Corduroy Mansions

  She waited for a few moments before she told him. “I’m engaged.”

  He had not expected this, and for a short time he seemed to lose his composure. “You?” he asked in disbelief. And then he realised that that sounded a bit rude, and he followed it with immediate congratulations. “Well, you and Oedipus! An MP’s wife!”

  She shook her head. “Not to Oedipus. He and I haven’t got back together. It’s somebody else.”

  “To the yeti? Is that wise? Such different backgrounds …”

  “Very funny. To a young man called Hugh. I haven’t known him all that long, but we became engaged last night.”

  Rupert had now recovered sufficiently to congratulate her properly. He stepped forward and embraced her warmly. “I’m very pleased to hear this, Barbara. It’s very good news. Tell me about him.”

  She realised that had he asked that question only a couple of days ago, she would not have been able to tell him very much. Now she knew a little more but it was still not a great deal.

  “He’s Scottish,” she said. “He’s lived in South America. He’s …”

  Rupert waited. “What does he do?”

  “I’m not too sure.”

  Rupert’s expression changed. “You’re not sure? How long have you known him?”

  “Not very long,” said Barbara airily. “But I’m sure. I’m absolutely sure.”

  Rupert looked down at the floor. He had known Barbara for so long—all his life, in fact—that he almost regarded her as a sister. He had thought Oedipus was a terrible mistake, and he had been pleased to hear that they were no longer together, but was she now about to make another mistake, on a par with, or even exceeding, her Oedipal mistake?

  He began nervously. “I’m … I’m very pleased that you’re happy, Barbara. The only thing is that this is rather … well, sudden, wouldn’t you say? You know the old expression—‘Marry in haste, resent at leisure.’”

  “Actually it’s repent, Rupert, although resent makes sense too. People do resent their partners, don’t they?” She corrected herself. “Not their business partners. Their spouses.”

  “Of course they do—or some do. But the point is: are you sure?”

  She smiled serenely. “Never more sure.”

  Rupert thought for a moment. There was the question of the flat. That was always present, somewhere in the background, and now it came to the fore.

  “Where are you going to live?” he asked, affecting a nonchalance that was not really there.

  “Why, in London, of course. Hugh seems happy enough here.”

  Rupert pursed his lips. “I see. But what I meant was, where in London? Has Hugh got a place?”

  “He’s with me at the moment.”

  Rupert persisted. “But has he got his own place? His own flat?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s a bit younger than me, you know. He hasn’t bought anything yet.”

  Rising from her desk, Barbara walked to the window and looked out over the rooftops. The office was on the top floor of a three-storey building in Soho and there was a good view of the neighbouring roofs. Directly opposite, the occupant of an attic flat had opened a window and was putting a small tub of red flowers out onto the roof to expose it to the sun. The flowers were a tiny splash of red against the grey of the roof.

  “I wonder,” Rupert said. “I would have thought that you might need a bit more room. You might move somewhere bigger.”

  Barbara turned to look at him. You have this thing about my flat, she thought. You always have had. And my father bought it fair and square from your father, and that’s all there is to it.

  “But my flat is perfectly large enough,” she said. “It has two bedrooms and then a study which could be used as a bedroom if one wanted. And the drawing room is really large too. It’s wonderful for parties.”

  Rupert received this badly. His own drawing room was far too small for entertaining and they had never had a party in the house as a result. It would have been different if the flat in Sydney Villa—Barbara’s flat, or the flat she claimed to own—had come to him. They could have entertained on quite a scale then.

  Rupert tried again. “Well, there may be a case for starting afresh somewhere,” he said. “A lot of people like to set up in a place that is really their own—somewhere they’ve chosen together. Rather romantic!”

  Barbara held his gaze. “And a lot of people don’t.”

  “Oh well,” said Rupert. “I hope that you’ll be very happy, Barbara. Come, let me give you a kiss.”

  He kissed her on the cheek and then went back to his own office. “You’ll never guess,” he said to his wife on the telephone. “La Ragg is engaged!” And then he said, “She doesn’t want to move, by the way. She’s installed the toy boy in the flat.”

  Rupert’s wife sighed. “Oh well. We must take a look at him. I wonder who on earth would have taken her on? The yeti?”

  “I cracked that joke too,” said Rupert.

  Seated behind her desk again, alone in her office, Barbara found it difficult to concentrate on work. There were contracts to peruse but she felt too exhilarated to get down to it. So she closed her eyes and went over in her mind the previous evening with Hugh. The little blue flower by her plate; the care he had lavished on the preparation of the meal; his gentleness and humour; the way he looked at her. Everything. Everything.

  She got up from her desk and returned to the window. The man in the attic flat opposite had appeared again. He was gazing at the red flowers he had placed outside on the lead surface of the roof. He yawned and looked across in her direction.

  She caught his eye. He was only thirty or forty yards away. He smiled at her. They had seen one another from time to time and had occasionally waved. Now Barbara opened the window and leaned out. The man opposite leaned out too a little way, his hand resting on the edge of his tub of flowers.

  “I love your flowers,” shouted Barbara.

  “Thanks,” shouted the man in return.

  A gust of wind had blown up and Barbara had to raise her voice to be heard. “I’m terribly happy.”

  The man made a thumbs-up gesture.

  “I’ve just got engaged,” Barbara continued.

  The man clapped his hands together and then, reaching forward, plucked one of his red flowers and threw it across to her. It was a lovely gesture, even if the flower fell far short of bridging the gap between them and dropped, a tiny Icarus out of the sky, tumbling down to the street below.

  92. Caroline Goes to Lunch Again

  IF BARBARA WAS CERTAIN that morning that she had found the man with whom she wanted to share her life, the same could not be said of Caroline. The final break with Tom, which could so easily have been messy, had proved to be simplicity itself. After his initial show of jealousy and resentment, manifesting itself in an almost immediately regretted bout of incivility towards James, Tom had proved to be perfectly reasonable. She suspected that they both wanted the break, and that his reluctance to let her go was no more than a vestigial sign of the feelings he had once had for her. Now it was done, and she was free again. Or was she?

  James was a problem. She was becoming very used to his company—so used to it, in fact, that she found herself feeling dissatisfied and at odds on days when she did not see him. It was worrying, because it seemed to her that some sort of dependence was building up and she was not sure that that was what she wanted. Then there was also the question of James’s fundamental suitability. That he liked her was not in doubt, but could he ever be passionate about her? And if he could not, then what was the point of his being anything more than a friend?

  That morning, James was not in the lecture room for the lecture on sixteenth-century Venetian painting. His absence was expected: he had told her that he was due to go for an interview for a position at a gallery; the interview was to be at eleven, and was to be followed by lunch.

  “A bad sign,” Caroline had said. “If you go for a job and they ask you to lunch it’s a bad sign.” r />
  James seemed surprised. “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “They’re wanting to look at you in social surroundings,” she explained. “They want to see how you hold your knife and fork.”

  James laughed. “Hello? This is the twenty-first century, you know! People don’t care about that sort of thing any more.”

  Caroline defended herself. “I’m not so sure about that. They won’t be up-front about it, but they still do it. Or some do. And a gallery like that would definitely subscribe to that sort of thing. Look at their clientele. Look at the people who work in those galleries. They’re not exactly rough diamonds.”

  James looked downcast. “Oh dear,” he said. “Do you think I should even bother to go?”

  His tone made her rather regret having issued the warning. “Of course you should go. I was just telling you what I thought they might be doing. And anyway, I’m sure that your table manners are fine.”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. Look, when you get a bread roll, you do break it, don’t you, rather than cut it?”

  “You do.”

  “And what do you do with smoked salmon? Do you put it on the bread and then cut the bread, or do you eat the salmon with a knife and fork and have bits of bread in between mouthfuls?”

  “I always put the smoked salmon on the bread,” said Caroline. “Then I cut it into squares. But they’re not going to pay any attention to that sort of thing. They’ll just want to make sure that you don’t talk with your mouth full or burp.”

  James thought for a moment. “What if I do burp?” he asked. “What do I say?”

  Caroline laughed. “My parents always told me not to say ‘pardon.’ They said you should say ‘excuse me.’ But they’re such snobs.”

  “Could you just say ‘oops’?” asked James.

  “Maybe.”

  “And if I need to go to the loo,” James went on. “What then? Do I call it ‘the gents’ or ‘the loo’? Or what?”

  “My father calls it the lavatory,” said Caroline. “I think that’s the approved word in really smart circles. Not the lav, but the lavatory. I don’t like that word much, I’m afraid.”

  “What about ‘the little boys’ room’?” asked James.

  “Definitely not. Extremely twee.”

  “‘The washroom’?”

  “American. They’re very keen on euphemisms.”

  James nodded. “‘Letting go’ means sacking someone. ‘I’m going to have to let you go’ means ‘you’re sacked.’”

  Caroline thought: I let Tom go. But then maybe he wanted to go. And at that point, she stopped her reverie, which had been a prolonged one, drifting from James to Tom, to home, to her parents; now the lecture on Venetian painting had ended and she found that all she had written in her Moleskine notebook was: “The boundaries of what we call the Venetian School …”

  She snapped the Moleskine shut and followed her fellow students out of the room. She felt at a bit of a loose end; there was an essay to write but she felt disinclined to start on it. If only James had been here, she would have taken him for lunch at that bistro where they had met Tim Something. Poor James—it was lunchtime now and he would be under inspection by his prospective employers, his handling of smoked salmon being judged according to some arcane precepts of the proper way to tackle such things. Yes, poor James.

  She decided on the spur of the moment: she would go for lunch at the bistro—she would treat herself. Why not? There was no rule against having lunch by yourself.

  She walked round Bedford Square and into Great Russell Street. She liked this part of London, which was such a contrast to the garishness of Oxford Street, not far away. The shops here were small and had character, and even if she was not in the market for antiquities or first editions, she liked to see them in the windows. She paused outside the headquarters of a bookshop that was also a press. A selection of titles was displayed in the window and her eye was drawn to Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within. She liked that. There were whisperings within all of us; whisperings that prompted us to do one thing rather than another, whisperings that made us what we were.

  “The whisperings within,” said a voice at her side. “Interesting! Should we listen to them?”

  She spun round. Tim Something was smiling at her.

  “You don’t fancy a bit of lunch, do you?” asked the photographer.

  Caroline hesitated. She had a feeling that the answer that she gave to this question might determine a great deal for her; it was not just lunch at stake.

  “Yes,” she said. “Why not?”

  It was as if the answer came from someone else; not from the cautious self which she thought ran her life, but from another self, a self of more instinctive stamp, a self that beckoned from altogether wilder, more exciting shores. And she could tell, just by looking at him, that Tim’s invitation, as spontaneous as was her acceptance, came from the equivalent quarter within him.

  93. Crop Circles

  TERENCE MOONGROVE drove Berthea back from the sacred dance in his newly acquired Porsche.

  “This is a very noisy car,” Berthea observed. “And it is also rather low. It would be very difficult to get into it if one had arthritis.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Terence. “The engine is deliberately noisy. Mr. Marchbanks told me that it is something they do on purpose. And as for its being low, that is just the way it is. It has something to do with making it possible to creep up behind people on the road and give them a fright when you overtake them.”

  Berthea gave her brother a withering look but said nothing. Homo ludens, she thought—man at play. And while she would normally apply any observation about man in general to women as well—particularly in the case of the term Homo sapiens—in this case by homo she meant vir rather than femina. No woman, she imagined, would find creeping up behind someone in a Porsche fun. It was just not something a woman would ever do. Indeed, when she came to think of it, most women looked at cars as functional machines and judged them accordingly. Cars got one from A to B—that was the point of them. Certainly it was nice to have a car that did this in comfort, and it was also nice to have a car that looked appealing, but that was about the extent of female interest in cars. Men, it seemed to Berthea, never grew out of their boyhood fascination with cars; there was an unbroken line of psychological continuity between the toy cars that boys played with and the real machines they later acquired as men. Puer ludens, she thought, and immediately congratulated herself on the term. She could use it, perhaps, as the title of a paper. “Puer Ludens: Men as Boys.” That was rather nice.

  Already the paper was being shaped in her mind. She would postulate a hypothetical mature man—the man who confronts the world in a rational, non-exploitative way; the man who treats others with consideration and is not constantly jockeying for position in relation to other men. And then she would investigate how the vestiges of boyhood prevent most men from reaching this plateau, this resolution.

  Terence dropped Berthea at the house. “I think I shall go for a little drive,” he said. “I need to get used to the gears.”

  “Be careful,” said Berthea, and she repeated the advice under her breath as she watched her brother disappear down the drive, the Porsche’s throaty roar becoming fainter.

  Terence drove slowly down the road. His foot was barely touching the accelerator and yet the car’s engine seemed ready to run away with him. But this was not the place to test the car’s performance—he would find a larger road for that, one where he could start overtaking. He had never been able to overtake anybody in the Morris Traveller and the thought of flashing past other drivers at speed rather appealed to him, particularly if he surprised them. I have so much overtaking to make up, he thought.

  After a few minutes, Terence found himself on the very edge of town. The open road lay ahead, and the traffic, he noticed, was moving faster. He eased his foot down on the accelerator and the car shot forward. He glanced at the speedometer—the needle had edged up to sixty and
his foot was barely on the pedal. He pressed it down a bit further. Seventy now. Was that the speed limit, or was it one hundred and seventy? He could not remember—it had all been so hypothetical with the Morris Traveller.

  He looked in the rear-view mirror. There was a car behind him, a car that looked remarkably like his own: another Porsche. That’s nice, thought Terence. Two Porsches out for a run together. He looked in the mirror again and recognised the face of the driver: Monty Bismarck. So that was his new Porsche; it looked very smart, Terence had to admit. He waved, and Monty Bismarck waved back. How nice for him to see me in his old car, thought Terence.

  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.”