The Glass Room by Simon Mawer Page A

examines the garden elevation, a long, lean rectangle laid sideways across the page and crossed with vertical lines, a rectilinear universe that might have been designed by that new painter whom Rainer talked about, the Dutchman Mondrian. The perspective drawings show all this as a construction of boxes, a child’s game played with wooden blocks. Only a tree, an architect’s conceit sketched in beside the building, gives a brief, ephemeral sense of flow. And as Viktor said, the street entrance seems to be on the top floor with the living room below it. She looks up. ‘“I will build you a house upside down,” that’s what he said.’
    ‘But is it what we want?’
    ‘Why not? And this room, all glass!’ She laughs, shifting her belly, leaning forward again. ‘We will be like plants, hothouse plants.’
    ‘Over-hot in summer, perishing cold in winter, I’d say.’
    She examines the plan of the main floor — it is a space, just a space. There are no internal walls, merely space. ‘What’s this line?’
    ‘He proposes some kind of partition to divide the area. Moveable, I think. And there’s another partition to separate the dining area. See? Where he has put the table and chairs. The semicircle.’
    ‘At least there’s one curve.’ She puts her finger out and touches the slick surface of the print as though by touching it she might understand it better, like a blind person reading Braille. There are small crosses ranked across the plan like graves marked on the map of a cemetery.
     

     
    ‘And these?’
    ‘Those are the pillars.’
    ‘Pillars?’
    ‘He wants to build a steel frame. Apparently there will be no load-bearing walls at all, just the whole thing hung on a steel frame. And where the uprights pass through the interior he is proposing to clad them in chrome.
Glänzend
, he calls it. Shining. Hard steel rendered as translucent as water.’ Viktor pulls a letter from his pocket and reads. ‘“Steel will be as translucent as water. Light will be as solid as walls and walls as transparent as air. I conceive of a house that will be unlike any other, living space that changes functions as the inhabitants wish, a house that merges seamlessly into the garden outside, a place that is at once of nature and quite aside from nature …” That’s what he says. What is the man going on about?’
    ‘I think it looks wonderful.’
    ‘It certainly looks different. More like that department store that the Bat´a people are putting up on Jánská. Do we want to live in a department store? Over here domestic supplies, over there soft furnishings and fabrics, downstairs for cutlery and crockery …’
    She laughs. ‘Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past. Next you will be insisting on a turret with crenellations and ogives. Look.’ She points to the top floor, the street level. ‘This is a terrace, a great space, with the rooms like a cluster of tents. Our family camped out on the steppe. The inside and the outside are one and the same thing.’
    ‘We’re not nomads.’
    ‘You enter here …’ She traces the curve of stairs — another curve! ‘And then descend into this … this space.’
Raum
, she says and suddenly she sees the space projected into her inner vision, the purity of line, the thrill of emptiness. ‘Can’t you see it? It’ll be wonderful.’
    ‘I can see it in theory. The fact seems rather remote at the moment. And frightening.’
    ‘But you take risks in your business. You trust to designers. You approve of the building of new factories and offices.’
    ‘But do I want to live in a factory? Or an office?’
    She straightens up. Once it was Viktor who was committed to the idea of the modern, and now it is she. ‘But this is where
I
want to live.’ She touches her belly. ‘With my daughter and my husband.’
    ‘How do you know it’s a daughter?’
    ‘Hana divined the sex.