Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  They were on the beach. Charlie didn’t like to lie in the sun all day; he grew brown easily, but he thought there was a risk of skin cancer for all northern Europeans. He was sitting under a borrowed sun umbrella, wrapped in a beach towel that had been inherited from one of the lady painters. Paris Jolie, it said in large art-nouveau letters, like the Paris Métro, and there were figures of the Eiffel Tower, a pierrot and a Piaf-like person playing the accordion under a starry sky. Oak was lying in the sun, six feet away from Charlie. He was naked; they were on the furthest beach, where no one ever came. By now, at the end of August, he was as brown as he ever got. Not only his hair, but his pubic hair and the hair on his legs were a vivid blond against his dark skin.

  ‘It’s nice,’ Oak said. ‘It can get very cold, and then you just wrap up warm and put the fire on. Some people shut up and go somewhere else. I like it. There’s not many people around. You’re not going to make very much money from the café, though. It’s only kids from the school and a few grandmothers sending emails to their grandchildren in America. I keep thinking about starting up a computer literacy course. It would be really popular. I’ll be all right this year, though.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to go,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m supposed to go in three weeks’ time.’

  ‘It’s two weeks,’ Oak said. ‘I was thinking about it the other day.’

  ‘I’d have to check,’ Charlie said. ‘It suits me here.’

  Oak made no reply. And in a moment Charlie started explaining, with all the foresight and care of the very rich in search of a project, that it would be perfectly possible for him to go on painting here, on this island, that he felt his painting had started to develop. And there were other possibilities. It was very cheap living here. Did Oak realize that, with his mother talking about the cost of living the whole time? You could buy a very nice house, a Venetian mansion, on the island for only three hundred thousand euros. It was nothing – it was a bargain. Of course it would need another hundred thousand spending on it – ‘another hundred K,’ Charlie casually said – to bring the bathrooms and the heating up to scratch, but compared to living in London!

  ‘Where is this house?’ Oak said casually.

  ‘On the other side of the island,’ Charlie said. ‘That was what I was doing the other day, when you said I was being mysterious.’

  So it was clear to Oak that Charlie would take him to the far side of the island, enough to take him away from Thorpe and Rose, enough to play the English squire. Charlie went on talking from his mummified position in the shade and, merely to amuse himself, Oak allowed himself to lie back, think of scenes from the past, and feel his cock engorge and rise, there on the beach. Charlie went on talking in practical terms, as if the stiff pointing member in its blond thicket was something that might happen to anyone, was hardly worth mentioning or responding to. And what about the internet café, Oak asked finally, strumming his cock, pulling it back and making it go thwack against his tight drum of a brown belly. You could keep that going, Charlie said. Or you could up sticks and start one in Hora. Or best of all you could ask Thyme to run it on a day-to-day basis, and you could just drop in once or twice a week. Pay him a salary. Put him on a regular footing. It’s not the other side of the world. It’s right you should have something to keep you going. Don’t give everything up for my sake. Oak thought of the truffling and snuffling and complaints over the food; about the high-pitched giggle; about having to stop himself thinking of what people were calling after him and – a painful sensation – what would happen when Charlie had learnt enough Greek to understand what they were calling him, too. But it was clear that Oak had succeeded in keeping Charlie on the island, that by next spring they would be moving into a Venetian mansion, the old place in Hora, with what Charlie would call a wet room and what the villagers would wonder at, twenty windows replaced in one go without regard to the expense. When they told Rose, she said she looked forward to them being allowed to marry, once the law changed. She would wear a hat when it happened, she said, mildly laughing.

  The next spring, and the year after that, it was clear that everything had changed. Thyme was regarded by everybody as having a job. He woke up in the flat above the internet café, and made himself a cup of coffee before walking down the road to the baker’s to buy a roll. He came back and, before opening the café, went back upstairs and did any small household chores. The half an hour at the beginning of the day was the best time for doing this. There had been some suggestion that he might like to go on living at Rose and Thorpe’s, so Oak could rent out the flat over the café to tourists. But Thyme had said that it would be best to be able to keep an eye on the computers downstairs, in case of burglary. Charlie said sarcastically that he was an expensive burglar alarm, keeping his brother from making money from the holiday trade, and occupying the little flat rent free. Oak had not insisted, however.

  Today he went downstairs after sweeping the floor, and switched on all the computers. People would start to dribble in some time late in the morning. He ran the security scan on each of them. He turned on the coffee machine behind the desk. He pulled out the chair he liked to sit on and, sticking his buds in his ears, went to sit on the front pavement while listening to an old Jam record. It had been a violent winter: the storms, of which the summer visitors knew nothing, had torn at the island, battering away until roofs and shutters and tethered boats had been flung loose. All spring, the winds had flung clouds across the bright sky, and the whole island had worked at painting, at nailing down, at renovating and cleaning and making their houses and businesses white and blue and ready for the first visitors.

  Oak and Charlie had finished the renovation of their house by the time the storms had come in January. Their house, solid and new-windowed, was a sealed nut against the storm, and they settled in with the luxury of open fires, burning ash logs and coal imported in sacks on the ferry, and the safe alternative of oil-fired central heating. In the summer, the air-conditioning would be powerful, but in January the pair of them sat in the warmth, as of an English suburban house, and listened to Charlie talk about his plans for the pair of them. Oak said it was just perfect, living there; he’d never been so happy, he said. He told his brother, sniggering a little behind his hand, that when the visitors started to come, in the summer, they would turn the Venetian house in Hora into a party house, in the centre of town. The swimming-pool in the back garden hadn’t yet been begun; it was going to be done by the middle of June, Oak thought. He was just going to go and ask all the cute boys on the beach if they’d like to come over; he would select and choose, and the best-looking boys all summer would come and hang out there. It was going to be a blast, Oak said. It was Charlie’s idea. When Thyme thought about Oak and Charlie, his face grew still with the rage he felt against them, against all of them. The shutters in his flat above the internet café rattled and banged all day and all night; he hunched over the single electric fan heater with two sweaters on. Thyme wondered about the power of Charlie, the power the little man had to compel things to happen to his own convenience and to suit his existence. He had had some power over Oak; that power had been enough to uproot him and yet to fix him for ever in the place he had grown up, to set a limit to what Oak could ever achieve or ever become. Oak had gone along with it, hardly thinking about the possibilities of a life without Charlie. Was that power nothing but money? Or was it the power of a will that had stretched out across nations and established itself here? Thyme hunched over his heater and thought, all winter, of how he would have brushed Charlie off indignantly, would have told him that he’d been refusing better offers since he was fourteen, would have told him to get out and put his trousers back on – his face trembled with a smile as he envisaged in detail the first scene between Charlie and Oak. Oak had not told him anything, as he had gone into detail about Nikolaos. Too much rested on Charlie. And Charlie had not come to him. He had come to Oak.

  A barrier of efficiency and established relations had arisen between
Thyme and his brother, and it was of Oak’s making and Oak’s choice. It was not just the arrangements between proprietor and employee that now existed, but the way a poor, plain brother with no future and no life must be required to look at the dream existence on the other side of the island with wet room and central heating, a Labrador puppy and a vast white leather sofa on which to lounge, barefoot. Oak must look away from so much in establishing this life as the way he wanted to live. Thyme had seen the way he made his gaze busy elsewhere when Charlie started talking about his painting, the festivals of regret and denigration that he could keep up for hours. It was as if he had married a painter even worse than his father, and Oak would look away from all of that, and at his father, looking smiling at a son-in-law who was just like him, but no threat whatsoever. Oak had got rid of his life, and he was glad of it. In the evenings sometimes, if someone was around, Charlie talked about the possibility these days of fathering a child, of fostering, of surrogacy and parenthood for people like them. This, Charlie said, would be an ideal place to bring kids up. Oak knew that he was talking about the island with the village school where they’d hardly learnt to read, where maths had dried up when they were twelve, with the textbooks sometimes thirty or forty years old and one computer, and he looked seraphically into the middle distance as his husband – his new word – talked.

  Now Thyme was outside his brother’s internet café, in the sun. The wind had died off completely in the last few days. The sea was still cold, and churning with sand and mud brought up in the past months; it would be June before it had its usual transparency. But the air was warm and still, and Thyme sat outside in the empty street. The very first visitors had been arriving in the last weeks, and soon he would be too busy with tourists writing their emails home to sit on a wooden chair and greet whoever it was walking by. He watched a couple approaching round the narrow bend of the street, looking carefully behind them in case a car might clip them. They came from a more orderly country than this, where the needs of pedestrians had been considered and pavements constructed. He watched them approach, having nothing else to do. They were oddly assorted: an old woman in an old-fashioned sun-dress, brilliant with greens and purples, plump in white patent slingbacks. She clung to the arm of what must be her son, a tall man, a little plump, in a pair of new white knee-length shorts, crisp and brilliant as whitewash, and a blue-checked shirt. To Thyme’s surprise, the man waved at him before saying something to the old woman, who brightened, smiled, raised her own hand. He made a gesture in response. Friendliness towards forgotten holidaymakers meant nothing.

  ‘I know who you are,’ the woman said, in English with some kind of accent. ‘Your father is Mr Lindley, the painter. I think there are only his children on the island who look as you do. You don’t remember me.’

  ‘I know I should,’ Thyme said quickly.

  ‘No, no, no reason,’ the woman said. ‘Your father painted my late husband, not last year but the year before. He was very ill and he wanted to come to Antidauros one last time, and I said to your father that I would like it if he would paint Herbert before he died. And he did and it is wonderful, a wonderful thing to have.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thyme said. He remembered something of the sort. The son, holding his mother’s arm, looked at him; a gentle, penetrating face, a face that might have come from a time when there was nothing to do but look with mild interest at anything that was going on around it. He was on holiday, and his gesture towards his holiday was that he had not shaved today, or yesterday, or the day before that. It might, too, be too painful: his face was a brilliant red, as were his arms and legs.

  ‘He was only fifty-five,’ the mother said. ‘That seems old to you, I expect, but fifty-five – it is nothing.’

  ‘That looks bad,’ Thyme said, pointing at the man’s arms, as if the mother had said nothing. He hadn’t known what to say: his embarrassment found something in the vicinity to offer sympathy with.

  ‘Excuse me?’ the man said, but politely, asking for an explanation rather than affronted.

  ‘Your sunburn,’ Thyme said. ‘It must be a bit painful.’

  ‘Only a little,’ the man said. ‘I went out on the beach yesterday and stayed too long. It was so nice. My mother was sleeping and I did not want to come back early and disturb her. I will give it a rest today and it will be fine tomorrow.’

  ‘Yoghurt’s the thing,’ Thyme said. ‘Just paint yourself with yoghurt and it should be fine.’

  ‘Any sort of yoghurt?’ the mother said. ‘Ordinary yoghurt or Greek yoghurt? Which is best?’

  Thyme wondered: he did not really know what yoghurt that was not Greek was like, and the yoghurt that could be bought on Antidauros was certainly Greek. He said he thought that anything would do. It was three years now since Florian – the son – had been to Antidauros, the mother went on to explain, but he corrected her and said it had been five years. The last time he had been eighteen, and had gone away with the friend he’d had then, with a backpack, like wander birds; the next year his father had said he would have to pay for himself and he could not pay for himself, so he had stayed at home; the year after he would have come, but he had just started working and he could not have time off; the year after that was last year, and his father had just died, and they had not come at all. ‘For the first time in twenty-three years,’ the mother said, wondering at this upheaval in rhythm, like Christmas being cancelled. ‘For the first time we did not come to Antidauros for our holiday in the spring.’ But now they had come and they would always come from now on. Florian smiled, a smile not quite meant for Thyme but one definitely not meant for his mother. She would be allowed to believe that for this year and perhaps next year too, but Florian was not going to go on holiday for ever with his mother. Thyme liked his kindness, and its limits. He remembered him.

  ‘You work for Starbucks,’ he said, making an effort to keep his tone neutral. He had probably never heard the name ‘Starbucks’ pronounced in a neutral way, and it needed some care.

  ‘Yes,’ Florian said. ‘Yes, I do. But how did you know that? Oh, my mother must have told you or your father when they were here two years ago. But you remembered. Why should you remember? Do I seem like the sort of person who has to work for something like Starbucks? Well, I work for Starbucks, and it is a very good company. My mother, she should be proud of me, being a manager for Starbucks. But here I am in Greece, again. And today we are going to sit under the shade, in a café somewhere, and watch boats come and go and we will read our books, all day long.’

  ‘Remember, yoghurt,’ Thyme said, smiling. ‘And tomorrow you can go back to the beach.’

  They went on, down towards the harbour, each holding a book, the mother clutching her tall son’s arm. There were no customers all morning; around noon, Oak telephoned to say that he would be over that evening. Charlie had things to do, so it would just be him. There was a bunch of Charlie’s friends arriving on the ferry that got in at seven and he’d be driving them back, but he’d drop by first. ‘I thought I should warn you,’ Oak said, giggling, ‘I just spoke to Ma and she’s on her way down the hill, she’s probably going to put in an appearance any second now. Just saying.’

  Rose was coming down the road, looking cross and hot. ‘She’s here now,’ Thyme said. ‘Got to go. See you later.’

  ‘You don’t look busy,’ Rose said, kissing him.

  ‘Done nothing all morning,’ Thyme said. ‘Just chatting with whoever. Those Swiss people are back.’

  ‘What Swiss people?’

  ‘Those Swiss people. Pa painted his portrait. It was two years ago, he didn’t think much of them.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Rose said. ‘I think I remember. Wasn’t he supposed to be dying? What’s he doing coming on holiday?’

  ‘No, he died all right,’ Thyme said. ‘They were just saying. It was the wife and her son, they’ve come back. They were saying how much they liked and valued their beautiful portrait by Pa in his best vein.’

  Thyme pulled what i
n the family was called a Clement Greenberg face, sanctimonious and art critical. ‘It was a very good portrait,’ Rose said. ‘I remember them now. And the son. Didn’t the son work for McDonald’s? No. Starbucks. Why should I remember that? Useful brain cells are being occupied with that information. He worked for Starbucks. God save us.’

  ‘He’s nice, Ma,’ Thyme said. ‘He’s called Florian.’

  ‘I’m being naughty,’ Rose said. ‘We shouldn’t sneer at the people who keep this place on the road. Kali mera,’ she said, as the priest’s wife came past; she nodded, unsmiling, at Rose, ignoring Thyme altogether. ‘Are you coming up for dinner tonight? I think Oak’s coming, and Charlie too.’

  ‘It’s tomorrow night, Ma,’ Thyme said. ‘Or the night after that.’

  That afternoon, Thyme closed the internet café and, instead of sleeping, went down to the beach. He took his towel and a swimsuit, not expecting to use the swimsuit. He didn’t think there would be anyone he knew around. It was too cold for the island boys to go swimming. He walked down through the town, an old pair of his brother’s khaki shorts on, loose on him and needing a tight-cinched belt, and a stained and faded T-shirt advertising a Rolling Stones concert from ten years ago. He went barefoot; the soles of his feet had half an inch of hard, thick skin. If the people of the village looked out and saw him, they would say, ‘There goes that English boy, the other one who’s a faggot, the one who’s not so good-looking.’ He was young-looking, with a pointed chin and a little mouth. If he had to say what might be nice to look at about him, he would have to say his thick blond hair, or perhaps his blue eyes, commented on by every Greek. He was less good-looking than his well-knit, shorter, squarer brother, and yet he knew that his brother was not good-looking at all.

  He was thinking of other matters, and his path took him towards the beaches without him thinking about it. The brilliant scarlet-flowered gardens of the town gave way to wildness, and the scattered debris and garbage around the roads was swallowed by wildflowers, great clouds of white and pale pink and palest blue he did not know the names for, and the scent of sage and rosemary and lavender on the hot air rising from the drying earth. The thick fistfuls of blossom – was that what it was, blossom? – were like snow on branches. He wondered what it was like for Florian to wake up in his Swiss winter, and look out of his little wooden window, and see heavy snow poised on the bare branches. Thyme had never seen snow settle, only on television, in films that the Greeks loved. He walked towards the beaches with a regret that surprised him, that Florian would not be there. He had said he would be sitting in the shade today, minding his sunburn with jealous and scrupulous care.