The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ said when the nurse was gone. ‘You wonder where they acquire them from. Coloured people.’

      ‘The owners of plantations,’ Rebecca said. ‘That would have been the Scottish one, and they pass their name on to the slaves, passed, rather, I should say. They would have thought it quite an honour to be named after the owner of the plantation, all over the Caribbean.’

      Rachel and Ruth exchanged a glance: their big sister Rebecca had always been the swot, held up to the twins, three years behind in school, as a scholastic ideal when in reality she had been willing only to put her own ideas of the truth forward in firm ways. And now she was seventy-four, and stout, and wearing a good tweed with a summer umbrella underneath the chair, because you really never knew, and still putting forward her ideas of the truth in a manner that required no contribution or disagreement.

      ‘It’ll be a shock to the son,’ Ruth said. ‘He’ll be under the impression that it’s going to be him, him and the sister, who are going to get everything.’

      ‘This beautiful house,’ Rachel said. ‘They would only sell it and pocket the money. And poor Samuel’s savings and shares, too. Neither of them married, or any sign of it.’

      There was a shriek from the end of the room. Rachel had brought her black parrot, Ezekiah, promising he would be no trouble but he liked to have some company around him. The room smelt faintly of bird, and he had a look in his eye, a wizened, assessing, timing look; Ruth and Rebecca went nowhere near him, and he sat on the backs of what chairs he chose, his claws like wrinkled grey tools.

      ‘The son – he was always a nasty little boy,’ Rebecca said. ‘I never thought much of him. Crying into his mother’s skirts, never wanting to come out and say hello. Scared of everything. Just the same now, I imagine.’

      ‘I found his address in Italy,’ Rachel said. ‘He had written to Samuel to tell him where he lived. I sent the telegram. More than that I cannot do. You know what he is?’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ Ruth said. ‘One of them.’

      ‘One of them?’ Rebecca said. ‘Oh, not a marrying type. How dreadful for Samuel. I expect he will turn up once poor Samuel has died, wanting to spend Samuel’s money on cushions, lipstick and a sex-change operation.’ Rebecca made a gesture; a feminine gesture but not a feminine gesture a woman would make, rather the extension and admiration of her finger-ends, which were a gardener’s hands, trimmed and painted with red polish. She made a curdling moue, a pout; she meant not to be a woman or to suggest one, but to show what Duncan might be like. ‘Lop it off, Doctor,’ she said.

      ‘But there isn’t going to be as much money as he thought,’ Rachel said, smiling sadly and shaking her head. ‘Samuel handled that all very well. I am so glad we explained everything to him so well while he was still not in too much pain.’

      ‘It was such a good idea, getting one of those easy forms from Smith’s,’ Ruth said. ‘It saved all the bother and expense of going to the solicitor. That was a very good idea of yours, Rachel.’

      ‘But there is a virtue in having a family solicitor for years,’ Rebecca said. ‘I always said so. And Mr Brooke is such a friend.’

      ‘Samuel saw the point, didn’t he?’ Ruth said. ‘We didn’t talk him into anything, nobody would be able to say that. I am so glad that Rachel got the will, and did everything, and got it witnessed, and took it to Mr Brooke for safekeeping. That was very good of Rachel.’

      ‘That was very good of Rachel,’ Rebecca said. ‘Of course we didn’t talk Samuel into anything. If the son got hold of the house, he would only sell it immediately and pocket the money. We wouldn’t have any say in the matter at all. He would probably sell it to the Jews. They buy everything for cash. They don’t trust the banks.’

      ‘They must trust some of the banks,’ Ruth said. She beat the floor with her walking stick emphatically. ‘They run a lot of them – behind the scenes.’

      ‘That’s true,’ Rebecca said thoughtfully. ‘If it’s not the Jews in Harrow, it’s the Pakistanis. Over the road, the house that used to be lived in by the Harrises, when we were girls, that’s owned by a family called – well, I don’t know, but they’re a Pakistani family and they fill it to the rafters. Soon there won’t be an English family left in the avenue at all.’

      Out in the garden, on the low brick wall that surrounded the knee-high flowerbeds on the terrace, a blackbird sat; it cocked its head, and sang, and inspected the three women inside. Or perhaps it was just drawn to the reflection of sun on the large windows. They flashed in the morning light. Rachel was looking out of the window. She was not looking at her sisters at all, even as they praised her sense.

      ‘Poor Samuel,’ Ruth said. ‘There was really nothing more that any of us could have done in that direction. We wrote to the son, and we wrote to the daughter. Where are they? Thank goodness he doesn’t know what’s going on around him any more.’

6.

      Upstairs, in a darkened room, Samuel found himself. He felt odd, and then he remembered that he was ill. The curtains were drawn, but it must be time to get up. Behind the curtains there was a hot day already. He could feel it. The curtains were brown but behind them the sun was bright and making everything red. Yesterday he had been able to jump out of bed and draw the curtains across and the rabbits had been eating in the garden, a dozen of them. He had wanted to go and get his gun and pick them off from the window, but Nanny had not let him. ‘Not on a Sunday,’ Nanny had said. That had been yesterday. But then it seemed to him that that had been a very long time ago, when he was a small boy, and then it seemed to him that it had not happened at all.

      The pillow and the sheet were creased and uncomfortable, and he could smell something – a sour smell, physical and not his own smell. But perhaps it was his own smell now. The temperature seemed wrong. His feet and legs were cold, but his head sweltered. No – his feet and legs were not cold, but they were numb. Samuel had always prided himself on getting the exact right word, and the word for his lower body was ‘numb’, not ‘cold’. And yet the sensations in his head and neck were more alert than they should have been, as well as hotter. There was a great heat spreading from the seams and rucks of the cotton sheets into his face, and he turned his head restlessly. There was a woman in his bedroom. There had not been a woman sitting in his bedroom since – he struggled for her name and could not remember the name of the wife he had been married to for decades – since Helen died. For a moment he thought it must be Death. Her face was covered by shade from where he looked. In her lap, a strip of light fell on a book. She read on, and in a moment passed her hand over her hair in an unconscious grooming gesture. Her hair was a vivid ginger, and neatly tied back. It needed no grooming, but the hand passed over it in reassurance. When Samuel saw the hair of the woman, he said to himself immediately ‘At least it’s not the coloured one,’ and then he remembered immediately. She was one of his nurses, the daytime one, who was sitting with him and doing things for him. If she was here, it was not early morning, when the coloured one sat with him. It would be the afternoon. He had slept most of the day, then. He congratulated himself on the continuing liveliness of his own mind, when he concentrated. Her name would come to him, but it was not important.

      ‘Nurse,’ he tried to say, and then again, ‘Nurse.’ The nurse looked up from her book. ‘The sheets need changing,’ he said.

      ‘What’s that, Mr Flannery?’ she said, rising and placing her hand, unsmilingly, on his forehead. He tried again.

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