Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘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 pas
sed 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.