The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “Nick?” I said. “Lord, no! In fact…”

  In fact it was on that voyage home from Spain that we had our one and only serious conversation about politics. I can’t remember how it started. I suppose I had attempted a bit of proselytising; I had all the zeal of the convert in those early, heady days, and Nick never did care to be preached at.

  “Do shut up, for God’s sake,” he said, not quite managing to laugh. “I’m sick of listening to you and your historical dialectic and all the rest of that tommyrot.”

  We were leaning at the rail in the bows, contemplatively smoking, under the dome of the great soft calm marine night. The further north we sailed the warmer the weather was becoming, as if the climate like everything else in the world had been turned topsyturvy. A huge, bone-white moon hung above the prostrate sea, and the ship’s wake flashed and writhed like a great silver rope unravelling behind us. I was giddy and slightly feverish after my recent bout of seasickness.

  “There must be action,” I said, with the doggedness of the dogmatist. “We must act, or perish.”

  That is, I’m afraid, the way we talked.

  “Oh, action!” Nick said, and this time he did laugh. “Words, for you, are action. That’s all you do—jaw jaw jaw.”

  That stung; it amused Nick, when he was being the bruiser, to mock me for my sedentary ways.

  “We can’t all be soldiers,” I said huffily. “There is a need for theorists, too.”

  He flicked his cigarette end over the rail and gazed off at the glimmering horizon. A breeze lifted the hanging lock of hair at his forehead. What did I think it was I felt for him? How did I account for the hopeless, silent sob that welled up in my breast when I looked at him at moments such as this? I suppose school had accustomed us to crushes and all that—though how I could think this was only a crush, I don’t know.

  “If I were a Communist,” he said, “I shouldn’t bother with theory at all. I should think only of strategy: how to get things done. I’d use whatever means come to hand—lies, blackmail, murder and mayhem, whatever it takes. You’re all idealists pretending to be pragmatists. You think you care only for the cause while really the cause is only something to lose yourselves in, a way to cancel the ego. It’s half religion and half Romanticism. Marx is your St. Paul, and your Rousseau.”

  I was taken aback, and not a little bemused; I had never heard him talk like this before, with his intellect’s lip curled, so to speak. He turned to me, smiling, leaning sideways on an elbow on the rail.

  “It’s rather sweet,” he said, “the way you deceive yourselves, but a little contemptible, too, don’t you think?”

  “Some of us are ready to fight,” I said. “Some of us are already signing up to go to Spain.”

  His smile turned pitying.

  “Yes,” he said, “and here you are, sailing home from Spain.” I felt a flash of anger, and had a strong desire to give him a slap— a slap, or something like it. “The trouble with you, Vic,” he said, “is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.”

  Miss Vandeleur was saying something, and I came back with a jolt.

  “My dear, I’m sorry,” I said, “my attention strayed. I was thinking about the Beaver—Sir Nicholas. Sometimes I wonder if I knew him at all. Certainly I never spotted whatever it was in him—just will-power, I suppose—that would drive him to such giddy heights of power and influence later on.” Miss V. had gone into that state of suspended animation, her head lowered and features fallen slack in a faintly idiotic looking way, that I have come to recognise as her mode of deepest listening. She would not make a good interrogator, she shows her interest too plainly. I told myself to proceed with caution. “But then,” I said, slipping into my bland old-boy routine, “which of us ever really recognises the true nature of others?”

  She is very interested in Nick. I would not want to see him harmed. No, I would not want that, at all.

  Another ship, another trip, to Ireland, this time. It was just after Munich, and I was glad to get away from London, with its blimps and rumours, and fear pervasive and palpable as fog. While the world was collapsing, however, my personal fortunes were soaring. Yes, that year I was very full of myself, as Nanny Hargreaves would have said. I had a modest but rapidly growing international reputation as a connoisseur and scholar, I had moved up from the Spectator to the altogether more austere and rarefied pages of the Burlington and the Warburg Journal, and in the autumn I was to take up the Deputy Directorship of the Institute. Not bad for a man of thirty-one, and an Irish man, at that. Perhaps more impressive than any of these successes was the fact that I had spent the summer at Windsor, where I had embarked on the task of cataloguing the great and, until I took it in hand, chaotic collection of drawings that had been accumulating there since the days of Henry Tudor. It was hard labour, but I was sustained in it by an acute awareness of its value, not only to art history, but also to the furtherance of my own multiple interests (God, you can’t beat a spy for smugness!). I got on well with HM—he had been up at Trinity not many years before me. Despite his enthusiasm for boys’ clubs and tennis, he was, like his mother, a shrewd and jealous guardian of the royal possessions. Often in those last months before the war, while we all waited in a state of dreamy tension for hostilities to break out, he would come up to the print room and sit on a corner of my desk, swinging one leg, the fingers of his slender, somewhat fidgety hands laced together and resting on his thigh, and talk about the great collectors among his predecessors on the throne, all of whom he spoke of with amused, rueful familiarity, as if they were so many generous but faintly disreputable uncles, which you might say they were, I suppose. Though he was not very much older than me, he reminded me of my father, with his diffidence, and air of vague foreboding, and sudden fits of somewhat unnerving playfulness. Certainly, I preferred him greatly to his bloody wife, with her hats and her drinkies and her after-dinner games of charades, into which I was repeatedly dragooned, to my distress and intense embarrassment. Her name for me was Boots, the origin of which I never could discover. She was a cousin of my dead mother. Moscow, of course, was entranced by these connections. Great snobs, the Comrades.

  At the end of that summer I was in a state of profound nervous exhaustion. When, ten years previously, I had failed mathematics, or it had failed me, I had understood clearly what the consequences would be: an entire remaking of the self, with all the dedication and unremitting labour that such an exercise would entail. Now I had managed the transformation, but at great cost in physical and intellectual energy. Metamorphosis is a painful process. I imagine the exquisite agony of the caterpillar turning itself into a butterfly, pushing out eye-stalks, pounding its fat-cells into iridescent wing-dust, at last cracking the mother-of-pearl sheath and staggering upright on sticky, hair’s-breadth legs, drunken, gasping, dazed by the light. When Nick suggested a recuperative jaunt (“You’re looking even more cadaverous than usual, old chap”) I agreed with a suddenness that surprised even myself. It was Nick’s idea that we should go to Ireland. Did he mean, I wondered nervously, to get the goods on me, nose out my family secrets (I had not told him about Freddie), place me in my class? He was full of enthusiasm for the trip. We would go to Carrickdrum to rest up, as he said, then travel on out to the far west, where, I had told him, my father’s people came from. It seemed a wonderful notion. The thought of having Nick to myself for weeks on end was intoxicating, and stilled whatever qualms I might have had.

  I bought the tickets. Nick was broke. He had long ago drifted out of his editorial job at Brevoort & Klein and was existing on an allowance from a grudging and ceaselessly complaining Big Beaver, supplemented by numerous small loans from his friends. We took the Friday night steamer, and travelled down from Larne on a rackety train through the glaucous light of a late-September dawn. I sat and watched the landscape making its huge, slow rotation around us. Antrim that morning wore a particularly tight-lipped aspect. Nick was subdued, and sat huddled in
a corner of the unheated compartment with his overcoat pulled close around him, pretending to sleep. When the hills of Carrickdrum came into view a kind of panic seized me and I wanted to wrench open the carriage door and leap out and be swallowed in the engine’s steam and flying smoke. “Home,” Nick said in a sepulchral voice, startling me. “You must be cursing me for making you come.” He had an unnerving ability sometimes to guess what one was thinking. The train passed along a raised embankment from which the garden and, presently, the house were to be seen, but I did not point out the view to Nick. Doubt and foreboding had set in.

  My father had sent Andy Wilson with the pony-and-trap to meet us. Andy was the gardener and general handyman at St. Nicholas’s, a wiry little man, like a wood-sprite, with bowed arms and legs and a baby’s washed-blue eyes. He was ageless, and seemed not to have changed at all since I was an infant, when he used to terrify me by putting frogs into the pram with me. He was a ferocious and unregenerate Orangeman and played the Lambeg drum in the town’s Twelfth parade every year. He took to Nick straight away and formed a jeering alliance with him against me. “Thon’s the lad won’t lift a finger,” he said as he heaved our bags into the trap, nodding towards me and nudging Nick and winking. “Never would, aye, and never will.” He cackled, shaking his head, and took the reins and clicked his tongue at the pony, and Nick smiled at me lopsidedly, and with a wallowing, backward lurch we were off.

  We skirted the town, the little pony going along at a fastidious trot, and began the ascent of the West Road. A weak sun was struggling to shine. With a pang I caught the buttery smell of gorse. Presently the Lough came into view, a great flat flaky sheet of steel, and something in me quailed; I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths. Nick was asleep again, or pretending to be, with his feet on his bags. I thought how much I envied him his ability to escape the tedium of life’s interludes. Andy, wielding the reins, cast a fond glance back at him and softly exclaimed:

  “Och, the gentleman!”

  The trees surrounding the house looked darker than ever, more blue than green, pointing heavenward in urgent, mute admonishment. Freddie was the first to appear, lumbering diagonally across the lawn to meet us with his arms spread, grinning and gibbering. “Here’s the boss,” said Andy. “Will you look at him, the gawnie!” Nick opened his eyes. Freddie drew level, and putting a hand on the wing of the trap turned and trotted along beside us, moaning in excitement. He gave me one of his sliding glances and did not look at Nick at all. Strange, that one so severely afflicted should be prey to something so subtle as shyness. He was a big fellow, with big feet and big hands and a big head topped by a thatch of straw-coloured hair. To look at him in repose, if he could ever be said to be in repose, you would hardly have known his condition, if it were not for those helplessly flickering eyes, and the scabs around his fingernails and his mouth where he picked and chewed at himself ceaselessly. He was nearly thirty by now, but despite his bulk he still had the rumpled, shirt-tails-and-catapults air of an obstreperous twelve-year-old. Nick raised his eyebrows and nodded in Andy’s direction. “His son?” he murmured. In my agitation and shame all I did was shake my head and look away.

  When we drew up at the house my father popped out at once, as if he had been waiting behind the door, which probably he had. He was wearing his dog collar and bishop’s starched front and a moth-eaten pullover, and was clutching a handful of papers—I think I never saw my father at home without a sheaf of scribbled notes in his hand. He greeted us with his usual mixture of warmth and wariness. He looked smaller than I remembered, like a slightly out-of-scale model of himself. Recently he had suffered a second heart attack, and there was a sort of lightness about him, a wispy, tentative something, that I supposed must be the effect of the subdued but ever-present fear of sudden death. Freddie ran up and hugged him and laid his big head on his shoulder and looked back at us with a sly, proprietorial leer. I could tell by the alarmed way my father took in the Beaver that he had forgotten I had said I would be bringing a guest. We got down from the trap, and I tackled the introductions. Andy was making a racket with our bags, and the pony put its snout into the small of my back and tried to push me over, and Freddie, moved by the agitation and awkwardness of the moment, began to howl softly, and just when I thought everything would turn irretrievably into ruinous farce, Nick stepped forward briskly, like a doctor taking over at the scene of an accident, and shook my father’s hand with just the right proportions of deference and familiarity, murmuring something about the weather.

  “Yes, well,” my father said, vaguely smiling, and patting Freddie soothingly on the back. “You’re very welcome. Both of you, very welcome. Did you have a good crossing? Usually it’s calm this time of year. Do stop that, Freddie, there’s a good boy.”

  Then Hettie appeared. She also seemed to have been lurking in the hallway, waiting for her moment. If my father had shrunk over the years, Hettie had swelled to the dimensions of one of Rowlandson’s royal doxies. She was in her sixties but still retained the bloom of youth, a big pink person with teary eyes and dainty feet and an uncontrollable, wobbly smile.

  “Oh, Victor!” she cried, clasping her hands. “How thin you’ve grown!”

  Hettie came of a wealthy Quaker family and had spent her youth in a vast grey stone mansion on the south shore of the Lough doing good works and needlepoint. I think that she is the only human being I have ever encountered, apart from poor Freddie, of whom I can say with complete conviction that she had not a trace of wickedness in her (how can there be such people as these, in such a world as this?). If she had not been my stepmother and therefore more or less a part of the furniture, I surely would have found her an object of amazement and awe. When she arrived in our lives I had tried hard to resent and thwart her, but her jollity had been too much for me. She had won me over at once by getting rid of Nanny Hargreaves, a fearsome Presbyterian frump who since my mother’s death had ruled over my life with malevolent efficiency, dosing me weekly with castor oil and subjecting Freddie and me to sulphurous homilies on sin and damnation. Nanny Hargreaves would not have known how to play; Hettie, though, loved children’s games, the rowdier the better—perhaps her Quaker parents had disapproved of such godless frivolities when she was little, and she was making up for lost opportunities. She would get down on hands and knees and chase Freddie and me about the drawing-room floor, growling like a grizzly bear, her face bright red and her great bosom swinging. In the evenings before our bedtime she read us stories of the foreign missions, featuring brave, pure girls and stout-hearted men with beards, and the odd martyr, staked out in the desert to die or boiled in a pot by capering Hottentots.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, flustered, I could see, by Nick’s exotic good looks. “Mary will make you an Ulster fry.”

  My father disengaged himself from Freddie’s embrace and we all bustled into the hall, Andy Wilson coming behind us with the bags and swearing mildly under his breath. Andy’s son, Matty, had been what I suppose I may call my first, precocious love.

  Matty was my age: black curls, blue eyes, and hardy, like his father. Is there any figure in childhood more invitingly vulnerable, any presence more sinisterly suggestive, than the son of a servant? Matty had died, drowned while swimming in Colton Weir. I had not known what to do with my sorrow, it had sat in me for weeks like a great brooding bird. And then one day it just flew off”. Thus does one learn about the limits of love, the limits of grief.

  Nick was smiling at me reprovingly. “You didn’t tell me you had a brother,” he said.

  By now I had realised the full magnitude of the mistake I had made in bringing him here. The home returned to is a concatenation of sadnesses that makes one want to weep and at the same time sets the teeth on edge. How dingy the place looked. And that smell!—tired, brownish, intimate, awful. I was ashamed of everything, and ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I could hardly bear to look at my shabby father and his
fat wife, I flinched at Andy’s mutterings behind me and cringed at the thought of red-haired Mary, our Catholic cook, slapping a plate of rashers and black pudding down in front of Nick (did he eat pork?—Oh God, I had forgotten to ask). My greatest shame, however, was Freddie. When we were children I had not minded him, deeming it right, I suppose, that anyone born into the family after me should be defective. He had been someone for me to order about, a makeweight in the intricate games that I devised, an uncritical witness to my cautiously daring escapades. I used to perform experiments on him just to see how he would react. I gave him methylated spirits to drink—he gagged and retched—and put a dead lizard in his porridge. One day I pushed him into a bed of nettles and made him scream. I thought I would be punished, but my father only looked at me with deep, droop-eyed sadness, shaking his head, while Hettie sat down on the lawn like a squaw and rocked Freddie in her arms and pressed dock leaves to his livid arms and his swollen knock-knees. In adolescence, when I developed a passion for the Romantics, I conceived of him as a noble savage, and even wrote a sonnet about him, composed of Wordsworthian apostrophes (0! thou princely child of Nature, list!), and made him tramp the hills with me in all weathers, to his distress, for he was as much afraid of the outdoors as he had been as a child. Now, suddenly, I saw him through Nick’s eyes, a poor, shambling, damaged thing with my high forehead and prominent upper jaw, and I walked down the hall in a hot sweat of embarrassment and would not meet Nick’s amused, quizzical eye, and was relieved when Freddie sloped off to the garden to take up again whatever obscure doings he had been engaged in when we arrived.

  In the dining room, while Nick and I ate breakfast, Hettie and my father sat and watched us in a sort of hazy wonderment, as if we were a pair of immortals who had stopped off at their humble table on the way to some important piece of Olympian business elsewhere. Mary the cook kept bringing us more things to eat, fried bread and grilled kidneys and racks of toast, walking around the table with her apron lifted to protect her fingers from the heat of the plates, glancing at Nick—his hands, that hanging lock of hair—from under her almost invisible, pale eyelashes and blushing. My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.