Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Marcia frowned. It was hard to envisage, but it was, she feared, something else to worry about. There seemed to be so much already—and now scallops.

  But there were other, more pressing matters. “That painting,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

  William thought for a moment. “Show it to somebody,” he said. “Caroline downstairs is doing some sort of course at Sotheby’s. Shall we show it to her?”

  Marcia turned to stir the white wine sauce she had been preparing. “Can she keep her mouth shut?”

  William wondered why this would be necessary. Did Marcia know—or suspect—something that he did not? Or did she have some plan that she had not yet disclosed?

  He was thinking about this when Freddie de la Hay came into the room with something in his mouth. It was something that he had been chewing—a piece of old leather perhaps. William bent down to examine the plaything and Freddie dropped his tail between his legs. It was a metaphor for guilt, and it was guilt itself.

  “What have you got hold of, Freddie?” William asked, taking the piece of leather from the dog’s mouth.

  Freddie looked up at William with his large, liquid eyes. William froze.

  A Belgian Shoe—or what remained of it.

  80. In Touch with His Feminine Side

  HUGH DID NOT WEEP for long.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said, unfolding a handkerchief. “I’m meant to have got over it all. But every so often it comes back.”

  Barbara Ragg wanted to say, “What comes back?” But she did not. Instead she said, “I often have a bit of a cry myself. We all do. And it’s nice when a man does. It shows … well, it shows he’s in touch with his feminine side.” That, she thought even as she uttered the words, is a terribly trite thing to say; why should it be that weeping is feminine? We all weep, the only difference being that men often suppress their tears.

  Hugh nodded. He looked grateful. “There are different views as to how to deal with a traumatic experience,” he said. “When I came back from South America, they said to me—or, rather, some people said to me—that I should have counselling. They said that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and that the only way I could deal with it was to talk about what had happened. So I was made to relive the whole experience, to look at it from all possible angles, with the aim of coming to terms with it. And yet I’m not so sure. There’s another view, you know, that you should try to put things out of your mind and get on with life.”

  He paused. “Go on,” said Barbara, adding, “if that’s what you want.”

  “Oh, I’m all right now,” Hugh reassured her. “And I don’t mind talking about the whole thing, I really don’t. I do find the question interesting, though—whether one should talk or whether one should try to forget. I read a lot about that, you know.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. I had an uncle, you see, who was a psychiatrist, and he was very interested in these things. He had dealt with mountain rescue people who had found climbers who had fallen great distances. They were encouraged to go for debriefing over what happened. It’s something that employers often arrange.

  “My uncle said that he was not at all convinced that debriefing helped. He said that if you looked for hard evidence—studies and so on—to show that there were benefits, you just couldn’t find them. Everybody said that debriefing was a good thing, but when you asked for evidence to show that people who were debriefed suffered fewer symptoms of psychological distress in the long term than those who were not, nobody could come up with the necessary proof. The point was that debriefing had become a sort of ideology—like so much else.”

  “So were you debriefed?” asked Barbara. “After it happened …” But what was it?

  “Yes,” said Hugh. “I was sent to a very depressing woman. She was a clinical psychologist and she encouraged me to tell her every single little detail of what happened during the whole three months. Everything.”

  Barbara drew in her breath. “Three months?”

  Hugh stared at her. “Yes,” he said. “Three whole months.”

  “That was a long time,” said Barbara. But she still had no idea what it was, and she now decided that she should ask. “What actually happened?” she asked.

  Hugh smiled at her. He had put his handkerchief away, and if he was still upset, his feelings were well concealed. “You won’t laugh, will you?”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t laugh at a thing like that.” Like what? she wondered. Perhaps she would. Perhaps it was really very funny, in retrospect—as traumatic experiences can be, provided they happen to others.

  “I was kidnapped,” said Hugh. “I was kidnapped in Colombia.”

  That, as Barbara knew, was not in the slightest bit funny. The victims of Colombian kidnappings could be held for much more than three months—for years, even—and if anybody deserved sympathy it was them. So she reached out and touched his arm in a gesture of sympathy. “How terrible.”

  “Well, there are plenty of people who have suffered far more than I have,” said Hugh. “I was relatively lucky. And that, interestingly enough, was something that I think really helped me to get over what happened. If I had sat about feeling sorry for myself and bemoaning my fate, I would have been more affected by it. As it was, I managed to get over it by keeping it in perspective.”

  Barbara waited for him to continue. She did not wish to replicate the role of the depressing clinical psychologist whom he had referred to, so she said nothing; he would continue when he was ready.

  “It happened in a place called Barranquilla,” he said. “It’s a rather strange place on the Caribbean coast—quite a busy industrial city, but one with all sorts of schools and universities. I had been travelling in South America for about eight months and I was heading for Cartagena. I had been right down in the south, in Tierra del Fuego, and had then gone up all the way to Ecuador and Colombia. When I got to Bogotá, I was beginning to run a bit short of money and somebody I met said that they could arrange a job teaching English as a foreign language at a school in Barranquilla. I had one of those very basic TEFL certificates—the sort you can get in a few weeks—and they said that this would be quite enough for the Colegio Biffi la Salle, which was the name of the school that was looking for an English conversation tutor.

  “Well, I applied for the job and I got it. I went up to Barranquilla and was given a room by a family who lived near the school. They were tremendously kind and made me feel very much at home. We exchanged lessons—I spoke to them in English one day and the next day they would speak to me in Spanish. My Spanish improved greatly and I learned all the current slang. Not that I could use any slang at the Colegio—it was a very proper place. A few days after I arrived, one of the teachers came up and asked me, quite seriously and in a very correct English accent, ‘Is it true that in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly happen?’”

  Barbara burst out laughing. “And what did you reply?”

  “’Ardly hever,” said Hugh.

  81. A Country House Weekend

  THIS IS HARDLY very traumatic, thought Barbara. She now reckoned that the moment had come to offer Hugh a further glass of Chablis, having felt until then that to mention Chablis in the midst of an encounter with past trauma would have been perhaps a little flippant.

  Hugh accepted. “I was happy enough in Barranquilla,” he went on. “My working commitments weren’t heavy and I had made a lot of new friends. It was warm and comfortable—a very easy place to be. You had to be a bit careful, of course—everywhere in Colombia has its dangers, and every so often there were items in the papers about kidnappings, and worse. As you know, in Colombia there are always guerrillas popping up and taking a swipe at the government. There were also thousands of narcotraficantes, who could be pretty ruthless. These people even had submarines that they ran from Barranquilla to the U.S. to smuggle cocaine. It was a bit of a frontier town, in a way.

  “I thought, of course, that none of this woul
d have anything to do with me. I was a very junior, insignificant teacher of a foreign language, and I didn’t imagine for a moment that I would see any of these things, let alone get involved in them. How wrong can you be?”

  He looked at Barbara as if expecting an answer, so she replied, “Very wrong?”

  Hugh took a sip of his Chablis. “Yes, very.” He paused and looked at Barbara with concern. “You promise you won’t laugh?”

  “Of course I promise. I wouldn’t dream of laughing. I really wouldn’t.”

  He seemed reassured. “Well, all right. One Friday afternoon I had a telephone call from the mother of one of my pupils at the school. These people, who were tremendously grand, did not live in Barranquilla but had an estate out in the country, some distance away. The school holidays were coming up, she said, and would I be interested in spending a couple of days on their estate? She explained that they were very isolated, but there would be plenty of opportunities to ride, if I wished, or I could just sit around and read and swim in the pool. She made it sound very attractive, and since I had nothing else to do I saw no reason not to accept the invitation. She then said that I would be picked up and flown there in their small private plane. Her husband, she explained, would send his pilot.”

  Barbara Ragg watched him as the tale unfolded. He had a way of telling a story that was completely natural and quite transfixing. She could not bear the thought of waiting for the outcome, although she knew in advance that it was not going to end well.

  “I told the family I was staying with about the invitation, and they seemed a little bit concerned. I asked them whether they thought I should have turned it down and they said, rather enigmatically, that even if they had thought that, they would not advise me to refuse. ‘There are some people in this country,’ they said, ‘whose invitations cannot be turned down. The only excuse they accept is that you’re dead and can’t come for that reason. Even then, they can be a bit grudging.’

  “I thought this very strange but I chose not to let it prey on my mind. When the car came to collect me to take me to the plane, I decided to take with me more than just the things I would need for only a few days. I took my trip diary and my walking boots and the very long Russian novel I was reading. It was just as well.”

  Hugh had reached the bottom of his glass of Chablis, and Barbara reached forward to refill it. She was attracted by the slight air of vulnerability, both touching and profoundly appealing, that settled upon him as he told this story. Oedipus Snark would never have been able to achieve an effect like this—he was always in control of the world, defeating it, proving himself, like the hero of some impossible adventure novel. What have I done, she asked herself, contemplating Hugh now, to merit a move from that man to this? The gods of mortal concupiscence had been kind—far kinder than she could ever have imagined they would be to a thirty-something literary agent with a bad record for choosing the wrong sort of man.

  “Colombia is a strikingly beautiful country,” Hugh went on. “I remember so vividly the flight in that small plane over the rich green landscape. The pilot said that we could fly low if I wished to see things: villages, colourful buses on the roads, fields, those great, towering trees they go in for. Then suddenly there was a landing strip on a sweep of land in front of a large hill, and we were down.

  “We were miles from anywhere, on a landing strip cleared out of thick bush. Under the trees to one side of the strip there was a jeep—two jeeps, in fact—one with two or three men carrying small machine guns. That did not surprise me all that much—I had become used to seeing machine guns in Colombia. People had to have them to protect themselves against attack from all sorts of quarters. It would have been surprising, in fact, if my hosts had not had any machine guns—it would have been a reason to be suspicious.

  “My hostess was waiting to greet me up at the main house. I had met her once before at the school when she had come to discuss her son’s progress, and I had quite liked her. She had the bearing that the South American rich have—a sort of imperious confidence that comes from knowing just what their wealth confers upon them, which is immunity from the lot of everybody else, whatever that may be. And they don’t hesitate to let you know that they have a lot of money. In this country the rich are discreet: ‘Rich? Not us! Oh no!’ In South America it’s very different.

  “Apolinar, their son, was standing with his mother on the veranda when I arrived. He was thirteen or thereabouts, and he hadn’t made a particular impression on me at the school. I remembered his name, of course, as it was Spanish for Apollo. In fact, I found myself thinking of him as Apollo rather than Apolinar, which made things rather comic. Has Apollo done his homework yet? is rather a strange thing to ask yourself, don’t you think?”

  Barbara laughed but then stopped herself, remembering that she had promised not to. But Hugh was laughing too. Then he became grave again.

  “I had no idea at the time,” he said. “None.”

  82. Poisonous Snakes

  “MY HOSTESS,” Hugh continued, “left Apollo to show me round. His manner was rather shy at first, which was understandable I suppose, in view of the fact that I was one of his teachers—even though there were probably only six years between us. Such a gap may be nothing later on, but at that age it seems like a whole generation.

  “The house was vast, rambling off in every direction from a central courtyard, but with the comfortable intimacy that you find in Spanish colonial architecture. We don’t go in for courtyards in this country, do we? I wish we did.”

  Barbara frowned. Did we really have no courtyards? Hugh saw the effect of his question and pressed her on it. “Well, just think: how many people do you know who have a courtyard in their house?”

  She thought there must be some, but when she tried to list them …

  “You see?” said Hugh. “We’re deprived of courtyards.”

  “Well, so many people live in flats. You can’t expect them to have a courtyard.”

  Hugh was quick to contradict her. “Yes, you can. If you go to a French or Italian city you’ll see flats arranged around a courtyard. And there are some in Scotland. In some of those small fishing villages in Fife, quite modest houses have little courtyards. There are very few courtyards in England. Some, but not many.”

  Barbara thought that there must be a reason for this. “The weather?” she wondered. “Why have courtyards if you have weather like ours? And space too. We don’t have much room, do we?”

  Hugh was not convinced. “A courtyard is actually rather a good thing to have in bad, blustery weather. You’re sheltered from the winds. And as far as space is concerned, look at the room that is taken up by gardens. People insist on a little strip of grass and a flowerbed—but how much use do they get out of that? They would use the space much more if they had a courtyard and grew plants in tubs and troughs. I really think that.

  “And there’s another thing,” he went on. “There’s a book you should read. It’s called A Pattern Language and it’s by a group of architects. I think the main author’s called Christopher Alexander, something like that. Anyway, they set out a whole lot of principles for humane architecture—for making rooms and houses in which people will feel comfortable. Rooms, for instance, should have light from two sources. Houses should not be built in long rows along the side of roads—that’s why so much of urban Britain has been rendered sterile, you know, because people just don’t feel comfortable living in long lines. They can’t relate to the other people on the line. It’s that simple. The same goes for American strip malls—they’ve killed cities. Whereas if you build everything in clusters, around what are effectively open-air courtyards, then it all feels quite different. People feel happy and secure. We feel at our most comfortable when we’re living round a courtyard. It’s just such a sympathetic space.”

  Barbara smiled. She was enjoying the luxury of being with a young man who used the expression “sympathetic space.” That was a real treat. The expression, she felt, could be used as a s
hibboleth, an expression that one had to utter to establish bona fides—a password at the gate of the camp. But in spite of the sheer, almost physical pleasure of listening to Hugh talk about courtyards, she was keen to discover what had happened in Colombia.

  “And the Colombian family’s mansion had courtyards?” she asked.

  “Bags of them. Small courtyards leading off bigger ones. Courtyards filled with plants—orchids grew well there. A courtyard that contained an aviary. Highly coloured South American parrots. A toucan. It was all very beautiful.

  “Apollo was matter of fact about it; the children of the rich usually are. Didn’t everybody have courtyards like this? That’s what he probably thought. Either that, or he didn’t care one way or the other. I suppose if you’re called Apollo, there’s a lot that’s going to be beneath your notice.

  “One of the servants had taken my bags to my room, which was at the back of the house, looking towards the large jungle-covered hill that dominated the property. It was a suite of rooms, actually. Leading off the bedroom was a sitting room with heavy Spanish colonial furniture and pictures of family ancestors: a fierce military type with an intimidating moustache; a rather sultry-looking woman in a blue satin dress, all ostrich feathers and bows; a couple of children dressed in uncomfortable-looking outfits, a pony standing behind them. How unhappy that pony looked—later on, during my incarceration, I used to stare at that pony’s face and marvel at how well the artist had captured the state of being subservient, trapped, under the power of another. It was a look of resignation, of resigned acceptance of a fate that was not that which one would have chosen for oneself.

  “Apollo took me outside to show me the swimming pool, which was reached by walking along a narrow, well-tended path through a great shrubbery of rhododendrons. The pool was at the edge of the cleared land where the house and outbuildings stood and it projected into the jungle itself. It was a large stone construction, rather like a half-sunken reservoir. To get into it, you had to mount several stone steps at the side, leading up to the rim, and there before you was the surface of the water, which was very clear but seemed black. This was because of the colour of the stone from which the basin was made. It was a sort of basalt, I think.