The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Where did we go? Did we go to Whipsnade, or some other zoo, or Box Hill, or was it to the theatre? It would have been a special treat. I don’t know that Whipsnade was open then, come to think of it, so maybe not there. And did you ask Dommie if she’d like to bring ten friends with her? I wish I could remember what her special treat was.’

  Samuel turned his head away. ‘When it gets worse,’ he said, ‘they’ll take me into hospital, but I hope I’m not going to know about any of that.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not going to get any worse than this,’ Duncan said lightly. ‘This is probably it. I wouldn’t have thought you had long to go. About Dommie’s birthday. What was it that we all did together? I think I remember now. She was going to be nine, and you told her that you thought she was too old to have a party, and she couldn’t ask her friends round because it would cost too much and it would be too much noise and trouble. But since you ask, you’re not going to get any worse. You’re probably going to die quite soon.’

  Samuel turned his face to Duncan in disbelief. His hollows and unshaven angles said only this: it’s your obligation to do whatever I say. It was not for Duncan to do anything but to give way.

  ‘So,’ Duncan said. ‘Are you comfortable? Can I do anything for you, in your last hours? Or do you just want me to go away so that you can sit with Rebecca and Ruth and Rachel? I don’t really care.’

  ‘Oh, you think you’re so clever,’ Samuel said, breathing deeply, the air juddering within. He raised his thin hand to his hairy, bony chest in the gap in his pyjama jacket. ‘That’s what you were always like, showing off. Let me do my dance – I made it up, Mummy. Look, Aunty Rachel, look, Uncle Harold, look at the dolly I made, isn’t it pretty. Oh, yes. I can see you came back to show off and tell me to bugger off before I die. But I can show you one thing.’

  There was a long pause; Samuel’s breath guttered and shuddered; he twisted in pain; he pulled at the bedsheets. Duncan waited. He did not want to help his father. He wanted to see how long it would take him to return to the point where he could speak again, or sleep. He watched with interest. In less than five minutes, his father had calmed. Outside the door, a chair scraped against the parquet. Sister Balls must have returned, and be sitting outside. He did not have a lot of time.

  ‘It hurts to talk,’ Samuel said. ‘There’s one thing I want you to see. In that box, there, on the dressing-table.’

  Duncan went over and drew it out. It was a document; a pre-printed form filled in in Samuel’s wavering looping hand, a will. ‘I don’t want to see this,’ Duncan said.

  ‘Look at it,’ Samuel said.

  Duncan did. There was what looked like a duplicate underneath. In a moment he read that his father was leaving his whole estate in equal parts to his two children, his three sisters, his five nephews and nieces, and seven named charities and educational institutions, including the Harrow rugby club, and Harrow School, which neither Duncan nor his father had attended. ‘I see,’ Duncan said. The will, which was to give him, what, a seventeenth part of this ugly house and the bank balance, was dated from two months ago. It was witnessed by a Corinna Balls, and another woman, whose handwriting made Duncan think she was another nurse.

  ‘You didn’t ask Aunt Rebecca or Aunt Ruth to witness it,’ he said.

  ‘No, you stupid boy,’ Samuel said. ‘You can’t get people to witness something they’re going to—’ He broke down in coughing.

  ‘Going to benefit from,’ Duncan said. ‘They’re not going to benefit very much, though, are they?’

  ‘I think,’ Samuel said. ‘I think – I’m going to cross Domenica out. She hasn’t been to see me. So you’ll get a little bit more. That’ll be nice, won’t it.’

  ‘And a lawyer’s drawn this up, has he?’ Duncan said. Samuel looked withdrawn and serene. ‘Oh, I see – it’s just something you’ve bought from the newsagent and filled in. Got Sister Balls to get from the newsagent. Something for everyone to discover after you die? I see. You just want people to know that they don’t deserve anything from you.’

  Duncan looked at his father. He knew perfectly well that Duncan would take this document and destroy it. It could have no effect on what happened to Samuel’s estate. But before Samuel died, he wanted to make clear to Duncan what he thought of him.

  ‘The thing is,’ Duncan said, ‘I don’t think that Domenica would take your money anyway. I think she’d probably take however much it was, and hand it over to the NSPCC. Do you think she wants anything to do with you?’

  ‘I’m her father,’ Samuel said.

  ‘There was an afternoon, wasn’t there,’ Duncan said, ‘when you said, Let’s all go out swimming, the children and I. Which was odd, because you never suggested anything like that for the children’s pleasure. You know, don’t you, that because Dommie never had any parties after she was eight years old, no one ever thought to ask her to theirs? I don’t suppose you ever thought of that. You only ever wanted to do your own thing. And Dommie said that she couldn’t swim, she didn’t know how, and you said that didn’t matter. You’d gone to the effort of buying her a swimming costume. She didn’t have one. She was only six. And when we all got to the swimming pool, you said to her, This is the way to swim, you know, and you picked her up by her arms and legs and threw her into the deep end, with no floats or anything, and just stood there. The lifeguard jumped in and rescued her. He gave you what for, you horrible old man, asking you what you thought you were doing. Don’t you remember?’

  Samuel shook his head demurely. He looked like such a small person, a small entrapped dwarf in a fairytale with a secret.

  ‘I remember. Even in the 1950s, you didn’t just throw small children into the deep end of swimming pools and wait to see if they drowned or not.’

  ‘Oh, once,’ Samuel said, shaking his head.

  ‘Every week,’ Duncan said. ‘Making her wait at the table to eat mutton fat. Making her walk all the way back to school in the dark in January to make her find a pencil case she had dropped. Do you know, you’ve never once given me any help or advice – you’ve never done anything for me, except once. Mummy made you explain to me how to shave. You couldn’t get out of that. That was it. I’m glad you’re dying. It won’t make the slightest difference to anyone. And what’s this rubbish?’ He held up the will. In the light it was a sad object: the handwritten parts were shaky and full of uneven gaps and holes. ‘No one’s going to pay any attention to that. I’m surprised Balls didn’t tell you not to be so stupid. Shall I burn it or shall I just tear it up?’

  ‘You do whatever you want to,’ Samuel said, crying. ‘The last wishes of a dying man. The last wishes of your dying father.’

  ‘The last wishes of my dying father are about as good as the wishes he had during his lifetime,’ Duncan said. ‘I’ll get rid of this, somehow. My conscience is going to deal with it. And it’s all going to come to me and Dommie, your money. You bet. A hundred quid to Balls and another to the other one. They won’t remember they’d ever signed anything. If you’ve told your sisters, do you think anyone’s ever going to believe them? And do you know what I’m going to do with my money? All that lovely money? Because you saved quite a lot from the insurance racket, Daddy. And this horrible house? Not enough to go round seventeen, but plenty for two. Me? I’m going to open a bookshop. I’m going to open the first gay bookshop in London. There are so many good books written by homosexuals. And lesbians. You know what they are. And there’s going to be a bookshop where you’ll be able to buy their books, if they’re dead or foreign or not available, and a place where you can come if you’re a homosexual or a lesbian and spend all day there, buying books and meeting people like you. That’s what your money’s going to do. That’s what you were working towards, all your life, without knowing it, Sam – you were working towards a bookshop celebrating sexual perversion. You know me – you know I’m a sexual pervert, too? My God, the men I’ve had in Sicily. It would make your eyes pop out of their sockets. Oh, I look forward to entertai
ning your ghost there, in my gay bookshop. We’re going to hang up a picture of you by the front door to say thank you, Sam, for making all of this possible. You thought you were buggering me up, and Dommie, too, and it made you laugh. But you were actually saving up, and giving us the chance to get out from under your stone. So thank you so much. And –’ Duncan took the two wills – ‘I’ll take care of these. Thanks. And ’bye. I won’t be seeing you again, Daddy.’

  ‘I’ll,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll. Write. It.’ His chest was torn open with coughing. Duncan waited and counted. He would not start caring now. He would not remember his father’s lifelong actions – he could not: most of it was neglect and a sneer. ‘Send. Nurse. Out.’

  ‘You stupid old man,’ Duncan said. ‘You can’t write it again. Don’t you know? You’re dying. You’re going to die tonight. You might last until tomorrow morning. You can’t write any more. But at least I saw you before you died. Remember that. Oh – I’m sorry. It’s us that will be remembering you, not the other way round. ’Bye then. I’ll send the nurse in.’

  Duncan got up, and turned the bedside light off. He folded the two stationers’ wills – they were only a couple of pages each – and put them into his jacket pocket. He stroked his father’s forehead – it was damp and hot, and writhed under the touch. His father cried out, an inarticulate noise, and his arms came up, as if to hit Duncan. The door opened, and the nurse whose name was Balls stood there, her stance inclined and concerned.

  ‘I’m just leaving,’ Duncan said quietly, going over to her. ‘I think he’s in a little pain, but we’ve managed to talk. I think it meant a lot to him. Thank you for everything, Sister.’

  ‘It’s my job – you don’t need to thank me. I’ll give him some morphine for the pain,’ Sister Balls said. ‘He does seem bad. It’ll help him to get some rest.’

  ‘And Daddy,’ Duncan said, raising his voice over the calls of pain, ‘I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.’

  But there was no articulate response. Sister Balls switched the light back on, and went to her case on the chest of drawers for the morphine. Duncan left the room and walked downstairs. From the sitting room came a violent shriek, the parrot’s yayayayaya. He ignored the aunts and their clawed familiar, and left the house with the sense of a burden lifting, or about to lift. Somewhere, a knotted little Clapham presence, a girl in a one-bedroom rented flat surrounded by her favourite objects, intensely waited. He could feel Dommie’s northward gaze on him. She knew he was back in her city, and had gone where she would not go. He saw her, in the safety of her room, surrounded by animals in plush on the bed, animals in glass and porcelain on the windowsill. In her frozen menagerie, she was expecting him.

  10.

  ‘Thank God he’s gone,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m going to go upstairs and get the will – the real one, the last one. And then tomorrow I’m going to put it in a very, very safe place.’

  But Rebecca and Ruth just shook their heads. Rachel’s parrot raised his head, and looked around from the back of the chair where he prowled and surveyed, and gave one reprimanding, minatory, regretful shriek. He was thirty-four years old, a great age for a parrot. Despite that, his voice was what it had always been, and his plumage as black, and he looked about him with triumph. He enjoyed it when he shrieked, and made the women leap.

  11.

  It was later than Duncan thought, and the train back into town was almost empty. He stepped into the carriage, its slatted wooden floor and its damp-smelling upholstery familiar but not thought of for months. At the far end of the carriage, a middle-aged black man sat, reading his book. Duncan put his bag on the seat opposite, and opened it. The Embassy would just be opening now. There was no reason not to go. It would be good to spend his first night back in London with a stranger; to get fucked by someone whose name he couldn’t quite remember at the exact moment his father was dying. The suitcases would turn up tomorrow – something else to look forward to. But in the meantime he had the clothes he had been wearing that morning in Sicily, changed out of in the toilets at Charles de Gaulle; a satin pair of shorts and a tight black T-shirt with an American flag on it. He was glad he’d taken the trouble to fold them neatly. He took off his jacket, there in the carriage, and then his white shirt; he pulled his jeans over his trainers, and folded everything. At the end of the carriage, the man had abandoned his book: he was staring, astonished, at the thin man with a shock of blond hair who had got onto the train and quickly stripped to his underpants. Duncan gave a mock curtsy to the man, whose attention quickly focused on the book again. The rackety bopping of the train’s wheels was going all disco in Duncan’s mind; the music on the dance-floor was in his thoughts. He could hardly wait. And then he wriggled into the shorts, glad that he had put on white socks with the trainers; he unfolded the T-shirt, and slipped into it. In his mind was the pump and funk of the two a.m. sweat machine, and the hot grind of jaw and hip after speed; and thirty boys he hadn’t seen for months. To the rhythm of the train’s wheels, he gave an unseen little pirouette, a twist, a shake, a small punch of the fist upwards, just there in the train carriage. And tomorrow he would call Dommie, as soon as he felt up to it.

  BOOK 3

  Next Year

  1.

  ‘I don’t know why we’ve got to come here,’ Nick said.

  ‘Allow it. Always the fucking same,’ Nathan said. ‘We were all right where we were. Then they say to you, you can’t stay here, you’ve got to come with us. So we come with them—’

  ‘Yeah, we come with them,’ Nick said.

  ‘And when we get there, it’s long, man. They say us, you can’t stay here,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Not downstairs, no way, is it,’ Nick said.

  ‘You’ve got to go upstairs,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s for you, is it?’

  ‘They don’t say that,’ Nick said. ‘They pretend it’s a treat, like it’s what they’re doing it for, like it’s total nang.’

  ‘Skeen. And we’re like wagwarn, having to eat all that food and make out you’re liking it, like,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Leastways,’ Nick said, ‘leastways we don’t have to be eating that food and shit. That looked rank, man.’

  ‘Don’t laugh at the food, man,’ Nathan said. ‘She said she was bringing us up some food in ten and it ain’t gonna be Claridges.’

  ‘Oh, man,’ Nick said. ‘I’m glad you bring that bottle of poppers, bro.’

  The first speaker was a boy of thirteen, with dark blond hair in curls and thick, adult eyebrows. The second was his identical twin. Both of them had newly deep, grating voices; their faces had grown in large, unexpected directions recently, giving them big noses and angular Adam’s apples. They talked at each other, not looking into each other’s faces, rapidly and with London accents. The room they were in was a large study, with a picnic table set up in the middle with a cloth cast over it. The leather-topped desk had four drawers on either side, and a long drawer under the green leather surface, topped with gold inlay. One drawer to the left was locked, as was the long drawer. The others were all open, but contained nothing interesting: plastic pens, papers of no interest, a ball of string. On the desk sat a small hi-fi system; on it, a man was speaking over the sound of strings playing slowly.

  Nick sat in the executive chair at the desk; from time to time he swivelled violently. His twin lay at full length on the green leather sofa to the side of the room, kicking at the underneath of the suspended bookshelves above him, which contained nothing but two dozen boring-sounding books about law.

  ‘I ain’t eating what they’re eating,’ Nick said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m going to sniff poppers all night, I’m going to get so high, and I ain’t eating that food they’re eating. Did you see that shit?’

  ‘Who’s coming, apart from us?’ Nick said.

  ‘There’s that sket whose husband left her,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s got a kid who’s coming.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s that?’ Nick said.
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br />   ‘I don’t fucking know,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s that sket with the fat arse down the street.’

  ‘That why her husband left her?’ Nick said. ‘’Cause her husband’s left her, is it? Was it ’cause she’s so fucking fat, he couldn’t stand it?’

  ‘Yeah, fat but no tits,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s bad luck in life, man, that’s bad luck. You’re a sket who’s fat, but you’ve got no tits.’

  ‘Not like Andrew Barley, then,’ Nick said. They convulsed at the thought of Andrew Barley, a boy in their class who was last to be chosen, whom they’d beaten with a torn-off branch from one side of the playground to the other, who’d produced a note from his mum saying that he might be late for chemistry because it was on the other side of school and he couldn’t run because of his weight – it had actually said that, because of his weight. ‘Andrew Barley and his gigantic tits.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s like that,’ Nick said. ‘She’s coming because they feel sorry for her, is it? And her little boy, we’ve to be looking after him and he’s going to be sent up here.’

  ‘I look forward to that,’ Nathan said, using a sarcastic phrase they’d heard, with admiration, from Mr Andropoulos next door whenever he’d been told about something really boring or unpleasant about to happen, like the Notting Hill Carnival and Mrs Barley promising to make him her Facebook friend and his garden being bought up to make room for Crossrail and shit.

  ‘Yeah, I look forward to that too, all right,’ Nick said. ‘And their daughter’s coming in here in a bit, Mrs Khan said. She said she was coming back from something, from orchestra or something, and she’d come and sit with us and have dinner and play cards and that.’

  ‘Fuck me, Anita Khan,’ Nathan said. ‘I’d forgotten about Anita fucking Khan. She’s fucking mental.’