Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  For William, the whole situation had become so painful that he preferred not to think about it. But at least the strategy had worked: Eddie had moved out and the lines of communication between them still appeared to be open. He would contact his son in a week or two. He would continue to pay the money that he transferred into Eddie’s account each month. That would cover his rent and give him a bit left over. He had to do that; he could not cut him off altogether.

  But now, in the office with Marcia, William found himself reflecting on the fact that the Eddie problem was by no means fully resolved. Even if Eddie settled in Stevie’s flat, even if he found a reasonable job and stopped being a drain on the family finances, even if Eddie were to meet some respectable girl … Yes, respectable, thought William, and why should I be ashamed to use the word? What was wrong with being respectable? How had it become virtually a term of abuse, employed, if at all, with a snigger? It was time for respectable people to strike back, he felt. After years of being ridiculed and mocked, they would strike back and say … What would they say? We told you so? We told you that things would get like this and did you listen? You did not. You did not … He took a deep breath and returned to his original line of thought. Even if Eddie met a respectable girl and settled down with her, there was still the issue of his past and of the parcel that William and Marcia had found in his wardrobe.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked Marcia as she passed him another cup of tea.

  “About?”

  “About the picture we found in Eddie’s wardrobe.” He stared gloomily into his teacup. It was not easy to acknowledge that one’s son was an art thief.

  Marcia shrugged. “Do we have to do anything?”

  William watched her sip her tea. She was an attractive woman—in a slightly blowsy sort of way—and he enjoyed her company. But he was not entirely sure about her, and the answer she had just given caused him some concern. He wanted a soulmate—not just a flatmate—and he wondered how close he could be to somebody who thought that the presence of a stolen painting under one’s roof was not a matter for immediate anxiety. Did women think about moral issues in a different way? Were they simply more pragmatic?

  “I don’t think we can just leave it,” said William. “It must belong to somebody. There must be an owner somewhere who’s missing it.”

  Marcia thought about this. After a while she put down her cup and looked at William. “So the painting’s stolen—it’s not our fault. Eddie’s stolen it or is looking after it for somebody who stole it. But we didn’t do any of that.”

  William shook his head. “No, Marcia, you’re wrong. If you hold on to something that’s been stolen, you’re in trouble. It amounts to being in possession of stolen property. You can be prosecuted.”

  Marcia seemed unconcerned. “I still say that it’s nothing to do with us. Return it to Eddie. Get rid of it. What else can we do?” She paused. “Unless we go to the police. You could always do that, I suppose.”

  It was not what William wanted to hear. He had, of course, considered the possibility, and in normal circumstances he would not have hesitated to hand in stolen property. But this was different. This was property that had been stolen by his own flesh and blood.

  “I can’t do that,” he said, his voice taking on a stressed, almost agonised tone. “I can’t turn in my own son.”

  Marcia understood. “Of course you can’t.”

  William rose to his feet and began to pace about the room. “And yet … and yet there must be cases where you have to report a member of your family. What if you know that somebody in the family is a serial killer, for example? You don’t keep quiet about that, do you?”

  “It can’t be very easy,” said Marcia. “But Eddie’s not a murderer, is he? Eddie’s just a … well, Eddie’s just a bit of a naughty boy. That’s all.”

  William did not seem to have heard her. He had stopped in front of the small window at the back of the office and was looking out of it. “Of course, I could get the painting back to its owner,” he muttered.

  He turned round and smiled at Marcia. “That’s the solution, Marcia. We return the painting. Discreetly. We set things right that way. Then I’m spared the duty of handing my own son over to the police.”

  William waited while Marcia considered this. She looked doubtful. “Maybe.”

  “Just maybe? Don’t you think it’s the obvious thing to do?”

  Marcia looked at her watch. She had an appointment with one of her suppliers and she needed to get going. “The problem is,” she said, “that we don’t know the first thing about it. Whose is it? Where did Eddie get it?”

  “We ask,” said William.

  Marcia looked at William dubiously. “Ask Eddie?”

  That was not necessary, William explained. “Something I read came back to me,” he said. “I think I know where to go.”

  Marcia looked at her watch again. Her seafood man, whom she was due to meet, always insisted on punctuality—which was a good thing, she thought, in a man who dealt in perishables. “Where?” she asked. “Where do we go?”

  William waved a hand in the air, indicating the ether, the world of www.

  64. Requin Trouvé

  AT THE SAME TIME as William and Marcia were agonising, or William, at least, was agonising, over what to do about their awkward discovery in Eddie’s wardrobe—their damnosa hereditas, as Roman lawyers might put it—Caroline and James, feeling the need for a late lunch, were peering into the window of a small bistro behind the British Museum. It was on a street of book and antique shops; to one side was a dusty dealership in antiquarian maps, and to the other a shop that specialised in Greek and Roman antiquities.

  “That’s what I really like about this area,” mused James. “If somebody from the past slipped through a time warp and ended up standing on this street, he would not feel lost. Not at all. He’d look into that window next door and think: Oh, a new lamp shop. Of course, the lamps are several thousand years old. And if he didn’t know where he was, he could pop into that map shop and pick up a map of the Roman Empire. Or a map of Londinium.”

  Caroline gazed at the menu displayed in the bistro window. Her mind was on quiche. Quiche could be dodgy: it was often soggy and very unappetising. Was she in a pasta mood? she asked herself. Perhaps. “What are you talking about, James?”

  “I’m talking about people who might find themselves in the wrong time. Through some quirk of physics.”

  “Oh. Is pizziccata hot? I don’t like those really hot chillies. I never have.”

  “Not sure,” said James. “Of course, nobody ever does, you know. Nobody wakes up and finds themselves in the wrong century. Mind you, some people just seem to have been in the wrong century from the beginning. Young fogeys, for instance. Do you know any young fogeys?”

  Caroline kept her eyes on the menu. Reading menus always made her hungry and she heard her stomach growl softly. “Young fogeys?” she said. “You?”

  “Very funny, Caroline,” said James. “You don’t listen to me, do you?”

  Caroline prodded him playfully. “Sometimes. But look, I’m really hungry and we can get quite a good lunch in here for … Well, look at the menu.”

  “Poor dears,” said James. “Restaurants are really struggling, aren’t they?”

  They went in. The restaurant was busy enough—what with the special promotions—but a table was just being vacated by another customer and they got that.

  “Well then,” said James after they had given their order. “Caravaggio.”

  They had just attended a lecture on the artist given by a passionate lecturer whom James had described as “a bit like Caravaggio himself, except, one assumes, for the violence.”

  “One can hardly imagine,” he said, “that a shrinking violet would be drawn to lecture on Caravaggio.” He paused. “What do you think of Caravaggio, Caroline?”

  “Too dramatic for me,” she said. “I can’t imagine that people of the time writhed quite as much as they do in hi
s paintings.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said James. “They were very expressive. It’s just that we’ve become so cool. They would probably consider us very stiff.”

  Caroline knew what he meant. “It’s very sad that people feel they have to be cool,” she said. “They have to suppress all sense of joy and excitement.”

  “Precisely,” said James. “And colours too. All those blacks and greys. Everything is toned down—muted really. Imagine finding a Caravaggio. Imagine how the Queen felt when she discovered that what she thought was a copy was the real thing.”

  “I suppose she’s used to it,” said Caroline. “But what about those Jesuits in Dublin who discovered a Caravaggio in their sitting room …?”

  “Their parlour,” corrected James. “Jesuits have parlours, not sitting rooms. There’s a difference, you know.”

  “Which is?”

  “A parlour is more formal. It’s the place where you receive people. You don’t sit around in a parlour; you do that in a sitting room or a living room—a drawing room if you’re a bit grander.”

  “Well, whatever. Just imagine it, though. You have a rather dark old picture in your parlour, a picture that you think is a mere Honthorst.”

  James corrected her again. “Honthorst is not mere. He was a very important painter, one of the major Caravaggisti of his time. He was—”

  “But he was not Caravaggio,” interrupted Caroline. “And if you had a choice: Honthorst or Caravaggio? If the chips were really down and you had to choose.”

  It was not a difficult choice. “Caravaggio out of sheer avarice,” said James. “Well, one has to eat, you know, and a Caravaggio would bring in millions. And he was a better painter too. That’s always convenient. Choose somebody on aesthetic grounds but make sure that he’s also the most expensive.”

  “Yet value isn’t the sole consideration,” argued Caroline. “You can have artists fetching stratospheric prices and yet their work may be trite, banal even. Those people who do installations, for example. They fetch millions, but what are the people who buy such things actually getting?”

  “A take on the world,” offered James. “A fresh perspective on things. A new understanding of the everyday world. Visual surprise.”

  Caroline was doubtful. “Sometimes,” she said. “But it’s not real value we’re talking about here. It’s an inflated sense of value—like tulips in the Dutch tulip frenzy. Everybody thought they were worth millions until somebody said, ‘Aren’t those just common or garden tulip bulbs?’ And that was the end of that.”

  James toyed with his fork. “You think contemporary art will go the same way?”

  “I do. Of course it will. When people wake up.”

  “So if I said, ‘This fork is by you know who,’ you might say, ‘It’s just a fork.’ Right?”

  Caroline said that she would.

  “And the shark?” James asked.

  “It’s just a shark,” said Caroline. “And whoever bought it must surely be sweating over the day that somebody stands up and says, ‘It’s just a shark, for heaven’s sake!’”

  James smiled. “I think they’ve already said it. And yet people still pay those prices at auction for that stuff.”

  “They have to,” said Caroline. “If they didn’t, then what they already had would be worthless. You can’t really sell sharks, you know. Particularly dead ones.”

  “But I think you can,” said James, “as long as you get people to believe it’s an important dead shark.” He paused. “That shark, you see, has been canonised.”

  65. Caravaggio as a Role Model for Boys

  JAMES CHOSE SPARKLING mineral water and a glass of house white. “I shouldn’t drink at lunchtime,” he said. “And I normally don’t. But all that Caravaggio, you know—what else can one do?”

  “Did you see the film about him?” asked Caroline. “The Derek Jarman film?”

  James nodded. “Caravaggio doesn’t exactly come out of it very well. He had a penchant for knives. And that awful scene where he murders his model by slitting his throat.” He shuddered, and reached for the sparkling mineral water. “Do you think artists have to lead intense lives? Do you think that you can be a great artist and be bourgeois? Or does it all have to be very gritty? Caravaggiesque.”

  Caroline considered this. “Let’s try to think of artists who were straightforward, conventional types. Can you think of any?”

  James looked up at the ceiling. “Difficult. It seems that the artistic personality has a certain contrariness to it. If you’re conventional, then perhaps there’s no impulse to create.”

  Caroline helped herself to a small amount of James’s water. “So creativity comes from conflict? Inner conflict? You have to be hurt into making art?”

  James thought that this was probably true. “Art comes from a desire to make sense of the world and one’s experience in it,” he intoned. “It’s intended to make up for the separation that we feel between us as humans and beauty. The artist tries to re-create beauty—to make it whole again.”

  “If the artist is really concerned with beauty,” said Caroline.

  James thought this self-evident. “Surely he is?”

  Caroline shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. Look at the sort of art we’ve just been discussing—installation art, the unmade beds and so on. Where’s the beauty in that?”

  James grinned. “In an unmade bed?”

  “Yes. How can that have anything to do with beauty?”

  James thought for a moment. “Ugliness can be beautiful,” he said. “Anything can be beautiful. And maybe that’s what a certain sort of artist is trying to do: he—or she, of course—is trying to open our eyes to a beauty we would not otherwise see.”

  Their plates arrived and were placed before them. Caroline looked at her pasta—all twisted shapes and beauty, an installation perhaps. She felt that she should say something about it, but the topic of generalised beauty took precedence over the particular, and certainly over the beauty to be found in pasta. James’s last remark interested her; it was right in one way, but she thought that in another way it was wrong. If everything was beautiful—as he appeared to be suggesting—did that not deprive beauty of all its aesthetic, and indeed moral, force?

  “How can everything be beautiful?” she asked. “Human suffering, for example? Is that beautiful? A scene of carnage? A place where suffering has occurred?”

  “Some things are horrible,” James said. “Some things are hateful. What you’ve just mentioned is horrible, and hateful too, but surely it can be beautiful in the sense that it’s part of our world, and our world, in its totality, is beautiful?”

  “Rubbish,” said Caroline. And then added, “What about a discordance in music? Is that beautiful?”

  James looked at her reproachfully. “You’re being very aggressive,” he said. “Why don’t you eat your lunch instead of attacking me and everything I say? Go on, eat your lunch, you horrid girl!”

  He laughed, and she laughed too. Dear James: he was so unlike … so unlike Caravaggio. She reached out and put her hand on his, just for a moment. The contact was brief, fleeting, but she noticed that he tensed; she could tell. She cast her eyes down to her plate. “Don’t you like to be touched?” she asked.

  His manner was one of affected nonchalance. “I don’t mind,” he said.

  “But you flinched just then, when I put my hand on yours. You did, you know.”

  He frowned. “Maybe I did. It’s just that I’m not used to being touched. I like to think of myself as quite tactile, but only when I’m in control, when I’m the one doing the touching. I suppose I’m just not used to not being in control.”

  Caroline sighed. “That’s sad. It really is.”

  James looked up. “I know. But it’s difficult, sometimes, to deal with something you know you want to change. You can’t just do it like that.” He clicked his fingers. “You have to understand why it is that you feel the way you do and then you have to tackle it.”
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br />   Caroline was silent. “Did something unsettling happen to you, James?” she asked. “Is that why …?”

  James met her gaze. I love his eyes, she thought. Nobody I know has such sensitive eyes. Like the eyes of a Botticelli model. Wide. Light brown.

  “There was something,” said James. “Something I saw a long time ago. I don’t really like to talk about it, though.”

  “Then you don’t need to,” said Caroline.

  He seemed to mull this over for a few moments. “No, maybe I do. Maybe that’s what I really have to do. Think about it. Talk about it.” He took a sip from his wine glass. “I read somewhere that this is exactly what you should do. You should talk about the thing that frightens you and in that way you deprive it of its power.”

  Caroline listened carefully. She had suspected ever since their conversation over homemade lemon gems that there was something that had to be dealt with in James’s past and now she knew that it was so. He was undoubtedly right: one had to confront these things if one wanted to lance the boil that they represented. In her own case, there had been the incident at the pony club, which she had brooded over for years, until somebody—somebody quite unconnected with the pony club—had casually mentioned it and it had all come pouring out. That was when she had discovered that what had seemed large was, in fact, small—ridiculously so—and suddenly she was able to talk about the pony club again without feeling guilty. I did not cheat, she said to herself. I did not. But although she was convinced of the liberating power of revelation, she was not sure that this bistro, over lunch, was quite the right place and time to encourage James to talk.

  “Perhaps we should talk about it some other time,” she said gently. “I don’t want you to think that I’m not willing to listen—I am, I really am. It’s just that …”