Tales of Persuasion
Tales of Persuasion
Philip Hensher
Ten daring stories from ‘a writer who seems capable of anything’ (Guardian), the Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip HensherBackdrops vary in this collection of stories from the author of The Northern Clemency – from turmoil in Sudan following the death of a politician in a plane crash, to southern India where a Soho hedonist starts to envisage the crump and soar of munitions. Each story, regardless of location, reveals a great writer at the peak of his powers.
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Copyright (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
4th Estate
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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
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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 (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
To Nicola Barr
Contents
Cover (#ud2213e5d-3d90-5184-9c8f-51d2a82f6c5b)
Title Page (#ubd58a5e4-21ad-5025-82f2-8763a461fbf7)
Copyright (#uecbb069f-fbfe-5331-b92f-d6f77a10b72a)
Dedication (#u14560d4b-42af-54bb-b5e6-83e2d423ee01)
Eduardo (#udcbf41be-0b33-563c-b4ab-9c92360f6ac7)
A Change in the Weather (#ue71d9d90-88a3-51d8-a192-63c667b69e6b)
My Dog Ian (#ue17f6b24-0ff8-5edc-8473-248bff3de719)
The Midsummer Snowball (#litres_trial_promo)
In Time of War (#litres_trial_promo)
Under the Canopy (#litres_trial_promo)
The Day I Saw the Snake (#litres_trial_promo)
The Pierian Spring (#litres_trial_promo)
The Whitsun Snoggings (#litres_trial_promo)
The Painter’s Sons (#litres_trial_promo)
A Lemon Tree (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Tales of Persuasion (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Philip Hensher (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Eduardo (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
(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.’
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 television,’ 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 Bradbury’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.’
‘I’ll let her know,’ Fitzgerald said, and put the phone down. Rage filled his soul.
‘I said that,’ Timothy Storey said, when she returned and Fitzgerald asked her for some more details. ‘I do come from Kenya. Mrs Baxter didn’t tell you that I didn’t come from Africa, did she?’
‘But you asked me to meet you at Paddington,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I thought you’d come from Kenya just that moment. I thought you were coming on the Heathrow Express.’
‘Oh, no,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I was coming from Southall on the train. It’s only fourteen minutes, it’s quite convenient. Mrs Baxter says she lives in Ealing, but it’s really Southall, she thinks it sounds smarter. It was nice of you to meet me at Paddington. I could have made my own way here, but I thought it would be good if we met somewhere neutral before you took me home – you hear such awful stories. Mrs Baxter, she was a bitch from Hell, I’ll tell you. She was always complaining about me watching TV when she wanted to watch something, and telling me I shouldn’t be lying on the couch eating snacks, and there was something on the other side she wanted to watch, like she owned the TV or something.’
‘But she did own the TV,’ Fitzgerald said, almost incapable of speech. ‘Didn’t she?’
‘No, I mean the TV channels, like she owned the TV channels. She always had her own thing she wanted to watch. She was a prize bitch. I’m glad to be out of there.’
‘You know,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘I think I’m going to have to ask you to move out. I don’t think you’ve been truthful with me at all.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I like it here. It’s been nice of you to let me have the room for nothing, but some people might wonder why a single man wanted to have a girl to stay in his house and gave her a room for nothing. It looks a little bit fishy, don’t you think? I would only have to say to someone that you’ve been touching me—’
‘I’m gay, you know. Everyone knows that.’
‘Yes, indeed, what people in my country and some people in this one, too, like to call a sexual pervert. And then I might have to show them the hole that you drilled in the wall to watch me getting undressed at night. It’s there, that hole.’
‘There’s no hole in the wall.’
‘Take a look. I think you’ll find there is.’
‘You’ve drilled a fucking hole in the wall of my spare bedroom?’ Fitzgerald said.
‘Of course,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone any of those awful things. I like it here, I really do. And another thing – those towels Mrs Baxter was telling you about, they’re my towels. I bought those towels. I swear on my mother’s life, I bought those towels.’
Satisfied that the conversation was over, Timothy Storey pushed off her shoes and lay back on the sofa. Fitzgerald went without speaking into the kitchen. A voice through a microphone in the other room began to announce the results of a phone-in vote, to wild applause, yellings of names and long, dramatic silences. The kitchen table was covered with the detritus of a quickly arranged snack; a tub of taramasalata lay open with the edge of a cream cracker broken off in it, like a tiny Excalibur. Fitzgerald pulled it out. Small fragments of cheese, of bread, lay scattered like bleak waste across the surface of the table; an open carton of orange juice had spilt onto the floor. The fridge door stood open, waiting for Timothy Storey to return to graze some more. Underneath the cork message board, Fitzgerald looked, and there was, indeed, a new hole, drilled in the wall, giving onto the spare bedroom. How had he failed to notice that? The situation bore down on him; where people like Bradbury had a handsome half-naked beast like Eduardo lolling around waiting for Bradbury’s attentions, someone like Fitzgerald would only have a Timothy Storey, spilling biscuit crumbs down the sofa, thinking up blackmail attempts, destroying the masonry and eyeing up the bath towels.
‘Can you give me a hand?’ a voice called from the sitting room. ‘This seems to be stuck.’ Hopeless and speechless, Fitzgerald went into the room. Timothy Storey was kneeling before the DVD player, jabbing at buttons. ‘I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that,’ she was saying. ‘But none of it does anything.’ Fitzgerald contemplated, with hatred, her enormous, lying, blackmailing, cotton-straining, homophobic, racist, idle arse. Then a joyous possibility occurred to him. There was no reason not to do it. With three fast and accelerating steps, he was behind her, and he did it. He had never been good at school at football or rugby, but there, with a single, confident, long smooth swing, he gave Timothy Storey’s arse the single kick of a lifetime.
He took a detour on his way to Eduardo’s flat, going to the fancy confectioner’s on Clapham High Street and buying an expensive box of chocolates – two pounds of pralines and fruit creams. Only when he reached Bradbury’s road did he remember Eduardo’s obsession with not eating or drinking anything that might make him fat. But it was too late; and, anyway, he realized he had bought the chocolates for himself, really.
‘I want to say sorry, Eduardo,’ he said, coming into the flat. The sun was streaming through the long windows, and lighting up half of Eduardo’s face. ‘And also goodbye, I suppose.’
‘Goodbye?’ Eduardo said. ‘Are you going away?’
‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. The pathos of his farewell almost made him lapse into tears. ‘No, I just think it’s better that I don’t see you again. It seems like a bad idea.’
‘But where are you going?’ Eduardo said.
He hadn’t understood, and Fitzgerald said, ‘I don’t know yet. You might as well have these.’
He handed over the box of chocolates, and from the way Eduardo took the bag, eagerly, peering in at the confectioner-wrapped box of ribbons and bright paper, Fitzgerald saw that he was a man who liked to get presents, to get a present every day, no matter what it was. ‘It’s only chocolates,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat them if you don’t like them.’
‘You can come in,’ Eduardo said. ‘I’m on my own. Daniel went to Monaco and he won’t be back until Friday night. He went away this morning. It’s so boring here.’
‘I thought he went to Munich?’
‘Yes, he did, he went to Monaco.’
‘That’s not the same place.’
‘OK,’ Eduardo said. ‘I didn’t know that. You want a coffee?’
‘Only if you’re making one. I’ll stay and fend off your boredom, if you like.’
‘Excuse me?’
Fitzgerald looked around. In this setting, this golden late afternoon, with the sun falling through the windows and the lilies from Saturday night’s party now full-blown and on the edge of falling, Eduardo looked more dark, glowing and healthful than ever. He had not shaved today, and a dark shadow around the jaw gave him the air of a beautiful navvy. Fitzgerald drew in a great breath, savouring Eduardo’s warm, animal, marshlike odour. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love the scent of lilies.’
‘Lilies are so ugly,’ Eduardo said. ‘Everyone else thinks they’re beautiful. For me, they’re ugly, the way they fall, the yellow thing in the middle. I think they’re ugly.’
‘You have interesting opinions,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I always thought you had a lot of interesting views about things.’
‘Do you think so?’ Eduardo said. ‘I think I have interesting opinions. I think you’re right. But Daniel always says, “Darling, just shut your mouth and look pretty. No one wants to know what you think.” And one guy, one friend of his, asked me once if I knew how to tell the time, or maybe if I could tell my right foot from my left foot, some shit like that. His friends, they all think I’m just stupid, I know.’
Fitzgerald’s attention was drawn to Eduardo’s feet, his left foot, his right foot, perfect, dark, hairy and masculine. He would agree to be walked over, by such feet, he truly would. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ he said. ‘I always think you have the most original views about things. Not everyone would say that lilies were ugly, but they are kind of ugly, as flowers, you’re right. I’ve often thought you had interesting opinions about all sorts of things.’
‘That’s funny,’ Eduardo said. ‘Because I do. I do have opinions about all sorts of things. For like, I think what we do in our lives, it comes back and has an effect on what happens to you. Like, if you are bad and mean to someone, then maybe later, someone else will be bad and mean to you. That’s my opinion. I don’t know how it works, but it does. And I think we’re all connected somehow, like maybe if you are friends with someone, and they are friends with someone else, and that someone else is friends with someone else, then you are connected, you have a connection with that person, and in the end maybe you have a connection with all the world.’
‘So because I know you, I have a connection with all sorts of South Americans I’ve never met,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘That’s really an interesting idea. You’re really an intelligent person, Eduardo.’
‘And I think there is maybe enough money in the world for all the people, the rich people and the poor people,’ Eduardo said. ‘So there is no need for there to be poor people and rich people, the rich people, they don’t need so much, so maybe the money can be shared about and the poor people get money from the rich people, and then everyone has enough and everyone is happy.’
‘That’s so true,’ Fitzgerald said, in an ecstasy of happiness. ‘That ought to happen. That definitely ought to happen.’
In the sunlit sitting room of a South London flat, the beautiful man sat, his hands clasped between his knees, his eyes widening, his pupils broad and dark and empty. He dipped now and then into the full box of chocolates, and his brilliant teeth shone from between his full lips as he went on talking, explaining, eating the pralines, emptying his poor unindulged mind before Fitzgerald. And Fitzgerald, understanding at last what it was that Eduardo wanted, and how, in the end, he saw himself, sat, barely interrupting, saying from time to time, ‘That’s so true,’ and ‘You surprise me. I didn’t know you were as intelligent as that,’ and ‘You’re an intelligent person, you really are,’ murmuring and encouraging from time to time, as the light failed and the warm blue evening surrounded them.
It was as simple as that.
A Change in the Weather (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
(i.m. M.W.)
The air was plump, cold, full of anticipation. Something would fall from it. He was walking along the famous street with a briefcase that was not new; it was empty. To the left and to the right, ministries stood like serious cliffs. Whitehall. At this moment, the people he had worked with all summer and autumn and half the winter, they were sitting down in their office chairs and asking each other whether they wanted anything from downstairs. Their lives were going on, unambitiously, teaching English as a foreign language. Today was the day he started work in the public service, at the centre of the public service, in a building just off Whitehall.
George had a pass to the building – his building, he must start to think. It was in his pocket. He felt it now, as he walked. He knew exactly where he was to go, on this first morning. Mr Castry – Bill, he was supposed to call him – had taken him round and introduced him to people the Thursday before. He had not remembered very much, but Bill had made sure that he knew exactly where to go the following Wednesday. Everything else can come after that, he had said. George had got up at the weekend and walked all the way from the flat in Bloomsbury he was sharing with the Brazilian girl and the American girl. It was a rehearsal of his first day. The streets had been empty at half past eight on a Sunday morning, apart from some tourists and people who might have been hurrying to a Sunday service, here and there. George had walked down to Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, to the outside of the building where he was going to work. He wanted to make sure that it was still there, where he remembered it was. Nobody was there to see him, and he had walked away quickly, not pausing, his trainers making no sound on the pavement. He might have been walking past purely by chance.
The office where he had worked for the last eight months was a cheerful and undemanding place. A temporary place. It accepted applications from overseas students to study the English language, and it assigned them to the appropriate class. Julie was in charge. She had been there for donkey’s years, she said. Her husband was something in business. Something to do with bacon or coffee, but he was in the City; he never saw any bacon or coffee unless it was in the snackbar by the tube. For most of his day, bacon and coffee were just figures on a screen, Julie explained. Great mountains of notional bacon and coffee. She didn’t know how he could stand it, all day long. There was a sense of fun in the office. They had opened the letters, had filled in the forms that were needed and, twice a week, had gone to the communal meeting room where the biggest empty table was, and arranged the applications from the past few days in order of classes. Probably Julie could have done this on her own, but she liked to get everyone involved. Sometimes a student came to demand his money back or to complain, because he had not succeeded in learning enough English. Those, too, were occasions of fun, once the complaining student had been refused and pacified and sent on his way. Julie had a way of rolling her eyes and holding her hands up to heaven that everyone copied. That office had been only until Christmas, and George had understood that from the start. The office he was going into would be for his entire life, from today onwards. He curbed his spirit of fun. The door to his building was open.
‘Good morning,’ he said to the man in uniform sitting behind the desk. A walk-in cupboard behind him was piled high with documents, tagged and ordered. George pulled out his plastic pass from his pocket and showed it carefully, the right side up so that the guard could inspect it.
The guard looked at it briefly, then at George, more curiously. ‘Morning,’ he said. Of course George should have been more casual about it. He felt like a criminal who, gaining access to a guarded building, had made himself stand out in some way. ‘Starting to snow,’ the guard said. His tone was not friendly, but it made George feel that he was accepted, grudgingly, within the building; it explained, too, something about the day that he had not understood. The metallic sensation of weight and chill obscurity in the air was not, as it had seemed, official London welcoming George to his new life. It was what had happened many times before without reference to the lives of any men or women: it was the sensation of snow about to happen. But George did not have to answer: a woman came out from the cupboard.
‘Is it now,’ she said, only glancing at George.
‘It won’t settle,’ the guard said. George was pleased he had not misunderstood and tried to start a conversation. The office he was to work in was on the third floor. There was no need to ask anyone’s advice about how to get there. One day, quite soon, he would know the names of both these people, and greet them with kindly deference.
He took the lift, and in a moment there he was in the corridor where the committee’s offices were. There were four doors, and there were labels on three of them, giving people’s names or their job titles. The fourth stood slightly open, a strip-light on. From inside he could hear a woman’s voice, slightly muttering, and the sound of heavy documents being moved from one pile to another.
Before he could knock, the noise halted, and the door was opened wide. A woman with white hair in a bob, a sharp nose and bulbous eyes was there; she was wearing a coat and a scarf, and underneath a skirt in a large floral pattern, which seemed to be too long for her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, I say.’ Her voice was light and metallic, grating. She was assessing him, not in an unfriendly way but without a welcoming smile. ‘I know who you are. You’re our baby Clerk, aren’t you? It’s George, isn’t it? I was saying to Pam, only this morning – trust the powers that be to send us a baby Clerk to nanny through, just when all this is kicking off. Patrick’s not going to be one bit pleased. He’ll be tearing his hair out.’
There was a sharp ring from inside the office. The woman turned and went inside, picking up the telephone. ‘Energy Committee, Andrea speaking – oh, hello!’ Her voice went from stern to girlish; she giggled. ‘No, Patrick, don’t you be – I’ll tell you something, there’s a lovely surprise for you when you get in, a lovely surprise waiting, your favourite thing … Oh. Who told you? … Well, no one tells me anything … Oh, about the usual, I would say. I expect you’re phoning to say you’re late in, as ever. Well, let me tell you …’
George walked away, feeling he should not listen to this flirtatious conversation. The walls were hung with mezzotints; eighteenth-century politicians and bishops on the shiny magnolia walls. Another door stood open to an empty office: its windows were hung with dirty grey net curtains, too long for the space and falling to a pile on the windowsill.
‘That was Patrick,’ the woman said, coming out of the office with a dark blue document clutched to her bosom. ‘What are you doing down there? Come back and sit down with your aunty Andrea. She’ll tell you what’s what. You’ll never guess. Patrick’s calling from the phone box at the top of Whitehall. He says— Well, did you hear that bang?’
‘No,’ George said. ‘What bang was that?’
‘That bang!’ Andrea said. ‘Half an hour ago, that bang. I wondered what it was so I went down and asked the front desk, they didn’t know any more than I did. What bang, he says. It made me jump, I can tell you.’
There was a pause. Andrea was inspecting him in close detail, standing with her legs apart.
‘Well, we can’t have you standing in the corridor all day,’ she said. ‘I expect I’d better show you where your office is, and you can make yourself at home. It’ll be funny not having Mike in there. Ah, well.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Now, these are my keys. I’ve got a set for everyone’s office. Don’t waste your time asking me if you can borrow them when you forget yours – ooh, Andrea, pretty please, it’ll only be this once, I’ve never forgotten them before. I’ve got a good reply to that sort of thing. No. Way. Sunshine. Because there’s no way I let them, my keys, I mean, out of my possession. So you’ve just got to hang on to yours. Welsh, are you?’
George’s office was quite bare: there was a desk facing the door, an empty bookcase, and nothing more but a desk tidy, and a pair of plastic trays, one labelled IN and the other labelled OUT. There was a pile of papers in the in-tray. There was a large, grubby white telephone on the desk, and a spiral-bound notebook with a chewed biro alongside. Everything was generic, except one thing: a miniature object, a range of five furled flags the size of a stretched hand. There had been a previous inhabitant of this office, who now had moved out and left this. At some point George was going to meet that previous inhabitant; at some point he, too, was going to leave some individual sign of his life for a new boy, a new girl, to wonder about. In two years’ time, perhaps.
Andrea had gone back to her office, closing the door, without waiting for a response to her question. A red light on the telephone showed that she had started a call. George hung his coat on the back of the door, and put his empty briefcase down by the side of the desk. His father’s professional life must have started exactly like this, thirty-five years ago. He had arrived in the office where he would spend the rest of his working life, moving from job to job, but always remaining loyal to the organization. George’s life had led up to this moment, and he would never be unemployed or unattached again. The years at university, trying to get an essay exactly right, trying to fish a piece of overlooked information from the seas of the Bodleian had led up to this moment, with an empty desk and a tray full of stern, detailed information.
He had taken two days off from the language school in October to undertake the application process. He had filled in forms, and drafted polite letters to imaginary supplicants who were attempting to defraud the public purse; he had entered into discussion with other applicants and with the examiners; and he had been interviewed. The rooms in which the process had taken place were bright-lit and yellowish. Each of them had windows, which, like this one, were veiled by net curtains too long for the space. A middle-aged woman with a mop of ginger hair and an amber brooch on a green sweater had introduced herself as the psychologist on the team. She had asked him penetrating and quite personal questions until one question – George could not recall what the question had been – had made him reply that he didn’t believe the answer was any of her business. The interview had come to an end promptly after that. At the time, George had wondered whether he had scuppered his chances by being rude. Afterwards, when the offer of a job came, it seemed to him that he had been firm and impressive in drawing a line. So he was in his office, not yet with his name on the door, preparing to start work.
Elsewhere in the city, Londoners were setting to work, exchanging insults and flirtatious suggestions with their colleagues, having a cup of coffee, getting down to their most ordinary business. To kick your shoes off under your desk, to hang your jacket up and straighten the photograph of your family in front of you. They would be taking it all for granted. They did not know how magical it was to have a job; only George, on his first day, knew that. In a moment, it occurred to him that he was being paid for what he was doing, even now. The thought made him dizzy.
He had been in only two or three rooms in the public service, and before, he had thought that the net curtains hanging over the windows were a matter of personal idiosyncrasy by the inhabitants or users of the rooms. Now he understood that it must have been a decision made by some central authority. He got up and examined the net curtains. They did not hang loose, but fell to a gathering pile on the windowsill. The hems of the net curtains held small lead weights, to hold the curtain down in any breeze. He picked them up; felt them in his hand. The window did not have any kind of view. It gave onto a well between buildings, and faced a high wall with yellow and brown glazed brick, broken by a single brightly lit window. It appeared to be a window on a stair or a communal space. Snow was falling thickly through the artificial light.
‘You’ll be wanting to get on with that,’ Andrea said, leaning against the doorpost. She held a blue printed report, the size of A4. ‘The dreaded in-tray. There’s always more to be getting on with. One word of warning – Patrick’s quite nice but he’s a devil for punctuality. He doesn’t like it if there’s something sitting in your in-tray that he’s waiting for and he’s still waiting for it tomorrow or, God forbid, the day after. Another word of warning – if Patrick starts gently suggesting that perhaps we could make a start on work before ten, start coming in by nine thirty or nine, just agree and come in at ten anyway. He’s hopeless about all of that, coming in early – he’s not another Chris Leonard, if you know who that was, which you don’t, I don’t suppose. Don’t be taken in by that demeanour, he’s very strict about most things. I had an aunt who was Welsh, not blood, of course, she was my uncle Edward’s second wife. Ooh, she was a bully. She sent him out to fetch her little things, all her errands, in all weathers right to the end of his life and her twenty years younger than him. He was an old fool, we always used to say, my mum whose brother she was. I don’t know why, but I’ve never managed to fancy the Welsh since then, all because of my uncle’s second wife, Phyl. Strange, isn’t it? And speak of the devil!’
In the corridor, behind Andrea, was a thin man with grey hair flopping over a drained white face, both middle-aged and boyish; he grinned forcefully, brushing the snow from his shoulders. ‘What a day,’ he said. ‘What a day. So you must be George! Welcome, welcome, welcome. I should have been here to welcome you. But Andrea was here, I’m sure. How are you, my sweet?’
‘Don’t think you can get around me as easily as all that,’ Andrea said.
‘There’s the most extraordinary thing,’ Patrick said – he must be Patrick. ‘Out there, the whole of Whitehall’s been closed off. Did you see? There’s been some kind of mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I’m amazed you got through. A very, very good start, George! You succeeded in getting through the mass of police cordons and security walls. Most people would have given up and gone home and started work tomorrow. But not George! A big gold star on your first day, George. I really doubted I was going to make it. Did you not hear anything going off?’
‘You see?’ Andrea said. She tapped a red-painted fingernail sharply on the back of the report she was clutching. ‘I said there was a bomb going off, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear it? I’m the only one who heard anything, but, oh, no, Andrea, you must have been hearing things. But there you are.’
‘I was at the far end of Whitehall,’ Patrick said. ‘And there was a police cordon going up, and I phoned you then from the phone box. Then I asked the policeman in charge what was happening. He wouldn’t let me through at first. I knew he wouldn’t. But then all of a sudden there was the Clerk of the House. I can’t think what he was doing at the far end of Whitehall at a quarter to ten, but he just sort of glowered at them and told them who he was, and they let him through and me as well.’
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Andrea said. ‘A mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I do hope that nice Mr Major is quite all right.’ She stood for a moment inspecting George, her mouth slightly open, an expression of amusement in her eyes. As if with a snap of command, she turned and left, shutting what must be the door of her office with a bright slam.
‘She’s a good soul,’ Patrick said. He thrust an index finger in his ear and waggled it furiously, extracting it with a pop. ‘You’ll find that she has her own ways of dealing with things, and they all work out in the end. Just don’t try to suggest any changes, and everything will be absolutely fine. Well. Welcome! I’m not at all sure what we should be doing today. I need to make two or three phone calls, and then we can sit down and talk and I can explain things, about where the committee has got to and what you ought to be doing and so on. I won’t be too long. One thing …’
Patrick came into the office, and noiselessly pushed the door to. ‘If I could recommend something – if I were you, I would always find that I had something important to do at the close of business on a Friday. Andrea’s a very good soul, but it’s as well not to be drawn into her Friday afternoons and evenings. Just a word to the wise.’
‘What are you saying?’ Andrea’s voice shouted from her office.
‘Nothing! Nothing at all, my sweet!’ Patrick called. ‘I was just welcoming George to the office. It occurs to me –’ his voice dropped to normal volume ‘– that the one thing that is supposed to happen this morning is John Slaughter, the bod from UCL, he was supposed to come in and brief us. About wave energy. I don’t know anything about wave energy and I don’t suppose you do either. He was meant to come in at eleven thirty but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. If you wanted, you could try to find out whether they’re letting anyone through. He hasn’t phoned, as far as I know. Andrea,’ he called again. ‘Has John Slaughter called? Well, no, then.’
Patrick left. George knew that the time had come to demonstrate initiative and efficiency. He picked up the biro, and wrote ‘John Slaughter?’ in the spiral-bound notebook. He thought the best way to discover the state of affairs was to go downstairs and ask the security staff. He left the office, leaving the door open, and walked to the stairs. At the bottom, the woman security officer was at the desk on her own. He noticed she had a large hairy mole on her left cheek. He wondered if the time would come when he knew her name, and could recognize her. There was no need to ask her anything. Her voice called out behind him: ‘There’s been a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. Everything’s sealed off.’ He nodded at her, and left the building, checking that he still had his pass in his pocket. The side-street outside was deserted; the snow was falling heavily, and had now settled. The junction with Whitehall was sealed off with police incident tape. George walked up to it. It must have been sealed off since Patrick had made it through. The whole of Whitehall, to left and right, was deserted behind incident tape. The snow fell on untouched ground, and was now a pristine three inches deep.
Once, George had been out in the country after a heavy snowfall, and had seen a woman playing a trick on her dog. A wound-up, bounding, overwhelmed dog, a Jack Russell. The woman bent down, and took a fistful of snow, rolling it into a snowball, and threw it. The dog hurtled forward to find the thrown thing to fetch, but where the snowball fell into the snow, there was only snow, and nothing to bring back. The dog ran around, astonished, baffled, and returned. The woman bent, rolled, threw again. The dog fell for it again. She had been doing it for some time. The field of snow contained something to fetch, and the dog had run into it, again and again. Now, beyond the Cenotaph, two policemen stood in their dark uniforms, like picturesque figures in a snow scene. There was no possibility that anyone would reach them until the road block was lifted. George stood there. The boulevard was transformed. Nobody else was there, looking at it. There was a perfume in the air that was the absence of perfume: London stripped of its odours and made to smell of snow falling through oxygen. Nobody else would ever see the sight of Whitehall as blank and clean and silent as a remote moor in deep winter, unpressed by the tread of foot. The sight was as unique as his first day at the work he was going to make a success of.
He was able to tell Patrick that he thought there was no possibility of receiving any visitors until the cordon was lifted, and he did not know when that might be. Patrick cursed amiably, and went away, promising that he would sit down and explain everything about the committee and its work later that morning. George sat down and reached for his in-tray. He opened the first document. It was the annual report of an organization that seemed to be something to do with nuclear energy. George began to read it. He understood almost nothing of what he read, and soon a feeling of mild satisfaction came over him at the image of dedication he must be presenting, if anyone walked past his office and happened to glance in. In time, he shut the document and placed it in the out-tray. It occurred to him to make a note of what he had read, and he did so, in the spiral-bound notebook. He picked up the second document in the pile, and soon he looked like someone who was making efficient work out of his inconveniently interrupted day. He passed papers from one pile to another, with the appearance of someone who was working hard, and beginning a new life. Anyone could see he had the capacity to be useful, and the thought gave George, head down, something rather like joy.
My Dog Ian (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
‘No, I don’t speak the lingo at all,’ she would say. ‘Just bono giorno, honey, bono sera, that’s all it takes. What’s the point? They rob you anyway, rob you blind. Take Paolo …’
Those Florentine afternoons. And afterwards I was always the same. Some people are always on stage. Most are destined always to be in the audience. Realizing it, you can never change the fact afterwards. After Florence, I would always be in row F of the stalls, hands clasped, looking up as the lights pointed in a different direction, allowing myself to be persuaded.
I went to Italy because of love – no, guilt. I was twenty-seven. I had been working ‘in the arts’ for five years. It was the sort of job that had sounded immensely desirable once. ‘Arts administration,’ I had confidently said to careers advisers, friends of my parents at drinks at Christmas. It had sounded good, labour rooted in passion and exchanged, at the end of the month, for money you couldn’t be ashamed of earning. My contemporaries failed, and had to settle for jobs as solicitors. Five years later, they earned three times what I did and were beginning to drop me. They could not be blamed. ‘Arts administration’ meant a narrow office in a Victorian museum in the north, kept going with public money and the promise of lottery largesse. I found, after all, that you could be ashamed of the money at the end of the month. It was so little. My grey walls teetered with box files; outside, you walked between the museum’s doubtful Raffaelino and the still more doubtful school parties. I grew to detest the single Matthew Smith, lurid as the municipal flowerbeds, to hate, too, the multiple aldermen in committees, drab and important in appearance as the museum’s solitary Stanley Spencer. Last Supper in Maidenhead. You may know it from reproductions.
It was a city of three hundred thousand people but, still, it hardly seems surprising that I noticed Silvia. In that city, she was like a panther at a Tupperware party. The society was less extensive than you might imagine. A small Italian woman, with expensive accoutrements and an expensive, contemptuous way of standing with her hips jutting forward, made herself conspicuous. I had formed the habit of going to concerts in the university hall every other Friday. The tickets were cheap, and the platform just about big enough for an orchestra. The timpanist had to sit beneath the conductor’s podium, however, and guess at the beat. More usually, as tonight, it was a string quartet. In the interval, the audience sat in their seats or clustered in the chilly atrium drinking coffee. It was not a well-dressed audience. You noticed Silvia.
‘Have you seen,’ my colleague Margaret said. ‘A footballer’s wife?’
(It was a recognized social category, in that impoverished northern town with two famous football clubs. It was used for any woman under thirty with a tan and a handbag.)
‘I hope she enjoyed the Webern,’ Margaret said bitchily. I went to concerts with Margaret. It was no more than that.
‘I hope so too,’ I said.
After the interval, I took more notice of Silvia. She was sitting three or four rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle. She listened intently to the first two movements of the next piece. Then, with a sigh, just as the string quartet was raising its bows, she got up and left, clacking down the central aisle. The string quartet lowered its bows, waited for her to leave. They began to play again.
‘A bit much for the Footballer’s Wife,’ Margaret said archly, when it was all over. ‘The bitonal passage can be a little demanding for many music lovers.’ I wasn’t sure, and not just because I didn’t know what Margaret meant. To me those decisive stilettos clacking towards the exit looked much more like someone who only wanted to hear the scherzo of the Ravel string quartet; had come for that, had left when it was done.
In fact, Silvia seemed to attend the university concerts fairly regularly. I started to notice her now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. She rarely stayed for a whole concert. She would turn up at the interval, leave after a particular piece, or even walk out, as with the Ravel, in the middle of one. It was terribly rude. It was the behaviour of someone, I decided, who had come to like music through a collection of CDs. She had the habit of skipping about, selecting favourite movements, and rejecting music with all its tyranny and gleeful infliction of boredom in favour of ‘highlights’. Margaret had a great deal to say on the subject. I weakly agreed, though tried not to refer to Silvia as ‘the FW’. I did not agree with Margaret as often as she seemed to assume, and sometimes rebelliously thought, as I clapped exhaustedly at the end of some juvenile assault on a great masterpiece, that it might indeed be quite nice to press a fast-forward button as the Diabelli Variations grew a little too pleased with themselves. There was no such fast-forward button at the museum, either. It took up as much time as you were prepared to grant it.
‘I’ve found out about the FW,’ Margaret said one day, popping her head round the door of my office. ‘She’s not an FW, a footballer’s wife, I mean. She’s a lettrice.’
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A lettrice in the Italian department of the university,’ Margaret said immaculately. ‘The equivalent of a lectrice in French, Lektorin, I believe, in German. She’s come to teach them Italian.’
‘It’s not a big department,’ I said. In the museum, we liked to think we had a relationship with the university that extended to sending Christmas cards to given departments, as long as no Bunsen burners were involved, at which point snobbery came into consideration. We did not know them, but we went to their concerts and we very well might have known them personally. Margaret, for instance, constantly referred to the professor of English literature, a man she had never spoken to and who was not called Percy as ‘Percy’.
‘No, it’s not,’ Margaret said. ‘She’s the first time they’ve been able to afford a lettrice – they’re cock-a-hoop about it.’
‘Where does the budget come from, though?’ I said knowingly.
‘They’ll have got sponsorship from an Italian company,’ Margaret said. ‘Fiat, no, I tell a lie, it’s Buitoni.’
‘They make ravioli,’ I said.
‘They’re sponsoring all sorts, these days,’ Margaret said. ‘The Hallé had a bel canto evening in Manchester and there was a reception at the town hall here after – the whole orchestra went. Oysters, I heard, the cor anglais player was laid prostrate for a week.’
‘Only to be expected,’ I said.
‘But they’ve funded a lettrice for the Italian department here as well,’ Margaret said. ‘I found out she’s called Silvia. Do you think they’d be interested in giving us money, Buitoni, I mean?’
‘What for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, that’s your pigeon, isn’t it? Something Italian. Futurismo. Let’s have a meeting. She’s living with the professor of theology. She comes from Cremona. Ah, la bella Italia,’ she finished, clacking her hands in the shape of imaginary castanets, for some geographically inaccurate but festive reason.
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, giggling.
‘You know who I mean, the Australian professor of theology, not that there’s more than one,’ Margaret said. ‘Renting a room off him. Must dash.’
She dashed.
As often happens in life, once you have acquired a certain body of information about a thing, a place, a person, it is impossible not to enter into a more active relationship with them. Once Margaret had told me all of this about Silvia, it was inevitable that I would meet her very soon. It is something to do with the quality of the gaze. Once you know that a woman lives in the spare room of the Australian professor of theology, that she comes from Cremona, a town that, though famous for violin makers, only called up in my more slapdash mind the idea of a vast pudding, creamy and lemony at once, a city, more realistically, of pale yellow churches surrounded by a perfectly circular crimped wall, the warm colour of baked pastry … To be in possession of all this knowledge, both factual and fanciful, and yet to know that she knows nothing about you, not even your name, such a situation must engender a curious, knowing, unequal gaze.
I finally met her in the museum. Having seen her only at concerts, I stared somewhat, trying for a second to establish her context. She was looking with apparent enchantment at a glass case of ammonites. She felt my gaze; she looked up.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You go to concerts, don’t you? I recognize you.’
So we started to become friends. Three days later, we were sitting in the museum café.
‘But you work here?’ Silvia said. ‘That’s marvellous. I love this museum, so wonderful. In Italy we don’t have these things, so beautiful, you know?’
A day or two later we were standing, as we had arranged, in front of a stuffed model of a sabre-toothed tiger. It had been patched together forty years ago out of old bits of dog and plaster fangs. Its skin was split and leaking kapok. Its fur was bald and patchy. Underneath, a handwritten notice in fading ink told us that possibly ten thousand years ago this animal had possibly roamed the countryside hereabouts, possibly.
‘Look, a woolly mammoth,’ Silvia said, moving on. ‘Or the tooth thereof. You would not know that I was not English, yes?’
‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘But you really like all this stuff?’
‘Oh, yes, lovely,’ Silvia said. ‘Where do you live? You live alone?’
‘Quite near here,’ I said. I went on to tell her – there was not much to tell, but I told her about the rented flat at the top of a big Victorian house, converted for four single people by the Irish doctor who owned it; the dingy communal spaces, with the floral wallpaper no one had chosen, the half-dead spider plants, the solitary undusted china ornaments, Irish cast-offs, a chipped and smiling Edwardian lady in her china skirts at each turning of the stair, the mail for departed tenants piling up in the hall.
‘Oh, that sounds nice,’ Silvia said dismissively. She abruptly looked at her watch – ‘Heavens,’ she said. The watch was so tiny and so heavily jewelled you could not imagine using it to tell the time from, but Silvia said, ‘I nearly forgot. I call my mother.’
‘Not in the museum,’ I said, gesturing at the woolly mammoth’s tooth. But no one was around, and Silvia whipped her mobile phone out pooh-poohingly.
‘Mamma,’ she said. ‘Come stai? … Bene, bene. Fa freddo – sta piovendo … Si, si, sempre. E Papa? … E Luca sta bene? … E Luigi? … E Roberto? … Mauro anche? … Massimo? … Va bene, va bene, ci parliamo domani, va bene? … Ciao ciao, Mamma.’
She switched off. I later learnt that Silvia made this exact phone call, at exactly the same time, every single day of her life. She said that it was raining in England, she found out what the weather was like in Italy, and she asked after the health of her father and, in order, her five unstoppable brothers, Luca, Luigi, Roberto, Mauro and Massimo, twenty-two years old down to five, before promising to telephone at the same time the next day for the same purpose. It seemed strange to me, who in the English way called his mother once a fortnight or so. I rarely had much more to say than Silvia, but the embarrassment happened much less frequently. Silvia, I guessed at the time, might be homesick. That was not, however, the case.
And a week or so later, sitting in a pub in the early evening, she continued this conversation about her room and told me about the Australian professor of theology. For some reason, I had thought that he was a single man, but I learnt that he had a wife and three children, two sons and a daughter. By the end of that evening, Silvia had invited me to dinner, the day after next, at their house.
‘I would say tomorrow night but, you know, it’s not my house. I can’t tell them until tomorrow morning, I need to give them a day or two, you understand? Listen, you like Italian food? I cook you an Italian dinner.’
All afternoon the next day I felt feverishly burgeoning, down in my windowless office at the museum. I felt like a nineteenth-century girl in a Swedish film, throwing off my corsets and discovering my sexuality.
‘We missed you,’ Margaret said, sidling through the door with a clipboard.
‘Oh, Christ,’ I said. ‘It was the— Christ, what was it?’
‘The education and outreach committee’s budget meeting,’ she said. ‘It’s been in all our diaries for weeks.’
‘I knew there was something,’ I said.
‘There was indeed,’ she said. ‘There was something, you’re right there.’
‘That’s a catastrophe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I could have forgotten it.’
‘You’ll get the minutes,’ she said. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself.’
Of course she was right: people missed meetings all the time. It wasn’t that she was concerned about me. She could just tell that something new had come into my life; it would have taken a bright guess to alight upon Silvia, but Margaret, hovering in the door of my office, could tell it was something of that sort. She just wanted to know. I just wanted not to tell her.
The professor of theology was called Professor Quincy. He lived, I discovered, in an absurd villa in the opulent inner suburbs of the city. The street was lined with vast, ancient beeches, never intended by the Victorian planners to grow to such a size. Their foliage met and struggled overhead, and the pavement writhed and buckled over the roots like a late chapter of Moby-Dick. In other cities, to live in a Victorian house of this sort would require some wealth. These houses had been built for ruinous, grasping magnates, but a hundred years on, few people in the city had much money at all, and they were lived in by mere professors of theology. Quincy’s house had crenellations, battlements in the local orange stone, stained glass in the oddest places. In the street, two small girls were playing an unnecessarily picturesque game of pat-a-cake, slapping each other’s palms fiercely. As I passed them, they stopped and silently watched me. Silvia had given me the address, but had not offered to pick me up and take me there. I rang the doorbell, holding a box of chocolates and a bunch of carnations, which, I realized too late, were artificially dyed into lurid colours, the sort that would probably last in the recipient’s second-worst vase for several weeks.
A dog hurled itself at the other side of the door, yelling furiously. I stepped back into the neglected border, tangling myself in some dead vines. As I was pulling my foot out, a shape appeared through the stained glass, a feminine shape, though too short and dumpy to be Silvia’s. The girl – the Quincy daughter, it must be – rattled the door free from its chains. It swung open. I quailed back. The dog, still bellowing with rage, threw itself past me and ran directly to the front gate. It continued barking at the street, which was empty of anyone except the two small girls, who ignored it.
‘He does that,’ the girl said. ‘He wants you to think he was barking at something behind you all the time. It’s really that he doesn’t want to offend you, but the temptation to bark, it’s just too much for him. He’s called Joseph. He’s got very good manners, really. He’ll come back when he thinks he’s made his point.’
‘Hello,’ I said, going in. The hall of the house was red as raw liver, the heavy, elaborate wallpaper torn away into yellowing scars and hung randomly with pictures, knocked off the level by the passing human traffic: cheap old prints, a painting by a child, solidly framed, a watercolour of Derwentwater, a disconcerting and conical nude that might be of either sex – the acquisitions of rainy days, the findings in junk shops, the exhibitions of local painting groups, of arguments concluded with a dashing purchase. Something was clinging about my feet. I looked down. It was a man’s walking sock. I kicked it off discreetly, trying to appear as if I were shaking myself from rain.
‘Are you a friend of the Lettuce?’ the girl said. ‘Silvia, I mean. We call her the Lettuce because she’s a lettrice, sorry, not very funny, I know. I’m Natasha.’
‘I’m Mark,’ a medium-sized boy said, hanging over the banister. ‘Who’s that?’
I introduced myself.
‘Why have you got flowers? You’ve not come for dinner, have you? No one said anyone was coming for dinner.’ The boy came downstairs, slouching from side to side.
‘Yes, they did,’ Natasha said. ‘Silvia said, this morning.’
‘Oh,’ the boy said. He approached me, looked at me with amusement and, with a considered gesture, wiped his wet and dribbling nose noisily along the sleeve of his home-knitted red sweater. I looked at his clothes, and at Natasha’s, with compassion. They were the clothes of the children of theology professors the whole world over. ‘I’m precocious. Do you know what that means?’
‘I would say that being able to describe yourself as precocious at your age is a fair definition of it.’
‘No,’ Mark said. ‘That’s not really correct. That would be an instance of precocity, and not a definition of it.’
I agreed.
‘Come through,’ a voice called. I followed the children into what proved to be the kitchen. I wondered whether I was expected. From the ceiling, what seemed to be a week’s washing was hanging on a wooden frame, the frills and collapses of much-washed intimates like some natural phenomenon of drip and accretion. On the kitchen worktop, a pile of unsorted socks threatened to fall into a bowl of salad. The only orderly thing in the kitchen seemed to be five neatly labelled recycling boxes, and they were near overflowing.
‘Hi,’ I said. Silvia was at the stove. You noticed the things of the kitchen before the people in it.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, half turning from the pot she was peering into. ‘You found the house.’
‘Yes,’ I said. For some reason, I could not walk forward and offer her the awful flowers. With the terrible clarity of a crashing driver I envisaged the small but ugly scene as Silvia accepted the dyed carnations from my hand and I struggled to remember what on earth you say when handing over such a thing, and I stood there mute. But then Natasha took it from my hand, gently but persuasively, and removed it, and I never saw it again.
In time other people came in, and sat at the table. ‘This is my mother,’ Natasha said; she seemed to have taken over the job of hostess. Conversation of a sort came and went. ‘This is my father,’ she said.
‘We’ve never met,’ I said firmly to the professor, bedraggled from some labour in the study, or so it seemed. ‘But I know you by reputation.’
‘Admired him from afar,’ Mark said. ‘Stalked him for months, drawn by an inexplicable fascination.’
‘You can behave yourself,’ the professor said. ‘Company.’
‘This,’ the girl said, with pained distaste, ‘is my brother Kevin.’
‘I prefer to be called Benedict,’ the boy said, coming in through the garden door. He was dressed unusually for a seventeen-year-old, in a striped boating jacket and a lopsided bow tie. I wondered what school he went to, and whether he risked such an appearance in the playground. ‘After the saint and founder of the well-known order.’
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.
‘How long is this going to go on for?’ Natasha said.
‘The Church has endured solidly for two thousand years,’ Kevin/Benedict said. ‘I see no reason why the name Benedict should not endure one more human lifetime.’
‘Yours, Mummy, he means,’ Natasha said.
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.
‘He got religion,’ Natasha said. ‘He went to the church down the road, the ordinary one, and got religion. He was always awful, you know. But then he decided that wasn’t religion enough for him. So he went on to another church, which was more religion. And then he ended up on his knees dreaming of the day when he can suck the Pope off.’
‘Natasha,’ Professor Quincy said.
‘Well,’ Natasha said. ‘And it was then that he got the voice to go with it.’ It was true that Kevin/Benedict talked in a way unlike the two other children, who had a faint, attractive Australian hovering in their voice. Kevin/Benedict was conspicuously posh in his manner, sounding as if he were working up to announcing Saint-Saëns on Radio 3 in hushed tones. ‘It won’t last. He’s signed all sorts of pledges, alcohol, smoking, chewing gum, but they won’t last and then he’ll not be religious any more. Temptation, you see.’
Kevin/Benedict lowered his head, faintly smiling, pustular. He looked like the Book of Job, and you could imagine him spottily going to and fro on the earth, walking up and down on it, forgiving everyone in a pimply manner.
‘Would our guest like to say grace?’ Kevin/Benedict said.
I looked at him with astonishment.
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said. I agreed. I had never said grace in my life, and had probably heard it said no more than ten times. ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know what would be the appropriate thing.’
‘Well, shall I?’ Kevin/Benedict said.
‘If you’re quick about it,’ Silvia said. ‘My pasta doesn’t wait for no one, not God, neither.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ Kevin/Benedict began. The rest of the family began eating, and, after a moment, so did I. ‘Thank you for a delicious dinner, which we can eat, conscious of the fact that many in this world, many even in this city, not a mile from where we sit, have no ravioli to eat, nor sugo all’amatriciana –’
‘Very good, Benedict,’ Professor Quincy said, through a mouthful of dinner.
‘– with which to adorn their ravioli, and so we give thanks that we are so fortunate as to enjoy the fruits of the pasta-maker and the mincing machine, free of worries, and taking pleasure in good company, and new friends around the family circle –’
‘He means you,’ Silvia said. ‘No, don’t use the bread, bread with pasta, that’s terrible, terrible.’
‘– and thinking all the time of how through the good things of the table our different lands and cultures are brought together in happiness and enjoyment in the unity of mankind and the love of God, amen.’ He opened his eyes and raised his head, murderously. ‘You’ve all finished.’
‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘I was hungry. I wasn’t going to let it go cold.’
‘I wonder where the practice of saying grace comes from,’ I said conversationally. ‘It must be of considerable antiquity.’
‘Yup, must be,’ Natasha said.
I was smiling and nodding like crazy at Professor Quincy. I had been aiming the observation at the professor of theology.
‘Pa,’ Mark said.
‘Hmm?’ Professor Quincy said. ‘Oh – you said something. Sorry, you were saying?’
‘I was saying, I wonder where the practice of saying grace comes from,’ I said.
‘Oh, right,’ the professor said, swatting a fly circling his head. ‘It was one of those English things where you’re really asking some kind of question. I thought you were just talking.’
Silvia got up, collecting the plates, as if inadequately appreciated. I was rather hoping for some more pasta. It was jolly good. My thanks were effusive, and strange at this family kitchen table.
‘Grace, Pa,’ Mark said.
‘Are we still talking about grace? To tell you the truth, I’m off work, chum,’ the professor said. ‘I like to stop the theologizing at six, if I can. Let a fellow eat his grub. I’ve met people like you before, think I like theology so much I want to talk about it all the time. What’s this, Silvia?’
‘Agnello,’ Silvia said, bringing a vast and incinerated joint, perhaps a shoulder, to the table, half buried in carrots.
‘Looks yummy,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t like theology at all. You want to know how I got lured into it? I’ll tell you.’
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said, but rather with relish, and the children’s eyes were shining. You could tell this was their favourite performance.
‘Do tell,’ I said.
‘You start off in year nine at school,’ Professor Quincy said. ‘And they say to you, “All right, what do you want to do? Do you want to go on with history, or do you want to do Sanskrit – because the Sydney public schools, they offer that now, these days – or do you want to be doing biblical studies or RE, as they’d be calling it? Now I tell you, I grew up in Australia, you know. So history in Australia is not much to be writing home about. And my old mum – your granny in Sydney who killed the funnel-web with the ping-pong bat, kids, I’m talking about – she said, “Do what you’re good at. A qualification’s a qualification.” So I do RE and I get the top marks in it because, to be frank with you, it’s not all that difficult to do well in RE. Well, the school says to me, “Do what you’re good at,” so I carry on with the old RE, and before you know it, there I am at Sydney University, which is one of the most distinguished universities in the world, as I’m sure you know, because you don’t strike me as one of those stupid snobs that England specializes in, and my degree, blow me down, it’s RE still, only they don’t call it that by now. It’s called theology.
‘Now my professor-lady at Sydney University, she takes me under her wing, because I’m a bright lad, and I pick up the old Hebrew for the Old Testament, and I pick up the old Greek for the New Testament, and she says to me, “What about taking it a bit further, because you know, my dear, it fits you for all sorts of things a degree in theology? And I say, “Like what?” And she says, “Well, you could become a priest,” to which I say, “No, thanks, love.” And I say, “Like what else?” And she says, “Hmm.” And it turns out that the other thing it turns you out for, fits you for marvellously, it’s doing more degrees in bloody theology. So then she says to me, “I’ve got an idea for something you can write about for your doctorate, son.” So, being a bit wet behind the ears, I say, “What’s that, then?” And she says, “Well, I reckon that there’s this book in the Bible called the Book of Kings – I don’t expect you to know of it, son – and I reckon, if you look at it, there’s bits that’s been written by one fellow and bits that’s been written by another fellow. Well,” she says, “I reckon that the bits that were written by the other fellow, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were written by a woman and not a fellow at all.”
‘So I says, “Why do you think that, then?” And she says, “You go and write your thesis and tell me why. And I tell you what, call the first fellow P and the other fellow Q.” So there it was, and here I am, and for thirty years, I’ve been writing about this nutty old girl called the Q narrator in the Book of Kings and no one else believes in her, and if she existed, I don’t know why you’d think she was a woman, and if she was, I guess she was fairly typical of her time and place, which means that she struggled with a major facial hair problem and took a bath maybe once in her life, like by accident. And she seems a bit slow on the uptake, because I tell you, the bits she wrote, she’s missed the point a bit, I reckon. And it’s taken me thirty years to work out that I hate a prehistoric old girl called Q who never existed, and I hate the Book of Kings, and I hate theology and, son, I’m not that keen on God in the first place. You ever think, we all end up doing the one thing – the one thing, mind – guaranteed to make you want to puke every day of your life?’
‘Yay,’ Natasha said. ‘Listen to your father, Kev. He knows about God.’
‘But God knows more about him,’ Kevin/Benedict said, placing his knife and fork fastidiously parallel.
Mrs Quincy put her knife and fork down too, in a furious clatter. ‘If you don’t stop it now, this second,’ she said, with real venom, to her son, ‘you can go and sit on the naughty step.’
Professor Quincy’s story – obviously a much-repeated one – had cheered him up. It cheers most people up to tell the story of their life, particularly if you can reduce it to well-paid catastrophe. He set about his lamb, now rather cold-looking, with beard-smearing gusto.
‘No no no no no no no no no,’ Silvia said. ‘You can’t say everyone hates what they do. Look at him. He works in the museum, he loves it.’
‘I don’t love it exactly,’ I said, unheard. ‘My job. That was a lovely dinner.’
‘The naughty step,’ Natasha said, in stages. Her face was purple; she had been in choking hilarity for a minute and a half. ‘The naughty step.’
‘The naughty step,’ Mark said, in solemn tones. ‘Do you hear that? Kevin?’
‘Benedict,’ Kevin/Benedict said, all fight out of him.
The next morning I lay in bed, listening to the radio wind itself up into early fits of irritation and denunciation. The specific repetitions of government ministers wound in and out of my dreams as I dropped in and out of thin layers of sleep, and the faces of old friends looked into my eyes, telling me with concern about dangers to the environment. I thought about the night before. Silvia’s vividness had been lost somewhere in that family, and her spotlit personality subsumed in the execution of her fine national dishes. Most of what I had said to her had been mere compliments on her cooking. I might as well have told her how well she managed to be an Italian woman. But perhaps that was right. I realized, after all, that I had no concept of Silvia apart from her nationality. She was just Italy in Yorkshire, an idea complete enough in itself that it sounded like the title of a symphonic poem by Delius. No nation is as interesting as a human being. So I was late in the museum, and Margaret, loitering round the eland in the foyer with a pen on a string round her neck, had a word for me. ‘So we’re friends with the professor of theology now,’ she said. ‘Eating dinner round there. You live dangerously, I must say.’
There was an unexpectedly hostile glitter in her eyes. She’d been preparing herself to coruscate lightly over the details of my expanding social life.
‘Dangerously?’ I said.
‘I’ve heard they use the dog’s basin as a pudding bowl,’ Margaret said. ‘If there’s more than a given number of guests. It’s said that many an unwelcome guest’s found “Bonzo” written at the bottom of the cherry trifle when, naturally, it would be too late to do anything about it.’
Sherry trifle, I silently and irritably corrected. ‘No, it was very nice. Silvia cooked. It was very good.’
Margaret, huffing off, was premature in her suggestion, but after that evening, I did rather take to the Quincys. Less predictably, they seemed rather to take to me. I did my grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s, a branch I’d always thought far too big for my bedsit needs. Like a child, I went up and down every aisle, even the sock aisle, generally finding something necessary in each one, and a few days down the line generally throwing out a pile of decaying compost, the evidently perishable remains of my excessive shop.
Going round a supermarket, one too big for your needs, is like a sad evening in front of the television, hurtling through the channels and seeing the same faces recurring, harassed and increasingly familiar. The OAP you greet absently like an old friend by the time you reach the whisky was a new face as recently as the organic peas. A White Queen-like figure was floating in and out of my awareness at the far ends of aisles, only doubtfully recognizable. But I did know her: it was the professor’s wife. She was only vague because she was out of her initial context. I was standing in front of the milk display when Mrs Quincy hailed me, coming alongside with a gigantic and nearly filled trolley, like a docking liner.
‘You look lost and confused,’ she said, hoisting four six-pint cartons of milk into her trolley, the shopping of a materfamilias with milk puddings to make.
‘I was looking for milk,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re in the right place,’ Mrs Quincy said.
‘No,’ I said. I gestured feebly. ‘I only want a pint of milk. Just for my cup of coffee in the mornings. They’ve only got enormous ones.’
She admitted this to be true. There were the gargantuan cartons suitable for her needs, but nothing smaller.
‘Well, that’s no good,’ she said. She looked around for an assistant. ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Yes. I mean you. Yes. Hello. Thank you.’
The assistant who came over unwillingly was a tall youth. He might have been a sixth-former doing a holiday job.
‘Do you really not have any milk,’ Mrs Quincy said, ‘in any size smaller than this? My friend here only wants to buy a single pint.’
‘It’s really not that important,’ I said, Mrs Quincy contradicting me. ‘I could buy a pint at the newsagent’s round the corner.’
‘At considerable inconvenience to yourself and some increased expense, I imagine,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Pay no attention. Now. Do you have one-pint sizes of – what, full-fat milk? You should drink semi-skinned. You get used to it in no time at all, three weeks, max.’
‘I don’t like it,’ I said.
There was a pause before the boy realized we were waiting for his answer.
‘We’ve run out,’ he said. ‘The delivery comes at three, I think.’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘How can you have run out? I want to talk to the manager. Fetch me the manager immediately.’
The boy disappeared.
‘The trouble with the English,’ Mrs Quincy said very distinctly, attracting some attention from passing shoppers, ‘is that they never complain. Or they never complain at the right time. They sit around whining endlessly when nothing can be done about a problem, and then when they’re offered the chance, they sit quietly. I’ve often noticed it. If you don’t say anything, you don’t get anything.’
‘How’s the professor?’ I said, in order not to respond. ‘And the children? I so enjoyed dinner the other night.’
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said cryptically. ‘Here he comes.’
She meant the manager, not the professor. The manager looked, frankly, too grand to be troubled with these things. He was approaching in his suit and tie, the original boy tagging along behind, his face purply embarrassed. He had never had to ask the manager anything directly before, and was now wondering, I guessed, whether he should have done so. But Mrs Quincy had worked herself up into a lather over someone else’s dairy purchases, and she was going to have her moment.
‘I understand that there’s a problem here,’ the manager said.
‘There is a problem,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Now, look at these shelves. You have six-pint containers of milk. You have four-pint containers of milk. And those are very well and good for someone such as I, with a family who drinks milk all day long. But look again and ask yourself whether you see single pints of milk. No. You do not. And for many people a single pint of milk is what they need. Now, this is my friend and he lives on his own. He lives in a bedsit. He has few friends and he never cooks. He lives on takeaways and similarly unhealthy things. But he likes a cup of coffee in the morning or sometimes a cup of tea. And it takes him probably five days to finish even one pint of milk. What is he going to do with a gigantic carton like this? He would never finish it. He would find it turning to cheese before he was halfway through it. And he’s paid four times as much as he wanted to for it, which, considering that he’s living on a very restricted budget, is not a trivial matter. Listen to me. Where are the single pints of milk for the single lonely people in this town? Where are they?’
‘We’ve got delivery problems,’ the manager said, as I made faint noises of demurral and objection to this poignant but honestly insulting account of my life.
‘What rubbish,’ Mrs Quincy said. She was delighted. ‘Now come along with me. Have you finished here? Will you ever. Do your shopping.’ (Over the shoulder.) ‘Here. Again?’
‘Well,’ I began, drawn along in Mrs Quincy’s wake.
‘The thing is,’ Mrs Quincy said, once we were in her car – it seemed a done deal that I was being whisked off by her, though whether she was generously offering me a lift home or abducting me was unclear, ‘Silvia’s really a sort of family. Well, not family at all. But Richard, my husband, you know, she’s the neighbour of a cousin of his in Florence.’
‘In Florence?’ I said. ‘I thought she came from Cremona.’
‘Comes from Cremona, ran away, very naughty, but it’s all made up now, lives in Florence in a flat next to Aunty Paulina. I say aunty, but let me get this straight. Richard’s sister’s second husband, his stepmother, it was her niece. Half-niece, is there such a thing, because of course their mother, who was married to the stepmother’s brother and used to be a McIntyre, one of the Mount Isa McIntyres, if you can imagine such a thing, she met a Melbourne dentist and moved to Melbourne with relief and married him, and that was Paulina’s father. Didn’t work out but she stayed on in Melbourne, can’t think why. This is all ancient history now, though. Paulina must be sixty if she’s a day.’
‘Look out,’ I said, as Mrs Quincy jumped a red light.
‘Oh, they get out of your way,’ Mrs Quincy said, on this occasion correctly. ‘Well, Paulina gets in touch out of the blue in July, which is very odd, because the only occasion we ever hear from her is Christmas, a card and a bottle of fruit in mustard-flavoured syrup, which no one will ever eat and you can’t in all conscience give it to anyone else, they’ve been piling up in the larder for years. Not even to a jumble sale. I tried.’
‘So you heard from Paulina,’ I said, seeing that Mrs Quincy had lost her train.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘And she says her next-door neighbour, a nice girl, she’s coming to England and not just England, to here, to be a lettuce in the university as the kids will insist on saying, not funny, and can we help her find somewhere to live? So Silvia comes and we let her have the top floor because, frankly, we just don’t use it. I can’t even remember the last time I went up there. The children tell me she’s made it quite nice now. And, as you see, she’s no trouble and she cooks up a storm, so she stayed. She was in West Side Story.’
‘Silvia?’ I said.
‘No, Aunty Paulina,’ Mrs Quincy said. Then – she must have told this before, and often been told in response that her listeners had been in Oliver!, back at school – she said, ‘The real one, I mean. The famous movie. Here we are.’
We were at the Quincys’ house. I went in, carrying half of Mrs Quincy’s bags and my own one; she was talking all the way. And I stayed all afternoon.
Silvia’s hours at the university were irregular, and when, over the next three months, I saw her or I did not see her, it was when I was at the Quincys’ house. I learnt more about her from Mrs Quincy and from Natasha than I did from our occasional independent outings. I did not suggest going to a concert with her. I knew that Margaret could hardly cope with my defection from her side to Silvia’s, and with Margaret I contrived different outings altogether. With her sensible shoes on, Margaret came with me on buses out to the national park and hiked in well-planned ways. We hiked not there and back, but in great twelve-mile circuits round entire dales, with a stop in a pub halfway round, greeting all other walkers on the way, if they seemed from their dress to be taking it as seriously as we were.
Silvia’s clothes alone would have disbarred her from any such outing. Our dates tended to be cultural, short of Margaret’s territory of the concert hall. The heavily subsidized theatre in the town was safe, a concrete bunker with an apron stage and, every so often, Sir Derek Jacobi. It changed its offering only every six weeks – a period that thoroughly exhausted the fascination the city might have cherished for Goethe’s Egmont, say. There was a university theatre, taken up with student productions and local amateur dramatic societies. The cinema of the town fastidiously refused ever to screen anything that had cost its makers less than thirty million dollars. We managed, somehow, though we left a lot of offerings halfway through.
It was over dinner after one of these unsuccessful outings that Silvia made her point. The offering had been a number about people falling in love against the odds and having to run through cities before being reunited at the check-in desk. We had stayed to the uplifting end. Silvia was silent and scowling all the way to the restaurant.
‘I’m going back to Florence the week after next,’ she said, not quite looking at me.
‘Not Cremona?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘My flat in Florence. It’s empty over the summer. I’m going there.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘You like Mrs Quincy, and you like Natasha, isn’t it?’ she said, quite emphatically.
The restaurant was Italian, after its own fashion. It was not my choice – I would have hesitated to suggest it to Silvia. Even more oddly, we had been there before, and she had spent the whole evening denouncing everything about it, from the waiter’s pronunciation of bruschetta to his kindly suggestion of a cappuccino to finish with. ‘They’re catering for what people want,’ I had mildly protested. ‘There’s no point in being Tuscan purists round here.’ But it was a terrible restaurant; everything, to the outer limits of plausibility, had been improved with the addition of cream, and unfamiliar foodstuffs had crept into unlikely dishes. In all of this I had been instructed by Silvia – I mean, I wouldn’t have known that rule about not having pineapple with pasta – but her mood of denunciation this evening was only encouraged by the restaurant. Its purpose was directed straight at me.
‘No, not yet,’ she said to the waitress, returning to her theme.
‘No, we’re not ready to order,’ she said again, five minutes later. ‘And the other thing …’
‘Listen, I will call you when we’re ready,’ she said, still later, as the waitress sauntered over.
‘All the same to us, love,’ the waitress said. ‘We’re not busy. I’m enjoying it, to tell you the truth.’
But all the same, when we were done, I had agreed to come with Silvia to Florence in two weeks’ time. The denunciation, I had been expecting for some time – the slammed door of the Quincys’ kitchen, the scowls and the increasingly rebarbative style of her outfits when we met. I hadn’t been prepared for this outcome.
The promise was easily made but, after all, I had a job. Silvia, so emphatic about my job at first, seemed to be under the impression that, like the university’s academic staff, I was going to take off for three months in the summer. The best I could manage was a fortnight, and that, I was given to understand, was quite a favour at such short notice. Margaret, when she heard of it from some other source, obstinately asked me, quite near the beginning of one of our hikes in the country, if I would like to go on holiday with her, if, of course, I hadn’t made other plans for the summer with any other person. My explanation cast a pall over the day; something I think she might have foreseen. It was all so tiring.
Silvia’s attic at the Quincys’ was an island of lucid clarity in that stormy household: a neat bed, two handsome chairs, some pretty pictures against a colour she’d chosen herself, and a small bookcase carrying her fifty favourite books. So it was not a surprise to discover the airy, even elegant quality of her flat in Florence. It was at the top of a modern building, with terraces the size of half a tennis court, crowded with pelargoniums, bright as a seaside landlady’s garden. Inside, in pockets of air-conditioned cool, austere long chairs of chrome and leather treacherously invited the act of reclining. It was on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of one of the hills that rise and surround it. The geography of Florence, as I soon discovered, kept the worst of its weather unchanging and building, stiflingly, from one week to the next all summer. There were other things about the flat to be discovered. The building was at the very end of a long-buried and nearly mythical river, the Affrica; and if there was no way of our detecting it, the river was clearly an object of fascination to millions of mosquitoes, which had an ancestral habit of following its course all the way from the Arno to Silvia’s building, then staying exactly where they were for the whole summer. I became familiar with great generations of mosquitoes as the weeks passed, thwacking at my own head in the middle of the night, sometimes in Silvia’s spare room, sometimes not.
‘And of course there’s Paulina next door,’ Silvia said. ‘But I expect you know everything about her.’
Quickly, we settled into a sulky routine. Silvia had, in the past, spent a good deal of time playing the guide, she said. (She meant: pushing visitors around Florence with an out-of-date guide book.) So the first day, she came out with me, showed me the crucial bus, and took me briskly to four asterisked treasures.
‘Duomo,’ she said.
‘David of Michelangelo, great masterpiece of Italian art,’ she said.
‘Out here in the rain?’ I said. ‘When it rains?’ (It was actually oppressively hot.)
‘In Florence, it never rains,’ she said. ‘Look, beautiful sunshine. Englishman, wanting his rain. Where’s your umbrella and your bowler hat, Englishman? No, it’s not real, anyway. The real one it’s inside Accademia, up that street. We don’t have time.’
‘Uffizi,’ she said. ‘Look at the queue!’
‘And Ponte Vecchio,’ she said, the unopened guide book firmly in her hand.
‘I see,’ I said. That evening, she phoned up all her Florentine friends at length, and complained with great gusto about me. She spoke in Italian; I understood quite well enough. After the first day, I left the flat in the morning and dutifully visited churches, palazzos, museums – more museums; I started with the postcard sights and steadily worked my way downwards. In time, I surprised the attendants of museums named after nineteenth-century Englishwomen, residents of Fiesole, with an unaccustomed ring on their doorbell. How Silvia passed her time, I don’t quite know. I returned to the flat after an invariably unsuccessful sort of tourist lunch, often a sandwich at a bar by the bus station, a one-armed bandit’s electric fanfares in my ear. The afternoons, she was incommunicado, and I read. We met at six each day.
‘You know a funny thing,’ she said, when we were settled in a bar the third night. ‘I asked an English boy to stay here last year, and at the end I said to him, “What do you like most in Florence?” Because, of course, I think maybe he’s going to the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio, maybe. But he says, “Most of all, I like the bars, where you go, you buy a drink, there’s nice little bits of food there you can eat, it’s all free.” You English! Crazy for something free, always, always.’
I laughed politely, but I rather agreed with last summer’s Englishman. The bar was laid out with such substantial nibbles, as Margaret would have called them, I was rather wondering in my impoverished way whether we could get away with not having dinner. Not the least of the issues that had arisen was that Silvia, considering the fact that I was saving on hotel bills, clearly thought that I ought to buy her dinner every night at a restaurant of her choice.
But that night I finally met Paulina. Silvia, I divined, had decided to keep her from me: enough of my friendship with the Quincys, or any potential one with their sister’s second husband’s stepmother’s half-nieces. The door to the flat next door was open when we got home, though inside there were no lights. It was a stifling evening. A languid wail came out of the open door, followed by a middle-aged woman emerging from the darkness in aquamarine kaftan and turban.
‘Oh, not again,’ Silvia said.
‘Oh, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘Be an angel. You know how hopeless I am. And I’d ask Paolo, honest to God, but—’
‘It’s not very difficult,’ Silvia said.
‘You say that, but— Well, hello there, I’m Paulina, how do you do – you remember, honey, the last time I somehow managed to put everybody’s lights out, it was simply a disaster,’ Paulina said. She had a curious voice, emphatic on each word, and with an accent not quite American, not obviously Australian. She could have been the product of a thorough elocutionist in any one of a dozen colonies. ‘You see,’ she explained confidentially, as if I were alone, ‘the lights here, they sometimes go out for no reason at all, and I know there’s something terribly simple you need to do in the basement …’
‘There’s just a switch, that’s all, and you pull, no – what is it you do with switches? You turn, you flick – is that right? You flick it and then it’s all OK, it’s simple,’ Silvia said, almost jumping up and down with rage.
‘Thank you a cartload, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘I know you don’t mind one bit when I need you to help me out.’
‘You, come with me,’ Silvia said. ‘Then you know what you need to do in case it happens again.’
It was as simple as Silvia had said. Paulina must have been some kind of genius to make a mess of it.
‘So that’s Paulina,’ I said, down in the basement.
‘Yes,’ Silvia said. She was decisive on the subject. And when we got back upstairs, Paulina’s light was restored.
‘I can’t imagine what I’d do without you,’ she said effusively, looking me up and down openly. ‘Come in and have a drink. I’ve got …’ her voice sank seductively ‘… I’ve got some Campari.’
‘Perhaps some other night,’ Silvia said.
It seemed to me, as the days went on, that the only understanding I had had of Silvia disappeared in her proper context. If in England she possessed a vivid and fascinating character, in Italy it was clear that I had not got much beyond discovering her to be Italian. In Italy, her reality dissolved, like a glass full of water in the ocean. I had no access to her real character, not having had the practice at reading it. It was partly my fault, for being satisfied with an exoticism that, after all, was banal even in Yorkshire. But partly, I think, it was hers, since in Yorkshire, in the Quincys’ house above all, she defined herself so entirely by what she was not as to appear nothing but an embodied foreign culture. In Italy, having nothing much in her repertory to fall back on, she settled for being sulky. So it was, inevitably, that at a loose end in Florence, I found someone who was conspicuous in her culture, like a photographic negative of Silvia clacking noisily down the aisle of a concert hall in England.
The next morning, as I was leaving Silvia’s flat, I saw that Paulina’s door was open again. Round the door unfurled a long white arm, like the frond of a fern, followed by Paulina’s head, the hair braided and twisted. Inside, the curtains were still drawn; she was in her peignoir.
‘Honey,’ she said huskily, her voice lowered for the sake – I guessed – of Silvia, ‘you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’
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Philip Hensher
Ten daring stories from ‘a writer who seems capable of anything’ (Guardian), the Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip HensherBackdrops vary in this collection of stories from the author of The Northern Clemency – from turmoil in Sudan following the death of a politician in a plane crash, to southern India where a Soho hedonist starts to envisage the crump and soar of munitions. Each story, regardless of location, reveals a great writer at the peak of his powers.
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Copyright (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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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 (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
To Nicola Barr
Contents
Cover (#ud2213e5d-3d90-5184-9c8f-51d2a82f6c5b)
Title Page (#ubd58a5e4-21ad-5025-82f2-8763a461fbf7)
Copyright (#uecbb069f-fbfe-5331-b92f-d6f77a10b72a)
Dedication (#u14560d4b-42af-54bb-b5e6-83e2d423ee01)
Eduardo (#udcbf41be-0b33-563c-b4ab-9c92360f6ac7)
A Change in the Weather (#ue71d9d90-88a3-51d8-a192-63c667b69e6b)
My Dog Ian (#ue17f6b24-0ff8-5edc-8473-248bff3de719)
The Midsummer Snowball (#litres_trial_promo)
In Time of War (#litres_trial_promo)
Under the Canopy (#litres_trial_promo)
The Day I Saw the Snake (#litres_trial_promo)
The Pierian Spring (#litres_trial_promo)
The Whitsun Snoggings (#litres_trial_promo)
The Painter’s Sons (#litres_trial_promo)
A Lemon Tree (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Tales of Persuasion (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Philip Hensher (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Eduardo (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
(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.’
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 television,’ 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 Bradbury’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.’
‘I’ll let her know,’ Fitzgerald said, and put the phone down. Rage filled his soul.
‘I said that,’ Timothy Storey said, when she returned and Fitzgerald asked her for some more details. ‘I do come from Kenya. Mrs Baxter didn’t tell you that I didn’t come from Africa, did she?’
‘But you asked me to meet you at Paddington,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I thought you’d come from Kenya just that moment. I thought you were coming on the Heathrow Express.’
‘Oh, no,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I was coming from Southall on the train. It’s only fourteen minutes, it’s quite convenient. Mrs Baxter says she lives in Ealing, but it’s really Southall, she thinks it sounds smarter. It was nice of you to meet me at Paddington. I could have made my own way here, but I thought it would be good if we met somewhere neutral before you took me home – you hear such awful stories. Mrs Baxter, she was a bitch from Hell, I’ll tell you. She was always complaining about me watching TV when she wanted to watch something, and telling me I shouldn’t be lying on the couch eating snacks, and there was something on the other side she wanted to watch, like she owned the TV or something.’
‘But she did own the TV,’ Fitzgerald said, almost incapable of speech. ‘Didn’t she?’
‘No, I mean the TV channels, like she owned the TV channels. She always had her own thing she wanted to watch. She was a prize bitch. I’m glad to be out of there.’
‘You know,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘I think I’m going to have to ask you to move out. I don’t think you’ve been truthful with me at all.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I like it here. It’s been nice of you to let me have the room for nothing, but some people might wonder why a single man wanted to have a girl to stay in his house and gave her a room for nothing. It looks a little bit fishy, don’t you think? I would only have to say to someone that you’ve been touching me—’
‘I’m gay, you know. Everyone knows that.’
‘Yes, indeed, what people in my country and some people in this one, too, like to call a sexual pervert. And then I might have to show them the hole that you drilled in the wall to watch me getting undressed at night. It’s there, that hole.’
‘There’s no hole in the wall.’
‘Take a look. I think you’ll find there is.’
‘You’ve drilled a fucking hole in the wall of my spare bedroom?’ Fitzgerald said.
‘Of course,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone any of those awful things. I like it here, I really do. And another thing – those towels Mrs Baxter was telling you about, they’re my towels. I bought those towels. I swear on my mother’s life, I bought those towels.’
Satisfied that the conversation was over, Timothy Storey pushed off her shoes and lay back on the sofa. Fitzgerald went without speaking into the kitchen. A voice through a microphone in the other room began to announce the results of a phone-in vote, to wild applause, yellings of names and long, dramatic silences. The kitchen table was covered with the detritus of a quickly arranged snack; a tub of taramasalata lay open with the edge of a cream cracker broken off in it, like a tiny Excalibur. Fitzgerald pulled it out. Small fragments of cheese, of bread, lay scattered like bleak waste across the surface of the table; an open carton of orange juice had spilt onto the floor. The fridge door stood open, waiting for Timothy Storey to return to graze some more. Underneath the cork message board, Fitzgerald looked, and there was, indeed, a new hole, drilled in the wall, giving onto the spare bedroom. How had he failed to notice that? The situation bore down on him; where people like Bradbury had a handsome half-naked beast like Eduardo lolling around waiting for Bradbury’s attentions, someone like Fitzgerald would only have a Timothy Storey, spilling biscuit crumbs down the sofa, thinking up blackmail attempts, destroying the masonry and eyeing up the bath towels.
‘Can you give me a hand?’ a voice called from the sitting room. ‘This seems to be stuck.’ Hopeless and speechless, Fitzgerald went into the room. Timothy Storey was kneeling before the DVD player, jabbing at buttons. ‘I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that,’ she was saying. ‘But none of it does anything.’ Fitzgerald contemplated, with hatred, her enormous, lying, blackmailing, cotton-straining, homophobic, racist, idle arse. Then a joyous possibility occurred to him. There was no reason not to do it. With three fast and accelerating steps, he was behind her, and he did it. He had never been good at school at football or rugby, but there, with a single, confident, long smooth swing, he gave Timothy Storey’s arse the single kick of a lifetime.
He took a detour on his way to Eduardo’s flat, going to the fancy confectioner’s on Clapham High Street and buying an expensive box of chocolates – two pounds of pralines and fruit creams. Only when he reached Bradbury’s road did he remember Eduardo’s obsession with not eating or drinking anything that might make him fat. But it was too late; and, anyway, he realized he had bought the chocolates for himself, really.
‘I want to say sorry, Eduardo,’ he said, coming into the flat. The sun was streaming through the long windows, and lighting up half of Eduardo’s face. ‘And also goodbye, I suppose.’
‘Goodbye?’ Eduardo said. ‘Are you going away?’
‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. The pathos of his farewell almost made him lapse into tears. ‘No, I just think it’s better that I don’t see you again. It seems like a bad idea.’
‘But where are you going?’ Eduardo said.
He hadn’t understood, and Fitzgerald said, ‘I don’t know yet. You might as well have these.’
He handed over the box of chocolates, and from the way Eduardo took the bag, eagerly, peering in at the confectioner-wrapped box of ribbons and bright paper, Fitzgerald saw that he was a man who liked to get presents, to get a present every day, no matter what it was. ‘It’s only chocolates,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat them if you don’t like them.’
‘You can come in,’ Eduardo said. ‘I’m on my own. Daniel went to Monaco and he won’t be back until Friday night. He went away this morning. It’s so boring here.’
‘I thought he went to Munich?’
‘Yes, he did, he went to Monaco.’
‘That’s not the same place.’
‘OK,’ Eduardo said. ‘I didn’t know that. You want a coffee?’
‘Only if you’re making one. I’ll stay and fend off your boredom, if you like.’
‘Excuse me?’
Fitzgerald looked around. In this setting, this golden late afternoon, with the sun falling through the windows and the lilies from Saturday night’s party now full-blown and on the edge of falling, Eduardo looked more dark, glowing and healthful than ever. He had not shaved today, and a dark shadow around the jaw gave him the air of a beautiful navvy. Fitzgerald drew in a great breath, savouring Eduardo’s warm, animal, marshlike odour. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love the scent of lilies.’
‘Lilies are so ugly,’ Eduardo said. ‘Everyone else thinks they’re beautiful. For me, they’re ugly, the way they fall, the yellow thing in the middle. I think they’re ugly.’
‘You have interesting opinions,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I always thought you had a lot of interesting views about things.’
‘Do you think so?’ Eduardo said. ‘I think I have interesting opinions. I think you’re right. But Daniel always says, “Darling, just shut your mouth and look pretty. No one wants to know what you think.” And one guy, one friend of his, asked me once if I knew how to tell the time, or maybe if I could tell my right foot from my left foot, some shit like that. His friends, they all think I’m just stupid, I know.’
Fitzgerald’s attention was drawn to Eduardo’s feet, his left foot, his right foot, perfect, dark, hairy and masculine. He would agree to be walked over, by such feet, he truly would. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ he said. ‘I always think you have the most original views about things. Not everyone would say that lilies were ugly, but they are kind of ugly, as flowers, you’re right. I’ve often thought you had interesting opinions about all sorts of things.’
‘That’s funny,’ Eduardo said. ‘Because I do. I do have opinions about all sorts of things. For like, I think what we do in our lives, it comes back and has an effect on what happens to you. Like, if you are bad and mean to someone, then maybe later, someone else will be bad and mean to you. That’s my opinion. I don’t know how it works, but it does. And I think we’re all connected somehow, like maybe if you are friends with someone, and they are friends with someone else, and that someone else is friends with someone else, then you are connected, you have a connection with that person, and in the end maybe you have a connection with all the world.’
‘So because I know you, I have a connection with all sorts of South Americans I’ve never met,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘That’s really an interesting idea. You’re really an intelligent person, Eduardo.’
‘And I think there is maybe enough money in the world for all the people, the rich people and the poor people,’ Eduardo said. ‘So there is no need for there to be poor people and rich people, the rich people, they don’t need so much, so maybe the money can be shared about and the poor people get money from the rich people, and then everyone has enough and everyone is happy.’
‘That’s so true,’ Fitzgerald said, in an ecstasy of happiness. ‘That ought to happen. That definitely ought to happen.’
In the sunlit sitting room of a South London flat, the beautiful man sat, his hands clasped between his knees, his eyes widening, his pupils broad and dark and empty. He dipped now and then into the full box of chocolates, and his brilliant teeth shone from between his full lips as he went on talking, explaining, eating the pralines, emptying his poor unindulged mind before Fitzgerald. And Fitzgerald, understanding at last what it was that Eduardo wanted, and how, in the end, he saw himself, sat, barely interrupting, saying from time to time, ‘That’s so true,’ and ‘You surprise me. I didn’t know you were as intelligent as that,’ and ‘You’re an intelligent person, you really are,’ murmuring and encouraging from time to time, as the light failed and the warm blue evening surrounded them.
It was as simple as that.
A Change in the Weather (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
(i.m. M.W.)
The air was plump, cold, full of anticipation. Something would fall from it. He was walking along the famous street with a briefcase that was not new; it was empty. To the left and to the right, ministries stood like serious cliffs. Whitehall. At this moment, the people he had worked with all summer and autumn and half the winter, they were sitting down in their office chairs and asking each other whether they wanted anything from downstairs. Their lives were going on, unambitiously, teaching English as a foreign language. Today was the day he started work in the public service, at the centre of the public service, in a building just off Whitehall.
George had a pass to the building – his building, he must start to think. It was in his pocket. He felt it now, as he walked. He knew exactly where he was to go, on this first morning. Mr Castry – Bill, he was supposed to call him – had taken him round and introduced him to people the Thursday before. He had not remembered very much, but Bill had made sure that he knew exactly where to go the following Wednesday. Everything else can come after that, he had said. George had got up at the weekend and walked all the way from the flat in Bloomsbury he was sharing with the Brazilian girl and the American girl. It was a rehearsal of his first day. The streets had been empty at half past eight on a Sunday morning, apart from some tourists and people who might have been hurrying to a Sunday service, here and there. George had walked down to Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, to the outside of the building where he was going to work. He wanted to make sure that it was still there, where he remembered it was. Nobody was there to see him, and he had walked away quickly, not pausing, his trainers making no sound on the pavement. He might have been walking past purely by chance.
The office where he had worked for the last eight months was a cheerful and undemanding place. A temporary place. It accepted applications from overseas students to study the English language, and it assigned them to the appropriate class. Julie was in charge. She had been there for donkey’s years, she said. Her husband was something in business. Something to do with bacon or coffee, but he was in the City; he never saw any bacon or coffee unless it was in the snackbar by the tube. For most of his day, bacon and coffee were just figures on a screen, Julie explained. Great mountains of notional bacon and coffee. She didn’t know how he could stand it, all day long. There was a sense of fun in the office. They had opened the letters, had filled in the forms that were needed and, twice a week, had gone to the communal meeting room where the biggest empty table was, and arranged the applications from the past few days in order of classes. Probably Julie could have done this on her own, but she liked to get everyone involved. Sometimes a student came to demand his money back or to complain, because he had not succeeded in learning enough English. Those, too, were occasions of fun, once the complaining student had been refused and pacified and sent on his way. Julie had a way of rolling her eyes and holding her hands up to heaven that everyone copied. That office had been only until Christmas, and George had understood that from the start. The office he was going into would be for his entire life, from today onwards. He curbed his spirit of fun. The door to his building was open.
‘Good morning,’ he said to the man in uniform sitting behind the desk. A walk-in cupboard behind him was piled high with documents, tagged and ordered. George pulled out his plastic pass from his pocket and showed it carefully, the right side up so that the guard could inspect it.
The guard looked at it briefly, then at George, more curiously. ‘Morning,’ he said. Of course George should have been more casual about it. He felt like a criminal who, gaining access to a guarded building, had made himself stand out in some way. ‘Starting to snow,’ the guard said. His tone was not friendly, but it made George feel that he was accepted, grudgingly, within the building; it explained, too, something about the day that he had not understood. The metallic sensation of weight and chill obscurity in the air was not, as it had seemed, official London welcoming George to his new life. It was what had happened many times before without reference to the lives of any men or women: it was the sensation of snow about to happen. But George did not have to answer: a woman came out from the cupboard.
‘Is it now,’ she said, only glancing at George.
‘It won’t settle,’ the guard said. George was pleased he had not misunderstood and tried to start a conversation. The office he was to work in was on the third floor. There was no need to ask anyone’s advice about how to get there. One day, quite soon, he would know the names of both these people, and greet them with kindly deference.
He took the lift, and in a moment there he was in the corridor where the committee’s offices were. There were four doors, and there were labels on three of them, giving people’s names or their job titles. The fourth stood slightly open, a strip-light on. From inside he could hear a woman’s voice, slightly muttering, and the sound of heavy documents being moved from one pile to another.
Before he could knock, the noise halted, and the door was opened wide. A woman with white hair in a bob, a sharp nose and bulbous eyes was there; she was wearing a coat and a scarf, and underneath a skirt in a large floral pattern, which seemed to be too long for her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, I say.’ Her voice was light and metallic, grating. She was assessing him, not in an unfriendly way but without a welcoming smile. ‘I know who you are. You’re our baby Clerk, aren’t you? It’s George, isn’t it? I was saying to Pam, only this morning – trust the powers that be to send us a baby Clerk to nanny through, just when all this is kicking off. Patrick’s not going to be one bit pleased. He’ll be tearing his hair out.’
There was a sharp ring from inside the office. The woman turned and went inside, picking up the telephone. ‘Energy Committee, Andrea speaking – oh, hello!’ Her voice went from stern to girlish; she giggled. ‘No, Patrick, don’t you be – I’ll tell you something, there’s a lovely surprise for you when you get in, a lovely surprise waiting, your favourite thing … Oh. Who told you? … Well, no one tells me anything … Oh, about the usual, I would say. I expect you’re phoning to say you’re late in, as ever. Well, let me tell you …’
George walked away, feeling he should not listen to this flirtatious conversation. The walls were hung with mezzotints; eighteenth-century politicians and bishops on the shiny magnolia walls. Another door stood open to an empty office: its windows were hung with dirty grey net curtains, too long for the space and falling to a pile on the windowsill.
‘That was Patrick,’ the woman said, coming out of the office with a dark blue document clutched to her bosom. ‘What are you doing down there? Come back and sit down with your aunty Andrea. She’ll tell you what’s what. You’ll never guess. Patrick’s calling from the phone box at the top of Whitehall. He says— Well, did you hear that bang?’
‘No,’ George said. ‘What bang was that?’
‘That bang!’ Andrea said. ‘Half an hour ago, that bang. I wondered what it was so I went down and asked the front desk, they didn’t know any more than I did. What bang, he says. It made me jump, I can tell you.’
There was a pause. Andrea was inspecting him in close detail, standing with her legs apart.
‘Well, we can’t have you standing in the corridor all day,’ she said. ‘I expect I’d better show you where your office is, and you can make yourself at home. It’ll be funny not having Mike in there. Ah, well.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Now, these are my keys. I’ve got a set for everyone’s office. Don’t waste your time asking me if you can borrow them when you forget yours – ooh, Andrea, pretty please, it’ll only be this once, I’ve never forgotten them before. I’ve got a good reply to that sort of thing. No. Way. Sunshine. Because there’s no way I let them, my keys, I mean, out of my possession. So you’ve just got to hang on to yours. Welsh, are you?’
George’s office was quite bare: there was a desk facing the door, an empty bookcase, and nothing more but a desk tidy, and a pair of plastic trays, one labelled IN and the other labelled OUT. There was a pile of papers in the in-tray. There was a large, grubby white telephone on the desk, and a spiral-bound notebook with a chewed biro alongside. Everything was generic, except one thing: a miniature object, a range of five furled flags the size of a stretched hand. There had been a previous inhabitant of this office, who now had moved out and left this. At some point George was going to meet that previous inhabitant; at some point he, too, was going to leave some individual sign of his life for a new boy, a new girl, to wonder about. In two years’ time, perhaps.
Andrea had gone back to her office, closing the door, without waiting for a response to her question. A red light on the telephone showed that she had started a call. George hung his coat on the back of the door, and put his empty briefcase down by the side of the desk. His father’s professional life must have started exactly like this, thirty-five years ago. He had arrived in the office where he would spend the rest of his working life, moving from job to job, but always remaining loyal to the organization. George’s life had led up to this moment, and he would never be unemployed or unattached again. The years at university, trying to get an essay exactly right, trying to fish a piece of overlooked information from the seas of the Bodleian had led up to this moment, with an empty desk and a tray full of stern, detailed information.
He had taken two days off from the language school in October to undertake the application process. He had filled in forms, and drafted polite letters to imaginary supplicants who were attempting to defraud the public purse; he had entered into discussion with other applicants and with the examiners; and he had been interviewed. The rooms in which the process had taken place were bright-lit and yellowish. Each of them had windows, which, like this one, were veiled by net curtains too long for the space. A middle-aged woman with a mop of ginger hair and an amber brooch on a green sweater had introduced herself as the psychologist on the team. She had asked him penetrating and quite personal questions until one question – George could not recall what the question had been – had made him reply that he didn’t believe the answer was any of her business. The interview had come to an end promptly after that. At the time, George had wondered whether he had scuppered his chances by being rude. Afterwards, when the offer of a job came, it seemed to him that he had been firm and impressive in drawing a line. So he was in his office, not yet with his name on the door, preparing to start work.
Elsewhere in the city, Londoners were setting to work, exchanging insults and flirtatious suggestions with their colleagues, having a cup of coffee, getting down to their most ordinary business. To kick your shoes off under your desk, to hang your jacket up and straighten the photograph of your family in front of you. They would be taking it all for granted. They did not know how magical it was to have a job; only George, on his first day, knew that. In a moment, it occurred to him that he was being paid for what he was doing, even now. The thought made him dizzy.
He had been in only two or three rooms in the public service, and before, he had thought that the net curtains hanging over the windows were a matter of personal idiosyncrasy by the inhabitants or users of the rooms. Now he understood that it must have been a decision made by some central authority. He got up and examined the net curtains. They did not hang loose, but fell to a gathering pile on the windowsill. The hems of the net curtains held small lead weights, to hold the curtain down in any breeze. He picked them up; felt them in his hand. The window did not have any kind of view. It gave onto a well between buildings, and faced a high wall with yellow and brown glazed brick, broken by a single brightly lit window. It appeared to be a window on a stair or a communal space. Snow was falling thickly through the artificial light.
‘You’ll be wanting to get on with that,’ Andrea said, leaning against the doorpost. She held a blue printed report, the size of A4. ‘The dreaded in-tray. There’s always more to be getting on with. One word of warning – Patrick’s quite nice but he’s a devil for punctuality. He doesn’t like it if there’s something sitting in your in-tray that he’s waiting for and he’s still waiting for it tomorrow or, God forbid, the day after. Another word of warning – if Patrick starts gently suggesting that perhaps we could make a start on work before ten, start coming in by nine thirty or nine, just agree and come in at ten anyway. He’s hopeless about all of that, coming in early – he’s not another Chris Leonard, if you know who that was, which you don’t, I don’t suppose. Don’t be taken in by that demeanour, he’s very strict about most things. I had an aunt who was Welsh, not blood, of course, she was my uncle Edward’s second wife. Ooh, she was a bully. She sent him out to fetch her little things, all her errands, in all weathers right to the end of his life and her twenty years younger than him. He was an old fool, we always used to say, my mum whose brother she was. I don’t know why, but I’ve never managed to fancy the Welsh since then, all because of my uncle’s second wife, Phyl. Strange, isn’t it? And speak of the devil!’
In the corridor, behind Andrea, was a thin man with grey hair flopping over a drained white face, both middle-aged and boyish; he grinned forcefully, brushing the snow from his shoulders. ‘What a day,’ he said. ‘What a day. So you must be George! Welcome, welcome, welcome. I should have been here to welcome you. But Andrea was here, I’m sure. How are you, my sweet?’
‘Don’t think you can get around me as easily as all that,’ Andrea said.
‘There’s the most extraordinary thing,’ Patrick said – he must be Patrick. ‘Out there, the whole of Whitehall’s been closed off. Did you see? There’s been some kind of mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I’m amazed you got through. A very, very good start, George! You succeeded in getting through the mass of police cordons and security walls. Most people would have given up and gone home and started work tomorrow. But not George! A big gold star on your first day, George. I really doubted I was going to make it. Did you not hear anything going off?’
‘You see?’ Andrea said. She tapped a red-painted fingernail sharply on the back of the report she was clutching. ‘I said there was a bomb going off, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear it? I’m the only one who heard anything, but, oh, no, Andrea, you must have been hearing things. But there you are.’
‘I was at the far end of Whitehall,’ Patrick said. ‘And there was a police cordon going up, and I phoned you then from the phone box. Then I asked the policeman in charge what was happening. He wouldn’t let me through at first. I knew he wouldn’t. But then all of a sudden there was the Clerk of the House. I can’t think what he was doing at the far end of Whitehall at a quarter to ten, but he just sort of glowered at them and told them who he was, and they let him through and me as well.’
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Andrea said. ‘A mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I do hope that nice Mr Major is quite all right.’ She stood for a moment inspecting George, her mouth slightly open, an expression of amusement in her eyes. As if with a snap of command, she turned and left, shutting what must be the door of her office with a bright slam.
‘She’s a good soul,’ Patrick said. He thrust an index finger in his ear and waggled it furiously, extracting it with a pop. ‘You’ll find that she has her own ways of dealing with things, and they all work out in the end. Just don’t try to suggest any changes, and everything will be absolutely fine. Well. Welcome! I’m not at all sure what we should be doing today. I need to make two or three phone calls, and then we can sit down and talk and I can explain things, about where the committee has got to and what you ought to be doing and so on. I won’t be too long. One thing …’
Patrick came into the office, and noiselessly pushed the door to. ‘If I could recommend something – if I were you, I would always find that I had something important to do at the close of business on a Friday. Andrea’s a very good soul, but it’s as well not to be drawn into her Friday afternoons and evenings. Just a word to the wise.’
‘What are you saying?’ Andrea’s voice shouted from her office.
‘Nothing! Nothing at all, my sweet!’ Patrick called. ‘I was just welcoming George to the office. It occurs to me –’ his voice dropped to normal volume ‘– that the one thing that is supposed to happen this morning is John Slaughter, the bod from UCL, he was supposed to come in and brief us. About wave energy. I don’t know anything about wave energy and I don’t suppose you do either. He was meant to come in at eleven thirty but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. If you wanted, you could try to find out whether they’re letting anyone through. He hasn’t phoned, as far as I know. Andrea,’ he called again. ‘Has John Slaughter called? Well, no, then.’
Patrick left. George knew that the time had come to demonstrate initiative and efficiency. He picked up the biro, and wrote ‘John Slaughter?’ in the spiral-bound notebook. He thought the best way to discover the state of affairs was to go downstairs and ask the security staff. He left the office, leaving the door open, and walked to the stairs. At the bottom, the woman security officer was at the desk on her own. He noticed she had a large hairy mole on her left cheek. He wondered if the time would come when he knew her name, and could recognize her. There was no need to ask her anything. Her voice called out behind him: ‘There’s been a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. Everything’s sealed off.’ He nodded at her, and left the building, checking that he still had his pass in his pocket. The side-street outside was deserted; the snow was falling heavily, and had now settled. The junction with Whitehall was sealed off with police incident tape. George walked up to it. It must have been sealed off since Patrick had made it through. The whole of Whitehall, to left and right, was deserted behind incident tape. The snow fell on untouched ground, and was now a pristine three inches deep.
Once, George had been out in the country after a heavy snowfall, and had seen a woman playing a trick on her dog. A wound-up, bounding, overwhelmed dog, a Jack Russell. The woman bent down, and took a fistful of snow, rolling it into a snowball, and threw it. The dog hurtled forward to find the thrown thing to fetch, but where the snowball fell into the snow, there was only snow, and nothing to bring back. The dog ran around, astonished, baffled, and returned. The woman bent, rolled, threw again. The dog fell for it again. She had been doing it for some time. The field of snow contained something to fetch, and the dog had run into it, again and again. Now, beyond the Cenotaph, two policemen stood in their dark uniforms, like picturesque figures in a snow scene. There was no possibility that anyone would reach them until the road block was lifted. George stood there. The boulevard was transformed. Nobody else was there, looking at it. There was a perfume in the air that was the absence of perfume: London stripped of its odours and made to smell of snow falling through oxygen. Nobody else would ever see the sight of Whitehall as blank and clean and silent as a remote moor in deep winter, unpressed by the tread of foot. The sight was as unique as his first day at the work he was going to make a success of.
He was able to tell Patrick that he thought there was no possibility of receiving any visitors until the cordon was lifted, and he did not know when that might be. Patrick cursed amiably, and went away, promising that he would sit down and explain everything about the committee and its work later that morning. George sat down and reached for his in-tray. He opened the first document. It was the annual report of an organization that seemed to be something to do with nuclear energy. George began to read it. He understood almost nothing of what he read, and soon a feeling of mild satisfaction came over him at the image of dedication he must be presenting, if anyone walked past his office and happened to glance in. In time, he shut the document and placed it in the out-tray. It occurred to him to make a note of what he had read, and he did so, in the spiral-bound notebook. He picked up the second document in the pile, and soon he looked like someone who was making efficient work out of his inconveniently interrupted day. He passed papers from one pile to another, with the appearance of someone who was working hard, and beginning a new life. Anyone could see he had the capacity to be useful, and the thought gave George, head down, something rather like joy.
My Dog Ian (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
‘No, I don’t speak the lingo at all,’ she would say. ‘Just bono giorno, honey, bono sera, that’s all it takes. What’s the point? They rob you anyway, rob you blind. Take Paolo …’
Those Florentine afternoons. And afterwards I was always the same. Some people are always on stage. Most are destined always to be in the audience. Realizing it, you can never change the fact afterwards. After Florence, I would always be in row F of the stalls, hands clasped, looking up as the lights pointed in a different direction, allowing myself to be persuaded.
I went to Italy because of love – no, guilt. I was twenty-seven. I had been working ‘in the arts’ for five years. It was the sort of job that had sounded immensely desirable once. ‘Arts administration,’ I had confidently said to careers advisers, friends of my parents at drinks at Christmas. It had sounded good, labour rooted in passion and exchanged, at the end of the month, for money you couldn’t be ashamed of earning. My contemporaries failed, and had to settle for jobs as solicitors. Five years later, they earned three times what I did and were beginning to drop me. They could not be blamed. ‘Arts administration’ meant a narrow office in a Victorian museum in the north, kept going with public money and the promise of lottery largesse. I found, after all, that you could be ashamed of the money at the end of the month. It was so little. My grey walls teetered with box files; outside, you walked between the museum’s doubtful Raffaelino and the still more doubtful school parties. I grew to detest the single Matthew Smith, lurid as the municipal flowerbeds, to hate, too, the multiple aldermen in committees, drab and important in appearance as the museum’s solitary Stanley Spencer. Last Supper in Maidenhead. You may know it from reproductions.
It was a city of three hundred thousand people but, still, it hardly seems surprising that I noticed Silvia. In that city, she was like a panther at a Tupperware party. The society was less extensive than you might imagine. A small Italian woman, with expensive accoutrements and an expensive, contemptuous way of standing with her hips jutting forward, made herself conspicuous. I had formed the habit of going to concerts in the university hall every other Friday. The tickets were cheap, and the platform just about big enough for an orchestra. The timpanist had to sit beneath the conductor’s podium, however, and guess at the beat. More usually, as tonight, it was a string quartet. In the interval, the audience sat in their seats or clustered in the chilly atrium drinking coffee. It was not a well-dressed audience. You noticed Silvia.
‘Have you seen,’ my colleague Margaret said. ‘A footballer’s wife?’
(It was a recognized social category, in that impoverished northern town with two famous football clubs. It was used for any woman under thirty with a tan and a handbag.)
‘I hope she enjoyed the Webern,’ Margaret said bitchily. I went to concerts with Margaret. It was no more than that.
‘I hope so too,’ I said.
After the interval, I took more notice of Silvia. She was sitting three or four rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle. She listened intently to the first two movements of the next piece. Then, with a sigh, just as the string quartet was raising its bows, she got up and left, clacking down the central aisle. The string quartet lowered its bows, waited for her to leave. They began to play again.
‘A bit much for the Footballer’s Wife,’ Margaret said archly, when it was all over. ‘The bitonal passage can be a little demanding for many music lovers.’ I wasn’t sure, and not just because I didn’t know what Margaret meant. To me those decisive stilettos clacking towards the exit looked much more like someone who only wanted to hear the scherzo of the Ravel string quartet; had come for that, had left when it was done.
In fact, Silvia seemed to attend the university concerts fairly regularly. I started to notice her now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. She rarely stayed for a whole concert. She would turn up at the interval, leave after a particular piece, or even walk out, as with the Ravel, in the middle of one. It was terribly rude. It was the behaviour of someone, I decided, who had come to like music through a collection of CDs. She had the habit of skipping about, selecting favourite movements, and rejecting music with all its tyranny and gleeful infliction of boredom in favour of ‘highlights’. Margaret had a great deal to say on the subject. I weakly agreed, though tried not to refer to Silvia as ‘the FW’. I did not agree with Margaret as often as she seemed to assume, and sometimes rebelliously thought, as I clapped exhaustedly at the end of some juvenile assault on a great masterpiece, that it might indeed be quite nice to press a fast-forward button as the Diabelli Variations grew a little too pleased with themselves. There was no such fast-forward button at the museum, either. It took up as much time as you were prepared to grant it.
‘I’ve found out about the FW,’ Margaret said one day, popping her head round the door of my office. ‘She’s not an FW, a footballer’s wife, I mean. She’s a lettrice.’
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A lettrice in the Italian department of the university,’ Margaret said immaculately. ‘The equivalent of a lectrice in French, Lektorin, I believe, in German. She’s come to teach them Italian.’
‘It’s not a big department,’ I said. In the museum, we liked to think we had a relationship with the university that extended to sending Christmas cards to given departments, as long as no Bunsen burners were involved, at which point snobbery came into consideration. We did not know them, but we went to their concerts and we very well might have known them personally. Margaret, for instance, constantly referred to the professor of English literature, a man she had never spoken to and who was not called Percy as ‘Percy’.
‘No, it’s not,’ Margaret said. ‘She’s the first time they’ve been able to afford a lettrice – they’re cock-a-hoop about it.’
‘Where does the budget come from, though?’ I said knowingly.
‘They’ll have got sponsorship from an Italian company,’ Margaret said. ‘Fiat, no, I tell a lie, it’s Buitoni.’
‘They make ravioli,’ I said.
‘They’re sponsoring all sorts, these days,’ Margaret said. ‘The Hallé had a bel canto evening in Manchester and there was a reception at the town hall here after – the whole orchestra went. Oysters, I heard, the cor anglais player was laid prostrate for a week.’
‘Only to be expected,’ I said.
‘But they’ve funded a lettrice for the Italian department here as well,’ Margaret said. ‘I found out she’s called Silvia. Do you think they’d be interested in giving us money, Buitoni, I mean?’
‘What for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, that’s your pigeon, isn’t it? Something Italian. Futurismo. Let’s have a meeting. She’s living with the professor of theology. She comes from Cremona. Ah, la bella Italia,’ she finished, clacking her hands in the shape of imaginary castanets, for some geographically inaccurate but festive reason.
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, giggling.
‘You know who I mean, the Australian professor of theology, not that there’s more than one,’ Margaret said. ‘Renting a room off him. Must dash.’
She dashed.
As often happens in life, once you have acquired a certain body of information about a thing, a place, a person, it is impossible not to enter into a more active relationship with them. Once Margaret had told me all of this about Silvia, it was inevitable that I would meet her very soon. It is something to do with the quality of the gaze. Once you know that a woman lives in the spare room of the Australian professor of theology, that she comes from Cremona, a town that, though famous for violin makers, only called up in my more slapdash mind the idea of a vast pudding, creamy and lemony at once, a city, more realistically, of pale yellow churches surrounded by a perfectly circular crimped wall, the warm colour of baked pastry … To be in possession of all this knowledge, both factual and fanciful, and yet to know that she knows nothing about you, not even your name, such a situation must engender a curious, knowing, unequal gaze.
I finally met her in the museum. Having seen her only at concerts, I stared somewhat, trying for a second to establish her context. She was looking with apparent enchantment at a glass case of ammonites. She felt my gaze; she looked up.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You go to concerts, don’t you? I recognize you.’
So we started to become friends. Three days later, we were sitting in the museum café.
‘But you work here?’ Silvia said. ‘That’s marvellous. I love this museum, so wonderful. In Italy we don’t have these things, so beautiful, you know?’
A day or two later we were standing, as we had arranged, in front of a stuffed model of a sabre-toothed tiger. It had been patched together forty years ago out of old bits of dog and plaster fangs. Its skin was split and leaking kapok. Its fur was bald and patchy. Underneath, a handwritten notice in fading ink told us that possibly ten thousand years ago this animal had possibly roamed the countryside hereabouts, possibly.
‘Look, a woolly mammoth,’ Silvia said, moving on. ‘Or the tooth thereof. You would not know that I was not English, yes?’
‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘But you really like all this stuff?’
‘Oh, yes, lovely,’ Silvia said. ‘Where do you live? You live alone?’
‘Quite near here,’ I said. I went on to tell her – there was not much to tell, but I told her about the rented flat at the top of a big Victorian house, converted for four single people by the Irish doctor who owned it; the dingy communal spaces, with the floral wallpaper no one had chosen, the half-dead spider plants, the solitary undusted china ornaments, Irish cast-offs, a chipped and smiling Edwardian lady in her china skirts at each turning of the stair, the mail for departed tenants piling up in the hall.
‘Oh, that sounds nice,’ Silvia said dismissively. She abruptly looked at her watch – ‘Heavens,’ she said. The watch was so tiny and so heavily jewelled you could not imagine using it to tell the time from, but Silvia said, ‘I nearly forgot. I call my mother.’
‘Not in the museum,’ I said, gesturing at the woolly mammoth’s tooth. But no one was around, and Silvia whipped her mobile phone out pooh-poohingly.
‘Mamma,’ she said. ‘Come stai? … Bene, bene. Fa freddo – sta piovendo … Si, si, sempre. E Papa? … E Luca sta bene? … E Luigi? … E Roberto? … Mauro anche? … Massimo? … Va bene, va bene, ci parliamo domani, va bene? … Ciao ciao, Mamma.’
She switched off. I later learnt that Silvia made this exact phone call, at exactly the same time, every single day of her life. She said that it was raining in England, she found out what the weather was like in Italy, and she asked after the health of her father and, in order, her five unstoppable brothers, Luca, Luigi, Roberto, Mauro and Massimo, twenty-two years old down to five, before promising to telephone at the same time the next day for the same purpose. It seemed strange to me, who in the English way called his mother once a fortnight or so. I rarely had much more to say than Silvia, but the embarrassment happened much less frequently. Silvia, I guessed at the time, might be homesick. That was not, however, the case.
And a week or so later, sitting in a pub in the early evening, she continued this conversation about her room and told me about the Australian professor of theology. For some reason, I had thought that he was a single man, but I learnt that he had a wife and three children, two sons and a daughter. By the end of that evening, Silvia had invited me to dinner, the day after next, at their house.
‘I would say tomorrow night but, you know, it’s not my house. I can’t tell them until tomorrow morning, I need to give them a day or two, you understand? Listen, you like Italian food? I cook you an Italian dinner.’
All afternoon the next day I felt feverishly burgeoning, down in my windowless office at the museum. I felt like a nineteenth-century girl in a Swedish film, throwing off my corsets and discovering my sexuality.
‘We missed you,’ Margaret said, sidling through the door with a clipboard.
‘Oh, Christ,’ I said. ‘It was the— Christ, what was it?’
‘The education and outreach committee’s budget meeting,’ she said. ‘It’s been in all our diaries for weeks.’
‘I knew there was something,’ I said.
‘There was indeed,’ she said. ‘There was something, you’re right there.’
‘That’s a catastrophe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I could have forgotten it.’
‘You’ll get the minutes,’ she said. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself.’
Of course she was right: people missed meetings all the time. It wasn’t that she was concerned about me. She could just tell that something new had come into my life; it would have taken a bright guess to alight upon Silvia, but Margaret, hovering in the door of my office, could tell it was something of that sort. She just wanted to know. I just wanted not to tell her.
The professor of theology was called Professor Quincy. He lived, I discovered, in an absurd villa in the opulent inner suburbs of the city. The street was lined with vast, ancient beeches, never intended by the Victorian planners to grow to such a size. Their foliage met and struggled overhead, and the pavement writhed and buckled over the roots like a late chapter of Moby-Dick. In other cities, to live in a Victorian house of this sort would require some wealth. These houses had been built for ruinous, grasping magnates, but a hundred years on, few people in the city had much money at all, and they were lived in by mere professors of theology. Quincy’s house had crenellations, battlements in the local orange stone, stained glass in the oddest places. In the street, two small girls were playing an unnecessarily picturesque game of pat-a-cake, slapping each other’s palms fiercely. As I passed them, they stopped and silently watched me. Silvia had given me the address, but had not offered to pick me up and take me there. I rang the doorbell, holding a box of chocolates and a bunch of carnations, which, I realized too late, were artificially dyed into lurid colours, the sort that would probably last in the recipient’s second-worst vase for several weeks.
A dog hurled itself at the other side of the door, yelling furiously. I stepped back into the neglected border, tangling myself in some dead vines. As I was pulling my foot out, a shape appeared through the stained glass, a feminine shape, though too short and dumpy to be Silvia’s. The girl – the Quincy daughter, it must be – rattled the door free from its chains. It swung open. I quailed back. The dog, still bellowing with rage, threw itself past me and ran directly to the front gate. It continued barking at the street, which was empty of anyone except the two small girls, who ignored it.
‘He does that,’ the girl said. ‘He wants you to think he was barking at something behind you all the time. It’s really that he doesn’t want to offend you, but the temptation to bark, it’s just too much for him. He’s called Joseph. He’s got very good manners, really. He’ll come back when he thinks he’s made his point.’
‘Hello,’ I said, going in. The hall of the house was red as raw liver, the heavy, elaborate wallpaper torn away into yellowing scars and hung randomly with pictures, knocked off the level by the passing human traffic: cheap old prints, a painting by a child, solidly framed, a watercolour of Derwentwater, a disconcerting and conical nude that might be of either sex – the acquisitions of rainy days, the findings in junk shops, the exhibitions of local painting groups, of arguments concluded with a dashing purchase. Something was clinging about my feet. I looked down. It was a man’s walking sock. I kicked it off discreetly, trying to appear as if I were shaking myself from rain.
‘Are you a friend of the Lettuce?’ the girl said. ‘Silvia, I mean. We call her the Lettuce because she’s a lettrice, sorry, not very funny, I know. I’m Natasha.’
‘I’m Mark,’ a medium-sized boy said, hanging over the banister. ‘Who’s that?’
I introduced myself.
‘Why have you got flowers? You’ve not come for dinner, have you? No one said anyone was coming for dinner.’ The boy came downstairs, slouching from side to side.
‘Yes, they did,’ Natasha said. ‘Silvia said, this morning.’
‘Oh,’ the boy said. He approached me, looked at me with amusement and, with a considered gesture, wiped his wet and dribbling nose noisily along the sleeve of his home-knitted red sweater. I looked at his clothes, and at Natasha’s, with compassion. They were the clothes of the children of theology professors the whole world over. ‘I’m precocious. Do you know what that means?’
‘I would say that being able to describe yourself as precocious at your age is a fair definition of it.’
‘No,’ Mark said. ‘That’s not really correct. That would be an instance of precocity, and not a definition of it.’
I agreed.
‘Come through,’ a voice called. I followed the children into what proved to be the kitchen. I wondered whether I was expected. From the ceiling, what seemed to be a week’s washing was hanging on a wooden frame, the frills and collapses of much-washed intimates like some natural phenomenon of drip and accretion. On the kitchen worktop, a pile of unsorted socks threatened to fall into a bowl of salad. The only orderly thing in the kitchen seemed to be five neatly labelled recycling boxes, and they were near overflowing.
‘Hi,’ I said. Silvia was at the stove. You noticed the things of the kitchen before the people in it.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, half turning from the pot she was peering into. ‘You found the house.’
‘Yes,’ I said. For some reason, I could not walk forward and offer her the awful flowers. With the terrible clarity of a crashing driver I envisaged the small but ugly scene as Silvia accepted the dyed carnations from my hand and I struggled to remember what on earth you say when handing over such a thing, and I stood there mute. But then Natasha took it from my hand, gently but persuasively, and removed it, and I never saw it again.
In time other people came in, and sat at the table. ‘This is my mother,’ Natasha said; she seemed to have taken over the job of hostess. Conversation of a sort came and went. ‘This is my father,’ she said.
‘We’ve never met,’ I said firmly to the professor, bedraggled from some labour in the study, or so it seemed. ‘But I know you by reputation.’
‘Admired him from afar,’ Mark said. ‘Stalked him for months, drawn by an inexplicable fascination.’
‘You can behave yourself,’ the professor said. ‘Company.’
‘This,’ the girl said, with pained distaste, ‘is my brother Kevin.’
‘I prefer to be called Benedict,’ the boy said, coming in through the garden door. He was dressed unusually for a seventeen-year-old, in a striped boating jacket and a lopsided bow tie. I wondered what school he went to, and whether he risked such an appearance in the playground. ‘After the saint and founder of the well-known order.’
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.
‘How long is this going to go on for?’ Natasha said.
‘The Church has endured solidly for two thousand years,’ Kevin/Benedict said. ‘I see no reason why the name Benedict should not endure one more human lifetime.’
‘Yours, Mummy, he means,’ Natasha said.
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.
‘He got religion,’ Natasha said. ‘He went to the church down the road, the ordinary one, and got religion. He was always awful, you know. But then he decided that wasn’t religion enough for him. So he went on to another church, which was more religion. And then he ended up on his knees dreaming of the day when he can suck the Pope off.’
‘Natasha,’ Professor Quincy said.
‘Well,’ Natasha said. ‘And it was then that he got the voice to go with it.’ It was true that Kevin/Benedict talked in a way unlike the two other children, who had a faint, attractive Australian hovering in their voice. Kevin/Benedict was conspicuously posh in his manner, sounding as if he were working up to announcing Saint-Saëns on Radio 3 in hushed tones. ‘It won’t last. He’s signed all sorts of pledges, alcohol, smoking, chewing gum, but they won’t last and then he’ll not be religious any more. Temptation, you see.’
Kevin/Benedict lowered his head, faintly smiling, pustular. He looked like the Book of Job, and you could imagine him spottily going to and fro on the earth, walking up and down on it, forgiving everyone in a pimply manner.
‘Would our guest like to say grace?’ Kevin/Benedict said.
I looked at him with astonishment.
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said. I agreed. I had never said grace in my life, and had probably heard it said no more than ten times. ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know what would be the appropriate thing.’
‘Well, shall I?’ Kevin/Benedict said.
‘If you’re quick about it,’ Silvia said. ‘My pasta doesn’t wait for no one, not God, neither.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ Kevin/Benedict began. The rest of the family began eating, and, after a moment, so did I. ‘Thank you for a delicious dinner, which we can eat, conscious of the fact that many in this world, many even in this city, not a mile from where we sit, have no ravioli to eat, nor sugo all’amatriciana –’
‘Very good, Benedict,’ Professor Quincy said, through a mouthful of dinner.
‘– with which to adorn their ravioli, and so we give thanks that we are so fortunate as to enjoy the fruits of the pasta-maker and the mincing machine, free of worries, and taking pleasure in good company, and new friends around the family circle –’
‘He means you,’ Silvia said. ‘No, don’t use the bread, bread with pasta, that’s terrible, terrible.’
‘– and thinking all the time of how through the good things of the table our different lands and cultures are brought together in happiness and enjoyment in the unity of mankind and the love of God, amen.’ He opened his eyes and raised his head, murderously. ‘You’ve all finished.’
‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘I was hungry. I wasn’t going to let it go cold.’
‘I wonder where the practice of saying grace comes from,’ I said conversationally. ‘It must be of considerable antiquity.’
‘Yup, must be,’ Natasha said.
I was smiling and nodding like crazy at Professor Quincy. I had been aiming the observation at the professor of theology.
‘Pa,’ Mark said.
‘Hmm?’ Professor Quincy said. ‘Oh – you said something. Sorry, you were saying?’
‘I was saying, I wonder where the practice of saying grace comes from,’ I said.
‘Oh, right,’ the professor said, swatting a fly circling his head. ‘It was one of those English things where you’re really asking some kind of question. I thought you were just talking.’
Silvia got up, collecting the plates, as if inadequately appreciated. I was rather hoping for some more pasta. It was jolly good. My thanks were effusive, and strange at this family kitchen table.
‘Grace, Pa,’ Mark said.
‘Are we still talking about grace? To tell you the truth, I’m off work, chum,’ the professor said. ‘I like to stop the theologizing at six, if I can. Let a fellow eat his grub. I’ve met people like you before, think I like theology so much I want to talk about it all the time. What’s this, Silvia?’
‘Agnello,’ Silvia said, bringing a vast and incinerated joint, perhaps a shoulder, to the table, half buried in carrots.
‘Looks yummy,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t like theology at all. You want to know how I got lured into it? I’ll tell you.’
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said, but rather with relish, and the children’s eyes were shining. You could tell this was their favourite performance.
‘Do tell,’ I said.
‘You start off in year nine at school,’ Professor Quincy said. ‘And they say to you, “All right, what do you want to do? Do you want to go on with history, or do you want to do Sanskrit – because the Sydney public schools, they offer that now, these days – or do you want to be doing biblical studies or RE, as they’d be calling it? Now I tell you, I grew up in Australia, you know. So history in Australia is not much to be writing home about. And my old mum – your granny in Sydney who killed the funnel-web with the ping-pong bat, kids, I’m talking about – she said, “Do what you’re good at. A qualification’s a qualification.” So I do RE and I get the top marks in it because, to be frank with you, it’s not all that difficult to do well in RE. Well, the school says to me, “Do what you’re good at,” so I carry on with the old RE, and before you know it, there I am at Sydney University, which is one of the most distinguished universities in the world, as I’m sure you know, because you don’t strike me as one of those stupid snobs that England specializes in, and my degree, blow me down, it’s RE still, only they don’t call it that by now. It’s called theology.
‘Now my professor-lady at Sydney University, she takes me under her wing, because I’m a bright lad, and I pick up the old Hebrew for the Old Testament, and I pick up the old Greek for the New Testament, and she says to me, “What about taking it a bit further, because you know, my dear, it fits you for all sorts of things a degree in theology? And I say, “Like what?” And she says, “Well, you could become a priest,” to which I say, “No, thanks, love.” And I say, “Like what else?” And she says, “Hmm.” And it turns out that the other thing it turns you out for, fits you for marvellously, it’s doing more degrees in bloody theology. So then she says to me, “I’ve got an idea for something you can write about for your doctorate, son.” So, being a bit wet behind the ears, I say, “What’s that, then?” And she says, “Well, I reckon that there’s this book in the Bible called the Book of Kings – I don’t expect you to know of it, son – and I reckon, if you look at it, there’s bits that’s been written by one fellow and bits that’s been written by another fellow. Well,” she says, “I reckon that the bits that were written by the other fellow, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were written by a woman and not a fellow at all.”
‘So I says, “Why do you think that, then?” And she says, “You go and write your thesis and tell me why. And I tell you what, call the first fellow P and the other fellow Q.” So there it was, and here I am, and for thirty years, I’ve been writing about this nutty old girl called the Q narrator in the Book of Kings and no one else believes in her, and if she existed, I don’t know why you’d think she was a woman, and if she was, I guess she was fairly typical of her time and place, which means that she struggled with a major facial hair problem and took a bath maybe once in her life, like by accident. And she seems a bit slow on the uptake, because I tell you, the bits she wrote, she’s missed the point a bit, I reckon. And it’s taken me thirty years to work out that I hate a prehistoric old girl called Q who never existed, and I hate the Book of Kings, and I hate theology and, son, I’m not that keen on God in the first place. You ever think, we all end up doing the one thing – the one thing, mind – guaranteed to make you want to puke every day of your life?’
‘Yay,’ Natasha said. ‘Listen to your father, Kev. He knows about God.’
‘But God knows more about him,’ Kevin/Benedict said, placing his knife and fork fastidiously parallel.
Mrs Quincy put her knife and fork down too, in a furious clatter. ‘If you don’t stop it now, this second,’ she said, with real venom, to her son, ‘you can go and sit on the naughty step.’
Professor Quincy’s story – obviously a much-repeated one – had cheered him up. It cheers most people up to tell the story of their life, particularly if you can reduce it to well-paid catastrophe. He set about his lamb, now rather cold-looking, with beard-smearing gusto.
‘No no no no no no no no no,’ Silvia said. ‘You can’t say everyone hates what they do. Look at him. He works in the museum, he loves it.’
‘I don’t love it exactly,’ I said, unheard. ‘My job. That was a lovely dinner.’
‘The naughty step,’ Natasha said, in stages. Her face was purple; she had been in choking hilarity for a minute and a half. ‘The naughty step.’
‘The naughty step,’ Mark said, in solemn tones. ‘Do you hear that? Kevin?’
‘Benedict,’ Kevin/Benedict said, all fight out of him.
The next morning I lay in bed, listening to the radio wind itself up into early fits of irritation and denunciation. The specific repetitions of government ministers wound in and out of my dreams as I dropped in and out of thin layers of sleep, and the faces of old friends looked into my eyes, telling me with concern about dangers to the environment. I thought about the night before. Silvia’s vividness had been lost somewhere in that family, and her spotlit personality subsumed in the execution of her fine national dishes. Most of what I had said to her had been mere compliments on her cooking. I might as well have told her how well she managed to be an Italian woman. But perhaps that was right. I realized, after all, that I had no concept of Silvia apart from her nationality. She was just Italy in Yorkshire, an idea complete enough in itself that it sounded like the title of a symphonic poem by Delius. No nation is as interesting as a human being. So I was late in the museum, and Margaret, loitering round the eland in the foyer with a pen on a string round her neck, had a word for me. ‘So we’re friends with the professor of theology now,’ she said. ‘Eating dinner round there. You live dangerously, I must say.’
There was an unexpectedly hostile glitter in her eyes. She’d been preparing herself to coruscate lightly over the details of my expanding social life.
‘Dangerously?’ I said.
‘I’ve heard they use the dog’s basin as a pudding bowl,’ Margaret said. ‘If there’s more than a given number of guests. It’s said that many an unwelcome guest’s found “Bonzo” written at the bottom of the cherry trifle when, naturally, it would be too late to do anything about it.’
Sherry trifle, I silently and irritably corrected. ‘No, it was very nice. Silvia cooked. It was very good.’
Margaret, huffing off, was premature in her suggestion, but after that evening, I did rather take to the Quincys. Less predictably, they seemed rather to take to me. I did my grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s, a branch I’d always thought far too big for my bedsit needs. Like a child, I went up and down every aisle, even the sock aisle, generally finding something necessary in each one, and a few days down the line generally throwing out a pile of decaying compost, the evidently perishable remains of my excessive shop.
Going round a supermarket, one too big for your needs, is like a sad evening in front of the television, hurtling through the channels and seeing the same faces recurring, harassed and increasingly familiar. The OAP you greet absently like an old friend by the time you reach the whisky was a new face as recently as the organic peas. A White Queen-like figure was floating in and out of my awareness at the far ends of aisles, only doubtfully recognizable. But I did know her: it was the professor’s wife. She was only vague because she was out of her initial context. I was standing in front of the milk display when Mrs Quincy hailed me, coming alongside with a gigantic and nearly filled trolley, like a docking liner.
‘You look lost and confused,’ she said, hoisting four six-pint cartons of milk into her trolley, the shopping of a materfamilias with milk puddings to make.
‘I was looking for milk,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re in the right place,’ Mrs Quincy said.
‘No,’ I said. I gestured feebly. ‘I only want a pint of milk. Just for my cup of coffee in the mornings. They’ve only got enormous ones.’
She admitted this to be true. There were the gargantuan cartons suitable for her needs, but nothing smaller.
‘Well, that’s no good,’ she said. She looked around for an assistant. ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Yes. I mean you. Yes. Hello. Thank you.’
The assistant who came over unwillingly was a tall youth. He might have been a sixth-former doing a holiday job.
‘Do you really not have any milk,’ Mrs Quincy said, ‘in any size smaller than this? My friend here only wants to buy a single pint.’
‘It’s really not that important,’ I said, Mrs Quincy contradicting me. ‘I could buy a pint at the newsagent’s round the corner.’
‘At considerable inconvenience to yourself and some increased expense, I imagine,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Pay no attention. Now. Do you have one-pint sizes of – what, full-fat milk? You should drink semi-skinned. You get used to it in no time at all, three weeks, max.’
‘I don’t like it,’ I said.
There was a pause before the boy realized we were waiting for his answer.
‘We’ve run out,’ he said. ‘The delivery comes at three, I think.’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘How can you have run out? I want to talk to the manager. Fetch me the manager immediately.’
The boy disappeared.
‘The trouble with the English,’ Mrs Quincy said very distinctly, attracting some attention from passing shoppers, ‘is that they never complain. Or they never complain at the right time. They sit around whining endlessly when nothing can be done about a problem, and then when they’re offered the chance, they sit quietly. I’ve often noticed it. If you don’t say anything, you don’t get anything.’
‘How’s the professor?’ I said, in order not to respond. ‘And the children? I so enjoyed dinner the other night.’
‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said cryptically. ‘Here he comes.’
She meant the manager, not the professor. The manager looked, frankly, too grand to be troubled with these things. He was approaching in his suit and tie, the original boy tagging along behind, his face purply embarrassed. He had never had to ask the manager anything directly before, and was now wondering, I guessed, whether he should have done so. But Mrs Quincy had worked herself up into a lather over someone else’s dairy purchases, and she was going to have her moment.
‘I understand that there’s a problem here,’ the manager said.
‘There is a problem,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Now, look at these shelves. You have six-pint containers of milk. You have four-pint containers of milk. And those are very well and good for someone such as I, with a family who drinks milk all day long. But look again and ask yourself whether you see single pints of milk. No. You do not. And for many people a single pint of milk is what they need. Now, this is my friend and he lives on his own. He lives in a bedsit. He has few friends and he never cooks. He lives on takeaways and similarly unhealthy things. But he likes a cup of coffee in the morning or sometimes a cup of tea. And it takes him probably five days to finish even one pint of milk. What is he going to do with a gigantic carton like this? He would never finish it. He would find it turning to cheese before he was halfway through it. And he’s paid four times as much as he wanted to for it, which, considering that he’s living on a very restricted budget, is not a trivial matter. Listen to me. Where are the single pints of milk for the single lonely people in this town? Where are they?’
‘We’ve got delivery problems,’ the manager said, as I made faint noises of demurral and objection to this poignant but honestly insulting account of my life.
‘What rubbish,’ Mrs Quincy said. She was delighted. ‘Now come along with me. Have you finished here? Will you ever. Do your shopping.’ (Over the shoulder.) ‘Here. Again?’
‘Well,’ I began, drawn along in Mrs Quincy’s wake.
‘The thing is,’ Mrs Quincy said, once we were in her car – it seemed a done deal that I was being whisked off by her, though whether she was generously offering me a lift home or abducting me was unclear, ‘Silvia’s really a sort of family. Well, not family at all. But Richard, my husband, you know, she’s the neighbour of a cousin of his in Florence.’
‘In Florence?’ I said. ‘I thought she came from Cremona.’
‘Comes from Cremona, ran away, very naughty, but it’s all made up now, lives in Florence in a flat next to Aunty Paulina. I say aunty, but let me get this straight. Richard’s sister’s second husband, his stepmother, it was her niece. Half-niece, is there such a thing, because of course their mother, who was married to the stepmother’s brother and used to be a McIntyre, one of the Mount Isa McIntyres, if you can imagine such a thing, she met a Melbourne dentist and moved to Melbourne with relief and married him, and that was Paulina’s father. Didn’t work out but she stayed on in Melbourne, can’t think why. This is all ancient history now, though. Paulina must be sixty if she’s a day.’
‘Look out,’ I said, as Mrs Quincy jumped a red light.
‘Oh, they get out of your way,’ Mrs Quincy said, on this occasion correctly. ‘Well, Paulina gets in touch out of the blue in July, which is very odd, because the only occasion we ever hear from her is Christmas, a card and a bottle of fruit in mustard-flavoured syrup, which no one will ever eat and you can’t in all conscience give it to anyone else, they’ve been piling up in the larder for years. Not even to a jumble sale. I tried.’
‘So you heard from Paulina,’ I said, seeing that Mrs Quincy had lost her train.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘And she says her next-door neighbour, a nice girl, she’s coming to England and not just England, to here, to be a lettuce in the university as the kids will insist on saying, not funny, and can we help her find somewhere to live? So Silvia comes and we let her have the top floor because, frankly, we just don’t use it. I can’t even remember the last time I went up there. The children tell me she’s made it quite nice now. And, as you see, she’s no trouble and she cooks up a storm, so she stayed. She was in West Side Story.’
‘Silvia?’ I said.
‘No, Aunty Paulina,’ Mrs Quincy said. Then – she must have told this before, and often been told in response that her listeners had been in Oliver!, back at school – she said, ‘The real one, I mean. The famous movie. Here we are.’
We were at the Quincys’ house. I went in, carrying half of Mrs Quincy’s bags and my own one; she was talking all the way. And I stayed all afternoon.
Silvia’s hours at the university were irregular, and when, over the next three months, I saw her or I did not see her, it was when I was at the Quincys’ house. I learnt more about her from Mrs Quincy and from Natasha than I did from our occasional independent outings. I did not suggest going to a concert with her. I knew that Margaret could hardly cope with my defection from her side to Silvia’s, and with Margaret I contrived different outings altogether. With her sensible shoes on, Margaret came with me on buses out to the national park and hiked in well-planned ways. We hiked not there and back, but in great twelve-mile circuits round entire dales, with a stop in a pub halfway round, greeting all other walkers on the way, if they seemed from their dress to be taking it as seriously as we were.
Silvia’s clothes alone would have disbarred her from any such outing. Our dates tended to be cultural, short of Margaret’s territory of the concert hall. The heavily subsidized theatre in the town was safe, a concrete bunker with an apron stage and, every so often, Sir Derek Jacobi. It changed its offering only every six weeks – a period that thoroughly exhausted the fascination the city might have cherished for Goethe’s Egmont, say. There was a university theatre, taken up with student productions and local amateur dramatic societies. The cinema of the town fastidiously refused ever to screen anything that had cost its makers less than thirty million dollars. We managed, somehow, though we left a lot of offerings halfway through.
It was over dinner after one of these unsuccessful outings that Silvia made her point. The offering had been a number about people falling in love against the odds and having to run through cities before being reunited at the check-in desk. We had stayed to the uplifting end. Silvia was silent and scowling all the way to the restaurant.
‘I’m going back to Florence the week after next,’ she said, not quite looking at me.
‘Not Cremona?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘My flat in Florence. It’s empty over the summer. I’m going there.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘You like Mrs Quincy, and you like Natasha, isn’t it?’ she said, quite emphatically.
The restaurant was Italian, after its own fashion. It was not my choice – I would have hesitated to suggest it to Silvia. Even more oddly, we had been there before, and she had spent the whole evening denouncing everything about it, from the waiter’s pronunciation of bruschetta to his kindly suggestion of a cappuccino to finish with. ‘They’re catering for what people want,’ I had mildly protested. ‘There’s no point in being Tuscan purists round here.’ But it was a terrible restaurant; everything, to the outer limits of plausibility, had been improved with the addition of cream, and unfamiliar foodstuffs had crept into unlikely dishes. In all of this I had been instructed by Silvia – I mean, I wouldn’t have known that rule about not having pineapple with pasta – but her mood of denunciation this evening was only encouraged by the restaurant. Its purpose was directed straight at me.
‘No, not yet,’ she said to the waitress, returning to her theme.
‘No, we’re not ready to order,’ she said again, five minutes later. ‘And the other thing …’
‘Listen, I will call you when we’re ready,’ she said, still later, as the waitress sauntered over.
‘All the same to us, love,’ the waitress said. ‘We’re not busy. I’m enjoying it, to tell you the truth.’
But all the same, when we were done, I had agreed to come with Silvia to Florence in two weeks’ time. The denunciation, I had been expecting for some time – the slammed door of the Quincys’ kitchen, the scowls and the increasingly rebarbative style of her outfits when we met. I hadn’t been prepared for this outcome.
The promise was easily made but, after all, I had a job. Silvia, so emphatic about my job at first, seemed to be under the impression that, like the university’s academic staff, I was going to take off for three months in the summer. The best I could manage was a fortnight, and that, I was given to understand, was quite a favour at such short notice. Margaret, when she heard of it from some other source, obstinately asked me, quite near the beginning of one of our hikes in the country, if I would like to go on holiday with her, if, of course, I hadn’t made other plans for the summer with any other person. My explanation cast a pall over the day; something I think she might have foreseen. It was all so tiring.
Silvia’s attic at the Quincys’ was an island of lucid clarity in that stormy household: a neat bed, two handsome chairs, some pretty pictures against a colour she’d chosen herself, and a small bookcase carrying her fifty favourite books. So it was not a surprise to discover the airy, even elegant quality of her flat in Florence. It was at the top of a modern building, with terraces the size of half a tennis court, crowded with pelargoniums, bright as a seaside landlady’s garden. Inside, in pockets of air-conditioned cool, austere long chairs of chrome and leather treacherously invited the act of reclining. It was on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of one of the hills that rise and surround it. The geography of Florence, as I soon discovered, kept the worst of its weather unchanging and building, stiflingly, from one week to the next all summer. There were other things about the flat to be discovered. The building was at the very end of a long-buried and nearly mythical river, the Affrica; and if there was no way of our detecting it, the river was clearly an object of fascination to millions of mosquitoes, which had an ancestral habit of following its course all the way from the Arno to Silvia’s building, then staying exactly where they were for the whole summer. I became familiar with great generations of mosquitoes as the weeks passed, thwacking at my own head in the middle of the night, sometimes in Silvia’s spare room, sometimes not.
‘And of course there’s Paulina next door,’ Silvia said. ‘But I expect you know everything about her.’
Quickly, we settled into a sulky routine. Silvia had, in the past, spent a good deal of time playing the guide, she said. (She meant: pushing visitors around Florence with an out-of-date guide book.) So the first day, she came out with me, showed me the crucial bus, and took me briskly to four asterisked treasures.
‘Duomo,’ she said.
‘David of Michelangelo, great masterpiece of Italian art,’ she said.
‘Out here in the rain?’ I said. ‘When it rains?’ (It was actually oppressively hot.)
‘In Florence, it never rains,’ she said. ‘Look, beautiful sunshine. Englishman, wanting his rain. Where’s your umbrella and your bowler hat, Englishman? No, it’s not real, anyway. The real one it’s inside Accademia, up that street. We don’t have time.’
‘Uffizi,’ she said. ‘Look at the queue!’
‘And Ponte Vecchio,’ she said, the unopened guide book firmly in her hand.
‘I see,’ I said. That evening, she phoned up all her Florentine friends at length, and complained with great gusto about me. She spoke in Italian; I understood quite well enough. After the first day, I left the flat in the morning and dutifully visited churches, palazzos, museums – more museums; I started with the postcard sights and steadily worked my way downwards. In time, I surprised the attendants of museums named after nineteenth-century Englishwomen, residents of Fiesole, with an unaccustomed ring on their doorbell. How Silvia passed her time, I don’t quite know. I returned to the flat after an invariably unsuccessful sort of tourist lunch, often a sandwich at a bar by the bus station, a one-armed bandit’s electric fanfares in my ear. The afternoons, she was incommunicado, and I read. We met at six each day.
‘You know a funny thing,’ she said, when we were settled in a bar the third night. ‘I asked an English boy to stay here last year, and at the end I said to him, “What do you like most in Florence?” Because, of course, I think maybe he’s going to the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio, maybe. But he says, “Most of all, I like the bars, where you go, you buy a drink, there’s nice little bits of food there you can eat, it’s all free.” You English! Crazy for something free, always, always.’
I laughed politely, but I rather agreed with last summer’s Englishman. The bar was laid out with such substantial nibbles, as Margaret would have called them, I was rather wondering in my impoverished way whether we could get away with not having dinner. Not the least of the issues that had arisen was that Silvia, considering the fact that I was saving on hotel bills, clearly thought that I ought to buy her dinner every night at a restaurant of her choice.
But that night I finally met Paulina. Silvia, I divined, had decided to keep her from me: enough of my friendship with the Quincys, or any potential one with their sister’s second husband’s stepmother’s half-nieces. The door to the flat next door was open when we got home, though inside there were no lights. It was a stifling evening. A languid wail came out of the open door, followed by a middle-aged woman emerging from the darkness in aquamarine kaftan and turban.
‘Oh, not again,’ Silvia said.
‘Oh, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘Be an angel. You know how hopeless I am. And I’d ask Paolo, honest to God, but—’
‘It’s not very difficult,’ Silvia said.
‘You say that, but— Well, hello there, I’m Paulina, how do you do – you remember, honey, the last time I somehow managed to put everybody’s lights out, it was simply a disaster,’ Paulina said. She had a curious voice, emphatic on each word, and with an accent not quite American, not obviously Australian. She could have been the product of a thorough elocutionist in any one of a dozen colonies. ‘You see,’ she explained confidentially, as if I were alone, ‘the lights here, they sometimes go out for no reason at all, and I know there’s something terribly simple you need to do in the basement …’
‘There’s just a switch, that’s all, and you pull, no – what is it you do with switches? You turn, you flick – is that right? You flick it and then it’s all OK, it’s simple,’ Silvia said, almost jumping up and down with rage.
‘Thank you a cartload, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘I know you don’t mind one bit when I need you to help me out.’
‘You, come with me,’ Silvia said. ‘Then you know what you need to do in case it happens again.’
It was as simple as Silvia had said. Paulina must have been some kind of genius to make a mess of it.
‘So that’s Paulina,’ I said, down in the basement.
‘Yes,’ Silvia said. She was decisive on the subject. And when we got back upstairs, Paulina’s light was restored.
‘I can’t imagine what I’d do without you,’ she said effusively, looking me up and down openly. ‘Come in and have a drink. I’ve got …’ her voice sank seductively ‘… I’ve got some Campari.’
‘Perhaps some other night,’ Silvia said.
It seemed to me, as the days went on, that the only understanding I had had of Silvia disappeared in her proper context. If in England she possessed a vivid and fascinating character, in Italy it was clear that I had not got much beyond discovering her to be Italian. In Italy, her reality dissolved, like a glass full of water in the ocean. I had no access to her real character, not having had the practice at reading it. It was partly my fault, for being satisfied with an exoticism that, after all, was banal even in Yorkshire. But partly, I think, it was hers, since in Yorkshire, in the Quincys’ house above all, she defined herself so entirely by what she was not as to appear nothing but an embodied foreign culture. In Italy, having nothing much in her repertory to fall back on, she settled for being sulky. So it was, inevitably, that at a loose end in Florence, I found someone who was conspicuous in her culture, like a photographic negative of Silvia clacking noisily down the aisle of a concert hall in England.
The next morning, as I was leaving Silvia’s flat, I saw that Paulina’s door was open again. Round the door unfurled a long white arm, like the frond of a fern, followed by Paulina’s head, the hair braided and twisted. Inside, the curtains were still drawn; she was in her peignoir.
‘Honey,’ she said huskily, her voice lowered for the sake – I guessed – of Silvia, ‘you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’
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Philip Hensher
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Ten daring stories from ‘a writer who seems capable of anything’ (Guardian), the Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip HensherBackdrops vary in this collection of stories from the author of The Northern Clemency – from turmoil in Sudan following the death of a politician in a plane crash, to southern India where a Soho hedonist starts to envisage the crump and soar of munitions. Each story, regardless of location, reveals a great writer at the peak of his powers.