The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher

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      ‘I don’t think I can,’ Samuel said meekly. ‘They’re really twisted and damp and I feel hot. Can I change my pyjamas?’

      ‘That I can do,’ the nurse said. ‘I’ll just clean you up and pop you in the chair, Mr Flannery, and then I’ll change your sheets as well, straight away. How do you feel in general?’

      ‘What was that shriek, that scream? I heard a woman screaming.’

      ‘It was your sister’s parrot,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s downstairs. He shouldn’t be here at all, in point of fact. It has a strange name, that bird.’

      ‘I remember,’ Samuel said, and was about to say the bird’s name, but it had gone, and there had been a woman shrieking about it, screaming, really, not ten feet from his ear. He hope that terrible screaming would stop soon. ‘I feel terrible. Terrible,’ Samuel said. ‘I don’t think I can sit in a chair. It all hurts so much and I don’t know where I am sometimes.’ Then a thought came to him. He remembered very well where he was and what was happening. ‘You could ask one of my sisters to help to change. They’re here. They’re the three women sitting in the kitchen. They used to be girls but they’re old women now. You know the ones I mean.’

      ‘Oh, Samuel,’ the nurse said. ‘Mr Flannery, I mean. You are a card.’

      He was puzzling over what she meant, but then he felt quite suddenly very sleepy and he closed his eyes and when he opened them again it was night-time and there was a different nurse.

      ‘Would you,’ he said, ‘would you …’ but he couldn’t get any further.

      ‘Hello, Mr Flannery,’ the other nurse said. She stood up in a quiet but decisive way. She was the one called Balls. Nurse Balls. He remembered that one. Not all of the nurses remembered they weren’t to call him Samuel, but she did. She didn’t have ginger hair. It was hard to say what colour her hair was.

      ‘Would you,’ he said, then stopped again, puzzled. He was not quite sure what he wanted to ask for.

      ‘Water?’ the nurse said. ‘Is it water that you’re saying, Mr Flannery?’

      And then Samuel smiled – did he smile on his face or was he just smiling inside? He was probably smiling inside. His face hurt so much. But he smiled because he had said, ‘Would you,’ and she had thought he said, ‘Water’; perhaps there was something wrong with her ears or perhaps he had spoken indistinctly, having just woken up, and in fact he had forgotten what he was going to ask for but it was right: it had been water he had wanted. That was strange. He tried to say, ‘Would you bring me some water?’ but it grew complicated, his tongue in his mouth. It seemed to have grown and grown. He shut his eyes, and he found himself in the same dream of illness he had always had, since he was a small boy, whenever he had fever. He was floating in a colourless space with no features, just a grid of small dots, when the small dots began to swell and grow inside. One of them had got inside his mouth, and it grew and grew, swelling until it forced his mouth open, and inside his mouth there was nothing but a great hard stone. He opened his eyes. The taste of the stone was still there. He did not know whether he had slept or not. The woman who was standing there, he did not know her. She was wearing a coat, or a white dress, or a uniform of some sort; it rucked up tightly around her thighs and bottom. What was she doing there? It was his room and he was being ill in it. She was not his wife and she was not his sister, any of them. Then he remembered he had a daughter but she was not her either.

      ‘Would you like some water, Mr Flannery?’ the woman said, and then he remembered what she was. She was a nurse. He nodded and she went over to the dresser where a glass jug stood covered with a plate. She removed it and poured water into one of the large tumblers from downstairs. It was really a whisky tumbler, engraved, but he took it and drank from it. I’ll drink whisky again, he thought, but only when I feel a good deal better.

      ‘Where is Helen?’ he said, passing the glass back. ‘I want to see Helen.’

      ‘I think she’s downstairs,’ the nurse said. ‘That’s one of the ladies downstairs, is she not?’

      Samuel nodded. ‘And I want to see Duncan,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where Duncan can be. I haven’t seen him since he was – oh, fifteen or sixteen. He ran away to sea, you know. He ended up in Italy. He’s there to this very day. I want to see him now, because I don’t want to die without seeing him. Am I dying? I know I am.’ And his eyes filled with tears. He pitied himself so much for what he was having to go through. Nobody else had ever gone through this. He had asked a question, but the nurse was moving around the room, settling things and returning the water jug to its place. She had not heard any of what he had said. It was typical. But then he thought that perhaps he had not said any of that out loud. ‘I don’t want to have to go to Sicily,’ he said.

      But this he had said out loud, because the nurse said, ‘If you don’t want to, you don’t have to, Mr Flannery,’ quite comfortably.

      ‘Is Duncan coming?’ Samuel tried to ask. His tongue fell back in his mouth. His head turned to one side. It seemed all so normal.

7.

      There were pubs in Camden, which would never be touched, and streets, too. The Queen’s Arms in Goldborne Street sat at the corner of two converging Victorian terraces, its corner rounded and sailing out into the junction like an ocean liner. It had recently been painted in dark green and white. The landlord had decided to place only one hanging basket at the front, rather than the usual seven or eight of London landlords – Tarquin thought it was a waste and a demand on labour. He did not discover until too late that it is as much a waste and a demand on anyone’s time to have to water one hanging basket daily during the summer as it is to water a dozen. The Queen’s Arms was one of those pubs that must have been constructed in anticipation of a great crowd of drinkers. Its downstairs rooms, the saloon and the snug, were both gigantic under low ceilings of rosettes and plaster ornamentation. But the crowds that would have filled it never arrived. Perhaps it was in an awkward position, tucked away between residential streets. Perhaps the adventurous young middle-class people who were the only people who bought houses in these two or three streets were not great pub-goers, or not Tarquin’s sort of pub-goers. There were generally a few groups, perhaps only three or four, of slow old drinkers scattered around the place, not making much money for Tarquin. He had refused all the stratagems of other pubs in the neighbourhood; there were no cabaret nights with singers at microphones at the Queen’s Arms, and he would not stoop to strippers at lunchtime like the Dog and Crown – that would scare away his loyal old Regent’s Park ladies, who dropped in twice a week for their Dubonnets.

      The pub, inside, had a curious smell, more like a laundry than a public house. No one who entered would be able to tell where it came from. Tarquin sometimes caught his own expression in the mirror, superior and unenthusiastic, when a customer came in, or observed Nora’s way, when a customer was trying to attract attention with a pound note, of lowering her eyes and sorting out the drying cloths rather than attend to him straight away. He tried to remember why it was that he and Nora had thought, ten years before, that running a pub was a good business proposition for them, or why the brewery had gone along with them, either.

      The one thing about the pub that was a success and had some kind of use was the upper room. It must have been some kind of club room when the pub was built, and still had a giant dining table there and an assorted mismatch of chairs, dining chairs with yellow velvet seats as well as swivelling captain’s chairs, more recent in manufacture, and odd painted kitchen chairs. СКАЧАТЬ