Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Marcia held the tiny fragment of canvas in between thumb and forefinger and peered at it. ‘Imagine,’ she said. ‘This survived all those years. Survived the fall of empires. Two world wars. And now this.’

  William was struck by the power of this observation, which underlined the significance of Freddie de la Hay’s role as cultural nemesis. If a work of art was to be destroyed, he thought, then it was marginally better that it should have been done by an agent who did not know what he was doing rather than by one who did it on purpose. For a painting to be destroyed by flood, fire, or, as in this case, dog, was less of an insult to the artist - or to the values that the painting represented - than to be torn up by one who despised it.

  William repeated his question. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Marcia looked at Freddie de la Hay. ‘The Poussin will be inside him, of course.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘We could take him to the vet,’ Marcia continued. ‘We could ask the vet to operate. To get it out of his stomach that way.’

  William did not know what to say; surely Freddie de la Hay could not go under the knife purely to recover a painting? There were bound to be risks involved, as there were in any operation. Would any ethically minded vet be prepared to do such a thing - to place a Poussin above the life of a dog?

  ‘I don’t think that’s feasible,’ William said after a while. ‘And anyway, the painting will be in little bits. I doubt they would be able to fit it together again.’ As he spoke, he thought of Dee downstairs and her enthusiasm for colonic irrigation. Could the Poussin be recovered by colonic irrigation? He very much doubted it.

  ‘Then I suspect we’ll just have to write it off,’ said Marcia.

  William bit his lip. ‘Maybe.’ It was an appalling conclusion, but then in some respects it was really rather convenient. There had been a major question mark over the painting’s provenance and that was now no longer a problem, as there was no painting to return to anybody. And there was also the question of whether it really was a Poussin; all that they had had so far was James’s view, and he was just a student, albeit a student at Master’s level.

  William looked down at Freddie de la Hay. He would have to forgive him, because ultimately we must all forgive one another; to do anything but that merely prolongs our suffering. And if forgiveness requires apology - which is not always the case, but sometimes is - then for a mute creature such as Freddie de la Hay, this look of dejection, as heart-rending as that on the face of any expellee from Eden, was apology enough, sufficient expiation.

  ‘All right, Freddie,’ he said. ‘We won’t mention Poussin again.’

  Freddie had no idea of the meaning of these words. He strained to make out the word ‘walk’, but it was not uttered. He could tell, though, from the tone of William’s voice, that he was forgiven, and his loyal heart leapt accordingly.

  95. A Real Job

  ‘I was hoping that I’d see you again,’ said Tim Something as he perused the bistro menu.

  Caroline smiled. ‘I’d actually decided to come here for lunch anyway,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why - I just did.’

  Tim Something caught the eye of the waiter. ‘Fate,’ he said. ‘Our lives are made up of random events that determine what’s going to happen to us. I’ve always thought that.’

  ‘A rather bleak view, surely?’

  Tim did not agree. ‘Well, take us, for example.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Yes. We met by chance, didn’t we? I happened to be assigned to take your photograph for the mag. They could have chosen somebody else - in fact, I almost didn’t answer the phone when they called. But I did, and I took your photograph.’

  She looked at him blankly.

  ‘And then,’ Tim went on, ‘I saw you here totally by chance. I almost went somewhere else for lunch that day. But I didn’t. I came here.’

  Caroline shrugged. ‘I don’t see . . .’

  ‘Finally,’ Tim interrupted, ‘I saw you in front of that bookshop. What are the odds of bumping into somebody in this city just by chance? How many million people live in London?’

  Caroline did not know.

  ‘Well, the odds must be millions to one against a completely random meeting with the person one wants to . . .’

  He did not complete the sentence. The waiter had arrived at the table with his notebook open. Caroline studied the menu with renewed concentration. The person one wants to . . . What had he in mind? The person one wants to ask out?

  They gave their orders and the waiter headed back into the kitchen. Caroline looked up from the menu.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ said Tim Something. ‘I wanted to see you about a job.’

  Caroline hoped that her disappointment was not too obvious. It was another of his assignments. Perhaps he wanted her advice; perhaps it involved art.

  Tim suddenly reached across the table and laid a hand on hers. ‘You are going to be looking for a job, I take it, when your course finishes?’

  It felt strange to have his hand on hers - it was not unpleasant, but it did feel odd.

  ‘I suppose I will. In fact, I definitely will. But it’s not easy at the moment, especially in my field - or what I would like to be my field.’ She thought of James and his interview, and felt vaguely disloyal that she was having lunch with Tim Something when James was undergoing his ordeal with his would-be employers.

  Tim looked sympathetic. ‘It’s never the right time to get a job. I remember when I started, I wondered whether I would ever get anything. I did - and now I have far more work than I can handle.’

  Caroline moved her hand slightly. ‘You’re lucky. You’re obviously good - to be in demand like that.’

  The compliment seemed to be well received. ‘There are people who like my work. But what I really want to do is to go in for something more . . . more stretching. That’s why I’m going into partnership.’

  She was not sure what the implications of this were. Presumably they were positive, as Tim’s mood seemed quite buoyant.

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘You probably won’t know anything about him - people never look at photographers’ bylines, they take us for granted - but you’ve probably seen his work.’

  ‘Well, I’m very pleased for you.’

  He took his hand off hers. ‘Now, this is where you come in.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, this other photographer has an assistant. He wants me to have one too. Apparently there’s going to be more than enough work to justify it.’

  She had not expected this, and yet the offer, not yet spelled out but already clear enough, was immediately attractive. Caroline had never before been offered a job - she had never worked - and it seemed immensely flattering to her that somebody actually wanted her to work with him.

  ‘A real job?’ she asked.

  Her question amused him. ‘Just because it’s creative work doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. Of course it is. With pay.’

  He was waiting for her to say something, but she could not think what to say. Could she be a photographer?

  ‘Twenty thousand a year to begin with,’ he said. ‘It’ll go up. And there’ll be the opportunity for some freelance work of your own - if you want.’

  The waiter returned with their first course. ‘I don’t know what to say, Tim,’ she began. ‘It’s very sweet of you, but . . . but I’d never thought of becoming a photographer. I don’t have any training in it . . .’

  ‘I’ll train you,’ he said. ‘It’s something you can learn on the job. There’s no need to go off to a college and study the history of photography. You’re artistic - that’s all that counts. And—’

  ‘Doing a degree in the history of art is not the same thing as being artistic,’ Caroline interjected. She was puzzled as to why he should offer the job to her. Surely there would be plenty of people more qualified to do it - graduates of photography courses who knew all about composition and depth of field and how to use light? And the history of p
hotography too.

  ‘But you must be,’ he said. ‘To be able to write about painting you must be artistic - otherwise you’d be doing something else.’

  ‘But why me in particular?’

  He reached for his glass of water and took a sip. ‘Do you want me to be honest?’

  ‘Of course. Who would want anybody to be dishonest?’

  ‘Not me. That’s why I’ll tell you. I like you. It’s that simple. I like you a lot. I’d love to work with you.’ He paused. ‘I think you’re fun.’

  Had she disliked him, she would have been embarrassed by his directness. But she had decided that she liked him now, whatever her feelings might have been in the past, so she felt instead a flush of pleasure.

  ‘I like you too,’ she said.

  ‘And what’s your answer?’

  ‘You’d have to tell me a little bit more about the job.’

  He nodded. ‘It’ll be great fun. I promise you that. And there’ll be bags of travel. My new partner goes to Kenya, India - places like that. He does features for travel magazines. He specifically wants me to take some of that off his hands.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘And lucky you?’

  ‘All right.’

  There was one last question, and she looked at him directly as she asked it. ‘Is it a good idea to work with somebody . . . you like?’

  He misheard her. ‘Somebody like me? Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘No. Somebody you like.’

  He answered as if there were only one possible response. ‘Naturally.’

  96. Three Sorts of Man Trouble

  If Caroline had felt at a loose end that morning, she felt even more so in the afternoon. Her lunch with Tim Something had been concluded with an exchange of telephone numbers and an arrangement to meet for dinner two days later - ‘to discuss the modalities’ of the job offer, as Tim put it. She agreed to this, although she was not entirely sure what a modality was - a state of uncertainty later resolved by a visit to a dictionary. They had an agreement, it seemed, and now the formalities of that agreement would have to be worked out. She wondered why he could not have said that they would meet to discuss the details - it would have been so much simpler and would have involved no dictionary. She felt slightly irritated by this, but contained her irritation; if she were to work for Tim Something, she would have to stop herself objecting to the way he put things.

  She returned to Corduroy Mansions at about three o’clock and tried to begin the essay that had been hanging over her head. The topic was easy enough: each member of the class had to write a four-thousand-word piece on a painting of their choice. This was a gift, because everybody would have four thousand words to say about a painting that interested them. James, she knew, had already written two thousand words on An Old Man and His Grandson by Ghirlandaio, a painting he had seen in the Louvre.

  ‘Two thousand words already,’ he had remarked to Caroline. ‘And I haven’t even got beyond the man’s nose! I’m still writing about that.’

  Caroline knew the painting. ‘It’s a marvellous nose. So bulbous.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said James. ‘The painting is all about that nose, really. And I think that’s what the child is looking up at. He sees a nose. His grandfather is a nose to him. I could write a whole book about it, you know, Caroline. I really could. Like that whole book I’ve just read about Hopper’s Nighthawks.’

  She envied James his facility with words, his ability to write two thousand words, and more, about a nose. She was out of her depth, she felt, compared with people like James. There was no place for her in the world of art, and all she was was a young woman from a conventional background in Cheltenham whose only distinction so far had been to appear in Rural Living magazine, on a page normally dedicated to attractive, marriageable, county-ish girls whose fathers were keen to get them off their hands. It was a bleak thought.

  Unable to settle down to the not-yet-started essay on a not-yet-identified painting, Caroline decided to leave the flat and go for a cup of herbal tea at Daylesford Organic. The shop was busy; the ladies who lunched had been replaced by ladies who drank tea, and Caroline had to wait a few minutes for a table. But she found one eventually and sat down to page through a magazine while she waited for her tea. She glanced about her and saw, at a neighbouring table, a man looking in her direction. She turned away, but then looked back at him and realised that she recognised him. It was the man in the flat at the bottom of the stairs - the man whom she hardly ever saw, although Jenny had spoken to him. She smiled, and nodded, which was the signal for him to rise to his feet and approach her table.

  ‘Please forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but are you waiting for anybody?’

  She shook her head. If he wanted to join her she would welcome it, given her unsettled mood.

  Basil Wickramsinghe sat down opposite Caroline. ‘I believe I have met one of your flatmates,’ he said. ‘Jenny. She and I met here just the other day.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caroline. ‘So I gather.’

  Basil, who had brought his cup over with him, took a sip of tea. ‘It is a very fine building, Corduroy Mansions,’ he said. ‘I like living there. Do you?’

  She nodded. ‘I do. I love it.’

  ‘And this area is so nice,’ Basil continued. ‘It’s so easy to walk to the parks from here. And we have all we need, don’t we?’

  Caroline sighed. She was thinking of her lunch with Tim Something. What was she doing? She hardly knew him, and when she had met him before she had not even liked him. How could her feelings change? Was she that flighty?

  Basil Wickramsinghe was staring at her. ‘You’re unhappy, aren’t you?’

  She stared at him for a moment. He could tell. And she could tell, just by looking at him, that this quiet man could probably read her as easily as she felt she could read others. ‘I’m unsettled,’ she said.

  Basil took a further sip of tea. ‘Which means man trouble, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it does.’

  Basil smiled. ‘There are three sorts of man trouble,’ he said. ‘There is one where there is no man. There is one where there is one man. And there is one where there is more than one man.’

  ‘Mine is the third. I can’t decide between two.’

  ‘That probably seems very difficult,’ said Basil, ‘but it isn’t. Not really. You can find the answer by doing a very simple thing. Close your eyes and then tell me which one you see.’

  Too simple, thought Caroline.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Basil. ‘Close your eyes. Which man comes to you? Don’t think about it, just see who steps forward.’

  ‘I’m not sure if it’s that straightforward.’

  ‘No, try it,’ he urged. ‘It’s rather like dream analysis. Dreams are meant to tell us about our inmost desires, aren’t they? But the problem with dreams is that we can’t anticipate in advance which desires they will reveal. If you do what I suggest, your conscious mind can instruct your subconscious to respond. It’s rather like a lucid dream, where we know we’re dreaming but we continue to control the unfolding of the dream.’ He paused. ‘Go on. Just close your eyes and tell me which man comes to you.’

  Caroline closed her eyes. For a moment there was nothing in her mind but the sounds of the café about her: the rattling of cups on saucers; the subdued drone of the conversation of others; the sound of leeks being chopped in the kitchen. But then she saw him, standing before her, smiling, his arms open, ready to embrace her.

  It was neither James, nor Tim Something. It was somebody she did not know at all. A perfect stranger.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ said Basil.

  She opened them and looked at her neighbour.

  ‘I can tell from your expression that you saw neither of them,’ Basil said. ‘Am I right? You saw a stranger.’

  ‘I’m afraid I did.’

  Basil sat back in his seat. ‘Well, that means that you have yet to meet the right man for you. He is out there somewhere, but you hav
e not yet met him.’

  97. The Interview

  James had said that he would drop in on Corduroy Mansions round about six that evening. He had also said that he might phone and let Caroline know how the interview and the lunch had gone, if he had time. There had been no call, and so she knew nothing about what had happened until she saw the expression on his face. That revealed everything.

  ‘You got it?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. I did.’

  He was standing in the doorway; she was in the hall. Now she stepped forward and threw her arms around him. ‘Oh, James! Congratulations! You clever, clever boy!’

  She kissed him on his cheek; she had intended to kiss him on the lips, but he moved and presented his cheek instead. He wriggled free of her embrace, not indecently soon but rather quickly nonetheless.

  ‘I’ve brought a bottle of champagne,’ he said. ‘I bought it from one of those places that sells them chilled so that they’re ready for an immediate celebration.’

  She took the bottle from him and went into the kitchen to fetch two glasses. He followed her through, full of news about the interview.

  ‘I was really nervous at the beginning,’ he said. ‘There was this guy before me and he came out looking very depressed - defeated, really. I said to him, “See you at lunch.” And he said that he had not been invited. I felt terrible about that.’

  ‘Well, you knew that you had a better chance, then.’

  James raised an eyebrow. ‘Except for the fact that he had a Ph.D. I had spoken to him before he went in and he told me - a Ph.D. from McGill on Tintoretto. A Ph.D., Caroline, for a small job in a gallery. That’s how tough things are.’

  Caroline agreed; things were not easy. ‘Polish Ph.D.s drive trucks. Romanian neurosurgeons wait at tables here in London.’

  ‘So there’s not much hope for somebody who hasn’t even got his Master’s yet,’ said James. ‘At least that’s what I thought.’