The Emperor Waltz Read online

  For the moment, I was new and in unfamiliar territory. The world outside wanted to know what was up, and my friends came to visit. Nicola was first, at nine in the morning after my admission, then, as soon as he could, my husband Zaved. Then they all came. Richard, Yusef, Renaud, Alan, Lucy, Jess, Amy, Georgia, Erin, Nicholas, Ginny, Matthew, Giles, Thomas, one after the other, in pairs and threes, so many that they had to wait or we had to decamp to the pastel-green family room or to the café downstairs. Zaved, who was there from two till eight every day, heard me tell the story of my infection and admission so many times that he started removing himself, by the fifth day, in mild annoyance. I had so many visitors that I started to feel myself popular, though I had only seventeen visitors in two days; I felt myself popular even when my sister Kate came to visit. I also, interestingly and very authentically, began to feel myself tired by society, like an invalid in a book. The stream of visitors to my bed infuriated Joe, who listened keenly, making abusive comments in the third person when he could hear the conversation, or complaining about people whispering when he could not. But if the numbers irritated Joe, they made a positive impact on the nurses, who seemed to show an interest and to like me more when they saw that I had, at the least, two dozen friends and a sister who got on with me and who had not moved to Australia in high dudgeon, the better never to lay eyes on me again. By the end of the second day, I started to feel that I could have got the nurses to do anything I wanted.

  6.

  Once I wrote in a novel that sometimes we see a new friend coming from far off. He falls into step with us, companionably, and as he begins to talk, we recognize that we had a Bertie-shaped hole in our lives and affections. We didn’t know about it, but it was there, and now it has been filled, by Bertie. It is hard to remember seeing him for the first time, or what our life was like before we knew him.

  How do we meet friends? How do we know that the person we have just met will or may become a friend? There he is, perhaps in a slightly awkward place in a group. You are not quite sure what his name is, and you make a remark that is not quite meant for him, though it does not exclude him, and not quite general in tendency. But he says something in return that is not quite what you expect, something that makes you pause, or that echoes something you’ve thought yourself. You look at him; he looks back when you make some kind of response; and a friendship begins. The next time you see him, you are not quite starting from scratch.

  This theory of friendship leaves too much out. Our friends are not people we happen to agree with most of the time. Only very shallow egotists choose their friends at all, and what basis you might decide on approving a stranger as a friend for the future is not something to be listed. We prefer to think of our friends as happy accidents – the person we have an office next to, the person we happened to be standing by at the Freshers’ Drinks in a beeswax-smelling Arts and Crafts common room, and said, ‘I’m really terrified – I want to go home before they find me out’ to. That was thirty years ago. You saw a movie with him last night, and you offered him your popcorn without thinking. Or they were friends of friends who became friends in their own right. They were somebody we once met in a bar and took home, and the sex did not work, but you made each other laugh over breakfast, and a week later you bumped into each other in Vauxhall and you laughed again over drinks, but didn’t go home together again – ten years later, you wouldn’t dream even of thinking you once went to bed with your old friend. They were somebody you used to meet at parties to launch books, whom you thought of as a professional contact to be civil to. Then one day you broke your ankle falling off your bike, and the phone rang and it was the professional contact pointing out that they only lived five minutes’ walk away, and it would be no trouble to get some food from Waitrose. The alternative, she said, was going in and facing a series of phone calls from fucking poets about why their work wasn’t selling better. Was it embarrassing to ask her to get a bottle of white wine and the cheap shepherd’s pie, which wasn’t too bad at all? Well, you asked anyway, and now she’s your friend.

  They are happy accidents, but there are plenty of happy accidents that fail to become the beginning of a happy friendship. The man who drove into you and broke your ankle, for instance, or the appalling man you used to work with, and had to be polite to every day, but who wrote prose poetry about clowns and small girls. He might have thought you were his friend, but the day you left that job was the day after which you never spoke to him again. There were other people, too, who came round with help when you were ill, whom you, indeed, visited with the second-best shepherd’s pie from Waitrose when they broke their ankle. They are not really your friends. If you saw a friend enter a crowded room of strangers, or walking unexpectedly across a crowded city street, your heart would rise at their dear flapping trousers and their church-bazaar orange-and-lime scarf wrapping itself round their face with the wind. If you saw a pseudo-friend like this, your heart would sink, inexplicably, guiltily, and you would wonder if they had seen you. The sentence, two weeks later, ‘I thought I saw you on Regent Street a couple of Saturdays ago,’ will fill you with terrible, unspeakable, unshareable self-flagellations, and you will promptly invite the man and his terrible wife to dinner, and cook a whole shoulder of mutton and even make both a green soup and a pink pudding from scratch, and at this dinner you and your partner will both get unforgivably, atrociously, unacceptably drunk.

  Friends don’t happen because you share their views, or because they are going to be useful to you. But afterwards you do find yourself sharing their views and, to your mild surprise, you are cheerfully being helpful to them; they are cheerfully glimpsed lifting a box of thrillers into their car to take on your behalf to the charity shop. They are coming to see you in hospital, and bringing you whatever you need, without you having to ask, but you don’t mind asking. It could be that the appearance of friendship, in the guileful, could get strangers to do your bidding, too.

  Perhaps there is a sense of the pariah, just outside the friendship. There are people whom we may agree we don’t care for – Liberal Democrats, hunting folk, people who are glimpsed transfixedly picking their nose just on the other side of their car window, sitting in a traffic jam, or single-issue activists, people who say, ‘A friend invited my wife and I on holiday,’ and explainers over dinner of the Chechnyan conflict. More specifically, there are the fucking poets or the friends of the past who introduced you to each other, who, years later, you confess that you wouldn’t care if you never saw the intermediary ever again. The pariahs cement our friendship, even if they are quite out of the room. And what are we, together? We may be holders of some special beliefs: our qualities will spread and the opinions we hold will triumph in the end, and the world will improve. Sometimes the opinions we hold, the ones that our pariahs would probably fight against, are on vegetarianism, racial equality, the purity of the Line, the importance of having a few hundred books and a nice painting or two around the place, the inferiority of certain races or of one gender, the idea that rhyming poetry and the C major chord aren’t done for quite yet, the rightness in all things of the Tory party or the Communist party, the conspiracy of the paedophile establishment, a single European currency, world peace and the excellence of the films of Douglas Sirk. (We don’t necessarily argue for any of this: sometimes we just embody it, and the belief gets spread just the same.) Sometimes these opinions that we jointly hold merely add up to the belief that, if we have to be in hospital at all, we should be in a small room, away from the smell of human shit, with, in ideal circumstances, a view of the Houses of Parliament there, just across the river. I was definitely going to get my way on this one.

  7.

  I began to work on a doctor whom, afterwards, I always referred to as Dr Arsehole. It was a childish play on his surname, which was not very much like the word Arsehole. At first he appeared to be a Vauxhall type, taking time off from a long shift at the disco coal-face. He had a shaved head and a twinkle in his eye: he was in early middle
age and had a rascally quality. He was a podiatrist, not a doctor at all; he came in the first morning to examine my feet. The first thing he did was to get out a scalpel and cut off the dead skin that made up most of my toe, cut off the sodden white mass that was the previously hardened skin at the end, probed through the ulcerated segment at the end, probing down to the bone. I could feel nothing, and I watched him at work with interest and some social speculation. He was senior enough not to wear a uniform of any sort.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’ve often wondered, in circumstances like this, what leads people to decide to specialize in one unlovely part of the body or another. Or, rather, when it dawns on you that the foot is where you want to spend the rest of your life.’

  Dr Arsehole giggled. He sat down on the end of the bed in a jolly, conspiratorial way. I felt that I was probably only slightly older than him, and could easily have been his friend in other circumstances. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It just sort of crept up on me.’

  ‘It can’t be nice coming into work in the morning and finding that you’ve got to deal with something like that, after all.’

  ‘This?’ Dr Arsehole said, with amusement. ‘This? Oh, this is nothing. You should see some of the things we see. They’re interesting, feet, though – they really are interesting little diagnostic tools for the rest of the body. If you have problems with your feet, there’ll be a problem somewhere else, often.’

  ‘There’s an awful Chinese thing, isn’t there,’ I said, ‘where they tell you that your digestion is bad or you suffer from migraines by sensitive bits on your feet or something? Reflexology.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Dr Arsehole said, looking long, deep and languidly into my eyes as he cut off another pad of hardened, soggy, pus-drenched skin and cast it aside. ‘There’s something in it, even if they take it too far. What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a novelist,’ I said.

  ‘Ooh,’ Dr Arsehole said. ‘What sort of novels? My wife’s reading that Fifty Shades of Grey. Not a novel like that one, I hope.’

  I hid my disappointment at the existence of Dr Arsehole’s wife, and explained the sort of novels I had been writing as briefly as was compatible with civility. As always, I felt that signed-up writers of thrillers, pony-based adventures, fantasy novels about giant insects or historical romances had this particular conversation much more easily sewn up than I did, and Dr Arsehole politely said he would look out for them. ‘But not much standing up required,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not much standing up required in your job.’

  ‘Oh. No. I don’t suppose any, in fact, apart from performing at lecterns occasionally.’

  ‘Now I think I want to have a look at your shoes, if they’re the sort of shoes you usually wear.’

  Zaved came in that afternoon, flying in from Switzerland in a concerned state. I told him about Dr Arsehole’s consultation, exaggerating parts of it for his entertainment.

  ‘And then Dr Arsehole said – get this – if they’re not happy about your shoes, they think they’re contributing to your poor state of foot health, then the NHS can actually have some shoes made for you. Bespoke shoes. Do you know how much that normally costs, how much if you had them made on the high street? Three thousand pounds, I reckon, minimum. So I said, I can’t believe it, I’ve really landed on my feet here, and Oliver said, Well, that’s one way of putting it, and actually, it’s cheaper for us than admitting you to hospital with infections like this one, look at it this way. So I said Oliver. Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re not going to make one of those terrible pairs of shoes for me, you know, those shoes for remedials, I couldn’t bear that, look at my shoes, the ones I’m wearing. Those cost five hundred dollars in New York. I couldn’t bear it if I had to start wearing the sort of shoes that remedials wear. But Oliver goes No, no, don’t worry, don’t panic, it’s not like that, you can get brogues, anything, all sorts, honest. And then he started talking to me about his wife reading porn all the time.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Zaved said, shaking his head. He had ten years of experience of my exaggerations in conversation. ‘There’s a terrible smell in here. What’s that smell?’

  ‘It’s Joe,’ I said, my voice lowered. ‘Just on the other side of the curtain. It’s worse when you go out and come back in again.’

  ‘My God,’ Zaved said. ‘Is that the man who shouted Nurse at me? He thought I was a nurse. How can he have thought I was a nurse? I was wearing an overcoat. Can’t you ask to be moved to a room on your own?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Don’t you ask on my behalf, either. Tea! How lovely! That is kind of you! Milk and no sugar, please. How lovely! Thank you so very, very much. I hope I’m not going to get into awful trouble for having a little bunch of tulips on my bedside table, am I?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ the ward assistant said. ‘I think we can probably overlook it for now.’ She went away smiling.

  I had won the game with Dr Arsehole, but he was only an occasional visitor to the ward. On the second day, he finished his treatment of my foot by cosily sitting down on the end of the bed and cutting my toenails, even the ones on the toes with nothing wrong with them. He went on so long that lunch arrived – a stolid mass of fish pie with carrots and peas on the side – and he said, ‘Oh, that looks delicious. It’s just a sandwich down in Pret à Manger for me,’ and went off, ignoring Joe’s urgent calls of ‘Nurse’. Ten minutes later a harassed and junior assistant, a woman with a dumpy figure and bags under her eyes, appeared at the end of my bed and rattled off my date of birth – this to prove that I was who she thought I was. ‘I’ve come to cut your toenails,’ she said.

  ‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘Oliver’s just done them. He’s only just gone.’

  ‘Oliver?’ she said. ‘Oliver the podiatrist? They sent me to cut your toenails. I’m supposed to do that.’

  ‘Well, you can have a look if you like,’ I said. Oliver seemed to have done a very neat job of cutting my toenails, as the woman orderly had to agree.

  ‘Well, that was nice of him,’ she said huffily. ‘I wish they’d let me know that I’m not needed, though.’

  ‘I’m sorry if you had a wasted walk,’ I said. I was quite concerned that urgent toenail-cutting was being neglected on the other side of the hospital because of her being summoned to my bedside.

  I had mastered the professionals without trouble. The nurses, however, were the ones with some control over where I could be placed, and they needed more careful handling. The doctors could be subjected to influence by worldly chatter, and not deferentially lowering my voice to address a hospital worker as ‘Doctor’. The nurses, however, did not seem to care much either way whether you addressed them as ‘Nurse’ or ‘Sophy’, and they were not to be cowed by suggestions about my social life outside the hospital. I concentrated, for the moment, on being modest, thankful, cheerful, and no trouble at all. Evilly, I waited for a time when I could introduce an object of loathing and hatred into the conversation, when I could exert some influence over them by establishing a shared pariah. The identity of the pariah was never in doubt. If I could get to the point where I could talk to them about his awfulness without sounding like a whinger, and get them to talk back, then the deal would be done, and I could move happily into a private room. It needed very careful handling.

  ‘Nurse,’ called Joe. ‘Nurse. Is it not fucking time for my fucking cigarette yet? You promised. You fucking promised. Ah, you cunts.’

  ‘Not now, Joe,’ a passing nurse said.

  The infection in my toe was of such virulence that I needed regular, and at first constant, supplies of antibiotic delivered through a drip, and the nurses came to see me very frequently to change the bag, to take my blood sugar, blood pressure and temperature. On these visits, I concentrated on being meek and no trouble. But the antibiotics were of some strength, and after two or three bags, the passage of the liquid became unendurably painful and sore. Once a day at least, I had to call a nurse a
nd say that the site of the cannula was now so painful that she would have to move it to a different place, and the cycle would begin again. I was always very apologetic about this, though there was really nothing else to be done. In fact, I noticed that the nurses were not at all impatient with this repeated request, and perhaps became more sympathetic towards me. Perhaps the confession of suffering, not overdone, reminded them of their vocation in a harmless way.

  The nurses had a mode of existence that was quite different from that of the doctors. They existed between an onstage and an offstage set of indicators. Within the ward, there would be a strict restriction on personal conversation between the nurses, and when they talked, they exchanged only information about the patients, and firm instructions from senior to junior. When they were outside the small ward, at the desk where ‘paperwork’, as they called it, was carried out and where interaction with administrators might take place, they often dropped into offstage behaviour. No patients sat there; we only passed by from time to time, and there what we overheard were exchanges about private existence, about partners and husbands, about inconveniences of travel and the doings of children. When in this mode, they relaxed; their bodies slumped; they scratched their heads with fingernail and biro; they adjusted their tight uniforms and yawned; stance and expression yielded and shifted, softened, the smiles came naturally and not professionally, and they did not use each other’s names in address. We were not exactly shielded from such behaviour, or from such frank conversation, but it only seemed to be happening in spaces a patient might pass through, but not stop within.