Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

‘Please forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but are you waiting for anybody?’

She shook her head. If he wanted to join her she would welcome it, given her unsettled mood.

Basil Wickramsinghe sat down opposite Caroline. ‘I believe I have met one of your flatmates,’ he said. ‘Jenny. She and I met here just the other day.’

‘Yes,’ said Caroline. ‘So I gather.’

Basil, who had brought his cup over with him, took a sip of tea. ‘It is a very fine building, Corduroy Mansions,’ he said. ‘I like living there. Do you?’

She nodded. ‘I do. I love it.’

‘And this area is so nice,’ Basil continued. ‘It’s so easy to walk to the parks from here. And we have all we need, don’t we?’

Caroline sighed. She was thinking of her lunch with Tim Something. What was she doing? She hardly knew him, and when she had met him before she had not even liked him. How could her feelings change? Was she that flighty?

Basil Wickramsinghe was staring at her. ‘You’re unhappy, aren’t you?’

She stared at him for a moment. He could tell. And she could tell, just by looking at him, that this quiet man could probably read her as easily as she felt she could read others. ‘I’m unsettled,’ she said.

Basil took a further sip of tea. ‘Which means man trouble, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, I suppose it does.’

Basil smiled. ‘There are three sorts of man trouble,’ he said. ‘There is one where there is no man. There is one where there is one man. And there is one where there is more than one man.’

‘Mine is the third. I can’t decide between two.’

‘That probably seems very difficult,’ said Basil, ‘but it isn’t. Not really. You can find the answer by doing a very simple thing. Close your eyes and then tell me which one you see.’

Too simple, thought Caroline.

‘Go on,’ urged Basil. ‘Close your eyes. Which man comes to you? Don’t think about it, just see who steps forward.’

‘I’m not sure if it’s that straightforward.’

‘No, try it,’ he urged. ‘It’s rather like dream analysis. Dreams are meant to tell us about our inmost desires, aren’t they? But the problem with dreams is that we can’t anticipate in advance which desires they will reveal. If you do what I suggest, your conscious mind can instruct your subconscious to respond. It’s rather like a lucid dream, where we know we’re dreaming but we continue to control the unfolding of the dream.’ He paused. ‘Go on. Just close your eyes and tell me which man comes to you.’

Caroline closed her eyes. For a moment there was nothing in her mind but the sounds of the café about her: the rattling of cups on saucers; the subdued drone of the conversation of others; the sound of leeks being chopped in the kitchen. But then she saw him, standing before her, smiling, his arms open, ready to embrace her.

It was neither James, nor Tim Something. It was somebody she did not know at all. A perfect stranger.

‘Open your eyes,’ said Basil.

She opened them and looked at her neighbour.

‘I can tell from your expression that you saw neither of them,’ Basil said. ‘Am I right? You saw a stranger.’

‘I’m afraid I did.’

Basil sat back in his seat. ‘Well, that means that you have yet to meet the right man for you. He is out there somewhere, but you have not yet met him.’

James had said that he would drop in on Corduroy Mansions round about six that evening. He had also said that he might phone and let Caroline know how the interview and the lunch had gone, if he had time. There had been no call, and so she knew nothing about what had happened until she saw the expression on his face. That revealed everything.

‘You got it?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Yes. I did.’

He was standing in the doorway; she was in the hall. Now she stepped forward and threw her arms around him. ‘Oh, James! Congratulations! You clever, clever boy!’

She kissed him on his cheek; she had intended to kiss him on the lips, but he moved and presented his cheek instead. He wriggled free of her embrace, not indecently soon but rather quickly nonetheless.

‘I’ve brought a bottle of champagne,’ he said. ‘I bought it from one of those places that sells them chilled so that they’re ready for an immediate celebration.’

She took the bottle from him and went into the kitchen to fetch two glasses. He followed her through, full of news about the interview.

‘I was really nervous at the beginning,’ he said. ‘There was this guy before me and he came out looking very depressed - defeated, really. I said to him, “See you at lunch.” And he said that he had not been invited. I felt terrible about that.’

‘Well, you knew that you had a better chance, then.’

James raised an eyebrow. ‘Except for the fact that he had a Ph.D. I had spoken to him before he went in and he told me - a Ph.D. from McGill on Tintoretto. A Ph.D., Caroline, for a small job in a gallery. That’s how tough things are.’

Caroline agreed; things were not easy. ‘Polish Ph.D.s drive trucks. Romanian neurosurgeons wait at tables here in London.’

‘So there’s not much hope for somebody who hasn’t even got his Master’s yet,’ said James. ‘At least that’s what I thought.’

‘Were they nice to you?’

‘Not to begin with. They looked me up and down and asked me to take a seat. Then somebody asked a question straight out of the blue - no preliminaries, nothing. He said, “You’ve heard of Marco Marziale, of course.”’

‘Who?’

‘That’s what most people would think,’ said James. ‘But it just so happened that I had read about him yesterday. I couldn’t believe my luck. There he was, a really obscure painter who has something like eleven or twelve surviving paintings to his name, and I knew about him because I had seen one in a catalogue - one coming up at Christie’s in New York. And I had read that some people considered the figures in his paintings to be a bit wooden, and so I said, “A bit wooden. That Adoration that came to light recently had some beautiful passages, though. Really interesting.”’

Caroline laughed. ‘Served them right.’

‘Yes. The person who had asked me looked really deflated. I was tempted to say to him, “You’ve looked at that one, I take it.” But I didn’t. Which was just as well because I think that would have sunk me. They were looking for something, you see - they were looking for coolness under fire.’

‘And they got it.’

James looked away modestly. ‘Maybe. And the rest of the interview went really well. The person who’d asked about Marziale tried it again, of course, with a real underarm ball about Honthorst’s portrait of Charles I in the National Portrait Gallery. But again, it just so happened that I knew that one and was able to talk about it. After that, he gave up.’

While James was talking, Caroline had eased out the cork of the champagne and was now filling the glasses. She handed one to James and raised her own glass. ‘To clever you. Well done.’

‘And then there was the lunch,’ James continued. ‘They were relaxed by that stage, and so we talked about all sorts of things. It turned out that one of the directors knew my uncle. In fact he had been the best man at my uncle’s wedding. So we talked about him, and his wife, and so on. All very chatty. Until one of them looked at his watch and realised that it was already three o’clock. So they called for the bill and the chairman said, “The job’s yours, by the way.”’

Caroline did not want to cap James’s story immediately, so she waited for a while before she brought up her own news.

‘I was offered a job today as well,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t been expecting it.’