Patrick Parker's Progress (50 page)

'Patrick
’
shouted a masculine voice. It was Rennie, his partner. Reality. 'Where the hell have you been? We've been scouring the place.'

Behind him he saw Peggy, very pink in the face, anxious and angry. Guiltily he stuffed the shoe back in his pocket and stood back to let them enter.

'Time for our interview with
Nexus Tokyo,'
Rennie said.

He ushered in the Japanese man to whom he had been speaking earlier. The Japanese man - on catching his eye - bowed. He held both a small recording machine and notebook. He did not look remotely like Madame Koi.

'Patrick,' said Peggy, in a voice that made him wince. 'You left me completely alone for nearly an hour.'

Had it really been that long?

She looked him up and down. He did not appear exactly as he had appeared when she last saw him. Indeed, he looked distinctly different. 'What
have
you been doing?' she said, more curious than hysterical now.

Well - yes - what had he been doing? With a sudden brainwave he said, 'Oh - I've sprained my ankle - quite badly -' He lifted it up to show a suitable swelling and bruise - not really a sprain as such -more of a rick - but it added credence.

Peggy, if she thought anything odd of it, knew that it was neither the time nor the place. She went over to him and smoothed down his hair. It reminded him of his mother, long ago and far away - suddenly he rather wanted to be back in that land. He let his wife steer him towards the rumpled sofa. Was it his imagination or did it feel still warm?

‘Ic
e
’
called Peggy to the caterers, who were by now pretending to be getting on with things at the other end of the room. A bucket of ice was produced, together with a large, pale grey napkin, which Peggy expertly wrapped around several melting chunks and held to the ankle. The caterers smirked.

Peggy knelt there. 'I thought you might have met up with Audrey
’
she muttered.

'Audrey?'
he said.

'Audrey
’
she said. 'Wapshott?' And gave the ankle a twitch. Patrick nearly shot off the couch.

'I've been stuck in here with a Japanese journalist as you very well know. What's Audrey Wapshott got to do with anything?'

'She lives in Paris.'

'She can live in bloody Timbuktu as far as I'm concerned.' Peggy was more gentle with him after that.

But while she was relieved, Patrick felt a curious mixture of humiliation, sadness, and loss. Of course, the Koi woman was quite wrong about Isambard - but at least she had something to say for herself. He looked at Peggy as she knelt at his feet. She had never learned anything about bridges.

'Peggy?' he said.

She looked up.

'What was Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
's gauge size?'

She shook her head and went back to tending him.

Throughout the press conference as he tried to keep his mind focused, his ankle throbbed and the shoe in his pocket dug uncomfortably, erotically, into his ribs.

Audrey moved swiftly, shuffling barefoot, through the crowd. Two bare feet and a shoe in her hand. The assembled guests were more relaxed now, loosened up by the champagne, more inclined to stare. All eyes seemed to be upon her as she made her way towards the entrance. Unsurprising, really, since apart from a somewhat wonky, and very odd, appearance, to be barefooted was
wild.
She looked neither to the right nor the left but made directly for the grand doors, holding out a beaded shoe as if it were an offering. Probably, decided the throng, she was one of the mime artists from the square below -or a more distinguished performance artist. Difficult to tell. W
atching her also, and with a litt
le amused regret, was Edwin Bonnard - a bit tipsy, he assumed - if only he were a few years younger
...
Madame Bonnard clung to the crook of his arm. The outing had tired her very much. It was unlikely she would attend such a party again. But she had rallied sufficiently to put one in the eye of that accursed Englishwoman - and the revenge was sweet.

As Audrey reached the grand doors, two attendants pulled them wide for her and she exited, laughing now, out into the night, the dusk departed into bright, bright stars. The doors swung to behind her, their shiny modern handles reflecting her gaudy dress. The grand staircase, bathed in blue moonlight, was empty and she descended - light-footedly running towards the street and hailing a taxi. As it pulled up in front of her she dropped her notebook down the grating of a drain. And that was that.

The taxi driver wanted to know if she had enjoyed herself. She said that she had. The taxi driver wanted to know if she had seen anyone famous? Gerard Depardieu, perhaps? No, she had not, she said, but there were certainly other actors about and she had seen one or two of those.

In the sky shimmered a huge, sinister hologram of Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
. Audrey, looking up at it from the cab window, thought that he looked down on her with a distinctly sour expression. 'Feeling's mutual,' she said. Before telling the driver to step on it. She shivered, that feeling again, as if someone had walked over her grave. If only, she thought, sitting back and relaxing at last, if only the caterers had come along even a quarter of an hour later. After all, Patrick had never taken very long in the past.

When Audrey reached home she bathed, hid everything away just in case Edwin changed his mind and came to call, put on her nightdress and robe and went and sat out on her balcony. In the distance, high in the sky, the
Brunel
hologram wavered and wobbled. Below her in the streets the town went rushing on, going about its late-hour business, ordinary, unremarkable, as she had seen it most nights for nearly thirty years. But now it had changed. Along with the mythology of
Brunel
, she had removed the mythology of Patrick Parker. And she didn't know if it was better or worse. Would it have been better to continue believing that he was special, a genius, a star in the firmament that she was privileged to have pleasured? Or was it better to know the truth as she now knew it, to see through the myth to the mortal? A talent, a huge talent, but as much a weak and flawed man as she was a weak and flawed woman. Florence was not the only one to blame for Patrick's unloving spirit, Little Audrey Wapshott was, too.

It made the last thirty years a waste of bloody time. She need never have broken her heart for Patrick at all. She need never have mourned him. And she need never have thought that to be rejected by one so wonderful meant that her life was over. That she was unworthy. You only get one hero in a lifetime, she remembered thinking all those years ago, and when you have known such a one
...
If I had been wiser then, she told herself, I would have rejected Edwin at the station, or at the first sign of My Last Duchess - gone home to England, taken my French examination, passed it probably, got a good job, settled down, married a respectable man, had two children and lived quite contentedly. Never thinking of Patrick again. Just as, come to think of it, she never thought about William the train steward. She had turned Patrick into an immortal, and she had therefore paid the price. But tonight, at least, she felt she had earned some of it back.

In
London Apsu sat in her large, draughty, skeletal loft in the soon-to-be-thriving industrial area of the easterly Thames, and played around on her computer. Her dexterous little feminine fingertips found it easy to negotiate the keyboard and she seldom had to go back over her virtual drawing of a bridge to rectify a mistake. I must, she thought, have faith. She had written the word
spectacular
up on one wall, in large red-lipsticked letters. It was her goad.

Hanging above it, the only framed pictures in the room, were two reproductions of details of paintings - the first Michelangelo's Sistine God and Adam - the fingers about to touch - the moment before man - and it would seem to be only man - connects with the world, and claims it as his own. The other, much enlarged, is a detail from a Rembrandt drawing of a mother encouraging her child in its first steps. The Rembrandt detail is of the two sets of hands holding on to each other as if there is nothing else in the world that matters beyond this first moment of daring, the step alone, the act of faith. The artist has used red chalk and the enlargement shows that his emphasis, his pressure point, was that linking of the pairs of hands. That was the connection upon which Rembrandt placed the whole dynamic of the drawing.

The girl who sits experimenting with her virtual drawing holds on to the simple, small idea, which intellect, pride, greed, hubris and desire for grandeur and glory make repeated attempts to pull from her. The simple, small idea comes from this: her grandmother lives on one side of the water, and there are places her grandmother wants to visit on the other side. At the moment her grandmother either has to walk a considerable distance (not too good for my old feet, my dear), or she must catch a bus to get to the other side (if there ever
are
any).

'It would', she says frequently to her granddaughter,
"
be
very useful if I could just walk over to the other side on a nice bridge.

FOUR

AFTERMATH

1

Some Years Later - At Home and Abroad

Game: Spot the Missing Person

Erasmus Bridge: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

[Designed by] Ben van Berkel
Dept. of Public Works of the City of

Rotterdam

Heading in Matthew Wells book illustrating
30
Bridges

Erasmus Bridge: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Since its completion in
1996
the bridge has rarely escaped headlines. Its designers, Ben van Berkel and
Caroline Bos,
referring to their creation as 'the baby blue monster'...

From text describing the same bridge in Lucy Blakstad's book
Bridge:

The Architecture of Connection

'Why do you never ask me anything?' said Patrick. 'About what?' said Peggy. 'About anything,' said Patrick. 'I just did,' she said. 'About what?' he asked. 'Exactly,' she replied.

Since Paris Peggy was not so compliant. Paris shook her to the core. Not only did Patrick leave her alone with the Van Crees - but the Van Crees immediately tried to engage her in conversation concerning his designs, about which she knew absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he had done them, they were big, he was famous for them, and they stayed up.

To make matters worse the Van Crees then drifted away to be replaced by a couple, who spoke no English, only French, of which she knew but two words, those being Yes and No - and certainly not the polite word for Toilet. She had never learned what the Van Crees knew how to do, which was drift off at parties when they were bored, and she felt that Patrick had let her down badly by leaving her alone for so long. Usually, if she was invited to functions at all, she sat at the side of him while he did his interviews or whatever it was, and he would occasionally take her hand, or look at her fondly, or even let them ask her what she thought of the latest project to which she, naturally enough, would only reply -
could
only reply - that it was another very Big and very Wonderful thing. That stayed up.

Patrick's lost hour had never been fully explained. And there were rumours . . . The only reason she knew there were rumours was because - when they arrived back in London - Isambard and Polly were full of sly nudges and irritating whispers. Apparently it had been over all the papers - their sort of papers - well, her sort of papers too but she kept it to herself - that the design team of this Parisian project was British (hurray), co-ordinated by Lord Buckland (hurray, hurray - a British aristocrat - the Brits knowing how to keep their aristos and not chop off their heads) and flanked by Giles Rennie and Patrick Parker (hurray, hurray), that the exhibition was about a very British man (Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
- hurray), despite the French trying to say he wasn't (boo), who should have been honoured by the British rather than the French (shame, shame) - and it was rumoured that a mysterious Japanese woman (ooh,
exo
tique)
had been disturbed, semi-clad, with one of the naked (shock, horror) British designers.

No one was quite sure which of the two men it was, but it was rumoured very strongly - because, it was hinted, the other might not like undressed women - that it was Patrick Parker. This was just as tasty in a way because Patrick Parker was always going off somewhere and building a bridge that wasn't English. And getting medals. Foreign Medals. And he was always complaining that he never got asked to build bridges in his own native land (paid for by the British Taxpayer, no doubt) - just who does he think he is? - and now he was behaving like Johnny Foreigner as well.

Patrick laughed it off. Peggy knew that laugh - Isambard Junior laughed like that when he was caught playing hooky and Polly laughed like that when she was caught pinching lipstick from Woolworth's. So Peggy was not convinced. And Peggy brooded. And when Peggy brooded she ended up distraught. Peggy felt sure that Audrey Wapshott - as she still was apparently - was somewhere at the bottom of all this. No man could have been with someone for so long and then just forgotten all about them. Patrick had not married her because he loved her better than Audrey, but because she was pregnant. He probably still had feelings for his old love and he was very well aware - as Peggy was well aware - that Audrey was At Large in Paris. Of course he
would
say it never occurred to him until Peggy mentioned it but she didn't believe him for one minute. They might even have had a secret rendezvous.
Florence
rang up (fortunately Patrick was away at the time) and
told
her that Audrey looked wonderful at Dolly Wapshott's funeral and
that she had been asking after him.
Who knows if it didn't begin then?
Florence
hinted as much. Said she thought Patrick would be very interested to see how well Audrey had turned out. And should she pass on the address? Or just the telephone number? Peggy said both, but they never arrived. It was quite likely she sent them straight to Patrick.
Florence
had never taken to her and goodness knew Peggy had tried. Oh yes, Oh dear, yes, if she ever sat down and thought about it all, Peggy was convinced that Audrey Wapshott was somewhere at the heart of the matter.