Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

The walk over, they returned to Corduroy Mansions. For some reason Freddie de la Hay seemed slightly uncomfortable, and William decided that he would watch him when he gave him his breakfast. Dogs were always hungry, it seemed, and if a dog turned up his nose at food it was a sure sign that something was wrong.

He took Freddie into the kitchen and picked up his bowl from the floor. Freddie watched him in silence. That was strange, as he normally whined and wagged his tail when he saw his bowl being prepared.

‘You not quite on form this morning, Freddie?’ William asked.

Freddie de la Hay gazed at his master. His tail, which normally wagged in response to any human question, remained still.

William crossed the room to get the half-full tin of dog food that he had put in the fridge the previous morning. Then he noticed something on the floor - a few fragments of wood and some torn paper. He bent down and picked up the bit of wood. It had been chewed.

He looked severely at Freddie. ‘What have you been chewing, Freddie? Come on now. Own up.’

Freddie de la Hay looked away. William, now quite puzzled, looked about the kitchen floor and saw more signs of Freddie’s activity - further fragments of wood and . . . He bent down again and picked up what looked like a small fragment of paper. But it was not paper; it was canvas.

William peered at the scrap of canvas; it was bare on one side, while the other was painted dark green, with touches of red and yellow. And as he began to make out what was there, the realisation came to him in an awful moment of clarity: the image was part of a snake. The Poussin. Freddie de la Hay had eaten the Poussin.

William did not remonstrate with Freddie - the offence was too enormous - but ran out of the kitchen to knock loudly on Marcia’s door. She opened it and looked at him anxiously.

‘Something wrong?’

‘Disaster,’ said William. ‘Extreme, indeed exceptional, disaster. Freddie de la Hay has eaten the Poussin. It’s a cultural tragedy.’

‘But I thought it was downstairs,’ said Marcia. ‘They took it.’

‘They must have popped it back through the letterbox,’ said William. ‘Come to think of it, I did hear something last night. That must have been it.’

Marcia followed William back into the kitchen, where Freddie de la Hay was sitting disconsolately, looking rather uncomfortable. When he saw Marcia, the dog lowered his snout even further until it was virtually on the ground - an admission of guilt, a position of abject repentance. If an artist had been present and had wished to paint a sentimental nineteenth-century genre painting entitled Sorrow for Past Misdeeds , no further arrangement of subject would have been required; Freddie de la Hay said it all.

William found another scrap of canvas on the floor and passed it to Marcia for examination. ‘What on earth are we to do?’ he asked.

Marcia held the tiny fragment of canvas in between thumb and forefinger and peered at it. ‘Imagine,’ she said. ‘This survived all those years. Survived the fall of empires. Two world wars. And now this.’

William was struck by the power of this observation, which underlined the significance of Freddie de la Hay’s role as cultural nemesis. If a work of art was to be destroyed, he thought, then it was marginally better that it should have been done by an agent who did not know what he was doing rather than by one who did it on purpose. For a painting to be destroyed by flood, fire, or, as in this case, dog, was less of an insult to the artist - or to the values that the painting represented - than to be torn up by one who despised it.

William repeated his question. ‘What are we going to do?’

Marcia looked at Freddie de la Hay. ‘The Poussin will be inside him, of course.’

‘But . . .’

‘We could take him to the vet,’ Marcia continued. ‘We could ask the vet to operate. To get it out of his stomach that way.’

William did not know what to say; surely Freddie de la Hay could not go under the knife purely to recover a painting? There were bound to be risks involved, as there were in any operation. Would any ethically minded vet be prepared to do such a thing - to place a Poussin above the life of a dog?

‘I don’t think that’s feasible,’ William said after a while. ‘And anyway, the painting will be in little bits. I doubt they would be able to fit it together again.’ As he spoke, he thought of Dee downstairs and her enthusiasm for colonic irrigation. Could the Poussin be recovered by colonic irrigation? He very much doubted it.

‘Then I suspect we’ll just have to write it off,’ said Marcia.

William bit his lip. ‘Maybe.’ It was an appalling conclusion, but then in some respects it was really rather convenient. There had been a major question mark over the painting’s provenance and that was now no longer a problem, as there was no painting to return to anybody. And there was also the question of whether it really was a Poussin; all that they had had so far was James’s view, and he was just a student, albeit a student at Master’s level.

William looked down at Freddie de la Hay. He would have to forgive him, because ultimately we must all forgive one another; to do anything but that merely prolongs our suffering. And if forgiveness requires apology - which is not always the case, but sometimes is - then for a mute creature such as Freddie de la Hay, this look of dejection, as heart-rending as that on the face of any expellee from Eden, was apology enough, sufficient expiation.

‘All right, Freddie,’ he said. ‘We won’t mention Poussin again.’

Freddie had no idea of the meaning of these words. He strained to make out the word ‘walk’, but it was not uttered. He could tell, though, from the tone of William’s voice, that he was forgiven, and his loyal heart leapt accordingly.

‘I was hoping that I’d see you again,’ said Tim Something as he perused the bistro menu.

Caroline smiled. ‘I’d actually decided to come here for lunch anyway,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why - I just did.’

Tim Something caught the eye of the waiter. ‘Fate,’ he said. ‘Our lives are made up of random events that determine what’s going to happen to us. I’ve always thought that.’

‘A rather bleak view, surely?’

Tim did not agree. ‘Well, take us, for example.’

‘Us?’

‘Yes. We met by chance, didn’t we? I happened to be assigned to take your photograph for the mag. They could have chosen somebody else - in fact, I almost didn’t answer the phone when they called. But I did, and I took your photograph.’

She looked at him blankly.

‘And then,’ Tim went on, ‘I saw you here totally by chance. I almost went somewhere else for lunch that day. But I didn’t. I came here.’

Caroline shrugged. ‘I don’t see . . .’

‘Finally,’ Tim interrupted, ‘I saw you in front of that bookshop. What are the odds of bumping into somebody in this city just by chance? How many million people live in London?’

Caroline did not know.

‘Well, the odds must be millions to one against a completely random meeting with the person one wants to . . .’

He did not complete the sentence. The waiter had arrived at the table with his notebook open. Caroline studied the menu with renewed concentration. The person one wants to . . . What had he in mind? The person one wants to ask out?

They gave their orders and the waiter headed back into the kitchen. Caroline looked up from the menu.

‘I wanted to see you,’ said Tim Something. ‘I wanted to see you about a job.’