Jonathan considered himself to be a reasonably moral man. He had never meant to end up working in a place like this. The pleasures of his life stemmed from peaceful pursuits, his interests inclined to classical studies. He had always held an unformulated plan in his head, to succeed as some kind of architectural historian. Instead he had married young, looked after his parents, raised a child, suffered a nervous breakdown. He had been sidetracked by his need to make money, distracted by the fuss of living, misrouted from his original goal. And now, here he was in the centre of one of the most historically important cities in the world, and the only work he had found since the death of Connie was in property speculation, helping to asset-strip and destroy the very thing he cared about most dearly. A typical Gemini trait, he thought, to be both destroyer and creator. Well, one day he would find a way to repay the debt, redress the balance. Until then…
He turned back to a desk smothered in unprocessed documents. Darren, the office junior, was laboriously clipping surveyors' reports together and arranging them in files. Today's problem had been growing for a while now. The building in question was a run-down Victorian house presently occupied by an electrical appliance contractor. The freehold was owned by the Japanese property conglomerate Dasako, and the lease had been granted on a short-term basis that was now reaching an end. Jonathan's case notes ran to dozens of pages. Marrick was desperate to purchase the building outright because it stood between two other properties he owned under different company titles. Individually neither was worth much above land value, but collectively they represented a highly attractive proposition. Jonathan assumed that ownership of the third property would increase access to the other two, but Marrick had never explained why he wanted to own such a large chunk of property. He never explained anything. He was guided by an unerring instinct for making money.
Jonathan was sure that Dasako had no knowledge of Marrick's involvement in the surrounding offices; the names on the company records would mean nothing to them. Even so, their asking price for the soon-to-be-vacant property was way too high. The area would not support such a valuation. There had to be a reason for pricing themselves out of the market, but what could it be?
'Tell you what,' said Marrick in the pub later that evening, 'I've got an idea,' and he threw Jonathan a crooked grin which normally meant something dishonest was coming. He made a meaty fist around the handle of his pint, his rings glittering like gold knuckle-dusters. 'Get me the plans for the city block, would you?'
'The whole block?'
'Yeah. There's something I remember seeing the last time I went over the place. I've got a feeling we can stitch up these tossers without moving a fucking muscle.' He drained his glass and banged it down, then felt his jacket for his cigars. 'Three hundred and seventy K for an almost derelict building, bollocks! I know their fucking game.'
'You think they're going to find a new tenant?'
'Nope,' said Marrick, lighting up an absurdly large cigar. 'Of course not. Crafty bastards have other plans. They're gonna get it listed and restore all the original features.' He sucked noisily at the stogie.
'How can you be so sure?' asked Jonathan, shifting beyond his boss's smoke-ring range.
'Ah, well you see, while you're still snuggled up in bed in your pyjamas dreaming about retirement, I'm up with the fucking larks collecting information, and I hear that Dasako are currently employing the services of a design company that specialises in restaurants. Fucking great big Conran-style eateries that seat 700 diners at a time. If they get a restaurant in that space and it's a success, we'll never fucking get them out.'
'So what do you propose to do?' asked Jonathan. He ran a hand through his straggling grey hair and waited while his employer picked flakes of tobacco from his lip.
'I'm gonna buy 'em out, pull the whole lot down and resell. It's worth fuck-all as it is. The upper floors are falling apart. Just get me the plans of the block.'
The teeming humanity that passes through London as the centuries rise and fall! The sheer weight of life borne by such a small area of land! The city transforms itself from a Romancapital with an amphitheatre, forum and basilica, its Temples of Mithras and Diana giving way to the spired cathedrals of Christianity. Walls, gates and defences rise, parish churchesare built over Saxon villages, medieval commerce packs the streets with wood-beamed houses, and the kaleidoscope of history spins wildly on through coronations, insurrections and disharmonies, mutiny and jubilation eliding past, present and future. And through these pululating voices one word is heard most clearly; Charles I, stepping up to his execution before jeering crowds in Whitehall, turns to his bishop-confessor and cries 'Remember!'
When old London Bridge was widened in the 1760s, it was realised that the new footpath would have to cut through the hundred-year-old tower of St Magnus the Martyr on the eastern side of the bridge. Incredibly, Sir Christopher Wren had built the church in anticipation that this problem would occur a century later, and had already provided the tower's arches with removable sections to create such a passageway.
London's building plans are a mess. The Second World War saw to that. In some parts of the capital virtually every other building was destroyed in the firestorm of the Blitz, and the once-elegant streets gaped like the rotten teeth of a corpse. Between 6.00 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. on Sunday, 29 December 1940, the second great fire of London occurred when the German Luftwaffe dropped 127 tons of high explosive and more than 10,000 incendiary bombs on the city. A famous photograph of that night shows St Paul's rising unharmed through a raging sea of flame.
Jonathan looked up at the squat brown building standing between two fifties' office blocks and tried to imagine how it had been that terrible night; the din of tumbling masonry, the blasts of the firefighters' hoses. He had been two years old and living far away, in north Yorkshire. London Can Take It – some motto. But the city had managed it in the past, so many times, surviving the plagues and the fires only to be brought to its knees at the end of the twentieth century by traffic and developers. A city as old as Christianity itself was fighting for its life. Jonathan pulled the camera from his jacket and snapped a few shots; the grimy storefront with the yellow plastic sign reading AIKO ELECTRICS, the four floors of crumbling Victorian redbrick (third and fourth clearly on the verge of collapse), the ill-fitting modern roof, what an invisible, unimpressive – and unlisted – building it was. Perhaps it deserved to be pulled down. It wasn't always a good idea to cling to the past. Marrick would have no qualms about demolishing the Albert Hall if it suited his plans.
But then he looked up at the building again and tried to imagine it restored and filled with people. That was when he noticed the details; the dusty turquoise glazing bars on the tops of the third-floor windows, the swagged ornamentation on the broken rainwater head at the top of the drainpipe, the rusticated keystone above the archway leading to the building's side-alley, and he realised then that a magnificent building was hiding behind its wounds and beneath a caul of dirt, that it could all be restored, because it had been a restaurant once before, long ago, and Dasako had spotted it even if Marrick hadn't. On the pavement was another telltale sign; a shattered section of black and white mosaic in which the name of the establishment would have been set in curlicues of brass. And most miraculous of all, there on the wall beside the door, a battered cone of blackened metal, a snuffer! These rarely-spotted pieces of street furniture were used to extinguish the tar-covered brands of the linkboys who escorted the restaurant's visitors through the unlit streets. Dasako's architects had seen all this. The Japanese respected the traditions of the past. With patience and planning, they would allow this building to spring to full-blooded life once more, filled with gaiety and beauty. Its restaurant would stand as a magnificent testament to the pleasures of the past, and the possibilities of the future.