The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘It was that black boy from Leicester who sometimes comes,’ Andrew said. ‘He came.’

  ‘No, that were week before,’ Arthur said. ‘Last week it were just you and me and Alan, and Alan said to me afterwards, that’s last time he’s coming, he’s sick of listening to you and Trotsky, he’s better off spending his evenings in Coleherne or even wi’ his old mother. That’s what he said to me, Andrew.’

  ‘It’s important—’ Andrew began, but the millionaire interrupted.

  ‘It’s important – what?’

  ‘I was going to say—’ Andrew said, but the millionaire went on.

  ‘It’s important to have a discussion group, to have a safe radical space where you can plot your revolutions? The thing is—’

  ‘Ronnie,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s best if I talk, really. Let’s be calm about this. The thing is, Andrew, the time for these discussion groups, it’s over. There’s nothing to stop you having your discussion group at home, or just round a table in a pub. But this – it can’t go on. Every Wednesday we’ve got to make up numbers, we’ve got to stay and talk, or listen to you talking and lock up afterwards. This is just a bookshop. In the evenings, we might want to have readings every now and then, instead of your discussion group.’

  ‘To a paying audience, I expect.’

  ‘Yes,’ Duncan said, not angrily, but perhaps even puzzled at the objection. ‘Look—’

  ‘What is this?’ Andrew said. ‘The Thatcherite revolution in action?’

  ‘When was the last time you even paid anything towards group?’ Arthur said, coming out from behind the till and walking with his shoulders back towards Andrew, who quailed: it was as if he were about to be hit, and hard. ‘You never pay anything, and at end, you always just put a book in your bag when you think no one’s looking.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Punchy little number,’ the millionaire said, puzzlingly, and he and Duncan exchanged a look, a secret smile.

  ‘Oh yes it is,’ Arthur said. ‘You always put a book in your bag. You wait until we’re at door, talking to someone, then it comes out, your hand, and book’s in bag. You’ve not paid for a book in this shop while 1984. Leave you in charge to lock up? It’d be like leaving Lady Isobel frigging Barnett in charge, you hairy thieving little shit. You say to yourself you’re just benefiting from community resource, but you’re in community and we’re not benefiting from you. We’re losing twenty pounds every bloody time you step over threshold. So frig off, you twat, and don’t come back till you’re prepared to spend some frigging money of your own.’

  As Arthur had begun to shout in Andrew’s face, Andrew took his hat and placed it firmly on his head. He paid no attention to Arthur’s display, buttoning his coat with dignity, and turned without saying goodbye to any of them. He left the shop as Arthur shouted after him, turned and paused. He was trembling. From the shop there was a moment of silence, and then a single cheer – the millionaire’s drawling voice made the huzzah. But then there was something worse: the noise of laughter from the three of them. One of them was shouting something in glee; it might have been Punchy little number, even. Over the road, a black man stood and looked at Andrew, bent over as if about to be sick. It was not the boy from Leicester. Andrew thought, as he straightened up, that it might be the man who worked in the sandwich shop opposite, the ones who hated the bookshop. He needed a drink.

  19.

  When Nat heard that Freddie Sempill had died, it struck him like news from a previous existence. It had been years since he had seen or heard of Freddie Sempill.

  Christopher had rung him on the train. Nat now had eight flats and had stopped using the expression ‘property empire’ – when he’d bought the last two last November, he’d done the sums and realized there was no point in working any more: he should just devote his whole time to what he owned. It was useful still to be in touch when he was out and about, talking to the builders who were doing up those last two. They were still working on them in June, and Nat was on the overground train to the Queenstown Road when his phone went. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he said to the lady opposite, who had leapt up in a startled way, looking about her for where this ringing might be coming from. It was a hot day. Nat delved in his bag for the phone, not wearing a jacket to put it in. Around him, people craned to look, some with expressions already disapproving.

  ‘I haven’t heard from him for years,’ he said to Christopher. ‘To be honest, I thought he’d died years back. When did I last see him?’

  He’d last seen him at that party to raise funds for Duncan’s bookshop. That was more than three years ago. Nat remembered that was the evening when he’d got off with that double-bass player, and they’d gone round the corner to what had been then only his second flat; it was still being done up. It was impossible for the three of them, Nat and the double-bass player and the instrument, to get into the lift together. They’d had to take relays. Anyway. Was that the last time they’d seen Freddie Sempill? He’d fainted, that’s right. Andrew Scott had come in a dress and was it then that Duncan had got off with Ronnie for the first time?

  The woman sitting opposite Nat leant forward and tapped him on the knee. ‘Is this conversation going to go on much longer?’ she said sharply. ‘Not everyone wants to listen to the details of your personal life.’

  ‘Got to go, darling,’ Nat said into the phone. ‘People getting awfully cross. Speak later.’ He hung up – hung up? Was that still what you said, or did you now say switched off, or something of that sort? Anyway, he stopped the phone call, and glared at the woman. ‘I’m only going two stops,’ he said. ‘Honestly.’

  The builders were, for once, hard at work when he arrived, and the flat looked close to completion: the windows were in, the paint dry, the floors sanded. With the first flat, he’d made the mistake of decorating it in a cool style, in grey with yellow details, and it had taken for ever to let. Ever since, he’d painted everything brilliant white, and nothing had taken more than a week to go. It was strange to think how, eight years ago, he’d been so worried about stretching himself that he’d constantly chivvied the builders and decorators at that first flat to get a move on. Now the cash flow was fine, and it didn’t really worry him that the builders were a month behind schedule, that asbestos had been discovered two months before in the flat downstairs, that the whole thing was costing money and not bringing money in. The other six flats were doing just fine, bringing in a nice steady income from nice steady gay tenants, hand-picked by Nat. The whole thing was a pleasure to think of on a nice June morning with the sun shining through the windows, and Radio 1 singing out on a plaster-encrusted radio, and Nat, a property mogul now, in his shorts and sandals. He remembered Freddie Sempill was dead. Well, that was sad. But you couldn’t say they hadn’t had enough practice at early deaths.

  ‘He looked absolutely terrible the last time I saw him,’ Christopher said to Simon that night, as Simon was making dinner. They were both watching their weight these days, and there was a no-alcohol rule Monday to Friday for Simon, who was making what he called Complicated Salad, with prawns and hardboiled eggs. ‘When did we last see him?’

  ‘No idea,’ Simon said. ‘I thought he’d died years ago. I never really knew him.’

  ‘He came to Paul’s funeral, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did he? I don’t remember. That was such years ago. With Donna Summer and I Will Survive. Ironic, really. Did he really come to Paul’s? Was he friends with Paul?’

  ‘Well, I think he came,’ Christopher said. ‘Nat thought he hadn’t seen him since that party at Duncan’s – you know, the one to raise funds.’

  ‘Oh, God, yes,’ Simon said, with a relishing, nostalgic, warm tone. ‘I can’t believe he’s only just died. He looked weeks away from the end, then.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Christopher said. ‘He’s gone now. I don’t know how Duncan came to know about it. He phoned me at work – that over-zealous secretary of mine came into a meeting with the chancell
or and passed me a note saying please phone Duncan Flannery AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, in capitals.’

  ‘Are we going? Did we like him enough?’

  ‘It’s in Richmond, Duncan said.’

  ‘Well, it’s not far, at least.’

  Simon stopped shelling the egg in his hand; with his saintly bald glow in the reflected light from the garden window and the hard white egg in his hand, he suddenly looked like a martyr in Piero della Francesca. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Richmond upon Thames. Richmond in Yorkshire.’

  ‘What’s Freddie Sempill doing being buried in Richmond in Yorkshire? Is that where his people came from? I thought he was born in Simpson’s menswear department on Piccadilly.’

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ Simon said.

  But it turned out that Freddie Sempill’s people, as he always put it, came from Essex. They were in Shoeburyness, as they always had been. His father had worked for the Ministry of Defence there. Very hush-hush, Freddie Sempill had always said. After his retirement, they’d stayed there, liking it. Freddie Sempill had always lived in Fulham in an awful flat on the second floor of a converted semi, with a strange smell of disinfectant on the stairs. Then he’d moved to Richmond in Yorkshire.

  Simon was telling all of this in Duncan’s car as they were driving up. It was a bit of a squeeze. Alan, surprisingly, had said he wanted to come, and Nat too; and then some people had heard about the trip and about the funeral and said they might as well come, even though they had hardly known Freddie Sempill, or not known him one bit. Duncan’s boyfriend Ronnie was driving another car, and his sister Dommie had been landed with Clive and Stephen. Christopher hadn’t wanted to come, and it was in any case hard to get a whole day off from the Treasury. Arthur’s friend Tim was minding the shop; Arthur was in with Ronnie and Dommie’s ten-year-old daughter Celia, who loved funerals, anything like that.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Alan said. ‘Why Richmond?’

  Simon said it had been either that or Catterick, apparently.

  ‘Simon,’ Nat said, ‘Catterick is Richmond. The name of the camp is Catterick. The name of the town is Richmond. He did move to Catterick. Honestly.’

  But Alan still didn’t understand, and Nat had to explain that, at the end, Freddie Sempill had wanted to move to a town with a constant supply of squaddies. Catterick – the name of the army camp, as Nat explained – was the biggest camp in Britain. He had gone there on his own, and was being buried there this morning.

  ‘Do you suppose there’s going to be a salute of honour?’ Duncan said, from the driving seat. ‘From the squaddies he helped out with the odd twenty quid?’

  They discussed it, and Freddie Sempill’s appearance towards the end. It seemed unlikely that Freddie Sempill had been able, in his last years, to persuade anyone to do anything, with twenty pounds or ten times twenty. Yorkshire was quite a distance away. They began to talk about the funerals they had been to. There had been Andrew’s, last year. But that didn’t count; that had been suicide. The others?

  ‘I loved Matthew’s best,’ Nat said simply. They agreed, Matthew’s had been wonderful. Alan hadn’t known Matthew – he had been a colleague of Nat’s, when Nat still had a job, and had always been Nat’s friend. Matthew had never been rich, but he had left two thousand pounds in his will to furnish the church with white flowers. It had made people cry, going into that little church in Putney on a grey March day, and finding it so blanched and fresh, and the smell so beautiful, too. You felt transformed, and then the vicar standing up in his white cassock, surrounded by lilies and white roses and branches of blossom, and his look of happiness to see his church like that. A look he composed before the service began, but there had been an air of happiness, improbably, over the whole ceremony. ‘That was the first funeral I ever went to,’ Nat said, ‘with a woven willow casket instead of a coffin. That was so nice. You could imagine Matthew lying in it and not minding a bit.’ And then there was Paul’s. Everyone remembered Paul’s – it had been a disco funeral with some bits of opera, and plumed black horses standing outside.

  ‘What was it Paul used to say?’ Nat said. ‘When I go to bed with a man –’

  ‘When I go to bed with a man,’ Duncan said, concentrating on the road, ‘I expect him to maintain …’

  He had started telling it as a funny remark, but he hadn’t said it for years, and in a moment he had to say to the car, ‘I’m sorry. I’d forgotten. I hadn’t thought about Paul or about that for a while. I’ll be all right in a moment.’

  ‘He was so special,’ Alan said.

  But then there was that other one, where the gay vicar had got over-excited, and had taken a red rose from the bouquet at the end of his sermon, and had gone over to the grieving widow, handed it over and said, with a special deep, husky voice, ‘For you.’ Who had that been? No, they couldn’t remember, but they all remembered the gay vicar. Hadn’t he said, ‘For you, Brian?’ But who was Brian? ‘I know I bought his boyfriend’s books from him afterwards,’ Duncan said, only a little tremulously. ‘He wasn’t a reader, Brian, or so he said. I think he lived in Barons Court. I could only give him sixty pounds, I remember.’ There had been Kevin’s funeral – that was another one with Verdi. Duncan explained to Alan that Kevin was the owner of the awful house Arthur used to live in. That had been two years ago. Never got over the shock of Mrs Thatcher being chucked out like that. Arthur was quite thrown – he had no idea where he was going to live when the house was sold out of the blue like that. Poor old Arthur, having to move in with his friends Tony and Tim for six months till they had had enough and told him to leave. No wonder they had all been crying at Kevin’s funeral.

  ‘They weren’t really,’ Nat said.

  ‘I can’t think what they’re going to say about Freddie Sempill,’ Simon said. ‘He was so awful. I remember, years ago, he told me that he would phone up rent boys and get them to come round, and then he would say, in his pretend-Cockney voice, I’m sorry, mate – I ain’t got no money. And then he said the rent boy would often have sex with you anyway. But sometimes he would hit you. But I quite enjoy that sometimes, too, Freddie Sempill used to say. I don’t know why we’re going to his funeral. I can’t think of anything nice to say about him at all.’

  And then there was that other funeral – Alan remembered a funeral where the boyfriend had broken his hip falling downstairs drunk and the mother was recovering from a stroke, and someone else, he couldn’t remember, anyway, they were all in wheelchairs and pretending not to notice or to speak to each other because the family and the boyfriend didn’t acknowledge each other. All wheeling around each other and pretending not to see. Nat had known one boy in a situation quite like that, a charming boy who had gone out with Patrick Dee, the old television presenter and closet case; had lived with him for years. And when Patrick Dee had died, the family had hired thugs and, during the funeral itself, this would have been, they went into the house they’d shared for years and took all of the boyfriend’s possessions out and put them into black bin bags and left them outside on the pavement and changed the locks and everything. And then there had been that one two years ago—

  ‘Has anyone got a phone in the other car?’ Alan said.

  ‘Ronnie has,’ Nat said. ‘Why? Do you want to speak to them?’

  ‘I just want to pause for a moment,’ Alan said. ‘If there’s a service station coming up. I’m awfully sorry, Duncan – just for a five-minute break.’

  ‘It’s fourteen miles,’ Duncan said. ‘Can you endure?’

  20.

  It was just after twelve as Richmond appeared. None of them had been there before. A square tower rose out of the mild stone town, set in green; the trees were dense with colour. They had rolled the windows down after leaving the motorway, and the scent of the country poured in in waves and gusts. Duncan turned down the music they had been playing, an old tape of Dusty in Memphis; they had stopped talking so exuberantly. Nat was reading out the directions from a piece of paper. The others sat quie
tly in the back of the car.

  ‘It says third left,’ Nat said. ‘But it means – I tell you what, take this one. How could Freddie Sempill come here to live?’

  Duncan turned left, and at the bottom of the hill there was the church. They were just in time, about ten minutes before the start, and the hearse was outside the church – an anonymous black Co-op car with a coffin inside it, and a single sour wreath of white flowers. They were on time, surely, but there was nobody much outside. Almost every funeral they could remember had been full, and the crowd outside before, like a busy, weeping wedding. It was the advantage of dying young: your friends outlived you, and came to your wedding. The other car had arrived before them, and Duncan parked his in the church car park. There was plenty of space.

  ‘Has everyone gone in already?’ Alan said. But they went in, and there was hardly anyone there. There was no leaflet on vellumed paper with a portrait of Freddie Sempill on the cover; only a sullen photocopied piece of paper with the words of a couple of hymns and ‘TREVOR SEMPILL, 1943–1994’ at the head of it.

  ‘That’s what he was called,’ Nat murmured, as Duncan gave a small turn sideways. ‘What he was christened, I mean. I would have thought – have we come to the right occasion? But he renamed himself when he came to London, Freddie with an ie on the end. Very Brideshead Revisited.’ In the front row, there were two small elderly heads, both female; a mother and an aunt. Three rows behind, and again at the other side of the church, there were two men; one an older, shaved-head, fat man; the other conceivably one of Freddie’s squaddies, with sharp-cut hair. And then towards the back, in two clumps, were the rest of them, travelled up from London. Dommie turned and, with Celia, gave Duncan a huge smile and a wave. She was wearing a curious black construction on her head, a substanceless design of stick and feather and ribbon patched onto a black saucer; Celia was wearing a black party shift with a white collar. They sat down. One of the two old ladies at the front turned round too, and inspected them with some vigour. Could she be Freddie Sempill’s mother? She turned back and, with a few muttered words, made her companion turn round, too; and that, clearly, was Freddie Sempill’s mother. She had the same disapproving pinhead air. They looked old, tired, bored; they did not inspect the other mourners in grief, but ready to express contempt. The younger of the two solitary men looked round too; he was pale and smooth, a once-a-week shaver, and he seemed to catch Duncan’s eye before turning back again.