The Lubetkin Legacy

Berthold: Eustachia

Although there was no actual evidence of Mother’s love affair with Lubetkin, there were tantalising clues hidden about the flat. For example, there was a book about modern architecture that Mother kept in the loo on the shelf above the loo roll, which featured the work of Berthold Lubetkin, with torn strips of newspaper between the Lubetkin pages for bookmarks. It had nice pictures, including one of Madeley Court, and small snatches of text, just long enough for an average bowel movement. As it happened, I had been reading it on the very morning I had arranged to meet Mrs Penny.

Her office was on the eighth floor of a grim concrete building around the back of the Town Hall. Lubetkin himself, according to this book, had worked with Ove Arup, the master of concrete; but his concrete swirled and flowed into playful patterns or uncluttered lines. ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people,’ he had said. The council offices, I surmised, were an example of the ‘new brutalist’ school of architecture, a bracing offspring of Lubetkin’s modernism that made no concessions to bourgeois notions like ‘beauty’, which was strictly for wimps. This council building no longer housed the benign supportive state that Lubetkin and his post-war colleagues had tried to engineer, but a bossy, intrusive, policing ‘Them’ whose role was to keep the undeserving poor in their place. In fact it was the perfect backdrop for nosy Mrs Penny and her flea-bitten ankles.

I took the lift (even in here, someone had pissed) up to floor eight and walked along a corridor lit with blinking neon and floored with carpet tiles in a jarring mosaic of camouflage green and battleship grey. If, as Lubetkin proposed, the surroundings in which we live help to mould our souls, then this environment did not bode well for my meeting with Mrs Penny.

Her name, with four others, was on the door. They sounded more like a crew of international deadbeats than public servants. Mr Matt Longweil, Mr En Nuy Yeux, Mr Fred Treg, Miss Ignacia Noiosa, Mrs Eustachia Penny.

Eustachia! Blimey!

It was a large office with five desks, but none of the other officers was there; presumably they were all out terrorising innocent tenants in their homes. Mrs Penny’s desk was neat and tidy, with orderly papers, a spotted mug full of sharpened pencils, and a fluffy teddy bear with a spotted ribbon. By contrast the desk next to hers, presumably Miss Ignacia Noiosa’s, was strewn with papers, dead teacups, a sickly cactus and an ashtray overflowing with scarlet-lipstick-tipped cigarette butts. Which was odd, I thought, because smoking is usually prohibited in offices, especially in shared offices.

‘Come in! Good to see you. Please, take a seat, Mr Lukashenko.’ Mrs Penny indicated a hard wooden chair with splintery edges.

‘Sidebottom,’ I said.

‘Sidebottom?’

‘My mother remarried. Remember we talked about it? I’ve brought the marriage certificate and my birth certificate.’

‘Ah, yes, I remember now. Dear old lady. Three husbands. A little confused. No wonder.’

As I sat down, I felt a heavy clink in the pocket of my jacket. With my left hand I explored my jacket pocket: two coins — probably a 50p and a £1 — and something smooth and long. I peeped surreptitiously. Howard’s Bic lighter.

Mrs Penny scrutinised my documents, nodded and reached for the clear plastic file she had brought to our flat. There, right at the top, was the green printed Tenancy Transfer form that Inna had signed with her own name. She opened it out and started to skim through it. Just at that moment, a telephone started to ring on one of the other desks. At first, she ignored it, and carried on scanning the form. The phone continued ringing: seven, eight … twelve, thirteen … nineteen, twenty …

‘Excuse me.’ She stomped over to the desk in the far corner, and picked up the receiver. Her back was towards me.

‘Yes? … Sorry, Mr Treg’s out of the office at the moment, can I help? … Urgent? … Emergency? … A fire? Oh dear …!’

I pricked up my ears. A fire? What a good idea! I clicked Howard’s Bic and held it to the corner of a crumpled document in the waste-paper basket of the cigarette-butts desk. It smouldered for a moment, then a small flame took hold.

‘… Nobody hurt, I hope … Thank heavens …!’

I whisked the Tenancy Transfer and a few other papers towards the flame, taking care to safeguard my precious certificates.

She smelled the smoke, turned around and screamed. I grabbed a half-full cup of tea off the desk and threw it at the bin. The fire fizzled, faltered, then picked up again. Mrs Penny tried to douse the flames with water from a kettle, but by now it was all burning briskly.

‘Oh, hell!’ She hit a glass-fronted alarm on the wall.

Sirens sounded. Soon there was a drumming of running feet outside in the corridor.

‘You’d better get out!’ I shouted, grabbing a fire extinguisher from the wall and directing it at the waste-paper basket, which immediately filled up with foam. ‘Don’t wait for me!’

The green Tenancy Transfer floated up on the foam, mangled and scorched, but with the signature still visible. Inna Alfandari. I added it to the flames. Then I raced down eight flights of new-brutalist stairs to the exit.

There was a carnival atmosphere down in the courtyard below the stairwell. Like birds freed from a cage, the council staff fluttered around and around, flapping and chattering, but only a few picked up the courage to take flight. Two fire engines arrived. Yellow-helmeted hunks played hoses on the windows, while others ventured inside.

Mrs Penny spotted me through the crowd, rushed up and threw her arms around me. ‘Oh, Berthold! I hope you’re okay! I kept telling Ignacia she shouldn’t smoke in the office, but …’

She held me tight for just a moment longer than was strictly warranted by the occasion. I could smell her flowery perfume and feel her pneumatic breasts pressing on me through the fabric of my foam-spattered jacket. Down below the belt, the beast stirred. Which was strange, because he hadn’t stirred like that when I had held lovely Violet in my arms.

‘Fine. All’s well that ends well,’ murmured the beast’s cerebral master.

‘Thank you for trying to save my paperwork. Some of those old paper files go back years! The new ones are all on the computer, of course, but the old ones, like your mum’s, are a piece of history.’ She sighed. ‘You were so heroic!’

Heroic! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, George Clooney.

‘Don’t mention it, Mrs Penny.’ As I said her name, I wondered for the first time whether there was a Mr Penny.

‘Please, call me Eustachia. Stacey for short.’

‘Eustachia. What a pretty name. Isn’t that something to do with tubes?’

‘Yes. In the ears. Actually, I was born with a hearing problem. My mum liked the name.’

‘It’s quite unusual. But you’re okay now?’

‘I’ve grown out of it now. But as a kid I really struggled to keep up at school. I went through a phase of feeling hopeless and depressed.’

Depressed. I’d been in that bear pit myself. ‘People don’t realise —’ I began.

‘They don’t know what it’s like.’ She raced on in full confessional flow, her voice soft and confiding. ‘I felt so embarrassed about the way I talked, I hardly said a word all through my childhood. I just stayed in my room and talked to my teddies.’

This had suddenly become very personal. Her breasts, as if inflated by some intense private emotion, were still rising and falling directly below my nose.

‘Then my parents split up. But I got sent to this wonderful speech therapist. She taught me how to speak clearly. She told me to go out and do something useful instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself. “Always keep on the sunny side, Stacey,” she used to say. After I took my A-levels, I went into local government. I reckoned there were a lot of people out there among our clients who were worse off than me.’

I glanced down at her ankles. They seemed shapelier, but the ugly scars were still there.

‘That sounds a bit like me.’

‘You, Berthold?’ Her sweet face and direct manner, her own admission of vulnerability, invited confidence.

It was a long time since I had spoken to anyone about my breakdown. ‘I got depressed when my daughter died. Meredith, she was called. My wife blamed me. Our marriage broke up. My stutter started up again because of the stress. Not the best thing for an actor.’

‘You’re an actor?’

‘All the world’s a stage.’

‘Isn’t that a quote by Shakespeare?’

‘Absolutely. Shall we go and have a coffee? I know a nice p-place just up the road.’