The Emperor Waltz (49 page)
Authors: Philip Hensher
As for me, I would get better; I would retreat to that quiet space where everyone is offstage, and everyone is listening.
‘You will have brought your own towels and bedlinen,’ the old queen said, in his lowered, theatrical, half-humming voice, ‘as I think I said, I suggested, Arthur, in my advert in
Time Out
. Or was it over the phone? I forget. Some queens turn up, think I’m going to do everything, and then they do a bunk with my best Egyptian cotton, and try and get Lily Law after them. I don’t think so. Other things I can supply, should you feel an urgent need for them. Soap and shampoo, there’s always a bottle left behind by one of the previous, as I call them, done a bunk and left me their Vosene – left you, I should say. You’re not going to do a bunk, I can tell, you’re a nice young man. This is a respectable place, there’s no drilling of holes in the bathroom wall to watch the tenants at their ablutions, not like some places I’ve heard of, and I like to keep it clean. You can have a friend back, we’re only human after all, but only the one, or at the most two but don’t make a habit of it, and try not to make too much noise when you’re coming in. Make as much noise while you’re at it as you like, my friend Bernard used to say to the new boys, I like that, he used to say, it makes me feel young again and I might even think about coming up and joining in. Gone his way, poor old Bernard, in the Charing Cross with the Gay Plague. He was the first I knew of – we gave him a lovely send-off, it was a release at the end all round. I hope you’ll call me Kevin, or Kev even, everyone does. When you think of the Gay Plague, it’s really for the best these days that we put on a cheerful face and get on with what queens do best, don’t you think, Arthur? It was Arthur, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s right. I’ve got everything – sheets and towels and soap and shampoo, thanks, Kevin.’ Arthur was aware of being only twenty-one or twenty-two at most to the assessing gaze, and Kevin, the old queen, proceeding in his stately way up the staircase of the lodging house in Islington, kept pausing to turn around, to take him in, to turn round and rearrange one of the china animal ornaments that he kept on the landing or on a shelf on the way up. It was a respectable house, he had said earlier, and he advertised in
Time Out
and not in that grubby community centre in Old Street, on that grubby notice-board they’d got. You got all sorts from there.
‘I don’t know why,’ Kevin said, stopping halfway up the stairs, ‘but you look very familiar to me. We’ve not met in some way, have we?’
‘I don’t remember,’ Arthur said. He was not being unfriendly: he was out of breath from lugging the colossal brown leather suitcase up the second flight of stairs. ‘We might have done. Or you might have come in the shop, I dare say.’
‘What shop is that, Arthur?’ Kevin said. ‘I didn’t know you worked in a shop. Did you mention? When we spoke? On the phone this would be?’
‘It’s the Big Gay Bookshop,’ Arthur said. ‘Do you know it? It’s the gay bookshop in Marylebone. It’s brilliant – I love it there. I’ve been there four years.’
‘I didn’t know it had been there four years,’ Kevin said. ‘I know it, I think. I’ve been in once or twice. It’s a little bit … it’s a little bit … you know … well, for me, it is, anyway. I may as well say, I’m not a great fan of that sort of thing. But I will pop in now. I dare say I wouldn’t be the first you’ve had in, in four years. Anyway.’
The house was a succession of plywood doors, some painted, some left raw; it had been a handsome town house, once, but had been divided up with partitions and divisions. Kevin was a man in his late forties, a clone; he wore the clone’s uniform of checked shirt and jeans, a neat ginger moustache and clipped-short ginger-and-white hair, but as he paused in their walk upwards, his hands went theatrically to and fro, as if he were passing a silk scarf between them. Now a door on a landing opened timidly; a face came out, a pale round face.
‘Timothy,’ Kevin said, without enthusiasm. ‘I wondered whether anyone was in, or everyone had got lucky last night and was scattered across this great metropolis of ours, like the scrubbers they are. This is Arthur. He’s our new one. He’s in Bruce’s old room. Keep your shop-soiled hands off him, I know your sort.’
‘Hello,’ the face called Timothy said, looking Arthur up and down.
‘Hello there,’ Arthur said, and Timothy retreated into his room.
‘Terrible old queen that one,’ Kevin said. ‘He’ll ask you into his room. Don’t go. Or do go. What do I know? You might be into what Timothy likes. It seems ever so unlikely. But there again, someone must be. There’s someone for everyone, here in London, they always say. You’re from the north, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am,’ Arthur said, still wondering what Kevin wouldn’t be the first of when he came next into the bookshop.
‘I thought so,’ Kevin said, and gave a disconcertingly broad smile. ‘It’ll all be very new and exciting for you, then, all of this.’
He gestured around him at the second landing, chipped china models of deer, a cat and a polar bear on the dusty window ledge and a pink glass vase full of peacock feathers and honesty. The carpet, of brown, purple and green Liberty intricacy, was less dirty than downstairs; a repainting had stopped, on the other hand, on the landing below, and up here the walls were covered with a primeval wallpaper at least twenty years old. There was a faint, persistent and familiar scent in the air up there, too.
‘Well, I’ve been here four years, now,’ Arthur said.
‘Like the bookshop, you were saying,’ Kevin said. He passed a hand over his scalp in a curious grooming gesture, but there was no hair long enough to smooth back, and the gesture remained theatrical. ‘And here we are. The door sticks. I don’t know why. It’s not in the least damp, this house. I put it down to mild subsidence, which, of course, isn’t your concern in the slightest. It’s a lovely room, Bruce always said. Of course, Bruce was a dreadful poppers fiend – there’s possibly a touch of that still in the air where he maybe spilt it on the carpet, but a few days of the window open and it’ll be quite gone. Poppers evaporate, after all, that’s what they’re meant to do.’
The room was surprisingly large – Arthur had anticipated a narrow strip of corridor with a bed inside it. The ceiling, up here on the top floor, was low, but the room was a good size. On the other hand, someone had painted all the walls black, so it was hard to see what it would be like in normal circumstances.
‘Some people blame poppers,’ Kevin said. ‘But I don’t see how it could be, to be honest. We were cultured folk, Bernard and I, and when two years ago they said that if we were going up to the Edinburgh festival, English boys were on no account to have relations with visiting Americans, we took that very seriously. It was all too late for poor Bernard, of course, without him knowing it, but I’m all right so far, I’m happy to say.’
‘Can I repaint it?’ Arthur said, putting his suitcase down and gesturing at the black walls. ‘The room?’
‘Well,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s true that Bruce painted it this shade – he said it was going to be purple, and I didn’t mind that, and I was surprised when it turned out to be so very dark a shade of purple as this. So I don’t see why not. I must insist, though, everything the same colour. Not green on this wall and orange on that and pink on that. Everything the same colour. That was the stipulation I made to Bruce so it’s only fair I make the same stipulation to you.’
‘I was going to paint it all white,’ Arthur said.
‘Well, there’s no problem at all, then,’ Kevin said brightly. ‘Just put some sheets down. You might need more than one coat, I dare say. It’ll come out grey the first coat or two. If you were ambitious, you could think about rag-rolling. Jocasta Innes. I thought I’d give it a go some time. Now – bedlinen and towels, I’ve done, the telephone I’ve done, friends and visitors I’ve done, what else? I said thirty-five pounds a week, didn’t I? That can be monthly, we can call that a hundred and fifty a month. I mean sixty. I might come calling for the electricity bill and the gas bill from time to time – I work it out and we just split it. There’s a gas fire, there’s a Baby Belling, it works quite well, and there’s the bed. Don’t you want to try the bed out?’
Arthur went over and sat down on the bed, gingerly bouncing up and down. Kevin followed him, sat down next to him, and bounced alongside. ‘It’s a lovely bed, really,’ he said. ‘There’s been lots of fun had in this bed. Lots of fun. We heard most of it, all through the house. I do hope you’re going to have fun here, like the rest of us. Arthur, wasn’t it?’
It was a Sunday lunchtime that Arthur moved into the room in Islington. Perhaps other people would have had more stuff to move in. He just had a cardboard box and his brown suitcase, the one he had bought when the Singhs’ suitcase shop over the road from the bookshop closed down, on the last day, for three pounds. It was too big for most people; the style was old-fashioned; and it had sat in the shop for years. They had been glad to sell it to him, even for three pounds. A furniture shop making sofas was there now.
Everything that Arthur owned he carried with him, and all of it was in the suitcase and the box in the hallway. Apart from the books, which were still in boxes above the shop. It was a cold and sunny April day outside; the clouds scudded across the sky. He stood there, at the window high up in the shabby house’s façade, and wondered what Duncan would be doing. He knew he went to his sister’s, Dommie’s, for lunch most Sundays. He did not blame him for asking him to move out. As he had explained, it was only ever intended to be for a month or so, until Arthur had got himself back on his feet, and four years was too long. Besides, Duncan said apologetically, the law was after them enough, without them finding out that one of them was living illegally in the room above the shop.
There was a timid knock on the door; a faint knock followed by a louder one, as if the knocker had not quite established where the door was in relation to his fist. The door was opened slowly, and the round face from earlier appeared. ‘Hello,’ the face said. Arthur said hello back.
‘I’m Tim,’ the round face said, coming in, the body somehow following the face in a sly, tracking, unsure way, like an animal. He was blond, undecided, round in features. ‘I know who you are. I’ve been in your shop. I’m not a great reader, I was looking at it, though, because I thought I would. Have you …’ He trailed off, standing by the door, his left arm behind his back and clutching his right elbow.
‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ Arthur said. ‘Actually I don’t have my kettle here yet. It’s downstairs in a brown box, and the coffee too.’
‘I was wondering what that box were,’ Tim said. ‘But then I realized it must be the new boy’s, yours. It doesn’t matter, I don’t drink coffee much. It’s nice up here, it’s nicer than mine.’
‘Have you been here long?’ Arthur said.
‘Oooh,’ Tim said, brooding crudely. He let silence fall. ‘What are you into, then?’
‘What am I into?’ Arthur said. Tim had gone over to the window and was peering out of it into the street, perhaps not to engage Arthur’s gaze.
‘Me,’ Tim began, ‘I’m—’
‘I like all sorts, me,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ve just read
A Boy’s Own Story
. Have you read that? That’s ace. Everyone who’s read it says so, we’ve sold tons in the shop. And I love, love, love Genet – do you know Genet? He wrote all his books in prison, almost, and they’re all about prison. But I like all sorts, me, I’m going to have a go at Proust one of these days. Mr Bailey who came in the shop told me everyone should.’
‘Oh, books,’ Tim said, turning round. ‘I should have said to Kevin, I want to move out, I want a bigger room. Still, I’m settled. I meant, what are …’
Arthur let Tim’s sentence trail away. ‘Oh, I thought what are you into, reading, like, because of bookshop.’
‘I’m into leather,’ Tim said, superfluously since he was wearing leather trousers and a leather jacket, although he was in his own house. He had put the jacket on over the white Brando vest to come upstairs.
‘Oh, I see,’ Arthur said. ‘What am I into? Let’s see.’
As Tim watched closely, Arthur elucidated, ticking off what he had done and what he had enjoyed, there in the upper room above the bookshop, in the last four years, with seven boys. There had not been so many. Only one had come once and never come again. Or there had been other rooms, elsewhere in London, in shared flats, in a boarding house a bit like this one, in a neat one-bedroom in Palmers Green, miles and miles away, but he’d been sweet, that’d been a nice summer, the summer before last with him and William trailing up and down to Palmers Green and back, and once there had been that rich bloke who had seemed quite ordinary at first but had turned out to live in a huge four-storey white house off the King’s Road and had been just that one-off. All but one had been customers in the first instance in the Big Gay Bookshop. You were a sitting duck, there at the till, a sitting duck by Paul’s stuffed sitting pheasant, as Duncan often said sunnily. Arthur went through these now, not talking about the houses or the individuals, but about the acts they’d done together, which, in the end, were fewer even than the number of men, over those four years.
‘Oh, you’re vanilla,’ Tim said, sitting down on the brown wooden chair. ‘Me too, really. I like a kiss and a cuddle best. In leather, a leather kiss and a cuddle, though, that’s nice.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Arthur said.
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ Tim said. Arthur thought of producing one. But then he took pity on Tim. It was Sunday afternoon, after all, and Arthur had nothing to do except bring up the cardboard box from the hallway, and unpack his few plates, his kettle, a saucepan and three tins of food. He guessed that Tim only really wanted to do it once.
Afterwards, Tim seemed in no hurry to go. He walked around the room, occasionally turning to inspect Arthur, lying on the bare mattress – it had seemed a waste, unpacking the sheets when they’d only have to be washed again afterwards, and anyway they were in the boxes downstairs.