The Restoration of Otto Laird (28 page)

And where else did they visit in that part of the world? The Amalfi coast – the hillside towns of Positano and Ravello. It was the usual tourist trail, but not so well trodden on the first of their visits. Less packaged up, back then. And every few days they would take the train to visit the ruins of Pompeii. With notebooks in hands, they sketched out the proportions of the buildings, the width and positioning of the windows, the public spaces and street plan. And then, as a break some days, when the midday sun became too much to bear, they sought shade at the House of the Vettii. The fresco near its entrance seemed to fascinate the jostling groups of tourists, who laughed out loud or stared in amazement at the outsized appendage of Priapus.

The carriages of the Circumvesuviana were scrawled with similar images, but no one took much notice of those. Riding the local train back to Sorrento, with the sun touching the sea beyond the mottled windows. Cynthia, back at the hotel, sketching in crayon the deepening blues of bay and sky. Otto, watching her work in the window, his long body stretched out on the bed. And as dusk came on he had studied his upturned toes, encrusted in dust, dissolving …

So there were aspects of humanity that remained the same, despite time's constant remaking. Perhaps, in the next millennium, tourists would flock in their thousands to see the ruins of Marlowe House. Maybe they, too, would queue in line to see the random obscenities on its walls. First things first, however. The immediate priority was to stop that demolition.

Pacing around the columns, which glistened in the chill from the overnight rain, Otto studied carefully the spacing between them – measured out with the help of his cane. He saw again the long months they had spent studying the laws of classical proportion, firstly in textbooks and then later, when they had the money, during their travels across southern Italy.

We tried to recapture some of that here, he thought. The play of light and shadow between the columns as one walked through them.

It was a nice idea, but in retrospect a bloody silly one. They didn't really take account of the conditions here in London. All that miserable English weather, reducing everything, buildings and sky, to a muddy and colourless grey. He was sure there must be moments, though, in the heat of a midsummer's day, when their classical shadow-play was occasionally revived. A momentary trick of the eye for the casual passer-by, transported, almost without noticing, into the shady folds of a Roman forum. It was pleasant to entertain such thoughts, however far removed from reality they might be. It made the decay and desperation of this place a little easier for him to bear.

He wondered, then, just what Anton would have made of Marlowe House in its present condition. Anton always referred to his sister and brother-in-law as the ‘patron saints of lost causes'. No doubt he would see its current state as a vindication of his views.

A more personal thought suddenly troubled Otto's conscience.

I should have supported him, too. He was in a bad way.

Once or twice, in the weeks following Cynthia's death, there had been tensions between the two men. Otto became irritated by Anton's sentimentality, by his tendency to deify his late sister, to speak about her in hushed and reverent tones: ‘as if she were Joan of Arc', as Otto described it to a friend.

Anton's eulogies were his own way of dealing with the sense of devastation. But in seeking to come to terms with Cynthia's loss, he had rapidly turned his sister into an alabaster idol, removing all nuance and complexity from her personality. In a few short weeks he had transformed her into a character from myth – and so banished her, without meaning to, into the distant past. It was something Cynthia herself would have found ridiculous. At the time Otto found it difficult to keep the impatience from his voice whenever Anton launched into one of his lengthy lamentations, and they had more or less lost contact with each other after that.

I regret that now – my irritation with Anton. It was unfair of me to treat him so. None of us was exactly thinking clearly then.

It must have been ten years now since Anton died. Otto had sent flowers but felt too awkward to attend the funeral. He wished he hadn't lost touch with him after moving away. Maybe they could have been of some help to each other at that time.

Another image sprayed onto a column distracted Otto from these thoughts.

I haven't seen one of those in years.

He stepped forward to take a closer look. It was an inverted Y shape with an extended stem, set within a circle: the symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Halting before it, he reached out a hand and lightly touched his fingers to the perimeter of the circle. The sight of it alone was enough to evoke the atmosphere of the late 1950s, back in the days before Daniel came along.

Twenty-Six

The threat of the bomb hung over everything at that time. The arms race appeared to be spiralling out of control. At a personal level, as they had married not long before, this was among the happiest periods of Cynthia and Otto's lives. But gradually they felt a shadow creep across their consciousness and conscience. The prospect of a nuclear conflict was becoming ever more real.

One evening at the apartment in Marchmont Street, Cyn was reading John Wyndham's novel
The Chrysalids
when she put it down and joined Otto on the sofa. Shaping herself around him, she pressed her face close to his. Glancing up from his own book, he saw that she looked pale and disturbed.

‘What is it?' he asked.

Nuzzling her nose against his cheek, she ran a hand through his thick mop of hair, admiring its pure black colouring in the light from the reading lamp.

‘Let's never have children,' she said.

Otto flinched in surprise.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Let's never have children.'

He moved his face back fractionally to inspect hers.

‘You're serious, aren't you?'

She nodded.

Otto felt caught off guard – embarrassed by the sudden intrusion of this weighty subject into an evening of quiet reading. His mind was still focused on his own book, a rather dense new work by the philosopher Theodor Adorno, and it took him a moment to find his bearings. When he did, his tone was conciliatory.

‘Clearly it's not something we've discussed a great deal, and we have plenty of time ahead of us in which to make an informed decision. Nevertheless, I must admit … I had hoped that, one day, perhaps, you know…'

Cynthia felt guilty about her unprovoked lunge. She had put poor Otto on the spot. John Wyndham's descriptions of a post-apocalyptic world had wrought a strange effect upon her. She smiled an apology, but could not deflect the sadness from her eyes. Now she kissed Otto on the lips and hugged him to her. This sudden display of ardour shocked him. There was nothing romantic or sensual in the gesture. She seemed close to tears.

‘Of course, a part of me hopes to have children,' she said unsteadily, ‘but I'm really not sure, any more. Not because of us, but because of the world – the direction everything is heading. I'm not sure it would be fair of us to bring them into this.'

Having recovered himself, Otto recalled the book that Cynthia was reading. Earlier, he had leafed through some of its pages.

‘I understand,' he said, slipping an arm around her shoulder. ‘But let's not give up just yet. We are young and we have plenty of time to think the situation over. We also have time to make a difference.'

She agreed with him on that last point. They must channel their concerns more positively. In February 1958, at Cynthia's instigation, they attended the inaugural meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, held at Central Hall in Westminster.

*   *   *

The darkest moment of that era came a few years later, in October 1962. Cynthia and Otto were on a camping holiday in the Lake District when news broke of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Over the course of the next two weeks, before the resolution of the dispute, a war between the USA and Soviet Union appeared inevitable. Everyone knew that it would quickly become a global confrontation. They also understood, in disturbing detail, just what the effects of a nuclear strike would mean.

During the daytime, in that difficult fortnight, they took long walks together in the hills. They wanted to take their minds off events elsewhere, to feel themselves fully alive. In the evenings, they sat nervously beside the campfire, wrapped in thick jumpers and waterproofs, listening to the news bulletins on a transistor radio. Their mood became increasingly sombre as the crisis deepened. The USA was demanding that the Soviet Union remove its weapons from Cuban soil. The Soviets showed no signs of acceding. Both sides, it seemed, were becoming more intransigent with every day that passed.

‘Surely the instinct for survival will win out,' said Otto, as they listened to the war of words intensify on the radio. ‘Sanity, at some point, must prevail.
Somebody
has to back down.'

He sounded, from the tone of his voice, as though he were trying to convince himself as much as Cynthia.

She said nothing for a while. A slight mist wreathed the fields and trees, causing the glow from the campfire to thicken in the twilight. The wet grass breathed its scent into the evening air.

‘I'm not so sure,' she said at last. ‘Do you really think they'll act sanely in the face of all this? There's so much fear, such paranoia, on both sides.'

Logs cracked and splintered in the fire. They looked out into the murky twilight, at the vast and looming shapes in the distance. Even the mountains themselves seemed suddenly vulnerable.

‘You're right,' said Otto. ‘Fear makes people do terrible things. All rationality disappears before it. It's there within our recent history.'

He sounded especially thoughtful as he said this.

Cynthia noticed that the reflection from the fire had transformed the lenses of his spectacles into two miniature flames. She slid an arm through his, their waterproofs squeaking noisily.

‘It's the scale of it all that's so hard to comprehend,' she said. ‘The scale of what will happen if these things are finally used. Not just to our own generation, but to many afterwards. The environmental devastation, radiation poisoning lasting centuries, maybe millennia. It's almost impossible to grasp.'

Otto was staring intently into the fire. All words of solace had deserted him. Cynthia paused before speaking again.

‘As a girl I used to try, sometimes, when out walking in the countryside with my family, to peel back the layers of time – to imagine the long-term development of the landscape around me. I did the same thing yesterday, when we went walking up in the hills. Going back one hundred years or so is never a problem. At that stage, I'm only just moving beyond the curve of a human lifespan, so to some extent I feel able to empathise with life as it was lived back then.

‘Moving back further in time, it becomes more difficult. Standing stones. Burial cairns. When trying to find my way back into prehistory, all sense of understanding starts to fade. I can't imagine what life was like, what it must have felt like to be a human being. Their worldview would have been completely alien to us.'

A fat log burst in the wind-ruffled flames as Cynthia pursued her train of thought.

‘Once I try to go back even further, into deep time, geological time, to the sculpting of the landforms beneath my feet, then my imagination fails me completely. All those thousands, millions of years become meaningless – an abstract number only. I can't connect them to my own tiny existence. It's the same, I suppose, when trying to look any distance into the future. It's hard enough to picture oneself not existing, let alone the planet itself. I can't imagine how bad things would be … for whoever, or whatever, followed us. My empathy can't reach that far ahead.'

Otto noticed that she was shivering slightly, and not only from the autumn chill. He drew closer to her in the firelight, trying to better protect her from the stirring easterly wind.

‘Maybe tomorrow things will be better,' he said, finding his voice once again. ‘Maybe tomorrow they'll finally come to their senses.'

*   *   *

Throughout the 1960s, they participated in a number of antinuclear demonstrations. On one occasion, they joined a sit-down protest before the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall. Otto was concerned about Cynthia taking part, as she was already four months pregnant with Daniel. Fearing a strong response from the authorities to this act of passive resistance, he tried to persuade her not to attend, but she had insisted.

‘It's even more important now that we take part, isn't that obvious?' she asked him.

There was a hint of impatience in her voice as her hand rested on her belly.

Otto, however, remained worried. During the protest, he sat shielding her as best he could, while police officers waded into the crowd and dragged protesters away. Cynthia sat firm when two young officers approached them with purpose, but Otto quickly relented. Climbing to his feet and holding out a hand to ward off the policemen, he announced in a firm voice that his wife was pregnant, causing them to hold back self-consciously while he gently helped her up.

‘You should act more responsibly, given your condition,' said one of the officers, as he tried to clear a path for Cynthia through the crowd.

‘And so should
they,
' she responded angrily, pointing towards the MoD building, before recovering herself and thanking the officer for his help.

Following a thaw in Cold War relations, the profile of the anti-nuclear movement dimmed somewhat during the 1970s. But in the early 1980s, with a renewed heightening of East–West political tensions, fears of a large-scale nuclear conflict revived. Otto and Cynthia listened at the dinner table with a sense of déjà vu, as Daniel voiced his concerns.

‘One push of a button by one of these maniacs in power, that's all it will take,' he said. ‘And then we'll be gone … everyone.'