Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher

tell her.

      The professor of theology was called Professor Quincy. He lived, I discovered, in an absurd villa in the opulent inner suburbs of the city. The street was lined with vast, ancient beeches, never intended by the Victorian planners to grow to such a size. Their foliage met and struggled overhead, and the pavement writhed and buckled over the roots like a late chapter of Moby-Dick. In other cities, to live in a Victorian house of this sort would require some wealth. These houses had been built for ruinous, grasping magnates, but a hundred years on, few people in the city had much money at all, and they were lived in by mere professors of theology. Quincy’s house had crenellations, battlements in the local orange stone, stained glass in the oddest places. In the street, two small girls were playing an unnecessarily picturesque game of pat-a-cake, slapping each other’s palms fiercely. As I passed them, they stopped and silently watched me. Silvia had given me the address, but had not offered to pick me up and take me there. I rang the doorbell, holding a box of chocolates and a bunch of carnations, which, I realized too late, were artificially dyed into lurid colours, the sort that would probably last in the recipient’s second-worst vase for several weeks.

      A dog hurled itself at the other side of the door, yelling furiously. I stepped back into the neglected border, tangling myself in some dead vines. As I was pulling my foot out, a shape appeared through the stained glass, a feminine shape, though too short and dumpy to be Silvia’s. The girl – the Quincy daughter, it must be – rattled the door free from its chains. It swung open. I quailed back. The dog, still bellowing with rage, threw itself past me and ran directly to the front gate. It continued barking at the street, which was empty of anyone except the two small girls, who ignored it.

      ‘He does that,’ the girl said. ‘He wants you to think he was barking at something behind you all the time. It’s really that he doesn’t want to offend you, but the temptation to bark, it’s just too much for him. He’s called Joseph. He’s got very good manners, really. He’ll come back when he thinks he’s made his point.’

      ‘Hello,’ I said, going in. The hall of the house was red as raw liver, the heavy, elaborate wallpaper torn away into yellowing scars and hung randomly with pictures, knocked off the level by the passing human traffic: cheap old prints, a painting by a child, solidly framed, a watercolour of Derwentwater, a disconcerting and conical nude that might be of either sex – the acquisitions of rainy days, the findings in junk shops, the exhibitions of local painting groups, of arguments concluded with a dashing purchase. Something was clinging about my feet. I looked down. It was a man’s walking sock. I kicked it off discreetly, trying to appear as if I were shaking myself from rain.

      ‘Are you a friend of the Lettuce?’ the girl said. ‘Silvia, I mean. We call her the Lettuce because she’s a lettrice, sorry, not very funny, I know. I’m Natasha.’

      ‘I’m Mark,’ a medium-sized boy said, hanging over the banister. ‘Who’s that?’

      I introduced myself.

      ‘Why have you got flowers? You’ve not come for dinner, have you? No one said anyone was coming for dinner.’ The boy came downstairs, slouching from side to side.

      ‘Yes, they did,’ Natasha said. ‘Silvia said, this morning.’

      ‘Oh,’ the boy said. He approached me, looked at me with amusement and, with a considered gesture, wiped his wet and dribbling nose noisily along the sleeve of his home-knitted red sweater. I looked at his clothes, and at Natasha’s, with compassion. They were the clothes of the children of theology professors the whole world over. ‘I’m precocious. Do you know what that means?’

      ‘I would say that being able to describe yourself as precocious at your age is a fair definition of it.’

      ‘No,’ Mark said. ‘That’s not really correct. That would be an instance of precocity, and not a definition of it.’

      I agreed.

      ‘Come through,’ a voice called. I followed the children into what proved to be the kitchen. I wondered whether I was expected. From the ceiling, what seemed to be a week’s washing was hanging on a wooden frame, the frills and collapses of much-washed intimates like some natural phenomenon of drip and accretion. On the kitchen worktop, a pile of unsorted socks threatened to fall into a bowl of salad. The only orderly thing in the kitchen seemed to be five neatly labelled recycling boxes, and they were near overflowing.

      ‘Hi,’ I said. Silvia was at the stove. You noticed the things of the kitchen before the people in it.

      ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, half turning from the pot she was peering into. ‘You found the house.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. For some reason, I could not walk forward and offer her the awful flowers. With the terrible clarity of a crashing driver I envisaged the small but ugly scene as Silvia accepted the dyed carnations from my hand and I struggled to remember what on earth you say when handing over such a thing, and I stood there mute. But then Natasha took it from my hand, gently but persuasively, and removed it, and I never saw it again.

      In time other people came in, and sat at the table. ‘This is my mother,’ Natasha said; she seemed to have taken over the job of hostess. Conversation of a sort came and went. ‘This is my father,’ she said.

      ‘We’ve never met,’ I said firmly to the professor, bedraggled from some labour in the study, or so it seemed. ‘But I know you by reputation.’

      ‘Admired him from afar,’ Mark said. ‘Stalked him for months, drawn by an inexplicable fascination.’

      ‘You can behave yourself,’ the professor said. ‘Company.’

      ‘This,’ the girl said, with pained distaste, ‘is my brother Kevin.’

      ‘I prefer to be called Benedict,’ the boy said, coming in through the garden door. He was dressed unusually for a seventeen-year-old, in a striped boating jacket and a lopsided bow tie. I wondered what school he went to, and whether he risked such an appearance in the playground. ‘After the saint and founder of the well-known order.’

      ‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.

      ‘How long is this going to go on for?’ Natasha said.

      ‘The Church has endured solidly for two thousand years,’ Kevin/Benedict said. ‘I see no reason why the name Benedict should not endure one more human lifetime.’

      ‘Yours, Mummy, he means,’ Natasha said.

      ‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.

      ‘He got religion,’ Natasha said. ‘He went to the church down the road, the ordinary one, and got religion. He was always awful, you know. But then he decided that wasn’t religion enough for him. So he went on to another church, which was more religion. And then he ended up on his knees dreaming of the day when he can suck the Pope off.’

      ‘Natasha,’ Professor Quincy said.

      ‘Well,’ Natasha said. ‘And it was then that he got the voice to go with it.’ It was true that Kevin/Benedict talked in a way unlike the two other children, who had a faint, attractive Australian hovering in their voice. Kevin/Benedict was conspicuously posh in his manner, sounding as if he were working up to announcing Saint-Saëns on Radio 3 in hushed tones. ‘It won’t last. He’s signed all sorts of pledges, alcohol, smoking, chewing gum, but they won’t last and then he’ll not be religious any more. Temptation, you see.’

      Kevin/Benedict lowered his head, faintly smiling, pustular. He looked like the Book of Job, and you could imagine him spottily going to and fro on the earth, walking up and down on it, forgiving everyone in a pimply manner.

      ‘Would our guest like to say grace?’ Kevin/Benedict said.

      I looked at him with astonishment.

      ‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said. I agreed. I had never said grace in my life, and had probably heard it said no more than ten times. ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know what would be the appropriate thing.’

      ‘Well,