Corduroy Mansions cm-1 Read online

  ‘He wants you to belt him in, mate,’ said the taxi driver, who had observed all this in his rear-view mirror. ‘Smart dogs, these Pimlico Terriers, obviously.’

  At first William could not believe this, but then, when he reached over to put the belt over Freddie de la Hay and the dog barked encouragingly, he knew that the driver was right.

  Freddie de la Hay had been trained to belt up in the back of a car.

  24. Lemon Gems

  James and Caroline sat on the sofa and ate the lemon gems they had just baked. The biscuits were, they felt, a success, although James was of the view that Nigella could have recommended just a touch more lemon. Caroline disagreed. ‘She never makes a mistake,’ she said. ‘She’s the domestic goddess, remember.’

  ‘I’m not saying that she’s wrong,’ James reassured her. ‘Heaven forfend that I would ever disagree with Nigella or Delia.’ He bowed his head respectfully, an unexpected gesture, but touching, thought Caroline. ‘Or Jamie, for that matter,’ he continued. ‘You have to trust these people, you know, Caroline. If we started to argue with our cookery writers, then where would it end . . . ?’

  James, Caroline noticed, had a tendency to emphasise certain strategic words, to italicise them, a habit that gave particular weight to his pronouncements. Impressed with this, as with many of the things James said or did, she had tried to do the same, but found that she ended up emphasising the wrong words, thus adding opacity rather than clarity to what she said.

  She looked at James. Since that moment of accidental, shared intimacy in the kitchen, she had been wondering whether the conversation would revert to the subject they had been discussing over coffee earlier that day. James had said nothing further about that, and she found herself somewhat relieved. Perhaps the whole matter had been set aside; it was a delicate topic, and the baking of the lemon gems had changed the atmosphere to one of comfortable collaboration. James returned her gaze, but not in a way which gave any indication of his intentions.

  ‘What about you?’ he said.

  ‘Me?’

  James picked up another lemon gem. ‘I know so little about you. We’re friends, of course, and we know one another well. But there’s a difference between knowing somebody and knowing them. You know what I mean?’

  Caroline was not sure, but decided that perhaps she did. James sometimes left her a bit behind, she felt, and she was eager that he should not think that she did not understand. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  James wiped a crumb from his lips. ‘So, I know a bit about your past, about Cheltenham and all that.’ He waved a hand in the air to indicate a whole hinterland of personal history - a county, a family, a set of social expectations - Caroline’s whole family history. ‘I know the sort of background you’ve had to endure. Your old man being a land agent and all that sort of thing. And your mother. I’m surprised they didn’t put your photograph in the front of Rural Living.’

  Caroline froze. She was on the point of popping a lemon gem into her mouth, but now her hand fell to her lap. The lemon gem, held between nervous fingers, cracked slightly, but Nigella’s mixture held and it escaped being reduced to crumbs.

  ‘What?’ Her voice was small.

  ‘Rural Living,’ said James. ‘I can just see it, can’t you? Caroline, only daughter of Mr and Mrs Whatever Jarvis of Bin End, or wherever, is pictured here - in pearls. Caroline is reading Art History at Oxford (almost) and hopes to work at Sotheby’s.’ He laughed. ‘I can just see it.’

  Caroline laughed, but her laugh came out strangled, prompting James to enquire whether she was all right.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Caroline, offering him another lemon gem. That would distract him, she hoped, and perhaps steer the conversation into less dangerous waters.

  ‘Of course, you can’t help it,’ James went on. ‘Nobody can help their background. Although you can correct things later on, once you’ve got away from family influences. Not everybody does, of course. Some people remain clones of their parents all the way to the grave.’

  ‘I quite like my parents,’ said Caroline. And she did. They loved her; for all their fuddy-duddy ways and their outdated notions, they loved her, and she knew that she would never encounter such unconditional love again. Never.

  ‘Of course,’ said James quickly. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t picking on them in particular. I was just thinking of what parents can do to their children - often with the best intentions in the world. You know Larkin’s poem?’

  Caroline was not sure.

  James smiled patiently. ‘It’s the one with the rather - how shall we put it? - forceful first line about what parents do to their kids. It was in a poetry book we had at school and I remember that when we got to it, the English teacher went pale and moved very quickly to the next poem, some frightfully dull thing by Cecil Day Lewis. Of course that meant we all went and looked very closely at what Larkin had to say. But it’s mild stuff, really, compared with what everybody writes today. It must be frustrating being a poet - or any sort of artist - and not being able to offend anyone any more.’ Or were people still as readily offended, and all that had changed was the nature of what was permissible and what was interdicted?

  He reached for another lemon gem - his sixth. ‘Sugar craving,’ he said apologetically. ‘Your fault, Caroline, for suggesting that we bake these things.’

  ‘Oh well . . .’

  James licked his fingers. ‘Last one. That’s it.’ He stared at Caroline intently. ‘What would you have done, by the way, if your parents had tried to get your photograph into Rural Living? What would you have said?’

  She looked away. James was proving persistent, and she would have to change the subject. ‘Let’s not talk about all that,’ she said. ‘My parents are my parents. I’m me. Same as you, really. You don’t sign up to everything your paren—your father stands for, do you?’

  James shook his head ‘No. But if I’m honest, I can see my father in me. Some of the things I do.’

  ‘Well, that’s natural enough.’

  ‘Maybe. But look, we were talking about you.’ He paused, as if unsure about continuing. ‘Are you still seeing him?’ he asked. ‘What’s he called again?’

  Caroline was on the point of answering, but stopped herself. Had she replied spontaneously, she would have confirmed that she was still seeing Tom. That was true, but she was only just still seeing him, and she had already decided that there was no future in the relationship. Her friendship with James was, she thought, on the cusp of change, and there was a chance that he might become more than a mere friend. Stranger things have happened, she said to herself - a banal phrase, a cliché, but one that nonetheless expressed the sense of opening out, of possibility, that she now experienced. Identity was not as simple a matter as many people believed: the old idea of clearly delineated male and female characteristics was distinctly passé, as old-fashioned as vanilla ice cream. Now there were new men, men in touch with their feminine side, and the intriguing category of metrosexuals, too - sensitive men, men who used male cosmetics such as ‘man-liner’, men who would enjoy baking Nigella’s lemon gems. These men could be more than adequate lovers and husbands, she believed; much better than the one-dimensional macho types who might score ten out of ten on the heterosexuality scale but who were somewhat boring in their conversation and hopeless in the kitchen. Men like Tom.

  25. Paris

  ‘He’s called Tom,’ said Caroline.

  James nodded. She had spoken about Tom before but he had not really been paying attention. ‘Of course. Tom. I remember - you told me. And . . .’

  She looked at him enquiringly. ‘And what?’

  ‘Are you and Tom still together?’

  She wanted to choose her words carefully. It was not that she was prepared to be untruthful, it was just that she was not entirely sure about her feelings, which were changing anyway. Togetherness was not a word she would ever have used to describe her relationship with Tom. They might have been together in the most general sense of the term
, but they were not together in the way in which James pronounced it - they were certainly not italicised. ‘I still see him,’ she said, and added, ‘now and then.’

  He was watching her. No, she thought then. Whatever happened in the future between Tom and her, this incipient thing with James, this fantasy, would never work. Not James, her wonderful, sympathetic, companionable James. She had a friend who had wasted three years in pursuing a man who was not in the slightest bit interested. At the time she had warned this friend that one could not expect to change something so fundamental, but her warning had been ignored. She must not do the same thing herself. Some men were destined to be good friends and nothing more. James was like that; it was so obvious. She should accept him for what he was and not encourage him to be something that he so clearly was not. He was fine as he was. He was perfect. Why nudge him into a relationship that would be inauthentic to him?

  James was smiling. ‘You don’t sound enthusiastic. You see him. That sounds really passionate, Caroline.’

  She looked away. James was right: it was not a passionate relationship.

  James continued. ‘Tell me this: how do you feel when you’ve got a date with him coming up? Do you count the minutes until you see him? Feel breathless? Fluttery?’ He rubbed a hand across his stomach. ‘You know the feeling. Like that?’

  ‘I like him.’

  He shook his head. ‘That was not the question I asked. I want to know whether you feel anticipation when you are about to see him. That really is the test, you know. Excitement. Anticipation.’

  It was difficult for her to answer, and she was not sure whether she wanted to do so anyway. He had guided their conversation into a realm of intimacy that she had explored with nobody else, not even her close girlfriends. It was strange to be talking this way to a man, even as comfortable a man as James. And yet that very strangeness had a strong appeal. One should be able to talk about these things; one should be able to share them.

  ‘It’s hard for me to know,’ she said. ‘It’s not that I don’t feel something for Tom - I do. It’s just that . . .’

  ‘You don’t feel it, do you?’ He spoke gently, as if guiding her to a source of pain, a tender spot.

  ‘No.’

  She realised that he had brought her to an understanding of her feelings she would not have achieved by herself, and she felt grateful as a result. That single word - that single cathartic ‘No’ - had revealed a truth that had been there all along but which she had simply never confronted.

  He made a gesture with his hands - a gesture she interpreted as saying, well, there you are. And he was right. There she was: it was the end of Tom.

  And the beginning of James? The thought refused to go away.

  ‘It’s not all that easy, you know,’ she said. ‘Ending something. It’s messy, isn’t it?’

  She waited for an answer, but James was staring silently at the ceiling.

  ‘You do understand that?’ she pressed. ‘You must know how hard it is to end a relationship. There are all sorts of connections and ties and associations. Bits of lives meshed together. You have to cut through all of that, as a surgeon cuts through living tissue.’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You suppose so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must have done it yourself.’

  He continued to stare at the ceiling as he answered. ‘Not really. No, I haven’t. At least, not quite like this.’

  ‘Well, it would have been a bit different in your case.’

  He looked at her coolly. ‘Why do you say that?’

  She blushed. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Of course it’s the same for everyone.’

  The coolness he had shown vanished. When she looked at him, she suddenly saw only regret.

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve never had what you’d call a love affair.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No, I mean it. People think that everybody has been involved with somebody else, whatever their nature. They find it inconceivable that one might go through life never finding anybody. But you know something, Caroline? I think that’s far more common than you would ever imagine. There are plenty of people in that position.’

  Impulsively, she reached out and took his hand. It seemed the most natural, the easiest thing to do, and it seemed easy for him too.

  ‘Poor James,’ she whispered.

  He smiled at her weakly. ‘Yes, poor James.’

  For a few minutes they sat there, not speaking, and not really looking at one another either. Their hands remained together, though, and when she squeezed his gently, in sympathy, he returned the pressure. It was as if signals were being exchanged in the night, in a time of war, perhaps - flashes of light in the darkness, one in answer to the other, messages that confirmed the presence of human sentiment, as feeling responded to feeling.

  After a while, she gently relinquished her grip. She leaned over towards him and whispered, although there was nobody else in the flat, nobody who would hear, ‘Why don’t we go to Paris together?’

  His eyes widened. ‘Paris?’ The italicised emphasis was perfect, she thought; just right.

  She had no idea why she had said this. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Very cheesy.’

  ‘Cheesy! It’s not cheesy.’ He paused. ‘It’s exactly the right thing to do, Caroline. Paris! Of course.’

  ‘We could go on the Eurostar,’ she said.

  It was a lame thing to say, enough to shatter the magic of the moment, but James was not deterred: there was nothing wrong with the Eurostar.

  ‘There are some Bonnards I want to see there,’ he said. ‘We could look at them together.’

  She nodded her agreement; the Bonnards would be nice. But as she stood up and went to look out of the window, she thought: that’s the problem - that’s exactly the problem! Paris was more than Bonnard, at least for most young couples planning un week-end. Far more.

  26. Applied Ethics

  When James left Corduroy Mansions that afternoon he did not notice the taxi drawing up a few yards away. There was no particular reason to notice it; London taxis are ubiquitous, barely noticeable other than when sought out, and often becoming completely invisible then. And his mind was on other things, preoccupied with thoughts of Paris and Bonnard, and - although not to the same degree - of the time he had spent with Caroline. There was also, of course, the memory of the lemon gems; those delicacies had left a lingering taste in his mouth, a vaguely lemony sensation that reminded him of a childhood holiday in Cyprus, where the hotel had a lemon grove in its grounds, and . . . No, he would not revisit the lemon grove.

  So James did not see a middle-aged man struggling to get out of the cab while holding what seemed to be a dog’s bed under one arm and the end of a leash in the other hand. The man, William French MW (Failed), succeeded in getting himself out of the taxi and then, laying the dog’s bed down on the pavement, began to tug on the leash. The dog at the other end seemed reluctant to move, but eventually, after a few increasingly firm tugs, jumped out of the cab and sat obediently at the man’s feet. The fare was paid and the cab moved off into the traffic.

  From his position on the pavement, seated at the feet of a human being whom he had only just met but instinctively liked, Freddie de la Hay, Pimlico Terrier, sniffed at the air. He had a very good nose - a trained nose, in fact, because before he had been acquired by the opinionated columnist, Manfred James, he had been employed as a sniffer dog at Heathrow airport. He had been good at his job, but had been dismissed as part of an affirmative action programme when it had been discovered that all the dogs at the airport were male. After this matter had been raised by a local politician, it was announced that there would be a policy of equal opportunity for female sniffer dogs - an absurd notion that had provoked outraged rants in those newspapers given to such things. But for some, at least, the point raised by this exercise was a valid one. Should one treat animals fairly?

  The question was
a serious one. The Heathrow issue had caught the attention of at least one moral philosopher concerned with the rights of animals - a weighty matter that was increasingly, and deservedly, the subject of philosophical discussion. Most of this writing was of one view: causing pain or distress to an animal was wrong - as even the Struwwelpeter, that none-too-gentle children’s classic, recognised in its story of Cruel Frederick. Frederick, the taunter of the good dog Tray, was bitten for his gratuitous cruelty, to the delight of all; a fate that could have been so much worse, bearing in mind what happened to Augustus in the same book, and to the digit-deprived victims of that thinly disguised castration-figure, the tailor with his large scissors, the bane of those who sucked their thumb.

  But if the inflicting of physical pain was generally, if not universally, disapproved of, then what of wrongs of a lower order, such as unfairness in treatment? The moral philosopher who seized on Freddie de la Hay’s case as an illustration for his paper, ‘Justice and Injustice Between Species’, suggested an example of two dogs and one biscuit. It was typical of the dilemmas beloved of moral philosophers, being set in a world which is recognisably our own, but not quite. Mother Hubbard, the owner of two dogs, has only one dog biscuit in her cupboard. Her two dogs, whom she does not love equally, are at her feet, eagerly anticipating the treat. What should she do? Should she break the biscuit into two equal parts and give each dog a morsel, or may she give the biscuit to the dog she prefers?

  The author of ‘Justice and Injustice Between Species’ began his analysis of the case by changing the dogs into children, a trick that would normally challenge even the most skilled stage magician, but which, for a philosopher conducting a thought experiment, is as easily done as said. A parent would be making a grave mistake were she to give a whole biscuit to a favoured child and none to another, but does the same rule apply to the owner of an animal? The answer will obviously depend, the author - a consequentialist - said, on the consequences of this act of preference. The favoured dog will be happy enough, but his unlucky companion will surely feel disappointment at not being given his share; that is, of course, if he has a notion of sharing, which, being a dog, he will not. So one must avoid, the author pointed out, any suggestion that the less fortunate dog will feel that he has been the victim of injustice. There is no such thing in the mind of a dog.