The Emperor Waltz by Philip Hensher Page A

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