Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  Patrick was despatched off to change, smiling, happy, and Katie and Sally went into Sally’s room. The clarinet case was on top of her little bookcase: a photograph of her mum and dad in a silver frame; a pencil drawing of Chatsworth, was it, above the bed where Katie had an RSC poster of a production of Hamlet? ‘Let me see,’ Sally said, and Katie brought her mum’s dress out. She had seen it before, in fact. Katie had sent her two photographs. Her mum had bought two versions of the same dress, a long chiffon floral print, and a short chiffon floral print. Her mum had thought of the knee-length version as an ordinary summer dress, the long one as a dressy version, but Sally had written back promptly to advise the short one, definitely – and Katie had brought that. She wondered. She was not very clothes-minded, and though Sally applauded delightedly from the bed when she saw it, she then dashed to the oak wardrobe and pulled out a dark green taffeta fantasy, a proper ballgown down to the floor, creaking and rustling and hugely billowing, like a ship at anchor rolling in the wind.

  ‘Oh, that’s amazing,’ Katie said politely. ‘It must have cost a fortune.’

  Sally pouted, pleased. ‘It’s only the once,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine not making a big thing about it. You know – you’ll see.’

  ‘I know,’ Katie said. She was, after all, at Cambridge. They had balls there, too. If she was ever going to come to see to the point of buying a huge taffeta ballgown, it would have happened by now. She knew she would be the only woman there in a chiffon dress, and the only one whose knees would be showing. She didn’t curse Sally; she cursed herself for being so easy for Sally to manipulate. Really, she had thought about her dress for about seven minutes, all in all, and now she was going to have to wear what Sally had decided, to allow herself to be outshone, all night long.

  ‘You smell gorgeous,’ Katie said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Fahrenheit,’ Sally said. ‘I love it. People here know when I’ve walked down a corridor in front of them. Someone told me it was my signature scent. Do you want to borrow some?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Katie said, to please Sally. ‘I just couldn’t – I couldn’t live up to it.’

  ‘It’s going to be beautiful,’ Sally said, looking out of the window. ‘Look – here’s Sam Thomas in his dinner jacket, and look – he’s got some flowers for you – he’s got a whole bouquet – look, look – adorable. He doesn’t know you’re supposed to give something that the girl can carry – oh, how sweet of him, though …’

  And he was there, coming round the quad in exactly the same dinner suit that he wore to play concerts in, the old one with the double-breasted jacket, a serious expression, a new sort of haircut. The size of the bouquet was absurd, and no one seeing him walk through the college quadrangle could doubt for a moment that here was someone with no interest in women. No doubt, either, when he came through the door and looked from one to the other, smiling but focused elsewhere. He might as well have opened his mouth and said, ‘Where’s Patrick?’ It was for Sally to make the best of it and, in her mode as hostess, to welcome someone she’d spent two years ignoring, and to say soothingly, ‘This is going to be fabulous – I’m so excited.’ Then he came over and kissed Katie, kissed Sally. It was a new gesture. They had never laid cheek to cheek.

  Sam Thomas was off work the day that Sally phoned. He hadn’t heard from her for years. Afterwards, he wondered why she had called on a Wednesday morning when he almost definitely wouldn’t be in. She had probably wanted to leave a phone message, to give him the chance of deciding whether to call back or not. But he had answered and, strangely, she hadn’t sounded disconcerted: she seemed happy to be able to speak to him. He had a dreadful cold, one that almost qualified as proper flu. It had been going since Friday afternoon. His awful boss had sounded sceptical on the telephone on Monday morning, but they would manage, he supposed. His flatmate had come and gone, not offering to go out for Lemsip and soup, even. He was at a low point when Sally phoned. She bet he didn’t know who this was.

  ‘It’s Sally,’ Sam said. ‘I knew exactly.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Sally said. ‘I haven’t seen you since – God, I was trying to work it out – I was just finishing at Oxford. It was the Trinity ball, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, there was that time afterwards – you know, I came round later that summer, don’t you remember?’

  ‘Oh, God, yes,’ Sally said. ‘Oh, God, I’d obliterated that.’ Because when the degree results had come through, Sally had done really very badly: she had gone to Oxford in glory, the pride of her school, and left with a third. Her tutor had told her, Sam remembered, that she was lucky to be given a degree at all. ‘That was awful and you were so sweet. I got your number from your mum – we had quite a chat about you, and what you’re up to. Listen.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Sam said, amused.

  ‘There’s someone I really want you to meet,’ Sally said. ‘I know it’s been years, and I know we’re living probably about a mile from each other, but I’d really like you to meet someone. Does that sound …’

  ‘Lovely,’ Sam said. ‘I’m not going anywhere at the moment. What’s his name?’

  ‘Richard,’ Sally said. ‘Well, I don’t know whether this could work, but actually, we’re not going to be far from you tonight. Can we maybe pop in?’

  ‘Oh, that would be so nice,’ Sam Thomas said, almost moved. It was so like Sally, after all – to move on, to have no time for them, to busy herself, but at the end, when something important like this happened, a serious boyfriend, a fiancé, even perhaps a husband, to make the effort and to phone up and say that there was someone she wanted them to meet. ‘Do you ever see any of that old lot? Katie and Stephen Cameron and Patrick? I saw Albert last Christmas. He came round and we went to the pub. He’s exactly the same.’

  ‘Katie’s a doctor in York,’ Sally said. ‘I know that much. Listen, let’s talk later. It would be so nice to see you. Around six? I’ve got your address. Rostrevor Road?’

  Years later, when they all met up, Katie and Alan and Albert and Sam Thomas and sometimes Patrick, too, someone would mention the day they thought they had seen a snake.

  ‘That was the year you lost all that weight,’ Alan would say kindly to Katie. Alan had failed his degree: with him, it hadn’t seemed to matter. He’d opened a business, had made a fortune, or so he said, but in any case he lived in a stone house with his girlfriend and their three children, paid the mortgage from the second-hand record shop. ‘I came across a photo of you before. I couldn’t think who that was.’

  ‘Oh, you’re always fat in your mind if you’re fat when you’re seventeen,’ Katie said.

  ‘And then that littlie was sick on the lawn,’ Albert said. ‘Do you remember? And Susie Westerhagen …’

  Was it the Easter holiday, or was it the week in the summer, the time somebody thought they had seen a snake? They couldn’t decide. The manor house that had belonged to the council for that sort of thing, it was privately owned now. Someone lived in it as if it were just a house. There had been forty bedrooms in the tacked-on dormitory – they must have demolished that. Sam Thomas had been at school with the girl who had bought it. God knew how she’d made all that money. And what had they been rehearsing? Brahms 2, they all remembered, but there was an overture, as well – was it Candide or had that been the year before? They remembered the Poulenc sextet: Sam Thomas said modestly that he couldn’t play the piano part now, not in a million years. He was so out of practice. Patrick played in the LSO now; Albert was a professor of bassoon; they smiled, as if the question were going to arise. And, remember, all those Poulenc afternoons, there had been poor Stephen Cameron, sitting in the corner of the room, gazing at Katie. (He had been killed in those bombings in London, the day after the Olympics had been announced, on 7/7, as people were starting to say.) Poor Stephen Cameron, going to work on an ordinary tube train, and twenty years before he had been sitting in a corner of a room, being bad at maths, loving Katie when she was fat, loving her wh
en she was thin, not really noticing anything when it changed, not being very good at anything, puzzled by the weather, by the Webern piano variations, by maths.

  ‘That was sad,’ Sam Thomas said. And then they would talk about the last time they had all seen Sally. It had been the same for all of them, except Albert. She hadn’t been able to track him down, maybe. Sally, over the phone, had someone she would like them to meet. They had all thought the same thing: that Sally was engaged and wanted to introduce her fiancé to her old friends in the orchestra. They thought she was doing the rounds. It must have been the same for Katie and Albert and Patrick and perhaps even for Stephen Cameron – who knew?

  Sam Thomas answered the door, and there was Sally exactly as she had been: tight, clipped, tidy, neat, and next to her a man with a huge briefcase, a man maybe ten years older than them, with a heavy five o’clock shadow. Oddly, Sally asked if they could come in. Sam led them upstairs. They sat down in the kitchen. Sally immediately started reminiscing about the days in the orchestra – do you remember, do you remember, and Susie Westerhagen, and the day that – and Sam made them a pot of tea. She had launched into it, not found herself in the middle of it, and Sam joined in dutifully rather than with pleasure. The man, whose name was Richard, Sam remembered, sat back and looked with calculating interest at the kitchen – the cupboards, oven, fridge, the sink. The kitchen was filled with an outrageous, peppery, puddingy scent. He remembered the smell. Sally came to the end of what she had practised. She had taken four minutes, not counting Sam’s contributions.

  ‘Do you ever buy bottled water, Sam?’ the man said.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Sam said. ‘I like San Pellegrino.’

  ‘Have you ever wondered, Sam, how much bottled water costs you, annually?’

  Sally was sitting forward in her chair, smiling in an unfocused, embarrassed, determined way. She knew how bad this was going to be.

  ‘And yet, Sam, we don’t like to drink tap water, especially here in London, do we? Look, Sam …’

  He lifted off the lid of the teapot in which the tea was stewing. He indicated some sort of film on the surface of the tea. ‘That’s the impurities and mineral deposits – harmful mineral deposits – that come with the water that comes out of your tap, Sam. Now, if I can show you something …’

  ‘This is so exciting, Sam,’ Sally said, as the man lifted his heavy case onto the table. He wondered if she had ever brought out his name like that, back when they were friends.

  It was some sort of device they were selling. You attached it to the tap in your sink, and it purified your water. It cost two hundred pounds and had a filter, costing much the same, which you had to replace once a year. Sally had been going through her address book. She was trying to make money out of people she’d once known, people she’d played Brahms 2 with, people she’d been to a summer ball with and danced with, people who thought they’d once seen a snake in the long grass, years ago, on a hot afternoon in Yorkshire.

  ‘I went along with it,’ Katie said, much later, when they were meeting up. ‘After half an hour they were explaining to me how you could recruit your friends and how much money you made out of them. It was incredible.’

  ‘I sat down and did the calculations,’ Alan said. ‘I worked out how much it would cost to buy a bottle of water every two days compared to the cost of this bloody contraption. There wasn’t much in it.’

  ‘I took it off them,’ Sam Thomas said. ‘I said I’d try it out for a week or two. Do you think they were going out with each other?’

  They couldn’t agree; they all thought that this man Richard was her puppet-master in the sinister cult of water-filters, had probably recruited her. But they couldn’t make up their minds whether the relationship between the two had a boyfriend-girlfriend feeling, or whether it was just control and agent.

  ‘Did you keep it, Sam?’ Katie said. ‘The two-hundred-pound filter?’

  He had tried for about a minute to attach it to the tap, then given up and put it back in its box. Sally had come back a week later, this time on her own. He had seen her coming, had gone down to the front door with the box already packed. She had been ready to come in. He had handed it back on the doorstep, saying briefly that he didn’t think it would suit him. Her face fell; they said goodbye. Afterwards, they would always say that it was a strange summer, the summer that contained the day that contained Stephen Cameron claiming to have seen a snake. But it wasn’t strange. It was the last normal summer and perhaps the only normal summer. Afterwards, it was the rest of their summers that were strange, that didn’t go the way summers should. Sam Thomas, from the first-floor window of his rented flat, watched Sally, with her neat, clipped walk, trot down towards the Fulham Road. The box was bulky, and causing her problems. There was a terrible pathos in the woman, so professionally dressed, her confident odour of Fahrenheit, being condemned to lug heavy boxes around. He imagined her going onwards, walking through back-streets and calm pavements, shadowed with plane trees, uninterrupted by duty or worry or obligation, until she reached the river. Like many women of London before, she would kick off her tight shoes, and in holed and laddered tights clamber up onto the embankment with her useless and expensive box in her arms, and, like many women of London, fall with a heavy lack of grace into the thick waters of the river. Sam Thomas watched her go with her clear-edged determination. It was a handsome evening: the sun was at the hour of aperitif, and was painting London in the tangible golden promise that it normally only possessed when glimpsed from long leagues away. His flu had kept him off work for nearly two weeks now, but he was feeling a little better. He thought he would phone Nick, that boy he’d met for the first time three weeks ago at the Daisy Chain, and ask him over.

  The Pierian Spring

  Once, an ill-intentioned acquaintance in the London Library had remarked in passing that Pentel were discontinuing those nice green roll-tip pens. Those ones you always use, Sam. She had noticed Sam writing, day after day, in the same turquoise-backed notebook with the same pen. It was one of a long series dating back to middle-childhood. She was observant, that ill-intentioned acquaintance, and the same day Sam had gone out to Paperchase and bought seventy-two of the green Pentel roller balls – twenty-four packs of three – to see him, or what passed for his inspiration, out.

  There had been no truth in it: the Pentel roller balls were still, five years on, being produced, but Sam proposed to take no risks in the matter. He had always written with the same style of pen in the same style of notebook. He did not know whether he would be able to write at all, if the pen that fitted into his hand like an extra finger, never to be thought about, were to disappear overnight.

  The reliance on habit had got worse, not better, with the event of his Success. He had written two novels, which had been reviewed. The first was described as clever and elegant; the second, elegant and clever. The third, on the other hand, had won a prize, and had sold. Incredulously, Sam found himself turning down an offer to transform the book into a film, and observing the incredulous looks on the faces of what could only be called executives on the other side of a boardroom table. Nobody – Sam, his agent Barbara, his editors at Meersbrook and Edgeworth in the UK or Muffin Parker in the States, Helena or Peter, who was anyway too young to know really what his father did for a living – none of them had ever expected such a thing. All it had been was two hundred pages about an old woman meeting an estranged daughter in a seaside town without a single adverb from beginning to end. It was devastating, heart-rending, exquisite, and made seven separate reviewers in three different continents weep on public transport, or so they claimed. That year, it constituted three million last-minute Christmas presents to less-regarded family members from Peru to Japan, and Sam, Helena and Peter moved from two bedrooms on the second floor in Kentish Town to a Georgian town house in Clapham Old Town. His new study on the second floor had a view over the Clapham roof-tops.

  The Success hit Sam like a tidal wave, which outlined the crossroads of his ne
wly soaring career – no metaphor was too grotesquely mixed to render so bizarre and terrifying an event. The transformation could only make Sam regard the daily properties of his luck in an analytical spirit. It was then that the observation about the Pentels had been made by the library acquaintance. After his mass acquisition of the pen that made him able to write in the first place, a similar mass acquisition of Ordning & Reda turquoise A4 notebooks had taken place. The study on the second floor, on the other hand, was quite new. He gave up reviewing for those little magazines at three hundred pounds a time, quitting regretfully over three polite lunches with three openly envious but gracious editors; he took his son to school in the mornings, returned and ascended to the white-painted, book-lined study, opened the notebook and stared out of the window at the roofs, dark and wet and open as the underside of a gull’s wings.

  A contract had been signed for a fourth novel in, it seemed, every country in the world, and for months Sam sat at the desk, and stared out, and wrote nothing. ‘How did it go?’ Helena said, returning each day from her job administering the NHS, and he said, ‘Oh, fine,’ allowing her to talk about what, after all, was much more interesting, the various loonies, halfwits, Asperger’s cases and, frankly, trollops who made up the mass of her colleagues. It was not the pen; it was not the notebook that made him incapable of getting on with it. It was the study. It made him, horribly, feel like Henry James.

  In reality, he had written every single page of those three novels in a pub in Kentish Town – the reissued two early miniatures and the horrible Success, extended before his eyes over two entire shelves in forty-three languages, of The Journey To Handsmouth, the lot. That setting had abundantly suited him. Four half-pints of Staropramen between two and four in the afternoon, and after every other completed paragraph, a cigarette. He had been going there pretty well every weekday afternoon for five years. The barmen had come and gone. In the hopeless human circus of Kentish Town, a shabby man in his early thirties in a succession of tweed jackets and corduroy trousers, writing in a turquoise notebook with a green pen, breaking off every twenty-five minutes for a cigarette and every forty minutes for another half of lager had attracted no curiosity.