Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  The people of the island and almost all of the holidaymakers showed no interest in Thorpe Lindley’s paintings. Few of them could see why anyone should set up in front of a handsome Cycladic view and then paint a vast canvas, three feet by nine, consisting of a black rectangle floating over a very dark green ground, and nothing else. They lived for a year on Mrs Lindley’s parents. Then they talked the matter over, and Thorpe Lindley worked for two or three months in the spring, before the holidaymakers came, on neat, careful, well-executed paintings of the harbour. Bundles of moulded frames arrived for the painter, and sheets of hardboard matting. He had already learnt how to stretch canvas over wooden supports. With the help of the ironmonger in the back-streets by the harbour, he now learnt to frame his own pictures. The picturesque views of Antidauros harbour, brightly coloured and firmly outlined with a touch of English pop art, sold well. He despised what he did, but continued to do it. Towards the end of the summer, he found himself teaching two Greek ladies on holiday, widows of Thessaloniki merchants. They struggled through his Greek and their English to suggest to him that he might place an advert, early in the spring, in the Greek national newspaper, and one of them kindly wrote the correct wording in a language he was only slowly learning. He placed an advert there, and also in an English newspaper, with similar wording. It was good that only after all this happened did Thorpe learn that the two Greek ladies were supporters of the Colonels, and he kept this information from his wife. The next year there were plenty of students, and he painted his large abstract slowly, in the interim times.

  His wife accepted the position that nobody, yet, wanted anything to do with advanced thinking about art. She went about the village pale, intense, furious, explaining to anyone that her husband’s art was not to be identified with the little paintings he sold to make money. He was at work on a great project, she explained to the old fishermen of the town and the rich visitors from Athens, making no distinction between them. The old fishermen had no interest in different schools of art and the rich visitors from Athens knew and mostly ridiculed abstract painting, so she grew angry. After some months, she learnt that it was better to confine her anger to the family house, and not to vent it in front of strangers, who would first be shocked, then laugh at her loss of dignity. She had too little to do, and raged in misery and disgust, only ever saying at the end of it that it would all be so much worse in England, horrible and stupid as the Greeks were, or could be.

  The children were conspicuous on the island. They were English, and could be nothing else. They had shocks of blond hair, white-blond, like the first stab of the sun in the morning, and quickly their skin grew dark in the summer until their eyes and hair and lips were paler than their cheeks. Still they did not look healthy, but thin-faced, uncertain, withdrawn. They were more at home with each other than with the other children of the island, who were entered into and withdrawn from the school according to how much their fathers needed them in the family business, on board a fishing boat, to help out at a taverna or unloading a ferry’s wares. The Lindley children never missed a day, and walked down the hill to the little school in procession, splash of white-blond after splash of white-blond, their hair cut by their mother to save money. For a long time, there was another Lindley child every two or three years, until there were six. Then it stopped. The two eldest were boys. Oak Lindley was short and pugnacious, with a look of a fight about to start and a wrong about to be put right. Thyme Lindley, the second boy, was fearful-looking, fretting as he walked, his fingers fluttering about his bag, opening and shutting it as he checked that the books he needed were still there. The others walked behind them, silent or murmuring. It was cause for comment in the village how very quiet the English children were. But whether it was a Lindley quiet or an English quiet, it was a quiet that had no calm in it, only some sort of fear, and it was felt to be unnatural that children all their days made no scream or yell to break the morning.

  After the passage of some years, Oak Lindley returned to the island and set up in a small office mending broken computers, under the business name of OKIT, and an internet café with six computers, his father’s unsold pictures on the walls and offering English cakes, with sultanas and carrots, made by his mother. He lived in a small flat upstairs. His café, which was popular with tourists in the summer and had steady unemployed regulars most of the winter, had a sign outside reading δρυς. ‘Drys’ was his name in Greek, but few people knew that; they thought of him as O-uark, a sound and not a meaning word. There were no oak trees on the island and the islanders thought of the name of his café as ordinarily fanciful. Thyme, who still lived in the bedroom he had shared with Oak, made a little money teaching yoga to tourists and to students at his father’s painting school. He charged 250 drachmas a lesson. Yoga was a skill he had learnt from a visiting teacher who, in addition to yoga, taught tai chi and meditation. She had spent the summer on Antidauros, ten years before. Thyme dreaded a customer who was already experienced in the art.

  One day in late May, Thorpe shut up the studio and walked down through the town towards the harbour. He passed his son Oak’s internet café. Oak was sitting inside, talking to his brother Thyme, two blond boys of different shape and size, their family resemblance seeming only to be made by their shared colouring. They were twenty-three and twenty years old. They did not see their father go past. Thorpe had seen the ship approaching from far away. It was the weekly cargo ship, and he was sure that it would be bringing him a supply of canvas, paper, stretchers and framing material, as well as paint, brushes and other important stuff, for himself and for the pupils who would start arriving in June. An assistant was arriving in two weeks from England, a rich boy who would pay him for the privilege of painting around him all summer, and of learning how to stretch canvas and mount frames. It was a biannual delivery, sent by the suppliers in Thessaloniki, that had once filled him with delight and anticipation, and now gave him feelings of dread and age. He knew as he walked towards the docking ship that he would feel, on opening the ordered cargo, the coagulating presence of a hundred inept views of the same stretch of land and sky from his pupils, the same ten pop-art-flavoured views of the island that he would paint this month and sell, and not the masterpiece that he had known he had in him and still heard his wife urge him towards. He painted somewhat in the manner of Willem de Kooning, these days. Even people he had spent time with had sometimes observed that his art of that sort was like the art on the side of subway trains, was influenced by graffiti. But it did not sell.

  At the dockyard, he signed for the tea-chest-sized cargo, and asked Marina if her son could drive it up to the studio that afternoon. It was the best time of year. The wildflowers on the island were still rich and abundant, and the sea was fresh. When he had first come to the island, he had found the abundant spread, up on the hill, of flowering broom, of purple borage, nasturtiums, anemones, daisies, wild irises among the smell of sage, rosemary and lavender, intoxicating. Now he liked this time of year because it was warm, but there were few tourists yet, and the town had painted itself. It presented itself fresh and brilliant, white and blue, to the arriving visitor, preparing to make a go of it.

  His name was called, an unfamiliar voice, not Greek or English. He shaded his eyes and looked on the terrace of the harbour-side café, Leonidas, and saw a waving female figure, ruddy and plump. He recognized her. She was a Swiss woman, a German speaker, a regular visitor at this time of year. She had been coming to Antidauros for at least twenty years, and greeted Thorpe as if he were an old friend. Next to her was a frail, gaunt man, shrunk into his grey flesh. Thorpe remembered that she came every year with her husband; she looked much as she had for the last year or two, but this man, surely, looked very much older and frailer than he had. Thorpe greeted them heartily enough, not remembering their names or anything about them. He did remember, however, that they had a son who was perhaps in his early twenties.

  ‘It is so pleasant to come back to Antidauros,’ the woman said. ‘We l
ook forward to our holiday almost as soon as Christmas is over and done with. We always have. Herbert, my husband, he always says to me, Maria, Maria, it will be here before you know it and over before you know it.’

  It was tactful of the woman to mention their names so casually. Thorpe did not believe that he would have remembered them unassisted. He had never liked or admired this pair, any more than any of the other regular visitors to the island. They came every year, but their clothes were exactly as they had been twenty years ago, the clothes of a comfortable Swiss-German pair of shopkeepers on a Sunday trip to the lake. The woman’s bright floral dress in orange and red, her vividly artificial tights and white slingback shoes corseted an abundant flesh that would be wobbling red and sore, her shoulders streaked with yogurt by the end of the holiday. The old man’s blue shorts and cheerful Hawaiian shirt were loose on him; his white socks and brown sandals, polished to a shine, were those of any other descending Teuton this year or any other. Thorpe reminded himself that these people kept the island going, and it was his responsibility to be pleasant to them, as much as any other resident of Antidauros.

  ‘I hope your painting is going well,’ the woman confided, leaning forward. ‘I was so looking forward to seeing you before much longer. You see,’ she patted her husband’s hand, ‘you see, I wanted to ask you if you could do one thing for me. It is, if you like, a commission.’

  ‘Well, that’s always a welcome suggestion,’ Thorpe said.

  ‘My husband wants to have his portrait painted,’ the woman said. ‘And I said, let us ask Mr Lindley of Antidauros. I must explain.’ She hurried on, seeing, perhaps, Thorpe’s unwillingness in his eyes. He never painted portraits for exactly this reason. It required sitting in a room, facing another human being, and perhaps even engaging in conversation with them. Thorpe believed that if the suggestion ever arose, it would arise from the people he already spent enough time with, the rich holidaymakers, the wealthy of Hamburg and Lyon, here on the island for two weeks, and full of unreasonable demands. He started to shake his head. The woman could buy one of the landscapes he had left over from last year.

  But she went on swiftly: ‘It has never happened before, this desire to have Herbert painted,’ she said. ‘And now it is our last chance. You see, Mr Lindley, Herbert is ill, and is not expected to last until the end of the year.’

  ‘I am so sorry to hear that,’ Thorpe said. The old man, fleshless, sunken, now began almost to grin, to nod in a slow, satisfied manner. Thorpe could not remember if he understood English, or if this conversation was being carried out in the safe knowledge that anything could be said in front of him. He remembered nothing of this pair except their bold appearance, and that they had a son. ‘It’s an honour even to be asked,’ he said in the end.

  But there was something about that response that dissatisfied the woman, and she shook her head sharply. ‘Money would be no object,’ she said firmly. ‘You could name your price, Mr Lindley.’

  ‘And your son?’ Thorpe said, revolted. ‘Is he with you?’

  ‘Florian is not with us this year,’ she said. ‘He has just started a new job and he found it impossible to ask for leave. He is the new junior manager of a branch of Starbucks in Solothurn, a beautiful city, not so very far from us, a hundred and fifty kilometres away, and he visits us every week. How kind of you to ask after him!’

  ‘I see,’ Thorpe said. In his mind he shrank from this family and its deeds. But he needed money: he perpetually needed money. And even the mother of a man who spread American filth and called it coffee could supply him with money for good deeds. He wondered how much he could charge for how little.

  ‘Won’t you join us,’ the woman said. ‘Join us in our morning drink. It is a little too late for breakfast, but we like to enjoy ourselves on holiday. It would be as our guest, of course,’ she went on expansively. Thorpe had not noticed that the pair of them were drinking, as very old Greek men sometimes used to, glasses of ouzo, although it was only ten thirty in the morning. The father took up his glass, half empty, and in the vacant café, looking out over the sun and the sea, finished it in one gulp.

  ‘That is kind of you,’ Thorpe said, with some distaste. ‘But I have some work I need to do before lunch. I would be happy to work on a portrait of your husband, and honoured. Perhaps he would like to come up to the studio tomorrow morning. Would that suit you?’

  ‘What do you think of charging?’ the woman said, her eyes wet and hungry.

  Thorpe assessed her. She was probably not immensely rich; she was of the class of persons that had little reason to spend on ordinary things, and on the rare occasions, like a holiday, when opportunities arose, she must enjoy splashing around the small margins of her income. He thought about what he could get away with, and named a sum. She lowered her eyes to her ouzo, her handbag, clutched in her hands, red-varnished. It was more than she had thought. She had never dealt with a proper painter before, she confided. But then she gathered strength, and said that this was important, and she agreed. Her son would transfer the deposit from Solothurn. This would happen in the next day or two days.

  He told the story to his wife and children, over lunch that day. His wife shook her head when she learnt that their son was the junior manager of a branch of Starbucks. ‘Do they not have coffee of their own in Switzerland?’ she said. ‘I think it’s rather well known to be extremely good. The Germans! They know all about coffee. And now the Americans, they come with their shops, selling slightly flavoured foaming milk, calling it coffee, and driving everyone who knows about coffee out of business. The minds of these people – their children working for scum like that. I would be ashamed to know anyone who worked for Starbucks, I truly would. My God, what does your son do – he’s the junior manager of a branch of Starbucks. These people.’

  ‘The son seemed reasonable,’ Thorpe said. ‘He had an odd name. He was called – he was called Florian. I think I remember him.’

  ‘I remember a Swiss boy called Florian,’ Thyme said. ‘He was nice. He’s been coming here for years. I remember him being our age.’

  ‘The father is going to die, his wife said,’ Thorpe said.

  ‘One final trip,’ Rose Lindley said. ‘They are so deluded, these people. They think that they come to a place once a year for two weeks, even for twenty years, and they think anyone remembers them. It’s only their lives that are so drab, back home, with their son working for Starbucks and— What did they do?’

  ‘God knows,’ Thorpe said. ‘But they made some money at it. She’s asked me to paint a portrait of her husband before he dies. He’s not expected to last more than six months. This is their last chance.’

  ‘Don’t they have artists in – where was it? – Solothurn? No. That was just where their son was living. Where are they?’

  ‘I forget. I’m the artist who came to mind. They’ve offered me a good sum of money. I’ll paint what portrait I can in the next ten days, then they’ll pay me five thousand euros. It isn’t a bad deal.’

  ‘You should have asked for ten,’ Rose said. But she was pleased. Five thousand euros, and the guaranteed payment that the student painter was going to make for staying with them the whole summer. If they could only guarantee selling eight paintings to tourists this summer, and if nobody dropped out of the painting courses, they would be all right for the winter.

  ‘Why didn’t Florian come with them?’ Oak said. ‘He was nice. I don’t care if he is the manager of Starbucks.’

  ‘Junior manager,’ Rose said. ‘I think she must have meant deputy manager. He won’t have been able to get holiday. They work them to the bone, those people, for nothing, just a degrading gruelling job for ten hours, having to smile at people constantly and going home with the stink of boiling milk in your nostrils.’

  ‘Is it just the mother and the father, then?’ Thyme said.

  The next morning, the two Swiss arrived at the studio exactly at nine thirty, as Thorpe had asked. They came up the hill in the taxi driven by Marina�
��s son, and Thorpe could hear them fussing about in a curious, yawping, golloping language outside. He had arranged the studio for a sitting, with an old armchair to one side where the light was good, and hung a tatty old purple shawl of Rose’s against the wall behind the chair.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said heartily, as they came in. The old man was in a plain shirt today, and a thin red bow tie; his wife was still in her shiny, floral, polyester holiday garb. Thorpe explained where he should sit, and his plan to sketch today with charcoal and to get to work on the canvas tomorrow. He explained soberly that sitting for a portrait was much more tiring than might be imagined, and that he would not ask the old man to sit for more than an hour without a break, and not more than two hours a day in total.

  ‘Should Herbert sit here now?’ the wife said.

  Thorpe suggested that the wife should go, and come back in two and a half hours. He liked the idea that he would not have to talk to his sitter at all. She hesitated, perhaps wondering how he would explain anything necessary to the sitter, but after a moment gurgled some explanation to him, and left with a little wave.