A Conspiracy of Friends: A Corduroy Mansions Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “A hotel’s the answer,” said Eddie. “But we should keep a few rooms for ourselves—a flat at the back maybe, or in the grounds. Get somebody in to run it. A manager.”

  Merle liked the sound of a manager. “A manager,” she said, savouring the reassuring qualities of the word. “Yes. Like the man who looks after the marina. A manager would be a good idea.”

  Eddie expanded upon this. “He can manage the place, you see.”

  Merle nodded. “That would be good.”

  “Hire the staff. Pay the bills. That sort of stuff.”

  “Important,” said Merle.

  “Yeah. And then we can check up that he’s managing right.”

  “We’d have to do that,” agreed Merle. “You want a good manager.”

  “We’d get the best,” said Eddie.

  The management structure having been decided, they passed on to the issue of decor and ambience.

  “It should be classy,” said Eddie.

  “Of course.”

  “If it’s classy,” Eddie went on, “then you get the right sort of people staying there. No rubbish.”

  Merle thought he was right. “We don’t want rubbish,” she said. “They can stay elsewhere.”

  “Yeah. Not at our place. They can stay down the road.”

  “So, what … feel are we looking for, Ed?”

  Already Eddie had an idea. “We need an angle,” he said. “We need to get somebody to tell us what people are looking for, know what I mean? If we know what people are looking for, then …”

  “Then we can give it to them,” supplied Merle.

  “Yeah. So we need to get a—”

  Merle was thinking ahead. “A designer. I read an article in one of the mags about this guy who designs restaurants and hotels. It said he was the best there is. And he’s here in London, I think. We could ask him. I’ve still got the mag.”

  She fetched the magazine—a bulky, glossily printed publication with advertisements for perfumes and fashion—and paged through it.

  “Do you like this?” she said, holding up a picture of a large diamond ring. “Only joking!”

  “One thing at a time,” muttered Eddie. “This designer guy …”

  The article was located. It was an interview with a man called Cosmo Bartonette, described at the head of the page as London’s sharpest design eye. “I call myself a design eye rather than a designer,” said Cosmo. “It sounds the same when you say it but the difference stresses the true nature of my calling. You have to have an eye for design.”

  Merle read this out to Eddie. “You see?”

  “Yeah,” said Eddie. “Carry on.”

  “ ‘I start from the basic premise that there is nothing there. I look at a space and then I subtract. I call this the cleansing process—rather like eating a trou normand before the meal begins, rather than halfway through. I cleanse my palate, so to speak. I exclude the items that the client already has—because they clutter the room. Then I allow an alternative to emerge—organically.

  “ ‘People have said to me that the hallmark of my approach is to allow the space itself to do the work. And I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s as if I interrogate the space and get it to tell me what it wants to have within it. Spaces are not inert. They breathe. They have their dreams. They have a destiny which their proportions, the materials they are made of, their positioning, all point towards. I simply unlock it for them. I open a door that would otherwise be closed by the preconceptions of the owner, or the designer for that matter. And it’s extraordinary how many spaces give a shout of joy when this happens. Look! they exclaim. Look! This is what I want to be! This is me! C’est moi!’ ”

  9. Cosmo Speaks

  MERLE ARRANGED AN appointment with Cosmo Bartonette. It was not easy; Cosmo was not the sort of person one could phone directly—and his personal assistant proved elusive. Eventually she returned Merle’s call and said that she would enter an appointment in Cosmo’s diary for the following week. “You’re lucky,” she said. “There’s been a cancellation—otherwise you would have had to wait for yonks and yonks. You can see Cosmo on Tuesday at nine, for an hour.”

  “Who does he think he is?” Merle said to Eddie. “Tuesday at nine. Yonks.”

  “Probably barmy,” said Eddie.

  “I suppose he is famous,” she conceded.

  Eddie appeared to have changed his mind. “You get what you pay for,” he said. “I’ve always said that. This guy is something special. You don’t get into mags like that without being something special.”

  They both went to the appointment, which took place in Cosmo Bartonette’s studio off Old Church Street. The designer was in his late thirties, dressed relatively casually but with a studied elegance that seemed entirely right for his profession: neatly pressed chinos, a woven leather belt, a pink check shirt, small gold-rimmed glasses.

  “Welcome to my studio,” he said as he led them into a sitting area at one end of a large, airy room decorated with several large Hockney prints. Noticing Eddie’s eyes go to these prints, he asked, “You like Hockney?”

  The question seemed to be about something more than Eddie’s taste in art, but Eddie did not pick up on this.

  “Yeah. A bit. Yeah. Maybe.”

  “The lines he uses are so clean,” said Cosmo Bartonette. “And there are no more than are absolutely necessary. Yet he captures mood so well, don’t you think? A few lines—zip, zip—and he’s got a whole mood.”

  “Those boys look like they’re good friends,” said Merle, peering at one of the prints. “Nice.”

  Cosmo Bartonette smiled. “It’s so hard to capture human closeness. Yet Hockney does it. Again, with just a few lines.”

  They sat down around a low glass table. Cosmo Bartonette folded his hands on his lap. “I hear from my assistant that you have a hotel.”

  “A house at the moment,” said Merle. “It was left to me by my uncle. He had this house on St. Lucia and we—that’s Eddie and I—thought we might turn it into a hotel. But we don’t want just any old hotel—”

  “We want something really special,” interjected Eddie. “A really classy place. No rubbish.”

  “No, no rubbish,” agreed Merle.

  Cosmo Bartonette was watching them closely, his gaze moving from Merle to Eddie, and back to Merle.

  “Well, we don’t do rubbish,” he said, a smile hovering on his lips.

  “That’s good,” said Eddie.

  “But I need to know a bit about what you have in mind. The setting. You’ve got some photographs to show me?”

  Merle reached into her bag and took out a folder of photographic prints. “These aren’t all that good, but they give a general idea of what it’s like.”

  Cosmo Bartonette took the photographs and began to look through them. “Nice,” he said. “Really nice. Not entirely unlike Mustique. I did a bit of work there for …”

  He did not finish the sentence but returned to his scrutiny of the pictures. When he had finished going through them he passed them back to Merle. “You could make something really special out of that place,” he said. “You’re very lucky to have it.”

  Merle exchanged a look of satisfaction with Eddie. “You’ll do it?” she asked.

  “Natch,” said Cosmo. “I’m already getting some idées. I think we need a theme.”

  “Like the Caribbean?” asked Eddie. “Pirates maybe?”

  Cosmo looked at him and smiled. “Not quite. Nice idea, of course, but that’s a bit on the demotic side, wouldn’t you say? I’m thinking of something much more refined.”

  “That’s what we want,” said Merle. “Refinement. Remember what we agreed, Eddie? No rubbish.”

  “Something literary,” suggested Cosmo Bartonette. “Something literary, but Caribbean. Have you been to Raffles in Singapore?”

  Merle and Eddie both shook their head.

  “Raffles plays on the connection with Somerset Maugham,” said Cosmo. “Reasonably enough, because he did flo
at around that part of the world. You should read him if you haven’t already. God, he can write! And you can just feel the wickerwork chairs and taste the gin slings. Anyway, Raffles has got a Writers’ Bar. People love it. How about something like that for your place?”

  “Sounds good,” said Eddie. “Maybe Wilbur Smith. Did you read the one he wrote about the Egyptian princess and this guy who was an elephant hunter in East Africa? You read that?”

  Cosmo Bartonette flicked a strand of hair from his brow. “Not exactly. I must try him. Such bright covers—clearly a lot of action within.”

  “Yeah. Great stories. And that other guy who writes those books about codes and—”

  “Not exactly what I had in mind,” said Cosmo. “Thrilling books, no doubt, but not quite what I was thinking of for your place. I was thinking more of Hemingway. He used to go deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean, didn’t he? Bull-fighting in Spain and fishing in the Caribbean. We could have a Hemingway Bar perhaps … serving twenty types of rum. Can’t you see it? A slow-moving fan above the bar …”

  “Could work,” said Eddie.

  “Of course it’ll work!” Cosmo enthused. “And there’ll be a Hemingway Suite, where he stayed for a few months while writing The Old Man and the Sea or maybe it was Islands in the Stream. Doesn’t matter—one of them will do.”

  “But it belonged to my uncle,” said Merle. “He bought it from a man called Edwards … Hemingway didn’t go there, I think.”

  Cosmo Bartonette made a dismissive gesture. “My dear! Quels scruples! One doesn’t have to be too literal about these things. I thought we might also have a Graham Greene Suite—the rooms he occupied while he was writing The Comedians, you know, the one set in Haiti—at that hotel, as chance would have it. And Papa Doc and those frightful Tontons Macoutes. Remember them? Those thugs that Duvalier used to frighten everybody out of their skins. Très voodoo! Perhaps we could dress the waiters up as Tontons, with dark glasses, just to give the guests a frisson. What do you think?”

  “I really like what you’re coming up with,” said Eddie. “What do you think, doll?”

  “Pretty good,” said Merle. “I think we should leave it up to you, Cosmo.”

  Cosmo smiled broadly. “I shall give it further thought and come up with some sketches,” he said. “I’ve got a really good feeling about this one, you know.” He paused. “The Graham Greene Suite will have to be a little seedy, you know. Run down. Slightly lumpy bed and a tatty mosquito net, of course. But we can manage that, can’t we? We can distress things, although perhaps when it comes to Graham Greene we should think about depressing them. And putting a bit of guilt into the decoration. The walls could be painted guilty white. You know what, my dears? I believe I’ve just invented a colour.”

  10. More About Boys

  CAROLINE JARVIS LIVED immediately below William in Corduroy Mansions, in a flat shared with a number of other young women—“the downstairs girls” as William called them. Caroline had completed her master’s degree in fine art at the Sotheby’s Institute and was now working as an assistant to Tim Something, the photographer. It was not an ideal job from her point of view, but then, as her mother pointed out, “What job is ideal? Name one.”

  Caroline’s mother, Frances, was not slow to give her daughter advice and had recently spoken to her about men, a subject on which many women feel they have something to say to their daughters; while many daughters feel that this is exactly the subject on which their mothers’ views are likely to be unhelpful and outdated. Men had changed dramatically—anybody could tell that—and women too, with the result that the insights a mother might be expected to have acquired over the years were now of dubious value and relevance; or so Caroline had thought as she listened to her mother issuing a series of warnings in the parental kitchen in Cheltenham.

  “That young man, James,” Frances said. “The one you brought down here for the weekend. He’s a case in point.”

  “Mummy, James and I are not—”

  “Oh, I know that,” said her mother. “And one couldn’t have expected any other outcome, dear, could one?”

  Caroline looked out of the window. Her parents’ house was on the edge of the town and the kitchen looked directly onto a field in which horses were grazing. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said quietly.

  Frances looked at her pityingly. “Oh come on, dear. No need to beat about the bush. James was a charming young man …”

  “Yes. And he and I were really good friends.”

  “Which is exactly my point. Men like that—artistic men—are not good husband material. They’re just not interested, you see. I know it’s a pity because they can be quite charming. James played the piano beautifully, didn’t he? But they are not the type to be interested in marriage, if you see what I mean. And sometimes it takes a woman a long time to admit that to herself.”

  Caroline said nothing.

  “I knew a man like that,” Frances continued. “He was a cousin of Betty Pargeter’s. Remember Betty? Anyway, she had this cousin called Harold, if I remember correctly. And we all thought that he was just perfect. He was terribly handsome, even for those days.”

  Caroline frowned. “Even for those days? Did men look different in your day?”

  “They can pay more attention to their grooming today,” said her mother. “When I was your age, men were much less—how should I put it?—individual. And they all wore such dull clothing. Yes, men look rather different now, I can tell you.”

  “I don’t see what this has got to do with James,” said Caroline.

  “It’s just an observation, dear. If you don’t want me to make any observations, then I’m quite happy to sit here in silence.”

  Caroline relented. “No, sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

  “Thank you. Well, as I was saying, you have to remind yourself that those men are a waste of time—from the woman’s point of view. What you have to do is find a man who needs you. No, don’t smile. I don’t mean it in any crude sense. I mean needs you in a practical sense. He has to need you to look after him, to make him comfortable, to give him a home.”

  Caroline shrugged. “I know all that. I really do.”

  Frances looked at her sharply. “Do you? I wonder.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that your generation of young women have lost the place when it comes to men. You’ve befriended men. You treat men in the same way as you treat your girlfriends. And what happens then? Men are quite happy to think of themselves as one of your friends, and not as anything else. The result? Men don’t see the point of settling down with one particular woman because they have all these women friends. They’ve stopped treating women as something special—they’re just the same as their other friends. Nothing special.”

  Caroline stared at her mother. Did she really think that? She sighed.

  “It’s no good sighing,” said her mother. “Sighing doesn’t change the truth.”

  Caroline tried to explain. “I really don’t see it,” she said. “I’m not sure if I understand what you’re driving at.”

  “Well, let me explain,” said Frances. “You know Peggy Warden. Do you remember her son, Ronald? He’s more or less exactly your age. Well, Peggy told me that Ronald brought home this very nice girl whom he’d met at university in Exeter. Peggy said that she really was charming, and of course her hopes, as Ronald’s mother, were raised. But she said nothing, and off they went. Then Ronald brought her home again a few weeks later and Peggy had the chance to speak to him privately. She said that she asked him about this girl and he said that they were just good friends. So she said that this could change and she told him how much she liked her. But apparently he just shook his head and said that he couldn’t possibly make a romance out of it precisely because they were friends. Peggy said to me that he then said, ‘You don’t sleep with your friends.’ Those were his exact words. So you see what I mean?”

  Again, Caroline shrugged. “Just because Ronald sa
ys—”

  Her mother interrupted her. “The point is, Caroline, that men and women can’t be friends. We have to keep up these … these psychological barriers between us because if we don’t then we’re never going to get men to agree to marriage—or even partnership, if you will. That’s why there are so many people living on their own. That’s why so many women find it difficult to get a man these days.”

  Caroline looked out of the window again. “Is it very difficult? Are there all that many women looking for men they’re not going to be able to find?”

  “Yes, there are. Thousands in this country alone. Millions. And it’s their own fault, much of the time. They’ve let men get what they want without giving anything in return. Men—our friends? We think they are but let me tell you, dear, they most definitely aren’t!”

  Caroline closed her eyes briefly; she found that it helped to close her eyes when talking to her mother, or indeed when participating in any argument. The closing of the eyes somehow equalised things. And while her eyes were closed, she thought: Of course men and women can be friends—it was ridiculous to assert otherwise. Of course they could. There were so many examples of such friendships, and she told her mother so, forcefully, and with a conviction that perhaps matched that shown by her mother.

  But Frances was not convinced. “Give me an instance,” she said provocatively. “If you’re so sure about that—give me an instance.”

  11. He’s My Friend

  FRANCES HAD CHANGED the focus of the conversation, as she often did. She had started talking about the difficulty of moving from a relationship of friendship to something more. Now the topic seemed to have broadened to that of friendship between the sexes—and its apparent impossibility. Caroline was sure that her mother was wrong about both: she saw no reason why a friend should not become a lover, just as she saw no reason why a man and a woman should not have a firm and uncomplicated friendship.