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Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

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Corduroy Mansions: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over sixty books on a wide array of subjects. For many years he was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and served on national and international bioethics bodies. Then in 1999 he achieved global recognition for his award-winning series The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and thereafter has devoted his time to the writing of fiction, including the 44 Scotland Street and the Isabel Dalhousie novels. His books have been translated into forty-five languages. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Elizabeth, a doctor.

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Corduroy Mansions had been built in the early twentieth century, in a fit of Arts and Crafts enthusiasm. It was an era when people still talked to one another, in sentences; that had since become unusual, but at least the occupants of all the Corduroy flats still conversed - at least sometimes - with their neighbours, and even appeared to enjoy doing so. ‘It’s got a lived-in feel,’ one of the residents remarked, and that was certainly true. Whereas in more fashionable blocks down the road in Eaton Square, or the like, there would be flats that lay unoccupied for most of the year, or flats occupied by exotic, virtually invisible people, wealthy wraiths who slipped in and out of their front doors without a word to neighbours, everyone with a flat in Corduroy Mansions actually lived there. They had no other place. Corduroy Mansions was home.

The staircase was the setting for most of these personal encounters, although every so often there would be a meeting at which all the tenants got together to discuss matters of mutual interest. There were the meetings that took place in William’s flat over the new carpet for the stairs - an issue that took six months of delicate negotiation to resolve - and there was also a meeting over what colour to paint the front door. On these occasions it was inevitably William who took the chair, being not only the oldest resident, but also the one most endowed with the gravitas necessary to deal with the landlord, a faceless company in Victoria that appeared to ignore any letters it received.

‘They’re in denial,’ said William. ‘We’ve got them for the next one hundred and twenty years and they’re in denial.’

But the landlord eventually did what was required, and although Corduroy Mansions could not be described as being in good order, at least it did not appear to be falling down.

‘This old place suits me,’ remarked William to his friend Marcia. ‘It’s like an old glove, familiar and comfortable.’

‘Or old sock, even,’ said Marcia, sniffing the air. Marcia was always ready to detect a smell, and she had often remarked on a slight odour on the staircase.

Marcia was a caterer. Ten years previously she had set up Marcia’s Table, a firm that specialised in catering for small weddings, board lunches and the like. Actually, to call Marcia’s Table a firm was to dignify it beyond what it deserved. Marcia’s Table consisted of Marcia and nobody else, other than the helpers she engaged to serve and clear up: young Australians, Poles, Romanians, eager all of them - to a fault - and totally free of the casual surliness that plagued their British contemporaries. It was Marcia who planned the menus, bought the supplies and cooked. And it was Marcia who frequently brought leftovers to Corduroy Mansions and left them in William’s flat. He had provided her with a key - in an impulsive gesture of friendship - and would sometimes come home to discover a pot of goulash sitting on the cooker, or half a plate of only-the-tiniest-bit-soggy chicken vol-au-vents, or cocktail sausages impaled on little sticks, like pupae in a butterfly collection.

It was thoughtfulness on her part, touched, perhaps, by the slightest hint of ambitious self-interest. Marcia liked William; she liked him a great deal. It was a tragedy, she thought, that he was on his own; what a waste of a perfectly good man! For his part, he had never shown any interest in her beyond that which one has in a comfortable friend - the sort of interest that stops well short of any gestures of physical affection. She understood: a woman can tell these things, especially one as sympathetic and emotionally sensitive as Marcia believed herself to be. No, William had shown no signs of wanting closeness, but that did not mean that he might not do so in the future. So she continued with her culinary overtures and he, replete on vol-au-vents, reflected on his good fortune to have such a friend as Marcia. But in his mind she was just a friend, firmly on that side of the line.

The stumbling block, Marcia thought, was Eddie. If William were truly on his own, and not sharing with his son, then she felt it likely that he would be more receptive to the idea of a relationship with a woman. Having his son there distracted him and took the edge off his loneliness. If only Eddie were to go - and it was surely time for him to fly the nest - then her own prospects would be better.

Unfortunately, Marcia had once let slip her low opinion of Eddie, incautiously describing him as a ‘waste of space’. It had been unwise - she knew that - but it had been said, and it had been said when Marcia, who had been visiting William after catering for a rather trying reception, had had perhaps two glasses of wine too many. Eddie had been in the flat, listening to the conversation from the corridor. Nobody likes to be described in such terms, and he had pursed his lips in anger. He waited for his father to defend him, as any father must do when his own flesh and blood, his own DNA, is described as a waste of space. He waited.

‘That’s a bit hard on the boy,’ his father said at last. ‘Give him time. He’s only twenty-four.’

Perhaps Marcia regretted her slip, since she said nothing more. But then Eddie heard William say: ‘Of course, there’s a theory in psychology that many men only mature at the age of twenty-eight. You’ve heard of that? Seems a bit late to me, but that’s what they say.’

Eddie had turned round and slunk back into his room, a Polonius in retreat from behind the arras. That woman, he thought, that blowsy woman is after my dad. And if she gets him, then she gets the lot when he snuffs it - the flat, the wine business, the old Jaguar. The lot. She has to be stopped.

Then he thought: twenty-eight? Twenty-eight?

3. Dee is Rude about Others

As William locked his front door behind him that morning, he heard the sound of somebody fiddling with keys on the landing downstairs. This was nothing unusual: the girls, as he called them, had a difficult lock, and unless one inserted the key at precisely the right angle and then exerted a gentle upward pressure, it would not work. It was not unusual, he had noted, for the locking-up process to take five or ten minutes; on one occasion he had gone out to buy a newspaper and returned to discover one of the young women still struggling with the recalcitrant lock.

As he made his way downstairs, he saw that it was Dee on the landing below.

‘Having trouble with the key?’ he asked jauntily.

She looked up. ‘No more than usual. I thought I’d got the hang of it and then . . .’

Фото

‘Keys are like that,’ said William. ‘They never fit exactly. I remember an aunt of mine who used the wrong key for years. She was determined that it would work and she managed to force the lock of her front door every time. But it took a lot of force. She had lost the right key and was in fact using the back door key. The triumph of determination over . . . well, locks, I suppose.’

Dee stood back and allowed William to fiddle with the key. After a few twists the lock moved and he was able to withdraw the key. ‘There we are. Locked.’

They started downstairs together. There were four floors in Corduroy Mansions, if one included the basement. William owned the top flat, the girls were on the first floor, and in the ground-floor flat lived Mr Wickramsinghe, a mild, rather pre-occupied accountant whom nobody saw very much, but who kept fresh flowers in a vase in the common entrance hall.

‘The others have all left for work?’ asked William.

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