Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

Caroline hoped that her disappointment was not too obvious. It was another of his assignments. Perhaps he wanted her advice; perhaps it involved art.

Tim suddenly reached across the table and laid a hand on hers. ‘You are going to be looking for a job, I take it, when your course finishes?’

It felt strange to have his hand on hers - it was not unpleasant, but it did feel odd.

‘I suppose I will. In fact, I definitely will. But it’s not easy at the moment, especially in my field - or what I would like to be my field.’ She thought of James and his interview, and felt vaguely disloyal that she was having lunch with Tim Something when James was undergoing his ordeal with his would-be employers.

Tim looked sympathetic. ‘It’s never the right time to get a job. I remember when I started, I wondered whether I would ever get anything. I did - and now I have far more work than I can handle.’

Caroline moved her hand slightly. ‘You’re lucky. You’re obviously good - to be in demand like that.’

The compliment seemed to be well received. ‘There are people who like my work. But what I really want to do is to go in for something more . . . more stretching. That’s why I’m going into partnership.’

She was not sure what the implications of this were. Presumably they were positive, as Tim’s mood seemed quite buoyant.

‘Who with?’

‘You probably won’t know anything about him - people never look at photographers’ bylines, they take us for granted - but you’ve probably seen his work.’

‘Well, I’m very pleased for you.’

He took his hand off hers. ‘Now, this is where you come in.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, this other photographer has an assistant. He wants me to have one too. Apparently there’s going to be more than enough work to justify it.’

She had not expected this, and yet the offer, not yet spelled out but already clear enough, was immediately attractive. Caroline had never before been offered a job - she had never worked - and it seemed immensely flattering to her that somebody actually wanted her to work with him.

‘A real job?’ she asked.

Her question amused him. ‘Just because it’s creative work doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. Of course it is. With pay.’

He was waiting for her to say something, but she could not think what to say. Could she be a photographer?

‘Twenty thousand a year to begin with,’ he said. ‘It’ll go up. And there’ll be the opportunity for some freelance work of your own - if you want.’

The waiter returned with their first course. ‘I don’t know what to say, Tim,’ she began. ‘It’s very sweet of you, but . . . but I’d never thought of becoming a photographer. I don’t have any training in it . . .’

‘I’ll train you,’ he said. ‘It’s something you can learn on the job. There’s no need to go off to a college and study the history of photography. You’re artistic - that’s all that counts. And—’

‘Doing a degree in the history of art is not the same thing as being artistic,’ Caroline interjected. She was puzzled as to why he should offer the job to her. Surely there would be plenty of people more qualified to do it - graduates of photography courses who knew all about composition and depth of field and how to use light? And the history of photography too.

‘But you must be,’ he said. ‘To be able to write about painting you must be artistic - otherwise you’d be doing something else.’

‘But why me in particular?’

He reached for his glass of water and took a sip. ‘Do you want me to be honest?’

‘Of course. Who would want anybody to be dishonest?’

‘Not me. That’s why I’ll tell you. I like you. It’s that simple. I like you a lot. I’d love to work with you.’ He paused. ‘I think you’re fun.’

Had she disliked him, she would have been embarrassed by his directness. But she had decided that she liked him now, whatever her feelings might have been in the past, so she felt instead a flush of pleasure.

‘I like you too,’ she said.

‘And what’s your answer?’

‘You’d have to tell me a little bit more about the job.’

He nodded. ‘It’ll be great fun. I promise you that. And there’ll be bags of travel. My new partner goes to Kenya, India - places like that. He does features for travel magazines. He specifically wants me to take some of that off his hands.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘And lucky you?’

‘All right.’

There was one last question, and she looked at him directly as she asked it. ‘Is it a good idea to work with somebody . . . you like?’

He misheard her. ‘Somebody like me? Don’t you trust me?’

‘No. Somebody you like.’

He answered as if there were only one possible response. ‘Naturally.’

If Caroline had felt at a loose end that morning, she felt even more so in the afternoon. Her lunch with Tim Something had been concluded with an exchange of telephone numbers and an arrangement to meet for dinner two days later - ‘to discuss the modalities’ of the job offer, as Tim put it. She agreed to this, although she was not entirely sure what a modality was - a state of uncertainty later resolved by a visit to a dictionary. They had an agreement, it seemed, and now the formalities of that agreement would have to be worked out. She wondered why he could not have said that they would meet to discuss the details - it would have been so much simpler and would have involved no dictionary. She felt slightly irritated by this, but contained her irritation; if she were to work for Tim Something, she would have to stop herself objecting to the way he put things.

She returned to Corduroy Mansions at about three o’clock and tried to begin the essay that had been hanging over her head. The topic was easy enough: each member of the class had to write a four-thousand-word piece on a painting of their choice. This was a gift, because everybody would have four thousand words to say about a painting that interested them. James, she knew, had already written two thousand words on An Old Man and His Grandson by Ghirlandaio, a painting he had seen in the Louvre.

‘Two thousand words already,’ he had remarked to Caroline. ‘And I haven’t even got beyond the man’s nose! I’m still writing about that.’

Caroline knew the painting. ‘It’s a marvellous nose. So bulbous.’

‘Exactly,’ said James. ‘The painting is all about that nose, really. And I think that’s what the child is looking up at. He sees a nose. His grandfather is a nose to him. I could write a whole book about it, you know, Caroline. I really could. Like that whole book I’ve just read about Hopper’s Nighthawks .’

She envied James his facility with words, his ability to write two thousand words, and more, about a nose. She was out of her depth, she felt, compared with people like James. There was no place for her in the world of art, and all she was was a young woman from a conventional background in Cheltenham whose only distinction so far had been to appear in Rural Living magazine, on a page normally dedicated to attractive, marriageable, county-ish girls whose fathers were keen to get them off their hands. It was a bleak thought.

Unable to settle down to the not-yet-started essay on a not-yet-identified painting, Caroline decided to leave the flat and go for a cup of herbal tea at Daylesford Organic. The shop was busy; the ladies who lunched had been replaced by ladies who drank tea, and Caroline had to wait a few minutes for a table. But she found one eventually and sat down to page through a magazine while she waited for her tea. She glanced about her and saw, at a neighbouring table, a man looking in her direction. She turned away, but then looked back at him and realised that she recognised him. It was the man in the flat at the bottom of the stairs - the man whom she hardly ever saw, although Jenny had spoken to him. She smiled, and nodded, which was the signal for him to rise to his feet and approach her table.