The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher
that is kind of you,’ Vivienne Osborne was saying. ‘Just a very weak one. I’ve been so looking forward to this, I can’t tell you – I’ve had such a week at work.’
‘I do like your blouse,’ Shabnam Khan said.
‘It’s new, actually,’ Vivienne said. ‘I bought it only yesterday in Marks & Spencer – I shouldn’t say, but we all do, don’t we? It’s such good quality, and much better than it used to be, I mean from the point of view of fashion. You really wouldn’t know sometimes that it wasn’t from some Italian designer in Bond Street.’
‘What do you do, Vivienne?’ Charles Carraway said.
‘Me? I teach economics at one of the London colleges – you won’t have heard of it, I won’t even embarrass you by asking you.’
‘Try me,’ Charles Carraway said drily.
‘Oh, I shall, I shall,’ Vivienne said, with a lowering of her head, a glance upwards with her eyes that dated her to the early 1980s. She had seemed, initially, confused and unprepared as she had come in, handing coat and umbrella and glimpsed son over to Shabnam as if she had thought that Shabnam might be the housekeeper named Bina. Now she appeared to have resources of flirtatiousness, directed for the moment at Charles Carraway. ‘It’s called London Cosmopolitan University – people say it sounds like a cocktail. So you haven’t heard of it and now we can move on.’
‘I think I do know the name,’ Charles said. ‘Is it in Bethnal Green?’
‘Close,’ Vivienne said. ‘Oh, thank you so much, a lovely weak gin and tonic. Perfect. No, we’re in Fulham, actually. But I’m thrilled that you’ve heard of it. Thank you so much –’ she gestured with her drink, which spilt a little ‘– for asking me. I’ve just recently been going through the dreaded breakdown-and-separation-and-divorce from my husband,’ she explained, turning to Caroline Carraway and making quotation marks in the air, ‘though, Heaven knows, there wasn’t much to dread about that, it was really quite a relief in the end. We had a long period of not getting on, then of him moving into the spare bedroom, then of spending time avoiding each other in the house, I think he ate at the Chiswick Pizza Express every night for a month, and then his girlfriend, who I wasn’t supposed to know about, moved to a slightly larger place and he decided to move out. It was really not just a relief but a real pleasure for Basil and I when my husband moved out. That would have been two years ago. But nobody asks a divorced woman with a great lump of a son out for dinner. This is so kind of you – I mean to make the most of it. And you must come round to mine for dinner too! Very soon. Single women can entertain and make a success of it, I mean to show you. You have a son, don’t you, Caroline?’
‘They’re upstairs,’ Caroline said. ‘Actually, there are two. They’re twins. Do you like it, there, at the Cosmopolitan University?’
She had tried, apparently, to say the name of the university without altering her tone; she had almost succeeded.
‘It is a silly name, I know,’ Vivienne said. ‘But they decided when they turned into a university to appeal to Asian students, students from Asia I mean, which was very forward-thinking of them, and now we’re all quite used to the name and hardly notice how silly it is any more. Well, it would be nicer if my ex-husband, soon-to-be-ex husband, no, really ex-husband now, of course, didn’t also work there, so I see him all the time and occasionally have to deal with him. He’s the registrar. So I’m looking for another job, somewhere else.’
‘It shouldn’t be hard,’ Michael Khan said. ‘Economists must be so in demand everywhere, these days, with things in the shape they’re in.’
‘Oh, thank you, thank you, but I’m not really that sort of economist,’ Vivienne said. ‘But it’s nice of you to say so. The thing is, after my husband left, it was really an immense relief. For Basil, too – Basil’s my son, Shabnam – Shabnam? It is Shabnam, isn’t it? You get good at names in my trade. Now, you know, this is an awfully unfashionable thing to say, but I really am enjoying being single, for the first time in years, decades, since I was fifteen perhaps, maybe ever! Anyway. Basil, too. Well, that is kind of you – I will have another drink, a very weak one, though, please, Michael.’
‘And an olive?’ Caroline said, passing over a ceramic bowl. She herself would not touch olives, death to the digestion, straight to the hips.
‘Thank you,’ Vivienne said, hovering and then judiciously taking one, as if she were judging produce in the market. ‘The truth of the matter is that
‘Give it me in my Coke,’ Nathan said. ‘I don’t like that OJ, I drink Coke, me.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Anita took her half-full bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and poured an inch into a glass. ‘Vodka and Coke, that’s a terrible drink, that’s a really like thirteen-year-old’s drink when you’ll drink anything? Oh, I forgot, you are thirteen. And you, Nathan, what do you want?’
‘I’m Nick,’ Nick said. ‘That’s Nathan. Can’t you tell us apart?’
‘No, I can’t remember,’ Anita said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m going to have some vodka with OJ,’ Nick said. ‘That’s how you drink vodka, fool.’
‘I’m drinking vodka how I like it,’ Nathan said. ‘Fool.’
‘And you, Basil?’ Anita said. ‘Do you want to try some?’
‘It’s not horrible, is it?’ Basil said. ‘But just a little bit, so I know what the taste of it is like. I don’t want to become addicted or an alcoholic. But just a little bit and mostly orange juice. It won’t taste horrible, will it, Anita? Promise?’
‘Promise,’ Anita said. She poured an inch or so into Basil’s glass; she dropped ice cubes into his drink; she took a slice of lemon from a plate where it had been sliced into half moons; she filled the glass with orange juice from the cardboard carton. She handed it to him, and Basil drank immediately from it, as if getting the drinking of poison over with.
‘Steady, mate,’ Nick said.
‘Mummy always said that I ought to be given the taste of alcohol when I was younger, like Granny giving me a glass of champagne to make sure what it tasted like, because she said if I did – if I did I would get used to it and never have a problem with it. But Mummy said that Granny had done the same with Daddy. My daddy does drink a bit too much, I think, and when he’s been drinking, he has a tendency to light a cigarette or two, and that I just don’t understand one bit. You know what? I really quite like this. You can’t taste the vodka, though I don’t know what vodka tastes like, it just makes the orange juice taste really orangey. I could drink this all night. Does it do the same for your Coke, Nathan?’
‘I’m Nathan, fool,’ Nathan said.
‘Yes, I know,’ Basil said, puzzled. ‘That’s what I called you.’
Nick brought his knees almost to his chest with laughing. ‘Ah, he got you, man,’ he said, punching himself on the breastbone. ‘He got you. He said does it do the same for your Coke, Nathan, and you said I’m Nathan, fool, though he’d said Nathan, and you weren’t listening, man, you just know everyone’s going to call you Nick when they mean Nathan, you don’t own your name, man, this wallad, he owned you, wallad.’
‘The fuck up,’ Nathan said. ‘Ain’t amusing, wallad.’
‘That was pretty funny,’ Anita said. ‘He was so like cross, too? Do it again, do something funny, Basil.’
‘Well, I can do this,’ Basil said, and he pulled a face, his long lower lip out and his hands to his ears. But they looked at him and did not laugh. ‘Most people think that’s awfully funny, it’s my best face. I can’t be funny to order. I didn’t know I was being funny when I called him Nathan, because