Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  78. Whose Home?

  William felt quite elated when he returned to Corduroy Mansions with Marcia and Freddie de la Hay. He had been profoundly shocked by his experience of the narrowly averted dog fight; not only had he been appalled by Eddie’s involvement, but he had been astonished that anybody - even Diesel’s disagreeable owner - could find pleasure in such activities. But then, he told himself, there would appear to be plenty of people who found violence agreeable - as professional pugilists knew very well.

  ‘Boxing,’ he remarked to Marcia, as she parked her van.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was thinking about boxing. It just came into my mind. I was thinking about how hypocritical we are. We don’t allow dog fighting, but it’s perfectly legal for people to knock the stuffing out of one another in the boxing ring. Doesn’t that strike you as being a bit odd?’

  Marcia shrugged; there was so much in life that was odd, she had stopped being surprised by anything. ‘Not necessarily. Dogs don’t consent to being harmed in the same way as boxers do. We push dogs into it. We don’t make boxers fight, do we? Maybe that’s the difference.’

  It was an interesting point, and the more that William thought about it, the more intriguing it became. Boxers were not forced to fight, but did they have a truly free choice in the matter? How many of them became boxers because they were obliged to do so by poverty and restricted opportunities? He was not sure whether he knew the answer to that; it could be condescending to assume that boxers were not volunteers just because they tended to come from the lower levels of the social heap. One could get one’s nose punched for that sort of assumption . . .

  ‘And anyway,’ said Marcia as they reached the landing outside William’s door, ‘we’re funny about animals in this country. We don’t approve of cruelty to animals. Not at all. So dog fighting is out - completely out.’ She paused, and added, ‘We’re home.’

  ‘Yes,’ said William. ‘We’re . . .’ He did not complete the sentence. I’m home, he thought. This is my home. Marcia may be staying here, but she has her own home over in Putney and she should not be saying we’re home because that implies that this is her home too, and it isn’t.

  Marcia was unaware of this mental reservation on William’s part and opened the door with all the assurance of a settled resident. And as she hung up her coat in the hall cupboard and patted Freddie cheerfully on the head, William felt his spirits sagging. He had made a dreadful mistake, he felt. It was like marrying somebody one did not want to marry and being unable to get out of it. He did not want to hurt Marcia - he liked her, and he found himself liking her even more after experiencing all the support she had given him that evening. She was generous; she was a character; she was easy company . . . but he was not in love with her. And, for William, that precluded anything but a platonic relationship. One did not enter into an affair unless one loved the other person - it was a minimum requirement of decency. It was as simple as that; or at least it was as simple as that when you were in your fif—late forties and above.

  Freddie de la Hay seemed relieved to be home. Free of his leash, he rushed around the flat, careering into each room and then bursting out again, barking joyously. And when he had completed his tour of inspection, he bounded over to William and enthusiastically licked such portions of his master as he could find: hands, shoes, and, standing on his hind legs in a brief moment of exhilaration, William’s face.

  Marcia went into the kitchen and began to prepare dinner. Freddie’s steak was cooked first - a choice cut which sizzled delectably in the frying pan. When it was done, she cut it into squares and put them on the dog’s plate. Freddie, sitting obediently as he had been trained to do before tackling his dinner, stared at the plate for a few moments before he stepped forward, on Marcia’s invitation, and sniffed at the steak.

  ‘You can eat it, Freddie,’ said Marcia. ‘It’s all right.’

  Freddie looked up at William, as if to seek confirmation. ‘Go ahead, my boy,’ said William. ‘Nice steak. Nice Freddie.’

  Freddie began to eat the steak - slowly at first and then very quickly, wolfing down the small squares of meat.

  ‘See?’ said Marcia. ‘So much for Freddie being a vegetarian.’

  William nodded. Freddie had indeed tackled the steak with enthusiasm, but now he had taken a few steps back from the plate and was sitting with his head sunk, his gaze focused on the floor.

  ‘Guilt,’ said William. ‘He feels guilty.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Marcia. ‘Dogs don’t feel guilt.’

  William disagreed. He had only owned Freddie for a short time, but he knew that the dog had a broad cupboard of emotions and that it was perfectly possible that he was now feeling guilt and remorse.

  ‘Dogs feel these things,’ he said. ‘They really do. They have emotional centres in their brains, same as we do.’

  ‘But surely not one for guilt?’ said Marcia.

  ‘Why not? When a dog does something that he knows he should not, he often looks unhappy. He puts his tail between his legs. He skulks around.’

  Marcia nodded. ‘But that’s only because they fear our displeasure. They think we’re going to beat them or shout at them. It’s just a reaction. They don’t feel guilt deep down - not like we do.’ She paused. Freddie de la Hay was looking up at her with mournful eyes. ‘And there’s no reason for Freddie to think that we’re going to disapprove of him for eating steak. After all, we gave it to him and encouraged him.’

  William was sure that there was a flaw in Marcia’s argument - as there often was. ‘He may not fear consequences from us - but that doesn’t mean that he won’t be afraid of somebody else. Somebody from his past. That Manfred character, for instance.’

  Freddie growled.

  ‘You see?’ said William. ‘Freddie recognised the name. He’s still frightened of Manfred.’

  Freddie now whimpered, looking furtively over his shoulder, as if he expected the famous columnist to enter the room and remonstrate with him. Noticing this, William bent down to comfort him, putting an arm around the dog and whispering into his ear.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Freddie, old boy,’ he said. ‘Daddy won’t let that man browbeat you any more.’ It slipped out, and he thought, Our animals make fools of us - infantilise us just as we infantilise them. No, Freddie de la Hay, I’m not your real dad . . .

  ‘And neither will Mummy,’ added Marcia.

  William caught his breath. He was going to have to talk to Marcia; he really was. And he would have to do it this evening, before things went any further.

  79. Marcia Understands

  ‘Coquilles St Jacques,’ Marcia called from the kitchen. ‘How about that? And then . . .’

  ‘Perfect,’ William replied from the living room. ‘I love anything with cheese.’

  ‘Sometimes I think that cheese doesn’t help,’ Marcia said. ‘I use it if I think that whatever I’m cooking is maybe just a little bit past its best. You can get away with a lot when you use cheese.’

  This elicited only silence from the living room.

  ‘Not that these scallops aren’t fresh,’ Marcia added hurriedly. ‘I think that they’re all right, but when you consider the distance they have to travel to reach us in London . . . Quite a journey.’

  William was about to say something about seafood and the case of prawns that had been discovered to have been flown out to Malaysia, frozen there, and then flown back to London. That was a criminal waste of precious fuel, he thought, but once one started to think of the wastage of fuel, where would one stop? How many of the journeys we made were necessary? Twenty per cent? Possibly less. We did not need to go to Florida for our holidays, let alone Thailand. If there was something unnatural about transporting our food halfway round the world, the same might be said about transporting ourselves. And yet, if the means existed to do something, we would do it; the most cursory glance at human history confirmed that. Here and there, brave souls questioned this and were often howled down for their pains.
Or people agreed with them, nodded sagely, and then did nothing. Very few people were prepared to take the first step, to deny themselves - on principle - something that was readily available.

  William sighed. He would have to go and talk to Marcia, and he would have to do it before dinner. He rose to his feet, watched by Freddie de la Hay, who had settled himself on his favourite rug and was beginning to doze off, but still kept an eye half open, just in case something should happen in the inexplicable world of humans.

  She was standing in front of the cooker, attending to the scallops. There was a cheese grater on the worktop beside her and a square of cheese rind.

  ‘Marcia,’ he began, ‘there’s something that I need to talk to you about.’

  She did not turn round. ‘I know,’ she said.

  He was momentarily taken by surprise. What did she know? That he wanted to talk - or what he wanted to say? Marcia had many talents, and perhaps prescience was one of them.

  Now she turned round and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. He gasped, and took a step forward, instinctively ready to comfort her. ‘Oh, my dear . . .’

  She held up a hand. ‘No, William. I’m all right. I’m all right.’

  ‘You’re crying.’

  She put down the spoon she had been holding and wiped at her eyes. ‘Not really. Not really crying.’

  ‘But why?’

  She looked at him. ‘I know, you see. You don’t even have to talk to me about it. You don’t have to say a thing - not a thing. The whole idea of my moving in here was a mistake. I should never have done it.’

  William looked down at the floor. If he had imagined at one time that he might be alone in feeling that things were not right - that he alone might have picked up on the unspoken - now he was being reminded that when an atmosphere exists, it is usually not just one person who detects it. He felt bad about Marcia; he should have been firmer, he should have made his position clearer, rather than allowing her to make unwarranted assumptions.

  ‘Marcia,’ he began, ‘I . . .’

  ‘No. You don’t need to spell it out. It was all my fault - my own silly fault.’

  ‘It was not. It was not.’

  She shook her head. ‘And now you’re being kind to me - which is just like you. But you don’t need to be.’

  He drew in his breath. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I like you a great deal. It’s just that I don’t know whether it should go further. That’s not to say that I don’t . . . that I don’t find you attractive. It’s just that . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You really don’t have to say anything more.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘But I want to. Look, why don’t you stay on for a while? We could be simply flatmates, like the girls downstairs. How about that?’

  ‘Is that what you’d like?’

  He nodded. It was. And when Marcia accepted, tentatively at first, but with greater warmth when after a few moments she realised he meant the invitation, he felt a surge of relief. The encounter with Diesel’s owner had left him feeling raw, as can happen when one comes up against hatred, or evil, or just sheer rudeness. It was a form of moral shock and it made one yearn for reassurance. Having Marcia in the flat for a while longer would provide just that. And he was not doing it under any false pretence; she would stay there as a friend, free to come and go as she pleased, with neither of them reading anything more into the situation.

  He stepped forward and took her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This has all been my fault.’

  She put a finger to her lips. ‘I have to do the scallops.’

  ‘I can’t wait. Coquilles St Jacques. Do you know why they’re called that?’

  She shook her head. ‘St Jacques?’

  ‘St James. The scallop was his symbol. I’m not sure why. It was something to do with his having saved somebody from scallops, I think.’

  Marcia laughed. ‘Are they dangerous?’

  ‘Get your fingers in a live scallop shell and see,’ he said. ‘And they swim around in shoals, you know. They’re quite energetic little things. They propel themselves by sucking water in and out. So I suppose if you had a whole shoal of them latching onto you . . .’

  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 w
oman. 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.