Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘At this time I was living in the Village with two boys from the chorus line. There had been three, but Preston had to leave in quite a hurry. You see, we had a party one night, and somebody dropped a gold and blue vase out the window to see the smash it would make on 12th Street, and everyone put the blame on Preston when it was some guy we’d never seen before and never saw again. And it turned out, it was the landlady’s property and she said some kind of valuable heirloom. She was nuts. Well, one of the other boys, he had a friend who was fairly wealthy and backing a new show, and to make up for some disappointment over a watch that had gone missing in the company of a young man who was not all that he could have been, this wealthy friend fixed it up for Harry and I to try out for this beautiful new show. And that was West Side Story.’

  ‘The movie?’ I said.

  ‘No, the stage show,’ Paulina said. ‘The movie comes later. You know, it’s curious the thing that will stand out in your life, the one thing that defines you for ever. It’s not teaching dance and movement in Buffalo to kids for thirty years, after all. Who knew? It was always going to be kind of a big deal, West Side Story, but so big a deal? Who knew? At first I was just a girl in the back line of the mambo, kick turn kick six seven eight, one of the Puerto Ricans with my hair dyed black and gravy browning on my face. But after it had become a big hit, and we settled down for a long run, I worked my way up. You know, it wasn’t lavish like it is now to live in New York, but even so, you were glad when you got into a big musical, and you didn’t walk away from it any too easily.

  ‘So I worked my way up – I understudied Anita, imagine, and in a good long run like that, I had a few cracks at it. I may say, she took care never to fall ill on a Saturday night for a good long time. It was a couple of years before I had to admit all that skirt twirling and stomping and Latino stuff was getting on top of me, hell on the tendons, darling, and I persuaded Kit, the wealthy backer who knew my friend and me, to talk to the producer. And they moved me back to the Anglo side where I stayed, and when the movie came along, I got myself a speaking role all of my own.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve seen the movie?’ Paulina said. ‘Well, you’ll remember me. I’m the girlfriend. And I loved it. I was the girlfriend on the stage for a year, and when they cast the movie, they cast me in the part, which I had the honour to reprise on screen.’

  Paulina’s voice had been rising towards a pitch of excitement, but just then, she seemed to accept the great honour, and it dropped sombrely. Her gaze was somewhere else. The flat was silent and muffled. I almost jumped when a carriage clock chimed, began to ring twelve times. Simultaneously all the jets of the terrace’s watering system came on with a cross pissing spurt. She looked over at me, a little confused. She had forgotten whom she was talking to.

  ‘And as I say,’ she said, as if cheerfully winding up, ‘you never know what it’ll be, the big fact of your life. Because if I thought anything about it, I thought that’d be the step to real fame and living lavish, to the mink coat and the fancy car, to people yelling my name outside premières, to the villa with the security guys outside, going from one triumph to another. I turned down a dozen proposals of marriage, some from some quite wealthy and charming guys. And then that was it. I don’t know why. I tried out for one movie after another, and I was always the second choice. I went into another couple of shows on stage, then cut my losses and opened the dancing school, and that kept me going for years, until just now, I decided I wanted to come and live in Italy and I sold up. That was the only film I was ever in, the whole of my goddamn life. It paid for all this’ – she gestured round at her one-bedroom flat, stiff with mementoes – ‘and I have the fantastic memory of being a star in one of the greatest films ever made. How many people can say that, huh?’

  ‘Do you keep in touch with them?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guys in the film,’ I said. ‘The others. That must be something you want to share?’

  ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I don’t. You know why? They’re all dead, mostly. Those chorus boys – they had kind of rackety lives. Picked up something nasty, murdered, fell sick, went missing. I met some amazing people – I met Mr Bernstein, and Mr Wise, and poor Miss Wood, she had a sad ending …’ She was falling quiet again, perhaps not remembering all their names. You could see that, for Paulina, nothing was so remarkable about her history as her finding herself living it. ‘Well, let me tell you something about Mr Wise. When we were making a film together, the film of West Side Story …’

  There was a noise behind me, and I swung round. The door to the flat, I must have left it open. ‘… the film of West Side Story,’ Paulina said again, with less conviction.

  Silvia was standing there, with a look of mild disgust on her face. ‘You silly old woman,’ she said. ‘You’re doing it again.’

  ‘Doing what again?’ Paulina said.

  ‘Telling them stories,’ Silvia said. ‘I’ve told you about this before. You have to forget about it. And don’t you start telling all those stories to just anyone who happens to walk past your door.’

  ‘Forget about what?’ Paulina said, but she looked a little bit ashamed.

  ‘About that kick turn kick six seven eight,’ Silvia said. Her malice was exact, and her memory of a phrase. In a moment I realized that there was nothing special about me at all in Paulina’s eyes. No wonder she had not troubled to ask me about the Quincys, about her distant relations, or anything at all about myself. I was just a one-man non-paying audience, middle of row F in the stalls when the theatres had emptied, the matinée audiences died, disappeared, turned into ghosts. She had told her story in exactly the same words, and many times. That was what she liked doing best, the performance that, after all, defined her life.

  As it happened, my ruthless eviction coincided more or less with the end of the fortnight. I had a couple of extra days in an awful hotel before my return flight, and then I came home in time for the weekend. Of course I did not visit the Quincys. I spent the time washing the contents of my suitcase in time for Monday morning. And when I went into the museum, Margaret was waiting for me.

  ‘You’re not very brown, I must say,’ she said happily. ‘Have a nice time in Florence?’

  ‘Lovely, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Did you see Santa Rita delle Castagne?’ she said, or possibly that, since I don’t remember exactly what she had so exactly prepared.

  ‘I think I can honestly say it was the highlight of my entire trip,’ I said.

  And the same day I went out after work and bought a DVD of West Side Story. Of course I had seen it before. I hadn’t remembered ‘the girlfriend’, Paulina’s speaking role. There was a good reason for that. It was really only a dancing role, and once I had eventually identified Paulina, I waited for her to say anything or do anything except posture behind the principals in a marvellous aquamarine frock. (She had evidently concluded that the colour suited her.) Finally, she did say something. It was her one line, it turned out. I thought she would say something else, but when the film reached the end, I concluded that I ought to understand what it was that she’d been saying. I rewound the film, and listened again, and finally it more or less coagulated into sense.

  ‘Warts a Bee Goy Dear,’ she said, but it’s no good. The alphabet won’t stretch to what she did with her mouth. You want phonetic symbols, groaning with colons in odd places, upside-down letters, inexplicable markings, and then, with practice, you might capture what she did to her one line. It was amazing, Paulina asking what the big idea was, a noise from a dialect never spoken by man, woman or child. You could see, as she sashayed through the crowd and brought out, projected the line, like her one big chance, the thirty or so takes that had preceded this one. You could read the impatience in the shoulders of the dancers behind her, and even in the faces of the bigger stars. They ought to have been more professional. Yes, this was the thirtieth take, and the end of a long afternoon under lights, a long time ago. />
  That was a peculiar time. I feel very much settled now. I was being led from one woman to another, and every one so resentful of her successor, and all the time the one at the end was going to be the one who was there, unrecognized, all along. I never thought my life was going to be so much like a terrible Oriental fable about Happiness being at Home. Most of those women, though not all, I slept with, and most of them I left in something like tears or rage. I think of them from time to time, though I don’t keep in touch. I google them sometimes.

  But now Margaret and I live in another northern town, not so different from that one, and we have a dog. A King Charles Spaniel, overbred and rather delicate in health, and expensive, I may say, at the vet. But Margaret always wanted one, and she always wanted a dog called Ian. ‘Hilarious,’ she says. ‘A dog called Ian.’ And this morning I was taking him for his morning walk – it was raining, but it was my turn, not Margaret’s – when he stopped dead on the pavement. I looked away tactfully, feeling in my pocket for one of the lemon-scented bags you pick up poo with. But he was making an awful noise, like a rusty engine going unwillingly into reverse. Not again, I thought, but Ian was coughing and choking, and then, in a single moment, he vomited hugely. A huge lake of green dog-sick. God knows what he’d been illicitly devouring. ‘Christ, Ian,’ I said, to explain to any passer-by my anti-social behaviour in leaving it there. I didn’t expect a response. ‘How do you expect me to deal with that?’ And then I decided to go home, to shut myself away with some quite private task, and not to come out again for quite a while.

  The Midsummer Snowball

  The school had been opened only two years before, in 1975. It was a low, long, complex structure of smoked glass, yellow brick and bright green and red pipes. Built at the corner of two main roads, it was conspicuous and striking, even to those driving past who had no children at the school. It had been entered for awards for both architecture and educational practice; the architects had consulted widely, and had built an exterior with elements of both nursery and factory. The interior was hardly divided up at all: classrooms opened up into each other around a central area, devoted to craft work. The offices of the headmaster and the administrative staff were up a short flight of stairs, but without divisions from each other or the teaching areas, and in practice without any privacy. The noise was terrific, the heating costs colossal, and professionals had been coming to look at it more or less ceaselessly, one party every ten days on average, for the last two years.

  For the children of the affluent western suburbs of the industrial Yorkshire town, the school was not anything so very remarkable. Most of them lived near each other, in the detached houses of the 1920s suburb of Satterthwaite, and the large executive development on the town’s outskirts, Moor Hills. Their houses were a little older than they were; the school, they knew, was younger. They could remember it going up from when they were little, months of bare mud and a huge square hole in the ground, and then, quite suddenly, the yellow walls had gone shooting up and you could see the building it would be within a couple of weeks.

  They had forgotten the old school almost as soon as they had moved in; now, what they were proudest of in their new school were the social innovations. Children in the last year could volunteer to be the social patrons of new first-years, supervising their play and listening to their miniature troubles – ‘Like a big brother or sister would,’ the headmaster said. His fresh face, spiked hair and usual bright-coloured jumper made him seem like a big brother himself. Each class elected one member to serve on the school council, with teachers and governors, though the adults held meetings without the pupils, too. Worry boxes, in which any pupil could place a written comment, complaint or confession of misery, were placed at regular intervals throughout the school. But there were not many unhappy pupils at Fisher Fields Middle, or so the headmaster said to his frequent official visitors and inquisitors. The visitors sometimes thought, but did not say, that it would be an odd child who would both admit and exacerbate his social failures by being seen to post a letter in a box like that.

  The children mixed well, even – the headmaster said – the twenty or so children bussed in from the old Powell’s Bottom flats, in the interest of social inclusion and spread. (‘Social inclusion and spread?’ his visitors wrote in their notebooks, balancing them awkwardly against their wrists.) Apart from the Powell’s Bottom children, the majority of the pupils caught the same number 51 bus home, up the hill to their 1920s brick crescents, executive avenues with their still spindly trees or, sometimes, a Victorian cottage marooned amid more recent development. The parents were doctors, university teachers, librarians, bank managers, accountants or, at the very least, shopkeepers. Their children played together in the undeveloped woodlands around their houses, exploring the moorlands that ran up to the edge of the city. They knew each other, and mixed in their avenues, closes and crescents without much reference to their own age or year. In these circumstances, crazes and fashions spread quickly: a solitary inherited pogo stick might sound out like a woodpecker from the bottom of Sandygate Avenue one Saturday afternoon. It would quickly attract a curious crowd, and by the end of the week, thanks to birthday money, advances on birthday money, sums cadged off grandmothers or, rarely, saved-up pocket money, the whole estate would echo and rebound to the pick-ah-puck-ah of a dozen pneumatic ride-ons.

  It was a Thursday morning, and geography, the last before lunch. The class had taken over the crafts area to work on a contour map of a glacial valley, one per table. ‘I don’t care,’ a child was saying, over and over. ‘I just don’t care, not a bit.’ ‘Now, Two C,’ Miss Clarke called. ‘Now – attention, please – please, attention – stop chattering and listen – now – I said …’

  Teresa was sharing a table with the twins, Cathy and Sam; at the next table were the boys they usually sat with at break and lunchtime, Joshua, Michael Brown and Santosh. There was also James Collins, who had been put on their table by Miss Clarke. He was the only boy in the room at a girls’ table. He came from Powell’s Bottom, the only one in their class; if he got put on your table, he would sit back cautiously, as if he were in church. His face was white and thin, mean-looking, his eyes large and watchful in the bony face. His hair was utterly black, and hardly ever properly brushed at the back. It stuck out horizontally behind him, like a dirty black jet trail. Always, when he was at your table, after a while, slowly, slowly, his thin white fingers, his thin white arm with the blue pullover rolled up to the elbow, always the same blue pullover, those horrible fingers would reach out waveringly, like some blind underwater tentacled thing, and start to move the Plasticine about for some reason of their own. Once his fingers started at their work of destruction, they would continue, mesmerized, systematic, until he was told to stop. He shouldn’t have been in their class: he should have been in Remedial. Joshua said he had heard a teacher say so once. They had all heard a teacher say, ‘James Collins!’ or overheard one saying, expressively, ‘That James Collins …’ He would never go on a table on his own: was always having to be put on one, unwillingly.

  ‘What are you doing, James Collins?’ Cathy said. ‘Stop that. That’s my glacial ridge. I’d got it just how I wanted it.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ Teresa said. James Collins withdrew his hands, let them sit on the table, the splatter of Plasticine on them like wounds on small animals. ‘It’s an age since breakfast. I’m starving. I hope it’s cottage pie. I love cottage pie. I could eat it for every meal.’

  ‘Could you eat it for breakfast?’

  ‘Cold from the night before?’

  ‘With cold peas and cold ketchup!’

  ‘Could you eat it for your birthday treat?’

  ‘Could you eat it for Christmas dinner?’

  ‘Because—’

  ‘Because—’

  ‘It’s always cold, ketchup is!’

  The twins burst out laughing, abandoning their inquisition.

  ‘I could,’ Teresa said. ‘I don’t like turkey at a
ll. I could eat it for Christmas dinner, easily.’

  ‘School cottage pie,’ Sam said, in mock awe. ‘For Christmas dinner.’

  ‘No, we don’t know what’s for dinner,’ Cathy said. ‘We’re not eating school dinners any more. We talked about it, and we decided that we wanted to bring packed lunches from now on.’

  ‘“A hot, heavy lunch at midday isn’t at all necessary,”’ Sam said, quoting someone.

  ‘Where do you keep your lunches till you eat them?’ Teresa said, and from their bags, first Sam, then Cathy brought out a plastic box, one blue, one green. Initials S and C were carefully painted on the top with correcting fluid.

  ‘We know which is ours,’ Sam said – she wanted to be a boy.

  ‘But Mummy gets it wrong, she’s always going to get it the wrong way round, she said,’ Cathy said, who wanted to work in a garden centre, when she grew up.

  Miss Clarke was at the other side of the classroom, and over the noise you could hear her voice crying, ‘I just don’t understand why you would …’ Her hair was flying, her fat face and arms in her short-sleeved floral dress were red and scrubbed-looking.

  First Sam, then Cathy, opened their packed lunches; on top, there was a banana for Cathy, an apple for Sam, who said bananas furred her teeth up and made her want to be sick; two sandwiches with tuna and cucumber, and two with ham, cheese and pickle, only without the pickle for Cathy; there were two bags of crisps to share, and a boiled egg with a little twist of salt in foil, and, wrapped up in clingfilm, a handful of dried fruit, a lobe of dried mango, a dark confusion of raisins, some dull-gold coins of dried banana. ‘Mummy said when it’s cold, she’ll make soup and put it in our Thermos flasks,’ Cathy said, perhaps unnecessarily. ‘Or we could go back to having school dinners.’