Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  ‘He means both of you,’ Mum said.

  ‘But if he means both of us why wouldn’t he say—’ Miles said, his voice rising.

  ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ Mum said. ‘I really haven’t the faintest idea why your father would do anything at all. Are you going to see him in carriage F, Sally?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Well, it seems like a very long walk, and if you don’t feel like it, I don’t think you have to.’

  The man at their table, who had started to read his book, didn’t seem to be reading his book any more.

  Sally texted with one thumb, two letters. ‘No,’ she texted, and then sent it.

  ‘That was a short text,’ Mum said.

  The train stopped at Taunton before it would go straight on to Reading and then London Paddington. They had settled into their puzzle books, and Mum into her book, when a pink-faced lady came bustling up the aisle, some time after Taunton. ‘Disgusting,’ she was saying, to nobody in particular, and immediately Sally knew that she must be talking about her dad and Joanna. What were they doing – were they snogging still, or were they arguing and saying ‘fucking’ at the top of their voices, or both? ‘Disgusting,’ the lady was saying, as she went past.

  ‘Wasn’t that Miss Jenkins?’ Mum said. ‘You know, Miles, the lady who was your form teacher at Kendall Primary?’

  ‘That wasn’t Miss Jenkins!’ Miles said, almost howling. ‘Miss Jenkins didn’t look like that at all.’

  ‘Miss Jenkins was Miles’s favourite when he was an infant,’ Sally said. ‘He loved her. Didn’t you, you baby?’

  ‘That wasn’t Miss Jenkins,’ Miles said.

  ‘It looked a bit like her, I thought,’ Mum said. Ten minutes later, the lady who wasn’t Miss Jenkins came back down the aisle of the train, followed by the train guard, in uniform, the one who was checking everyone’s tickets. The train was crowded, and you could hear him going ‘Pardon me – pardon me – pardon me,’ as he pushed past the people standing at the end of the carriage, or sitting on their luggage.

  ‘Something’s up,’ the man at their table said, watching them go past.

  ‘You see,’ the lady was saying, ‘I don’t mind asking someone politely in those circumstances, but people of that sort – you know, I’m very sorry to have to—’

  ‘The man who owns the greengrocer,’ Miles said slowly, ‘is not the man who rides a red motorcycle.’

  The lady who wasn’t Miss Jenkins and the train guard passed into the next carriage. The people at the end of the carriage, and some of the people in the seats craned their heads after them. Sally lowered her head over her puzzle book. This one was famous composers. There was one called Borodin, but Sally just couldn’t find it. Usually, when you couldn’t find a name, it was diagonally hidden, forwards or backwards. She just couldn’t see it. She went on looking. And in fifteen minutes, the guard came back, having sorted out whatever the problem had been. Sally wanted to say ‘whatever the problem had been’ but she knew it was her dad and that Joanna. They had been snogging and saying ‘fucking’ and everything. The lady who had come down the carriage saying that she didn’t mind asking someone politely in those circumstances had been talking about her father.

  When the divorce had started coming, it had approached from a very long way away. Of course Sally knew about divorce. But she hadn’t thought about it in relation to Mum and Dad. The first argument she hadn’t been meant to hear. It had happened downstairs after she had gone to bed. She had only heard it because she had stayed up reading her book and hadn’t gone to sleep; it was Mum shouting, though you couldn’t hear what she was saying, and then Dad’s voice mumbling. What was it about? It was over too quickly to find out, and the next day she wondered whether she had imagined it all. But then a few days later, the same thing happened. Perhaps she was listening out for it this time. And the shouting went on for longer, and Dad raised his voice, too. ‘That’s your problem,’ he was shouting. ‘It’s all in your mind.’ But it wasn’t in Sally’s mind. She could hear them downstairs.

  Quite soon, the mood in the house stopped being bad in the evenings. You would get up in the morning and they wouldn’t be speaking to each other. They would go off to work separately without saying goodbye, and when they came in in the evening, they wouldn’t say hello to each other. Dad went upstairs as soon as he had finished dinner, into his study. He spent the whole evening on the computer. He said, as he went upstairs, that he had work to do. But really he spent the evening on Facebook. Mum would open a bottle of wine and switch the telly on, watching the whole of an evening’s programmes, one after another. Then, after Sally and Miles had gone to bed, Dad would come downstairs and they would have an argument. It was worse at weekends and it was very bad at Christmas, after which Dad had left for the first time. It was on Christmas Day that Mum first mentioned the name of Joanna in front of Sally and Miles.

  ‘This is nice,’ Mum said.

  ‘What?’ Dad said.

  ‘Oh, I was just saying something,’ Mum said. ‘To keep the party atmosphere going. It’s nice to sit here with your children on Christmas Day with a glass of wine and the turkey finished and over with.’

  ‘Did you like your presents, kids?’ Dad said.

  ‘Have you phoned your mother?’ Mum said.

  ‘I phoned her first thing,’ Dad said.

  ‘I’d have liked to say hello,’ Mum said. ‘You could have said.’

  ‘You were busy in the kitchen,’ Dad said. ‘I was up in my study.’

  ‘Yes, I could hear you making your phone calls,’ Mum said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘You can phone her again now,’ Dad said.

  ‘How’s Joanna?’ Mum said.

  ‘Joanna?’ Dad said.

  ‘You know, Joanna you work with,’ Mum said. ‘I thought you were phoning her this morning.’

  ‘This morning?’ Dad said. ‘No, I was phoning my mum. Why would I be phoning Joanna?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mum said. ‘It was just that you were making about five phone calls, one after another. I could hear when you were putting the phone down, it rings down here, and you were laughing a lot over one phone call. It didn’t sound like your mum you were laughing with, if I’m honest. And I’m down here putting the stuffing in the turkey and making an X on the bottom of every Brussels sprout, and there’s the man I married, laughing away with someone called Joanna who only six months ago you said, Oh, let’s have her for dinner, and she came for dinner and she asked if the kids could be sent to bed. Remember? We asked Pete as well. You thought that a single woman like that, in Devon, she’d be glad of meeting a single man, they’d do for each other, you said. And she got drunk and obnoxious and Pete said he had stuff to do. Remember? And then you never mentioned her again because I thought the dinner had been a disaster, and because she’d been so rude, sending the kids off like that because “I’m jist not mach of a children persin”, that’s what she said, and getting drunk like that. I thought you thought of her what I thought of her, so why would we be mentioning her? I’m so stupid. Not knowing what not mentioning her meant. And now it’s Christmas Day and I’m stuck inside with you and you spent most of the morning on the phone to bloody Joanna.’

  Sally hadn’t known the name for the colour then, but if she could have named the colour of Dad’s face, she would have called it puce.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Just get out,’ Mum said.

  ‘She’s on her own,’ Dad said. ‘It can’t be nice, spending Christmas Day on your own in a foreign country.’

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ Mum said. ‘But it seems to me that it wasn’t loneliness that was her problem in your office three weeks ago, after lunch.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Catherine told me. Your colleague Catherine. Do you know how Catherine knew about it? Joanna told her. Boasting about it, Catherine said. She thought I should know. She was prob
ably right.’

  ‘Do you think—’ Dad said. He made a face towards Sally and Miles. They had been sitting at the kitchen table. Ten minutes ago, they had been trying to solve a wooden puzzle, a globe in pieces. It had been a stocking filler. They had stopped trying to do that some minutes ago.

  ‘No, I don’t think,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve done enough shielding and protecting and telling lies on your behalf and pretending nothing’s going on, to you, to me, myself, to the kids, to my mum and dad. So you can get out, tonight.’

  There was more crying to get through, and more shouting in the other room. And then it seemed to be all right. At least, Dad said so. But it couldn’t have been because the next morning he drove away after breakfast and didn’t come back that night.

  When the train got to London, it turned out that Mum had got three Oyster cards for them. They were brilliant. You just held your card up to an electronic pad at the gates at the Underground and the gates opened. They had known how to deduct some money from the Oyster card. How did the money get onto the Oyster card? Mum said that she’d asked Katy and Katy had sorted it all out and sent the cards by post, which was really nice of Katy. Miles’s card meant he didn’t have to pay anything, but Sally was over eleven, and she paid half fare, and Mum, of course, paid the full fare. Sally had been on the Underground before, but she always found it confusing, with its tunnels and signposts saying if you wanted to go WEST, when she didn’t know what direction they wanted to go in. Once she heard a man’s voice from behind that might have been Dad’s, shouting, ‘Wait, wait,’ but the three of them just went on walking.

  Katy lived near Waterloo, and Mum explained this meant they went on the Bakerloo Line, which would take them all the way there. But a horrible thing happened. Sally had thought that she had heard Dad calling from behind them, but she must have been wrong. Because when they got to the platform for the Bakerloo Line, there were Dad and Joanna, and they were standing on the platform with their bags in front of them. ‘Let’s go this way,’ Mum said. She had seen them too. And Joanna saw them – you could see her seeing them. She turned round and took Dad’s face and starting kissing it. Her tongue was all the way out and pushing into his mouth. They were right there in the Underground, where the air was so dusty and dirty, and snogging and snogging. All the people around looked, or pretended not to look, or started paying attention to their newspapers. And Joanna and Dad were just feeling each other all over. The train was due in four minutes. Now they had their hands in each other’s hair, and Joanna’s face was pushed sideways. She had her eyes open. You could see that she was looking at them, even though her mouth was snogging Dad’s mouth and she was feeling him all over.

  ‘Have you seen that poster?’ Mum said. ‘Look, it’s clever, isn’t it?’

  ‘I like that one, with the man up in the tree,’ Sally said.

  ‘Yes, I like that one, too,’ Mum said. ‘I’m really tired. As soon as you come to London, it tires you out.’

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ Sally said. ‘We’ll be at Katy’s and she’ll make us a cup of tea and we can put our feet up for a bit, have a bit of an old chinwag.’ That was what Granny Hopkins often said, and she said it as a sort of joke. But Mum didn’t seem to notice that she was joking. She was trembling, looking in the other direction, the direction from which the trains came. Sally remembered the whoosh and the roar and the hot wind when a train came. It always frightened her a little bit. Mum was holding tight to both their hands.

  ‘I hate that,’ Miles said. ‘I’m never going to do that, never, never, never.’

  ‘What, Miles?’ Mum said.

  ‘That snogging,’ Miles said. ‘It looks horrible. I never want to do that. As long as I live, I don’t want to. I’m never, ever going to do anything like that.’

  ‘You don’t have to look,’ Mum said. ‘Let’s just not look. Pay no attention.’

  The train came, its hot wind and roar carrying torn papers up from the black, dusty bed of the tracks. Mum had closed her eyes. Her mouth was tight shut. Only when the doors opened did she look again. They picked up their suitcases, one, two, three, and stepped into the train. But here came Dad and Joanna; she was pulling at him, and pulling him towards the carriage they were in. Joanna had a mean, determined face on; she was looking at them but not looking at them in a way that meant to be looked back at. The doors shut, and Dad and Joanna were at one end of the carriage, and they were at the other. And instantly, Joanna dropped the bag she was holding, and there, in the dirty and half-full carriage, full of strangers reading and trying to work out the tube map and twiddling with their iPhones, she began to snog their father again. Sally knew that if they stepped out at the next station to wait for the next train, Joanna would pull their father out, too; if they moved to the next carriage, she would follow them. Joanna and their father would snog and snog until Joanna decided that it was time for them to step out, and leave his wife and children, and she would leave them with a backwards glance and a look of snogged triumph, saying loudly as she went that she supposed she was just not a fucking children sort of person.

  And then Mum was there with a hankie. ‘Please don’t cry, Sal,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason to cry, is there? We’re going to have a fantastic time in London. They’ll be gone soon. We don’t need to look at them if we don’t want to. They don’t matter if we don’t look at them. They’re not enjoying it, much, either. They look so stupid, don’t they?’ But Mum was crying now, too, and Miles was clinging to her, in terror at what he might one day have to do. ‘If you don’t think about them,’ Mum was saying, ‘then they don’t exist. We’ll be at Katy’s, soon, and we can all sit down and have a nice cup of tea.’

  What Mum said seemed to be true. Because at the next stop, as people drew away from Dad and Joanna, they pulled away from each other, and got out. Joanna went with a backwards glance and a look of snogged triumph in their direction. Sally could not help but look. She seemed to be saying something to their dad as she went. Where they were going she didn’t know. They had got out at – she looked – Piccadilly Circus. And, in time, Mum brightened up, and Sally’s crying had stopped. They came to Waterloo Station. It was big and complicated, and they kept having to stop and make sure they were going in the right direction. Mum said she would have phoned Katy to find out the right exit, but of course mobiles wouldn’t work down here, underground. Miles kept saying he knew where to go, he’d take them to Katy’s house, he knew how to get there, but that was just his way. Mum said she hoped it hadn’t started raining outside. You wouldn’t know down here. Somewhere out there, on the surface, the rain might be coming down in buckets. In the end they found the right exit, and the rain was really nothing at all. The station was only a few hundred yards from Katy’s house – it was a pretty house, with a yellow door and a brass number and, Sally remembered, red flowers in the window-boxes. Sometimes she got details like that wrong, but not this time. When they turned into the street, they could see the yellow door and the red flowers in the window-boxes, exactly as she had remembered it. As they came up to number eleven, there was Katy herself, Mum’s oldest friend, her pretty round freckled face and piled-up ginger hair, there in the window, poking aside the flowered curtains. She was looking out for them, and an expression of pure delight now came over her face.

  The Painter’s Sons

  (i.m. D.H.L.)

  Thorpe Lindley was the foreign painter on Antidauros. The houses on this small Greek island had been uniform, cubed, white since long before memory. They were clustered around the circular harbour, and began to climb the steep white rocky hill behind. The landscape was bleached by the summer heat, the scrubby grass and rocks remaining drained of colour even in winter. The people of the island had always gone with their sweethearts up the hill to sit among briars and wildflowers, to embrace and to notice the view. When they had married their sweethearts, their use for a view came to an end, and they rarely climbed the hill.

  But some time in the early 1970s, new houses
started to be built on the island. Rich men from Athens discovered it and, finding it unspoilt, decided to begin the work of spoiling it. They built four or five luxurious villas with fine views of the harbour and the sea, from far above. When they arrived, they first agreed to be transported up the hill by the villagers’ donkeys, but in time roads were built, and a taxi firm with one driver started to find it worth his while in the summer months, when he was not working as a waiter in the taverna. After the rich Athenian men, the locals began to build new houses for the tourists who would come. They discovered that houses, if lived in but left unfinished, were not taxable. So the tourists, when they came, had to look harder for the island as it had been, unspoilt. Much of the hillside came to be covered with ugly brown square blocks, iron rods stiffly poking into the sky and rusting from the square-topped surface of the roof.

  To suit the sense of the picturesque that the tourists sought, first coming from Greece, then from France, Germany and England, it was necessary to encourage a painter, a foreign one. A painter might become rich quickly on more established islands, but here that was all in the future. The painter who came was there for the peace, and money, perhaps, might come much later on. The studio and school of art was a large single-room building, finished and painted white, surrounded by purple-flowering oleander bushes on the edge of the island’s single town, and in spring by wildflowers. The painter had tried to plant ivy against the toilet that stood behind the building, perhaps to hide it, or maybe to remind people of where he came from – it looked very strange on that Greek island, and was much discussed when it started to grow and cover the little kiosk. A hundred metres away was the house that the painter and his family lived in: square, bulky, white, but without rusting metal rods shooting up from the roof.

  Thorpe Lindley had come to Antidauros at the age of twenty-seven. He had been a painter in London, taking occasional work teaching for schools and trying to make his name as a painter. His wife believed in him: she worked as the personal assistant to the editor of a political journal, and they managed to live on what they made. She was confident that things would work out for them, as the daughter of a prosperous estate agent who had turned against all that materialistic shit. He was the son of an office cleaner and a clerk in an undertaker’s office, who were awed by their clever son making it through grammar school, and were no more worried when he went to art school to become a painter than if he had gone to law school to become a solicitor. He was not confident that things would work out for them. His art had been pencil studies of nudes, then Graham Sutherland, then Bacon, then Jackson Pollock, and now it had been simplified into blocks of floating colour, given texture on the canvas. He had become fascinated by Mark Rothko, with whom his wife said he was in a dialogue. Sometimes he sold a painting, but in London, he had no dealer. They talked the matter through and came to Antidauros to live more cheaply, more honestly, and to introduce the innocent people of the island and those who visited to new currents in art.