The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “Wonderful woman,” Querell said when she had gone. He put a hand on my arm. “You’re not divorced yet, are you?”

  And Nick gave a loud, slurred laugh.

  At midnight I found myself trapped in uneasy conversation with Leo Rothenstein. We were on the landing outside Boy’s room, with drunken people sitting on the stairs above and below us.

  “They say you’re leaving the ranks,” he said. “Bowing out gracefully, eh? Well, you’re probably right. Not much left for us here, is there? Boy’s had the right idea—America is the place. And of course, you have your work; I see your name about frequently. They want me to be something on the Board of Trade. Can you imagine it? Our friends will be pleased, I suppose, given their passion for tractors and suchlike. But it’s hardly Bletchley Park, is it. One does miss the old days. Much more fun, and that nice warm sense of really doing something for the cause.”

  He produced an impossibly slender gold cigarette case and opened it with an elegant flick of his thumb, and I saw again a sunlit garden room in Oxford long ago and the young Beaver opening another cigarette box with just that gesture, and something happened inside my chest, as if it had begun to drizzle in there. I realised I must be drunk.

  “Nick is going to stand for parliament,” I said.

  Leo chuckled softly.

  “Yes, so I hear. Bit of a joke, don’t you think? At least they’ve found him a safe seat, so humiliation will be avoided. I can just see him on the hustings.”

  Briefly, gratifyingly, I imagined myself landing a punch in the middle of Leo’s big sallow face and smashing his raptor’s nose.

  “He may surprise us all,” I said.

  Leo gazed at me for a moment with peculiar, boggle-eyed intensity, and then laughed heartily, in his humourless way.

  “Oh, he may,” he said, nodding vigorously. “He may indeed!”

  Below us, someone struck a shaky chord on the piano, and Boy began to sing an obscene version of “The Man I Love.”

  Everybody nowadays disparages the 1950s, saying what a dreary decade it was—and they are right, if you think of McCarthyism, and Korea, the Hungarian rebellion, all that serious, historical stuff; I suspect, however, that it is not public but private affairs that people are complaining of. Quite simply, I think they did not get enough of sex. All that fumbling with corsetry and woollen undergarments, all those grim couplings in the back seats of motor cars, the complaints and tears and resentful silences, while the wireless crooned callously of everlasting love— faugh! what dinginess, what soul-sapping desperation. The best that could be hoped for was a shabby deal marked by the exchange of a cheap ring, followed by a life of furtive relievings on one side and of ill-paid prostitution on the other. Whereas— O my friends!—to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear. At night before I went out cottaging I would have to spend an hour downing jorums of gin to steady my nerves and steel myself for the perils that lay ahead. The possibility of being beaten up, robbed, infected with disease, was as nothing compared with the prospect of arrest and public disgrace. And the higher one had climbed in society, the farther one would fall. I had recurring, sweat-inducing images of the Palace gates clanging shut against me, or of myself tumbling head over heels down the steps of the Institute and Porter the porter—yes, but it had long ago ceased to be amusing—above me in the doorway brushing his hands and turning away with a sneer. Yet what a sweet edge these terrors gave to my adventures in the night, what throat-thickening excitement they provoked. I loved the fashions of the fifties, the wonderful three-piece suits, the rich cotton shirts and silk bow ties and chunky, handmade shoes. I loved all the appurtenances of life in those days that are so sneered at now, the cuboid white armchairs, the crystal ashtrays, the moulded-wood wireless sets with their glowing valves and mysteriously erotic mesh fronts—and the motor cars, of course, sleek, black, big-bottomed, like the negro jazzmen whom on occasion I used to be lucky enough to pick up at the stage door of the London Hippodrome. When I look back, these are the things I remember most vividly, not the great public events, not the politics—which was not politics at all, only a hysterical squaring up for more war—and not even, I am sorry to say, the doings of my children, so uncertain and needful in their fatherless teens; above all, I remember the fizz and swirl of the queer life, the white-silk-scarfed enchantment of it all, the squabbles and sorrows, the menace, the unspeakable, always abundant pleasures. This was what Boy missed so much, in his American exile (“I am like Ruth,” he wrote to me, “amid the alien cornballs”). Nothing could make up for the fact of not being in London, not the Cadillacs or the Camels or the crew-cutted football players of the New World. Perhaps, if he had not gone to America, if he had got out, like me, or remained and gone on doing desultory work for Oleg, he might not have brought all that trouble on himself, might have ended up a sprightly old queen toddling between the Reform Club and the public lavatory beside Green Park Tube station. But Boy suffered from an incurable commitment to the cause. Pitiful, really. I have always thought Boy went a little mad in America. He was being watched all the time—the FBI had always been suspicious of him, not seeing the point of the joke—and he was drinking too much. We were used to his enormities—the brawls, the three-day binges, the public displays of satyriasis—but now the stories grew darker, the deeds more desperate. At a party thrown for our embassy people by one of Washington’s legendary hostesses—I am glad to say I have forgotten her name—he made a clumsy pass at a young man in full view of the other guests, and when the poor fellow demurred Boy knocked him down. He drove in that ridiculous car of his—a pink convertible, with a genuine Klaxon horn which he employed with enthusiasm at every intersection—at breakneck speeds all over Washington and the surrounding states, collecting speeding tickets, three or four a day, which he would tear up under the noses of the traffic policemen, claiming diplomatic immunity.

  Poor Boy; he did not realise how dated he had become. This kind of thing might have been amusing back in the twenties, when we were so easily amused, but now his indiscretions were merely embarrassing. Oh, of course we went on regaling each other with accounts of his latest scrapes, and we would laugh, and shake our heads, saying, Good old Boy, he never changes! But then a silence would fall, and someone would cough and someone else would begin loudly ordering another round, and quietly the subject would be dropped.

  And then, one humid evening in late July, I came out of the Institute and found myself staring at a splotch of crushed chalk on the rain-washed, steaming pavement. In the old days this had been Oleg’s signal to summon me to a rendezvous. The sight of that white stain provoked in me a medley of sensations: alarm, of course, quickening to fright; curiosity, and a kind of childish expectancy; but, most strongly, and most surprisingly, nostalgia, fed no doubt by the evening smell of summer rain on the pavement and the oceanic hushing of the plane trees above me. I walked along for a little way, with my raincoat over my arm, outwardly calm, while my thoughts were in turmoil; then, feeling not a little ridiculous, I ducked into a phone box—check the street corners, the windows opposite, that parked car—and dialled the old number, and stood in hot suspense listening to the blood beating in my temples. The voice that answered was unfamiliar, but my call had been expected. Regent’s Park, at seven: the old routine. While the strange voice was relaying its instructions—how blank and timbreless they are, those drilled Russian voices—I thought I heard Oleg chuckle in the background. I hung up and left the booth, dry mouthed and a little dizzy, and hailed a taxi. The old routine.

  Oleg seemed pudgier, but otherwise he was unchanged since I had last seen him. He was wearing his blue suit, his grey mac, his brown hat. He greeted me warmly, ducking his Christmas-pudding head and making
happy burbling noises. Regent’s Park was all hazy golds and pale grey-greens in the soft summer evening. There was the smell of recent rain on grass. We met by the Zoo, as always in former days, and struck off in the direction of the lake. Dreamy lovers drifted across the greensward arm in arm. Children ran and shrieked. A lady walked a little dog. “Like Watteau,” I said. “A painter. French. What do you like, Oleg? I mean, what are you interested in?” Oleg only waggled his head and did that bubbly chuckle again.

  “Castor wants to go,” he said. “He says it is time to go.”

  I thought of MacLeish tramping the windy grey wastes of Moscow. Well, he might feel quite at home there—he was born in Aberdeen, after all.

  “And Boy?” I said.

  Grown men were sailing model boats on the lake. A quite beautiful young man in a white shirt and corduroy trousers, a ghost out of my youth, was lounging in a deckchair, moodily smoking a cigarette.

  “Yes, Virgil too,” Oleg said. “They will go together.”

  I sighed.

  “So,” I said, “it’s come to this. I never really believed it would, you know.” I looked at the young man in the deckchair; he caught my eye and smiled, insolent and inviting, and a familiar something happened in my throat. “Why have you come to me?” I said to Oleg.

  He turned on me his blankest, most blameless bug-eyed stare.

  “We have to get them to France,” he said, “or northern Spain, maybe. Anywhere on the Continent. After that it will be easy.”

  Moscow had suggested sending a submarine to pick the pair up from the shores of some Highland lough. I had a vision of Boy and the Dour Scot stumbling in the dark over wet rocks, their city shoes sodden, trying to get their flashlight to work, while out in the night the submarine captain scoured the shore for their signal, muttering Russian oaths.

  “For goodness’ sake, Oleg,” I said, “surely you can come up with something less melodramatic than a submarine? Why can’t they just take the ferry to Dieppe?—or one of those boats that cruise along the French coast for forty-eight hours? Businessmen use them for dirty weekends with their secretaries. They call into St. Malo, places like that; no one ever bothers to check papers or count the passenger lists.”

  Oleg suddenly reached out and squeezed my arm; he had never touched me before; odd sensation.

  “You see, John, why I came to you?” he said fondly. “Such a cool head.” I could not suppress a smirk; the need to be needed, you see, that was always my weakness. We walked on. The low sun shone on the molten water beside us, throwing up flakes of gold light. Oleg giggled, snuffling through his flat, piggy nose. “And tell me, John,” he said roguishly, “have you been with your secretary on these boats?” And then he remembered, and blushed, and hurried on ahead of me, waddling along like a fat old babushka.

  Boy came back. I telephoned him at the Poland Street flat. He sounded worryingly hearty. “Tip-top, old chap, never better, glad to be home, bloody Americans.” We met at the Gryphon. He was bloated and hunched, and his skin had a fishy sheen. He reeked of drink and American cigarettes. I noticed the torn skin around his fingernails and thought of Freddie. He was rigged out in tight tartan slacks, tennis shoes, a Hawaiian shirt of scarlets and vivid greens; a fawn stetson hat with a leather band sat on the bar by his elbow like a giant, malign mushroom. “Have a drink, for Christ’s sake. We’ll get completely blotto, shall we? My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness, et cetera.” He laughed and coughed. “Have you seen Nick? How is he, I missed him. Missed you all. They don’t know how to have fun over there. Work work work, worry worry worry. And there I was, Boyston Alastair St. John Bannister, trapped in a madhouse with nothing to do but drink myself silly and bugger black men. I had to get out; you see that, don’t you? I had to get out.”

  “Heavens,” I said, “is that really your name—Boyston? I never knew.”

  Betty Bowler was on her stool behind the bar, smoking cocktail cigarettes and clanking her bracelets. Betty by now had become the kind of big, blowsy disaster that buxom young beauties always turn into. In her prime she had been famously painted by Mark Gertler—cream flesh, blue eyes, burnt-sienna nipples, a pyramid of portentous apples in a pink bowl—but now, as she waddled into her late fifties, the Bloomsbury look was all lost, sunken in fat, and she had become one of Lucian Freud’s potato people. I was always a little afraid of her. She had a tendency to go too far, lurching from raillery into sudden bursts of venomous abuse. It was a conceit of hers to pretend to believe there was no such thing as homosexuality.

  “Thought as how you was going to bring home a war bride, Boy Bannister,” she said, doing her cockney voice. “One of those Yank heiresses, nice big blonde with plenty of assets behind her.”

  “Betty,” Boy said, “you should be in the pantomime.”

  “So should you, tub-of-guts. You could play the Dame, except you don’t look man enough for the part.”

  Querell turned up, wearing a crumpled white linen suit and two-tone shoes. He was in his Solitary Traveller phase. He was about to leave for Liberia, or maybe it was Ethiopia; somewhere distant, hot and uncivilised, anyway. It was said he was fleeing an unhappy love affair—Love’s Labour had just come out—but he had probably started the rumour himself. He sat between us at the bar looking bored and world-weary and drinking triple gins. I watched a smoky pale patch of sunlight at the foot of the steps inside the door, and thought how stealthily the world goes about its business, trying not to be noticed.

  “Well, Bannister,” Querell said, “the Americans finally rumbled you, did they?”

  Boy gave him a sullen, slithery look.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I hear Hoover kicked you out. You know he’s a notorious queen. They always have a kink, don’t they, the Hoovers and the Berias.”

  Much later—the light at the foot of the steps had turned red-gold—Nick came in, with Leo Rothenstein, both in evening dress, sleek and faintly ridiculous, like a pair of toffs in a Punch cartoon. I was surprised to see them here. Since his election Nick had steered clear of the old dives, and Leo Rothenstein, whose father was on his deathbed, was about to inherit a peerage and the family’s banks. “Just like old times,” I said, and they both regarded me in silence with a peculiar, flat stare. I suppose I was drunk. Nick peevishly ordered a bottle of champagne. He was wearing a crimson cummerbund; he never did have any taste. We lifted our glasses and toasted Boy’s return. Our hearts were not in it. When we had finished the first bottle, Betty Bowler brought out another, on the house.

  “Absent friends!” Leo Rothenstein said, and looked at me over the rim of his glass and winked.

  “Christ,” Boy mumbled, pressing a fat, sunburned arm to his eyes, “I think I’m going to blub.”

  Then Oleg telephoned. The code word was Icarus. Somewhat unfortunate, I agree.

  15

  Odd, the air of melancholy burlesque the whole thing had. It was all absurdly simple. Boy made an excuse, and we left the Gryphon together and I drove him to Poland Street. Above the twilit streets the sky was a tender deep dark blue, like an upside-down river. In the flat I waited, sitting by myself on the sofa, while he got his things together. The champagne was still fizzing in my sinuses, and I too felt weepy, in a distracted sort of way, and kept heaving great sobby sighs and slowly blinking and peering about me, like a drunken tortoise. Vividly I recalled tussling here with Danny Perkins, and experienced an awful pang, like a spasm of physical pain. I could hear Boy crashing around upstairs, talking to himself and groaning. Presently he came down, carrying an ancient gladstone bag.

  “Wanted to bring everything,” he said mournfully. “Left it all, in the end. How do I look?”

  He was dressed in a dark-grey three-piece suit, striped shirt, cufflinks, school tie with gold pin.

  “You look ridiculous,” I said. “The Comrades will be wonderfully impressed.”

  We went down the stairs, wordless and solemn, like a pair of disappointed undertakers.

  “I�
��ve locked the flat,” Boy said. “Danny Perkins has a key. I’ll keep this one, if you don’t mind. Souvenir, you know.”

  “You’re not coming back, then?” I said lightly, and he gave me a wounded look and went on, past the doctor’s surgery, and out into the glimmering night. God knows why I was feeling so frolicsome.

  Again, I drove the big white car eating up the miles with callous eagerness. As we were crossing the river I wound down my window and the night howled and leaped into the car. I looked down past the bridge and saw a red ship at anchor there, and something about the scene—the glossy darkness, the bulging, restless river, that fauve-bright vessel—sent a shiver through me, and suddenly, with a tigerish thrill, I saw my life as grand and dark and doomed. Then we left the bridge and plunged among warehouses and weed-grown bomb-sites again.

  Beside me, Boy was weeping, in silence, with a hand over his eyes.

  Soon we were speeding over the Downs. In my memory of it, this part of the journey is all a smooth irresistible headlong dash through the startled, silvery night. I see the car swirling along, headlights sweeping over tree-trunks and moss-grown signposts, and Boy and me, two grim-faced figures tensed behind the windscreen, lit from below, jaws set and eyes fixed unblinkingly upon the onrushing road. I too have read my Buchan and my Henty.

  “Wish it was day,” Boy said. “This is probably my last sight of Blighty.”

  Philip MacLeish was at his mother’s place in Kent, a genuine rose-covered cottage complete with wooden gate and gravel path and bottle-glass windows all aglow. Antonia MacLeish opened the door to us and without a word showed us into the living room. She was a tall, angular woman with a great mane of black hair. She seemed always to be brooding on some smouldering private resentment. I associated her with horses, though I had never seen her mounted on one. MacLeish was sitting in an armchair, morosely drunk, staring into a cold grate. He was wearing an old pair of flannel trousers and an incongruous, canary-yellow cardigan. He glanced up unenthusiastically at Boy and me, said nothing, and went back to his contemplation of the fireplace.