The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  So that was how Dommie and Duncan came to be sitting in a sitting room in Clapham, talking about the gay bookshop that Duncan was in the process of opening up.

  9.

  ‘Thank you,’ Duncan said, coming down into the shop. Behind him was a tow-haired man with a flush of pink cheek, a smooth complexion and a big smile. There was nothing upstairs except a room that had been used for storage by the previous tenants; there was no plan to make anything more of it in the near future. The man picked up his briefcase, which had been by the cherrywood counter. Andrew and Simon, who had dropped in to help out twenty minutes before, had been warned by the plumber that Duncan was in a meeting upstairs, that he had said not to disturb him. There was nowhere to have a meeting upstairs; Duncan always had his meetings downstairs. Then Duncan came down with this English country face in a suit, like the cheerful half of an A. E. Housman poem, the part before the ploughman gets sent off to be killed in the trenches. The man said goodbye buoyantly; he gave Simon and the plumber a look, before exchanging a different sort of look with Duncan, and off he went, as if about to whistle.

  ‘You didn’t,’ Simon said to Duncan.

  ‘Oh, I thought I would, just this once,’ Duncan said.

  The word had got out among the sales reps. It became clear to Duncan that their stock would rest on all the classics anyone could think of, a lot of single copies of academic books and the entire list of four publishing houses. There was Gay Men’s Press, there was Brilliance Books, Onlywomen Press and there was the classics list of Virago. There was a list of US publishers who specialized – some of it was porn, but Duncan had come to the view that printed porn, porn in the written word, might as well be stocked. It was images that would be the problem. The mainstream publishers were sending their reps to persuade Duncan to stock all sorts of absurd things that, they said, would be of interest to gay readers, including one hopeful man who tried to talk him into stocking every children’s pony novel written by the three Pullein-Thompson sisters. The shop could be stocked with second-hand classics – he himself proposed to start things off by emptying his shelves at home and asking for a pound a copy, three pounds for first editions. Christopher and Alan, both great readers, had promised to go over their bookshelves, and to keep an eye open for stuff when they went to second-hand bookshops. There were, too, the radical producers of radical magazines. But was there enough out there? Would people sacrifice their precious libraries? Duncan’s line was that when you looked away from the traditional sort of publisher, there was lots of stuff out there that people just didn’t know about, that they’d be so happy to be pointed towards. In reality, he just didn’t know. He had a vision of the shop opening with half of its shelves empty, or filled with the traditional publishers’ biographies of Gluck and Ethel Smyth. As if they knew all about Duncan’s self-doubt, the traditional sort of publishers kept on sending their traditional sort of sales reps, and Duncan kept taking a book or two from them, in self-doubt and pity. These books were often about the Bloomsbury Group. They were a popular diversion, these meetings, now that friends had taken to dropping in regularly to help out.

  The sales rep that Duncan had taken upstairs to shag was an unexpected turn-up for the books. He had been greeted by Duncan, and announced himself as a rep from Sachs. Duncan made him a cup of coffee.

  ‘And we have great hopes for this,’ the rep had said, opening his book of samples. ‘Charming. I couldn’t get through it myself. Writing at the height of her powers – we all know what that means.’

  ‘Not for us,’ Duncan said bravely, running his fingers over the embossed gold cover of the latest novel by the widow of the department-store owner; the rep, whose name was Rupert, let their hands touch as he took it away.

  ‘You’re hard to satisfy,’ Rupert said, inspecting Duncan with his round blue gaze. ‘Well, there’s always this – no? – and this, but what I really want to recommend to you, the thing which we think you’ll do very well with …’

  It was not a familiar name to Duncan, but the author photograph, taken in a Victorian cemetery by a mourning cherub, black-and-white and deep in shadows, showed a hollow-cheeked prodigy who seemed familiar; then he realized that it was just a familiar type. The book was called The Garden King, and the cover image was of a Roman torso in sunlight.

  ‘It’s his first novel,’ Rupert said. ‘We love Stuart, we think he’s got a marvellous future. It’s a brave novel, in lots of ways, but we know it’ll appeal a lot to your customers. It’s a very romantic love story. Between men. Italy, between the wars. Shall I leave this with you?’ Rupert reached into his bag, and pulled out a proof with the title in Sachs’s generic print, bound in suede-like paper in a neutral pale brown. ‘You’re going to love it,’ he said. ‘Shall I call back in a week for your numbers?’

  But Duncan was surprising even himself this morning. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll take two hundred and fifty. Can the author come in to sign copies, perhaps do a reading?’

  ‘Two hundred …’ Rupert was saying smoothly, writing it down, evidently hiding any gesture of shock, as if bookshops of Duncan’s size ordered first novels in this quantity every day of the week ‘… and … fifty. Well, I’m sure you’ll do very well with it. It’ll go on selling for years, a modern classic, you might say. I don’t know about a reading – I’ll have to pass that request on to the publicity department. He’s very shy, I understand. But he’ll definitely come in to sign some copies. I like your shirt.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s an old favourite, really. I like your bag, if I can say so.’

  Rupert reached up and fingered the soft collar of Duncan’s purple-and-green striped shirt. ‘It’s lovely and soft,’ Rupert said. ‘I like that faded thing. Are you going to be running the shop with your boyfriend?’

  ‘No, no,’ Duncan said. ‘No boyfriend. We might run to an assistant, in time, but …’

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ Rupert said, lowering his voice. Duncan could have laughed. And in five minutes, Rupert had raised his voice and was telling Duncan that he would like him to ‘show me the premises’.

  ‘I’m astonished,’ Simon said later. ‘But impressed. He was cute.’

  ‘Yeah, he bought two hundred and fifty copies of a book off him and all,’ the plumber said. ‘That was before he showed him the premises, mind. The boiler’s dead, mate, you know that? You’re going to need a new one.’

  ‘He’s told me that three times,’ Duncan said to Simon. ‘About the boiler.’

  ‘I don’t know much about these things,’ Simon said. ‘But two hundred and fifty copies – really? That sounds like a lot of copies of one book. Something famous? The Joy of Gay Sex?’

  ‘Or radical?’ Andrew said. ‘There’s a lot of people that want radical gay-liberation texts, of course.’

  ‘No,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s a first novel. But I’ve got a very good feeling about it. I think it’s going to be huge, and I want everyone to come and buy a copy from us. They will. It’ll be the making of us. And the author’s promised to come in and sign them all when they arrive.’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty, though?’ Andrew said. ‘Of a book nobody’s heard of until now?’

  ‘Probably won’t, ever,’ the plumber said cheerfully. ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. You can always send them back. Not like in my game.’

  ‘To be honest,’ Simon said, ‘I think we need to have a word about cashflow.’

  ‘Oh, I expect you’re right,’ Duncan said. ‘It probably won’t work. It’s no way to run a business, I know.’

  But now Andrew was gaping at him. ‘To run a business?’ he said. ‘Are you running a business here now, then?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Duncan said.

  ‘This isn’t a business,’ Andrew said. ‘We never thought this was going to be a business. It’s a community opportunity, isn’t it? You’re not here to make money out of the community, are you? You’re here to bring the community together.’

  ‘No one e
ver got rich from running a bookshop,’ Duncan said. ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’

  ‘But you called it a business?’ Andrew said.

  ‘Well, there are business-like aspects to it,’ Duncan said. ‘As well as some not very business-like ones. Don’t lose any sleep over it, darling.’

  10.

  Andy, across the road in the sandwich shop, opened up much earlier than anyone else in Heatherwick Street. There were always people who wanted a bacon sandwich at seven. He lived off the Seven Sisters Road, and picked up Chris in the yellow Saab at six thirty. Chris lived with his English girlfriend Sammy a couple of streets away, but there was no point in telling him to be at his dad’s house by six fifteen or else: you had to go round and ring on the doorbell, be his alarm clock. He’d given Chris the deposit on the white-painted brick house with the blue door and the red flowers in the window box two years ago. There weren’t many twenty-five-year-olds paying the mortgage on a two-bedroom house in central London, Greek central London. Andy’s granddad would have been proud of him. Well, no, probably not: he’d have said what his dad always said, which was ‘You could have done better.’

  They were arriving at the shop at ten to seven, as usual. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining almost horizontally into the car. Andy had put on a cassette and was singing along; Chris had yawned and rubbed his eyes and complained – he’d lost the taste for Greek music. Over the road, that bookshop was nearing its opening time. The inside was painted and finished; there were boxes all over the floor, which Andy supposed were boxes of books, stock, property. The window was decorated – they’d put in some fake grass for some reason, which was odd. You didn’t think of grass and books together; it looked more like an old-fashioned butcher’s shop with mince packs sitting on plastic grass. That was a sign that they didn’t know what they were doing, like the health-food shop before them that had painted a sunflower on the window. And there was the shop sign, finished and brazen. In Roman letters on dark blue, it read ‘The Big Gay Bookshop’. It got worse: there was a painting of a kind of naked bloke on the left, reading a book, and another one on the right, reading another. Andy knew he should have said something about the naked blokes to the one who ran the place and came over looking very pleased with himself every day to get a sandwich for lunch, or a round of sandwiches. But he hadn’t. It was too late now. Already, someone had passed a remark to him about it – ‘Oh, I see you’re facing the Big Gay Bookshop, it’s your shop that’s in Heatherwick Street, isn’t it?’ And that was someone who hadn’t even come into the shop, had just seen it while driving through. The customers who came into the shop had had a lot to say about it.

  Andy and Chris parked the car round the corner, and walked to the shop. In the tree in the street, a blackbird was singing, as loud as it could. There was a bundle in the doorway of the bookshop, a bundle of blankets with an outcrop of hair at one end, when they went over to investigate. Heatherwick Street was not usually their hang-out.

  ‘Oi,’ Andy said, nudging the bundle with the toe of his shoe. ‘Oi. Oi. You can’t sleep here. What’s your game? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m waiting,’ a voice came from the blankets. ‘I’m waiting for shop to open.’ Then he put his head outside the blankets. He was a teenager, very white in the face, with a home-made dye job; his newly black hair, too evenly coloured to be natural, was spiked, with both sleep and gel. Around his chin and neck were fat red spots, and under his head was a knapsack. He looked from Andy to Chris and then back again. ‘It’s not you who run shop, is it?’

  ‘Us? No, mate, not us,’ Andy said. ‘Don’t be a berk. No, they’ll be along in another couple of hours. We’re just the sandwich over the road.’

  ‘You don’t want to sleep in this doorway, mate,’ Chris said, yawning and rubbing his eyes with his fists. ‘You don’t want that. You don’t know how they’ll wake you up when they get here. Didn’t you see the name of the shop, son?’

  Andy looked at the boy. He had been a runaway, too, he reckoned. Well, he’d had to run away from Cyprus, like all the rest of the Greeks. Sometimes people ended up sleeping where they didn’t want to sleep because of circumstances beyond their control. His mum and dad had left their house in such a hurry that they hadn’t had time to clear up the table from lunch. It was a source of shame to his mother that they had left like that, and ever since, she had sometimes said that those Turks, they would be able to come in and see the lamb dish festooned with mould and maggots and flies and making the whole place stink, and be able to say that those Greeks, by God, they were dirty people. So Andy knew that sometimes you had to leave the place where you’d lived for years, that sometimes people would treat you with not much respect because of the way you’d had to go or the way you’d had to leave things. There was a lamb dish abandoned, somewhere, by this boy; not a real lamb dish, but something he’d had to leave that would make people talk about him in a bad way when he was gone.

  So because of all that, Andy turned to Chris and said, ‘Shut your mouth,’ before telling the boy that he could come over to the shop and they’d give him a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea.

  ‘Are we going to give him a sandwich?’ Chris said.

  ‘Yes, Chris,’ Andy said, with a warning look. ‘We’re going to give him a sandwich.’

  11.

  The phone had rung at seven – the earliest possible time anyone could ring anyone else, even a brother to a sister. A catastrophe had happened, had struck both shop and flat simultaneously. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ Duncan had said to Dommie. She calmed him down, and it turned out that the boiler in the flat and the boiler in the shop had broken down simultaneously. He had been warned. He was going to replace the one in the shop, but the one in the flat had seemed to be working perfectly well. It was all my eye about it needing to go altogether, just another way of making some money out of a customer, Duncan had thought at the time. Then the water had had to be switched off for a couple of days while the bathroom had been fitted, and when they had switched it back on, water was just pouring out of the boiler. God knew how. They’d told Duncan, he said, they told me that a washer was perished and only holding together because normally it was damp and flexible and then they turned it off and it dried out and then it broke and when someone switched it back on again …

  Dommie could not quite follow everything, but it seemed as if he needed to stay at home while the boiler was being fixed, and someone else needed to be in the shop to let the workmen in to install the new boiler there.

  ‘When is he coming, the boiler man? I can come over so long as I leave by twelve,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Dommie, that is kind of you,’ said Duncan. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  So Dommie decided to call in sick, saying she had a headache and sometimes these things cleared up by lunchtime but sometimes they didn’t. She had a key to the shop for exactly these emergencies, though she had not been inside it on her own. She had been three times, every time when Duncan was there. She came in: she sat while Duncan’s friends did some handiwork, talking amusingly all the while. Sometimes they knew who she was, but sometimes they overlooked her. The professional handymen were more interested once they knew she was Duncan’s sister. The sign painter, who of course knew what the shop was to be called and what sort of customers they were going to have, found it extraordinary that Duncan was in touch with his family, even. There was an awful man called Freddie Sempill, who talked in a false and unconvincing way to her, which she could not understand; then she realized that he was putting on a performance for the benefit of the electrician. There was Christopher, who was a stiff old thing, old beyond his years, talking carefully in sentences and holding himself rigidly upright. There was Paul, who she’d met before, who was, he said, Duncan’s best friend; she quite liked him once she realized that his performance was the most sincere of all of them. It was interesting to sit and watch a business taking shape in such a physical way. But all the t
ime she had longed to be alone in the shop, to take charge.

  She was at the shop by eight thirty, with a sense of joy at putting things right. She did not turn on the lights. She liked the dim mercantile shadow; the clean smell of shaved wood and new paint, the kitchenette with its cupboards and sink still in part wrapped in coloured cellophane. The sound of birdsong filled the shadowy interior. The troublesome boiler was in the middle of all that kitchen newness and, looking at it, Dommie wondered why Duncan hadn’t decided to have a new one from the start. The floor was filled with boxes of stock; there would be a stockroom upstairs in time, but this stock would fill the shelves, and her brother’s stock boxes stood filled with promise.