Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher
Patrick left. George knew that the time had come to demonstrate initiative and efficiency. He picked up the biro, and wrote ‘John Slaughter?’ in the spiral-bound notebook. He thought the best way to discover the state of affairs was to go downstairs and ask the security staff. He left the office, leaving the door open, and walked to the stairs. At the bottom, the woman security officer was at the desk on her own. He noticed she had a large hairy mole on her left cheek. He wondered if the time would come when he knew her name, and could recognize her. There was no need to ask her anything. Her voice called out behind him: ‘There’s been a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. Everything’s sealed off.’ He nodded at her, and left the building, checking that he still had his pass in his pocket. The side-street outside was deserted; the snow was falling heavily, and had now settled. The junction with Whitehall was sealed off with police incident tape. George walked up to it. It must have been sealed off since Patrick had made it through. The whole of Whitehall, to left and right, was deserted behind incident tape. The snow fell on untouched ground, and was now a pristine three inches deep.
Once, George had been out in the country after a heavy snowfall, and had seen a woman playing a trick on her dog. A wound-up, bounding, overwhelmed dog, a Jack Russell. The woman bent down, and took a fistful of snow, rolling it into a snowball, and threw it. The dog hurtled forward to find the thrown thing to fetch, but where the snowball fell into the snow, there was only snow, and nothing to bring back. The dog ran around, astonished, baffled, and returned. The woman bent, rolled, threw again. The dog fell for it again. She had been doing it for some time. The field of snow contained something to fetch, and the dog had run into it, again and again. Now, beyond the Cenotaph, two policemen stood in their dark uniforms, like picturesque figures in a snow scene. There was no possibility that anyone would reach them until the road block was lifted. George stood there. The boulevard was transformed. Nobody else was there, looking at it. There was a perfume in the air that was the absence of perfume: London stripped of its odours and made to smell of snow falling through oxygen. Nobody else would ever see the sight of Whitehall as blank and clean and silent as a remote moor in deep winter, unpressed by the tread of foot. The sight was as unique as his first day at the work he was going to make a success of.
He was able to tell Patrick that he thought there was no possibility of receiving any visitors until the cordon was lifted, and he did not know when that might be. Patrick cursed amiably, and went away, promising that he would sit down and explain everything about the committee and its work later that morning. George sat down and reached for his in-tray. He opened the first document. It was the annual report of an organization that seemed to be something to do with nuclear energy. George began to read it. He understood almost nothing of what he read, and soon a feeling of mild satisfaction came over him at the image of dedication he must be presenting, if anyone walked past his office and happened to glance in. In time, he shut the document and placed it in the out-tray. It occurred to him to make a note of what he had read, and he did so, in the spiral-bound notebook. He picked up the second document in the pile, and soon he looked like someone who was making efficient work out of his inconveniently interrupted day. He passed papers from one pile to another, with the appearance of someone who was working hard, and beginning a new life. Anyone could see he had the capacity to be useful, and the thought gave George, head down, something rather like joy.
‘No, I don’t speak the lingo at all,’ she would say. ‘Just bono giorno, honey, bono sera, that’s all it takes. What’s the point? They rob you anyway, rob you blind. Take Paolo …’
Those Florentine afternoons. And afterwards I was always the same. Some people are always on stage. Most are destined always to be in the audience. Realizing it, you can never change the fact afterwards. After Florence, I would always be in row F of the stalls, hands clasped, looking up as the lights pointed in a different direction, allowing myself to be persuaded.
I went to Italy because of love – no, guilt. I was twenty-seven. I had been working ‘in the arts’ for five years. It was the sort of job that had sounded immensely desirable once. ‘Arts administration,’ I had confidently said to careers advisers, friends of my parents at drinks at Christmas. It had sounded good, labour rooted in passion and exchanged, at the end of the month, for money you couldn’t be ashamed of earning. My contemporaries failed, and had to settle for jobs as solicitors. Five years later, they earned three times what I did and were beginning to drop me. They could not be blamed. ‘Arts administration’ meant a narrow office in a Victorian museum in the north, kept going with public money and the promise of lottery largesse. I found, after all, that you could be ashamed of the money at the end of the month. It was so little. My grey walls teetered with box files; outside, you walked between the museum’s doubtful Raffaelino and the still more doubtful school parties. I grew to detest the single Matthew Smith, lurid as the municipal flowerbeds, to hate, too, the multiple aldermen in committees, drab and important in appearance as the museum’s solitary Stanley Spencer. Last Supper in Maidenhead. You may know it from reproductions.
It was a city of three hundred thousand people but, still, it hardly seems surprising that I noticed Silvia. In that city, she was like a panther at a Tupperware party. The society was less extensive than you might imagine. A small Italian woman, with expensive accoutrements and an expensive, contemptuous way of standing with her hips jutting forward, made herself conspicuous. I had formed the habit of going to concerts in the university hall every other Friday. The tickets were cheap, and the platform just about big enough for an orchestra. The timpanist had to sit beneath the conductor’s podium, however, and guess at the beat. More usually, as tonight, it was a string quartet. In the interval, the audience sat in their seats or clustered in the chilly atrium drinking coffee. It was not a well-dressed audience. You noticed Silvia.
‘Have you seen,’ my colleague Margaret said. ‘A footballer’s wife?’
(It was a recognized social category, in that impoverished northern town with two famous football clubs. It was used for any woman under thirty with a tan and a handbag.)
‘I hope she enjoyed the Webern,’ Margaret said bitchily. I went to concerts with Margaret. It was no more than that.
‘I hope so too,’ I said.
After the interval, I took more notice of Silvia. She was sitting three or four rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle. She listened intently to the first two movements of the next piece. Then, with a sigh, just as the string quartet was raising its bows, she got up and left, clacking down the central aisle. The string quartet lowered its bows, waited for her to leave. They began to play again.
‘A bit much for the Footballer’s Wife,’ Margaret said archly, when it was all over. ‘The bitonal passage can be a little demanding for many music lovers.’ I wasn’t sure, and not just because I didn’t know what Margaret meant. To me those decisive stilettos clacking towards the exit looked much more like someone who only wanted to hear the scherzo of the Ravel string quartet; had come for that, had left when it was done.
In fact, Silvia seemed to attend the university concerts fairly regularly. I started to notice her now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. She rarely stayed for a whole concert. She would turn up at the interval, leave after a particular piece, or even walk out, as with the Ravel, in the middle of one. It was terribly rude. It was the behaviour of someone, I decided, who had come to like music through a collection of CDs. She had the habit of skipping about, selecting favourite movements, and rejecting music with all its tyranny and gleeful infliction of boredom in favour of ‘highlights’. Margaret had a great deal to say on the subject. I weakly agreed, though tried not to refer to Silvia as ‘the FW’. I did not agree with Margaret as often as she seemed to assume, and sometimes rebelliously thought, as I clapped exhaustedly at the end of some juvenile assault on a great masterpiece, that it might indeed be quite nice to press a fast-forward button as the Diabelli Variations grew a little too pleased with themselves. There was no such fast-forward button at the museum, either. It took up as much time as you were prepared to grant it.
‘I’ve