Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘We’re not a library,’ the man behind the counter said, a fat man with no neck, red over the face and bare scalp. ‘You want to read the magazines wi’out buying them, I’ve no doubt you can find ’em in Sheffield library service.’

  ‘I am going to buy it,’ Alan said, aggrieved. ‘I’ve not seen this issue yet,’ he added, turning to Sam Thomas.

  ‘You’ll be popular,’ the man said. ‘We get it in for vicar, one copy and just one, he’s the only one as reads it.’

  ‘Well, that’s just hard cheese on the vicar,’ Alan said, and bought the cigarettes and the magazine. Barely outside, he lit up, offering one to Sam Thomas. ‘What a dreadful, dreadful person,’ he went on. ‘You don’t suppose he knew, do you?’

  ‘Knew what?’ Sam Thomas said.

  ‘Knew that you were – a homosexual,’ Alan said, hissing the words in a way that would project rather than suppress them. In his burst of laughter, Sam realized that the words were strange but now would be familiar; that he had avoided them but they were true, that he had not said anything about a passing feeling but had definitively described, almost with an absence of feeling, a scientific category into which a specimen could now be placed. It was funny, it was; but in the memory afterwards of what was called a coming out, Sam Thomas would always recall not the sentence he had spoken, something about finding the same sex appealing, or some other euphemism, but Alan saying outside the scruffy village shop, with dead flies on the plastic children’s toys in the window, that the owner had been dreadful, that he must have known that Sam Thomas was a homosexual. That was it.

  Their rehearsals of the Poulenc sextet in the afternoon had set off all sorts of impromptu chamber investigations and rehearsals. The percussionists had abandoned their instruments altogether and were getting some spoken-word piece into shape. It was a sort of fugue that was nothing but shouted names of places. They were practising it now, the timpanist and the three others. They must be down by the big sundial, and someone was shouting, ‘Trinidad … and the big Mississippi and the …’ There was the Lake Titicaca, too, Sam Thomas knew, and Popacatapetl, which was not in Canada, rather in Mexico.

  ‘God, that is driving me up the wall,’ Sam Thomas said.

  ‘The town Honolulu,’ Alan said. ‘I thought it was an island.’

  ‘It’s the Lake Titicaca I hate,’ Sam said. ‘It must be fun to do, though.’

  And that seemed to be a cue, because Alan then plucked at Sam Thomas’s sleeve, first impatiently then hard, pulling him, and in a second Sam Thomas found he was kissing – no, being kissed by – Alan. It was the first time he had been kissed by a man, not initiated the action. He was not likely to forget the feeling of the bark of the tree against the back of his head, the sensation of Alan’s thin and forceful mouth against his own, the familiar taste, made strange with the push of the tongue that brought it, of cigarettes. Trinidad. In a moment it stopped, and Alan bent to pick up the copy of Private Eye where it had fallen onto the wood’s layer of mulch. Sam Thomas followed him up the path, asking himself whether now was the moment to take his hand, whether any of that would now make sense. He wondered who Alan had thought he was keen on.

  That was the year Katie lost all that weight. She never put it on again. There was something in her mind about going to Africa – she was volunteering in the north of Kenya, in a health centre that served hundreds of miles around. It was ridiculous, it made no sense, but she didn’t want to turn up and start saying she could be of help to all these people when she had obviously had far too much to eat all her life. She told nobody, only her mother. At the end of March, almost as soon as it was feasible, she went with her mother to Halfords and bought a bicycle – she hadn’t had one since she was seven, a fairy bicycle in pink. She rode down the hill, at first terrified at the velocity, then determined to enjoy it, then all the way down the Manchester road as far as the Rivelin dam. For the first day that was perfectly all right. One day soon she would get as far as Ladybower.

  Nobody knew about it, apart from Stephen Cameron. He saw her one day. She was hurtling along the Manchester road, her usual morning outing. What was he doing there? He was standing against a dry stone wall, staring into space, a mile from the nearest house. Stephen Cameron was often alone, but alone in crowds. He didn’t need to walk a mile into the moors to stand and relish aloneness. He could find aloneness on a crowded bus, in a classroom, at a party. She saw him approaching as she pedalled furiously; it was a June day of bright winds, the clouds scudding as if thrown across the blue. He saw her approaching, too. You could see him gripping himself, tensely, preparing for Katie. It was as if he knew that she took this route in exercise, four days a week, and had positioned himself exactly there in order to greet her. But how could he know? She had told nobody except her mother, and her mother had told nobody, she was sure. The thing that could not be allowed to happen was for her cycle route to become, like the maths set and the physics set and orchestral practice, an opportunity for Stephen Cameron to gaze at her sorrowfully. She stared straight ahead in concentration. Five yards away from Stephen Cameron, she allowed herself to look at him, to give him a bright wave to acknowledge his own long-raised hand and worried expression, to cycle straight on without slowing. The next time she went out on the bicycle, she started by going up the hill, not down, along the top of the golf course and through Lodge Moor. He wouldn’t have known where to stand, even if he had known where to go.

  A year went by, before the next time they met. They were at Patrick’s: he had suggested that they get together to see each other before the orchestral week in July. Sally had agreed; she’d left the orchestra now that she was going into her last year at university, and Katie, too, thought this was going to be her last one. She was calculating the loss of time for her oboe practice once the rote learning of joints and bones and organs started, all that slicing into her allotted corpse, and she didn’t think it was fair to cling to things if you didn’t really have time for them. She was going to call her corpse Wendy, she’d decided. It was all right for Patrick and Albert: they did nothing but play the flute and the bassoon all day long at music college. Medicine wasn’t going to allow much time for keeping on top of things musically, she knew.

  She had come to Patrick’s parents’ door, and gratifyingly, he had just stared at her. She had always found their house entrancing: his mother had done it beautifully inside, with lovely elegant white rooms, just shaded with pale blues and purples, and always a bowl of flowers in just the right colours. She could have stared at it for hours before noticing the one strange thing about it, that there was never a book to be seen in it. Staring at Patrick, too, she had been: for years in the woodwind section she had let her eyes fall on him, and had never quite reconciled herself to the beauty of his dark-curled head, the fine features nodding with solid dedication over the sumptuous sound of a flute played by a man. Until now, she had loved Patrick’s masculinity in its unexpected places; loved a man so confident he could play the flute without any raising of eyebrows, loved his dark presence, heaped up with motherlove in that most feminine of houses. But that had been last summer, when she had been fat. She had seen so much since then: had seen a child die in her hands, and let an American doctor, a qualified adult, roam confidently over her new thin body in the room in the white-plastered residency. She felt almost too old in experience to think of starting university in October. She had done all that. She had stared once, so long ago, at Patrick and at Patrick’s mother’s beautiful house, and now she was thin, and it was Patrick’s turn to stare at her. ‘My God, Katie,’ he said. ‘I hardly recognized you. You look— Come in.’

  ‘She looks amazing,’ Sally said in the hallway, but dismissively, almost ironically, as if ‘amazing’ were all that could be expected of her. ‘We want to hear all about it.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just what you would expect,’ Katie said. ‘It was very hard work, to be honest, and very uncomfortable. Where’s Sam Thomas? I thought Sam Thomas was coming.’

&n
bsp; ‘I’m feeling guilty,’ Sally said, taking her arm and leading her through. ‘The truth of it is – I haven’t seen Sam Thomas at all, all year. It’s ridiculous. His college is only five hundred yards away, and I’ve hardly seen him, really not at all. The thing is,’ Sally said to Katie, sitting down, ‘there just isn’t time to sit around with people and chat all afternoon. You’ll see. Just because you’re at the same university – my God, the terms at Oxford, they’re only eight weeks long. I don’t know how we fit anything in. You just don’t have time – I hate to say it, but you’re going to find it’s completely true – you don’t have time to be kind to people from home. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

  ‘He was probably just as busy, really,’ Katie said.

  ‘Sam Thomas?’ Sally said, although it was Sam Thomas they were talking about. ‘Oh, I’m sure he was absolutely fine. But it was awful that he kept sending me notes, four or five, suggesting that we meet up for a coffee or something. I saw him in passing in orchestras, you know, but only that, a quick wave. I’m sure he was fine. It takes some people time to find their feet.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Patrick said, coming in. ‘Africa? You’ve got to have so much to tell us.’

  Sally had the grace to smile, and say, ‘I want to hear all about it,’ but that only made Katie feel that she wouldn’t waste her time beginning to tell. What was the point of starting to tell when it was so immense an alteration, and to tell it would mean another year of telling to follow the year of doing? She said something bright about probably waiting until the others were here, but Patrick said that there were no others coming, only perhaps Sam Thomas. Albert was teaching this morning – he had taken on some eleven-year olds from his teacher, and was being paid for it – and Patrick hadn’t heard back from Alan. He thought he might be away.

  Katie asked about Stephen Cameron, but that surprised Patrick, you could see. Sally knew about him.

  In a way, Stephen Cameron’s appearance and presentation had been a matter of the most perfect genius. He had persuaded almost everyone that he was one of the clever kids; a vicar’s son, he had the handed-down and mildly frayed, clean look that you would expect. They had taken one look at him, his hobbies and his glasses and his side parting, and they had put him into the top maths set. But Stephen Cameron was not one of the clever kids. The school had written off his O-level results as a strange off-day, and had taken him into the sixth form. He loved maths, he said, and was in the further maths set. But he couldn’t do it. You saw him puzzling over a page of figures, letters, equations, pencil scribblings in the corner of the common room, between halves of the rehearsal as if it was all he wanted to get back to. Then a flourish of the pencil, a clearing of the brow, a bright wide smile, a series of scribbles. Katie had seen those triumphant scribbles: they were usually wrong or not to the point at all. Like the cerulean hand-knitted Aran sweater with patches at the elbows, Stephen Cameron’s maths performance was all theatre in the wrong setting. And still the teacher had persuaded himself, somehow, that Stephen was a natural, a gifted mathematician who saw the result, or saw another result, or saw something else entirely, and leapt to that conclusion where it wasn’t helpful. He went to pieces in tests, always, the teacher used to say, fondly cudgelling Stephen Cameron’s head. But it would be all right on the night. He gave a cursory glance at Katie’s work. It was correct, and he went on.

  The admissions tutors at the different universities had not seen Stephen Cameron; they only knew what they had read about him in the tutor’s report; so they went on thinking that he was a gifted mathematician until they saw his interim reports, or the paper that he did for his Cambridge exam. Then they did not offer him a place. It was just where everyone else had applied, to Cambridge, because it was the best, then to a good London college, then a traditional place for second-choice after Cambridge, then two good old red-bricks. They all refused him, except one, which failed to answer at all. The refusals came in steadily, one after another, and Stephen Cameron had said that it was just bad luck, he was up against stiff competition, he knew, he just fell to pieces in exams, that was the trouble. Then Katie got her place to read medicine at Cambridge. The teacher bumped into her in the second-floor corridor between lessons, the Monday after she’d heard. He waved his hand with a dismissive cheerfulness, said, ‘I knew you would be all right.’ She looked out of the window, burning, as he walked away. She felt she had always taken for granted that the teachers’ job was to concentrate on those who needed help and support. They had taken her for granted in return. Just once, she would like to be told that she had done well. It was as if she had inherited her ability, unfairly, from an aunt she had never met, who ought to have left her abilities to Stephen Cameron. And Stephen Cameron went in the end to a polytechnic in Dundee to study maths and computing. He went by train.

  It must have been in March, towards the end of the spring term – the Hilary Term, Sally went on calling it – that Katie had a letter from Sally in Oxford. It was Sally’s last year in Oxford, and before the dreaded job market struck, Sally said, she really wanted to go to a final summer ball. It was Trinity, she said – not her college, but a beautiful one. She was going to ask Patrick, too, and Sam Thomas was coming. It wasn’t his final year, but he was thrilled to be coming. Finals!!!! Sally wrote, and then a despairing little figure, its head in its hands and question marks exploding from its wild hair.

  So they went to the Trinity summer ball. It was a hot day when Katie got off the coach from Cambridge, her dress in a plastic hanging bag, just as she had brought it from Sheffield at the end of the Easter vac. It was her mum’s dress – she really didn’t want to spend three hundred pounds on a dress she was only going to wear once before sidling back into last year’s size – and she thought it would do. It had hung from the luggage rack all the way. There were three other big luggage bags hanging in the same way; the coach was the only way to get from Cambridge to Oxford, and there was a fair amount of movement between the two. One boy, obstinately reading a chemistry text book, had got on the bus already wearing his black tie. An older man had got on at the stop outside Cambridge – perhaps a don of some sort, he looked so distinguished with his shining white whiskers – and had surveyed the half-full coach before deciding on the seat next to Katie’s. It had worked then, if only on older men, possibly dons. But no – he was not a don, he was a porter at Churchill, had been there since it was founded, almost. His son was at Oxford, was going to see him. He expected Katie was going across to see her young man. His son – how he got the same sort of job as his dad but at the other place – that was a story. He was still telling it, leisurely, practised, passing the time as the coach was rolling into Oxford. He could have been innocent and paternal, but for the way his large hands kept running down his thighs as if to smooth out his trousers’ wrinkles, and incidentally against Katie’s legs in their white summer skirt.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Katie had said once, and he had seemed not to hear, but had stopped for five minutes before his hand, like a nervous feeding animal, had fallen back to its unsupervised to and fro. And now they were arriving. There was Sally at the side of the bus station, peering into the coach, not having seen her yet; she was trim, precise as an ant, shining and clipped and small, and next to her was Patrick, dark, smiling and beautiful, but somehow meaningless. ‘Here we are,’ Katie said dismissively, getting up and pushing past, walking towards the front of the coach before it had even properly stopped, and the groping porter was behind her for ever. Patrick had just said something to Sally, and Sally laughed brilliantly, head back, her white teeth bared. When Katie looked at Patrick, waving in a cheerful, sexless way, she looked first of all at what seemed to be missing, his flute in his other hand, ready to be raised to play. His masculinity seemed incomplete, without a point or purpose, without the surprise of femininity the flute proposed.

  They were to go back to Sally’s room in college. Katie and she were in the same position, or nearly; she reflected that Sally was,
after all, on the other side of a divide. In Cambridge, the final-year students were friendly, remote, jarred by a long and testing experience. Katie was walking not with her friend from the youth orchestra but with someone who had experienced the future. All the time, walking up the wide street, divided between white museums and flushed red colleges, Patrick was talking in his unchanged way about music, about the day they thought they had seen the snake, about the Boulez sonatina his tutor was making him learn with a pianist called Sue. Frank was the name of his tutor; he and Sue had become characters in the narrative without Katie or Sally knowing them at all. ‘At first I hated it – it just had nothing to hang on to, and it’s one of those pieces that you wonder whether the composer just hates you. Frank said I would wonder whether it was written for the flute or against the flute before I was done. But then it’s weird – something happened – Sue said the same thing – I found myself thinking about the tunes one day. There aren’t any tunes! But I was thinking about them. It’s really got inside me, now. Do you know what I mean?’

  They went into Sally’s college, and Patrick was talking, reaching out to them from his old life. He was so beautiful still, and generous, smiling, and nothing had happened to him but the Boulez sonatina. It had not occurred to Katie that anything had happened to her in particular, but when people who had known her for years had said to her, ‘Is that you? What have you done? You look …’ they seemed lost for words, as if they were trying to explain not the trivial daily undertakings on the bicycle, but the things she had seen in Kenya, the understanding of the body she had reached in the last year, handling the innards and preserved organs of a corpse that had once been a woman. She had not named her corpse Wendy; she had only thought she would, before she had met her in all her sullen nude horizontal dignity.