Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  To be alone was astonishing. She had been presenting him with choices all the way back, but the choice she hadn’t offered him was the important one. Would he prefer to be the person who loves? Or the person who gets to endure being loved? Would you rather be a talker, or a listener? He asked himself the questions. He didn’t know the answers.

  He was far from home, but he had no idea how far. The only unit of measurement he had was the memory of one of the posse – Christian, was it? – moaning that with the prospect of a shag he’d gone all the way to Brighton, a good hundred kilometres. It had been a funny story. Fred heard Christian’s voice, saying ‘a good hundred kilometres’. He tried to see London and Brighton on a map, tried to multiply that hundred kilometres over an imagined globe to see how far India was from London. He couldn’t do it. A hell of a distance, though, to travel in order to discover that he was bored with the lulling womanly topic of love, whether one person loved a second more than the second loved the first. Though he had devoted hours of his conversation to the subject, he now felt unutterably bored with its future applications, and felt in any case that nothing much in his life had prepared him to discuss love with authority. Deprived of that, he had nothing else to resort to. He could hear the vague, rumbling music of inquisitive and knowledgeable speech, but a man who, like him, could not turn those swells and crescendos into words, into an explanation of war and politics and the world, would always be vulnerable to an easy exchange. One says, ‘Do you love me?’ and the other replies, ‘No,’ before silence and incapacity swallow everything. Millions of books and films, billions of individual dreams had found love and nothing else interesting enough and, until now, the prospect of it and its attendant physical acts had been enough to keep him talking, all his life. Carrie entered the hotel, leaving him to pay the driver, and he saw the terrible poverty of the situation. Their lives: there was nothing in it but a CV, and a lot of going on about love.

  She wasn’t at dinner. He didn’t blame her. It didn’t seem important; after all, the next day he would see her. The night had descended, and the lake, which had so delighted him, had been put away for him to play with tomorrow. The dinner, too, which he ate self-consciously and with embarrassed attentiveness, turned out to be exactly the same sequence of dishes as the night before and the night before that. It hadn’t disappointed him until now, this unambitious regularity. Carrie had just fallen asleep, he assured himself. But when he came down the next morning, she had gone, and he was, again, the only guest in the hotel. There was a note waiting for him, on the single table set for breakfast on the lawn, in an actressy hand. ‘Bye-bye,’ it said. ‘I suddenly felt like moving on. It was awfully nice yesterday and meeting you. I do hope we’ll somehow meet again. And please enjoy the orange! C.’

  An incomprehensible joke. She was a girl to whom incomprehensible jokes came easily. But, after all, she meant exactly what she said. Perhaps people mostly did. Because here, across the lawn, came the waiter in his green velvet jacket and his silk cravat, solicitously bearing a single orange, glowing like a jewel. The waiter had one courtly hand behind his back. But when had she bought it? The waiter placed it on the table and smiled. Fred peeled it and ate it. It was dry and old and full of pips, as he had told her it would be.

  ‘Very good,’ he said finally, attempting a smile.

  ‘Another?’ the waiter said, and brought his other hand from behind his back, bearing another orange. Fred took it. As if choreographed, the manager of the hotel, the two cooks, the kitchen boy and three other men, old and bent, whom he didn’t recognize at all, came in ragged procession from the door of the hotel. Each of them carried an orange in each hand. There was no mockery on their faces, no sign that it was anything but rational to request sixteen oranges. They piled up the fruit in front of him in a perfect pyramid. He felt some hostility in the gesture, which was not Carrie’s but indifferent India’s; a gift, like the hotels’ garlands, to show that it was time for their solitary guest to go. He had been inspected and shown that he had brought nothing. It was going to take him weeks and months to discover what they so lucidly saw, and what it was that he had been given to take back with him.

  Under the Canopy

  He tried to have something ready to tell her when she came home: something about his day. It was not so easy. The little that happened had, generally, to be ruled out as something to be retold. He would not tell her anything he had seen on the television; he would not tell her anything about the simple progress of his illness.

  Today, he had gone to see the doctor, however, and had something interesting to tell her. It had not been a regular appointment. They had decided the day before that he should turn up and ask to be seen. For that, you had to arrive at the surgery in Clapham Manor Street at eight a.m. at the latest. Toby had to look after himself; Sonia was leaving home for the office at six thirty, these days. He had wrapped himself warmly, and the minicab had been ordered for seven forty, to allow for delays and confusion. (And the inevitable irritated argument, the exaggerated performance of illness when the driver discovered that he had been given a job that meant driving only eight hundred yards.) He arrived; he paid the driver; he got into the ill-sorted queue under the canopy outside the still-locked surgery. Then he saw something interesting, and as he watched it unfolding, he thought: I must tell Sonia about this, when she comes home.

  Toby told her what he had seen. She hunched over her bowl of brown soup, lifting it to her mouth with pale concentration, vulnerable and exhausted. She might have been the invalid, but it was just a long day at work. The rain of the morning had cleared. Through the window the garden looked rinsed, photogenic, spring-like, and the camellias’ vulgar splash of red was shining. There were new beginnings going on down there.

  ‘You didn’t have to wait long in the rain,’ Sonia said, in the end.

  ‘No, it was only a few minutes,’ Toby said. ‘I was fine.’

  ‘And the doctor?’ Sonia said. ‘Did you see Molly?’

  ‘It’s such a lottery, those on-the-day appointments,’ Toby said. ‘I had to see Dr Lady Whitaker.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to see Dr Lady Whitaker any more.’

  Dr Lady Whitaker was a GP; they had discovered quite by chance that her husband, also a Whitaker, had been knighted for services to the Conservative Party, or making money in the City, or something. She did not use her title in the surgery: Toby and Sonia did, sometimes speculating what she would be called if the government made her a dame. Dr Dame Lady, perhaps.

  ‘That was all there was,’ Toby said. ‘She was fine, really. They all have exactly the same information in front of them.’

  Then he started coughing. He had to cover his mouth with a towel; it was disgusting to produce sputum while Sonia was eating. When he came back from his efforts, hunched over with the effort of coughing, she had finished her soup and had drawn herself upright. She was doing that thing with her tongue on her teeth, cleaning a leaf of suspected spinach off.

  ‘But it was fine,’ Sonia said in the end.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, determined that what he had to tell her would not be what the doctor had said to him in the surgery, a story at the beginning of managed decline. ‘Yes, they’re very pleased with me.’

  What he had seen was a story of distinction and shame, and it had amused him. Perhaps he had not told it well enough. It had been raining, quite heavily, when the tetchy taxi driver had dropped him off. There was a huddle of patients standing underneath the canopy waiting for the surgery to open. He had joined that huddle, in which a queue was somehow manifest, like a hierarchy in a chicken pen. One person waiting was not underneath the canopy, however, but sitting on the wall three metres away, in the full force of the rain. She was getting soaked underneath a plastic rain hood, and was smoking a cigarette substitute with determination.

  ‘I just couldn’t understand,’ Toby said. ‘I couldn’t see— Why would someone wait in the rain when there was plenty of room under the canopy with everyone else
?’

  ‘That must have seemed odd,’ Sonia said, but she seemed distracted, picking at a dried piece of food on the tray.

  ‘Then I saw,’ Toby said. The thing was that next to the surgery there was a pharmacy where prescriptions could be collected. It opened at half past eight in the morning, some time after the surgery itself. The woman waiting in the rain, sitting on a wall smoking a substitute cigarette, she wasn’t a patient waiting to see a doctor. She was a junior assistant in the pharmacy, and was waiting for someone senior enough to be entrusted with keys to come and open up.

  ‘Well, of course, it’s important,’ Sonia said, rattling it off a little impatiently. ‘They can’t give keys to a pharmacy to just anyone, probably only to people with some seniority. There’s any number of things in the back there, heroin, even.’

  ‘But the thing was,’ Toby said, ‘she just wasn’t going to wait with patients. She really wanted to make it clear that she was much more important, or something, so she had to wait in the rain, ten feet away.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Sonia said. ‘And then they unlocked the door and let you in, and only when all the patients had been let in, then she got up and stood by herself under the canopy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said. ‘She could have come in and sat in the warm in the waiting room, but then— Sonia?’

  ‘It wasn’t this morning,’ Sonia said, as the door to the bedroom opened.

  A figure came in, standing there, just as Toby started saying, ‘Have I told you all this?’ It was a girl, nineteen or twenty, her shoulders rounded in her green mackintosh, her blonde hair falling to both sides equally from a severe parting, dead on the centre of her skull. Toby recalled: her name was Lucy. She came every day.

  ‘It happened weeks ago,’ Sonia said, her head turning a little in the direction of the girl called Lucy, but not acknowledging her in any other way. ‘I’m sorry, Toby. You’re just a bit confused. It was the morning you first went to the doctor, the morning they diagnosed you. It’s the medication, it makes you not clear in your mind. Anyway. Are you tired? Lie down. I’ll rearrange the pillows and put the light out. Lucy’s going now.’

  And then it did seem to him that he had been confused, because it came to him in a moment of understanding that he was, after all, in bed, and Sonia, his wife, was sitting in a chair by the side of him, finishing a bowl of soup after her long day. He didn’t know why he’d thought anything else. The girl called Lucy raised her hand in an upright gesture, unpractised and unfamiliar and embarrassed, a gesture from a political movement, or one made at first greeting or a first farewell, from one uncommitted to friendship and uncertain that any of this might happen again. He watched it with interest.

  Maybe it was the next day that Lucy came into his room and said to him—

  No, it was not like that. He was dressed and in his chair downstairs. But the chair had been moved and was now facing the mirror in the sitting room. Who would put a chair like that? It made reading so difficult, to look up between paragraphs and see that that was what you looked like, these days, and what you were made to wear by someone who thought you were old and might benefit from putting on your best clothes. (Cardigan, cravat.)

  It was like that. Lucy came into the room and said to him, ‘I’ve forgotten my shoes.’

  ‘I’m always forgetting things,’ he said. But she was wearing shoes.

  ‘I’m such an idiot,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m going out straight away after this. When Sonia comes home, I’m going straight into Soho. I’ve got a date. I can’t be turning up with these on. I need my good shoes and I’ve forgotten to bring them to change into.’

  ‘Is he nice?’ Toby said. He looked at her shoes again. They were flat, practical, scuffed, the shoes of a carer with miles of corridors to walk. She was wearing a green tweedy dress with pockets in front, and black opaque tights: she looked charming, he said to himself, relishing the octogenarian expression.

  ‘Well, I don’t know yet, do I?’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve made a date on Tim’ – that was what she seemed to say – ‘and I’m meeting him for the first time tonight. He sounds really nice but the things I said about myself – you know – the things I said about myself, I can’t be turning up with these on. I’m going to have to—’

  Somewhere about Lucy a harp twanged. She was surrounded with haloes of annunciatory noises, the harp twanging regularly as if in joy or celebration. He knew now what it was: her mobile phone announcing a text message, but Lucy never answered it in front of him, and it was as if nothing had sounded at all. She ignored the invisible harp now, sounding a chord. She assessed him with a long up-and-down gaze. He couldn’t think what he had to do with Lucy’s tasks, her schedule.

  ‘I like your shoes,’ Toby said. ‘If I was meeting you for the first time, your shoes wouldn’t be the first thing I’d notice about you.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Lucy said, going to the window and peering out – up at the sky, down at the dry earth. ‘I don’t know what to do. How are you feeling today?’

  ‘I’m not so bad,’ Toby said, wondering. Had he had his lunch yet? There were no plates about with the lunch congealing on it. Lucy, he remembered, sometimes left his lunch there for an hour or two before she got round to clearing it up. His afternoon cup of tea, on the other hand, she usually took away quite quickly, washing it up with the lunchtime things so as to do everything at the same time. So, he thought with firm direction, he had probably not had his lunch yet. Then he remembered that he could have looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and he looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and it said that it was half past ten. ‘I don’t feel so bad today,’ Toby said again.

  ‘The shoes are at my sister’s,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s not so far away. I lent them to her two days ago. She had a do to go to, she’s a PA in the City, she had a do to go to with her boss. I know where they’ll be – she’ll have kicked them off under her bed. She lives in Clapham, it’s only a mile from here. I’ve got my little car, I’d be there and back in twenty minutes if I can find a space to park in.’

  She came over from the window and, delicately, as if a part of her own personal grooming, she straightened his cardigan. It hung loose over his shoulders nowadays, this blue one. He must remember to wear the brown one tomorrow. That was a better fit.

  ‘I was going to say,’ Lucy said. ‘You don’t mind being left for half an hour, do you? I was going to say that, but you’re feeling a bit better today than you were, aren’t you? Don’t tell Sonia, but I don’t see why you shouldn’t put on a coat and get in the car and come out with me. It’ll be good for you to get some air. And then you won’t be on your own, not for a minute. That sounds better, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know when I went out,’ Toby said. ‘It was some days ago, I know.’

  Lucy peered at him, as if at a shy beast in an overgrown burrow, not quite sure that she could see him there at all. She might have been trying to read the phrase that was now coming to the front of his mind: total rest. Was it for him to make up his mind? It was all coming at him backwards, and sorting it all out was too much. Lucy was going to take him out now: she would put him in his coat and scarf and put him in the car and drive him to the place where she wanted to go and then she would bring him back and everything would be just as it had been before. It was all decided. But who was Lucy?

  He asked her as she was dressing him, in a grey tweed coat that belonged to someone else, someone much larger whose possessions flapped about him in a warmly annoying way, as she was placing a woolly hat on his head, and she told him quite quickly. She had been with him for three months now. She was the daughter of Sue, who was in Caroline’s book club – Caroline who worked with Sonia his wife? (He knew who Sonia was, bridling a little.) She had finished at college and was looking for a job, had been looking for a job for eight months now without much luck. Remember? (He might have remembered.) It was a job in journalism she was after, in the fashion world, she loved that, but it was all sewn up, daughters of
friends getting everything, she didn’t think they read what she sent them. So it was this, this was to fill a gap, coming in to sit with Toby during the day so he wouldn’t be on his own while Sonia was at work, doing, Lucy said, whatever it is I do for you. But Sonia doesn’t want you to be alone in the house for a moment. I can understand that, Lucy said. But don’t tell her what we’re doing today, Lucy said. And then the door was open and Toby was in the outside world.

  They had lived in this street for nearly twenty years – had bought the house at the stretch of their incomes, had renovated it, then done nothing more. The street had risen about them; the pub that had been at the end, an old Irishmen’s drinking den, had been utterly transformed into a chichi cottage with a sage-coloured front door and suggestions of tongue-and-groove through the frosted downstairs glass. The pub that had been at the other end was now a gastropub, with floorboards, that served shin of beef and took bookings. The street was altered, he knew that, but no alteration was like the one that had taken place in the weeks or months since he’d gone outside. He knew it had been weeks or months from the alteration. There was a lightness and a delirium about the air. The houses were luminous, weightless, drawn clearly against the purity of the air’s colour. He felt if he touched anything in this street it would have no more substance than a Ladybird illustration of a happy suburb: that, dislodged by his pained touch, it would most likely float away into the blue sky. Lucy was here as his guide. It did not matter that his eyes, until just now, had not been asked to look at anything more than fifteen feet away, that looking down a long street or upwards into nothing at all, they sang and resonated with the effort. She lived in the world, stepped outside and inside without thinking about it. That was what she was hired to do, and now as she opened the door of the black Mini that was parked at the bottom of the steps, she was talking about something else entirely.