Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher

yes,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘And she says her next-door neighbour, a nice girl, she’s coming to England and not just England, to here, to be a lettuce in the university as the kids will insist on saying, not funny, and can we help her find somewhere to live? So Silvia comes and we let her have the top floor because, frankly, we just don’t use it. I can’t even remember the last time I went up there. The children tell me she’s made it quite nice now. And, as you see, she’s no trouble and she cooks up a storm, so she stayed. She was in West Side Story.’

      ‘Silvia?’ I said.

      ‘No, Aunty Paulina,’ Mrs Quincy said. Then – she must have told this before, and often been told in response that her listeners had been in Oliver!, back at school – she said, ‘The real one, I mean. The famous movie. Here we are.’

      We were at the Quincys’ house. I went in, carrying half of Mrs Quincy’s bags and my own one; she was talking all the way. And I stayed all afternoon.

      Silvia’s hours at the university were irregular, and when, over the next three months, I saw her or I did not see her, it was when I was at the Quincys’ house. I learnt more about her from Mrs Quincy and from Natasha than I did from our occasional independent outings. I did not suggest going to a concert with her. I knew that Margaret could hardly cope with my defection from her side to Silvia’s, and with Margaret I contrived different outings altogether. With her sensible shoes on, Margaret came with me on buses out to the national park and hiked in well-planned ways. We hiked not there and back, but in great twelve-mile circuits round entire dales, with a stop in a pub halfway round, greeting all other walkers on the way, if they seemed from their dress to be taking it as seriously as we were.

      Silvia’s clothes alone would have disbarred her from any such outing. Our dates tended to be cultural, short of Margaret’s territory of the concert hall. The heavily subsidized theatre in the town was safe, a concrete bunker with an apron stage and, every so often, Sir Derek Jacobi. It changed its offering only every six weeks – a period that thoroughly exhausted the fascination the city might have cherished for Goethe’s Egmont, say. There was a university theatre, taken up with student productions and local amateur dramatic societies. The cinema of the town fastidiously refused ever to screen anything that had cost its makers less than thirty million dollars. We managed, somehow, though we left a lot of offerings halfway through.

      It was over dinner after one of these unsuccessful outings that Silvia made her point. The offering had been a number about people falling in love against the odds and having to run through cities before being reunited at the check-in desk. We had stayed to the uplifting end. Silvia was silent and scowling all the way to the restaurant.

      ‘I’m going back to Florence the week after next,’ she said, not quite looking at me.

      ‘Not Cremona?’ I said.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘My flat in Florence. It’s empty over the summer. I’m going there.’

      ‘Ah,’ I said.

      ‘You like Mrs Quincy, and you like Natasha, isn’t it?’ she said, quite emphatically.

      The restaurant was Italian, after its own fashion. It was not my choice – I would have hesitated to suggest it to Silvia. Even more oddly, we had been there before, and she had spent the whole evening denouncing everything about it, from the waiter’s pronunciation of bruschetta to his kindly suggestion of a cappuccino to finish with. ‘They’re catering for what people want,’ I had mildly protested. ‘There’s no point in being Tuscan purists round here.’ But it was a terrible restaurant; everything, to the outer limits of plausibility, had been improved with the addition of cream, and unfamiliar foodstuffs had crept into unlikely dishes. In all of this I had been instructed by Silvia – I mean, I wouldn’t have known that rule about not having pineapple with pasta – but her mood of denunciation this evening was only encouraged by the restaurant. Its purpose was directed straight at me.

      ‘No, not yet,’ she said to the waitress, returning to her theme.

      ‘No, we’re not ready to order,’ she said again, five minutes later. ‘And the other thing …’

      ‘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