The Untouchable

by John Banville

“Why do you think of that now?” I said.

  She drew up her legs under the sheet, with a grimace of pain which she instantly repressed, and put her arms around her knees and hugged herself pensively.

  “Oh, it was just…” She glanced at me wryly. “I was just thinking, I never seem to see you any more, just your statue.”

  I might have told her then, about Felix Hartmann, and Boy and Alastair and Leo Rothenstein, about that whole other life I had been leading for years without her knowing anything of it. But I could not bring myself to step over that brink. I never did tell her, not any of it, in all the years. Perhaps I should have? Perhaps things would have been different between us. But I did not trust her; I was afraid that she would tell Nick, and I could not have borne it if Nick were to know. And in the end, it was she who told me, all there was to know

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, and lowered my eyes.

  She gave a glittering laugh.

  “Sorry, yes,” she said. “Everyone is sorry. It must be the times.”

  I was suddenly impatient to be away. The smell of the flowers, and behind that the hospital smell—ether, boiled food, faeces—and the flocculent warmth of the room were making me nauseous. I thought of Ireland, the wind-harrowed fields above Carrickdrum and the dull-blue surface of the sea stretched tight all the way to Belfast with its gantries and spires and flat, black hills. Hettie had written me one of her rare letters recently, worrying over the prospect of war and fretting about Baby’s pregnancy. It was like a document out of the last century, the heavy, gum-smelling paper embossed with a stylised representation of St. Nicholas’s, and Hettie’s genteel and faintly mad handwriting, all hatted t’s and startled o’s and spiky, outflung ascenders. I hope Vivienne is not uncomfortable. I hope you will take care of yourself and that you are eating well at this worrying time for Diet is most Important. Your Father continues poorly. We have had some Rain at last but not enough everything is so dry and the garden in a Bad Way… I had a fantasy, a sort of daydream I indulged in now and then, that if things got bad—if someone betrayed me, or if I got caught through some piece of carelessness of my own—I would somehow make my way to Ireland and hide out up there in the hills, in a shelter under the rocks, among the whin bushes, and Hettie would come up every day in the pony-and-trap with a basket of food for me covered with a white napkin, and would sit with me while I ate, and listen to my story, my confession, the litany of my sins.

  “I must go,” I said. “When will your parents come down?”

  Vivienne blinked, and roused herself; what was her dream of escape, I wonder?

  “What?” she said. “Oh, before the weekend.” In his cot the child made a sound in his sleep like a rusty hinge being opened. “We must think about the christening; you never know, these days.” Vivienne still held on, with a tenacity that irritated me, to a few tattered remnants of Christianity; it was a constant source of friction between her and her mother. “It should be in Oxford, I think, don’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “What are you going to call him, by the way?” I said.

  I must have sounded peeved, for she reached forward quickly and laid a hand over mine and in a mortified tone in which she could not quite suppress a tinkle of amusement said:

  “My dear, you didn’t want him to be called Victor, did you?”

  “No; he would be picked on dreadfully in school by his German prefects if we lose the war.”

  I kissed her cool pale brow. As she leaned toward me to receive the kiss, the neck of her bed-jacket opened a little way and I glimpsed her swollen, silvery breasts, and a surge of something, a sort of anguished pity, rose in me hotly like gorge.

  “Darling,” I said, “I… I want…”

  I was half kneeling on the edge of the bed and in danger of toppling over; she held on to my elbow to steady me, and reached up a hand and touched my cheek.

  “I know,” she murmured, “I know.” I stepped back, buttoning my jacket and brushing at the pockets. She held her head to one side and regarded me quizzically. “Won’t it be odd,” she said, “in the coming weeks, all that emotion, those tearful partings? Quite medieval, really. Do you feel like a knight about to go forth and do battle?”

  “I’ll telephone you when I get down there,” I said. “If I can, that is. They may not allow us to call out.”

  “Gosh, it does sound thrilling. Will you have a pistol and invisible ink and things? I always wanted to be a spy, you know. To have secrets.”

  She kissed her fingertips at me in farewell. As I was closing the door behind me I heard the child beginning to cry. I should have told her; yes, I should have told her what I was. Who I was. But then, she should have told me, too, sooner than she did.

  Old age, as someone whom I love once said, is not a venture to be embarked on lightly. Today I went to see my doctor, the first such visit since my disgrace. He was a little cool, I thought, but not hostile. I wonder what his politics are, or if he has any. He’s a bit of a dry old article, to be honest, tall and gaunt, like me, but with a very good line in suits: I feel quite shabby beside his dark, measured, faintly weary elegance. In the midst of the usual poking and prodding he startled me by saying suddenly, but in a tone of complete detachment, “Sorry to hear about that business over your spying for the Russians; must have been an annoyance.” Well, yes, an annoyance: not a word anyone else would have thought of employing in the circumstances. While I was putting on my trousers he sat down at his desk and began writing in my file.

  “You’re in pretty good shape,” he said absently, “considering.”

  His pen made a scratching sound.

  “Am I going to die?” I said.

  He continued writing for a minute, and I thought he might not have heard, but then he paused and lifted his head and looked upward as if searching for just the right formula of words.

  “Well, we shall all die, you know,” he said. “I realise that’s not a satisfactory answer, but it’s the only one I can give. It’s the only one I ever give.”

  “Considering,” I said.

  He glanced at me with a wintry smile. And then, returning to his writing, he said the oddest thing:

  “I should have thought you had died already, in a way.”

  I knew what he meant, of course—public humiliation on the scale that I have experienced it is indeed a version of death, a practice run at extinction, as it were—but it’s not the kind of thing you expect to hear from a Harley Street consultant, is it.

  8

  There was still the best part of a week to go before that Sunday morning when Chamberlain came on the wireless to tell us we were at war, but it is that endless, oneiric Tuesday, the day my son was born and I was issued with my first military uniform, that I think of as the real opening of hostilities, for me. Still hungover, and using up who knows what unreplenishable reserves of energy, I left the hospital and took a taxi straight to Waterloo, and was in Aldershot by four in the afternoon. Why does that town always smell of horses? I trudged through the hot streets to the bus station, sweating pure alcohol, and fell asleep on the bus and had to be shaken awake by the conductor (“Bloody hell, squire, I thought you was dead!”). Bingley Manor was an unlovely red-brick nineteenth-century Gothic pile, standing in a large flat park, with isolated stands of yew and weeping willow, like an extensive, ill-kept cemetery. It had been requisitioned from the relicts of some grand family, Catholics, I believe, who had been rehoused somewhere in darkest Somerset. I grew depressed at once when I saw the place. The thick gold light of evening only served to deepen the funereal atmosphere. There was an insolent corporal sitting in the great entrance hall—flagstones, antlers, crossed spears and a fur-covered shield—with his feet on a metal desk, smoking a cigarette. I filled out a form and was handed an already grubby identity card. Then I was walking up flights of stairs and along bare corridors, each one narrower and shabbier than the last, in the company of an ill-tempered, red-faced sergeant major who, despite my attempts to make conversati
on, maintained a kind of fuming silence, as if he were under some form of private interdiction. I told him I had just become a father. I don’t know why I said it—a fatuous notion of the lower classes having a weakness for children, I suppose. Anyway, it didn’t work. He gave a snort of angry laughter, his moustache twitching. “Congratulations, sir, I’m sure,” he said, without looking at me. At least, I thought, he called me sir, despite—in fact, because of—my civilian suit.

  I was presented with an ill-fitting uniform—I can still feel the tickle and chafe of that hairy serge—and the sergeant major showed me to my bunk in what must once have been the ballroom, a long, high, many-windowed hall with a polished oak floor and plaster flora on the ceiling. There were thirty bunks, set out in three neat rows; across those nearest the windows, delicate gold shapes of sunlight lay like broken box kites. I felt as lost and weepy as a small boy on his first day at boarding school. The sergeant major noted my distress with satisfaction.

  “You’re in luck, sir,” he said. “Dinner is still being served. Come down when you’re changed.” He suppressed a smirk, the angry thicket of his moustache twitching again. “Just uniform; we don’t dress here.”

  A big servants’ room in the basement had been converted into a mess hall. My fellow recruits were already at feed. It was a disconcertingly monastic-seeming scene, with stone floor and wooden benches, and shafts of vesperal sunlight in the mullioned windows, and monklike figures hunched over their bowls of gruel. A few heads turned when I came in, and someone sent up a derisive cheer for the newcomer. I found a place beside a man named Baxter, a brutally handsome, black-haired fellow bursting out of his uniform, who introduced himself at once and shook my hand, making my knuckles creak, and challenged me to say what I thought he did for a living in Civvy Street. I made a couple of hopeless guesses, at which he smiled and nodded happily, closing his womanly, long-lashed eyes. He was, it turned out, a contraceptives salesman. “I travel all over—British rubbers are greatly in demand, you’d be surprised. What am I doing here? Well, it’s the lingo, see; I can speak six languages— seven, if you count Hindi, which I don’t.” The soup, a thin, brown sludge with floating lozenges of fat, smelled of wet dog. Baxter lapped it up, then planted his elbows on the table and lit a cigarette. “What about you,” he said, blowing vigorous clouds of smoke, “what’s your line? No, wait, let me guess. Civil servant? Schoolmaster?” When I told him, he grinned uneasily, as if he thought I was pulling his leg, and turned his attention to the person on his other side. After a while he turned back to me, though, looking more uneasy than ever. “Christ,” he muttered, “I thought you were bad, but this geezer”—indicating his neighbour with a sideways slide of eyes and mouth—“he’s an unfrocked bloody priest!”

  I never saw Baxter again after that evening. Quite a number of our company were to disappear silently like that over the first few weeks. We were not told what had become of them, and we never mentioned the subject amongst ourselves; we were like the inmates of a sanatorium, waking each morning to find another bed empty, and wondering which of us the silent killer would carry off next. Many of the ones that remained seemed even less prepossessing than the rejects. They were academics, and language teachers from the grammar schools, travelling salesmen like Baxter, and a few indeterminates, shifty characters who tended to lurk, and smiled at one with vague intent, like nervous queers out for a night’s cottaging. As time went on a strange web of alliances and enmities began to weave itself amongst us. Ties of class, profession, shared interests, were all undone. In fact, the wider the disparity in background between us, the better we got on. I was far more at ease with the likes of Baxter than with those who came from my own world. I wish I could say that this arbitrary mingling of the classes fostered a democratic atmosphere (not, I hasten to say, that I cared—or care—much for democracy). When I first arrived, the sergeant major had treated me with resentful deference, but once I was in uniform there was no more sirring, and on the parade ground he screamed in my face in what he thought was an Irish accent, spraying me with spit, as if I were the rawest working-class recruit hauled in from the slums. Almost immediately, however, I was promoted—by the influence of what agency I did not know—to the rank of captain, and the poor wretch had to go back to that peculiar, stolid-faced fawning which unofficial army protocol demands.

  We started straight off on basic training, which to my surprise I found that I enjoyed. The bone-tiredness that felled one at the end of a day of square-bashing and kit inspection and swabbing-out of floors was almost erotic, a voluptuous, swooning lapse into oblivion. We were instructed in the art of hand-to-hand combat, which we went at with the loud enthusiasm of small boys. I particularly enjoyed bayonet practice, the licence it afforded to shriek at the top of one’s lungs, as one deftly disembowelled an imaginary and yet strangely, shiveringly palpable enemy. We were taught map-reading. In the evenings, despite exhaustion, we studied rudimentary encoding techniques and the rules of surveillance. I made a parachute jump; as I leapt from the plane and the icy air caught me I was filled with a kind of exalted, almost holy terror, inexplicably pleasurable. I discovered a stamina in myself I had not known I was capable of, especially on the long treks we were forced to make over the Downs in the hay-smelling, late-summer heat. My comrades chafed under these impositions, but I saw them as the stages of a kind of purification rite. The sense of the monastic I had detected in the mess that first evening persisted; I might have been a lay brother, a worker in the fields, one of those for whom humble toil is the truest form of prayer. Like all the males of my class, I had hardly known how to tie my own shoelaces; now I was mastering all sorts of interesting and useful skills I would never have had the opportunity to learn in civilian life. It all seemed wonderful fun, really.

  I was taught, for instance, how to drive a lorry. I barely knew how to drive a motor car, and this great fuming monster, with its blunt front end and shuddering rear parts, was as stubborn and unwieldy as a carthorse, yet what a thrill it was to ease out the clutch and plunge down on the quivering, two-foot-long gear-stick and feel the cogs meshing and the whole huge machine surging forward as if its soul had come alive under my hands. I was captivated. There was a staff car, too, which we could borrow, on a strict rotational basis. It was an ancient grey-blue Wolseley, high and narrow, with walnut fascia and a wooden steering wheel and an ebony choke button which I always forgot to push in, so that whenever I took my foot off the accelerator the engine whined as if in pain and gouts of angry blue smoke belched out behind; the floor on the driver’s side was so worn it was hardly more than a filigree of rust, and if I looked down between my knees when I was driving I could see the road rushing under me like a river in spate. The poor thing came to a sad end. One night, when it was not his turn, a chartered accountant—he spoke fluent Polish—sneaked the keys from the wall cabinet in the Base Commander’s room and drove into Aldershot to see a girl he was sweet on, got drunk, and crashed into a tree on the way back, and was killed. He was our first fatality of the war. To my shame, I confess I grieved more for the car than for the accountant.

  In our little settlement we had scant contact with the outside world. Once a week we were allowed to telephone our wives or girlfriends. On Saturday nights, we were told, we might venture into Aldershot, though under no circumstances were we to congregate together, or even to acknowledge that we knew each other, should we meet by chance in pub or dance hall; the result was a weekly invasion of the town by solitary drinkers and hapless wallflowers, all pining for the company of comrades whom during the rest of the week they spent their time trying to avoid.

  I had of course no communication at all with Moscow, or even the London embassy. I assumed that my career as a double agent was at an end. I was not sorry. In retrospect, all that now seemed unreal, a game I used to play which I had now grown out of.

  The announcement that we were at war was greeted at Bingley Manor in a curiously lackadaisical fashion, as if it had nothing particularly to do with
us. When the news came we were crowded into the mess hall, which served also as a chapel— Brigadier Bradshaw, our commanding officer, had made attendance at Sunday service compulsory, in order that our morale should be kept up, as he said, though with little conviction. A young chaplain, troubled and inarticulate, was struggling with a complicated military metaphor involving St. Michael and his flaming sword, when a runner arrived with a message for the Brigadier, who stood up, lifting a hand to silence the padre, and turned to the congregation and announced that the Prime Minister was about to address the nation. An enormous wireless set was wheeled forward on a tea trolley and, after a scrabbling search for a socket, was plugged in with great solemnity. The set, like a cockeyed idol, slowly opened its jade-green tuning eye as the valves warmed up, and, after clearing its throat with a series of goitrous hawks, settled down to a mantra-like hum. We waited, shifting our feet; someone whispered something, someone stifled a laugh. The Brigadier, the back of his neck reddening, went forward on tiptoe and bent to the instrument and twiddled the knobs, showing us his broad, khaki-clad backside. The wireless squeaked and babbled, blubbing its lip, and suddenly there was Chamberlain’s voice, crabbed, querulous, exhausted, like the voice of God himself, helpless in the face of his ungovernable creation, to tell us that the world was coming to an end.

  When I had first gone to work at the Department—though work is a strong word for what went on in the Languages section—no one had thought to enquire into my political past. I was the son of a bishop—albeit an Irish bishop—an Old Malburian and a Cambridge man. That I was an internationally recognised scholar might have raised doubts in some quarters—the Institute, being full of refugee foreigners, had always been viewed with suspicion in security circles. On the other hand, I was received at Windsor not only in the print room and the tower library, but in the family wing, too, and if pressed I’m sure I could have got HM to vouch for me personally. (The successful spy must be able to live authentically in each of his multiple lives. The popular image of us as smiling hypocrites boiling with secret hatred of our country and its people and institutions is misconceived. I genuinely liked and admired HM and, perhaps more impressively, made no attempt to hide from him my disdain for his feather-brained wife, who consistently failed to remember that she and I were related. The fact is, I was both a Marxist and a Royalist. This is something that Mrs. W., who possesses the subtlest mind in that intellectually undistinguished family, clearly if tacitly understood. I did not have to pretend to be loyal; I was loyal, in my fashion.) Was I overconfident? Only Boy could get away with that gloating, schoolboy swagger into which the successful agent, smugly clutching his secrets, can so easily fall. When I was summoned to the Brigadier’s office a couple of weeks after the official outbreak of war, I imagined it was to be told that I had been selected for some special assignment. The first cold tentacles of alarm uncoiled themselves in my innards when I noticed his reluctance to meet my eye.