Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  He was very sorry that he’d put Sonia to so much trouble and rage. They had entered the house with a beautiful gift for Sonia, a beautiful big chicken, offered because he loved his wife so much and never did anything for her, these days. He had taken her to Rome once: it had been their honeymoon. And today he had given her a chicken but had been greeted with trouble and rage. It had been nice of Lucy, really, though the after-effects weren’t so very pleasant. And she had in the end agreed to his one request, to a visit to the butcher’s shop in Clapham. It was a lovely shop. He’d always enjoyed going there. It was tiled and polished, and heaped high with glowing flesh, neatly carved and displayed in its pinks and browns, piles of sausages, of steaks, of inner organs and a shelf of well-thumbed cookbooks to give their waiting customers ideas. He was only sorry that he didn’t feel at all hungry. It looked so pretty. And the idea he’d had! A chicken! He had eaten it in the past, with his wife, just the two of them. He was sure that he had. He had seen it in his mind’s eye with a red ruffle round its neck, and white frills on its little upward-pointing legs, and to be honest, the chicken was almost as picturesque, the chicken that the butcher, red in his twenty-something face and with a shock of white-blond hair above the blue-and-white-striped apron presented to them on a square of greaseproof brown paper. It was a lovely thing to do. He would have to arrange for Lucy to be paid back. She had forgotten to mention it to Sonia when they had arrived home and she had been standing impatiently at the door, and Sonia had hardly given her an opportunity to speak before bundling Toby into his nightclothes and back into bed. But that was only justice. He had seen the butcher’s shop once more; its gleam and purpose, its use and its riches. It was more than anyone could ever eat in the rest of their eating lives, all that flesh, and Toby was both glad to have seen it once more, and hoped that at some point before he died, as he knew he would, he would be allowed to leave the house to walk the few hundred yards and see it all again.

  The Day I Saw the Snake

  Their lives went in different directions, and quite quickly. Not all of them stayed in touch, but when the ones who met up did meet up, their conversation could be stiff and unsure after the first happy embraces. In the kitchens of their parents across the suburbs, the same kitchens but the parents now old and frail, they would cry out; would mention a spouse or the children, left behind or despatched on a Boxing Day walk; would smile inarticulately. Then silence would threaten to fall like a curtain between them, thick, velvet, satisfied and smothering. They had known each other so well in those single weeks in the 1980s. Sooner or later, on those afternoons during the Christmas holidays, someone would say, ‘Do you remember – that afternoon when Stephen Cameron found the snake?’ And that would cue them in. They all remembered the afternoon when Stephen Cameron had run up the lawn and across the terraces shouting out, and everyone could add something different. It was like a communal story that everyone knew. The one thing that everybody remembered was Albert, coming across the lawn still playing his bassoon. He liked to play the opening phrase of The Rite of Spring in the open air, in the spring afternoon light. (It wasn’t the Easter holidays, but the summer week, they all agreed.) So he came across the lawn playing the opening phrase of The Rite of Spring, and finished it before taking the bassoon out of his mouth and saying a very Albert-ish thing. ‘Very sage beasts, snakes,’ he said. ‘But they don’t stick around to be gawped at. Lead me to it.’

  They didn’t all remember what Albert said in exactly the same words, but they all remembered the word ‘sage’. And Stephen Cameron had led Albert and Sally and Patrick and Katie down past the lake to the woods. They were all there, all the sextet, apart from Alan and Sam Thomas, who played the piano. They were off somewhere, they agreed. (Sam Thomas and Alan had stayed in touch. At those Christmas gatherings, they could add details from the second half of the story, the disconsolate and amused return.) Stephen Cameron led them to the exact place where he had seen the snake. Albert moved steadily, just behind Stephen Cameron. It was still there, Stephen Cameron said, pointing. Albert relaxed, his shoulders dropping, and said another very Albert-ish thing: he said, ‘I expect you’ll find, on investigation, that you’ve discovered the end of a rubber hose.’ And it was hard to see how even Stephen Cameron could have thought of it as a snake: it was the bright green that plastic hoses were. A gardener must have abandoned it at the end of the summer before.

  The story ended there, or it ended with them coming back up to the house. In the story – in their mind’s eye – they drifted up, carrying picnic rugs trailing on the grass, ankle-deep in the untrimmed wildness below the lawn. In their hands were their instruments: a flute for Patrick, a clarinet for Sally, and a bassoon slung over Albert’s shoulder, dashingly, perkily. They clambered onto the stone terrace, and with a sad smile back at the lovely afternoons of their eighteenth or nineteenth July, they stood at the open french windows of the house. That was what memory supplied. It was a substantial Edwardian manor house in the country, used for conferences and training weeks by the local authorities, and the doors stood constantly open. There was always some noise on the lawn to tempt people out, and Sam Thomas and Alan, who had been inside somewhere, came out as the rest of the sextet and Stephen Cameron came trudging up the hill, laughing. A couple of the littlies were there, too. They were standing with Susie Westerhagen, the strings’ tutor; she was smoking, as always. ‘What are you up to?’ Susie Westerhagen said, drawling in her amused and detached way, like a remote house with a beautiful view. She had some kind of supervisory role; pastoral, she said, like a shepherd with a colossal crook; and her pastoral role consisted of asking people what they were up to from time to time.

  ‘Stephen Cameron thought he had seen a snake,’ Katie said. ‘So we went to have a look at it.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Susie Westerhagen said, just as Albert was pointing out that there hadn’t been a snake, that it had been something else, a plastic hose or something.

  And that would have been that, except that one of the littlies just then dropped to her knees and was violently sick on the lawn. It was a viola player from the fifth desk wearing a skirt that only her mother could have made and a Festival of Youth Orchestras T-shirt from earlier that year; they recognized the blonde and scrubby top of her head, bent in rehearsals in studious terror in case she be picked on, bent over now in nausea. ‘Oh, God,’ Susie Westerhagen said. ‘Someone take her inside. That’ll be the sunstroke. It’s hotter than you think, out here.’

  Who was it, they always said, retelling this story years later, in the kitchen of one of the sextet? It was a fifth-desk viola player, they knew, but no one could think what her name was. Susie Westerhagen knew her name: she would have said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, take Diana’ – or Mandy or Polly – ‘inside and make her lie down in the dark for an hour.’ She would have known her name. That was her job. And phoning for a doctor from Ardlesford, she had done that. But what was the viola-playing littlie called? No one could remember any longer, and once a year, Albert could be relied upon to say at this point, ‘It wasn’t Karen Whitaker’s little sister, was it?’ and they would say, ‘No, Albert, Karen Whitaker’s little sister was very sensible, she’s a dentist in Crosspool nowadays.’ Because when the doctor emerged from the darkened room, he had a sharp couple of words with Susie Westerhagen, who had failed to notice not only that the littlie string players had got hold of a bottle of vodka but were sipping it in the afternoons in glasses of orange squash. Susie Westerhagen knew their names, but she couldn’t recognize drunkenness in children until they were sick, literally sick, on her shoes.

  ‘My God,’ Katie might say at this point, years later. ‘That orchestra – it would be closed down by the authorities nowadays. Letting thirteen-year-olds go off on their own to discover vodka and heavy petting.’

  ‘Heavy petting!’ Sam Thomas would say. ‘Heavy petting!’

  ‘That’s what we always used to call it,’ Katie would say. ‘That was the phrase for it, back then.’<
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  ‘For what?’ Sam Thomas said. ‘Does it just mean not quite having sex? I never knew.’

  ‘Oh, a bit of finger fun, I dare say,’ Albert said, who had somehow discovered his own funniness in the thirty years since the afternoon when he had discounted the snake. ‘No more than that. It was always warned against, though – you never described what you were doing as heavy petting.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever did it,’ Katie said. ‘Never, ever, ever. Of course I was terribly fat, right up until I went to Africa.’

  ‘Your relationship was with your oboe,’ Sam Thomas said. ‘And with your A-level grades, of course. You weren’t fat. Not in the way teenagers are fat now.’

  ‘I could have petted a little,’ Katie said. ‘Perhaps not very heavily. In between all the fretting. Fretting, fretting, fretting, then petting. It wouldn’t have done any harm.’

  They were at that moment when music was like a great door flung open onto the wide lawns out there, radiant and glowing, like an outlined cartoon of a landscape. The orchestra was assembled for a week’s residence and rehearsal there, in that house in the country. In the morning was the second symphony of Brahms and the third piano concerto of Beethoven and an overture by Shostakovich; in the evening was the same. Each of them went so deeply into every note, not skating over it, not merely producing it, but trying to think of every aspect of every note, how it should be produced, with what swelling depth of tone, trying to hear everything around them. Even the littlies did this, and they dreamt of D major. For the rest of their lives, sometimes a doctor or a solicitor who had once played the cello in the municipality youth orchestra would find themselves thinking with terror of the F sharp from nothing that began the slow movement of Brahms 2, and wondering once again what exactly Brahms meant by asking for poco forte. The days had that strength of purpose in them.

  In the afternoons they could do what they chose. Some sections met up for extra practice, especially the strings; others found a corner and prepared pieces of their own. Others went for walks in the countryside or, like the littlies, drank vodka and learnt how to smoke under the benignly oblivious nose of Susie Westerhagen, the strings’ tutor. Sally and Katie and Patrick and Albert had been in the orchestra for three years, since its founding; they all knew each other well from sectional rehearsals, and from sitting next to each other. That year, Katie and Patrick had both independently learnt a Poulenc sonata – the flute sonata, the oboe sonata – and before they knew it, the woodwind section was Poulenc-mad, everyone learning the horn Elegy (Alan), the bassoon sonata (Albert), the clarinet sonata (Sally). It was Patrick who mentioned the sextet for piano and wind. No one could think of another piece for quite that combination. Everyone liked Sam Thomas, who was a good pianist as well as playing the double bass, and they played it through. The long hot lazy cadences of the slow movement stole through the open windows of the music room, like perfume; they were crazy about it. The clocks all through the house moved in unison; they were called slave clocks, all tied to a central mechanism, which now, a hundred years on, was not quite right.

  ‘I wish I could play that now,’ Sam Thomas said. ‘I’m so out of practice. But what year was that?’

  It must have been 1983, the summer of 1983, because Sally had had her first year at Oxford, and had come back full of sophistication and human observation. She was a year older than the others, and able to advise them. Patrick and Albert were going to music college – they were going to make a fist of it – but the others had all got into Oxford or Cambridge. Katie had got into medical school, and was taking a year out to volunteer in Africa; Sam Thomas was going to do English at Oxford – there was always a book in his hand to deposit on the piano before he yawned and started on the fast scale, almost a savage glissando, that began the Poulenc sextet. That week it was Bleak House – he had stopped after the first movement at one rehearsal and just said, in a lowering voice, ‘Hope, joy, youth, peace, rest, life, dust, ashes, waste, want, ruin, despair, madness, death, cunning, folly, words, wigs, rags, sheepskin, plunder, precedent, jargon, gammon and spinach.’ Then he had given that nod that the pianist gave, and they started on the second movement, not getting very far before they laugh-spluttered to a halt. And Alan had got into Cambridge to read music. They were all doing well, and the windows, open to the summer day, sent the long, lazy serenade of twining winds out into the elm-shaded gardens where birdsong responded.

  There was another person in the room, often. Stephen Cameron had been there for ever. He sat brightly listening, his hands to the side of his chair, gripping. He played the violin; he was on the third desk of the second violins, and he tried so hard. Katie went to the same school as him, the one with the portico, named after George V where they had never got over no longer being a grammar school. He gazed at them; he listened; he was a vicar’s son; he was good at maths; he said afterwards that he found this modern music a struggle – you didn’t know what note was going to come next, it could be anything at all. He meant the Poulenc sextet. Sam Thomas, who had played the Webern variations in public and was struggling with the Stockhausen Klavierstücke and the Berio Sequenza in private, looked at him with amusement when he said this. But it turned out that Stephen Cameron was not really good at maths: that was just the air he had, of scholarly lack of attention to appearance. His clothes! (That was what Sam Thomas thought.) He wore the same clothes all year round, a patterned jumper, frayed brown cords. He had the air of someone permanently puzzled by the weather. He had applied for and been turned down by all five of his UCCA choices. He would have to wait until after his A-level results, then apply again, perhaps going to a university that was like playing on the third desk of the second violins in an orchestra. But he sat in his mother-knitted sweater and his brown, balding corduroys, and he listened with open puzzlement to the Poulenc sextet, his hands gripping the side of the chair. His gaze was on Katie, as it always was.

  The day they saw the snake was also the day that Sam Thomas agreed with himself that he was going to tell someone else he was gay. And after that it would always be easier. He had thought about it for years, and it was now clear to him that he had handled it in the wrong way, in ways that would lead to nothing. He had sat in the kitchens of sympathetic girls, and had hung his head and muttered about how difficult it all was, what he had to say, and had stuck there for so long that in the end, patient but exasperated, they had always said it for him. And they had been kind and supportive, but that was a fat lot of good. It was like playing the Berio Sequenza to Stephen Cameron. They wouldn’t know what to do with the experience or the knowledge. And then, twice now, he had met a boy in irregular circumstances. His mum had made him go to a law weekend for sixth-formers at Cambridge, and he had stayed at Gonville and Caius. (‘Keys’: he had found that out just in time.) There had been a boy there who came from Sheffield, too. His name was Alexander. They had sat up late, talking about law. Alexander was absurd, he saw that now: he had put up his hand after a lecture and begun a question ‘I put it to you,’ and the whole lecture theatre had laughed. But then he had loved Alexander. Two weeks after they had returned to Sheffield and the third time they had met up, Sam Thomas had said to him in his bedroom, ‘I think I love you,’ and that had been that. Alexander had written him a letter, an absurd letter beginning ‘Sir’, which would have hurt him, but for that absurdity. Afterwards Sam Thomas had known very well what to do with that experience and knowledge.

  So the day they had gone to see the snake was the first day that Sam Thomas had decided that the thing he must, must do was to tell the fact to a friend of long standing, a male friend, in a neutral way, not declaring love or anything of that sort. And he had done so. After lunch he had found himself walking with Alan up the driveway towards the main road; Alan wanted to go to the village a mile away to get a packet of ten cigarettes, Benson & Hedges. Before they had reached the gatehouse, Sam Thomas had just said, ‘I like men,’ to Alan, and then again, ‘I like men, I mean in the way most people like girls,’
and had looked up at the trees because he knew he hadn’t meant to say ‘people’ but ‘men’ or ‘males’ or ‘people of our sex’ or something.

  Alan had said, ‘Oh, I see,’ and then, ‘I thought you were keen on—’ and had cut himself short. They had walked on in silence for a while, but a companionable silence, Sam Thomas thought. In any case Alan had not called him ‘Sir’, like a dog, or turned round and walked away. When they started to talk again it was about Brahms. Brahms had played the French horn and his father had played the double bass; Sam Thomas and Alan had had this conversation before, and they believed that Brahms, because of this, had a special affinity with and understanding of how these two instruments were played.

  ‘It just feels exactly right,’ Sam Thomas said. They were walking into Ardlesford; a woman was standing, irate, outside the Cross Keys waving at a rapidly departing yellow Cortina as if trying to attract the driver’s attention. ‘Those passages at the end, it’s like an exercise in your tutor, how the hands fall exactly at the right point, just exactly as they’re meant to fall. He knows, I reckon. He knows what your hands want to do.’

  ‘Not like Berlioz,’ Alan said, and they both burst out laughing, shaking their heads like veterans of last summer’s epic struggle with the Fantastique.

  What had they wanted to buy in the village? Sam had forgotten when Alan went into the village shop and asked for ten Benson & Hedges; he picked up a copy of Private Eye and showed it to Sam. On the cover was the prime minister and four of her colleagues, and she was saying something about hanging, how she was in favour of it but wouldn’t bring it back. ‘That’s clever,’ Sam said, knowing that was the sort of thing you said about Private Eye. Alan read it every fortnight, he said. You needed to read it every issue or you wouldn’t get the jokes. For instance … He opened the issue and started flicking towards the back—