Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  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.’

  They had been there for a while, in fact. They were a herd of does and month-old fawns; a great buck or two could be seen, much further off. The mothers were performing a small ballet of rush and delay: of eating, of raising their heads, then making a short communal run before stopping again. The spontaneous and sudden movements separated by pauses of still and quiet had something moving about it to Fitzgerald. He wondered whether Stubbs had ever painted does with their fawns.

  Eduardo propped himself up on his elbows, inspecting the herd. ‘They are big animals,’ he said. ‘You don’t know deer, they are such big animals. I thought they were the same size as, I don’t know, as a goose, but they are big.’

  ‘Yes, they are big,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘The males are bigger.’

  Eduardo took this without comment. ‘You know, it’s strange that nobody ever eats deer,’ he said. ‘Every other animal, they eat them. Sheep, they eat them. Beef, they eat them. Pig, they eat them. Veal, they eat them. Fish, they eat them. I never heard of anybody eating deer.’

  ‘People eat deer,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘It’s called venison. It’s good. I don’t know whether people eat the deer in Richmond Park, though.’

  ‘I never heard of that,’ Eduardo said. ‘I don’t think that’s right. I never heard of anyone eating deer, or what did you say?’

  ‘Venison,’ Fitzgerald said. Presently, Eduardo lowered himself back onto his pillow, and behind his mirrored Aviator sunglasses, his eyes closed; in a few moments, his hands folded on his chest, his slightly open mouth began to emit faint whiffles. And Fitzgerald admired the view.

  Fitzgerald went round to Bradbury’s flat the following day at ten thirty in the morning – he didn’t want to make a habit of waking Eduardo up, if he was not a morning sort of person. He went to his usual café first, and picked up two croissants and two cups of some take-out coffee – a cappuccino with skimmed milk and without chocolate on top for him, a double espresso, which was what he believed South Americans drank for breakfast, for Eduardo. A different voice answered the intercom – not Eduardo’s, but not Bradbury’s either. A small Vietnamese woman opened the door to him, dressed in a plastic coverall. She explained that Mr Bradbury was not at home, and that his friend who was staying had gone out. She looked at Fitzgerald, wearing a pair of white jeans, sandals on his hairy white Irish feet and a washed-out black T-shirt, carrying two paper cups of coffee, one in each hand, and the neck of a paper bag awkwardly between the fourth and fifth fingers. ‘If you like, you can give me his breakfast,’ she said. ‘I think he’s Mr Bradbury’s boyfriend, the one who stays here,’ and she made a small, amused expression on her small, experienced face.

  Timothy Storey was lying on the sofa when he returned, some time after eleven. ‘Was it with that handsome fella you went to Richmond Park?’ she asked.

  ‘Eduardo, yes.’

  ‘Is he a half-caste?’ Timothy Storey said.

  ‘No,’ Fitzgerald said, with distaste. ‘He’s Argentinian.’

  ‘You know how you tell a half-caste – because some of them, they look really as if they could be white? You take a look at their gums, and they’re sort of bluish. It’s hard to describe, but they never lose that.’

  ‘I see,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I must keep it in mind.’

  On the television, a boy like a rat was assuring a girl very much like Timothy Storey that he had not slept with her mother; the girl was assuring the boy in return that the baby she had just given birth to was his. ‘Do you ever watch this?’ Timothy Storey said. ‘We don’t have programmes like this in Africa. This is great.’

  ‘Normally, I have too much work to do in the mornings to watch televisio
n,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘When does your course start, Timothy? Shouldn’t you be in college or something?’

  ‘They’re going to make them take a lie-detector test,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I love it when they do that.’

  ‘Where is your college, anyway?’

  ‘I think it’s in Canning Town,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘Is that close to here?’

  ‘Not very,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘You’ll need to be out early in the morning to get to classes on time.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s really that sort of college,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘You pay them a fee and they get you a student visa, but I don’t think they expect to see you at classes or anything. It’s just to get you into the country, and then you see how long you can stay before they catch up with you. The visa don’t know your address, though. I would reckon I’m pretty safe for a few months holing up here. Is that a coffee going spare?’

  Bradbury came back from Paris the next day, and though of course he worked during the day, there would be more of a sneaking-around aspect to calling on Eduardo. The combination of Bradbury being away and Fitzgerald knowing that Bradbury was away would not necessarily coincide soon. But before Fitzgerald could wonder how he was going to see Eduardo again, Bradbury’s Saab was drawing up by the bus-stop where Fitzgerald was waiting for a bus. Fitzgerald involuntarily looked beyond Bradbury, but the passenger seat was empty.

  ‘I heard you kept poor old Eduardo entertained while I was away,’ Bradbury said. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Yes, we had a nice day out,’ Fitzgerald said.

  ‘He’s not got a lot of get-up-and-go,’ Bradbury said. ‘I think he’d stay in the house all day if it were left up to him. Poor soul. Listen, we’re having some people round for a drink on Saturday night – do drop in.’

  There was something insulting about Bradbury’s total lack of curiosity about the day in Richmond Park; it was evidently, from Eduardo’s account, not something to awaken anything like jealousy. Fitzgerald wondered what he had said. But all the same, he said, ‘I’d love to,’ rather fervently, and Bradbury drove off, not offering Fitzgerald a lift, wherever he was going to.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ Bradbury called wildly, from his door, to Fitzgerald at the bottom of the stairs. An old Perez Prado track was playing deafeningly from the flat; a fashionable choice that year, but a mistake, Fitzgerald believed, since once you had got past the Dolce Vita one, the Bob the Builder one and the one from the Guinness advert, they were difficult to tell apart. ‘Come in!’ Bradbury said excitedly. ‘It’s all good!’ With an immediate glance, Fitzgerald saw the array of champagne bottles on the glass console table by a vase of white lilies, and bent to deposit his bottle of Jacob’s Creek behind the door. He was an old hand at that sort of thing: if you handed your inferior bottle over to the host, it would disappear and you would get sneered at.

  The party was in its early-full stage; a couple were attempting to dance and falling over cushions; the food on the table was untouched, but not yet covered with stubbed-out cigarettes. Bradbury introduced Fitzgerald to a man; a decent-looking but bewildered man called Stephen, in a white jacket, who turned out to be a friend of Bradbury’s youth in Northern Ireland, in London for the first time, he said, in five years. No, he was staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Clapham Old Town; he’d found it on the internet. Wasn’t the internet a marvellous thing, for finding hotels and that? Fitzgerald agreed. ‘Do you think these lads here’d be up for a suck and a bunk-up later in the evening?’ Stephen asked, indicating three bulky men in vests, romping on the carpet. ‘I heard they had some of that cocaine with them, I’d like to have a go on that.’

  Fitzgerald excused himself, and made his way over to Eduardo, who was sitting without drink or company in the far corner of one of Bradbury’s enormous sofas. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Eduardo said. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned to below his nipples, and quite an ordinary pair of jeans from which the labelled waistband of a pair of white pants emerged, whether by design or chance; he wore no shoes, and once more Fitzgerald allowed himself to be dazzled by the broad dark feet, the dazzling emergence of the dark breast from the flutters of a new white shirt. It was too much.

  ‘Is anyone getting you a drink?’ Fitzgerald said.

  ‘I’m fine, I don’t want one,’ Eduardo said. ‘I don’t know why Daniel’s having this party. They all come and say hello, then they leave me, they go off into their bathroom and they have a line. I don’t like to drink, I don’t like to do line. It makes you fat.’

  ‘Don’t you like a party?’

  ‘Oh, sure, but I like to dance, and no one’s dancing here. That’s not dancing,’ indicating the wobbling pair, whose attempts to mambo to Perez Prado had turned into a more or less successful attempt to hold each other up. ‘No one wants to dance, or talk, or anything but get drunk and high and then go to a club, maybe. And they all sleep with someone who isn’t their boyfriend. I never do that. I think if a man’s your boyfriend, you keep yourself for him and he keeps himself for you. That’s what I think. Daniel thinks I’m crazy but I know he’s happy I’m a good boy like that.’

  ‘Well, Eduardo,’ Fitzgerald said. He was so much more beautiful than anyone else there, so much more. ‘One day soon I’ll have a party for you, and people will dance and talk, and not sleep with anyone who isn’t their boyfriend afterwards.’

  ‘Thank you, you’re sweet,’ Eduardo rattled off, scowling at the room.

  ‘I don’t think anyone here understands you,’ Fitzgerald said.

  Eduardo seemed to ignore this, but something in his demeanour, like a dog pricking up its ears at the faint noise or sniff of prey two hundred yards off, encouraged Fitzgerald.

  ‘I don’t think you show people what you’re really like,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I think I know what the real you is like.’

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ Eduardo said. ‘I don’t think anyone does. Sometimes I don’t think I do, even.’

  ‘Well, I think I have some idea,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘You’re really beautiful, do you know that?’

  ‘Oh, everyone says that,’ Eduardo said, the air of the attentive dog suddenly switching off. ‘It’s so boring, people saying that, it means nothing. I’m going to dance.’

  ‘Let’s dance,’ Fitzgerald said desperately, and leant forward; he meant to take Eduardo’s arm as a dancing partner might, but some movement of Eduardo’s, some inability of Fitzgerald’s to execute a suave gesture, meant that first his right hand, then the other, landed on Eduardo’s upper thigh.

  Eduardo pushed him off angrily. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said, getting up. ‘Daniel was right about you. You’re just the same as everyone else.’

  ‘Yes, he does that to people,’ Bradbury said to Fitzgerald, gliding past. Humiliatingly, the episode had amused the whole party, including even the terrible Irishman, who was tittering behind his hands. ‘Don’t worry, Graham. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. I’m going to Munich for four days next week. Take him to the zoo this time. He’d like that, I expect.’

  Fitzgerald punished himself; he only had himself to blame. A little more leisurely, a few more compliments about his beauty, and Eduardo would be eased into his bed. That was how it was done, wasn’t it? Involuntarily, he thought about his greyish crumpled sheets, the pillows and the holed duvet scattered about his fetid retreat, and revised the picture: seducing Eduardo onto the no-doubt immaculate and crisp sheets of Bradbury’s vast and snowy bed. All the next day, he lay on the sofa, groaning when he thought of what he had said and done, in front of an audience who despised him anyway. Timothy Storey was out for the day, God knew where; he settled into the depression in the sofa, the buffalo wallow she had made in the previous weeks of lying down. He did not have the excuse, for last night’s behaviour, of drunkenness, either; he hoped Eduardo might assume, as they did, that Londoners were drunk most of the time.

  Around three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the telephone rang, and he leapt for it. He was conscious that Brad
bury’s ‘four days’ meant that he might have gone on Monday, but had definitely gone on Tuesday. He set about immediately constructing a scene in which Eduardo was offering him the opportunity to apologize, in which Eduardo was apologizing, in which Eduardo had considered his offer and, now that Bradbury had gone to Munich and Eduardo was alone in the house—

  It was a woman’s voice. ‘Is Timothy Storey there?’

  ‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘She’s out.’

  ‘Well, could you pass on a message? Tell her that Mrs Baxter from Ealing called, and she’d very much like to know where her aubergine bath sheet and matching hand towels are. It’s not a joke. Those were expensive towels she’s waltzed off with.’

  Fitzgerald knew those purple towels: he kicked them out of his way on the bathroom floor most mornings, wondering who on earth bought purple towels. ‘I’ll tell her,’ he said equably.

  ‘It’s really too bad,’ Mrs Baxter said, relenting as she talked. ‘Have you let her a room? I’d just like to give you some advice. Count your towels before she leaves.’

  ‘I’m puzzled,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘This is Ealing in London you’re calling from, right? When was she living with you?’

  ‘Till two weeks ago,’ Mrs Baxter said. ‘It’s taken me that long to get this number out of her people in Kenya. She was with me for six months. I had to pretend to her family that I’d bought her a gold necklace and I wanted it to be a surprise for her. Otherwise they wouldn’t give me her new number – they’re no fools. She told me she was going back to Africa, but of course I didn’t believe that. She came to me from a friend of a friend in Acton, and I’ve just heard she had concerns about some missing knives. Sounds like she’s preparing to furnish a flat. At our expense, if you don’t mind me giving you some advice.’