Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I don’t care for him a great deal,” said Rupert. “It’s funny, when we were at school there was another boy and the two of them looked quite alike. Not alike in any other way, just their looks. A chap called Ratty Mason, poor fellow. None of us knew, or even suspected.”

  Gloria frowned. She had not heard of Ratty Mason before and felt that she needed to find out more. But not now; now she was thinking of friendship between men and women. She was wondering how possible it was for a woman to form a friendship with another woman who was principally a friend of her husband or her lover. Could one do that, or were there always going to be tensions underneath the surface? And in her particular, difficult case, was the problem hers or was it Barbara’s? Barbara might not be jealous of her being married to Rupert; it might be she who was jealous of Barbara. Was that the way it was?

  “Do you think that a woman can have a friendship—a strong friendship—with a man?” she asked.

  “Depends on what sort of friendship you’re talking about,” said Rupert. “If you’re talking about the type of friendship that D. H. Lawrence goes on about, then … well, I’m not sure. I suppose man-woman friendships are different.”

  “Different from what?”

  “From the friendships that men have.”

  Gloria looked at her husband. He was always talking about a whole cast of friends, but she very rarely saw any of them; nor, she thought, did he. “David and Jonathan?” she asked. “That sort of friendship?”

  “Not many men have that,” said Rupert. “Most men have rather distant relations with their male friends. Whereas women are much more emotionally engaged with their female friends. They love their friends. They’re much better at that than we men are.”

  Gloria thought that Rupert was generalising rather too much: there were some men with a great talent for friendship; there were some, too, who were emotionally engaged with their friends to the same extent as were women. But then there were so many men who were, quite simply, lonely; who did not seem to know how to conduct a friendship. There were legions and legions of those.

  But now she came back to the other question that was troubling her: who was Ratty Mason? Wives believe they know their husbands, but often do not—not really—she now realised. There are whole hinterlands that they do not see: old friends never mentioned, private sorrows, worries about virility, doubts and disappointments. And men go through life bearing all these in the name of masculinity and manliness, until it all becomes too much and they dissolve into tears.

  “Who was Ratty Mason? Tell me about him.”

  Rupert shook his head. “No,” he said. “Can’t.”

  72. Rupert’s Insecurities

  BARBARA RAGG, of course, had not been troubled by Rupert’s feelings over her flat for the simple reason that he had never expressed them within her hearing. There had been the occasional comment that was mildly suggestive of envy, but nothing unambiguous. That would have been difficult; one person could hardly say to another that he considered her house to be his by right. Although there were cases where that was said—at an international level—by those who eyed with intent the land and dwellings of others. Such claims are made here and there in our troubled world by bullies and expansionists of every stripe. But Rupert was not one of these—not by the remotest stretch of the imagination—and so he never revealed to Barbara the views he discussed with Gloria. “They stole that flat,” he remarked to his wife. “Her father did not pay a full market price. Dad thought that Gregory wanted to live in it himself. And all the time he was planning to give it to Barbara! If Dad had known that it was for her, he would have passed it on to me instead. They stole it—it’s as simple as that.”

  Gloria was not so sure. She was a fair-minded person, and although she thought that Barbara, in Rupert’s words, directed negative waves towards her, she was not prepared to leap to conclusions about her involvement in this particular historical injustice—if that was what it was.

  “But they did buy it, didn’t they? Fatty sold it willingly. ‘Willing seller, willing buyer’—isn’t that what they say?”

  This annoyed Rupert. “Who says? Who is this they that people talk about?”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Gloria. “It’s an expression, that’s all. It’s a way of saying, ‘I’ve heard it said.’”

  “Well, you should be more exact,” said Rupert peevishly. “At Uppingham we had this really good housemaster. He used to fine you a penny if you made any statement that couldn’t be supported. He collected all the fines and then used the money to buy books for the house library.”

  Gloria stared at him. “The point is, it’s no good raking over old coals. Even if Gregory induced your father to sell on the understanding that he would live in the flat himself, you can’t go back and re-open all that. It’s old business. You have to move on.”

  Rupert looked irritated. “I have moved on,” he said. “I moved on ages ago. I wouldn’t dream of taking this up with Barbara—it’s just that I do occasionally think of it, and it makes me really cross. It’s like when you hear of some great injustice—it rankles, even on an individual level. You may know that you can’t do anything about it, but it’s there—it’s there in the room with you and you can’t ignore it.”

  “Such as?”

  “A great injustice?” Rupert asked. “Oh, there are bags of those. Which one do you want me to name? The Poles?”

  “What about the Poles?”

  Rupert spread his hands in a gesture of despair. “We let them down. The whole world let them down. We put them into the hands of the Soviet Union—into Stalin’s bloody hands. Ireland. The Kurds. The list is a very long one.”

  Gloria nodded. “We were bullies, I suppose. We broke our promises. We stole people’s land on an epic scale. But so did everybody else.”

  “We were bullies?” repeated Rupert. “We jolly well were. And have we said sorry?”

  Gloria thought for a moment. “On one or two occasions,” she said. “Mr. Blair said sorry to Ireland, but he was the first British leader to find it possible to do that. Nobody else bothered. Mr. Clinton also said sorry to quite a few people. And remember when that German Chancellor—it was Willy Brandt, I think—went to Warsaw and fell to his knees, and people were so moved by his contrition? That was a very profound moment, a moment of utter apology. Yet it’s strange how hard it is to say sorry.”

  Rupert agreed. “Sometimes politicians dress it up in the language of regret. They say that they regret what happened.”

  “That’s not the same as saying sorry,” said Gloria. “Look at Mr. Nixon. What did he say? He said that mistakes had been made. That’s very different from admitting that you have done something terrible.”

  “That’s not always easy,” said Rupert. “What you can do, though, is do things that make up for the past. That’s maybe even more important. You can show that you mean business. You can do things.”

  For a moment they were both silent as they contemplated historical injustice. Then Gloria said, “There comes a point at which one has to forgive. One has to forgive others—and also forgive oneself.”

  “Oh yes?”

  Gloria’s reply was emphatic. “Yes. Because if we continue to think about historical wrongs, then nobody can get on with life. The memory of old wrongs poisons relations—freezes them too. Those people are our enemies because of something that they did fifty, one hundred years ago—that sort of thinking is fatal. It clutters everything up. We can’t get on with life if we allow all sorts of unfinished business to distort our dealings with others. So we draw a line and say, ‘That’s the past. The past is dead.’”

  “Except that the past is never dead,” Rupert said quietly.

  “Are you thinking about that flat again?”

  Rupert looked away, ashamed. He was.

  “Listen, Rupert,” said Gloria, “you really have to do something about this. You need to sort yourself out. No, don’t make that face. You’re going to have to listen to m
e. And what I want to say to you is this: you live far too much in the past. No, listen to me—don’t look like that. Listen. You need to get your past sorted out. You need to tackle all the baggage you carry with you. Barbara Ragg’s flat, for instance. No, I called it that deliberately. It’s her flat. It’s her flat, Rupert! We’ve got a perfectly good flat of our own. What? You think it’s smelly. Don’t be so ridiculous. Our flat doesn’t smell. Where? Nonsense! And the other thing you have to sort out is Uppingham—you really do. Uppingham is in the past, Rupert. You’re thirty-six. You left Uppingham eighteen years ago. I know that it’s a wonderful school. I know that you were very happy there. But it’s past business, Rupert. You haven’t got a housemaster any more. We have a bedroom, Rupert, not a dorm. And I am not your housemistress.” She paused. “Who was Ratty Mason, Rupert? Let’s start there.”

  Rupert looked at her sullenly. “Ratty Mason is also in the past, Gloria. He’s gone.”

  Gloria was not one to allow herself to be hoist with her own petard. “Well, maybe that’s one of the things you need to look at. Some of the past is still inside us. You need to talk to somebody about all that.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s a therapist I’ve heard of. Apparently she’s really good.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s called Berthea Snark.” She paused, and then added, “I think.”

  Rupert frowned. “Snark? Do you think she’s related to Oedipus?”

  “Must be. His mother maybe?”

  Rupert nodded. His manner seemed distant; he was pondering something. School days. Oedipus Snark. Ratty Mason. It was all coming back.

  73. Free at Last!

  STILL OUTSIDE HER FLAT, Barbara Ragg now put all thoughts of yetis and their amanuenses out of her mind. She had been thinking about Errol Greatorex and his manuscript and about the damage that would have been done had the story found its way into the press prematurely. It was Oedipus who had alerted The Times, she was sure of it; he would have done it out of spite or even for gain. In fact, the more she dwelled on it the more convinced she became that money was his motivation. Oedipus was greedy: in spite of all his political rhetoric about sharing, he meant sharing only after he had helped himself to his own, somewhat larger share. I am finally free of him, she thought; I am free. And freedom had been so easy—as it often is. The step is taken, the resolution made, and the shackles fall away.

  In her case, all that was required was for her to assert herself, to tell him what she thought of him, and he was deprived of all his power over her, as a muttered prayer or spell breaks the hold of some ghastly demon. No need for garlic or a sword of ice; merely a few words and Oedipus was … She asked herself what Oedipus was. History. That was it: Oedipus was history. The cliché, so easily uttered, nonetheless seemed to fit so perfectly, even if describing somebody as history was a very unkind thing to do. Well, he was unkind to me, thought Barbara, and if I have to be unkind to him in order to free myself, then so be it.

  But this was no time to be thinking of Oedipus Snark because within the flat, she reminded herself as the key slipped into the lock, was a young man sent from heaven. She could still hardly believe what had happened. Never would she have imagined that she, Barbara Ragg, would do something quite as precipitate as pick up a young man in a car park—“A handbag!”—and then, piling Pelion upon Ossa, take him back to her flat and allow him to move in. This last development almost took her breath away. Perhaps it was true that we all had an impulsive twin lurking beneath the surface and this twin occasionally manifested himself—or herself, in this case—and did something utterly outrageous. Perhaps her twin had done all this.

  And yet why shouldn’t two people decide that they were suited to one another and embark, perhaps rather quickly, on a relationship? There were many occasions in this life, she thought, when the impulsive decision proved to be exactly the right one. Too much hemming and hawing could result in the missing of an opportunity. It would be too late. Had Robert Graves not written about this? she asked herself. Yes, he had. She had read a poem of his, “Dream Bird,” in which he said that once one had the dream bird in one’s grasp one should close one’s fist about it and hold it tightly—one should never let it go. She had done no more than follow this advice—to grasp at something that had presented itself suddenly and without warning, a romance with a young man who seemed as smitten by her as she was by him. Why wait? Why let the dream bird fly away? Graves certainly said you should not.

  She closed the front door behind her. The light in her hall was on and there were sounds coming from the direction of the kitchen. She noticed that the mail had been retrieved from downstairs and neatly stacked on the hall table, bills to one side and personal letters to the other. Junk mail—those desperate Technicolor exhortations to avail oneself of take-out restaurants or invitations to send away photographs for printing—had been put at the back, neatly rolled and secured by an elastic band, ready for disposal. And a vase of flowers, which had not been there that morning, had been placed on the low shelf above the table: a small arrangement of roses and delicate supporting fern. For a moment she stood still and stared at the roses. Oedipus had bought her flowers on how many occasions? None. Not once.

  She smiled. Further sounds emanated from the kitchen: running water, the sound of a knife on a chopping board. She made her way across the hall and pushed open the kitchen door.

  Hugh had his back to her, but heard her come in and spun round in surprise. “You said that you were going to be late.”

  “Well, actually it is quite late,” she said. “I’m normally back shortly after six.”

  He picked up a tea towel, wiped his hands and then looked at his watch. “Oh, it’s seven already.”

  “You’ve obviously been busy,” said Barbara, looking around. “You lose track of time when you’ve got lots to do.”

  He tossed the towel down on the kitchen table. Then he crossed the room and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She felt herself blushing.

  “I wanted to surprise you with a meal that was already prepared,” he said. “There’s a bottle of Chablis in the fridge and I thought we’d sit down and have a glass before we eat.”

  “We can still do that.”

  “Yes, I suppose we can. It’s just that I’ve still got some stuff to do. I have to clean some mussels.”

  “Mussels!”

  “Yes. And then we’re having … Well, I want it to be a surprise.”

  Barbara beamed with pleasure. When had Oedipus last surprised her? “You’re terrific,” she said.

  “Not really. I just like cooking.”

  She moved over to the sink and looked at the mussels. They were large and succulent-looking. “I love mussels,” she said. “I love all seafood.”

  “I know a place where one can get the most wonderful seafood,” Hugh said. “Absolutely fresh. Clams. Lobsters. Octopi.”

  “Octopodes,” muttered Barbara.

  She regretted it the moment she said it.

  “Octopodes?”

  She had to explain. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be pedantic. Octopi as a plural form suggests a Latin origin. But the word ‘octopus’ is Greek and the plural should not be the Latin -i form but octopodes. I didn’t mean …”

  He had turned round and resumed his work at the sink. Oh, she thought, and then, again, oh. I’ve hurt his feelings. Already.

  “Why don’t you go and have a bath?” he said over his shoulder. “Then dinner will be ready when you are.”

  She went into the bathroom. I must be so careful, she thought.

  Then she saw the box of bath oils, tiny flasks in a row, placed beside the taps. He had somehow found out her favourite and had bought it: Jo Malone. And next to that, Clinique’s Sparkle Skin—another favourite. How did he know? How would any man know?

  74. Sparkle Skin

  IT’S VERY STRANGE, thought Barbara Ragg, how we can be transformed by the small luxuries of life. A new item of clothing, an impractical but glamorou
s pair of shoes, a well-made pen with a gold nib—any of these things is capable of making us feel so much better about ourselves. Now, stepping out of her bath with its pampering Jo Malone bath oil, exfoliated by Sparkle Skin, she felt herself filled with energy, lit by an exhilarating glow.

  It was just the right feeling to accompany the glass of chilled Chablis that Hugh presented her with when she returned to the kitchen. Taking the glass, she raised it to him in a toast. “You’re spoiling me,” she said. “What a lovely surprise through there …” She gave a toss of the head in the direction of the bathroom.

  He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Oh that. Just a couple of little presents.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “How did I know that you liked those particular things?”

  “Yes.”

  He tapped the side of his nose. “Intuition.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. Surely it would be impossible to find out a person’s tastes purely on intuition. “I don’t believe …” She stopped herself. She should not contradict him. She had already corrected him over the plural of “octopus”; it would not do to disagree with him again. So she said instead, “You’re very clever.”

  He laughed modestly. “Not really.”

  “What else can you tell about me on the basis of intuition?” she asked.

  “That you like France.”

  She nodded. “Yes.” But everybody liked France.

  “And Jane Austen.”

  He was right once more but then, again, everyone liked Jane Austen. “What else?”

  “That your favourite colour is a sort of russet brown.”

  That was a little bit more impressive, but then it occurred to her that he had enjoyed the run of the flat and must have seen all the russet brown in the rugs and elsewhere. And he must have seen the volumes of Jane Austen on the bookshelves too. And the empty tube of Clinique Sparkle Skin in her bedroom drawer … If he had looked in the drawer, that is.