The Emperor Waltz (21 page)

‘You see,’ Paul confided, over a cocktail at Peter Harper’s, as the theatrical restaurant was called, underneath a red-papered wall of near-identical caricatures, some signed, some with a loving kiss, ‘you see, some of us just find our niches somehow. And I’m sure that you will, too. Mother was saying that it seems such a waste that someone of your talents and charms should be so wasted down there in that dreary office. She’s quite right, you know.’

‘I don’t know what your mother knows about it,’ Duncan said. ‘She’s never met me.’

‘Oh, believe you me,’ Paul said, ‘she knows a lot about you. When someone’s a real human being, like you, or like Mother, you don’t have to meet them to understand what makes them go. These people aren’t real – she’s not, and he’s not, and this one behind the bar who calls herself Doris, she’s certainly
not
a real person.’

‘Oh, not this again,’ said the moustachioed barman, polishing a cocktail glass with a cloth. ‘I get this three times a week – Doris, you’re not a real person, you’re just a … What was it last time? A kim-rar, whatever that may be. And don’t call me Doris if you don’t think I’m real.’

‘There, you see,’ Paul said. ‘And it’s
chi-
me-ra, you uneducated lout. Almost the only proof that another person is a real person is the evidence of an erection. That, I insist on. When I go to bed with a man, Duncan, I insist – I simply insist – on an erection from the
moment of nudity onwards
. Anything less – the slightest hint of flaccidity – I regard as a personal insult, and probably evidence of them
not
being a real person at all. How is that Carlossss of yours, darling?’

‘I haven’t seen him in an age,’ Duncan said. ‘I only saw him that one time, actually. There’s been a phalanx of Spaniards since. I’ve felt like I’ve been standing at the top of the stairs with a white coat and half-moon glasses, looking at my clipboard and going, Next, please. Shouldn’t you be working? There’s a lot of lost-looking people over there.’

‘Oh, fuck them,’ Paul said. ‘I’ll go over in a moment.’

On the other side of the bar, there were seven people of provincial appearance, between forty and seventy, smiling and attempting to ingratiate themselves with whoever there was to be helpful. It was a matinée crowd. Their relations were unclear but their optimism at being admitted to Peter Harper’s, where the stars flourished, was radiant. This was where the magic happened, nightly, after eleven. At twelve midday, one of the slots reserved for unknown names, there was nobody in the restaurant apart from Marti Caine, knocking back the vodkas at a corner table in company with three elderly rabbis.

‘They’ll find their own way to a table, I should say,’ the barman called Doris said. ‘Have another drink, Duncan, love, it’s on the house.’

‘Oh, I’d better go over,’ Paul said. ‘You’ll be all right for twenty minutes?’

‘I’ve got my book,’ Duncan said, hoicking an old Gore Vidal paperback out of his pocket.

‘And then he asked me if I would shit on his head if he gave me fifty quid,’ Marti Caine said, at top volume, to the three enraptured rabbis. The waiting women of the matinée party fixed their smiles, and moved their tan handbags from one hand to the other.

‘Thank Heaven, he’s gone,’ the barman said. ‘You can talk to me now.’

‘No, I really was going to get on with some reading,’ Duncan said. ‘It wasn’t a prop or anything.’

3.

The sales reps started arriving long before the shop was at all ready for business. The first of them came through the door on the second day. The carpenters were still measuring up; the floor had only just been cleared of detritus, and Paul had gone over the road for a cup of coffee. A small man, pale and rodent-like, with a sharp nose and beaky teeth, was poking his face around the open door. In his hand was a hard black plastic briefcase, thicker than normal briefcases; he wore, however, a brown tweed jacket and a yellow shirt. His blond hair was combed down in a neat, divided helmet. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello? Anyone at home?’

The carpenters looked over; one made a gesture with his head in Duncan’s direction.

‘Hello there,’ the man said, advancing in a self-consciously confident way, his hand already held out. ‘We’re delighted to see a new customer, a new sales outlet. I’m Roland Inscape. Ardabil and Cowper. I think you spoke on the telephone to one of my colleagues, a week or two back. About stock.’

Duncan remembered: he was not sure how to acquire stock, and in a fit of enthusiasm had gone round his bookshelves, writing down the names of every publisher he could find, and then looked in the
Yellow Pages
, and phoned up the head office of all of them. He had been redirected and talked to patiently; they had agreed to send out sales reps to talk to him and supply him with material. Roland Inscape of Ardabil and Cowper was the first to arrive.

‘So, general stock, general interest, a few children’s books, perhaps some of our reference lines. We have some very interesting novels coming out this autumn, which I’m sure I could get you a proof to see what your customers would enjoy. A history of exploration in the South Seas …’ and by now Roland Inscape was opening his briefcase, extracting a loose-leaf glossy folder and opening it on the cherrywood counter to show a mock-up of a cover displaying a Gauguin girl and the title in bold, sinuous lettering. ‘And a life of Gluck. Very fashionable, the composer Gluck, and Stephen McGiver, the biographer, he’s always had a passion for Gluck, and we expect it to do at least as well as Stephen’s life of Emmeline Pankhurst, which you may remember from two years ago, twenty-two thousand in hardback and three times that in paperback to date and still selling strongly, no one can say that the Edwardians have lost their appeal to the discerning readership and we expect there to be a lot of coverage of the Gluck biography too, not an Edwardian, of course, but Stephen has a good loyal readership. A real word-of-mouth author, you might say. Shall I put you down for—’

‘Is he gay?’ Duncan said.

‘Is he …’

‘Is he homosexual?’ Duncan said. ‘The biographer. Stephen –’ he peered ‘– McGiver.’

‘What?’

‘I’m just asking,’ Duncan said.

‘He’s only
asking
,’ Paul said, coming back through the door behind the sales rep with a cup of coffee. ‘Hello.’

The carpenters were greatly enjoying this; they were only pretending to confer now.

‘Well, I really don’t know,’ Roland Inscape said. ‘I really don’t think it’s any of our …’

‘Or Gluck,’ Duncan said. ‘At a pinch. I ought to know, I know. Gluck, he was some sort of composer before Mozart, wasn’t he?’

‘No, she was a lesbian,’ Paul said. ‘A pre-war sort of lesbian. And there’s Robert Gluck who’s a queen in San Francisco who we really ought to stock but I don’t think you can be talking about him.’

‘The Mozart one,’ Roland Inscape said.

‘I really ought to know,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m so glad I was thinking of the right Gluck, the Mozart one. Was he – I know …’

Roland Inscape was staring at them, his hands frozen over his folder, looking wildly from Paul to Duncan and back again, as Paul began to sing: ‘“
Che faro
…”’

‘We’re not really a general bookshop,’ Duncan said kindly.

‘You’re not a general bookshop,’ Roland said.

‘No,’ Duncan said. ‘We’re a gay bookshop. We stock books about gay people and by gay people. Or we’re going to. Children’s books, no. Or not yet. Homosexuals,’ he clarified. ‘And lesbians.’

Roland Inscape came to life. He seized Duncan’s hand, and shook it firmly. ‘Well, what an interesting idea,’ he said. ‘What a very interesting idea. Like that bookshop that only stocks science fiction, won’t look at anything else. How very interesting. Let me think. I’m sure there are some things we publish that would interest your customers. You see, when we saw the name of your bookshop, we did wonder, we wondered whether you quite … but Go Gay.’

‘Go Gay?’ Paul said.

‘Go Gay,’ Roland said. ‘It’s a laundry in Parsons Green. I live in Parsons Green. My wife and children. They think it’s terribly funny. I explain to them, it’s nothing to do with … It’s been called that for ever, since it was an innocent, a sort of …’

Roland Inscape’s bluster ran out. He looked from one to the other, and his expression was almost pitiable. ‘Let me think,’ he said. ‘We had a great success last year with a life of Ethel Smyth. Very popular, those lady Edwardians. It might appeal to …’

‘We’ll take one,’ Duncan said. ‘Perhaps if you leave us your catalogue?’

‘Just one?’ Roland said, but Duncan could not be swayed. He would confirm the order when he had had a chance to look through the catalogue; the bookshop would open in six weeks, so there was no particular reason to panic, he told Roland. They shook hands; Roland went; he cast a curious eye at the carpenters as he went, appearing to wonder how it was that two carpenters endured the company of Paul and Duncan. The carpenters watched him go, stumbling over his briefcase in his hurry.

‘You can’t open a bookshop with just one book on the shelf,’ Paul said. ‘A life of Ethel Smyth. Who was Ethel Smyth?’

‘Lady Edwardian,’ Duncan said, in a veiled way. ‘Very popular with …’

‘Are you planning to be popular with …?’ Paul said. ‘I think the word he couldn’t say was
Lesbians.
That’ll make our fortune. Lesbians and their disposable income, it’s a well-known phenomenon.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ Duncan said. ‘We’ll fill the bookshop with lovely gay stock. I’m full of ideas.’

‘I’m sure you are,’ Paul said. ‘Your dad left you a million quid or something, too, which helps with the
ideas
, I expect.’

‘And what’s with the our?’ Duncan said, a moment too late. ‘Less of the our.’

4.

There was just so much to do. Duncan put on a brave face to Paul during the day. But in the evening he had to sit and watch the television in his new flat in Notting Hill, a glass of whisky in his hand, and try not to think about how much needed doing, and what needed to be done next.
Blankety Blank
could not bring his thoughts away from the carpenters, the electrician who had come to fix the lights and declared that the whole place needed rewiring, the people to install a kitchenette at the back, the accountant, the plasterer who had been found necessary, the signwriter, the decorators, the stock ordering, the post office for the telephone account, the paperwork; the stuff, Duncan thought. He had just wanted a place where people could come and buy books about people like them, and people could write a book knowing that somewhere would stock it and appreciate it, where people could meet and talk to each other. What had any of that to do with electricians and accountants? It had been a mistake to buy and renovate this flat at the same time as starting the shop up; he had two sets of carpenters, two of electricians and decorators to deal with, not always knowing who it was who had left the message on the flat’s telephone, since they always began, ‘Hello there, it’s Brian the electrician here.’ Confusion followed, and expenditure; his mind went from the new people in his life to an escalation of figures, which was already cutting into what had seemed a colossal amount of money, six months before, after his father’s death.

There was some pleasure in deciding on the interior of the shop. The bookcases were an ingenious, lavish design, with a floating case on wheels that you could push to and fro before the stock in the back shelves; it added half as much shelving space again to the shop, though puzzling to the carpenters who had to put it together and make it move smoothly. There would be a display case for community magazines, mock-splendid with Grecian terminations and flourishes. The pretend-tasteful William Morris wallpaper had gone on day one, Paul and he ripping it off with yelps of joy. The floor would be sanded down to the wood, then repainted black; Duncan had it in mind to seek out the previous tenant and buy a couple of Turkey carpets from him. There was some gesture of goodwill in this that he didn’t quite manage to make sense of, even to himself. Paul had turned up with a chandelier and, when this had proved a success, had returned the next day with a stuffed pheasant in a glass case, mounted against a miniature Scots backdrop of moss and heather. ‘You thought that what the shop really needed was a
big cock
,’ Duncan said, beating Paul to his own joke. ‘No, I’m not having it.’

‘I think I’ve shown restraint,’ Paul said. ‘You should have seen the capercaillie, darling.’ And since Paul had bought it, out of his own money, on the Portobello Road and since it was marvellous, the sort of thing your grandchildren would love again if you were going to have grandchildren, which, thank the Lord, they weren’t, Duncan gave way. For the moment the bird was staying, sitting with a beady, quizzical air on the cherrywood counter. Duncan would find the moment to get rid of it after the shop had opened.

There were invitations to be printed for the opening-night party. Not the very opening night, but two or three weeks in, just to make sure everything was all right, and things always overran so with builders. There was the community to consider, not just your friends. (Though there were your friends, too – astonishing how friends, and friends of friends, quickly amounted to three hundred names and addresses.) There was a nice man and a cross girl from
Gay News
, who had promised them a big spread. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened before,’ the man had said, almost before he was through the door. ‘We’re so excited.’

‘But there’s always Prinz Eisenherz in Berlin,’ the cross girl had interjected. ‘Do you really think you can be as good a bookshop in London as they are?’

‘Let me get you a cup of coffee from Andy over the road,’ Duncan had said. ‘And then we can start the interview, if you like.’

There was Francis King and Paul Bailey and Maureen Duffy and Angus Wilson and Brigid Brophy and any number of famous great gays; there were painters too, who might as well come if they were in the country, which Maggi Hambling was and David Hockney wasn’t, more’s the pity. There was
Gay News
and the men’s group magazines that might run something. Then a man turned up from
Zipper
and
Vulcan
– God knows how he had heard about it.
Zipper
and
Vulcan
were porn mags, run from the same flat in Islington by the same bloke; he got most of his ‘models’ from the steam room at the baths in Bethnal Green, he told Duncan, putting them in
Zipper
if they were over twenty-five or had hair, in
Vulcan
if they were under, hairless and ‘just looked a little bit nervous, a little bit scared-like, in front of the camera,’ the man had said, and laughed wheezily, lighting another cigarette, the seventh of nine, in Duncan’s shop. (The shop that would never, ever, stock
Zipper
or
Vulcan
, but Duncan wasn’t going to tell the man that.) The man came back two days later with a sample of each, and Duncan liked the
Photographer’s World
naffness of the props and the studio lighting, and some strange engagement with the laws that meant all the models had erections, but they were held down by the thigh to point downwards in the photographs. Would it be the enthusiasts for hair – that one turned out to be
Zipper
– or the proto-paedophiles who would read the piece and run to the bookshop? The bloke would make a decision when he’d written the piece, he’d said. Well, he had to be invited to the party, too, Duncan supposed, dropping the terrible porn in the dustbin behind the shop.