The Emperor Waltz (12 page)

‘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.

‘Nurse,’ he tried to say, and then again, ‘Nurse.’ The nurse looked up from her book. ‘The sheets need changing,’ he said.

‘What’s that, Mr Flannery?’ she said, rising and placing her hand, unsmilingly, on his forehead. He tried again.

The nurse smoothed them out underneath him, and promised to change them when her other colleague arrived for the evening. ‘I’m not sure who that’s going to be, to tell you the truth, Mr Flannery, but I know it’s going to be just an hour or two, if you can put up with it a little longer.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Samuel said meekly. ‘They’re really twisted and damp and I feel hot. Can I change my pyjamas?’

‘That I can do,’ the nurse said. ‘I’ll just clean you up and pop you in the chair, Mr Flannery, and then I’ll change your sheets as well, straight away. How do you feel in general?’

‘What was that shriek, that scream? I heard a woman screaming.’

‘It was your sister’s parrot,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s downstairs. He shouldn’t be here at all, in point of fact. It has a strange name, that bird.’

‘I remember,’ Samuel said, and was about to say the bird’s name, but it had gone, and there had been a woman shrieking about it, screaming, really, not ten feet from his ear. He hope that terrible screaming would stop soon. ‘I feel terrible. Terrible,’ Samuel said. ‘I don’t think I can sit in a chair. It all hurts so much and I don’t know where I am sometimes.’ Then a thought came to him. He remembered very well where he was and what was happening. ‘You could ask one of my sisters to help to change. They’re here. They’re the three women sitting in the kitchen. They used to be girls but they’re old women now. You know the ones I mean.’

‘Oh, Samuel,’ the nurse said. ‘Mr Flannery, I mean. You are a card.’

He was puzzling over what she meant, but then he felt quite suddenly very sleepy and he closed his eyes and when he opened them again it was night-time and there was a different nurse.

‘Would you,’ he said, ‘would you …’ but he couldn’t get any further.

‘Hello, Mr Flannery,’ the other nurse said. She stood up in a quiet but decisive way. She was the one called Balls. Nurse Balls. He remembered that one. Not all of the nurses remembered they weren’t to call him Samuel, but she did. She didn’t have ginger hair. It was hard to say what colour her hair was.

‘Would you,’ he said, then stopped again, puzzled. He was not quite sure what he wanted to ask for.

‘Water?’ the nurse said. ‘Is it water that you’re saying, Mr Flannery?’

And then Samuel smiled – did he smile on his face or was he just smiling inside? He was probably smiling inside. His face hurt so much. But he smiled because he had said, ‘Would you,’ and she had thought he said, ‘Water’; perhaps there was something wrong with her ears or perhaps he had spoken indistinctly, having just woken up, and in fact he had forgotten what he was going to ask for but it was right: it had been water he had wanted. That was strange. He tried to say, ‘Would you bring me some water?’ but it grew complicated, his tongue in his mouth. It seemed to have grown and grown. He shut his eyes, and he found himself in the same dream of illness he had always had, since he was a small boy, whenever he had fever. He was floating in a colourless space with no features, just a grid of small dots, when the small dots began to swell and grow inside. One of them had got inside his mouth, and it grew and grew, swelling until it forced his mouth open, and inside his mouth there was nothing but a great hard stone. He opened his eyes. The taste of the stone was still there. He did not know whether he had slept or not. The woman who was standing there, he did not know her. She was wearing a coat, or a white dress, or a uniform of some sort; it rucked up tightly around her thighs and bottom. What was she doing there? It was his room and he was being ill in it. She was not his wife and she was not his sister, any of them. Then he remembered he had a daughter but she was not her either.

‘Would you like some water, Mr Flannery?’ the woman said, and then he remembered what she was. She was a nurse. He nodded and she went over to the dresser where a glass jug stood covered with a plate. She removed it and poured water into one of the large tumblers from downstairs. It was really a whisky tumbler, engraved, but he took it and drank from it. I’ll drink whisky again, he thought, but only when I feel a good deal better.

‘Where is Helen?’ he said, passing the glass back. ‘I want to see Helen.’

‘I think she’s downstairs,’ the nurse said. ‘That’s one of the ladies downstairs, is she not?’

Samuel nodded. ‘And I want to see Duncan,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where Duncan can be. I haven’t seen him since he was – oh, fifteen or sixteen. He ran away to sea, you know. He ended up in Italy. He’s there to this very day. I want to see him now, because I don’t want to die without seeing him. Am I dying? I know I am.’ And his eyes filled with tears. He pitied himself so much for what he was having to go through. Nobody else had ever gone through this. He had asked a question, but the nurse was moving around the room, settling things and returning the water jug to its place. She had not heard any of what he had said. It was typical. But then he thought that perhaps he had not said any of that out loud. ‘I don’t want to have to go to Sicily,’ he said.