The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey Page A

Think about decoration in general: every time it occurs, it occurs in order to cover up for a crime. The ugly woman. Mankind putting its clothes on after it ate the apple.” He pauses for a moment. This was once his wife's argument also, the one ideal they both believed in. “Think how many criminals have tattoos.”
    “Adolf Loos,” Fergus says to his surprise. “You're quoting his theory, Jake, am I right?”
    He nods; of course the architect's name had abandoned him but yes, this is his theory.
    “But it's just meaningless rebellion,” Fergus continues. “Look where Loos lived—Vienna, which is a beautiful city. He just got sick of beauty, like being full up on a huge chocolate cake. Doesn't make chocolate cake bad. It certainly doesn't mean we should destroy every chocolate cake we find, am I right or am I wrong?”
    What Fergus is alluding to, he assumes, is the period of architecture for which they are both part responsible, the decade of obliteration in which wrecking balls defied hundreds ofyears of history and replaced them with concrete. In which tower blocks were built to be lived in by the most unfortunate until the best inventions in demolition techniques ten or twenty years later allowed them to be brought down in front of applauding crowds. In which bright new towns spliced the landscape with right angles in order that people could move from the expanding twilight of cities. In which the manor house now known as Moorthorpe prison had suffered an extension so ugly that even at the time, and even over something as profane as a prison, people had been outraged and petitioned against the violence done to beauty.
    Lined up on the table are three bourbons; he drops mint into them, stirs them with his finger, and knocks one of them back. Fly apart, he thinks. Fly apart.
    “You are wrong,” he tells Fergus. “Architecture rests itself too much on the principle of beauty. A building must be beautiful because it is first worthy, and not worthy because it is first beautiful.”
    Lewis, sitting opposite, leans forward with his elbows either side of his plate. “So you'd honestly screw someone worthy before you screwed someone beautiful?”
    Eleanor laughs. It is the first sound she has made for ten minutes or more, and he supposes that she has laughed out of a need to contribute more than out of appreciation of the joke. He dislikes it when Lewis—not the most masculine of men—assumes the stance of the predator; despite himself, he dislikes the infidel trait that he sees in other men, as if they think they can live by their own rules alone.
    “You miss my point,” he says, “if you think it is about screwing people. Architecture is at the heart of life, it's life wroughtinto something permanent.” He turns his hands as if manoeuvring a great lever. “It's not just how to build but how to be
moral
and to use your brick, your concrete, your steel honestly, without tricking people, without treating them as if they are children.”
    He is not sure how well he even understands what he says, and how much mass has been lost from the argument over the years. Nevertheless it gains stature as he speaks it, warming him to his profession as he has not been for years, unearthing that good faith that drew him to it in the first place. He drinks down another mint julep and considers Joy in her yellow dress gazing out over the ocean from the glass wall of her home, sipping a julep—never gulping, always sipping.
    “I was going to build a glass house once.” He cuts steak away from the bone and chews it ponderously, wondering if he has an attentive audience.
    He begins telling of the glass house he had always wanted on the moors. A little like that famous one in America, he says, and a flurry of nods and
Philip Johnsons
echo around the table. But better, he says. Better than that. He tells them how he had intended to dredge the water from the peat; at first the structure would sit out of sorts in its sponge bed. But