The Emperor Waltz Read online

  ‘It’s not very big,’ Dommie said. ‘You wouldn’t get a whole mug out of that.’

  ‘Dessau,’ the dealer said. ‘Probably. The silverware is difficult to date definitely, but I think it’s the period when the school had moved to Dessau. They started in Weimar, you know – where the Republic is named after. Beautiful town. I don’t suppose this ever left Dessau, where they moved to. That’s not such a beautiful town – very run-down. The school’s still there. They’re talking about renovating it.’

  ‘The school?’

  ‘The Bauhaus?’ the dealer said. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Lost in my own world. The Bauhaus. They started off in Weimar, then the town council drove them out. Couldn’t bear all that free love and political agitation. Dessau offered them a place. Nice town. Very quiet. Don’t know that they went down any better there, either. They’re both in the DDR, East Germany. I go over from time to time. There’s stuff to buy, people very glad to sell it to you. Can’t take out much at a time, and it can be a little bit tricky. The best idea is to pack a big picnic hamper with knives and forks and stuff, and throw the teapot in with all that stuff. It’s harder with a sugar bowl – who takes a silver sugar bowl on a picnic? This is a nice little thing, though. Found it two years ago. Old lady in Dessau, said her husband had bought it sixty years ago. He was dead. She didn’t know what it was. Had to buy three worthless silver photograph frames and a silver tea caddy I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to hide my tracks. “Oh,” you say, “that’s an unusual teapot. While I’m here …” Doesn’t always work. Bauhaus. A lot of academic interest in it. Collectors only here and there – it’s so difficult to find the good stuff, and people still think it’s ugly, not like the Werkstätte. In twenty years, you’ll be getting begging letters from museums. Feel it.’

  Duncan had been growing warm towards the curious, squat, insulting object, like an angry punctuation mark. He could see himself, in four years’ time, bringing out a beautiful range of Bauhaus silverware for the delectation of guests. And this, he was saying, was the little piece that started it all off, this teapot, handing it round. Without quite intending it, he was handling the teapot, picking it up, turning it over. It was heavy in his hands. Underneath, the crossed sheets of silver it stood on were soldered with a pucker, as of scarred tissue. For the rest of it, the surface was smooth, only very lightly tarnished. He looked at it, aware that he was moving his face in the simulacrum of a connoisseur. The dealer and Dommie were observing him, curiously, and Celia, quiet in her pushchair until now, began to make a small querulous noise, of boredom and request.

  ‘It would look so beautiful in the shop,’ Duncan said, and was about to say that he would think about it, that they would talk about it and come back, when Celia said something.

  ‘See,’ Celia said, quite clearly.

  ‘It looks better at home than in the shop,’ the dealer said persuasively, not understanding what Duncan had said. ‘You’ll want to talk about it with your wife. It’s two hundred and twenty pounds, but I dare say I could do two hundred for cash, what with … your wife being an old friend, and all that.’

  ‘No,’ Duncan said, envisaging his gracious future. But it was more than that: it was an object that he wanted to be able to pick up and hold whenever he felt like it. The solid silver teapot, too small to hold anything like a mug of tea, sat solidly and patiently, and there was a regretted absence in the house of a widow in Weimar or – where was the other place? ‘No, I don’t think I want to think about it. I’d love to take it.’

  ‘You won’t regret it,’ the man said. ‘This style is definitely coming back into fashion. To tell you the truth, I’ll be a little sorry to see it go. I’ve grown very attached to it.’

  ‘It’s a good excuse to go back to East Germany,’ Dommie said. ‘Don’t get arrested.’

  ‘Oh, I have my ways,’ the dealer said, mysteriously. ‘Now. Cheque or cash?’

  9.

  Arthur was reading a book at the till, but in reality watching the two men who had come in together; watching them with what the novel in his hand – by a pulp crime novelist, an American specialist in a detective with fabulous tits and a hunky sidekick called Watson and a tendency to break off for threesomes whenever you might have thought it would be better to chase after the escaping villain – would have called a beady eye. Sherlock flaming Homo, Arthur thought. It wasn’t as engaging as watching these two. It was the third time in two weeks they’d been in, and they’d spent a hundred pounds this Monday, and seventy or eighty the Wednesday before. They ought to have been his favourite customers.

  Another familiar sort of customer was browsing the shelves in a dim, hopeful, self-conscious way. He had walked past the bookshop three times before entering: he did not give the impression of coming to bookshops much, and had stood for a second on the mat, breathing in the atmosphere of a gay shop, not sure where to start. Arthur liked this sort of customer. He would start by looking at the picture books, hoping for a bit of smut, and then he would circle the shop, finding the Californian academic texts on gay people in the middle ages and the reconstruction of gender a little taxing. Some of them would work to left or right, picking up books in a desultory and undecided way, and would discover a novel with a man on the front – if he was lucky, an American small-press gay thriller; if he was unlucky, the paperback of Querelle de Brest. The speculatively acquired pile would return to Tooting or Cardiff.

  Arthur regarded this particular customer with tenderness. His short-sleeved white shirt revealed quite a sexy tight torso, and his blue M & S slacks were tight round the bum. He had achieved sexiness by accident through his shopping, without knowing he had done any such thing. The queen who picked up this tow-haired hero for the first time, with his puzzled expression and untutored gratitude, wouldn’t be able to believe his luck, as he spunked over that same puzzled expression and untutored gratitude, two hours later. Arthur thought he would ask him whether he’d read A Boy’s Own Story when he came to pay.

  There were other recurrent customers – there were the argumentative ones who had come to men’s group nights and asked to borrow books. There were the knowledgeable literati who came with friends and boyfriends, sometimes with well-dressed women and straight men with a benevolent glitter of condescension in the eye; they would expect to be greeted by and engaged with Arthur and Duncan in conversation while the friend or boyfriend made a noisy way round the shop. The polite reference to the knowledgeable writer’s most recent work would be made by Arthur or Duncan, to be batted away; a book or two would be bought with cries of excitement; the companion would promise to return to buy all their Christmas presents here; and they would depart, leaving something of a silence behind. There were teenage versions of Arthur, burning with desire to discover – what? They didn’t know, but they came, and they spent or they shoplifted. There were those who came to cruise – disappointing on a Tuesday morning, and never very successful at any time of the week – and those who came to build up a library, carrying their possessions in two tattered old supermarket plastic bags. Arthur knew them all. The two men now in the shop were none of these. They were policemen in mufti. Arthur went on observing them over the top of the new Kiss Me, Handsome novel with keen attention.

  Their clothes seemed hardly to match, or resemble, in the ways that friends’ usually did. They seemed more like the clothes of straight men who had been thrown together by ill fortune, in the corner of a pub or in the queue of a service station. One was fifty, and wearing an old but quite good quality overcoat – it was early in the year to be wearing an overcoat, on this September day, and he might have been sweating. His shoes were very old-fashioned, solid and thick and black, like the shoes of someone who did a lot of urban walking. The other was more like a homosexual, but only quite like: his pastel sweater over his shoulder with arms dangling, his little leather-stringed necklace were at odds with the way he held himself and moved, and as he turned to his friend, The Nude Male photo book in hand and said something in lowere
d tones, he ran a finger round the inside of the necklace; clearly an unfamiliar and skin-irritating presence. He had dressed up sedulously to come to the Big Gay Bookshop. He, too, was wearing old-fashioned solid and thick and black shoes. It was the shoes and their dissimilar quality that told Arthur what they were. If they went on buying copies of books in the hope that they might find something illegally filthy, on the budget of Her Marge’s Metropolitan Police, then all well and good. He wished that he could tell the one with the necklace on, the butch one who was trying so hard, that nobody round here gave a shit what you wore: they obviously weren’t gay anyway, whatever they put on.

  They were causing some nervousness, some disturbance in the atmosphere; the other customer, the one with the tight clothes who had walked past the shop repeatedly before coming in, was edging away from them. He could see that something was wrong, though he probably didn’t know what, exactly. ‘Do you want to leave them over here?’ Arthur said kindly, as by now he had a pile of six books balancing under one arm, and the man, blushing crimson at being addressed at all, came over and left them silently, but with a nervous smile. He hovered; took a step back in the direction of the shelf he had come from; indecisively looked at the two plainclothes policemen, and indecisively turned back to Arthur.

  ‘I love this one,’ Arthur said, tapping the book on the top of the pile. ‘Have you read Anglo-Saxon Attitudes? That’s brilliant, that’s my favourite book ever, I reckon.’

  ‘I’ll look out for it,’ the man said, in an unpractised, croaky way. Perhaps he had hoped not to have to speak at all. He had a Scottish accent, perhaps a light Edinburgh accent, and Arthur smiled brilliantly at him. It was illegal still in Scotland, wasn’t it? He’d come down on the train, was buying books to keep him going through the long illegal Scottish nights, would come back in six months’ time. Arthur looked at Edinburgh with some tenderness. Men were always trying to pick you up, sitting here at the till, but once a month or so, Arthur thought he could be so happy with a customer. He might never see this customer again, and like all the men Arthur could be so happy with, he paid with cash and not a cheque, from which Arthur could at least have discovered what his name was.

  The Scotsman left. There was a brief exchange between the two plainclothes policemen, and the one who had made slightly more effort came up to the till while the other one loitered. He would not meet Arthur’s eye as he put them down. Arthur would do all the work.

  ‘Hello again,’ Arthur said. ‘Nice to see you again. You’re getting to be a bit of a regular, you and your friend there. Do you come far?’

  The plainclothes policeman made an assessing, official gesture at his top pocket, as if his radio might be in there, or perhaps just protecting his right nipple from sexual assault by bookshop assistants.

  ‘You’re keen readers, I can see,’ Arthur went on. ‘You’re like me – you get through a lot. Oh, I like this.’ He took the top one from the pile and keyed it into the till. It was a quite innocuous novel about American high-school students falling in love, which the Boston publisher had put a startlingly frank cover on. ‘Four ninety-nine, and this – yes, you’ll want a book about helping yourself sexually, getting to know your sexual needs, we all do, don’t we, when we’re coming out – eight ninety-seven – and this one – and this one – yes, and a picture book, lovely …’

  Arthur could have sworn that these two policemen had bought The Nude Male last week. Certainly they had had two copies in stock when he’d reordered it, last Tuesday, and Duncan had commented that another one had sold the next day. They’d been in on Wednesday because Duncan had had to take another half-day off to go to another funeral. The more he thought about it, the more Arthur was sure that the policemen had already bought this one. He wasn’t going to mention it, though, since they were paying with money. The Nude Male was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and was largely full of pictures of Greek vases, which hadn’t been considered rude since Queen Victoria died. He thought the forces of law and order would ultimately be disappointed in their hunt for obscenity here.

  ‘There,’ Arthur said. ‘That’ll be sixty-one pounds eighty-three pence.’

  ‘Is this everything?’ the policeman said. He had a light, feminine voice, either put on for the occasion or the thing that had led him to be selected for the mission. Operation Bumboy Books, Arthur thought derisively. ‘Is this all your stock, out here in the shop?’

  ‘Well, mostly,’ Arthur said, keeping a straight face. Policemen had asked this before. ‘Was there something special you were looking for? If it’s not in stock, we can order most things, and some things from abroad.’

  ‘What sort of things do you order most?’ the man said.

  But his friend had been listening, and called over, ‘I bet you get some unusual requests.’

  Arthur didn’t know who he was supposed to be responding to. He thought for a moment about reeling them in with the tale of the book about feet that Tony and Tim had got them to order from Amsterdam. It had cost thirty-eight pounds, plus shipping and ordering costs, and when it arrived it was in German, with photographs of twelve pairs of feet, some in socks, between pages 104 and 105. That had been the only time they had ordered anything ‘special’ from abroad, and they’d only done it for Tony and Tim. There was nothing else that hadn’t gone straight on the shelves. If he could get the policemen to order a second copy of the book about feet, he would feel satisfied. But then he realized that he didn’t know what the German text had said, and he had a better idea. ‘We keep a little bit of stock upstairs, for special customers,’ he said. ‘At the moment, up there –’ he looked around as if there might be someone else in the shop ‘– we’ve got quite a sexy book. Our customers are eating it up. We can’t get rid of it fast enough.’

  The policemen looked dubiously at the copy of The Garden King that Arthur returned with, its artistically misty cover in blue and green, and if they had opened it up, they would have been still more dubious if they had started to read the elegant prose. But they bought a copy and off they went.

  ‘Well, good luck to them,’ Duncan said, when he came back and Arthur told him about the visit. ‘They’re getting to be some of our best customers.’

  Then Arthur told him about the copy of The Garden King that he’d persuaded them to buy, and Duncan couldn’t stop laughing. If the police forces of England could be made to hear about this filthy novel, which could justify prosecuting the filthy gay bookshop in London, they’d all order a copy, and extra copies for the prosecution, and then it would get into the press and normal gays would read about it, and they’d all be down here wanting a copy and …

  ‘Won’t happen,’ Arthur said. ‘The police aren’t as stupid as that. No, they are that stupid. They wouldn’t be able to get past page five, they’d just flick through it looking for if it said “cock” or “arse” and that.’

  ‘You didn’t leave them alone in the shop, did you?’

  ‘Well, only when I went upstairs to get the book.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Duncan said. ‘That means a stock check. I know they’ll have stolen something they were too embarrassed to buy. The Joy of Gay Sex, I’m sure of it.’

  It proved to be the case.

  ‘Dying for a cup of tea,’ Duncan said to console Arthur. There was nothing to be done about policemen and Arthur shouldn’t feel so guilty about it. They were always going to be there, policemen, like the weather, stones through the window, Aids.

  10.

  ‘It was January the seventh, 1987, this year, a Wednesday,’ Duncan would say a few months later. ‘It would have been about eleven o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘The date and time are not in dispute,’ the lawyer would say.

  Over the road, Andy and Chris were observing the arrival of the police in their van.

  ‘Not a moment too soon,’ Andy said. ‘Shut them down. I don’t know why it was allowed in the first place.’

  ‘That’s right, Dad,’ Chris said. ‘Selling filth. Anyone coul
d have gone in.’

  The van disgorged the police; there were nine of them. The officer in charge counted them out, seven men and a woman police officer. There was something queer about their hands: pink and shiny. Arthur came to the door.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘Are we suspected of robbing a bank or summat?’

  ‘You’re believed to be selling pornographic material both openly and in a concealed manner,’ the police officer. ‘In this first instance, we are not arresting you, but taking material away for examination. In there, Sergeant.’

  ‘There’s nothing pornographic in there,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m going to get my boss. What the hell is that?’ He had seen that the police officers were wearing pink plastic gloves.

  Duncan and Dommie had been going through the accounts in the little store room upstairs, the one that had been Arthur’s room until four years ago. They had heard the rumpus downstairs as the policemen came into the shop.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Dommie said. The police had started bundling books into black plastic bags. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘They’re doing us for selling dirty books,’ Arthur said. ‘Oy. A bit more care. That’s valuable stock you’re throwing into them bags.’

  The police were throwing books indiscriminately into bags, or not quite indiscriminately: they had lists they were consulting, and were going to specific shelves. But they were taking dozens of books.