The Emperor Waltz (22 page)

There were the other traders in Heatherwick Street to ask, as well. Duncan had been doing the rounds, buying his fruit from the greengrocer, his morning coffee from Andy opposite and his lunchtime sandwich. He’d made a point of dropping in to buy some rawlplugs from the hardware shop, some fish from the fishmonger, and where there was nothing to buy – you couldn’t expect him to drop ten pounds at the suitcase shop just to make friends – he called in and introduced himself anyway. There was a limit to what could be achieved. The hard, distasteful stare of the old sod in the hardware shop as he had handed over the rawlplugs – that didn’t suggest someone who was going to be welcoming them. Gay people needed lightbulbs too, and they’d be buying them somewhere else. But Andy seemed perfectly cheerful, and the fishmonger had said it would be nice to see a bookshop in the street, though he wasn’t one for reading himself, before handing over some startlingly orange smoked haddock. Duncan hadn’t quite caught his name. All in all, there were about five hundred people on the list, and a week after compiling it, Duncan woke with a start in the middle of the night and remembered that he hadn’t thought to invite a single politician or public administrator.

5.

Paul was the first to turn up, and he came almost every day from then on. The next person to turn up to offer his help, or condolences, was Freddie Sempill. Paul and Duncan had been going over the shop, and had settled down behind the counter, where the kitchenette and discussion table were going to go. Outside the window a short figure was standing, his legs astride, his fists on his hips.

‘You won’t want to come in,’ Duncan called. ‘It’s a gay bookshop, called the Gay Bookshop. An old closet case like you, it’s not for you, sweetie.’

Freddie Sempill looked from side to side. There was nobody outside except Andy, standing as usual at the door of his sandwich shop, and two old ladies in tweed coats and hats with a little dog yapping at their feet: respectable old ladies, washed up in this corner of London and left there to maintain a standard of behaviour no one else had cared about for many years. One was indicating the bookshop to the other; it was unlikely that they were about to beat up Freddie Sempill.

‘Oh, do come in,’ Paul said. ‘Look at the silly queen, he’s not going to come in unless someone goes and brings him in. Just look. I was saying,’ as he opened the door, ‘I suppose we’ve got to come and fetch you in. Silly old closet-case queen, honestly.’ Freddie Sempill followed him in breathlessly.

‘All right, mate?’ Freddie Sempill said.

‘What?’ Duncan said. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, all right, mate? Are you all right? How are things going?’

‘Oh, you were asking after us,’ Duncan said. ‘Nobody would have guessed –’

‘Thanks, mate,’ Freddie Sempill said.

‘– would have guessed that your father was quite an important civil servant, they really wouldn’t. You sounded almost exactly like a Cockney barrow boy.’

‘Almost, but interestingly, not quite like,’ Paul said. ‘How are you, my darling old closet case?’

‘I’m not a closet case,’ Freddie Sempill said. ‘Most people think I’m straight, that’s all. It’s not the same as being a closet case.’

‘Your mother doesn’t think you’re straight,’ Paul said. ‘Come to think of it, I can’t think of a single person who does.’

‘Ah, well, the squaddie the other night thought I was,’ Freddie Sempill said triumphantly. ‘He said so. You wouldn’t have heard about him, though, I expect.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘That pub by the Knightsbridge barracks. You should have seen him. Shaved head, fat lip from a fight and a black eye, blond—’

‘How do you know he was blond if he had a shaved head?’

‘It was sort of glinting blond on his scalp, do you know what I mean? Amazing. And we had a drink, and I told him I was a plumber—’

‘Oh, pur-lease,’ Paul said, because Freddie Sempill worked as a manager on the menswear floor in Simpson’s on Piccadilly, ordering in lovely spring modes for the gentleman with the fuller figure.

‘It was just like two lads having a beer or two together. There was no reason for him to think I was anything but straight. It would have ruined the evening. But then at closing time he said he was in the mood for another drink, and I said, come back to mine, it’s not far—’

‘You’re in Fulham, still, aren’t you?’ Duncan said, but Freddie Sempill ignored this.

‘And he came back, and one thing led to another, and we ended up fooling around, if you know what I mean, and he said at one point, I’ve never wanted to do anything like this before, it must be being with another straight lad like you, you’d never tell anyone, would you? And he went off in the morning saying what no one knows doesn’t hurt anyone. He was perfect.’

‘He left in the morning?’ Paul said.

‘Yes, he stayed all night,’ Freddie Sempill said.

‘And he still thought you were straight after the whole night of kissing and cuddling and doing all sorts of awful gay-sex things?’ Duncan said.

‘That wasn’t my point,’ Paul said. ‘He’s supposed to be a soldier, and he stayed all night. Don’t they have to spend the night in the barracks, or whatever?’

‘He was on leave,’ Freddie Sempill said promptly.

‘And he was staying in his barracks anyway,’ Paul said. ‘You stupid queen, you’ve picked up another queen like you, pretending to be a soldier like you were pretending to be a plumber. Anyway. What are you doing here? Just passing? You won’t be coming in once we put the sign up that says “Big Gay Bookshop”.’

Freddie Sempill rolled his eyes; he put his hands to his throat; he laughed boldly. Then he remembered that most people in the world thought he was straight, and he made a straight man’s shrugging gesture. ‘You aren’t seriously going to call it that, mate?’ he said in the end. ‘Not seriously.’

‘They are going to call it that,’ one of the carpenters called from the front, coming in after their cigarette break. ‘You’re behind the times, mate. That’s what all shops are going to be called these days. The Big Gay Grocer’s. The Big Gay Furniture Shop. The Big Gay Menswear Shop. The –’

‘It’s here. It’s called Simpson’s, sweety,’ Paul said. He had a warm relationship with the carpenters, who thought him a card.

‘– Big Gay Bookshop and the Big Gay Butcher’s.’

‘Butcher and butcher,’ Paul said. ‘Now, I can see you’re torn, Miss Sempill. You don’t want to stay in a big gay shop in case people think there’s something wrong with you. But you can see we’re about to do something manly and you want to join in, though you’re not quite sure what the manly thing is. Let me enlighten you. We’re going to paint the back wall a nice shade of terracotta.’

‘Looks orange to me,’ Freddie Sempill said, with an attempt at manliness, trying to impress the carpenters.

‘Well, it’s terracotta,’ Duncan said briskly.

Freddie Sempill was one of those queens whom every queen knew: his attempt at being perceived as straight saw to that. He made a point of only going to bed with straight men, or those he believed to be straight. It was surprising, at first, that he had come at all to the Big Gay Bookshop. They had thought that, as Paul remarked to Duncan afterwards, he was only going to come before they put the sign up, before anyone could have seen what he was visiting. Once that had gone up, they wouldn’t see him for dust.

‘So what needs doing?’ he said now. ‘Painting? I can do a bit of that.’

‘If you feel like it,’ Paul said. ‘Roll your sleeves up. We’ve got some overalls somewhere – there, that pile of what looks like rags at the back of the shop. Pop those on and get busy. We’ll start you on the ceiling – we’ll see how you do with that.’

‘I’m going to get a tattoo one of these days,’ Freddie Sempill said. ‘One of those that sailors used to have, on the forearm, saying Mum. Don’t you think?’

‘Don’t you ever have to roll your sleeves up in Simpson’s?’ Paul said. ‘When it gets hot? No, I don’t suppose you do.’

6.

‘And then he made such a hash of the ceiling, I can’t tell you,’ Paul said later on, at the CHE meeting. ‘We’re going to have to repaint it all tomorrow. We thought he couldn’t do much harm – we haven’t touched the bookcases, which are all in now, or the walls, and the floor was all covered up so, no matter how much he spilt all over the place, he couldn’t do much harm. But
paint
in his
hair
and
hair
in the
paint
on the ceiling. And then he was about to fall off the ladder and he put his hand in the bit he’d just painted and then he leant immediately on one of the bookcases and there was a sort of smeared handprint on it. Duncan went all tight-lipped, you know how he does when he’s seriously annoyed.’

They were in the upstairs room at the pub in Camden. They were supposed to discuss the likelihood of extending Gay Pride outside London, maybe to Birmingham or Manchester to start with. On the other side of the table to Paul and Alan, the discussion was coming to an end with a long story, told by Christopher, about a man he had met at Gay Pride the year before last, who had come down from Newcastle, and he had said that there was quite a good scene in Newcastle now, and they’d had a good time marching, but Christopher had lost his phone number the next morning and he supposed that the man had lost his too, since he hadn’t been in touch. But Christopher was going to Manchester only next week.

‘I thought you said he was from Newcastle?’ Simon said, draining the last of his pint of bitter. ‘I wish you’d get these things right when you tell a story.’

‘Yes. He was from Newcastle,’ Christopher finished decisively. Simon and Christopher had had years of turning up at the same meetings and saying ‘hello’ to each other when they met over a conference table in Whitehall. There had often been a professional tinge to the way they spoke to each other at the CHE meetings, a sense of mild mutual deference, but there was a petty sharpness about the way Simon was speaking to Christopher tonight – he had told Christopher to ‘get on with it’ earlier when he was explaining, as an account of personal growth, how he had gone to gay rights meetings for the first time in America.

‘And I don’t even know how Freddie Sempill came to hear about Duncan’s bookshop in the first place,’ Paul said to Alan, not paying any attention to Christopher’s story.

The landlord came in without knocking. There was, as always, a faint stiffening at this: he was never openly hostile, unlike his wife, but they had in the past wondered whether he had known what they were, and what they did; the general consensus was that he hadn’t known at the start, but when he had found out had decided to be bonhomous, at least to their faces. His name was Tarquin: nobody had discovered what his wife’s name was. ‘Everything all right?’ Tarquin now said, going round the table and collecting what pint glasses there were. ‘Don’t mean to be rude, gents, but …’

‘It’s about time for another one,’ Simon said dutifully, after he had collected everyone’s money – CHE was not the sort of place where they bought rounds for each other. Some of them thought they shouldn’t be drinking: they were really there to talk serious things over and decide on the future. Some of them (Christopher) said this every time they met, but he went along with it and bought a soft drink. ‘I do wish there was a gay pub with an upstairs room,’ Simon said, leaving the room. ‘There’s that one in Romford we talked about.’

‘No one’s going to go to Romford,’ Nat said, as Simon left. ‘We can’t plot the next stage in the sexual revolution from there. It’s not even a gay pub, or only every other second Thursday of the month. The only place we can go to is the cellar at the King’s Head. We’ve been through this before, it’s not used on Tuesdays.’

‘I’m not going to sit in the King’s Head cellar,’ Alan said, getting up and going to the uncurtained window. Outside, it was raining heavily; a woman under a black umbrella was making an unsteady progress down the street, her personal black dome glistening in the yellow streetlights. ‘I’m not, and that’s final. It might not be used for anything on Tuesdays, but it’s too well used on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and especially Sundays.’

‘I saw a man being weed on there one Sunday,’ Nat said. ‘I really did.’

‘Well, there you are,’ Alan said. ‘I really don’t think the King’s Head cellar would be an improvement.’

‘So why was Freddie Sempill there in any case?’ Christopher said.

‘I don’t know why they don’t get on, but they just don’t,’ Paul said. ‘But he turned up – he’d turn up at anything where workmen were hammering and sawing. After he’d made such a mess of the ceiling and we told him for Heaven’s sake to stop, he started asking the carpenters where they went for a pint, these days, but they made short work of him, I can tell you.’

‘A pint of bitter, a lemonade for Christopher, a half of lager and lime, another pint of bitter, and a peppermint cordial with a dash of rum in it, here you go, Nat,’ Simon said, coming back and shouldering the door open, turning round carefully with a laden tray. It sloped dangerously as he turned. ‘And a half of bitter for me and that’s going to be my lot.’ He set the tray down, sat down heavily, and passed the drinks to left and right.

‘I can’t wait for the bookshop to open,’ Christopher said, ‘and then at least we won’t have to come here any more.’

They stared at him.

‘Well, it’s a community resource, isn’t it?’ Christopher said. ‘I thought that was the whole point of it. We’ll just start meeting at the bookshop after closing time. Of course, we won’t be able to buy alcoholic drinks, but Paul said they were putting in a kitchenette, so we can make cups of instant coffee and tea, and perhaps even a cheese toastie if we get hungry and the discussion seems to be going on fruitfully. And there’s probably a “pub” on the same street or not too far, I don’t really know about these things, but there often is in London, I know, for anyone who feels after the meeting that they need an alcoholic drink, I mean feels they can’t go for one evening without one.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘I suppose that would be a good idea. But you’d have to ask him. Go round tomorrow.’