Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher

No nation is as interesting as a human being. So I was late in the museum, and Margaret, loitering round the eland in the foyer with a pen on a string round her neck, had a word for me. ‘So we’re friends with the professor of theology now,’ she said. ‘Eating dinner round there. You live dangerously, I must say.’

      There was an unexpectedly hostile glitter in her eyes. She’d been preparing herself to coruscate lightly over the details of my expanding social life.

      ‘Dangerously?’ I said.

      ‘I’ve heard they use the dog’s basin as a pudding bowl,’ Margaret said. ‘If there’s more than a given number of guests. It’s said that many an unwelcome guest’s found “Bonzo” written at the bottom of the cherry trifle when, naturally, it would be too late to do anything about it.’

      Sherry trifle, I silently and irritably corrected. ‘No, it was very nice. Silvia cooked. It was very good.’

      Margaret, huffing off, was premature in her suggestion, but after that evening, I did rather take to the Quincys. Less predictably, they seemed rather to take to me. I did my grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s, a branch I’d always thought far too big for my bedsit needs. Like a child, I went up and down every aisle, even the sock aisle, generally finding something necessary in each one, and a few days down the line generally throwing out a pile of decaying compost, the evidently perishable remains of my excessive shop.

      Going round a supermarket, one too big for your needs, is like a sad evening in front of the television, hurtling through the channels and seeing the same faces recurring, harassed and increasingly familiar. The OAP you greet absently like an old friend by the time you reach the whisky was a new face as recently as the organic peas. A White Queen-like figure was floating in and out of my awareness at the far ends of aisles, only doubtfully recognizable. But I did know her: it was the professor’s wife. She was only vague because she was out of her initial context. I was standing in front of the milk display when Mrs Quincy hailed me, coming alongside with a gigantic and nearly filled trolley, like a docking liner.

      ‘You look lost and confused,’ she said, hoisting four six-pint cartons of milk into her trolley, the shopping of a materfamilias with milk puddings to make.

      ‘I was looking for milk,’ I said.

      ‘Well, you’re in the right place,’ Mrs Quincy said.

      ‘No,’ I said. I gestured feebly. ‘I only want a pint of milk. Just for my cup of coffee in the mornings. They’ve only got enormous ones.’

      She admitted this to be true. There were the gargantuan cartons suitable for her needs, but nothing smaller.

      ‘Well, that’s no good,’ she said. She looked around for an assistant. ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Yes. I mean you. Yes. Hello. Thank you.’

      The assistant who came over unwillingly was a tall youth. He might have been a sixth-former doing a holiday job.

      ‘Do you really not have any milk,’ Mrs Quincy said, ‘in any size smaller than this? My friend here only wants to buy a single pint.’

      ‘It’s really not that important,’ I said, Mrs Quincy contradicting me. ‘I could buy a pint at the newsagent’s round the corner.’

      ‘At considerable inconvenience to yourself and some increased expense, I imagine,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Pay no attention. Now. Do you have one-pint sizes of – what, full-fat milk? You should drink semi-skinned. You get used to it in no time at all, three weeks, max.’

      ‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

      There was a pause before the boy realized we were waiting for his answer.

      ‘We’ve run out,’ he said. ‘The delivery comes at three, I think.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘How can you have run out? I want to talk to the manager. Fetch me the manager immediately.’

      The boy disappeared.

      ‘The trouble with the English,’ Mrs Quincy said very distinctly, attracting some attention from passing shoppers, ‘is that they never complain. Or they never complain at the right time. They sit around whining endlessly when nothing can be done about a problem, and then when they’re offered the chance, they sit quietly. I’ve often noticed it. If you don’t say anything, you don’t get anything.’

      ‘How’s the professor?’ I said, in order not to respond. ‘And the children? I so enjoyed dinner the other night.’

      ‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said cryptically. ‘Here he comes.’

      She meant the manager, not the professor. The manager looked, frankly, too grand to be troubled with these things. He was approaching in his suit and tie, the original boy tagging along behind, his face purply embarrassed. He had never had to ask the manager anything directly before, and was now wondering, I guessed, whether he should have done so. But Mrs Quincy had worked herself up into a lather over someone else’s dairy purchases, and she was going to have her moment.

      ‘I understand that there’s a problem here,’ the manager said.

      ‘There is a problem,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Now, look at these shelves. You have six-pint containers of milk. You have four-pint containers of milk. And those are very well and good for someone such as I, with a family who drinks milk all day long. But look again and ask yourself whether you see single pints of milk. No. You do not. And for many people a single pint of milk is what they need. Now, this is my friend and he lives on his own. He lives in a bedsit. He has few friends and he never cooks. He lives on takeaways and similarly unhealthy things. But he likes a cup of coffee in the morning or sometimes a cup of tea. And it takes him probably five days to finish even one pint of milk. What is he going to do with a gigantic carton like this? He would never finish it. He would find it turning to cheese before he was halfway through it. And he’s paid four times as much as he wanted to for it, which, considering that he’s living on a very restricted budget, is not a trivial matter. Listen to me. Where are the single pints of milk for the single lonely people in this town? Where are they?’

      ‘We’ve got delivery problems,’ the manager said, as I made faint noises of demurral and objection to this poignant but honestly insulting account of my life.

      ‘What rubbish,’ Mrs Quincy said. She was delighted. ‘Now come along with me. Have you finished here? Will you ever. Do your shopping.’ (Over the shoulder.) ‘Here. Again?’

      ‘Well,’ I began, drawn along in Mrs Quincy’s wake.

      ‘The thing is,’ Mrs Quincy said, once we were in her car – it seemed a done deal that I was being whisked off by her, though whether she was generously offering me a lift home or abducting me was unclear, ‘Silvia’s really a sort of family. Well, not family at all. But Richard, my husband, you know, she’s the neighbour of a cousin of his in Florence.’

      ‘In Florence?’ I said. ‘I thought she came from Cremona.’

      ‘Comes from Cremona, ran away, very naughty, but it’s all made up now, lives in Florence in a flat next to Aunty Paulina. I say aunty, but let me get this straight. Richard’s sister’s second husband, his stepmother, it was her niece. Half-niece, is there such a thing, because of course their mother, who was married to the stepmother’s brother and used to be a McIntyre, one of the Mount Isa McIntyres, if you can imagine such a thing, she met a Melbourne dentist and moved to Melbourne with relief and married him, and that was Paulina’s father. Didn’t work out but she stayed on in Melbourne, can’t think why. This is all ancient history now, though. Paulina must be sixty if she’s a day.’

      ‘Look out,’ I said, as Mrs Quincy jumped a red light.

      ‘Oh, they get out of your way,’ Mrs Quincy said, on this occasion correctly. ‘Well, Paulina gets in touch out of the blue in July, which is very odd, because the only occasion we ever hear from her is Christmas, a card and a bottle of fruit in mustard-flavoured syrup, which no one will ever eat and you can’t in all conscience give it to anyone else, they’ve been