“They’re not essential,” Dee had once snapped. “You don’t need cooked grains. And milk is bad for you, as everybody knows. It’s full of chemicals that the cows pick up when they eat the chemical-covered grass. Chemicals, Jo, chemicals. There was an article about it in Anti-oxidant News.”
Jo had ignored this. “Back home in Perth,” she said, “you never thought twice about buying something like milk. You just bought it. Here—”
Caroline’s train of thought was interrupted by James.
“When I was at Cambridge,” he went on, “there was a Fellow of Peterhouse called David Watkin. Heard of him? A very amusing, interesting man. He said that modernism in architecture involved a frightening, stern morality. Everything must be functional, stripped bare, stark. Brutal. Hence the South Bank Centre.” He paused. “I think he’s right about modernism.”
“Oh,” said Caroline. “So …”
“Of course,” James continued, “we all know that buildings express an attitude to the world. And that means we can judge them morally.”
“Stansted Airport?” asked Caroline.
“Open. Reasonably friendly. Not scary. It’s OK from the moral point of view.”
Caroline was intrigued. She enjoyed James and his conversation. What would it be like, she wondered, to be married to somebody like him—somebody who would keep one entertained all the time? The world would be always be interesting with James by one’s side. She looked at him again. He was very good-looking; there was little doubt about that. And yet, and yet …
“Give me an example of an evil building,” she asked. “Can you?”
James did not take long to come up with an answer. “Anything commissioned by Mussolini,” he said. “Or designed by Speer. Fascist buildings. Soviet architecture—you know, those great horrid blocks of flats that showed such contempt for the people who lived in them. Treated them like ants. Las Vegas—virtually everything there.” He thought for a moment longer. “Or the palace of that Romanian dictator. You know, the one who was shot in his long winter coat when people rose up against him.”
“What about prisons? Don’t they express … well, cruelty?”
“I’m trying to think of famous prisons,” said James. “I suppose, by their very nature, prisons will look unfriendly and hard. They have very small windows, you see, and that makes a building look threatening. The Bastille? San Quentin?”
“Yes. Those are certainly cruel buildings.”
James sighed. “But look at modern fortress architecture. Schools with tiny windows and large swathes of concrete. Look at the Hayward Gallery, in all its brutality. How could they do it, Caroline? How could anybody make a thing like that?” He sighed again. “And here’s this lovely building, your Corduroy Mansions. Crumpled—if a building can be crumpled. Utterly friendly and human. A building that says, ‘Come in, love.’ That’s what it says: it calls us ‘love,’ like a tea lady. A building that one would like to sit down and have tea with. That sort of building.”
They both looked up at the comfortable brickwork.
“Those are our windows up there,” said Caroline.
James smiled. “Lovely. Lovely windows.”
Caroline looked at him appreciatively. What other man would compliment one’s windows? As her younger sister would say—with the elongated teenage vowel that signified utter approbation—he’s sooooo sympathetic.
Was there a possibility? That business about stages—was there any truth in it? she wondered.
No, she must put all of that out of her mind. James was here to bake biscuits. Nothing more.
18. On the Sofa
JAMES ENTHUSED FURTHER about the building, on the staircase and on the landing. “Original doors,” he said. “Worth their weight in … well, not quite gold, but very nice anyway. And look, your fittings, Caroline. The handle. To die for!”
Caroline thought this a little exaggerated, but said nothing. She had never inspected their door handle, and now, viewing it through James’s aesthetically keener eyes, she realised that it was rather attractive. Vaguely Art Nouveau, she thought.
They went inside. “Not much to get excited about in here,” she said. “Our furniture is pretty ordinary. A bit run-down, in fact.”
James looked about him. “I see what you mean. It could certainly do with a makeover. However, that sofa looks tempting.” He lowered himself onto the sofa, stretching his legs out in front of him. “I could be very comfortable living here.”
Caroline raised an eyebrow. “Well, there’s no room, I’m afraid. Four people is about as many as this flat can hold.”
“Four girls,” mused James. “Four girls living together in Corduroy Mansions. Tell me about them. I know all about you, of course, so you can skip that bit, but what about the others?”
“We all get on well enough,” said Caroline. “I’m the most recent arrival. I’ve been here for six months—the others have all been here for a couple of years. Jenny found the flat. She knows the person who owns it. In fact, the owner is some sort of distant cousin of Jenny’s father, a woman who lives down in Dorset. She’s let this place ever since she inherited it from a friend. Wouldn’t you like a friend to leave you a flat? Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise?”
“Very,” agreed James. “And also very unlikely. But who’s this Jenny person? Tell me about her.”
Caroline slipped off her shoes and settled herself on the threadbare chintz sofa beside James. “She’s a few years older than me. Twenty-seven, I think. Everybody’s older than me in this flat. I’m the baby.”
James laughed. “You’re twenty-three, aren’t you? Same as me.”
Caroline did not think of James as being twenty-three. He looked young enough, of course—he was often asked for ID in the off-licence—but he talked as if he were much older. He knew so much, that was why. He was one of those people, she thought, who just seemed to know a great deal. And he spoke so wisely, as if he had thought for hours about everything he said.
“Jenny works as a PA,” she went on, “for an MP. A man called Snark. Oedipus Snark.”
James frowned. “I think I’ve read about him,” he said. “Something in the Evening Standard. There was a picture of him and they said something like, ‘If you think Liberal Democrat MPs are nice, meet Oedipus Snark.’ Something like that. I had to laugh. Poor Lib Dems—they really are nice. As are the others, come to think of it. I’ve got nothing against the Tories or Labour. They’re all rather sweet, don’t you think?”
“Jenny hates him,” Caroline said. “She’d agree with the Standard.”
“Then why does she work for him?”
Caroline had discussed the issue with Jenny and had received a curious answer. “Because he fascinates me,” Jenny had said. “Like a snake. You know how you go to a zoo and you see these deadly snakes in their glass enclosures and the snake looks at you with his little eyes. And you think: I’m only that far away from a painful death, only that far. If it weren’t for the glass …”
She told James this. He shrugged. “Forgive my saying this, Caroline, but isn’t that the sort of thing that some women—I’m not saying all women, but some women—do? They find themselves fascinated by dreadful men and they stay with them—as employees or wives or girlfriends or whatever. And the horrible men know that this is how they feel and so they just carry on being ghastly because they’re certain the women won’t leave them. And they don’t.”
“Maybe.” And then she added, “Sometimes.” She was thinking of a girl she had known at university who had taken up with a boyfriend who talked about soccer all the time, got drunk regularly at weekends and was ill on the stairs. They had all said that she should leave him, but she had said that he was getting better and that underneath it all he was really very gentle. She had remained with him and they had eventually married; he had been drunk at his own wedding and had threatened the vicar. She shuddered at the memory.
“It’s interesting that it should be like that,” James said. “Men who find th
emselves with difficult women are far more likely just to leave, aren’t they? They put up with so much less than women do. You people are heroines, you know. Heroines.”
“It’s kind of you to say that, James.”
“Well, I do mean it. The more I think about women, the more I like them. Isn’t that interesting? I used to be wary of girls, you know.” He paused. “You don’t mind my saying that, do you, Caroline? Present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course.”
He leaned back in the chair. “I used to think that women were … well, rather bossy. That’s why I preferred playing with other boys rather than with girls. I didn’t like being bossed about.”
“Understandable.”
“Yes. But now I find that women don’t really want to push me around. I suppose I’ve got more confidence. I know what I want.”
Caroline thought, But you don’t, do you? That’s the whole point: you don’t know what you want. “Did your mother push you around?” she asked. For a moment she entertained an absurd mental image of the infant James in a pushchair, being propelled around a park by his mother and, even then, gazing at the architecture of the park buildings and commenting on the fine ironwork.
For a few moments James was silent. “My mother?” he asked.
“Yes. Your mother. Was she … dominating?”
There was something odd in James’s eyes as he looked at Caroline. “My mother,” he said quietly, “was completely absent from my childhood. I never met her. Not once. Or at least not that I can remember.”
Caroline felt a twinge of anxiety. Her question had been a prying one but she had not expected to uncover something quite as uncomfortable as this.
“You needn’t talk about it if you don’t want to, James,” she said.
He looked at her again. “All right,” he said. “I won’t.”
19. Unknown Boys
AFTER THEIR TRUNCATED conversation about mothers, Caroline and James moved into the kitchen to start baking biscuits. The maternal conversation had been brief, and indeed only covered the mother of one of them. Had the conversation developed more fully, then it might have progressed to deal with Caroline’s own mother, Frances Jarvis, about whom Caroline had a considerable amount to say. Had James merely asked, “What about your own mother, Caroline?” there would have been a brief pause, as if to underline the significance of what was to follow, and then Caroline would have said, “My mother? Oh, James, where does one start?”
James would have smiled. “It’s never a simple question, is it? You never get people saying, ‘Oh yes, my mother. A very normal, integrated person. Nothing to say, really.’ You don’t get that, do you?”
And Caroline would have agreed. “Never. But since you’ve asked about my mother, let me tell you.
“Ever since I can remember—right back—my mother has had ambitions for me. Some mothers, I suppose, bring up their sons and daughters to do great things—to play the piano well, or to become tremendously good at some stupid sport, or to get the most fantastic exam results, or whatever. With my mother, all of that energy was focused on one thing—to make sure that I met the right sort of boys.”
“No!”
“Yes. Right from the beginning, when I was at nursery school, she spent a lot of time choosing my friends. They had to be nice. That was the word she used. They had to be nice. And if somebody wasn’t nice, then he was not allowed. That’s what she said: ‘Not very nice. Not allowed.’”
James would have sighed. “But all parents are like that. They have very clear ideas about who their children’s friends ought to be.”
Caroline would have conceded that point, but her mother, she felt, was in a different league from most parents. Her determination that Caroline should eventually marry a boy of whom she approved was single-minded and all-consuming. The teenage Caroline’s social programme was strictly vetted for suitability. Invitations to parties at the houses of boys who met maternal criteria were accepted with alacrity—by Frances, on behalf of Caroline—and those from dubious boys—unknown boys, as Frances called them, the sons of unknown parents—were turned down, again by Frances on behalf of her daughter.
“I’m sorry, dear, we don’t know much about that boy. In fact, we know nothing about him at all. There’ll be plenty of other invitations.”
“But I do know him! He’s not unknown at all. He’s really nice.”
“He may well be, dear, but we don’t know that, do we? And unknown boys—well, we don’t really have to go into that, do we?”
Caroline would have indeed preferred to be able to go into all that. What exactly was the problem with unknown boys? What did unknown boys do, if anything, that known boys did not do? In her mind one thing at least was clear: the moment maternal authority was weakened and she was in a position to run her own life, she would seek out the company, without any delay, of the most unknown, the most obscure of boys.
Of course the motives behind her mother’s concern were transparent. Her ambition for Caroline was simple: marriage to a suitable boy. Anything else, in her mind, was merely preparatory to that objective. Caroline, however, thought differently. She might have sprung from a background in which a woman’s ideal destiny was to marry and settle down to the task of raising children, but this was not what she wanted to do. She wanted to study the history of art. She wanted to travel. She wanted to think for herself. She wanted to move among people who stimulated her—who had something to say. The sorts of boys thrown in her path by her mother were the antithesis of all that: they were dim, rather sporty boys from boarding schools with a reputation for rugby. Not what she wanted. She wanted a boy with style, a boy with a whiff of danger about him, a witty, artistically literate boy, a boy a bit like … James, come to think of it.
And now, standing with James in the kitchen as he paged through How to Be a Domestic Goddess for a suitable recipe, she found herself thinking: Perhaps it’s been obvious all along. Perhaps the reason why James is thinking of redefining himself is that he really wants me. Not girls in the abstract, but me.
It was an intriguing idea. And even more intriguing was the idea of explaining the situation to her mother. Frances had views on such matters. “Such boys, Caroline, are fine—in their place. Which is playing the piano, like Noël Coward or somebody like that.” That is what Frances thought.
She glanced at James. He would probably make her breakfast in bed. He would even come shopping with her. They would go to lunch at Daylesford Organic round the corner and chat about the day’s events. There was a lot to be said for it. But what did he feel about her? It is all very well, she thought, from my perspective, but what does he feel about me?
James had found a suitable recipe in Nigella’s book. “Lemon gems,” he said. “Look.”
Caroline examined the large photograph of lemon biscuits sitting on a cooling rack and nodded. “Just what we need,” she agreed. “And we’ve got everything, including the ground almonds.”
“Heaven,” said James.
Once again, Caroline thought that this was a bit of an exaggeration. But then it occurred to her that in saying “heaven,” James was referring not only to the biscuits, with what Nigella herself described as their lemoniness, but also to the heavenliness of being there, with her, about to do some baking together.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” she suddenly asked.
He looked at her with surprise. “Immensely. Why do you ask?”
“Because I was just wondering. The two of us … baking together. It just seems … very right.”
He looked away, out of the window. The London afternoon light was attenuated, soft. There would be rain, he noted.
He reached out and touched her hand, gently, brushing against it.
“Festina lente,” he said, and smiled.
Festina Lente, thought Caroline, would be a good name for a cookery writer. Almost as good as Delia, or even Nigella.
20. Rare Tea
EVEN IF THERE ARE many negative features
to my job, thought Jenny, there is at least one that is unconditionally positive. Oedipus Snark might require of her that she be loyal to his highly dubious personal cause, but at least she was more or less left to her own devices every afternoon, when the oleaginous politician went to the House of Commons or enjoyed lengthy lunches with his friend Barbara Ragg at the Poule au Pot restaurant. He had made it clear to Jenny when he first employed her that if there was nothing still to be done in the afternoon, then she was free to go home.
“I don’t know what you get up to in your spare time, darling,” he drawled, “and I don’t care too much, frankly. No offence! So if there’s nothing doing here at headquarters, please toddle along and do whatever girly stuff you fancy.”
He smiled at her with the air of one conferring a favour, or even some sort of benediction.
“You mean this is a flexi-time job?”
“If you must use such terms, yes. Perk of the position. My own job, of course, is pretty much flexi-time, as you put it, although heaven knows how much I exert myself. See?”
Jenny bit her lip. Girly stuff! She was a graduate of the London School of Economics. She was currently reading a biography of Wittgenstein. She was … She felt herself getting warm with resentment.
“Mr. Snark, I feel that I must—”
He raised a hand to stop her. “Please! Oedipus. We don’t stand on formality here. Now then …”
And they had progressed to the next item of business, leaving Jenny secretly fuming and determined to correct his erroneous impression of her. But she never did; as the months wore on, she realised that she would never succeed in getting him to see her as an intellectual equal, to treat her without the condescension that he seemed to show in all his dealings with women. And the reason for that, she decided, was that Oedipus Snark was profoundly solipsistic. If he paid no attention to her feelings, it was because he did not see her. For one who was constantly adding “See?” to his observations, he saw remarkably little.