The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  On the way out of the house, Duncan noticed the long greasy mark, like the drag of a mop, about five feet up along the old floral wallpaper in the hall. He had noticed it before. ‘Let me come with you,’ his father said, walking in a tired old way out of the sitting room at the back of the house. Duncan said there was no need, and with surprise his father agreed there was no need – he wasn’t proposing to walk him to the bus stop. ‘I’ve got to go out to post a letter,’ his father said. ‘To your aunt Rachel. She will keep on writing. “Dear Samuel …”’ Duncan’s father made a derisory imitation of a woman speaking his name, as if it were an obviously stupid thing to write, even at the beginning of a letter. He refused an offer of Duncan’s to post his own letter for him. Then he leant his head against the wall, just above the shoe-rack in the hall, and took his slippers off before putting on his brown shoes, much mended and soft with much polishing. He moved his head along the wall as he did so, just there, where the dark streak of grease had formed.

  ‘And you’ll be off shortly, I expect,’ his father said. ‘I suppose all the duties of dropping in and seeing how I am are going to fall on your sister now. If you had come yesterday, I could have put all this news in my letter to your aunt Rachel, but I’m not going to waste a good envelope now it’s sealed.’

  ‘And the stamp,’ Duncan said, opening the door with the stained-glass window. The glass porch at the front was hot and dry; in it, a rubber plant was yellow, dying, withered. That was not the place for it, but his father had given up watering it.

  ‘Oh, you can detach and reattach stamps to a new envelope,’ his father said, putting his raincoat on and feeling in his pocket for his keys. ‘Sometimes a letter arrives and the lazy so-and-sos at the GPO haven’t franked it. No, I wouldn’t trust you to remember to post my letter, and then I’ve got your aunt Rachel to deal with.’

  It was only four days after arriving in Sicily that Duncan woke up not in the cheap hotel in the centre he had settled in but in a bright bedroom at the top of an old palazzo, and just remembering the exchange of glances, the small nod, the turn and the falling into simple conversation on the street the night before. He just remembered the sequence that had followed the delicious greasy almondy dinner, the fish swimming in oil and eaten at dangerous room temperature, and the way the two of them had piled up the four flights of stairs with their hands and mouths all over each other in the hot stairwell; just remembered the man’s face as he turned his head and found the warm tangle of unkempt black hair and the grand Arab nose in the dark sleeping face. His own arm, just flushed with red after wandering around the blazing city for three days, made a sharp contrast against the man’s conker-coloured chest. He had heard that there were blond people in the city, descendants of what, Normans? Englishmen? His father’s colleague and subordinate? But they were not like him, and he saw his desirability as something exotic. That was the day Sicily spoke to him, and it spoke when the man, whose name was Salvatore, as always, left him in bed and returned with what he called breakfast, a brioche each, with chocolate granita in one, lemon granita in the other. There was a shop just underneath. ‘It’s my breakfast every day, beginning May, till September,’ this Salvatore said. The hot brioche and the stab of ice made Duncan’s face ache; the pain of eating iced food too fast spread across his sinuses, and Salvatore rubbed his face with his big hands. Later, when they were done, they were both showered, the dog, a noble Irish setter called Pippo, had been admitted to the bedroom and praised, and it was time for Duncan to go, he commented on Salvatore getting dressed. ‘You don’t wear underwear,’ he said.

  ‘Again, from May to September, never,’ Salvatore said, spraying his bare chest with cologne. ‘Do you not know? No Sicilian will wear underwear for five months. It is just too hot. Oh, the day in September when you have to put on your underwear!’

  ‘But the day in May when you are allowed to take it off?’ Duncan said. Salvatore laughed and laughed, warmly, ecstatically, half with Duncan and half in exact memory of that annual private festival. And Sicily had spoken to Duncan. He never saw that particular Salvatore again, not even in passing in the street. He welcomed the introduction of a new rule of Italian life. Most of the rules seemed to be concerned with food, of not having cappuccino after eleven in the morning, of never eating cheese with fish, of not combining a fish course with a meat course – this was theoretical to Duncan, who had to find some means of earning a living within, he calculated, three weeks. Later he discovered rules about behaviour, of what to call people, of who you should stand up in front of. Those were all public rules, which strangers on buses would share with you.

  But the rules of clothes, the rule that said you should not wear short socks or a tie with a suit, that you should not wear a pair of shorts in town, and that on the first of May all Sicilian men left their underwear off until autumn, those were rules that were passed on exactly like this one, first thing in the morning in a strange bedroom or, once Duncan had found the loan of a pretty little flat off the via Merulana from another teacher, all wooden furniture and cool dark red tiles underfoot, in his own bedroom. Duncan would walk down the street and see the men passing, and think not only, They’re none of them wearing any underwear, but It’s the rule that they don’t have to wear underwear, and they all – all of them – they all know that none of the rest of them are. Not one of them. Sicily had spoken to him, on the fourth day.

  4.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to the man in the departure lounge at Catania airport. ‘Yes, I like Sicily a lot. I’ve got to go back to England now, though. My father’s dying.’

  The man made a formal gesture of regret, and the conversation was over. On the other side of the glass wall, the blind man battered on and on, his face turning from side to side, as he called for help.

  5.

  The house in Harrow had once looked like its neighbours – a substantial Edwardian house, with gables and a bay window at the front. But it had been added to, and now was pointed out, and people shook their heads over it. A garage had come first, in the 1930s, a square box with a wooden double door, once painted blue; an old red Volvo, seventeen years old, hardly used, wallowed in there. But Duncan’s father had done the rest. A sun terrace at the back, pushing the house further out into the garden; a square block of a kitchen at the side, in a sort of black tarpaulin material covering brickwork, the sort of material that covered flat roofs in this part of the world; a glass porch before the old Edwardian front door, now with a dead houseplant in it and a pile of unopened letters on the windowshelf. There was a square attic conversion at the top, a bald cube in peeling white planks and a square empty window cutting out of the dormer roof; there was another extension, which had been made on the first floor, resting on top of the garage. The original house was in there somewhere, impossible to imagine among all those black geometries, all that contrived asymmetry for the sake of an extra room here and there.

  Samuel, Duncan’s father, had kept the builders of Harrow busy, and the property lawyers, too: he meticulously applied for planning permission for every small change and every extension, resubmitting when he was turned down, discussing details every which way with the builder – he would not employ an architect when, as he said, the builder had to build it, and he knew very well what was needed. It was Duncan’s memory of his childhood, to be banished with his sister Domenica to a spare room or other while a part of the house was rendered uninhabitable for months – the dining room with no wall, the kitchen huddled and stripped without cupboards, the builders sitting on the ground smoking where the sun lounge was going to go. There were only the four of them; their parents were in the future going to need less space, not more. In the end, he concluded that it was his father’s hobby, like the law suit his father brought with gusto against a builder when one extension, to the dining room, proved to let in rain in torrents.

  In the streets of Harrow, people pointed out the house as a disaster, as something extended and pulled beyond what anything could reasonably take
. They pointed it out now. Upstairs, the curtains were drawn in the master bedroom, where Samuel lay dying. He was sleeping at the moment. A nurse had sat with him overnight, now that he was in no position to argue with the expense, or with the fact that she was Trinidadian. She was speaking in low tones to the day nurse, who had just arrived in her little beige Morris Marina and was taking off her thin summer coat in the hall.

  In the summer terrace, the glass-covered extension at the back of the house, three women sat. They were Duncan’s aunts, his father’s three sisters. They had been there in pairs, or all three of them, for days. They were Aunt Rachel, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Rebecca. A grandfather had named them after Biblical figures, not foreseeing that, for ever afterwards in north London, people would ask them and their brother Samuel which synagogue they went to, creating a hostility they saw no reason to diminish. Samuel’s children were called Duncan and Domenica; the children of Ruth and Rebecca were called Amanda, Raymond, Richard and Caroline. Normal names, Ruth would say, meaning what she meant by that. Rachel had no children, but if she had, she would have named them away from the scriptures too; she had a black parrot, however, named Ezekiah. Ruth and Rachel were already in black, as if preparing for the day of their brother’s death; Rebecca, a plump woman, was wearing a practical tweed, her hat still on. They were talking about their niece and nephew.

  ‘She’s no use,’ Rachel said. ‘No use at all. I phoned her and she hardly seemed to understand what I was asking of her. I don’t think we’ll see her until the weekend.’

  ‘Oh, but surely,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘She simply doesn’t care,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Possibly,’ Rachel said. ‘I think she’s a little bit simple, sometimes. I don’t think she understands what’s going on. She said to me that she’d wait until her brother got here.’

  ‘Her brother!’ Rebecca said.

  ‘I don’t know what she was thinking of,’ Rachel said. ‘Waiting for her brother.’

  ‘She loves her brother,’ Ruth said. ‘At least, everyone always said so. Even when she was a little girl, she would follow him round, holding something to give him, a toy or something of that nature. Her little brother …’

  ‘Oh, what people do, what people justify, in the name of love,’ Rebecca said. ‘“I love him.” Fancy. So she’s waiting until her brother gets here, is she?’

  ‘She’ll be waiting for a good long time, then,’ Rachel said. ‘Is it me or is it hot in here?’

  ‘No,’ Ruth said. ‘It is hot, it isn’t you. The brother, too – at least Samuel saw some sense over that one. Giving everything up and going to be a hippie in Italy. There’s no sign of that one, is there?’

  ‘I am so glad Samuel listened to what we suggested,’ Rebecca said. ‘The estate couldn’t just go to someone like that. He’d just – yes, thank you so much, Nurse Macdowell, thank you.’

  ‘Are you coming tonight, Nurse Macdowell?’ Rachel asked, but Nurse Macdowell was not. ‘Do have a cup of coffee – you know where the kitchen is. No?’

  ‘Such a Scottish name, Macdowell,’ Ruth said when the nurse was gone. ‘You wonder where they acquire them from. Coloured people.’

  ‘The owners of plantations,’ Rebecca said. ‘That would have been the Scottish one, and they pass their name on to the slaves, passed, rather, I should say. They would have thought it quite an honour to be named after the owner of the plantation, all over the Caribbean.’

  Rachel and Ruth exchanged a glance: their big sister Rebecca had always been the swot, held up to the twins, three years behind in school, as a scholastic ideal when in reality she had been willing only to put her own ideas of the truth forward in firm ways. And now she was seventy-four, and stout, and wearing a good tweed with a summer umbrella underneath the chair, because you really never knew, and still putting forward her ideas of the truth in a manner that required no contribution or disagreement.

  ‘It’ll be a shock to the son,’ Ruth said. ‘He’ll be under the impression that it’s going to be him, him and the sister, who are going to get everything.’

  ‘This beautiful house,’ Rachel said. ‘They would only sell it and pocket the money. And poor Samuel’s savings and shares, too. Neither of them married, or any sign of it.’

  There was a shriek from the end of the room. Rachel had brought her black parrot, Ezekiah, promising he would be no trouble but he liked to have some company around him. The room smelt faintly of bird, and he had a look in his eye, a wizened, assessing, timing look; Ruth and Rebecca went nowhere near him, and he sat on the backs of what chairs he chose, his claws like wrinkled grey tools.

  ‘The son – he was always a nasty little boy,’ Rebecca said. ‘I never thought much of him. Crying into his mother’s skirts, never wanting to come out and say hello. Scared of everything. Just the same now, I imagine.’

  ‘I found his address in Italy,’ Rachel said. ‘He had written to Samuel to tell him where he lived. I sent the telegram. More than that I cannot do. You know what he is?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ruth said. ‘One of them.’

  ‘One of them?’ Rebecca said. ‘Oh, not a marrying type. How dreadful for Samuel. I expect he will turn up once poor Samuel has died, wanting to spend Samuel’s money on cushions, lipstick and a sex-change operation.’ Rebecca made a gesture; a feminine gesture but not a feminine gesture a woman would make, rather the extension and admiration of her finger-ends, which were a gardener’s hands, trimmed and painted with red polish. She made a curdling moue, a pout; she meant not to be a woman or to suggest one, but to show what Duncan might be like. ‘Lop it off, Doctor,’ she said.

  ‘But there isn’t going to be as much money as he thought,’ Rachel said, smiling sadly and shaking her head. ‘Samuel handled that all very well. I am so glad we explained everything to him so well while he was still not in too much pain.’

  ‘It was such a good idea, getting one of those easy forms from Smith’s,’ Ruth said. ‘It saved all the bother and expense of going to the solicitor. That was a very good idea of yours, Rachel.’

  ‘But there is a virtue in having a family solicitor for years,’ Rebecca said. ‘I always said so. And Mr Brooke is such a friend.’

  ‘Samuel saw the point, didn’t he?’ Ruth said. ‘We didn’t talk him into anything, nobody would be able to say that. I am so glad that Rachel got the will, and did everything, and got it witnessed, and took it to Mr Brooke for safekeeping. That was very good of Rachel.’

  ‘That was very good of Rachel,’ Rebecca said. ‘Of course we didn’t talk Samuel into anything. If the son got hold of the house, he would only sell it immediately and pocket the money. We wouldn’t have any say in the matter at all. He would probably sell it to the Jews. They buy everything for cash. They don’t trust the banks.’

  ‘They must trust some of the banks,’ Ruth said. She beat the floor with her walking stick emphatically. ‘They run a lot of them – behind the scenes.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Rebecca said thoughtfully. ‘If it’s not the Jews in Harrow, it’s the Pakistanis. Over the road, the house that used to be lived in by the Harrises, when we were girls, that’s owned by a family called – well, I don’t know, but they’re a Pakistani family and they fill it to the rafters. Soon there won’t be an English family left in the avenue at all.’

  Out in the garden, on the low brick wall that surrounded the knee-high flowerbeds on the terrace, a blackbird sat; it cocked its head, and sang, and inspected the three women inside. Or perhaps it was just drawn to the reflection of sun on the large windows. They flashed in the morning light. Rachel was looking out of the window. She was not looking at her sisters at all, even as they praised her sense.

  ‘Poor Samuel,’ Ruth said. ‘There was really nothing more that any of us could have done in that direction. We wrote to the son, and we wrote to the daughter. Where are they? Thank goodness he doesn’t know what’s going on around him any more.’

  6.

  Upstairs, in a darkened room, Samuel found himself.
He felt odd, and then he remembered that he was ill. The curtains were drawn, but it must be time to get up. Behind the curtains there was a hot day already. He could feel it. The curtains were brown but behind them the sun was bright and making everything red. Yesterday he had been able to jump out of bed and draw the curtains across and the rabbits had been eating in the garden, a dozen of them. He had wanted to go and get his gun and pick them off from the window, but Nanny had not let him. ‘Not on a Sunday,’ Nanny had said. That had been yesterday. But then it seemed to him that that had been a very long time ago, when he was a small boy, and then it seemed to him that it had not happened at all.

  The pillow and the sheet were creased and uncomfortable, and he could smell something – a sour smell, physical and not his own smell. But perhaps it was his own smell now. The temperature seemed wrong. His feet and legs were cold, but his head sweltered. No – his feet and legs were not cold, but they were numb. Samuel had always prided himself on getting the exact right word, and the word for his lower body was ‘numb’, not ‘cold’. And yet the sensations in his head and neck were more alert than they should have been, as well as hotter. There was a great heat spreading from the seams and rucks of the cotton sheets into his face, and he turned his head restlessly. There was a woman in his bedroom. There had not been a woman sitting in his bedroom since – he struggled for her name and could not remember the name of the wife he had been married to for decades – since Helen died. For a moment he thought it must be Death. Her face was covered by shade from where he looked. In her lap, a strip of light fell on a book. She read on, and in a moment passed her hand over her hair in an unconscious grooming gesture. Her hair was a vivid ginger, and neatly tied back. It needed no grooming, but the hand passed over it in reassurance. When Samuel saw the hair of the woman, he said to himself immediately ‘At least it’s not the coloured one,’ and then he remembered immediately. She was one of his nurses, the daytime one, who was sitting with him and doing things for him. If she was here, it was not early morning, when the coloured one sat with him. It would be the afternoon. He had slept most of the day, then. He congratulated himself on the continuing liveliness of his own mind, when he concentrated. Her name would come to him, but it was not important.