Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

He looked at her in alarm. ‘Such as?’

‘Flecks. And quite a few yellow dots. I don’t know what those mean. I suppose we could look them up.’

They were interrupted by the arrival of the first customer of the morning. He wanted St John’s Wort and a bottle of Echinacea. Dee served him while Martin tidied the counter. Afterwards, when the customer had gone, Martin turned to her. His anxiety was evident.

‘Should I cut out salt altogether?’

She shrugged. ‘We need a certain amount of salt. If you cut out salt altogether you’d die. So maybe just a bit less.’

He nodded. There was a mirror in the washroom and he would have a quick look at his eyes in that. If he could see the sodium rings himself, then he could monitor his progress in getting rid of them.

‘It’s not the end of the world,’ said Dee reassuringly. ‘People live with sodium rings for a long time.’

‘And then they die?’

‘Maybe. But you’re not going to die, Martin. Not just yet. As long as you take sensible precautions.’

Martin looked thoughtful. ‘Supplements?’

Dee shook her head. She knew that Martin was already on a number of supplements - they all were - and probably needed nothing else. No, the yellow flecks she thought she had seen in his irises pointed to colon issues.

‘I think that you need colonic irrigation,’ she said. ‘Those yellow flecks I saw are probably related to the colon.’

Martin said nothing.

‘Colonic irrigation is the answer,’ Dee pronounced. ‘We all need it, but very few people take it up.’

Martin swallowed. ‘You have to . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Dee. ‘It’s not a very savoury subject, but it’s no use running away from it. The transit time for food through the system should ideally be less than twenty-four hours. The average time for British men - of which you, Martin, are an example - is over sixty hours. Sixty hours!’

Martin swallowed again. ‘And it involves . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Dee. ‘It does. But we don’t need to go into that. One doesn’t have to look.’

She stared at Martin. She liked this young man. There was something innocent about him; something fresh. And yet when she had looked into his irises . . .

She smiled at him. ‘Don’t be too concerned. It’s not as bad as you think it is. I’ve had colonic irrigation. I went to Thailand and had a special course of it on Ko Samui. But you don’t have to go that far.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No. Not at all.’ She reached out and patted him on the shoulder. ‘How old are you again, Martin?’

‘Nineteen. Twenty next month.’

‘Twenty years of impurity,’ mused Dee. ‘Look, why don’t you let me do it for you? It’s not difficult, you know.’

Martin looked down at the floor. He was not sure what to say. It was such a generous offer.

Dee might have had a low opinion of her flatmate Caroline’s work, but for all that it was about as removed as was at all possible from the factory floor - in so far as any factory floors remained - still it required a measure of talent, and considerable application. And that was not all: in addition, the annual fees for the course amounted to seventeen thousand pounds, and that was just for tuition. On top of that one had to live, and for most of the people on the course with Caroline - and for Caroline herself - the living was the expensive part. One could not do a Master’s degree in Fine Art and just exist . There were certain standards to be kept up, and those were expensive.

Caroline had the distinction of having had her photograph featured in Rural Living , a fact she carefully concealed from her flatmates. Not that this was difficult: Dee’s reading was more or less confined to the vegetarian and alternative therapies press - Anti-oxidant News , for example, or The Healthy Table ; Jenny read political biographies, and little else; and Jo, as far as anybody could ascertain, read nothing at all. So there was little chance that any of them would have spotted her in the magazine, immediately after the property advertisements and just before the editorial on rural policy.

The publication of full-page photographs of attractive young women of a certain class was one of the great traditions of British journalism, better established than the rival - and vulgar - tradition of plastering naked women across page three of the Sun . The Rural Living girls could not have been more different from their less-clad counterparts in the Sun , separated by social and cultural chasms so wide as to suggest that each group belonged to a fundamentally different species.

Rural Living girls were photographed in a rural setting, although from time to time one might be featured in a cloister or some other suitable architectural spot. Generally they wore clothes that were not entirely dissimilar to their mothers’. Indeed, in the case of those girls of very ancient breeding, where long bloodlines had not been synonymous with commercial success and where genteel penury was the order of the day, the clothes they wore were in fact their mothers’, having been passed on with relief when it was discovered that fashions had come full circle and the outfits were once again à la mode .

The girls were always unmarried, even if some of them were engaged. The engaged girls had their pictures in the magazine as an encouragement to others to make suitable marriages when the time came. None of the fiancés was unsuitable; quite the opposite, in fact. So this meant that unengaged girls should put behind them any temptation to marry unsuitable men - of whom there was always a more than adequate supply - and marry, instead, boys who would in the fullness of time be the fathers of girls who appeared in Rural Living . And if there was a degree of circularity in this, it was entirely intentional.

Of course, Caroline’s parents would never have sought out the placing of their daughter’s photograph in Rural Living . It was well known that anybody who did so would be quietly and tactfully made aware that that was not the way it worked. The best route to inclusion was to come to editorial attention in a social context; another way was to know one of those photographers whose work was regularly published in the magazine. These photographers wielded considerable power - as photographers, and picture editors, often do. They could make or break political careers, for instance, simply by photographing their subject in a particular way. There was many a politician, or politician’s wife, who had been photographed in such a manner as to make him or her an object of derision. A former prime minister, for instance, was regularly portrayed as having extraordinary eyes, rather like the eyes of one possessed, and his wife was portrayed as having a perpetually open mouth, the mouth of one who was rarely silent. Now neither of these portrayals was accurate or fair. The Prime Minister’s eyes were not those of a maniac: photographers who did not approve of him simply achieved this effect by omitting to turn on the anti-red-eye device on their cameras. This created the impression that the Prime Minister was a messianic lunatic, which he was not. Similarly, when photographing his wife, these photographers simply waited until her mouth opened in order to breathe and then they snapped her. It was all extremely unkind.

Caroline had been spotted by a photographer called Tim Something. Something was a freelance photographer who specialised in covering events such as May Balls at provincial universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. He also covered picnics at Glyndebourne, regattas at Henley, and the occasional charity cricket match. His photographs were competently executed rather than brilliant, but then none of his subjects was particularly brilliant, and so it was a good match.