The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘The big gay bo,’ Chris said. ‘Bookshop, that’s going to say. The evil fucking bastards. Gay fucking books. Fucking each other on the pavement in Heatherwick Street.’

  ‘Mind your language, son,’ Andy said.

  2.

  People had volunteered to help out almost from the start. Duncan was really astonished. There were the old gang, of course, but there were people from Paul’s men’s group who Duncan just didn’t know at all. They had just turned up each morning, saying they were volunteering to do anything that Duncan wanted them to do. Paul came first, on the very first morning Duncan started work on the place. He’d come in in his yellow dungarees with nothing underneath – with Paul it was either that or the Andy Pandy ones, blue-and-white striped, these days. Duncan had been standing at the back of the shop, just measuring the space, making a list of what needed to be done. The builders had said they were coming that morning, but hadn’t turned up yet. Paul had called from the open door, ‘Coo-ee!’ They’d sat down, Paul on the floor, Duncan on the cherrywood counter where the rug-shop man had kept his account books and order forms – it had been too grand to have a till as such. No wonder they had gone under. Duncan was so pleased to see Paul: after half an hour they were laughing together about everything that needed to be done before the bookshop could open in a month’s time. Duncan would have had to laugh on his own otherwise.

  ‘The worst of it is,’ Duncan said, ‘that I’m paying rent anyway, while I’m turning it into the shop of my dreams.’

  ‘The shop of my dreams too,’ Paul said sententiously. He looked about in the empty shop for a mirror; he found none, and satisfied himself with licking his canine tooth as if to clear it of spinach. ‘I’ve always wanted a big gay bookshop to buy my filth from.’

  ‘No filth,’ Duncan said. ‘I insist – no filth.’

  ‘What?’ Paul said, but Duncan was convinced of that, and tried to explain. There were plenty of places in Soho for that. What there wasn’t was somewhere that stocked novels about gay life, books about what it was like to be gay, a place where gay people could come and meet …

  ‘There’s the Salisbury,’ Paul said.

  ‘We got thrown out of there last week,’ Duncan said. ‘There’s a new landlord. I heard from Andrew that he’s put up a sign saying “This pub is for couples only”, meaning breeders.’

  ‘The ingratitude!’ Paul said.

  ‘It’s a total disgrace,’ Duncan said. ‘They can come here and meet instead.’

  ‘You’re dreaming, dear,’ Paul said. ‘I’ll come, but I don’t think the Dilly boys are going to make it all the way up here. There’s still the Coleherne, I suppose.’

  ‘The ingratitude of that man!’ Duncan said. ‘When you think of the number of drinks we’ve poured down our necks at the Salisbury over the years. I hope it goes bust.’

  There was a pause; a contemplation of the Salisbury, its gilt and theatrical flourishes, its sour and watchful bar staff, the throwings out and the goings on. They would care less about the Salisbury’s future if there was much in the way of an alternative. As it was, you had to invest your hopes in what was there.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was much likelihood of the Coleherne going straight, there’s a consolation,’ Paul said. ‘Now, enough of messing about. What needs to be done? I put my third-worst dungarees on, so don’t be afraid of being the cause of my broken fingernails. I’m in a butch mood.’

  They went round the shop with pliers and screwdrivers, wrenching the little shelves from the walls, tearing down the artistic William Morris wallpaper. ‘It’s not too bad, the counter,’ Paul said. ‘It must have cost— That’s solid wood. It’s a shame to get rid of it.’

  ‘It’s in exactly the wrong place,’ Duncan said. ‘Do you think my Sicilian tan is fading?’

  ‘Well, it’ll do that over time,’ Paul said. ‘But the counter?’

  ‘It’s in exactly the wrong place, as I said,’ Duncan said. ‘Do you know? I think that might have been why no one ever came in here to buy a rug. Do me a favour, Paul – just go outside and walk past.’

  Duncan half crouched behind the counter, facing the door. There were no chairs. Paul went out, to the left, leaving the door open. He then walked past briskly.

  ‘No, no!’ Duncan called. ‘Look in.’

  ‘I did look in,’ Paul said. ‘Not very hard. I could just see you glowering like a madman at the door.’

  ‘And would you have come in?’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t be glowering in future, and there’d be lots of lovely things to come in and rifle through even if you hadn’t thought of buying, but, yes, you might have a point. The cash till directly facing the door is a bit off-putting. Shall I make a cup of tea?’

  ‘There’s no tea,’ Duncan said. ‘Or kettle. Or cups. You could go over the road and make friends with that fat bald bloke who runs the café. Got to blend in with the local community, you know.’

  ‘Blend in!’ Paul said. ‘Blend in!’

  Paul was wearing a pair of sunshine-yellow dungarees; his hair was cut upwards, like a cockatoo’s comb; he had a diamond earring in his left ear; it could not be sworn that there was no mascara on his eyelashes. He had a point in pouring scorn on the idea of blending in. Paul, Duncan supposed, was his best friend. ‘You’re the best friend I ever had who I’ve never been to bed with,’ Paul had once said to Duncan. Duncan hadn’t believed it. ‘Come on, besties?’ they would say to each other, after a row or a bicker, and besties they were.

  They had known each other for seven or eight years. One day at work, Duncan had been sitting at his desk between unemployed when his supervisor at the time, a woman called Karen, approached, followed by a willowy figure. His movements were strange and interesting: Karen was walking decisively forward; the new boy was havering from side to side, like a candle caught in a side wind. Mysteriously, they seemed to be progressing at the same speed.

  Karen introduced Paul, and placed him down at the desk – really, just a table – next to him. Paul had just joined them, she said, and she wanted him to watch what Duncan did. ‘He’s one of our old hands,’ she said. ‘Been here years. Longer than me. He knows the ropes. If you need anything, Duncan will show you. Everything all right?’

  Off she went. ‘I’ve been on a training programme,’ the new boy began. ‘And it was marvellous. I did think it wonderfully well thought through.’

  ‘Oh, there’s not so very much to master,’ Duncan said. ‘Ninety-five per cent of the people we see are completely straightforward to deal with.’

  ‘That,’ Paul said, ‘is so true of life. If only people told one that at the very beginning! That ninety-five per cent of all people, everywhere in the world, are completely straightforward to deal with. But that is because ninety-five per cent of people, everywhere, don’t really exist. Tell me, Duncan – Duncan, it is Duncan, isn’t it? Tell me, Duncan, has it ever struck you that ninety-five per cent of people everywhere –’ there was a smooth, slow movement of the hands apart from each other, gesturing towards the room, the civil servants, the unhappy unemployed, like the opening gesture in a stage musical ‘– simply don’t have any real existence? Illusions. None of them real. Tell me, Duncan—’

  At this point a long-term unemployed came up, wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat in orange tweed. Duncan told her to take a number and wait her turn, which the woman did.

  ‘Tell me, Duncan,’ Paul continued. ‘Have you ever found yourself in bed with a stranger, or at dinner with someone you’ve never been sure what their name was, and then suddenly found yourself wondering this – are you real? Does this person really exist, or is the universe providing me with a three-dimensional model of a human being to keep me quiet and fill the time?’

  ‘Well, that’s a big philosophical issue,’ Duncan said briskly. ‘But we’re quite busy this morning. Let me take a few people to sign on and you’ll see what it’s all about.’

  ‘Oh, piffle,’ Paul said. ‘You just go ahead and take the tiny
few people you need to take in order to keep Karen out of your hair, and I’ll just carry on keeping you entertained with camp old metaphysical speculations as we go. How does that sound?’

  ‘Let’s keep it professional,’ Duncan said, but Paul continued anyway, once asking a bedraggled fat woman in a purple coat why she believed in money when it seemed to do her no good at all. That was Paul’s induction, but at the end of the day, told by Duncan that he could have his own desk tomorrow and carry out his own interviews so long as Duncan sat in and helped out, he said, ‘Whoopee. Will it be that desk? Can I enliven it with my own personal touch? Is it there to contain important files and information or just to provide a barrier against the angry hordes of the workless many? Do you know the Salisbury?’

  ‘The Salisbury?’ Duncan said.

  ‘It’s a gay old pub down on the St Martin’s Lane. You like a drink or two after work, I can tell – you look the sort, I must say. Come on, it’s part of my induction and training.’

  Much later in the evening, when they were sitting in the Salisbury in a corner, a Spanish waiter by Duncan’s side, pawing at his thigh under the table, Paul continued as if nothing was happening, Carlos had not appeared, and none of the nine vodka-and-tonics had been drunk in the previous four hours. ‘And then,’ Paul said, ‘my friend Derek told me that I couldn’t stay in his house one second longer because he couldn’t bear my mannerisms. My mannerisms! I can tell you, Duncan, it was his mannerisms that were truly the more marked. He just would not accept it. Another drink?’

  ‘Your friend,’ Carlos said. ‘Your friend, I think he is really a twat. Why don’t he go home and leave us to have our time together? You tell him, or I tell him.’

  ‘He’s not my friend,’ Duncan said. ‘I only met him today. He works with me.’

  ‘OK, well, you tell him now. And that really your third vodka I see now, and I don’t think that first vodka you were drinking when I come over, I don’t think that was your first either, so I don’t know how much you drink and I want to make sure you give me a nice rough sexy time?’

  ‘My friend Derek,’ Paul said, returning with the drinks – two vodka tonics and a tonic water for Carlos in the half-pint dimpled mugs with handles that the Salisbury always used, ‘well, the thing was that we’d been going together for two years, maybe nearly two years and a half. But he’d never, ever, once said to me, Would you like to be my boyfriend, or anything nice like that. I was never allowed to stay over two nights running, and never allowed to leave anything like toothbrush or toothpaste in his bathroom, and as for a spare pair of underwear— And then I found out that he’d taken another boy home – this is on a night after a night I’d stayed over, he’d told me I couldn’t stay and sure enough he nipped out to the Coleherne and picked up this leather boy. The place, I can tell you, stank of poppers when I went round there the next day. Purely by chance I went round, I hadn’t arranged to go there. I asked him what he thought he was doing. Paul, he says to me. Paul. I could understand you throwing plates at my head if we’d sworn to be faithful to each other. But we’re not even boyfriends, we’re not going out together, so I don’t know why you should mind in the slightest if I’m seeing someone else. Seeing someone else, is it? I say. I thought it was a yield to temptation that you couldn’t resist and that you regretted seriously afterwards, and now it’s you’re seeing someone. That, he said, is none of your business and please stop throwing plates. Well, I can tell you, he wasn’t seeing anyone else, that was all my eye made up to make me feel jealous, but he would never say to me You’re my boyfriend or, Heaven forbid, I love you, or …’

  Coming to the words ‘I love you’, Paul had opened his mouth wide and spoken the words without sound.

  ‘You see, Carlo,’ he said, turning to the Spanish waiter, ‘cheers, down the hatch, you see, Carlo, the important thing in life is to say to people what they mean to you. Not to wait until it’s too late to tell people that they love you. You see, Carlo, people just can’t get it into—’

  ‘My name is Carlos,’ Carlos said, raising his voice. ‘Carlosssss. You don’t call me by some other wop’s name, you stupid queen. Carlosssss. We sick of you and your friend Derek, no one interested round here, you finish your drink and go, leave us in peace, OK?’

  ‘I’m so sorry to have forced my presence on you when it was so evidently unwelcome,’ Paul said, and got up, with a great deal of poised and dignified handling of bags and a brushing down of the jacket as he left. Duncan watched his immaculate deportment going out of the door. There seemed no point in rescuing the situation. He would see Paul tomorrow at work and they would take it from there.

  He had never seen Carlos again – those Spanish waiters had a tendency to appear and disappear. But Paul was in his life for ever. Even after he had been given the opportunity to leave the Unemployment, as he put it, a year later, Paul had stayed in touch with Duncan. ‘Been given the opportunity’ was one way of putting it: being strongly suspected of pilfering from the Christmas fund kept in Mr Khan’s office another. Paul went straight away into a job as waiter in a West End restaurant of theatrical tendencies, and in six months was working as front of house, meeting and greeting and kissing the most distinguished, or almost the most distinguished, of the actor-patrons.

  ‘You see,’ Paul confided, over a cocktail at Peter Harper’s, as the theatrical restaurant was called, underneath a red-papered wall of near-identical caricatures, some signed, some with a loving kiss, ‘you see, some of us just find our niches somehow. And I’m sure that you will, too. Mother was saying that it seems such a waste that someone of your talents and charms should be so wasted down there in that dreary office. She’s quite right, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know what your mother knows about it,’ Duncan said. ‘She’s never met me.’

  ‘Oh, believe you me,’ Paul said, ‘she knows a lot about you. When someone’s a real human being, like you, or like Mother, you don’t have to meet them to understand what makes them go. These people aren’t real – she’s not, and he’s not, and this one behind the bar who calls herself Doris, she’s certainly not a real person.’

  ‘Oh, not this again,’ said the moustachioed barman, polishing a cocktail glass with a cloth. ‘I get this three times a week – Doris, you’re not a real person, you’re just a … What was it last time? A kim-rar, whatever that may be. And don’t call me Doris if you don’t think I’m real.’

  ‘There, you see,’ Paul said. ‘And it’s chi-me-ra, you uneducated lout. Almost the only proof that another person is a real person is the evidence of an erection. That, I insist on. When I go to bed with a man, Duncan, I insist – I simply insist – on an erection from the moment of nudity onwards. Anything less – the slightest hint of flaccidity – I regard as a personal insult, and probably evidence of them not being a real person at all. How is that Carlossss of yours, darling?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him in an age,’ Duncan said. ‘I only saw him that one time, actually. There’s been a phalanx of Spaniards since. I’ve felt like I’ve been standing at the top of the stairs with a white coat and half-moon glasses, looking at my clipboard and going, Next, please. Shouldn’t you be working? There’s a lot of lost-looking people over there.’

  ‘Oh, fuck them,’ Paul said. ‘I’ll go over in a moment.’

  On the other side of the bar, there were seven people of provincial appearance, between forty and seventy, smiling and attempting to ingratiate themselves with whoever there was to be helpful. It was a matinée crowd. Their relations were unclear but their optimism at being admitted to Peter Harper’s, where the stars flourished, was radiant. This was where the magic happened, nightly, after eleven. At twelve midday, one of the slots reserved for unknown names, there was nobody in the restaurant apart from Marti Caine, knocking back the vodkas at a corner table in company with three elderly rabbis.

  ‘They’ll find their own way to a table, I should say,’ the barman called Doris said. ‘Have another drink, Duncan, love, it’s on the ho
use.’

  ‘Oh, I’d better go over,’ Paul said. ‘You’ll be all right for twenty minutes?’

  ‘I’ve got my book,’ Duncan said, hoicking an old Gore Vidal paperback out of his pocket.

  ‘And then he asked me if I would shit on his head if he gave me fifty quid,’ Marti Caine said, at top volume, to the three enraptured rabbis. The waiting women of the matinée party fixed their smiles, and moved their tan handbags from one hand to the other.

  ‘Thank Heaven, he’s gone,’ the barman said. ‘You can talk to me now.’

  ‘No, I really was going to get on with some reading,’ Duncan said. ‘It wasn’t a prop or anything.’

  3.

  The sales reps started arriving long before the shop was at all ready for business. The first of them came through the door on the second day. The carpenters were still measuring up; the floor had only just been cleared of detritus, and Paul had gone over the road for a cup of coffee. A small man, pale and rodent-like, with a sharp nose and beaky teeth, was poking his face around the open door. In his hand was a hard black plastic briefcase, thicker than normal briefcases; he wore, however, a brown tweed jacket and a yellow shirt. His blond hair was combed down in a neat, divided helmet. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello? Anyone at home?’

  The carpenters looked over; one made a gesture with his head in Duncan’s direction.

  ‘Hello there,’ the man said, advancing in a self-consciously confident way, his hand already held out. ‘We’re delighted to see a new customer, a new sales outlet. I’m Roland Inscape. Ardabil and Cowper. I think you spoke on the telephone to one of my colleagues, a week or two back. About stock.’

  Duncan remembered: he was not sure how to acquire stock, and in a fit of enthusiasm had gone round his bookshelves, writing down the names of every publisher he could find, and then looked in the Yellow Pages, and phoned up the head office of all of them. He had been redirected and talked to patiently; they had agreed to send out sales reps to talk to him and supply him with material. Roland Inscape of Ardabil and Cowper was the first to arrive.