Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Rupert tried again. ‘Well, there may be a case for starting afresh somewhere,’ he said. ‘A lot of people like to set up in a place that is really their own - somewhere they’ve chosen together. Rather romantic!’

  Barbara held his gaze. ‘And a lot of people don’t.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Rupert. ‘I hope that you’ll be very happy, Barbara. Come, let me give you a kiss.’

  He kissed her on the cheek and then went back to his own office. ‘You’ll never guess,’ he said to his wife on the telephone. ‘La Ragg is engaged!’ And then he said, ‘She doesn’t want to move, by the way. She’s installed the toyboy in the flat.’

  Rupert’s wife sighed. ‘Oh well. We must take a look at him. I wonder who on earth would have taken her on? The yeti?’

  ‘I cracked that joke too,’ said Rupert.

  Seated behind her desk again, alone in her office, Barbara found it difficult to concentrate on work. There were contracts to peruse but she felt too exhilarated to get down to it. So she closed her eyes and went over in her mind the previous evening with Hugh. The little blue flower by her plate; the care he had lavished on the preparation of the meal; his gentleness and humour; the way he looked at her. Everything. Everything.

  She got up from her desk and returned to the window. The man in the attic flat opposite had appeared again. He was gazing at the red flowers he had placed outside on the lead surface of the roof. He yawned and looked across in her direction.

  She caught his eye. He was only thirty or forty yards away. He smiled at her. They had seen one another from time to time and had occasionally waved. Now Barbara opened the window and leaned out. The man opposite leaned out too a little way, his hand resting on the edge of his tub of flowers.

  ‘I love your flowers,’ shouted Barbara.

  ‘Thanks,’ shouted the man in return.

  A gust of wind had blown up and Barbara had to raise her voice to be heard. ‘I’m terribly happy.’

  The man made a thumbs-up gesture.

  ‘I’ve just got engaged,’ Barbara continued.

  The man clapped his hands together and then, reaching forward, plucked one of his red flowers and threw it across to her. It was a lovely gesture, even if the flower fell far short of bridging the gap between them and dropped, a tiny Icarus out of the sky, tumbling down to the street below.

  92. Caroline Goes to Lunch Again

  If Barbara was certain that morning that she had found the man with whom she wanted to share her life, the same could not be said of Caroline. The final break with Tom, which could so easily have been messy, had proved to be simplicity itself. After his initial show of jealousy and resentment, manifesting itself in an almost immediately regretted bout of incivility towards James, Tom had proved to be perfectly reasonable. She suspected that they both wanted the break, and that his reluctance to let her go was no more than a vestigial sign of the feelings he had once had for her. Now it was done, and she was free again. Or was she?

  James was a problem. She was becoming very used to his company - so used to it, in fact, that she found herself feeling dissatisfied and at odds on days when she did not see him. It was worrying, because it seemed to her that some sort of dependence was building up and she was not sure that that was what she wanted. Then there was also the question of James’s fundamental suitability. That he liked her was not in doubt, but could he ever be passionate about her? And if he could not, then what was the point of his being anything more than a friend?

  That morning, James was not in the lecture room for the lecture on sixteenth-century Venetian painting. His absence was expected: he had told her that he was due to go for an interview for a position at a gallery; the interview was to be at eleven, and was to be followed by lunch.

  ‘A bad sign,’ Caroline had said. ‘If you go for a job and they ask you to lunch it’s a bad sign.’

  James seemed surprised. ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  ‘They’re wanting to look at you in social surroundings,’ she explained. ‘They want to see how you hold your knife and fork.’

  James laughed. ‘Hello? This is the twenty-first century, you know! People don’t care about that sort of thing any more.’

  Caroline defended herself. ‘I’m not so sure about that. They won’t be up-front about it, but they still do it. Or some do. And a gallery like that would definitely subscribe to that sort of thing. Look at their clientele. Look at the people who work in those galleries. They’re not exactly rough diamonds.’

  James looked downcast. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Do you think I should even bother to go?’

  His tone made her rather regret having issued the warning. ‘Of course you should go. I was just telling you what I thought they might be doing. And anyway, I’m sure that your table manners are fine.’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know. Look, when you get a bread roll, you do break it, don’t you, rather than cut it?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘And what do you do with smoked salmon? Do you put it on the bread and then cut the bread, or do you eat the salmon with a knife and fork and have bits of bread in between mouthfuls?’

  ‘I always put the smoked salmon on the bread,’ said Caroline. ‘Then I cut it into squares. But they’re not going to pay any attention to that sort of thing. They’ll just want to make sure that you don’t talk with your mouth full or burp.’

  James thought for a moment. ‘What if I do burp?’ he asked. ‘What do I say?’

  Caroline laughed. ‘My parents always told me not to say “pardon”. They said you should say “excuse me”. But they’re such snobs.’

  ‘Could you just say “oops”?’ asked James.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And if I need to go to the loo,’ James went on. ‘What then? Do I call it “the gents” or “the loo”? Or what?’

  ‘My father calls it the lavatory,’ said Caroline. ‘I think that’s the approved word in really smart circles. Not the lav, but the lavatory. I don’t like that word much, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What about “the little boys” room”?’ asked James.

  ‘Definitely not. Extremely twee.’

  ‘“The washroom”?’

  ‘American. They’re very keen on euphemisms.’

  James nodded. ‘“Letting go” means sacking someone. “I’m going to have to let you go” means “you’re sacked”.’

  Caroline thought: I let Tom go. But then maybe he wanted to go. And at that point, she stopped her reverie, which had been a prolonged one, drifting from James to Tom, to home, to her parents; now the lecture on Venetian painting had ended and she found that all she had written in her Moleskine notebook was: ‘The boundaries of what we call the Venetian School . . .’

  She snapped the Moleskine shut and followed her fellow students out of the room. She felt at a bit of a loose end; there was an essay to write but she felt disinclined to start on it. If only James had been here, she would have taken him for lunch at that bistro where they had met Tim Something. Poor James - it was lunchtime now and he would be under inspection by his prospective employers, his handling of smoked salmon being judged according to some arcane precepts of the proper way to tackle such things. Yes, poor James.

  She decided on the spur of the moment: she would go for lunch at the bistro - she would treat herself. Why not? There was no rule against having lunch by yourself.

  She walked round Bedford Square and into Great Russell Street. She liked this part of London, which was such a contrast to the garishness of Oxford Street, not far away. The shops here were small and had character, and even if she was not in the market for antiquities or first editions, she liked to see them in the windows. She paused outside the headquarters of a bookshop that was also a press. A selection of titles was displayed in the window and her eye was drawn to Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within. She liked that. There were whisperings within all of us; whisperings that prompted us to do one thing rather than another, whisperings that made us what we were.

 
‘The whisperings within,’ said a voice at her side. ‘Interesting! Should we listen to them?’

  She spun round. Tim Something was smiling at her.

  ‘You don’t fancy a bit of lunch, do you?’ asked the photographer.

  Caroline hesitated. She had a feeling that the answer that she gave to this question might determine a great deal for her; it was not just lunch at stake.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

  It was as if the answer came from someone else; not from the cautious self which she thought ran her life, but from another self altogether, a self of more instinctive stamp, a self that beckoned from altogether wilder, more exciting shores. And she could tell, just by looking at him, that Tim’s invitation, as spontaneous as was her acceptance, came from the equivalent quarter within him.

  93. Crop Circles

  Terence Moongrove drove Berthea back from the sacred dance in his newly acquired Porsche.

  ‘This is a very noisy car,’ Berthea observed. ‘And it is also rather low. It would be very difficult to get into it if one had arthritis.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Terence. ‘The engine is deliberately noisy. Mr Marchbanks told me that it is something they do on purpose. And as for its being low, that is just the way it is. It has something to do with making it possible to creep up behind people on the road and give them a fright when you overtake them.’

  Berthea gave her brother a withering look but said nothing. Homo ludens, she thought - man at play. And while she would normally apply any observation about man in general to women as well - particularly in the case of the term Homo sapiens - in this case by homo she meant vir rather than femina. No woman, she imagined, would find creeping up behind someone in a Porsche fun. It was just not something a woman would ever do. Indeed, when she came to think of it, most women looked at cars as functional machines and judged them accordingly. Cars got one from A to B - that was the point of them. Certainly it was nice to have a car that did this in comfort, and it was also nice to have a car that looked appealing, but that was about the extent of female interest in cars. Men, it seemed to Berthea, never grew out of their boyhood fascination with cars; there was an unbroken line of psychological continuity between the toy cars that boys played with and the real machines they later acquired as men. Puer ludens, she thought, and immediately congratulated herself on the term. She could use it, perhaps, as the title of a paper. ‘Puer Ludens: Men As Boys’. That was rather nice.

  Already the paper was being shaped in her mind. She would postulate a hypothetical mature man - the man who confronts the world in a rational, non-exploitative way; the man who treats others with consideration and is not constantly jockeying for position in relation to other men. And then she would investigate how the vestiges of boyhood prevent most men from reaching this plateau, this resolution.

  Terence dropped Berthea at the house. ‘I think I shall go for a little drive,’ he said. ‘I need to get used to the gears.’

  ‘Be careful,’ said Berthea, and she repeated the advice under her breath as she watched her brother disappear down the drive, the Porsche’s throaty roar becoming fainter.

  Terence drove slowly down the road. His foot was barely touching the accelerator and yet the car’s engine seemed ready to run away with him. But this was not the place to test the car’s performance - he would find a larger road for that, one where he could start overtaking. He had never been able to overtake anybody in the Morris Traveller and the thought of flashing past other drivers at speed rather appealed to him, particularly if he surprised them. I have so much overtaking to make up, he thought.

  After a few minutes, Terence found himself on the very edge of town. The open road lay ahead, and the traffic, he noticed, was moving faster. He eased his foot down on the accelerator and the car shot forward. He glanced at the speedometer - the needle had edged up to sixty and his foot was barely on the pedal. He pressed it down a bit further. Seventy now. Was that the speed limit, or was it one hundred and seventy? He could not remember - it had all been so hypothetical with the Morris Traveller.

  He looked in the rear-view mirror. There was a car behind him, a car that looked remarkably like his own: another Porsche. That’s nice, thought Terence. Two Porsches out for a run together. He looked in the mirror again and recognised the face of the driver: Monty Bismarck. So that was his new Porsche; it looked very smart, Terence had to admit. He waved, and Monty Bismarck waved back. How nice for him to see me in his old car, thought Terence.

  He decided to go a little bit faster, and pressed his foot down sharply. The car responded immediately, surging ahead as the powerful engine showed its form. The sudden increase in speed alarmed Terence, and he took his foot off the accelerator and applied it to the brake. Behind him, Monty Bismarck, seeing the brake lights glow red, himself braked sharply. This prompt action avoided a collision between the two cars, but it meant that Monty had to watch powerlessly as Terence’s car, although now travelling much more slowly, left the road and shot through a hedgerow and into a field of ripening wheat.

  When his car went off the road, Terence’s first response was to close his eyes. But he quickly reopened them once he found himself in the field, with the car obediently continuing its journey, although at a slower pace. He was relieved that the consequences of the accident were so slight; all he would have to do, it seemed to him, was to drive round in a circle and he could then make his way out through the hole that he had created when he went through the hedge.

  Terence described a complete circle in the field of wheat, arriving back at his point of entry. There he found Monty Bismarck standing beside his own Porsche, anxious to check on his welfare.

  ‘You OK, Mr Moongrove?’ Monty called out as Terence drew to a halt.

  ‘Perfectly all right, thanks, Monty!’ Terence replied. ‘This is a jolly good car, you know.’

  ‘Can’t beat them, Mr Moongrove. But you need to be careful.’

  Terence assured Monty that he would be. He switched off the engine and got out of the car to stretch his legs. Then he saw it.

  ‘My goodness,’ he said, pointing to the field behind him. ‘A crop circle. See that, Monty?’

  94. A Cultural Disaster

  The first thing William did that morning was take Freddie de la Hay out for a walk. The streets were quiet at that time of day, although William often encountered fellow dog-owners similarly exercising their charges. There seemed to be a comfortable free-masonry between the owners, clear common ground in a city of too many strangers, and greetings and dog news would often be exchanged. The dogs, too, appreciated the canine contact, Freddie de la Hay being on particularly good terms with a small, rather fussy Schnauzer and an elderly Dalmatian. William wondered what it was that led to a canine friendship - was it simple recognition of shared experience, random affection, or was it some similarity of viewpoint? Or possibly smell? He wondered whether one dog liked another dog because the smell was right. Humans, he had read, made friendships on that basis - even if they were unaware of it.

  The walk over, they returned to Corduroy Mansions. For some reason Freddie de la Hay seemed slightly uncomfortable, and William decided that he would watch him when he gave him his breakfast. Dogs were always hungry, it seemed, and if a dog turned up his nose at food it was a sure sign that something was wrong.

  He took Freddie into the kitchen and picked up his bowl from the floor. Freddie watched him in silence. That was strange, as he normally whined and wagged his tail when he saw his bowl being prepared.

  ‘You not quite on form this morning, Freddie?’ William asked.

  Freddie de la Hay gazed at his master. His tail, which normally wagged in response to any human question, remained still.

  William crossed the room to get the half-full tin of dog food that he had put in the fridge the previous morning. Then he noticed something on the floor - a few fragments of wood and some torn paper. He bent down and picked up the bit of wood. It had been chewed.

  He look
ed severely at Freddie. ‘What have you been chewing, Freddie? Come on now. Own up.’

  Freddie de la Hay looked away. William, now quite puzzled, looked about the kitchen floor and saw more signs of Freddie’s activity - further fragments of wood and . . . He bent down again and picked up what looked like a small fragment of paper. But it was not paper; it was canvas.

  William peered at the scrap of canvas; it was bare on one side, while the other was painted dark green, with touches of red and yellow. And as he began to make out what was there, the realisation came to him in an awful moment of clarity: the image was part of a snake. The Poussin. Freddie de la Hay had eaten the Poussin.

  William did not remonstrate with Freddie - the offence was too enormous - but ran out of the kitchen to knock loudly on Marcia’s door. She opened it and looked at him anxiously.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Disaster,’ said William. ‘Extreme, indeed exceptional, disaster. Freddie de la Hay has eaten the Poussin. It’s a cultural tragedy.’

  ‘But I thought it was downstairs,’ said Marcia. ‘They took it.’

  ‘They must have popped it back through the letterbox,’ said William. ‘Come to think of it, I did hear something last night. That must have been it.’

  Marcia followed William back into the kitchen, where Freddie de la Hay was sitting disconsolately, looking rather uncomfortable. When he saw Marcia, the dog lowered his snout even further until it was virtually on the ground - an admission of guilt, a position of abject repentance. If an artist had been present and had wished to paint a sentimental nineteenth-century genre painting entitled Sorrow for Past Misdeeds, no further arrangement of subject would have been required; Freddie de la Hay said it all.

  William found another scrap of canvas on the floor and passed it to Marcia for examination. ‘What on earth are we to do?’ he asked.