Tales of Persuasion Read online

  The opening of the lunch boxes had drawn the boys from the next table, who were craning to see this elegant independence, this choice to picnic like shaded gentry, rather than gorge at a long bench at hot communal messes, indoors.

  ‘You’ve got salt and vinegar crisps,’ Santosh said.

  Then there was Miranda, who could never bear for there to be anything exciting going on that she hadn’t started, who had come halfway across the classroom. She stood and sucked her hair, a long blonde wet strand, nodding and looking. ‘I might do that one day,’ she said eventually. ‘I thought of doing it last week, but I decided not to in the end.’

  The two lunch boxes sat on the table amid the half-built wreckage of a Plasticine geography. In a moment a pale finger started to creep towards them; a thin arm followed. Cathy snapped the box shut, and hugged it to her bosom.

  ‘Don’t think you can steal my packed lunch, James Collins,’ she said.

  Sam snatched hers, too, the apple falling out and rolling across the table landscape. ‘I know you’d like to,’ she said.

  James Collins looked down; his fingers busied themselves with pills of Plasticine, rolling thin sausages of green and blue and brown clay. ‘You can get salt and vinegar from the school shop,’ he could be heard to say, which was stupid: those wouldn’t be crisps you’d brought from home in a box with your initial on it. And then they closed their boxes, not to reopen them until dinner time.

  Even Miranda felt a little shamefaced today at going in to eat a hot dinner, served by dinner ladies, where you couldn’t choose what you wanted and didn’t like what they gave you. It was lamb stew and dumplings, which no one liked. There were always fatty bits floating around. And out there in the sunshine, sitting on the steps as if it was a real picnic, there were Sam and Cathy, resting their elbows on their knees, Sam putting her sandwich down in her own box with her own initial on it, showing Cathy a new move she’d worked out for the hand-jive to do in class when the teacher was facing the blackboard. You could see it. They were all too old for games and chasing: they’d done all that, oh, years ago, played everything. And Sam and Cathy had moved on to packed lunches and their own choice.

  If they made an impression at lunchtime, it was still more impressive at the middle of the afternoon when, at break time, the twins opened their boxes and compared their teatime treat, a chocolate bar each; they found they had different ones, but snapped them in half, compared again, and swapped. By Friday of the same week, everyone – Santosh, Michael Brown, Teresa, the twins and Joshua – had all started bringing packed lunches. Miranda had a bigger box than anyone else, with her full name, not just her initial, painted on it very neatly, in curly copper-plate writing, though she didn’t have any brothers or sisters and her mother wouldn’t confuse her lunch with anyone else’s. They sat on the steps outside the dining space; they once went on sitting in their form area, perching on tables. They tried some of the odd fried confections and cold rice dishes Santosh’s mother sent him to school with. They swapped sandwiches – turkey and cheese for Philadelphia and grapes, tinned salmon and mayonnaise for beef and tomato. As the week went on, a certain jostling competitiveness entered into the contents of the sandwiches. Miranda – it would be Miranda – opened her box nonchalantly, looked and said, ‘Oh, it’s Coronation Chicken.’ One day when Michael Brown forgot his bag and his packed lunch with it, they all chipped in, donating a sandwich each, and he had a bigger and more interesting lunch than anyone else. Sometimes their lunches went on all lunch break, leaving no time for anything else; they sat on the steps and were conscious of being, in the eyes of the school running about the playground, an elite.

  Teresa Fynes, her brother William and her parents lived in a tall witchy house with gables, triangulated windows and even a turret; it was just at the border where the dentists’ art deco of Satterthwaite gave way to the young executives’ brick and glass modernism of Moor Hill. It, and half a dozen other Victorian houses, had been surrounded by later buildings, the gardens growing smaller and smaller with time; previous owners had sliced off areas of an ample lawn for building on, and now the garden of the Fyneses’ old house was exactly the same size as the gardens of the houses that surrounded it. People driving past the house often wondered about the turret, and envisaged a child, sitting with a book in a curved window seat. In fact, though the Fyneses had bought the house four years ago largely because of the turret’s romantic appeal, they hadn’t yet found a use for it, and it was full, still, of packed boxes from poor Granny Pineapple’s house.

  There was a room that had always been called, by them, the dining room, just as there was a room on the second floor, beyond the three bedrooms and the spare bedroom, that they had called the library, at first ironically and then just neutrally, because it had all the books in it. They hadn’t eaten in the dining room, however, until poor Granny Pineapple had died and left them her dining table. The old one had been cast onto the street for the bin men to take away –Teresa would never forget the glum appearance of the square old table on the street, like a cow in a field in the rain. And then they had taken to eating their meals in the dining room, Teresa’s mother at the head and her father at the foot, Teresa and William facing each other. Even breakfast.

  ‘So what have you got planned for today?’ her mother said.

  ‘I haven’t got anything planned,’ her father said.

  ‘There’s a surprise.’

  ‘Just pass the sodding butter.’

  Teresa and William began to giggle. ‘If I pass you the sodding butter,’ William said, ‘can I have the bleeding jam back?’

  ‘Charming,’ their mother said. ‘I can’t think where they get it from.’

  ‘No, nor can I,’ their father said. ‘Actually, I did have something I wanted to do. I was going to pop down to the builders’ yard.’

  ‘Oh, the builders’ yard. What a lovely idea.’

  ‘Yes, I thought so. And then I thought about popping in to see that exhibition of Burne-Jones and having lunch in the pub.’

  ‘If I were these two,’ their mother said, ‘I can’t think of a single thing I’d rather do than go to the builders’ yard, followed by some old paintings, followed by lunch in the pub. You really know how to keep children entertained, Derek.’

  ‘Oh, they’re coming with me, are they?’

  ‘You bet they are. You really know how to give your children a morning out to remember, don’t you?’

  Teresa and William sat, absorbed in this, their eyes going from one end of the table to the other, dragged between mother and father, like the spectators at a tennis match. Teresa was always impressed by her parents’ ability to have an argument without actually disagreeing at any point with each other. As for herself and William, she realized that neither of them could do any wrong, not really, because whatever one parent said about what they had done, the other could be guaranteed to say the exact opposite.

  ‘Can I go and work in my flower patch after breakfast?’ she said. ‘William can do the weeding.’

  ‘Don’t you want to come out with me?’ her father said.

  ‘Yes, to a builders’ yard, then to some old art gallery, then—’

  ‘Thanks, Chrissie,’ her father said. ‘It might be fun.’

  ‘Don’t you listen to your father,’ her mother said. ‘You go and work in your flower patch. Do some weeding. In the rain. That’s a very good idea. That sounds like more fun than your dad’s day out. You too, William. Pull out some weeds. See you at lunchtime.’

  ‘Christ, are there any weeds left in that flower patch?’ her father said. ‘They were at it all last Sunday. You’ll be pulling out the flower shoots if you do much more weeding.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re very good at telling the difference,’ her mother said. ‘And they could always start on the rest of the place if they run out of little weeds to deal with.’

  ‘The rest of the garden.’

  ‘The rest of the garden.’

  Later that morning, Mira
nda phoned and invited Teresa round to what she called a ‘gathering’. ‘We’ve got boys coming round,’ she drawled. ‘I invited Joshua, and Santosh Chatterjee. I wouldn’t ask some of the other boys. They’re so immature. But Joshua and Santosh I think are all right. I thought I just would, just on the spur of the moment. Have some people round for a gathering.’

  It was not like Miranda to start inviting people only an hour or two before she wanted to see them arrive. A Saturday-morning invitation for a Saturday-afternoon gathering at her pink-and-white house, the glass surfaces gleaming, her awed parents withdrawing from the sitting room, once they had arranged the mounded-up trays of refreshments about the place for their prodigious daughter: that was unheard of. The smallest of Miranda’s gatherings usually meant a week of giving and taking away invitations, as she played current favourites off against each other, holding out the possibility of an invitation, threatening another with exclusion. The pleasure of the party, for Miranda, was obviously in the anticipation. Once the guests had arrived, Miranda had no more power over them; they could only either leave or stay; and her parties, even her smallest gatherings, had a dissatisfied aspect that radiated from Miranda herself.

  The big blue car of Santosh’s parents overtook Teresa as she was walking up the hill; it slowed and stopped, waiting for her to catch up. Mrs Chatterjee asked if she wanted a lift, but Teresa said she would rather walk, and the car drove slowly by her side up the hill, Mrs Chatterjee talking all the while. At the window of the house, Miranda stood, her arms folded angrily. She didn’t like people to talk to each other independently when she wasn’t there to supervise.

  But while white, nervous, bald Mr Cole was welcoming them in, ushering them into the sitting room and asking them what they fancied, what he could get them, Miranda’s mother must have been having a firm word with her. Because in a moment the Miranda who was presented to them was gracious and smiling, her plump outer appearance sparkling with green eyeshadow, blusher and pink lipstick – her own, not borrowed from her mother. Every detail of Miranda’s Saturday appearance had been forbidden specifically for wear at school, so she wore it. It was early in the gathering for her to be told to stop showing off, or so Teresa considered. But the word had worked, and Miranda for the moment was plump, smiling, adorned and generous with bright green facepaint.

  ‘You’re on time,’ Miranda said. ‘But Joshua’s not here yet.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s fashionably late,’ her mother, a fat woman in a strappy summer dress, said, raising her plump hands to her cheeks in amusement; both nails and dress were a brilliant, pillar-box red.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Miranda said. ‘I think he’s forgotten I invited him.’

  ‘How can he have forgotten if you only thought of having people round this morning?’ Teresa said, and then, halfway through her question, she understood a hundred signs. Santosh wriggling in his seat, Miranda blushing, the oval dishes of heart-shaped and diamond-shaped sandwiches and other delicacies, the tidied and cleared sitting room, the china-lady ornaments on the top shelves of the bookcase. She saw what had really happened: that Miranda had asked Santosh and Joshua round for a mature and perhaps even a naughty afternoon; that something had happened to disclose the guests to Miranda’s parents, and her mother had insisted, that morning, that Miranda phone Teresa and include her, too.

  To confirm this, Mrs Cole now said, ‘It’s so nice to see you, Teresa,’ and, putting her dish down, gave her a special but rather undecided one-sided embrace, somewhere between a tousle and a full hug. Mrs Chatterjee was all shine and surface, Teresa’s mother untidy, impractical, skinny in jeans, but Miranda’s mother, a warm and toasty bundle of flesh, curls, powdered skin and a warm patchouli-ish, Christmas-spice smell, was the most obviously mother-like of any of them.

  ‘Have you seen my new trolls?’ Miranda said, when her mother had retreated. They went upstairs to see the three new trolls that Miranda had bought that morning, plastic squashed dolls with hair like a cypress on fire. The doorbell went; it was Joshua, and she dashed down and brought him straight up. Without breaking her stride, she showed them a new pair of shoes she’d bought the week before, white slingbacks from Chelsea Girl. ‘I’m not wearing them for school,’ she said. ‘They’re too good for that. I’m waiting until the weather improves, and I’ll wear them out some evening, for a special occasion, or possibly at a weekend gathering in the garden, if my parents decide to hold one.’

  ‘Can we see your dad’s rubber johnnies again?’ Santosh said, because once before, when Mr and Mrs Cole were out, they had gone into their room and found a pack with ‘Durex’ on it; they had passed it from hand to hand, marvelling that something so known to them through playground jokes should have a more than mythical existence.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Miranda said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Then she played them a new record, by Elkie Brooks, that she’d got in town last week, and showed them her collection of postcards, and her holiday photographs from the South of France from the summer before. ‘That one didn’t come out so well,’ she said, of one in which an explosion seemed to be overwhelming a table in a café. They had seen all of these before, but Miranda was always a bit like that; in a while, once everything had been shown, she would calm down and they would start to be normal together.

  ‘Gosh, it was hot,’ Miranda said. ‘In the South of France.’ Then a thought came to her: ‘If only it would hurry up and turn into summer, we could get the snowballs out and have our snowball fight at last.’

  ‘What?’ Santosh said. ‘What snowballs? How can you have a snowball fight whenever you feel like it?’

  The other three looked at him, but of course he was only recently their friend, and he didn’t know about the snow and the snowballs, preserved for the July snowball fight.

  ‘What happened,’ Teresa explained, ‘you know last year, there was that really big snow, where it came up to your knees and we didn’t have to go to school even. We went up to the top of the road, William and me, in our wellingtons, and we thought that the main road would be clear even if our road wasn’t, but the main road was really blocked too, so we just went home, and when we got home Mummy said the school had phoned to say that there wouldn’t be any school that day. So we all stayed in and went down to the lower crags and sledged, and everything.’

  ‘And I said,’ Miranda butted in, almost shouting, ‘because it was my idea really, I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to wait for it to snow for us to have a snowball fight, if we could just have a snowball fight whenever we wanted, whatever the weather was like?” And then I thought, it was my idea, that we could make a lot of snowballs, and bring them back here, and put them in the chest freezer, and keep them cold until it was July, even, and then one day we’d take them out and we’d have a snowball fight, in the middle of summer.’

  ‘But why?’ Santosh said. ‘Why do you want to have a snowball fight in the middle of summer?’

  The two girls looked at each other, and Miranda made her eyes go wide, and her shoulders rose in a huge shrug. Why would they? ‘Heaven alone knows,’ Miranda said. ‘Maybe I’m just completely insane, that’s probably it. Loopy, round the twist, fit for Middlewood Hospital. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Where are they?’ Santosh said.

  ‘In the chest freezer, in the utility room,’ Miranda said, delighted to have something else to show her guests. They trooped downstairs together – Miranda’s parents were sitting cautiously in the kitchen, out of the way, like servants waiting for the bell to be rung by their mistress. ‘We’re just going to have a look at the snowballs,’ Miranda told them.

  ‘They’re still there, I know,’ her mother said. ‘I haven’t touched them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ her father said.

  And there they were, in a Ziploc bag, to the side of the family’s immense entombed holdings of ice-stiff food; an organic, fungi-like form. Here, surrounded by the white blossoms of ice cree
ping up the silvery wall, the snowballs seemed less impressive than in their description. But they were definitely snowballs. Miranda unclipped the bag, and let them look inside, and there, you could see the hand’s mouldings that had shaped them, the fingers’ marks, the detritus of black and green fibres all over their surface from Miranda’s winter mittens, or – was it? – William’s gloves: he had been with them that day, trailing along.

  They all looked at them, one after the other, and it seemed to Teresa that a breath of winter rose from the bag’s secrets. She could not imagine what it might be like to toss one of the snowballs on a hot summer day.

  ‘Listen,’ Miranda said. ‘I found something out. You know that James Collins, that awful James Collins? He doesn’t live in a house. I found out. He lives with his mum, just the two of them, and they live in a maisonette.’

  On Monday, Miranda had plenty to say about her successful Saturday-afternoon gathering. The weather was better, and they were sitting on the steps to the hall, comparing their packed lunches: samosas and a little box of rice salad, another with some chopped pineapple, another with hunks of beef from, the twins said, their Sunday roast, Sam’s with piccalilli, Cathy’s with mayonnaise, because she liked that with almost everything. Teresa turned – she didn’t know what had taken her attention – and there was James Collins. He, too, was holding a plastic box; not a Tupperware picnic box, but a plastic box made originally to hold ice-cream, and still with some rags and tatters of its original label. He held it to his chest and his musty blue pullover, bloomed over and faded with something like mould. The others turned round too, and saw him, nervous, unspeaking, not knowing what he should say. Embarrassment and pity claimed Teresa for their own.