The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  There had been a wreath over the coffin in the hearse, and there were two floral arrangements on either side of the altar. But they were generic arrangements, done by the church; there was nothing chosen or characteristic about them, and most of it was made up with carnations and greenery. The vicar came to the front and asked them to stand, and the organist started to play, too slowly, ‘Sheep Will Safely Graze’. The coffin was borne in on the shoulders of the undertaker’s men. Should they have volunteered to carry it? It was too late now. The coffin was set down and, slowly, to the vicar’s half-smile, the organ performance came to a sticky end. The vicar, a porker with pink cheeks and a snub nose, welcomed them to this celebration of Trevor’s life.

  They sang a hymn, the sound of less than a dozen voices difficult to pull together into a congregation. It was a familiar choice, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. The heart moved painfully, reflecting the lack of engagement in the choice. Who had made it? Did Freddie Sempill have a favourite hymn? ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ – that was the navy hymn, wasn’t it? It would remind him of all those queens who had pretended to be in the navy for Freddie Sempill’s benefit. This one had been chosen by someone who had remembered that Trevor as a little boy had liked it, as all children are supposed to like ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Or perhaps the vicar had suggested it, saying that everyone knew it.

  The hymn came to its grisly conclusion. The vicar began to speak. He had a fluting, unctuous voice, as of a much older person, and gestured with both hands simultaneously, waving up and down, like a teacher quelling a noisy class.

  ‘Although I never knew Trevor,’ he began, ‘or Freddie, as he liked to be called as an adult, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Vera, Trevor’s mother, about him in his early years, and to Sean and Keith, his two friends up here in Richmond where he spent his last years. We should probably remember Trevor in his best years. His last years were spent in suffering. The rare Chinese bone infection he picked up while travelling in the 1970s was something he bore bravely, with the support of Sean and Keith to help out in the house. But before his last years, we should think of him as he wanted to be remembered, as a jolly chap, you might say.

  ‘Trevor Sempill was born in 1943, in London’s East End. Before he was five, he and his mother and father, Vera and Martin, moved to Shoeburyness in Essex.’

  The whole service was over in twenty-five minutes. Duncan cast a look over the aisle at Dommie as it came to an end with another singing of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. The organist had played ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations in between. There hadn’t been a poem; that would have defeated old mother Sempill. Dommie cast a warning look back, and Duncan gave a consoling pat on the thigh to Nat. Vera, supported by her friend, came tottering up the aisle, followed at a safe distance by the two friends, going separately. The fat, bald one seemed a little upset. Vera was an upright, grey-faced woman of some height, her hair roughly brought into some sort of shape, her pinheaded face without makeup, her eyebrows left untrimmed, like a Soviet dictator’s. Her friend, less bony but not much shorter, had made a little more of an effort, and an ugly orange slash of lipstick and two raw diagonals of blusher crossed her face. Vera stared straight ahead as she walked; the friend, walking by her but not supporting her, gave a direct look at Duncan’s group – an accusing, cold, assessing look straight from the North Sea into the cold heart of Shoeburyness. Duncan looked back levelly. There was somebody, at any rate, who knew where Freddie Sempill had been when he said he’d been to China and picked up a rare bone disease there. Vera’s friend knew where Freddie Sempill had been. He’d been to Earls Court.

  ‘Come on,’ Nat said. ‘Let’s go and introduce ourselves. Rare Chinese bone disease. Honestly.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was going to be such a silly old thing as all that,’ Alan said, getting a helping hand from Dommie’s daughter Celia. ‘It’s one of the best things in my life that I told Mother all about it – well, not all about it, but enough that she said she didn’t really need to know the details. She wouldn’t have said she loved me anyway. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to say such a thing.’

  ‘Alan,’ Celia said. ‘When you die, can I sing a solo?’

  ‘Of course you can, my darling,’ Alan said. ‘Can I choose what it’s going to be?’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to be there,’ Celia said. ‘But I’m going to be there, so why shouldn’t I choose it?’

  ‘Don’t be pert, darling,’ Dommie said, coming up behind and putting sunglasses on. ‘Alan knows lots of people who can sing whatever he wants to have sung. And I might point out that it’s not going to be very soon, so your voice might very well have gone beyond its childish promise by then.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Alan said. ‘I never really mind what people sing. I don’t really know about music. That hymn was nice, though, like the hymns you sing at school. Not like the difficult ones that some queens like to choose for their funerals, knowing that no one knows the tunes and you’ll all be going Hurdy-hur-di-hur, gloria, gloria, hallelujah, not really knowing any of you what you’re doing. No, I knew that tune, it was nice to have a good old sing-song.’

  ‘Put on your sad face, dear,’ Clive said to Simon. ‘And stand by me. Stephen’s ever so good at this sort of thing – it’s being a barrister and having to speak in court all the time, he’s never nervous. But I know the mother’s going to make a beeline for me. I’ve only come for the day out. You’ve got to stand by me and do all the work.’

  But when they came out, the vicar was standing helplessly on his own in his white cassock in the bright sunlight, blinking like a rabbit. Beyond the church gates, the mother and her friend were getting into a red minicab with a sign on top reading 1AAA RICHMOND CABS, the mother almost pushing the friend in. She hustled round to the other side, her haste making no concession to the occasion, and the car pulled out.

  ‘Vera and Mrs Thompson had to make an early start back,’ the vicar said helplessly. ‘They came from Essex, and had a very early start. Were you friends of – of Freddie?’

  ‘Thank you for the service,’ Ronnie said smoothly. ‘I thought it went very well.’

  ‘I was sorry I had to call him Trevor all the way through,’ the vicar said. ‘It was what the family requested, you see. I know he didn’t like to be called Trevor. Have you met Sean? And Keith? They were Freddie’s friends up here. I’m sure they’d like to meet you.’

  The vicar turned and went back into the church, perhaps hungry for his lunch. Sean turned out to be the fat, bald queen; Keith the squaddie, or he looked like a squaddie. He had a black earring in his left ear, which probably meant that he was another queen.

  ‘Friends of his, were you?’ Keith said. They agreed that they probably had been. ‘Funny, he never mentioned you. From London, are you? Freddie always said it was the best thing he’d ever done, leaving London.’

  ‘I only knew he’d moved when he died,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was the only friend he had at the end,’ the squaddie said.

  ‘That’s sad to hear,’ Nat said. ‘I’m sorry for that. But he had you, and Sean, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sean weren’t his friend,’ the squaddie said. ‘Sean were –’ he paused with scorn ‘– his nurse.’

  They stood and watched the soldier-like figure disappear down the path.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Alan said. ‘People so often get cross at funerals. I never know why. But there it is.’

  The nurse, whose name was Sean, stood with them. ‘That’s Keith,’ he said. ‘He was hoping to be left the house, I’ve been told. Sorry about that. I’m Sean.’

  ‘Rare Chinese bone disease?’ Duncan said.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Sean said. ‘That’s what he wanted people to say. I don’t know – I think he thought people might even believe it. I don’t think anyone did, mind. Has the mother gone?’

  21.

  As there was nothing arranged back at the house, they went with Sean
to a pub. It was at his suggestion, made without any reference to the fact that there was a ten-year-old girl in the party. But Dommie quietly said to Duncan and Ronnie that she and Celia would much rather have a walk round the town and play at ladies having lunch in a tea shop anyway. It was a pub that, as it were, all of them knew, but none of them had been to for years. It had a solitary alcoholic patron with a huge cardigan and an Alsatian at his feet; there were comedy paragraphs from the local newspaper stuck to the walls, with a chained-up charity box for a military cause, photographs of regulars with jocular additions, and, outside, a handwritten notice in upper-case italics announcing a Night With The Stars – Andy McRae, The Heartthrob With The Voice of Gold. ‘I don’t much fancy a night with Andy McRae, the Heartthrob With The Voice of Gold,’ Arthur said, after inspecting the gruesome little photograph of a smile, being given by one unpractised in the art. Still, they trooped in and, in their black funeral suits and neat appearance, might have made a favourable impression on the landlord.

  ‘I’m honestly envious of Dommie and Celia,’ Alan was saying to Nat. ‘These country towns, they’re always full of treasures – you only have to know where to look. Those Staffordshire pugs on my mantelpiece, Mother and I found them in a strange little back-street in Taunton, twenty years ago. A house-clearer, really. Well, Mother always said to me, Alan, you’re a little magpie, and you’ve got an eye for a bargain, but she knew when to keep schtum, and she went off and bothered herself in the back of the shop while I did the necessary. We were so gleeful and relieved when they were wrapped up – in newspaper – and safely in our hands. I was certain the man was going to drop one. They were seventy new pence for the two, believe it or not. I wish I could excuse myself and go with Dommie and Celia round the town.’

  ‘It was always very important to Christopher,’ Simon was saying to Duncan about something or other. ‘Always, really, from day one.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Stephen was saying to Ronnie, ‘it just wouldn’t work. It just wouldn’t work at all, not one bit.’

  ‘What are you two talking about?’ Clive said.

  ‘Shoes,’ Ronnie said.

  But then a pause in the conversation came, and over the pints of bitter, and lemonades for Alan and Nat, the man who had been Freddie Sempill’s friend was suddenly talking over silence; he had been talking to Clive. ‘I don’t remember him mentioning you,’ the man – his name was Sean – was saying. ‘I don’t remember your name at all. It’s nice of you to come. There could have been more of a turn-out. His brother couldn’t come, of course.’

  ‘Freddie Sempill had a brother?’ Duncan said. Sean gave him a hostile look, difficult to account for.

  ‘Yes, Freddie had a brother,’ Sean said. ‘Didn’t you know? He’s in Kuwait at the moment, very hush-hush. He’s a brigadier. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No,’ Duncan said. ‘I had no idea. I don’t remember him ever mentioning a brother.’

  ‘Perhaps you weren’t listening,’ Sean said. He turned back to Clive. ‘It’s nice of you to come, though I don’t remember him mentioning you. None of you ever came up to visit him when he was alive, I notice.’

  ‘Probably because none of us knew he was living here,’ Ronnie said drily.

  ‘You could have found out,’ Sean said, pulling savagely at his pint.

  Nat and Arthur exchanged a glance in which amusement was not quite successfully concealed.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ Simon said.

  ‘Oh, everyone knows everyone in this place,’ Sean said. ‘I looked after him, too, when he had a health crisis. Because of the way he looked – you know, with the growth on his face – everyone noticed him when he arrived. I think he’d got the wrong idea about Richmond. He used to say that he could have bought a mansion here for the price of his flat in London, and there might be some truth in that. He bought a nice house, a terrace, one of those in Almond Street, but not one worth the same as his place before. He said he’d come up here to splash it around a bit, have as much fun as he could. He used to say that to me a lot, even at the end. He liked soldiers, didn’t he?’

  ‘Rather known for it,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘Rather known for it,’ Sean said, sneering in imitation. ‘Yes, he was rather known for it. He’d go round the Fox and Hounds, because of the custom they get there, and he’d sit there, quite quietly with a pint, then another pint, then another one, then he’d go up to someone and buy them a drink, buy them another one, and then in half an hour he would say that he’d give them fifty pounds if they’d let him suck them off. He didn’t have much luck, poor Freddie. He looked like that, you see. No one was going to put their doings in that face. You’d be afraid of catching something. You couldn’t help it.

  ‘Everyone knew him, to look at, but not many people passed the time of day with him. There was only Keith. You know Keith – he was the one who came just now.’

  ‘The squaddie,’ Duncan said.

  Sean turned to Duncan in rage. ‘Keith’s not a squaddie,’ he said. ‘Course he’s not a squaddie. He’s like Freddie was. He’d moved here for the sake of the squaddies, and he cut his hair to look like one, and he dressed like one in civvies – in a white polo shirt and tight white trousers with a little belt on. And the first time Freddie saw him in the same pub, he went and offered him fifty quid if he’d come and wank off in his sitting room. “You don’t have to look at me if you don’t want to,” Freddie said. He’d got humble like that. He’d taken to asking me if I’d wank off when I came to change his sheets. I were a nurse, though, I wasn’t a squaddie, so he didn’t ask me every time, only when he wasn’t having such a good day. I don’t suppose anyone had ever offered Keith money for sex before, or mistaken him for a serving soldier in Her Majesty’s Forces. So he took the money and he went home with Freddie and he did what Freddie asked him to do. After that he’d go over to Freddie’s once a week and take the money and do whatever Freddie wanted him to do. That’s why he was crying at the funeral. End of his income stream. I think Keith thought he was going to be left the house and Freddie’s money, what was left of it after pouring most of it down his throat, Keith’s throat. It’s a nice street, Almond Street, I always think. But the mother’s got it. There wasn’t a will. I don’t suppose he could think of who he wanted to leave anything to.

  ‘I said to him once – this would have been after he went blind, and Keith had taken to coming over dressed any old how, not even pretending any more – I said to Freddie once, you do know Keith’s not a soldier, he’s nothing to do with the armed forces? And Freddie said, Course he is, he’s on manoeuvres right now as we speak. I said to him, Some people call it manoeuvres, some people call it going to Cinderella’s Nite Spot in Leeds of a Friday night. He said, Don’t be daft, he can talk you through everything he’s done, he could put a rifle together in front of you in thirty seconds. So I said, Fantasy, Freddie. Sheer fantasy. And he sort of smiled a little bit. I don’t think he were under any illusions. I don’t think he ever met anyone else up here, apart from me and Keith, who got paid fifty pounds a go.’

  ‘That’s a bit sad,’ Duncan said.

  ‘What would you know about it?’ Sean said. His rage had been passing – most of his story he had been telling in the direction of Alan, who had been nodding and saying, ‘I see,’ and ‘Really,’ and ‘Oh dear,’ in encouragement. ‘What would you know about it? You never made any effort with Freddie. He told me all about you. He was in at the beginning of your bookshop, doing all the hard work, the painting and the carpentry and everything, all the electricals, and doing it for nothing. Then he moves up to Richmond and you never try to reach him. There’s not much gratitude there for everything Freddie did for you.’

  ‘I see,’ Duncan said. He wasn’t going to say that it hadn’t been quite like that.

  ‘It’s good to know that he had some gay friends,’ Alan said peaceably. ‘I always think that helps enormously. Just to have two people to talk things over with, who’ll understand what it’s like, to be like
this, all the little pleasures and the pains and everything, really. It’s nice to have lots of gay friends, so that when you fall out and bicker, you’ve got someone else to rely on.’ Nat started to giggle quietly: there was nobody less able to fall out and bicker with anyone than Alan, and Nat’s giggle proved infectious. ‘But even if you don’t have a large social circle, if there’s always two nice gay friends—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Sean said. ‘I’m not gay. I’m not one of your gays. When he said to me, Sean, I want you to strip off and have a wank, I’ll give you thirty pounds, I said, No, Freddie. I said no every time. I’ve got a wife at home. We’re trying for a child. I’m very happy as I am, thank you very much. I’ve got to go now. I thought I’d be friendly to Freddie’s friends, but I can see that he was right after all. You’re none of you worth it.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Nat said, as the man departed, slamming the door of the pub behind him. ‘That was a bit unfortunate.’

  ‘Closet case,’ Arthur said.

  ‘You are terrible,’ Duncan said. ‘Not everyone’s gay, you know.’

  ‘No, but he knew all about Cinderella’s Nite Spot in Leeds, didn’t he?’ Arthur said. ‘And Friday night there? Happens to be its only gay night. Very well informed, that Sean, I would say. Did you notice, too, he thought we knew everything he knew, what the best pub for picking up squaddies in Richmond were and what Almond Terrace were like? No idea about other people, that Sean.’