The Emperor Waltz (25 page)

And then there was that time when Dommie had come in and gone straight to her room and after a whole evening without Dommie his father had grown crosser and crosser and finally he had said to his mother and to him that she could …

And then there were all those other times around that time a long time ago when Father …

No. He would not think of that. That was not what had forged their relationship.

But how could he feel that gaze on him? How could he be so sure of the safety his sister offered, her sense that he was in every way going to do well because she was looking out for him and believed in him? There was no safe and tucked-in feeling from Daddy, and there was only a dutiful attendance from Mummy at bedtime and mealtimes. You felt with them that they were not quite sure whether they had done the right thing, and were busy. Mummy smiled with her mouth when she saw you do something for her benefit, but she did not smile with her eyes, and soon the mouth-smile went. There was that feeling of safety with Dommie, though she said, ‘Go away, horrid boy,’ and ignored him altogether when she was with her friends. You knew she would stand up for you. It went back to a time when she went out to school and he did not, he was so tiny. Watching Mummy make pastry with the radio on, playing with his toy cars on the kitchen floor. And then Dommie coming home and playing too. The feeling went back all the way to the moment when he had just had Mummy and Daddy and Dommie and they had always been there and he lived in the room where he lived and that was the way things were. Dommie said she could remember him being born. He was born at home, in Mummy’s bed – second children often were, back in the late 1940s, to save on hospitals. And he was born when there was snow outside the little house in Harrow, the semi-detached, frowning, 1930s house with lead in the windows and Tudor gabling in the roof. His father had had to walk out to the telephone box at the corner of the road. The midwife set off at once, but still had only just arrived in time, having to walk up Harrow Hill without her bicycle. It was so easy that he just arrived, and there was a sound of a baby crying, and the midwife cleaned him off and put Mummy in a new nightie and dressing gown, and then Daddy and Dommie were allowed to come in, with Duncan only just born in Mummy’s arms, in swaddling and a soft white blanket, light and open and crocheted. It was the nicest moment Dommie could ever remember, she always said afterwards, him with his squashed little face and any amount of black hair. Knowing that he was always going to be her little brother and she would always look out for him.

So that was how Dommie and Duncan came to be sitting in a sitting room in Clapham, talking about the gay bookshop that Duncan was in the process of opening up.

9.

‘Thank you,’ Duncan said, coming down into the shop. Behind him was a tow-haired man with a flush of pink cheek, a smooth complexion and a big smile. There was nothing upstairs except a room that had been used for storage by the previous tenants; there was no plan to make anything more of it in the near future. The man picked up his briefcase, which had been by the cherrywood counter. Andrew and Simon, who had dropped in to help out twenty minutes before, had been warned by the plumber that Duncan was in a meeting upstairs, that he had said not to disturb him. There was nowhere to have a meeting upstairs; Duncan always had his meetings downstairs. Then Duncan came down with this English country face in a suit, like the cheerful half of an A. E. Housman poem, the part before the ploughman gets sent off to be killed in the trenches. The man said goodbye buoyantly; he gave Simon and the plumber a look, before exchanging a different sort of look with Duncan, and off he went, as if about to whistle.

‘You didn’t,’ Simon said to Duncan.

‘Oh, I thought I would, just this once,’ Duncan said.

The word had got out among the sales reps. It became clear to Duncan that their stock would rest on all the classics anyone could think of, a lot of single copies of academic books and the entire list of four publishing houses. There was Gay Men’s Press, there was Brilliance Books, Onlywomen Press and there was the classics list of Virago. There was a list of US publishers who specialized – some of it was porn, but Duncan had come to the view that printed porn, porn in the written word, might as well be stocked. It was images that would be the problem. The mainstream publishers were sending their reps to persuade Duncan to stock all sorts of absurd things that, they said, would be of interest to gay readers, including one hopeful man who tried to talk him into stocking every children’s pony novel written by the three Pullein-Thompson sisters. The shop could be stocked with second-hand classics – he himself proposed to start things off by emptying his shelves at home and asking for a pound a copy, three pounds for first editions. Christopher and Alan, both great readers, had promised to go over their bookshelves, and to keep an eye open for stuff when they went to second-hand bookshops. There were, too, the radical producers of radical magazines. But was there enough out there? Would people sacrifice their precious libraries? Duncan’s line was that when you looked away from the traditional sort of publisher, there was lots of stuff out there that people just didn’t know about, that they’d be so happy to be pointed towards. In reality, he just didn’t know. He had a vision of the shop opening with half of its shelves empty, or filled with the traditional publishers’ biographies of Gluck and Ethel Smyth. As if they knew all about Duncan’s self-doubt, the traditional sort of publishers kept on sending their traditional sort of sales reps, and Duncan kept taking a book or two from them, in self-doubt and pity. These books were often about the Bloomsbury Group. They were a popular diversion, these meetings, now that friends had taken to dropping in regularly to help out.

The sales rep that Duncan had taken upstairs to shag was an unexpected turn-up for the books. He had been greeted by Duncan, and announced himself as a rep from Sachs. Duncan made him a cup of coffee.

‘And we have great hopes for this,’ the rep had said, opening his book of samples. ‘Charming. I couldn’t get through it myself. Writing at the height of her powers – we all know what that means.’

‘Not for us,’ Duncan said bravely, running his fingers over the embossed gold cover of the latest novel by the widow of the department-store owner; the rep, whose name was Rupert, let their hands touch as he took it away.

‘You’re hard to satisfy,’ Rupert said, inspecting Duncan with his round blue gaze. ‘Well, there’s always this – no? – and this, but what I really want to recommend to you, the thing which we think you’ll do very well with …’

It was not a familiar name to Duncan, but the author photograph, taken in a Victorian cemetery by a mourning cherub, black-and-white and deep in shadows, showed a hollow-cheeked prodigy who seemed familiar; then he realized that it was just a familiar type. The book was called
The Garden King
, and the cover image was of a Roman torso in sunlight.

‘It’s his first novel,’ Rupert said. ‘We love Stuart, we think he’s got a marvellous future. It’s a brave novel, in lots of ways, but we know it’ll appeal a lot to your customers. It’s a very romantic love story. Between men. Italy, between the wars. Shall I leave this with you?’ Rupert reached into his bag, and pulled out a proof with the title in Sachs’s generic print, bound in suede-like paper in a neutral pale brown. ‘You’re going to love it,’ he said. ‘Shall I call back in a week for your numbers?’

But Duncan was surprising even himself this morning. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll take two hundred and fifty. Can the author come in to sign copies, perhaps do a reading?’

‘Two hundred …’ Rupert was saying smoothly, writing it down, evidently hiding any gesture of shock, as if bookshops of Duncan’s size ordered first novels in this quantity every day of the week ‘… and … fifty. Well, I’m sure you’ll do very well with it. It’ll go on selling for years, a modern classic, you might say. I don’t know about a reading – I’ll have to pass that request on to the publicity department. He’s very shy, I understand. But he’ll definitely come in to sign some copies. I like your shirt.’

‘Thank you,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s an old favourite, really. I like your bag, if I can say so.’

Rupert reached up and fingered the soft collar of Duncan’s purple-and-green striped shirt. ‘It’s lovely and soft,’ Rupert said. ‘I like that faded thing. Are you going to be running the shop with your boyfriend?’

‘No, no,’ Duncan said. ‘No boyfriend. We might run to an assistant, in time, but …’

‘I can’t believe that,’ Rupert said, lowering his voice. Duncan could have laughed. And in five minutes, Rupert had raised his voice and was telling Duncan that he would like him to ‘show me the premises’.

‘I’m astonished,’ Simon said later. ‘But impressed. He was cute.’

‘Yeah, he bought two hundred and fifty copies of a book off him and all,’ the plumber said. ‘That was before he showed him the premises, mind. The boiler’s dead, mate, you know that? You’re going to need a new one.’

‘He’s told me that three times,’ Duncan said to Simon. ‘About the boiler.’

‘I don’t know much about these things,’ Simon said. ‘But two hundred and fifty copies – really? That sounds like a lot of copies of one book. Something famous?
The Joy of Gay Sex
?’

‘Or radical?’ Andrew said. ‘There’s a lot of people that want radical gay-liberation texts, of course.’

‘No,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s a first novel. But I’ve got a very good feeling about it. I think it’s going to be huge, and I want everyone to come and buy a copy from us. They will. It’ll be the making of us. And the author’s promised to come in and sign them all when they arrive.’

‘Two hundred and fifty, though?’ Andrew said. ‘Of a book nobody’s heard of until now?’

‘Probably won’t, ever,’ the plumber said cheerfully. ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. You can always send them back. Not like in my game.’

‘To be honest,’ Simon said, ‘I think we need to have a word about cashflow.’

‘Oh, I expect you’re right,’ Duncan said. ‘It probably won’t work. It’s no way to run a business, I know.’

But now Andrew was gaping at him. ‘To run a business?’ he said. ‘Are you running a business here now, then?’

‘Sorry?’ Duncan said.

‘This isn’t a business,’ Andrew said. ‘We never thought this was going to be a business. It’s a community opportunity, isn’t it? You’re not here to make money out of the community, are you? You’re here to bring the community together.’

‘No one ever got rich from running a bookshop,’ Duncan said. ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’

‘But you called it a business?’ Andrew said.

‘Well, there are business-like aspects to it,’ Duncan said. ‘As well as some not very business-like ones. Don’t lose any sleep over it, darling.’

10.

Andy, across the road in the sandwich shop, opened up much earlier than anyone else in Heatherwick Street. There were always people who wanted a bacon sandwich at seven. He lived off the Seven Sisters Road, and picked up Chris in the yellow Saab at six thirty. Chris lived with his English girlfriend Sammy a couple of streets away, but there was no point in telling him to be at his dad’s house by six fifteen or else: you had to go round and ring on the doorbell, be his alarm clock. He’d given Chris the deposit on the white-painted brick house with the blue door and the red flowers in the window box two years ago. There weren’t many twenty-five-year-olds paying the mortgage on a two-bedroom house in central London, Greek central London. Andy’s granddad would have been proud of him. Well, no, probably not: he’d have said what his dad always said, which was ‘You could have done better.’

They were arriving at the shop at ten to seven, as usual. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining almost horizontally into the car. Andy had put on a cassette and was singing along; Chris had yawned and rubbed his eyes and complained – he’d lost the taste for Greek music. Over the road, that bookshop was nearing its opening time. The inside was painted and finished; there were boxes all over the floor, which Andy supposed were boxes of books, stock, property. The window was decorated – they’d put in some fake grass for some reason, which was odd. You didn’t think of grass and books together; it looked more like an old-fashioned butcher’s shop with mince packs sitting on plastic grass. That was a sign that they didn’t know what they were doing, like the health-food shop before them that had painted a sunflower on the window. And there was the shop sign, finished and brazen. In Roman letters on dark blue, it read ‘The Big Gay Bookshop’. It got worse: there was a painting of a kind of naked bloke on the left, reading a book, and another one on the right, reading another. Andy knew he should have said something about the naked blokes to the one who ran the place and came over looking very pleased with himself every day to get a sandwich for lunch, or a round of sandwiches. But he hadn’t. It was too late now. Already, someone had passed a remark to him about it – ‘Oh, I see you’re facing the Big Gay Bookshop, it’s your shop that’s in Heatherwick Street, isn’t it?’ And that was someone who hadn’t even come into the shop, had just seen it while driving through. The customers who came into the shop had had a lot to say about it.

Andy and Chris parked the car round the corner, and walked to the shop. In the tree in the street, a blackbird was singing, as loud as it could. There was a bundle in the doorway of the bookshop, a bundle of blankets with an outcrop of hair at one end, when they went over to investigate. Heatherwick Street was not usually their hang-out.

‘Oi,’ Andy said, nudging the bundle with the toe of his shoe. ‘Oi. Oi. You can’t sleep here. What’s your game? What are you doing here?’

‘I’m waiting,’ a voice came from the blankets. ‘I’m waiting for shop to open.’ Then he put his head outside the blankets. He was a teenager, very white in the face, with a home-made dye job; his newly black hair, too evenly coloured to be natural, was spiked, with both sleep and gel. Around his chin and neck were fat red spots, and under his head was a knapsack. He looked from Andy to Chris and then back again. ‘It’s not you who run shop, is it?’