Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Do you want to sit with us?’ she said. ‘You can eat your packed lunch with us, if you want.’

  They divided in the middle, making a space for James Collins, and he sat down, squatting awkwardly without saying anything. He opened his box with a sudden, unformed, almost angry gesture.

  ‘But you’ve got …’ Miranda said, glancing into it.

  In James Collins’s box there was not the variety, the abundance, the evidence of care that the others had found in their boxes, all last week. In it there were only six sandwiches, squashed and malformed as if sat upon, all out of damp, cheap white bread. The filling was seeping through, like blood through a shirt, and smeared all about the inside of the box. It was red jam that James Collins had filled his sandwiches with, and nothing else.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything else?’ Joshua said, tactless and incredulous. ‘Have you only brought jam sandwiches for your lunch?’

  ‘James Collins brought nothing but jam sandwiches for his lunch?’ Miranda said.

  ‘Shut up, Joshua,’ Teresa said. ‘James Collins likes jam sandwiches. He can have jam sandwiches for his lunch if that’s what he wants.’

  She thought that was helpful and kindly, but James Collins shot her a look of pure hostility. He had made them himself – that was obvious: no mother’s hand had been responsible for those sad torn objects – and perhaps had not been able to take more than the end of the loaf and a few knifeloads of jam, what he might be expected to eat anyway when he got home from school.

  ‘I’ve got tuna,’ Michael Brown announced. ‘I don’t like it that much. Do you want one of mine? Do you like tuna?’

  ‘I’ve never had it,’ James Collins said. His voice was harsh and mechanical, grinding out the words one by one; he spoke like a poor reader, making sense of the page before him as best he could.

  ‘You’ve never eaten tuna?’ Miranda said. ‘Tinned tuna, Michael means, not fresh tuna. I’ve only had fresh tuna once, on holiday in Italy. It was gorgeous. He doesn’t mean he’s got tuna sandwiches from fresh tuna. That would be really stupid.’

  ‘I’ve definitely had it,’ James Collins said. ‘It was a long time ago, though. I can’t remember exactly. What is it? Is it fish?’

  ‘It’s not really fish,’ Michael said. ‘I don’t know what it is. It’s not like the fish you get in fish-and-chip shops, but I think it might be a fish originally.’

  ‘I’ve had tuna loads of times, hundreds of times, but I don’t know that I like fish,’ James Collins said, his tone not changing at all with the change of his statement, but in a moment he reached out his hand, his thin fingers trembling, rippling towards the out-held sandwich, its gestures all tentative and deniable, as if prepared to snatch itself back if the offer turned out to be a humiliating joke. But it was not, and he took it. Michael released the sandwich gently. They all watched as James Collins brought it to his mouth, sniffing discreetly. Then he put it into his mouth and they all started to talk at once.

  Somebody must have spoken to Miranda during the afternoon. The class was supposed to be doing a poll on how much TV they were allowed to watch during the week, so everyone was milling round the teaching area. Miss Clarke was sitting at the front of the class – there was no front and no back, that was the idea, but there were still parts where the teachers stood or sat, and parts where the naughty boys clustered to be out from under her eye. Miranda, going round with her notebook, approached James Collins first, talking to him quite earnestly, then the others. ‘We’re going to have the snowball fight tonight, I’ve decided,’ she said, sitting down with a great tired adult flump at Teresa’s table. ‘And I’ve asked James Collins to come, too.’

  ‘You hate James Collins.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I don’t hate anyone. Don’t be so immature.’

  ‘You said he’s poor and he lives in a maisonette, and today you laughed at him for bringing jam sandwiches for his lunch.’

  Miranda gave rather an affected sigh. ‘I would never say anything so immature. Whoever said that, I’m going to ask James Collins to forgive them.’

  ‘Do you think he cares what you say about him, anyway?’ Teresa said.

  Miranda stared. ‘Of course he cares. He wants to be our friend. Why do you think he brought his raspberry jam sandwiches, anyway? He wants to sit with us, and I for one …’

  Teresa left it: when Miranda said, ‘I for one,’ there was no further argument to be had.

  So they found themselves, three hours later, in Miranda’s garden. It was shaded by two large trees, a holly tree and an elm, both much older than the house or the estate, one to the left, the other to the right. A bench circled the trunk of the elm, and a filigree green-painted cast-iron table stood by the side, loaded with two jugs of squash, some crisps and – Mrs Cole had almost gone too far with her spontaneous and party-like offerings – a plate of cold chipolatas. In the middle of the lawn, in a perfectly circular island of gravel chippings, a cherry tree, the fruit, like bright vermilion marbles, scattered among the foliage.

  ‘Where are the snowballs?’ James Collins said. He seemed determined not to look around him at the smooth garden, the eight-windowed back of the house under the Tudor roof, the shining expensive carp pond or the Japanese bridge over the rockery.

  Teresa decided to put him at his ease. ‘Miranda will get them,’ she said. ‘Let’s get into teams for the fight first.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Miranda said. ‘A midsummer snowball fight doesn’t work like that. Don’t you know anything?’

  She did not wait for an answer, but went into the house, trotting on the white slingbacks she had changed into. ‘How does it work?’ Teresa said.

  ‘Miranda says it’s different,’ Sam said. ‘She’s going to tell us how.’

  She was coming back with a large plastic picnic hamper, made to preserve frozen goods, and a length of twine on top of it. ‘It’s quite easy,’ she said. ‘This is the way a midsummer snowball fight goes. There’s one person who agrees to stand up against a wall, or a tree, or something like that. And the others agree that they’ll throw snowballs at him. It’s easy, really.’

  ‘Who’s going to be the one person?’ Santosh said, but he was looking already at James Collins, and Teresa found that she, too, was looking at James Collins. Over the surface of his face was running the memories of humiliation: of the jam sandwiches of that day, all that could be contrived to get him into their company; of lawns and Japanese bridges and a maisonette in Powell’s Bottom; and of what must be endured. Perhaps all of that, and the knowledge that on the other side of some humiliation might lie acceptance. Or perhaps none of that at all was on his face: only fear.

  ‘Now,’ Miranda said, ‘James, you stand here against the tree, and we’ll fasten you to it. Like that. Yes: just stand still.’ There was a croak of excitement in her voice. ‘Hold the end of the string, and Joshua, you run round till he’s tied fast.’

  In five minutes the thing was done; James Collins stood wrapped fast against the tree, his head and shoulders left free, his arms tied against his sides. They had done it silently, and with none of the Red Indian yelps that might have come in different circumstances. Miranda opened the box, and inside were the preserved snowballs. Teresa took one; it did not feel like a winter snowball, but hard, frozen, stone-like. On its surface were the marks of some other hand, she did not know whose. It was already beginning to slick and to melt, the ice of its casing liquid under her warm palm, in that warm afternoon.

  ‘Santosh, you throw first,’ Miranda said, and Santosh threw underarm, from five yards distance; it hit James Collins’s side and bounced off without breaking or disintegrating, as snowballs do in winter when thrown in fun. ‘That was pathetic,’ Miranda said, and Cathy threw hers harder, just missing his head, landing on the lawn beyond intact. Sam and Joshua were next, Joshua scoring a direct hit on James Collins’s head. Then Teresa, then Miranda, who threw hers harder than any of them, running up almost to James Collins, and throwing it dir
ectly in his face. He gave a little grunt, but no more noise of pain; he seemed determined to get to the end of this without showing weakness. Only Miranda’s snowball had broken on impact, and it was soon discovered that these midsummer snowballs, preserved in the chest freezer for the moment of their liberation, could be thrown more than once, could be picked up and chucked again, and again, until the midsummer sun melted them. There were more snowballs in the picnic box, and soon they were picking them up, dirty, tainted with handprints and the fibres of mittens, and throwing them without much sense of order, one after the other in James Collins’s face.

  ‘Look,’ Miranda shouted with joy. ‘He’s crying.’ And he was, but not only that: about his mouth, blood was running from where a lump of hard ice had hit him in the eye, or the nose. ‘I know where you live,’ Miranda was calling in a fit of savage joy. ‘I know you only live in a maisonette, James Collins.’

  ‘He’s hurt, stop it,’ Teresa cried; her missile had dropped to the ground, half melted. But Miranda paused, took stock of James Collins’s mask of tears and blood, raised her last snowball, ran up to him, and almost smacked him in the mouth with a mess of fist and ice and blood. Santosh was already behind James Collins, untying him.

  And then, all at once, James Collins was gone, pushing his way past Mrs Cole, at the garden gate with some more crisps in a bowl. ‘Let me call your mother,’ she was saying. ‘I’m not happy about letting you make your own way home. I’m sure your mother would be happy to come and pick you up …

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I hope he hasn’t got far to go.’

  ‘He lives in Powell’s Bottom,’ Sam said.

  ‘Powell’s Bottom? Does he really? That’s near Tattercliffe, isn’t it? I don’t really know. Oh dear. I haven’t seen him before – whose friend was he?’

  ‘We don’t really know him,’ Miranda said, flushed and breathless. ‘I don’t know why he came.’

  ‘Well, it’s a shame things had to end like that,’ Mrs Cole said. ‘I expect he’ll be all right in five minutes, no harm done. Who’s for some more nibbles?’

  Many years later, Teresa – nowadays Tess – was at a dinner dance in the city. Her marriage hadn’t worked out: she had been persuaded there by a colleague. ‘Get a babysitter, leave the kids,’ the colleague had said. ‘How are you ever going to meet another man, staying at home?’

  In the hotel ballroom, she went from group to group. She saw herself, a small, nervous woman with a practical haircut, wearing the same posh frock that she had worn last year and the year before, always on the edge of a group, always late for the joke. After half an hour, she was standing between much taller men in a circle, when one of the group said, ‘James Collins.’ The name was familiar, she could not say why.

  ‘I used to know someone called James Collins,’ she said, when the conversation seemed to have run its course for the moment and her associations had pinned the reason down.

  ‘I hope it’s not the same one,’ the man who had spoken said, a sweaty-faced accountant type with a white carnation in his dinner jacket. ‘This one ran off with half my clients and then came back for my wife.’

  ‘Let’s be fair,’ a woman with a hard face and a geometric bob said. ‘Your wife ran after him. He didn’t have to do much running in that direction.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ the fat man said. ‘But he’s got a nerve, showing his face here tonight.’

  The group turned, and their collective subdued attention focused on a man alone at a table, tapping impatiently on the white cloth. ‘Bit of a smoothie,’ someone murmured. Tess had no memory of James Collins’s appearance, of the one she had known and seen pelted with the midsummer snowballs in Miranda Cole’s garden. She had only a collection of verbal attributes, and this one – neat-faced, bold-eyed, his smooth grey head the possible consequence of pitch-black hair – did not contradict those descriptors, that was all. She had no idea. What struck her was that the boy’s flight, whatever had happened to him, had left such a trough of guilt and repentance in her mind. The guilt grew as she acknowledged that the boy James Collins could have died at some intervening moment, that his life could have disappeared into the mass of humanity, or it could have led him to a table in the same northern town, tapping his fingers on the tablecloth, and not caring whether he was observed or not. Yes: it could be him. But it was a common name – she had seen it on other occasions and in other contexts, and in a moment the man stood up and walked in another direction.

  In Time of War

  The Germans had stayed only one night. Fred was glad of it. They had arrived in a mood of resentful ruddiness, and had kept it up until their departure the next morning. Here, at the southern end of India, they had been discordant and unwelcome. Fred’s eye had grown used to a different human scale, to seven-stone Dravidians in crowds, and even his morning reflection in the wardrobe mirror had started to strike him as indecent. The manager of the lakeside hotel, tapping away in his office trying to get onto the internet, had taken the same view. Far from being pleased at this addition, he had looked the two Germans up and down and done his best to get rid of them immediately. He refused to give them any discount, although he had only one other guest. He gave way grudgingly – there were no other hotels for miles – and showed them to the worst room. Fred had glimpsed it when the door had been left open earlier that day, and knew it was horrid, dark and dirty, with a view over the kitchen dustbins. It was quite unlike his top-floor room, empty and luminous with a balcony giving over the lake. Perhaps it was kept for such a purpose as this, and a colony of cockroaches tenderly nurtured.

  The war, a few hundred miles north, had emptied the hotels of India. All that long hot night Fred sat by the side of the lake, thinking nothing very much, enjoying each new eruption of complaint from the Germans. The food, the towels, the bed, the light-switches, the nation. It was as interesting as the battles of small-scale wildlife. They ignored him. There was the noise, calm as milk, of the lake lapping at the shore beyond the villa’s veranda, and then absolute starry blackness. Moonless unfeeling felt. In the morning, the Germans paid their bill with noisy outrage and departed in a taxi, a white Ambassador, which, with its squashed front and its engine complaint, reminded him of an old boxer trundling into a boastful retirement. Fred and the manager watched them go, and enjoyed a moment of sly, unspoken satisfaction. The manager sat on one of the benches, and raised a smiling eyebrow at his only guest. They sat listening to the car groan up the track and away. There were the ghosts of two quite different smiles on each face. When the car’s noise had quite faded away, the manager turned to the lake and gave himself up to the luxuriant, old-fashioned poetry of the day. It was as if the two of them were quite alone. Fred found that flattering. He would stay a while longer here.

  When people told Fred he was a dizzy tart, he could not plausibly deny it. But if they referred to his ‘gang’, his ‘crowd’, his ‘cronies’, he would counter the distaste with a short smile and by saying, ‘It’s more of a posse, really.’ He was always pleased to know that the arrival or assembly of the posse in one of their five regular London bars attracted not just attention but often alarm. They had gravitated towards Fred, one by one, until he was at the centre of a little court; noisy, handsome and scathing, they were the object of envy of strangers who, finding them impermeable by duller or plainer applicants, often described them as a clique. Fred was rather thrilled by that, and even egged acquaintances on when they voiced their resentment. He had always preferred the company of foreigners to that of his own nationality, and the posse, made up as it was of half a dozen nationalities, might have been assembled for the purpose of making him shine in public. His most cherished evenings were those that began at eight in a Soho bar, and ended twelve hours later, as the posse lay about on the sofas of some bewildered boy they had somehow acquired on their yellow-brick route, and shouted, indefatigably, with laughter.

  As the years went by, however, the posse had begun to shrink as, one after the other, the fo
reigners took a graceful bow, and returned to their birthplaces, summoned by promotion, love or duty. Christian, who for years had been intermittently pursuing some tiny academic point in the British Library, finally exhausted the munificence of the German government and had to take a job as an administrator in the Pinakothek at Dresden. Max went to Chicago for three months to take the lead in a new play, was discovered and never came back. Each departure was marked by a Soho bender in the grand style, and from time to time a new member of the posse was acknowledged, in order to fill a gap. Still, Fred’s posse was not what it had been, and sometimes, at thirty-five, he was uncomfortably aware that those who had remained were the least adventurous and dashing of the original group. From always being the one who would pursue the evening to its last moment, Fred became the one who, quite often, would go home before closing time, on the tube. When two of the staunchest members of the posse fell in love with each other and started living a life of quiet domesticity, Fred said to himself that enough was enough. He decided to take radical action before he found that his life had diminished to a quiet pint up the road on his own in a cardigan, farty old Alsatian at his feet.

  Fred had always longed to have a career of a random and unlikely nature, the despair of his parents, but in the event had worked steadily for the same clothing chain for fifteen years. He had slowly risen to a position of responsibility, managing all the chain’s London shops. Just as he had decided that the state of his social life justified some radical alteration, an event took place that would make this possible. The firm he worked for had, for many years, existed almost outside fashion, the dowdy butt of urban jokes and the safe choice of country matrons. It was acquired by a conglomerate. The conglomerate was newly under the control of a viciously successful young American designer. Fred knew what that meant.

  It would not be true to say that Fred, in those fifteen years, had not changed. In some respects, he had altered a great deal. His name, which at school had been something borrowed from a great-uncle, changed its nature in the early eighties. As Freddie, Fred rode the snobbish aspirations of the time. It was now perfectly incredible to him that he had once gone to nightclubs with a cricket sweater draped round his neck. Later, he reverted to Fred. In the interim that had become a name of fascinating urban style. With his name, he scrupulously altered his dress, his behaviour, even his accent.