The Ice Age Read online

  Len switched off the radio: he’d hoped there would be a discussion of the Community Land Bill, but evidently not.

  He thought about land. And buildings. Unlike most property men, Len had a genuine passion for buildings. He loved them. He loved modern architecture, brutal architecture, concrete and cement; he liked the buildings of ten, twenty years ago too, glass, steel, elegant, airy. But he liked cement better, being a man of the moment; or rather, a man of the last moment but one, a man of six months ago. He had friends in the business who didn’t give a damn what they bought, what they put up, as long as they made money out of it, others who enjoyed collecting sites and fitting them together like expensive jigsaw puzzles, others who thought big enough, but only in terms of square feet and high rents, others whose sense of power seemed to want to force people to go and live where they didn’t want to live, shop where they didn’t want to shop, work where they didn’t want to work. Len had a little of all these impulses in him, but his strongest impulse was a love of the grand. This had gone out of fashion: nowadays, conservationists wrangled over unattractive little Victorian tobacconists’ shops on dingy corners, architects had abandoned high-rise, and even in America, the home of the grand, they were blowing up their largest blocks of flats. He had seen one of these explosions on television. The explosion itself had been grand enough, in its way: the whole block, hundreds and hundreds of homes, thousands of tons of concrete, had shaken and curved elegantly and collapsed forever. People like blowing things up these days, thought Len. They prefer blowing up to building.

  Len’s love of the grand had been nurtured in the industrial North. The landscape had seemed to him magnificent: huge hillsides, slag heaps, cooling towers, furnaces. But the civic buildings were so petty, so ugly, so horribly out of scale, so grimly undistinguished. He did not notice this at first, of course: he was content to play football on the willow-herb-blossoming bomb sites, without asking himself what could be done with those bomb sites. Nor did he ask himself until it was nearly too late: many of them had gone, in the tardy piecemeal postwar rebuilding schemes of the late forties and fifties. He had started life in a real estate agent’s office, collecting rents—a bright boy, with no A Levels, who left school at sixteen to help pay the bills. In his twenties, after ten years in the trade, he saw the light. He saw the light on an evening visit to Sheffield from his hometown of Northam, and it was gleaming on the block of flats at Park Hill, built by Lynn, Smith and Nicklin: pink in the smokeless sunset, the huge building rose, like an outcrop, like a part of nature, a massive cliff with every window glinting in a pale golden pink, dazzling, beautiful, inspired. Len Wincobank fell in love with Park Hill. What did he care if the families in it went to the bad, pestered by bugs in the heating ducts, by sociologists and research workers and visiting foreign architects; what did it matter if they went mad like animals too constantly displayed in their cages in a zoo? The building was beautiful; it sang out.

  And so now did Chay Bank, his own inspiration. It too sang. It was built just before the architects decided that back-to-back tenement housing was really a perfectly decent way of accommodating people, and that all one needed to do was to put in bathrooms, so that old ladies dying of cancer did not have to shuffle two hundred yards to the lav on a dark wet night, or piss into a stinking chamber pot. The theory behind this, Len Wincobank was occasionally prepared to concede, might be right, but if everyone obeyed it, what would happen to the grand, the huge, the magnificent? What would England look like? He did not care all that much about people. When he thought about them he thought them petty, to prefer convenience to grandeur. He had wanted to wipe away all those squalid little strips of houses and make them into something big, something significant. It upset him, born in a back-to-back, to hear slum housing praised. “They’ll be slapping preservation orders on Victoria Buildings and Ballard Dwellings next,” he would yell aggressively when people stood in his way or argued with him. “Anything that’s old and nasty, people want to keep. Why do you think this country’s in the shit? Because people think small, they live in the past, they’ve got no vision,” he would yell: quite effectively, until the country’s downward slide into the shit became too pronounced for a one-man resistance.

  He left his mark before he too slid, and got his four years. Chay Bank, built by the council but largely through his persuasion, still stood, and was a noted success: remarkably few of its inhabitants had as yet gone mad, jumped out of high windows, murdered and mugged each other’s grandmothers, or wantonly destroyed the children’s adventure playground. A gleaming office tower, with at least half the office space let, was another monument to Wincobank. Many lesser enterprises—small shopping developments, a conversion of Nutley’s old covered market into an air-conditioned paradise, a department store on an overlooked bomb site in that laziest and ugliest of towns, Bonsett—bore witness still to his successful activities. But, of course, people had turned on him. They even criticized Chay Bank, an acknowledged masterpiece.

  He could not really understand it. Did they really like their shabby nonconformist co-ops, their mucky little alleyways, their dull unadventurous little spread of suburban streets? Couldn’t they see what he had been offering them? All right, he had made (and largely lost) a fortune out of it, but that wasn’t the point. Out of sheer disinterest, they ought to have seen his visions. Look at Bonsett—Bonsett, the ugliest dump you could ever hope to find, stuck down in the middle of the moor, littered about with little miserable mine adits and yellow clay pits, and the best buildings in it, before his company put up Weightman’s Store, had been a mock-Gothic Wesleyan chapel and a nineteen-thirties Essoldo cinema. Or look at Porcaster—he groaned, to think of Porcaster. It had had, unlike Bonsett, some advantages: an old market town, it had a market square with a cross, a church, a bridge. But they were swamped in such miserable squalor, surrounded by such chilly grimy incompetent unplanned silly little developments—and none of them very new, for Porcaster’s Borough architect seemed to have been dead in his chair for twenty years. Three minutes’ walk from the main square, there were neglected back alleys, cobbled, weed-filled, passing among houses with broken and boarded windows, like something out of the depression (the last depression) where old ladies in curlers and slippers still shuffled. Three minutes from the town square. Len had nearly passed out with excitement, had leaped into a phone box to ring Maureen, then leaped out again, overcome by the strong stink of urine—Christ, what a dump—had taken refuge in the main hotel, the town’s main hotel, which stank of dog and stale beer, which was full of old men playing billiards at three thirty in the afternoon—and had rung Maureen. “Get in the car, love,” he said. “Come over, come and have a look at this, it’ll knock you over.”

  It had finished him, Porcaster. He had borrowed too much money, bought too many properties at fancy prices, and then been obstructed, at a vital moment, by the evidently malicious planning authorities. They didn’t want to be developed by Wincobank: they wanted to stink and rot in their own manner. They ruined him. He tried to rescue himself, injudiciously, with funds from another company: injudiciously, and, as a jury decided on a fine spring afternoon in 1975, criminally.

  He thought of them with hatred.

  England. What was the matter with it? Shabby, lazy, unambitious, complacently high-minded when it so chose.

  He thought of America. New York, the most beautiful city in the world, the apotheosis of aspiration. What buildings there, what inspiration, what vision, what glory, steel, glass, concrete, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Brutality, fountains, spires, windows, avenues, intersections, passion, and desire. Or Chicago, with the glittering lakefront, the water that flowed backward, the highest building in the world, the largest multicolored fountain in the world, a paradise of invention and felicity. They said that Sydney was beautiful, too. When he got out he would go and have a look at Sydney and pick up a few ideas.

  Meanwhile, he sat here on his bed in a drafty Nissen hut. Soon he would go and while away an hour or s
o at Twenty-one with that clever young ex-copper in Bed Eleven. He had learned a lot from the clever young ex-copper, who, like Len, was undismayed by the rate of inflation and speed of collapse in the world outside. He saw these problems as a challenge to his ingenuity. He had some interesting plans. There are some interesting people to be found among Category D prisoners in open prisons, as well as some very dull ones. Len felt that he was not entirely wasting his time.

  While Len Wincobank was thinking about New York and Sydney, Maureen Kirby was thinking about Len Wincobank, although that was, she knew, a waste of time. There was nothing one could do about Len. The exciting dance he had led her and himself had come to an end, at least for the present. There was no way one could profitably think about Len in prison. She went to see him every month, but that was not much fun. And now she sat here alone, in her tiny shabby Sheffield flat, idly cutting her toenails in front of the gas fire. Unlike Len, she was free to go out. But she did not much want to go out. There was nowhere to go, no one to go with. And she had a toothache. She ran her tongue experimentally around the tooth with the missing filling. It didn’t ache badly, but it was sensitive, and of course she couldn’t stop herself from giving it a feel, which made it worse. She knew she ought to go to the dentist. But she couldn’t afford to go to the dentist. She was hard up. She’d got a new job as soon as Len was put away, but there’d been a lot of debts lying around. Luckily she wasn’t responsible for Len’s, but her own were bad enough. She’d had to sell the car. And she couldn’t afford to go and see Eric Hargreaves about her filling. He charged at least eight quid a go, and it just wasn’t worth it. She’d have to get herself back on the National Health. But she’d got so used to sinister Eric, with his big Jaguar and his smooth talk and his dubious innuendoes. He was a good dentist; he knew her teeth. She didn’t want to risk an unknown dentist with an unknown out-of-date drill and no reassuring patter.

  It’s a bit of a laugh, really, thought Maureen Kirby glumly, not laughing at all, that I’ve ended up here worrying about private dentists. Me, of all people.

  Maureen Kirby had been born in Attercliffe, Sheffield, in 1946, nine months after her father was discharged. She was the youngest of six and slept three to a bed through most of her childhood. Her first idea of bettering herself was via hair dressing, the glamour of which appealed to her and most of her school friends, so she started cutting hair at the age of fifteen. She was quite happy for two or three years, cutting, shampooing, back combing, trying to make eighteen-year-old girls look thirty, as was then the vogue, and looking about thirty herself, in her cheap-smart two-piece suits with her brown bouffant hair. She was a friendly girl, happy to titivate the thinning locks of old-age pensioners as well as the sticky, pungent beehives of her contemporaries. But even she could see she wasn’t going to get anywhere, from the back salon of Suzanne’s. The area was going downhill, too, if that was possible. Too many Indians and blacks. Not that she had anything against them. But she could see there was no future in Suzanne’s. The glamour was fading.

  So at the age of twenty she took a secretarial course. Secretaries were glamorous, thought Maureen. She had seen many sexy advertisements for them, had read stories in which they married the boss, had even seen rude pictures of them being groped by the boss. That side of the business appealed to her, after five years of the female world of hair and a boring boyfriend. So she left boyfriend and salon, learned shorthand and typing, started work in a seedy solicitor’s office, and found herself, somewhat to her own surprise, very good at the job. She didn’t stay long with the seedy solicitor, who sealed his own fate by groping her, much as she had expected: she didn’t mind him putting his hand up her skirt, in fact she quite liked it, but she recognized that if he did that, just like in the pictures, then so might someone better. So she worked hard, and after a couple of years’ experience found herself with a very good post, as secretary to a director of a company that sold airconditioners and ventilation. He was called Stanley Flood, but she soon learned to call him Stan. Life was fun with Stan, in its own way. The pay was good, the work was interesting and involved quite a bit of travel and staying in smart hotels for sales conferences. It also involved quite a bit of groping, and much of the lighter side of business, for Stan, as he willingly admitted, was a dirty old man, who didn’t mind a little harmless fun, and didn’t mind putting it in the way of his clients, either. Maureen did not object to this for it was all done, as Stan said, in good spirit and no harm meant: she would have sworn in a court of law that Stan was more interested in fun for its own sake than in bribing or corrupting potential clients. She didn’t let him go too far with her, because he was after all old enough to be her father, but she certainly didn’t mind his dirty jokes and dirty postcards, his souvenirs from Copenhagen, his sex diary and his Danish playing cards, and she didn’t mind him putting his hand down her blouse in the summer or up her skirt in the winter for a quick feel. Why not? It didn’t hurt her, she didn’t mind a squeeze. This was the age of the miniskirt, the swinging sixties, the days of liberation, and dirty old men like Stan felt that the golden age had arrived at last: they had waited long enough for it, had worked away for Ventex in the repressed provinces with repressed and aging wives, through a World War and through years of austerity, and suddenly here it all was, the world of Penthouse and the Beatles, the world of large steaks and double cream on real gateaux, the world of girls and nightclubs and expense account champagne. No wonder Stan was in such high good humor most of the time, and no wonder his clients enjoyed themselves so much, and handed him such healthy contracts. Maureen couldn’t see much wrong with that. She would have been astonished if anyone had described Stan to her as corrupt, corrupting, calculating: to her, he was a nice old boy with very vulgar tastes, and no harm in him. It was his vulgarity that helped to refine Maureen a little, though she never became very refined: when he showed her, for instance, a joke rubber toy of a nude lady which, when filled with water and squeezed, performed certain natural functions, she laughed rather feebly, and said, “Stan, you do go too far sometimes.” And she hadn’t much cared for the extraordinary object he had once produced, with a flourish, from his briefcase; it looked harmless enough at first sight, and she had allowed herself to be tricked into inspecting it quite closely. It looked like a rubber sea anemone with all kinds of little flaps and fringes; it was called Happy End, Stan said, and when Maureen realized what it was she screamed and dropped it, as she had as a child dropped rubber spiders. Stan was amused, but Maureen had turned quite pale, and he had to put it away and comfort her and promise never to show her anything like that again.

  But some of his jokes she thought quite funny. For instance, she sympathized with his urgent desire to purchase a car number plate that he had spotted in a multistory car park in Rotherham: SO SEXY, it said, though one could see on closer inspection that it in fact read 50 5EXY. It was much smarter than Stan’s own, which simply read SF 2001. Maureen spent much company time and money advertising for the owner of this car, and when she finally contacted him was as disappointed as Stan when he refused to sell.

  Maureen’s mum for some reason took against Stan, and all she heard of Stan. Although by no means a puritan herself, she was offended by Maureen’s stories about him, and kept asking Maureen when she was going to settle down, staring critically meanwhile at Maureen’s new trendy gear, her Dolly dresses and silver tights and Mary Quant eyelashes. You shouldn’t show your arse to all the world like that, you’ll wear it out, she would say, then wheeze at her own wit. Oh, piss off, Mum, Maureen would reply, amiably, explaining that although Stan was no gent, he was a good boss, and the money was good, and that she was learning a lot about the way the world goes. Anyway, she’d say, I’m young yet, who wants to get stuck with a lot of snotty kids, like our Mavis? I want to see a bit of life: I don’t want to waste myself like you did, Ma. You girls these days, it’s self self self, money money money, said Maureen’s mum, who had always put herself first and money second, but had unfort
unately put family planning rather lower down on her list of priorities.

  She saw even more of life when she met Len Wincobank. She met him at a sales conference in Wakefield. She and Stan were staying the weekend, selling (one of Stan’s jokes) a lot of hot air. Stan introduced her to Len in the smart modern anonymous hotel foyer. “This is my perfect secretary,” said Stan, giving Maureen a friendly thump. “We don’t know where Ventex would be without our Maureen. The temperature would certainly drop without our Maureen.” Maureen smiled and wriggled in an appropriate manner and stared at Len, who stared back at her. Len was a new man, the new businessman of the sixties, she could see that at a glance. He was of a completely different breed from the jovial Stan, though he and Stan were clearly on good terms. For one thing, he was of another generation: Stan was in his fifties (he was coy about the precise date), whereas Len was nearer her own age, surely not more than thirty, and dressed in a trendy style. Stan’s hair was silver, short back and sides, but Len’s was black and curly and too long for a businessman. He had sideburns.

  “Never recommend your secretary to anyone,” said Len, still giving Maureen the eye, “or they get stolen, didn’t you know? We’ll have her off you, if you don’t keep an eye on her.”

  And that was how it happened. They met up in the bar that night, spent the night in one of the twin beds in Len’s room, and had arranged their plot by the morning. Stan was sad, but philosophic. Maureen was delighted. It wasn’t till she started sleeping with Len that she realized what a relief it was to be able to do all those wicked amusing things with someone she was really keen on, someone more in her own age group. She and Len got on fine. She liked working for him, and after a few weeks she moved into his flat and lived with him. Nobody minded that kind of irregularity, in the swinging sixties. Len’s style made Stan’s innuendoes and dirty weekends seem very dated. She got more and more fond of him: I love you, she’d say, and he’d reply, of course you do, but both of them were in fact rather surprised by this unexpected extra bonus that life had suddenly handed them.