Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘That’s what I really like about this area,’ mused James. ‘If somebody from the past slipped through a time warp and ended up standing on this street, he would not feel lost. Not at all. He’d look into that window next door and think: oh, a new lamp shop. Of course, the lamps are several thousand years old. And if he didn’t know where he was, he could pop into that map shop and pick up a map of the Roman Empire. Or a map of Londinium.’

  Caroline gazed at the menu displayed in the bistro window. Her mind was on quiche. Quiche could be dodgy: it was often soggy and very unappetising. Was she in a pasta mood? she asked herself. Perhaps. ‘What are you talking about, James?’

  ‘I’m talking about people who might find themselves in the wrong time. Through some quirk of physics.’

  ‘Oh. Is pizziccata hot? I don’t like those really hot chillies. I never have.’

  ‘Not sure,’ said James. ‘Of course, nobody ever does, you know. Nobody wakes up and finds themselves in the wrong century. Mind you, some people just seem to have been in the wrong century from the beginning. Young fogeys, for instance. Do you know any young fogeys?’

  Caroline kept her eyes on the menu. Reading menus always made her hungry and she heard her stomach growl softly. ‘Young fogeys?’ she said. ‘You?’

  ‘Very funny, Caroline,’ said James. ‘You don’t listen to me, do you?’

  Caroline prodded him playfully. ‘Sometimes. But look, I’m really hungry and we can get quite a good lunch in here for . . . Well, look at the menu.’

  ‘Poor dears,’ said James. ‘Restaurants are really struggling, aren’t they?’

  They went in. The restaurant was busy enough - what with the special promotions - but a table was just being vacated by another customer and they got that.

  ‘Well then,’ said James after they had given their order. ‘Caravaggio.’

  They had just attended a lecture on the artist given by a passionate lecturer whom James had described as ‘a bit like Caravaggio himself, except, one assumes, for the violence’.

  ‘One can hardly imagine,’ he said, ‘that a shrinking violet would be drawn to lecture on Caravaggio.’ He paused. ‘What do you think of Caravaggio, Caroline?’

  ‘Too dramatic for me,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine that people of the time writhed quite as much as they do in his paintings.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said James. ‘They were very expressive. It’s just that we’ve become so cool. They would probably consider us very stiff.’

  Caroline knew what he meant. ‘It’s very sad that people feel they have to be cool,’ she said. ‘They have to suppress all sense of joy and excitement.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said James. ‘And colours too. All those blacks and greys. Everything is toned down - muted really. Imagine finding a Caravaggio. Imagine how the Queen felt when she discovered that what she thought was a copy was the real thing.’

  ‘I suppose she’s used to it,’ said Caroline. ‘But what about those Jesuits in Dublin who discovered a Caravaggio in their sitting room . . . ?’

  ‘Their parlour,’ corrected James. ‘Jesuits have parlours, not sitting rooms. There’s a difference, you know.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A parlour is more formal. It’s the place where you receive people. You don’t sit around in a parlour; you do that in a sitting room or a living room - a drawing room if you’re a bit grander.’

  ‘Well, whatever. Just imagine it, though. You have a rather dark old picture in your parlour, a picture that you think is a mere Honthorst.’

  James corrected her again. ‘Honthorst is not mere. He was a very important painter, one of the major Caravaggisti of his time. He was—’

  ‘But he was not Caravaggio,’ interrupted Caroline. ‘And if you had a choice: Honthorst or Caravaggio? If the chips were really down and you had to choose.’

  It was not a difficult choice. ‘Caravaggio out of sheer avarice,’ said James. ‘Well, one has to eat, you know, and a Caravaggio would bring in millions. And he was a better painter too. That’s always convenient. Choose somebody on aesthetic grounds but make sure that he’s also the most expensive.’

  ‘Yet value isn’t the sole consideration,’ argued Caroline. ‘You can have artists fetching stratospheric prices and yet their work may be trite, banal even. Those people who do installations, for example. They fetch millions, but what are the people who buy such things actually getting?’

  ‘A take on the world,’ offered James. ‘A fresh perspective on things. A new understanding of the everyday world. Visual surprise.’

  Caroline was doubtful. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘But it’s not real value we’re talking about here. It’s an inflated sense of value - like tulips in the Dutch tulip frenzy. Everybody thought they were worth millions until somebody said, “Aren’t those just common-or-garden tulip bulbs?” And that was the end of that.’

  James toyed with his fork. ‘You think contemporary art will go the same way?’

  ‘I do. Of course it will. When people wake up.’

  ‘So if I said, “This fork is by you know who,” you might say, “It’s just a fork.” Right?’

  Caroline said that she would.

  ‘And the shark?’ James asked.

  ‘It’s just a shark,’ said Caroline. ‘And whoever bought it must surely be sweating over the day that somebody stands up and says, “It’s just a shark, for heaven’s sake!”’

  James smiled. ‘I think they’ve already said it. And yet people still pay those prices at auction for that stuff.’

  ‘They have to,’ said Caroline. ‘If they didn’t, then what they already had would be worthless. You can’t really sell sharks, you know. Particularly dead ones.’

  ‘But I think you can,’ said James, ‘as long as you get people to believe it’s an important dead shark.’ He paused. ‘That shark, you see, has been canonised.’

  65. Caravaggio as a Role Model for Boys

  James chose sparkling mineral water and a glass of house white. ‘I shouldn’t drink at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘And I normally don’t. But all that Caravaggio, you know - what else can one do?’

  ‘Did you see the film about him?’ asked Caroline. ‘The Derek Jarman film?’

  James nodded. ‘Caravaggio doesn’t exactly come out of it very well. He had a penchant for knives. And that awful scene where he murders his model by slitting his throat.’ He shuddered, and reached for the sparkling mineral water. ‘Do you think artists have to lead intense lives? Do you think that you can be a great artist and be bourgeois? Or does it all have to be very gritty? Caravaggiesque.’

  Caroline considered this. ‘Let’s try to think of artists who were straightforward, conventional types. Can you think of any?’

  James looked up at the ceiling. ‘Difficult. It seems that the artistic personality has a certain contrariness to it. If you’re conventional, then perhaps there’s no impulse to create.’

  Caroline helped herself to a small amount of James’s water. ‘So creativity comes from conflict? Inner conflict? You have to be hurt into making art?’

  James thought that this was probably true. ‘Art comes from a desire to make sense of the world and one’s experience in it,’ he intoned. ‘It’s intended to make up for the separation that we feel between us as humans and beauty. The artist tries to recreate beauty - to make it whole again.’

  ‘If the artist is really concerned with beauty,’ said Caroline.

  James thought this self-evident. ‘Surely he is?’

  Caroline shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think so. Look at the sort of art we’ve just been discussing - installation art, the unmade beds and so on. Where’s the beauty in that?’

  James grinned. ‘In an unmade bed?’

  ‘Yes. How can that have anything to do with beauty?’

  James thought for a moment. ‘Ugliness can be beautiful,’ he said. ‘Anything can be beautiful. And maybe that’s what a certain sort of artist is trying to do: he - or she, of course - is tryi
ng to open our eyes to a beauty we would not otherwise see.’

  Their plates arrived and were placed before them. Caroline looked at her pasta - all twisted shapes and beauty, an installation perhaps. She felt that she should say something about it, but the topic of generalised beauty took precedence over the particular, and certainly over the beauty to be found in pasta. James’s last remark interested her; it was right in one way, but she thought that in another way it was wrong. If everything was beautiful - as he appeared to be suggesting - did that not deprive beauty of all its aesthetic, and indeed moral, force?

  ‘How can everything be beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Human suffering, for example? Is that beautiful? A scene of carnage? A place where suffering has occurred?’

  ‘Some things are horrible,’ James said. ‘Some things are hateful. What you’ve just mentioned is horrible, and hateful too, but surely it can be beautiful in the sense that it’s part of our world, and our world, in its totality, is beautiful?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Caroline. And then added, ‘What about a discordance in music? Is that beautiful?’

  James looked at her reproachfully. ‘You’re being very aggressive, ’ he said. ‘Why don’t you eat your lunch instead of attacking me and everything I say? Go on, eat your lunch, you horrid girl!’

  He laughed, and she laughed too. Dear James: he was so unlike . . . so unlike Caravaggio. She reached out and put her hand on his, just for a moment. The contact was brief, fleeting, but she noticed that he tensed; she could tell. She cast her eyes down to her plate. ‘Don’t you like to be touched?’ she asked.

  His manner was one of affected nonchalance. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘But you flinched just then, when I put my hand on yours. You did, you know.’

  He frowned. ‘Maybe I did. It’s just that I’m not used to being touched. I like to think of myself as quite tactile, but only when I’m in control, when I’m the one doing the touching. I suppose I’m just not used to not being in control.’

  Caroline sighed. ‘That’s sad. It really is.’

  James looked up. ‘I know. But it’s difficult, sometimes, to deal with something you know you want to change. You can’t just do it like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘You have to understand why it is that you feel the way you do and then you have to tackle it.’

  Caroline was silent. ‘Did something unsettling happen to you, James?’ she asked. ‘Is that why . . . ?’

  James met her gaze. I love his eyes, she thought. Nobody I know has such sensitive eyes. Like the eyes of a Botticelli model. Wide. Light brown.

  ‘There was something,’ said James. ‘Something I saw a long time ago. I don’t really like to talk about it, though.’

  ‘Then you don’t need to,’ said Caroline.

  He seemed to mull this over for a few moments. ‘No, maybe I do. Maybe that’s what I really have to do. Think about it. Talk about it.’ He took a sip from his wine glass. ‘I read somewhere that this is exactly what you should do. You should talk about the thing that frightens you and in that way you deprive it of its power.’

  Caroline listened carefully. She had suspected ever since their conversation over homemade lemon gems that there was something that had to be dealt with in James’s past and now she knew that it was so. He was undoubtedly right: one had to confront these things if one wanted to lance the boil that they represented. In her own case, there had been the incident at the pony club, which she had brooded over for years, until somebody - somebody quite unconnected with the pony club - had casually mentioned it and it had all come pouring out. That was when she had discovered that what had seemed large was, in fact, small - ridiculously so - and suddenly she was able to talk about the pony club again without feeling guilty. I did not cheat, she said to herself. I did not. But although she was convinced of the liberating power of revelation, she was not sure that this bistro, over lunch, was quite the right place and time to encourage James to talk.

  ‘Perhaps we should talk about it some other time,’ she said gently. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m not willing to listen - I am, I really am. It’s just that . . .’

  James looked at her imploringly. ‘I want to talk, Caroline. I want to tell you about what I saw behind the cricket pavilion . . .’

  ‘Of course you can . . . But couldn’t we go back to the flat? Go back to Corduroy Mansions and talk there?’

  James shook his head. ‘The moment is sometimes right,’ he said. ‘And . . . Well, I feel secure here. Do you understand?’

  She reached out to take his hand again but stopped herself in time. He saw this and smiled. ‘No, please go ahead. It seems right. Please go ahead. I’ll talk. You hold my hand. I’ll talk.’

  But she did not have the opportunity. Two men at a neighbouring table had just paid their bill and one of them now stood up and looked intently in her direction.

  66. Tim Something Sits Down

  ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ said Tim Something.

  Caroline looked up at the man who had come across to their table and was standing before them. He had been lunching with somebody - a man with a moustache - who was obviously in a hurry because he was already at the door and waving perfunctorily to his erstwhile companion.

  The thought occurred to her that the answer to this question of whether one is one must always be yes. If somebody says ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ then what else can one answer? No? That would only be possible if one read into the question a proper noun - implicit and unspecified - immediately after the pronoun. Of course it was her, but perhaps not the her this man had in mind. And then she realised. Tim Something!

  ‘Tim,’ she said weakly. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

  Tim laughed. ‘Of course it is. Well, I hope it is. It’s me.’

  Caroline felt warm with embarrassment. Tim Something was not somebody she wanted to meet - or not with James. She remembered the conversation she had had with James in which he had made light of those pictures of young women in the front of that country magazine, and she had said nothing, had failed to confess to him that she herself had in fact been one of those young women. Now here was Tim Something, the very photographer who had taken the photograph, and he would be bound to mention that fact. James would look at her and remember that he had made a joke about it and realise that all the time she must have been squirming. And then he would feel guilty about not having known how cruel his words must have seemed to her.

  Tim looked at James. ‘I’m Tim Something,’ he said, extending a hand.

  Caroline almost blurted out: But he doesn’t like to be touched! Here was James, coming for a quiet lunch after a lecture on Caravaggio, and suddenly everybody was touching him.

  But James did not seem to mind. He reached up and took Tim’s proffered hand and shook it. Yet he dropped it quite quickly, thought Caroline; it had not been a lingering handshake.

  ‘Tim what?’ asked James. ‘I didn’t quite get your name.’

  ‘Something,’ said Tim.

  James glanced at Caroline. ‘Tim Something,’ she muttered.

  James looked increasingly puzzled.

  Caroline decided to take the initiative. ‘How are things, Tim? Are you working in London?’

  Before Tim Something could answer, Caroline turned to James and said, ‘I know Tim from Oxford.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tim, ‘I took a—’

  ‘When was it, Tim?’ Caroline interrupted. ‘Over two years ago now, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ asked James.

  ‘I haven’t seen Tim for a couple of years, I think,’ Caroline went on. ‘And now, well . . . London. What are you doing, Tim?’

  There was a third, unoccupied chair at their table, which Tim now lowered himself into. ‘Do you mind?’

  Caroline wanted to say, yes, I mind a lot. I was talking to my friend James and he was about to say something important, something really important to him, and maybe to me . . . And then you came along and sat down at our table uninvited and . . .


  ‘Yes,’ said Tim, leaning his elbows on the table. ‘I do a bit of work over in Oxford and thereabouts from time to time - I’ve still got a flat there, you know - but most of the time I’m in London. More work here. And I must say that I got a bit fed up with taking those photographs of village fetes and . . .’ He paused, and smiled at Caroline. ‘County-ish girls for the inside page of the mag. Sorry, Caroline!’

  ‘What mag?’ asked James.

  ‘You should ask her,’ said Tim with a grin. He nodded in Caroline’s direction. ‘There’s this mag that county types read and they love having—’

  ‘What sort of work do you get in London?’ Caroline blurted out.

  Tim turned back to face her. ‘This and that. Some social stuff, quite a lot of business-related work. The City. Men in suits sitting in boardrooms or behind desks. I do them really well, you know. You have to make them look solid and reliable but not too dull. Apparently there’s a look that’s just right. You see the photo and you think: that chap’s got ideas. And sometimes I photograph the odd actor or author. That chap who bought me lunch - you probably saw him leaving the restaurant - Christopher Catherwood, I’ve just taken his photograph for a magazine.’

  Caroline wondered whether James was getting annoyed with Tim and his interruption of their conversation. But if he was, he did not show it. In fact, he seemed quite pleased that Tim had sat down at their table. Perhaps, she thought, James did not really want to speak about whatever it was that he had been going to speak about - in which case he probably welcomed Tim’s arrival.

  ‘So you were at Oxford Brookes with Caroline?’ James asked Tim. ‘Did you study art history too?’

  Tim shook his head. ‘No. I was at Bath Spa University. They have a degree course in photography. I did that.’

  Caroline saw her opportunity to navigate the conversation away from perilous shoals. ‘Bath Spa is terrific,’ she said. ‘I had a friend who did design there. She had a great time.’