Corduroy Mansions

33. ‘An hairy man’ (sic)

Oedipus was not one to show an overt interest in anything very much but Barbara Ragg could tell that he was acutely interested in Errol Greatorex’s manuscript. This pleased her; indeed, she basked in his attention, a rare experience for her. At least now he’s taking me seriously, she said to herself as she tackled the last scraps of scallop.

‘The scallops were just perfect,’ she commented, dabbing at her mouth with her table napkin. ‘They must have been hand-picked rather than sucked up, don’t you think?’

‘Very possibly,’ said Oedipus. ‘Perhaps some brave Scottish diver went down into the waters off Mull or somewhere like that. Tremendously cold, no doubt. But tell me, this Errol Greatorex . . .’

Barbara was enjoying herself. ‘I wonder if they dive with air tanks?’ she mused. ‘Or do they just hold their breath and swim down? There’s something called free-diving, you know. I read about it.’

‘Maybe. But tell me, this manuscript . . .’

Barbara ignored the incipient question. ‘They go down to an amazing depth, you know, these free-divers. Two hundred feet and more in some cases. All with one lungful of air.’

‘Yes, yes. But I don’t think that these scallop divers . . .’

‘There’s something called the mammalian diving reflex,’ Barbara continued. She had listened to him for so long; now he could listen to her for a change. ‘It makes it easier for your system to work on very little oxygen. You can get better and better at it if you train yourself. It’s quite amazing.’

Oedipus pushed his plate aside. ‘I’m not really all that interested in free-diving, Barbara,’ he said. ‘This novel of yours: that’s what I want to discuss.’

‘But there’s not much to discuss,’ said Barbara calmly. ‘It’s just the story of a yeti’s life.’ She paused. ‘And it’s not fiction, you know.’

She watched Oedipus’s expression. He looked mocking. ‘You mean he claims to be a yeti?’

‘No, of course not. Greatorex is not a yeti name. I would have thought that you would know that.’ She paused. I have just said something extremely witty, she said to herself. But Oedipus Snark just stared at her. ‘He’s called it an autobiography,’ she continued, ‘because the yeti told him his story. It’s an “as told to” book. You know, the sort that pop singers and footballers write. They’re just like yetis, in their way. Everybody knows that they can’t do it themselves and use ghost writers. Hence the “as told to” books.’

Oedipus shook his head. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. The yeti doesn’t exist.’

Barbara leaned forward slightly. ‘How do you know, Oedipus? How do you know the yeti doesn’t exist?’

‘For the same reason I know that Father Christmas doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘Or the Tooth Fairy.’

‘Or Higgs’s boson?’

Oedipus Snark’s eyes flashed. If Barbara imagines she can pull particle physics on me, he thought, she’s in for a surprise.

‘The Higgs boson?’ he snapped. ‘There’s mathematics for that. Where is the mathematics for the Tooth Fairy? And anyway, what about the W and Z bosons?’

Barbara wondered whether she could ask for more scallops. ‘The W and Z bosons?’ she repeated.

Oedipus held her gaze. ‘Yes.’

‘I haven’t got the first clue,’ she said. ‘I’m not a physicist, Oedipus. You tell me about them. What are they, these bosons?’

Oedipus waved a hand in the air. ‘Some other time,’ he said. ‘But where’s the evidence for the existence of yetis?’

Barbara looked at her empty plate. She would buy some scallops when she got back to London and eat them privately in her kitchen, with a glass of white wine and Mozart playing in the background. It would be nice to be married, but could married people do that sort of thing? ‘There’s some evidence,’ she said. ‘Sightings. Big footprints in the snow. Quite a bit of this comes from perfectly level-headed people.’

Oedipus laughed. ‘Listen, light can play tricks. People see all sorts of things - ghosts, UFOs, the face of Elvis in their pizzas and so on. If you believed half of what people claim to have seen, you’d be very badly informed.’ He paused. ‘And as for footprints in the snow, an ordinary footprint gets much bigger as the snow melts around the edges. See?’

Barbara shrugged. ‘Well, you can believe what you will. I shall remain agnostic on the subject. All that I know is that Errol’s book is absolutely riveting. And it will sell. In fact, I’m prepared to bet that it will be pretty much number one on the lists. It’s absolutely compelling.’

Oedipus became placatory. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to rubbish your book. It’s just I doubt if it can be true. I’m sure that it’s a great read - as fiction. Look, why don’t you tell me a bit about it? How did he meet the yeti?’

Barbara sat back while the waiter served the second course. ‘Errol Greatorex is an American travel writer. He mostly writes for magazines but was working on a coffee-table book on the Himalayas when all this happened.’

‘What happened?’ asked Oedipus.

‘His encounter,’ said Barbara. ‘He had an encounter.’

Oedipus rolled his eyes upwards. ‘The effect of thin air,’ he said. ‘The oxygen-starved brain hallucinates.’

‘Not when you’re acclimatised,’ snapped Barbara. ‘Errol had been there for several weeks. He would be unlikely to be hallucinating at that stage.’

‘All right,’ said Oedipus grudgingly. ‘So he had an encounter. What exactly happened?’

Barbara sat back in her chair. ‘He was staying in a Buddhist monastery up in Nepal. It was a very remote place. Can you picture it? Prayer flags fluttering in the wind. Bare green pastures ringed by mountains. Grey rocky outcrops. The chant of monks hanging in the air.’

She waited for him to respond. He nodded.

‘One of the monks came to him one morning and said that he wanted to show him something very unusual. Most of the monks spoke no English, but this one had a few words and was able to make himself understood. He said that it was not something that he would show to anybody; Errol Greatorex had been kind to him, he explained, and he trusted him.

‘This monk led him off to the back of the monastery. They had a whole lot of buildings - it was all rather higgledy-piggledy. One of these buildings was a sort of classroom; he had walked past it once or twice and had seen a class of boys being instructed in religious texts. There were no schoolboys there at the time, but Greatorex saw the teacher sitting at a desk apparently marking a pile of little school notebooks. For a while the teacher did not appear to notice his visitors, but then he looked up from his task and Greatorex saw his face for the first time.’

Barbara paused. Oedipus Snark was watching her intently. ‘And?’ he prompted. ‘What was he like?’

‘He was hairy,’ said Barbara. ‘Like Esau. An hairy man.’

‘A hairy man,’ corrected Oedipus.

‘An,’ she said. ‘Esau was an hairy man.’

He looked irritated. ‘What are you going on about?’ he asked.