Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

On Saturday morning it was Jo who was up first in the shared flat in Corduroy Mansions. She was an early riser and always had been, a result of her upbringing in Perth. Her architect parents, Gavin and Madge Partlin, were believers in a healthy outdoor existence, which had been one of the reasons why they had moved from Sydney to Perth shortly after Jo’s birth. It was not that their lifestyle in Sydney had been particularly unhealthy - it had not - but neither had enjoyed the constraints of the flat in which they lived, nor the chilled, conditioned air of the tall city building they both worked in. In Perth they could live near the beach and work from home; in the mornings they could go running together along the beach, just below the high-tide mark, where the sand was firm enough for pounding feet, carrying Jo in her special baby-backpack. At weekends, if they wished, they could go camping near Margaret River, where the air that wafted in from the coast blew straight from the southern oceans; scented with the eucalyptus of the forests, it seemed to fill the lungs with life and energy.

Coming from such a background, Jo might have expected to find the transition to a life in London a difficult one. But she had not. London was for her something of a promised land - not a place where she could see herself staying for ever, but the place to be for that stage of one’s life at which one yearned after something different, even if one might not come right out and say that one wanted adventure . Which is what she did want, in fact; but where might one find such experiences when the world had contracted so much? When Base Camp at Everest itself could be reached in two days rather than two weeks? When even space flight was about to become a commodity which one might pay for on a credit card and book online? Like so many of her peers, she had gone travelling for a year after completing her course in physical education at the University of Western Australia. She had gone to Thailand, where she had spent four months working her way up from Krabi to Chiang Mai, staying in hostels and cheap guest houses. But the life of a lotus-eater, to which the existence of staying in Thai resorts proved to be so similar, became boring and eventually palled. Travel was all very well, but it needed a sense of purpose - something which a journey without a terminus always lacked. After Thailand there were Vietnam and Cambodia, but she was impatient and beginning to run out of money. It was time to go to London.

The flat in Corduroy Mansions was the first one she looked at, seeing Jenny’s advertisement by chance a few minutes after it had gone live on Gumtree. She had arrived two hours later, been interviewed by Jenny and agreed to move in the next day.

Dee had been interviewed the day after that, with Jo being co-opted onto the vetting committee. She and Jo had taken to one another immediately, although both of them had been less sure about Caroline when it was her turn to be assessed as the final member of the flat. ‘I’m not too sure,’ Dee whispered to Jo as Jenny took Caroline out of the room to show her the bedroom she would have.

‘No? What’s the problem?’

‘She’s a bit . . . you know.’

Jo had her doubts too, but was it because Caroline was a bit . . . you know? And what was ‘you know’ anyway?

‘I don’t know actually,’ she said. Was ‘you know’ the same as being a whinger ? English people were said to whinge a bit but perhaps in England itself they could be allowed to do so. After all, it was their country, even if it was run by Scots.

‘Posh,’ said Dee simply.

‘Oh.’ That was different from being a whinger, although one might have, of course, a posh whinger.

But Jo’s fundamental sense of fairness, her Australian heritage, came to the fore. She remembered her father once remarking, ‘You can’t help the bed you’re born in, you know.’ She had been a teenager when he said that, and the observation had stuck in her memory. Of course you can’t help who you are. That is something that people forgot, she felt. They forgot it when they were unkind to people because of where they came from, or because they were different, or because they had greasy skin. Her father was right. ‘She can’t help that, you know,’ she pointed out. ‘She can’t help the way she talks, can she? None of us can.’

Dee had found herself unable to argue with that, although she mumbled something about Sloane Rangers. But they both decided that they would not object to Caroline’s admission to the flat, which was just as well because Jenny announced when she came back into the room that Caroline would be moving in.

‘Why did she ask us to interview her if she was going to make up her mind by herself?’ Jo later complained to Dee.

Dee thought for a moment. ‘Because that’s what we call consultation in this country,’ she said. ‘It’s the same with government. Look at how they have all these consultation exercises. But they decide policy in advance, before they have the consultation exercise, and then they announce what they’re going to do - which is exactly what they were always going to do anyway. That’s the way it works.’

‘But that’s very hypocritical,’ said Jo.

Dee laughed. ‘Oh yes, it’s hypocritical all right. But there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy in this country. Isn’t it the same in Australia?’

That question required more than a few moments of thought. Then Jo replied, ‘I think we’re more direct speakers,’ she said. ‘We say things to people’s faces.’

Dee was intrigued. ‘Such as?’

Again Jo hesitated. ‘That I find you very attractive.’

Dee had not known what to say. For a few moments she stared at her flatmate, not in the way that one stares at something that interests one, but with the sort of stare used when one is looking at somebody and is suddenly too embarrassed to look away. If such a stare lingers, it lingers because it can do nothing else.

‘Oh,’ she said. And then, again, ‘Oh.’

Then it was Jo’s turn to show embarrassment. She, too, said, ‘Oh.’

Dee tore her gaze away and looked at the floor. They were standing in the kitchen, and she was looking down at cork tiles, which had been pitted over the years by stiletto heels. It was like the surface of a brown planet somewhere, she thought, the indentations being tiny hits by ancient meteorites.

‘Oh,’ repeated Jo. ‘I didn’t mean it like that . You didn’t think . . . ?’

Dee looked up with relief, and laughed. ‘Of course not.’

She was lying. Of course she had.

‘You see,’ Jo went on, ‘that shows the truth of what I said about us Australians. We really do speak our minds. I was thinking that you look really good in that top. It suits you. Suits your colouring. Green.’

Dee reached up to touch her blouse. ‘Thanks. I’ve had it for ages.’ All her clothes were old; second-hand, mostly, bought from charity shops or passed on by more affluent friends. There was a woman who came into the vitamin agency who had taken to giving Dee the clothes that she no longer needed. This top came from her, she remembered.

‘You’ve got good skin too,’ Jo went on. ‘High cheekbones. My face is going to sag when I’m forty. God, I’m going to sag.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Dee. ‘And your skin’s fine. I don’t see anything wrong with it.’

‘That’s because you don’t live in it,’ Jo retorted. ‘I know. You should see my mother. I’m going to be like her.’