Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The columnist rose to his feet and gestured to the door. “I suggest we go and see Freddie,” he said. “Then I’ll call a cab, if you like. You’ll need to take his bed and a supply of carrot sticks—I can tell you where to get more of those. And his certificates.”

  “Certificates?”

  “From the canine lifestyle course,” said Manfred. “The paperwork.”

  William nodded.

  They left the study and made their way into the kitchen at the back of the house. There was Freddie de la Hay, sitting obediently in the middle of the floor—like a sentry, thought William.

  “Freddie,” said Manfred. “This is Mr. French. He’s your new carer. Say hello, Freddie.”

  Freddie de la Hay looked at William with his dark, mournful eyes, eyes so liquid that they might conceal the presence of tears, might break the very heart.

  23. Nice Dog

  WILLIAM FRENCH, MW (Failed), climbed into the cab called by the celebrated columnist Manfred James. He was accompanied by Freddie de la Hay, a Pimlico terrier, a “new dog,” whose small canine life was now beginning an important and challenging phase. Not much happens to dogs; they lead their lives around our feet, in the interstices of more complex doings, from which perspective they look up at the busier human world, eager to participate, eager to understand, but for ever limited by biology and the vagaries of evolution to being small-part players in the drama. Every so often a particular dog might rise above this limited destiny, might perform some act of loyalty that attracts human recognition and praise. But for most dogs such saliences are rare, their lives being punctuated by nothing more significant than the discovery of an intriguing smell or the sight of a rabbit or a rat—usually frustratingly inaccessible—or by some minor territorial challenge that requires a bark. Nothing much, really, but for dogs, their lot, their allocation.

  “Pimlico,” said William to the taxi driver, and gave the address of Corduroy Mansions.

  The driver nodded. “Nice dog,” he said. “Got one myself. A bit like that but smaller. What make is he, guv?”

  “He’s a Pimlico terrier,” William replied.

  They were moving off now, and he waved to Manfred James, standing at his gate. There was a look of relief on the columnist’s face, which irritated William. One does not wave goodbye to one’s dog with a broad smile on one’s face.

  “Pimlico terrier?” repeated the taxi driver, craning his neck to look into the mirror. “Bit big for a terrier, if you ask me. Are you sure?”

  Freddie de la Hay was sitting at William’s feet, looking up at his new carer (as Manfred James had described the relationship). The dog seemed anxious. Understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances: being passed from one carer to another is a traumatic experience for any dog, even the strongest and most secure. To them, we are God incarnate, and to have one god exchanged for another is as stressful as any change of religion can be in the human world.

  “Never heard of a Pimlico terrier,” continued the taxi driver. “You get it by mixing something up? Crossing one breed with another?”

  William found his irritation increasing in the face of this close examination by the driver. While he was as prepared as anybody to enter into conversation with a taxi driver, he felt that there were circumstances in which a driver should be able to detect reticence on the part of a fare. It should be part of the famous knowledge that taxi drivers went on about. It was all very well knowing the quickest way from an obscure street in one part of London to an equally obscure street in another, but it was important, too, to understand the mood of the person in the back of the cab and to know when an atmosphere of Trappist silence would be appreciated. Not all taxi drivers shared that insight.

  For his part, William had devised a good way of avoiding talking, if one wanted to do so, a way that prompted the taxi driver himself either to talk at great length—to deliver a monologue, in fact—or to become quite silent. This was to ask, at an early stage of the journey, “What do you think of the Government?”

  It is well known that taxi drivers have a low opinion of governments—of any government—but almost without exception take a particularly dim view of their own. This question tends, therefore, to offer them the maximum opportunity to express themselves in monologue, or alternatively it gives them the impression that the fare is a secret sympathiser with the Government and therefore not to be engaged in conversation.

  This technique of asking just the right question to inhibit further conversation was a useful one, and was used by William in other social circumstances when small talk needed to be avoided. At cocktail parties, where one might quite reasonably simply wish to stand, or sit, and not be pestered by other guests seeking to make small talk, the use of a discreet lapel badge was sometimes to be recommended. This badge might state one’s religious position in unequivocal terms, and invite discussion on it. Thus a small badge saying “Please talk to me about Salvation” usually had the effect of ensuring a peaceful time at any party, leaving one untroubled by other guests coming up to engage one in unwanted conversation. Similarly a badge saying “No longer infectious” could usually be calculated to ensure physical space, another commodity in short supply at the more popular cocktail parties.

  Nevertheless, on this occasion William would have attempted to answer the taxi driver’s questions had Freddie de la Hay not started to whine.

  “Sounds a bit unhappy,” remarked the driver. “Wants up on the seat, I’d say. You can let him up as long as his paws are clean.”

  William thought that the taxi driver was right. Freddie de la Hay, who was still shivering with anxiety, now had his gaze fixed firmly on the seat next to his new carer.

  “Want up, old chap?” William asked, patting the seat beside him. “Up, Freddie de la Hay! Up!”

  Freddie de la Hay hesitated for a few moments, and then, as the taxi slowed down to turn a corner, he leapt up onto the seat beside William.

  “Good boy,” said William, patting the dog on the head. “Clever boy.”

  Freddie looked appreciatively at William, but then turned and stared pointedly at the back of the seat he was occupying.

  “Something wrong?” asked William. “Do you see something?”

  Freddie de la Hay responded to this question by moving further back in his seat and nuzzling at the seat belt. William, observing this, was puzzled. The dog appeared to be objecting to the seat belt; perhaps he thought it was a leash of some sort.

  Freddie started to whine again, pressing his snout behind the belt, trying to lift it off the seat.

  “He wants you to belt him in, mate,” said the taxi driver, who had observed all this in his rear-view mirror. “Smart dogs, these Pimlico terriers, obviously.”

  At first William could not believe this, but then, when he reached over to put the belt over Freddie de la Hay and the dog barked encouragingly, he knew that the driver was right.

  Freddie de la Hay had been trained to belt up in the back of a car.

  24. Lemon Gems

  JAMES AND CAROLINE sat on the sofa and ate the lemon gems they had just baked. The biscuits were, they felt, a success, although James was of the view that Nigella could have recommended just a touch more lemon. Caroline disagreed. “She never makes a mistake,” she said. “She’s the domestic goddess, remember.”

  “I’m not saying that she’s wrong,” James reassured her. “Heaven forfend that I would ever disagree with Nigella or Delia.” He bowed his head respectfully, an unexpected gesture, but touching, thought Caroline. “Or Jamie, for that matter,” he continued. “You have to trust these people, you know, Caroline. If we started to argue with our cookery writers, then where would it end …?”

  James, Caroline noticed, had a tendency to emphasise certain strategic words, to italicise them, a habit that gave particular weight to his pronouncements. Impressed with this, as with many of the things James said or did, she had tried to do the same, but found that she ended up emphasising the wrong words, thus adding opacity rather th
an clarity to what she said.

  She looked at James. Since that moment of accidental, shared intimacy in the kitchen, she had been wondering whether the conversation would revert to the subject they had been discussing over coffee earlier that day. James had said nothing further about that, and she found herself somewhat relieved. Perhaps the whole matter had been set aside; it was a delicate topic, and the baking of the lemon gems had changed the atmosphere to one of comfortable collaboration. James returned her gaze, but not in a way which gave any indication of his intentions.

  “What about you?” he said.

  “Me?”

  James picked up another lemon gem. “I know so little about you. We’re friends, of course, and we know one another well. But there’s a difference between knowing somebody and knowing them. You know what I mean?”

  Caroline was not sure, but decided that perhaps she did. James sometimes left her a bit behind, she felt, and she was eager that he should not think that she did not understand. “Yeah,” she said.

  James wiped a crumb from his lips. “So, I know a bit about your past, about Cheltenham and all that.” He waved a hand in the air to indicate a whole hinterland of personal history—a county, a family, a set of social expectations—Caroline’s whole family history. “I know the sort of background you’ve had to endure. Your old man being a land agent and all that sort of thing. And your mother. I’m surprised they didn’t put your photograph in the front of Rural Living.”

  Caroline froze. She was on the point of popping a lemon gem into her mouth, but now her hand fell to her lap. The lemon gem, held between nervous fingers, cracked slightly, but Nigella’s mixture held and it escaped being reduced to crumbs.

  “What?” Her voice was small.

  “Rural Living,” said James. “I can just see it, can’t you? Caroline, only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Whatever Jarvis of Bin End, or wherever, is pictured here—in pearls. Caroline is reading Art History at Oxford (almost) and hopes to work at Sotheby’s.” He laughed. “I can just see it.”

  Caroline laughed, but her laugh came out strangled, prompting James to enquire whether she was all right.

  “I’m fine,” said Caroline, offering him another lemon gem. That would distract him, she hoped, and perhaps steer the conversation into less dangerous waters.

  “Of course, you can’t help it,” James went on. “Nobody can help their background. Although you can correct things later on, once you’ve got away from family influences. Not everybody does, of course. Some people remain clones of their parents all the way to the grave.”

  “I quite like my parents,” said Caroline. And she did. They loved her; for all their fuddy-duddy ways and their outdated notions, they loved her, and she knew that she would never encounter such unconditional love again. Never.

  “Of course,” said James quickly. “Sorry. I wasn’t picking on them in particular. I was just thinking of what parents can do to their children—often with the best intentions in the world. You know Larkin’s poem?”

  Caroline was not sure.

  James smiled patiently. “It’s the one with the rather—how shall we put it?—forceful first line about what parents do to their kids. It was in a poetry book we had at school, and I remember that when we got to it, the English teacher went pale and moved very quickly to the next poem, some frightfully dull thing by Cecil Day Lewis. Of course that meant we all went and looked very closely at what Larkin had to say. But it’s mild stuff, really, compared with what everybody writes today. It must be frustrating being a poet—or any sort of artist—and not being able to offend anyone any more.” Or were people still as readily offended, and all that had changed was the nature of what was permissible and what was interdicted?

  He reached for another lemon gem—his sixth. “Sugar craving,” he said apologetically. “Your fault, Caroline, for suggesting that we bake these things.”

  “Oh well …”

  James licked his fingers. “Last one. That’s it.” He stared at Caroline intently. “What would you have done, by the way, if your parents had tried to get your photograph into Rural Living? What would you have said?”

  She looked away. James was proving persistent, and she would have to change the subject. “Let’s not talk about all that,” she said. “My parents are my parents. I’m me. Same as you, really. You don’t sign up to everything your paren—your father stands for, do you?”

  James shook his head. “No. But if I’m honest, I can see my father in me. Some of the things I do.”

  “Well, that’s natural enough.”

  “Maybe. But look, we were talking about you.” He paused, as if unsure about continuing. “Are you still seeing him?” he asked. “What’s he called again?”

  Caroline was on the point of answering, but stopped herself. Had she replied spontaneously, she would have confirmed that she was still seeing Tom. That was true, but she was only just still seeing him, and she had already decided that there was no future in the relationship. Her friendship with James was, she thought, on the cusp of change, and there was a chance that he might become more than a mere friend. Stranger things have happened, she said to herself—a banal phrase, a cliché, but one that nonetheless expressed the sense of opening out, of possibility, that she now experienced. Identity was not as simple a matter as many people believed: the old idea of clearly delineated male and female characteristics was distinctly passé, as old-fashioned as vanilla ice cream. Now there were new men, men in touch with their feminine side, and the intriguing category of metrosexuals too—sensitive men, men who used male cosmetics such as “man-liner,” men who would enjoy baking Nigella’s lemon gems. These men could be more than adequate lovers and husbands, she believed; much better than the one-dimensional macho types who might score ten out of ten on the heterosexuality scale but who were somewhat boring in their conversation and hopeless in the kitchen. Men like Tom.

  25. Paris

  “HE’S CALLED TOM,” said Caroline.

  James nodded. She had spoken about Tom before but he had not really been paying attention. “Of course. Tom. I remember—you told me. And …”

  She looked at him enquiringly. “And what?”

  “Are you and Tom still together?”

  She wanted to choose her words carefully. It was not that she was prepared to be untruthful, it was just that she was not entirely sure about her feelings, which were changing anyway. “Togetherness” was not a word she would ever have used to describe her relationship with Tom. They might have been together in the most general sense of the term, but they were not together in the way in which James pronounced it—they were certainly not italicised. “I still see him,” she said, and added, “now and then.”

  He was watching her. No, she thought then. Whatever happened in the future between Tom and her, this incipient thing with James, this fantasy, would never work. Not James, her wonderful, sympathetic, companionable James. She had a friend who had wasted three years in pursuing a man who was not in the slightest bit interested. At the time she had warned this friend that one could not expect to change something so fundamental, but her warning had been ignored. She must not do the same thing herself. Some men were destined to be good friends and nothing more. James was like that; it was so obvious. She should accept him for what he was and not encourage him to be something that he so clearly was not. He was fine as he was. He was perfect. Why nudge him into a relationship that would be inauthentic to him?

  James was smiling. “You don’t sound enthusiastic. You see him. That sounds really passionate, Caroline.”

  She looked away. James was right: it was not a passionate relationship.

  James continued. “Tell me this: How do you feel when you’ve got a date with him coming up? Do you count the minutes until you see him? Feel breathless? Fluttery?” He rubbed a hand across his stomach. “You know the feeling. Like that?”

  “I like him.”

  He shook his head. “That was not the question I asked. I want to know whether yo
u feel anticipation when you are about to see him. That really is the test, you know. Excitement. Anticipation.”

  It was difficult for her to answer, and she was not sure whether she wanted to do so anyway. He had guided their conversation into a realm of intimacy that she had explored with nobody else, not even her close girlfriends. It was strange to be talking this way to a man, even as comfortable a man as James. And yet that very strangeness had a strong appeal. One should be able to talk about these things; one should be able to share them.

  “It’s hard for me to know,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t feel something for Tom—I do. It’s just that …”

  “You don’t feel it, do you?” He spoke gently, as if guiding her to a source of pain, a tender spot.

  “No.”

  She realised that he had brought her to an understanding of her feelings she would not have achieved by herself, and she felt grateful as a result. That single word—that single cathartic “No”—had revealed a truth that had been there all along but which she had simply never confronted.

  He made a gesture with his hands—a gesture she interpreted as saying, Well, there you are. And he was right. There she was: it was the end of Tom.

  And the beginning of James? The thought refused to go away.

  “It’s not all that easy, you know,” she said. “Ending something. It’s messy, isn’t it?”

  She waited for an answer, but James was staring silently at the ceiling.

  “You do understand that?” she pressed. “You must know how hard it is to end a relationship. There are all sorts of connections and ties and associations. Bits of lives meshed together. You have to cut through all of that, as a surgeon cuts through living tissue.”

  He nodded. “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have done it yourself.”