The Untouchable

by John Banville

  Deep down I was afraid that my exclusion from the Fifth Floor might be due to something far more sinister than mere prejudice, or a poisoned word from Nick. My fear was fed by the persistence of that curious echo, that faint sonar blip, which I seemed to catch at certain significant turns in my term of service at the Department. Sometimes I would stop dead in my tracks, like a traveller halting on a country road at night, convinced he is being followed, though when he stops, the footsteps he imagines behind him stop as well. The strangest aspect of it was that I could not distinguish whether this shadowy stalker, if he existed, was friend or foe. Things came into my possession, pieces of information, documents, maps, names, which it was no real business of mine to have; these unlooked for, choice trouvailles made Oleg nervous, though he always allowed his greed to overcome his misgivings. There was an opposite effect, too, when this or that scrap of information that Moscow had asked for, often very low-grade stuff, would suddenly acquire a security classification that put it beyond my reach. In all of this I thought I detected a whimsically malicious note; it was as if I were being made to dance for someone’s amusement, and no matter how I might struggle, the strings, impossibly delicate and fine, remained tightly attached to my ankles and my wrists.

  I suspected everyone. For a time I even suspected Nick. During the war, one fog-muffled afternoon deep in winter, when I was with Oleg in Rainer’s—-yes, we went on meeting there almost to the end, even though it was just around the corner from the Department—I saw Nick in the street passing by the smeary window and could have sworn that he had spotted me, though he gave no sign and just pulled down his hat brim and disappeared into the fog. I went on tenterhooks for days afterwards, but nothing happened. I told myself it was all nonsense. Was it likely that Nick would go in for the kind of cat-and-mouse game that I suspected was being played with me—would he have had the subtlety, the wit, for it? No, I said, no, if Nick were to spot one of his top people, even if it was his brother-in-law, hugger-muggering with a Soviet controller—and Oleg was known to pretty well everyone by now—he would have pulled out his Service revolver and strode into the tea shop Richard Hannay fashion, pushing chairs and waitresses aside, and marched me off to be dealt with by the Department’s internal security people. The straight-as-a-die, no-nonsense man of impulse and precipitate action, that was the image of himself that Nick chose to put forward.

  Boy, then? No: he might have started the thing as a practical joke, but he would have tired of it rapidly. Leo Rothenstein was a more likely suspect. That kind of elegantly contemptuous game would have appealed to a Levantine parvenu and money-aristocrat like him, but I did not believe he had the subtlety for it, either, nor the sense of mischievousness, despite his parties and his ponderous jests and his boogie-woogie piano playing. Billy Mytchett, needless to say, I did not consider at all. So that left Querell. It would have been perfectly in character for him to make a plaything of me and push me this way and that, just to amuse himself. I remember him once saying, when he was drunk, that a sense of humour is nothing but the other face of despair; I believe that was true of him, although I am not sure that humour is the word to apply to that malignantly playful way he had of toying with the world. Despair is not quite the word either, though I cannot think what is. I never thought that he believed in anything, really, despite all his high talk of faith and prayer and sanctifying grace.

  In my calmer moments I accepted that these fears and suspicions were a delusion. No one was able to think straight in those last, frantic years of the war, and I had more to be frantic about than most. My life had become a kind of hectic play-acting in which I took all the parts. It might have been more tolerable had I been allowed to see my predicament in a tragic, or at least a serious, light, if I could have been Hamlet, driven by torn loyalties to tricks and disguises and feigned madness; but no, I was more like one of the clowns, scampering in and out of the wings and desperately doing quick-changes, putting on one mask only to whip it off immediately and replace it with another, while all the time, out beyond the footlights, the phantom audience of my worst imaginings hugged itself in ghastly glee. Boy, who revelled in the theatricality and peril of the double life, used to laugh at me (“Oh, God, here’s Shivershanks with his scruples again!”), and sometimes I suspected that even Oleg was mocking me for my worries and my caution. But mine was more than a double life. By day I was husband and father, art historian, teacher, discreet and hard-working agent of the Department; then night fell, and Mr. Hyde went out prowling, in mad excitement, with his dark desires and his country’s secrets clutched to his breast. When I began to go in search of men it was all already familiar to me: the covert, speculative glance, the underhand sign, the blank exchange of passwords, the hurried, hot unburdening—all, all familiar. Even the territory was the same, the public lavatories, the grim, suburban pubs, the garbage-strewn back-alleyways, and, in summer, the city’s dreamy, tenderly green, innocent parks, whose clement air I sullied with my secret whisperings. Often, at pub closing time, I would find myself sidling up to some likely looking red-knuckled soldier or twitching, Crombie-coated travelling salesman in this or that George, or Coach, or Fox and Hounds, at the very same corner of the bar where earlier in the day I had stood with Oleg and passed to him a roll of film or a sheaf of what the Department supposed were top-secret documents.

  Art was the only thing in my life that was untainted. At the Institute I would sometimes slip away from my students and go down to the basement and take out something, not any of the big pieces, not my Seneca, still in storage there, not one of the great Cézannes, but a Tiepolo sketch, say, or Sassoferrato’s Virgin in Prayer, and bathe my senses, swollen with guilt and dread, in the picture’s serenity and orderliness, giving myself up wholly to its insistent silence. I know, and who should know better, that art is supposed to teach us to see the world in all its solidity and truth, but in those years it was the possibility of transcendence, even for the space of a quarter of an hour, that I sought after repeatedly, like a prelate returning nightly to the brothel. And yet, the magic never quite worked. There was something wrong, something too deliberate, too self-conscious, in these occasions of intense contemplation. A suspicion of fraudulence always attended the moment. I seemed to be looking not at the pictures, but at myself looking at them. And they in turn looked back at me, resentful, somehow, and stubbornly withholding that benison of tranquillity and brief escape that I so earnestly desired of them. Unsettled, inexplicably chagrined, I would at last give up and cover up the painting and put it away, in embarrassed haste, as if I had been guilty of an indecency. The dreadful thought comes to me that perhaps I do not understand art at all, that what I see in it and seek in it is not there, or, if it is, that I have put it there. Have I any authenticity at all? Or have I double dealt for so long that my true self has been forfeit? My true self. Ah.

  In those years Vivienne and I did not see much of each other. With money left her by her father she had bought a small house in Mayfair, where she led what to me was a mysterious but seemingly contented life. There was a nanny for the children, and a maid for her. She had her friends, and, I imagine, her lovers; we did not speak of such things. She accepted my sexual defection without comment; I think she found it amusing. We treated each other courteously, with cool regard, and always a certain cautiousness. Our exchanges were not so much conversations as a kind of brittle raillery, like fencing matches between two fond but wary friends. As the years went on her melancholy deepened; she nursed it like a cancer. We each had our losses. She grieved a long time for her father, in her shrouded way; I had not realised how close they had been, and was obscurely shocked. Her mother died, too, after years of spectral communication with the departed Big Beaver. And poor Freddie died. He survived six months in that so-called Home and then quietly succumbed to some kind of pulmonary infection—it was never made clear what exactly it was that had killed him. “Och, it was the heart that broke,” Andy Wilson said to me at the funeral. “He was pining, like an
old dog that you’d send away from his own place.” And he gave me a slyly venomous glance. Hettie that day was more dazed than ever. At the graveside she plucked at my sleeve agitatedly and said in a hoarse stage-whisper, “But we’ve done all this already!” She thought it was my father’s funeral we were attending. That winter she fell one morning on the icy front step of St. Nicholas’s and broke her hip. From the hospital she was moved directly to a nursing home, where, to everyone’s surprise and no little dismay, including, I suspect, her own, she lived for another five years, confused, sometimes troublesome, lost in the far past of her childhood. When she died at last, I entrusted a local agent with the sale of the house; there are things even a heart as hard as mine cannot endure. On the afternoon of the auction I read in a biography of Blake the poet’s own account of how he had walked out of his cottage on his first morning in sweet Felpham and heard the ploughman’s boy say to the ploughman, Father, the Gate is Open, and I felt that somehow my own father was sending me a message, though what its import might be, I could not tell.

  Boy and I went on a pub crawl the day the news came of Hitler’s death. It was May Day. We started at the Gryphon and staggered on to the Reform, with an interlude at a public lavatory in Hyde Park, the big one near Speakers Corner, which was to be a favourite hunting ground of mine in later years. That first time I was too timid, despite the many gins I had already drunk, to do anything but watch the furtive comings and goings. I kept a lookout while Boy and a burly young Guardsman with red hair and extraordinarily pretty ears made noisy and, by the sound of it, not very satisfactory love in one of the stalls. While I was standing guard, an emaciated individual in a mac and a derby came in and cocked an eye in the direction of the ill-fitting door from behind which could be clearly heard, amid groans and stifled cries, the dead-fish slap of Boy’s stout thighs against the red-haired young man’s buttocks. I thought the fellow must be a detective, and my heart set up that curious, light, tripping measure which in the years ahead I would come to know so well in such circumstances, the source of which was a mixture of fear, wild hilarity and a wholly wanton exultation. The loiterer proved not to be a copper, however, and, after glancing once more wistfully towards the stall door and then, despondently, at me—he knew me for a beginner, I’m sure—he buttoned up his flies and ducked out into the night. (By the way, I greatly deplored, towards the end of the good old 1950s, the universal adoption of the zip-fastened fly; true, the zip greatly enhances access, especially if one is in the throes of amor tremens, but I used to love to see that delicate tweaking action of the hand as it undid the always slightly awkward buttons, the thumb and index finger busy as mice while what the Americans delightfully call the pinkie held itself aloof, conjuring for a delicious, absurd moment an agitated society matron reaching tremulously for her teacup.)

  I woke next morning on the sofa in Poland Street, crapulous and, as always after a night out with Boy, filled with a smouldering, objectless anxiety. The telephone was harshing beside my ear. It was Billy Mytchett, with an urgent summons. He would not say what the matter was, but he sounded excited. When I came into his office he stood up and trotted around from his side of the desk and shook my hand vehemently, making little huffing noises and looking past my shoulder in a sort of agitated daze. He was by now Controller of the Department. He was still an ass.

  “It’s the Palace,” he said, in a fraught whisper. “They—he— he wants you to come round at once.”

  “Oh, is that all,” I said, picking a loose thread from my cuff; it struck me how much I should miss being in uniform. I thought of mentioning to Billy that the Queen was a relative, but thought I might have done so already, and did not wish to seem to be harping on the connection. “It’s probably about those damn drawings at Windsor that I’m still supposed to be cataloguing for him.”

  Billy shook his head; excitable, hirsute and ingratiatingly eager, he always reminded me of a dog, though I could never decide which breed, exactly.

  “No no,” he said, “no—he wants you to go on some kind of mission for him.” He opened his eyes wide. “Very delicate, he says.”

  “To where?”

  “Germany, old chap—bloody Bavaria. What about that, eh?”

  A Department car, with chauffeur, was assigned to take me to the Palace, an indication in itself, in those days of severe petrol rationing, of how impressed Billy was by this royal summons. My driver brought us in by the Horse Guards gate, where a rather brutish but good-looking sentry in full fig, busby and all, sneered at my pass and motioned us on. All this seemed peculiarly familiar, and presently I realised why: I was remembering the day more than a decade before when I had been driven into the Kremlin yard on my way, so I thought, to meet the Father of the People. The anterooms of power are all alike. Not, mind you, that the Palace had much power left, though HM still retained—or believed he did, anyway—considerably more clout than his daughter Mrs. W. has today. He is not highly regarded, I know, but in my opinion he was one of the shrewder of the latter-day monarchs.

  “It will be the devil of a thing,” he said, “if these Labour chaps get in, as looks increasingly likely.” We were in one of the great, glacial reception rooms which are a depressing feature of that depressing palace. He was standing at the window, hands clasped at his back, frowning out over the Palace Gardens awash with watery sunlight. In a vast fireplace a tiny coal fire was burning, and there was a vase of wilted daffodils on the mantelpiece. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “What do you think, Maskell?—you’re a sound Tory, aren’t you?”

  I was seated, in exquisite discomfort, on a delicate gilt Louis Quinze chair, with my legs crossed and hands resting one upon the other on my knee, looking rather prissy, I suspected, though I could not think how better to comport myself in the circumstances: tiny chair, freezing limbs, propinquity of the sovereign. HM was in his we-don’t-stand-on-ceremony-here mood, which I always found hard to endure.

  “I think I’m more of a Whig than a Tory, sir,” I said. His left eyebrow shot up, and I added: “A loyal one, of course.”

  He turned back to the window with a deeper frown; this was not, I told myself gloomily, an auspicious start to the audience.

  “Of course, the country’s lost the run of itself,” he said testily; his stammer was hardly noticeable when he was exercised like this. “How would it not, after what we have had to endure in these last five years? Mind you, I often think it’s not the war itself but its consequences that have had the most profound effects. Women in the factories, for instance. Oh, I’ve seen them, in their trousers, smoking cigarettes and giving cheek. I said from the start no good would come of it—and now look where we are!”

  He fell into a brooding silence. I waited, breathing shallowly from the top of my lungs. He was wearing an impeccably cut three-piece suit of smooth tweed, with a regimental tie; such ease, such negligent grace, even in a bad mood—you really cannot beat royalty for poise in adversity. He was fifty, but looked older. His heart even then must have been beginning to fail.

  “Mr. Attlee,” I said with judicious care, “seems a reasonable man.”

  He shrugged.

  “Oh, Attlee’s all right; I can work with Attlee. But the ones around him…!” He gave himself an angry shake, then sighed, and turned and walked to the fireplace and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece and looked resignedly at a far corner of the ceiling. “Well, we shall have to work with all of them, shan’t we. We wouldn’t want to hand them an excuse to abolish the monarchy.” He lowered his eyes abruptly from the ceiling and gave me a merry stare. “Or would we? What says the loyal Whig?”

  “I hardly think, sir,” I said, “that Clem Attlee, or for that matter anyone in his party, would attempt, or even wish, to abolish the throne.”

  “Who knows, who knows? Anything is possible in the future—and they are the future.”

  “For a time, perhaps,” I said. “The life of a government is short; the throne endures.” Really, the thought of the moderate Left in
power for any appreciable interval made me shudder inwardly. Hot, hangover breath rasped in my gullet like a flare from a furnace. “People are realistic; they will not be fooled by promises of jam for all, especially when even the bread has not yet materialised.”

  He chuckled wanly.

  “Very good, that,” he said. “Very droll.”

  His gaze drifted ceilingwards again; he was in danger of becoming bored. I sat more purposefully upright.

  “The Controller, sir, Commander Mytchett, mentioned something about Germany…?”

  “Yes, yes, quite.” He seized a second gilt chair and set it down in front of me and sat, elbows on knees and hands clasped before him, and looked at me earnestly. “I want to ask you a favour, Victor. I want you to go to Bavaria, to Regensburg—do you know the place?—and fetch back some papers that a cousin of ours is holding for us. Willi—that’s our cousin—is a kind of self-appointed family archivist. We had all got rather into the habit— a bad habit, I dare say—of giving him… documents, and so on, for safe keeping, and then of course the war came and there was no way of retrieving them, even if Willi would have been prepared to release them: he’s a bit of a terror, is old Willi, when it comes to his precious archive.” He paused, in difficulty, it seemed, and sat motionless for a long moment with his head bowed, frowning at his hands. He had never before addressed me by my Christian name (and was never to do so again, by the way). I was pleased, of course, and flattered, I think I may even have blushed a bit, not unbecomingly, I hope, but I was shocked, too, and not a little put out. As I think I have remarked already, I am a staunch Royalist, as all good Marxists are at heart, and I did not like to hear a king… well, lowering himself in this way. Those papers, I thought, must be very delicate indeed. HM was still frowning stolidly at his linked fingers. “I remember when you were out at Windsor,” he said, “working on those drawings of ours—by the way, have you finished that catalogue yet?”