The Emperor Waltz (11 page)

Going into his office he realized that there was no reason why he should not resign from his job and go to work in Sicily. Teaching English. It could hardly be any worse than here. And why Sicily? It was cheap, Duncan knew; it spoke Italian, which he had a smattering of. But mostly Duncan thought of Sicily because he had, the week before, picked up an off-duty Sicilian waiter in a gay pub on St Martin’s Lane, and the island, now, for him, was a land full of lemons, oranges and waiters called Salvatore. By half past ten he had told an overweight woman looking for employment in the legal field that she was wasting everyone’s time and should aim much, much lower. By eleven he had gone to see his supervisor, and had told him that he wanted to resign at the end of the month. By six thirty he was in the same gay pub on St Martin’s Lane – he had phoned up everyone he could think of on their office numbers – and he was telling a thrilled group of twenty men with moustaches, almost all with checked shirts on, just what he had done and where he was going to go.

‘You’ve got some nerve,’ Paul said, coming back from the bar with a half of lager and lime and a pint of bitter for Duncan. ‘I wish I had your nerve, even a bit of your nerve.’

‘If you only had a
bit
of his nerve,’ Simon said, ‘that’d only get you to the Isle of Wight, not much of a life-change, that, I don’t think.’

‘Cheek!’ Paul said.

Even Andrew had come, though it was his night for his men’s group, and he never liked to miss that. Or was it revolutionary politics? ‘I’ll come to that some time,’ Paul said. ‘Sounds like a right laugh.’ Anyway, it was a fantastic turn-out, and they were still there at closing time, most of them. Why Sicily? Why not.

3.

Sicily had spoken to him on the fourth day, exactly as he had known it would. He had gone to see his father in his falling-down old house in Harrow the day before he left, to tell him – after he had left the unemployment job – that he was going to the other side of Europe. He had dreaded it, but it wasn’t, in the end, so bad. His father was not what he had been. His shoulders had narrowed, and surely he had grown shorter. His hair fell in a solid lump away from his forehead, not washed for some days. As always, he had immediately started talking about himself. ‘When I started work in the insurance company,’ he said, ‘there was a man there who was a great friend of mine. He admired me immensely. “I just don’t know how you manage to get through all the work you do,” he used to say. When I managed to get out of going into the army, he was drafted in. And he –’ his father reached for a handkerchief, sitting in a damp crumple on the walnut card table by the side of his habitual mustardy winged armchair ‘– he went into Sicily. The first wave of the liberation. He never spoke about it to me when he came back. By then I had made myself useful in all sorts of ways, and I was his superior by a good distance when he returned to his post, but I always let him call me by my Christian name, if no one was around, and I think he appreciated that a great deal. My father always said to me – your grandfather – he said, “Treat your subordinates with courtesy, and they will treat you with respect.” And I believe I’ve always done precisely that.’

Duncan waited to hear something about Sicily. There in his father’s mind, there was an irritating fly, buzzing about, a tiny fly, not visible, but audible, and introduced into the normal furniture and spaces of the mind without warning. The name of the fly – what was it? It was Sicily. But in time it proved to go quite harmoniously with all the furniture that was already in the room, and could really safely be ignored.

‘Your mother always wanted to go to Italy,’ his father continued. He stroked the arm of the chair; it was bald from this repeated gesture, carried out all the time, all day long, while his father gave the impression of thought. ‘Not Sicily, I don’t think. She wanted to go to Rome, and Florence, and Venice, I believe. But I looked into it, and I found that Rome was a dangerous sort of place. It would not suit us. The food, too, would not suit. The best food in Europe is the food in southern Germany, where the salads are clean and the vegetables are well prepared. I explained all this to your mother. It was only a whim on her part. In the end I decided to surprise her, and we took a holiday on Lake Como, and she enjoyed it a lot. She said, “Samuel, I thought I wanted to go to Rome, but this was a lovely idea of yours, and I don’t think anything in Italy could improve on this.” All the Italians go for their holidays to Lake Como, you know. You don’t catch Italians going to Rome for their summer holidays. That was really a clever wheeze of mine, I always think.’

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.