Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘I’ll buy you a new pair of Belgian Shoes,’ Marcia said to William. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t do that,’ protested William. ‘They’re very expensive.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Marcia.

  ‘One hundred and seventy pounds,’ said William.

  Marcia laughed. ‘That wouldn’t be expensive by the standard of women’s shoes. Men’s shoes are obviously much cheaper.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said William. He was remembering the pair of handmade shoes he had bought from John Lobb in St James’s Street. ‘Unless you get a pair of made-to-measure from Lobb. They’re rather expensive.’

  Marcia repeated her direct question. ‘How much?’

  William looked embarrassed. ‘Two and a half thousand pounds,’ he said. ‘But they last a long time.’

  Marcia let out a whistle. ‘Imelda Marcos! You didn’t, did you . . .’ It was meant to be a question but it came out as an accusation.

  William sighed. ‘I’m afraid so. But they’re extremely comfortable. At least Freddie didn’t choose to chew them . . .’ He stopped. A terrible possibility had occurred. And if the worst came to the worst, would he be able to forgive two and a half thousand in the same way he had forgiven one hundred and seventy?

  Marcia had reached the same conclusion as William. ‘You’d better go and check,’ she said. ‘Or would you like me to do it for you?’

  William shook his head. ‘I’ll go.’

  He went out of the kitchen. While he was away, Marcia looked down at Freddie de la Hay, who looked back at her, uncertain as to what this latest development meant. Was he in renewed disgrace? he wondered. And if so, why?

  84. James Reveals His Good Eye

  William returned, smiling; Freddie de la Hay’s aberration had been confined to his Belgian Shoes and nothing else had been eaten. So while Marcia finished preparing the coquilles St Jacques, he went to the telephone to dial the number of the flat downstairs. Dee answered and confirmed that Caroline was in; she had a friend round, Dee said, but she was sure that she would be happy to speak.

  ‘My friend Marcia and I need some advice on a painting,’ William said to Caroline when she came to the phone. ‘I wonder if you would be able to come up for a drink, or coffee, later on? Perhaps you would look at it.’

  ‘You’ve bought a painting?’ asked Caroline. ‘How exciting.’

  ‘Not quite bought,’ said William. ‘Sort of . . . sort of found, I suppose.’

  ‘Even more exciting,’ said Caroline. ‘And of course I’d be happy to come up. May I bring my friend, James? He’s doing the course with me but he knows much more than I do. He could be helpful.’

  That, said William, would be perfect, and rang off. Then it was time for the coquilles St Jacques, which Marcia had cooked to perfection. They ate them in silent mutual enjoyment. There was no real need to say anything, at least on William’s side, as he felt quite happy and replete. The new arrangement with Marcia, which removed all the threat from an otherwise tricky situation, was an unmitigated relief. Eddie was no longer living in the flat and inflicting his music on him - another cause for relief, if not outright celebration. And although he had lost a Belgian Shoe, his John Lobb shoes had escaped the attentions of Freddie de la Hay. The world, or his very small corner of it, could have been in a far worse state, and he was grateful for it. And for the scallops and Sauvignon blanc too.

  When Caroline and James arrived half an hour later, William and Marcia were ensconced in the drawing room, Marcia on her sofa and William in his chair. Marcia had made no attempt to persuade William to sit on the sofa with her - a sign, he thought, of her better understanding of the relationship between them. So James was able to sit next to Marcia while Caroline occupied the small tub chair alongside William’s armchair.

  William asked James about his course and where it would lead. ‘I’d like to work for a gallery or one of the auction houses,’ James explained. ‘I’ve been promised an internship at the end of the course, and that might help. But there are lots of people after those posts. Everybody wants to do that sort of thing. Or everybody who has a degree in the history of art, that is.’

  ‘Well, it must be wonderful work,’ said William. ‘I sometimes go to the wine auctions at Sotheby’s. I understand the excitement.’

  ‘I’d like to work in the Old Masters department,’ said James. ‘I wish!’

  ‘James has a very good eye,’ said Caroline. ‘He really does.’

  ‘Go on,’ said James modestly. ‘Just because . . .’

  ‘No, you do,’ Caroline persisted. ‘Remember when we saw that Brescia-school painting and everybody said that it was something else, and you said, no, it was Brescia. Even Professor Marinelli was wrong about that. And what he doesn’t know . . .’

  James laughed. ‘Beginner’s luck.’

  ‘Well, we won’t be showing you anything special,’ said William.

  ‘What will you be showing us?’ asked James.

  William shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It looks old - or it looks old to me. But I suppose that somebody could paint something today and make it look old.’

  ‘Of course they could,’ said James. ‘They’d have to make their own paints, of course - you can’t get modern paints to do the trick. Everything painted with modern paints - paint out of a tube - looks far too chalky and white. You need to mix pigments with varnishes and a drop of oil. That enables you to get the light effect that you find in Old Masters. You put on layer after layer and the light shines through.’

  ‘James knows how to do it,’ said Caroline. ‘James could have been a great painter if he wanted.’

  James blushed. ‘You’re really flattering me tonight, Caroline. I couldn’t.’

  As they spoke, Marcia looked on, bemused. She was wondering about the nature of the relationship between the two students - were they just friends or was there something more between them? It was difficult to tell. He was obviously the sensitive type, which meant that he might not be interested, but one could never tell. It was quite wrong to assume that just because a man tucked his legs underneath him, as James was doing on the sofa next to her, and lowered his eyelids when he spoke - it was wrong to assume just because he did those things that he would not be interested in Caroline. And even if he was not interested in her, it was clear to Marcia that Caroline was interested in James. Any woman could tell that.

  For his part, William was wondering what Caroline saw in James. That was a very peculiar way to perch on the sofa, but then everybody was so peculiar these days, in William’s view, one could not read anything into anything. Caroline was really very attractive, but William wondered whether James was even aware of it. He rather thought James was not, and he felt a momentary pang of regret. Here was an attractive, physical girl, obviously in desperate need of a boyfriend, and here was he, William - too old even to be considered by her - while this boy seemed to take her completely for granted. It was all very depressing. He thought of Eliot’s poem, and of wearing the bottoms of one’s trousers rolled. Prufrock, was it? Am I Mr Prufrock in the flat above? Is that what I am to her?

  ‘Shall I get the painting?’ he said.

  James clapped his hands together. ‘Yes, let’s see it. I can’t wait. Ooh!’

  William smiled at the Ooh.

  ‘Before you get it,’ said Caroline, ‘tell us where you found it.’

  ‘In a wardrobe,’ said Marcia.

  The two students looked at her in astonishment, while William went out of the room to fetch the painting from his study. When he came back, he held it turned away from them. ‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

  They did, and he turned the painting round. They’ll say something disparaging, he thought; a cheap nineteenth-century souvenir of the Grand Tour - something like that.

  ‘Open your eyes now.’

  James let out a gasp. Then he muttered, ‘Caspita!’

  ‘Who was he?’

  James looked up at William. ‘Sorry. He wasn’t an artist - caspita
is an Italian exclamation. It expresses how I feel looking at . . . looking at this painting.’

  And you? thought William, turning to gauge Caroline’s reaction.

  Caroline said nothing at first. Then, glancing at James, she frowned. A shadow came over her and it was as obvious to William as a thundercloud in the sky. He looked again at James, who had reached out to take the small painting from William’s hands and was holding it out in front of him. There was no shadow there - just astonishment, and unmistakable, spontaneous delight.

  85. A Poussin in Pimlico

  William gazed intently at James as he studied the painting in front of him. Marcia watched him too, and even Freddie de la Hay, his disgrace forgotten, looked on with interest.

  ‘First impressions,’ said James, ‘are so important. You look at a good painting and bang, it’s there. You just feel it.’

  ‘It’s the same with wine,’ William said. ‘You know when you first experience it when it’s a great wine. It can change in the glass, of course, but that first encounter leaves you in no doubt. I tasted a 1961 Médoc the other day. The balance!’ He paused. ‘But I’m distracting you.’

  James looked up and smiled. ‘Not at all. I like talking about wine too. It all involves aesthetics. And isn’t it amazing how things survive? There’s your wine, in its fragile bottle, surviving almost fifty years, and here’s this painting, in pretty much the condition it was when it left Poussin’s studio . . . Except the colours in just about all Poussins have faded rather badly.’

  ‘Poussin!’ exclaimed Caroline.

  James turned to her and smiled triumphantly. ‘Yes, Poussin. Nicolas Poussin.’

  Caroline, who had leapt to her feet in her excitement, now sat down again. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she muttered.

  ‘You don’t?’ asked Marcia. She wondered whether she should have been incredulous too. The problem, though, was that she was not sure who Poussin was. Picasso, yes. But Poussin?

  It was as if James sensed Marcia’s embarrassment. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Lots of people aren’t all that familiar with Poussin. There are so many painters!’

  That helped. ‘Is he important?’ Marcia asked.

  James nodded. ‘Immensely. He was a great classical painter. He disapproved of other French painters of his time and went off to Rome. He did some wonderful paintings.’

  William was frowning. ‘Do you really think that this is by him? And how can you tell?’

  James placed the painting on the table in front of him. ‘It’s a question of style - principally. When you get to know an artist’s work, you’ll always recognise it - in much the same way as you’ll recognise a face. It’s just there, the flow and feel, the way of looking at the world - everything. It’s like a signature.’ He turned to William. ‘It’s the same with your wine, surely? You know where a wine comes from when you first taste it. You may not be able to put your finger on the exact reason, but you know, don’t you?’

  William agreed. But how could one tell, he wondered, whether something was the real thing, as opposed to an imitation or a copy? He raised this doubt now. ‘What about that chap who did the Vermeers during the War? If he could churn out Vermeers, then surely there could be somebody doing Poussins - in the same convincing way?’

  James reached out and touched the picture lightly with his fingertips. ‘Of course you’re right,’ he said. ‘This could be a copy by a follower of Poussin. A very good follower. It could be of the period, or it could be by a modern forger. It could be anything. But to me it looks like a Poussin - a very small Poussin. Mind you, I’m no expert . . .’

  ‘James is only a student,’ Caroline pointed out. ‘Nobody will listen to a student.’

  ‘We’re listening,’ said Marcia.

  James smiled. ‘Thank you. But Caroline’s right. My opinion counts for nothing. We need to show it to somebody whose attribution will stand for something. We need to find an authority on Poussin.’

  ‘Can you do that?’ asked Marcia. ‘Can you just approach somebody out of the blue like that?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied James. ‘That’s what these people are there for. And there’s bound to be a Poussin expert in London. There was Anthony Blunt, of course, at the Courtauld . . .’

  William looked up sharply. ‘The Fourth Man?’

  James sighed. ‘That’s right. He’s dead now, of course. And people seem only to remember the fact that he was a spy. They don’t remember what he did for Art History. Or for the Courtauld Institute. Or for all the students he helped.’

  William raised an eyebrow. ‘He spied for one of the greatest tyrannies the world has ever known,’ he said. ‘He lived in a democracy but spied for a tyranny.’

  James was cautious. ‘He believed in his cause, I think. People really believed in communism; they thought that it was the only possible way out. And once he was recruited - as a young man - it might have been difficult to escape. I can imagine how easy it was to find oneself on the wrong side and then . . .’

  William thought for a moment. ‘Yes. It’s not as simple as people think it is.’

  ‘It never is,’ said Marcia.

  ‘Yet I don’t condone what he did,’ added William.

  ‘Nor do I,’ said James.

  They looked at Caroline. ‘He had no real excuse,’ she said. ‘What a mess he made of his life. And then he was publicly humiliated.’

  ‘Even if what he did seemed unforgivable,’ said William, ‘perhaps we should still have forgiven him.’

  ‘Well, we can’t ask Blunt,’ concluded James. ‘But there’s bound to be someone. So what do you want us to do, William?’

  Marcia now made a suggestion. ‘We’ve shown them the painting,’ she said to William, talking as if Caroline and James were not in the room. ‘I think we should tell them about how we came to have it. About whose wardrobe it was in and so on. Then we can all decide what to do.’

  Caroline had already guessed. ‘It was Eddie’s wardrobe, wasn’t it?’

  William confirmed this, and added, ‘I think . . . well, I have to say that I think it’s stolen - how else would it be here?’

  ‘He may have bought it in an antique shop,’ ventured Caroline. ‘Sometimes you see paintings hanging up in such places. They often have no idea what they’ve got.’

  William thought this unlikely. ‘Those characters - the dealers - know what’s what. If they see anything remotely interesting, they show it to an expert. It’s inconceivable these days that any antique dealer would let something like this slip through their fingers.’ He paused. He had more to say on the subject of the painting’s provenance. ‘I should tell you, by the way, that I found a site on the web. It lists stolen paintings, and there was nothing by Poussin, I’m sure. So—’

  ‘If the owner knew that it was a Poussin,’ James interjected. ‘What if this had simply been an attractive painting hanging on his wall? He might have had no idea at all what he had. Then along comes somebody and steals it.’

  William winced. That somebody could have been his only son.

  86. Terence and Berthea

  ‘It’s entirely unsuitable,’ said Berthea Snark. ‘You told me that you were buying a Peugeot. Now look what you’ve gone and done. You’ve bought a Porsche. What am I to think, Terence? Honestly, you tell me - what am I to think?’

  It was Tuesday morning, and Berthea was at breakfast in the garden room of her brother’s Queen Anne house on the edge of Cheltenham. It was a fine morning and the sun was streaming through the large glass windows, making brilliant the white tablecloth, glinting off the cutlery laid at each end of the breakfast table. It was a day that made Berthea glad that she had postponed her return to London and still had two weeks to spend in the bucolic surroundings of Cheltenham, even if looking after Terence was proving to be a frustrating experience. One does not expect one’s brother to have a near-death experience when one goes to spend a few days with him; nor does one expect him to buy a totally unsuitable Porsche, when up to that point he
has been perfectly content to drive a Morris Traveller.

  Terence, who was cutting the top off his boiled egg, seemed unconcerned. ‘It’s a lovely little car,’ he said. ‘It used to belong to Monty Bismarck. So I know it’s been well looked after.’

  Berthea made a face: Monty Bismarck sounded a completely unsuitable man from whom to buy a car. ‘And who exactly is this Monty Bismarck? You’ve mentioned him before,’ she said.

  ‘Monty is Alfie Bismarck’s son,’ he explained. ‘Alfie has racehorses. A terribly nice man. He’s offered me a share in a racehorse on several occasions but I’ve never taken him up on it. Maybe I shall sometime in the future.’

  Berthea sighed. ‘I don’t think so, Terence. But tell me - why did you want a car like that? Is it a . . .’ She hesitated. Terence was sensitive to criticism from her, but there were some questions that just demanded to be asked. ‘Is it a potency issue?’

  Terence looked at her in puzzlement. ‘I really don’t see what a car has to do with potency, of all things. What a funny thing to say, Berthy! You really are a silly-billy!’

  Berthea busied herself with the buttering of a piece of toast. ‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘don’t say that I didn’t warn you. I’ve had so many middle-aged male patients for whom the purchase of a car has been the first sign of something going awry. It’s the new car first and then it’s infidelity. New car, new girlfriend. It’s all so predictable.’

  Terence sighed. ‘But I don’t have anybody to be unfaithful to, Berthy. You know that.’

  Berthea’s hand was poised above the toast. Terence was not one for self-pity, and the absence of that unattractive quality made the words he had just uttered all the more poignant. Berthea looked at her brother and reflected on how we allow loneliness in others to escape our attention. The lonely are often brave, putting on the pretence of being content in their condition but all the time wanting the company of another. Was that how it was for Terence? Did he sit by himself in this morning room, contemplating empty days in which there would be nobody to speak to? Did he yearn for telephone calls that he knew would never come? She realised that his telephone never rang - indeed she had had no idea where it was until she had been obliged to look for it quickly when he had had his near-death experience. Poor Terence! And here she was sniping at him over his one little extravagance, the one bit of excitement in his life, this new Porsche of his. It was like laughing at a little boy’s new bicycle, like saying that it was too red, or too small, or that the girls would laugh at him as he rode it. It was every bit as mean as that.