The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘So what needs doing?’ he said now. ‘Painting? I can do a bit of that.’

  ‘If you feel like it,’ Paul said. ‘Roll your sleeves up. We’ve got some overalls somewhere – there, that pile of what looks like rags at the back of the shop. Pop those on and get busy. We’ll start you on the ceiling – we’ll see how you do with that.’

  ‘I’m going to get a tattoo one of these days,’ Freddie Sempill said. ‘One of those that sailors used to have, on the forearm, saying Mum. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Don’t you ever have to roll your sleeves up in Simpson’s?’ Paul said. ‘When it gets hot? No, I don’t suppose you do.’

  6.

  ‘And then he made such a hash of the ceiling, I can’t tell you,’ Paul said later on, at the CHE meeting. ‘We’re going to have to repaint it all tomorrow. We thought he couldn’t do much harm – we haven’t touched the bookcases, which are all in now, or the walls, and the floor was all covered up so, no matter how much he spilt all over the place, he couldn’t do much harm. But paint in his hair and hair in the paint on the ceiling. And then he was about to fall off the ladder and he put his hand in the bit he’d just painted and then he leant immediately on one of the bookcases and there was a sort of smeared handprint on it. Duncan went all tight-lipped, you know how he does when he’s seriously annoyed.’

  They were in the upstairs room at the pub in Camden. They were supposed to discuss the likelihood of extending Gay Pride outside London, maybe to Birmingham or Manchester to start with. On the other side of the table to Paul and Alan, the discussion was coming to an end with a long story, told by Christopher, about a man he had met at Gay Pride the year before last, who had come down from Newcastle, and he had said that there was quite a good scene in Newcastle now, and they’d had a good time marching, but Christopher had lost his phone number the next morning and he supposed that the man had lost his too, since he hadn’t been in touch. But Christopher was going to Manchester only next week.

  ‘I thought you said he was from Newcastle?’ Simon said, draining the last of his pint of bitter. ‘I wish you’d get these things right when you tell a story.’

  ‘Yes. He was from Newcastle,’ Christopher finished decisively. Simon and Christopher had had years of turning up at the same meetings and saying ‘hello’ to each other when they met over a conference table in Whitehall. There had often been a professional tinge to the way they spoke to each other at the CHE meetings, a sense of mild mutual deference, but there was a petty sharpness about the way Simon was speaking to Christopher tonight – he had told Christopher to ‘get on with it’ earlier when he was explaining, as an account of personal growth, how he had gone to gay rights meetings for the first time in America.

  ‘And I don’t even know how Freddie Sempill came to hear about Duncan’s bookshop in the first place,’ Paul said to Alan, not paying any attention to Christopher’s story.

  The landlord came in without knocking. There was, as always, a faint stiffening at this: he was never openly hostile, unlike his wife, but they had in the past wondered whether he had known what they were, and what they did; the general consensus was that he hadn’t known at the start, but when he had found out had decided to be bonhomous, at least to their faces. His name was Tarquin: nobody had discovered what his wife’s name was. ‘Everything all right?’ Tarquin now said, going round the table and collecting what pint glasses there were. ‘Don’t mean to be rude, gents, but …’

  ‘It’s about time for another one,’ Simon said dutifully, after he had collected everyone’s money – CHE was not the sort of place where they bought rounds for each other. Some of them thought they shouldn’t be drinking: they were really there to talk serious things over and decide on the future. Some of them (Christopher) said this every time they met, but he went along with it and bought a soft drink. ‘I do wish there was a gay pub with an upstairs room,’ Simon said, leaving the room. ‘There’s that one in Romford we talked about.’

  ‘No one’s going to go to Romford,’ Nat said, as Simon left. ‘We can’t plot the next stage in the sexual revolution from there. It’s not even a gay pub, or only every other second Thursday of the month. The only place we can go to is the cellar at the King’s Head. We’ve been through this before, it’s not used on Tuesdays.’

  ‘I’m not going to sit in the King’s Head cellar,’ Alan said, getting up and going to the uncurtained window. Outside, it was raining heavily; a woman under a black umbrella was making an unsteady progress down the street, her personal black dome glistening in the yellow streetlights. ‘I’m not, and that’s final. It might not be used for anything on Tuesdays, but it’s too well used on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and especially Sundays.’

  ‘I saw a man being weed on there one Sunday,’ Nat said. ‘I really did.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Alan said. ‘I really don’t think the King’s Head cellar would be an improvement.’

  ‘So why was Freddie Sempill there in any case?’ Christopher said.

  ‘I don’t know why they don’t get on, but they just don’t,’ Paul said. ‘But he turned up – he’d turn up at anything where workmen were hammering and sawing. After he’d made such a mess of the ceiling and we told him for Heaven’s sake to stop, he started asking the carpenters where they went for a pint, these days, but they made short work of him, I can tell you.’

  ‘A pint of bitter, a lemonade for Christopher, a half of lager and lime, another pint of bitter, and a peppermint cordial with a dash of rum in it, here you go, Nat,’ Simon said, coming back and shouldering the door open, turning round carefully with a laden tray. It sloped dangerously as he turned. ‘And a half of bitter for me and that’s going to be my lot.’ He set the tray down, sat down heavily, and passed the drinks to left and right.

  ‘I can’t wait for the bookshop to open,’ Christopher said, ‘and then at least we won’t have to come here any more.’

  They stared at him.

  ‘Well, it’s a community resource, isn’t it?’ Christopher said. ‘I thought that was the whole point of it. We’ll just start meeting at the bookshop after closing time. Of course, we won’t be able to buy alcoholic drinks, but Paul said they were putting in a kitchenette, so we can make cups of instant coffee and tea, and perhaps even a cheese toastie if we get hungry and the discussion seems to be going on fruitfully. And there’s probably a “pub” on the same street or not too far, I don’t really know about these things, but there often is in London, I know, for anyone who feels after the meeting that they need an alcoholic drink, I mean feels they can’t go for one evening without one.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘I suppose that would be a good idea. But you’d have to ask him. Go round tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t go round tomorrow,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve got meetings about North Sea oil all day long. It’s interesting, but it takes up your time. I don’t know whether you can go, Simon?’

  ‘No, naturally I can’t, Christopher, I don’t know why you even ask,’ Simon said. Nat and Paul exchanged meaning glances.

  ‘But it would be a good thing if we all buttered Duncan up by volunteering to do something or other in the next week,’ Christopher said.

  ‘Rather than just turning up to the party,’ Alan said. ‘You have a point there. I can go tomorrow. I don’t know what I can do. I’m really as hopeless with my hands as Freddie Sempill. The only thing I can do is find little treasures in country antiques shops. I was only seven when I came home with my first little treasure. Mother complimented me on it and said I had an eye. That was when I was seven,’ he went on, turning in his seat to Nat, ‘the war hadn’t even started. That was the golden age of treasure-hunting in country junk shops, you know. It was never the same after the war. Do you know, we still have that first little treasure, in the spare bedroom at Tregunter Road, a real little treasure, but of course …’

  So then, of course, they all knew that at some point in the last three weeks, pe
rhaps over a conference table in Whitehall about North Sea oil, where Christopher was representing the Treasury and Simon was representing the President of the Board of Trade, they had shuffled their papers at the end of all that technical talk, and had let their eyes meet, and Christopher had said, ‘Do you fancy a drink?’, no, ‘a cup of tea’ from Christopher, and perhaps over a smooth and oval and shining conference table in Whitehall the two of them had let their formal front fall away, as Simon did when he came to CHE meetings but Christopher never did. Paul and Nat were saying all this very quickly as they hurried away under their umbrellas, dashing away saying they had to get home, but in fact wanting to find a quiet corner of a different pub to talk over this deeply interesting development.

  So Paul dared say that probably they had just seen each other as if for the very first time, no one knows what causes these things, maybe just there was one last pink wafer biscuit on the civil-service plate, one of those pink wafer biscuits that are such a temptation even to the joyless civil-service palate, one last biscuit between Christopher in his pinstriped suit and Simon in his blue serge with the waistcoat, and they both reached for it, and Christopher said, ‘No, you have it,’ and Simon looked at him and smiled and took the last one, and gave him such a flirtatious look as he put the little pink thing in his mouth … Nat burst out laughing; they entered the second pub, shaking their umbrellas at the door, like black herons opening their wings and shutting them after a fishing plunge; the pub was crowded, and they stood at the bar to carry on, Nat buying the drinks, a brandy for Paul, a third pint of bitter for Nat. ‘I don’t suppose it was exactly like that,’ Paul said. ‘I can absolutely see the look in Christopher’s eyes when he realized that he was going to get an offer from Simon, though.’ So then the pair of them had gone out, and they found themselves, entranced, walking in the same direction, and pretty soon they were in the public toilets in St James’s Park because they couldn’t bear to wait until they were home together, and first Christopher said to Simon, no, Simon to Christopher, please, just do it to me, now, hard …

  A girl wearing an Afghan coat beside Paul now turned and stared at them, Nat laughing so hard he had to rest his hand on Paul so as not to fall off his stool. She smelt of patchouli oil. ‘Do you mind?’ she said, in a quick, drawling, upper-middle class voice.

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ Nat said. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Yes, fuck off back to … Catford,’ Paul said.

  ‘I’m not from Catford, actually,’ the girl said. ‘I’m from Hereford actually.’

  ‘Well, fuck off back to Hereford actually then wherever that is,’ Nat said. The girl turned back to her friend, another student-type girl, with a flounce of the shoulders, observing with a loud voice that they were all the same and her father would have had them all shot at birth. ‘But,’ Nat went on, paying no attention, ‘how did we know? That they’re having it off? Simon and Christopher? They weren’t feeling each other under the table, were they?’

  ‘Those two? No,’ Paul said. ‘What an extraordinarily horrible thought. No. I know exactly what it was. They were being so unkind to each other. Christopher telling Simon he drank too much. Simon telling Christopher he didn’t know what he was talking about and to shut up for a change. They might have been married for years.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ Nat said. ‘They’ll be looking round for new partners to keep things going. Honestly.’

  ‘Discussing whether or not they should have an open relationship.’

  ‘Spicing up their marriage by having the occasional threesome.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul, finishing his brandy in one gulp and holding up his glass to the gormless-looking spiky-haired student behind the bar with one finger raised. ‘Of course there’s one thing that Christopher’s got going for him.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Didn’t you guess? That borderline-bewildered air of Christopher’s? Could only mean one thing. I know for a fact that he’s got,’ Paul said, ‘a truly enormous cock. One more double brandy, if you please. And another pint of “bitter” for you, my darling?’

  7.

  All it needed was persuasion, one person after another, that it was not so bad, that you could live your life openly. And then you would persuade people who saw you, one after the other, as if turning to the sun, that life did not need to be like that. They truly believed it. They had no choice in the matter.

  On Sunday Duncan left the flat in Notting Hill. He had moved out only for two weeks, while the new bathroom and the new kitchen were put in – the old lady who had lived there for forty years, on the first floor of a once grand stucco villa, had lived with the same ones all her life. The top of the bathroom walls had been green with mould: the kitchen cabinets had hung precariously off the wall, dragging the rawlplugs with them. She had gone into a home only two months before she died; it had killed her. Her family, consisting of two sons and their children, living in Enfield and Ealing, had thought themselves lucky to sell the flat to Duncan for £60,000 in its current state.

  He had been glad to pay that. The rooms were huge, and the ceilings were grandly remote; you could see, from the patterns of stains on the carpet, where the old lady had huddled in corners and moved slowly from point to point in the rooms. She had not carved up the space with hardboard partitions, like a lot of flats he had looked at; she hadn’t needed to, and her boys, they told Duncan, had shared the second bedroom until they had married and left home. There were probably disasters to be uncovered underneath the plaster; there were probably disagreeable and difficult neighbours to overcome. Duncan loved his new flat. He was making a kitchen out of, and around, a huge slab of light oak, and a bathroom out of white fittings, a rolltop bath, a stained-glass window instead of the suburban rippled glass the fitters obviously thought more appropriate. They had discovered blue asbestos in the floor; they had found that the mortar between the bricks in the back wall had dried, crumbled, trickled down and disappeared; they had found rats’ nests and a boiler that broke all up-to-date safety rules and could kill Duncan at any moment. They had discovered the extent of the damp that had stained the wallpaper in the bathroom, and expressed wonder that the house was still standing.

  Every day, for some time, there had been more and more horrible discoveries, and Duncan had been escaping the nightmares at home only to go to the nightmares in his shop. His father had left him hundreds of thousands of pounds, against his will at the end. It was pouring down the gullet of workmen in one place or another. Still, Duncan did not doubt for one second that he was doing the right thing. To put a sum of money into a shop was not to submit to the nature of London, where money melts like a wine gum in the mouth, but to transform expenditure into investment, which will grow and grow, and make a man rich.

  On the other hand, Duncan had serious doubts about the Notting Hill flat. He associated builders with madness, ugliness, vanity and absurdity. It was only his sense of the height of the Notting Hill ceilings and the beautiful walk to the shop in the summertime that kept him going, carrying on enriching the richest tradesmen in London.

  He shut the front door and locked it – even the clunk of the new lock in the new, steel-framed front door was a satisfaction to him, a proof of new ownership. Outside, the sky was casting a wet springtime pall over the creamy stucco of the street. The front door of his neighbours stood open: from the house of Hubert St George there came an intense perfumed smell, almost delicious, almost a baker’s advertising smell. It was only mid-morning on a Sunday: Hubert St George and his friends and cronies must have been smoking quietly all night. One of these days Hubert St George’s landlord was going to notice what the houses round here were fetching and would evict Hubert, who would have to go and live in King’s Cross, Kentish Town or some still more alarming place. When Duncan had looked round the house and up and down the street, Hubert St George had seemed like an appealing guarantee of life, not like a lot of people doing up their houses. Now, Duncan rather longed for Hubert to notice, in his drug-stewed way, t
hat the street wasn’t there for him any more, and for him to move out. This was particularly the case since one of Hubert St George’s friends had called him something amusingly insulting when he was just talking to the builders on the pavement outside. Duncan hadn’t understood the word, but its specificity about Duncan’s favourite sexual act was unmistakable, and disconcerting in its accuracy. ‘That’s a quaint old-fashioned remark I haven’t heard for a long time,’ he had said at the time, however. There was something to be said for knocking through and doing up, of tarting up and making over, for the reformation that people like Duncan were shaping across London.

  The tube was quiet: on a Sunday morning only three or four people stood on Notting Hill platform. One was a young dad with a pushchair, a small child with an Afro and a striped burglar’s sweater asleep in it, a bunch of flowers tucked into the handle. Was the father on his way to see his wife? Duncan liked to think she might have just given birth, and they were going to see the child’s little brother or sister. And a heavy, drooping, depressed woman in a weighty old coat, on her way to her job, and a young couple, laughing, on their way to an early day out. Duncan took out his book and for a couple of minutes was lost in Dawn Powell.

  He was getting used to this trip; the Circle Line down to Embankment, the change to the Northern Line, the six stops southwards, and Dommie at the end of it. She had moved to Clapham years ago. It was as far from her father in Harrow as she could manage, and she felt safe with the weight of the river and the whole expanse of the city between her and him. But he was dead now, and his money had gone to Dommie as well. One of these days, she was fond of saying, I’m going to do what you’ve done, Duncan; I’m going to buy a bigger place, and I’m going to use the money to set up a business, leave Carter, Gershon and Carter, they can find a new contracts person and good luck to them, and I’ll have my life sorted out. She had said that a number of times now.