Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  The sitter focused sharply. He had seemed vague, led about like a pet spaniel, unsure, but he had made his own life and had run everything in his house and business for decades. He had his own purpose. Now he sat and focused sharply on the man who was to paint him before he died. But he had not sat for a portrait before, and it was as if he were posing in front of a camera. He produced a strong grin, as big and stretched as he could manage. Thorpe looked. It was a terrifying grin. Under the thin stretched skin, the broad yellow Swiss teeth were pulled back as if in agony. The grin revealed the skull beneath. If there was any joy in this grin, it had disappeared years ago. But it was how a man pictured himself in his portrait. Today there was no need for the man to hold any facial expression at all. Thorpe had painted few portraits in his life, but he knew that the thing you did was to block out the relationships of parts of the body, to form a structure, and only then to move on from charcoal on paper to the portrait on canvas. Then there would be time to discourage the grin.

  The assistant from England arrived at the end of the following week. He was a boy called Charlie who had been on one of the painting courses, a year before. But he had proved himself too good to fit in with the ladies and amateurs who wanted to learn how to sketch on a Greek hillside. He was a student at an art college, and had taken Thorpe’s course only because he wanted to get away, to paint in the sun. He had shown an interest in Thorpe’s abstract painting; he had sat with Thorpe and Rose outside on the terrace, arguing about de Kooning and Twombly, late into the night. The painting school had not been the right place for him. He was limp, affected, timid in manner, Thyme said decisively, and he had seen how the people of the village stared after him as he walked through the town with his elaborate moustache, wearing a blue-and-white-striped Edwardian one-piece bathing costume and Roman sandals. But he scared off the women on the painting course that week with his work and his confidence with a brush. He was, it had emerged, rich. His father was something in the City, he said, with a flourish, and had provided Thorpe with a joke. ‘Art schools,’ he said, ‘are the downwardly mobile section of higher education. Taking the sons of commodity brokers and introducing them to a way of life in which they’ll find it impossible to make a living.’ Rose had laughed with the others – Charlie, too, had let out his feminine giggle, high-pitched and quickly covered with the back of his hand. She had said when they were alone that Charlie was the real thing, that he had, like Thorpe, a vocation. She felt, however, there was a way to use Charlie’s trust fund, and go on using it. When he had written suggesting that what he needed was more than a week, Thorpe had invited him to come and stay as his apprentice – a word in inverted commas, an old-fashioned word that neither of them would feel they would have committed to – and learn through osmosis, by working alongside, by making frames and helping Rose out with the books.

  Oak couldn’t remember him. In his internet café, he paid little attention to his father’s pupils. They were all middle-aged women. Sometimes, when things were quiet, Oak and Thyme would sit and discuss handsome men of the town, or handsome men who had come on holiday to the island. They had both told their parents that they preferred men to women, years ago. Rose had made a point of saying that it was a tragedy that both her sons, the eldest children, were gay. But she said it as a joke, raising the back of her hand to her forehead as she spoke, to parody the intense melodrama with which such things were responded to in the past. In reality she welcomed it. She felt that no man would take Oak or Thyme away from her, that a relationship with a man would always be a secondary thing. Oak had had a relationship lasting two years with a boy from the village, the son of the post office, a dark, glowering boy with an early moustache. They had been seventeen and eighteen, and it had been a secret from his parents, but not from Oak’s, who had invited Nikolaos to supper whenever he wanted, and cherished him. After two years it had come to an end and Oak still came up the hill to eat supper with his mother. Thyme was more shy. If he had had a relationship, his mother did not know about it. She felt and said that he deserved to be happy.

  Rose had half remembered the assistant called Charlie. She saw him getting off the ferry and waved energetically. She realized that she had remembered, above all, the moustache he had worn the summer before. She had hung on to that moustache when reading his letters; it was the moustache of a Victorian strong man in a circus, curled and immense, and she had constructed a strong man about him. The moustache was gone this year, and instead there was an apologetic small person, Greek-dark but as small as a fifteen-year-old, coming towards her with a valise and a suitcase on wheels. The Disappointment held out his hand, and Rose, making the best of it, embraced him. His narrow little chest, like a tubercular child’s, inflated beneath her strong arms. He would do very well for Thyme, who had not done very well on his own behalf. She felt this with certainty, and with some amusement.

  ‘Thorpe’s busy still with a commission,’ Rose said, as they dragged up the hill – Marina’s son’s taxi was only for students, not for apprentices, she had decided. ‘It’s a portrait.’

  ‘That’s a new development,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t remember him doing portraits before.’

  ‘Oh, he’s done portraits before,’ Rose said. ‘He painted one of me when we first met. He doesn’t do them often. This one was supposed to be finished by now. It’s a holidaymaker who just decided out of the blue that he wanted his portrait painted, and since he was here for two weeks, Thorpe said yes. And charged him five thousand euros,’ she went on, deciding that the Disappointment might as well hear about everything, if he was hoping to learn about the life of a painter.

  ‘When is he going?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Rose said. ‘He was supposed to go last Friday, but announced that Thorpe shouldn’t hurry, that he’d put his flight off for ten days, and could put it off for ten days more. It should have been done by now. But I think it’s nearly finished. You might like to talk to Thorpe about it now the piece is nearly done.’

  ‘I look forward to seeing Thorpe’s new pieces,’ Charlie said, pausing for a moment and letting his suitcase rest on the ground. He mopped his brow, speaking formally but breathlessly. He had caught that word, piece, from Thorpe last summer and had caught it again just now from Rose. It gave the products of painting a new dignity, an intellectual substance, a suggestion of white cube buildings in Mayfair, galleries of art, and not the white cubes rented out to holidaymakers on Antidauros. Rose used it again.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s a strong piece,’ she said casually. What a Disappointment, she said to herself. But he would do for Thyme, this summer. She was proud of her generosity.

  She took Charlie to the house first, where he could wash himself and change. His shirt was dark-stained. For a moment she thought that somehow water had been poured over him. He did not seem capable of doing anything as physical as sweating, and he gave off no odour. He would be living in Thyme’s room this summer, Rose explained. Thyme would move down to share his brother’s flat over the internet café, but had not cleared out all of his stuff. Rose apologized for this as she showed Charlie the room, saying that Thyme was a lazy little sod, but a charmer, and he would get the rest of his stuff out later that day. She was pleased at this accident, or Thyme’s lack of organization. She saw that it was a way to introduce Charlie and Thyme again to each other in intimate circumstances, and after that, they would easily move to the next stage. Charlie hardly looked around, although the drawers in Thyme’s room were open, spilling clouds of the clean white underwear he hardly ever wore, and on the shelf were dusty trophies from inter-island chess matches, on the shelf the disco CDs she had encouraged him in and which he never played. It came to her that Charlie, last summer, had struck her as no kind of observer. Did a painter need to be a talented observer? She did not know, but Charlie was not one. His paintings might have been produced with his back to any kind of sight of interest, in a cell or before a blank wall. It was more than that: she remembered, and she thought no
w of how Charlie could be taken to see something of interest, and give the strong impression of boredom, of not seeing, of wanting only to project himself into the space and talk about what was already inside his head.

  He was a bore with only the normal powers of perception, not an artist’s perception. She remembered those long conversations at night that had engaged and interested Thorpe so much. Not her. They had been abstract, philosophical, nothing to do with the world. When he talked about the tactile, or about sensuous textures of paint, or about the quality of light in this part of the world, it was with no engagement with facts, and was not the product of observation. She had listened to him moving little chess pieces of abstract values about the field of conversation, and for him the phrase ‘quality of light’ had the same abstract value as the word ‘similitude’ or ‘ontology’. He could not say what colour the quality of light possessed, or endowed. And his body, his physical presence, in his clean, short-sleeved blue-checked shirt, bought after hardly a glance in a high-street emporium, his odourless and insubstantial, thin-calved, elbowing body, was barely present. No wonder she had only remembered the moustache and the high-pitched, feminine, apologetic and shameful giggle. He had never looked at the quality of light before bringing out the term; he had not inhabited, fully, his body before sponging it and placing it in different clothes. She allowed herself to think this. He was a Disappointment and he would do very well for Thyme. She allowed herself to think that the most concrete thing about Charlie might be his money, of which he had a lot.

  They went over to the studio, where Thorpe was in the last stages of the portrait of the Swiss shopkeeper. Rose had not seen it: she preferred to keep out of Thorpe’s way when he was working on a piece, and she did not especially want to see the result of this. A shopkeeper whose son was the deputy manager of a Starbucks. She opened the door of the studio, saying, ‘Look, it’s Charlie.’ What struck her with alarm was not the painting, which she would not look at, but the expression on the face of the sitter. Why was he pulling his face back like that, to show his teeth? The look of strained terror in his face, the bones underneath the yellow skin, the sockets of bone holding the yellow bits of jelly he had for eyes. Behind the easel the sitter’s wife rose up from her chair, smiling more gently to greet Rose; a fat woman in a dress from six summers ago, surely hot in here with her orange tan tights on. The sitter did not move. Thorpe set his paintbrush down and shook Charlie’s hand. The sitter’s wife offered hers to Rose, who, after a moment, took it and shook.

  ‘We are very pleased with the progress of the painting,’ the wife said. ‘It looks so like Herbert. I wish we had done this when Herbert was in good health, but this is so like him.’

  Rose looked. Thorpe had rendered with absolute accuracy the grin of a skull the sitter was performing; the yellow eyes were blurred as if with terror and, with some careful precision, the blotches and patches of the sitter’s yellow skin had been accounted for. Behind him the purple shawl she had always loved and had missed only the other day was rendered in great slashes of brush, and given a gory red tinge. Blood had been pouring down the wall behind this poor sitter, and the terror and rictus of his expression said that he knew it.

  But it was as if nobody else could see the painting for what it was. Charlie had been led over by Thorpe, and after they had stood there for a moment, Charlie said, ‘It’s a very strong piece, Thorpe,’ and started talking about the quality of light.

  ‘It should be finished tomorrow,’ Thorpe said. ‘I thought I would leave the backdrop like that, those fat brushstrokes. I like those painterly gestures.’

  ‘It reminds me a little of Francis Bacon,’ Rose said, out of devilment. She knew that you did not say to a painter that his work resembled the work of some other painter, particularly one whose work (she believed) had been grown out of. But Thorpe was not taking this commission seriously. It did not bear on his own, proper, work, which was nothing but pure Thorpe. She felt dizzy, alone, windswept, about to plunge into the depths without any kind of support, and that she must say what she meant before the abyss swallowed her. She would never see this man again, tight-pulled in his skull’s grin, and the painting, too, would disappear onto the wall of a house in Switzerland where she would never go. Perhaps at some point the deputy manager of a Starbucks in a provincial Swiss town would look at it, and see that it was too strong a rendering of his father dying, and destroy it. These people were capable of anything.

  When the taxi pulled up outside, Oak got out. He had caught a lift with Marina’s son, knowing that he was ordered every day for twelve thirty, and handed the taxi over to a stiffly bowing sitter and his fat, smiling wife. His brother Thyme had forgotten, he explained, his toothbrush and razor, still sitting on his dressing-table in the bedroom. Did Charlie mind if he went to collect it?

  ‘I don’t know why Thyme couldn’t come himself,’ Rose said, filled with rage. Her purpose was being frustrated.

  ‘He’s looking after the café,’ Oak said. ‘And I thought I’d come up to say hello to Charlie.’

  He smiled, not a rictus like Herbert, but a warm smile, the head tipped on one side, all pugnacity gone. For a moment Charlie did not smile back before remembering where he was, and who Oak was.

  ‘I think I might have put a lot of stuff in a drawer,’ Charlie said. ‘I didn’t know anyone was going to need it. It might be easiest if I come up and help you find your brother’s stuff.’

  ‘Yes, go on, that would be quickest,’ Rose said. ‘And do you want to eat lunch up here or go down into the village? Thorpe won’t need you to start work today. Go off and have a nice afternoon on the beach.’

  That afternoon, Oak sat with Charlie on the terrace of the taverna on the corner beyond his café, Drys. He went with Charlie into the kitchen and, after discussing the food with Marina, selected lunch for his guest. Charlie pushed it round his plate, hardly eating anything. He said that he rarely ate anything at lunchtime. Oak persuaded him to drink a glass of wine, however. They made themselves conspicuous then, and afterwards, as they walked down through the village towards the chain of beaches that stretched out towards the southern tip of the island. At one point, as they were passing a house on the outskirts of the town, a Greek man stood on the upper terrace of a half-finished house and called down to them. Oak rattled back something, scowling. The man went inside, banging the shutters and laughing in a sour way. When Charlie asked what had passed between them, Oak said it was nothing, that he paid no attention to what these people said. The man had been one of the brothers of Nikolaos, one of the ones who had told him to stop bothering his brother. He kept the post office, a minor inconvenience. Nikolaos had a fiancée now. They would be very happy together.

  All over the town, the villagers saw Oak walking to the beach with Charlie, or having lunch with him, or walking back from the beach, and afterwards they said to each other, ‘That English boy, the faggot, he’s got himself a boyfriend. You never saw such a little drip and a pansy as the boyfriend. They should be very happy together.’

  But the next day, or the day after that, Oak and Charlie and Thorpe and Rose, all together, went down to the harbour, Thorpe in his one jacket and Rose in a clean ironed white dress with her hair up. Thorpe walked with his wife holding his arm, and in front of them, Oak and Charlie, also arm in arm. Thorpe and Rose said good evening to everyone, smiling and nodding. The villagers afterwards said it was the funniest thing they ever saw, the English painter and his wife treating her faggot son and his new pansy boyfriend like an engaged couple to be paraded. But they said good evening back, even complimenting the new pansy when he managed to say kali spera, and somebody afterwards said that the new pansy was a millionaire. That English boy knew what he was doing, and his mother, too. Somebody said that the person who had let it be known about the millions was the English boy’s brother, who was supposed to be a faggot as well.

  They had dinner after their walk along the harbour-side. Oak smiled tightly, as his father offered Charlie a glas
s from a bottle of the taverna’s most expensive wine. Charlie accepted, but hardly drank, and when they suggested that they order some grilled octopus, Charlie said he would prefer something very plain.

  ‘There’s nothing plainer than ordinary grilled fish,’ Oak said, astonished.

  ‘It wouldn’t suit me,’ Charlie said. ‘But order it and I’ll eat some salad, and perhaps a little rice.’

  ‘Are you having some problems?’ Rose said. ‘You shouldn’t be drinking wine if you are.’

  ‘No, nothing in particular,’ Charlie said. ‘I suffer from intestinal problems, though. I have to be careful what I eat. I don’t think I can eat octopus.’

  ‘Try a little,’ Oak said. ‘You never know until you try it. You don’t want to be one of those English people, complaining about the food swimming in oil, asking for fish fingers for their kiddies.’

  Rose saw that there was a little edge of contempt in the way Oak was addressing Charlie. It was early in their connection for this to make itself plain. She heard herself talking about the English people and their kiddies and the fish fingers, and reflected that if Oak could learn one way of talking from her, he could learn another, too. He should understand that the reason they were able to take Oak and Charlie out for dinner and pay for wine and octopus and some brandy afterwards was that Charlie was staying with them for sixteen weeks, all summer, and paying them twelve hundred euros a week all summer. Charlie was allowed to eat whatever he liked, and Oak should concentrate on being the fundamentally nice person that he probably was.

  Towards the end of the summer, Charlie said to Oak, ‘What is it like here, in the winter?’