Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  The road that circled the island veered away from the last of the beaches, and to reach them you had to cut across bare land where Pavlos the accountant rented grazing to goatherds. The goats were tearing now at the scrubby juniper bushes and the thyme for which he was named, leaping as Thyme went barefoot through the grass. There was a white chapel, no bigger than a shed, by the head of the last beach. It contained a single icon and could hold no more than two worshippers. It was never used, but somebody painted it yearly. A mulberry tree grew in its shade, staining that side of the chapel with heavy purple. The beach was long and narrow, curving like a bow. There was nobody there but, to Thyme’s surprise, the Swiss woman, sitting underneath an umbrella in a folding chair. She must have brought them with her, along with the beach towel extended at her feet; there were no beach shops or cafés for miles in any direction. A hundred yards out to sea, her son floated on his back, drifting, clutching something over his belly, which must be some kind of flotation device; it was brightly coloured, and must be intended for children. There was some wind in the afternoon; the water in the bay ruffled, and the son was rotating slowly. Thyme waved, and settled himself a hundred paces or so from the Swiss grouping. The sea must be cold; the salt must sting the man Florian’s red-raw skin. Thyme himself was brown by now; he took off his T-shirt and shorts and, after a moment’s consideration, put his swimsuit on. There was a sort of delicacy in him that made him decide that he would not swim until Florian got out: he would not divide the whole bay with Florian if there were only two of them. A curious sort of intimacy, of bold advance or flirtation, arose in their sharing the billions of litres of salt water, and Thyme thought of something he had once been told in school, that the atoms of H2O that filled his glass of water had once passed through Napoleon, through Lord Byron, through Metaxas and Venizelos and King Otto the First. The litres that held Florian’s body would also hold Thyme’s, and he waited until the Swiss might get out before getting in. And yet the Swiss manager of the coffee concession did not acknowledge him and had not noticed him. He swam, he floated, in the sea as if this element offered him a break from his real life, as if the life that he had for the other weeks of the year, the rest of his existence, mattered. His recreation was grave and formal in its celebrations.

  The Swiss woman noticed him and waved at him. Thyme went over. She offered him a drink of water from the three unopened bottles underneath her chair – Thyme wondered how she and Florian had managed to get all this stuff to the beach.

  ‘Florian should not be in the sun,’ she said fondly. ‘I have told him and told him. But he says he is fine.’

  ‘It can be dangerous,’ Thyme said. ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘Only three days ago,’ the woman said. ‘We are here for two weeks – I think he has really done too much in his first two days. He was always like that. Because he has the sort of skin that goes brown in the end, after a period of going bright red, he does not remember, and goes into the sun immediately, for hours and hours. My husband was much more sensible, and I know how to handle the sun.’

  ‘It’s nice to come back to the same place,’ Thyme said.

  ‘This was always our favourite beach,’ the woman said. ‘It is always so quiet here. No one disturbs you, you can read or you can sleep, you can just sit and look at the sea for hours. Look, Florian, he’s so peaceful lying there in the sea, he’s hardly moved for an hour.’

  ‘Is he asleep?’

  ‘Asleep?’ the woman said, alarmed. ‘No, that is unsafe, to fall asleep in the sea. You could easily drown or be swept out to sea.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Thyme said. He didn’t think anyone would be swept out to sea today: there was only a very mild wind, and Florian was only a hundred metres out. Thyme came here often too, and for the same reason: there were few people who made it as far as this, and the four bays that preceded this one were perfect as far as most islanders and visitors were concerned.

  ‘Do you think he could be asleep?’ the woman said. ‘Please, we should wake him, ask him to come back. Could you swim out to wake him?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s absolutely fine,’ Thyme said, but in any case he waded out, breaking into his lazy stroke, splashing water about like the village boys. From here, the beach was a thin line of white with a dark shape at the centre of it called Mother; behind her, the far pale hills fell from the skies like a curtain. Out here, there was only Thyme in the sea, and in a moment, the Swiss boy, floating, unconscious, every limb as relaxed as could be, floating like a jellyfish. Thyme stopped where he was, out of his depth, treading water five metres from the floating man. His splashing had not disturbed him, and now he trod water quietly, and looked at him. It was no more than ten seconds before he was almost overwhelmed by a sense of what Florian was, and what his body was. In the sea, there was a density and a lightness of spirit in his body, a conviction in the looseness of limbs that it would do as well to float out to sea, to stay just where it was. Thyme had often been whelmed by a sense of the erotic in a man’s body in the sea, on the beach. It was an ordinary joy of incompleteness to him. You could satisfy it by walking out here and knowing there would be a man to look at and, sometimes, to engage with. This was that and not that. The sensation of incomplete excitement was there in him, but before it had always been an emotion of gazing, of an encounter with an indifferent object that could somehow move and breathe, like an untethered hill. Now the sudden and unheralded sensation he had, treading water at the edges of the vast ocean, was of being embraced in the warmth of another body and another consciousness, as if it were scanning him and taking him in. I must have him, Thyme thought, and corrected himself: he must have me. For the first time he felt himself aware of the desire and possession of another person as of a limitless field or space containing a fluid and the strength and density of that desire; the strength and density of the loose-limbed body floating confidently in the still cold sea made him feel how little he knew. Florian was there; he was asleep or unconscious; he knew nothing about Thyme’s presence within his sphere and still his sphere enveloped, crushed, seized Thyme. He did not know how he could speak if Florian woke up. Like an irrelevant and insignificant detail, Thyme noted that Florian was quite naked. It hardly seemed to matter, and it was out of a habit of assessment and enthusiasm that applied to other men that Thyme now tried to assess the weight and heft, the heavy substance of Florian’s cock and balls. The centre of his power was there and it was somewhere else. Thyme trod water.

  There was calling coming from the beach. It was the Swiss man’s mother. Thyme had had no idea she was still there. He splashed at Florian, with no result, then swam towards him, almost feeling the waves of pressure and loose personal confidence around Florian’s floating personality, and with a sense of daring reached out one arm and shook Florian’s shoulder. It was not a very safe thing to do. Florian woke, his arms flailed and he swallowed water. Thyme had gripped Florian’s shoulder, but he almost immediately righted himself and, like Thyme, sank and trod water. He took a handful of water, snorted it up his nose and out again, splashed it all over his face in a strong and decisive way. He grinned at Thyme as if he had expected nothing else. To be taken into Florian’s arms would not be to be overpowered, but to have a sense of your place in his world, and Thyme shut his eyes to remind himself that he knew nothing about this man, saying to himself that he was just another good-looking tourist. But he was not good-looking in any way that Thyme could understand or would be able to explain. It was that density and the radiant lightheartedness. In a moment Florian lightly punched Thyme on the shoulder, as if they had known each other for years, as if that annual holiday of the Swiss man on a Greek beach, from early childhood, could be said to amount to knowing each other for years. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Florian said. ‘I should be in the shade. I thought you would come out this afternoon.’

  ‘Your mother,’ Thyme said, ‘thought – you were asleep – thought it was – dangerous – so I came out to wake – you up. Aren’t you
cold?’

  ‘The lake at home is colder in August,’ Florian said. ‘Come on and we will swim back to the beach. Come and sit with us.’

  But they swam together, treading water, and grinning at each other, and by the time they had drifted slowly towards the beach and Florian had got out, kneeling on the sand, puffing, pushing himself up, the mother underneath the umbrella had herself gone to sleep. ‘Don’t disturb her,’ Florian said, shaking himself, naked, like a large Swiss dog. ‘She’ll wake up in her own time.’

  ‘It must be strange,’ Thyme said, seizing Florian’s towel and rubbing himself, ‘being here without your father for the first time.’

  ‘We have a task to carry out,’ Florian said. He did not seem to be answering Thyme, but in a minute he said, ‘My mother, she talked to my father before he died, and he said that he wanted his ashes to be here. We didn’t come last year because it was too soon, but this year, she said to me, Florian, we need to go to Antidauros, to empty your father – empty your father? That does not seem correct.’

  ‘Scatter your father’s ashes,’ Thyme said. ‘I think that’s what you say.’

  ‘Scatter – scatter? – your father’s ashes. I see. Yes. But she wants to do this, and she said first, Oh, not today, we can’t do it on the first day, then not again after that, and she has not said anything about it today. I think she is scared to do it. Or something like that.’

  ‘You probably need to take charge,’ Thyme said. ‘Where are you going to do it?’

  Well, Florian said, that was the problem. There was no particular place they had decided on, and it seemed wrong to deposit the ashes in the town on the streets, outside the taverna, or on the beach, or in the sea, or … Well, they had not decided. It was difficult. For Thyme it was not difficult, and he knew where they should go. The hills that rose behind the village looked steep, but could be quite easily walked in a morning, and at the top of the hill, Dauros could be seen across the strait, and beyond that Naxos in the looming, swimming Aegean air, like a whale surfacing. Up there it was peaceful, and up there were wind and flowers. Thyme liked to go up there. And before he knew it he had agreed to walk with Florian and his mother the next morning, to wait while they perhaps read a poem, and Florian should open the lid of the box, and let his father scatter – scatter? – on the wind.

  ‘It would be good if you came,’ Florian said. ‘My mother – she appreciates very much the portrait of your father, the picture of my father. She often shows it to visitors and tells them it was how my father was. You can help us to a good place on the mountain.’

  It was five o’ clock. Thyme had to go. The mother’s mind had been penetrated by her son’s voice. The afternoon wind had subsided towards a still warmth: the beginnings of the evening. She woke, her mouth opening and smacking with thick saliva, like a much older woman, and in a moment composed herself, smiled at the English boy without saying anything. He dressed slowly, looking all the time at Florian. They seemed to be staying a while longer. He wondered if he should offer to help them carry their beach possessions back – the towels, blue umbrella, chair.

  Oak was there at the café, and had opened it up. He was sitting behind the desk, tapping away. There were no customers, and he carried on, paying no attention to Thyme as he came in until Thyme dropped his wet towel on the desk.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Oak said flatly.

  ‘It was so quiet,’ Thyme said. ‘There was no one in all morning, so I went down the beach. I was with Florian.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Oak said.

  ‘That Swiss boy,’ Thyme said. ‘You remember.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Oak said, but absently. ‘There’s those friends of Charlie arriving in a bit. I’ve been getting the house ready. It’s a nightmare.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Thyme said.

  ‘Charlie says one of them’s a real interior-design queen,’ Oak said. ‘He’s been wandering round for days getting the curtains to hang just so. And an arrangement of pebbles on a white marble plate and – oh, you don’t want to know. He’s done no painting for about a month.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what you do when you stay with a friend,’ Thyme said. ‘Say straight off, Charlie, I’m sorry, but I can’t sleep somewhere where the curtains are hanging so badly. And those pebbles, the way they’re arranged – it’s an insult to your guests. You’re mental.’

  ‘Well, Charlie’s friends might say exactly that,’ Oak said. ‘I’m nervous, to be honest. They haven’t met me, apart from one of them called Henry who was in Paris when we went. They’re coming to inspect me and inspect the house about equally. I thought Charlie was going to start going through what I was going to wear for the next ten days when he’d finished rearranging the willow branches in the vase. He had a sort of look, but I think I’m OK.’

  Thyme giggled and Oak, in a way, joined in; since Oak, these days, only ever wore cream linen shirts and white linen trousers, with a cotton jumper in blue or cream for cold days, it was hard to see what Charlie could object to.

  ‘Close the café tomorrow and come over for lunch,’ Oak said. ‘I could do with a hand. That’s another thing – trying to make something that looks Greek and typical and seasonal and all that crap that Charlie doesn’t mind eating. It’s a challenge, I don’t mind telling you.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Thyme said. ‘I promised Florian I’d spend the morning with him. He’s got something he needs to do tomorrow morning.’ But then it occurred to Thyme that he had made no arrangements with Florian, and Florian had not seemed to think it at all necessary. They could only be staying at one of three hotels in the village; perhaps he was just expected to come and find them.

  ‘Florian,’ Oak said, in a superior, Charlie-like way. ‘Remind me.’

  ‘He’s that Swiss boy,’ Thyme said. ‘I spent the afternoon with him. And his mum.’

  ‘Oh, his mum,’ Oak said.

  ‘He’s really nice,’ Thyme said. ‘Pa painted his father’s portrait a couple of years ago. He was dying.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, the Germans,’ Oak said. ‘I remember. Pa kept going on about how awful they were. I don’t remember a son – just a husband and a wife, and the painting they went off with. It would have given me nightmares.’

  ‘Well, there’s a son,’ Thyme said. ‘He’s here now. He works as a manager of Starbucks in Switzerland. Swiss, not German. He’s really nice.’ Something made him insist on this. There was no reason to insist on Florian’s job, but he knew the thing that would specify Florian for his brother, as for all his family, and that was the possibility of open contempt. He offered the possibility to Oak.

  ‘Oh, the deputy manager of Starbucks,’ Oak said. ‘I remember now, and Ma going on and on about it. She does go on,’ he finished languidly, and the contempt in his voice covered his mother, and Starbucks, and the Swiss manager of the concession that he had no recollection of ever having met.

  ‘He’s the manager, these days,’ Thyme said blandly. ‘He’s been promoted in the meantime. He’s like me, managing Drys, except that he’s got some staff, and a pension plan, and he’s not employed by his brother in a shop named after his brother, or anything.’

  A bold single howl filled the air of the evening; a huge trumpet, echoing and resounding, playing its single note over water, and Oak stood up.

  ‘That’s the ferry coming in now,’ Oak said. ‘So fuck off. I’ll see you tomorrow, about lunchtime.’

  They were at the first hotel he went to in the morning, and finishing their breakfast. It was the cleanest of the three hotels in town. In a rough period between patches of profit, Ma had worked as the receptionist, trying out her O-level German and A-level French on the customers, struggling through Greek with the handymen. She’d quite enjoyed it, she said. But afterwards she always said, when they were a bit hard up, ‘We haven’t got to the point where I’m going to have to work at the Aphrodite, I’m pleased to say.’ It was an efficient and well-run hotel, the Aphrodite, at the hands of Mr Matsoukas or, these
days, his shipshape daughter Anna; the hotel was painted white top to bottom every other year, and the beds renewed. There was talk of her installing a cocktail bar, even a swimming-pool; Anna Matsoukas said it would appeal to the better sort of holidaymaker. Florian and his mother were sitting outside on the terrace underneath a bougainvillaea, eating yoghurt and honey: the mother was drinking Greek coffee but, Thyme noticed, Florian was stubbornly drinking something that looked like instant. They greeted him as if they had had an appointment and he was slightly but forgivably late. After offering him a coffee, the three left. The mother patted her canvas bag, in which there was something hard and metallic that clinked. It was the container of the man’s ashes. The single road out of the village that went up the hill was quickly steep, and Florian and Thyme soon found themselves a hundred metres in front of Florian’s mother. They waited; Florian wordlessly put his hand out and took the bag from his mother, and they started to walk again. By the time they were out of the village, and past the last of the unfinished villas, rusting steel rods running across the roof, they were ahead of his mother again. They looked back, and she waved in an encouraging style. She would catch up, Florian said, and Thyme pointed out that there was only one road and it went to only one place, the top of the hill.