Philip Hensher - The Emperor Waltz

‘Who is that coming up the path?’ Aunt Rachel said, peering out of the window.

‘It’s some man,’ Aunt Rebecca said. ‘He is probably selling something from his little bag. Silk stockings and shoe brushes. How dark he is!’

‘I know who it is,’ Aunt Ruth said with a note of triumph. ‘He is that horrid little boy.’

Duncan had been delayed: the plane to Paris had been an hour late, and he had just missed his connection; the next plane from Paris had been four hours later; his luggage had been lost or mislaid in the confusion, and he had had to fill in a lot of forms at Heathrow. All his clothes were somewhere between Catania and London – they could be anywhere in Europe. The only clothes he had were in a suitcase somewhere under his sister’s bed in Clapham, and the ones in his hand luggage, the tiny shorts and T-shirt he had changed out of at the airport. He had meant to get to his father’s house before lunchtime, but it was now nearly night. He was ravenous.

All the way up the hill, he had been thinking of food – he wanted solid, dry English cheese and perhaps, if there was some leftover cold mashed potato in a bowl, that fried with some peas. Sicilian potatoes didn’t go into any kind of mash – too waxy, or something. Even the sight of his father’s ramshackle house hadn’t shifted his thoughts. But when he rang the doorbell, and it had its familiar, inexplicable half-second delay before sounding, its four-note Big Ben call, which had been there for twenty years at least, Duncan remembered where he was and how much of his life had been there. The house bell was so jaunty, and so little of the life within was jaunty. The sound of the doorbell could always bring him and Dommie to their feet, racing downstairs to open it to whoever it was – usually the postman or the meter reader, nothing more exciting than that. It was the things you put out of your mind that could come back into it, with force.

Aunt Rebecca opened the door. She had put on some weight since he had last seen her, seven years ago at Christmas. She was pretending not to know who he was, but overdoing it in an amateurish way. She peered into his face, screwing up her eyebrows and forehead. ‘Yes?’ she said, hooting rather. ‘Can I help you?’

Duncan wished he had insisted when he left home that he had kept a key. But his father had said he couldn’t have sets of keys being mislaid all over London, and he’d always be there to let Duncan in – or if he weren’t, then he didn’t want Duncan going all over the house in his absence. Dommie had done better and insisted; Duncan had been weak and now, with his father dying upstairs, was at the mercy of his aunt.

‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Duncan. How are you, Rebecca?’

‘Aunt Rebecca, you used to call me,’ she said. ‘How extraordinary. I thought you were in Italy.’

‘I was in Italy,’ Duncan said. ‘But I had a telegram saying that my dad wasn’t very well.’

‘Ha!’ Rebecca said. ‘That is an understatement. He’s very ill indeed.’

‘So I came,’ Duncan said. ‘I came as fast as I could. Can I come in?’

Rebecca had been leaning with her arm heavily against the doorjamb, guarding; the word ‘dragon’ came into Duncan’s mind. It was her weight and awkwardness; but she was blocking Duncan’s way all the same. She gave him a thorough look. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether your father can see you. He has been very uncomfortable the last two days.’ Duncan felt accused by her expression, as if he had been the cause of the discomfort, even though he had not even been in the country. ‘He is only sleeping in fits and starts, so I won’t wake him if he’s asleep. You could come back tomorrow.’

‘He might be asleep when I come tomorrow,’ Duncan said, putting his little bag down in the hall by the hatstand. All the doors in the hall were closed, as if in the central lobby of some office. They had never been closed like that before; doors had stood open or closed as they happened to be. In the panelled hallway, closed off, with nothing but the wooden stair rising upwards to the death chamber, Duncan found himself in an unfamiliar and formal house. ‘I’ll wait until he wakes up.’

‘Oh, very well,’ Rebecca said. She retreated into the sitting room; she opened the door and there was the sight of a woman reading in the gloom. The lights had not been switched on; there was only a small table lamp by the side of her, and she peered in a pool of light downwards, not looking up as Rebecca entered. It was either Ruth or Rachel; he could not see. They must have heard him coming in, perhaps even discussed who should answer the door. There was something territorial about her, something relaxed and confident about her ownership. She was saving her own electricity bill, not her brother’s, by reading in the dark; she was not greeting him because he was there to perform a function, like a meter reader or a Gas Board employee. She might as well have been counting the silver spoons. And now, as if from nowhere, a shape leapt onto the back of her chair; not a cat, but an animal of burst and flutter. It took a strut into the small pool of light, and Duncan saw that it was a parrot, quite black. The parrot tipped its head on one side; it looked in Duncan’s direction; it raised a foot and began to groom itself, quite uninterested in the new arrival. Presently the aunt reached up behind her. She had taken something – a nut or a seed – from her lap, and the bird snatched it. All this Duncan watched remotely, as if it were a drama on a television screen. And then an unknown force seemed to push the door behind Rebecca, and it closed, leaving him alone with the staircase.

The stairs creaked. He felt like a burglar. And upstairs the bedroom doors were also closed. For the first time, Duncan saw the box-like construction of the hall downstairs, the landing upstairs; the distinguished shape that the house had once had, and still had at its core. The panelling continued upstairs, and a threadbare green and blue carpet. This was where Samuel had hung his less successful acquisitions in the way of paintings, including the ‘Constable’, signed extravagantly, from which he had hoped to make a fortune until he was laughed out of Sotheby’s – a red-jacketed farm boy on a wagon in the middle of a dark wood. Samuel’s bedroom was in the middle. Duncan gave a very gentle knock, and in a moment there was a small crisp bustle and the door was opened by what must be a nurse. She came out, closing the door softly behind her.

‘Are you Duncan?’ she said. ‘I’m Sister Balls. We’ve been having a slightly restless couple of days, and sometimes he doesn’t make the best sense, but I don’t think he’s in pain any more. He’s falling asleep and waking up and falling asleep again, but he’ll be very happy to see you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s kind of you to say so, though.’

‘Now why would you say that?’ Sister Balls said. ‘He’s asleep, but he’s been asking after you a lot, saying, When is he going to get here? I’ll be all right when Duncan gets here. It’s been very nice to listen to and to be able to say that you were definitely coming today.’

‘Shall I wait downstairs?’ Duncan said.

‘Oh, no,’ the nurse said. ‘No, that’s not necessary. Just come in quietly and hold his hand, and he’ll wake up when he’s ready, and then I’ll go and leave you two in peace for a bit. Don’t tire him out, I’m sure you won’t.’

Duncan felt a kind of gratitude to Aunt Rebecca for being so abrupt, to the other two aunts for being so rude as not to come out to greet him. He felt tenderized. Talking to Sister Balls, he had been admitted to a caring space, concealed and protected. Then the nurse opened the door to the dark room, and he remembered that inside that space, his father lay.