TWO
Peter Pryor sat in the cool, white loft space and waited for the cafetière to brew. He liked delayed gratification and would not open his post until the coffee was ready. He enjoyed being aesthetic. Among the post was a letter from Daniel, so he felt quite impatient. What car had the boy bought? He looked at his watch. Another two minutes before aromatic perfection.
To pass the time he drew delicate doodles on a plain white pad set exactly square to the shiny white German table top. He doodled curlicues and devices and decorative conceits – an acanthus leaf surrounded by a swan’s neck, an initial P intertwined with another P by means of a rose garland – the baroque designs he used to play around with when he first graduated. Before he became an ardent minimalist and sold himself to his future clients as plain, plain, plain.
He looked up with pleasure at the flat white-painted canvas he had just purchased. Smooth as a baby’s bottom. Just the odd flaw here and there in the smoothness to show the painter’s hand. Saatchi bought the others. He smiled more broadly. Good company to keep. He poured the coffee, which was almost black, into a white cup and added no sugar, though he craved it. He took the first sip. And then he turned to the pile of post. He had to hold the envelopes some way away from his face now, to focus. A change that he did not like. He made a note to see his oculist.
He poured more coffee. Something showed pink among all the whiteness reflected in the metal of the cafetière. He peered and was upset to discover it was his eyeballs. He had been rubbing them again. Damn. He opened Danny’s letter. It was simply a photograph of a small red sports car, with black tonneau, out of which popped that girlfriend’s selfconsciously smiling head. Written on the back was, ‘Thanks, Dad. Only six years old and goes like a bomb.’ Which he took to refer to the car.
He wondered for a moment how Pamela was bearing up. Badly, he expected. She always did wear her emotions on her sleeve. Whereas, now that Danny had moved from London and got a job, got a flat, got a girl, he felt pleasantly adrift. Like a smooth white iceberg. As he said to those few who knew of his fatherhood and who enquired, it was appropriate that Danny had moved to Liverpool. He could always combine his visits to him with a visit to the Tate.
He opened another envelope using a bone-handled paper knife. Danny had brought it back from a Portobello junk stall when he was just fourteen and when Peter had first moved out of the house to here. At that point he wondered if the boy was going to follow in his footsteps and ‘have an eye’, but he did not. He followed no one, embraced red and black, drank a lot of lager straight from the bottle, did a degree in business studies and went into computers.
‘Wise up and surf the net, Dad,’ was a lastingly unpleasant aural memory. Only made worse when Danny decided to refer to his father in company as Pete. Apart from the ugliness of the shortening, it also made him feel like a sack of something bought in a garden centre. If Danny really wanted to break down the barriers of parental authority, surely Peter was fine? It was Pamela, of course, who encouraged it. When he asked her to suggest that Danny should call him Peter in future, she just said, ‘Oh, bollocks.’ Once they separated, he had no control over her any more, except in the matter of Danny’s maintenance money, which he found irritating.
From the envelope he removed the payment for one of his accounts. The Swedish heiress who wanted a cubic home. No doorknobs, no skirtings, no nothing. Easy money. He had created that environment in one form or another for the last ten years. Even to designing the extension to the Shored-itch Gallery in the same way. Caused quite a fuss when no one was sure how to get in or out of the lavatories. But they learned. He could almost do the design sleeping nowadays. In fact, sometimes it felt as if he were sleeping. To Simplify Your Environment is to Simplify Your Life was his philosophy. Pamela, who had once been so admiring of him, said ‘Oh, bollocks’ to that, too. He opened another envelope, took out another cheque, this time from a delighted American couple. You had to peer quite hard to find the doors in their house, too.
Sometimes he thought that if he could harness the sky and the trees he could make even the houses themselves disappear. Like a Rachel Whiteread in reverse: a conjuring trick for the cognoscenti. The Peter Pryor philosophy. He had designed everything from museums to a pop star’s barge on the same principal, though, truth to tell, he was just the tiniest bit tired of it now. The thought of doing anything so grandiloquent as harnessing nature made him feel quite weak.
He first conceived the Design of Absence years ago. While Pam graduated and took a post with a fabric designer, he began his professional journey towards a creative philosophy to herald the ebbing of the age. A profound journey. One that reflected the damage man had already wrought on the world. It took many years. On the way he made a name for himself. And then, one day, he was ready. He made an announcement about it during a particularly targeted, select gathering at his then home.
Which was when his then wife, Pamela, pulled one of her funny faces and said, ‘Don’t be so silly. Think of children, pets, grubby finger-marks. What would you do? Make everyone wash their hands before coming indoors?’
Later, a glass or two down the road, she had added the familially famous ‘Oh, bollocks’. He was shocked then, still shocked when he thought about it now. It was the beginning of the end. She was for colour, of course, bright colours, often vulgar colours. And destined to be unambitiously domestic. He then reminded her, and the gathering, that Corbusier had done just that. Put a washbasin in the hall. Put washing facilities in every conceivable part of the house. Made washing an integral part of living. Pamela laughed, also reminding the gathering that the despairing Mrs Corbusier said enough was enough and knitted a cheerful cosy for the bedroom bidet by way of rebellion.
That was the trouble with having a wife who had been educated in the same discipline as you but who took diametrically opposing views. No respect. She served red wine at their parties, too, which splashed on to the polished stone floor. Since he went she had actually covered those lovely German Furtzwanger flagstones in carpet. Royal blue carpet. And where once there had been white Japanese blinds she had now put sweeping sky-blue curtains. And she still had not hemmed them.
He wondered what she would think if he told her that recently he had begun to miss her. He still did not know what to think about that. It took him completely by surprise. They had seen rather a lot of each other during the run-up to Daniel’s leaving and got on rather well. He wondered if he could forgive her for the offensive cry of Oh, bollocks. If he could, he might consider living with her again. The calm-as-an-iceberg-adrift philosophy was wearing strangely thin. He dared not think the unthinkable, that he was lonely . . . He turned to the final envelope a little sadly. An invitation to give a talk at the Dublin Arts Festival in the New Year. Bill Viola was showing. A favourite artist of his, Bill Viola, cool, measured. He might go. But it was a long time ahead.
On the pad, on a separate page from the conceits and curlicues, and the note about the oculist, he wrote ‘Call travel agent: Dublin.’ And then he looked around the room a little anxiously. Given the tonal qualities of matching whiteness and his fifty-one-year-old eyesight, he was forever losing the phone.