Corduroy Mansions Read online

  “Not my fault,” said Paul. “Somebody on the District Line. Everything stopped.”

  William rolled his eyes. He suspected that Paul’s excuses for being late were not always true; indeed he thought that Paul, for all his merits—and he was a willing worker—had little idea of the difference between lies and the truth. This suspicion had been aroused on a number of occasions, most recently when, in the course of a desultory conversation during a slack period in the wine shop, William had commented on a newspaper report about a government minister found to have been lying.

  “Can’t blame him,” said Paul. “Poor geezer. All those journalists after him like that. Can’t blame him.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said William. “He is a minister of the Government. He should not tell lies.”

  “A few porkies,” said Paul. “Everybody tells porkies now and then. Specially if somebody’s trying to get you.”

  William found himself almost speechless. “Porkies!”

  “Yeah, porkies. What difference does it make if he says that he didn’t do it? Nobody’s been hurt, have they?”

  William was silent for a few moments. “You don’t mind being lied to? You don’t mind? When you trusted somebody and then he goes and lies to you when you’re paying him your taxes …”

  “Don’t pay all that much tax,” Paul had said, looking reproachfully at William. “If I earned more, then I’d pay more tax and maybe I’d feel a bit different. But as it is …”

  Now, glaring at his assistant, William resorted to sarcasm. “You seem to live in a highly suicide-prone area, Paul. How many this year? Four? Amazing. Other people don’t seem to suffer from quite as many person-on-track delays as you do. Extraordinary.”

  Paul shrugged. “Awful, isn’t it? You’d think that they might choose a time when people didn’t need to get to work. Why jump in front of a train when people need to get to work?”

  William found himself being drawn into the exchange. He had started off talking about punctuality, but the conversation was entering deeper waters. “People don’t think about these things,” he said. “They’re usually very upset. But let’s not dwell on that. There but for the grace of God go I.”

  Paul looked at him in astonishment. “What?”

  “Never mind. It’s an expression that means it could happen to anybody. They don’t teach you people anything these days, do they?”

  “I wouldn’t choose the District Line,” said Paul.

  William opened one of the cases of wine and held a bottle up to the light. “Look at this lovely stuff. You do know that they gave this to the Queen when she visited Italy last, don’t you? They had a state banquet and served Her Majesty Brunello di Montalcino.”

  Paul stared at the bottle. “They could hardly give her Lambrusco.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Paul,” said William. “Lambrusco has its place. Not the sort of stuff that we get in this country, but the real thing. They make it around Reggio Emilia and Parma. And I’ve tasted some very fine examples of it in the past. Out there it’s much drier.”

  “It tastes like sherbet here,” said Paul.

  “Perhaps. But that’s because it’s the sweet version. The locals drink it dry, and eat some fresh Parmesan cheese with it. It’s delicious.”

  William replaced the bottle of Brunello in its case. At this point the telephone rang and Paul, being closer, answered. He smiled as he spoke, and William began to wonder whether it was to be one of those long personal calls that irritated him so much. But then Paul mumbled something and handed the receiver to his employer.

  It was Marcia.

  “I’m coming round at lunchtime,” she said, “with some very interesting news.”

  “What is it?”

  “You just wait.”

  9. Marcia’s Idea

  ALTHOUGH MARCIA had a habit of parking her van halfway over the pavement, she had never been given a parking ticket.

  “The wardens are sweeties,” she once said to William. “Or at least the male wardens are—in my experience. If you talk to them reasonably, they understand that you don’t mean any harm. It’s the female ones who are the problem. They’re ruthless. Fortunately, I’ve never had any dealings with them, but my goodness, they’re a bunch of frumps. Amazons. And they take out all their sexual frustrations on drivers—all because they can’t get a man. Not one of them, I believe, has a man. Can you credit it?”

  William had smiled. He was used to Marcia sounding off about all sorts of matters, and used to discounting most of what she said. She was full of prejudices, but in spite of that he found her entertaining. Nothing she said was really nasty; untrue, perhaps, and extreme, but not downright nasty.

  That afternoon, she parked her car immediately in front of the wine shop, in a spot where the council might once have considered establishing a paid parking place but in the end decided not to. It was just right, Marcia thought; it was a car-shaped space that needed a car, or, as in this case, a modest-sized van, and she was doing no harm in leaving the van protruding just slightly over the pavement.

  “There you are,” she said, as she walked into William’s office at the back of the shop. “Was that the coffee you were putting on?”

  “No, not exactly. But I can if you wish.”

  She lowered herself into the chair on the other side of William’s desk. “There’s a dear. Thank you. As I said on the phone—”

  “You have some important news to impart to me.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  William busied himself with the coffee as Marcia began to talk. “Eddie,” she said.

  William stiffened slightly. “Eddie?”

  “Yes, Eddie.” She paused, and looked at him across the room. “You were telling me that you were keen to get Eddie into his own place.”

  William unscrewed the top of the coffee canister and sniffed at the contents. Smells. He was very sensitive to smell, and coffee grounds were one of his olfactory favourites.

  “Yes,” he said. “Eddie is twenty-four now and I have been thinking about helping him to move on. There was that place in Kentish Town …”

  “You told me about that,” said Marcia. “The one that had no kitchen and a front door at a forty-five-degree angle.”

  “Yes. Not the best of places. But he could have made something of it.”

  “But didn’t.”

  William sighed. “No. He didn’t.” He turned and met Marcia’s stare. “Look, Marcia, Eddie may have his little failings but he is my flesh and blood, you know …”

  She held up a hand. “Of course he is. Of course. And as his father you love him dearly. I know that.”

  William turned back to the coffee. Did he love Eddie dearly? Would it be possible for anybody to love Eddie dearly? William’s late wife had done so, but that was because she was his mother. Every mother loves her son dearly—or should. Even after the son has done something egregiously terrible—tried to shoot the Pope, or something equally awful—the mother would still love him. There had been that man, of course, who had shot the Pope; what must his mother have thought? Perhaps it would depend on whether the mother was Catholic or not, thought William. A Catholic mother might find her maternal affection stretched if her son did something like that. But then again, she would have remained his mother and might have argued, “Well, dear, you must have had your reasons …”

  The thought occurred to him that Marcia had found a flat for Eddie. That would be all very well, but the problem lay not so much in the finding of flats—there were plenty of those—but in getting Eddie to move into one of them.

  “You’ve found somewhere suitable for him?” he asked. “He’s difficult, you know. He’s very fussy when it comes to flats. Corduroy Mansions seems to suit him rather too well.”

  Marcia shook her head. “No, I haven’t found him a flat. But I’ve found a way of encouraging him to move out. It’s something you and I have already discussed.”

  William poured two shots of espresso into
a cup and brought it over to Marcia.

  “There,” he said. “Strong.”

  She looked at him appreciatively. “Remember you said you’d had the idea of getting a dog. You said that Eddie can’t stand dogs and that if you got one, then he would probably be inclined to move out. Remember?”

  William laughed. “Yes, I do. I had planned that but the problem, you see, is that I can’t envisage keeping a dog for ever. What would happen once Eddie had taken the hint? You can’t take dogs back to the”—he waved a hand in the air—“to the dog place.”

  “But—”

  William was emphatic. “No, you can’t.”

  “I know that,” said Marcia, rather crossly. “But the point is that you could have a temporary dog.” She paused, taking a sip of her espresso. William made such delicious coffee, and yet there he was single; such a waste … “Let me explain. I was catering for a dinner party in Highgate the other night. Quite a do, and some fairly well-known faces there. The host is a newspaper columnist. Not that I read him. But somebody must, I suppose. Always preaching to people, telling them what to do; holier than thou. Anyway, when I took things round before the guests arrived I got talking to him. They have this dog, you see. Odd sort of creature. A mongrel, I’d say, but he said it was a Pimlico terrier. Now there’s a coincidence—you living in Pimlico. Have you ever heard of Pimlico terriers? No? Neither have I.”

  She took another sip of her coffee. “Anyway, he said that they liked this dog but they wished they had some sort of dog-sharing arrangement. He said that they had friends who had a set-up like that—the dog was shared by two households. If one set of people had to go away, the dog went to the other. It divided its time.”

  William nodded. “A useful arrangement. People sometimes have that sort of thing for their elderly relatives.”

  “Exactly. So it occurred to me: Why don’t you talk to them about sharing this Pimlico terrier with them? You need a dog, but not a full-time dog. They have a full-time dog that they would like to convert into a part-time dog. If job-sharing is all the rage, then why not dog-sharing?”

  10. Oedipus Snark, MP

  JENNY WAS ON HER WAY to Dolphin Square, where she was to meet Oedipus Snark for what he described as dictée. She had asked him why he called it that, and he had replied, “Dictation, my dear Jennifer, is such an authoritarian word. If I were to give you dictation, I would feel so like a … like a Conservative. Dictators, no doubt, give dictation. Whereas dictée is what we used to have at the Lycée in South Kensington. Our dear teacher, Madame Hilliard, would dictate a complicated passage to us—Proust perhaps, with its dreadfully long sentences—and we poor élèves would write it all down in our little cahiers. So sweet. That’s why I call this taking of letters on your part dictée rather than dictation. See?”

  Oedipus Snark had an annoying habit of adding “See?” to his observations. At first Jenny had been largely unaware of it, but then, after she had worked for him for a few weeks, she became acutely conscious of it and resented it greatly. She had even sent a letter about it to an agony aunt, in which she had written: “I work for a man in public life. He has his good points, I am sure, but I am finding his turn of phrase more and more irritating. At the end of many of his sentences he adds the word ‘see.’ He is not Welsh; when Welsh people say that, or ‘look you,’ it sounds rather nice, but he is not Welsh. Should I say something to him about this, or should I try to put it out of my mind? The work is otherwise interesting and I do not want to lose my job.”

  The agony aunt had published this letter, and her reply.

  Dear Anxious,

  There is often nothing worse than some little mannerism in others that we become aware of and then look out for. I have a teenage son who adds “and stuff” to virtually everything he says. When I ask him what time it is, he says, “It’s eight, and stuff.” By comparison, what your boss says is mild, although I fully understand that my telling you that other people have worse verbal mannerisms must be scant consolation. I always remember the advice given by a rather wise psychiatrist, who said, “The contemplation of the toothache of another in no way relieves one’s own toothache.” That, I think, is broadly true.

  What should you do? Well, the same doctor also said, “Verbalisation precedes resolution.” And that, I think, is also very true. So I suggest that you talk to your boss and say that there is a little matter that is worrying you. Stress that it’s just you—that it’s an odd sensitivity you have—and then tell him what it is. My bet is that if you are frank—and if you mention that you have many faults yourself—he will be accommodating and will try to stop. Alternatively, of course, he may sack you.

  The final part of this advice had persuaded Jenny that perhaps it was best not to say anything, and so she merely closed her ears to the “see.” And there was so much else to take exception to in Oedipus Snark that linguistic mannerisms were soon overshadowed. Jenny became used to the false excuses that he gave—“diplomatic excuses,” he called them—but still it made her uncomfortable to be party to them. Like all MPs, he received regular invitations to visit schools and libraries in his constituency, and he was in the habit of turning all of these down, without exception. “I shall, alas, be tied up with parliamentary business on that day” was the standard excuse. It was then followed by fulsome praise of the school’s efforts: “May I take this opportunity to tell you how many people have expressed their admiration for the high standards that your school has achieved over the last year. I really must congratulate you: it is not easy to motivate students in these distracting days, and you seem to achieve this with conspicuous success.” This was said to every school, and had even once been inserted into a letter to a local baker, who had written about European regulations and their baneful effect on small bakers.

  For invitations to functions that were several months away, more inventive excuses were necessary. It was difficult to turn down an invitation received in, say, March for an event that was to take place in October. But Oedipus Snark was not loth to do this, and he had even told a pensioners’ action group that he could not attend a meeting planned for six months hence. “I very much regret that I shall be unable to attend,” he dictated, “on the grounds that …” He paused, and looked at Jenny as if for inspiration. “On the grounds that I shall be attending a funeral on that day. There!” he said. “That settles that.”

  Jenny looked up from her notebook. “But …,” she began. “But, how could you know? Funerals are usually arranged only a few days beforehand. They’ll know that you can’t possibly be booked to go to a funeral six months ahead.”

  Oedipus Snark glared at her. “Oh yes?” he challenged. “And what about cases where people are given six months to live? You have heard of those, I take it? Well, there you are. It’s perfectly possible that if somebody has been given six months to live and has told his friends, they’ll pencil his funeral in the diary. Perfectly possible.” And to underline his point, he added, “See?”

  Jenny had bitten her lip, both in reality and metaphorically. She told herself that she was not in a position to change him in any respect and that she should therefore simply accept him for what he was. After all, he was a democratically elected Member of Parliament, even if the turn-out in his constituency at the election had been only thirty-two per cent. He had been chosen, and it was not for her to dispute the choice of his electors. In those circumstances, her job was to help him to do the job that he had been elected to do; or to avoid doing it, as was the case with him. But she realised that she did not like him, and never could. And that, she later discovered, was exactly what Oedipus Snark’s own mother thought about him too.

  “Don’t talk to me about my son,” Berthea Snark had said to Jenny when she first met her. “Just don’t talk to me about him.”

  11. A Flexible Diary

  OEDIPUS SNARK’S two-bedroom flat in Dolphin Square was on the third floor, affording him a wide view, just above the tops of the trees, of the unlikely Italianate gardens. It w
as a place much favoured by politicians. “From my window,” he was fond of saying, “I can see into the flats of twenty-two other members of the House of Commons. With binoculars, of course.”

  He knew the locations of the many political landmarks: the house where de Gaulle had lived and from which he had run his campaign, the counterpoint to that infamous hotel in Vichy; the flat where Lord Haw-Haw had stayed; the one where Christine Keeler had entertained; and so on. “Success in politics,” he had explained to Jenny when she first went to work for him, “is purely about one’s address book. There is only one person who can afford not to have an address book, Jenny. You know who that is?”

  She did not. “Who?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time,” he said.

  It was typical of the evasive answers to which she would soon become accustomed. Even a simple question—such as an enquiry as to what time it was—could be evaded. “It’s rather late,” he said to her once when her watch had stopped and she had asked him the time.

  “But what’s the actual time?”

  He looked at his wristwatch. “After four,” he said, “and I must get up to the House.”

  That answer, she reflected, revealed two things about his personality. The first was this tendency not to provide an answer to a question, however innocuous; the second was the extent to which the universe—even time—revolved around him. Four o’clock was four o’clock universally—at least for the sixty-odd million people living in the GMT zone—but for Oedipus Snark the significance of four o’clock was what it meant in his life, according to the exigencies of his diary for that day.

  Jenny arrived shortly before ten that morning to find Oedipus Snark sitting in the converted bedroom that served as his office. It was not a large room, but it was big enough to hold two desks—a generously proportioned one for him and an extremely small one for Jenny. In fact, Jenny had earlier discovered that her desk came from a primary school that had closed down and sold off its furniture cheaply. The desk’s provenance had been revealed by the initials carved by a child into the underside of the lid, and also by the small pieces of dried chewing gum parked underneath. When she had pointed these out to Oedipus Snark, he had laughed.