The Emperor Waltz (13 page)

But this he had said out loud, because the nurse said, ‘If you don’t want to, you don’t have to, Mr Flannery,’ quite comfortably.

‘Is Duncan coming?’ Samuel tried to ask. His tongue fell back in his mouth. His head turned to one side. It seemed all so normal.

7.

There were pubs in Camden, which would never be touched, and streets, too. The Queen’s Arms in Goldborne Street sat at the corner of two converging Victorian terraces, its corner rounded and sailing out into the junction like an ocean liner. It had recently been painted in dark green and white. The landlord had decided to place only one hanging basket at the front, rather than the usual seven or eight of London landlords – Tarquin thought it was a waste and a demand on labour. He did not discover until too late that it is as much a waste and a demand on anyone’s time to have to water one hanging basket daily during the summer as it is to water a dozen. The Queen’s Arms was one of those pubs that must have been constructed in anticipation of a great crowd of drinkers. Its downstairs rooms, the saloon and the snug, were both gigantic under low ceilings of rosettes and plaster ornamentation. But the crowds that would have filled it never arrived. Perhaps it was in an awkward position, tucked away between residential streets. Perhaps the adventurous young middle-class people who were the only people who bought houses in these two or three streets were not great pub-goers, or not Tarquin’s sort of pub-goers. There were generally a few groups, perhaps only three or four, of slow old drinkers scattered around the place, not making much money for Tarquin. He had refused all the stratagems of other pubs in the neighbourhood; there were no cabaret nights with singers at microphones at the Queen’s Arms, and he would not stoop to strippers at lunchtime like the Dog and Crown – that would scare away his loyal old Regent’s Park ladies, who dropped in twice a week for their Dubonnets.

The pub, inside, had a curious smell, more like a laundry than a public house. No one who entered would be able to tell where it came from. Tarquin sometimes caught his own expression in the mirror, superior and unenthusiastic, when a customer came in, or observed Nora’s way, when a customer was trying to attract attention with a pound note, of lowering her eyes and sorting out the drying cloths rather than attend to him straight away. He tried to remember why it was that he and Nora had thought, ten years before, that running a pub was a good business proposition for them, or why the brewery had gone along with them, either.

The one thing about the pub that was a success and had some kind of use was the upper room. It must have been some kind of club room when the pub was built, and still had a giant dining table there and an assorted mismatch of chairs, dining chairs with yellow velvet seats as well as swivelling captain’s chairs, more recent in manufacture, and odd painted kitchen chairs. There were hunting scenes on the walls, and a tired, torn wallpaper with floral relief, which he must ask Tom to get round to replacing one of these days. (Tom was their son, recently left home; he had gone into the painting and decorating trade, which kept him busy.) Five years ago, a man, a student-type in a neckerchief, with long hair and purple bags, had come into the pub just before the afternoon closing and asked if they had rooms that they hired out for meetings. Tarquin had shown him the upper room, then piled high with lumber and old broken things, and had said it could be cleared out easily if this was going to be a regular thing. It was – Jones and his group of revolutionaries met every Wednesday night, paid five pounds for the privilege and managed to sink a few drinks downstairs once their meeting was over. The revolution didn’t come, during which Tarquin and Nora, Nora observed sardonically, would probably have been strung up as bloodsuckers by Jones’s group. Instead, Jones’s group kept coming, every Wednesday night, the same eight or nine of them, give or take a few.

The word spread. These days, there were four weekly groups and three that met once a fortnight or once a month, all shelling out eight pounds each, now that the costs had gone up so much, as regular and uncomplaining as clockwork. Nora thought they should raise the cost of hire again, but Tarquin thought they’d jib at ten pounds. ‘They’ll pay up,’ Nora said. ‘They always feel more passionately about revolution when there’s a Tory government. They don’t like
her
, you see. They talk about women’s rights, but they don’t like it when there’s a woman in charge.’

He didn’t really know what they were all up to. They were all lefties, he supposed, but you got that, living in Camden Town, these days. The biggest one was CND – he knew what they were, all right. It was so popular; the group that met here was only the West Camden division, and still forty people came every week. They brought their own film projector, quite often, and liked to sit in darkness, watching old films about nuclear war. It took all sorts to make a world. There was one that might be something to do with vivisection or vegetarians, judging by their strange shoes. But they paid their eight pounds like anyone else. ‘I draw the line only at nudists,’ Tarquin said sagely to his son, Tom, who shook his head. Tom had voted for Mrs Thatcher in May.

Tonight was one of the fortnightly ones. They were all men, coming in ones and the occasional pair, but not talking loudly or, most of them, even greeting Tarquin. They just ducked their heads and moved through the quiet pub as quickly as possible. They wore, most of them, checked lumberjack shirts and denim trousers or, until the weather really hotted up, leather trousers; one or two, now that it had hotted up, some bright-coloured shorts, like the ones the teenagers wore, though these daft Herberts were verging on middle age. ‘I know what they are,’ Nora had said tonight, but Tarquin didn’t respond. He didn’t care, so long as they were just talking upstairs. One of the first to arrive had asked if he could pin up a sign, on the brown-painted doorframe by the side of the bar, directing ‘anyone new,’ he said hopefully. On it, now, pinned neatly with two drawing pins was a piece of paper reading ‘CHE meeting – this way!’ There was another on the door of the pub outside – he hoped that wouldn’t lead to trouble, he said to the main one. But he didn’t think it would. For whatever reason, Tarquin thought that they weren’t a revolutionary group calling for executions in the streets. Whatever CHE meant. It was the exclamation mark, or perhaps the heart underneath, or perhaps just because the notice had been written by the daft Herberts in purple felt-tip pen.

8.

They had hardly started when the door to the upper room was opened abruptly. There was an unfamiliar face, a big bearded fellow and a slim girl with limp blonde hair behind him. ‘Is this the Central and South American group?’ he said. ‘I was told it met on Fridays.’

‘It might well do,’ Christopher said, turning round impatiently. ‘This isn’t it. We’re nothing to do with Central or South America.’

‘I saw your sign,’ the man said. ‘So they meet on Fridays still? We want to come to that.’

‘I’ve no idea when they meet,’ Christopher said. ‘It might well be Friday. But it’s not today. We’re here today and we’ve got nothing to do with Central or South America.’

The man and his girl withdrew; she had been holding a bottle of some kind of clear spirits, only two-thirds full. She waved it in obscure greeting, or farewell, walking backwards down the stairs.

‘Do you think they’d been drinking that in the street, out of the bottle?’ Nat said, when they had gone.

‘Oh, no,’ Alan said. ‘They’re very strait-laced, those revolutionary types. They look scary, but they’re like pussycats, really. They’ll have brought that from home, or from their mum and dad’s, probably. They won’t be drinking out of a bottle in the street. You know, that’s not the first time that’s happened.’

‘What, the confusion with the South American struggle?’ Andrew said. Andrew was the most revolutionary of them or, really, the only one.

‘It’s being called CHE that does it,’ Nat said. ‘They think it’s something to do with that man they all like so much, the one with the beard and the gaze upwards, you know, Che Guevara. That’s the third time we’ve had that. We should really spell out what we are on the poster, write Campaign for Homosexual Equality, then they wouldn’t come upstairs by mistake.’

‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t mind them coming upstairs. One was quite nice. I was sorry to see him go, to be honest. That one I wasn’t so bothered about.’

‘People talk about anal sex as though it’s the be-all and end-all of gay identity,’ Christopher said. He had been trying to revert to what he had been saying before the bearded man came in. ‘And for me it was very important. But I understand if people don’t want to assert it as important. For me—’

‘I don’t think we can really write Campaign for Homosexual Equality on the poster,’ Alan said. ‘The landlord might have views about that.’

‘Well, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Honestly!’ Nat said. ‘I thought the point of all of this was to be proud and public. I don’t see anything proud and public about hiding behind initials, in case the landlord doesn’t like it.’

‘He’ll get his windows smashed,’ Alan said. ‘And we’d be beaten up.’

‘For me, anal sex was always very important,’ Christopher intoned.

There was a noise on the stairs, and the noise of a homosexual talking to himself. ‘The cheek of it,’ he was saying. ‘Now, where did I put my wallet? Not that pocket, not this pocket, not— Oh, here it is. You’d lose,’ he said, as he came into the room, ‘your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders. Hello, hello, hello, hello, Christopher, hello, Nat, hello, all. Am I late? Have you started?’

‘Yes, Paul,’ they said. ‘Yes, you’re late, we’ve started, it doesn’t matter, you’re late.’

‘Well,’ Paul said. He was always late for CHE meetings. He was wearing, like the rest of them, a lumberjack shirt, but it was oddly assorted with a pair of tiny denim shorts, and he had tied the tails of the shirt somewhat above the waist of the shorts to leave his midriff bare. He had blond hair with highlights, and a glossy moustache; just to the left of his mouth was a beauty spot, which some thought was applied with the end of the same mascara brush that gave his eyelashes such length and curl. ‘You’ll never guess why I’m late. I was just on the way out—’

‘Have a seat,’ Andrew said. He was eyeing Paul from head to foot with a faint air of disapproval; his hairy arms were folded across his stomach and his voice was deep and emphatic; he had his revolutionary scowl on.

‘I
will
,’ Paul said, and sat down. From his bag, he extracted a quarter-bottle of supermarket vodka, a glass filled with ice and a slice of lemon from the bar downstairs, and finally a small open bottle of tonic. ‘I was just on the way out when the phone goes, and I think, Oh, drat, that’s going to make me late,
definitely
going to make me late for my gay men’s group. So I could have ignored it, but you know me, I can’t ignore a ringing phone. For the rest of the night I’d have been thinking, Who’s that phoning me, who was that. Worst thing that can happen, you say to yourself, I’ll ignore it, then after ten rings you say, I can’t stand it
any more
and make a dive for it just as it stops ringing. And you’ll never know who it was who was calling you – it might have been the love of your life for all you know. So—’

‘You’re not
that
late,’ Nat said – Paul’s stories could go on for some time if not curbed.

‘So, anyway, this time I go to myself, I’m not going to be strong and ignore it, I’m going to be pathetic and answer it. And you know what, I’m glad I did. Do you know who it was? Go on, have a guess, you’ll never guess.’ The others showed no sign of making a guess. Christopher shook his head, his lips pursed. ‘Well. It was only Duncan. I thought he must be calling from abroad – you remember my friend Duncan, you know him, don’t you, Nat, but I’m not sure he knows
you
, Andrew, because I asked him if he knew you and he wasn’t sure. Listen, he says, I’m calling from the airport – I just landed. So I just shrieked. Ethel – you know, the clone who lives in the flat opposite – Ethel he came in and said, What are you shrieking at, you silly mare? Duncan says he’s at the airport, he’s just landed, and he wants to see everyone now, tonight, and so I said I’d tell everyone to go off to the Embassy tonight, and we’ll all be there, and then I said, So have you come back for good, why are you here, and he says he’s only got two two-pence pieces, he’s had them at the bottom of the suitcase since he went to Sicily, so they’ll cut him off in a moment, and then he’s about to tell me why he’s come back and, sure enough, the telephone cuts him off before he can tell me, just as he said it was going to, which I think as I said to Ethel is really a bit ironic if you think about it.’

‘That’s not ironic, my dear,’ Alan said. ‘That’s just Duncan running out of money for the telephone. Don’t sit over there all on your own. Come and sit down by me. I want to hear all about it.’

‘So I wasn’t going to come, but now I have come, though I can’t stay, because I’ve got to go on to tell everyone I can find in Earls Court, but you’ve all got to come to the Embassy later. Duncan’s back!’ Paul said, waving his hands like Al Jolson, taking the vodka and tonic and downing it in one, then getting up and, instead of going over to Alan, trotting off down the stairs. For some reason, Nat and Alan got up and went to the window; they watched him walk down the street in his shorts, with his bag over the crook of the arm. Outside the window hung two small Union Jacks; they had been there since the Silver Jubilee, two years before, and the landlord saw no reason to remove them. The sensibilities of his radical customers, who rented the upstairs room once a week or once a fortnight, did not worry him.

‘I don’t think,’ Christopher said, ‘I ever met Paul’s friend Duncan.’

So then they all told him about Duncan.

9.

‘Who is that coming up the path?’ Aunt Rachel said, peering out of the window.

‘It’s some man,’ Aunt Rebecca said. ‘He is probably selling something from his little bag. Silk stockings and shoe brushes. How dark he is!’