The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  At Clapham Common, after the half-hour journey and the change of lines, a completely different young father and child got off; this time Indian, not black, this time holding his daughter’s hand in her pink party dress. He left the station. The homeless congregated here, in a small fenced-off square of land, already drinking, and the handsome eighteenth-century church with a steely, frowning gable could have done with a reroofing and a repainting. Wesley must have preached there once. He followed the road round, past the bad butcher and the good butcher, the newsagent and the hairdresser. There was an Asian grocer with displays of old-looking fruit, and just there, by the display, Duncan noticed something lying on the floor. It was a lady’s fat purse, green and crocodile-skin in effect. He hesitated and looked around, but there was nobody in sight. He put it into his pocket to investigate later, and in a moment got to the turn-off for Dommie’s square.

  All the way, almost since waking up that morning, he had felt quite clearly that a particular gaze was fixed on him, approaching from Notting Hill. He had always known this, that Dommie’s life was addressed towards her brother in adoration and responsibility. And as if to confirm this, when he rang the doorbell – one of six in the tall stucco house in Granby Square – which had Dommie’s name by it, reading ‘Dommie’ in her fat, feminine, poignant writing, with a circle over the i, the buzzer to let him in rang immediately. Dommie’s flat was not large: it had been what she could afford; but it was Dommie’s way to place her armchair flat by the entry buzzer, perhaps from the moment she dressed, waiting to hurl herself at the button.

  Duncan walked up the communal stairs, a mad steel spiral arrangement that defeated the deliverers of furniture. In his bag there was the copy of Dawn Powell’s book, some papers he wanted to show Dommie, a bottle of Vacqueyras, which someone else had brought to a dinner, or to a party, or just to say thank you for something years before – Duncan had no idea how good it was, but he hadn’t paid for it and was going to drink half of it, so it didn’t matter. Above, on the third floor, as high as it got, there was the noise of the door to the flat opening. Plump, in a black dress with a nameless stain on her breast, a turquoise and purple silk scarf tied around her neck and a bracelet of pearls on her wrist, Dommie held the door open with her foot. He was glad to see the bracelet of pearls: it was new, he thought. She was spending some of the money.

  ‘I didn’t know whether I should come to you,’ Dommie said. ‘I can’t wait to see what’s happened in the flat this week.’

  ‘Oh, more disasters,’ Duncan said. He handed over the bottle, which Dommie took and they went together into the kitchen, an untouched desecration of today’s cooking and yesterday’s eating. ‘You don’t want to hear about the stuff that’s happening with builders, though, surely.’

  ‘Like hearing about other people’s children,’ Dommie said. ‘Probably lovely if you have some of your own.’

  ‘No children, no builders …’

  ‘What were we thinking of?’ Dommie said.

  ‘I had such a lovely letter from Aunt Rebecca,’ Duncan said, as Dommie poked hopefully in a pan – it might be a stew, or it might be some sort of meat sauce she was planning to turn into some kind of made dish, it was impossible to guess. ‘I almost wrote back.’

  Dommie shuddered, closing her eyes and putting her hands up as if to ward off a leaping hound. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t. It’s too early to hear about anything like that. Horrible Rebecca. I thought we never needed to hear from her ever again.’

  ‘It’s about once a month she writes,’ Duncan said. ‘I used to put them on one side and not open them for a day or two. But now I open them quite calmly and I read them straight away. I thought I might have got to the point where I could throw them away without reading them.’

  ‘I would do that, I must say,’ Dommie said.

  ‘Well, you might do it once – I did do it once,’ Duncan said. ‘But it tormented me for days, weeks afterwards. I found I wanted to see what she said. It was only the same as every other letter, I expect. How could I do this. Don’t think that she didn’t know what I’d got up to. Don’t think that my father’s wishes could be flouted on his deathbed with impunity. Look forward to hearing from her solicitors very shortly with an arraignment. Does she mean arraignment?’

  ‘I couldn’t really guess at the meaning of Rebecca’s letters. I tell you what, though,’ Dommie said, wiping her hands on a tea towel. ‘I don’t know why she isn’t writing to me. I almost regret it. I almost take it personally.’

  ‘She thinks I’m flaunting the money,’ Duncan said. ‘What with leaving my job and opening a shop and buying an expensive flat where my father would have been shocked to find any of his family living. You haven’t done anything with yours, you’re just where you’ve always been.’

  ‘Tell her I’ve given it to charity, the fat beast,’ Dommie said. ‘Do you have it? Let’s see it. Just one moment, though – we need a stiff drink before we face Rebecca’s worst.’

  It was only twenty to twelve, but Duncan felt that Dommie had a point. He accepted a vodka and tonic from her, and together they went through to the sitting room where, side by side on the sofa, they went over Rebecca’s letter, phrase by phrase, setting it down and huffing, shaking their heads, commenting, dismissing, and once laughing. ‘I wish I knew where she got it from,’ Dommie said. ‘She seems so pleased to be writing like this. You should save them up and publish them. And the shop? How’s that going?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Duncan said.

  Towards the end of their time together, the terrible lunch finished and laughed over, they went out for a walk in the sunshine. They were halfway down the stairs when a wail was heard from the flat on the ground floor, and a bedraggled, long-haired woman’s face peered through the gap.

  ‘Oh, Domenica, thank heavens,’ she said.

  ‘Not now, Margery, I’m just going out,’ Dommie said decisively. Margery’s doings and her habit of imposing obligations with tragic little gifts irritated Dommie more than anything, she often said.

  ‘Oh, but everyone’s gone out. I just don’t know what to do,’ Margery said. Her hands opened and closed somewhere around her face. ‘I went to the newsagent’s for my paper, as usual, and I don’t know why, but there was something on the front cover of the Sunday Telegraph, which is not my usual paper …’

  ‘Margery, we’re in a very great hurry here – you remember my brother?’

  ‘Yes, I do! And this awful thing – somehow and somewhere I lost my purse, and it has so many important little things in it. I don’t know what I can do, and on the back of my bank card I wrote down my machine number, you know, the number you punch in to get out money, which of course I never use, but now anyone can take money from my account and the bank’s not open until tomorrow, it’s too awful.’

  Duncan remembered. He reached into his bag, and the woman’s purse was still there. He brought it out. ‘Is this it? I didn’t have a chance to take it to the police.’

  ‘Well, yes, it is,’ Margery said. Her panic seemed to dissolve; her hands calmed and took the purse from Duncan.

  ‘There you are,’ Dommie said. ‘All’s well that ends well. Now, we really must be going.’

  Neither Dommie nor the neighbour seemed the slightest bit surprised that Duncan had in his possession the exact thing that the neighbour had lost. On the other hand, Duncan thought that in ten minutes she was going to start suspecting him of trying to thieve her purse. The neighbour was probably one of those egotists who thought that the world ought to labour on her behalf, and was not surprised when things worked out, elaborately, in her favour. But Dommie, Duncan knew, was not surprised because her brother had always been going to set the world right. No wonder she believed in the bookshop so.

  8.

  The previous time Duncan had seen Dommie had been two weeks before. She had cooked for him – a roast chicken – and they had talked about the shop, and about Dommie’s job, and about the flat, and about what Dommie might do with
her two weeks’ holiday. And afterwards, as it had been nice, they had gone for a walk on the common and had an ice-cream each from a van.

  That sort of thing. They had had a nice time. And the time before that, it had been two weeks before, and much the same sort of thing had happened then. The time before that, and that, and that, and that, and that, perhaps ten or fifteen times – a terrible lunch with which something had gone wrong, and catching up with the fortnight, and a walk on the common if it was nice and not if it was not.

  But the time before that …

  (This is going back a good couple of years now, going backwards into Dommie and Duncan.)

  Duncan had arrived without warning at Dommie’s office in the City, a grey marble lobby with a man behind a desk who didn’t think much of Duncan in his scrap of a red tie and a scruffy tweed jacket, and the remains of a big night out on his face. Dommie had come down straight away, and they had flung themselves into each other’s arms. ‘You should have told me you were coming,’ Dommie had said. ‘I knew you were on your way. I didn’t know when you were arriving.’ Then he had led her out of the building and to a coffee shop in a side street, still quiet at eleven forty, and had told her that he had seen their father last night when he had arrived back from Sicily, and this morning had telephoned the house to be told by Aunt Rachel that he had died quietly in the night. Dommie had cried; he had held her hand. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ she said after a while. ‘I wouldn’t go to see him, I wouldn’t be made to care.’

  ‘It’s over now,’ Duncan said.

  They agreed that Duncan, who was staying with a friend, would come over for Sunday lunch at Dommie’s place in Clapham. ‘We could make a thing of it,’ Dommie said.

  And the time before that, it had been a year before, they had seen a film, Dommie not wanting to make a big thing of saying goodbye when Duncan went to Sicily – Dommie had suggested Heaven Can Wait but it was full, surprisingly, and they had settled for California Suite. She hadn’t cried then, but they’d deliberately just said goodbye casually. It would be hard for Dommie. He wondered who her friends were, apart from the loyal pair of Katy and Bella, girls whom Dommie had known in her first job in the City.

  The time before that, they had had the sense of getting back to normal after a long period of remoteness.

  Because the time before that they had met by arrangement, a bit stiffly, and had dinner in much too formal a restaurant. It wasn’t their place: the waiters, on the plush ground floor of a block of mansion flats in Swiss Cottage, had murmured the specials of the day and hovered with vast leather-clad menus and wine lists. Duncan had chosen it as a place to make things up, to force her to see what an effort he was making, and in the end, though it had cost him an arm and a leg, it had been worthwhile. ‘I’m sorry I said those things,’ Duncan said. ‘Lucien was really quite a nice man. I shouldn’t have said those things. I can see what you saw in him.’

  ‘No, he was dreadful,’ Dommie had said. ‘He was really awful. You were quite right. I lent him money, five hundred pounds, and he’s gone and I’m not going to see any of that again, I know.’ And then it was all right, over the strudel and the schnitzel and a strange sort of fish cocktail to start with, smoked oysters in mayonnaise, and a bottle of German wine in a blue bottle.

  Because the time before that had been terrible, simply terrible, a year and a half before. It had just been by chance in the street, and Duncan had said that he knew she hadn’t been to see their father in an age, and she had said she wasn’t going to see him any more, not ever again. ‘So it’s all down to me, I suppose,’ Duncan said, and Dommie had looked scared but determined, and had said, yes, she supposed that it was. And then before they knew it they were onto Dommie’s French boyfriend Lucien, and was she going to support him for ever and, oh, there on the pavement in Regent Street, they had had such a blazing row, and in five minutes she had told him that she didn’t want to see him any more, either, that from that moment onwards she had no family but Lucien. She had walked away with her neck stiff and her face upwards, away into the September crowds. Duncan had turned and walked in the direction of Piccadilly Circus. His face was burning. He had said what Dommie needed to be told.

  The time before that had been six months; it must have been her birthday. There was Lucien, grumpy and refusing all the food in the restaurant Dommie had suggested, and there was Bella and the other one, Katy, Dommie’s friends. He had left early.

  And then the time before that had been at their mother’s funeral. For some reason Dommie had got dressed up to an appalling degree, and was wearing Bianca Jagger sunglasses with an old-fashioned black dress and a black shawl of some kind. She had turned up at the crematorium, and had refused to come back to the house. Lucien was wearing sunglasses too, and what was evidently a new suit, bought for the occasion. She seemed harder, less open, guarded like a film star, smiling faintly when Duncan came over to say something to her. He had looked pointedly at Lucien, but Lucien had stayed by her side, looking out – it was hard to see, but he appeared to be gazing into the remote distance. ‘And you, Duncan,’ Lucien said eventually. ‘You don’t have a kind friend, a boyfriend, who comes with you to your mother’s funeral? You don’t go home on your own, I hope.’

  ‘No,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s quite all right.’

  The time before that had been in Harrow, where their mother was dying. It must have been the last time Dommie had ever gone to the house in Harrow. She didn’t stay; she said goodbye; she hardly exchanged a word with her father.

  And the times before that were in Dommie’s new flat in Clapham. She had loved it then; she had told Duncan that he really needed to buy something, not go on sharing a flat with those boys. Duncan had agreed for a peaceful life; then, at the end of one evening, he had told her that he was going to give up his job and go and work in Sicily. ‘I don’t see the point of a career that makes you so unhappy,’ he said. ‘And this country is finished. You might as well go to work somewhere where the sun shines.’ That had been four years before he left, and every time they saw each other, he had told her that his mind was made up. It took so long to organize.

  And the time before that, and the time before that … There had never been a moment when he had sat her down and told her that he was gay, that he liked men rather than women. She knew and the whole thing was all right. And then there had been the pair of them, living in the monstrous house in Harrow, her father dismissive and hurtful and contemptuous at mealtimes. She would leave home, she said, as they sat upstairs in her bedroom, and she would come back for exactly one Christmas, for her mother’s sake.

  She said these things when he was there but not for his benefit. When a friend came round – was her name Tricia, the main one? – they had sat in her bedroom and talked incessantly. Duncan liked to sidle in and listen. He so admired this line of talk Dommie had. She was going to triumph in the world, and their father was going to regret it, would observe it from far off. She and Tricia, putting their faces up against the mirror, the pink-framed one in the blue bedroom, trying on eyeshadow and then lipstick, making efforts with the blusher, first placing it in a round spot on the cheeks, then learning to brush it lightly over the cheekbones to enhance the bone structure, Tricia with her ripple of spots underneath the foundation and Dommie with her lovely skin being covered up. They would bare their teeth to make sure there was no lipstick on them, not in a smile. That was a long time ago. Dommie could make herself into anything, once she got out of Harrow.

  But it was not as long ago as those times before, when Dommie was his big sister, and in charge of him; ignoring him after school yet keeping an eye on him in a way he couldn’t define. In the playground on the first day, standing with the cardboard-stiff new blazer cutting into his neck, clutching the regulation brown leather satchel with nothing as yet in it, he was in two worlds; in one, he was talking to, then running around with, the other boys; in the second world, invisible and unfelt by all the others, he was subjected to the gaze
and concerned, intense speculation of his sister Dommie. She was in the girls’ school next door to his. In the junior school, before, they had been in the same school and she had ignored him in just the same way. But he knew it didn’t mean anything. He could feel her gaze on him.

  And then at the same time, there was that time when their father had said to Dommie …

  And then before that, there was that time when Dommie was just walking along and Father came up to her and …

  And then there was that time when Dommie had come in and gone straight to her room and after a whole evening without Dommie his father had grown crosser and crosser and finally he had said to his mother and to him that she could …

  And then there were all those other times around that time a long time ago when Father …

  No. He would not think of that. That was not what had forged their relationship.

  But how could he feel that gaze on him? How could he be so sure of the safety his sister offered, her sense that he was in every way going to do well because she was looking out for him and believed in him? There was no safe and tucked-in feeling from Daddy, and there was only a dutiful attendance from Mummy at bedtime and mealtimes. You felt with them that they were not quite sure whether they had done the right thing, and were busy. Mummy smiled with her mouth when she saw you do something for her benefit, but she did not smile with her eyes, and soon the mouth-smile went. There was that feeling of safety with Dommie, though she said, ‘Go away, horrid boy,’ and ignored him altogether when she was with her friends. You knew she would stand up for you. It went back to a time when she went out to school and he did not, he was so tiny. Watching Mummy make pastry with the radio on, playing with his toy cars on the kitchen floor. And then Dommie coming home and playing too. The feeling went back all the way to the moment when he had just had Mummy and Daddy and Dommie and they had always been there and he lived in the room where he lived and that was the way things were. Dommie said she could remember him being born. He was born at home, in Mummy’s bed – second children often were, back in the late 1940s, to save on hospitals. And he was born when there was snow outside the little house in Harrow, the semi-detached, frowning, 1930s house with lead in the windows and Tudor gabling in the roof. His father had had to walk out to the telephone box at the corner of the road. The midwife set off at once, but still had only just arrived in time, having to walk up Harrow Hill without her bicycle. It was so easy that he just arrived, and there was a sound of a baby crying, and the midwife cleaned him off and put Mummy in a new nightie and dressing gown, and then Daddy and Dommie were allowed to come in, with Duncan only just born in Mummy’s arms, in swaddling and a soft white blanket, light and open and crocheted. It was the nicest moment Dommie could ever remember, she always said afterwards, him with his squashed little face and any amount of black hair. Knowing that he was always going to be her little brother and she would always look out for him.