The Emperor Waltz Page 44

  ‘If in doubt, chuck it in,’ Duncan said hotly. ‘Is that it? Who’s in charge here?’

  ‘I am,’ the officer in charge said, coming in from the doorway. ‘We’ve received substantive information from members of the public that your shop is selling pornographic material.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Duncan said. ‘Members of the public my foot. Those two plainclothes officers that kept coming round last summer. I’ll have you know that the fourth time they came round, one of them solicited a bribe from my assistant here. Five thousand pounds they wanted, and then the whole thing would be dropped. He told your officer – he quite rightly told your bloody officer – to piss off and never come back.’

  ‘All this and any other claims you wish to make will be aired in due course,’ the officer said wearily.

  ‘And they stole a fucking book, too, when we weren’t looking. That’s not pornography,’ Arthur was saying to an officer ladling books into a bag. ‘That’s E. M. Forster’s Maurice. Can I ask you, have you ever tried to have a wank to that? Have you? Have you?’

  ‘I must ask you to restrain your assistant from using obscene language and/or making improper sexual approaches to my officers, if that’s what the little twat is doing,’ the officer in charge said, delicately turning his head away from Arthur.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Duncan said. ‘Dommie, go and phone a lawyer. You’re a lawyer. Phone another one.’

  ‘They’re wearing gloves,’ Dommie said; she was already holding the telephone at the desk. ‘What are they wearing gloves for? Officer, why are they wearing gloves? It can’t be for fingerprints.’

  ‘I have to guard my officers against all possibilities of physical danger,’ the officer in charge said.

  ‘This is a bloody bookshop,’ Arthur said. ‘There’s no danger here, except if a copy of Proust, translated by Terence Kilmartin, falls on your foot.’

  ‘This is standard practice when investigating non-traditional communities of drug users, Haitians, haemophiliacs and homosexuals, and the safety of my officers must come first,’ the officer in charge said.

  ‘Your officers are not going to catch Aids from a bloody paperback,’ Dommie said.

  ‘What? What?’ Duncan said. ‘You think—’

  ‘In this area I am not permitted and not prepared to take risks and not prepared to enter into discussions about measures I have decided to take,’ the officer in charge said.

  Out in the street, a curious crowd of onlookers had arrived. The greengrocer had crossed the road and was talking to the Greek sandwich-makers on their step; a couple of regular old ladies who must live near by had stopped to watch, their tartan or jolly spotted shopping trolleys waiting patiently like dogs. They looked worried; it was clear that they were greatly enjoying all of this. If only the raid could have happened on a Saturday afternoon, when everything was so much busier.

  ‘You realize that you are bringing me into disrepute with the whole of this street,’ Duncan said. ‘I’ve been here for nearly eight years now. Do you know what it’s been like? Do you know how many times this front window’s been smashed? Well, neither do I – I’ve lost count. Do you know what it’s like being called a queer fucking cunt twice a week on the way to work? And now they’ll think we’re fucking pornographers they can catch Aids from. What a fucking disgrace. We should have paid your fucking officers that five grand and looked on it as an insurance premium.’

  ‘I would be very grateful if you would not use foul language towards me or other officers trying to do their job,’ the officer in charge said.

  ‘Go on, piss off,’ Duncan said. ‘Before I bite you.’ And then, to his horror, he just burst into tears. He wished Paul was still there.

  It took all morning and what would normally have been lunchtime, and at the end, when the police went, anyone would have thought that the shop was proposing to shut up and close down. The bookshelves were filleted, leaving great gaps; the photography section was almost completely emptied. Stock had been dropped on the floor and left there; a policeman had trodden on a new hardback novel and torn its spine off with his boot. How long would it take? As long as it took, the officer in charge said, departing, not removing his gloves until he was safely outside on the pavement. He had touched nothing in the shop.

  ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to go on,’ Duncan said. ‘Just when we were starting to do all right. I just don’t know.’

  Together, they started putting the books back in their places. The other shopkeepers outside started dispersing, discussing, casting surprised or interested glances back towards the shop. For whatever reason, the officers had not gone into the display of books in the window, and the neat arrangement was undisturbed. Arthur had done it last week, right after New Year. It was of a summer garden with little deckchairs, a Barbie in sunglasses drinking a cocktail, and a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex spread-eagled downwards on some sand. (Arthur had stolen some from an open sack a builder had left a couple of streets away – that had been his inspiration, along with an old Barbie.) An old mirror was meant to be the sea. The proportions were wrong and The Joy of Gay Sex in Barbie’s world was the size of a volleyball pitch. The police had not noticed the solitary remaining copy in the window. There must be some way to turn that to their advantage, Duncan thought.

  ‘Go away,’ he said, to the blond young man who had just poked his head through the door with a startled expression. ‘We’re closed.’

  ‘No, I’m awfully sorry to have taken such a time to get here,’ the man said. ‘It’s no distance really, but, you know—’

  ‘Oh hello!’ Dommie said brightly. ‘You must be Gervase. Duncan, this is Gervase – he’s going to make everything all right, aren’t you, Gervase? I knew everything would be all right. As soon as I saw your face, I knew it. Now. First things first – a cup of coffee.’

  11.

  ‘I just don’t know what to wear,’ the voice came from upstairs. Clive was in the dressing room, judging from the muffled sound and by now, Stephen thought, he had spread most of his wardrobe over the bed, the available chairs in the bedroom, and into the dressing room by the side. This had happened before.

  ‘Wear what you like,’ Stephen called. ‘You look lovely in anything.’

  There was a muted response. Stephen himself was sitting at the desk in the drawing room, writing a postcard of thanks to Diana for last night. There was a proper study on the second floor where he kept papers and books and did proper work. This art-deco desk in silvered wood had been just the thing for the drawing room, Clive had thought, and Stephen had agreed. The desk on the second floor was not for company: it was a repro desk topped with green leather that Stephen had inherited from his father. Neither Stephen nor his father had had any taste, as Clive quite fondly observed from time to time, and thank heaven Clive had come into Stephen’s life as nobody had come into his father’s to put that right. Clive never had to go to the second floor: up there were briefing notes and the documentation and the framed certificates of Stephen’s professional life. On the first floor all was luxe, calme et volupté; the ground floor was silver, sage-green, with quite daringly acute touches of neon pink, and the basement was the kitchen of Stephen’s dreams, so he was told. All of that was Clive’s doing. He himself was wearing an old graph-paper patterned shirt and an ancient pair of – he looked – dung-green corduroys. It was what he had flung on when he had got back from today’s case in Isleworth, that interesting tax fraud, his white shirt soaked in sweat under the double-breasted pinstriped suit. He knew he was going to be made to go up and change into something better. It wouldn’t take him a moment.

  ‘The thing is,’ Clive called, coming down the stairs, ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re supposed to wear to something like this.’

  ‘Something radical and chic,’ Stephen said. ‘Something fundraising. Something that shows you’re going to fight for the cause. I’m wearing dungarees.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen,’ Clive said, coming into the drawing room, ‘I would say tha
t you don’t have a pair of dungarees, except that I’m not one hundred per cent sure about what lies in that half of the wardrobe.’

  ‘One third of the wardrobe, at the absolute most,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Be that as it may. How do I look?’

  ‘Perfect, my darling,’ Stephen said, and he meant it, as he had almost every night for the last twenty-three years. Clive really looked nice tonight. Other people’s boyfriends dressed up and followed fashion, but Clive just looked beautiful: he was wearing a white shirt and black trousers, high-waisted and with something very slightly unusual about the cut that defeated Stephen – anyway, they were not at all like the black trousers he put on in the morning. He had first seen him doing the jive, or the twist, or whatever it had been, in a basement in Notting Hill in 1963, and he had been wearing a white shirt and black trousers then, and Stephen had just known from his turn and his smile that he would be perfect, my darling, for evermore. ‘You do look nice.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Clive said, but he would never go on about it once a decision had been made. ‘I’ve left such a mess for Mrs Thing to sort out tomorrow. Everything’s on the floor.’

  ‘Well, it was well worth it,’ Stephen said. ‘I wish there was something better than a party in a bookshop I could be offering you. Did you go to the park again? You’re lovely and brown.’

  ‘You’re not going out dressed like that, I hope,’ Clive said. ‘You really are the limit. The car’s coming in fifteen minutes, too.’

  ‘I’ll be ready,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s only a bookshop party.’

  ‘It’s a fundraising party,’ Clive said. ‘It’s for their defence costs. And we all know how much that can amount to, don’t we. Have you even had a shower since you came in?’

  ‘The car can wait, darling,’ Stephen said. ‘There. That’s done. Have you got a stamp?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s one in the top drawer,’ Clive said, coming over and sitting on Stephen’s knee. ‘What were you up to today?’

  ‘That interesting tax fraud,’ Stephen said. ‘Didn’t get much further, though. Now – give me a nice big kiss, lovely husband of mine.’

  All over London, rich and literary and well-intentioned men were discussing with each other, in person or over the phone, what exactly one wore to a party meant to raise funds for the defence of a gay bookshop. Something festive? Something sober? Radical? Rich? ‘It’s a charity event, like a ball,’ Alan said to his mother, as he tied his black tie. The mirror in the sitting room was best for that – an old flatterer of a mirror, one that didn’t shine up your wrinkles and blotches like the mirrors at work. ‘But it’s a sort of ball that you don’t have to take anyone to in particular.’

  ‘I wish someone would take me to a ball,’ his mother said, pulling her blanket up about her knees. ‘Now, I remember once, your father—’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ Alan said, impatiently. ‘I’ve got to make a move. You’ll be all right then. I won’t be late back.’ He knew that he would be the only person in black tie, but fundraising suggested dressiness, even if it was just in a bookshop. Would there be food? Would they all go on somewhere jolly afterwards?

  ‘You look nice,’ Tony said to Tim, and Tim said the same back to Tony, in the lodging house where Arthur lived. They were matching tonight, in white vests and black leather trousers but, then, they often were. They stood by the window, and it was Tim’s turn to trim Tony’s moustache.

  ‘Look at your whiskers,’ Tim said. ‘I wish mine grew half as fast as yours. I’ll never have such a pretty moustache as yours. Ah, well.’

  ‘But yours is so nice and blond,’ Tony said. ‘I’d love to have a nice blond moustache.’

  ‘Yours is nicer, though,’ Tim said. ‘How was that guy last night?’

  ‘That guy?’ Tony said, his upper lip tickling as Tim, concentrating, trimmed the hair with a frown. ‘Oh, that French guy. He was OK. He wanted to take me home, but I said, where do you live, Jacques, and he said he was staying with his sister in Tulse Hill and sleeping on her sofa, so I said maybe later and we did it in a cubicle. He wasn’t called Jacques. I can’t remember what he was called.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Tim said. He lowered the scissors, looked critically at his own work. ‘I was as wasted as a monkey. Are we going with Arthur tonight?’

  ‘Arthur?’ Tony said, smiling as Tim’s frown disappeared and he gave a small nod. ‘No, he came home and changed but he went out hours ago. He said he’d got things to do at the bookshop. We ought to have a threesome with him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Tim said. ‘He’s quite a nice boy. Vanilla, he is.’

  The literary gentlemen of London were dressing, or being reminded to dress, were setting off in keen or reluctant moods, unwilling to be prised from their Nationwide or their Jane Austen. One had refused an invitation to dinner with Kingsley Amis for this; another had promised to take his editor, who had, in a ladylike way, said that she had always longed to see a room full of sodomites. ‘You see,’ she had said, ‘I was brought up in Cheltenham. I only really read of them.’ Her author admired that ladylike of; promised himself he would use it soon, in dialogue. Francis King was coming, and Paul Bailey, and Angus Wilson, and Adam Mars-Jones, and ladies too, Maureen Duffy and Kay Dick and Maggi Hambling and for some reason Olivia Tempest. She had heard about it from Maureen Duffy and had phoned the bookshop in quite a rage demanding to know why she hadn’t been invited. (They invited her.) They lived, these literary ladies and gentlemen, in shabby and overstuffed houses, full of books and objects and paintings, still-lifes and portraits, Staffordshire china dogs and fine Indian screens, and they lived amid dust. They were coming with a book, each of them, signed, and they were going to be auctioned off to the willing guests. It had been Arthur’s idea. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to fetch for Kay Dick’s autobiography, however she signs it,’ Duncan had said, but Arthur had said, very properly, that Kay Dick had her fans, too, and they would be very happy to pay to show their support for her and keep the bookshop going. Olivia Tempest was bringing a signed copy of that book that everyone had read or anyway seen on BBC2 a couple of years ago.

  The gang were coming, the men’s group, and the gay radicals from the old CHE days, and they were bringing their radical friends. Andrew lived in a little house in Clapham, and Nat, who lived in a little house in Kennington, was going to pick him up and drive him to Marylebone. It had not been Andrew’s usual way to request a lift, and it was going in slightly the wrong direction, really, but Nat had agreed. When Andrew opened the door of his little terraced house in North Street, Clapham, Nat saw why he had asked. Andrew was wearing radical drag.

  ‘I like your frock,’ Nat said ironically. It wasn’t a frock to be liked. Andrew hadn’t shaved his beard, and he had applied green eyeshadow and pink lipstick with an inexpert hand. The dress was tight on him, the bosom flapping loose over his hairy chest, the cap sleeves tight on Andrew’s hairy upper arms. He was wearing Dr Martens boots.

  ‘It’s a radical critique of gender roles performed in the urban space today,’ Andrew said, in a perfunctory way. ‘Come in.’

  Nat cautiously followed Andrew into the hallway, making his way past the bicycle, a pile of leaflets on the floor, and surreptitiously trying to reattach a soggy piece of peeling green-and-yellow flock wallpaper that was peeling off.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ Nat said. ‘Your frock.’

  ‘Littlewoods catalogue,’ Andrew said. ‘They’ll never stop sending me their stuff now, I know.’

  ‘You should have gone to Evans,’ Nat said. ‘They’ve got outsize. I suppose you would be outsize for a girl.’

  ‘Be that as it may. I’m not sure if I’m going tonight,’ Andrew said. They were in Andrew’s kitchen, and he opened the fridge door and poured them both a glass of wine. Nat sat down at the scrubbed-pine table. The fridge was chock full of dirty-looking vegetables, preparatory to being turned into some enormous and tasteless meatless stew, a vague orange colour. Nat�
��s fridge in Kennington, it contained a bottle of wine, a bottle of vodka and maybe some olives and a yogurt. But he was everyone’s friend; he never really cooked for himself.

  ‘Oh, Andrew. Honestly. Why not?’ Nat said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Andrew said, sitting down heavily in his frock and green eyeshadow, ‘and I don’t know it’s what I want to support any more. Duncan – he’s just in it to make money.’

  ‘Well, it’s a shop – it’s got to make some money, or it won’t stay a shop much longer.’

  ‘We’ve been through this,’ Andrew said. ‘It could be a collective, and give out books to the community. A meeting place for people of all sorts, to discuss the future of society, young and old, straight and gay, male and female, working-class people of all sorts, and how to bring down this government. That’s what we should be talking about. I’ve been thinking about it.’

  ‘Yes, that would be simply lovely,’ Nat said. ‘What’s this wine?’

  ‘Parsnip,’ Andrew said. ‘And I don’t think Duncan’s really behind that. He looks as if he likes the community, as if he’s there for us, but I don’t think he really is. Maybe we should just let this trial run its course, see what happens to the bookshop. Afterwards, someone else could take it over.’

  ‘Oh,’ Nat said. ‘Oh – really?’

  ‘The last straw was last week,’ Andrew said. ‘I was in there buying – buying – that new anthropological book about gay weddings in the Kalahari, and there’s a new poster on the wall, saying “Use Condoms Always”, or something like that.’

  ‘Yes, I saw it,’ Nat said. ‘You’ve not been in for a while – that’s been up for months.’

  ‘Tory propaganda,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s just Tory propaganda, in what ought to be a radical bookshop. But it’s being run for money, for profit, and it’s putting up Tory propaganda now. I don’t know that I want to support him in this case at all. Let the police prosecute him, close the place down. It was an experiment and it didn’t work.’