Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘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. ‘E
xcuse 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 Fl
orence 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.