Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

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. She’s 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 thread-bare 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 themselves 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.’

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.