Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

‘Which is?’

‘A parlour is more formal. It’s the place where you receive people. You don’t sit around in a parlour; you do that in a sitting room or a living room - a drawing room if you’re a bit grander.’

‘Well, whatever. Just imagine it, though. You have a rather dark old picture in your parlour, a picture that you think is a mere Honthorst.’

James corrected her again. ‘Honthorst is not mere. He was a very important painter, one of the major Caravaggisti of his time. He was—’

‘But he was not Caravaggio,’ interrupted Caroline. ‘And if you had a choice: Honthorst or Caravaggio? If the chips were really down and you had to choose.’

It was not a difficult choice. ‘Caravaggio out of sheer avarice,’ said James. ‘Well, one has to eat, you know, and a Caravaggio would bring in millions. And he was a better painter too. That’s always convenient. Choose somebody on aesthetic grounds but make sure that he’s also the most expensive.’

‘Yet value isn’t the sole consideration,’ argued Caroline. ‘You can have artists fetching stratospheric prices and yet their work may be trite, banal even. Those people who do installations, for example. They fetch millions, but what are the people who buy such things actually getting?’

‘A take on the world,’ offered James. ‘A fresh perspective on things. A new understanding of the everyday world. Visual surprise.’

Caroline was doubtful. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘But it’s not real value we’re talking about here. It’s an inflated sense of value - like tulips in the Dutch tulip frenzy. Everybody thought they were worth millions until somebody said, “Aren’t those just common-or-garden tulip bulbs?” And that was the end of that.’

James toyed with his fork. ‘You think contemporary art will go the same way?’

‘I do. Of course it will. When people wake up.’

‘So if I said, “This fork is by you know who,” you might say, “It’s just a fork.” Right?’

Caroline said that she would.

‘And the shark?’ James asked.

‘It’s just a shark,’ said Caroline. ‘And whoever bought it must surely be sweating over the day that somebody stands up and says, “It’s just a shark, for heaven’s sake!”’

James smiled. ‘I think they’ve already said it. And yet people still pay those prices at auction for that stuff.’

‘They have to,’ said Caroline. ‘If they didn’t, then what they already had would be worthless. You can’t really sell sharks, you know. Particularly dead ones.’

‘But I think you can,’ said James, ‘as long as you get people to believe it’s an important dead shark.’ He paused. ‘That shark, you see, has been canonised.’

James chose sparkling mineral water and a glass of house white. ‘I shouldn’t drink at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘And I normally don’t. But all that Caravaggio, you know - what else can one do?’

‘Did you see the film about him?’ asked Caroline. ‘The Derek Jarman film?’

James nodded. ‘Caravaggio doesn’t exactly come out of it very well. He had a penchant for knives. And that awful scene where he murders his model by slitting his throat.’ He shuddered, and reached for the sparkling mineral water. ‘Do you think artists have to lead intense lives? Do you think that you can be a great artist and be bourgeois? Or does it all have to be very gritty? Caravaggiesque.’

Caroline considered this. ‘Let’s try to think of artists who were straightforward, conventional types. Can you think of any?’

James looked up at the ceiling. ‘Difficult. It seems that the artistic personality has a certain contrariness to it. If you’re conventional, then perhaps there’s no impulse to create.’

Caroline helped herself to a small amount of James’s water. ‘So creativity comes from conflict? Inner conflict? You have to be hurt into making art?’

James thought that this was probably true. ‘Art comes from a desire to make sense of the world and one’s experience in it,’ he intoned. ‘It’s intended to make up for the separation that we feel between us as humans and beauty. The artist tries to recreate beauty - to make it whole again.’

‘If the artist is really concerned with beauty,’ said Caroline.

James thought this self-evident. ‘Surely he is?’

Caroline shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think so. Look at the sort of art we’ve just been discussing - installation art, the unmade beds and so on. Where’s the beauty in that?’

James grinned. ‘In an unmade bed?’

‘Yes. How can that have anything to do with beauty?’

James thought for a moment. ‘Ugliness can be beautiful,’ he said. ‘Anything can be beautiful. And maybe that’s what a certain sort of artist is trying to do: he - or she, of course - is trying to open our eyes to a beauty we would not otherwise see.’

Their plates arrived and were placed before them. Caroline looked at her pasta - all twisted shapes and beauty, an installation perhaps. She felt that she should say something about it, but the topic of generalised beauty took precedence over the particular, and certainly over the beauty to be found in pasta. James’s last remark interested her; it was right in one way, but she thought that in another way it was wrong. If everything was beautiful - as he appeared to be suggesting - did that not deprive beauty of all its aesthetic, and indeed moral, force?

‘How can everything be beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Human suffering, for example? Is that beautiful? A scene of carnage? A place where suffering has occurred?’

‘Some things are horrible,’ James said. ‘Some things are hateful. What you’ve just mentioned is horrible, and hateful too, but surely it can be beautiful in the sense that it’s part of our world, and our world, in its totality, is beautiful?’

‘Rubbish,’ said Caroline. And then added, ‘What about a discordance in music? Is that beautiful?’

James looked at her reproachfully. ‘You’re being very aggressive, ’ he said. ‘Why don’t you eat your lunch instead of attacking me and everything I say? Go on, eat your lunch, you horrid girl!’

He laughed, and she laughed too. Dear James: he was so unlike . . . so unlike Caravaggio. She reached out and put her hand on his, just for a moment. The contact was brief, fleeting, but she noticed that he tensed; she could tell. She cast her eyes down to her plate. ‘Don’t you like to be touched?’ she asked.

His manner was one of affected nonchalance. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

‘But you flinched just then, when I put my hand on yours. You did, you know.’

He frowned. ‘Maybe I did. It’s just that I’m not used to being touched. I like to think of myself as quite tactile, but only when I’m in control, when I’m the one doing the touching. I suppose I’m just not used to not being in control.’

Caroline sighed. ‘That’s sad. It really is.’

James looked up. ‘I know. But it’s difficult, sometimes, to deal with something you know you want to change. You can’t just do it like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘You have to understand why it is that you feel the way you do and then you have to tackle it.’

Caroline was silent. ‘Did something unsettling happen to you, James?’ she asked. ‘Is that why . . . ?’

James met her gaze. I love his eyes, she thought. Nobody I know has such sensitive eyes. Like the eyes of a Botticelli model. Wide. Light brown.

‘There was something,’ said James. ‘Something I saw a long time ago. I don’t really like to talk about it, though.’

‘Then you don’t need to,’ said Caroline.

He seemed to mull this over for a few moments. ‘No, maybe I do. Maybe that’s what I really have to do. Think about it. Talk about it.’ He took a sip from his wine glass. ‘I read somewhere that this is exactly what you should do. You should talk about the thing that frightens you and in that way you deprive it of its power.’