Corduroy Mansions Page 0,118

cities. Whereas if you build everything in clusters, around what are effectively open-air courtyards, then it all feels quite different. People feel happy and secure. We feel at our most comfortable when we’re living round a courtyard. It’s just such a sympathetic space.”

Barbara smiled. She was enjoying the luxury of being with a young man who used the expression “sympathetic space.” That was a real treat. The expression, she felt, could be used as a shibboleth, an expression that one had to utter to establish bona fides—a password at the gate of the camp. But in spite of the sheer, almost physical pleasure of listening to Hugh talk about courtyards, she was keen to discover what had happened in Colombia.

“And the Colombian family’s mansion had courtyards?” she asked.

“Bags of them. Small courtyards leading off bigger ones. Courtyards filled with plants—orchids grew well there. A courtyard that contained an aviary. Highly coloured South American parrots. A toucan. It was all very beautiful.

“Apollo was matter of fact about it; the children of the rich usually are. Didn’t everybody have courtyards like this? That’s what he probably thought. Either that, or he didn’t care one way or the other. I suppose if you’re called Apollo, there’s a lot that’s going to be beneath your notice.

“One of the servants had taken my bags to my room, which was at the back of the house, looking towards the large jungle-covered hill that dominated the property. It was a suite of rooms, actually. Leading off the bedroom was a sitting room with heavy Spanish colonial furniture and pictures of family ancestors: a fierce military type with an intimidating moustache; a rather sultry-looking woman in a blue satin dress, all ostrich feathers and bows; a couple of children dressed in uncomfortable-looking outfits, a pony standing behind them. How unhappy that pony looked—later on, during my incarceration, I used to stare at that pony’s face and marvel at how well the artist had captured the state of being subservient, trapped, under the power of another. It was a look of resignation, of resigned acceptance of a fate that was not that which one would have chosen for oneself.

“Apollo took me outside to show me the swimming pool, which was reached by walking along a narrow, well-tended path through a great shrubbery of rhododendrons. The pool was at the edge of the cleared land where the house and outbuildings stood and it projected into the jungle itself. It was a large stone construction, rather like a half-sunken reservoir. To get into it, you had to mount several stone steps at the side, leading up to the rim, and there before you was the surface of the water, which was very clear but seemed black. This was because of the colour of the stone from which the basin was made. It was a sort of basalt, I think.

“The pool was fed by a stream that entered it at one end—it was really rather long. Then, at the other end, the water tumbled over rocks and became a small rivulet that disappeared into the shrubbery. Apollo explained that it was wise to walk round the perimeter of the pool before diving in, because of snakes. They often became trapped, the smaller ones finding it difficult to surmount the obstacle presented by the six inches or so of sheer stone between the water and the top of the wall. There was a net on a long pole, which could be used to extract the snakes from the water and deposit them in a large urn that the gardeners had placed at the edge of the shrubbery.

“I asked him if the snakes were poisonous and he replied that many were. ‘Everything is dangerous in this country,’ he said. ‘Snakes, plants, mountain roads … mothers.’”

83. Freddie de la Hay Forgiven

WILLIAM HAD LOVED his Belgian Shoes, even if he had only had them for a very brief time. They had been so comfortable, with their lightness and their soft, horsehair-filled soles. And now, holding the piece of mangled leather he had taken from Freddie de la Hay’s jaws, he reflected on how foolish, indeed how vain it was to be proud of something like an item of clothing or a pair of shoes. But that was how we were—the pride we felt in childhood when we got something new to wear never really went away. When he was six he had been given a pair of red Wellington boots that had filled his heart to