Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘Well, I applied for the job and I got it. I went up to Barranquilla and was given a room by a family who lived near the school. They were tremendously kind and made me feel very much at home. We exchanged lessons - I spoke to them in English one day and the next day they would speak to me in Spanish. My Spanish improved greatly and I learned all the current slang. Not that I could use any slang at the Colegio - it was a very proper place. A few days after I arrived, one of the teachers came up and asked me, quite seriously and in a very correct English accent, “Is it true that in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen?”’

  Barbara burst out laughing. ‘And what did you reply?’

  ‘’Ardly hever,’ said Hugh.

  81. A Country House Weekend

  This is hardly very traumatic, thought Barbara. She now reckoned that the moment had come to offer Hugh a further glass of Chablis, having felt until then that to mention Chablis in the midst of an encounter with past trauma would have been perhaps a little flippant.

  Hugh accepted. ‘I was happy enough in Barranquilla,’ he went on. ‘My working commitments weren’t heavy and I had made a lot of new friends. It was warm and comfortable - a very easy place to be. You had to be a bit careful, of course - everywhere in Colombia has its dangers, and every so often there were items in the papers about kidnappings, and worse. As you know, in Colombia there are always guerrillas popping up and taking a swipe at the government. There were also thousands of narcotraficantes , who could be pretty ruthless. These people even had submarines that they ran from Barranquilla to the US to smuggle cocaine. It was a bit of a frontier town, in a way.

  ‘I thought, of course, that none of this would have anything to do with me. I was a very junior, insignificant teacher of a foreign language, and I didn’t imagine for a moment that I would see any of these things, let alone get involved in them. How wrong can you be?’

  He looked at Barbara as if expecting an answer, so she replied, ‘Very wrong?’

  Hugh took a sip of his Chablis. ‘Yes, very.’ He paused and looked at Barbara with concern. ‘You promise you won’t laugh?’

  ‘Of course I promise. I wouldn’t dream of laughing. I really wouldn’t.’

  He seemed reassured. ‘Well, all right. One Friday afternoon I had a telephone call from the mother of one of my pupils at the school. These people, who were tremendously grand, did not live in Barranquilla but had an estate out in the country, some distance away. The school holidays were coming up, she said, and would I be interested in spending a couple of days on their estate? She explained that they were very isolated, but there would be plenty of opportunities to ride, if I wished, or I could just sit around and read and swim in the pool. She made it sound very attractive, and since I had nothing else to do I saw no reason not to accept the invitation. She then said that I would be picked up and flown there in their small private plane. Her husband, she explained, would send his pilot.’

  Barbara Ragg watched him as the tale unfolded. He had a way of telling a story that was completely natural and quite transfixing. She could not bear the thought of waiting for the outcome, although she knew in advance that it was not going to end well.

  ‘I told the family I was staying with about the invitation, and they seemed a little bit concerned. I asked them whether they thought I should have turned it down and they said, rather enigmatically, that even if they had thought that, they would not advise me to refuse. “There are some people in this country,” they said, “whose invitations cannot be turned down. The only excuse they accept is that you’re dead and can’t come for that reason. Even then, they can be a bit grudging.”

  ‘I thought this very strange but I chose not to let it prey on my mind. When the car came to collect me to take me to the plane, I decided to take with me more than just the things I would need for only a few days. I took my trip diary and my walking boots and the very long Russian novel I was reading. It was just as well.’

  Hugh had reached the bottom of his glass of Chablis, and Barbara reached forward to refill it. She was attracted by the slight air of vulnerability, both touching and profoundly appealing, that settled upon him as he told this story. Oedipus Snark would never have been able to achieve an effect like this - he was always in control of the world, defeating it, proving himself, like the hero of some impossible adventure novel. What have I done, she asked herself, contemplating Hugh now, to merit a move from that man to this? The gods of mortal concupiscence had been kind - far kinder than she could ever have imagined they would be to a thirty-something literary agent with a bad record for choosing the wrong sort of man.

  ‘Colombia is a strikingly beautiful country,’ Hugh went on. ‘I remember so vividly the flight in that small plane over the rich green landscape. The pilot said that we could fly low if I wished to see things: villages, colourful buses on the roads, fields, those great, towering trees they go in for. Then suddenly there was a landing strip on a sweep of land in front of a large hill, and we were down.

  ‘We were miles from anywhere, on a landing strip cleared out of thick bush. Under the trees to one side of the strip there was a jeep - two jeeps, in fact - one with two or three men carrying small machine guns. That did not surprise me all that much - I had become used to seeing machine guns in Colombia. People had to have them to protect themselves against attack from all sorts of quarters. It would have been surprising, in fact, if my hosts had not had any machine guns - it would have been a reason to be suspicious.

  ‘My hostess was waiting to greet me up at the main house. I had met her once before at the school when she had come to discuss her son’s progress, and I had quite liked her. She had the bearing that the South American rich have - a sort of imperious confidence that comes from knowing just what their wealth confers upon them, which is immunity from the lot of everybody else, whatever that may be. And they don’t hesitate to let you know that they have a lot of money. In this country the rich are discreet: “Rich? Not us! Oh no!” In South America it’s very different.

  ‘Apolinar, their son, was standing with his mother on the veranda when I arrived. He was thirteen or thereabouts, and he hadn’t made a particular impression on me at the school. I remembered his name, of course, as it was Spanish for Apollo. In fact, I found myself thinking of him as Apollo rather than Apolinar, which made things rather comic. Has Apollo done his homework yet? is rather a strange thing to ask yourself, don’t you think?’

  Barbara laughed but then stopped herself, remembering that she had promised not to. But Hugh was laughing too. Then he became grave again.

  ‘I had no idea at the time,’ he said. ‘None.’

  82. Poisonous Snakes

  ‘My hostess,’ Hugh continued, ‘left Apollo to show me round. His manner was rather shy at first, which was understandable I suppose, in view of the fact that I was one of his teachers - even though there were probably only six years between us. Such a gap may be nothing later on, but at that age it seems like a whole generation.

  ‘The house was vast, rambling off in every direction from a central courtyard, but with the comfortable intimacy that you find in Spanish colonial architecture. We don’t go in for courtyards in this country, do we? I wish we did.’

  Barbara frowned. Did we really have no courtyards? Hugh saw the effect of his question and pressed her on it. ‘Well, just think: how many people do you know who have a courtyard in their house?’

  She thought there must be some, but when she tried to list them . . .

  ‘You see?’ said Hugh. ‘We’re deprived of courtyards.’

  ‘Well, so many people live in flats. You can’t expect them to have a courtyard.’

  Hugh was quick to contradict her. ‘Yes, you can. If you go to a French or Italian city you’ll see flats arranged around a courtyard. And there are some in Scotland. In some of those small fishing villages in Fife, quite modest houses have little courtyards. There are very few courtyards in England. Some, but not many.’

  Barbara though
t that there must be a reason for this. ‘The weather?’ she wondered. ‘Why have courtyards if you have weather like ours? And space, too. We don’t have much room, do we?’

  Hugh was not convinced. ‘A courtyard is actually rather a good thing to have in bad, blustery weather. You’re sheltered from the winds. And as far as space is concerned, look at the room that is taken up by gardens. People insist on a little strip of grass and a flowerbed - but how much use do they get out of that? They would use the space much more if they had a courtyard and grew plants in tubs and troughs. I really think that.

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ he went on. ‘There’s a book you should read. It’s called A Pattern Language and it’s by a group of architects. I think the main author’s called Christopher Alexander, something like that. Anyway, they set out a whole lot of principles for humane architecture - for making rooms and houses in which people will feel comfortable. Rooms, for instance, should have light from two sources. Houses should not be built in long rows along the side of roads - that’s why so much of urban Britain has been rendered sterile, you know, because people just don’t feel comfortable living in long lines. They can’t relate to the other people on the line. It’s that simple. The same goes for American strip malls - they’ve killed cities. Whereas if you build everything in clusters, around what are effectively open-air courtyards, then it all feels quite different. People feel happy and secure. We feel at our most comfortable when we’re living round a courtyard. It’s just such a sympathetic space.’

  Barbara smiled. She was enjoying the luxury of being with a young man who used the expression sympathetic space. That was a real treat. The expression, she felt, could be used as a shibboleth, an expression that one had to utter to establish bona fides - a password at the gate of the camp. But in spite of the sheer, almost physical pleasure of listening to Hugh talk about courtyards, she was keen to discover what had happened in Colombia.

  ‘And the Colombian family’s mansion had courtyards?’ she asked.

  ‘Bags of them. Small courtyards leading off bigger ones. Courtyards filled with plants - orchids grew well there. A courtyard that contained an aviary. Highly coloured South American parrots. A toucan. It was all very beautiful.

  ‘Apollo was matter of fact about it; the children of the rich usually are. Didn’t everybody have courtyards like this? That’s what he probably thought. Either that, or he didn’t care one way or the other. I suppose if you’re called Apollo, there’s a lot that’s going to be beneath your notice.

  ‘One of the servants had taken my bags to my room, which was at the back of the house, looking towards the large jungle-covered hill that dominated the property. It was a suite of rooms, actually. Leading off the bedroom was a sitting room with heavy Spanish colonial furniture and pictures of family ancestors: a fierce military type with an intimidating moustache; a rather sultry-looking woman in a blue satin dress, all ostrich feathers and bows; a couple of children dressed in uncomfortable-looking outfits, a pony standing behind them. How unhappy that pony looked - later on, during my incarceration, I used to stare at that pony’s face and marvel at how well the artist had captured the state of being subservient, trapped, under the power of another. It was a look of resignation, of resigned acceptance of a fate that was not that which one would have chosen for oneself.

  ‘Apollo took me outside to show me the swimming pool, which was reached by walking along a narrow, well-tended path through a great shrubbery of rhododendrons. The pool was at the edge of the cleared land where the house and outbuildings stood and it projected into the jungle itself. It was a large stone construction, rather like a half-sunken reservoir. To get into it, you had to mount several stone steps at the side, leading up to the rim, and there before you was the surface of the water, which was very clear but seemed black. This was because of the colour of the stone from which the basin was made. It was a sort of basalt, I think.

  ‘The pool was fed by a stream that entered it at one end - it was really rather long. Then, at the other end, the water tumbled over rocks and became a small rivulet that disappeared into the shrubbery. Apollo explained that it was wise to walk round the perimeter of the pool before diving in, because of snakes. They often became trapped, the smaller ones finding it difficult to surmount the obstacle presented by the six inches or so of sheer stone between the water and the top of the wall. There was a net on a long pole, which could be used to extract the snakes from the water and deposit them in a large urn that the gardeners had placed at the edge of the shrubbery.

  ‘I asked him if the snakes were poisonous and he replied that many were. “Everything is dangerous in this country,” he said. “Snakes, plants, mountain roads . . . mothers.”’

  83. Freddie de la Hay Forgiven

  William had loved his Belgian Shoes, even if he had only had them for a very brief time. They had been so comfortable, with their lightness and their soft, horsehair-filled soles. And now, holding the piece of mangled leather he had taken from Freddie de la Hay’s jaws, he reflected on how foolish, indeed how vain it was to be proud of something like an item of clothing or a pair of shoes. But that was how we were - the pride we felt in childhood when we got something new to wear never really went away. When he was six he had been given a pair of red wellington boots that had filled his heart to bursting point with pride and pleasure; he had been reminded, years later, by his mother how he refused for weeks to take the boots off, wearing them to bed, to church, everywhere.

  Marcia looked at Freddie de la Hay with horror when she realised what he had done. ‘You wicked, wicked dog!’ she shouted. ‘Bad dog!’

  Freddie de la Hay hung his head. A small drop of saliva fell from his mouth to the floor; it could have been a tear.

  ‘Smack him,’ Marcia urged. ‘William, you can’t let him get away with it! Your lovely Belgian Shoes. Bad, bad dog!’

  ‘I can’t smack him,’ said William. ‘He’s already suffering remorse. Look at him. He’s saying sorry.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ snapped Marcia. ‘He’s just bad.’

  William shook his head. ‘He’s not bad. He’s had a bit of a lapse, that’s all.’

  He crouched down on his haunches and gently lifted up Freddie’s snout so that man and dog were looking at one another eye to eye. ‘Freddie, I’m very disappointed,’ he said. ‘Those shoes . . . well, they were very special shoes. Do you promise never to do that again?’

  Freddie stared at William. He knew that he had done something terrible and that he was in disgrace. He was not quite sure what it was, but he knew that there had been a sudden interruption of the current of love and affection that existed between him and William, which was, for him as it was for all dogs, the entire rationale of his existence. His theology was simple: William existed, and he, Freddie, existed to do William’s bidding and to please him. William’s displeasure was terrible unto him, and he could not bear it. But now his owner was patting his head and that brief, awful period of being cut off was over. He licked William’s hand, grateful for the restoration, the forgiveness.

  Marcia turned away. Seeing William forgive Freddie de la Hay in this way, she had become conscious of how vindictive she sounded when she had urged him to smack the dog. How mean she must have seemed in William’s eyes; how cruel. William was a good man, a gentle and kind man, and she had behaved like one of those women, strangers to the case, who hammer on the side of the police van as it takes some unpopular criminal away from court and off to prison, the contemporary equivalent of the tricoteuses who knitted as the guillotine did its terrible revolutionary work.

  This realisation amounted to more than a mere dawning of self-understanding; it made her see, too, how different they were. William was a sensitive, thoughtful man, and she admired him for that. But was she worthy of such a man? The problem was that there were depths to him that she simply could not match in herself. He was more perceptive than she was; he had read more; knew more about the world; saw things in a different, more subtly nuanced light.
And while she appreciated this, her appreciation was that of the amateur who gazes upon a work of beauty, a great painting perhaps: the work of art is admired, but the observer knows that it belongs to a realm of understanding that will be for ever beyond him. He may look on, but that does not mean he can converse with the artist.

  All of this made her conscious that her decision to renounce her claim on him was the right one. And although Marcia did not know it, that very decision, in its unselfishness and realism, made her something of a great person too. She was unlikely ever to say anything profound; she would never change the way the world was; but she had taken a step in the direction of living rightly. That made Marcia great - in a tiny way.

  She turned back to face William and Freddie de la Hay. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re not a bad dog, Freddie de la Hay. We all fall into temptation from time to time.’

  ‘Hear that, Freddie?’ said William. ‘Marcia says that you’re not so bad after all.’

  Freddie looked at Marcia and made to lick her from a distance - a token, virtual lick, but an important gesture nonetheless.