Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She took a sip of wine. A cold hand had touched her, somewhere inside, and she imagined Hugh prowling around the flat while she was at work. She did not like the thought of his looking into things; he could examine things on the walls and on the shelves but he should not poke about in drawers.

  She tried to sound light-hearted. “You seem to know a lot about me,” she said, giving a short, nervous laugh. “But what do I know about you?”

  He looked at her over the top of his wine glass, his expression one of bemusement. “You’d have to tell me that yourself.”

  She thought for a moment. What did she know about him? That he was called Hugh. That he had been in a relationship but was out of it now. That he …

  “I really don’t know much about you, Hugh,” she confessed. “I suppose you told me a little. But it wasn’t very much.”

  As she waited for his response, she thought how foolish she would look if he did something terrible. People would say, “She picked him up in Rye and brought him home, just like that.” And others would shake their heads and say, “Well, what did she expect?”

  Hugh put down his wine glass. “Would you like me to tell you?”

  “Yes. We should know a bit about each other, don’t you think? I mean, rather more than what our favourite colours are and so on. About who we are. About where we come from. About what we do. That sort of thing.”

  It was as if her answer had disappointed him. “All right,” he said. “But it’s a pity, isn’t it, that we can’t just be … well, just ourselves to each other? Not the social self, the self that other people have created for us, but the real inner soul, stripped of all the trappings of social identity. I think that’s a pity.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “But I’d still like to know.”

  Hugh reached for the bottle of Chablis and topped up her glass. “You know the Hugh part of my name,” he began. “The second part is Macpherson.”

  “You’re Scottish?”

  “Yes, I’m Scottish. And don’t say, ‘But you don’t sound Scottish.’ I really hate that. Not everyone in Scotland sounds like Rob Roy.”

  She defended herself. “I wasn’t going to say that. I know that there are plenty of …” She was about to say posh people in Scotland, but she stopped herself in time. “I know that there are plenty of people in Scotland who …”

  He saved her. “Who went to school in England, as I did. I was sent off to school at twelve. I went to a boarding school in Norfolk. Not a very well-known one—in fact, hardly anybody’s ever heard of it.”

  “Unlike Uppingham.”

  He looked surprised. “Yes, unlike Uppingham. How do you know about Uppingham, by the way?”

  “Rupert Porter, my partner—my business partner, as one has to say these days—went there. He still talks about it. I think he was a prefect and has never grown out of it. I once gave him a prefect’s badge that I found on a stall on the Portobello Road. I told him that if he was going to dictate to me then he might as well have a prefect’s badge. He didn’t find it funny.”

  “Well, the place I was at was distinctly downmarket of that. But it wasn’t too bad, I suppose.”

  Barbara had never been able to understand why anybody would send their child to a boarding school. Why have children in the first place unless you wanted them to spend their childhood with you? She asked Hugh why he was sent away, and he thought for a few moments before answering. “It was complicated,” he said. “We had a farm in Argyll and I would have had to go away to school anyway, or travel for hours every day to get to Fort William. It was a very remote place. And my mother, you see, was English and she wanted me to have a bit of both cultures, my father’s and hers—of Scotland and England. So they decided to send me to boarding school in England. The place I went to was quite cheap and that suited them too. We did not have all that much money.”

  “And then?”

  “And then what?”

  “Then what did you do?”

  He looked up at the ceiling. “I had a gap year. Sixteen months in fact.”

  “Where?”

  “South America, for the most part.”

  “Whereabouts in South America?”

  It was not, she thought, an intrusive question and she was quite unprepared for his reaction—which was to start to weep.

  75. Terence Moongrove Confesses

  OVER IN CHELTENHAM, that particular day had proved an eventful one for Terence Moongrove and his sister, Berthea Snark. Berthea had decided to extend her stay in Cheltenham by a few weeks, and had spent several hours on the telephone cancelling and rearranging her patients. (She refused to call them clients. “They are under my care,” she explained. “If somebody is under your care, then they are the patient, in the old-fashioned sense of being one to whom something is done. A client is not under your care. That is a totally different transaction. You do not care for clients in the same way that you care for patients.”)

  It happened that her diary over the following month was not particularly full, so it was not too difficult to find alternative appointments for everybody. Had her patients not been loquacious, the task of arranging these appointments would have been the work of half an hour at the most. But many of her patients were given to long-windedness and took the opportunity of the telephone call to unburden themselves of doubts and anxieties that they had felt since they last saw Berthea. They knew, too, that telephone time was free—at least to them—and anything they said to her on the telephone was therefore very much cheaper than what they said to her in their hour-long sessions in her consulting room.

  “Phew!” Berthea exclaimed, as she replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. “You wouldn’t imagine that it would take quite so long to arrange something so insignificant as a change of appointment.”

  “Poor dears,” said Terence. “They do so need to talk. All those horrid worries and doubts bottled up inside! They must be bursting to tell you all about it.”

  “There’s a time and place for that,” said Berthea briskly.

  “Mind you, Berthy,” Terence went on, “I can understand why the poor souls want to talk to you. You’re such a good listener, you really are. And you aren’t bossy at all. Not really.”

  Berthea looked at him with surprise. “Who said I was bossy?”

  Terence spoke sheepishly. “Well, I’m afraid I have a teeny confession to make,” he said. “I called you bossy when I was talking to Mr. Marchbanks. I said that you were bossy and you stuck your long nose into my business. And I’m terribly sorry that I said it. It was the electricity, I think. I really don’t think that way.”

  Berthea looked at him reproachfully. She had saved his life by her prompt action and in return he had called her bossy. Well, if she had not stuck her long nose into his business—and her nose was not long at all, she told herself—then Terence would be no more. He should remember that, perhaps.

  “I know,” said Terence, holding up a hand, “you must think me utterly beastly for saying something like that. I really am sorry, Berthy. But at least I’ve got it off my chest now and I can see the forgiveness in your eyes. It’s like a great light, you know, from where I’m sitting. It’s like the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria—a beam of forgiveness piercing the encircling gloom.”

  Berthea looked at her brother. If anybody’s nose was long, she thought, it’s his. But there was no point in saying it; one of the things she knew, both as an analyst and as a person, was that remarks about the nose of another would never be anything but the cause of misunderstanding or annoyance. The only thing anybody ever wanted to hear about their nose was that it was a very fine and attractive one; that was the only acceptable thing to say. You could not say to somebody, “Your nose is average,” or “Nobody will notice your nose.” You had to be positive.

  “Well, at least you’ve told me,” she said. “And you’re right, I don’t think you were yourself for a little while after the accident.” She paused. “But how are you feeling now?”
/>   “I feel extremely well,” said Terence. “Quite optimistic, in fact, especially since I made my decision to replace the Morris.”

  “Good,” said Berthea. “Well, I shall stay, if I may, for another couple of weeks, just to make sure everything’s settled. Sometimes accidents like that can leave one feeling a bit vulnerable for a while. I’ll stay until you’re absolutely sure that you’ve recovered from the experience. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Not at all,” said Terence. “We can go to sacred dance together, and do those photies I mentioned—the ones that Daddy took in Malta.”

  “Maybe,” said Berthea quickly. “I was also hoping to get some of my book done—the biography of Oedipus that I mentioned. I’ve got as far as his school days at Uppingham. I don’t have much information about that part of his life, but I’m hoping that I’ll hear from people who spent more time with him than I did in those days. I’ve written to one or two of his contemporaries and I’ve already had a couple of replies.”

  “Oh,” said Terence. “From his school friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did they say?”

  Berthea looked evasive. “Nothing very much, I’m afraid. In fact, now that you ask, they weren’t very helpful. One of them wrote and asked for Oedipus’s address because he had something to discuss with him. I didn’t like the letter and so I didn’t send Oedipus’s address. I didn’t fancy the way that the handwriting became shakier and shakier as the letter progressed—as if the writer were under acute emotional stress.”

  “Oh dear,” said Terence. “Perhaps the writer was a lunatic. Did he write in green ink, by any chance?”

  “What’s the significance of green ink?”

  Terence nonchalantly waved a hand in the air. “It’s well known,” he said. “Lunatics choose to write in green ink. Everybody knows that.”

  “Nonsense!” exclaimed Berthea. “To begin with, the term ‘lunatic’ is frightfully old-fashioned.”

  “Nutters, then,” said Terence.

  “Even worse,” said Berthea. “‘Differently rationaled’ is the term, you know.”

  Terence raised an eyebrow. “Whatever you say. Anyway, I’m jolly glad that you’re going to stay, because I really appreciate you, Berthy. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that, but I really do appreciate you. So you can stay as long as you like—and we can even go on some trips in my new car. How would you like that?”

  “That would be fine, Terence,” Berthea said. “But listen, what sort of car will it be?”

  Terence’s brow knit with concentration. “I think … I think it’s something beginning with a P. Yes, I’m pretty sure of it. I can’t remember the exact name, though. Mr. Marchbanks is going to get me one—he’s promised.”

  “A Peugeot,” said Berthea. “That’ll be very suitable, Terence.”

  “Yes, I believe it’s a Peugeot. Are they good cars? It’s the sort that Monty Bismarck drives.”

  “I don’t know Monty Bismarck,” said Berthea. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if he drives a Peugeot.” Monty Bismarck drew up in his Peugeot. Yes, that sounded very appropriate.

  She rubbed her hands in satisfaction. Two weeks in the country, away from the demands of her patients and the noise and crush of London, was exactly what she needed. And yes, she would like to go for drives with Terence in his Peugeot, out along the rural roads that led through little valleys, deep into England, into the country that everybody took for granted but which was so beautiful, and fragile, and threatened.

  76. Lennie Marchbanks Calls

  IT WAS AT THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon that the doorbell rang. Berthea was sitting in the small morning room at the back of the house—the sunny side—reading a rather slow-moving autobiography when she heard the bell. She laid the book on the table with some relief and decided, at that moment, that she would pick it up again only to replace it on the shelf in her brother’s study. Terence’s house was replete with books but very few of them were to her taste. She had seized on the autobiography—which was by a minor literary figure of the nineteen-thirties—hoping that the claim on the back cover would prove true. “A gripping account of a life of passionate involvement,” the publisher enthused, “a life lived to the full in turbulent and trying times.”

  The book, unfortunately, failed to live up to this promise. After eighty pages, the author had done nothing more exciting than contemplate going to Spain to visit a friend who was cooking for the Republican forces. However, he had developed a heavy cold and had cancelled his passage on grounds of ill health. That was the high point of a narrative that was otherwise mostly concerned with the minutiae of a very modest existence, that of an assistant editor of a literary magazine. Names were bandied about, of course, but it seemed that the author had never had any conversations with the well-known writers of the day, although MacNeice wrote to him once and he spoke to Spender on the telephone when the poet called the magazine office. The call, however, had been a mistake. Spender had been given the wrong number and had really wanted to speak to somebody else. Nonetheless, he had commented on the weather before hanging up, and the author had made a note of the exact words he used, observing that the sentence in question was undeniably an iambic pentameter.

  “That’s a frightfully exciting book,” Terence had said when he saw his sister reading it. “I must say they had a jolly lively time, those writers of the thirties. I wouldn’t have minded being alive then.”

  Berthea looked doubtful. “Nothing much seems to have happened so far,” she said. “He’s just got to Oxford and had a letter from a friend in Florence.”

  “Jolly exciting,” said Terence. “I remember that bit—I think. Does he write back?”

  Berthea ran an eye down the page she was reading. “He doesn’t say.”

  “Well, I bet he did,” said Terence. “They were good correspondents in those days, always writing letters to one another, full of interesting observations on the world. You wait until you get to the bit where he’s turned down for the Navy during the war and goes to teach in Bristol.”

  And now, of course, she would never get to that part, since she was abandoning the book altogether. How narcissistic these people were, she thought as she went to answer the doorbell. How special they thought themselves to be. Whereas in reality they led rather uneventful lives—much like everybody else. Nothing really remarkable happened to most of us, she thought; we grew up, we got a job, we fell in love—if we were lucky—and then we went into decline and eventually disappeared. And at the end of the day, what did we achieve? Well, perhaps it was an achievement just to get through life without any conspicuous disasters. If we did that, then we were pulling off at least something.

  It was Lennie Marchbanks at the door. She had met him once or twice before and rather liked him; mechanics struck her as being such easy, agreeable people. And, she noticed, as a psychotherapist, one never had a mechanic for a patient. Why was that? Were they invariably balanced people, free of the neuroses that afflicted non-mechanically-minded others?

  Lennie smiled at Berthea. She noticed that he had false teeth and that they were not a very natural colour, being rather too white; ill-fitting too.

  “Is your brother in?” asked Lennie.

  Berthea went to fetch Terence, who had been taking an afternoon nap in his room upstairs.

  “That electricity has done me no good at all,” he said as he sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “It’s got all my ions going in the wrong direction. I can tell, you know. I need to be re-polarised.”

  The mention of Lennie Marchbanks seemed to cheer him up, though, and he was very talkative as they made their way downstairs. “I suspect he’s found me that new car,” said Terence. “If he has, then we could go for a spin later on. That is, if you’d like to. I don’t believe in forcing people to do things they don’t want to, you know. There’s far too much coercion in the world today. They should just leave us to get on with our lives rather than telling us to do all sorts of things. Have y
ou seen those signs, Berthy? Those signs on the road? They have big messages in lights telling you to put on your safety belt and do this and do that and not do the other thing. It’s really very, very cross-making. These government people sit there in their offices and think up things they can tell us to do. Did you see that they actually issued a code of practice on how to look after your cat? What a cheek.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Berthea.

  “And there’s another thing …,” Terence continued. But he did not finish because they had arrived in the front hall, where Lennie was waiting.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Moongrove,” said the mechanic. “I hope that you’re fully recovered.”

  Terence nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Marchbanks. I expect I shall be fine—in due course.” He looked past the mechanic through the open front door. “You haven’t …”

  “Yes, I have. Your new car. Or, rather, one that I reckon you might like. You can take a look at it and see what you think.”

  Terence rubbed his hands together gleefully. “One of those small cars we talked about?”

  Lennie nodded. “The very one.” He glanced anxiously at Berthea as he spoke.

  “It’s all right,” Terence reassured him. “My sister knows about this car and gives it her blessing.”

  77. Terence Moongrove, Porsche Owner

  BERTHEA HAD no real interest in cars and left Terence and Lennie to get on with their transaction while she returned to the morning room. There could be no question of taking up the autobiography again, so she picked up the newspaper and began to tackle the crossword. 1 across: He conquers all? A nubile tram. This old clue required only a moment’s thought. Tamburlaine! Of course. And 1 down? This for two and two for this (3 letters). Well really! Who did they imagine would be doing these crosswords—children?

  Outside, Lennie led Terence to the garage, where he had parked the Porsche.