The Emperor Waltz - Philip Hensher

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did not; he asked if he was French, returning home, but Duncan explained that he was English, going back to London. Why not go back directly? The man was handsome, one of those good-looking Sicilians who peak, to the world’s gratitude, at twenty-two, then lose their hair, grow papery and dry; he was in his middle twenties, and his hair was beautifully thinning. There are flights, directly, now, to London from Catania. Was the gentleman not advised properly?

      ‘Duncan,’ Duncan introduced himself. ‘Yes, I know about the direct flights, but I had to return at very short notice. This was the only flight today that could take me. I needed to get back as soon as possible.’

      ‘A holiday?’ the gentleman asked. But Duncan had seen that while he had been speaking the man’s eyes had gone towards the daughter of a large family, a girl in a short skirt and a tight blouse, and had run up and down her appreciatively. He was just passing the time in a neutral way in talking to Duncan – not that Duncan knew what could result from their conversation. Duncan simply said that, no, he had been working here. He had been teaching English as a foreign language to schoolchildren, and had been living in a small flat in the centre of the city. He liked Catania, yes, he did, and the food, and he had seen the fish market and had gone to Taormina to see the beauties of the island, which, yes, was the most beautiful place in the world, and he agreed that Sicilians were really very lucky to have been born in such a place, even given all its terrible troubles, which made you think you would have been better being born in the shit with no arms and no legs, sometimes, but then the sun shone and the sea was beautiful, and the women, the women of Sicily.

      Duncan had been in Sicily for eleven months. He could keep this sort of conversation going with only one ear on its content. He had heard its contradictions, its flow and counterflow, many times. The other, more active, ear was busy keeping an interested and acute ear attending to the difficulties of Italian as he went. Was that an idiom the man had used – in the shit with no arms and no legs? Or just his own way of talking? He did not know.

      He had come to Sicily for no reason in particular – or no good reason, not one that you could tell anyone of any seriousness. He had been working for the government in London. His job had been in an unemployment office in Kilburn, interviewing the out-of-work and granting them the dole. There were mothers, hard cases, alcoholics, but also students and people who did not really need anything. Duncan did not engage with them, in the shabby office behind the solid stone walls. He knew that, if he thought about it, he would probably take the short step that existed between his state, as a poor employee of the government, and the most desperate of the subjects who came through the door.

      One day he could no longer stand it. It was a hot day in early summer and he had, as it were, fooled himself into coming to work. All the way from his second-floor flat in Brondesbury, he had told himself what a beautiful morning it was, how lucky he was to be walking in the sun, what a joy London could be on these days. He admired the boys in their shorts and vests; they might have been on their way to the Heath or to an open-air swimming pool, and Duncan might have been going with them. He had performed this mental trick before, pushing what he did not want to think about to the back of his mind – his father, Christmas, what Mr Mansfield his supervisor had said to him the day before. He had performed the trick with his job as he did now, putting it quite out of his mind and letting his feet trace a route without thinking what was at the end of it. In his bag was a Tupperware box of lunch, in his pocket a Baldwin novel: he might have been saving the two for a read under a tree with a picnic, not an hour in the staff room at lunchtime. It was only when he was in the street of the unemployment office, almost before the staff door, which was to the side of the locked public door, that he remembered he was not going to the Heath, not going to swim, not going to take his clothes off with the boys of London today. He was going to sit in his neat white short-sleeved shirt and tie with his suit trousers on, and listen to the failures of society asking for more money.

      ‘Did you see that programme on last night?’ Marion was saying, as she puffed up behind him. She was a colleague at the same level as him. She had been there longer – it had been a mysterious amount longer for some time – and had a tendency to explain ordinary things to him, where the coffee money was kept, where the better sandwich shop was at lunchtime, how it was important to stay calm and not raise your voice even when they deserved killing, really. He had in the end discovered that she had started working there three months and two weeks before him. Some still older hands probably regarded the pair of them as having the same sort of newness. He could see it happening when, as time passed, still newer colleagues, processors and analysts and form-fillers, arrived in batches.

      ‘I don’t think I did,’ Duncan said. ‘I was catching up with some ironing I should have done at the weekend. Terrible, really.’ He held the door open for her.

      ‘Oh, it was incredible,’ Marion said, coming in and removing her headscarf. Her hair stuck to her scalp. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It was a programme about nudists, all over the world. All of them, all on holiday, like that, like the day they were born. Hello, Frank.’

      On the stone steps just inside the unemployment office, Duncan made up his mind without intending to. The steps were just the same as they had been at his grammar school. They spoke institution. He was smiling and trying to show an interest in a forty-year-old woman watching a television documentary about nudists and saying hello politely to a man with a scruffy beard who commuted every day from St Albans. The man looked at him in return with painful disapproval, hardly greeting him. The man’s name he had always believed to be Fred and perhaps he really was called Fred, since Marion never listened to anything she was told. Duncan had been the subject of institutions before, and now, as he easily absorbed himself into the flow of the institution before the locked doors opened, he felt himself to be the easy agent of those institutions. And that would not do. It was as if he had become a schoolteacher, but without the power of doing good in the world. He would spend a glorious sunny day inside, looking at high windows through which the light fell, looking down at men who smelt, at women who had slept in their clothes, at people begging for money just to feed their kiddies because they were desperate and they didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. There would be students coming in soon, pretending to be interested in getting a job between their summer and their autumn terms. There would be people who had been sacked and people who could not work through injury not their fault. He would sit in the sad, echoing hall on the other side of his desk. He thought of all those people and he really did not give a shit about any of them.

      Going into his office he realized that there was no reason why he should not resign from his job and go to work in Sicily. Teaching English. It could hardly be any worse than here. And why Sicily? It was cheap, Duncan knew; it spoke Italian, which he had a smattering of. But mostly Duncan thought of Sicily because he had, the week before, picked up an off-duty Sicilian waiter in a gay pub on St Martin’s Lane, and the island, now, for him, was a land full of lemons, oranges and waiters called Salvatore. By half past ten he had told an overweight woman looking for employment in the legal field that she was wasting everyone’s time and should aim much, much lower. By eleven he had gone to see his supervisor, and had told him that he wanted to resign at the end of the month. By six thirty he was in the same gay pub on St Martin’s Lane – he had phoned up everyone he could think of on their office numbers – and he was telling a thrilled group of twenty men with moustaches, almost all with checked shirts on, just what he had done and where he was going to go.

      ‘You’ve got some nerve,’ Paul said, coming back from the bar with a half of lager and lime and a pint of bitter for Duncan. ‘I wish I had your nerve, even a bit of your nerve.’

      ‘If you only had a bit of his nerve,’ Simon said, ‘that’d only get you to the Isle of Wight, not much of a life-change, that, I don’t think.’

      ‘Cheek!’ Paul said.

      Even Andrew had come, though it was his night for his men’s group, and he never liked to miss that. Or was it revolutionary politics? ‘I’ll come to that some time,’ Paul said. ‘Sounds like a right laugh.’ Anyway, it was a fantastic turn-out, and they were still there at closing time, most of them. Why Sicily? Why not.

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