back towards them, her face still glowing with some misplaced sense of ownership of the building.

Frank smiled at her but directed his words at Andrea. ‘I’ve no idea who he was, and this,’ he said, indicating the building, ‘never brought me any closer to knowing.’