The Untouchable

by John Banville

  Sex turned out to be easier than I had expected, or feared. I was pleased to encounter a version of Baby—warm, yielding, languorous, even—very different from the alarmingly hard-edged one I had married, while she was amused, and touched, to discover that she had married a thirty-one-year-old virgin. I had some difficulty getting going, and she laughed, and pushed back her hair, and said, “Poor darling, let me help you, I’m a sucker for this sort of thing.” On our last night we made a solemn, if tipsy, vow that we would not have children. And by Christmas she was pregnant.

  TWO

  5

  Dear Miss Vandeleur. I have been neglecting you, I know. More, I have been avoiding you: I was here this morning when you called, but did not answer the bell. I knew it was you because I had seen you from the window, crossing the square, in the rain (what is it young women have against the employment of umbrellas?). I felt like an elderly spinster (but then, when do I not feel like an elderly spinster?), peeping out from behind lace curtains at a world of which she is growing increasingly afraid. I have not been well. Heartsick, is the word. Too much brooding, here, under the lamp, just me and the scratching of my pen, and the distracting noise of the birds in the trees outside, where spring has come to a frantic head and toppled over into full-throated Keatsian summer. Such rude good weather strikes me as heartless; I have always been prone to the pathetic fallacy. I took things too quickly, I think; I should have allowed myself time to recuperate after that public exposure and the resulting humiliation. It is like having had an operation, or what it must be like to have been shot; you come round and you think, Well, this is not so bad, I’m still here, and there is hardly any pain—why are all these people about me behaving in such an exaggerated way? And you feel almost euphoric. It is because the system has not absorbed the shock, or because the shock is acting as an anaesthetic. But this little interval of exhilaration ends, the excited attendants rush off to the scene of some new emergency, and then comes night and darkness and the dawning astonishment of pain.

  I was genuinely surprised when they stripped me of the knighthood, and Cambridge revoked the honorary doctorate, and the Institute delicately indicated that my continued presence there, even for the purposes of research, would not be welcomed. (I have heard nothing from the Palace; Mrs. W. does hate a scandal.) What have I done, to be so reviled, in a nation of traitors, who daily betray friends, wives, children, tax inspectors? I am being disingenuous, I know. I think what they find so shocking is that someone—one of their own, that is—should actually have held to an ideal. And I did hold to it, even in the face of my own innate, all-corroding scepticism. I did not deceive myself as to the nature of the choice I had made. I was not like Boy, with his puerile conviction of the perfectibility of man, and not like Querell, either, wandering the world and dropping in to argue fine points of dogma over the Bishop of Bongoland’s best port. Oh, no doubt for me Marxism was a recrudescence, in a not greatly altered form, of the faith of my fathers; any back-street Freudian could tease that one out. But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? The fact that you place your bet on red does not mean that the black is not still there.

  I often think how differently things might have gone for me if I had not encountered Felix Hartmann when I did. Naturally, I fell a little in love with him. You will not have heard of this person. He was one of Moscow’s most impressive people, both an ideologue and a dedicated activist (dear me, how easily one falls into the jargon of the Sunday papers!). His front was a fur trading business in the vicinity of Brick Lane, or some such insalubrious place, which gave him frequent opportunities for travel, both within the country and abroad. (I trust, Miss V., you are taking notes.) He was a Hungarian national of German and Slav extraction: father a soldier, mother a Serb, or a Slovenian, something like that. It was said, though I do not know where the story originated (it may even be true), that he had been ordained a Catholic priest and had served in the Great War as a chaplain in the Austro-Hungarian army; when I asked him once about this period of his life he would say nothing and only gave me one of his studiedly enigmatic smiles. He had suffered a shrapnel wound—“in a skirmish in the Carpathians”—which had left him with an attractive Byronic limp. He was tall, straight-backed, with glossy blue-black hair, soft eyes, an engaging, if somewhat laboured, ironical smile. He could have been one of those Prussian princes out of the last century, all gold braid and duelling scars, so beloved of operetta composers. He claimed he had been captured in battle by the Russian army, and when the Revolution came had joined the Reds and fought in the civil war. All this gave him the faintly preposterous air of fortitude and self-importance of the Man Who Has Seen Action. In his own eyes, I suspect, he was not the Student Prince, but one of those tormented warrior priests of the Counter-Reformation, trailing his bloodied sword through the smoking ruins of sacked towns.

  It was Alastair Sykes who introduced me to him. Summer of 1936.1 had travelled up to Cambridge in the middle of August— I still had rooms at Trinity—to finish work on a long essay on the drawings of Poussin. The weather was hot, and London impossible, and I had a deadline from Brevoort & Klein. War had broken out in Spain, and people were excitedly preparing to go off and fight. I must say it never occurred to me to join them. Not that I was afraid—as I was later to discover, I was physically not uncourageous, except on one unfortunately memorable occasion—or that I did not appreciate the significance of what was happening in Spain. It is just that I have never been one for the grand gesture. The John Cornford type of manufactured hero struck me as self-regarding and, if I may be allowed the oxymoron, profoundly frivolous. For an Englishman to rush out and get his head shot off in some arroyo in Seville or wherever seemed to me merely an extreme form of rhetoric, excessive, wasteful, futile. The man of action would despise me for such sentiments—I would not have dreamed of expressing them to Felix Hartmann, for example—but I have a different definition of what constitutes effective action. The worm in the bud is more thorough than the wind that shakes the bough. This is what the spy knows. It is what I know.

  Alastair, of course, was in a high state of excitement over the events in Spain. The remarkable thing about the Spanish war—about all ideological wars, I suppose—was the fiery single-mindedness, not to say simple-mindedness, that it produced in otherwise quite sophisticated people. All doubts were banished, all questions answered, all quibbling done with. Franco was Moloch and the Popular Front were the children in white whom the West was offering to the fiend in heartless and craven sacrifice. The fact that Stalin, while flying to the aid of the Spanish Loyalists, was at the same time systematically exterminating all opposition to his rule at home, was conveniently ignored. I was a Marxist, yes, but I never had anything other than contempt for the Iron Man; such an unappetising person.

  “Come on, Victor!” Alastair said, wrenching the stem of his pipe from its socket and shaking dribbles of black goo out of it. “These are dangerous times. The Revolution has to be protected.”

  I sighed and smiled.

  “The city must be destroyed in order to save it, is that what you mean?”

  We were sitting in deckchairs in the sun in the little back garden below the windows of his rooms in Trinity. Alastair tended the garden himself and was touchingly proud of it. There were roses and snapdragons, and the lawn was as smooth as a billiard table. He poured out tea from a blue pot, daintily holding the lid in place with a fingertip, and slowly, gloomily, shook his head.

  “Sometimes I wonder about your commitment to the cause, Victor.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and if we were in Moscow you could denounce me to the secret police.” He gave me a wounded look. “Oh, Alastair,” I said wearily, “for goodness’ sake, you know as well as I what’s going on over there. We’re not blind, we’re not fools.”

  He poured tea into his saucer and slurped
it up through exaggeratedly pouted lips; it was one of his ways of demonstrating class solidarity; it struck me as ostentatious and, I’m afraid, slightly repulsive.

  “Yes, but what we are is believers,” he said, and smacked his lips and smiled, and leaned back on the faded striped canvas of the deckchair, balancing the cup and saucer on the shelf of his little pot belly. He looked so smug, in his sleeveless Fair Isle pullover and brown boots, that I wanted to hit him.

  “You sound like a priest,” I said.

  He grinned at me, showing the gap between his rabbity front teeth.

  “Funny you should say that,” he said. “There’s a chap coming round shortly who used to be a priest. You’ll like him.”

  “You forget,” I said sourly, “I come from a family of clergymen.”

  “Well, you’ll have a lot to talk about then, won’t you.”

  Presently Alastair’s gyp appeared, a cringing, forelock-pulling semi-dwarf—God, how I despised those people!—to announce that there was a visitor. Felix Hartmann wore black: black suit, black shirt, and, remarkably in the surroundings, a pair of narrow, patent-leather black shoes as delicate as dancing pumps. As he crossed the lawn to meet us I noticed how he tried to hide his limp. Alastair introduced us and we shook hands. I should like to be able to say that a spark of excited recognition of each other’s potential passed between us, but I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect. His handshake, a brief pressure quickly released, communicated nothing other than a mild and not wholly impolite indifference. (Yet what a strange ceremony it is, shaking hands; I always see it in heraldic terms: solemn, antiquated, a little ridiculous, slightly indecent, and yet, for all that, peculiarly affecting.) Felix’s soft, Slavic eyes, the colour of toffee—that toffee which, when I would come home from Miss Molyneaux’s school on winter evenings, Hettie used to help me make from burnt sugar poured out in a pan—rested on my face a moment, and then he turned them vaguely aside. It was one of his tactics to seem always just a bit distracted; he would pause for a second in the middle of a sentence and frown, then give himself a sort of infinitesimal shake, and go on again. He had a habit also, when being spoken to, no matter how earnestly, of turning very slowly on his heel and limping a little way away, head bowed, and then stopping to stand with his back turned and hands clasped behind him, so that one could not be sure that he was still listening to what one was saying, or had sunk into altogether more profound communings with himself. I could never finally decide whether these mannerisms were genuine, or if he was merely trying things out, rehearsing in mid-play, as it were, like an actor walking into the wings to have a quick practice of a particularly tricky move while the rest of the cast went on with the drama. (I hope you do not wonder, Miss V., at my use of the word genuine in this context; if you do, you understand nothing about us and our little world.)

  “Felix is in furs,” Alastair said, and giggled.

  Hartmann smiled wanly.

  “You are such a wit, Alastair,” he said.

  We stood about awkwardly on the grass, the three of us, there being only two deckchairs, and Felix Hartmann studied the glossy toes of his shoes. Presently Alastair, squinting in the sunlight, put down his cup and muttered something about fetching another chair, and scuttled off. Hartmann shifted his gaze to the roses and sighed. We listened to the buzz of summer about us.

  “You are the art critic?” he said.

  “More an historian.”

  “But of art?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, looking now in the vicinity of my knees.

  “I know something of art,” he said.

  “Oh, yes?” I waited, but he offered nothing more. “I have a great fondness for the German baroque,” I said, speaking over-loudly. “Do you know that style at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “I am not German,” he said, with a lugubrious intonation, frowning to one side.

  And we were silent again. I wondered if I had offended him somehow, or if I were being a bore, and I felt faintly annoyed; we cannot all be winged in skirmishes in the Carpathians. Alastair came back with a third deckchair and set it up with much struggling and cursing, pinching his thumb badly in the process. He offered to make a fresh pot of tea but Hartmann silently declined, with a throwaway motion of his left hand. We sat down. Alastair heaved a happy sigh; gardeners have a particularly irritating way of sighing when they contemplate their handiwork.

  “Hard to think of Spain and a war starting,” he said, “while we sit here in the sun.” He touched the sleeve of Felix’s black suit. “Aren’t you hot, old chap?”

  “Yes,” Hartmann said, nodding again with that peculiar mixture of indifference and frowning solemnity.

  Pause. The bells of King’s began to chime, the bronzen strokes beating thickly high up through the dense blue air.

  “Alastair thinks we should all go to Spain and fight Franco,” I said lightly, and was startled and even a little unnerved when Hartmann lifted his gaze and fixed it on me briefly, with a positively theatrical intensity.

  “And perhaps he is right?” he said.

  If not a Hun, I thought, then Austrian, surely—somewhere German-speaking, at any rate; all that gloom and soulfulness could only be the result of an upbringing among compound words.

  Alastair sat forward earnestly and clasped his hands between his knees, putting on that look, like that of a constipated bulldog, that always heralded an attack of polemics. Before he could get started, however, Hartmann said to me:

  “Your theory of art: what is it?”

  Strange now to think how natural a question like that seemed then. In those days we were constantly asking each other such things, demanding explanations, justifications; challenging; defending; attacking. Everything was gloriously open to question. Even the most dogmatic Marxists among us knew the giddy and intoxicating excitement of exposing to doubt all that we were supposed to believe in, of taking our essential faith, like a delicate and fantastically intricate piece of spun glass, and letting it drop into the slippery and possibly malevolent hands of a fellow ideologue. It fed the illusion that words are actions. We were young.

  “Oh, don’t get him started,” said Alastair. “We’ll have significant form and the autonomy of the object until the cows come home. His only belief is in the uselessness of art.”

  “I prefer the word inutility,” I said. “And anyway, my position has shifted on that, as on much else.”

  There was a beat of silence and the atmosphere thickened briefly. I glanced from one of them to the other, seeming to detect an invisible something passing between them, not so much a signal as a sort of silent token, like one of those almost impalpable acknowledgements that adulterers exchange when they are in company. The phenomenon was strange to me still but would become increasingly familiar the deeper I penetrated into the secret world. It marks that moment when a group of initiates, in the midst of the usual prattle, begin to go to work on a potential recruit. It was always the same: the pause, the brief tumescence in the air, then the smooth resumption of whatever the subject was, though all, even the target, were aware that in fact the subject had been irretrievably changed. Later, when I was an initiate myself, this little secret flurry of speculative activity always stirred me deeply. Nothing so tentative, nothing so thrilling, excepting, of course, certain manoeuvres in the sexual chase.

  I knew what was going on; I knew I was being recruited. It was exciting and alarming and slightly ludicrous, like being summoned from the sideline to play in the senior-school game. It was amusing. This word no longer carries the weight that it did for us. Amusement was not amusement, but a test of the authenticity of a thing, a verification of its worth. The most serious matters amused us. This was something the Felix Hartmanns never understood.

  “Yes,” I said, “it is the case that I did once argue for the primacy of pure form. So much in art is merely anecdotal, which is what attracts the bourgeois sentimentalist. I
wanted something harsh and studied, the truly lifelike: Poussin, Cezanne, Picasso. But these new movements—this surrealism, these arid abstractions—what do they have to do with the actual world, in which men live and work and die?”

  Alastair did a soundless slow handclap. Hartmann, frowning thoughtfully at my ankle, ignored him.

  “Bonnard?” he said. Bonnard was all the rage just then.

  “Domestic bliss. Saturday night sex.”

  “Matisse?”

  “Hand-tinted postcards.”

  “Diego Rivera?”

  “A true painter of the people, of course. A great painter.”

  He ignored the lip-biting little smile I could not suppress; I remember catching Bernard Berenson smiling like that once, when he was making a blatantly false attribution of a tawdry piece of fakery some unfortunate American was about to purchase at a fabulous price.

  “As great as… Poussin?” he said.

  I shrugged. So he knew my interests. Someone had been talking to him. I looked at Alastair, but he was engrossed in examining his sore thumb.