A Conspiracy of Friends: A Corduroy Mansions Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “It’s just that you looked as if … well, you looked as if you were in pain.”

  He was in pain, he realised, his pain being the entirely familiar discomfort felt by the guilty. It was difficult to see why this should be; he had been completely ignorant of Maggie’s feelings for him and had done nothing to encourage them. There was no reason, then, for him to feel guilty—and yet he did.

  For a moment he questioned whether to tell Geoffrey about what had happened. If he did not, he would be concealing something from him, and one did not hide things from old friends. But if he were to reveal Maggie’s secret, it would be an appalling breach of confidence—an implied one, of course, but a confidence nonetheless. No, this was a miserable situation, whichever way one looked at it.

  “In pain?” said William, trying to smile. “No, not really. I was just standing and thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?” asked Geoffrey.

  About your wife, William said to himself. About your wife—who has just revealed that she’s been in love with me for years.

  “Nothing important.” And then he said to himself: Nothing important, other than your marriage and your wife’s happiness.

  Geoffrey smiled. “Ready for a Scotch?”

  They went together into the low-ceilinged drawing room. On a table behind a sofa was a small array of bottles and decanters from which Geoffrey took a bottle of whisky. He poured two drams, adding a small quantity of water to each. “I don’t have to ask you about the water,” he said. “I know what you like.”

  William raised his glass to his friend. “Your health.”

  “And yours.”

  Geoffrey looked at him. “You know, I was reflecting the other day on how long we’ve known one another. It’s getting to the stage where one doesn’t want to count the years.”

  His friend’s words rang in his ears like the terms of a formal indictment. “Yes, it’s been a long time,” agreed William. He inhaled the aroma of the whisky before taking a sip. The thought of his friendship with Geoffrey weighed heavily on him because it was now dawning on him how difficult it might be to carry on. Geoffrey and Maggie came as a package, so to speak—he could not conduct the friendship solely with one and not with the other; and while he had no desire to fall out with Maggie, at the same time he felt that it would probably be just too awkward to continue to see her with this unresolved issue hanging over them, an elephant in the room of their friendship.

  Geoffrey was talking about his plan to plant truffles. “A long shot,” he said, “but I’ve got a bit of woodland that apparently could support them. Tricky things, though. Temperamental. Maggie can’t stand them.” He smiled. “Her tastes have always been a bit unsophisticated.”

  William felt himself blushing. Was that why she had fallen for him? He finished his whisky hurriedly and looked at his watch. “I need to go and change,” he said.

  “Me too,” said Geoffrey. “Where’s Freddie de la Hay, by the way?”

  William had had other things on his mind, and now he realised that the dog had been outside for rather a long time. “I’ll go and call him,” he said. “He’s probably persecuting rabbits.”

  “He’s welcome to do that,” said Geoffrey. “They’re a perfect pest at the moment. But I hope he’s careful. My neighbour lost a dog a few weeks ago. It went down a hole and never came back up. Everybody was very upset. They tried to dig him out, but you know what it’s like down there—a bit of a rabbit warren, as perhaps one might expect.”

  “Freddie is very careful about these things,” said William.

  “I hope so,” said Geoffrey.

  William put down his glass and went outside. The sun had moved further down the sky, and although it was still light, the farmhouse was no longer bathed in gold. He looked up—the evening sky was quite empty, and was now that attenuated blue which occurs just before dusk sets in. One can so easily forget about the sky in London, he thought.

  He called Freddie’s name, using all four words. This was how he normally summoned him, as he believed that the operative word that Freddie recognised was “Hay.” Dogs, he had read somewhere, pick up short words rather than long ones. He might, therefore, with equal effect simply shout “Hay,” but he felt it would sound ridiculous. One could not go about shouting “Hay”; one could not.

  When there was still no response after he had called out six or seven times, William made his way onto the expanse of grass beyond the shrubbery. He called out again, half expecting, half hoping to hear an answering bark, but there was silence. A solitary gull, blown in from the sea, rose from a field somewhere and mewed over something that was not quite right.

  William walked further away from the house. He found himself in a patch of stinging nettles, and he negotiated his way through it with great care. He remembered that on one of his previous visits Maggie had complained that Geoffrey was not assiduous enough in his spraying and that there was a limit to the amount of nettle soup she could make. It was strange what one’s memory brought back.

  If Freddie had gone this way then he would have left some trace in the undergrowth. But there was nothing; no sign of flattened grass to reveal that an animal had passed through. William began to feel concerned. There were plenty of rabbit holes: he could see them all about him now, and one seemed to have freshly disturbed earth at its mouth, as if an inhabitant of the warren—or even a passing dog—had energetically and messily strived to enlarge the entrance.

  How many of us dig our own graves, thought William. We dig them with vigour and determination, unaware of the implications, but with all the conviction of those who do not really know what they are doing, who are impervious to the dangers that others can see so clearly.

  26. Ronald Telephones

  IT WAS NOT that Caroline did not know Ronald at all; it was just that their acquaintanceship was slight, and certainly not intimate enough for him to have the number of her mobile phone. A mobile telephone number is not one to be bandied about: if one has the mobile phone number of another, one has his ear, or at least his pocket, or bedside table, or wherever the telephone itself happens to be.

  So she was surprised when Ronald phoned her as she was walking past the flower shop round the corner, and it took her a moment or two to work out which Ronald it was. There was Ronald Evans, who had been on her course and was an obsessive jogger: she occasionally saw him running on the pavements, dodging pedestrians, glistening with sweat. He would have no time to telephone people, she thought, or might do so perhaps while on one of his runs, speaking—or gasping—into one of those headsets that enable taxi drivers to conduct what appear to be long soliloquies while negotiating the traffic.

  “Are you sure you’re not running away from something?” she had once asked him.

  “Ha ha, Caroline,” he had retorted. “Very funny. But since you ask, yes.”

  She had been taken aback, and had not wanted to ask him what that something was; nor had he offered any explanation, and the matter had been left where it was.

  But this was not Ronald Evans.

  “Ronald Warden.”

  “Of course. Well, hello …” When had she last seen him? Last year, at a party in the house of an old schoolfriend in Cheltenham, Emmy, and he had been with that Irish girl, the one with the teeth …

  “I got your number from my ma. She was talking to your mother …”

  Caroline stiffened. A mental picture had come to her of the two women gossiping on a copious chintzy sofa with a large flower arrangement in the background.

  “Yes.” Her voice was guarded.

  “You know what they’re like,” continued Ronald. “Old bats. Sorry—my poor ma is, not yours …”

  Caroline relaxed. “Sure.”

  “And my ma told yours that I was looking for a place to stay in London. She said that you might have a room in your flat. You don’t by any chance …?” He trailed off.

  Caroline hesitated. Dee had generously paid two months’ rent when she left, “to give you time
to find somebody nice,” and they were therefore in no hurry. Dee could afford it, of course, since she had sold the rights in that ridiculous Sudoku Remedy of hers for an astronomic amount, but still it was good of her as their agreement specified that only a month’s notice was required. Jo, her remaining flatmate, seemed happy enough to leave it up to Caroline to find a replacement, which was just as well: Jo had very peculiar taste when it came to friends and almost certainly would have come up with somebody difficult to live with.

  And the one thing one did not want, Caroline thought, was a flatmate who was odd. A friend of hers had taken the first person who answered her advertisement and then discovered that he was electronically tagged following an unspecified offence and could leave the flat for only twenty minutes a day. She had found him poring over the layout of a building and become convinced that he was plotting some further crime. “I’m really interested in design,” he said hurriedly as he put the plans away. “Of banks?” Caroline’s friend had asked. Thereafter the arrangement had become distinctly tense, and the friend had herself moved out.

  And another friend had taken a flatmate on the recommendation of a cousin and discovered that the new flatmate was an enthusiast for a contrived international language called Interlingua. That was unexceptionable enough, but it had become a bit trying when this new resident insisted on using nothing but Interlingua to address his flatmates, and labelled everything in the house with a small sticky label on which he printed the Interlingua word for that object.

  “I wish you’d speak English to us,” said Caroline’s friend. “After all, this is England.”

  “Anglaterra,” he corrected. “Un bon numero de parolas in Interlingua es similar a parolas anglese.”

  RONALD, OF COURSE, was neither a criminal nor an Interlingua enthusiast, and so her hesitation did not last. If he became wearing, after all, she could always complain to his mother, who was given, she remembered, to organising her son’s life.

  “Yes, we do have a room coming up. In fact, it’s already come up—would you like to take a look at it?”

  Ronald accepted, and Caroline noted the relief in his voice. “Is it hard to find somewhere at the moment?” she asked.

  “Immensely,” said Ronald. “Or anywhere semi-decent, or semi-central. I’ve just looked at a place in Tooting. Tiny. And over an hour from where I’m working.”

  “I’ve always liked the sound of Tooting,” said Caroline. “But not to live there.”

  Ronald laughed. “I don’t care what a place is called,” he said. “I’m sure Tooting’s fine—but maybe not for the whole weekend.”

  Caroline laughed too. “You know this place we live in, Corduroy Mansions, isn’t at all posh. You do know that, don’t you? Pimlico’s a bit of a mixture, and we’re not one of the grand bits. But it’s got character and there are nice shops nearby, and you can just about get to work on foot if your office is fairly central.”

  “Sounds great,” said Ronald. “Can I see it?”

  They made an arrangement for him to come that evening, an hour before James was due to arrive to cook risotto. Caroline explained that she had a friend coming round but it would be all right if Ronald did not mind restricting his visit to half an hour or so. He had no objection, he said. He was going to see a film at the South Bank and it suited him not to stay too long.

  “It’s a film about Le Corbusier,” he said. “You know him? The French architect.”

  Caroline knew him—vaguely. “I’ve seen photographs of his work in art history books,” she said. “Long buildings that look as if they’ve been squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste.”

  “That’s him,” said Ronald. “My God, I hate him, I really do. I hate him.”

  “Then why go and see a film about him?” she asked.

  “Because I enjoy horror movies,” said Ronald.

  He laughed again, and so did Caroline. There was something about Ronald that rather appealed to her. Perhaps it was the same thing that she saw and appreciated in James, and this made her wonder: Was she destined to admire men whose wit and entertainment value set them apart from that other, more ubiquitous class of dull and uninspiring men, the sort of whom her mother approved, the sort who were unambiguously—and depressingly—available? Yes, she decided, she probably was.

  27. Ronald’s Interview

  SHE BARELY RECOGNISED Ronald.

  “Your hair …,” she began. And then, “You …”

  His hand went up involuntarily to the side of his head. “Oh, this.”

  Last time she had seen him he had been unkempt, with long, rather straggly blond hair tied up at the back in a ponytail; now his hair had been barbered just short of a crew cut. It was, she thought, a great improvement—a transformation from the awkward territory of late teenagerdom to the firmer ground of early adulthood. Ronald was her contemporary—or close enough—but always seemed younger, as if he had just stepped off a skateboard. There was no metaphorical skateboard now.

  “You’ve had a haircut,” she said. “It really suits you.”

  He smiled at the compliment; the smile was still boyish. “Thanks. I had to become respectable, you see, when I started work. Corporate image and all that.”

  She invited him in. “I thought architects could dress casually,” she said as they made their way through to the kitchen.

  “It depends. Most wear a sort of uniform, of course. Slightly preppy, for want of a better word. You know the style? But with a bit more colour maybe. Linen jackets are pretty important.”

  “Linen crumples,” said Caroline.

  Ronald nodded. “Big problem for architects.”

  She gestured to a chair. “Coffee?”

  He accepted. “I used those big tins of Colombian coffee too when I was at uni. Have you been to South America?”

  She had not.

  “Nor me. I can’t wait to go to Colombia. The firm I’m working for has a contract to design a museum in Cartagena. I asked if I could be put on that project, and they just laughed. They said I had to do at least five council buildings in Hackney before I could get onto an overseas project. Or Tooting.”

  “Tooting,” she said. “We seem to talk about Tooting a lot.”

  “Yes. We must stop.”

  She switched on the kettle, and as she did so she cast a glance at Ronald. He was taller than she remembered him—perhaps he was still growing. Did boys carry on growing longer than girls? She noticed his high cheekbones for the first time. Did cheekbones change, or was it the effect of the haircut? He was very … She looked away guiltily. The word came unwanted to her mind: gorgeous. Oh no, she thought. Don’t think he’s gorgeous: just don’t. This is a flatmate, and flatmates should not be gorgeous.

  “What’s your work like?” she asked.

  He sat back in his chair. “I enjoy it,” he said. “Even the buildings in Hackney, which I’m not actually working on. I’m doing a bit of an office block in Maidstone, down in Kent. It’s pretty routine stuff, of course, but I don’t mind. Specifying windows and insulation and so on. There are lots of green considerations these days and I like that. But I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life.”

  “Windows and insulation?”

  “I want to do domestic stuff. Houses. Flats. Living space. That’s what interests me.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of somebody called Christopher Alexander? No? I just wondered—you did art history, didn’t you?”

  She nodded. She had to remind herself sometimes that she used to consider herself an art historian; and now she was just a photographer’s assistant—the girl who carried the lighting stand.

  “I thought you might have come across him,” Ronald went on. “He wrote a terrific book called A Pattern Language. I’ve got two copies of it, in case I lose one. I love it that much.”

  She felt the side of the kettle with the back of her hand; it was getting warm. “Should I have read it? There’s a massive list of books I should have read.”

  “No, there�
��s no reason why you should even have come across it. It’s about building, and about how we can make our houses more habitable, more humane.” Ronald looked about him. “This kitchen, for instance.”

  “It’s a bit of a mess,” said Caroline. “Jo cooked last night and she never washes up.” She bit her tongue. She should not have said that; she wanted Ronald to move in, after only these few minutes she wanted it desperately, and she should not give him the impression that one of his future flatmates was messy.

  She need not have worried. “I lived with somebody like that in Exeter,” Ronald said. “He lived out of a tin. All his food was canned, and he left the empty cans lying around. It was disgusting, especially the ones that had contained pilchards. He loved pilchards.”

  “Nobody eats pilchards here,” said Caroline.

  “I’m pleased to hear it,” said Ronald, smiling. “But I wasn’t talking about tidiness. I was talking about light.”

  Caroline looked up at the light fitting. She had meant to clean it weeks ago.

  “Not electric light,” said Ronald. “The free stuff. The light that comes from outside.”

  Caroline looked at the window. She had meant to clean that too.

  “Light should come from two sources,” said Ronald. “Go into a room where there is only a single window and you’ll see how lifeless the light is. It’s static. Whereas if you go into a room like this kitchen, where you’ve got a window there and that window on the side, it’s different, isn’t it? Chris Alexander points that out, together with hundreds of other rules. He calls them principles, actually.”

  The kettle boiled, and Caroline busied herself with pouring the water into the cafetière. Waiting a few moments for the grounds to settle, she pushed gently down on the strainer. “We can take our coffee with us as I show you round. Dee’s room is at the back. It’s nice and quiet.”

  “I get the feeling already that I’m going to like it,” said Ronald. “In fact, I want to live here!”

  Caroline felt a surge of pleasure. “All right. Live here.”