The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘You ought to be a novelist,’ Simon said, drinking away – he was breaking his and Christopher’s no-alcohol Monday to Friday regime, with some enjoyment. ‘You’ve got excellent observational skills, as they say on the office away days.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Alan said. ‘Did we say something to offend that charming man?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ Nat said. ‘I remember the day that Freddie Sempill went over and tried to paint the bookshop. It all had to be done again. He never did anything for anyone else, it was always for himself and because he might get a shag out of it with someone he’d never see again. He was trying to impress the electricians, as I remember. Honestly.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Duncan said. ‘I don’t think he ever did anything. I don’t know why I’m the villain of the piece. Oh, God.’

  ‘Oh, we all feel like that sometimes,’ Ronnie said. ‘Don’t you worry about it. Only an idiot would believe anything Freddie Sempill ever said to them about anything, or a mad old closet case.’

  ‘They’ll be reduced to each other now,’ Stephen said cheerfully. ‘One of them saying I’ve got to get back to wife and kids, and the other saying I’ve got to get back to barracks before sergeant major locks up for night, and then doing it with their eyes closed, thinking about someone else entirely. Poor old them.’

  ‘Your Yorkshire accent is terrible,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ve never heard worse.’

  22.

  Hours and hours later – it took five hours to drive to Richmond in Yorkshire to witness the last rites of Trevor (Freddie) Sempill, deceased of a rare Chinese bone disease, and five hours back – Ronnie and Duncan were sitting in the kitchen of Ronnie’s house, in the basement. Just for once, Duncan would quite have liked to phone out for a pizza, like a student, or something even worse. But Annunziata had left a delicious light supper with grapes at the end.

  ‘What’s up, honey?’ Ronnie said, in an American accent.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Duncan said. ‘Just tired. I don’t want to go to any more funerals, that’s all. I didn’t even end up getting any books out of it for the second-hand corner.’

  ‘Well, you won’t have to tomorrow or the day after,’ Ronnie said. ‘But you’ll probably have to some time. They won’t be as awful as that one, though.’

  ‘It was just …’ Duncan paused. He didn’t know if he should say what he wanted to say. ‘It was just – he didn’t do anything with his life. There was just nothing there. Not even old books.’

  ‘Not everyone can do something,’ Ronnie said, only slightly disapprovingly. ‘Poor old queen.’

  ‘No, it’s just …’ Duncan said. ‘It’s just – oh, I don’t know, Ronnie. It’s not about making something or building a monument or running a Footsie 100 company.’ (He realized as he said it that five years before he wouldn’t have known to say Footsie 100 company with such confidence. Ronnie had brought some awful things into his conversation.) ‘Do you – at school, do you remember there were those men, I can’t remember, were they called Radley and Latimer? Ridley. I think.’

  ‘Not at my school,’ Ronnie said. ‘Do you mean at school?’

  ‘I mean in history,’ Duncan said. ‘In history lessons. And I can’t remember what they were, or what they were supposed to have done, but they were burnt for it – this is back in the Tudors, we did them for O level. And one of them said to the other, “Be of good cheer, Master Latimer,” or possibly Master Ridley, depending on who was talking, because, because—’

  ‘“This day we light such a candle as in England shall never be put out,”’ Ronnie said, surprisingly. ‘I do know. How they know that one of them said it to the other as they were in flames, I don’t know. We can’t remember what they did or why they did it. But we remember what they’re supposed to have said. You can’t expect Freddie Sempill to die a martyr’s death just to please you, you know.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Duncan said. ‘He never lit a candle. He’d have put candles out if he had, whenever he’d noticed one. There was just nothing in Freddie Sempill’s life that you’d want to copy. It was all just awful and empty and disapproving of everyone, and pretending that he wasn’t gay in the hope that someone would shag him, just the once.’

  ‘I wish I’d known him. I would have told him that was a strategy doomed to failure.’

  ‘Once, in five years’ time, someone will say to someone else, probably on their way to someone else’s funeral, Do you remember Freddie Sempill, and the other person will say Oh, God, that one – I haven’t thought of him in years. And that will be the very last time anyone will ever have any reason to think of Freddie Sempill. He didn’t change anyone’s life at all.’

  ‘That queen will think of him, I dare say.’

  ‘The nurse? Dead of a rare Chinese bone infection by then, I promise you. What was he called – Sean?’

  ‘You’ve lit a candle,’ Ronnie said suddenly. ‘You have.’

  ‘I’ve lit a fucking torch,’ Duncan said. He felt warm and happy and secure, all at once. He wished they could be Victorian orphans, eating bread and milk from white bowls in the kitchen basement, wearing white nightgowns like angels. ‘A fucking torch. That’s what I’ve lit, darling.’

  23.

  It was at the end of September that Arthur found himself in the big bookshop near the university. It had always been a drab, academic sort of place, with, on the ground floor, only minimal piles of popular new books, and ascending towards still more austere and daunting material in the upper floors. Two days before, he had found himself in the bed of an Austrian, a student. There wasn’t the age difference that might have been assumed. The Austrian had been a student for fourteen years now, and had ended up at one of the London colleges doing a dissertation on an aspect of an Indian language. He had explained which one, in the new bar on Old Compton Street. Then they had moved on together to another bar, another new one on Old Compton Street. And then they had moved on to a third. Old Compton Street was getting to be quite brazenly gay, and the new bars, unlike the old gay bars, had great sheets of windows rather than the blacked-out sheets of hardboard that had guarded the clientele of the Coleherne in Earls Court. Good luck with that, Arthur thought, remembering the number of their glazier without too much effort. But you could go on a short bar crawl now in Old Compton Street. Arthur had stayed the night with the Austrian, in his tiny rented flat in Bethnal Green, and in the morning had had breakfast with him – a hard-boiled egg, German black bread and a piece of apple cake. Interesting. The Austrian had turned out to be a great reader, with a wall full of books in English and German and, presumably, the Indian language. They looked like classics. Arthur said he hadn’t read enough of the classics, Dickens and all that; he was ashamed of it but there it was. He knew he was missing out.

  ‘And German books?’ the Austrian said. ‘Not even Buddenbrooks?’

  Arthur just about knew that Buddenbrooks was by Thomas Mann. He’d read Mann’s diaries and letters when they came out, and they stocked it in the bookshop – he’d enjoyed the moment when Mann couldn’t get it up when his wife was lying next to him and had written afterwards that he’d be able to get it up soon enough if it were a man next to him. He told Ralf this.

  ‘But the novels – you have not read the novels? The novels are why Mann is interesting to us in the first place!’

  Ralf had insisted, asking him one by one about The Magic Mountain and Joseph and His Brothers and Felix Krull and Doctor Faustus and Death in Venice—

  ‘Yes! I have read that one. I definitely have. I definitely saw the film, anyway. I don’t know about the book. I’m sure I have. We definitely stock it. I’m so uneducated, I warn you.’

  And something called Lotte in Weimar and The Black Swan and Royal Highness – Ralf was pretty genuinely enjoying himself here. He would see Arthur again when Arthur had read Buddenbrooks at least. Buddenbrooks was the book that everyone should read.

  ‘But not until then,’ Ralf said.

  ‘I hope it’s not a long b
ook,’ Arthur said. He was enjoying sitting there naked, at the naked Austrian’s breakfast table, eating black bread and looking at his nice blond beard and the nice blond hair on his nice chubby chest, like a god. He would read Buddenbrooks and then he would phone Ralf and then they would go out again and talk about it, and then hopefully he would end up licking the salty sweat from Ralf’s chest in his nice student bed again.

  They didn’t stock any Mann apart from the diaries, a biography and Death in Venice, so around twelve Arthur said he was going out, and got the bus to the big university bookshop – the ones on Oxford Street might have it, but he wanted to range freely over shelves and shelves of slightly different translations, snuffling in pseudo-expertise, like a pig after truffles. He found it easily – there was, after all, only one translation – and was about to go to the till to pay for it when he saw a mild, scholarly type of woman with spectacles, an uneven-hemmed browny-green dress. There was something calculated about her vague stance, a deliberate sort of who-me-Officer about the way she was peering at the shelves, and in a moment Arthur pinned it down: her expression was peaceful and half smiling, but her hands were moving restlessly, down at her side. In a moment, she picked a book off the shelf – no, two books, but held together. Arthur watched her closely. She brought both towards her face, shook her head in apparent disappointment and, by releasing her grip slightly, let one fall into her bag before returning the other to the shelf. If you hadn’t been watching her closely, it would have seemed quite innocuous.

  Like all shopkeepers, Arthur could not abide thieves. They came only behind bribe-hungry members of the Vice Squad and glass-smashers in his loathing. Most of all, he loathed them because he knew, somehow, that someone who stole a book from a bookshop would never lend it to a friend with the words ‘You ought to read it – it’s really good.’ He didn’t know whether the Big Gay Bookshop suffered more than most bookshops from thieves. In their case, it was always the potentially smutty books that were taken. Was it more embarrassing to pay for The Nude Male or to be discovered with it in your bag in front of a shopful of customers? The answer seemed obvious to Arthur, but not to the six or seven regulars that had to be watched constantly – one a vicary sort of fellow with half-mast trousers in Crimplene, and hair he cut himself, apparently. He was the reason that Arthur had noticed the woman with the hemline in the first place. She had seemed, to the expert eye, like a shoplifting type.

  He followed her discreetly from the E–M bay to the N–Z, picking up and dawdling over a book as he went. She didn’t appear to have noticed. In a moment she repeated the performance with, Arthur saw, two novels by Philip Roth. The Great American Novel went into the basket. It was impressive; Arthur realized with indignation that she had done this many times before to be so practised. She went into the next bay.

  Arthur had intended, imprecisely, to follow her for a time, then priggishly warn the management. But in the next bay, after the end of fiction, there was something unexpected. It was a mixed bag of offerings, and his shoplifter gave one cursory glance to the categories and moved on to the richly glossy pickings of hardbacked biography. Arthur stayed where he was. There were nine cases in the bay, of social theory, politics and women’s writings, and then, finally, over the ninth in chalk capitals the bookseller had written GAY AND LESBIAN. Arthur went over. The collection was meagre; there were about a hundred novels, he reckoned, most of which were classics, and some porn novels. On the bottom two shelves were books of photography. It wouldn’t keep anyone curious busy for long.

  But how long had this been here? Anyone wanting to read about people like them would have had to fossick through the whole shop for a reference or a single volume. You’d had to look, or to take a trip to the Big Gay Bookshop over in Marylebone. Now it was here. No one was looking at it. Soon every bookshop would have one. There would be glass windows in front of every gay bar, which would be full of gay people and heterosexual people mixing indifferently. People would say, ‘Oh, are you gay?’ casually, in the way that they said, ‘Oh, are you left-handed?’ Books would be about gay people and about straight people and everyone would know some of each and no one would care. You would be able to marry a man or a woman and all that was characteristic, that was deliberate, that was protective, that was shameful, that was unlike the normal would pass from human behaviour, then from human memory. There would be no need for gay people to have liberation groups; there would be no need for a bar for gay people; there would be no need for an area of a city to declare itself a gay place; there would be no need for a gay bookshop. Arthur knew that the work of the Big Gay Bookshop was done, or almost.

  He left the bookshop and, instead of returning to Duncan’s shop, he went home to the little flat in Streatham he now rented. There he packed his one suitcase with the things in his flat he really liked and the clothes he couldn’t live without. He took his passport. That all went into one suitcase, not very big. Then he went out and caught the bus, then the tube, to the railway station at Paddington. He was glad he had saved, over the last fifteen years, ten thousand pounds. He didn’t mind the expense, just this time, of the ticket he bought – to the airport on the fast new train, and at the airport, a flight abroad. It was just a one-off expense.

  24.

  Afterwards, when Duncan thought about the bookshop period of his life, he always thought of Arthur, who had come into it at the start and had stayed with it for most of its existence. And Arthur’s appearance and disappearance were always a mystery to him. He had gone out one lunchtime saying he’d be back by two, and had never returned. Only after five days of phoning round the hospitals had a postcard arrived, from Berlin, saying that he’d moved there on the spur of the moment and he was sorry to have let Duncan down. Since then, nothing. Arthur: one of those tousle-haired angels in a fairy story, who arrives at the moment of the hero’s greatest need, and teaches him three lessons before departing in a pillar of fire and smoke. Remember, Arthur’s voice called from inside the vertical zip of fire, remember, Duncan …But what had the voice been telling Duncan to remember? What lessons had been learnt? He would have asked anyone else who had been around all through it, but so many of them were dead now. From the sky, or from Berlin, a thunderous tousled voice came, but so remote and so veiled with fire that Duncan, afterwards, could never hear it properly. As Arthur’s nature revealed itself at the very last, and his quotidian shambling body and his way with the definite article were subtracted from Duncan, who had taken it all for granted, the purpose of the last fifteen years was concealed, hidden, made cryptic. The books had gone out into the world as, now, Arthur had. That was all that could be done.

  BOOK 9

  1927

  1.1

  The Variété Theatre in Dessau was an old institution, not painted or restored for years. When the upper balcony was full, and the whole of the front row leant on the brass rail in front of them better to admire some faded singer, reduced to appearing in Dessau, the customers in the back row could hear a terrible creaking and groaning behind them as the balcony began to part company with the wall of the auditorium. The whole frayed structure would, one day, come plummeting down onto the heads of the audience in the orchestra, there was no doubt. On stage, there was an Oriental dance, an aria from La Dame Blanche, a conjuror, two aged comedians practising back-talk, a strong man, a Russian ballet of five swans, another aria, some jugglers, and then the interval. In the uppermost balcony, the seats were three Rentenmarks. To Fritz, this seemed inexplicably much more than the billions and trillions of marks that had been demanded for cinema tickets a year earlier. It seemed more like money. Next week, at the Bauhaus, there would be a staging of a ballet of geometry and experiment that would change the notion of theatrical display for ever. Tonight, they were going to discover what theatrical display actually was.

  In the pit there was a group of brass players, two violins, a clarinet and a solitary querulous bassoon. Now, an aged soprano was singing to their accompaniment with rouge painted on her ch
eeks and wrinkled bosom, pretending to be a country girl of no more than seventeen. Behind her was a backdrop of farmland, paint flaking off in patches. Her donkey, a trained animal with red-tipped ears, stood patiently while the hit of the 1870s ran its course. The audience were talking to each other while the waiters in white came up and down the aisles, carrying full beer mugs through the darkened auditorium. Onstage, by the side of the ancient singer, the band’s best efforts were being supplemented by the jangling and thumping of an ancient piano, not tuned for many years; it was being played by the compère, who, as rouged as the singer, doubled his duties as accompanist. The band was leisurely; the singer was vague; the pianist was impatient; each phrase began at three quite different moments. Nobody in the audience was paying much attention.

  Fritz sat in the upper balcony with five students. One was dressed as a pierrot. Fritz was at least ten years older than they were, and his style was that of the students of five years before. He wore a heavy blue jacket and trousers such as workmen wear; he had a knot of a red tie at the neck of his khaki shirt. He was paying intense attention to what was happening onstage. Through steadily narrowed eyes, he could perceive the essence of the space he was in. His perception then left out the trivialities, the rough red-painted surface of the walls with the plaster coming through, the holed seats of the chairs, the glare of a yellow spotlight shining out of the wings onto the unconvincing maquillage of woman and donkey. Instead, the whole scene was transformed into its essential truths. There were two large blocks of space, one cuboid and bright, the other rounded towards the back and dark. At their conjunction were three irregular dark shapes. The two large blocks met over a line of sound, buried deep in the ground. That was the orchestra. There was a smell in the larger rounded block, and there came another smell from the smaller, cuboid block. He opened his eyes more widely, and tried to see reality with the same intensity of perception. Beneath the scene – the auditorium, the stage, the singer and the donkey and the piano – were blocks of light and colour. Their nature was no longer concealed by the inessentials. He could see now how The Euclidean Ballet was going to reveal itself to its audience and performers.