Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  In a moment of great clarity, William realised that anybody who got between the dogs would be in danger of being badly mauled - not by Freddie, of course, but by the mesomorphic Diesel. Yet he was in no doubt that if he did not intervene, this would be the end of Freddie de la Hay. Valiant though Freddie undoubtedly was, he would be no match for the steroid-fed Diesel, the worst sort of dog in terms of attitude.

  William took a deep breath. Then, directing himself towards Diesel, he shouted in as stern a voice as he could manage, ‘Diesel!’

  Diesel hesitated and looked towards William.

  ‘Diesel!’ William continued in stentorian tones. ‘Diesel, sit! Sit!’

  For a moment Diesel looked confused, and then sat down firmly. He was well trained, like a Royal Marine, and when told to sit, he sat.

  Diesel’s owner looked on in astonishment while William stepped firmly forward and snatched Freddie de la Hay’s leash from Stevie’s hand. Attaching it quickly to Freddie’s collar, he led the relieved dog back to Marcia, took her by the arm and walked at a fast pace down the passage.

  Eddie shouted out something, as did Diesel’s owner, but neither William nor Marcia heard what it was, nor bothered to listen.

  ‘Chutzpah!’ said Marcia as they turned onto the lane. ‘William, you’re brilliant!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said William. ‘It seemed the obvious thing to do.’ He spoke casually but inside he was shaking with a mixture of relief, fear and sheer astonishment at his own performance. It could have ended quite differently, he thought. What if Diesel had ignored him or possibly not understood the way he spoke? Freddie could be dead by now if that had happened.

  They went back to the van and Freddie de la Hay hopped into the back while William sat in the passenger seat, wiped his brow with his handkerchief and closed his eyes. Marcia could detect a state of shock when she saw it, and she held William’s hand gently before she started the engine.

  ‘We’ll go home and have a nice dinner,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some scallops. And we’ll give Freddie de la Hay a steak.’

  William opened his eyes. ‘He’s a vegetarian,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Was,’ said Marcia.

  70. At the Ragg Porter Agency

  That Monday was not proving to be a particularly busy day at the Ragg Porter Literary Agency, and the three directors - Barbara (non-fiction), Sheila Stevens (films and other media) and Rupert Porter (fiction) - had taken the opportunity to have their quarterly planning meeting somewhat in advance of its normal date. The agency was doing well, having recently taken over the administration of the estate of a deceased novelist who had suddenly - and posthumously - become immensely successful. They were now looking at the list of their existing authors with a view to guessing which of them might be expected to die in the short rather than the long term, and which of these might enjoy a sudden burst of posthumous popularity.

  ‘It seems such a pity that some people have to pass on in order to be widely read,’ said Sheila.

  Barbara winced. ‘For heaven’s sake don’t use that term,’ she said. ‘Passing on! What a euphemism. Call it what it is. You die when you die, you don’t pass on. Where do you pass on to, may I ask?’

  Rupert came to his colleague’s defence. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Passing on sounds very reassuring. Rather stately, in fact. And who knows where we go after this mortal vale? My housemaster at Uppingham used to talk about the Elysian Fields as if they really existed. I think he may have believed in them. Probably did.’

  Barbara gave him a glance. They heard a great deal from Rupert about Uppingham.

  ‘Well, that’s very nice,’ she said.

  Rupert did not pick up her sarcasm. ‘Yes, indeed it was. He used to give us little talks and, do you know, everybody listened. Even the chaps who were not very academic. They sat there and listened. He explained that the Elysian Fields were probably restricted to those connected with the gods in some way; ordinary people had to go to the Fields of Asphodel, if I remember correctly. Not quite so comfortable.’

  ‘Like standard class on the trains,’ suggested Sheila.

  Rupert nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose so. That’s quite a good analogy, in fact. Indeed, one might expand it and apply it to Christian notions of the afterlife. First class would be heaven, while standard class would be hell, or purgatory.’

  ‘That depends on the line,’ said Sheila. ‘Some lines are all right, the others, well . . . Why do we tolerate it? Why do we tolerate having the worst train service in western Europe? And one of the most expensive ones in the whole world?’

  ‘Because we privatised the railways,’ Barbara said. ‘The French and the Germans warned us. They said: “It’s not going to work.” And we ignored them, and look at us now. Dirty trains. Not enough seats. Nowhere to put your luggage. When you get into the train in France, for example, there’s always bags of room to stow your suitcase. They assume, you see, that people are going to travel with a suitcase. Radical assumption!’

  ‘So what are we going to do about it?’ asked Rupert.

  They looked at one another. ‘Well, frankly,’ said Barbara, ‘I don’t see that there’s much that Ragg Porter can do about it. So I suggest that we get on with our meeting.’

  ‘All right,’ said Rupert. And then, with the air of one who had just remembered something, ‘Oh, I took a call for you, Barbara, while you were out for lunch.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rupert. ‘It was a journalist. I noted his number down somewhere. He wanted to know about that Greatorex manuscript of yours.’

  Rupert now had Barbara’s full attention. ‘Greatorex?’ How had the press got to hear of this?

  ‘Yes. That’s the yeti biography, isn’t it?’ said Rupert. ‘Not that I believe it for one moment. At Uppingham we had a chap who had climbed quite a few of those mountains in Nepal. He said that the yeti was complete nonsense.’

  Barbara gave him a withering look. ‘That is a matter of opinion. Errol Greatorex is a highly regarded travel writer.’ She held Rupert’s gaze. ‘And may I remind you of the advance we’re going to be getting for this particular manuscript? And serialisation rights sold to the Sunday Telegraph. So don’t talk this thing down, Rupert.’

  Rupert put up his hands in mock defence. ‘All right.’

  Barbara still looked at him severely. ‘Who was this person, anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘Somebody from The Times,’ he said. ‘He said that he had been talking to an MP he knows who told him that you had this manuscript and that you could arrange an interview for him.’

  Barbara’s eyes glinted. ‘Which MP, may I ask?’ She knew the answer, of course.

  Rupert laughed. ‘Your boyfriend. Oedipus Snark.’ He paused. ‘Pillow talk getting out of hand, Barbara?’

  Barbara ignored this and they moved on to the next topic on the meeting agenda. But immediately after the meeting she got the journalist’s telephone number from Rupert. She would have to handle this carefully, she thought. If the story broke prematurely, then the large advance that she was confident of securing for her author might be compromised. The point about the yeti book was that it would have impact, and the leaking of the story beforehand could substantially diminish that.

  The journalist was available and took Barbara’s call.

  ‘So what’s the story?’ he asked. ‘Is it true that you’ve got the biography of the abominable snowman?’

  Barbara laughed. ‘Who on earth told you that?’

  ‘Somebody. You know that we don’t reveal our sources.’

  ‘Well, I know exactly who it was: Oedipus Snark. And yes, it’s true that I spoke to him about this. But it was a joke. A complete joke. I didn’t expect Oedipus to take it any further. I assumed that he’d know that the whole thing was absurd.’

  The journalist was silent. ‘You mean there’s no yeti?’

  Barbara laughed. ‘Of course there’s no yeti. Sorry about that. And no Father Christmas either.’
/>   The journalist sounded disappointed. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘The best-laid scoops of mice and men . . .’

  ‘Well put,’ said Barbara, and rang off.

  She stood at the window and thought. Oedipus Snark could spoil everything unless he were stopped. But how did you stop somebody like that? Threaten him with something? But what could she threaten Oedipus Snark with? Unless . . .

  71. On the Nature of Friendship

  She was still thinking of the yeti - and Oedipus Snark - when she reached the door of her building in Chepstow Villas. Like William French, Barbara Ragg lived on the top floor, but that was where the similarities between his and her domestic arrangements ended. Corduroy Mansions was nowhere near as well appointed as Sydney Villa, the house in which Barbara had lived for the last twelve years. Her flat in Sydney Villa, a four-floor building of generously sized apartments - one to each floor - had belonged to Fatty Porter, the business partner of Barbara’s late father, Gregory Ragg. When Fatty had stopped working and moved to Norfolk, he had sold the flat to Gregory, who had lived in it for little more than a year before he too retired and took up residence in Kent. Gregory had given the flat to Barbara, much to the annoyance of Rupert Porter, who thought that his father would not have sold the flat to Gregory had he known that Gregory intended it for his daughter.

  ‘I would have loved to live there, Dad,’ Rupert had complained to his father. ‘Gregory knew all along that Barbara wanted it. Why should she be there and I’m stuck in my smelly old place?’ His smelly old place was in fact a rather pleasant flat in Holland Park, not far away from Sydney Villa. What really rankled Rupert was that the transaction had meant that he could not fulfil his ambition to have two flats rather than one.

  Not that Rupert and Barbara did not get on - they sparred a little, as colleagues will do, but beneath there were the strong bonds that bind those who are members of families that have run a business together over more than one generation. And Fatty and Gregory themselves had been very close friends - both members of the Savile Club, where they dined together once a week and where Fatty had for many years sat on the catering committee. Rupert and Barbara were not quite as close, because Barbara had never really got on with any of Rupert’s girlfriends, nor, after he married, with his wife, Gloria.

  ‘She doesn’t like me,’ said Gloria. ‘I can sense it. You know how you can sense dislike. You just feel it.’

  ‘Negative waves,’ said Rupert. ‘You can pick up negative waves. But do you think Barbara really doesn’t like you? She seems civil enough.’

  ‘Yes, civil,’ said Gloria. ‘But have you noticed that when she’s talking to us, she always looks at you? Have you noticed that? Even if she’s saying something to me, she looks at you.’

  ‘There was a chap like that at Uppingham,’ mused Rupert. ‘He always looked at somebody else when he spoke to you. Strange chap.’ He paused. ‘Maybe she looks at me just because she’s used to my face. She sees it at the office all the time and so she’s used to it.’

  Gloria shook her head. ‘I think it’s because she’s jealous. Deep down, she’s jealous of me. You were her friend - ever since you were small. You went to each other’s birthday parties, didn’t you? Right from the beginning.’

  Rupert smiled. ‘She’s not jealous,’ he said. ‘She’s just a friend. There’s never been anything more than that between us.’

  Gloria did not doubt that - at least from Rupert’s point of view. But she was a woman, after all, and she had views on how women felt about their male friends. No male friend, she believed, was ever just a friend. His potential for being something else was always, even if only subconsciously, evaluated, thought about.

  ‘And anyway,’ Rupert went on, ‘she’s got that awful boyfriend of hers. That Snark. Oedipus Snark, no less. I was at Uppingham with him, you know. What on earth was a mother doing calling her son Oedipus? What can she have been thinking of?’

  ‘I can’t stand him,’ said Gloria. ‘Remember when Barbara managed to persuade him to come and open the Elizabethan Fair in the gardens and he turned up twenty minutes late and left after five minutes? Ghastly man. Insincere. Untrustworthy. Strange that he should be a Liberal Democrat. Not a trace of sandals.’

  ‘I don’t care for him a great deal,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s funny, when we were at school there was another boy and the two of them looked quite alike. Not alike in any other way, just their looks. A chap called Ratty Mason, poor fellow. None of us knew, or even suspected.’

  Gloria frowned. She had not heard of Ratty Mason before and felt that she needed to find out more. But not now; now she was thinking of friendship between men and women. She was wondering how possible it was for a woman to form a friendship with another woman who was principally a friend of her husband or her lover. Could one do that, or were there always going to be tensions underneath the surface? And in her particular, difficult case, was the problem hers or was it Barbara’s? Barbara might not be jealous of her being married to Rupert; it might be she who was jealous of Barbara. Was that the way it was?

  ‘Do you think that a woman can have a friendship - a strong friendship - with a man?’ she asked.

  ‘Depends on what sort of friendship you’re talking about,’ said Rupert. ‘If you’re talking about the type of friendship that D. H. Lawrence goes on about, then . . . well, I’m not sure. I suppose man-woman friendships are different.’

  ‘Different from what?’

  ‘From the friendships that men have.’

  Gloria looked at her husband. He was always talking about a whole cast of friends, but she very rarely saw any of them; nor, she thought, did he. ‘David and Jonathan?’ she asked. ‘That sort of friendship?’

  ‘Not many men have that,’ said Rupert. ‘Most men have rather distant relations with their male friends. Whereas women are much more emotionally engaged with their female friends. They love their friends. They’re much better at that than we men are.’

  Gloria thought that Rupert was generalising rather too much: there were some men with a great talent for friendship; there were some, too, who were emotionally engaged with their friends to the same extent as were women. But then there were so many men who were, quite simply, lonely; who did not seem to know how to conduct a friendship. There were legions and legions of those.

  But now she came back to the other question that was troubling her: who was Ratty Mason? Wives believe they know their husbands, but often do not - not really - she now realised. There are whole hinterlands that they do not see: old friends never mentioned, private sorrows, worries about virility, doubts and disappointments. And men go through life bearing all these in the name of masculinity and manliness, until it all becomes too much and they dissolve into tears.

  ‘Who was Ratty Mason? Tell me about him.’

  Rupert shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Can’t.’

  72. Rupert’s Insecurities

  Barbara Ragg, of course, had not been troubled by Rupert’s feelings over her flat for the simple reason that he had never expressed them within her hearing. There had been the occasional comment that was mildly suggestive of envy, but nothing unambiguous. That would have been difficult; one person could hardly say to another that he considered her house to be his by right. Although there were cases where that was said - at an international level - by those who eyed with intent the land and dwellings of others. Such claims are made here and there in our troubled world by bullies and expansionists of every stripe. But Rupert was not one of these - not by the remotest stretch of the imagination - and so he never revealed to Barbara the views he discussed with Gloria. ‘They stole that flat,’ he remarked to his wife. ‘Her father did not pay a full market price. Dad thought that Gregory wanted to live in it himself. And all the time he was planning to give it to Barbara! If Dad had known that it was for her, he would have passed it on to me instead. They stole it - it’s as simple as that.’

  Gloria was not so sure. She was a fair-minded person and although she thought that
Barbara, in Rupert’s words, directed negative waves towards her, she was not prepared to leap to conclusions about her involvement in this particular historical injustice - if that was what it was.

  ‘But they did buy it, didn’t they? Fatty sold it willingly. “Willing seller, willing buyer” - isn’t that what they say?’

  This annoyed Rupert. ‘Who says? Who is this they that people talk about?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Gloria. ‘It’s an expression, that’s all. It’s a way of saying “I’ve heard it said”.’

  ‘Well, you should be more exact,’ said Rupert peevishly. ‘At Uppingham we had this really good housemaster. He used to fine you a penny if you made any statement that couldn’t be supported. He collected all the fines and then used the money to buy books for the house library.’

  Gloria stared at him. ‘The point is, it’s no good raking over old coals. Even if Gregory induced your father to sell on the understanding that he would live in the flat himself, you can’t go back and re-open all that. It’s old business. You have to move on.’

  Rupert looked irritated. ‘I have moved on,’ he said. ‘I moved on ages ago. I wouldn’t dream of taking this up with Barbara - it’s just that I do occasionally think of it, and it makes me really cross. It’s like when you hear of some great injustice - it rankles, even on an individual level. You may know that you can’t do anything about it, but it’s there - it’s there in the room with you and you can’t ignore it.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A great injustice?’ Rupert asked. ‘Oh, there are bags of those. Which one do you want me to name? The Poles?’

  ‘What about the Poles?’

  Rupert spread his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘We let them down. The whole world let them down. We put them into the hands of the Soviet Union - into Stalin’s bloody hands. Ireland. The Kurds. The list is a very long one.’