Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

He looked at Barbara as if expecting an answer, so she replied, ‘Very wrong?’

Hugh took a sip of his Chablis. ‘Yes, very.’ He paused and looked at Barbara with concern. ‘You promise you won’t laugh?’

‘Of course I promise. I wouldn’t dream of laughing. I really wouldn’t.’

He seemed reassured. ‘Well, all right. One Friday afternoon I had a telephone call from the mother of one of my pupils at the school. These people, who were tremendously grand, did not live in Barranquilla but had an estate out in the country, some distance away. The school holidays were coming up, she said, and would I be interested in spending a couple of days on their estate? She explained that they were very isolated, but there would be plenty of opportunities to ride, if I wished, or I could just sit around and read and swim in the pool. She made it sound very attractive, and since I had nothing else to do I saw no reason not to accept the invitation. She then said that I would be picked up and flown there in their small private plane. Her husband, she explained, would send his pilot.’

Barbara Ragg watched him as the tale unfolded. He had a way of telling a story that was completely natural and quite transfixing. She could not bear the thought of waiting for the outcome, although she knew in advance that it was not going to end well.

‘I told the family I was staying with about the invitation, and they seemed a little bit concerned. I asked them whether they thought I should have turned it down and they said, rather enigmatically, that even if they had thought that, they would not advise me to refuse. “There are some people in this country,” they said, “whose invitations cannot be turned down. The only excuse they accept is that you’re dead and can’t come for that reason. Even then, they can be a bit grudging.”

‘I thought this very strange but I chose not to let it prey on my mind. When the car came to collect me to take me to the plane, I decided to take with me more than just the things I would need for only a few days. I took my trip diary and my walking boots and the very long Russian novel I was reading. It was just as well.’

Hugh had reached the bottom of his glass of Chablis, and Barbara reached forward to refill it. She was attracted by the slight air of vulnerability, both touching and profoundly appealing, that settled upon him as he told this story. Oedipus Snark would never have been able to achieve an effect like this - he was always in control of the world, defeating it, proving himself, like the hero of some impossible adventure novel. What have I done, she asked herself, contemplating Hugh now, to merit a move from that man to this ? The gods of mortal concupiscence had been kind - far kinder than she could ever have imagined they would be to a thirty-something literary agent with a bad record for choosing the wrong sort of man.

‘Colombia is a strikingly beautiful country,’ Hugh went on. ‘I remember so vividly the flight in that small plane over the rich green landscape. The pilot said that we could fly low if I wished to see things: villages, colourful buses on the roads, fields, those great, towering trees they go in for. Then suddenly there was a landing strip on a sweep of land in front of a large hill, and we were down.

‘We were miles from anywhere, on a landing strip cleared out of thick bush. Under the trees to one side of the strip there was a jeep - two jeeps, in fact - one with two or three men carrying small machine guns. That did not surprise me all that much - I had become used to seeing machine guns in Colombia. People had to have them to protect themselves against attack from all sorts of quarters. It would have been surprising, in fact, if my hosts had not had any machine guns - it would have been a reason to be suspicious.

‘My hostess was waiting to greet me up at the main house. I had met her once before at the school when she had come to discuss her son’s progress, and I had quite liked her. She had the bearing that the South American rich have - a sort of imperious confidence that comes from knowing just what their wealth confers upon them, which is immunity from the lot of everybody else, whatever that may be. And they don’t hesitate to let you know that they have a lot of money. In this country the rich are discreet: “Rich? Not us! Oh no!” In South America it’s very different.

‘Apolinar, their son, was standing with his mother on the veranda when I arrived. He was thirteen or thereabouts, and he hadn’t made a particular impression on me at the school. I remembered his name, of course, as it was Spanish for Apollo. In fact, I found myself thinking of him as Apollo rather than Apolinar, which made things rather comic. Has Apollo done his homework yet? is rather a strange thing to ask yourself, don’t you think?’

Barbara laughed but then stopped herself, remembering that she had promised not to. But Hugh was laughing too. Then he became grave again.

‘I had no idea at the time,’ he said. ‘None.’

‘My hostess,’ Hugh continued, ‘left Apollo to show me round. His manner was rather shy at first, which was understandable I suppose, in view of the fact that I was one of his teachers - even though there were probably only six years between us. Such a gap may be nothing later on, but at that age it seems like a whole generation.

‘The house was vast, rambling off in every direction from a central courtyard, but with the comfortable intimacy that you find in Spanish colonial architecture. We don’t go in for courtyards in this country, do we? I wish we did.’

Barbara frowned. Did we really have no courtyards? Hugh saw the effect of his question and pressed her on it. ‘Well, just think: how many people do you know who have a courtyard in their house?’

She thought there must be some, but when she tried to list them . . .

‘You see?’ said Hugh. ‘We’re deprived of courtyards.’

‘Well, so many people live in flats. You can’t expect them to have a courtyard.’

Hugh was quick to contradict her. ‘Yes, you can. If you go to a French or Italian city you’ll see flats arranged around a courtyard. And there are some in Scotland. In some of those small fishing villages in Fife, quite modest houses have little courtyards. There are very few courtyards in England. Some, but not many.’

Barbara thought that there must be a reason for this. ‘The weather?’ she wondered. ‘Why have courtyards if you have weather like ours? And space, too. We don’t have much room, do we?’

Hugh was not convinced. ‘A courtyard is actually rather a good thing to have in bad, blustery weather. You’re sheltered from the winds. And as far as space is concerned, look at the room that is taken up by gardens. People insist on a little strip of grass and a flowerbed - but how much use do they get out of that? They would use the space much more if they had a courtyard and grew plants in tubs and troughs. I really think that.

‘And there’s another thing,’ he went on. ‘There’s a book you should read. It’s called A Pattern Language and it’s by a group of architects. I think the main author’s called Christopher Alexander, something like that. Anyway, they set out a whole lot of principles for humane architecture - for making rooms and houses in which people will feel comfortable. Rooms, for instance, should have light from two sources. Houses should not be built in long rows along the side of roads - that’s why so much of urban Britain has been rendered sterile, you know, because people just don’t feel comfortable living in long lines. They can’t relate to the other people on the line. It’s that simple. The same goes for American strip malls - they’ve killed cities. Whereas if you build everything in clusters, around what are effectively open-air courtyards, then it all feels quite different. People feel happy and secure. We feel at our most comfortable when we’re living round a courtyard. It’s just such a sympathetic space.’