Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘She’s not at work today,’ Lucy was saying. ‘She’s only got two weeks to go before she’s off permanently on maternity leave. Well, I say permanently – it’s only six months. It’s not much. She was wondering whether she should be wearing the heels to the do last night at all, whether she’d be better advised to go in flatties. But she’s like me, she wants to be glamorous. She should be in work today, but I know she’s not. She was planning to call in sick today, she said they’d not care, it only being two weeks before she’s off anyway. Are you all right there? Tuck you in. Do you want a blanket? It’s not cold, but if you want one, I’ll get you one.

  ‘And off we go,’ Lucy said. For the first time he could remember, she plucked out the mobile phone from one of her pockets, and stabbed at it with both thumbs. She sighed, put it back, and started the car. ‘It’s been a while since you’ve been out. Do you fancy going anywhere? Not to get out, just to have a look as we drive through.’

  Toby thought, but nothing came to mind. The high street was astounding, full of people. What were they doing? What did their lives contain, so separated from Toby’s long days in his interior? He must have seen them so many times before, been part of them, walked among them with no sense of detachment or ecstasy, never been overcome by the shimmer and flash of life reflected in the polished glass of the front of Sainsbury’s shop; never seen with a full view the promise and meaning of people, animals, properties going between the long history of buildings and the lives they contained and still would contain. The dizzy quality of light held all of these for him as, with an invalid’s eyes, he reflected on the unconscious world of the healthy. Could they see him? Driven by Lucy, he was not sure. And after a pause at the traffic lights, the rich openings of the high street proved to be only a preface, because in a moment of splendour the forgotten possibilities of the Common were before them, the shining round of the pond, the tall outlined possibilities of the white noble church, and beyond that, the green and brown atmospheres piling up in the radiant clarities of the Common itself. He had not thought there were such spaces in London, any more.

  ‘I think I’d like to go to the butcher’s shop,’ he said eventually. ‘The posh one over there.’

  ‘We’ll go on the way back,’ Lucy said reassuringly. ‘If that’s what you’d like. We’ll get something nice for your tea, if you feel up to it. She’s in South Clapham – well, she says Battersea, actually, but it’s hardly even South Clapham, it’s more like Balham borders. I don’t really know where these things begin and end. You’re in Clapham proper. I wish she’d text me.’

  ‘Look at that,’ Toby said, meaning the boy running across the vast expanse of the Common, a kite high above his tipped-back head. To run like that!

  ‘My sister’s on at me to sort out my life,’ Lucy was saying. ‘She never shuts up. When I told her about this date tonight – the date I sorted out through Tim I was telling you about – she said, Oh, you mustn’t do that, you don’t know what they’re like. But I’ve told her all about it, I’ve told you, I’ve told everyone, so I’m not going to get kidnapped or murdered or anything. It’s quite safe, Tim.’

  ‘I don’t really know who Tim is,’ Toby said.

  ‘It’s not a who,’ Lucy was saying. ‘It’s a nap.’ Or that’s what he thought she said, but then she said, ‘It’s a dating app,’ and he remembered what those were, or nearly. ‘You put in your details, and he puts in his details, and you go on a little shopping expedition, and you chat a bit, and if he seems OK and you seem OK to him, then you might meet up. I’ve met some quite nice people through Tim. I’d tell you but I’d never tell my mum, and I don’t know that it was a good idea to tell Katy either, the way she goes on about it. We can’t all be like her with a steady boyfriend going to antenatal classes alongside.’

  The glow and song and lightness of the world beyond the windows was gone now. Toby felt tired, or that phase of the body that he summed up by using those words – a tremor, a pressure, at the extremities of wrist and leg and a pressure on the part of the chest where you might breathe and even eat. The world seemed to be going past too quickly now. He closed his eyes and it was gone. When he opened them again he did not know where he was. The car had stopped and it was in a street with large houses set back from the road, mature trees to either side. He was in the passenger seat of a car, parked to the side of the road. He felt shaky: his hand when he held it out had a tremor in it, and when he pulled down the mirror in the sunshade against the windscreen, the face in it was white and frightened. A woman in her sixties, a well-dressed woman in a brilliant yellow coat and a headscarf, was standing across the road inspecting him. In a moment, she crossed the road, her polished handbag swinging with purpose, and rapped on the window of the car. Toby wound the window down.

  ‘I don’t think you can sleep here,’ she said; her voice was patrician but regretful, kindly. ‘You’ve been asleep for half an hour at least. I think you’re going to have to move on, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m waiting for someone, actually,’ Toby said.

  ‘You’re lucky that the traffic wardens haven’t been along,’ the woman said. ‘They’re a holy terror in St Bartholomew’s Avenue, patrolling up and down like soldiers on an exercise. Are you all right? You look rather unwell.’

  ‘I should be all right,’ Toby said. He tried to remember how it was that he’d come here, and in a moment he remembered that he had been driven. If he could just stay here for a few minutes then the person who drove him would drive him back safely, and then everything would be quite all right. ‘I live in Clapham,’ Toby said.

  ‘Well, you’re not so very far from home,’ the woman said. ‘But I don’t think you can sit here all day. People might think you were casing the joint, you know.’

  He did not know what to say to that and, quite at once, he felt extremely ill. The head he seemed to be in was expanding and yet stony, inflexible, and great invisible rocks were inflating within his mouth. He could not breathe. Soon it would be time to go home but how he was to find his way home he did not know. The woman standing outside the car might help him. He was in a car and he did not know how he had got into the car and how he had been taken to this place. The word Lucy came into his mind. He opened his eyes, not being quite aware that he had shut them, and although he did not feel quite as good as he should, the pitch and toss of the world had subsided. In darkness it could be anywhere and he could be anywhere. He opened his eyes again in experiment and the street was as it had been. The woman who had spoken to him from outside the car had gone. A different woman was opening the car door and getting in.

  ‘I don’t feel all that well, Lucy,’ Toby said.

  ‘Did you want Lucy?’ the woman said, and now Toby looked at her and found that she was not someone he had ever seen before. ‘You’re Toby, aren’t you? I’m Lucy’s sister’s flatmate – I’m Minnie. She was lucky – it was my day off. I was just lazing about the flat. I’m so sorry. I wanted to come and bring you in, it was all taking so long, but we came out and you were fast asleep. You looked so peaceful Lucy said to leave you be. It’s quite a performance. The famous shoes – they’re not here. It took us twenty-five minutes to establish that elementary fact, and now it turns out that Charlotte, Lucy’s sister, she left them at her friend Giuseppe’s last night. How she came home and in what condition, I really don’t know. Shoeless.’

  ‘Is Lucy …’ Toby said. He felt there was a question he needed to ask.

  ‘She’s all right, but it’s all proving a touch more complicated than she thought. She’s gone to Giuseppe’s, he’s only round the corner. I thought she’d driven there but she just sent me a message, can you believe it, saying she came out of the house and was so focused on the shoes and how to get to Giuseppe’s that she totally forgot she had you sitting outside at all. She says she walked but I don’t see how she can have done. She must have taken a taxi. So she says can I drive you home and she’ll come back very shortly and she’ll get another taxi, just once she’s
got her shoes from Giuseppe. She shouldn’t be more than an hour all in all. I’m so sorry about all of this.’

  Toby shut his eyes again.

  ‘You’re ill, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said. ‘I’m very ill. I should be at home.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Toby said. ‘I haven’t been outside for weeks.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be outside now,’ the woman said. ‘Shall I drive you home?’

  ‘I don’t have the keys,’ Toby said.

  ‘House keys or car keys, do you mean?’ the woman said. ‘Because she’s actually left the car keys in the ignition, look. Very unlike her, planning ahead.’

  ‘I don’t have either,’ Toby said.

  ‘And no one at home to let you in, I suppose. And no key under the doormat, I hope. Right,’ the woman said.

  It struck him that in that other world, where he once had lived, men like him had left the house with a number of important props for their future convenience. There was the car key, and there was the house key, neither of which he now had. He would be taken from place to place and deposited like luggage. And there was the wallet, which contained money for any important purpose and the cards that went with money. He felt in his pockets, but there did not seem to be any wallet there. There was a hard rectangular lump, but that was not his wallet. He remembered that he was hoping to go to the butcher’s shop later, that he really wanted to go to the butcher’s shop, but now he did not know whether he could. He fetched out the hard rectangular lump, and that was the other thing that people took out with them, that he had taken out with him: a mobile phone. He did not know the last time he had used or answered it, and placed it quietly on his lap.

  ‘Do you want to call Lucy?’ the woman said. ‘Was that what you wanted?’

  Toby was not sure. Outside, the other woman was standing at her gatepost. Now she had a small white dog in her arms, a terrier of some sort, and with its right paw she was imitating a sort of wave, a wave hello or goodbye.

  ‘There’s loony Georgina,’ the woman in the car said. ‘She’s always bringing her awful dog out to say hello to the street. Pay no attention. Shall we call Lucy? I know where she’s gone, it’s not far. We could just drive round there.’

  ‘I really wanted to go to the butcher’s shop,’ Toby said. ‘But I think it might be too late now.’

  The woman whose name was Minnie gave him a sideways look as she started the car. ‘It’s not late,’ she said. ‘It’s not lunchtime yet. Is it the butcher’s in Clapham you want to go to? They’re open until seven today, I happen to know. Is it all a bit much?’

  They began to drive off. When Toby opened his eyes again, they were on a dual carriageway, and the woman Minnie was explaining something.

  ‘It’s cruel, really,’ she said. ‘My sympathies are with you. My boyfriend’s looked into it a lot, and I must say, when it comes to my turn, I’m absolutely clear – I don’t want to drag on for months and years becoming a … just getting iller and iller. Just a quiet little pill and that’s the end of it, and everyone can remember you how you were. It’s simply tragic, though, you can’t do that, it’s against the law. My boyfriend says that by the time it comes to it – I’m only thirty-two – the law’s going to turn a blind eye. I don’t know. I think we’re going to have to confront it sooner or later. I’ve told him that he can just grind up the pill in my food if I can’t talk or move or anything, but he says he’ll just do it anyway, anyone would. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to go on like this. I’m like that, I just say what’s on my mind – it just comes out even if it’s a bit tactless. I don’t mean to offend. Are you all right there? Little bit comfy? Not far now.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ Toby said. He wanted to say that he felt ill, that he had to go home. But he knew that you did not say that to a stranger who was being very kind and driving you about. There were the first days of his getting to know Sonia – oh, years before. He did not know why he was thinking of them now. They were sitting on the steps in the concrete forum at the university, the little square surrounded by buildings where talk echoed and shouted so. They had been in the same class together; the girl with ginger hair piled up carelessly anyhow, sometimes with a pencil stuck in it, but they hadn’t spoken to each other until a couple of days ago. It had been in the queue at the canteen: he had been next to her and had said something, and she had noticed him. How would she summarize him – the ill man in the cardigan too big for him? No – that was now. The boy in the brown duffel coat his mum had thought was good for students, the boy with the bicycle that wasn’t quite like other people’s bicycles, the boy with a knack of jiggling his leg when listening to lectures? (He’d been told off about that, he remembered.) And now it was some days later. They’d met in the meantime; they’d talked, and now it was getting dark. It might even be a bit cold to be sitting there on the concrete steps, after eight, but he didn’t want to be the first to suggest going inside. They’d had their dinner, ages ago. They were talking about Italy: she’d been, the summer before, he’d always wanted to, he knew all about what he wanted to see in Rome, and she was laughing at him with amazement. She didn’t know half what he knew; she only knew a brilliant place just by the Tiber where the ice-cream was probably the best in the world, she’d gone back there twice a day all week, and once three times. She just didn’t know Rome as well as he did. She laughed and laughed. And then it struck him that he didn’t want to suggest going inside, and neither did she. It was like a projection into the thoughts of another human being, for the very first time in his life, and as silence fell she made a gesture: a gesture not suggesting that she was cold, but performing the sort of thing that a very cold person would do. It was an invitation, and in a moment he moved closer to her and did something in response. That was the beginning of everything and now he was dying and he was going to die.

  He did not know how far they had gone. He was woken by the twang of harps, somewhere close by, and opened his eyes at a sound he knew was familiar. Outside the car, three women and a man, a dark unkempt young man, were standing. He knew one of them: Lucy. It was her that was making the twanging noise, the sound of her mobile telephone receiving a message.

  ‘… told you about waiting outside the doctor’s in the rain, and the woman who sat on the wall?’ Lucy was saying.

  ‘No, actually,’ one of the other women said. ‘He was very sweet. I think he needs to go home, though.’

  ‘He’s back with us,’ the other woman said – she looked very much like Lucy, and now Toby remembered that they were visiting Lucy’s sister. She was round, swollen, gross in appearance, but like Lucy in the face. Was there something wrong with her? Then he understood that she was pregnant.

  ‘Got everything you need,’ the man said, bending down and giving Toby a wave through the windscreen with an immense, white and insincere smile. He tried to smile back.

  Lucy patted the supermarket plastic bag she held under her arm, leaned forward and kissed the girl who must be her sister. ‘Hope they do the trick,’ she said. ‘Minnie – you want a lift?’

  The other woman shook her head. ‘Take him straight home and put him to bed,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have brought him out. I’ll be all right.’

  Lucy smiled brightly, and for a moment it seemed to Toby that they were all just about the same person, that it hardly mattered whether Lucy or her sister or the other woman, whose name was Minnie, stepped into the car to be bright and cheerful and talk to him about ways in which death might strike, how death might be invited in and welcomed, how life might cease painlessly and with minimal inconvenience to anyone else. They seemed replaceable, well-balanced, differently aged but essentially the same. He wondered about the dark man. But then it was not Minnie or Lucy’s sister, whose name he did not know and whom he had not met, who opened the car and got in, tossing the shoes onto the back seat and giving him a broad open smile. It was Lucy herself.

  ‘Home then,’ she said. ‘So
rry it’s been such a palaver. You’re OK? I think we need to get you back into bed, mister.’

  ‘Can we do something first?’ Toby said.

  ‘No, no, nothing first,’ Lucy said, starting the car. A harp twanged about her person. ‘I bet that’s Sonia. God, I hope she hasn’t been phoning at home.’

  ‘I just wanted to do one tiny thing,’ Toby said.

  ‘Man, what are you like?’

  ‘Just to go to the butcher’s,’ Toby said. ‘Just to get a chicken for dinner. I really want to.’

  ‘It’s on the way?’

  Toby shut his lips tight, nodded. He thought it was on the way. He wasn’t quite sure. He definitely wanted to go to the butcher’s. He knew that Sonia liked to eat, and he wanted to present her with a gift, a surprise, a chicken.

  Much later in the evening, he was sitting in bed, feeling quite exhausted, and his wife was raging about the room. She had sacked the girl who had driven him about all day, had told her to go away and never come back. It was really quite impressive, like a scene from a detective drama, the things she had said. Sonia had tried to telephone, on the landline and then on his mobile, but had no response; she had tried many times. His mobile was out of batteries – he had no idea of the last time he had used it, or charged it. In the end she had come home, fearing that – well, she had just come home because that had seemed easier. And then she had waltzed in with him! What on earth did she think she was doing? There was some story about a pair of shoes, for Heaven’s sake, and they seemed to have pushed poor Toby out of the house and driven him about London. She had no idea if this was the first time it had happened, even. The girl must be mad. Lucy had gone. He hoped her date went well with the man called Tim, though he really thought that, however nice her shoes were, she now wouldn’t be in the mood to flirt, to put herself out and be attractive to the opposite sex. Toby wouldn’t say this to Sonia, when she got off the phone to whichever one of her friends she was now talking to, so exhaustingly. It was lucky that Sonia only had to find someone else to come in and sit with him on Monday, because it turned out that tomorrow was Friday and Sonia could work from home, and then it was the weekend when she was just at home. Phone calls to friends complaining about Lucy had been alternating with phone calls to agencies, acquaintances, leads of all sorts, trying to find a stand-in.