The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ late, definitely going to make me late for my gay men’s group. So I could have ignored it, but you know me, I can’t ignore a ringing phone. For the rest of the night I’d have been thinking, Who’s that phoning me, who was that. Worst thing that can happen, you say to yourself, I’ll ignore it, then after ten rings you say, I can’t stand it any more and make a dive for it just as it stops ringing. And you’ll never know who it was who was calling you – it might have been the love of your life for all you know. So—’

      ‘You’re not that late,’ Nat said – Paul’s stories could go on for some time if not curbed.

      ‘So, anyway, this time I go to myself, I’m not going to be strong and ignore it, I’m going to be pathetic and answer it. And you know what, I’m glad I did. Do you know who it was? Go on, have a guess, you’ll never guess.’ The others showed no sign of making a guess. Christopher shook his head, his lips pursed. ‘Well. It was only Duncan. I thought he must be calling from abroad – you remember my friend Duncan, you know him, don’t you, Nat, but I’m not sure he knows you, Andrew, because I asked him if he knew you and he wasn’t sure. Listen, he says, I’m calling from the airport – I just landed. So I just shrieked. Ethel – you know, the clone who lives in the flat opposite – Ethel he came in and said, What are you shrieking at, you silly mare? Duncan says he’s at the airport, he’s just landed, and he wants to see everyone now, tonight, and so I said I’d tell everyone to go off to the Embassy tonight, and we’ll all be there, and then I said, So have you come back for good, why are you here, and he says he’s only got two two-pence pieces, he’s had them at the bottom of the suitcase since he went to Sicily, so they’ll cut him off in a moment, and then he’s about to tell me why he’s come back and, sure enough, the telephone cuts him off before he can tell me, just as he said it was going to, which I think as I said to Ethel is really a bit ironic if you think about it.’

      ‘That’s not ironic, my dear,’ Alan said. ‘That’s just Duncan running out of money for the telephone. Don’t sit over there all on your own. Come and sit down by me. I want to hear all about it.’

      ‘So I wasn’t going to come, but now I have come, though I can’t stay, because I’ve got to go on to tell everyone I can find in Earls Court, but you’ve all got to come to the Embassy later. Duncan’s back!’ Paul said, waving his hands like Al Jolson, taking the vodka and tonic and downing it in one, then getting up and, instead of going over to Alan, trotting off down the stairs. For some reason, Nat and Alan got up and went to the window; they watched him walk down the street in his shorts, with his bag over the crook of the arm. Outside the window hung two small Union Jacks; they had been there since the Silver Jubilee, two years before, and the landlord saw no reason to remove them. The sensibilities of his radical customers, who rented the upstairs room once a week or once a fortnight, did not worry him.

      ‘I don’t think,’ Christopher said, ‘I ever met Paul’s friend Duncan.’

      So then they all told him about Duncan.

9.

      ‘Who is that coming up the path?’ Aunt Rachel said, peering out of the window.

      ‘It’s some man,’ Aunt Rebecca said. ‘He is probably selling something from his little bag. Silk stockings and shoe brushes. How dark he is!’

      ‘I know who it is,’ Aunt Ruth said with a note of triumph. ‘He is that horrid little boy.’

      Duncan had been delayed: the plane to Paris had been an hour late, and he had just missed his connection; the next plane from Paris had been four hours later; his luggage had been lost or mislaid in the confusion, and he had had to fill in a lot of forms at Heathrow. All his clothes were somewhere between Catania and London – they could be anywhere in Europe. The only clothes he had were in a suitcase somewhere under his sister’s bed in Clapham, and the ones in his hand luggage, the tiny shorts and T-shirt he had changed out of at the airport. He had meant to get to his father’s house before lunchtime, but it was now nearly night. He was ravenous.

      All the way up the hill, he had been thinking of food – he wanted solid, dry English cheese and perhaps, if there was some leftover cold mashed potato in a bowl, that fried with some peas. Sicilian potatoes didn’t go into any kind of mash – too waxy, or something. Even the sight of his father’s ramshackle house hadn’t shifted his thoughts. But when he rang the doorbell, and it had its familiar, inexplicable half-second delay before sounding, its four-note Big Ben call, which had been there for twenty years at least, Duncan remembered where he was and how much of his life had been there. The house bell was so jaunty, and so little of the life within was jaunty. The sound of the doorbell could always bring him and Dommie to their feet, racing downstairs to open it to whoever it was – usually the postman or the meter reader, nothing more exciting than that. It was the things you put out of your mind that could come back into it, with force.

      Aunt Rebecca opened the door. She had put on some weight since he had last seen her, seven years ago at Christmas. She was pretending not to know who he was, but overdoing it in an amateurish way. She peered into his face, screwing up her eyebrows and forehead. ‘Yes?’ she said, hooting rather. ‘Can I help you?’

      Duncan wished he had insisted when he left home that he had kept a key. But his father had said he couldn’t have sets of keys being mislaid all over London, and he’d always be there to let Duncan in – or if he weren’t, then he didn’t want Duncan going all over the house in his absence. Dommie had done better and insisted; Duncan had been weak and now, with his father dying upstairs, was at the mercy of his aunt.

      ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Duncan. How are you, Rebecca?’

      ‘Aunt Rebecca, you used to call me,’ she said. ‘How extraordinary. I thought you were in Italy.’

      ‘I was in Italy,’ Duncan said. ‘But I had a telegram saying that my dad wasn’t very well.’

      ‘Ha!’ Rebecca said. ‘That is an understatement. He’s very ill indeed.’

      ‘So I came,’ Duncan said. ‘I came as fast as I could. Can I come in?’

      Rebecca had been leaning with her arm heavily against the doorjamb, guarding; the word ‘dragon’ came into Duncan’s mind. It was her weight and awkwardness; but she was blocking Duncan’s way all the same. She gave him a thorough look. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether your father can see you. He has been very uncomfortable the last two days.’ Duncan felt accused by her expression, as if he had been the cause of the discomfort, even though he had not even been in the country. ‘He is only sleeping in fits and starts, so I won’t wake him if he’s asleep. You could come back tomorrow.’

      ‘He might be asleep when I come tomorrow,’ Duncan said, putting his little bag down in the hall by the hatstand. All the doors in the hall were closed, as if in the central lobby of some office. They had never been closed like that before; doors had stood open or closed as they happened to be. In the panelled hallway, closed off, with nothing but the wooden stair rising upwards to the death chamber, Duncan found himself in an unfamiliar and formal house. ‘I’ll wait until he wakes up.’

      ‘Oh, very well,’ Rebecca said. She retreated into the sitting room; she opened the door and there was the sight of a woman reading in the gloom. The lights had not been switched on; there was only a small table lamp by the side of her, and she peered in a pool of light downwards, not looking up as Rebecca entered. It was either Ruth or Rachel; he could not see. They must have heard him coming in, perhaps even discussed who should answer the door. There was something territorial about her, something СКАЧАТЬ