Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?’ Stephen asked, indicating three bulky men in vests, romping on the carpet. ‘I heard they had some of that cocaine with them, I’d like to have a go on that.’

      Fitzgerald excused himself, and made his way over to Eduardo, who was sitting without drink or company in the far corner of one of Bradbury’s enormous sofas. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Eduardo said. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned to below his nipples, and quite an ordinary pair of jeans from which the labelled waistband of a pair of white pants emerged, whether by design or chance; he wore no shoes, and once more Fitzgerald allowed himself to be dazzled by the broad dark feet, the dazzling emergence of the dark breast from the flutters of a new white shirt. It was too much.

      ‘Is anyone getting you a drink?’ Fitzgerald said.

      ‘I’m fine, I don’t want one,’ Eduardo said. ‘I don’t know why Daniel’s having this party. They all come and say hello, then they leave me, they go off into their bathroom and they have a line. I don’t like to drink, I don’t like to do line. It makes you fat.’

      ‘Don’t you like a party?’

      ‘Oh, sure, but I like to dance, and no one’s dancing here. That’s not dancing,’ indicating the wobbling pair, whose attempts to mambo to Perez Prado had turned into a more or less successful attempt to hold each other up. ‘No one wants to dance, or talk, or anything but get drunk and high and then go to a club, maybe. And they all sleep with someone who isn’t their boyfriend. I never do that. I think if a man’s your boyfriend, you keep yourself for him and he keeps himself for you. That’s what I think. Daniel thinks I’m crazy but I know he’s happy I’m a good boy like that.’

      ‘Well, Eduardo,’ Fitzgerald said. He was so much more beautiful than anyone else there, so much more. ‘One day soon I’ll have a party for you, and people will dance and talk, and not sleep with anyone who isn’t their boyfriend afterwards.’

      ‘Thank you, you’re sweet,’ Eduardo rattled off, scowling at the room.

      ‘I don’t think anyone here understands you,’ Fitzgerald said.

      Eduardo seemed to ignore this, but something in his demeanour, like a dog pricking up its ears at the faint noise or sniff of prey two hundred yards off, encouraged Fitzgerald.

      ‘I don’t think you show people what you’re really like,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I think I know what the real you is like.’

      ‘I don’t think you do,’ Eduardo said. ‘I don’t think anyone does. Sometimes I don’t think I do, even.’

      ‘Well, I think I have some idea,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘You’re really beautiful, do you know that?’

      ‘Oh, everyone says that,’ Eduardo said, the air of the attentive dog suddenly switching off. ‘It’s so boring, people saying that, it means nothing. I’m going to dance.’

      ‘Let’s dance,’ Fitzgerald said desperately, and leant forward; he meant to take Eduardo’s arm as a dancing partner might, but some movement of Eduardo’s, some inability of Fitzgerald’s to execute a suave gesture, meant that first his right hand, then the other, landed on Eduardo’s upper thigh.

      Eduardo pushed him off angrily. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said, getting up. ‘Daniel was right about you. You’re just the same as everyone else.’

      ‘Yes, he does that to people,’ Bradbury said to Fitzgerald, gliding past. Humiliatingly, the episode had amused the whole party, including even the terrible Irishman, who was tittering behind his hands. ‘Don’t worry, Graham. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. I’m going to Munich for four days next week. Take him to the zoo this time. He’d like that, I expect.’

      Fitzgerald punished himself; he only had himself to blame. A little more leisurely, a few more compliments about his beauty, and Eduardo would be eased into his bed. That was how it was done, wasn’t it? Involuntarily, he thought about his greyish crumpled sheets, the pillows and the holed duvet scattered about his fetid retreat, and revised the picture: seducing Eduardo onto the no-doubt immaculate and crisp sheets of Bradbury’s vast and snowy bed. All the next day, he lay on the sofa, groaning when he thought of what he had said and done, in front of an audience who despised him anyway. Timothy Storey was out for the day, God knew where; he settled into the depression in the sofa, the buffalo wallow she had made in the previous weeks of lying down. He did not have the excuse, for last night’s behaviour, of drunkenness, either; he hoped Eduardo might assume, as they did, that Londoners were drunk most of the time.

      Around three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the telephone rang, and he leapt for it. He was conscious that Bradbury’s ‘four days’ meant that he might have gone on Monday, but had definitely gone on Tuesday. He set about immediately constructing a scene in which Eduardo was offering him the opportunity to apologize, in which Eduardo was apologizing, in which Eduardo had considered his offer and, now that Bradbury had gone to Munich and Eduardo was alone in the house—

      It was a woman’s voice. ‘Is Timothy Storey there?’

      ‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘She’s out.’

      ‘Well, could you pass on a message? Tell her that Mrs Baxter from Ealing called, and she’d very much like to know where her aubergine bath sheet and matching hand towels are. It’s not a joke. Those were expensive towels she’s waltzed off with.’

      Fitzgerald knew those purple towels: he kicked them out of his way on the bathroom СКАЧАТЬ