Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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 re-opened 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 freemasonry 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 looked 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.

  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.”
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br />   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 photography 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, countyish 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.