Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

Barbara gave him a withering look. ‘That is a matter of opinion. Errol Greatorex is a highly regarded travel writer.’ She held Rupert’s gaze. ‘And may I remind you of the advance we’re going to be getting for this particular manuscript? And serialisation rights sold to the Sunday Telegraph . So don’t talk this thing down, Rupert.’

Rupert put up his hands in mock defence. ‘All right.’

Barbara still looked at him severely. ‘Who was this person, anyway?’ she asked.

‘Somebody from The Times ,’ he said. ‘He said that he had been talking to an MP he knows who told him that you had this manuscript and that you could arrange an interview for him.’

Barbara’s eyes glinted. ‘Which MP, may I ask?’ She knew the answer, of course.

Rupert laughed. ‘Your boyfriend. Oedipus Snark.’ He paused. ‘Pillow talk getting out of hand, Barbara?’

Barbara ignored this and they moved on to the next topic on the meeting agenda. But immediately after the meeting she got the journalist’s telephone number from Rupert. She would have to handle this carefully, she thought. If the story broke prematurely, then the large advance that she was confident of securing for her author might be compromised. The point about the yeti book was that it would have impact, and the leaking of the story beforehand could substantially diminish that.

The journalist was available and took Barbara’s call.

‘So what’s the story?’ he asked. ‘Is it true that you’ve got the biography of the abominable snowman?’

Barbara laughed. ‘Who on earth told you that?’

‘Somebody. You know that we don’t reveal our sources.’

‘Well, I know exactly who it was: Oedipus Snark. And yes, it’s true that I spoke to him about this. But it was a joke. A complete joke. I didn’t expect Oedipus to take it any further. I assumed that he’d know that the whole thing was absurd.’

The journalist was silent. ‘You mean there’s no yeti?’

Barbara laughed. ‘Of course there’s no yeti. Sorry about that. And no Father Christmas either.’

The journalist sounded disappointed. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘The best-laid scoops of mice and men . . .’

‘Well put,’ said Barbara, and rang off.

She stood at the window and thought. Oedipus Snark could spoil everything unless he were stopped. But how did you stop somebody like that? Threaten him with something? But what could she threaten Oedipus Snark with? Unless . . .

She was still thinking of the yeti - and Oedipus Snark - when she reached the door of her building in Chepstow Villas. Like William French, Barbara Ragg lived on the top floor, but that was where the similarities between his and her domestic arrangements ended. Corduroy Mansions was nowhere near as well appointed as Sydney Villa, the house in which Barbara had lived for the last twelve years. Her flat in Sydney Villa, a four-floor building of generously sized apartments - one to each floor - had belonged to Fatty Porter, the business partner of Barbara’s late father, Gregory Ragg. When Fatty had stopped working and moved to Norfolk, he had sold the flat to Gregory, who had lived in it for little more than a year before he too retired and took up residence in Kent. Gregory had given the flat to Barbara, much to the annoyance of Rupert Porter, who thought that his father would not have sold the flat to Gregory had he known that Gregory intended it for his daughter.

‘I would have loved to live there, Dad,’ Rupert had complained to his father. ‘Gregory knew all along that Barbara wanted it. Why should she be there and I’m stuck in my smelly old place?’ His smelly old place was in fact a rather pleasant flat in Holland Park, not far away from Sydney Villa. What really rankled Rupert was that the transaction had meant that he could not fulfil his ambition to have two flats rather than one.

Not that Rupert and Barbara did not get on - they sparred a little, as colleagues will do, but beneath there were the strong bonds that bind those who are members of families that have run a business together over more than one generation. And Fatty and Gregory themselves had been very close friends - both members of the Savile Club, where they dined together once a week and where Fatty had for many years sat on the catering committee. Rupert and Barbara were not quite as close, because Barbara had never really got on with any of Rupert’s girlfriends, nor, after he married, with his wife, Gloria.

‘She doesn’t like me,’ said Gloria. ‘I can sense it. You know how you can sense dislike. You just feel it.’

‘Negative waves,’ said Rupert. ‘You can pick up negative waves. But do you think Barbara really doesn’t like you? She seems civil enough.’

‘Yes, civil,’ said Gloria. ‘But have you noticed that when she’s talking to us, she always looks at you? Have you noticed that? Even if she’s saying something to me, she looks at you.’

‘There was a chap like that at Uppingham,’ mused Rupert. ‘He always looked at somebody else when he spoke to you. Strange chap.’ He paused. ‘Maybe she looks at me just because she’s used to my face. She sees it at the office all the time and so she’s used to it.’

Gloria shook her head. ‘I think it’s because she’s jealous. Deep down, she’s jealous of me. You were her friend - ever since you were small. You went to each other’s birthday parties, didn’t you? Right from the beginning.’

Rupert smiled. ‘She’s not jealous,’ he said. ‘She’s just a friend. There’s never been anything more than that between us.’

Gloria did not doubt that - at least from Rupert’s point of view. But she was a woman, after all, and she had views on how women felt about their male friends. No male friend, she believed, was ever just a friend. His potential for being something else was always, even if only subconsciously, evaluated, thought about.

‘And anyway,’ Rupert went on, ‘she’s got that awful boyfriend of hers. That Snark. Oedipus Snark, no less. I was at Uppingham with him, you know. What on earth was a mother doing calling her son Oedipus? What can she have been thinking of?’

‘I can’t stand him,’ said Gloria. ‘Remember when Barbara managed to persuade him to come and open the Elizabethan Fair in the gardens and he turned up twenty minutes late and left after five minutes? Ghastly man. Insincere. Untrustworthy. Strange that he should be a Liberal Democrat. Not a trace of sandals.’

‘I don’t care for him a great deal,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s funny, when we were at school there was another boy and the two of them looked quite alike. Not alike in any other way, just their looks. A chap called Ratty Mason, poor fellow. None of us knew, or even suspected.’

Gloria frowned. She had not heard of Ratty Mason before and felt that she needed to find out more. But not now; now she was thinking of friendship between men and women. She was wondering how possible it was for a woman to form a friendship with another woman who was principally a friend of her husband or her lover. Could one do that, or were there always going to be tensions underneath the surface? And in her particular, difficult case, was the problem hers or was it Barbara’s? Barbara might not be jealous of her being married to Rupert; it might be she who was jealous of Barbara. Was that the way it was?

‘Do you think that a woman can have a friendship - a strong friendship - with a man?’ she asked.

‘Depends on what sort of friendship you’re talking about,’ said Rupert. ‘If you’re talking about the type of friendship that D. H. Lawrence goes on about, then . . . well, I’m not sure. I suppose man-woman friendships are different.’