Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Barbara paused. Oedipus Snark was watching her intently. “And?” he prompted. “What was he like?”

  “He was hairy,” said Barbara. “Like Esau. An hairy man.”

  “A hairy man,” corrected Oedipus.

  “An,” she said. “Esau was an hairy man.”

  He looked irritated. “What are you going on about?” he asked.

  34. William Plans a Soufflé

  WHILE BARBARA RAGG regaled Oedipus Snark with her account of Errol Greatorex’s manuscript, William French, wine merchant and now part-owner of the dog known as Freddie de la Hay, was in his flat in Corduroy Mansions, waiting for the return of his son, Eddie. Eddie spent Friday evenings in the pub with his friends, but would usually come home first; however, he had not done so that day. William wondered if he had gone straight to the pub, in which case he might not see his son until well after midnight—if he had the stamina to wait up for him.

  He felt distinctly disappointed. Now that he had taken the plunge and acquired Freddie de la Hay, he was eager to get the inevitable confrontation with Eddie out of the way. It would not be easy—he knew that—because Eddie had a temper and was given to emotional outbursts. He would not take the presence of Freddie de la Hay lying down.

  Which, as it happened, was what Freddie de la Hay himself was doing at that moment. He had found a spot on the rug in front of the drawing-room fireplace and had curled up there, his eyes just sufficiently open to watch William as he moved about the room.

  When William had first taken him upstairs, the dog had rushed around the flat, sniffing at the furniture. Once he had completed his inspection, he had gazed up at William, as if awaiting instructions.

  “Well,” said William, looking down at his new companion, “that’s about it, Freddie, old chap. I suppose it’s not all that exciting from the canine point of view, but you should be comfortable enough.”

  Freddie cocked his head to the side, as if to elicit a further remark from William. The dog was aware that something had changed in his life but he was not quite sure what. His inspection of the flat had yielded nothing significant—there were none of the smells he had been trained to detect at the airport, and so there was no need to bark. But he was puzzled: he had picked up the smell of two people in the flat, yet as far as he could see, there was only one. That was about as far as Freddie’s limited reasoning powers could go. Two smells, one person. All he knew, then, was that there was somebody missing.

  William went into the kitchen to prepare himself something to eat. Since the death of his wife some years earlier he had become an accomplished cook, at least in respect of the twenty or so recipes that he had written out in a small Moleskine notebook that Eddie had given him for Christmas. These recipes he had numbered from one to twenty, and he worked through them one by one, in numerical order. Tonight was number seventeen, which was an easily prepared cheese soufflé served with broccoli and Puy lentils.

  He started to grate the small block of Gruyère that he had bought the day before. That done, he helped himself to a glass of Chablis from an open bottle in the fridge. The Chablis, he thought, would go well with the Gruyère, the flinty taste of the wine providing a sharpness that would sit well against the cheese. Then he began working on the roux for the soufflé while the lentils boiled on the stove. How comfortable, he thought; how nice to be in the flat by myself without music drifting down the corridor from Eddie’s room. He has such appalling taste in music, thought William. All that insistent, throbbing bass rhythm—what can he possibly find to like in it?

  William had once asked Eddie what his music actually meant. His son had looked at him blankly.

  “What do you mean what does it mean?” Eddie asked. “It’s music. That’s all.”

  “But music means something,” William pointed out. “It has structure. It tells you something. It creates a mood, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it just sounds good,” said Eddie. “You like old music because you’re old. I like something more lively because I’m not past it like you.”

  William was used to such comments. “I wasn’t talking about our individual preferences,” he said mildly. “I was just wondering what your music, that thudding stuff you play, what it actually says about”—he searched for the right words—“about anything at all. Does it say anything?”

  “It’s random,” said Eddie.

  William sighed. And now, appreciating the silence, he thought about how much of Eddie’s random music he had been obliged to endure. He, who liked Mozart and Gregorian chant, had put up with the filling of his personal space with the very antithesis of all that. Well, now was the time to do something about it, and he would; it was his music that would be heard in the flat from now on.

  He was thinking about this, relishing the thought, when he heard the key turn in the lock. He put down the bowl in which he had been whisking the eggs for the soufflé. Eddie was his son; he had no reason to be afraid of him. And yet his breath came quickly and his mouth felt curiously dry as he made his way from the kitchen into the hall. He would have to tell Eddie about Freddie de la Hay before his son saw the dog. He needed to get the upper hand right away so that he would have the advantage in the confrontation that would inevitably ensue.

  Eddie opened the door and came into the hall.

  “I’ve got some interesting news,” William blurted out.

  “Oh yeah?” said Eddie.

  “Yeah,” said William. “I’ve acquired a pet.”

  Eddie frowned. “You?” he asked. “You’ve acquired a what?”

  “A pet,” William repeated.

  Eddie burst out laughing. “A hamster?” he said. “That’s pretty tragic, Dad. ‘Elderly Wine Merchant Acquires Hamster for Company.’” Eddie liked to talk in newspaper headlines—another habit that irritated William.

  William shook his head. “No,” he said. “‘Middle-aged Wine Merchant Gets Dog.’”

  Eddie, who had been walking across the hall towards his room, stopped where he was. “Dog?” he whispered.

  “Yes. A very agreeable dog,” confirmed William. “He’s called Freddie de la Hay. He’s through there in the drawing room. Go and take a look, if you like.”

  The deed was done, and William felt a surge of relief. He had presented Eddie with the clearest ultimatum, and it had been much easier than he had expected.

  Eddie glared at his father. “Have you gone out of your mind?” he hissed. “You … you know I can’t be near a dog. You know that.”

  William spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But you said you were going to move out. I’ve always assumed that you were going to do that. So the fact that you don’t like dogs shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

  35. Eddie Is Cool

  FOR A FEW MOMENTS Eddie said nothing, but stared intensely at his father in frank astonishment. Then, his disbelief changing to horror, he brushed past William and strode into the drawing room.

  Freddie de la Hay, half asleep on the Baluchi rug in front of the fireplace, content to doze in this new, agreeable place, lazily opened first one eye and then the other. Raising his nose from the rug, he sniffed at the air: Yes, this was the other person he had smelled on his earlier rounds of the flat. So this was the second occupant of the house. One could not, as a dog, expect that most perfect of arrangements from the canine perspective: one human and one dog. Such dispositions existed but were rare, and were not to be, it seemed, for Freddie de la Hay.

  He stared at Eddie for a few moments and then lowered his head back onto the rug to continue his doze. There was nothing he needed to do; any instructions, he imagined, would come from William, who was clearly now his master, and not from this new arrival.

  Eddie spun round and stormed back into the hall. William saw his expression and winced, his resolve not to be intimidated by his son seeming a small thing now in the face of this towering filial wrath.

  “Is this your idea of a joke, Dad?” Eddie shouted. And then, before William could answer, he added,
“Whose dog is it? Get them to come and fetch it.”

  William swallowed. He belonged to a generation that had missed the two great conflicts of the twentieth century and he had a profound distaste for any manifestation of anger. Seeing his son in this mood shocked him, and he was for a moment uncertain what to do. His instinct was to agree, to assure Eddie that the dog was only a visitor and that he had indeed been joking. But he managed to steel himself sufficiently to reply, “Sorry, Eddie, but it’s not a joke. I’ve always wanted a dog. And you did say that you were going to get your own place. That place with Stevie.”

  Eddie had been about to shout out something more but this stopped him. He frowned. He had said nothing to his father about Stevie’s proposal, or had he? No, he had only discussed it on the phone, when his friend had rung him. His father, then, must have been listening; it was the only explanation for his knowing anything about it.

  “So now you’re listening in to my telephone conversations, are you?” It was as if he were adding another outrage to a long list of grievances.

  William lowered his gaze. He had never been able to lie, and he could not lie now. “I picked up the telephone at the moment you answered it yourself. I didn’t intend to listen in.”

  “But you did.”

  He nodded. “I did. And perhaps it taught me the lesson that Polonius learned—you know, in Hamlet—that it doesn’t pay to eavesdrop, particularly when people are talking about you. You’ll never hear anything but ill of yourself. It’s the same with Googling yourself. Don’t Google yourself lest you read something you’d rather not read.”

  He was rather proud of the analogy, which struck him as being bang up to date, but it seemed lost on Eddie, who simply stared at him blankly, still cross, of course, but now blank too. William decided to press his advantage. “Oh yes,” he continued. “You hardly defended me when Stevie suggested that you were fed up with me, did you? What did he say? ‘Fed up with your old man? Blah, blah.’ Weren’t those the words he used?”

  “Stevie’s just Stevie,” Eddie mumbled. “You know how he is. He doesn’t mean it most of the time.”

  “Oh no?” said William. “Yet you went along with him quickly enough, didn’t you, Eddie?”

  Eddie shifted on his feet. “You’re trying to change the subject, Dad.”

  William’s voice rose as he replied. “Really? Well, let’s get back to the subject then, which is my life. I want to lead a life. I want to lead a life on my terms in my own flat. I want to listen to my music, not yours. I want to spend as long as I like in the bathroom in the morning, washing my own face. I want to have a dog. Maybe even two dogs. More, even. I want to have friends. I want everything that parents give up when they have children, especially children like you. I want quiet. I want to spend my own money on myself and not on you. That’s what I want, Eddie. That’s what I want.”

  William’s words were delivered with all the dignity and force of the Gettysburg Address. And the effect was extraordinary. Eddie suddenly stepped forward and put an arm around William’s shoulder. Then he leaned forward so that his face brushed against his father’s cheek, briefly, before he drew back and stared directly into William’s eyes.

  “All right, Dad,” he said. “It’s fine to cry. It really is.”

  “I’m not crying,” said William.

  “Sure, sure,” soothed Eddie. “Don’t hold it in.”

  “I have no desire to cry,” repeated William, emphasising each word. “I don’t know why you’re going on about it. I have no desire to cry. I’m in perfect control of my emotions, as I’m sure you can see.”

  “But that’s the trouble, Dad,” said Eddie. “That’s the trouble that all men have with their emotions. Particularly middle-class men like you. Elderly middle-class men. They can’t let go. It all builds up and then … out it comes, and they flip.”

  William now raised his voice. “I have not flipped,” he said.

  “No, not yet,” said Eddie. “But that’s the way it happens. Everything looks fine on the surface, but just below there are all those churning emotions—all of them without an outlet. It’s unnatural.”

  William tried to pull himself away from his son, who still had an arm around his shoulder. But Eddie hung on. “I’m with you, Dad,” he said. “We can get through this thing together.”

  “What thing?” asked William.

  “This whole mid-life crisis thing that you’re experiencing. This dog thing. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. A powerful car. A dog. A younger woman. Same thing. Lots of men do exactly that during their MLC.” He paused. “So don’t you worry any more—it’s going to be all right. If it helps you, then I can live with a dog. I’m cool with that. Hakuna matata. You know what that means? No problems, in Swahili. Hakuna matata, Dad!”

  36. I Find You Very Attractive

  ON SATURDAY MORNING it was Jo who was up first in the shared flat in Corduroy Mansions. She was an early riser and always had been, a result of her upbringing in Perth. Her architect parents, Gavin and Madge Partlin, were believers in a healthy outdoor existence, which had been one of the reasons why they had moved from Sydney to Perth shortly after Jo’s birth. It was not that their lifestyle in Sydney had been particularly unhealthy—it had not—but neither had enjoyed the constraints of the flat in which they lived, nor the chilled, conditioned air of the tall city building they both worked in. In Perth they could live near the beach and work from home; in the mornings they could go running together along the beach, just below the high-tide mark, where the sand was firm enough for pounding feet, carrying Jo in her special baby-backpack. At weekends, if they wished, they could go camping near Margaret River, where the air that wafted in from the coast blew straight from the southern oceans; scented with the eucalyptus of the forests, it seemed to fill the lungs with life and energy.

  Coming from such a background, Jo might have expected to find the transition to a life in London a difficult one. But she had not. London was for her something of a promised land—not a place where she could see herself staying for ever, but the place to be for that stage of one’s life at which one yearned after something different, even if one might not come right out and say that one wanted adventure. Which is what she did want, in fact; but where might one find such experiences when the world had contracted so much? When Base Camp at Everest itself could be reached in two days rather than two weeks? When even space flight was about to become a commodity which one might pay for on a credit card and book online? Like so many of her peers, she had gone travelling for a year after completing her course in physical education at the University of Western Australia. She had gone to Thailand, where she had spent four months working her way up from Krabi to Chiang Mai, staying in hostels and cheap guest houses. But the life of a lotus-eater, to which the existence of staying in Thai resorts proved to be so similar, became boring and eventually palled. Travel was all very well, but it needed a sense of purpose—something which a journey without a terminus always lacked. After Thailand there were Vietnam and Cambodia, but she was impatient and beginning to run out of money. It was time to go to London.

  The flat in Corduroy Mansions was the first one she looked at, seeing Jenny’s advertisement by chance a few minutes after it had gone live on Gumtree. She had arrived two hours later, been interviewed by Jenny and agreed to move in the next day.

  Dee had been interviewed the day after that, with Jo being co-opted onto the vetting committee. She and Jo had taken to one another immediately, although both of them had been less sure about Caroline when it was her turn to be assessed as the final member of the flat. “I’m not too sure,” Dee whispered to Jo as Jenny took Caroline out of the room to show her the bedroom she would have.

  “No? What’s the problem?”

  “She’s a bit … you know.”

  Jo had her doubts too, but was it because Caroline was a bit … you know? And what was “you know” anyway?

  “I don’t know, actually,” she said. Was “you know” the same as bei
ng a whinger? English people were said to whinge a bit but perhaps in England itself they could be allowed to do so. After all, it was their country, even if it was run by Scots.

  “Posh,” said Dee simply.

  “Oh.” That was different from being a whinger, although one might have, of course, a posh whinger.

  But Jo’s fundamental sense of fairness, her Australian heritage, came to the fore. She remembered her father once remarking, “You can’t help the bed you’re born in, you know.” She had been a teenager when he said that, and the observation had stuck in her memory. Of course you can’t help who you are. That is something that people forgot, she felt. They forgot it when they were unkind to people because of where they came from, or because they were different, or because they had greasy skin. Her father was right. “She can’t help that, you know,” she pointed out. “She can’t help the way she talks, can she? None of us can.”

  Dee had found herself unable to argue with that, although she mumbled something about Sloane Rangers. But they both decided that they would not object to Caroline’s admission to the flat, which was just as well because Jenny announced when she came back into the room that Caroline would be moving in.

  “Why did she ask us to interview her if she was going to make up her mind by herself?” Jo later complained to Dee.

  Dee thought for a moment. “Because that’s what we call consultation in this country,” she said. “It’s the same with government. Look at how they have all these consultation exercises. But they decide policy in advance, before they have the consultation exercise, and then they announce what they’re going to do—which is exactly what they were always going to do anyway. That’s the way it works.”