The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher
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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.
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. There were hunting scenes on the walls, and a tired, torn wallpaper with floral relief, which he must ask Tom to get round to replacing one of these days. (Tom was their son, recently left home; he had gone into the painting and decorating trade, which kept him busy.) Five years ago, a man, a student-type in a neckerchief, with long hair and purple bags, had come into the pub just before the afternoon closing and asked if they had rooms that they hired out for meetings. Tarquin had shown him the upper room, then piled high with lumber and old broken things, and had said it could be cleared out easily if this was going to be a regular thing. It was – Jones and his group of revolutionaries met every Wednesday night, paid five pounds for the privilege and managed to sink a few drinks downstairs once their meeting was over. The revolution didn’t come, during which Tarquin and Nora, Nora observed sardonically, would probably have been strung up as bloodsuckers by Jones’s group. Instead, Jones’s group kept coming, every Wednesday night, the same eight or nine of them, give or take a few.
The word spread. These days, there were four weekly groups and three that met once a fortnight or once a month, all shelling out eight pounds each, now that the costs had gone up so much, as regular and uncomplaining as clockwork. Nora thought they should raise the cost of hire again, but Tarquin thought they’d jib at ten pounds. ‘They’ll pay up,’ Nora said. ‘They always feel more passionately about revolution when there’s a Tory government. They don’t like her, you see. They talk about women’s rights, but they don’t like it when there’s a woman in charge.’
He didn’t really know what they were all up to. They were all lefties, he supposed, but you got that, living in Camden Town, these days. The biggest one was CND – he knew what they were, all right. It was so popular; the group that met here was only the West Camden division, and still forty people came every week. They brought their own film projector, quite often, and liked to sit in darkness, watching old films about nuclear war. It took all sorts to make a world. There was one that might be something to do with vivisection or vegetarians, judging by their strange shoes. But they paid their eight pounds like anyone else. ‘I draw the line only at nudists,’ Tarquin said sagely to his son, Tom, who shook his head. Tom had voted for Mrs Thatcher in May.
Tonight was one of the fortnightly ones. They were all men, coming in ones and the occasional pair, but not talking loudly or, most of them, even greeting Tarquin. They just ducked their heads and moved through the quiet pub as quickly as possible. They wore, most of them, checked lumberjack shirts and denim trousers or, until the weather really hotted up, leather trousers; one or two, now that it had hotted up, some bright-coloured shorts, like the ones the teenagers wore, though these daft Herberts were verging on middle age. ‘I know what they are,’ Nora had said tonight, but Tarquin didn’t respond. He didn’t care, so long as they were just talking upstairs. One of the first to arrive had asked if he could pin up a sign, on the brown-painted doorframe by the side of the bar, directing ‘anyone new,’ he said hopefully. On it, now, pinned neatly with two drawing pins was a piece of paper reading ‘CHE meeting – this way!’ There was another on the door of the pub outside – he hoped that wouldn’t lead to trouble, he said to the main one. But he didn’t think it would. For whatever reason, Tarquin thought that they weren’t a revolutionary group calling for executions in the streets. Whatever CHE meant. It was the exclamation mark, or perhaps the heart underneath, or perhaps just because the notice had been written by the daft Herberts in purple felt-tip pen.
They had hardly started when the door to the upper room was opened abruptly. There was an unfamiliar face, a big bearded fellow and a slim