Alexander McCall Smith: Corduroy Mansions

Jenny had bitten her lip, both in reality and metaphorically. She told herself that she was not in a position to change him in any respect and that she should therefore simply accept him for what he was. After all, he was a democratically elected Member of Parliament, even if the turn-out in his constituency at the election had been only thirty-two per cent. He had been chosen, and it was not for her to dispute the choice of his electors. In those circumstances, her job was to help him to do the job that he had been elected to do; or to avoid doing it, as was the case with him. But she realised that she did not like him, and never could. And that, she later discovered, was exactly what Oedipus Snark’s own mother thought about him too.

‘Don’t talk to me about my son,’ Berthea Snark had said to Jenny when she first met her. ‘Just don’t talk to me about him.’

Oedipus Snark’s two-bedroom flat in Dolphin Square was on the third floor, affording him a wide view, just above the tops of the trees, of the unlikely Italianate gardens. It was a place much favoured by politicians. ‘From my window,’ he was fond of saying, ‘I can see into the flats of twenty-two other members of the House of Commons. With binoculars, of course.’

He knew the locations of the many political landmarks: the house where de Gaulle had lived and from which he had run his campaign, the counterpoint to that infamous hotel in Vichy; the flat where Lord Haw-Haw had stayed; the one where Christine Keeler had entertained; and so on. ‘Success in politics, ’ he had explained to Jenny when she first went to work for him, ‘is purely about one’s address book. There is only one person who can afford not to have an address book, Jenny. You know who that is?’

She did not. ‘Who?’

‘I’ll tell you some other time,’ he said.

It was typical of the evasive answers to which she would soon become accustomed. Even a simple question - such as an enquiry as to what time it was - could be evaded. ‘It’s rather late,’ he said to her once when her watch had stopped and she had asked him the time.

‘But what’s the actual time?’

He looked at his wristwatch. ‘After four,’ he said, ‘and I must get up to the House.’

That answer, she reflected, revealed two things about his personality. The first was this tendency not to provide an answer to a question, however innocuous; the second was the extent to which the universe - even time - revolved around him. Four o’clock was four o’clock universally - at least for the sixty-odd million people living in the GMT zone - but for Oedipus Snark the significance of four o’clock was what it meant in his life, according to the exigencies of his diary for that day.

Jenny arrived shortly before ten that morning to find Oedipus Snark sitting in the converted bedroom that served as his office. It was not a large room, but it was big enough to hold two desks - a generously proportioned one for him and an extremely small one for Jenny. In fact, Jenny had earlier discovered that her desk came from a primary school that had closed down and sold off its furniture cheaply. The desk’s provenance had been revealed by the initials carved by a child into the underside of the lid, and also by the small pieces of dried chewing gum parked underneath. When she had pointed these out to Oedipus Snark, he had laughed.

‘I remember doing that as a boy,’ he said. ‘I used to stick chewing gum under the dining-room table and then take it out and revive it by dipping it in the sugar bowl.’

Jenny winced. Could germs survive in the medium of dried-up gum, or did they die a gummy death? She extracted her handkerchief from her bag and used it to prise the small nodules of gum off the wood. Oedipus Snark watched her, amused.

‘You’re not one of these people who’re pathologically afraid of germs, are you?’ he asked. ‘Like the late Howard Hughes. The germs eventually got him, of course.’

‘No. It’s just that I don’t like the idea of little pieces of gum on my desk. It is a school desk, isn’t it? For a very small child?’

Oedipus Snark frowned. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Compact, I suppose. But that’s an advantage these days.’ He paused. ‘Going back to germs, tell me what do you do with the handles of public loos? Do you touch them?’

Jenny looked away. She was not sure whether she wanted to talk about that. As it happened, she made sure that she never touched such handles with her hands, and would resort to gymnastics, pulling the chain with her foot if necessary, rather than risk the very obvious bacterial contamination that awaited those unwise enough to put their hands on such things. But she was not going to tell Oedipus Snark that.

‘What do you do?’ she asked.

He sniffed. ‘I am not one of those obsessive-compulsive types,’ he said. ‘And we all know that a few germs are necessary for the immune system to keep itself in trim. That’s why there’s so much asthma these days - people are not exposed to enough germs.’

She realised that he had not answered her question. She persisted. ‘So you don’t touch the handle?’

Oedipus Snark nonchalantly picked up a piece of paper from his desk and began to read it. ‘This is a letter from Lou Portington. Remember her? Rather large party. There’s one loo I wouldn’t touch, even with gloves on! Hah! See?’

Jenny settled herself at her minuscule desk and picked up her notebook.

Oedipus Snark continued: ‘She wants me to go to a dinner she’s holding for the French Ambassador. At her place. How kind of her.’

Jenny made a note in her notebook. ‘And the date?’

Oedipus Snark put down the letter. ‘ Problema . La Portington has alighted on the twenty-second, which no doubt suits His Excellency but which is the evening I’ve agreed to speak at that substance abuse conference. I was due to open it, wasn’t I?’

Jenny consulted a diary. ‘Yes. You agreed to that eight months ago. They wrote the other day with the programme. You’re on at seven-thirty. The first plenary session.’

‘Pity,’ said Oedipus Snark.

‘Yes.’ Jenny made another note in her book. ‘Shall I write and give your regrets?’

‘Please do. Say that I’m terribly sorry, but I just can’t manage it.’

Jenny nodded. ‘I’m sure that she’ll find plenty of people happy to have dinner with the French Ambassador.’

Oedipus Snark looked up sharply. ‘I meant that you should give my regrets to the substance abuse people. Usual thing. Sorry to cancel etc., etc. Urgent Party business.’

She looked at him. Hateful, she thought. Hateful Snark. Dissembling, lying Oedipus.

Those were the very thoughts, as it happened, that Berthea Snark was entertaining about her son at that precise moment - an example of what is known as Proustian synchronicity, where the stream of consciousness of one person matches another’s and where, for a few moments, both flow in the same direction and at the same pace, like waters conjoined. This instance of synchronicity, though, was not all that surprising, for if Oedipus Snark crossed the mind of anybody at any particular time, there was a reasonable chance that his mother was also thinking of him at that same point, given that she thought about him thirty or forty times a day - possibly more. This was not just because she was his mother, but because for the past two years she had been writing her son’s unauthorised biography - a task that required frequent contemplation of the subject. Such is the lot of the biographer: to live with the subject, to inhabit his skin, to enter his mental universe, to such an extent that biographer and subject become one.