The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  After the drink at Kevin’s downstairs, Arthur went heavily up to his room. He’d tidied it up and he’d left a few Christmas cards on top of his shelf of books. This was his perfect Christmas. He had seen off Kevin and the lodgers, who could now argue with each other about small domestic matters, the festering objections of the rest of the year coming to the surface now. He had done his social duties and could go upstairs. He had got hold of an old book by Robert Liddell about the misery of being in a family, and was really looking forward to spending his afternoon with that. There was food to be got through, Arthur supposed. In celebration of the day, he’d got some bacon and eggs in, which he’d fry at one or so. Then in the evening he’d resort to his usual diet of baked beans on toast and Pot Noodle. He’d resisted the special Christmas flavour Pot Noodle. He thought that was depressing. Dommie had wondered, about once a month for the last nine years, that he didn’t die of scurvy or some other deficiency, but he’d explained that he ate an apple every day and that seemed to see him all right. In the evening he’d go to the Edward IV, have a pint and pick up another sad case, he reckoned.

  He put on both the bars of the electric fire and soon it was warm as toast up there, with Arthur tucked up under his duvet in the armchair and quickly absorbed in the travails of the two brothers.

  Whether it was the book or the day, Arthur didn’t know, but he found himself contemplating what had been his family, what they were up to. He supposed he was a missing person to them. He wondered what they were thinking about him, whether they imagined him living on the streets, addicted to heroin, drunk or dead. Maybe they thought about him on Christmas Day. There would be his stepfather and his mother, still in that house in Adalbert Street, and she’d have cooked the turkey all right and all the vegetables. There would be his stepfather’s mother Maisie, that whiskery old bag smelling of wee and asking him if he was courting – no, she’d probably be dead by now. There’d be Arthur’s sisters. Julie was bound to have married her Antony by now – they’d been going steady for five years when Arthur had cleared out. They probably had children of their own. He was an uncle! Karen, she’d have run away like him; she’d have dyed her hair or shaved her head. Or would she have stuck to it, become a teacher like she’d said she wanted to? Maybe one of these days he’d write to them, let them know he was all right and that. He thought about them all, in the house in Adalbert Street, and for a moment felt a small pang. He reached for the big tin of Quality Street – it had been a sort of shamefaced present from Duncan, the first time it had ever happened, and Arthur reckoned it was because the shop had put both of them through too much this year. He rifled for a purple one, his favourite. Then he remembered that he could get on the train easily, get off when it stopped at Sheffield, get the number sixty-two bus that stopped at the end of Adalbert Street and go to number twenty-seven, knock the brass dolphin that was still the knocker on their door, still painted green. He could do that any time. But then they’d answer the door, and his stepfather would say, ‘So you’ve come back, have you, Wayne,’ and his mum would say, ‘Why did you do it, Wayne.’

  He popped another purple one into his mouth. Those were definitely the best. In the north, he remembered, nobody knew he was called Arthur, and nobody in the south knew he had ever been called anything else. That was why they hadn’t found him, even if they’d been looking, and that was why he couldn’t go back.

  Some time in the afternoon, Arthur finished the book. It was so much almost his favourite book in the world. He wondered whether the two brothers in the book ever helped each other out when they were a bit older. He reckoned one of them wouldn’t have minded and the other one would have wanted to but wouldn’t have been able to say so. He didn’t know whether Robert Liddell was still alive; he thought about writing him a nice long letter to ask him. He caught sight of the bacon on the shelf next to the Baby Belling, still in its plastic wrapper, the eggs in their open box next to it. My God, he said, like Duncan in his mind. I can’t believe it. I haven’t had my Christmas dinner. Arthur got up and stretched; he had been so absorbed in the book that his joints were sticking like an old man’s. He gave the frying pan a wipe with the tea towel – it always needed a wipe, but there was no point in washing it unless you’d fried fish in it, for instance, which Arthur never had. Sometimes it tasted a little bit funny, but there was nothing that would kill you. He put six rashers of bacon in, cracked two eggs into the pan. While it heated, his hand crept towards the book that was sitting by the side of the Baby Belling. It was not properly a book: it was a bound proof of a new novel that the publisher had sent out and had said that Arthur would probably really enjoy. It was something about a swimming pool. Arthur started to read it, in a scoffing frame of mind, thinking of The Garden King. The watery hiss of bacon, a fierce spit of wet egg in bacon fat did not disturb him. He turned the page. Some time around six o’clock, Tony or Tim came up and knocked on the door. Tony or Tim called out that they wondered if Arthur wanted to go out for a drink this evening. Arthur said nothing. His right hand went from his face to a plate of chocolate digestives, next to the abandoned plate of his Christmas dinner, and back again. His left hand kept the book open as he went on reading. He hoped this book would last the evening, or he would just start reading it all over again.

  18.

  Wednesday was Andrew’s day for the gay men’s discussion group. His staff at Hoxton housing department knew that he liked to be off very sharp at five on Wednesdays. He also liked to be off very sharp at five on Tuesdays for the Friends of the Earth, and very sharp on Monday for the Spartacist League, and very sharp at five or even four on Friday because it was Friday.

  The housing department was on the second layer of the piled-up terrapins behind the main town hall and offices; they had been placed there as a temporary measure some time in the mid-1970s to supplement the baroque 1930s splendour of the limestone town hall. The town hall was all idealistic mosaic and mahogany fixed furniture with polished brass fittings; it had been built by an architect whose name Andrew could never remember, but you knew it when you heard it. He rather approved of the lavish interiors of the town hall, where the population came to marry in a peach-coloured plush lounge, with lilies in a vase at the front, and register deaths in a little office off to one side of the main hall, behind an abstract blue and red stained-glass door. It was something for them to share and to make them feel part of something important, beyond themselves. But the functions of the town hall had long outgrown its size, and many of the offices were either in 1960s blocks in Ramsden Way and the newly renamed Bangabandhu Place or, like the housing department, in a series of temporary 1970s terrapins behind the town hall. You had to climb up an outside steel staircase to get to your office if it was on the first floor.

  When Andrew had been promoted to head of the housing department, he had decided to make a break with old Wallis’s pipe-and-half-moon-glasses style by moving his desk among the rest of his staff. The old office in the main building had been abandoned, and Andrew now sat among all his staff, however junior, and was available if they wanted to come up and ask him something. In practice, this did not happen because Andrew was so busy; Mohammed and Helena sat near by, and were experienced enough to deal with anyone’s problems. Sometimes, too, a meeting needed to take place out of earshot of all the others, like the meeting when he and Mo and Helena had had to decide, today, who was going to get a promotion. (There had been going to be three, but now because of the budget cuts, there were going to be only two.) It was a shame, but there it was; and it was always a problem finding somewhere to sit and talk in confidence. Once or twice they’d gone out and sat in the new McDonald’s on Old Street, at Mo’s suggestion. If Helena had suggested it, Andrew would have refused; but you couldn’t exactly tell Mohammed where he could or couldn’t eat.

  ‘Well, I think I’m going to leave that for the day,’ Helena said, turning from her desk. Her personal noticeboard carried a postcard image of a kitten in a bowl of spaghetti, its mouth open a
nd yowling. She got up with a sigh, brushing some biscuit crumbs from her bosom. She was a large woman, and the crocheted white cardigan she now lifted from the back of her swivel chair was on the scale of a bedspread. ‘I feel that was a really useful day, and I’ll be glad to settle for the evening in front of the telly.’

  ‘Sounds like a good plan,’ Andrew said, watching her put her purple coat on and wrap her scarf round her neck. ‘It’s cold out.’

  ‘February,’ Helena said, and theatrically shuddered. ‘Are you off, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s my gay men’s group on a Wednesday.’

  Helena merely nodded at this. It was important to say where you were going without any embarrassment, or suggesting that you might like to conceal anything about it. At any rate, it was important to say this when Helena was around. Andrew thought it might be challenging or disrespectful to Mohammed to mention this, and perhaps raise some statement from him that, however understandable in terms of Mohammed’s culture and heritage, would also be unfair and challenging to the gay members of staff within earshot, if any. (He wondered about that boy Ricky with the tribal tattoos on his biceps.)

  They left the office together. In the fierce wind, Helena wrapped in her scarf and Andrew with his furry hat with earflaps, they did not speak; the bus for Marylebone was just pulling up as they got to the stop, and Andrew got on it muttering a kind of goodbye. He hoped someone would turn up tonight; the last few weeks there had been only four of them or, a couple of times, three. Behind him, an old person of indeterminate sex, wrapped up like a babushka, was fumbling in the depths of its outfit. The bus driver was getting irritated; he had shut the door against the cold, but was not moving off until the old person had shown that they had the money to pay for a ticket.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ the driver said. ‘We ain’t got all day, now.’

  The figure went on rifling, a small sexless noise of indeterminate pitch escaping from the mass of cloth around the face. There was a peculiar smell in the bus; it must come from this figure. Finally, a handful of coins was dropped on the driver’s tray. He counted it. ‘You’re five pee short,’ he said. There was a gesture of helplessness. ‘Go on,’ the driver said eventually. ‘You can owe it to us. Don’t do it again.’

  The figure waddled on to the bus, devoid of gratitude, and took the seat in front of Andrew. The bus moved slowly forward. The figure unwrapped itself slowly, muttering. The smell coagulated; a curious, fishy, damp, cigarette-smelling odour; the gender of the person was no clearer – either a whiskery bald old woman or a femininely bulging old man of some sort. Andrew could not restrain himself. He leant forward.

  ‘The bus is a public service,’ he said, almost but not quite tapping the figure on their damp-looking shoulder. ‘Someone’s got to pay for it somehow. It’s not much.’

  The person turned round; it was the astonished face of someone to whom nobody habitually spoke, who was more used to strangers in buses removing themselves than beginning a conversation. ‘I paid,’ it said, in the astonished, ladylike tones of a dowager intruded upon in her private business. ‘I paid. I was only fivepence short and he didn’t mind, the driver.’

  ‘But someone’s got to pay that fivepence,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s not a lot to ask.’

  ‘I was only fivepence short,’ the figure said complainingly. ‘Are you an inspector? I was only fivepence short today. He’s not an inspector. Only fivepence short.’

  ‘Oh, leave the poor soul be,’ a matronly woman in a cagoule and a woolly bobble hat said. ‘She was only fivepence short. It won’t bankrupt anyone.’

  ‘I’m not a woman,’ the person said. ‘Don’t call me she. I’m not she. Is he an inspector? I need to get home. I was only fivepence short.’

  The person continued muttering all the way to Marylebone, where Andrew got off; only fivepence short and not an inspector; he saw how it would carry on muttering for miles, perhaps until the end of the route, its concerns preserved like the rituals of a class in society long after that class’s functions and significance have departed from the world. If he were to die now, as he walked through the wind-blasted February streets, he would be preserved for a time in the misapprehensions of a stranger, not an inspector and only fivepence short keeping him in the ether as a tattered brain hung on to its momentary obsession before fading away. He entered Heatherwick Street. There was a new coffee shop at the corner, and a bookmaker’s where the fishmonger had been until last summer. The bookshop was lit up, opposite the dark and closed-up sandwich shop run by Greeks. Inside, Arthur was leaning into the window display, and adding to a pile of copies of a blue marbled hardback book. Andrew observed him: as he drew upright, his face looked suddenly old and drawn under his mop of black hair, his expression mournful. What did his hair look like, underneath that ancient and much-renewed colour? It looked old, artificial, approximate in the shop’s light. But then Duncan came forward, wearing a suit and tie for some reason, and Arthur’s face burst into a smile at something he said. No – it wasn’t Duncan in the suit and tie. It just looked like him. Andrew crossed the road and entered the shop with a tug and a ring on the shop-door bell. The man he had thought was Duncan was actually that millionaire Duncan was supposed to be going out with. Andrew couldn’t remember his name – didn’t want to remember his name.

  ‘What’s that you’re putting in the window?’ Andrew said.

  ‘It’s that new novel,’ Arthur said. ‘The swimming-pool one. We can’t sell enough of it. We’ve re-ordered four times now.’

  ‘Thank God,’ the millionaire said. ‘If it carries on like that, this’ll save our bacon.’

  Andrew noticed but did not comment on ‘our’ bacon. The millionaire was wearing a deep blue suit with some kind of red check in it, and a tie that had, what was it, horseshoes? The smell that came from the millionaire was some kind of luxury smell, of gentlemen; of money; of toiletries. In the middle of the bookshop, the smell transformed it, quite at once, into a place for the exchange of money for goods, for a profit.

  ‘It’s about rich people, isn’t it?’ Andrew said. ‘Rich people fucking poor people. Charming.’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ Arthur said. ‘Have you read it? Well, you should. Everyone’s reading it. We keep quoting bits of it to each other. The big bookshops only ordered five copies each, if that, and they were caught on the hop, so everyone for a week had to come and get it from us if they wanted a copy. We’ve had all sorts in. They’ve come in for that and then they’ve said, I didn’t know you were here, and they’ve wandered round and bought all sorts. It’s been fantastic. We’ve never had such a fortnight. It’s not just poor people, it’s poor black people that get fucked in it, Andrew.’

  ‘I must read it,’ Andrew said. ‘I simply can’t wait. Is nobody here yet?’

  ‘What for?’ Arthur said. ‘Oh, it’s your group. No, nobody’s here. Do you think—’

  All at once he turned away and busied himself, as if it were not for him to finish the sentence, as if he had overstepped the mark. To begin with he stood at the round table at the front of the shop and squared copies of the books; but they were square, and in a moment to carry on busying himself, Arthur went to the counter and squared the stuffed pheasant. One eye was missing now, and had been for a year or two. Then he picked up the silver teapot – the one that just sat on the shelf at elbow level above the till, was never used and indeed looked fairly unusable. Andrew watched him levelly. His occupation was steady and his movements involved, but he had no doubt that Arthur was fluttering about with his hands so that he would seem busy and not have to talk to Andrew. The millionaire Duncan was going out with was more confident, however; he switched one leg over the other, standing cross-legged at the knee; he folded his arms and stood looking at Andrew without apparently feeling any need to address him. Like a squire. Andrew had been coming to this shop much longer than any millionaire. The shop had been in part his idea – he remembered those days at CHE when they had talked about how they c
ould have a place to meet in, a neutral place to discuss and take the movement forward. It had been his idea and Nat’s, and Simon’s, and all those people’s as well as Duncan’s. A radical space. And here came the money-maker from the back of the shop, wearing – Christ, no – a bow-tie like a professional book-seller in an advert for toffees. His hair was different since last week, clipped neatly short and grey; he looked and, as he approached, smelt like the millionaire.

  ‘Andrew,’ Duncan said. There was something wrong: Duncan had a businesslike air.

  ‘Hello, sweetie,’ Andrew said, poisonously.

  ‘It’s so nice to see you,’ Duncan said. ‘Always so nice to see you. Are you here for your discussion group?’

  ‘That’s a nice tie you’re wearing,’ Andrew said. ‘I don’t remember seeing you in a bow-tie before.’

  ‘You’re here for your discussion group,’ Duncan said again. Arthur was pretending, not very convincingly, to sort out the postcards in a pile by the till.

  ‘Every Wednesday,’ Andrew said.

  ‘I don’t think I can stay tonight,’ Duncan said. ‘We’re going – Ronnie and I, we’re going to the theatre.’

  ‘Judi Dench,’ the millionaire said, grinning.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Andrew said. He waited.

  ‘And actually Arthur said he can’t stay either tonight, for once.’

  ‘Actually Arthur said he doesn’t want to stay tonight,’ Arthur said, raising his head. ‘Actually Arthur’s sick to death of it, sticking around all evening listening to you.’

  ‘It’s not compulsory,’ Andrew said. ‘You don’t have to stay.’

  ‘Yes, well, someone’s got to stay to lock up,’ Duncan said. ‘And tonight I don’t think anyone can.’

  ‘I’ll lock up,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s no bother.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Duncan said resolutely. ‘The thing is, Andrew – is anyone else coming tonight? I mean, last week, who came?’