Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher
had a record of seductions and triumphs beyond the imagination – no, beyond merely the ambition – of Fitzgerald. He always had some delicious man in tow, installed in what Bradbury imagined to be the lavish white spaces of the converted loft apartment. But looking at this man, with his simultaneous quality of darkness and glow, with his unaffected grace of leg and jawline, even sprawled over his luggage where he had thrown himself, even tired and unwashed after so long a flight, Fitzgerald wondered at the unfairness of it all. Bradbury was not so very young or good-looking or charming; he was only rather rich, and thin. A man like Eduardo should not be sitting, unremarked, in Paddington Station on a weekday morning. Everything about him and his sulky plump lips implied fame, the red carpet, the shining cliff of flashbulbs, the swimwear shoot with a budget of half a million.
Bradbury went on talking, evidently wanting to show off Eduardo, to talk about him; the days and weeks to come would bring better and more highly placed listeners to the subject, but Fitzgerald was by chance the first to lie in their way, so Bradbury talked. Eduardo made no sign that he understood what was being discussed. In a moment, Fitzgerald said to him, ‘Have you only just arrived?’
‘Only two hours ago,’ Eduardo said, slowly, complainingly. His voice, in the middle register, was sleepy and resonant, with an odd and unspecific rasp to it, as if an ancestor had once smoked too many cigars of provincial manufacture. ‘So long to wait at the visa. We don’t have that in Argentina. You only show your passport and they wave you through.’
‘Well, they wave you through in Argentina if you’ve got an Argentinian passport,’ Bradbury said, laughing a little.
‘Yes, of course I’ve got an Argentinian passport,’ Eduardo said. ‘And I’m so hungry I could eat anything.’
‘They never give you enough to eat on planes, do they?’ Fitzgerald said.
‘I don’t eat on planes,’ Eduardo said seriously. ‘If you eat food in a plane, it swells up in your stomach, you get fat, your stomach it swells, even it can explode and kill you. Everyone knows that.’
‘Someone’s been having a joke with you,’ Bradbury said. ‘I don’t think that’s really true.’
‘It’s true. It was the steward in an airline, he told me that.’
For some moments, a fat white girl with a bright red face had been standing by them, trying to attract their attention. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Are you Mr Edmund Fitzgerald?’
Fitzgerald looked at her, up and down, at the brownish stain running vertically down her side – rust? Ketchup? – from gypsyish blouse to dirndlish skirt, both unusually fashioned in some undefinable way. He looked at her woven plastic square holdall and plastic rucksack. Bradbury and Eduardo were turning away. ‘Yes?’ Fitzgerald said.
‘Timothy Storey,’ the girl said.
‘Yes?’ Fitzgerald said, bewildered.
‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I’m Timothy Storey. Did you think I was a boy? People have thought that before. Because of my name. My parents called me Timothy after my little brother, he died when he was only three months old and my dad said he’d name the next one Timothy to keep his memory alive.’
‘But—’ Fitzgerald said.
‘We’ll be off,’ Bradbury said, looking the girl up and down and perhaps comparing Fitzgerald’s visitor with his. ‘Nice to see you. We must have lunch some time.’
‘Bye,’ Eduardo said, and Fitzgerald observed that Bradbury, despite his commanding and top-person manner, picked up both Eduardo’s bags and followed his beautiful stride.
‘That’s funny,’ Timothy Storey said, as they went towards the Underground. (Fitzgerald was not a generous or lavish man; he had had only a half-formed plan to impress a phantom wide-eyed and black Timothy Storey with a journey home in a London taxi but, aghast, he dismissed that now as not worth the candle.) ‘I thought I said I was a girl. I always try to remember to say that I’m a girl because otherwise it confuses people. But maybe I forgot when I was writing to you. It’s easy for me to forget that not everyone knows, you know what I mean? My mum says, “Always say, Timothy, that you’re a girl, because actually it’s a boy’s name.” But not many people are called Timothy in Africa necessarily, so they aren’t as surprised as I guess people are here. It’s because of my brother that I’m called Timothy. Do we buy a ticket here? Golly, it’s costly here, I couldn’t believe it, what they asked for the train fare., it was nice of you to say that you’d pay for that so I wouldn’t have to get here on the Underground. Were those friends of yours? He was a handsome fella, I’d say.’
Over the next few days, Fitzgerald tried to find out more about Eduardo – he laboured at bumping into him by the purest chance – but though Eduardo was living with Bradbury, only a hundred yards or so away, he seemed never to appear in any of the usual places. Fitzgerald went in a craze of expectation around Clapham; he sat in coffee shops, he walked round and round the Common – surely everyone the first time they came to Clapham took walks on the Common. But it was not Eduardo’s first time in London; he had seen it all; and presumably he never went onto the Common. Fitzgerald threw caution to the wind and went up and down the bars of Soho, looking everywhere for Eduardo, in order to produce the casual ‘Well, and how are you enjoying London, then?’ That would lead to a daytime invitation, to drop round while Bradbury was at work at his advertising agency, or going round his buy-to-let property empire chastising tenants. At the end of the evening, he found he had gone into twenty-three bars, paying a five-pound entrance fee in twelve of them, drinking first small glasses of beer, then glasses of Coca-Cola, then fizzy water, then tap water, then nothing at all. It had cost him a hundred and seventeen pounds and he had not caught a glimpse of Eduardo. He knew Bradbury at all only by chance – once, during a tube strike, they had been hailing a cab within yards of each other on Upper Street in Islington, and had discovered they were both heading in the same direction, could share the cab; the heavy traffic had turned even the longish journey from Islington to Clapham into an epic, and they had discovered at the end of the forty-quid trip that they lived, strangely enough, within a hundred yards of each other. ‘We must keep in touch,’ Bradbury had said airily, and Fitzgerald had agreed.
Timothy Storey was showing no sign of starting her studies. She was hanging around the flat endlessly, eating whatever Fitzgerald placed in the fridge. How had such an awful blunder been made? Fitzgerald could have sworn that something in what she had written indicated that she was a boy, and black. He had never specified, himself. In the adverts that he placed online, offering a room to overseas students in exchange for some light household duties, he had always said very carefully that he was a single man. He had believed that would discourage girls from taking up the offer. At first he had thought of saying that he only wanted to let the room to young men, but that seemed a little too lecherously open, and Fitzgerald had an unspecific belief that such a stipulation might prove to be illegal. Up until now, the question had never arisen. He thought of telling Timothy Storey that a mistake had been made, that she ought to find somewhere else to live, but he had overheard her telling her parents over the Skype that it was ideal, that her landlord was a gay man so it was all perfectly safe. He resigned himself to having her around the flat for the next three months, filling up the bathroom with her unguents and peering over his shoulder whenever he started writing anything on the computer. ‘Journalist, are you? That’s nice. I’d love to be a journalist,’ she would say, through a mouthful of Fitzgerald’s hummus and Fitzgerald’s bread. ‘I’ve always wanted to write in a book.’
There was no telling when Timothy Storey might slide up behind him. To quell his disbelieving heart, he decided that he could only check the statements she had made by going up to the internet café on Clapham High Street. Fitzgerald envisaged, vaguely, some one-man kangaroo court in his sitting room, confronting her with her deceptions, pointing righteously at the front door at its conclusion.
‘I live in the country here, on a game reserve,’ he read, having called up Timothy Storey’s old emails. ‘My father works as the manager of the general stores. I used to want to work there too, to “follow in his footsteps”, as they