Tales of Persuasion

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‘Listen, I will call you when we’re ready,’ she said, still later, as the waitress sauntered over.

‘All the same to us, love,’ the waitress said. ‘We’re not busy. I’m enjoying it, to tell you the truth.’

But all the same, when we were done, I had agreed to come with Silvia to Florence in two weeks’ time. The denunciation, I had been expecting for some time – the slammed door of the Quincys’ kitchen, the scowls and the increasingly rebarbative style of her outfits when we met. I hadn’t been prepared for this outcome.

The promise was easily made but, after all, I had a job. Silvia, so emphatic about my job at first, seemed to be under the impression that, like the university’s academic staff, I was going to take off for three months in the summer. The best I could manage was a fortnight, and that, I was given to understand, was quite a favour at such short notice. Margaret, when she heard of it from some other source, obstinately asked me, quite near the beginning of one of our hikes in the country, if I would like to go on holiday with her, if, of course, I hadn’t made other plans for the summer with any other person. My explanation cast a pall over the day; something I think she might have foreseen. It was all so tiring.

Silvia’s attic at the Quincys’ was an island of lucid clarity in that stormy household: a neat bed, two handsome chairs, some pretty pictures against a colour she’d chosen herself, and a small bookcase carrying her fifty favourite books. So it was not a surprise to discover the airy, even elegant quality of her flat in Florence. It was at the top of a modern building, with terraces the size of half a tennis court, crowded with pelargoniums, bright as a seaside landlady’s garden. Inside, in pockets of air-conditioned cool, austere long chairs of chrome and leather treacherously invited the act of reclining. It was on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of one of the hills that rise and surround it. The geography of Florence, as I soon discovered, kept the worst of its weather unchanging and building, stiflingly, from one week to the next all summer. There were other things about the flat to be discovered. The building was at the very end of a long-buried and nearly mythical river, the Affrica; and if there was no way of our detecting it, the river was clearly an object of fascination to millions of mosquitoes, which had an ancestral habit of following its course all the way from the Arno to Silvia’s building, then staying exactly where they were for the whole summer. I became familiar with great generations of mosquitoes as the weeks passed, thwacking at my own head in the middle of the night, sometimes in Silvia’s spare room, sometimes not.

‘And of course there’s Paulina next door,’ Silvia said. ‘But I expect you know everything about her.’

Quickly, we settled into a sulky routine. Silvia had, in the past, spent a good deal of time playing the guide, she said. (She meant: pushing visitors around Florence with an out-of-date guide book.) So the first day, she came out with me, showed me the crucial bus, and took me briskly to four asterisked treasures.

‘Duomo,’ she said.

‘David of Michelangelo, great masterpiece of Italian art,’ she said.

‘Out here in the rain?’ I said. ‘When it rains?’ (It was actually oppressively hot.)

‘In Florence, it never rains,’ she said. ‘Look, beautiful sunshine. Englishman, wanting his rain. Where’s your umbrella and your bowler hat, Englishman? No, it’s not real, anyway. The real one it’s inside Accademia, up that street. We don’t have time.’

‘Uffizi,’ she said. ‘Look at the queue!’

‘And Ponte Vecchio,’ she said, the unopened guide book firmly in her hand.

‘I see,’ I said. That evening, she phoned up all her Florentine friends at length, and complained with great gusto about me. She spoke in Italian; I understood quite well enough. After the first day, I left the flat in the morning and dutifully visited churches, palazzos, museums – more museums; I started with the postcard sights and steadily worked my way downwards. In time, I surprised the attendants of museums named after nineteenth-century Englishwomen, residents of Fiesole, with an unaccustomed ring on their doorbell. How Silvia passed her time, I don’t quite know. I returned to the flat after an invariably unsuccessful sort of tourist lunch, often a sandwich at a bar by the bus station, a one-armed bandit’s electric fanfares in my ear. The afternoons, she was incommunicado, and I read. We met at six each day.

‘You know a funny thing,’ she said, when we were settled in a bar the third night. ‘I asked an English boy to stay here last year, and at the end I said to him, “What do you like most in Florence?” Because, of course, I think maybe he’s going to the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio, maybe. But he says, “Most of all, I like the bars, where you go, you buy a drink, there’s nice little bits of food there you can eat, it’s all free.” You English! Crazy for something free, always, always.’

I laughed politely, but I rather agreed with last summer’s Englishman. The bar was laid out with such substantial nibbles, as Margaret would have called them, I was rather wondering in my impoverished way whether we could get away with not having dinner. Not the least of the issues that had arisen was that Silvia, considering the fact that I was saving on hotel bills, clearly thought that I ought to buy her dinner every night at a restaurant of her choice.

But that night I finally met Paulina. Silvia, I divined, had decided to keep her from me: enough of my friendship with the Quincys, or any potential one with their sister’s second husband’s stepmother’s half-nieces. The door to the flat next door was open when we got home, though inside there were no lights. It was a stifling evening. A languid wail came out of the open door, followed by a middle-aged woman emerging from the darkness in aquamarine kaftan and turban.

‘Oh, not again,’ Silvia said.

‘Oh, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘Be an angel. You know how hopeless I am. And I’d ask Paolo, honest to God, but—’

‘It’s not very difficult,’ Silvia said.

‘You say that, but— Well, hello there, I’m Paulina, how do you do – you remember, honey, the last time I somehow managed to put everybody’s lights out, it was simply a disaster,’ Paulina said. She had a curious voice, emphatic on each word, and with an accent not quite American, not obviously Australian. She could have been the product of a thorough elocutionist in any one of a dozen colonies. ‘You see,’ she explained confidentially, as if I were alone, ‘the lights here, they sometimes go out for no reason at all, and I know there’s something terribly simple you need to do in the basement …’

‘There’s just a switch, that’s all, and you pull, no – what is it you do with switches? You turn, you flick – is that right? You flick it and then it’s all OK, it’s simple,’ Silvia said, almost jumping up and down with rage.

‘Thank you a cartload, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘I know you don’t mind one bit when I need you to help me out.’

‘You, come with me,’ Silvia said. ‘Then you know what you need to do in case it happens again.’

It was as simple as Silvia had said. Paulina must have been some kind of genius to make a mess of it.

‘So that’s Paulina,’ I said, down in the basement.

‘Yes,’ Silvia said. She was decisive on the subject. And when we got back upstairs, Paulina’s light was restored.

‘I can’t imagine what I’d do without you,’ she said effusively, looking me up and down openly. ‘Come in and have a drink. I’ve got …’ her voice sank seductively ‘… I’ve got some Campari.’

‘Perhaps some other night,’ Silvia said.

It seemed to me, as the days went on, that the only understanding I had had of Silvia disappeared in her proper context. If in England she possessed a vivid and fascinating character, in Italy it was clear that I had not got much beyond discovering her to be Italian. In Italy, her reality dissolved, like a glass full of water in the ocean. I had no access to her real character, not having had the practice at reading it. It was partly my fault, for being satisfied with an exoticism that, after all, was banal even in Yorkshire. But partly, I think, it was hers, since in Yorkshire, in the Quincys’ house above all, she defined herself so entirely by what she was not as to appear nothing but an embodied foreign culture. In Italy, having nothing much in her repertory to fall back on, she settled for being sulky. So it was, inevitably, that at a loose end in Florence, I found someone who was conspicuous in her culture, like a photographic negative of Silvia clacking noisily down the aisle of a concert hall in England.

The next morning, as I was leaving Silvia’s flat, I saw that Paulina’s door was open again. Round the door unfurled a long white arm, like the frond of a fern, followed by Paulina’s head, the hair braided and twisted. Inside, the curtains were still drawn; she was in her peignoir.

‘Honey,’ she said huskily, her voice lowered for the sake – I guessed – of Silvia, ‘you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’