The Emperor Waltz

There was a shriek from the end of the room. Rachel had brought her black parrot, Ezekiah, promising he would be no trouble but he liked to have some company around him. The room smelt faintly of bird, and he had a look in his eye, a wizened, assessing, timing look; Ruth and Rebecca went nowhere near him, and he sat on the backs of what chairs he chose, his claws like wrinkled grey tools.

‘The son – he was always a nasty little boy,’ Rebecca said. ‘I never thought much of him. Crying into his mother’s skirts, never wanting to come out and say hello. Scared of everything. Just the same now, I imagine.’

‘I found his address in Italy,’ Rachel said. ‘He had written to Samuel to tell him where he lived. I sent the telegram. More than that I cannot do. You know what he is?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ruth said. ‘One of them.’

‘One of them?’ Rebecca said. ‘Oh, not a marrying type. How dreadful for Samuel. I expect he will turn up once poor Samuel has died, wanting to spend Samuel’s money on cushions, lipstick and a sex-change operation.’ Rebecca made a gesture; a feminine gesture but not a feminine gesture a woman would make, rather the extension and admiration of her finger-ends, which were a gardener’s hands, trimmed and painted with red polish. She made a curdling moue, a pout; she meant not to be a woman or to suggest one, but to show what Duncan might be like. ‘Lop it off, Doctor,’ she said.

‘But there isn’t going to be as much money as he thought,’ Rachel said, smiling sadly and shaking her head. ‘Samuel handled that all very well. I am so glad we explained everything to him so well while he was still not in too much pain.’

‘It was such a good idea, getting one of those easy forms from Smith’s,’ Ruth said. ‘It saved all the bother and expense of going to the solicitor. That was a very good idea of yours, Rachel.’

‘But there is a virtue in having a family solicitor for years,’ Rebecca said. ‘I always said so. And Mr Brooke is such a friend.’

‘Samuel saw the point, didn’t he?’ Ruth said. ‘We didn’t talk him into anything, nobody would be able to say that. I am so glad that Rachel got the will, and did everything, and got it witnessed, and took it to Mr Brooke for safekeeping. That was very good of Rachel.’

‘That was very good of Rachel,’ Rebecca said. ‘Of course we didn’t talk Samuel into anything. If the son got hold of the house, he would only sell it immediately and pocket the money. We wouldn’t have any say in the matter at all. He would probably sell it to the Jews. They buy everything for cash. They don’t trust the banks.’

‘They must trust some of the banks,’ Ruth said. She beat the floor with her walking stick emphatically. ‘They run a lot of them – behind the scenes.’

‘That’s true,’ Rebecca said thoughtfully. ‘If it’s not the Jews in Harrow, it’s the Pakistanis. Over the road, the house that used to be lived in by the Harrises, when we were girls, that’s owned by a family called – well, I don’t know, but they’re a Pakistani family and they fill it to the rafters. Soon there won’t be an English family left in the avenue at all.’

Out in the garden, on the low brick wall that surrounded the knee-high flowerbeds on the terrace, a blackbird sat; it cocked its head, and sang, and inspected the three women inside. Or perhaps it was just drawn to the reflection of sun on the large windows. They flashed in the morning light. Rachel was looking out of the window. She was not looking at her sisters at all, even as they praised her sense.

‘Poor Samuel,’ Ruth said. ‘There was really nothing more that any of us could have done in that direction. We wrote to the son, and we wrote to the daughter. Where are they? Thank goodness he doesn’t know what’s going on around him any more.’

6.

Upstairs, in a darkened room, Samuel found himself. He felt odd, and then he remembered that he was ill. The curtains were drawn, but it must be time to get up. Behind the curtains there was a hot day already. He could feel it. The curtains were brown but behind them the sun was bright and making everything red. Yesterday he had been able to jump out of bed and draw the curtains across and the rabbits had been eating in the garden, a dozen of them. He had wanted to go and get his gun and pick them off from the window, but Nanny had not let him. ‘Not on a Sunday,’ Nanny had said. That had been yesterday. But then it seemed to him that that had been a very long time ago, when he was a small boy, and then it seemed to him that it had not happened at all.

The pillow and the sheet were creased and uncomfortable, and he could smell something – a sour smell, physical and not his own smell. But perhaps it was his own smell now. The temperature seemed wrong. His feet and legs were cold, but his head sweltered. No – his feet and legs were not cold, but they were numb. Samuel had always prided himself on getting the exact right word, and the word for his lower body was ‘numb’, not ‘cold’. And yet the sensations in his head and neck were more alert than they should have been, as well as hotter. There was a great heat spreading from the seams and rucks of the cotton sheets into his face, and he turned his head restlessly. There was a woman in his bedroom. There had not been a woman sitting in his bedroom since – he struggled for her name and could not remember the name of the wife he had been married to for decades – since Helen died. For a moment he thought it must be Death. Her face was covered by shade from where he looked. In her lap, a strip of light fell on a book. She read on, and in a moment passed her hand over her hair in an unconscious grooming gesture. Her hair was a vivid ginger, and neatly tied back. It needed no grooming, but the hand passed over it in reassurance. When Samuel saw the hair of the woman, he said to himself immediately ‘At least it’s not the coloured one,’ and then he remembered immediately. She was one of his nurses, the daytime one, who was sitting with him and doing things for him. If she was here, it was not early morning, when the coloured one sat with him. It would be the afternoon. He had slept most of the day, then. He congratulated himself on the continuing liveliness of his own mind, when he concentrated. Her name would come to him, but it was not important.

‘Nurse,’ he tried to say, and then again, ‘Nurse.’ The nurse looked up from her book. ‘The sheets need changing,’ he said.

‘What’s that, Mr Flannery?’ she said, rising and placing her hand, unsmilingly, on his forehead. He tried again.

The nurse smoothed them out underneath him, and promised to change them when her other colleague arrived for the evening. ‘I’m not sure who that’s going to be, to tell you the truth, Mr Flannery, but I know it’s going to be just an hour or two, if you can put up with it a little longer.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Samuel said meekly. ‘They’re really twisted and damp and I feel hot. Can I change my pyjamas?’

‘That I can do,’ the nurse said. ‘I’ll just clean you up and pop you in the chair, Mr Flannery, and then I’ll change your sheets as well, straight away. How do you feel in general?’

‘What was that shriek, that scream? I heard a woman screaming.’

‘It was your sister’s parrot,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s downstairs. He shouldn’t be here at all, in point of fact. It has a strange name, that bird.’

‘I remember,’ Samuel said, and was about to say the bird’s name, but it had gone, and there had been a woman shrieking about it, screaming, really, not ten feet from his ear. He hope that terrible screaming would stop soon. ‘I feel terrible. Terrible,’ Samuel said. ‘I don’t think I can sit in a chair. It all hurts so much and I don’t know where I am sometimes.’ Then a thought came to him. He remembered very well where he was and what was happening. ‘You could ask one of my sisters to help to change. They’re here. They’re the three women sitting in the kitchen. They used to be girls but they’re old women now. You know the ones I mean.’

‘Oh, Samuel,’ the nurse said. ‘Mr Flannery, I mean. You are a card.’

He was puzzling over what she meant, but then he felt quite suddenly very sleepy and he closed his eyes and when he opened them again it was night-time and there was a different nurse.

‘Would you,’ he said, ‘would you …’ but he couldn’t get any further.

‘Hello, Mr Flannery,’ the other nurse said. She stood up in a quiet but decisive way. She was the one called Balls. Nurse Balls. He remembered that one. Not all of the nurses remembered they weren’t to call him Samuel, but she did. She didn’t have ginger hair. It was hard to say what colour her hair was.

‘Would you,’ he said, then stopped again, puzzled. He was not quite sure what he wanted to ask for.

‘Water?’ the nurse said. ‘Is it water that you’re saying, Mr Flannery?’

And then Samuel smiled – did he smile on his face or was he just smiling inside? He was probably smiling inside. His face hurt so much. But he smiled because he had said, ‘Would you,’ and she had thought he said, ‘Water’; perhaps there was something wrong with her ears or perhaps he had spoken indistinctly, having just woken up, and in fact he had forgotten what he was going to ask for but it was right: it had been water he had wanted. That was strange. He tried to say, ‘Would you bring me some water?’ but it grew complicated, his tongue in his mouth. It seemed to have grown and grown. He shut his eyes, and he found himself in the same dream of illness he had always had, since he was a small boy, whenever he had fever. He was floating in a colourless space with no features, just a grid of small dots, when the small dots began to swell and grow inside. One of them had got inside his mouth, and it grew and grew, swelling until it forced his mouth open, and inside his mouth there was nothing but a great hard stone. He opened his eyes. The taste of the stone was still there. He did not know whether he had slept or not. The woman who was standing there, he did not know her. She was wearing a coat, or a white dress, or a uniform of some sort; it rucked up tightly around her thighs and bottom. What was she doing there? It was his room and he was being ill in it. She was not his wife and she was not his sister, any of them. Then he remembered he had a daughter but she was not her either.

‘Would you like some water, Mr Flannery?’ the woman said, and then he remembered what she was. She was a nurse. He nodded and she went over to the dresser where a glass jug stood covered with a plate. She removed it and poured water into one of the large tumblers from downstairs. It was really a whisky tumbler, engraved, but he took it and drank from it. I’ll drink whisky again, he thought, but only when I feel a good deal better.

‘Where is Helen?’ he said, passing the glass back. ‘I want to see Helen.’

‘I think she’s downstairs,’ the nurse said. ‘That’s one of the ladies downstairs, is she not?’

Samuel nodded. ‘And I want to see Duncan,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where Duncan can be. I haven’t seen him since he was – oh, fifteen or sixteen. He ran away to sea, you know. He ended up in Italy. He’s there to this very day. I want to see him now, because I don’t want to die without seeing him. Am I dying? I know I am.’ And his eyes filled with tears. He pitied himself so much for what he was having to go through. Nobody else had ever gone through this. He had asked a question, but the nurse was moving around the room, settling things and returning the water jug to its place. She had not heard any of what he had said. It was typical. But then he thought that perhaps he had not said any of that out loud. ‘I don’t want to have to go to Sicily,’ he said.

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.’