The Planner(77)

This lift wasn’t anything like the one at Southwark Council. It was the size of a bedroom, no one needed to brush against anyone else, it didn’t judder and it had a screen on a wall with business news. It didn’t occur to James for the slightest moment that it might get stuck between levels for two hours, and it took no more than twenty seconds to take him all the way up to the thirtieth floor, three-quarters of the way to the top. His confidence still perfectly intact, James stepped out directly into the reception of Galbraith & Erskine and strode on.

‘Yes, hello, can I help you?’

Only now did James falter. The receptionist who looked up at him from behind the crescent desk was unnervingly magnificent, almost impossible for James to describe without romanticising or dehumanising. She was a gypsy princess, with black hair, ferocious white teeth and red lips that took up almost all her face. Her dark eyes were serious, but her smile so large and friendly it was incoherent, as if James was an old friend.

‘Hello, I’m James Crawley. I’m here for a meeting with Robert Wenham at three. Sorry, I’m a bit early.’

‘Okay, just wait here and I call him.’

She had a Spanish accent and imperfect grammar – displaced from the mountains of Andalusia by the European financial crisis, she was now stranded in London’s service economy. She was exactly the woman he wanted to be holding hands with when he next saw Alice.

‘Don’t worry. Please sit down and I’ll tell Robert you’re here. Would you like tea or coffee?’

‘No, thanks very much. I’m fine – I don’t need anything.’

‘Robert will be out in a minute. Just let me know if you need anything.’

Unable to think of anything else he could talk to her about, James went to sit down on a soft leather chair. On the low table in front of him were neatly arranged copies of the Financial Times, the Economist and Property Week. On the walls above was a series of large and beautiful photographs of Galbraith & Erskine projects from across the country. There were apartments in Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde, Victorian warehouses in Manchester converted into creative studios, a business incubator in Oxford, a block of pastel-coloured flats in Stratford overlooking the Olympic Park and neo-Georgian town houses on the edge of Basingstoke.

There was none of the naive hope of James’s Sunbury Square masterplan poster. They may not have had a significant affordable housing component, they may not have been supported by local community groups, but they had all happened: these were photographs, and they hadn’t been created on a computer. It wasn’t Metroland either – none of them had been built for the aspiring middle classes with limited means and imaginations, desperate to look like each other. Galbraith & Erskine’s buildings were as confident, diverse and ambitious as the people they had been made for.

‘James – it’s good to see you,’ said Robert. ‘Thanks so much for coming over. Let’s go into my room. It’s just here.’

Robert’s office was just as James had thought it would be: attractive, busy but uncluttered, designed to motivate and encourage effective decision-making. It wasn’t as pretentious as an architect’s, and it wasn’t anything like as depressing as being in a local authority. It was, James thought, a room he could be comfortable with, and had lots of space – enough for James to recalibrate Robert’s seniority within the company. For surely, in that respect at least, it worked just like the public sector.

‘This is Paul. He shares the office with me. It’s just the two of us at the moment.’

There was a third desk in the corner – a conspicuously empty one, with a cover over the computer screen. Perhaps, thought James, they had it in mind for him. It seemed a perfectly reasonable supposition.

‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ said Paul.

‘Just water, if that’s okay,’ said James, determined to answer every question as appropriately as possible.

Paul nodded. He was younger than James and looked well designed for long-term subservience and steady career progression. His light brown hair was cropped short, his face slightly freckled, and his eyes blue with only a dash of cruelty. He wore a pinstripe suit, which James didn’t care for, but was bound to be expensive. James very badly wanted to know how much he earned.

‘Some water sounds good. It can get very dry here.’

Above Robert’s desk was a large map of London, just like Lionel’s. But it was more than decorative – it was dotted in coloured pins, yellow Post-it notes and arrows drawn in felt-tip pen. There was a cluster of red pins around the southern borders of Southwark. It was gratifying, in a way: even if the residents weren’t bothered, over in Canary Wharf the things he did were being followed closely.