The Emperor Waltz (63 page)

‘But I don’t understand,’ Alan said. ‘Why Richmond?’

Simon said it had been either that or Catterick, apparently.

‘Simon,’ Nat said, ‘Catterick is Richmond. The name of the camp is Catterick. The name of the town is Richmond. He did move to Catterick. Honestly.’

But Alan still didn’t understand, and Nat had to explain that, at the end, Freddie Sempill had wanted to move to a town with a constant supply of squaddies. Catterick – the name of the army camp, as Nat explained – was the biggest camp in Britain. He had gone there on his own, and was being buried there this morning.

‘Do you suppose there’s going to be a salute of honour?’ Duncan said, from the driving seat. ‘From the squaddies he helped out with the odd twenty quid?’

They discussed it, and Freddie Sempill’s appearance towards the end. It seemed unlikely that Freddie Sempill had been able, in his last years, to persuade anyone to do anything, with twenty pounds or ten times twenty. Yorkshire was quite a distance away. They began to talk about the funerals they had been to. There had been Andrew’s, last year. But that didn’t count; that had been suicide. The others?

‘I loved Matthew’s best,’ Nat said simply. They agreed, Matthew’s had been wonderful. Alan hadn’t known Matthew – he had been a colleague of Nat’s, when Nat still had a job, and had always been Nat’s friend. Matthew had never been rich, but he had left two thousand pounds in his will to furnish the church with white flowers. It had made people cry, going into that little church in Putney on a grey March day, and finding it so blanched and fresh, and the smell so beautiful, too. You felt transformed, and then the vicar standing up in his white cassock, surrounded by lilies and white roses and branches of blossom, and his look of happiness to see his church like that. A look he composed before the service began, but there had been an air of happiness, improbably, over the whole ceremony. ‘That was the first funeral I ever went to,’ Nat said, ‘with a woven willow casket instead of a coffin. That was so nice. You could imagine Matthew lying in it and not minding a bit.’ And then there was Paul’s. Everyone remembered Paul’s – it had been a disco funeral with some bits of opera, and plumed black horses standing outside.

‘What was it Paul used to say?’ Nat said. ‘When I go to bed with a man –’

‘When I go to bed with a man,’ Duncan said, concentrating on the road, ‘I expect him to maintain …’

He had started telling it as a funny remark, but he hadn’t said it for years, and in a moment he had to say to the car, ‘I’m sorry. I’d forgotten. I hadn’t thought about Paul or about that for a while. I’ll be all right in a moment.’

‘He was so special,’ Alan said.

But then there was that other one, where the gay vicar had got over-excited, and had taken a red rose from the bouquet at the end of his sermon, and had gone over to the grieving widow, handed it over and said, with a special deep, husky voice, ‘For you.’ Who had that been? No, they couldn’t remember, but they all remembered the gay vicar. Hadn’t he said, ‘For you, Brian?’ But who was Brian? ‘I know I bought his boyfriend’s books from him afterwards,’ Duncan said, only a little tremulously. ‘He wasn’t a reader, Brian, or so he said. I think he lived in Barons Court. I could only give him sixty pounds, I remember.’ There had been Kevin’s funeral – that was another one with Verdi. Duncan explained to Alan that Kevin was the owner of the awful house Arthur used to live in. That had been two years ago. Never got over the shock of Mrs Thatcher being chucked out like that. Arthur was quite thrown – he had no idea where he was going to live when the house was sold out of the blue like that. Poor old Arthur, having to move in with his friends Tony and Tim for six months till they had had enough and told him to leave. No wonder they had all been crying at Kevin’s funeral.

‘They weren’t really,’ Nat said.

‘I can’t think what they’re going to say about Freddie Sempill,’ Simon said. ‘He was so awful. I remember, years ago, he told me that he would phone up rent boys and get them to come round, and then he would say, in his pretend-Cockney voice, I’m sorry, mate – I ain’t got no money. And then he said the rent boy would often have sex with you anyway. But sometimes he would hit you. But I quite enjoy that sometimes, too, Freddie Sempill used to say. I don’t know why we’re going to his funeral. I can’t think of anything nice to say about him at all.’

And then there was that other funeral – Alan remembered a funeral where the boyfriend had broken his hip falling downstairs drunk and the mother was recovering from a stroke, and someone else, he couldn’t remember, anyway, they were all in wheelchairs and pretending not to notice or to speak to each other because the family and the boyfriend didn’t acknowledge each other. All wheeling around each other and pretending not to see. Nat had known one boy in a situation quite like that, a charming boy who had gone out with Patrick Dee, the old television presenter and closet case; had lived with him for years. And when Patrick Dee had died, the family had hired thugs and, during the funeral itself, this would have been, they went into the house they’d shared for years and took all of the boyfriend’s possessions out and put them into black bin bags and left them outside on the pavement and changed the locks and everything. And then there had been that one two years ago—

‘Has anyone got a phone in the other car?’ Alan said.

‘Ronnie has,’ Nat said. ‘Why? Do you want to speak to them?’

‘I just want to pause for a moment,’ Alan said. ‘If there’s a service station coming up. I’m awfully sorry, Duncan – just for a five-minute break.’

‘It’s fourteen miles,’ Duncan said. ‘Can you endure?’

20.

It was just after twelve as Richmond appeared. None of them had been there before. A square tower rose out of the mild stone town, set in green; the trees were dense with colour. They had rolled the windows down after leaving the motorway, and the scent of the country poured in in waves and gusts. Duncan turned down the music they had been playing, an old tape of
Dusty in Memphis
; they had stopped talking so exuberantly. Nat was reading out the directions from a piece of paper. The others sat quietly in the back of the car.

‘It says third left,’ Nat said. ‘But it means – I tell you what, take this one. How could Freddie Sempill come here to live?’

Duncan turned left, and at the bottom of the hill there was the church. They were just in time, about ten minutes before the start, and the hearse was outside the church – an anonymous black Co-op car with a coffin inside it, and a single sour wreath of white flowers. They were on time, surely, but there was nobody much outside. Almost every funeral they could remember had been full, and the crowd outside before, like a busy, weeping wedding. It was the advantage of dying young: your friends outlived you, and came to your wedding. The other car had arrived before them, and Duncan parked his in the church car park. There was plenty of space.

‘Has everyone gone in already?’ Alan said. But they went in, and there was hardly anyone there. There was no leaflet on vellumed paper with a portrait of Freddie Sempill on the cover; only a sullen photocopied piece of paper with the words of a couple of hymns and ‘TREVOR SEMPILL, 1943–1994’ at the head of it.

‘That’s what he was called,’ Nat murmured, as Duncan gave a small turn sideways. ‘What he was christened, I mean. I would have thought – have we come to the right occasion? But he renamed himself when he came to London, Freddie with an
ie
on the end. Very
Brideshead Revisited
.’ In the front row, there were two small elderly heads, both female; a mother and an aunt. Three rows behind, and again at the other side of the church, there were two men; one an older, shaved-head, fat man; the other conceivably one of Freddie’s squaddies, with sharp-cut hair. And then towards the back, in two clumps, were the rest of them, travelled up from London. Dommie turned and, with Celia, gave Duncan a huge smile and a wave. She was wearing a curious black construction on her head, a substanceless design of stick and feather and ribbon patched onto a black saucer; Celia was wearing a black party shift with a white collar. They sat down. One of the two old ladies at the front turned round too, and inspected them with some vigour. Could she be Freddie Sempill’s mother? She turned back and, with a few muttered words, made her companion turn round, too; and that, clearly, was Freddie Sempill’s mother. She had the same disapproving pinhead air. They looked old, tired, bored; they did not inspect the other mourners in grief, but ready to express contempt. The younger of the two solitary men looked round too; he was pale and smooth, a once-a-week shaver, and he seemed to catch Duncan’s eye before turning back again.

There had been a wreath over the coffin in the hearse, and there were two floral arrangements on either side of the altar. But they were generic arrangements, done by the church; there was nothing chosen or characteristic about them, and most of it was made up with carnations and greenery. The vicar came to the front and asked them to stand, and the organist started to play, too slowly, ‘Sheep Will Safely Graze’. The coffin was borne in on the shoulders of the undertaker’s men. Should they have volunteered to carry it? It was too late now. The coffin was set down and, slowly, to the vicar’s half-smile, the organ performance came to a sticky end. The vicar, a porker with pink cheeks and a snub nose, welcomed them to this celebration of Trevor’s life.

They sang a hymn, the sound of less than a dozen voices difficult to pull together into a congregation. It was a familiar choice, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. The heart moved painfully, reflecting the lack of engagement in the choice. Who had made it? Did Freddie Sempill have a favourite hymn? ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ – that was the navy hymn, wasn’t it? It would remind him of all those queens who had pretended to be in the navy for Freddie Sempill’s benefit. This one had been chosen by someone who had remembered that Trevor as a little boy had liked it, as all children are supposed to like ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Or perhaps the vicar had suggested it, saying that everyone knew it.

The hymn came to its grisly conclusion. The vicar began to speak. He had a fluting, unctuous voice, as of a much older person, and gestured with both hands simultaneously, waving up and down, like a teacher quelling a noisy class.

‘Although I never knew Trevor,’ he began, ‘or Freddie, as he liked to be called as an adult, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Vera, Trevor’s mother, about him in his early years, and to Sean and Keith, his two friends up here in Richmond where he spent his last years. We should probably remember Trevor in his best years. His last years were spent in suffering. The rare Chinese bone infection he picked up while travelling in the 1970s was something he bore bravely, with the support of Sean and Keith to help out in the house. But before his last years, we should think of him as he wanted to be remembered, as a jolly chap, you might say.

‘Trevor Sempill was born in 1943, in London’s East End. Before he was five, he and his mother and father, Vera and Martin, moved to Shoeburyness in Essex.’

The whole service was over in twenty-five minutes. Duncan cast a look over the aisle at Dommie as it came to an end with another singing of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. The organist had played ‘Nimrod’ from the
Enigma Variations
in between. There hadn’t been a poem; that would have defeated old mother Sempill. Dommie cast a warning look back, and Duncan gave a consoling pat on the thigh to Nat. Vera, supported by her friend, came tottering up the aisle, followed at a safe distance by the two friends, going separately. The fat, bald one seemed a little upset. Vera was an upright, grey-faced woman of some height, her hair roughly brought into some sort of shape, her pinheaded face without makeup, her eyebrows left untrimmed, like a Soviet dictator’s. Her friend, less bony but not much shorter, had made a little more of an effort, and an ugly orange slash of lipstick and two raw diagonals of blusher crossed her face. Vera stared straight ahead as she walked; the friend, walking by her but not supporting her, gave a direct look at Duncan’s group – an accusing, cold, assessing look straight from the North Sea into the cold heart of Shoeburyness. Duncan looked back levelly. There was somebody, at any rate, who knew where Freddie Sempill had been when he said he’d been to China and picked up a rare bone disease there. Vera’s friend knew where Freddie Sempill had been. He’d been to Earls Court.

‘Come on,’ Nat said. ‘Let’s go and introduce ourselves. Rare Chinese bone disease. Honestly.’

‘I didn’t know he was going to be such a silly old thing as all that,’ Alan said, getting a helping hand from Dommie’s daughter Celia. ‘It’s one of the best things in my life that I told Mother all about it – well, not all about it, but enough that she said she didn’t really need to know the details. She wouldn’t have said she loved me anyway. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to say such a thing.’

‘Alan,’ Celia said. ‘When you die, can I sing a solo?’

‘Of course you can, my darling,’ Alan said. ‘Can I choose what it’s going to be?’

‘Well, you’re not going to be there,’ Celia said. ‘But I’m going to be there, so why shouldn’t I choose it?’

‘Don’t be pert, darling,’ Dommie said, coming up behind and putting sunglasses on. ‘Alan knows lots of people who can sing whatever he wants to have sung. And I might point out that it’s not going to be very soon, so your voice might very well have gone beyond its childish promise by then.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Alan said. ‘I never really mind what people sing. I don’t really know about music. That hymn was nice, though, like the hymns you sing at school. Not like the difficult ones that some queens like to choose for their funerals, knowing that no one knows the tunes and you’ll all be going Hurdy-hur-di-hur, gloria, gloria, hallelujah, not really knowing any of you what you’re doing. No, I knew that tune, it was nice to have a good old sing-song.’

‘Put on your sad face, dear,’ Clive said to Simon. ‘And stand by me. Stephen’s ever so good at this sort of thing – it’s being a barrister and having to speak in court all the time, he’s never nervous. But I know the mother’s going to make a beeline for me. I’ve only come for the day out. You’ve got to stand by me and do all the work.’