The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘You liked him best when he was walking away,’ Duncan said.

  ‘Well, yes, I did,’ Ronnie had said. ‘Anyone would. Anyway, he never knew – I don’t think he ever came up here after that first time. Shall we go down again?’

  The curtains were so thick in Ronnie’s house that it seemed dense night until you woke, and rose, and drew them. That had been the case even in the summer, when Duncan and Ronnie had met. Now, the day before Christmas, Ronnie was almost horrified to see how late it was. They had slept, and woken, and moved into each other’s shapes and slept again, Duncan’s chin against the back of Ronnie’s neck with its nice warm morning smell. Sleep and sex alternated; coming out of the bathroom, naked, having thought it might be polite to brush his teeth before they started up again, Duncan picked up his watch and saw from the luminous dial that it was half past twelve. He had thought it might be after nine. They had slept for eleven hours, on and off. But it was nearly Christmas.

  He gave Ronnie a kiss on his shoulder, and went next door into the absurdly over-glamorous bathroom – ‘That’ll be the first to go,’ Ronnie had said, about its black tiles and eye-aching star’s dressing-room lighting, the relic of the previous owners. But almost everything had been done, and the bathrooms on this floor had not been touched. He started to run the bath.

  In a few moments, he felt Ronnie’s arms around him from behind. It was nice to feel Ronnie’s warm bare flesh and him being in Ronnie’s nice-smelling white dressing-gown.

  ‘I don’t want to get up yet,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘Ah, you,’ Duncan said. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘No idea,’ Ronnie said, nibbling at Duncan’s ear. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Late enough,’ Duncan said. ‘Do you want to sleep some more?’

  Ronnie made a humming, thoughtful noise, shaking his head in mild denial; a difficult gesture for him to make with Duncan’s earlobe in his mouth.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Ronnie said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You look all thoughtful,’ Ronnie said, dropping into stage Cockney. ‘All thoughtful, you do.’

  ‘I was just thinking if you don’t do something about this bathroom soon,’ Duncan said, ‘you’ll probably never do anything about it.’

  ‘I’ll get used to it,’ Ronnie said, mumbling a little, ‘and it’ll just be what the bathroom looks like, and then I’ll sort of forget what I wanted to do with it. I know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Duncan said. ‘But what do you want to do with it?’

  ‘What do you want to do with it?’ Ronnie said, putting his hand up Duncan’s dressing-gown.

  ‘I’m going so grey,’ Duncan said. ‘Something avocado, perhaps.’

  ‘With your hair?’

  Duncan said, ‘Or an aubergine suite with gold dolphin taps. That would be ever so nice.’

  ‘With a peppermint bidet,’ Ronnie said. ‘For contrast. And your hair?’

  ‘Avocado and peppermint, and those brown smoked mirrors all around,’ Duncan said.

  ‘I like your hair, really,’ Ronnie said. ‘I like your nice granny’s hair, all grey and distinguished. You should go to a better place to get it cut, though.’

  ‘The cheek of it,’ Duncan said. ‘But definitely gold dolphin taps, definitely.’

  They liked being mildly snobbish to each other about the bathroom fittings that they hadn’t got round to. Once Ronnie’s terrifying mother had said to Duncan in quite a remote, neutral way, ‘Yes, when I bought the house in Gloucestershire in 1974, the owners were awfully proud of having just installed a bathroom suite, as they called it, in nigger brown.’ Duncan had wanted to run downstairs and tell Ronnie in the kitchen immediately. One of these days Duncan was going to catch Ronnie out and have a bathroom installed in aubergine, saying he’d thought Ronnie had meant it. One of these days: Duncan found himself thinking that. He hoped Ronnie thought the same thing from time to time.

  Later, they were in the kitchen.

  ‘Do you know,’ Duncan said, ‘I do believe that Dommie and Celia have been round. Those presents weren’t there last night.’

  ‘We must have been in bed still,’ Ronnie said. ‘How awful. But they’re coming round on Boxing Day, aren’t they?’

  The ancient coffee percolator was popping and belching; they were on to their third slice of toast each. Duncan liked lime marmalade on his, and Ronnie liked Marmite. Sometimes, strangely, they both liked cottage cheese in the morning.

  ‘I once had a boyfriend who was French,’ Ronnie said, watching Duncan ladle cottage cheese onto his brown toast. ‘He discovered crumpets for himself. But he thought they were a breakfast thing. He had them with apricot jam, first thing in the morning.’

  ‘What did awful Franklin have first thing in the morning?’

  ‘Cock,’ Ronnie said. ‘Only not mine, usually. Usually some stranger’s in the public lavatory.’

  ‘Not before breakfast, surely.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘The strangest thing I ever had for breakfast,’ Duncan said, ‘was in Sicily. That time I was there. In ’seventy-eight or ’seventy-nine. Good Lord, it’s ten years since I was in Sicily.’

  ‘That’s very accurate of you,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘Well, I remember because it was immediately after that that my father died. I got called back because of it. And also because it was then – I was in Sicily – Mrs Thatcher got elected. I always remember because everyone used to ask me about it, and I used to say e possibile, seconda lei, che l’Italia avrebbera … avrebberai … Do you know, I’ve forgotten all the Italian I ever knew. I used to say to them, is it possible according to you that Italy will ever have a woman prime minister, and they would say mai, never, in horror.’

  ‘They’ve got used to her by now,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Duncan said. ‘But the strangest breakfast I ever had, it was there in the summer. A nice boy I picked up, he took me home and the next morning he went downstairs to the gelateria and got me a hot brioche with ice-cream in it, chocolate ice-cream. And the next time I picked up a boy, he asked me if I wanted breakfast, and I said brioche with watermelon granita, because I’d had that at a posh gelateria a couple of nights before. But that one stared because he’d only meant did I want a dry biscuit with my coffee.’

  ‘The heart sinks,’ Ronnie said. ‘Ice-cream for breakfast.’

  ‘Ah, you,’ Duncan said. ‘Only because it’s so cold and it’s so nice in here eating toast.’

  ‘Did you ever talk to Annunziata about Sicily?’ Ronnie said. ‘I can’t remember where she comes from.’

  ‘Has she done all of this?’ Duncan said.

  ‘All what?’ Ronnie said. Then he laughed, because all about them were dishes, jars, filled plates, and on the table between them was a special blue notebook with the words ‘Christmas Instructions’ written neatly in Annunziata’s beautiful schoolroom hand. ‘She’s done everything. In there, I bet she’s put a timetable down for what goes in where and when. There’s no minute of the day between now and the twenty-eighth when there is the slightest risk of anything failing, or going wrong. We just have to follow every single instruction and she’ll be back on the twenty-eighth and everything will be perfectly all right again.’

  ‘We could have our Christmas dinner tonight,’ Duncan said. ‘We could just put the duck in the oven, and do all of that, and just get on with it, and Christmas itself would be nice and over with.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ronnie said.

  A thought came to Duncan. ‘Did you actually like Christmas?’

  Ronnie folded the last half of a slice of toast, and stuffed it whole into his mouth. ‘When I was a kid?’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, of course I did. Everyone does. It’s when you’ve got to do any of it for anyone else that you stop liking it.’

  ‘I’m just glad that it’s a week, almost, away from the shop and I don’t need to think about it, unless someone smashes the window again.’

  ‘As bad as
that?’

  ‘The smashing of windows I’m used to, frankly,’ Duncan said. ‘No one’s done it since August. The worst year was 1982 – I think it was seven times we had the glaziers out. I’d rather not have to deal with it on Christmas Day, but apart from that, it’s not the windows.’

  ‘But a week off.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s just all so hopeless. I thought it would be OK after we saw off the court case. It was such a waste of everyone’s time, that, but at the end of it – I don’t know, looking at the books, we just lost so much income because of it, all the stock being confiscated. Some of it’s coming back from the filth in dribs and drabs, but you couldn’t sell it – it’s all straight into the remainders pile.’

  ‘The party, though, and the auction.’

  ‘It seemed fantastic at the time. Seven thousand, nearly. It doesn’t go far. Eleven hundred for that Hockney print, amazing. Nothing else came near it. It was really a bit embarrassing that no one wanted to pay more than ten pounds for some of those donations. Olivia Tempest, awful moment. I was going to pass Arthur a note to get him to bid, but that sort of destroyed the whole point of the evening, if we were going to have to bid for the lots ourselves. Did I tell you about the donation, just before Christmas? I got to the shop, and there was a brown envelope, no address on it, with a ten-pound note inside, and “With Best Wishes and Good Luck for the Future from One of Your Neighbours”. I thought they all hated us. Well, they do, apart from maybe one closet case we didn’t know about. Oh, God.’

  ‘Seriously, as bad as that?’

  ‘Terrible,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m going to have to ask Arthur if he’ll mind going part-time – I can’t afford to keep him on.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Ronnie said. But his manner was mild and distracted; he gave a great yawn and a tousled grin.

  Duncan stared. ‘Well, I might really have to,’ he said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Ronnie said. Duncan looked at him in a quizzical way. ‘Well,’ Ronnie went on. ‘It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? There’s absolutely no future for him in the bookshop – I mean, you’re not going to have a chain of Big Gay Bookshops, are you? It’s perfectly all right for you, but for him? He ought to start thinking about what he wants to do with his life.’

  ‘Sometimes, Ronnie, I don’t believe you think my bookshop is much of a success.’

  ‘Well, I love your bookshop,’ Ronnie said. ‘But you just said yourself it’s not making any money. Look. If you’re really in need, if it’s the difference between keeping going or not, I can put off doing the bathroom and get ten thousand pounds together.’

  ‘As a loan.’

  ‘Well, a loan of rather an unexiguous variety, let’s say. I wouldn’t expect to see it again until you felt that things were back to normal. Just think of it as me giving you backing.’

  ‘Oh, God, Ronnie,’ Duncan said. ‘Spare me the innuendo.’ He was not quite sure how he felt about becoming a rich man’s plaything – that was how he put it to himself, pronouncing it in rather a Cockney way in his mind, rich man’s plaything. He had never thought of himself as being poor until he’d met Ronnie, who knew people who were richer than Duncan had ever seriously envisaged. ‘If it were just me I’d say no. But if it really comes to having to ask Arthur to work for less – I mean, that shithole he lives in already – I don’t know that I could do it. Let me think about it. It really is very sweet of you. If you did—’

  ‘Would I expect a say in things?’ Ronnie said. ‘Not much more than I do now. What do you suppose that brown liquid in the Evian bottle is? It looks truly sinister.’

  ‘It’s the orange sauce,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s for the duck, which I suppose is in the fridge. What’s she left us for our lunch? Or shall we go out for lunch?’

  17.

  It was nice, Christmas at Kevin’s, once you didn’t expect very much of it. This would be Arthur’s sixth there. They followed the same path. You went down dutifully to Kevin’s flat on the ground floor around twelve and had a glass of sparkling wine with anyone else who was around. There was a dubious smell of turkey in the air – Kevin said anyone was welcome to join his friend Adam and him for Christmas dinner, there would be plenty. But nobody ever did. Arthur had always been there, but the others varied – an Australian or a French lodger would go home; sometimes somebody who had been there the year before would have moved out or died. Tony sometimes stayed in London and Tim sometimes did. Otherwise they went off to their respective parents in Bradford and Guildford.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you again,’ Kevin said, with a ghastly smile on his face and a Christmassy waistcoat on his body, ornamented with sequined swirls and splashes. His friend Adam was doing something in the kitchen. ‘Another Christmas rolls round, regular as sin. Another year, another happy year, and Arthur’s still with us and so are Tim and Tony. You’re not eating Christmas dinner up there on your own, I hope? You must come down and join Adam and I, there’s plenty of turkey – we’ll be eating it until Tuesday week.’

  ‘That’s OK, Kevin,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ll just have a drink and pop off if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Tim and I, we’ve booked at the Mumtaz in Upper Street,’ Tony said. ‘We thought we’d get away from it altogether.’

  ‘Very unusual,’ Kevin said. ‘I know where you mean. That’s an Indian restaurant, isn’t it? I don’t know that they’ll have turkey. It’ll be more like curry they’ll be making, even today of all days, surely.’

  ‘Tony and I,’ Tim said, ‘we thought about what we really like and what we’d like for ourselves – and the answer was chicken korma for him and meat dopiaza for me with extra poppadums. We’re of an age to please ourselves.’

  ‘Oh, we’re all that age,’ Kevin said. ‘Just seems a bit funny, somehow, having curry on Christmas Day for Christmas dinner. And you, Arthur? Are you not tempted for once to go and see your family? Christmas, it’s a time for family.’

  ‘Never,’ Arthur said firmly. ‘The truth of matter is, you’re my family.’

  Kevin and Tony and Tim looked at each other; Adam was brought out of the kitchen, a laminated apron with a hairy hunk’s body printed on it; he stared, a pair of mid-basting oven gloves on his hands.

  ‘I’m not your fucking family, darling,’ Adam said. ‘What, I’m supposed to be your aunty Adam? What’s Kevin – Grandma fucking Moses?’

  ‘Cheeky cow,’ Kevin said. ‘I’m not your flaming family, Arthur love, either. I’m your landlord, remember, that you pay the rent to every month? There’s a difference.’

  ‘I only meant because I see Adam just once a year, on Christmas Day, and then within ten minutes I always remember I hate him,’ Arthur said lightly.

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ Adam said, going back into the kitchen.

  ‘Poor old Arthur,’ Tony said. ‘You don’t have any family at all, then. Just a lot of, I don’t know, customers. Do they send you Christmas cards?’

  ‘Some of them, wi’ big kisses on the bottom and all,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s my job to send the cards out in return. We cut right down this year, thank the Lord, one of Duncan’s little economies.’

  ‘And very sensible too,’ Kevin said. ‘I always tell everyone I don’t want Christmas cards, and if I get one, don’t you go thinking I’ll be sending one in return, either. Now, a little top-up?’

  Afterwards, Tony and Tim sat in the Mumtaz in Upper Street, and ordered everything they felt like, just because it was Christmas. It didn’t quite work: Ali the owner had said he didn’t celebrate Christmas himself and would be opening just the same, but when they got there, the place had been Christmassified, with tinsel hung over the hand-made paintings of the Taj Mahal, a tiger, a dancing girl, and a river with a tiger, a dancing girl and another view of the Taj Mahal, done on black velvet. Tony supposed that they served up Christmas like they served up beer and alcohol in general: not believing in it for themselves, but giving it to the customers. It was surprisingly full of older couples and two or t
hree sad, solitary men. There were Christmas crackers on the table, which Tony and Tim left untouched until Ali came round and talked them into it. (He left the solitary diners alone, they noticed.) They sat with paper crowns on, a tin whistle and a tin powder compact on the table between them, and they read the jokes to each other.

  ‘What do you call a man with a spade in his head,’ Tony said.

  ‘A corpse, or a seriously mutilated person who ought to be taken to hospital immediately,’ Tim said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Tony said.

  ‘Why would you invite a mushroom to a Christmas party,’ said Tim, looking over the top of his glasses at the slip of paper.

  ‘Because you felt you had provided inadequate food and you wanted to give your guests something to eat, other than one measly bag of crisps, which considering that all your guests pay you rent for the rest of the year is really a bit of a cheek,’ Tony said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Tim said. ‘I don’t know why we’re still living in that dump.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Tony said. ‘It’s cheap. That’s the only thing. Where could we afford somewhere?’

  ‘If we live together, we can afford Balham, I reckon,’ Tim said. ‘But no one’s going to give us a mortgage. You have to fill in a form, you know, saying that you’ve never had sex with a man and you never would.’

  ‘We could rent somewhere,’ Tony said.

  ‘We’re renting now,’ Tim said.

  ‘Somewhere nicer,’ Tony said. ‘Where it’s actually a flat, not my bedroom and your bedroom that we’ve turned into a sitting room but you’ve got to walk across the hall and the sofa’s actually just your bed with a cover on it.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Tim said. They had had this conversation before. ‘Let’s make 1988 the year when we actually move out of bloody Kevin’s bloody house. I hate it there.’

  ‘And here are your poppadums, sir,’ Ali said, putting them down. ‘And a very merry Christmas to you, sir.’