Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  Two months after the takeover, he was summoned by the new director of the subsidiary – a mild, nervous man, whose milky blue eyes, disconcertingly suggesting, of all things, grief, would not connect with Fred’s. Fred learnt, after hearing a great deal about the future of the company, that he was being sacked. The future of the company now did not interest him: he wondered why the man had told him all about it.

  He was not surprised. He was one of the last of the long-serving staff of the company to be dismissed in this way. Nor did it worry or frighten him. He saw in this sacking an opportunity to carry out the change in his life he had come to see as necessary. The settlement was generous, amounting to fifteen months’ pay; the new owners were impatient to begin work, and had little stomach for legal disputes.

  With this neat exchange of years for months, and months for money, Fred saw a way to do something he had always wanted to do. He prepared for departure. He let his flat, bought a plane ticket, packed his bags. He had it in mind, for the first time in his life, to take a holiday for some other purpose than getting a suntan.

  ‘It was either that or Morocco,’ he said to the posse. ‘There was just this great deal going on with business class to India at the moment.’

  ‘That’ll be because they’re in the middle of a war,’ someone said. ‘You dizzy tart. At least you’ve got the combats.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m not about to discover myself, or anything.’

  They grinned at the idea that there was anything much of Fred to be discovered. Like the globe, by the beginning of the twenty-first century that terrain had been thoroughly gone over by all sorts of amateur explorers.

  Fred had arrived at the hotel in the dark. In England, the idea had been to have a butch, unplanned sort of holiday, rather than one with coaches and an itinerary. His vague general idea of working around the coast of the southern half of India had deposited him at Kollam towards the end of the afternoon. He didn’t quite know why he’d left the train here. Every time he heard someone mention the town, they gave it a different pronunciation. Quilon, Kwee Lung, Co-Lamb, Column. The ragged guide book had not been enthusiastic, saying only that it was a convenient point from which to explore the surrounding countryside. In fact it was a dirty, squat, scrubby little town, like any other. He hailed an auto-rickshaw, and told the driver to take him to a good hotel. Tomorrow he would set off for somewhere better. ‘Where are you coming from?’ the driver asked, after a mile or so.

  ‘Trichy,’ Fred said absently. The driver fell into a puzzled silence, but it was five minutes before Fred saw his mistake and said, ‘I mean, I come from England.’ The driver left the answer where it lay, wary of a man who was unsure of his origins. They drove on in silence.

  There were no hotels of any sort here, and they were soon in dark, wooded country. The driver appeared confident, and Fred did not query their direction. ‘Not very Thomas Cook,’ he said to himself, but it was hard to be camp and ironic on your own. After half an hour, they turned off the main road onto a rough track. By now it was dark, and the only light came from a few bungalows set back from the road. The few people they passed peered curiously into the rickshaw. A European now, in this time of war, counted as an event for them. Drowsily, Fred entertained the possibility that there was no hotel here, that he was about to be robbed and murdered.

  But the rickshaw climbed the slope, whinnied at the crest of the hill and, taking a steep descent into near darkness, came all at once upon the villa. They stopped, and the driver unloaded the bags. Fred offered him a hundred rupees, which he took without comment, driving off. The manager came out. Previous hotels had treated Fred like royalty instantly on his arrival; trains of anxious-eyed bearers had greeted him with ornamental drinks and floral tributes, promises of reduced rates and volumes of handwritten commendations. This man was indifferent. He did not even call Fred ‘my friend’. No one offered to carry Fred’s bag for him; no one emerged as they went into the hotel. It proved cheap, and the top-floor room plainly furnished and clean. The silence all around was absolute. For one night it would do. He went early to bed, sleeping without dreaming until eight in the morning.

  Fred made his way downstairs to breakfast. He wandered about the ground floor of the hotel before noticing that a single table had been laid on the lawn; clean and much-darned linen, and plastic-handled cutlery. He sat down in solitude, looking at the lake, the low sun, the forested hill at the far shore. Someone appeared. It was not the man from the night before, but someone younger. His hair was slicked down, and he was wearing a green velvet suit with a purple cravat. He was carrying a pot of coffee and a jug of milk, which he set down in front of Fred. Without saying anything, he went back into the hotel, and in stages brought out a breakfast: a plate of that pink-orange Indian fruit with its cotton texture and faint feety smell of Parmesan, a salty glass of brine-coloured lime juice, and a hot dish, a soft pancake filled with a sort of potato curry. Fred ate it all steadily, like a patient, his eyes on the eventless lake. No request had been made of him, no decision required. A boat drifted into view, a small canoe with two fishermen in it. They raised their hands, and Fred waved back. There was nothing to do, and nothing to think. When he had finished, and the dishes had been cleared away by the velvet dandy, he lit a cigarette peacefully.

  The day passed without narration or commentary, and for most of it, Fred sat by the lake, watching the sun move through the sky. He fetched his book, but after a few minutes, his attention lapsed; there was nothing in the landscape to watch, but all the same he watched it. Some time after ten, he remembered his camera, and got that from the room. Over the next hour, he took fifteen or so photographs, hardly moving from his chair. It was just when the view struck him as suddenly beautiful that he raised the camera. Sometimes he was photographing something new, a cormorant landing on a floating branch, a fishing boat. But mostly he was photographing the same thing, the lake. He could see how corny the photographs were going to look. It was more like a tribute to beauty than a record of it.

  Lunch came in the same way breakfast had, without consultation, and it was all delicious. Afterwards he fell asleep for a time in the sun. He considered going for a walk, and actually got up and strolled round the grounds; but then decided that it was too near sunset, and sat down to read a page or two more. The sunset held his attention, like pornography. It was odd to see a whole day like this, and when it was over, he gave a sigh and went inside to shower and rest before dinner. He had more or less forgotten that he was supposed to go on today, to the next place. Beyond the lake – beyond the hill – out there, the world was burning, the earth was beginning to roar. For the first time in his life, Fred felt something of all that, out there.

  The next day the Germans came, and quickly went. It was only on the fourth or perhaps fifth day that he came down in the evening and there were two tables set for dinner. Fred felt a tang of surprise and disappointment. Five minutes later, a girl emerged. She was white, deeply tanned, and tiny in her backpackers’ vest and khaki cargo pants. She looked at him, her nose wrinkling, and grinned. He started mildly – he supposed he must have been staring – as if some unobserved animal had slinked itself about his calves.

  ‘You had a quiet afternoon,’ she said. ‘Snoring, you were, when I got here. I thought, There’s a man without a care in the world.’

  ‘You should have woken me up,’ Fred said, but that was absurd.

  The girl raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever met anyone who the first thing they said it was about your snoring.’

  ‘No,’ Fred said, reflecting that this was not so; that quite often the first proper conversation he’d had with someone had begun with a breakfast complaint about his snoring, after the brisk Soho pickup, the taxi snog, the efficient one-off shag. No, it was quite often the first thing someone said to him. ‘Second impressions are best. Shall I sit here?’

  ‘Don’t mind,’ she said. Fred picked up his knives and forks, and transferred them to her ta
ble. The girl snorted with laughter – he couldn’t think why. ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘England,’ he said.

  ‘Just now, I meant,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said. Where have you come from, he thought. Where are you coming from; where do you come from. Odd that. A silence fell. He noticed after a time that it was his silence.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Boring question, I know. People always say that when they meet you here, where have you come from, where are you going. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Fred said. ‘Madurai, it was. No, Trichy.’

  She made a gesture with her hand, as if winding up an invisible crank, encouraging him to go on. ‘It was nice,’ Fred said helplessly, and smiled, shrugging.

  ‘How long’s it been?’ the girl said.

  ‘Long?’ Fred said.

  ‘You’re funny,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t look so scared. I’m not going to eat you. I mean since you’ve been in India, since you’ve opened your mouth and had a conversation, you know, with words. Me, it’s just a couple of weeks. I’m still normal, I can still talk, you know, but I’ve seen it before. After a bit, you get so you can’t talk or you can’t stop talking, one or the other. I’ve seen it before, don’t worry, I don’t mind. Oh, boy, that man – where was it? Madras – I just said hello and it was like you’d pulled a plug out, he couldn’t shut up, and then half an hour later he was following me down the road. Couldn’t shut up. You’re the other way, I can tell. Hello!’ she said quite abruptly, in a Minnie Mouse voice, grinning and waving with both hands from three feet away. ‘My name’s Carrie, what’s yours?’

  ‘Fred,’ Fred said. He was appalled.

  ‘Oooh,’ the girl said. ‘Here comes dinner.’ But then the waiter, who had been coming out of the villa with a tray of food, appeared to think twice. He turned back. ‘Ah, well,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you say something?’

  ‘You know,’ Fred said, ‘people are always saying to me, why don’t you say something. Well, not always, but I can remember a few times when someone’s said it to me and I couldn’t think of anything to say back. I did German in school, years ago now, and I don’t know why – well, yes, I do, it was that or geography or technical drawing and I thought, You never know when you’ll need a bit of a foreign language, do you? Four years I did it, but the only thing I can remember is the one afternoon Mrs Thornton said, “And what goes in the gap in this sentence, Frederick?” and I just sat there and then she said, “Why don’t you say something?” and I said, “What would you like me to say?” Funny, really, because there have been quite a lot of occasions in my life when someone has said to me, “Why don’t you say something?” and I always say back, “What would you like me to say?” And you know what? They never tell you. There was once a boy, and I’d been seeing him for a while, a year or two even, suddenly said to me that he’d met someone else, and then we had the why-don’t-you and the what-would-you-like conversation, Richard his name was. But what would you say? Good luck, I hate you, oh, fancy that? And then a month or two back, when I got the sack, I knew it was coming, I did, so I didn’t have anything much to say, and my boss said it. “Why don’t you say something?” Funny, really. It doesn’t really matter who it is but they tell you something. You know it’s coming whatever it is, or you don’t know it’s coming but there’s nothing to say. And they want you to say something. They always do. And you don’t know what to say and they don’t know what to say but still they say it. Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you say something? And sometimes you want to shut your eyes and close your mouth and say nothing because there’s nothing to say. Nothing.’

  Fred stopped talking for a moment. He was out of breath. It was eight in the morning, the next day. He was alone in his room before breakfast. A sound had attracted his attention outside. He cocked his head; he lowered the fist he had been making to the empty room. The bed was rumpled with his sleep, the blue canvas bedspread tossed to the floor. On the bedside table was a green plastic flask of boiled water, his watch and his untouched book. The noise came again, a call. He didn’t know how loud he had been. There was no telephone in the room to blame his talking on. Stealthily, like someone stalking a cockroach in the dark, he went step by step through the balcony doors into the day. Down there was the girl from last night, her face upturned like a flower, her hands behind her back. He waved uncertainly down at her.

  ‘Hello, Mr Fred,’ she called up. ‘Look!’ She spun round and pointed, there, there, there, lake, trees, villa, before turning back to him with a great smile. The morning woke again for him with the clean magic it had displayed on his first morning, and she had woken it for him with a sorceress pointing. ‘Look!’

  ‘I know,’ Fred said, smiling despite himself. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Oh, you’re dressed,’ Carrie said. ‘Come down. I was just thinking—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Fred said. It was true, it was beautiful; the long lax passage of days had veiled the lake’s beauty without him noticing, and the girl had shown it to him again. He hurried, gratefully. She was already talking when he came out onto the lawn.

  ‘… wouldn’t be a bore, I mean, I was going to head off today, but I might as well stay, and I’ve got no plans otherwise. You’re not going on today, are you? You didn’t say. I mean why not? It could be fun, the guide says it’s fun.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Fred said, divining that at some point she had suggested something. ‘But I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘You’re funny,’ Carrie said. ‘You’re not going on anywhere today, that’s all I was saying.’

  ‘No,’ Fred said. He didn’t know how long she had been standing there, but now that there were two of them, the waiter came out to lay the first stages of their breakfast.

  ‘So I was wondering,’ Carrie said, ‘if you’d like to go somewhere today with me. It could be fun. Did you get a newspaper today? I didn’t get one.’

  ‘No,’ Fred said. ‘I don’t think they give you one here.’ He stopped talking and just looked. ‘It’s lovely here.’

  ‘Laavly,’ Carrie said, making a joke of it.

  After breakfast, they had agreed to drive to Kollam together. Fred didn’t mind the idea now. He had never been a solitary person, and already his lone travelling started to strike him as an uncharacteristic interlude, an attempt to be a person he could never be, like – what it was – a holiday from the self. He waited on the steps of the villa. Carrie might prove the beginning of some new posse, as if in a week or two he and she and five others, friends yet to be made, would be hilariously trolling the bars of some south Indian city.

  It was true, what she said, that this hotel did not supply you with a morning newspaper. Every hotel he had stayed in until now had done so; the luxurious mock-Mughal palace in Madras, the overstaffed and dusty towers in Trichy, Madurai, Tanjore. They had been local papers, but still they were the same stories, the same slow terror that was on the front pages of every newspaper in the world in these black months. He had never been a habitual reader of newspapers; he preferred the sort of magazines that depicted the lives and taste and marriages of rich people. Even Hello!, however, seemed to find itself discussing threats and violence and bloodshed among distant people; even breakfast television’s chipper sequence of innuendo and natter was intruded into, once an hour, by a minute or two of sinister declarations, of brisk body-counts. It could not be avoided, the outside world, and Fred had not missed the free newspaper.

  But all the same there was a presence in his mind that had not been there before, an expanse stretching behind the immediate and particular events of his life, and this journey. It was like the lake, behind everything, like an atmospheric backcloth. Sometimes, in the last few days, he had found himself envisaging the crump and soar of munitions flying over borders only a few hundred miles to the north of the quiet Keralan lake. At first the images of war were as clean and swift as Hollywood fireworks, but he could not prevent the camera in his mind zooming in; the
imagined ka-pow of the rockets always seguing into the noises people made. The thoughts ran their course, and perhaps for the first time in his life Fred found the vivid imagery giving way to intense fruitless speculation about wrongs and global grievances. He had not been paying attention, and could not answer his own questions, never having thought that they might one day become urgent to him. The questions would not go away. It surprised him; he surprised himself.

  He waited for Carrie outside the empty hotel. The train of thought ran its course, but then it was exactly the unenvisaged emptiness of India that encouraged such speculations. Involuntary and inept, they were provoked by the painful absence of European tourists. The floral tributes were disconcerting enough, but it was a single recurrent gesture that most unnerved Fred. He would walk down a road in a temple town, and a row of faces would turn slowly and watch his progress. On his return, the faces would monitor that progress, too. It happened again and again. It was like a slow-motion film of the crowd at Wimbledon, swivelling their necks. The acclamations and curiosity his presence inspired puzzled him at first – it was more of a burden than a pleasure, this sudden celebrity. But there were no other Europeans around, or very few. It was then that he started to think about the war.

  Fred was not a stupid man, but the furniture of his mind was randomly and unhelpfully arranged, as if supplied by others; a flat-pack of parts without the necessary tools, and instructions in Japanese. The sense that the mental furniture had been supplied by others was not so false. What he knew had been donated by the posse and people like them, and he had acquired little by his own efforts, but by listening to informed members of the posse going on about Tiepolo, or whoever. None of it had arrived by the more conventional routes of reading a book or a newspaper. Fred wondered how he had ever come to know the name of the prime minister without, as far as he remembered, anyone ever mentioning it over a vodka and Red Bull in a gay bar.