City of the Mind by Penelope Lively

Author:Penelope Lively [Lively, Penelope]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780141909967
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-05-07T22:00:00+00:00

Matthew’s present flat was the top floor of a large mid-Victorian terrace house in north London. When he first moved in he had cared so little about his surroundings that he had simply set down his furniture and lived there as he might have done in a hotel. More recently, partly in view of Jane’s weekend visits and partly, he recognized, in consequence of his own slow progress to a more normal state of mind, he had redecorated a couple of rooms, hung pictures and shifted the furniture to more congenial positions. He had put his desk in front of the largest window at the back and began to work there sometimes, at evenings and at weekends.

The view from this window was of the roof-line of the houses in the neighbouring street, and their back elevations. At night, it was surprisingly beautiful. The roof-line made a complicated black silhouette of chimney pots and angles against the ochre-orange city sky, while the buildings themselves were a dark mass brilliantly packed with the squares and rectangles of lit windows. From time to time a plane would creep above them, a firefly winking white and ruby red. And then by day the houses presented a complex of individualities by way of extensions, fire escapes, dormer windows. Someone had a minuscule conservatory in which was a white cane armchair frequented by a ginger cat. Someone else grew tomatoes on a parapet balcony. One penthouse flat with through windows afforded frequent glimpses of its occupant – a shadowy figure who went to and fro and, once, was joined by another with whom he or she stood in an embrace. Matthew had instinctively looked away and when he turned back both were gone.

It was a view, above all, of brick. An extension built onto the house some ten years or so ago jutted out at right angles to Matthew’s window, giving him the perfect opportunity, in idle moments, to study in detail the city’s system of rebirth. The bricks – laid Flemish bond, headers and stretchers alternating – were all old London stock bricks but of many kinds and colours: rust red, beige, grey, brown, nearly black. Here and there were yellow ones – malm bricks made with an admixture of clay and chalk. The cumulative effect was pleasing – the variety gave texture, interest and warmth to the surface of the wall. The eye approved the range of colour, the uneven look, the way in which each brick differed from its neighbour and yet was in subtle harmony. But, more than that, to look at it was to see the way in which this wall arose from the ashes of many buildings. Studying it, Matthew saw in the mind’s eye warehouses and churches, factories and shops, terrace houses like this one, blasted to the ground perhaps on some furnace night of 1940. He thought of how the city lifts again and again from its own decay, thrusting up from its own detritus, from the sediment of brick dust, rubble, wood splinters, rusted iron, potsherds, coins and bones.

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