Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher
himself down on the slope, made a single twisting gesture with his fists at either hipbone, and drew his T-shirt over his head. In the open air, there was the brief gust of that smell of Eduardo’s: clean, but animal, and suggestive to Fitzgerald. Eduardo screwed his T-shirt up into a pillow, and placed it beneath his head. Lying back, his torso was articulated like architecture. The twin lines headed downwards into his low-slung trousers as if towards the point of a V; they bracketed about his solid abdominal muscles, like the lines of a pendentive on a dome, lightly furred. Fitzgerald sat down too, drawing his knees up and hugging them tight.
‘Look,’ he said, after a while, more for the pleasure of seeing the concertina-fold of Eduardo’s stomach as he sat up than anything else. ‘There are the deer.’
They had been there for a while, in fact. They were a herd of does and month-old fawns; a great buck or two could be seen, much further off. The mothers were performing a small ballet of rush and delay: of eating, of raising their heads, then making a short communal run before stopping again. The spontaneous and sudden movements separated by pauses of still and quiet had something moving about it to Fitzgerald. He wondered whether Stubbs had ever painted does with their fawns.
Eduardo propped himself up on his elbows, inspecting the herd. ‘They are big animals,’ he said. ‘You don’t know deer, they are such big animals. I thought they were the same size as, I don’t know, as a goose, but they are big.’
‘Yes, they are big,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘The males are bigger.’
Eduardo took this without comment. ‘You know, it’s strange that nobody ever eats deer,’ he said. ‘Every other animal, they eat them. Sheep, they eat them. Beef, they eat them. Pig, they eat them. Veal, they eat them. Fish, they eat them. I never heard of anybody eating deer.’
‘People eat deer,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘It’s called venison. It’s good. I don’t know whether people eat the deer in Richmond Park, though.’
‘I never heard of that,’ Eduardo said. ‘I don’t think that’s right. I never heard of anyone eating deer, or what did you say?’
‘Venison,’ Fitzgerald said. Presently, Eduardo lowered himself back onto his pillow, and behind his mirrored Aviator sunglasses, his eyes closed; in a few moments, his hands folded on his chest, his slightly open mouth began to emit faint whiffles. And Fitzgerald admired the view.
Fitzgerald went round to Bradbury’s flat the following day at ten thirty in the morning – he didn’t want to make a habit of waking Eduardo up, if he was not a morning sort of person. He went to his usual café first, and picked up two croissants and two cups of some take-out coffee – a cappuccino with skimmed milk and without chocolate on top for him, a double espresso, which was what he believed South Americans drank for breakfast, for Eduardo. A different voice answered the intercom – not Eduardo’s, but not Bradbury’s either. A small Vietnamese woman opened the door to him, dressed in a plastic coverall. She explained that Mr Bradbury was not at home, and that his friend who was staying had gone out. She looked at Fitzgerald, wearing a pair of white jeans, sandals on his hairy white Irish feet and a washed-out black T-shirt, carrying two paper cups of coffee, one in each hand, and the neck of a paper bag awkwardly between the fourth and fifth fingers. ‘If you like, you can give me his breakfast,’ she said. ‘I think he’s Mr Bradbury’s boyfriend, the one who stays here,’ and she made a small, amused expression on her small, experienced face.
Timothy Storey was lying on the sofa when he returned, some time after eleven. ‘Was it with that handsome fella you went to Richmond Park?’ she asked.
‘Eduardo, yes.’
‘Is he a half-caste?’ Timothy Storey said.
‘No,’ Fitzgerald said, with distaste. ‘He’s Argentinian.’
‘You know how you tell a half-caste – because some of them, they look really as if they could be white? You take a look at their gums, and they’re sort of bluish. It’s hard to describe, but they never lose that.’
‘I see,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I must keep it in mind.’
On the television, a boy like a rat was assuring a girl very much like Timothy Storey that he had not slept with her mother; the girl was assuring the boy in return that the baby she had just given birth to was his. ‘Do you ever watch this?’ Timothy Storey said. ‘We don’t have programmes like this in Africa. This is great.’
‘Normally, I have too much work to do in the mornings to watch television,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘When does your course start, Timothy? Shouldn’t you be in college or something?’
‘They’re going to make them take a lie-detector test,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I love it when they do that.’
‘Where is your college, anyway?’
‘I think it’s in Canning Town,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘Is that close to here?’
‘Not very,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘You’ll need to be out early in the morning to get to classes on time.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s really that sort of college,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘You pay them a fee and they get you a student visa, but I don’t think they expect to see you at classes or anything. It’s just to get you into the country, and then you see how long you can stay before they catch up with you. The visa don’t know your address, though. I would reckon I’m pretty safe for a few months holing up here. Is that a coffee going spare?’
Bradbury came back from Paris the next day, and though of course he worked during the day, there would be more of a sneaking-around aspect to calling on Eduardo. The combination of Bradbury being away and Fitzgerald knowing that Bradbury was away would not necessarily coincide soon. But before Fitzgerald could wonder how he was going to see Eduardo again, Bradbury’s Saab was drawing up by the bus-stop where Fitzgerald was waiting for a bus. Fitzgerald involuntarily looked beyond Bradbury, but the passenger seat was empty.
‘I heard you kept poor old Eduardo entertained while I was away,’ Bradbury said. ‘Good for you.’
‘Yes, we had a nice day out,’ Fitzgerald said.
‘He’s not got a lot of get-up-and-go,’ Bradbury said. ‘I think he’d stay in the house all day if it were left up to him. Poor soul. Listen, we’re having some people round for a drink on Saturday night – do drop in.’
There was something insulting about Bradbury’s total lack of curiosity about the day in Richmond Park; it was evidently, from Eduardo’s account, not something to awaken anything like jealousy. Fitzgerald wondered what he had said. But all the same, he said, ‘I’d love to,’ rather fervently, and Bradbury drove off, not offering Fitzgerald a lift, wherever he was going to.
‘Come in! Come in!’ Bradbury called wildly, from his door, to Fitzgerald at the bottom of the stairs. An old Perez Prado track was playing deafeningly from the flat; a fashionable choice that year, but a mistake, Fitzgerald believed, since once you had got past the Dolce Vita one, the Bob the Builder one and the one from the Guinness advert, they were difficult to tell apart. ‘Come in!’ Bradbury said excitedly. ‘It’s all good!’ With an immediate glance, Fitzgerald saw the array of champagne bottles on the glass console table by a vase of white lilies, and bent to deposit his bottle of Jacob’s Creek behind the door. He was an old hand at that sort of thing: if you handed your inferior bottle over to the host, it would disappear and you would get sneered at.
The party was in its early-full stage; a couple were attempting to dance and falling over cushions; the food on the table was untouched, but not yet covered with stubbed-out cigarettes. Bradbury introduced Fitzgerald to a man; a decent-looking but bewildered man called Stephen, in a white jacket, who turned out to be a friend of Bradbury’s youth in Northern Ireland, in London for the first time, he said, in five years. No, he was staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Clapham Old Town; he’d found it on the internet. Wasn’t the internet a marvellous thing, for finding hotels and that? Fitzgerald agreed. ‘Do you think these lads here’d be up for a suck and a bunk-up later in the evening?’