The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  She had always wanted to play shops when she was little, and she had always wanted to have her own shop when she was older. Perhaps a dress shop for glamorous older women, but her thoughts hadn’t really got that far. She saw herself placing a book in a paper bag, saying, ‘I do hope you enjoy it,’ to the customer, a distinguished silvery fellow a touch too perfectly dressed; taking his money; putting it in the till; and saying, ‘Goodbye, then,’ and listening to the shop-door bell ring. It would be simply perfect.

  There was a shape at the window, peering in. It was not the boiler man, but the sandwich man from across the street. With him was someone unfamiliar, a teenage boy with a sullen, inexpressive face and a rucksack. Dommie turned on the lights as if she had been about to do that all the time and, smiling, opened the door.

  ‘This young man wants a word,’ the sandwich man said. ‘This lady can help you. Now off you go. And remember, your parents are the most important people in your life, and they’re not going to be there for ever.’

  The sandwich man turned round and crossed the road. The boy, outside the shop, looked at Dommie, and Dommie, inside the shop, looked at him.

  ‘I thought you were gay men,’ the boy said. He had a northern accent. ‘I thought you’d all be gay men. Are you a lesbian?’

  ‘Indeed no,’ Dommie said. ‘It’s my brother’s shop. I’m just here this morning to let the man in to mend the boiler. You wanted a word, did he say?’

  ‘I’m Arthur,’ the boy said. He reflected, looked about with his long neck and jutting chin and nose; he looked Dommie up and down, and then about him at the street. ‘You’ve not got anything in your window yet.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s quite got round to it,’ Dommie said. ‘That probably comes last. There are still a few things to get right.’

  ‘I’ve run away from home,’ the boy said. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ Dommie said. ‘No, you don’t need to take your shoes off. This is only a shop. But the rucksack by the door, please.’

  12.

  When Duncan turned up at the shop at half past eleven, he was in a much better mood. The boiler man had looked, and said that the old boiler in the flat didn’t need replacing: if he put together half a dozen parts, it would be good for a couple of years yet. That was a relief. Duncan had left him to it. Now for the boiler in the shop.

  He arrived, and inside the shop, there were Dommie and Paul and, at the back of the shop working, another boiler man. With them was a boy Duncan didn’t know. They were sitting on chairs around the table, which had arrived yesterday, the table for group discussions: large, polished and round, it would hold twelve, fifteen at a pinch.

  ‘This is Arthur,’ Dommie said. ‘He’s come about a job.’

  ‘A job?’ Duncan said, pulling up a chair and sitting down. ‘A job in the bookshop?’

  ‘I told you,’ Paul said to the boy. ‘I told you he’s not taking on help.’

  ‘You’ve got to take me on,’ Arthur said. ‘You’ve just got to.’

  ‘How did you hear about the shop?’ Duncan said. ‘We aren’t opening for another week or ten days.’

  ‘If it’s ten days,’ Paul said, ‘we won’t be open before the party.’

  ‘It was yesterday,’ Arthur said. ‘I was in newsagent near the City Hall where I buy my Gay News. I’m from Sheffield, this is in Sheffield. It’s the only newsagent I know of in town that sells Gay News, it’s the fourth time I’ve bought it. And I was reading it on bus home. I don’t buy it and then hide it in a newspaper, I read it on bus, I don’t care, me. And there was this article about you. You’ve seen article?’

  ‘No, what article?’ Duncan said. ‘I knew she was going to write something, but I haven’t seen it. She was supposed to send me a copy when the magazine came out. When did it come out?’

  ‘It’s only just out,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s supposed to be out on the fourth of month, but I start looking for it on third – it sometimes comes a day early. Don’t you get it early in London? It’s published here, we’re always miles behind in Sheffield. Look, it’s here – I was showing your sister and your friend.’

  Arthur reached into his pocket, and handed over the magazine. On the cover an interview was flagged up with a Broadway legend, who perhaps did not know what she was letting herself in for, and features about types of lesbian, amyl nitrate, ‘Is Earls Court’s Day Over?’ and ‘Does London Really Need a Gay Bookshop?’ The magazine, much-handled, was folded down the middle, its ink smeared by Arthur’s hot hands.

  ‘Cheeky cow,’ Duncan said. ‘Why write about it if you don’t think London needs one?’

  ‘It’s better than it sounds,’ Arthur said. ‘I read it and I wanted to come to London to find you straight away.’

  ‘I want to read this,’ Duncan said, turning the pages – there were adverts for bum-douches under the slogan ‘For That Big Night Out’, and for bed-and-breakfasts in Blackpool, and a fashion spread, which seemed to have been shot against a backdrop of foil by a photographer’s stand-in. The types-of-lesbian article was illustrated with cartoons of ‘Gay Woman’, ‘Lesbian’, ‘Butch’, ‘Dyke’ and ‘Gay Lady’, this last one sitting on a bar stool wearing a fedora. Over the page was Duncan. The photograph was simply terrible, in dim light and with Duncan standing bolt upright, looking startled. He was sure he had managed to smile at one point, at least, during the session. The headline was ‘Read All About It! We investigate the opening of London’s first gay bookshop and talk to its manager Duncan.’

  ‘“There’s nothing better than curling up with a good book,”’ Duncan read out loud. ‘Oh my God. “Unless you count curling up with a good bookshop owner. When GAY NEWS heard that Duncan Flannery, thirty-three, was planning to open a gay bookshop in London’s King’s Cross –”’

  ‘We’re not in King’s Cross here,’ Dommie said. ‘This is practically what I would call Marylebone.’

  ‘“– London’s King’s Cross,”’ Duncan went on, ‘“we thought, What a good idea! So we minced on down to Canning Street in the West End, to ask its manager and owner Duncan Flannery what plans he has for this shop. “I’ve always loved reading,” Duncan said, “and men. So I thought I would put my two passions together.”’ She said that. She said to me when I said, “I love reading,” she said, “And men, too,” and I thought that was embarrassing, but I sort of agreed. I never said that.’

  ‘Oh, go on,’ Paul said. ‘We don’t care if it’s accurate, just if it’s sensational. Shame she got the street wrong, even.’

  ‘No, she got it right later on – “Heatherwick Street seems not quite sure yet about its new addition,” blah blah. I’m not going to go on,’ Duncan said. ‘I’ll curl up with it later. Like a good book. Oh, God.’

  ‘So I saw this article,’ Arthur said, in a faintly aggrieved tone. ‘It was on bus back home. And I thought immediately, I love men, I love books, I can’t get enough of them. I’ve taken Maurice out of the central library about ten times almost. That’s a fantastic book. I love it when Scudder says to Maurice, when he says, well, when he says anything, really. They should make a film out of that, it would be magic. And I hate it at school, I really hate it. When did you know you were gay? I knew when I was nine, the first time I heard of it, I knew that was me all right. But them – they’ve all known I was gay since I was fifteen, and this boy came over one Saturday, we got drunk on gin and vodka and the boy said he had to stay the night because his mum couldn’t see him like that, and we slept in my mum and dad’s bed, they were away, and I said I thought everyone was really bisexual—’

  ‘Heavens above, are they still using that old chestnut?’ Paul said. ‘Everyone’s really bisexual? It doesn’t work, child. It’s never worked. If they’re going to have sex with you, they’ll have sex with you. There’s no point in bringing in the mirror stage and the Wolf Man and Uncle Sigmund’s ideas. It won’t work.’

  ‘How do you know about the Wolf Man?’ Dommie said. ‘You’re full of surp
rises.’

  ‘I wasn’t landed the last time the wind blew from the east, darling,’ Paul said. ‘I am an educated queen, if you please.’

  ‘It didn’t work, you’re right,’ Arthur said. ‘He looked at me as if I was just talking rubbish, which I was. But he kissed me and he felt my cock and I felt his cock, and we were both really hard. But then on Monday it turned out that he’d told everyone and that I’d told him I was gay and then had tried to force myself on him and he’d had to go home. Which wasn’t true, he’d stayed and had breakfast and everything, he asked if I’d cook him bacon, but we didn’t have bacon in. I thought that was a bit cheeky. But I didn’t know where to run away to, until I read this article about your bookshop. And then I knew. It’s going to change world, your bookshop.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Duncan said, looking up from the article. ‘No trouble.’ The tone of irony in his voice could not be shed.

  ‘I love, love, love, books,’ the boy said. ‘Please let me stay. I won’t be any trouble. I’d cook you bacon, any day.’

  ‘“We asked Duncan what he would save from his stock, if his shop caught on fire. What are the five books he couldn’t live without?”’ Duncan read out loud. ‘This is really the most boring interview. I can’t imagine anyone coming to the bookshop after reading this.’

  ‘I came,’ Arthur said simply. ‘I went to wrong street and then right one. And you aren’t even open yet. If I came all the way from Sheffield, there are loads of people who are going to come from all over England – all over world, probably. I read your five favourite books. I think they’re amazing. You’ve got to give me a job.’

  ‘Oh, God. You’re going straight back to Sheffield,’ Duncan said. ‘I haven’t got any money to pay anyone with, and I don’t know that I ever will. Don’t start going on about bacon. It’s not going to work on me. I can’t employ every runaway.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want paying,’ Arthur said. ‘I’d work here for nothing, if you could just find somewhere I could live for nothing. I could live in stockroom, even. If there were just a bed in there. I would wash in little kitchen and make myself things to eat. I’d manage somehow. I can’t go back to Sheffield. You see, I went back home with my copy of Gay News, and my stepfather, Donald, who’s married to my mother, he said he was sick of me making a spectacle of myself. And I said it weren’t me who were making people stare. And he goes, well, who the hell is it then? And I go if they don’t want to stare they shouldn’t stare. That’s their decision and I’m only carrying a magazine, they don’t have to read magazine theirselves. Then he goes it’s not just the magazine, it’s your clothes and way you walk and way you talk, and he goes say “decision” again. And I say “decision”, and he says no, “decision”, and I say yes, “decision”, and he’s about to hit me.’

  ‘What?’ said Paul. ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying. It all sounds terribly thrilling, but why did your stepfather make you say “decision”?’

  ‘Because of my lisp, I’ve got a bit of a lisp, my stepfather’s always on about it, I can’t say “decision” and it drives him up wall. So he’s saying say “decision” and I’m trying to say “decision”, and my mum’s coming out of kitchen and she says no, Don, don’t do it, it’s just a phase he’s going through. And he stops and he looks at his hand, and then a right mean look comes over his face and he belts me one, with the back of his hand, across my face.’

  He was telling it as an exciting story, his cheeks flushed and his voice fast. But now he saw Paul’s face, and Duncan’s, and Dommie’s, and he slowed down.

  ‘So I went upstairs and threw some things into a knapsack. And then I came down with it, and I went straight back down to town. By now it’s nearly nine o’clock. I know where Donald keeps his money, and I’d taken all of it, three hundred and fifty pounds, it’s illegal cash payments, he’s a builder, so I’m not worried about being pursued by police. I buy myself a ticket to London, and I say to myself, I don’t care, I’m going to that bookshop and they’re going to give me a job. And I catch last train to London, and I get here about half past midnight. I don’t know why I thought you’d be here. I came here anyway and I slept in doorway, it wasn’t so cold last night. Then that man over road came and gave me a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich. Then he brought me over and she were here –’ nodding at Dommie ‘– so I told her the story, then he came –’ nodding at Paul ‘– so I told the story again, and now you’re here and it’s the third time she’s heard the story and the second time him.’

  Duncan waited for a pause. It seemed to have come. Dommie got up and went to the back kitchen. There, she filled the new kettle from the new tap. Duncan watched her. There were five mugs back there; for the moment, they matched, but in five years’ time they would have been smashed, and replaced, and would be a jumble, a mismatch, witnesses to passing moments. For now they were five in different pastel shades, all the same size. There was a new jar of Nescafé, which Dommie was unscrewing, then puncturing with one of the new teaspoons. There was a delicious smell, the first thing out of a new jar of instant coffee, though perhaps in time they would stretch to a percolator and proper coffee. Dommie was measuring out the coffee into the mugs; she was asking the boiler man if he wanted one; she was opening the bookshop’s new fridge and taking out the single object inside it, a pint of milk, which the milkman must have brought that morning for the first time. There was even a little bowl of sugar in the kitchen cupboards for Dommie’s sake, and anyone else who still took sugar in their coffee. One day – perhaps soon – there would be biscuits, two sorts of biscuits, and customers reading, absorbed. Dommie handed the green mug to the boiler man; she placed the other four on the ceramic tray with a view of the Taj Mahal; she brought them and gave them to her brother, to Paul, to Arthur, to herself, the pink, the white, the blue, the purple. Duncan contemplated his business decision. There was no doubt that Arthur would cost money. He had worked out that he could get to London and live rent-free, but what was he going to eat? How was he going to use the launderette? What would he wash with and eat off and sleep on? It was all a very bad idea. He was the one new human in the shop.

  ‘You’ve got no experience,’ Duncan said.

  ‘I’m very experienced!’ Arthur said.

  ‘In retail,’ Duncan clarified.

  ‘He’s not asking you how many men you’ve had sex with,’ Paul said. ‘That’s not a useful qualification for working in a bookshop.’

  ‘Oh. No. I haven’t, really.’

  ‘And you’ve never stuck at anything.’

  ‘Well, I would stick at this!’

  ‘And your parents don’t trust you.’

  ‘No, but they’re evil, they’re horrible, you wouldn’t want to take their word on anything, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘All right,’ Duncan said. ‘You can stay. I’ll get some kind of bed for the stockroom upstairs. I’ll pay you twenty-five pounds a week.’

  ‘Mind,’ Paul chipped in, glaring at Duncan, ‘there’s to be no hanky-panky upstairs, no mucking around. No boys. You meet a boy, you go to his place. You’re not letting people in to steal the stock.’

  ‘Never, never, never,’ Arthur said. ‘Now I never need to see my mum and stepfather ever again. You don’t know what this means.’

  The boiler man sauntered over. ‘It’s got to go,’ he said, and pushed his pencil back behind his ear in a solitary, assured, assessing manner. ‘There’s no two ways about it. You can’t carry on with that boiler. It’s illegal for one thing.’ Then he took a look at Arthur, whose eyes were moist with tears. ‘You lot,’ he said. ‘You lot. It’s always drama with you lot, isn’t it? Can’t you just get from one end of a day to the other without the waterworks and the kissing and making up? What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Tell us about the boiler,’ Duncan said, standing up.

  13.

  Two days later, it was the day of the party. The stock was on the shelves, shining and new and glossy as racehorses; there was a nice little corner wit
h books that had been much loved and read repeatedly, priced up by Dommie in a more or less random way. The two hundred and fifty copies of the new novel, it turned out, would fill an entire bookcase, which wasn’t reasonable. The author had come in yesterday, announcing himself in a diffident way. He’d had a dreadful cough, and was painfully thin in the face. He spoke in an undertone, saying that it was exciting, he supposed, to have a book out, but he just felt so tired all the time, ‘like an old man, and I’m only thirty’. He signed slowly, scrupulously, taking nearly two and a half hours to get through the two hundred and fifty books – he had to have three breaks in between. Arthur had turned the pages and held the book open as he signed. It was his first task in the bookshop, and he did it with nervous care.

  ‘We love your book,’ Duncan said, as he was going, quite truthfully. ‘I hope you’re writing something new.’

  ‘There won’t be another one,’ the author said. ‘I don’t think there’ll be another one.’

  ‘I hope that’s not true,’ Duncan said, smiling. ‘And will you come to our party, tomorrow night?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ the author said, holding on to the door. Then he glanced at Duncan with dark, shadowed eyes. He looked very ill. Duncan wondered what was wrong with him. His eyes dropped, and he went like a wraith in a black PVC raincoat.

  The invitations had gone out to the whole of the street, as well as to everyone else. The leader of the GLC had replied, and Angus Wilson, and Derek Jarman, and Maureen Duffy, and John Schlesinger, and Maggi Hambling, and half a dozen actors, asking if they could bring friends. But the fishmonger had not replied, or the hardware shop – didn’t expect him to – or the suitcase man, the greengrocer, the bookmaker, the newsagent or the butcher. Some of those, Duncan thought, would probably come round when they realized what sort of business the Big Gay Bookshop was – just an ordinary bookshop, no trouble to anyone. He felt that when the wife of the suitcase man, Mrs Dasgupta, had sidled out behind her husband and looked in a frightened but not hostile way at Duncan, the one time he had dropped in and told them about the shop he was on the verge of opening and he hoped they would come to the party to open it, he had felt that she was in her own way a little bit interested. Those Indian women were often steely; they made a pretence of being downtrodden and not speaking up before their men, but they ran the show when they thought no one outside the family was looking. It took only one person to change their mind, one person at a time. It had to be done like that, in fact.