Tales of Persuasion Page 3

  ‘I’ll let her know,’ Fitzgerald said, and put the phone down. Rage filled his soul.

  ‘I said that,’ Timothy Storey said, when she returned and Fitzgerald asked her for some more details. ‘I do come from Kenya. Mrs Baxter didn’t tell you that I didn’t come from Africa, did she?’

  ‘But you asked me to meet you at Paddington,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I thought you’d come from Kenya just that moment. I thought you were coming on the Heathrow Express.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I was coming from Southall on the train. It’s only fourteen minutes, it’s quite convenient. Mrs Baxter says she lives in Ealing, but it’s really Southall, she thinks it sounds smarter. It was nice of you to meet me at Paddington. I could have made my own way here, but I thought it would be good if we met somewhere neutral before you took me home – you hear such awful stories. Mrs Baxter, she was a bitch from Hell, I’ll tell you. She was always complaining about me watching TV when she wanted to watch something, and telling me I shouldn’t be lying on the couch eating snacks, and there was something on the other side she wanted to watch, like she owned the TV or something.’

  ‘But she did own the TV,’ Fitzgerald said, almost incapable of speech. ‘Didn’t she?’

  ‘No, I mean the TV channels, like she owned the TV channels. She always had her own thing she wanted to watch. She was a prize bitch. I’m glad to be out of there.’

  ‘You know,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘I think I’m going to have to ask you to move out. I don’t think you’ve been truthful with me at all.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I like it here. It’s been nice of you to let me have the room for nothing, but some people might wonder why a single man wanted to have a girl to stay in his house and gave her a room for nothing. It looks a little bit fishy, don’t you think? I would only have to say to someone that you’ve been touching me—’

  ‘I’m gay, you know. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, what people in my country and some people in this one, too, like to call a sexual pervert. And then I might have to show them the hole that you drilled in the wall to watch me getting undressed at night. It’s there, that hole.’

  ‘There’s no hole in the wall.’

  ‘Take a look. I think you’ll find there is.’

  ‘You’ve drilled a fucking hole in the wall of my spare bedroom?’ Fitzgerald said.

  ‘Of course,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone any of those awful things. I like it here, I really do. And another thing – those towels Mrs Baxter was telling you about, they’re my towels. I bought those towels. I swear on my mother’s life, I bought those towels.’

  Satisfied that the conversation was over, Timothy Storey pushed off her shoes and lay back on the sofa. Fitzgerald went without speaking into the kitchen. A voice through a microphone in the other room began to announce the results of a phone-in vote, to wild applause, yellings of names and long, dramatic silences. The kitchen table was covered with the detritus of a quickly arranged snack; a tub of taramasalata lay open with the edge of a cream cracker broken off in it, like a tiny Excalibur. Fitzgerald pulled it out. Small fragments of cheese, of bread, lay scattered like bleak waste across the surface of the table; an open carton of orange juice had spilt onto the floor. The fridge door stood open, waiting for Timothy Storey to return to graze some more. Underneath the cork message board, Fitzgerald looked, and there was, indeed, a new hole, drilled in the wall, giving onto the spare bedroom. How had he failed to notice that? The situation bore down on him; where people like Bradbury had a handsome half-naked beast like Eduardo lolling around waiting for Bradbury’s attentions, someone like Fitzgerald would only have a Timothy Storey, spilling biscuit crumbs down the sofa, thinking up blackmail attempts, destroying the masonry and eyeing up the bath towels.

  ‘Can you give me a hand?’ a voice called from the sitting room. ‘This seems to be stuck.’ Hopeless and speechless, Fitzgerald went into the room. Timothy Storey was kneeling before the DVD player, jabbing at buttons. ‘I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that,’ she was saying. ‘But none of it does anything.’ Fitzgerald contemplated, with hatred, her enormous, lying, blackmailing, cotton-straining, homophobic, racist, idle arse. Then a joyous possibility occurred to him. There was no reason not to do it. With three fast and accelerating steps, he was behind her, and he did it. He had never been good at school at football or rugby, but there, with a single, confident, long smooth swing, he gave Timothy Storey’s arse the single kick of a lifetime.

  He took a detour on his way to Eduardo’s flat, going to the fancy confectioner’s on Clapham High Street and buying an expensive box of chocolates – two pounds of pralines and fruit creams. Only when he reached Bradbury’s road did he remember Eduardo’s obsession with not eating or drinking anything that might make him fat. But it was too late; and, anyway, he realized he had bought the chocolates for himself, really.

  ‘I want to say sorry, Eduardo,’ he said, coming into the flat. The sun was streaming through the long windows, and lighting up half of Eduardo’s face. ‘And also goodbye, I suppose.’

  ‘Goodbye?’ Eduardo said. ‘Are you going away?’

  ‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. The pathos of his farewell almost made him lapse into tears. ‘No, I just think it’s better that I don’t see you again. It seems like a bad idea.’

  ‘But where are you going?’ Eduardo said.

  He hadn’t understood, and Fitzgerald said, ‘I don’t know yet. You might as well have these.’

  He handed over the box of chocolates, and from the way Eduardo took the bag, eagerly, peering in at the confectioner-wrapped box of ribbons and bright paper, Fitzgerald saw that he was a man who liked to get presents, to get a present every day, no matter what it was. ‘It’s only chocolates,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat them if you don’t like them.’

  ‘You can come in,’ Eduardo said. ‘I’m on my own. Daniel went to Monaco and he won’t be back until Friday night. He went away this morning. It’s so boring here.’

  ‘I thought he went to Munich?’

  ‘Yes, he did, he went to Monaco.’

  ‘That’s not the same place.’

  ‘OK,’ Eduardo said. ‘I didn’t know that. You want a coffee?’

  ‘Only if you’re making one. I’ll stay and fend off your boredom, if you like.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Fitzgerald looked around. In this setting, this golden late afternoon, with the sun falling through the windows and the lilies from Saturday night’s party now full-blown and on the edge of falling, Eduardo looked more dark, glowing and healthful than ever. He had not shaved today, and a dark shadow around the jaw gave him the air of a beautiful navvy. Fitzgerald drew in a great breath, savouring Eduardo’s warm, animal, marshlike odour. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love the scent of lilies.’

  ‘Lilies are so ugly,’ Eduardo said. ‘Everyone else thinks they’re beautiful. For me, they’re ugly, the way they fall, the yellow thing in the middle. I think they’re ugly.’

  ‘You have interesting opinions,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I always thought you had a lot of interesting views about things.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Eduardo said. ‘I think I have interesting opinions. I think you’re right. But Daniel always says, “Darling, just shut your mouth and look pretty. No one wants to know what you think.” And one guy, one friend of his, asked me once if I knew how to tell the time, or maybe if I could tell my right foot from my left foot, some shit like that. His friends, they all think I’m just stupid, I know.’

  Fitzgerald’s attention was drawn to Eduardo’s feet, his left foot, his right foot, perfect, dark, hairy and masculine. He would agree to be walked over, by such feet, he truly would. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ he said. ‘I always think you have the most original views about things. Not everyone would say that lilies were ugly, but they are kind of ugly, as flowers, you’re right. I’ve often thought you had interesting
opinions about all sorts of things.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Eduardo said. ‘Because I do. I do have opinions about all sorts of things. For like, I think what we do in our lives, it comes back and has an effect on what happens to you. Like, if you are bad and mean to someone, then maybe later, someone else will be bad and mean to you. That’s my opinion. I don’t know how it works, but it does. And I think we’re all connected somehow, like maybe if you are friends with someone, and they are friends with someone else, and that someone else is friends with someone else, then you are connected, you have a connection with that person, and in the end maybe you have a connection with all the world.’

  ‘So because I know you, I have a connection with all sorts of South Americans I’ve never met,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘That’s really an interesting idea. You’re really an intelligent person, Eduardo.’

  ‘And I think there is maybe enough money in the world for all the people, the rich people and the poor people,’ Eduardo said. ‘So there is no need for there to be poor people and rich people, the rich people, they don’t need so much, so maybe the money can be shared about and the poor people get money from the rich people, and then everyone has enough and everyone is happy.’

  ‘That’s so true,’ Fitzgerald said, in an ecstasy of happiness. ‘That ought to happen. That definitely ought to happen.’

  In the sunlit sitting room of a South London flat, the beautiful man sat, his hands clasped between his knees, his eyes widening, his pupils broad and dark and empty. He dipped now and then into the full box of chocolates, and his brilliant teeth shone from between his full lips as he went on talking, explaining, eating the pralines, emptying his poor unindulged mind before Fitzgerald. And Fitzgerald, understanding at last what it was that Eduardo wanted, and how, in the end, he saw himself, sat, barely interrupting, saying from time to time, ‘That’s so true,’ and ‘You surprise me. I didn’t know you were as intelligent as that,’ and ‘You’re an intelligent person, you really are,’ murmuring and encouraging from time to time, as the light failed and the warm blue evening surrounded them.

  It was as simple as that.

  A Change in the Weather

  (i.m. M.W.)

  The air was plump, cold, full of anticipation. Something would fall from it. He was walking along the famous street with a briefcase that was not new; it was empty. To the left and to the right, ministries stood like serious cliffs. Whitehall. At this moment, the people he had worked with all summer and autumn and half the winter, they were sitting down in their office chairs and asking each other whether they wanted anything from downstairs. Their lives were going on, unambitiously, teaching English as a foreign language. Today was the day he started work in the public service, at the centre of the public service, in a building just off Whitehall.

  George had a pass to the building – his building, he must start to think. It was in his pocket. He felt it now, as he walked. He knew exactly where he was to go, on this first morning. Mr Castry – Bill, he was supposed to call him – had taken him round and introduced him to people the Thursday before. He had not remembered very much, but Bill had made sure that he knew exactly where to go the following Wednesday. Everything else can come after that, he had said. George had got up at the weekend and walked all the way from the flat in Bloomsbury he was sharing with the Brazilian girl and the American girl. It was a rehearsal of his first day. The streets had been empty at half past eight on a Sunday morning, apart from some tourists and people who might have been hurrying to a Sunday service, here and there. George had walked down to Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, to the outside of the building where he was going to work. He wanted to make sure that it was still there, where he remembered it was. Nobody was there to see him, and he had walked away quickly, not pausing, his trainers making no sound on the pavement. He might have been walking past purely by chance.

  The office where he had worked for the last eight months was a cheerful and undemanding place. A temporary place. It accepted applications from overseas students to study the English language, and it assigned them to the appropriate class. Julie was in charge. She had been there for donkey’s years, she said. Her husband was something in business. Something to do with bacon or coffee, but he was in the City; he never saw any bacon or coffee unless it was in the snackbar by the tube. For most of his day, bacon and coffee were just figures on a screen, Julie explained. Great mountains of notional bacon and coffee. She didn’t know how he could stand it, all day long. There was a sense of fun in the office. They had opened the letters, had filled in the forms that were needed and, twice a week, had gone to the communal meeting room where the biggest empty table was, and arranged the applications from the past few days in order of classes. Probably Julie could have done this on her own, but she liked to get everyone involved. Sometimes a student came to demand his money back or to complain, because he had not succeeded in learning enough English. Those, too, were occasions of fun, once the complaining student had been refused and pacified and sent on his way. Julie had a way of rolling her eyes and holding her hands up to heaven that everyone copied. That office had been only until Christmas, and George had understood that from the start. The office he was going into would be for his entire life, from today onwards. He curbed his spirit of fun. The door to his building was open.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said to the man in uniform sitting behind the desk. A walk-in cupboard behind him was piled high with documents, tagged and ordered. George pulled out his plastic pass from his pocket and showed it carefully, the right side up so that the guard could inspect it.

  The guard looked at it briefly, then at George, more curiously. ‘Morning,’ he said. Of course George should have been more casual about it. He felt like a criminal who, gaining access to a guarded building, had made himself stand out in some way. ‘Starting to snow,’ the guard said. His tone was not friendly, but it made George feel that he was accepted, grudgingly, within the building; it explained, too, something about the day that he had not understood. The metallic sensation of weight and chill obscurity in the air was not, as it had seemed, official London welcoming George to his new life. It was what had happened many times before without reference to the lives of any men or women: it was the sensation of snow about to happen. But George did not have to answer: a woman came out from the cupboard.

  ‘Is it now,’ she said, only glancing at George.

  ‘It won’t settle,’ the guard said. George was pleased he had not misunderstood and tried to start a conversation. The office he was to work in was on the third floor. There was no need to ask anyone’s advice about how to get there. One day, quite soon, he would know the names of both these people, and greet them with kindly deference.

  He took the lift, and in a moment there he was in the corridor where the committee’s offices were. There were four doors, and there were labels on three of them, giving people’s names or their job titles. The fourth stood slightly open, a strip-light on. From inside he could hear a woman’s voice, slightly muttering, and the sound of heavy documents being moved from one pile to another.

  Before he could knock, the noise halted, and the door was opened wide. A woman with white hair in a bob, a sharp nose and bulbous eyes was there; she was wearing a coat and a scarf, and underneath a skirt in a large floral pattern, which seemed to be too long for her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, I say.’ Her voice was light and metallic, grating. She was assessing him, not in an unfriendly way but without a welcoming smile. ‘I know who you are. You’re our baby Clerk, aren’t you? It’s George, isn’t it? I was saying to Pam, only this morning – trust the powers that be to send us a baby Clerk to nanny through, just when all this is kicking off. Patrick’s not going to be one bit pleased. He’ll be tearing his hair out.’

  There was a sharp ring from inside the office. The woman turned and went inside, picking up the telephone. ‘Energy Committee, Andrea speaking – oh, hello!’ Her voice went from stern to girlish; she giggled. ‘No, Patrick, don’t you be – I
’ll tell you something, there’s a lovely surprise for you when you get in, a lovely surprise waiting, your favourite thing … Oh. Who told you? … Well, no one tells me anything … Oh, about the usual, I would say. I expect you’re phoning to say you’re late in, as ever. Well, let me tell you …’

  George walked away, feeling he should not listen to this flirtatious conversation. The walls were hung with mezzotints; eighteenth-century politicians and bishops on the shiny magnolia walls. Another door stood open to an empty office: its windows were hung with dirty grey net curtains, too long for the space and falling to a pile on the windowsill.

  ‘That was Patrick,’ the woman said, coming out of the office with a dark blue document clutched to her bosom. ‘What are you doing down there? Come back and sit down with your aunty Andrea. She’ll tell you what’s what. You’ll never guess. Patrick’s calling from the phone box at the top of Whitehall. He says— Well, did you hear that bang?’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘What bang was that?’

  ‘That bang!’ Andrea said. ‘Half an hour ago, that bang. I wondered what it was so I went down and asked the front desk, they didn’t know any more than I did. What bang, he says. It made me jump, I can tell you.’

  There was a pause. Andrea was inspecting him in close detail, standing with her legs apart.

  ‘Well, we can’t have you standing in the corridor all day,’ she said. ‘I expect I’d better show you where your office is, and you can make yourself at home. It’ll be funny not having Mike in there. Ah, well.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Now, these are my keys. I’ve got a set for everyone’s office. Don’t waste your time asking me if you can borrow them when you forget yours – ooh, Andrea, pretty please, it’ll only be this once, I’ve never forgotten them before. I’ve got a good reply to that sort of thing. No. Way. Sunshine. Because there’s no way I let them, my keys, I mean, out of my possession. So you’ve just got to hang on to yours. Welsh, are you?’