The Emperor Waltz (51 page)

‘What’s so funny?’ Christopher said, as he came into the shop. The man who had come in was only Alan.

‘I was wondering about coloured hankies,’ Arthur said. Christopher and Alan exchanged a baffled glance.

5.

‘Got Aids yet?’ a child shouted in at the door, and ran off like a celebrant in a street fair, followed by two or three children of the neighbourhood who paused to say, ‘Fucking bummers,’ before running after their friend. ‘Did you hear what I …’ you could hear them calling as they ran.

Alan tutted and looked away. He was no more than fifty-five, they reckoned, from his talk of ‘before the war’ as a remote childhood paradise, but he dressed and presented himself like a pensioner. His hair was quite white and combed upwards into a cockatoo’s crest, listing sideways; his walk was strict, his hands held firmly downwards by his hips in case they broke out into florid gesture. He lived, as he always had, in a shabby but now rather valuable house in Fulham, on the borders of Chelsea, with his mother. Nothing there had changed since 1957, when the hall wallpaper had been removed and distemper applied. ‘Oh,’ Nat used to say, with a despairing wave of his hand, ‘Alan’s really just like his house. He’s so much like Tregunter Road, it’s hardly true.’ His clothes, too, were sourced by his mother from a west London emporium quite isolated from the 1980s, or indeed the 1970s; like a pensioner, he dressed imperviously to the heat, as if his mother had warned him to wrap up warm, it might turn nasty later. He wore a tweed jacket, with broad lapels and gold buttons, in brilliant oranges and greens; a tie was making a break in a floral direction; his shirt and trousers were different shades of man-made brown. Despite his age, both performed and real, his face was puzzled and yet eager, like a keen dull boy at the front of a maths class. It was as if he had not understood what the youths had shouted in.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Arthur said. ‘I’m just making one.’

‘That is so kind of you,’ Alan said. ‘Milk, no sugar. Christopher?’

‘Oh, tea,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve had such a day you wouldn’t believe. That Lawson! You just would not believe what he’s decided to do with us.’

‘Still, you got off on time,’ Alan said. ‘I don’t see him keeping you behind at the office just yet. I was supposed to have a meeting with the deputy VC, but he’d gone off to play some golf, the weather being so nice. Just slid off.’

‘The trick is, Alan,’ Christopher said, ‘around four twenty-five, you start ruffling your papers as if you’ve got a meeting at four thirty, you start checking your watch, and then – this is the clever bit – you leave your jacket over the back of your chair and just walk straight out. It’s really a cinch. It does mean that you’ve got to be back early the next morning to bundle your jacket from yesterday into your briefcase. I’ve done it for years. I’d love a cup of tea, thank you, Arthur. Is this the book everyone’s talking about?’

He picked up a copy of
A Boy’s Own Story
from a pile of eight.

‘We’ve done ever so well with it,’ Duncan said. ‘We’ve had to reorder four times already. Everyone’s reading it.’

‘Nat was telling me about it,’ Alan said. ‘He’s not a great reader, is he? I mean, not even his best friends. But he said he couldn’t put it down. He got to page twelve and he had to have a wank, and then he was a bit ashamed of himself, because it’s actually about fourteen-year-olds having it off, or cornholing each other – had you ever heard of cornholing before? I said to Nat, there’s no need to apologize, it’s only words on a page, but he said – well. Mother read it, actually, she saw it on the coffee-table, and when I was busy in the kitchen, I was running up a little apple-and-cinnamon strudel that I’d been saving up for a quiet afternoon, I was otherwise occupied in any case, and when I came back in, all hot and bothered, she was reading it, twenty pages in, and she said straight out to me, Alan, I hope you don’t go in for any of that cornholing. It sounds very ill-advised. You could have knocked me down with a feather, because you know, Mother and I, we don’t talk about any of that side of my life, but she then said what an interesting way of writing the author had, and now I really think that I might have to buy another copy – she’s passed the one she read on to her friend Dolly with a strong recommendation and I hadn’t even finished it. Dolly’s a man, by the way.’

‘How was the apple-and-cinnamon strudel?’ Duncan said.

‘Disappointing,’ Alan said. ‘Very disappointing. And such a lot of work, too. There was a story on the cookery page in the magazine I got it from that you were supposed to be able to read a love letter through the pastry when it was done, which I suppose tickled me rather. I said to Mother, after I’d been slaving away at the pastry, I’ve got a lovely old 1890s ceramic rolling pin that only gets taken out on very special occasions, I said to Mother, come on, we’ll see if we can read an old love letter through this pastry. And she said, well, I’m sure I don’t want to read any of your love letters and I’m not at all convinced that I have any of your father’s to hand, so we ended up attempting to read a circular from the head of German through it, not at all the same thing although I do see it maintained the Austrian theme.’

‘Who’s coming?’ Duncan said to Christopher. ‘And what’s the topic tonight?’

‘Socialism, gay rights, equality and lesbians,’ Christopher said. ‘Seems a bit much. It was Andrew’s idea. Speak of the devil.’

‘In any case,’ Alan said, as he and Christopher took their cups of tea from Arthur, ‘hello, Andrew, I was just talking about an unsuccessful apple strudel I attempted, in any case I don’t believe the quantities were right. It was really unpleasantly sour. Now, I don’t ask for anything too sickly sweet, I don’t care for that, but this, it really made Mother and I wince. We ended up sprinkling Demerara sugar on top just to make it palatable. It’s the last time I cook anything from Mother’s
Family Circle
.’

Andrew stood, with a faint impatient air, barely in the door. He carried a folder of documents and, in his hand, a Sainsbury’s carrier bag full of books. His beard was full, and his T-shirt carried a hand-printed message about GAY PRIDE 1977. His shorts were bright blue, tight and short, and he wore brown leather Jesus sandals. He was a hairy man – his legs and arms seemed surrounded by an aura, half an inch thick – and was sweating lightly. ‘Is this everyone?’ he said. ‘I thought there’d be more tonight. How are you, Alan?’

‘Thank you, Andrew,’ Alan said. ‘I’m feeling really a lot more myself, it’s kind of you to ask. I’ve been out for two weeks now, and fingers crossed … I never thanked you for the cake you brought into the Charing Cross. Beetroot, so original. Of course, I couldn’t eat anything much, my appetite was completely shot, but it came in so handy for visitors and for the nurses, too, to tell the truth. They were shockers.’

‘You’ve not been ill, have you, Alan?’ Christopher said quickly.

‘Oh, no, nothing like that, Christopher,’ Alan said. ‘Just gall bladder, nothing … Well, anyway, the beetroot cake was a lovely contribution.’

‘Not up to his standards,’ Duncan said quietly to Arthur, as they went through the day’s takings. ‘Sixty, sixty-one, -two, -three and …’ he counted through the change ‘… don’t disturb me, now, that’s -six, -seven and …’ There was a long pause as Duncan furrowed his brow. ‘That’s seventy-two pounds seventeen, better than some days, not so good as a few. There was ten pounds sixty in change in the till this morning. And three cheques.’

‘Excellent,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s excellent. Three people paying with cheques, that’s an improvement.’ (He meant that people were not so worried about leaving their names when they paid; his thought, which Duncan followed, was about frankness and openness. Someone who wrote, ‘Twelve pounds payable to The Big Gay Bookshop’ – one day everyone would be like that.)

‘And no bloody credit cards today, either,’ Duncan said. ‘That’s another thirty pounds – no, twenty-nine pounds, no, thirty-one forty-nine. That’s … Where’s the calculator?’

‘Christopher,’ Arthur called. ‘We need your help.’

‘No good at mental arithmetic,’ Christopher said, ambling over. ‘Simon’s better at it than I am.’

‘The nation’s finances are in these fumbling hands,’ Duncan said, quite fondly – this exchange was a regular one. ‘What happens when Lawson says to you, Quick, Duffy, what’s last year’s income tax receipts minus government expenditure minus the National Debt? How much money have we got to spend on tea and biscuits and a new bridge in Norfolk that the Ministry of Defence wants?’

‘Well, I should turn very briskly to the principal who sits behind me and pass him an urgent note,’ Christopher said, ‘telling him to his great surprise that we’ve found we’ve got a nice lot of money left over and we don’t know what to spend it on. Lawson tells everyone they can’t spend money, that’s his job. I can’t believe you ever worked in the public service.’

‘Not just me,’ Duncan said. ‘Paul did, too. I met him first in the unemployment office. We were dealing with the unwashed together. He didn’t last long. He was even worse than me.’

‘I forgot that!’ Christopher said, with a brave cheerfulness. ‘Paul in the civil service! What a fantastic image! They didn’t sack him, though, did they? He just left, didn’t he?’

‘Well, I can’t really remember,’ Duncan said. ‘It was so long ago. Well, not so long ago – it’s just that stuff’s happened, it’s hard to think of him ever being there. They didn’t send anyone to the funeral, at any rate.’

Together they thought about Paul’s funeral, six months before; that cold December day, his respectable father no one had ever met, sitting for form’s sake with the mother everyone knew, divorced years before. And a handicapped sister smiling at everyone. The parents had seemed numb in the Northamptonshire chapel, and about them a hundred people Northamptonshire had never seen or experienced. One boy in full Adam Ant drag with a white stripe across the face and a pirate jacket; a girl in a fluorescent pink leather catsuit; a woman in an emerald taffeta ballgown. Half the queens had been wearing their black PVC raincoats, tightly belted. If any of them had been asked, they’d have replied, ‘Oh, Paul specifically asked me to wear it.’ Duncan had just worn a suit and a black tie, which, he’d noticed on the train, had glitter in its material. He had tried to put on the normal one in his flat, first thing that morning. But he must have reached for the wrong one. He had cried over breakfast, and cried again in the shower. Paul had put him off and put him off, saying in a postcard, ‘Oh, no, I’m fine, come when I’m out of hospital, they’re not worried.’ He hadn’t seen him for six weeks. The last message he’d had from him was on the back of a postcard with a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh on the front, and the farewell message, handwritten in blue biro in Paul’s looping, confident hand, had said, ‘Suck a black man’s cock for me, darling.’ He had been spared blindness, then. The next he had heard was a hoarse-voiced man announcing himself as Paul’s father, and Paul had died in the hospice. Paul had been thorough, however, and had made a list of everyone who should be invited to the funeral with their phone numbers. The restaurant must have closed for the day; the funeral was full of its waiters and customers, beautifully dressed and weeping in squadrons. Bonnie Langford had come, even. Over the coffin was a six-foot-by-four photograph of Paul, soft-focus and unrecognizable. The hearse was glass-sided and pulled by black-plumed horses; the coffin brought in by beautiful muscular boys in frock coats. The music was Donna Summer, at which everyone smiled, and a fat girl singing ‘Va, Pensiero’ with a struggling organist – he’d never had to play it before, he’d confided to Arthur, who had got his phone number anyway with an expression of big-eyed sympathy. Every detail was planned and specific, and very Paul, while at the same time not evoking him in the slightest. It was all what he would have wanted it to be. On the way back, Duncan, Andrew, Christopher, Nat, Arthur, Simon and Freddie Sempill, who had invited himself, they had got a bit drunk at the wake and got drunker on the train. They had gone parading up and down in the carriage, their funeral clothes awry, performing Paul’s encounter at the dole office with the Yorkshire bricklayer in search of work. ‘I can see you’re firm, and if I had but a single opening I could insert you into, it would be my pleasure,’ Nat recited, and then a woman in a blue hat and a pink scarf deep in Anita Brookner had stood up and complained that there were women and children in the compartment. ‘Our fucking friend’s died,’ Arthur said, outraged, and Nat had said, ‘Honestly.’ But then Duncan had stood up and in a moment of inspiration, drunk as a lord, had responded by saying the other thing Paul was famous for saying: ‘When I go to bed with a man,’ he had said once, and Duncan now said for the benefit of the carriage and the complaining woman, ‘I expect him to maintain full erection –
full erection
– from the
moment of nudity onwards.
Do I make myself plain? The
very first
moment of nudity. Anything else – anything that falls short of that – I regard as a
personal insult
.’ And then they all joined in, with laughter and applause and cheering even, and chanted, ‘Anything else I regard as a personal insult,’ and laughed and laughed, like football supporters on a drunken train. There were more of them, for once, than the normals. There had been people leaving the compartment. Fuck them. Two days later, Duncan had told Arthur that he’d better find somewhere else to live than the room over the bookshop.

They thought about that day of Paul’s funeral. ‘No,’ Christopher said in the end. ‘They probably wouldn’t have known about it. There’s such a turnover of staff in that bit of the civil service, no one would have remembered him.’

‘Let’s make a start,’ Andrew said. ‘Are you staying tonight? Arthur? Duncan? It can’t just be the three of us.’

Arthur agreed with a bad grace.

‘It’s socialism, gay rights, lesbian feminism tonight,’ Andrew said, his voice rising brightly, like a hostess offering a particularly alluring and yet healthy quiche to a weight-watching guest. ‘It’ll be fun.’

‘So my landlord – he says to me, he’s one of them, he says,’ Arthur said, continuing some long-abandoned fragment of conversation. ‘You know – one of
those
.’