Philip Hensher - Tales of Persuasion

‘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?’

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