The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “Say what you like about Chamberlain,” he said, “but he remembers the Great War, the cost of it.”

  I glared at a sausage, thinking what a hopeless booby my father was.

  “Peace in our time,” Hettie murmured, sighing.

  “Oh, but there will be war,” Nick said equably, “despite the appeasers. What is this, by the way?”

  “Fadge,” Mary blurted, and blushed the harder, making for the door.

  “Potato cake,” I said between clenched teeth. “Local delicacy.” Two days ago I had been chatting with the King.

  “Mm,” Nick said, “delicious.”

  My father sat blinking in distress. Light from the leaded window glinted on his balding pate. Trollope, I thought; he’s a character out of Trollope—one of the minor ones.

  “Is that what people feel in London,” he said, “that there will be war?”

  Nick pondered, head to one side, looking at his plate. I can see the moment: the thin October sunlight on the parquet, a curl of steam from the teapot’s spout, the somehow evil glitter of the marmalade in its cut-glass dish, and my father and Hettie waiting like frightened children to hear what London thought.

  “Of course there’ll be a war,” I said impatiently. “The old men have let it happen all over again.”

  My father nodded sadly.

  “Yes,” he said, “you must consider our generation has rather let you down.”

  “Oh, but we want peace!” Hettie exclaimed, as close to indignation as it was possible for her to get. “We don’t want young men to go out again and be killed for… for nothing.”

  I glanced at Nick. He was working away unconcernedly at his plate; he always did have a remarkable appetite.

  “The fight against Fascism is hardly what you could call nothing,” I said, and Hettie looked so abashed it seemed she might burst into tears.

  “Ah, you young people,” my father said softly, batting a hand at the air before him in a gesture which must have been a secular modification of the episcopal blessing, “you have such certainty.”

  At this Nick looked up with an expression of real interest.

  “Do you think so?” he said. “I feel we’re all rather… well, unfocused” Pensively he buttered a piece of cold toast, lathering on the butter like a painter applying cadmium yellow with a palette knife. “Seems to me that chaps of my age lack any sense of purpose or direction. In fact, I think we could do with a jolly good dose of military discipline.”

  “Shove ’em in the army, eh?” I said bitterly. Nick went on calmly buttering his toast and, preparing to take a bite, glanced at me sideways and said:

  “Why not? Those louts one sees standing on street corners complaining that they can’t get work—wouldn’t they be better off in uniform?”

  “They’d be better off in work!” I said. “Marx makes the point that-”

  “Oh, Marx!” Nick said through a crackling mouthful of toast, and chuckled.

  I felt my forehead turning red.

  “You should try reading Marx,” I said. “Then you might know what you’re talking about.”

  Nick only laughed again.

  “You mean, then I might know what you are talking about.”

  An uneasy silence fell and Hettie looked at me apprehensively but I avoided her eye. My father, troubled, cleared his throat and with anxious fingers traced an invisible pattern on the tablecloth.

  “Marxism, now,” he began, but I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.

  “Nick and I are thinking of going to the west,” I said loudly. “He wants to see Mayo.”

  Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion. In my time I have, knowingly or otherwise, sent men and women to terrible deaths, yet I do not feel as sharp a pang when I think of them as I do when I recall the gleam of light on my father’s bowed pate at the table just then, or Hettie’s big sad soft eyes looking at me in silent beseeching, without anger or resentment, asking me to be kind to an ageing, anxious man, to be tolerant of the littleness of their lives; asking me to have a heart.

  After breakfast I had to get out of the house, and made Nick walk with me down to the harbour. The day had turned blustery, and the shadows of clouds scudded over the white-flecked sea. The Norman castle on the shore looked particularly dour today, in the pale, autumn light; as a child I had believed it was made of wet sea-sand.

  “Good people,” Nick said. “Your father is a fighter.”

  I stared at him.

  “You think so? Just another bourgeois liberal, I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.”

  Nick laughed.

  “Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?”

  “Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.”

  “There you are: a fighter.”

  We strolled along the front. Despite the lateness of the season there were bathers down at the water, their cries came to us, tiny and clear, skimming the ribbed sand. Something in me always responds, shamefacedly, to the pastel gaieties of the seaside. I saw, with unnerving clarity, another version of myself, a little boy playing here with Freddie (Wittgenstein accosted me one day by the Cam and clutched me by the wrist and stuck his face close to mine and hissed: “Is the dotard the same being that he was when he was an infant?”), making castles and trying surreptitiously to get him to eat sand, while Hettie sat placidly in the middle of a vast checked blanket doing her knitting, sighing contentedly and talking to herself in a murmur, her big, mottled legs stuck out before her like a pair of windlasses and her yellow toes twitching (a parishioner once complained to my father that his wife was down on the strand “with her pegs on show for all the town to see”).

  Nick halted suddenly and gazed about him histrionically at sea and beach and sky, his overcoat billowing in the breeze like a cloak.

  “God,” he muttered, “how I loathe nature!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “perhaps we shouldn’t have come.”

  He looked at me and put on a glum grin, pulling down his mouth at the sides. “You mustn’t take everything personally, you know,” he said. We walked on and he patted his stomach. “What was that stuff called? Fudge?”

  “Fadge.”

  “Amazing.”

  I had watched him throughout breakfast, while my father talked platitudes and Hettie stoutly nodded her support. One smile from him at their quaintness, I had told myself, and I shall hate him for life. But he was impeccable. Even when Freddie came and pressed his nose and his scabbed lips against the dining room window, smearing the glass with snot and spittle, Nick only chuckled, as at the endearing antics of a toddler, I was the one who had sat with lip curled in contemptuous impatience. Now he said:

  “Young people, your father called us. I don’t feel young, do you? The Ancient of Days, rather. It’s we who are the old men now. I shall be thirty next month. Thirty!”

  “I know,” I said. “On the twenty-fifth.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “How did you remember?”

  “I have a head for dates. And that’s a momentous one, after all.”

  “What? Oh, yes, I see. Your glorious Revolution. Didn’t it in fact take place in November?”

  “Yes. Their November, Old Style. The Julian calendar.”

  “Ah, the Julian calendar, yes. What-ho for jolly old Julian.”

  I winced; he never sounded more Jewish than when he came out with these Woosterisms.

  “Anyway,” I said, “the symbol is all. As Querell likes to remark, the Catholic Church is founded on a pun. Tu es Petrus?

  “Eh? Oh, I see. That’s good; that’s very good.”

  “Pinched it from someone else, though.”

  We walked into the shadow of the castle wall and Nick’s mood darkened with the air.

  “What will you do in this war, Vict
or?” he asked, his voice going gruff and Sydney Cartonish. He stopped and leaned against the harbour rail. The sea wind was chill, and sharp with salt. Far out to sea a flock of gulls was wheeling above a patch of brightness on the water, wheeling and clumsily diving, like blown sheets of newsprint. I fancied I could hear their harsh, hungry cries.

  “You really think there will be a war?” I said.

  “Yes. No question but.” He walked on and I followed a pace behind him. “Three months, six months—a year at the most. The factories have been given the word, though the War Office hasn’t told Chamberlain about it. You know he and Daladier worked together in secret for months to strike a deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland? And now Hitler can do whatever he pleases. Have you heard what he said about Chamberlain? I feel sorry for him, let him have his piece of paper.”

  I was staring at him.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, laughing in surprise. “Chamberlain, the factories, all that stuff?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’ve been talking to some people,” he said. “You might like to meet them. They’re our sort.”

  My sort, I thought, or yours? I let it pass.

  “You mean, people in the government?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Something like that,” he said. We turned from the harbour and set off back up the hill road. While he had talked, a sort of slow, burning blush had come over me from breast to brow. It was as if we were a pair of schoolboys and Nick thought he had discovered the secrets of sex but had got the details all wrong. “Everything’s gone rotten, don’t you think?” he said. “Spain finished the whole thing for me. Spain, and now this beastly Munich business. Peace in our time—ha!” He stopped and turned to me with an earnest frown, brushing the lock of hair back from his forehead. Eyes very black in the pale light of morning, lip trembling with emotion as he struggled to maintain a manful mien. I had to look away to hide my grin. “Something has to be done, Victor. It’s up to us.”

  “Our sort, you mean?”

  It was said before I knew it. I was terrified of offending him— I had a vision of him sitting grim-faced in the trap, with eyes averted, demanding to be taken back to the station at once, while my father and Hettie, and Andy Wilson, and even the pony, looked at me accusingly. I need not have worried; Nick was not one to spot an irony; egotists never are, I find. We turned to the hill again. He walked with his hands jammed in his overcoat pockets and eyes on the road, his jaw set, a muscle in it working.

  “I’ve felt so useless up to now,” he said, “playing the exquisite and guzzling champagne. You’ve at least done something with your life.”

  “I hardly think a catalogue of the drawings in the Windsor Castle collection will stop Herr Hitler in his tracks.”

  He nodded; he was not listening.

  “The thing is to get involved,” he said; “to act.”

  “Is this the new Nick Brevoort?” I said, in as light a tone as I could manage. Embarrassment was giving way in me now to a not quite explicable and certainly unjustified annoyance—after all, everyone that autumn was talking like this. “I seem to remember having this conversation with you some years ago, but in reverse. Then I was the one playing at being the man of action.”

  He smiled to himself, biting his lip; my annoyance shot up a couple of hot degrees.

  “You think I’m playing?” he said, with just the hint of a contemptuous drawl. I did not let myself reply. We went on for a while in silence. The sun had retreated into a milky haze. “By the way,” he said, “I have a job, did you know? Leo Rothenstein has hired me as an adviser.”

  I thought this must be one of Leo’s practical jokes.

  “An adviser? What kind of an adviser?”

  “Well, politics, mostly. And finance.”

  “Finance? What on earth do you know about finance?”

  He did not reply for a moment. A rabbit came out of the hedge and sat up on its hind legs at the side of the road and looked at us in amazement.

  “His family is worried about Hitler. They have money in Germany, and a lot of relations there. He asked me to look in on them. He knew I was going over, you see.”

  “Are you? To Germany?”

  “Yes—didn’t I say? Sorry. The people I’ve been talking to have asked me to go.”

  “And do what?”

  “Just… look around. Get the feel of things. Report back.”

  I let out a loud laugh.

  “Good God, Beaver,” I cried, “you’re going to be a spy!”

  “Yes,” he said, with a rueful smirk, proud as a boy scout. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  I did not know why I should have been surprised: after all, I had been in the secret ranks myself for years, though on the other side from him, and his sort. What would have happened, I ask myself, if I had said to him then, Nick, my love, I’m working for Moscow, what do you think of that? Instead I stopped and turned and looked back down the hill to the harbour and the roughening sea.

  “I wonder what those gulls were after,” I said.

  Nick turned too and vaguely peered.

  “What gulls?” he said.

  4

  We did not go to Mayo. I cannot remember what excuse I made to my father and Hettie, or if I even bothered to offer one. We were both anxious to get back to London, Nick to his spying and I to mine. Father was hurt. The west for him was the land of youth, not only the scene of his childhood holidays— his grandfather had kept a farm on a rocky islet in Clew Bay— but the place where his people had originated, mysterious autochthons stepping out of the mists of the western seaboard, the mighty O Measceoils, warriors, pirates, fierce clansmen all, who just in time to avoid the ravages of the Famine had changed their religion and Anglicised the family name and turned themselves into Yeats’s hard-riding country gentlemen. I had no wish to introduce Nick to these legends, and much less to walk with him through the sites where had stood the stone cottages of my forebears and the base beds from which they had sprung. In these matters he and I observed a decorous silence: he did not speak of his Jewishness nor I of my Catholic blood. We were both, in our own ways, self-made men. Three days at Carrick-drum was enough for us; we packed up our books and our unworn hiking boots and took ship for what I realised now was home. Leaving Ireland and my father’s house, I had the sense of having committed a small but particularly brutish crime. Throughout the journey I could feel my father’s wounded, forgiving gaze fixed like a spot of heat on the already burning back of my neck.

  London that autumn had an abstracted, provisional air; the atmosphere was hectic and hollow, like that of the last day of school term, or the closing half-hour of a drunken party. People would drift off into silence in the middle of a sentence and look up at the tawny sunlight in the windows and sigh. The streets were like stage-sets, scaled down, two-dimensional, their bustle and busyness tinged with the pathos of something set in motion only so that it might be violently halted. The squawks of the news-vendors had an infernal ring—cockney chirpiness has always grated on my nerves. At evening the sunset glare in the sky above the roofs seemed the afterglow of a vast conflagration. It was all so banal, these hackneyed signs and wonders. Fear was banal.

  For some, the times were grimly congenial. Querell, for instance, was in his element. I remember meeting him in the Strand one drizzly afternoon late in that November. We went to a Lyons Corner House and drank tea that was the same colour as the rain falling on the pavement outside the steamy window where we sat. Querell looked even more the spiv than usual, in his narrow suit and brown trilby. Within minutes, it seemed, he had filled to overflowing the tin ashtray on the table between us. I was well established at the Department by then, but I rarely saw him there—he was on the Balkans desk, I was in Languages— and when we chanced upon each other in the outside world like this we felt embarrassed and constrained, like two clergymen meeting the morning after an accidental encounter in a brothel. At least, I felt embarrassment, I felt constraint; I do n
ot think Querell would ever allow himself to succumb to sensations so weak-kneed and obvious. I could not take seriously the self-deluding, school-brigade, boys-with-men’s-moustaches world of military intelligence; the atmosphere of mingled jollity and earnestness in which the Department went about its work was amusing at first, then obscurely shaming, then merely tedious. Such asses one had to deal with! Querell was different, though; I suspected he despised the place as much as I did. It had taken me a long time, and much vigorous yanking on the lattices of the old-boy network, to get in; in the end Leo Rothenstein managed it for me. He was—and had been for years, I was surprised to discover—something very high up in the Middle East section.

  “It’s in the blood,” Querell said, with a pursed smile. “His family has been running spies for centuries. They got early news of Waterloo and made their fortune out of it on the Stock Exchange, did you know that? Crafty; very crafty.” Querell did not care for Jews. He was watching me out of those unblinking, protuberant pale eyes of his, two lazy streams of cigarette smoke flaring out of his nostrils. I busied myself eating a sticky bun. His mention of spies had startled me; it was not a word Department people used, even amongst ourselves. Sometimes it crossed my mind that he too, like me, might be more than he was admitting—he had just published a thriller called The Double Agent. The idea of having Querell as a secret sharer was not appealing. When I looked up from my bun he shifted his gaze to the legs of a passing waitress. I had never succeeded in pinning down his politics. He would talk of the Cliveden crowd or Mosley and his thugs with a sort of wistful admiration, then in the next breath he would be the worker’s champion. In my innocence I thought it was his Catholicism that afforded him this breadth of casuistry. At Maules one weekend when the Moscow show trials were going on he overheard me castigating Stalin. “Thing is, Maskell,” he said, “a bad pope doesn’t make a bad church.” Leo Rothenstein, draped on a sofa, his long legs crossed before him, shifted himself and laughed lazily. “My God,” he said, “a Bolshie in the house! My poor papa would turn in his grave.”