Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

William wondered why this would be necessary. Did Marcia know - or suspect - something that he did not? Or did she have some plan that she had not yet disclosed?

He was thinking about this when Freddie de la Hay came into the room with something in his mouth. It was something that he had been chewing - a piece of old leather perhaps. William bent down to examine the plaything and Freddie dropped his tail between his legs. It was a metaphor for guilt, and it was guilt itself.

‘What have you got hold of, Freddie?’ William asked, taking the piece of leather from the dog’s mouth.

Freddie looked up at William with his large, liquid eyes. William froze.

A Belgian Shoe - or what remained of it.

Hugh did not weep for long.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said, unfolding a handkerchief. ‘I’m meant to have got over it all. But every so often it comes back.’

Barbara Ragg wanted to say, ‘What comes back?’ But she did not. Instead she said, ‘I often have a bit of a cry myself. We all do. And it’s nice when a man does. It shows . . . well, it shows he’s in touch with his feminine side.’ That, she thought even as she uttered the words, is a terribly trite thing to say; why should it be that weeping is feminine? We all weep, the only difference being that men often suppress their tears.

Hugh nodded. He looked grateful. ‘There are different views as to how to deal with a traumatic experience,’ he said. ‘When I came back from South America, they said to me - or, rather, some people said to me - that I should have counselling. They said that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and that the only way I could deal with it was to talk about what had happened. So I was made to relive the whole experience, to look at it from all possible angles, with the aim of coming to terms with it. And yet I’m not so sure. There’s another view, you know, that you should try to put things out of your mind and get on with life.’

He paused. ‘Go on,’ said Barbara, adding, ‘if that’s what you want.’

‘Oh, I’m all right now,’ Hugh reassured her. ‘And I don’t mind talking about the whole thing, I really don’t. I do find the question interesting, though - whether one should talk or whether one should try to forget. I read a lot about that, you know.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. I had an uncle, you see, who was a psychiatrist, and he was very interested in these things. He had dealt with mountain rescue people who had found climbers who had fallen great distances. They were encouraged to go for debriefing over what happened. It’s something that employers often arrange.

‘My uncle said that he was not at all convinced that debriefing helped. He said that if you looked for hard evidence - studies and so on - to show that there were benefits, you just couldn’t find them. Everybody said that debriefing was a good thing, but when you asked for evidence to show that people who were debriefed suffered fewer symptoms of psychological distress in the long term than those who were not, nobody could come up with the necessary proof. The point was that debriefing had become a sort of ideology - like so much else.’

‘So were you debriefed?’ asked Barbara. ‘After it happened . . .’ But what was it ?

‘Yes,’ said Hugh. ‘I was sent to a very depressing woman. She was a clinical psychologist and she encouraged me to tell her every single little detail of what happened during the whole three months. Everything.’

Barbara drew in her breath. ‘Three months?’

Hugh stared at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Three whole months.’

‘That was a long time,’ said Barbara. But she still had no idea what it was, and she now decided that she should ask. ‘What actually happened?’ she asked.

Hugh smiled at her. He had put his handkerchief away, and if he was still upset, his feelings were well concealed. ‘You won’t laugh, will you?’

‘Of course not. I wouldn’t laugh at a thing like that.’ Like what? she wondered. Perhaps she would. Perhaps it was really very funny, in retrospect - as traumatic experiences can be, provided they happen to others.

‘I was kidnapped,’ said Hugh. ‘I was kidnapped in Colombia.’

That, as Barbara knew, was not in the slightest bit funny. The victims of Colombian kidnappings could be held for much more than three months - for years, even - and if anybody deserved sympathy it was them. So she reached out and touched his arm in a gesture of sympathy. ‘How terrible.’

‘Well, there are plenty of people who have suffered far more than I have,’ said Hugh. ‘I was relatively lucky. And that, interestingly enough, was something that I think really helped me to get over what happened. If I had sat about feeling sorry for myself and bemoaning my fate, I would have been more affected by it. As it was, I managed to get over it by keeping it in perspective.’

Barbara waited for him to continue. She did not wish to replicate the role of the depressing clinical psychologist whom he had referred to, so she said nothing; he would continue when he was ready.

‘It happened in a place called Barranquilla,’ he said. ‘It’s a rather strange place on the Caribbean coast - quite a busy industrial city, but one with all sorts of schools and universities. I had been travelling in South America for about eight months and I was heading for Cartagena. I had been right down in the south, in Tierra del Fuego, and had then gone up all the way to Ecuador and Colombia. When I got to Bogotá, I was beginning to run a bit short of money and somebody I met said that they could arrange a job teaching English as a foreign language at a school in Barranquilla. I had one of those very basic TEFL certificates - the sort you can get in a few weeks - and they said that this would be quite enough for the Colegio Biffi la Salle, which was the name of the school that was looking for an English conversation tutor.

‘Well, I applied for the job and I got it. I went up to Barranquilla and was given a room by a family who lived near the school. They were tremendously kind and made me feel very much at home. We exchanged lessons - I spoke to them in English one day and the next day they would speak to me in Spanish. My Spanish improved greatly and I learned all the current slang. Not that I could use any slang at the Colegio - it was a very proper place. A few days after I arrived, one of the teachers came up and asked me, quite seriously and in a very correct English accent, “Is it true that in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen?”’

Barbara burst out laughing. ‘And what did you reply?’

‘’Ardly hever,’ said Hugh.

This is hardly very traumatic, thought Barbara. She now reckoned that the moment had come to offer Hugh a further glass of Chablis, having felt until then that to mention Chablis in the midst of an encounter with past trauma would have been perhaps a little flippant.

Hugh accepted. ‘I was happy enough in Barranquilla,’ he went on. ‘My working commitments weren’t heavy and I had made a lot of new friends. It was warm and comfortable - a very easy place to be. You had to be a bit careful, of course - everywhere in Colombia has its dangers, and every so often there were items in the papers about kidnappings, and worse. As you know, in Colombia there are always guerrillas popping up and taking a swipe at the government. There were also thousands of narcotraficantes , who could be pretty ruthless. These people even had submarines that they ran from Barranquilla to the US to smuggle cocaine. It was a bit of a frontier town, in a way.

‘I thought, of course, that none of this would have anything to do with me. I was a very junior, insignificant teacher of a foreign language, and I didn’t imagine for a moment that I would see any of these things, let alone get involved in them. How wrong can you be?’