The Emperor Waltz

‘Duncan,’ Duncan introduced himself. ‘Yes, I know about the direct flights, but I had to return at very short notice. This was the only flight today that could take me. I needed to get back as soon as possible.’

‘A holiday?’ the gentleman asked. But Duncan had seen that while he had been speaking the man’s eyes had gone towards the daughter of a large family, a girl in a short skirt and a tight blouse, and had run up and down her appreciatively. He was just passing the time in a neutral way in talking to Duncan – not that Duncan knew what could result from their conversation. Duncan simply said that, no, he had been working here. He had been teaching English as a foreign language to schoolchildren, and had been living in a small flat in the centre of the city. He liked Catania, yes, he did, and the food, and he had seen the fish market and had gone to Taormina to see the beauties of the island, which, yes, was the most beautiful place in the world, and he agreed that Sicilians were really very lucky to have been born in such a place, even given all its terrible troubles, which made you think you would have been better being born in the shit with no arms and no legs, sometimes, but then the sun shone and the sea was beautiful, and the women, the women of Sicily.

Duncan had been in Sicily for eleven months. He could keep this sort of conversation going with only one ear on its content. He had heard its contradictions, its flow and counterflow, many times. The other, more active, ear was busy keeping an interested and acute ear attending to the difficulties of Italian as he went. Was that an idiom the man had used – in the shit with no arms and no legs? Or just his own way of talking? He did not know.

He had come to Sicily for no reason in particular – or no good reason, not one that you could tell anyone of any seriousness. He had been working for the government in London. His job had been in an unemployment office in Kilburn, interviewing the out-of-work and granting them the dole. There were mothers, hard cases, alcoholics, but also students and people who did not really need anything. Duncan did not engage with them, in the shabby office behind the solid stone walls. He knew that, if he thought about it, he would probably take the short step that existed between his state, as a poor employee of the government, and the most desperate of the subjects who came through the door.

One day he could no longer stand it. It was a hot day in early summer and he had, as it were, fooled himself into coming to work. All the way from his second-floor flat in Brondesbury, he had told himself what a beautiful morning it was, how lucky he was to be walking in the sun, what a joy London could be on these days. He admired the boys in their shorts and vests; they might have been on their way to the Heath or to an open-air swimming pool, and Duncan might have been going with them. He had performed this mental trick before, pushing what he did not want to think about to the back of his mind – his father, Christmas, what Mr Mansfield his supervisor had said to him the day before. He had performed the trick with his job as he did now, putting it quite out of his mind and letting his feet trace a route without thinking what was at the end of it. In his bag was a Tupperware box of lunch, in his pocket a Baldwin novel: he might have been saving the two for a read under a tree with a picnic, not an hour in the staff room at lunchtime. It was only when he was in the street of the unemployment office, almost before the staff door, which was to the side of the locked public door, that he remembered he was not going to the Heath, not going to swim, not going to take his clothes off with the boys of London today. He was going to sit in his neat white short-sleeved shirt and tie with his suit trousers on, and listen to the failures of society asking for more money.

‘Did you see that programme on last night?’ Marion was saying, as she puffed up behind him. She was a colleague at the same level as him. She had been there longer – it had been a mysterious amount longer for some time – and had a tendency to explain ordinary things to him, where the coffee money was kept, where the better sandwich shop was at lunchtime, how it was important to stay calm and not raise your voice even when they deserved killing, really. He had in the end discovered that she had started working there three months and two weeks before him. Some still older hands probably regarded the pair of them as having the same sort of newness. He could see it happening when, as time passed, still newer colleagues, processors and analysts and form-fillers, arrived in batches.

‘I don’t think I did,’ Duncan said. ‘I was catching up with some ironing I should have done at the weekend. Terrible, really.’ He held the door open for her.

‘Oh, it was incredible,’ Marion said, coming in and removing her headscarf. Her hair stuck to her scalp. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It was a programme about nudists, all over the world. All of them, all on holiday, like that, like the day they were born. Hello, Frank.’

On the stone steps just inside the unemployment office, Duncan made up his mind without intending to. The steps were just the same as they had been at his grammar school. They spoke institution. He was smiling and trying to show an interest in a forty-year-old woman watching a television documentary about nudists and saying hello politely to a man with a scruffy beard who commuted every day from St Albans. The man looked at him in return with painful disapproval, hardly greeting him. The man’s name he had always believed to be Fred and perhaps he really was called Fred, since Marion never listened to anything she was told. Duncan had been the subject of institutions before, and now, as he easily absorbed himself into the flow of the institution before the locked doors opened, he felt himself to be the easy agent of those institutions. And that would not do. It was as if he had become a schoolteacher, but without the power of doing good in the world. He would spend a glorious sunny day inside, looking at high windows through which the light fell, looking down at men who smelt, at women who had slept in their clothes, at people begging for money just to feed their kiddies because they were desperate and they didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. There would be students coming in soon, pretending to be interested in getting a job between their summer and their autumn terms. There would be people who had been sacked and people who could not work through injury not their fault. He would sit in the sad, echoing hall on the other side of his desk. He thought of all those people and he really did not give a shit about any of them.

Going into his office he realized that there was no reason why he should not resign from his job and go to work in Sicily. Teaching English. It could hardly be any worse than here. And why Sicily? It was cheap, Duncan knew; it spoke Italian, which he had a smattering of. But mostly Duncan thought of Sicily because he had, the week before, picked up an off-duty Sicilian waiter in a gay pub on St Martin’s Lane, and the island, now, for him, was a land full of lemons, oranges and waiters called Salvatore. By half past ten he had told an overweight woman looking for employment in the legal field that she was wasting everyone’s time and should aim much, much lower. By eleven he had gone to see his supervisor, and had told him that he wanted to resign at the end of the month. By six thirty he was in the same gay pub on St Martin’s Lane – he had phoned up everyone he could think of on their office numbers – and he was telling a thrilled group of twenty men with moustaches, almost all with checked shirts on, just what he had done and where he was going to go.

‘You’ve got some nerve,’ Paul said, coming back from the bar with a half of lager and lime and a pint of bitter for Duncan. ‘I wish I had your nerve, even a bit of your nerve.’

‘If you only had a bit of his nerve,’ Simon said, ‘that’d only get you to the Isle of Wight, not much of a life-change, that, I don’t think.’

‘Cheek!’ Paul said.

Even Andrew had come, though it was his night for his men’s group, and he never liked to miss that. Or was it revolutionary politics? ‘I’ll come to that some time,’ Paul said. ‘Sounds like a right laugh.’ Anyway, it was a fantastic turn-out, and they were still there at closing time, most of them. Why Sicily? Why not.

3.

Sicily had spoken to him on the fourth day, exactly as he had known it would. He had gone to see his father in his falling-down old house in Harrow the day before he left, to tell him – after he had left the unemployment job – that he was going to the other side of Europe. He had dreaded it, but it wasn’t, in the end, so bad. His father was not what he had been. His shoulders had narrowed, and surely he had grown shorter. His hair fell in a solid lump away from his forehead, not washed for some days. As always, he had immediately started talking about himself. ‘When I started work in the insurance company,’ he said, ‘there was a man there who was a great friend of mine. He admired me immensely. “I just don’t know how you manage to get through all the work you do,” he used to say. When I managed to get out of going into the army, he was drafted in. And he –’ his father reached for a handkerchief, sitting in a damp crumple on the walnut card table by the side of his habitual mustardy winged armchair ‘– he went into Sicily. The first wave of the liberation. He never spoke about it to me when he came back. By then I had made myself useful in all sorts of ways, and I was his superior by a good distance when he returned to his post, but I always let him call me by my Christian name, if no one was around, and I think he appreciated that a great deal. My father always said to me – your grandfather – he said, “Treat your subordinates with courtesy, and they will treat you with respect.” And I believe I’ve always done precisely that.’

Duncan waited to hear something about Sicily. There in his father’s mind, there was an irritating fly, buzzing about, a tiny fly, not visible, but audible, and introduced into the normal furniture and spaces of the mind without warning. The name of the fly – what was it? It was Sicily. But in time it proved to go quite harmoniously with all the furniture that was already in the room, and could really safely be ignored.

‘Your mother always wanted to go to Italy,’ his father continued. He stroked the arm of the chair; it was bald from this repeated gesture, carried out all the time, all day long, while his father gave the impression of thought. ‘Not Sicily, I don’t think. She wanted to go to Rome, and Florence, and Venice, I believe. But I looked into it, and I found that Rome was a dangerous sort of place. It would not suit us. The food, too, would not suit. The best food in Europe is the food in southern Germany, where the salads are clean and the vegetables are well prepared. I explained all this to your mother. It was only a whim on her part. In the end I decided to surprise her, and we took a holiday on Lake Como, and she enjoyed it a lot. She said, “Samuel, I thought I wanted to go to Rome, but this was a lovely idea of yours, and I don’t think anything in Italy could improve on this.” All the Italians go for their holidays to Lake Como, you know. You don’t catch Italians going to Rome for their summer holidays. That was really a clever wheeze of mine, I always think.’

On the way out of the house, Duncan noticed the long greasy mark, like the drag of a mop, about five feet up along the old floral wallpaper in the hall. He had noticed it before. ‘Let me come with you,’ his father said, walking in a tired old way out of the sitting room at the back of the house. Duncan said there was no need, and with surprise his father agreed there was no need – he wasn’t proposing to walk him to the bus stop. ‘I’ve got to go out to post a letter,’ his father said. ‘To your aunt Rachel. She will keep on writing. “Dear Samuel …”’ Duncan’s father made a derisory imitation of a woman speaking his name, as if it were an obviously stupid thing to write, even at the beginning of a letter. He refused an offer of Duncan’s to post his own letter for him. Then he leant his head against the wall, just above the shoe-rack in the hall, and took his slippers off before putting on his brown shoes, much mended and soft with much polishing. He moved his head along the wall as he did so, just there, where the dark streak of grease had formed.

‘And you’ll be off shortly, I expect,’ his father said. ‘I suppose all the duties of dropping in and seeing how I am are going to fall on your sister now. If you had come yesterday, I could have put all this news in my letter to your aunt Rachel, but I’m not going to waste a good envelope now it’s sealed.’

‘And the stamp,’ Duncan said, opening the door with the stained-glass window. The glass porch at the front was hot and dry; in it, a rubber plant was yellow, dying, withered. That was not the place for it, but his father had given up watering it.

‘Oh, you can detach and reattach stamps to a new envelope,’ his father said, putting his raincoat on and feeling in his pocket for his keys. ‘Sometimes a letter arrives and the lazy so-and-sos at the GPO haven’t franked it. No, I wouldn’t trust you to remember to post my letter, and then I’ve got your aunt Rachel to deal with.’

It was only four days after arriving in Sicily that Duncan woke up not in the cheap hotel in the centre he had settled in but in a bright bedroom at the top of an old palazzo, and just remembering the exchange of glances, the small nod, the turn and the falling into simple conversation on the street the night before. He just remembered the sequence that had followed the delicious greasy almondy dinner, the fish swimming in oil and eaten at dangerous room temperature, and the way the two of them had piled up the four flights of stairs with their hands and mouths all over each other in the hot stairwell; just remembered the man’s face as he turned his head and found the warm tangle of unkempt black hair and the grand Arab nose in the dark sleeping face. His own arm, just flushed with red after wandering around the blazing city for three days, made a sharp contrast against the man’s conker-coloured chest. He had heard that there were blond people in the city, descendants of what, Normans? Englishmen? His father’s colleague and subordinate? But they were not like him, and he saw his desirability as something exotic. That was the day Sicily spoke to him, and it spoke when the man, whose name was Salvatore, as always, left him in bed and returned with what he called breakfast, a brioche each, with chocolate granita in one, lemon granita in the other. There was a shop just underneath. ‘It’s my breakfast every day, beginning May, till September,’ this Salvatore said. The hot brioche and the stab of ice made Duncan’s face ache; the pain of eating iced food too fast spread across his sinuses, and Salvatore rubbed his face with his big hands. Later, when they were done, they were both showered, the dog, a noble Irish setter called Pippo, had been admitted to the bedroom and praised, and it was time for Duncan to go, he commented on Salvatore getting dressed. ‘You don’t wear underwear,’ he said.

‘Again, from May to September, never,’ Salvatore said, spraying his bare chest with cologne. ‘Do you not know? No Sicilian will wear underwear for five months. It is just too hot. Oh, the day in September when you have to put on your underwear!’

‘But the day in May when you are allowed to take it off?’ Duncan said. Salvatore laughed and laughed, warmly, ecstatically, half with Duncan and half in exact memory of that annual private festival. And Sicily had spoken to Duncan. He never saw that particular Salvatore again, not even in passing in the street. He welcomed the introduction of a new rule of Italian life. Most of the rules seemed to be concerned with food, of not having cappuccino after eleven in the morning, of never eating cheese with fish, of not combining a fish course with a meat course – this was theoretical to Duncan, who had to find some means of earning a living within, he calculated, three weeks. Later he discovered rules about behaviour, of what to call people, of who you should stand up in front of. Those were all public rules, which strangers on buses would share with you.

But the rules of clothes, the rule that said you should not wear short socks or a tie with a suit, that you should not wear a pair of shorts in town, and that on the first of May all Sicilian men left their underwear off until autumn, those were rules that were passed on exactly like this one, first thing in the morning in a strange bedroom or, once Duncan had found the loan of a pretty little flat off the via Merulana from another teacher, all wooden furniture and cool dark red tiles underfoot, in his own bedroom. Duncan would walk down the street and see the men passing, and think not only, They’re none of them wearing any underwear, but It’s the rule that they don’t have to wear underwear, and they all – all of them – they all know that none of the rest of them are. Not one of them. Sicily had spoken to him, on the fourth day.

4.

‘Yes,’ he said to the man in the departure lounge at Catania airport. ‘Yes, I like Sicily a lot. I’ve got to go back to England now, though. My father’s dying.’

The man made a formal gesture of regret, and the conversation was over. On the other side of the glass wall, the blind man battered on and on, his face turning from side to side, as he called for help.

5.

The house in Harrow had once looked like its neighbours – a substantial Edwardian house, with gables and a bay window at the front. But it had been added to, and now was pointed out, and people shook their heads over it. A garage had come first, in the 1930s, a square box with a wooden double door, once painted blue; an old red Volvo, seventeen years old, hardly used, wallowed in there. But Duncan’s father had done the rest. A sun terrace at the back, pushing the house further out into the garden; a square block of a kitchen at the side, in a sort of black tarpaulin material covering brickwork, the sort of material that covered flat roofs in this part of the world; a glass porch before the old Edwardian front door, now with a dead houseplant in it and a pile of unopened letters on the windowshelf. There was a square attic conversion at the top, a bald cube in peeling white planks and a square empty window cutting out of the dormer roof; there was another extension, which had been made on the first floor, resting on top of the garage. The original house was in there somewhere, impossible to imagine among all those black geometries, all that contrived asymmetry for the sake of an extra room here and there.

Samuel, Duncan’s father, had kept the builders of Harrow busy, and the property lawyers, too: he meticulously applied for planning permission for every small change and every extension, resubmitting when he was turned down, discussing details every which way with the builder – he would not employ an architect when, as he said, the builder had to build it, and he knew very well what was needed. It was Duncan’s memory of his childhood, to be banished with his sister Domenica to a spare room or other while a part of the house was rendered uninhabitable for months – the dining room with no wall, the kitchen huddled and stripped without cupboards, the builders sitting on the ground smoking where the sun lounge was going to go. There were only the four of them; their parents were in the future going to need less space, not more. In the end, he concluded that it was his father’s hobby, like the law suit his father brought with gusto against a builder when one extension, to the dining room, proved to let in rain in torrents.

In the streets of Harrow, people pointed out the house as a disaster, as something extended and pulled beyond what anything could reasonably take. They pointed it out now. Upstairs, the curtains were drawn in the master bedroom, where Samuel lay dying. He was sleeping at the moment. A nurse had sat with him overnight, now that he was in no position to argue with the expense, or with the fact that she was Trinidadian. She was speaking in low tones to the day nurse, who had just arrived in her little beige Morris Marina and was taking off her thin summer coat in the hall.

In the summer terrace, the glass-covered extension at the back of the house, three women sat. They were Duncan’s aunts, his father’s three sisters. They had been there in pairs, or all three of them, for days. They were Aunt Rachel, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Rebecca. A grandfather had named them after Biblical figures, not foreseeing that, for ever afterwards in north London, people would ask them and their brother Samuel which synagogue they went to, creating a hostility they saw no reason to diminish. Samuel’s children were called Duncan and Domenica; the children of Ruth and Rebecca were called Amanda, Raymond, Richard and Caroline. Normal names, Ruth would say, meaning what she meant by that. Rachel had no children, but if she had, she would have named them away from the scriptures too; she had a black parrot, however, named Ezekiah. Ruth and Rachel were already in black, as if preparing for the day of their brother’s death; Rebecca, a plump woman, was wearing a practical tweed, her hat still on. They were talking about their niece and nephew.

‘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.’