Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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 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 w
anted 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 being 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.’

  ‘But that’s very hypocritical,’ said Jo.

  Dee laughed. ‘Oh yes, it’s hypocritical all right. But there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy in this country. Isn’t it the same in Australia?’

  That question required more than a few moments of thought. Then Jo replied, ‘I think we’re more direct speakers,’ she said. ‘We say things to people’s faces.’

  Dee was intrigued. ‘Such as?’

  Again Jo hesitated. ‘That I find you very attractive.’

  37. Dee Meets Freddie de la Hay

  Dee had not known what to say. For a few moments she stared at her flatmate, not in the way that one stares at something that interests one, but with the sort of stare used when one is looking at somebody and is suddenly too embarrassed to look away. If such a stare lingers, it lingers because it can do nothing else.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. And then, again, ‘Oh.’

  Then it was Jo’s turn to show embarrassment. She, too, said, ‘Oh.’

  Dee tore her gaze away and looked at the floor. They were standing in the kitchen, and she was looking down at cork tiles, which had been pitted over the years by stiletto heels. It was like the surface of a brown planet somewhere, she thought, the indentations being tiny hits by ancient meteorites.

  ‘Oh,’ repeated Jo. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You didn’t think . . . ?’

  Dee looked up with relief, and laughed. ‘Of course not.’

  She was lying. Of course she had.

  ‘You see,’ Jo went on, ‘that shows the truth of what I said about us Australians. We really do speak our minds. I was thinking that you look really good in that top. It suits you. Suits your colouring. Green.’

  Dee reached up to touch her blouse. ‘Thanks. I’ve had it for ages.’ All her clothes were old; second-hand, mostly, bought from charity shops or passed on by more affluent friends. There was a woman who came into the vitamin agency who had taken to giving Dee the clothes that she no longer needed. This top came from her, she remembered.

  ‘You’ve got good skin too,’ Jo went on. ‘High cheekbones. My face is going to sag when I’m forty. God, I’m going to sag.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Dee. ‘And your skin’s fine. I don’t see anything wrong with it.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t live in it,’ Jo retorted. ‘I know. You should see my mother. I’m going to be like her.’

  ‘We’re all going to be like our mothers,’ said Dee. ‘And we’re going to say the same things, too.’

  Jo shook her head. ‘Never.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Now, almost a year later, Dee found herself in the kitchen making herself a pot of green tea when Jo came into the room, already dressed in the grey tracksuit that she donned for her regular morning runs.

  Jo looked out of the window. ‘Nice day,’ she said. ‘I’m on duty at the wine bar this evening, worse luck. But the day’s free. I’m going to do ten miles this morning. Then I think I’ll have a picnic with some friends. One of the parks.’

  Dee thought that this was a good idea. She approved of exercise and took it herself, in theory at least. But exercise without a good diet was not enough. What was the use of pounding the pavements if one was deficient in selenium, or magnesium for that matter?

  She poured green tea into her cup. ‘I’m working,’ she said. ‘Saturday morning’s always busy for us.’ They would be so busy that she would not have very much time to talk to Martin. But she hoped that she would be able to sit him down after lunch and discuss his colonic irrigation. She had planted the seed in his mind, and she wanted to get back to it because she thought that he was on the point of agreeing to it. If he did agree, then she was going to suggest that they did it the following day. Doing it on a Sunday would give him time to take the salts in advance and it could be done in a leisurely way. Their flat would be best - she did not fancy going all the way out to Martin’s house in Wimbledon or wherever it was that he lived with his parents, carrying all the necessary equipment. And what would his parents think? People were sensitive about colonic irrigation, largely because they had no idea, Dee thought, about what it involved and what the benefits were. If only they knew, if only they could see what could be flushed out of the system. She had heard recently of a man who had swallowed a marble as a child and had only now, at the age of thirty, had it flushed out of his system. Imagine having a marble in one’s digestive tract for over twenty years! She would have to tell Martin about that. Perhaps it wou
ld persuade him.

  She was thinking about this when she suddenly heard an unfamiliar sound on the landing outside. ‘Is that a dog barking?’ she said to Jo.

  Jo frowned. ‘Sounded like it. But inside?’

  There was another bark - louder this time.

  ‘I’m going to take a look,’ said Dee. ‘Perhaps a stray has come in. Eddie often doesn’t shut the front door. I’ve asked him. But he doesn’t care.’

  She left the kitchen and went into the hall to open the front door. When she looked outside, it was to see William beginning to descend the final flight of stairs. At his side, attached to a leash, was Freddie de la Hay.

  William, hearing the door open, looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘Meet your new neighbour, Freddie de la Hay.’

  Dee stared at Freddie. How very strange. A dog with a surname. But it was Pimlico, after all, and one might expect anything to happen in Pimlico.

  ‘How do you do?’ she said.

  Freddie looked at her. Was this woman addressing him? Perhaps he should sit, just to be on the safe side. People were always asking dogs to sit, even when there was clearly no need to. Freddie sighed, and sat. Life was complicated. And he had just picked up an interesting scent, too. It came from downstairs. Very interesting.

  38. At Breakfast

  Down in Rye, Barbara Ragg sat with Oedipus Snark awaiting breakfast in the dining room of the Mermaid Inn. They were at the same table at which they had eaten dinner the previous night. That had hardly been the romantic evening she had been looking forward to; she rather regretted, in fact, mentioning the Greatorex manuscript at all, as Oedipus had harped on about it for the entire meal, eager for every detail she could provide. It was an extraordinary story, she agreed, but not that extraordinary, particularly since she had a very strong suspicion that Greatorex had made the whole thing up. Of course there was no yeti, even if there were some puzzling unexplained sightings of creatures that could be the yeti. But there was always a rational explanation for these things: a trick of light, an error of the human brain, a misinterpreted shadow.