The Emperor Waltz Page 42

  Outside, the snow was falling but not settling, and there was a brightness in the sky that suggested it would not be falling for long. Duncan’s neighbour, Hubert St George, was standing on his steps, staring vaguely upwards, confused at what the sky was now producing, though after three decades away from Trinidad, snow in London could not have been so astonishing as all that. He was wearing pyjamas, a pair of army boots and a woman’s overcoat with a hand-knitted scarf wrapped round his neck a dozen times; the characteristic smell of weed and Hubert was perceptible.

  ‘Hello, Hubert,’ Duncan said, locking his front door and pulling his woollen hat on. ‘Caught us all by surprise, the snow.’

  Hubert St George looked around slowly, creakily. ‘Oh, it you,’ he said. ‘Yeah, Mr Batty Bummer Bend-it Backdoor, don’t you come anywhere near of me.’

  ‘No, I certainly won’t,’ Duncan said. ‘See you around, Hubert.’

  Every day, Duncan regretted having bought an Austin Princess. Its only recommendation was that it would never be stolen, even in drug-addled Notting Hill, even by one of Hubert St George’s terminally confused friends. It sat on the road, its mushroom colour veiled by a thin layer of snow, somehow smugly. You can never go wrong with a British car, his father’s voice had sounded in his ear four years before. That had guided him with wallet open, knowing nothing, towards the incredulously joyful Austin Princess salesman. Paul, bless his heart, had instantly observed that the Austin Princess Duncan had come to pick him up in had the appearance of a woman looking down her nose, and not a very smart woman at that. And the back half doesn’t seem to have any kind of connection with the front half, he had gone on. But beggars could not be choosers, he supposed, he had concluded, stepping as gracefully into the car as a finishing-school debutante demonstrating the art. How long could it be before he could justify getting rid of the thing in favour of something better? Something Japanese, something Korean, something tinny and deplorable from far away that would never fall apart.

  ‘Lovely!’ Dommie said, stepping out from the front door of her tiny terraced house off Clapham High Street, her daughter asleep and already strapped into a sort of car seat. Dommie could by now reconstruct a pram with one hand while holding a sleeping Celia on the crook of her elbow. ‘Lovely! Bang on time. No traffic? Good. I’ve got everything. Madam woke me up at five forty-five, full of beans, then two hours’ charging about, then breakfast, and then, like a log, whoosh, back off to sleep. I can’t help thinking she hasn’t made a rational assessment of her sleep needs.’

  ‘You don’t look like someone who’s been deprived of sleep,’ Duncan said. ‘Shall I take that?’

  Dommie had surprised Duncan when, two years before, she had taken him out to dinner at Ménage à Trois – a flash place for her and definitely for him. He’d at first thought she might be trimming the bill when she ordered water to drink. He hadn’t believed it. The father, Dommie said, was nobody; she had just found the best-looking and healthiest specimen she could reasonably persuade to take part in the transaction, and let him go his way afterwards. He wouldn’t know anything about it. Duncan had been amazed. ‘After all,’ Dommie said, ‘I’m not getting any younger. I’m not going to hang around for a man to show up, and then years of debate about whether we had a future, and then years of trying, and then it’s all too late.’ Over a dinner that consisted, modishly, of two starters each, one with a kiwi-fruit garnish, another exploiting aubergine, she confided in her brother, ‘I really wanted a child much more than I wanted a husband and a father to the child. So there you are.’

  There had been other and much more difficult dinners in the past, reconciling or arguing, Dommie making herself into a new person or living up to what other people hoped to turn her into. Duncan had been the first on the scene when the child was born in St George’s, Tooting – he would have stood by her side, but she’d said she really only wanted professionals, not weak-minded boys who would probably faint at the sight of where babies came from. Duncan was relieved and guilty, but had come with a great bunch of flowers, and had not gone into it too much when Dommie had said what the child was going to be called. The child had lain in her white cot in the white room, with smiling, tranquil nurses around her, in the happy part of the hospital where everyone, more or less, was well, and her face turned to the air with its flushed red cheeks and nose, her surprising scrub of very dark hair; her tiny fists flailed in the air like those of a floored tiny boxer. Duncan loved her, not knowing why. She looked nothing like their father Samuel. The father, Dommie mentioned much later in passing, had been Syrian, and beautiful.

  ‘How’s the shop?’ Dommie said, when they were out of London. The snow was not quite over, and on green spaces, gardens and roofs, it was settling.

  ‘Mostly lovely,’ he said. ‘We had Paul Bailey in last week signing copies of his new novel and all the old stock we could get hold of. He was charming. Told a lot of stories about actors. Oh, God, get off the sodding road if you can’t be bothered to … Sorry. It’s the ones wearing trilbies when they drive I can’t cope with. It’s like a symbol of non-driving ability, that bloody trilby.’

  ‘But your author.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he was charming. Bought a lot of stock as well, I mean other books, and left a box of old things for us to sell in the second-hand corner. A donation, he said. Very nice of him. We offered him a tenner for the lot, and at first he wouldn’t hear of it, then he would. Perfectly reasonable of him, really.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t let him sign too many of his own books.’

  ‘Ten of the new one, five of the last, two each of the novels before that, the ones we had, I mean. That should do us quite well. Anyway, he’s only in Shepherd’s Bush so he can come back and sign some more.’

  ‘You learnt your lesson with that bloody book,’ Dommie said. ‘That bloody …’

  ‘Now then,’ Duncan said. ‘I’ll have you know I sold a copy of The Garden King only three months ago.’

  ‘That was the first since when, exactly?’

  ‘It was really good, too. I don’t know why no one bought it.’

  ‘How absolutely frightful,’ Dommie said. Duncan gave her a sidelong glance. Had she always been so posh? It seemed to him that she had been getting steadily posher in the last ten years. It was catching on like the plague. He had heard Christopher and Simon saying ‘simply awful’ and even Nat had been known to say ‘absolutely ghastly’. Soon they’d all be at it, and Arthur would be talking about the drawing room looking awfully unspeakable, or something.

  ‘You should pack them up and send them back to – what was he called, the author?’

  ‘He died, poor soul,’ Duncan said. ‘No, it’s all been written off and forgotten about. They might as well sit upstairs gathering dust and selling one copy every two years. I didn’t have the heart to ask his family if they had a use for two hundred and thirty-six signed copies of their son’s only novel. Ah, well. Lesson learnt. Someone’s catching up with some important sleep, there in the back.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Dommie said, ‘it always sends her off to sleep, the back of the car. Ah, Celia. Yes? Celia, Celia, Mummy’s here.’

  ‘I have no idea why you called her Celia,’ Duncan said. ‘Everything about it – before it was just her name, I kept thinking coeliac, and then someone said “Celia, Celia, Celia shits –”’

  ‘Well, she does,’ Dommie said.

  ‘– you know, that awful poem,’ Duncan said. ‘I just don’t understand it.’

  ‘Well, I like it, and it suits her,’ Dommie said. ‘I thought I would think of the future. She looks like a Dame Celia already. Highly authoritative. Anyway.’

  ‘Is this Brighton?’ Duncan said. He thought the alternative might be that your child was run over by a lorry at fourteen, and then you would only have a child with a bewildered pink face and a strange adult name to remember. He corrected the death-filled direction of his thoughts.

  ‘No,’ Dommie said. ‘It’s not even Haywards Heath. We’re
hours off. It’s thinking of snowing again, too.’

  ‘I love snow,’ Duncan said, with a burst of enthusiasm. ‘And I love Christmas too. I love it now. I never used to, but I really love it now.’

  ‘I love it too,’ Dommie said remotely and casually, as if talking about nothing so very much.

  8.

  The snow had begun again in earnest by Brighton. They parked on the front, and for a moment Duncan and Dommie sat and looked at snow falling on the metal-green sea. As far as Duncan could remember, he had never seen snow falling on sea before. It fell; it disappeared; the sea flexed and swelled. Celia stirred in the back, waking, and they both turned. She gave them a lovely broad smile; her woollen hat had fallen off at some point in the journey, and her almost blue-black hair spilt out in curls.

  ‘Car,’ she said, with an air of delight.

  ‘I wish anyone else felt like that about the Austin Princess,’ Duncan said. ‘Now. Where are we going?’

  ‘The Lanes are just there, aren’t they?’ Dommie said. ‘I don’t know – it’s so long since I’ve been in Brighton. I used to come here with Lucien, you know, my awful Frenchman. He had a real thing for it.’

  ‘And now you have a thing for it, too,’ Duncan said sagely.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Dommie said. ‘I quite like it, I suppose. I tell you what – let’s go and find a nice little tea shop and have a cup of tea and even a cake before we start on anything. I’ve got quite a little list of people to buy things for, not including you. Are you ready?’

  They got out, and in the falling snow Dommie quickly opened the boot of the car and put the pushchair together. She opened the back door, wrapped Celia up as tightly as possible, and as the child gurgled and joyously writhed, she bundled her deftly into the seat. Brighton was quiet, and they soon found a tea shop at the entrance to the Lanes with an Australian proprietress, her hair under a scarf, and a less exuberant school-leaver taking their order laboriously on a pad. ‘Quiet today,’ Duncan said, with a merchant’s fellow feeling, but the girl said, ‘Yes, that’s because it’s snowing outside,’ so slowly that at first he thought she must be joking. But she brought a pot of satisfying orange stewed tea, a coffee cake (for Dommie) and a toasted teacake (for Duncan) as well as some warm milk for Celia, which Dommie took the skin off and decanted into Celia’s infant cup. ‘She likes it, doesn’t she?’ Dommie said, for Celia’s benefit rather than anyone else’s.

  ‘Cup!’ Celia said, with ecstasy, and then ‘Milk! Milk!’ That was a new one, Dommie observed. She had talked of cup until now meaning her favourite drink, but since her favourite drink always came in her favourite cup, there was no way of separating it.

  ‘She seems to have worked it out for herself,’ Dommie said dispassionately.

  ‘Beastly stuff,’ Duncan said. ‘I don’t know how she can bear it.’

  ‘Let’s not sit and talk about my prodigy child managing to call milk by its proper name before she’s two years old,’ Dommie said. ‘Let’s talk like adults.’

  She made her brother smile – it had always been such a thing with Dommie to talk like an adult, to spend time with the older boys, to impress her little brother with the adult conversation she could embark on and baffle him. Once it had been talk about men and professions and sex and restaurants, with her friend Tricia in front of the bedroom mirror; now it was about her professional development, and when she thought she was going to go back to work. Duncan observed that that was one worry he didn’t have as an employer, maternity leave, and Dommie replied tartly that he should be aware of his responsibilities too; there was such a thing as sex discrimination when you gave people a job. It was that sort of nice, responsible, grown-up conversation, and it was watched and observed by two keen listeners, the waitress leaning against the Welsh dresser and waiting for customers to come in from the snow, and by Celia, her little hands competently around the lukewarm pink cup with rabbits on it, raising it to her face all by herself, her eyes going from Mummy to Uncle and back again, round as saucers, taking in, it seemed, every word.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as sex discrimination when there’s no one to discriminate against,’ Duncan said.

  ‘That wouldn’t stand up for a second if someone turned up and made a claim. How many pregnant women have you employed in the last four years?’

  ‘I would be simply thrilled to employ any number of pregnant women – well, I wouldn’t, but for the sake of this conversation I would be simply thrilled – but the fact remains that in four years the only person who has asked me for a job and the only person I’ve given one to is Arthur.’

  ‘Dear old Arthur,’ Dommie said. ‘What’s he doing today? Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes, safe as houses,’ Duncan said. ‘He’s got his friend Tim dropping in after lunch, he said. I told him I’d give him a job title – shop manager, if he wants that. But he says it’s only of any use if he had cards or anyone to give them to, or if he was going to go for another job. Shall we?’

  Dommie paid – he noticed that she worked out 10 per cent exactly of the bill, and then, since that would have been 33p, she returned the coppers to her pocket and left another 40p on top. He liked the practical, exact sides to her personality that had become clear in the last few years, and especially since she’d had Celia.

  Outside, the Lanes were almost absurdly picturesque in the falling snow. Duncan could not remember whether he had been there before – it seemed more familiar to him from people’s mentions and stories and tales of acquisition than from direct experience. He was almost sure he had been to Brighton more than once, but perhaps he had not made up as diligently as Dommie for the lack of childhood outings. She knew exactly where she was going, and although she had declared her interest in silverware, she ignored two or three windows, like a dentist’s cabinet, before turning her head and saying, ‘In here,’ to Duncan. It looked much like the others, but Dommie evidently knew what she needed.

  ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Yes, I remember Lucien. I remember his girls, too. Were you one of his girls?’

  The man was sitting behind a high counter on a pinewood stool; he had been reading the Daily Mirror, but at Dommie’s introduction and the mention of Lucien, he had put his paper down. He wore a dirty old cravat tied in a knot and a shirt with a pattern of graph-paper; his eyes were hooded and knowing, his nose swollen and bulbous. He looked rheumily from Dommie to Duncan and back again.

  ‘I haven’t seen him in an age,’ the old man said. ‘I thought he went back to … Toulouse, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him in ten years, almost,’ Dommie said. ‘I suppose he’s somewhere. How’s business?’

  ‘Business? Oh, good, good, very good,’ the man said. ‘Never better. Not today, of course. I’m branching out. I used to be eighteenth-century English tableware, but everyone’s at that game nowadays. You never know where this trade’s going to lead you. In Chipping Camden once, at a house sale, I’d gone there for a chafing dish I’d been tipped off about and there was an Ashbee bonbonnière. Nobody else seemed to be interested in it. I looked at it and I saw what a nice piece it was, in its own terms. Not very fashionable. Very nicely made. Everyone about me was going mad for the candelabra and the chafing dish I was supposed to be there for. I got the Ashbee piece for a song, and then, I suppose I had the bit between my teeth, three or four more pieces and even a Voysey plate, though I don’t suppose I’d ever bought a plate in my life.

  ‘The next thing I know, I’m in Elsenham and there, at that little auction house they have over there, there’s a nice little piece of silver, something of the same sort, and again, no one’s noticed or no one cares. You see, the thing about Arts and Crafts is that it looks very plain to the untutored eye unless there’s a bit of jewel or a bit of enamel on top of it. That catches the eye and suddenly you’re bidding against what I call the magpies – they love a bit of tourmaline or a shiny piece of enamel. They don’t care about Ashbee or the propo
rtions or the quality of the piece, they just want a bit of shiny colour. Without that, the best pieces can look as plain as if they come from Woolworth’s. Look.’ And he drew out a small box, the surface rippling under the spotlight but the shape simple and pure. It looked like a pedestal, no more than that. ‘Nothing to it,’ the man said.

  ‘But it looks so lovely when you put it on velvet like that,’ Dommie said.

  ‘They don’t come on velvet,’ the man said. ‘They come in boxes any old how, dented and filthy, and no one’s interested. Unless there’s a scrap of garnet or tourmaline, like I saw – anyone can see that. It led me on. I haven’t bought a piece of eighteenth-century silver in eighteen months. No interest. There’s a bit more interest around in the Arts and Crafts now than there was. You can’t clean up now like you could. At any rate it’s harder. You know what I’m interested in now? It’s not caught on yet, but it will. German silverware. German and Austrian. You think of that heavy stuff, you don’t think of this.’

  He turned behind him, opened the door of the cabinet. Dommie took the opportunity to give Duncan a look: an old-fashioned look, a sceptical look, a look that said as a parent to a child to do or not do something. Duncan found it impossible to read. The dealer turned round with a vessel of some sort – a novelty teapot, he would have said as the dealer placed it on the green cloth on the worktop. His movements were all relaxed and without the hushed reverence Duncan might have expected; he was used to handling these things, and in any case they were silverware and not china. Still, he was holding the teapot by its black wooden handle and not touching the silver body. It was a half-globe, resting on a crossed base; a spout jutted impudently upwards and a horizontal circle formed the lid. If it were not for the black wood – evidently some kind of luxury element – it might have looked like the sort of thing that hospitals and schools used. Except—