Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

Pettifer dropped the note and rolled onto his front. ‘That’s a terrible idea.’

‘Why?’

‘Have you ever seen me act? Mac would look foolish, and I would look foolish, and everything would turn out badly for all concerned.’ He turned his head away. ‘You two do what you like. Just keep me out of it.’

‘It isn’t acting, it’s reading,’ I said. ‘Don’t be a pain. We’re going to need a few copies of the script typed up — at least help us with that.’

Quickman made a throat-cutting gesture, but it was too late.

‘I’m a woeful typist,’ said Pettifer. ‘If you want the truth, I’m useless in every respect. But especially — most spectacularly — in the field of architecture, which is a bit of a handicap for an architect, I think you’ll agree.’ He took the pillow out from under his cheek and covered his whole head with it. ‘My God. I can’t believe Mac’s actually finished. You realise this means she’s better than us, don’t you? We’re never getting out of here. I’m going to be working on this stupid building till they put me in a box.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Quickman said. ‘I knew you’d see the bright side.’

‘Go away.’

‘It could be worse,’ I said. ‘You’d have seen it up on the bulletin board if we hadn’t told you.’

‘Go. Away.’

Quickman retrieved his shoes, stepping into them barefooted. ‘Come on, Knell. This was a mistake.’ He draped his wet socks on the back of a chair and collected the umbrella. ‘Let him stew in his self-pity for a while. We’ll try again at lunchtime.’

Pettifer lifted his arm. ‘Finally, some sense.’

It was easy to forgive his selfishness. The end of Tif’s project was so far off that every departure bruised his confidence, brought on a panic that made him thorny and humourless for days. We had never had to say farewell to anyone as consequential as MacKinney before, so I could not blame him for wanting to stay in bed. If there had not been the consolation of knowing Mac’s project was unfinished, I might well have behaved the same way. Looking about his studio now, I could see the remains of so much labour, so much pursuit, but no coherence. How many sketches of doorways could a man draw before he settled on the perfect form? How long could he keep on prospecting the same dry patch of land before it collapsed beneath him?

I knew that Pettifer worked harder at his craft than any of us. From his very first day at Portmantle — when Mac and I had watched him lumbering through the gate with a plan-tube strapped across his chest — he had been toiling at the same project. He had told us all about it on his second night. ‘They’re building a new cathedral in Manchester,’ he had said. ‘I’m sorting out the drawings.’ What we came to understand later, over the course of so many seasons in his company, was that he had already won the commission. There had been an exhausting competition between him and four other architects and his initial concept had impressed the Archbishop most. It had been a thrilling time in his career—‘the very pinnacle’. But, a week before construction was due to start, Pettifer had noticed a serious flaw in the design.

The way he explained it to us, the problem was not a structural error, more of an aesthetic lapse — he would never qualify exactly what this meant, but he often talked of ‘light imbalance’. The issue did not concern the engineers, who were eager to break ground; the Archbishop had no reservations; even the partners at Pettifer’s firm were confounded by the delay. But Tif believed the fault in the design to be so fundamental that he withdrew from the project altogether, taking back every last plan, elevation, and section he had submitted. He returned his fee to the Archbishop and vowed to pursue other commissions. Still, the issue with the cathedral hounded him, day after day. He told us it had felt like a test of his passion. Competition deadlines came and went. Further commissions were declined or not sought at all. He found that he was no longer interested in anything except fixing the deficiencies of his cathedral — a process that took him so deep into the fog of creation that he began to question everything he knew about architecture. He rejected his own mannered style of drawing and found a different way to express his ideas, contrary to his training. When this new style did not work, he tried another, and another, ad infinitum. He told us that he changed his personal philosophy so often that his mind became a soup. He no longer trusted his own decisions. He lost all sense of proportion, fixating on the tiniest details. His cathedral was stripped down like an engine and reassembled; it was minimised, exploded, modernised, pared back, reshaped. He started anew, and anew, and anew, and anew, until every day became an exercise in undermining the epiphanies of the day before. Soon enough, his colleagues ran out of patience and dissolved their partnership. They left him at his drafting board one afternoon, steeped in his own sweat and sour breath. He carried on without them in an empty office, a solo practice with no clients and one resigned commission to sustain him, until an old friend intervened. The friend (his eventual sponsor) saw the depth of Pettifer’s troubles and decided he should be told about Portmantle. The only thing Pettifer had said in reply was, ‘How soon can I get there?’

Or so his story went. I did not know if his cathedral was any nearer to perfection than it had been when he arrived, because I had never deigned to open his plan chest to see what lay inside the drawers. Part of me was afraid to. But I had no doubt that Pettifer would achieve it, given time. His doggedness, his principles, his courage in defeat — all of these things made me proud to know him, even if his attitude was sometimes hard to tolerate.

The rain was still hurtling down outside and I feared that lightning was not far off. Quickman and I huddled back under the umbrella and trudged up the slope. ‘He took it rather well, I thought,’ Q said. ‘What now?’

‘Let’s ask the boy.’

‘I had a feeling you’d say that.’

We carved our way through the trees, considering every step, and made it to level ground. The distant sky was misty, dull as iron, and the mansion chimneys puffed out brooks of smoke that seemed solid enough to climb on. As we came round the west side of the building, we found the provost’s dog sitting upright in the middle of the path. The rain had made a ragged chamois of her fur and water streamed from her muzzle, but she sat there patiently, shivering. Her nostrils steamed. It was as though she had been waiting there especially for us. She did not bay, just eyed us as we approached. Quickman stooped to pet her. ‘Not the smartest of mutts, are we?’ he said, wiping the rain from her face. He told me to hold the umbrella and reached into his coat, brought out a dried fig. She was not interested. ‘Suit yourself.’ When he got up again, she stood right at his heels.

‘She must think you’re the provost,’ I said.

He ate the fig himself. ‘Don’t know if it’s much of a compliment.’

As we moved off towards Fullerton’s lodging, the dog followed closely. I could feel the thump of her tail against my calves.

‘I guess we’re stuck with her,’ Q said.

The pine needles sagged under the deluge. All around the boy’s hut there was a drear daylight. Rain struck the sides of the oil drum that was still out on the grass, playing a dud calypso tune. The windows were shuttered and the flue was smokeless. ‘If he agrees to this,’ Q said, ‘I might just let him keep that lighter.’

‘You’re more sentimental than you look.’

We stepped up to the walkway and I knocked hard on the shutters. Nazar went to the door and sniffed around the threshold. She began to scratch at the wood, shadow-boxing. ‘Come away,’ Quickman said, nudging her aside with his ankle. He rapped his knuckles on the door. The dog slipped by him, scratching again, and then she began to howl and bark.