Tales of Persuasion

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

Copyright © Philip Hensher 2016

Philip Hensher asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover: detail from The Bolt, c. 1778 (oil on canvas), Fragonard, Jean-Honoré (1732–1806) © Louvre, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Source ISBN: 9780007459650

Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007459643

Version: 2016-12-20

Dedication

To Nicola Barr

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Eduardo

A Change in the Weather

My Dog Ian

The Midsummer Snowball

In Time of War

Under the Canopy

The Day I Saw the Snake

The Pierian Spring

The Whitsun Snoggings

The Painter’s Sons

A Lemon Tree

Praise for Tales of Persuasion

Also by Philip Hensher

About the Author

About the Publisher

Eduardo

(i.m. J.C.)

The trains were simmering under the glowing glass roof. In a moment, one midnight-blue train to the airport would leave, and another would arrive, disgorging and absorbing voyagers. The express to Penzance, beyond the shining metal barriers, began joltlessly to move away, and at the same moment, an express from, perhaps, Penzance drew up at the platform next to it. All this coming and going, as Fitzgerald thought of it. He never went anywhere. He did not even own a car, having no need for one in London. He stood at the bagel concession stand where he had agreed to meet Timothy Storey. Most people arranged to meet at the statue of a bear from a series of children’s books. Fitzgerald had thought there was too much scope for confusion in explaining to a foreigner that they would meet at a bear called Paddington, at a station called Paddington. He had no idea whether the adventures of Paddington Bear would be familiar to someone who had spent all his life living in Kenya. His mind filled with the affecting image of a grass hut, a bowl of meal, a runner approaching across the veld with a single, cellophane-bound library book, Paddington Returns, its boards warped and damp, gripped under his arm.

His name was called. ‘I thought it was you,’ Daniel Bradbury said. Fitzgerald went over to speak to him. Bradbury was a neighbour of his in Clapham; one on the other side of a social divide, since he lived in a new gated community. It was the result of the conversion of an old red-brick board school into loft apartments and even whole vertical houses. No keypad and gate guarded the access to Fitzgerald’s maisonette, and the door was on the street. They were both from over the water; they had met by chance, passing the time of day when they found themselves in the same space, but they might have inhabited different cities. ‘I had to come down to meet Eduardo,’ Bradbury said, with a friendliness that took Fitzgerald by surprise. Bradbury was by no means open and chatty with his neighbour Fitzgerald as a rule. ‘He wasn’t sure about the Circle Line and the Northern Line. He wanted me to come to Heathrow, but I thought that was absurd. I said I would meet him at Paddington, it wasn’t hard. Did I tell you about Eduardo? He was living here last year – I knew him, we met at a dinner party – and then he got deported back to Argentina, his visa ran out, but I’ve invited him back, he’s moving in. It’s all so much easier than it used to be, getting a visa for a partner.’

Fitzgerald agreed with whatever it was Bradbury was explaining. ‘What are you here for?’ Bradbury said. Fitzgerald explained that he was expecting a visitor. It was a young man from Kenya, a sort of au pair who would be living with Fitzgerald and undertaking light household duties in exchange for a low rent for the next three months. ‘You haven’t met Eduardo,’ Bradbury said, turning to a man who had sat down on his suitcases. Fitzgerald had noticed him – of course he had noticed him – but it had not occurred to him that even Bradbury could be with such a man.

Bradbury had a record of seductions and triumphs beyond the imagination – no, beyond merely the ambition – of Fitzgerald. He always had some delicious man in tow, installed in what Bradbury imagined to be the lavish white spaces of the converted loft apartment. But looking at this man, with his simultaneous quality of darkness and glow, with his unaffected grace of leg and jawline, even sprawled over his luggage where he had thrown himself, even tired and unwashed after so long a flight, Fitzgerald wondered at the unfairness of it all. Bradbury was not so very young or good-looking or charming; he was only rather rich, and thin. A man like Eduardo should not be sitting, unremarked, in Paddington Station on a weekday morning. Everything about him and his sulky plump lips implied fame, the red carpet, the shining cliff of flashbulbs, the swimwear shoot with a budget of half a million.

Bradbury went on talking, evidently wanting to show off Eduardo, to talk about him; the days and weeks to come would bring better and more highly placed listeners to the subject, but Fitzgerald was by chance the first to lie in their way, so Bradbury talked. Eduardo made no sign that he understood what was being discussed. In a moment, Fitzgerald said to him, ‘Have you only just arrived?’

‘Only two hours ago,’ Eduardo said, slowly, complainingly. His voice, in the middle register, was sleepy and resonant, with an odd and unspecific rasp to it, as if an ancestor had once smoked too many cigars of provincial manufacture. ‘So long to wait at the visa. We don’t have that in Argentina. You only show your passport and they wave you through.’

‘Well, they wave you through in Argentina if you’ve got an Argentinian passport,’ Bradbury said, laughing a little.

‘Yes, of course I’ve got an Argentinian passport,’ Eduardo said. ‘And I’m so hungry I could eat anything.’

‘They never give you enough to eat on planes, do they?’ Fitzgerald said.

‘I don’t eat on planes,’ Eduardo said seriously. ‘If you eat food in a plane, it swells up in your stomach, you get fat, your stomach it swells, even it can explode and kill you. Everyone knows that.’

‘Someone’s been having a joke with you,’ Bradbury said. ‘I don’t think that’s really true.’

‘It’s true. It was the steward in an airline, he told me that.’

For some moments, a fat white girl with a bright red face had been standing by them, trying to attract their attention. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Are you Mr Edmund Fitzgerald?’

Fitzgerald looked at her, up and down, at the brownish stain running vertically down her side – rust? Ketchup? – from gypsyish blouse to dirndlish skirt, both unusually fashioned in some undefinable way. He looked at her woven plastic square holdall and plastic rucksack. Bradbury and Eduardo were turning away. ‘Yes?’ Fitzgerald said.

‘Timothy Storey,’ the girl said.

‘Yes?’ Fitzgerald said, bewildered.

‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I’m Timothy Storey. Did you think I was a boy? People have thought that before. Because of my name. My parents called me Timothy after my little brother, he died when he was only three months old and my dad said he’d name the next one Timothy to keep his memory alive.’

‘But—’ Fitzgerald said.

‘We’ll be off,’ Bradbury said, looking the girl up and down and perhaps comparing Fitzgerald’s visitor with his. ‘Nice to see you. We must have lunch some time.’

‘Bye,’ Eduardo said, and Fitzgerald observed that Bradbury, despite his commanding and top-person manner, picked up both Eduardo’s bags and followed his beautiful stride.

‘That’s funny,’ Timothy Storey said, as they went towards the Underground. (Fitzgerald was not a generous or lavish man; he had had only a half-formed plan to impress a phantom wide-eyed and black Timothy Storey with a journey home in a London taxi but, aghast, he dismissed that now as not worth the candle.) ‘I thought I said I was a girl. I always try to remember to say that I’m a girl because otherwise it confuses people. But maybe I forgot when I was writing to you. It’s easy for me to forget that not everyone knows, you know what I mean? My mum says, “Always say, Timothy, that you’re a girl, because actually it’s a boy’s name.” But not many people are called Timothy in Africa necessarily, so they aren’t as surprised as I guess people are here. It’s because of my brother that I’m called Timothy. Do we buy a ticket here? Golly, it’s costly here, I couldn’t believe it, what they asked for the train fare., it was nice of you to say that you’d pay for that so I wouldn’t have to get here on the Underground. Were those friends of yours? He was a handsome fella, I’d say.’

Over the next few days, Fitzgerald tried to find out more about Eduardo – he laboured at bumping into him by the purest chance – but though Eduardo was living with Bradbury, only a hundred yards or so away, he seemed never to appear in any of the usual places. Fitzgerald went in a craze of expectation around Clapham; he sat in coffee shops, he walked round and round the Common – surely everyone the first time they came to Clapham took walks on the Common. But it was not Eduardo’s first time in London; he had seen it all; and presumably he never went onto the Common. Fitzgerald threw caution to the wind and went up and down the bars of Soho, looking everywhere for Eduardo, in order to produce the casual ‘Well, and how are you enjoying London, then?’ That would lead to a daytime invitation, to drop round while Bradbury was at work at his advertising agency, or going round his buy-to-let property empire chastising tenants. At the end of the evening, he found he had gone into twenty-three bars, paying a five-pound entrance fee in twelve of them, drinking first small glasses of beer, then glasses of Coca-Cola, then fizzy water, then tap water, then nothing at all. It had cost him a hundred and seventeen pounds and he had not caught a glimpse of Eduardo. He knew Bradbury at all only by chance – once, during a tube strike, they had been hailing a cab within yards of each other on Upper Street in Islington, and had discovered they were both heading in the same direction, could share the cab; the heavy traffic had turned even the longish journey from Islington to Clapham into an epic, and they had discovered at the end of the forty-quid trip that they lived, strangely enough, within a hundred yards of each other. ‘We must keep in touch,’ Bradbury had said airily, and Fitzgerald had agreed.

Timothy Storey was showing no sign of starting her studies. She was hanging around the flat endlessly, eating whatever Fitzgerald placed in the fridge. How had such an awful blunder been made? Fitzgerald could have sworn that something in what she had written indicated that she was a boy, and black. He had never specified, himself. In the adverts that he placed online, offering a room to overseas students in exchange for some light household duties, he had always said very carefully that he was a single man. He had believed that would discourage girls from taking up the offer. At first he had thought of saying that he only wanted to let the room to young men, but that seemed a little too lecherously open, and Fitzgerald had an unspecific belief that such a stipulation might prove to be illegal. Up until now, the question had never arisen. He thought of telling Timothy Storey that a mistake had been made, that she ought to find somewhere else to live, but he had overheard her telling her parents over the Skype that it was ideal, that her landlord was a gay man so it was all perfectly safe. He resigned himself to having her around the flat for the next three months, filling up the bathroom with her unguents and peering over his shoulder whenever he started writing anything on the computer. ‘Journalist, are you? That’s nice. I’d love to be a journalist,’ she would say, through a mouthful of Fitzgerald’s hummus and Fitzgerald’s bread. ‘I’ve always wanted to write in a book.’

There was no telling when Timothy Storey might slide up behind him. To quell his disbelieving heart, he decided that he could only check the statements she had made by going up to the internet café on Clapham High Street. Fitzgerald envisaged, vaguely, some one-man kangaroo court in his sitting room, confronting her with her deceptions, pointing righteously at the front door at its conclusion.

‘I live in the country here, on a game reserve,’ he read, having called up Timothy Storey’s old emails. ‘My father works as the manager of the general stores. I used to want to work there too, to “follow in his footsteps”, as they say, but now I hope I have larger ambitions! I have never been outside Kenya in my life, but I have an adventurous spirit and I am looking forward to seeing Europe with my own eyes. It can be quite conventional living here, with not very many people, and I do not think that I am really a conventional person, deep down inside my heart. Perhaps I should admit to you that, although I have not seen very much of the world and have not had many opportunities, I love fashion more than anything! I do not know from where that interest comes, and all my family, especially my four brothers, are forever teasing me for my enthusiasm for fashion. But that is by the by.’

Fitzgerald read all of Timothy Storey’s emails, explaining all about her life – those details he had found so extraordinarily interesting and absorbing, so full of erotic promise. He found it hard to remember. There was absolutely nothing in these stilted statements that suggested she was anything but what she was; and Fitzgerald struggled to construct once more the image of the lonely, sensitive boy living in the middle of nowhere with four hearty hunting brothers; a boy with a dream of elegance, the interest in fashion a gift from the gods of Gay to the plains of Africa; a gift that would send him off to Europe in search of adventure and like-minded people. Fitzgerald had precisely envisaged a thin black boy, sitting up at nights, making ruffles. On the other hand, Timothy Storey had definitely never said, not in so many words, ‘By the way, I am not a boy.’

Some presence interrupted his thoughts, and Fitzgerald looked up. Over the thin screen and the MDF partition, on the hired workspace backing onto this one, was the face he had been looking for: was Eduardo’s.

‘Hello,’ Fitzgerald said, and the face looked blankly back at his, not sure that it had been spoken to. ‘Hello,’ Fitzgerald said again, less voicelessly. ‘We met. At Paddington Station. I’m a friend of Daniel’s.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Eduardo said. ‘Were you with a girl? Your girlfriend?’

‘No, not at all,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘It was a mistake, a big mistake. She’s not my girlfriend or anything.’

‘Yes, I remember now,’ Eduardo said. ‘Daniel told me you live near him, but he doesn’t know you.’

‘Well …’ Fitzgerald said: he would not normally insist on his friendship with Bradbury, but it was his only connection with Eduardo.

‘Listen,’ Eduardo said. ‘How do I make this thing work? It won’t switch itself on. I tried, and asked them, and they told me to try again, and it still doesn’t work. Can you show me?’

Fitzgerald was delighted. He moved smoothly round, pulling a chair up to sit close to Eduardo. He had a curious, marshy, wet-earth smell, like an animal, not at all unpleasant; where he sat he could feel the radiant, almost artificial warmth of Eduardo’s body. He took the little ticket from Eduardo, and typed the code into the box – that had not occurred to Eduardo to be the thing to do. The machine started up.

‘What do you do all day?’ Fitzgerald said, to prolong the moment.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Eduardo said. ‘I sit, and I watch TV, and maybe I listen to music, or I go on Daniel’s rowing machine, his running machine, I have a shower, and then it’s time for Daniel to come home, I guess.’

‘Do you ever go anywhere in London?’ Fitzgerald said. ‘If you’re here, you should definitely go and see the city. Did you ever go to Richmond Park? It’s beautiful – there are deer there, and the Isabella Plantation …’ He trailed off, struck by the ineptness of the offer.

‘No, I never go anywhere,’ Eduardo said. ‘I never heard of that park. Tomorrow, Daniel goes away to Paris with his job, for two nights, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I go then. He said to me too, “Why don’t you go to a museum, go to see some palace, fill your day?” but I don’t know. I don’t think I like to go to a museum, I never went to any museum in Argentina, except maybe at school.’

‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I wouldn’t recommend that to you, not if it’s not the sort of thing you wouldn’t take any enjoyment in.’

His sentences were growing inarticulate, struggling, vague, the utterances of a man who had learnt English as his third or fourth language, and had no rational sentiment to voice in that or any of the others.

The next day broke with sun through the thin curtains, and Fitzgerald was awake before seven; he had a sense of something to do, somewhere to go. He went through to his kitchen; from behind the door of the spare room, obscure rumbles and murmured syllables were emerging. Timothy Storey snored, and talked somewhat in her sleep, which extended until nine or later – he wondered what she had done on the veld, or whatever it was called in Kenya. He took a bath and dressed, and by eight was ensconced in a café at the corner of two main roads, sitting in a window, reading the newspaper. He believed that Daniel Bradbury usually left for work soon after dawn but perhaps, if he were going to Paris— Just then, in mid-speculation, he saw Bradbury’s silver Saab at the lights heading away from his flat, with Bradbury at the wheel.

At half past nine, Fitzgerald went to the gate of Bradbury’s converted school, and rang the bell of Bradbury’s flat. The long silence made him fear that Eduardo had gone out, but eventually the sleepy voice came over the intercom. Fitzgerald said his name; there was another pause, and then the gate buzzed open. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Eduardo said, when Fitzgerald had gained access. He was standing on the landing, holding the door open with his bare foot; he was in a short silky dressing-gown going halfway down his brown thighs, hanging open to reveal a dark half-shaven chest. ‘Daniel’s gone, he’s gone to Paris. Did you want him? He didn’t say you were coming for anything. You woke me up.’

‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘You told me Daniel was going to Paris, yesterday. I thought you might be bored. I’ve come to take you to Richmond Park.’

Eduardo considered the invitation, rubbed his sleepy fists into his eyes, like a cat. He seemed unenthusiastic. ‘The place with the deers,’ he said. ‘Oh, all right. Come back in half an hour.’

‘I could come in and wait,’ Fitzgerald said.

‘I have to shower,’ Eduardo said.

‘I could wait somewhere else while you do that,’ Fitzgerald said.

Eduardo considered this, then went back inside, leaving the door open. Fitzgerald took up this ambiguous invitation. The flat was what he had expected, the tall windows of the school, and the double-height ceiling, and it was entirely white. The sitting room was furnished with two identical giant black leather sofas, and on the main wall was an eight-foot-square painting-cum-screen-print of a flower some interior designer had concocted in the style of Andy Warhol. Fitzgerald walked about, examined all the photographs on the shelves. None, as far as he could see, included Eduardo just yet. He took a seat. In the recesses of a flat, a door clanged; the waters of a shower began to hiss.

When Eduardo presented himself, he was in holiday wear; a pair of white low-slung jeans, advertising the wares, and a sexily much-washed and faded black T-shirt. On his hairy, broad, flat feet, a pair of sandals identifying themselves as Versace. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Where do we go?’

In the taxi to Sloane Square and the tube to Richmond, Eduardo was evasive, short-sentenced, hardly observing Fitzgerald’s company at all from behind his sunglasses. Fitzgerald made a couple of observations about passing objects, but then left it; some people, or so he believed, were not at their conversational best in the morning. At Earl’s Court, an acquaintance of Fitzgerald’s got on – one of his commissioning editors from way back, when Fitzgerald was still writing for gay magazines at a hundred pounds a pop. He stood in front of Fitzgerald, his eyes wandering constantly to Eduardo; the train was full, and it did not appear to occur to him that Fitzgerald could be accompanied by someone like Eduardo. When Eduardo said impatiently, ‘How many more stops?’ Fitzgerald introduced him; he noticed that Eduardo was just as brief with the editor, whose eyes were wandering back to Fitzgerald, perhaps considering whether he had missed something vital about Fitzgerald in the first place.

‘This is nice,’ Eduardo said, once in the park. ‘I like to walk.’ Over there was the white-icing façade of the royal lodge – or was it the ballet school – or White Lodge? Somewhere in the park was the Isabella Plantation. Fitzgerald remembered being taken to it, the dense displays of magnolia and rhododendron, whatever. He recalled walls of white and pink flowers; he did not think it was worth while dragging Eduardo about the place in search of somewhere so pensioner-friendly. Over there was a copse, heading the hill, and a single white cloud in the sky, quivering still on this warm morning. Eduardo flung himself down on the slope, made a single twisting gesture with his fists at either hipbone, and drew his T-shirt over his head. In the open air, there was the brief gust of that smell of Eduardo’s: clean, but animal, and suggestive to Fitzgerald. Eduardo screwed his T-shirt up into a pillow, and placed it beneath his head. Lying back, his torso was articulated like architecture. The twin lines headed downwards into his low-slung trousers as if towards the point of a V; they bracketed about his solid abdominal muscles, like the lines of a pendentive on a dome, lightly furred. Fitzgerald sat down too, drawing his knees up and hugging them tight.

‘Look,’ he said, after a while, more for the pleasure of seeing the concertina-fold of Eduardo’s stomach as he sat up than anything else. ‘There are the deer.’