Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  But Sally had been to London quite a lot. She had been to visit Aunty Susanna and Uncle Boyd in their pretty house in Fulham. And they had been to visit Mum’s old friend Katy. And once as a really special birthday treat they had all gone up to see The Lion King, which had been fantastic, and had lunch at Joe Allen’s first, too. And there had been days out with museums, and once, her and Mum, just the two of them, they had gone up on the train and had a day at the sales and they had bought shoes and both had their nails done in Selfridges, Mum having zebra stripes and Sally a real rainbow on every finger, and Mum had said that she wasn’t to tell Dad about any of it. And then in year six when they’d all had to have a penpal and Ulrike came to stay with them for a week, Mum had thought there wouldn’t be enough to show her in Devon, so they’d had a day up in London, all of them, with the Natural History Museum and the London Eye and Nelson’s Column and the Houses of Parliament (from outside), and Ulrike hadn’t been at all impressed, which was ironic since when Sally went to Bonn in a return visit there was nothing to see except Beethoven’s boring house, and Ulrike’s mother had made no effort at all, except for creating endless salads covered with that horrible stuff called dill.

  So Sally had been to London quite a lot.

  They got to the station in plenty of time. Mum had been stressing that they had to get the nine-fifty-seven because that was the train they had tickets for. If they missed that one then they would have to get three new tickets, and they couldn’t afford that. ‘Why couldn’t we just tell them that we missed the train and they could find us places on the next one?’ Sally had wanted to know. Mum said that the train company didn’t allow that, for reasons best known to itself.

  But they got there in plenty of time. Mum paid the taxi driver and they each got their suitcase out of the boot. ‘Everyone ready?’ Mum said. ‘This is exciting, right?’ And then at the barriers, she fumbled for the tickets – they were somewhere in her big green purse with lots of old tickets and receipts and people’s phone numbers. The guard held the big gates open for them, and told them that the train would leave from platform five. And then they all lugged their suitcases up the stairs, and over the bridge where you could see the trains standing underneath your feet, and down the staircase again, where it said not to run because seven people had been seriously injured falling downstairs at this station last year. The seven was in a different lettering, like this – 7 – so that the station could change it if anyone fell over and died this year. Then Mum checked on the board – the train to London was the third one to arrive. There was plenty of time, after all, and Mum needn’t have worried.

  ‘Is Dad coming to London, too?’ Miles asked.

  Further down the platform, in a different new suit, this time brown and pinstriped, Dad was standing. He was with Joanna. Next to them were two suitcases – new, dark brown and leather, and matching. Joanna was wearing a man’s black vest and a long purple floor-length skirt in a sort of attempt at fashion; with her little head she looked rather like a Dalek, Sally thought.

  ‘Is Dad coming to London?’ Miles said. ‘Is that the surprise?’

  ‘No,’ Mum said, and that was stupid of Miles. He sometimes said these things he didn’t believe and couldn’t have thought, because he thought it was cute to be stupid and pretend not to know things. He always went on pretending to believe in magical things at Christmas and the dentist’s years after everyone else, if he thought there was some advantage to be got out of it. No one could have thought that Dad and Joanna were coming with them to London as a lovely surprise. ‘No, they must be getting a train somewhere else.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re going to go anywhere together,’ Sally said. Dad and Joanna were in the middle of a really loud argument. Joanna had reached that point where she had placed a hand on either hip, was leaning forward right into Dad’s face and was shouting, really shouting, into his face. ‘Only a fucking ignorant fucking moron …’ she was shouting. Everyone, not just on their platform but on the platform opposite and even further away, across two lines of tracks was staring at them. Dad was shouting back, but he was making no sentences, just shouting, ‘Don’t you – don’t you—’ His face was dark red, and Sally matched it with satisfaction to a new word she had found out that week: puce, she said to herself.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Mum said, and she looked a little puce in the face, too, ‘let’s go and sit in the café and wait. It’s still another half an hour.’ She fiddled with the strap of her handbag: she pushed both wings of hair back behind her ears in the way she had.

  It seemed like a small gesture Mum had made, that movement with strap and the stroke of her hair, but it was enough. Sally knew that, when you were in the schoolyard, you didn’t need to do or say a conspicuous wrong thing in front of Sophie Okonwe or Chloe Macdonald or any of that tough lot. They would jump on your back and start beating you up if you made just a small movement, said just one thing, put on your coat when no one else was. It only took a small movement, one that drew attention to you.

  Mum putting her hair back in place and adjusting the strap of her handbag was one of those small movements. They were things that she did all the time: they were things that were very much like her, like the particular neat clack of her heels on lino when she was coming towards you. People would only have to meet Mum three times to remember that she was someone who smoothed her hair back behind her ears with both hands at once, and then adjusted the strap of her handbag. Though Joanna was sixty yards away, she must have seen someone making the gesture out of the corner of her eye. It must have said something familiar to her. She looked properly. She saw them – Sally saw her seeing them, her eyes going over Sally and Miles and Mum. She didn’t say anything to Dad, who still hadn’t seen them, but she immediately stopped shouting. She looked back at Dad. Then, almost jumping at him, she threw herself at his face, and started snogging him furiously. Dad hadn’t expected that. His arms flew backwards, and he almost stumbled. Joanna’s arms were round his neck, and she was pulling him towards her. Dad’s arms went round Joanna’s back. At first he patted her on the back, that pat, like you give an animal, saying, ‘No, that’s enough now,’ but Joanna carried on, clutching him to her and pulling his face down towards hers. It was a real snog. You could see she was pushing her tongue right into his mouth, and he was pushing his tongue right back into hers, pushing as hard as they could. Sally had seen Joanna look at them before she started. On the platform opposite, three students were standing. They were watching Dad and Joanna, and were laughing. On this platform, two old ladies had picked up their bags and were coming this way. They hadn’t minded the shouting, but they didn’t want to watch the snogging.

  ‘Let’s go in the café,’ Mum said. ‘Let’s get some breakfast.’

  ‘We had breakfast,’ Miles said. ‘We had breakfast at home.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have another one,’ Mum said. ‘Our train’s not coming for half an hour.’

  In the Pumpkin Café, they also sold magazines and some books, and Mum said they should get a puzzle book to do on the train. They could choose one each. Sally liked the hidden words ones, where you knew there were forty names of plants, or pop stars, or countries secreted in a big grid of letters, like this: DFILKUNADANACHQPX. And all you had to do was find CANADA written backwards and put a big ring round it. Miles liked the logic puzzles, ever since Granny Hopkins had shown him how to do them. But he still wasn’t very good at them. After ten minutes of frowning and crossing things out and putting Xs in boxes and reading out the clues that went ‘JOHN is the only shopper who doesn’t have any vegetables in his trolley’ and ‘The boy who rides the bicycle does not play chess’, Miles would always turn secretly to the back, and start putting Xs in all the boxes as if he had worked it out himself. So they bought one of each of those, and a cup of tea for Mum, and went to sit down at a table inside.

  ‘What’s your number one plan for when we get to London?’ Mum said.

  ‘I want to go to the Marantine Museum,�
� Miles said – that was what he called the Maritime Museum, insisting that that was how it was pronounced. ‘I want to see that ship again.’

  Outside, on the other platform, two uncle-types, in bold checks and striped ties, gave a big shout in unison; a cheerful, upwards gesture with their arms. One of them shouted something smutty. They had cards dangling from strings in their lapels; on the way to the races, they were enjoying whatever it was that Dad and Joanna were doing on platform five.

  ‘I want to go to the London Eye,’ Sally said. ‘That was brilliant.’

  ‘You’ve been on the London Eye,’ Mum said. She looked a little bit more cheerful now. ‘We can go anywhere you want. Don’t you want to go on a boat this time?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sally said gratefully. She hadn’t thought very hard about what she really wanted to do. The boat or the London Eye or another museum or just staying inside with Katy. And when they finished talking about all of that and the train came, Dad and Joanna would have got on another train, going somewhere else.

  ‘Katy said that if the weather’s not too bad, then we could probably go up to Hampstead Heath one day and have a picnic,’ Mum said. ‘That would be really nice.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Sally said. ‘It’s been raining for days and days and days. I expect we could go up on Hampstead Heath anyway. But it might be too muddy to sit on the ground, I expect perhaps.’

  ‘Well, you never know,’ Mum said.

  ‘Oh, God, not a picnic,’ Miles said. They looked at him, surprised. ‘Picnics are fucking awful.’

  ‘Stop it at once,’ Mum said. ‘Or we won’t be going anywhere.’

  Outside, a train came, and the passengers got off and on, and the guard blew a whistle, and it moved off. You could never see the moment at which a train started to move; at one moment it was absolutely still and then, before you could tell, it was sliding into movement and then, by the time the last carriage left the station, it was moving too quickly for you to see anyone’s face inside the train. Ten minutes later, they were still sitting inside the café when another train came. Mum had finished her tea. She didn’t say anything; she might almost have forgotten that they were there. She stared ahead of her, through the window. Sally thought, not for the first time, how pretty Mum was, especially with her special parrot earrings on. All at once she remembered that Mum had bought those parrot earrings at Covent Garden market in London, one day last year when Katy had come out with them to go shopping to give Mum a bit of a boost, as Katy had said. That was the day she had bought them, and Sally had been allowed to choose them for Mum, once it got down to a choice between the parrot earrings and another pair – Sally couldn’t remember what the other earrings had been like. And today she and Mum and Miles were going to see Katy and were going to stay with her. So of course Mum had put her special earrings on.

  ‘Isn’t that our train?’ Miles said, but Mum said that it wasn’t, it was a train for Edinburgh that went through Birmingham and Sheffield. Miles offered to go outside and make sure, but Mum said, quite sharply, that he should stay where he was. She didn’t want any of them to go out on the platform until they had to.

  The guard looked up and down the platform, like a spectator at tennis; he raised his little yellow flag; he blew his whistle. He did this hundreds of times a day, you could see. The train began to move, so smoothly that you thought it was silent. ‘Good,’ Mum said, and she gave them a smile, one each. ‘Let’s go out, shall we?’

  Mum had made a mistake. As soon as the train had cleared the station, the two fat uncle-types on the opposite platform gave out a great cheer. They, like Mum, had thought that Dad and Joanna were going to get on this train, that their entertainment was going to be taken away from them. But they were delighted to discover that the huge and farcical Punch and Judy show was still going on. ‘Go on, my son,’ one of the race-going uncles shouted.

  It was too late for Mum to turn back, and say, ‘We’ll wait in the café, after all.’ She hesitated with her suitcase in the doorway. She made a decision. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and say hello to Dad and Joanna.’ Sally couldn’t see how they could say hello to Dad and Joanna, as they were still trying to get each other’s face in their mouths. But she and Miles followed Mum along the platform. It was interesting that, though the platform was quite crowded with people, a space had cleared around Dad and Joanna of about fifteen yards. It was as if they were a very bright light that you didn’t want to get too near; that once you had gone far enough away, you were free to stop ignoring it and start staring directly at it. Mum broke through that invisible barrier and went straight up to Dad and Joanna.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ she said. Her face was red, and her expression was almost cross, but determined. ‘Hello, Joanna. How nice to see you.’

  Dad broke away from Joanna. You could see that she would have gone on kissing him and ignored Mum. But Dad broke away and looked in a silly, embarrassed way at Mum. ‘Hello!’ he said, overdoing it, pretending that he hadn’t seen them. His face was wet and slobbered over, his hair crumpled upwards. He looked as if he had been in a fight. Joanna pulled his face sideways towards hers. She looked at them without saying anything.

  ‘Bye, then,’ Mum said, and together they went back down the station platform. ‘It’ll be along in a minute,’ Mum said. ‘Now, I know we’re in carriage H, but I don’t know where that’s going to be. Do you think carriage A is at the front, or at the back? I don’t know where we should stand. You’ve got everything – Miles, you’ve got your logic magazine, haven’t you? I think it’s probably around the middle. If we stand here, we won’t be too far out, anyway. What do you think?’

  They didn’t need to look; a cheer from the platform opposite, and, joining the uncles, three or four big boys. One shouted advice across the gap. Dad and Joanna had started up again, almost without a break. And then the train came in and they could get on it.

  They had their own seats, three of them around a table. There weren’t many tables on the train. Most of the seats were just in twos, facing the back of the seat in front, like seats in a bus. Mum had booked the train so long ago, almost two months ago, that she had been able to choose exactly the seats she wanted, and they had been much cheaper than if she had bought them on the day. Mum had explained all that, and why it was so important to get this exact train, and that Miles shouldn’t make them late. But they weren’t late, and they turned out to have been standing almost at the door to their carriage, H. ‘This is us,’ Mum said. They put their suitcases in the luggage rack at the end of the carriage – it was a squash, but they managed it. When they got to their table, there was a man sitting there, a man in a yellowish sports jacket, reading a book. You couldn’t expect the train company to let them have the whole table, just for themselves. The man had his bag, a brown sort of satchel on one of their seats, but he had a kind face, and apologized as he got up and put his satchel in the luggage rack. ‘Don’t let me forget that,’ he said. ‘I’m always getting off trains and forgetting things I’ve put in the rack.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just the same,’ Mum said, as they all sat down. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of umbrellas I’ve left on the train, just like that, putting them up on the luggage rack and then forgetting them when I get off.’

  ‘I don’t know what the trick is, to remember what you’ve put up there,’ the man said.

  ‘I heard,’ Mum said, smiling and settling, ‘that it helps if you just count how many things you put up there – one, two, coat, umbrella, three, like that. I don’t know. Where are you getting off?’

  ‘Me – oh, London,’ the man said.

  ‘We’ll make sure you don’t forget anything, won’t we?’ Mum said, including Sally and Miles.

  The man had seemed quite friendly and pleased to be sharing his table with them. Perhaps, though, he didn’t mind saying a couple of things to them, but he didn’t want to have a long conversation with them, because sometimes people were like that. Because when she said they would
all remind him about his satchel he smiled in a vaguer way, as if he had seen someone that he wasn’t sure had seen him, over the top of everyone’s head, it might have been, and went back to his book.

  Mum had a book, too. It was called The Line of Beauty and had a photograph of two people on the cover – Mum had bought it in the charity shop last week to read on the train. She had only just opened it when Sally’s phone made the noise it made when it had a message; it was a shriek of birdsong, like a parrot sounding the alarm in the jungle. The ringtone was called Amazon. Sally kept her phone in her pocket – once she had phoned her friend Martha without meaning to, just by leaning against the wall, and Martha had had to listen to the inside of her pocket rustling, and only after ten minutes Sally had noticed the tiny noise of Martha’s voice from her pocket, shouting, ‘It’s me, it’s me,’ like a secret fairy she’d hidden in her clothes. Since then she had learnt how to lock the phone, but she still kept it in her pocket. Sally picked out the telephone.

  ‘Who is it, Sal?’ Mum said.

  Sally looked. ‘It’s Dad, Mum.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mum said. ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘“Hello Sal,” Sally read. ‘“Saw you were on the train. Want to come and say hello? I’m in carriage F.” He’s down there with that Joanna. I saw them.’

  ‘He hasn’t sent me one,’ Miles said. ‘Why doesn’t he want me to come and see him?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure he’d like both of you to go, but there’s no point in sending two messages if he knows you’re with Sally.’

  ‘Why does he say only “Hello Sal”?’ Miles said. ‘Why doesn’t he say “Hello Sally and Miles”? It’s not fair.’