Tales of Persuasion
Ten daring stories from ‘a writer who seems capable of anything’ (Guardian), the Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip HensherBackdrops vary in this collection of stories from the author of The Northern Clemency – from turmoil in Sudan following the death of a politician in a plane crash, to southern India where a Soho hedonist starts to envisage the crump and soar of munitions. Each story, regardless of location, reveals a great writer at the peak of his powers.
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2016
Philip Hensher asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover: detail from The Bolt, c. 1778 (oil on canvas), Fragonard, Jean-Honoré (1732–1806) © Louvre, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Source ISBN: 9780007459650
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007459643
Version: 2016-12-20
To Nicola Barr
Contents
(i.m. J.C.)
The trains were simmering under the glowing glass roof. In a moment, one midnight-blue train to the airport would leave, and another would arrive, disgorging and absorbing voyagers. The express to Penzance, beyond the shining metal barriers, began joltlessly to move away, and at the same moment, an express from, perhaps, Penzance drew up at the platform next to it. All this coming and going, as Fitzgerald thought of it. He never went anywhere. He did not even own a car, having no need for one in London. He stood at the bagel concession stand where he had agreed to meet Timothy Storey. Most people arranged to meet at the statue of a bear from a series of children’s books. Fitzgerald had thought there was too much scope for confusion in explaining to a foreigner that they would meet at a bear called Paddington, at a station called Paddington. He had no idea whether the adventures of Paddington Bear would be familiar to someone who had spent all his life living in Kenya. His mind filled with the affecting image of a grass hut, a bowl of meal, a runner approaching across the veld with a single, cellophane-bound library book, Paddington Returns, its boards warped and damp, gripped under his arm.
His name was called. ‘I thought it was you,’ Daniel Bradbury said. Fitzgerald went over to speak to him. Bradbury was a neighbour of his in Clapham; one on the other side of a social divide, since he lived in a new gated community. It was the result of the conversion of an old red-brick board school into loft apartments and even whole vertical houses. No keypad and gate guarded the access to Fitzgerald’s maisonette, and the door was on the street. They were both from over the water; they had met by chance, passing the time of day when they found themselves in the same space, but they might have inhabited different cities. ‘I had to come down to meet Eduardo,’ Bradbury said, with a friendliness that took Fitzgerald by surprise. Bradbury was by no means open and chatty with his neighbour Fitzgerald as a rule. ‘He wasn’t sure about the Circle Line and the Northern Line. He wanted me to come to Heathrow, but I thought that was absurd. I said I would meet him at Paddington, it wasn’t hard. Did I tell you about Eduardo? He was living here last year – I knew him, we met at a dinner party – and then he got deported back to Argentina, his visa ran out, but I’ve invited him back, he’s moving in. It’s all so much easier than it used to be, getting a visa for a partner.’
Fitzgerald agreed with whatever it was Bradbury was explaining. ‘What are you here for?’ Bradbury said. Fitzgerald explained that he was expecting a visitor. It was a young man from Kenya, a sort of au pair who would be living with Fitzgerald and undertaking light household duties in exchange for a low rent for the next three months. ‘You haven’t met Eduardo,’ Bradbury said, turning to a man who had sat down on his suitcases. Fitzgerald had noticed him – of course he had noticed him – but it had not occurred to him that even Bradbury could be with such a man.
Bradbury 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.
