The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher
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saw your sign,’ the man said. ‘So they meet on Fridays still? We want to come to that.’
‘I’ve no idea when they meet,’ Christopher said. ‘It might well be Friday. But it’s not today. We’re here today and we’ve got nothing to do with Central or South America.’
The man and his girl withdrew; she had been holding a bottle of some kind of clear spirits, only two-thirds full. She waved it in obscure greeting, or farewell, walking backwards down the stairs.
‘Do you think they’d been drinking that in the street, out of the bottle?’ Nat said, when they had gone.
‘Oh, no,’ Alan said. ‘They’re very strait-laced, those revolutionary types. They look scary, but they’re like pussycats, really. They’ll have brought that from home, or from their mum and dad’s, probably. They won’t be drinking out of a bottle in the street. You know, that’s not the first time that’s happened.’
‘What, the confusion with the South American struggle?’ Andrew said. Andrew was the most revolutionary of them or, really, the only one.
‘It’s being called CHE that does it,’ Nat said. ‘They think it’s something to do with that man they all like so much, the one with the beard and the gaze upwards, you know, Che Guevara. That’s the third time we’ve had that. We should really spell out what we are on the poster, write Campaign for Homosexual Equality, then they wouldn’t come upstairs by mistake.’
‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t mind them coming upstairs. One was quite nice. I was sorry to see him go, to be honest. That one I wasn’t so bothered about.’
‘People talk about anal sex as though it’s the be-all and end-all of gay identity,’ Christopher said. He had been trying to revert to what he had been saying before the bearded man came in. ‘And for me it was very important. But I understand if people don’t want to assert it as important. For me—’
‘I don’t think we can really write Campaign for Homosexual Equality on the poster,’ Alan said. ‘The landlord might have views about that.’
‘Well, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Honestly!’ Nat said. ‘I thought the point of all of this was to be proud and public. I don’t see anything proud and public about hiding behind initials, in case the landlord doesn’t like it.’
‘He’ll get his windows smashed,’ Alan said. ‘And we’d be beaten up.’
‘For me, anal sex was always very important,’ Christopher intoned.
There was a noise on the stairs, and the noise of a homosexual talking to himself. ‘The cheek of it,’ he was saying. ‘Now, where did I put my wallet? Not that pocket, not this pocket, not— Oh, here it is. You’d lose,’ he said, as he came into the room, ‘your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders. Hello, hello, hello, hello, Christopher, hello, Nat, hello, all. Am I late? Have you started?’
‘Yes, Paul,’ they said. ‘Yes, you’re late, we’ve started, it doesn’t matter, you’re late.’
‘Well,’ Paul said. He was always late for CHE meetings. He was wearing, like the rest of them, a lumberjack shirt, but it was oddly assorted with a pair of tiny denim shorts, and he had tied the tails of the shirt somewhat above the waist of the shorts to leave his midriff bare. He had blond hair with highlights, and a glossy moustache; just to the left of his mouth was a beauty spot, which some thought was applied with the end of the same mascara brush that gave his eyelashes such length and curl. ‘You’ll never guess why I’m late. I was just on the way out—’
‘Have a seat,’ Andrew said. He was eyeing Paul from head to foot with a faint air of disapproval; his hairy arms were folded across his stomach and his voice was deep and emphatic; he had his revolutionary scowl on.
‘I will,’ Paul said, and sat down. From his bag, he extracted a quarter-bottle of supermarket vodka, a glass filled with ice and a slice of lemon from the bar downstairs, and finally a small open bottle of tonic. ‘I was just on the way out when the phone goes, and I think, Oh, drat, that’s going to make me 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.
‘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