The Girl Before(7)

I’d been right earlier, I realize, when I used the word integrity. These questions are some form of psychometric test. But then, integrity isn’t a word estate agents need very often. No wonder Camilla had looked bemused.

Before I fill it in I Google “The Monkford Partnership.” The first link is to their own website. I click, and a picture of a blank wall appears. It’s a very beautiful wall, made of pale, soft-textured stone, but a little uninformative, even so.

I click again and two words appear:





WORKS


CONTACT


When I select “Works” a list fades onto the screen: SKYSCRAPER, TOKYO

MONKFORD BUILDING, LONDON

WANDERER CAMPUS, SEATTLE

BEACH HOUSE, MENORCA CHAPEL, BRUGES

THE BLACK HOUSE, INVERNESS

ONE FOLGATE STREET, LONDON

Clicking on each name brings up more pictures—no words, just images of the buildings. All are utterly minimal. All are built with the same attention to detail, the same high-quality materials, as One Folgate Street. There isn’t a single person in the photographs, or anything that even hints at human occupancy. The chapel and the beach house are almost interchangeable: heavy cubes of pale stone and plate glass. Only the view beyond the windows is different.

I go to Wikipedia.

Edward Monkford (b. 1980) is a British techno-architect associated with the minimalist aesthetic. In 2005, along with data technologist David Thiel and two others, he formed the Monkford Partnership. Together they have pioneered the development of domotics, intelligent domestic environments in which the house or building becomes an integrated organism with no extraneous or unnecessary elements.[1]

Unusually, the Monkford Partnership accepts only a single commission at a time. Their output to date has thus been intentionally small. They are currently working on their most ambitious project so far: New Austell, an eco-town of 10,000 homes in North Cornwall.[2]

I skim down through lists of awards. The Architectural Review called Monkford “a wayward genius,” while Smithsonian magazine described him as “Britain’s most influential starchitect…A taciturn trailblazer whose work is as unshowy as it is profound.”

I skip to “Private Life.”



In 2006, when still largely unknown, Monkford married Elizabeth Mancari, a fellow member of the Monkford Partnership. They had one son, Max, in 2007. Mother and child were killed in an accident during the construction of One Folgate Street (2008–2011), which had been intended to serve as the family home as well as being a showcase for the fledgling Partnership’s talents.[3] Some commentators[who?] have pointed to this tragedy, and Edward Monkford’s subsequent lengthy sabbatical in Japan, as the formative event behind the austere, highly minimalist style that made the Partnership’s name.

Returning from his sabbatical, Monkford abandoned the original plans for One Folgate Street—at the time still a building site[4]—and redesigned it from scratch. The resulting house became the recipient of several major awards, including a Stirling Prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects.[5]

I read the words again. So the house started with a death. Two deaths, in fact; a double bereavement. Is that why I felt so at home there? Is there some kind of affinity between those austere spaces and my own sense of loss?

Automatically I glance at the suitcase by the window. A suitcase full of baby clothes.

My baby died. My baby died and then, three days later, she was born. Even now, it’s the unnatural wrongness of it, the horror of that casual inversion of the proper order of things, that hurts almost more than anything.

Dr. Gifford, a consulting obstetrician despite being barely older than I am, had been the one to look me in the eye and explain that the baby would have to be born naturally. The risk of infections and other complications, plus the fact that a cesarean is a major surgical procedure, meant it was hospital policy not to offer one in cases of prenatal mortality. Offer—that was the word he used, as if having a baby by cesarean, even a dead one, was some kind of treat, like a free basket of fruit in a hotel. But they’d induce me with a drip, he said, and make the whole thing as fast and painless as possible.

I thought: But I don’t want it to be painless. I want it to hurt, and to have a live baby at the end of it. I found myself wondering if Dr. Gifford had children. Yes, I decided. Doctors married young, to other doctors usually, and he was far too nice not to have a family. He would go home that night and describe to his wife, over a pre-dinner beer, how his day had been, using words like prenatal mortality and full term and possibly bit grim. Then his daughter would show him a drawing she’d done at school, and he would kiss her and tell her she was brilliant.

I could tell from the set, strained faces of the medical team as they went about their work that even for them, this was horrible and rare. But whereas for them professionalism could provide some sort of refuge, for me there was only an overwhelming, numbing sense of failure. As they attached the drip with its cargo of hormones to get me started, I could hear the howls of another woman, farther down the maternity ward. But that woman would walk out with a baby, not an appointment card to see a bereavement counselor. Maternity. Another strange word, when you thought about it. Would I even be a mother, technically, or was there some other term for what I was about to become? I’d already heard them saying postpartum instead of postnatal.



Someone asked about the father and I shook my head. No father to contact, just my friend Mia here, her face white with misery and worry as all our carefully laid birthing plans—Diptyque candles and water pools and an iPod full of Jack Johnson and Bach—were discarded in the somber rush of medical activity; not even mentioned, as if they’d only ever been part of an illusion that all was safe and well, that I was in control, that childbirth was barely more taxing than a spa treatment or a particularly fierce massage, not a deadly business in which outcomes like this were perfectly possible, even to be expected. One in two hundred, Dr. Gifford had said. In a third of cases, no reason was ever found. That I was fit and healthy—before the pregnancy I’d done Pilates every day, and run at least once a week—made no difference; neither did my age. Some babies simply died. I would be childless, and little Isabel Margaret Cavendish would never have a mother. A life would never happen. As the contractions started I took a gulp of gas and air and my mind filled with horrors. Images of abominations in Victorian formaldehyde jars swam into my mind. I screamed and clenched my muscles, even though the midwife was telling me it wasn’t time yet.