High Rise (1987) Page 8

  In principle, the mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the post-war years. But once again Royal had found himself reacting personally to these acts of vandalism. The breakdown of the building as a social structure was a rebellion against himself, so much so that in the early days after the jeweller’s unexplained death he expected to be physically attacked.

  Later, however, the collapse of the high-rise began to strengthen his will to win through. The testing of the building he had helped to design was a testing of himself. Above all, he became aware that a new social order was beginning to emerge around him. Royal was certain that a rigid hierarchy of some kind was the key to the elusive success of these huge buildings. As he often pointed out to Anne, office blocks containing as many as thirty thousand workers functioned smoothly for decades thanks to a social hierarchy as rigid and as formalized as an anthill’s, with an incidence of crime, social unrest, and petty misdemeanours that was virtually nil. The confused but unmistakable emergence of this new social order—apparently based on small tribal enclaves—fascinated Royal. To begin with, he had been determined to stay on, come what may and whatever the hostility directed against him, in the hope of acting as its midwife. In fact, this alone had stopped him from notifying his former colleagues of the mounting chaos within the building. As he told himself repeatedly, the present breakdown of the high-rise might well mark its success rather than its failure. Without realizing it, he had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.

  But these dreams of helping the two thousand residents towards their new Jerusalem meant nothing to Anne. As the air-conditioning and electricity supply began to fail, and it became dangerous to move unaccompanied around the building, she told Royal that they were leaving. Playing on Royal’s concern for her, and his own feelings of guilt about the breakdown of the high-rise, she soon persuaded him that they must go.

  Curious to see how she was getting on with her packing, Royal walked into his wife’s bedroom. Two wardrobe trunks, and a selection of small and large suitcases, jewellery boxes and vanity cases lay open on the floor and dressing-table like a luggage store display. Anne was packing, or unpacking, one of the cases in front of the dressing-table mirror. Recently, Royal had noticed that she deliberately surrounded herself with mirrors, as if this replication of herself gave her some kind of security. Anne had always taken for granted a naturally deferential world, and the last few weeks, even in the comparative safety of this penthouse apartment, she had found more and more trying. The childlike strains in her character had begun to come out again, as if she was suiting her behaviour to the over-extended mad-hatter’s tea-party that she had been forced to attend like a reluctant Alice. The journey down to the 35th-floor restaurant had become a daily ordeal, and only the prospect of leaving the apartment building for good had kept her going.

  She stood up and embraced Royal. As usual, without thinking, she touched the scars on his forehead with her lips, as if trying to read a digest of the twenty-five years that separated them, a key to that part of Royal’s life she had never known. As he recovered from the accident, sitting in the windows of the penthouse or exercising on the callisthenics machine, he had noticed how much his wounds had intrigued her.

  “What a mess.” She gazed down hopefully at the jumble of suitcases. “I’ll be about an hour—have you called the taxi?”

  “We’ll need at least two. They refuse to wait now—there’s no point in calling them until we’re on the doorstep.”

  Both their own cars, parked in the line nearest the building, had been damaged by the tenants below, their windscreens knocked out by falling bottles.

  Anne returned to her packing. “The important thing is that we’re going. We should have left a month ago when I wanted to. Why anyone stays on here I can’t imagine.”

  “Anne, we’re _leaving_…”

  “At last—and why has no one called the police? Or complained to the owners?”

  “We are the owners.” Royal turned his head away from her, his smile of affection stiffening. Through the windows he watched the light fading across the curtain-walling of the nearby high-rises. Inevitably, he had always taken Anne’s criticisms as a comment on himself.

  As Royal knew now, his young wife would never be happy in the special atmosphere of the high-rise. The only daughter of a provincial industrialist, she had been brought up in the insulated world of a large country house, a finicky copy of a Loire château maintained by a staff of servants in the full-blown nineteenth-century manner. In the apartment building, by contrast, the servants who waited on her were an invisible army of thermostats and humidity sensors, computerized elevator route-switches and over-riders, playing their parts in a far more sophisticated and abstract version of the master-servant relationship. However, in Anne’s world it was not only necessary for work to be done, but be seen to be done. The steady breakdown of the building’s services, and the confrontation between the rival groups of tenants, had been too much for her, playing on her huge sense of insecurity, all her long-ingrained upper-class uncertainties about maintaining her superior place in the world. The present troubles in the apartment block had exposed these mercilessly. When he had first met her, Royal had taken for granted her absolute self-confidence, but in fact the reverse was true—far from being sure of herself, Anne needed constantly to re-establish her position on the top rung of the ladder. By comparison, the professional people around her, who had achieved everything as a result of their own talents, were models of self-assurance.

  When they first moved into the high-rise as its first tenants, they had both intended the apartment to be no more than _a pied à terre_, conveniently close to Royal’s work on the development project. As soon as they found a house in London they would leave. But Royal noticed that he continued to postpone any decision to move out. He was intrigued by life in this vertical township, and by the kind of people attracted to its smooth functionalism. As the first tenant, and owner of the best and highest apartment, he felt himself to be lord of the manor—borrowing a phrase he disliked from Anne’s rule book. His sense of physical superiority as a sometime amateur tennis champion—a minor hard-courts title, though no less impressive for that—had inevitably slackened with the passage of years, but in a way had been rekindled by the presence of so many people directly below him, on the shoulders of whose far more modest dwellings his own rested securely.

  Even after his accident, when he had been forced to sell out his partnership and retreat to a wheelchair in the penthouse, he had felt this sense of renewed physical authority. During the months of convalescence, as his wounds healed and his body grew stronger, each of the new tenants in some way seemed identified with his strengthening muscles and sinews, his quickening reflexes, each one bringing his invisible tribute to Royal’s wellbeing.

  For Anne, by contrast, the continued flow of new arrivals puzzled and irritated her. She had enjoyed the apartment when they were alone in the high-rise, taking it for granted that no one else would appear. She rode the elevators as if they were the grandly upholstered gondolas of a private funicular, swam alone in the undisturbed waters of the two swimming-pools, and strolled about the shopping concourse as if visiting her own personal bank, hairdresser and supermarket. By the time that the last of the two thousand residents had appeared and taken their place below, Anne was impatient to move.

  But Royal was drawn to his new neighbours, exemplars beyond anything he had previously imagined of the puritan work ethic. In turn, he knew from Anne that his neighbours found him a puzzling and aloof figure, an automobile-crash casualty in his wheelchair living on the roof of the high-rise in a casual ménage with a rich young wife half his age whom he was happy to see taken
out by other men. Despite this symbolic emasculation, Royal was still regarded in some way as having the key to the building. His scarred forehead and chromium cane, the white jacket which he affected and wore like a target, together seemed to be the elements of a code that concealed the real relationship between the architect of this huge building and its uneasy tenants. Even Anne’s always imminent promiscuities were part of this same system of ironies, appealing to Royal’s liking for the ‘game’ situation where one could risk everything and lose nothing.

  The effect of all this on his neighbours interested Royal, and particularly on those mavericks such as Richard Wilder, who would set out to climb Everest equipped with nothing more than a sense of irritation that the mountain was larger than himself, or Dr Laing, staring out all day from his balcony under the fond impression that he was totally detached from the high-rise, when in fact he was probably its most true tenant. At least Laing knew his place and kept to it; three nights earlier they had been forced to give Wilder a short sharp lesson.

  Thinking about Wilder’s intrusion—only one in a series of attempts by people below to break into the top-floor apartments—Royal left the bedroom and checked the bolts on the front door.

  Anne waited while he stood in the deserted corridor. There was a continuous sullen murmur from the lower levels carried up the elevator shafts. She pointed to Royal’s three suitcases.

  “Is that all you’re taking?”

  “For the time being. I’ll come back for anything else.”

  “Come back? Why should you want to? Perhaps you’d rather stay?”

  To himself, rather than to his wife, Royal remarked, “First to arrive, last to leave…”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Of course not.”

  Anne placed a hand on his chest, as if searching for an old wound. “It’s really all over, you know. I hate to say it, but this place hasn’t worked.”

  “Perhaps not…” Royal took her commiseration with a strong dose of salt. Without realizing it, Anne often played on his sense of failure, frightened by Royal’s new resolve to prove himself, this conviction that the building might succeed after all. In addition, their neighbours had accepted him a little too readily as their leader. His partnership in the consortium had been largely paid for by the commissions her father had steered his way, a fact Anne had never let him forget, not to humble Royal so much as to prove her own value to him. The point was made, though. He had come up in the world, all right, in too many senses of the term. In an insane way, his accident might have been an attempt to break out of the trap.

  But all this belonged to the past now. As Royal knew, they were leaving just in time. During the last few days life in the high-rise had become impossible. For the first time the top-floor residents were directly involved. The erosion of everything continued, a slow psychological avalanche that was carrying them downwards.

  §

  Superficially, life in the apartment building was normal enough—most of the residents left for their offices each day, the supermarket was still open, the bank and hair-dressing salon functioned as usual. Nonetheless, the real internal atmosphere was that of three uneasily coexisting armed camps. A complete hardening of positions had taken place, and there was now almost no contact between the upper, middle and lower groups. During the early part of the day it was possible to move freely around the building, but as the afternoon proceeded this became increasingly difficult. By dusk any movement was impossible. The bank and supermarket closed at three o’clock. The junior school had moved from its vandalized classrooms to two apartments on the 7th floor. Few children were ever seen above the 10th floor, let alone in the sculpture-garden on the roof which Royal had designed for them with so much care. The 10th-floor swimming-pool was a half-empty pit of yellowing water and floating debris. One of the squash courts had been locked, and the other three were filled with garbage and broken classroom furniture. Of the twenty elevators in the building, three were permanently out of order, and by evening the remainder had become the private transit lines of the rival groups who could seize them. Five floors were without electricity. At night the dark bands stretched across the face of the high-rise like dead strata in a fading brain.

  Fortunately for Royal and his neighbours, conditions in the upper section of the building had yet to decline so steeply. The restaurant had discontinued its evening service, but a limited luncheon was available each day during the few hours when the small staff could freely enter and leave. However, the two waiters had already gone, and Royal guessed that the chef and his wife would soon follow. The swimming-pool on the 35th floor was usable, but the level had fallen, and the water supply, like that to their own apartment, was dependent on the vagaries of the roof tanks and electric pumps.

  From the drawing-room windows Royal looked down into the parking-lot. Many of the cars had not been moved for weeks—windscreens broken by falling bottles, cabins filled with garbage, they sat on flattening tyres, surrounded by a sea of rubbish that spread outwards around the building like an enlarging stain.

  This visible index of the block’s decline at the same time measured the extent to which its tenants accepted this process of erosion. At times Royal suspected that his neighbours unconsciously hoped that everything would decline even further. Royal had noticed that the manager’s office was no longer besieged by indignant residents. Even his own top-floor neighbours, who in the early days had been only too quick to complain about everything, now never criticized the building. In the absence of the manager—still lying in a state of mental collapse in his ground-floor apartment—his dwindling staff of two (the wives of a dubbing-mixer on the 2nd floor and a first violinist on the 3rd) sat stoically at their desks in the entrance lobby, oblivious of the deterioration going on apace over their heads.

  What interested Royal was the way in which the residents had become exaggeratedly crude in their response to the apartment building, deliberately abusing the elevators and air-conditioning systems, over-straining the power supply. This carelessness about their own convenience reflected a shuffling of mental priorities, and perhaps the emergence of the new social and psychological order for which Royal was waiting. He remembered the attack on Wilder, who had laughed happily as the group of paediatricians and academics had flailed away at him with their dumb-bells like a troupe of demented gymnasts. Royal had found the episode grotesque, but he guessed that in some obscure way Wilder had been glad to be flung half-conscious into an elevator.

  Royal strolled around the shrouded furniture. He raised his stick and slashed at the stale air with the same stroke he had used against Wilder. At any moment a battalion of police would arrive and cart them all off to the nearest jail. Or would they? What played straight into the residents’ hands was the remarkably self-contained nature of the high-rise, a self-administered enclave within the larger private domain of the development project. The manager and his staff, the personnel who manned the supermarket, bank and hairdressing salon, were all residents of the apartment building; the few outsiders had left or been sacked. The engineers who serviced the building did so on instructions from the manager, and clearly none had been issued. They might even have been told to stay away—no garbage-collection vehicle had called for several days, and a large number of the chutes were blocked.

  Despite the growing chaos around them, the residents showed less interest in the external world. Bales of un-sorted mail lay about in the ground-floor lobbies. As for the debris scattered around the high-rise, the broken bottles and cans, these were barely noticeable from the ground. Even the damaged cars were to some extent concealed by the piles of building materials, wooden forms and sand-pits that had yet to be cleared away. Besides, as part of that unconscious conspiracy to shut out the external world, no visitors came to the high-rise. He and Anne had invited none of their friends to the apartment for months.

  Royal watched his wife move about vaguely in her bedroom. Jane Sheridan, Anne’s closest friend, had called in and was helpin
g her to pack. The two women were transferring a line of evening gowns from the wardrobe racks to the trunks, and at the same time returning unwanted shirts and trousers from the suitcases back to the shelves. For all the activity it was uncertain whether they were packing on the eve of departure or unpacking on arrival.

  “Anne—are you coming or going?” Royal asked. “We hardly stand a chance of making it tonight.”

  Anne gestured helplessly at the half-filled cases. “It’s the air-conditioning—I can’t think.”

  “You won’t get out now even if you want to,” Jane told her. “We’re marooned here, as far as I can see. All the elevators have been commandeered by other floors.”

  “What? Did you hear that?” Anne stared angrily at Royal, as if his faulty design of the elevator lobbies was directly responsible for these acts of piracy. “All right, we’ll leave first thing tomorrow. What about food? The restaurant will be shut.”

  They had never eaten in the apartment—Anne’s gesture of contempt for her neighbours’ endless preparation of elaborate meals. The only food in the refrigerator was the dog’s.

  Royal stared at himself in the mirror, adjusting his white jacket. In the fading light his reflection had an almost spectral vibrancy, making him look like an illuminated corpse. “We’ll think of something.” A curious answer, he realized, implying that there were other sources of food than the supermarket. He looked down at Jane Sheridan’s plump figure. Seeing Royal’s subdued expression, she was smiling reassuringly at him. Royal had taken on the task of looking after this amiable young woman since the death of her Afghan.