Corduroy Mansions cm-1 Read online

  ‘How does Jenny get on with Snark?’ asked William. ‘Does she share your low opinion of him?’

  Dee became animated. ‘Yes. She really does. She hates him. She thinks he’s gross.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But then everybody hates him,’ Dee continued. ‘Even his mother.’

  William laughed. ‘Surely not. Mothers rarely hate their sons. It’s a very non-maternal thing to do. Particularly if one’s son is called Oedipus.’

  He waited for her to react. But nothing came.

  ‘Oedipus—’ he began.

  ‘But this one does,’ interrupted Dee. ‘Jenny told me all about it. She can’t conceal it. She hates him intensely.’

  ‘How does Jenny know all this?’

  ‘His mother has spoken to her about it. She said, “I wish I didn’t dislike my son so much, but I do. I can’t help it.”’ She paused. ‘And she’s plotting against him.’

  William was silent. Mothers should not plot against their sons . . . and nor should fathers. And yet was that not exactly what he was doing? He was plotting against Eddie in that he was making plans for Eddie’s exclusion from the flat. But that was different: he was not working for Eddie’s downfall, merely for his moving out. It was a different sort of plot, but nevertheless he felt a degree of shame about it. And yet at the same time, he felt a certain satisfaction at the sheer cunning of his idea. Eddie could not abide dogs and was petrified of even the smallest and most unthreatening breeds. It would not be necessary, then, for William to buy himself an Alsatian or a Rottweiler; a mere terrier would do the trick. If a dog moved into the house, then Eddie would have to move out. It was a very simple and really rather clever plan.

  William smiled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ asked Dee.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said William. ‘Just an idea I’ve had.’

  4. A Generous Offer

  ‘Half the time,’ said Dee, ‘I can’t follow what he’s going on about. It was Watergate this morning. Watergate and some guy called Nixon.’

  ‘Old people wander a bit,’ said Martin, her colleague at the Pimlico Vitamin and Supplement Agency. ‘I had an uncle - or something - who lost all his nouns. He had a stroke and all the nouns went. So he used the word “concept” for any noun. He’d say things like “Pass the concept” when he wanted you to pass the salt.’

  Dee frowned. William was not all that old. But there was no need to correct Martin on that; the interesting thing was the salt issue. ‘He ate a lot of salt?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Dee. ‘Sodium blockages. You know I’ll never forget when I went for iridology the first time and the iridologist looked into my eyes and said, “You eat a lot of salt.” And it was true. I really freaked out.’

  Martin looked concerned. ‘How do they tell?’

  ‘Sodium rings in the eyes,’ said Dee. ‘It’s pretty obvious.’

  Martin was silent. Then, after a few moments, ‘Could you tell? Yourself, I mean. Would you be able to tell if you looked into my eyes?’

  Dee smiled. ‘Maybe. Do you want me to?’

  It took Martin a minute or so to decide. Then he said, ‘Yes. It’s better to know, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course you must know anyway,’ said Dee. ‘You must know whether you eat too much salt. Do you?’

  Martin looked away. ‘Maybe sometimes.’

  ‘All right.’

  There were no customers in the Vitamin and Supplement Agency at the time and Dee pointed to a chair in front of the counter. ‘Sit down, Martin. No, don’t close your eyes. I’m going to have to shine a light into them. Just relax.’

  There was a small torch beside the cash register. They used it from time to time to look into the mouths of customers who wanted something for mouth ulcers or gingivitis. Dee reached for this torch and crouched in front of Martin. She rested a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. His shoulder felt bony; Martin did not eat enough, she thought, but that was something they could deal with later. For now it was sodium rings.

  The torch threw a small circle of weak light onto his cheek. She moved it up closely until it was shining directly into his right eye.

  She felt Martin’s breathing upon her hand, a warm, rather comforting feeling. Then it stopped; he was holding his breath.

  ‘See anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Hold on. I’m just trying to see. Yes . . . Yes.’

  ‘Yes what? Are there any sodium rings?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. There are some white circles. I think those are sodium rings all right.’

  She turned the torch off and stood back. Martin stared at her balefully.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Eat less salt for starters.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And the sodium rings should disappear.’ She paused. ‘But there were other things there.’

  He looked at her in alarm. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Flecks. And quite a few yellow dots. I don’t know what those mean. I suppose we could look them up.’

  They were interrupted by the arrival of the first customer of the morning. He wanted St John’s Wort and a bottle of Echinacea. Dee served him while Martin tidied the counter. Afterwards, when the customer had gone, Martin turned to her. His anxiety was evident.

  ‘Should I cut out salt altogether?’

  She shrugged. ‘We need a certain amount of salt. If you cut out salt altogether you’d die. So maybe just a bit less.’

  He nodded. There was a mirror in the washroom and he would have a quick look at his eyes in that. If he could see the sodium rings himself, then he could monitor his progress in getting rid of them.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ said Dee reassuringly. ‘People live with sodium rings for a long time.’

  ‘And then they die?’

  ‘Maybe. But you’re not going to die, Martin. Not just yet. As long as you take sensible precautions.’

  Martin looked thoughtful. ‘Supplements?’

  Dee shook her head. She knew that Martin was already on a number of supplements - they all were - and probably needed nothing else. No, the yellow flecks she thought she had seen in his irises pointed to colon issues.

  ‘I think that you need colonic irrigation,’ she said. ‘Those yellow flecks I saw are probably related to the colon.’

  Martin said nothing.

  ‘Colonic irrigation is the answer,’ Dee pronounced. ‘We all need it, but very few people take it up.’

  Martin swallowed. ‘You have to . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dee. ‘It’s not a very savoury subject, but it’s no use running away from it. The transit time for food through the system should ideally be less than twenty-four hours. The average time for British men - of which you, Martin, are an example - is over sixty hours. Sixty hours!’

  Martin swallowed again. ‘And it involves . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dee. ‘It does. But we don’t need to go into that. One doesn’t have to look.’

  She stared at Martin. She liked this young man. There was something innocent about him; something fresh. And yet when she had looked into his irises . . .

  She smiled at him. ‘Don’t be too concerned. It’s not as bad as you think it is. I’ve had colonic irrigation. I went to Thailand and had a special course of it on Ko Samui. But you don’t have to go that far.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’ She reached out and patted him on the shoulder. ‘How old are you again, Martin?’

  ‘Nineteen. Twenty next month.’

  ‘Twenty years of impurity,’ mused Dee. ‘Look, why don’t you let me do it for you? It’s not difficult, you know.’

  Martin looked down at the floor. He was not sure what to say. It was such a generous offer.

  5. Unmarried Girls

  Dee might have had a low opinion of her flatmate Caroline’s work, but for all that it was about as removed as was at all possible from the factory floor - in so far as any factory flo
ors remained - still it required a measure of talent, and considerable application. And that was not all: in addition, the annual fees for the course amounted to seventeen thousand pounds, and that was just for tuition. On top of that one had to live, and for most of the people on the course with Caroline - and for Caroline herself - the living was the expensive part. One could not do a Master’s degree in Fine Art and just exist. There were certain standards to be kept up, and those were expensive.

  Caroline had the distinction of having had her photograph featured in Rural Living, a fact she carefully concealed from her flatmates. Not that this was difficult: Dee’s reading was more or less confined to the vegetarian and alternative therapies press - Anti-oxidant News, for example, or The Healthy Table; Jenny read political biographies, and little else; and Jo, as far as anybody could ascertain, read nothing at all. So there was little chance that any of them would have spotted her in the magazine, immediately after the property advertisements and just before the editorial on rural policy.

  The publication of full-page photographs of attractive young women of a certain class was one of the great traditions of British journalism, better established than the rival - and vulgar - tradition of plastering naked women across page three of the Sun. The Rural Living girls could not have been more different from their less-clad counterparts in the Sun, separated by social and cultural chasms so wide as to suggest that each group belonged to a fundamentally different species.

  Rural Living girls were photographed in a rural setting, although from time to time one might be featured in a cloister or some other suitable architectural spot. Generally they wore clothes that were not entirely dissimilar to their mothers’. Indeed, in the case of those girls of very ancient breeding, where long bloodlines had not been synonymous with commercial success and where genteel penury was the order of the day, the clothes they wore were in fact their mothers’, having been passed on with relief when it was discovered that fashions had come full circle and the outfits were once again à la mode.

  The girls were always unmarried, even if some of them were engaged. The engaged girls had their pictures in the magazine as an encouragement to others to make suitable marriages when the time came. None of the fiancés was unsuitable; quite the opposite, in fact. So this meant that unengaged girls should put behind them any temptation to marry unsuitable men - of whom there was always a more than adequate supply - and marry, instead, boys who would in the fullness of time be the fathers of girls who appeared in Rural Living. And if there was a degree of circularity in this, it was entirely intentional.

  Of course, Caroline’s parents would never have sought out the placing of their daughter’s photograph in Rural Living. It was well known that anybody who did so would be quietly and tactfully made aware that that was not the way it worked. The best route to inclusion was to come to editorial attention in a social context; another way was to know one of those photographers whose work was regularly published in the magazine. These photographers wielded considerable power - as photographers, and picture editors, often do. They could make or break political careers, for instance, simply by photographing their subject in a particular way. There was many a politician, or politician’s wife, who had been photographed in such a manner as to make him or her an object of derision. A former prime minister, for instance, was regularly portrayed as having extraordinary eyes, rather like the eyes of one possessed, and his wife was portrayed as having a perpetually open mouth, the mouth of one who was rarely silent. Now neither of these portrayals was accurate or fair. The Prime Minister’s eyes were not those of a maniac: photographers who did not approve of him simply achieved this effect by omitting to turn on the anti-red-eye device on their cameras. This created the impression that the Prime Minister was a messianic lunatic, which he was not. Similarly, when photographing his wife, these photographers simply waited until her mouth opened in order to breathe and then they snapped her. It was all extremely unkind.

  Caroline had been spotted by a photographer called Tim Something. Something was a freelance photographer who specialised in covering events such as May Balls at provincial universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. He also covered picnics at Glyndebourne, regattas at Henley, and the occasional charity cricket match. His photographs were competently executed rather than brilliant, but then none of his subjects was particularly brilliant, and so it was a good match.

  Something had been in Oxford to cover the award of an honorary degree to an influential financier, having been commissioned to photograph the event for the financier’s company. Afterwards, he was having a cup of coffee in a coffee bar when Caroline came in with two of her friends. He had been drawn to her looks, which were typical of a certain sort of English girl who, although not overly intellectual, nonetheless has intelligence sufficient to animate the face.

  Something had watched her discreetly from his table. He noted the style of her clothes - there was no sign of the ubiquitous blue jeans that virtually everybody else in the coffee bar was sporting. He noticed the single strand of pearls that she was wearing; the subdued, pastel-shaded blouse; the shoes (everybody else was in trainers). And he said to himself: Oxford Brookes, the university where girls of a certain background can go and be well placed to meet boys at the ‘real’ Oxford University, in so far as any of these would be considered by such a girl to be worth meeting.

  He watched her, and then acted. Crossing to her table, he cleared his throat and said, ‘Look, I know you don’t know me, but would you like to have your photograph in a magazine?’

  Caroline looked up at Something. ‘What magazine?’

  ‘One that mostly features dogs and horses,’ he replied.

  6. Tim Something Takes a Photo

  ‘Tim Something,’ said Caroline. ‘He’s a photographer. I’m sure he’s all right.’

  ‘Not a name to inspire confidence,’ said her father, Rufus Jarvis, a semi-retired partner in Jarvis and Co., a land agency in Cheltenham.

  Caroline smiled. ‘But you can’t judge people by their names,’ she said. ‘It has nothing to do with them. You called me Caroline, for instance.’

  There was a silence. They were sitting in the kitchen of the Jarvis house in Cheltenham, a rambling old rectory with a large Victorian conservatory and a monkey puzzle tree in the garden. Rufus Jarvis stared at his daughter. She had been a very easy teenager - no rebellions, as far as he could recall - but now that she was twenty-one, were resentments going to start to come out? Did she resent being called Caroline?

  ‘Caroline is a perfectly good name,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if we called you . . .’ He thought for a moment. Bronwen was a problematic name, to say the least. Or Mavis. A girl called Mavis these days might have every reason to resent parental choice. But Caroline?

  ‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with being called Caroline,’ said Caroline. ‘I was just making the point that you chose it, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, you can hardly complain about that,’ said Rufus. ‘Parents can’t very well say, “I’m not going to call you anything until you’re twelve, or sixteen, or whatever, and then you can choose for yourself.” For heaven’s sake!’

  Caroline sighed. ‘No, listen, Daddy, you’re not getting the point. What I’m saying is that parents choose names and children don’t. So you can’t judge anybody by their name. Because it has nothing to do with them.’

  ‘All right. But you must admit that there are some names that just don’t . . . don’t inspire confidence. That’s all. This chap, Something, how do you know . . . ?’ He did not finish.

  ‘He’s perfectly respectable. And he wants to put my photograph in Rural Living.’

  Rufus frowned. ‘In the front? Where they have the photo of the girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But are you looking for a husband?’

  Caroline laughed. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.’

  ‘Come, come, my dear,’ said Rufus. ‘It has everything to do with it. Any chap - unmarried chap
- reading Rural Living will see that you’re not yet married. Hello, he’ll say. Nice-looking girl, that. That’s how it works, my dear. Half of Mummy’s friends appeared in Rural Living. Mummy herself—’

  Caroline gasped. ‘Mummy? Her photograph was in?’

  ‘Yes, it was. And she looked extremely attractive, if I may say so. I saw it and I said to myself, there’s a looker! And the rest, as they say, was history.’

  Caroline was silent. She was shocked, indeed she was appalled, to discover that her father had found her mother in a magazine. Like everybody, she did not like to think that she was the product of . . . well, all that. And between her parents too! She had fondly imagined that her parents had met at . . . a dance, perhaps (and not too close a dance). They had had a formal and courteous relationship and then, after a decent interval, she had appeared on the scene. That was how she liked to imagine it. Anything else would have taken her into the Freudian territory of the ‘primal scene’, where the child, witnessing the closeness of parents, interprets the situation as one involving violence.