Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The girls were always unmarried, even if some of them were engaged. The engaged girls had their pictures in the magazine as an encouragement to others to make suitable marriages when the time came. None of the fiancés was unsuitable; quite the opposite, in fact. So this meant that unengaged girls should put behind them any temptation to marry unsuitable men—of whom there was always a more than adequate supply—and marry, instead, boys who would in the fullness of time be the fathers of girls who appeared in Rural Living. And if there was a degree of circularity in this, it was entirely intentional.

  Of course, Caroline’s parents would never have sought out the placing of their daughter’s photograph in Rural Living. It was well known that anybody who did so would be quietly and tactfully made aware that that was not the way it worked. The best route to inclusion was to come to editorial attention in a social context; another way was to know one of those photographers whose work was regularly published in the magazine. These photographers wielded considerable power—as photographers, and picture editors, often do. They could make or break political careers, for instance, simply by photographing their subject in a particular way. There was many a politician, or politician’s wife, who had been photographed in such a manner as to make him or her an object of derision. A former prime minister, for instance, was regularly portrayed as having extraordinary eyes, rather like the eyes of one possessed, and his wife was portrayed as having a perpetually open mouth, the mouth of one who was rarely silent. Now, neither of these portrayals was accurate or fair. The Prime Minister’s eyes were not those of a maniac: photographers who did not approve of him simply achieved this effect by omitting to turn on the anti-red-eye device on their cameras. This created the impression that the Prime Minister was a messianic lunatic, which he was not. Similarly, when photographing his wife, these photographers simply waited until her mouth opened in order to breathe and then they snapped her. It was all extremely unkind.

  Caroline had been spotted by a photographer called Tim Something. Something was a freelance photographer who specialised in covering events such as May Balls at provincial universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. He also covered picnics at Glyndebourne, regattas at Henley, and the occasional charity cricket match. His photographs were competently executed rather than brilliant, but then none of his subjects was particularly brilliant, and so it was a good match.

  Something had been in Oxford to cover the award of an honorary degree to an influential financier, having been commissioned to photograph the event for the financier’s company. Afterwards, he was having a cup of coffee in a coffee bar when Caroline came in with two of her friends. He had been drawn to her looks, which were typical of a certain sort of English girl who, although not overly intellectual, nonetheless has intelligence sufficient to animate the face.

  Something had watched her discreetly from his table. He noted the style of her clothes—there was no sign of the ubiquitous blue jeans that virtually everybody else in the coffee bar was sporting. He noticed the single strand of pearls that she was wearing; the subdued, pastel-shaded blouse; the shoes (everybody else was in trainers). And he said to himself: Oxford Brookes, the university where girls of a certain background can go and be well placed to meet boys at the “real” Oxford University, in so far as any of these would be considered by such a girl to be worth meeting.

  He watched her, and then acted. Crossing to her table, he cleared his throat and said, “Look, I know you don’t know me, but would you like to have your photograph in a magazine?”

  Caroline looked up at Something. “What magazine?”

  “One that mostly features dogs and horses,” he replied.

  6. Tim Something Takes a Photo

  “TIM SOMETHING,” said Caroline. “He’s a photographer. I’m sure he’s all right.”

  “Not a name to inspire confidence,” said her father, Rufus Jarvis, a semi-retired partner in Jarvis and Co., a land agency in Cheltenham.

  Caroline smiled. “But you can’t judge people by their names,” she said. “It has nothing to do with them. You called me Caroline, for instance.”

  There was a silence. They were sitting in the kitchen of the Jarvis house in Cheltenham, a rambling old rectory with a large Victorian conservatory and a monkey puzzle tree in the garden. Rufus Jarvis stared at his daughter. She had been a very easy teenager—no rebellions, as far as he could recall—but now that she was twenty-one, were resentments going to start to come out? Did she resent being called Caroline?

  “Caroline is a perfectly good name,” he said. “It’s not as if we called you …” He thought for a moment. Bronwen was a problematic name, to say the least. Or Mavis. A girl called Mavis these days might have every reason to resent parental choice. But Caroline?

  “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with being called Caroline,” said Caroline. “I was just making the point that you chose it, I didn’t.”

  “Well, you can hardly complain about that,” said Rufus. “Parents can’t very well say, ‘I’m not going to call you anything until you’re twelve, or sixteen, or whatever, and then you can choose for yourself.’ For heaven’s sake!”

  Caroline sighed. “No, listen, Daddy, you’re not getting the point. What I’m saying is that parents choose names and children don’t. So you can’t judge anybody by their name. Because it has nothing to do with them.”

  “All right. But you must admit that there are some names that just don’t … don’t inspire confidence. That’s all. This chap, Something, how do you know …?” He did not finish.

  “He’s perfectly respectable. And he wants to put my photograph in Rural Living.”

  Rufus frowned. “In the front? Where they have the photo of the girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “But are you looking for a husband?”

  Caroline laughed. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

  “Come, come, my dear,” said Rufus. “It has everything to do with it. Any chap—unmarried chap—reading Rural Living will see that you’re not yet married. Hello, he’ll say. Nice-looking girl, that. That’s how it works, my dear. Half of Mummy’s friends appeared in Rural Living. Mummy herself—”

  Caroline gasped. “Mummy? Her photograph was in?”

  “Yes, it was. And she looked extremely attractive, if I may say so. I saw it and I said to myself, there’s a looker! And the rest, as they say, was history.”

  Caroline was silent. She was shocked, indeed she was appalled, to discover that her father had found her mother in a magazine. Like everybody, she did not like to think that she was the product of … well, all that. And between her parents too! She had fondly imagined that her parents had met at … a dance, perhaps (and not too close a dance). They had had a formal and courteous relationship and then, after a decent interval, she had appeared on the scene. That was how she liked to imagine it. Anything else would have taken her into the Freudian territory of the “primal scene,” where the child, witnessing the closeness of parents, interprets the situation as one involving violence.

  When she had recovered her composure, she glanced at her father and said, with a certain note of reproach in her voice, “I didn’t realise that you got Mummy from a catalogue.”

  Rufus found this amusing. “A catalogue? No, it was hardly like that. After I saw her picture in the magazine I got somebody who lived near her father to get me invited to a do they had. That’s how I met her. Of course there were lots of other men all about her and I had to join the queue, so to speak.”

  “Daddy!” This was unbearable. That her mother should have entertained advances from anybody but her father was inconceivable. How could she? It was almost as if she had discovered that her mother had a history as a courtesan: talked about by men; the subject of heaven knows what dark ambitions and fantasies.

  That was where the discussion stopped. Caroline had discovered enough about the expectations that might be raised by the publication of her picture—which had already been taken—and she decided to contact
Tim Something and get him to withdraw the photograph. She did not want a husband—at least not yet—and she certainly did not want people to think that she had agreed to have her photograph featured in this way purely for that reason.

  She telephoned Tim Something. “That photograph,” she said. “I don’t want you to use it.”

  “But it’s great. They liked it a lot. That picture of you standing next to the monkey puzzle tree in your old man’s garden. Fantastic. Have you ever thought of modelling? I know a guy in London who’s always on the look-out for likely vict—subjects. I could do a few portfolio shots. You know the sort of thing. You looking into the middle distance. You smiling. You’ve got a great smile, btw.”

  She began to shout, but then calmed down and spoke more evenly. “You’re not listening to me,” she said, adding, “btw. I said that I’m withdrawing my consent. You know what that means? No. Nyet. Nein.”

  It was a moment or two before he replied. “Too late,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “What do you mean too late?”

  “I mean that they’ve made up the magazine. It’ll be ready for printing.”

  Caroline drew in her breath. “Then they’ll just have to stop,” she said. “I’m withdrawing my consent.”

  “Too late,” he said. “Really. It’s just too late.” He paused. “Of course you could get them to over-print it with a sign saying Sold. That’s what they do with houses that are off the market by the time the magazine goes to press.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?” she hissed.

  “No,” said Tim Something. “Just helpful.”

  7. Proustian-Jungian Soup

  CAROLINE THOUGHT: It’s odd, sitting here, letting one’s mind wander, and who should come into it but Tim Something, of all people. Strange.

  She had not seen him for two years; her photograph had appeared in Rural Living during her last year at Oxford Brookes and then there had been the gap year in New Zealand looking after the children of a family who lived in Auckland (whose fifteen-year-old son had made a pass at her; fifteen!). Now here she was doing her Master’s in Fine Art, sitting in a lecture on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and a photographer whom she barely knew—and rather disliked—suddenly came into her mind. It was odd, but that was how the human mind was: a Proustian-Jungian soup of random memories and associations.

  Proustian-Jungian; she rather liked the term, and might use it in one of her essays. She was overdue with one of them—a discussion of influences in Veneto-Cretan painting—and she was finding the going rather difficult. There was a literature on the subject but a lot of it was in German, and Caroline’s German was almost nonexistent. She could ask the way to the station, perhaps, in that language, and had indeed once done so in Frankfurt, only to be answered in perfect, almost non-accented English. But when it came to influences in Italian art, it was a different matter.

  The Proustian-Jungian line would certainly help. She had been looking at a photograph of a small Veneto-Cretan treatment of the birth of the Virgin Mary, a popular theme in the art of the time. In this painting, the Virgin Mary’s mother was lying in a large four-poster bed, across which a rich, brocaded green cover had been draped. The mother was composed, and was being served a tray by a serving girl, next to whom was standing a saint, his halo providing a measure of illumination for the eating of the meal on the tray. In the foreground a group of angels stood around the newborn babe, who was, curiously enough, already standing, at the tender age of a couple of hours, although admittedly lightly supported by another serving girl, or an early au pair perhaps.

  It was the reading of the painting that was all-important, and only the naive would see this painting as being simply about the birth of the Virgin Mary. There was far, far more to be gained from looking at it closely, but … what exactly? That was the difficulty.

  Her thoughts, however, were interrupted by the voice of their lecturer, who had pressed the button to bring a fresh slide to the screen. Thoughts of the Veneto-Cretan were replaced by thoughts of the Dutch Golden Age and the significance of light.

  “These paintings,” said the lecturer, a small man in a velvet jacket, “are really about water, because whenever a Dutch artist paints land, he is really painting land as seen through the water that suffused the very air about him. It is this omnipresence of water that gives to the light of that period its particular quality. As we see here in this landscape by Pieter de Hooch. See. Here and here. And here.”

  Caroline felt herself becoming drowsy. It was warm in the lecture theatre, and she had woken up rather early that morning. The Dutch light, she felt, was soporific; it had perhaps had that effect on de Hooch as he sat at his easel all those years ago.

  She felt a gentle dig in her ribs. “Don’t go to sleep,” her neighbour whispered. “Poor Dr. Edwards will be very offended if he sees you. But he is boring, isn’t he?”

  She half turned to the young man sitting beside her. He had started taking notes at the beginning of the lecture but now appeared to have stopped. James was a special friend of hers; they often sat next to one another in lectures, lent each other notes, and went off for coffee together. He was easy company, amusing and undemanding and, most importantly, quite unthreatening to women.

  “I can’t help it,” she whispered back. “His voice …”

  James patted her forearm. “Quite. But listen, I need to talk to you. Have you got a moment after this?”

  “Of course.” She hesitated. “A problem?”

  He put a finger to his lips. Dr. Edwards was looking in their direction. “Wait,” he said. “Afterwards.”

  At the end of the lecture they left the lecture room together, abandoning a small knot of members of the course who wanted to take up with Dr. Edwards some point about the Dutch Golden Age. Coming out of Bedford Square, they went into the coffee bar off Tottenham Court Road, where, at any hour of the day, they knew they could always find a table.

  “So,” said Caroline. “What’s up? Have you got an interview? Or even an offer?” James was applying for jobs at various galleries and had been passing on to her the woes of his fruitless quest.

  He shook his head. “Nothing like that. Actually, this is a personal issue. I don’t want to burden you …”

  “Listen,” she said. “Who’s your best friend on this course? Me. And what are best friends for? To be burdened. So …”

  He looked at her gratefully. “I couldn’t talk to anybody else about this,” he said. “It’s not the sort of thing … well, it’s not the sort of thing I’ve found very easy to talk about. Ever.”

  She nodded. “I can imagine … Not that I know what it is, of course, but if I did, then I’m sure I’d see what you mean.”

  James toyed with the spoon that the barista had placed beside his caffe latte. “It’s not easy.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you see, it’s about me. About who I am. About what I feel.”

  Caroline looked at him encouragingly. “For most of us, that’s quite an important issue. Yes?”

  He looked at her. “Caroline, you do know that I’m … well, you know that I’m … you know …”

  She laughed; this was hardly a disclosure. James, after all, had admired the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke—more than once. “But of course. And so what? Surely that’s not an issue.”

  “No, it isn’t. Except that … well, except that I think I’m not … you know.”

  Caroline frowned. “You’ve just discovered that you like … girls?”

  James sighed. “Yes. I think I may be straight. Here I am at twenty-two, committed to art history, and discovering that I may be straight. How bad is that?”

  “Now, that is a problem,” agreed Caroline.

  8. The Merits of Italian Wine (or Some of It)

  WHILE CAROLINE SAT in the coffee bar with James, listening to his unexpected and unsettling disclosure, William was busy taking delivery of a large consignment of Brunello di Montalcino, eighteen cases in all, of which seven were alr
eady promised to clients and three were semi-promised. A semi-promise was where the client said that he would take something and the merchant said that he would set it aside, both knowing that neither meant it. Failure to take up a semi-promise had no consequences for the client but he could nonetheless treat such a failure as cause for minor umbrage—mild disappointment, perhaps, that something he might have wanted had been sold. But there were limits to this umbrage and if the merchant thought these limits had been surpassed, he could come back with a remark about making firm orders in future. Clients who traded in semi-promises did not like firm orders and would usually let the matter drop at that point.

  William’s assistant, Paul, a young man of nineteen, was late that morning and came in to find William stacking the last of the cases of Brunello. William looked pointedly at his watch and then at Paul, who was dressed in the outfit that he wore every day—denim jeans and a T-shirt of a colour somewhere between grey and white. He wondered whether it was always the same pair of jeans and the same T-shirt, but it was difficult to tell. Paul seemed clean enough to him and was never, as William put it when commenting on the unwashed who appeared to circulate in London, “slightly off.” Indeed, Paul wore something, some cologne or aftershave, that had a pleasant, slightly sandalwood tang to it. William had once discovered a bottle of white wine from the Veneto which seemed to have exactly the same nose to it as Paul’s cologne. He had called out to Paul, “My goodness, Paul, this Italian white smells exactly like—” And had stopped himself before he said “you.” One man—even a new man, which William would claim to be—did not comment to another man on how he smelled; there were taboos about this, and the most that any man could do of another was to wrinkle his nose slightly, or perhaps waft the air in front of his nose with a hand—a gesture into which all sorts of alternative and innocent meanings could be read.

  But now there was the issue of time-keeping, rather than smell, and William looked again at his watch and then glanced at Paul.