The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “But tell me what it is I’m expected to do,” I said to Hartmann, when we had settled ourselves with our halves of bitter on high-backed benches facing each other on either side of the coke fire. (Coke: that is something else that has gone; if I try, I can still smell the fumes and feel their acid prickle at the back of my palate.)

  “Do?” he said, putting on an arch, amused expression; his earlier, violent mood had subsided and he was his smooth self again. “You do not do anything, really.” He took a draught of beer and with relish licked the fringe of foam from his upper lip. His blue-black oiled hair was combed starkly back from his forehead, giving him the pert, suave look of a raptor. He had rubber galoshes on over his dancer’s dainty shoes. It was said that he wore a hairnet in bed. “Your value for us is that you are at the heart of the English establishment—”

  “I am?”

  “—and from the information you and Boy Bannister and the others supply to us we shall be able to build a picture of the power bases of this country.” He loved these expositions, the setting out of aims and objectives, the homilies on strategy; every spy is part priest, part pedant. “It is like—what is it called…?”

  “A jigsaw puzzle?”

  “Yes!” He frowned. “How did you know that was what I meant?”

  “Oh, just a guess.”

  I sipped my beer; I only ever drank beer when I was with the Comrades—class solidarity and all that; I was as bad as Alastair, in my way. A miniature but distinctly detailed horned red devil was glowing and grinning at me from the pulsing heart of the fire.

  “So,” I said, “I am to be a sort of social diarist, am I? The Kremlin’s answer to William Hickey.”

  At mention of the Kremlin he flinched, and glanced over at the bar, where Noakes was polishing a glass and whistling silently, his puckered big lips swivelled to one side.

  “Please,” Hartmann whispered, “who is William Hickey?”

  “A joke,” I said wearily, “just a joke. I had rather thought I would be required to do more than pass on cocktail party gossip. Where is my code book, my cyanide pill? Sorry—another joke.”

  He frowned and began to say something but thought better of it, and instead smiled his crookedest, most winning smile, and did his exaggerated European shrug.

  “Everything,” he said, “must go so slowly in this strange business of ours. In Vienna once I had the task of watching one man for a year—a whole year! Then it turned out he was the wrong man. So you see.”

  I laughed, which I should not have done, and he gave me a reproachful look. Then he began to speak very earnestly of how the English aristocracy was riddled with Fascist sympathisers, and passed me a list of the names of a number of people in whom Moscow was particularly interested. I glanced down the list and stopped myself from laughing again.

  “Felix,” I said, “these people are of no consequence. They’re just common-or-garden reactionaries; cranks; dinner-party speech-makers.”

  He shrugged, and said nothing, and looked away. I felt a familiar depression descending upon me. Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy’s world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching on to things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriadness that the world takes on, is both the attraction and the terror of being a spy. Attraction, because in the midst of such uncertainty you are never required to be yourself; whatever you do, there is another, alternative you standing invisibly to one side, observing, evaluating, remembering. This is the secret power of the spy, different from the power that orders armies into battle; it is purely personal; it is the power to be and not be, to detach oneself from oneself, to be oneself and at the same time another. The trouble is, if I were always at least two versions of myself, so all others must be similarly twinned with themselves in this awful, slippery way. And so, laughable as it seemed, it was not impossible that the people on Felix’s list might be not only the society hostesses and double-barrelled bores whom I thought I knew, but a ruthless and efficient ring of Fascists poised to wrest power from the elected government and set an abdicated king back on a swastika-draped throne. And there lay the fascination, and the fear—not of plots and pacts and royal shenanigans (I could never take the Duke or that awful Simpson woman seriously), but of the possibility that nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems.

  “Look here, Felix,” I said, “are you seriously proposing that I should spend my time attending dinners and going to weekend house parties so that I can report back to you on what I overheard Fruity Metcalfe telling Nancy Astor about the German armaments industry? Do you have any idea what conversations are like on these occasions?”

  He considered his beer glass. Light from the fire lay along his jaw like a polished, dark-pink scar. This evening his eyes had a distinctly Eastern cast; did mine look Irish, to him, I wonder?

  “No, I do not know what these occasions are like,” he said stiffly. “A fur trader from the East End of London is not likely to be invited for weekends to Cliveden.”

  “It’s Clivden,” I said absently. “It’s pronounced Clivden.”

  “Thank you.”

  We supped the last of our warm beer in silence, me irritated and Hartmann bridling. A few locals had come in and sat about lumpily in the reddish gloom, their ovine, steamy smell insinuating itself amid the coke fumes. The early-evening murmur in English public houses, so wan and weary, so circumspect, always depresses me. Not that I go into public houses very often, nowadays. I sometimes find myself yearning for the ramshackle hilarity of the pubs of my childhood. When I was a boy in Carrickdrum I often ventured at night into Irishtown, a half acre of higgledy-piggledy shacks behind the seafront where the Catholic poor lived in what seemed to me euphoric squalor. There was a pub in every alleyway, low, one-roomed establishments whose front windows were painted with a lacy brown effect almost to the top, where a strip of buttery, smoke-clogged light, jolly, furtive, enticing, shone out blearily into the dark. I would creep up to Murphy’s Lounge or Maloney’s Select Bar and stand outside the shut door, my heart beating in my throat— it was known for a fact that if the Catholics caught a Protestant child he would be spirited away and buried alive in a shallow grave in the hills above the town—and listen to the din inside, the laughter and the shouted oaths and jagged snatches of song, while a white moon hung above me on its invisible gibbet, sliming the cobbles of the alley with a suggestive smear of tarnished pewter. These pubs made me think of weather-beaten galleons, shut fast against the sea of night, bobbing along in mutinous merriment, the crew drunk, the captain in chains, and I, the dauntless cabin boy, ready to plunge into the midst of the roisterers and seize the key to the musket chest. Ah, the romance of forbidden, brute worlds!

  “Tell me, Victor,” Hartmann said, and I could tell, by the breathy, consonantal way he uttered my name (“Vikh-torr…”), that he was about to shift into the realm of the personal, “why do you do this?”

  I sighed. I had thought he would ask it, sooner or later.

  “Oh, the rottenness of the system,” I said gaily. “Miners’ wages, children with rickets—you know. Here, let me buy you a whiskey; this beer is so dreary.”

  He held up his glass to the weak light and contemplated it solemnly.

  “Yes,” he said, with a mournful catch. “But it reminds me of home.”

  Dear me; I could almost hear the twang of a phantom zither. When I brought back the whiskey he looked at it doubtfully, sipped, and winced; no doubt he would have preferred plum brandy, or whatever it is they drink on rainy autumn nights on the shores of Lake Balaton. He drank again, more deeply this time, and huddled tightly into himself, elbows pressed to his ribs and his legs twined about each other corkscrew fashion with one slender foot tucked behind an ankle like a cocked trigger. They do love a cosy chat, these international spies.

  “And you,”
I said, “why do you do it?”

  “England is not my country—”

  “Nor mine.”

  He shrugged grumpily.

  “But it is your home,” he said, with a stubborn set of the jaw. “This is where you live, where your friends are. Cambridge, London…” He made a sweeping gesture with his glass, and the measure of whiskey tilted and in its depths a sulphurous gemlike fire flashed. “Home.”

  Another phantom slither of strings. I sighed.

  “Do you get homesick?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I have no home.”

  “No,” I said, “I suppose you haven’t. I should have thought that would make you feel quite… free?”

  He leaned back on the bench seat, his face sinking into darkness.

  “Boy Bannister gives us information that he gets from his father,” he said.

  “Boy’s father? Boy’s father is dead.”

  “His stepfather, then.”

  “Retired, surely?”

  “He still has contacts at the Admiralty.” He paused. “Would you,” softly, “would you do that?”

  “Betray my father? I doubt if the secrets of the bishopric of Down and Dromore would be of great interest to our masters.”

  “But would you?”

  The upper part of his torso was swallowed in shadow, so that all I could see were his corkscrewed legs and one hand resting on his thigh with a cigarette clipped between thumb and middle fingers. He took a sip of whiskey, and the rim of the glass clinked tinnily against his teeth.

  “Of course I would,” I said, “if it were necessary. Wouldn’t you?”

  When we left the pub the rain had stopped. The night was blowy and bad-tempered, and the vast, wet darkness felt hollowed out by the wind. Sodden sycamore leaves lolloped about the road like injured toads. Hartmann turned up the collar of his coat and shivered. “Ach, this weather!” He was on his way back to London, to catch the sleeper to Paris. He liked trains. I imagined him on the Blue Train with a gun in his hand and a girl in his bunk. Our footsteps plashed on the pavement, and as we walked from the light of one lamp to another our shadows stood up hastily to meet us and then fell down on their backs behind us.

  “Felix,” I said. “I’m not at all adventurous, you know; you mustn’t expect heroics.”

  We reached the car. An overhanging tree gave itself a doggy shake and a random splatter of raindrops fell on me, rattling on the brim of my hat. I suddenly saw the Back Road in Carrick-drum, and remembered myself walking with my father one wet November night like this when I was a boy: the steamy light of the infrequent gas lamps, and the undersides of the dark trees thrashing in what seemed an anguish of their own, and the sudden, inexplicable swelling of ardour inside me that made me want to howl in ecstatic sorrow, yearning for something nameless, which must have been the future, I suppose.

  “As a matter of fact, there is something we want you to do,” Hartmann said.

  We were standing on either side of the car, facing each other across the glistening roof.

  “Yes?”

  “We want you to become an agent of Military Intelligence.”

  Another gust of wind, another spatter of raindrops.

  “Oh, Felix,” I said, “tell me that’s a joke.”

  He got into the car and slammed the door. He drove for some miles in an angry silence, very fast, gouging about with the gear-stick as if he were trying to dislodge something from the innards of the car.

  “All right, tell me, then,” I said at last. “How am I supposed to get into the Secret Service?”

  “Talk to the people at your college. Professor Hope-White, for instance. The physicist Crowther.”

  “Crowther?” I said. “Crowther is a spy master? He couldn’t be. And Hope-White? He’s a scholar of Romance languages, for God’s sake! He writes lyric verses about boys in Provencal dialect.” Hartmann shrugged, smiling now; he liked to surprise. In the glow of the dashboard lights his face had a greenish, death’s-head pallor. A fox appeared on the road in front of us and stared in venomous surprise at the headlights before putting down its tail and sliding off at a low run into the dark verge. And I remember now a rabbit hopping out of a hedge and gaping at two young men walking towards it up a hill road. “I’m sorry, Felix,” I said, looking out at the night rushing helplessly at us in the windscreen, “but I can’t see myself passing my days decoding estimates of German rolling stock in the company of former Eton prefects and retired Indian Army officers. I have better things to do. I am a scholar.”

  He shrugged again.

  “All right,” he said.

  It was a phenomenon with which I was to become familiar, this way they had of trying out something and then dropping it when it met even the mildest resistance. I remember Oleg in a great flap rushing around to Poland Street one day during the war after he had discovered that Boy and I were sharing rooms there (“Agents cannot live together like this, it is impossible!”) and then staying to get weepily, Slavicly drunk with Boy and flopping on the couch in the living room for the night. Now Hartmann said:

  “A new case officer will be arriving soon.”

  I turned to him, startled.

  “And what about you?”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the road.

  “It seems they have begun to suspect me,” he said.

  “Suspect you? Of what?”

  He shrugged.

  “Of everything,” he said. “Of nothing. They come to suspect everyone, in the end.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “You know,” I said, “I wouldn’t have agreed to work for them, if they had sent a Russian.”

  He nodded.

  “This one will be Russian,” he said grimly.

  We were silent. In the dark sky before us a low, big-bellied bank of cinder-black cloud reflected the lights of Cambridge.

  “No,” I said presently, “it won’t do. You’ll have to tell them it won’t do. I’ll deal with them through you, or not at all.”

  He gave a melancholy laugh.

  “Tell them?” he said. “Ah, Victor, you don’t know them. Believe me, you do not know them.”

  “Nevertheless, you must tell them: I will only work with you.”

  I have forgotten the Russian’s name. Skryne always refused to believe this, but it is true. His code name was Iosif, which struck me as dangerously obvious (the first time we made contact I asked if I might call him Joe, but he did not think it funny). He is one of the many persons from my past upon whom I do not care to dwell overmuch; the thought of him ripples across my consciousness like a draught across the back of a fever patient. He was a nondescript but dogged little sharp-faced man, who reminded me eerily of a Latin master, harsh of tongue and a fine mimic, especially of the Northern Irish accent, who had made life hell for me in my first year at Marlborough. At Iosif’s insistence, our meetings took place in various pubs in the more respectable of London’s suburbs, a different one each time. I believe he secretly liked these ghastly establishments; I suppose he, like Felix Hartmann, saw them as typical manifestations of an idealised England, with their horse brasses and dart boards and cravatted, ruddy-hued proprietors, who all looked to me like the kind of cheery chap who would have his wife coming along nicely in an acid bath upstairs. A belief in this mythical version of John Bull was one of the few things that the Russian and the German ruling elites and their lackeys had in common in the thirties. Iosif was proud of what he imagined was his ability to pass for a native Englander. He wore tweeds and brown brogues and sleeveless grey pullovers and smoked Capstan cigarettes. The effect was of a diligently fashioned but hopelessly inaccurate imitation of a human being, something a scouting party from another world might send ahead to mingle with Earthlings and transmit back vital data—which, when I think of it, is pretty much an accurate description of what he was. His accent was laughable, though he imagined it was flawless.

  For our first meeting I was summoned one cold bright afternoon earl
y in December to a pub beside a park in Putney. I arrived late and Iosif was furious. As soon as he had identified himself—furtive nod, strained smile, no handshake—I demanded to know why Felix Hartmann was not there.

  “He has other duties now.”

  “What sort of duties?”

  He shrugged a bony shoulder. He was standing with me at the bar, with a glass of fizzy lemonade in his hand.

  “At the embassy,” he said. “Papers. Signals.”

  “He’s at the embassy now?”

  “He was brought in. For his protection; the police were beginning to investigate him.”

  “What became of his fur business?”

  He shook his head, annoyed, pretending impatience.

  “Fur business? What is this fur business? I know nothing about this.”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  He wanted us to go to a “quiet table in the corner”—the place was empty—but I would not budge. Although I do not care for the stuff, I ordered vodka, just to see him flinch.

  “Na zdrovye!” I said, and knocked back the measure Russian style, remembering the brothers Heidegger. Iosif’s glittery little eyes had narrowed to slits. “I told Felix I would work only with him,” I said.

  He darted a sharp glance in the direction of the barman.

  “You are not in Cambridge now, John,” he said. “You cannot choose your colleagues.”

  The door opened and a ragged old boy with a dog came in, preceded by a pallid splash of winter sunlight.