Corduroy Mansions

74. Sparkle Skin

It’s very strange, thought Barbara Ragg, how we can be transformed by the small luxuries of life. A new item of clothing, an impractical but glamorous pair of shoes, a well-made pen with a gold nib - any of these things is capable of making us feel so much better about ourselves. Now, stepping out of her bath with its pampering Jo Malone bath oil, exfoliated by Sparkle Skin, she felt herself filled with energy, lit by an exhilarating glow.

It was just the right feeling to accompany the glass of chilled Chablis that Hugh presented her with when she returned to the kitchen. Taking the glass, she raised it to him in a toast. ‘You’re spoiling me,’ she said. ‘What a lovely surprise through there . . .’ She gave a toss of the head in the direction of the bathroom.

He smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘Oh that. Just a couple of little presents.’

‘But how did you know?’

‘How did I know that you liked those particular things?’

‘Yes.’

He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Intuition.’

She stared at him in disbelief. Surely it would be impossible to find out a person’s tastes purely on intuition. ‘I don’t believe . . .’ She stopped herself. She should not contradict him. She had already corrected him over the plural of octopus; it would not do to disagree with him again. So she said instead, ‘You’re very clever.’

He laughed modestly. ‘Not really.’

‘What else can you tell about me on the basis of intuition?’ she asked.

‘That you like France.’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’ But everybody liked France.

‘And Jane Austen.’

He was right once more but then, again, everyone liked Jane Austen. ‘What else?’

‘That your favourite colour is a sort of russet brown.’

That was a little bit more impressive, but then it occurred to her that he had enjoyed the run of the flat and must have seen all the russet brown in the rugs and elsewhere. And he must have seen the volumes of Jane Austen on the bookshelves too. And the empty tube of Clinique Sparkle Skin in her bedroom drawer . . . If he had looked in the drawer, that is.

She took a sip of wine. A cold hand had touched her, somewhere inside, and she imagined him prowling around the flat while she was at work. She did not like the thought of his looking into things; he could examine things on the walls and on the shelves but he should not poke about in drawers.

She tried to sound light-hearted. ‘You seem to know a lot about me,’ she said, giving a short, nervous laugh. ‘But what do I know about you?’

He looked at her over the top of his wine glass, his expression one of bemusement. ‘You’d have to tell me that yourself.’

She thought for a moment. What did she know about him? That he was called Hugh. That he had been in a relationship but was out of it now. That he . . .

‘I really don’t know much about you, Hugh,’ she confessed. ‘I suppose you told me a little. But it wasn’t very much.’

As she waited for his response, she thought how foolish she would look if he did something terrible. People would say, ‘She picked him up in Rye and brought him home, just like that.’ And others would shake their heads and say, ‘Well, what did she expect?’

Hugh put down his wine glass. ‘Would you like me to tell you?’

‘Yes. We should know a bit about each other, don’t you think? I mean, rather more than what our favourite colours are and so on. About who we are. About where we come from. About what we do. That sort of thing.’

It was as if her answer had disappointed him. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But it’s a pity, isn’t it, that we can’t just be . . . well, just ourselves to each other? Not the social self, the self that other people have created for us, but the real inner soul, stripped of all the trappings of social identity. I think that’s a pity.’

‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘But I’d still like to know.’

Hugh reached for the bottle of Chablis and topped up her glass. ‘You know the Hugh part of my name,’ he began. ‘The second part is Macpherson.’

‘You’re Scottish?’

‘Yes, I’m Scottish. And don’t say, “But you don’t sound Scottish.” I really hate that. Not everyone in Scotland sounds like Rob Roy.’

She defended herself. ‘I wasn’t going to say that. I know that there are plenty of . . .’ She was about to say posh people in Scotland, but she stopped herself in time. ‘I know that there are plenty of people in Scotland who . . .’

He saved her. ‘Who went to school in England, as I did. I was sent off to school at twelve. I went to a boarding school in Norfolk. Not a very well-known one - in fact, hardly anybody’s ever heard of it.’

‘Unlike Uppingham.’

He looked surprised. ‘Yes, unlike Uppingham. How do you know about Uppingham, by the way?’

‘Rupert Porter, my partner - my business partner, as one has to say these days - went there. He still talks about it. I think he was a prefect and has never grown out of it. I once gave him a prefect’s badge that I found on a stall on the Portobello Road. I told him that if he was going to dictate to me then he might as well have a prefect’s badge. He didn’t find it funny.’

‘Well, the place I was at was distinctly downmarket of that. But it wasn’t too bad, I suppose.’

Barbara had never been able to understand why anybody would send their child to a boarding school. Why have children in the first place unless you wanted them to spend their childhood with you? She asked Hugh why he was sent away, and he thought for a few moments before answering. ‘It was complicated,’ he said. ‘We had a farm in Argyll and I would have had to go away to school anyway, or travel for hours every day to get to Fort William. It was a very remote place. And my mother, you see, was English and she wanted me to have a bit of both cultures - my father’s and hers - of Scotland and England. So they decided to send me to boarding school in England. The place I went to was quite cheap and that suited them too. We did not have all that much money.’

‘And then?’

‘And then what?’

‘Then what did you do?’

He looked up at the ceiling. ‘I had a gap year. Sixteen months in fact.’

‘Where?’

‘South America, for the most part.’

‘Whereabouts in South America?’

It was not, she thought, an intrusive question and she was quite unprepared for his reaction - which was to start to weep.