The Untouchable

by John Banville

  I stood up—I mean my real, corporeal, stark and sweating self—and walked to the window. Outside, there was a monkey-puzzle tree, looking very black and mad in the sun, and a discouraged strip of grass with a flowerless border. In the house opposite, a fat man was leaning out of a narrow upstairs window; he was so still, and filled the window frame so fully, that I wondered if he had become wedged there and was waiting for someone to come along behind him and give him a tug. Slowly I took a cigarette out of my case—whatever became of that, I wonder—and lit it; the gesture seemed to me impossibly theatrical. Odd, the lights one sees oneself in on such occasions.? hardly knew myself. “Billy,” I said, without turning, “do you remember that day at the end of the war, when you called me round to the Department and told me the Palace needed me to run an errand in Bavaria…?” I threw my unsmoked cigarette into the fireplace and returned to the straight-backed chair— how disapproving a chair like that can look—and sat down, crossing my knees and resting my folded hands on them. All this had happened before; I wondered where. Billy was looking at me with a puzzled frown. I described my trip to Regensburg, how I had smuggled out the chest, and what was in it. “Blackmail,” I said, “has never seemed to me an ugly word. Quite the opposite, in fact.” There was the noise of a lawnmower, the old-fashioned kind that you had to push. I looked to the window. The fat man opposite had extricated himself from the upstairs window, and was shearing his lawn now, pushing the machine with a curiously antique action, bending low from the waist with arms stretched out stiff and one stout leg extended behind him. The word felucca came to my mind. Idle fancies, Miss V., idle fancies in the midst of crisis, it is ever thus with me. Billy Mytchett brought out his cold pipe and sucked on it, like a baby with its soother; in the pipe department, Mytchett was no match for Skryne.

  “Blackmail,” he said, flatly.

  I toyed with my cigarette case—what would I do without my props?—and selected another cigarette and tapped it on the lid. No one taps cigarettes like that any more; why did we do it, anyway?

  “All I want,” I said, “is for my life to go on as it is, in the same placid, unexcited way. I stay at the Institute, I keep my position at the Palace, and I still get the knighthood that HM has privately promised me. In return for this, I guarantee silence on everything I know.”

  I was remarkably cool, if I say so myself. I have a way at times like that of going quite still all over, a protective instinct which is at once primitive and highly developed. I imagine my O Measceoil ancestors out on the bracken in pursuit of the great elk, hunter and hound together stopping dead at point as their poor prey lifts its magnificently burdened head and regards them out of one tragic, tear-streaked eye. There was another silence, and Skryne and Billy Mytchett looked at each other, and it seemed as if they might laugh. Billy cleared his throat.

  “Look here, Victor,” he said, “there’s no need for this kind of nonsense. We’re all grown-ups. That Regensburg stuff has been known about for years; no one is interested in that.” And straight away I understood. They wanted a deal, just as I did. Immunity for me was immunity for them. The flight of Boy and MacLeish was scandal enough to be going on with. I was disconcerted; more, I was dismayed. I had slapped down my trump card, and the rest of the table could hardly suppress a snigger. “You’ll have to cooperate, though,” Billy was saying with a great show of sternness. “You’ll have to talk to Skryne here and his people.” Skryne nodded, fairly glowing at the prospect of the fascinating conversations he and I would have in the coming months and years—our liaison was to last, on and off, for two and a half decades.

  “But of course,” I said, making what I considered a gallant stab at insouciance; really, their cynical practicality had shocked me. “I shall tell Mr. Skryne such things, why, they will make his eyes pop.”

  Billy jabbed the stem of his pipe at me. “And you’ll have to keep your mouth shut,” he said. “No running with stories to your pansy pals.”

  “Oh, Billy,” I said.

  He turned away with a disgusted grimace, as if to spit.

  We broke up then, and Brocklebank was detailed to drive me home. They could not get rid of me fast enough. I tarried, dissatisfied. Everything felt so flat and anticlimactic. In the hallway I stopped beside a dusty aspidistra in a tarnished brass pot and turned to Billy.

  “By the way,” I said, “as a matter of interest: who was it betrayed me?”

  Skryne and Billy looked at each other. Skryne smiled, tolerant, dismissive, as if I were a favourite nephew who had asked for one treat too much.

  “Oh, now, Dr. Maskell,” he said, “that would be telling, wouldn’t it.”

  The evening air was heavy with the smell of cut grass. Brocklebank, stout Rodney, walking ahead of me to the garden gate, gave a yawn that made his jaw muscles crack. On the journey home he became quite talkative; no one really minds a bit of treachery, no one on the inside, I mean. I could tell there were all sorts of things he was dying to ask me. When we got to the flat I invited him up to see my Poussin; it was a device I often employed, with more success than you might expect. The majority of my invitees did not know, or care, what I was talking about, and God knows what they expected to see when I threw open the study door like a proud impresario and presented to them the spectacle of Seneca’s stylised exsanguination. French-speakers probably thought I was asking them in to a chicken dinner. Rodney, however, was a bit of a snob, and pretended to know something about art. He carried his great bulk carefully, going about daintily on creaking tiptoe, as if the flat were a china shop. He proved to be something of a bull in the bedroom, too, with that big back, those unexpectedly narrow thighs. Pity about the pimples, though.

  He left at dawn, creeping out of my bed and gathering up his clothes—dropping a shoe with a crash, of course—while I pretended tactfully to be asleep. I wondered if he would tell anyone he had been with me. Talk about a breach of security—as Boy might have said. I was missing Boy already. I lay awake watching the room whiten, beset by a profound and not quite explicable sadness. Then I got up, and changed the sheets—more than once I had caught Patrick, for all his vaunted freedom from jealousy, going over the bedclothes with the beady eye of a suspicious landlady—and went down and got out the car, in those days a big old Hillman of which I was very fond, and set off westward across the city. I did not know where I was going; I was dizzy from lack of sleep. The streets were all harsh sunlight and long, slender sharp shadows. After a while it seemed to start to rain, impossibly, out of a cloudless sky, and when I put on the wipers they did no good, and I realised that I was weeping. This was a surprise. I stopped the car and got out a handkerchief and swabbed my face, feeling ridiculous. Presently the tears stopped, and I sat for a while with my head leaning on the back of the seat, sniffling and gulping. A milkman passing by looked in at me with lively interest; I must have livened up his round for him. It was a fine morning, truly lovely. The sun. The little white puffs of cloud. The birds. I was about to drive on again when it struck me that the street was familiar, and I saw, with a small shock, that I had stopped a few doors away from Vivienne’s house. Homing: the word came to me in all its ambiguity, its fatuous yearning. When had Vivienne’s house, any house she had ever inhabited, been home to me?

  She must have been awake—she never was much of a sleeper—for when I rang the bell she came down at once and opened the door. Vaguely I wondered if she could be accustomed to receiving callers at this hour of the day—and was that a look of disappointment that crossed her face when she saw that it was me and not some far more interesting other? She was wearing a bright-blue gown—with a jolt I saw again Senhor Fonseca sprawled in his blood—and silk slippers, and her hair was tied up in an unbecoming knot. She had not put on her make-up, which gave her a blurred and almost apprehensive expression; if she had been expecting a visitor, it must have been an old and trusted someone, for the world was not often permitted to see Vivienne without her face.

  “Victor!” she said. “Good hea
vens, what a nice surprise. I thought you must be the postman.” The hall, filled with morning light, had the look of a long glass box suspended in sunlit space. Crimson roses crowding in a bowl seemed to throb in their depths, like slow hearts. Vivienne closed the door and hesitated for a moment in amused perplexity. “Is it very late for you,” she said, “or very early? You’re not drunk, are you? It’s just that you look a bit… odd. You do realise it’s five o’clock in the morning?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking of. I was passing, and…”

  “Yes. Well, come into the kitchen. The children are asleep.” I thought of Antonia MacLeish: should I telephone her? And say what? “One hardly knows what to offer, at this hour of the morning,” Vivienne said, going ahead of me and opening the kitchen door. “In the old days we would have had champagne. Speaking of which, how is Boy?”

  “He’s… away.”

  “I haven’t seen him in such a long time. Haven’t seen anyone, really, from that world. I do seem to have lost contact. Do you think it means I shall turn into a lonely old woman, the Miss Havisham of South Audley Street? I feel positively ancient. If it weren’t for the children I’m sure I shouldn’t go out at all. Would you like some tea?” She turned interrogatively from the sink with the kettle in her hand. I said nothing. She laughed softly and shook her head. “Do tell me what the matter is, Victor. You look like a little boy who’s been caught stealing apples. Are you in trouble? Have you made some awful mistake, misattributed one of the King’s pictures, or something?”

  I was about to say something, I hardly knew what, when suddenly I began to weep again, helplessly, in a great splurge of misery and objectless rage. I could not stop. I just stood there, in the middle of the floor, in the gaseous light of morning, choking on phlegm, my shoulders shaking, grinding my teeth and bunching my fists, with my eyes squeezed shut and the hot tears spurting down my shirt-front. There was an awful, indecent pleasure in it. It was like that glorious transgressional moment when as a child dreaming in bed I would give way and wet myself, copiously, scaldingly, unstoppably. At first Vivienne did nothing, but stood, startled and uncertain, with a hand to her lip. Then she came forward, shimmeringly, and put her arms about me and made me rest my forehead on her shoulder. Through the stuff of the dressing gown I could smell the faint staleness of the night on her skin.

  “My darling,” she said, “whatever is the matter?”

  She made me sit me down at the table, and fetched me a fresh handkerchief, and busied herself preparing the tea while I sat and snuffled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t know what came over me.”

  She sat down and regarded me across the table.

  “Poor dear,” she said, “you really are in a state.”

  I told her about Boy and MacLeish and the dash to Folkestone. I was breathless and afraid, like the messenger kneeling at the king’s feet telling him of the rout of his army, but I could not help myself, the words spilled out as the tears had done, unstoppably. Vivienne sat quite still, watching me, with almost clinical attention, and said nothing until I had finished.

  “Boy has gone off with the Dour Scot?” she said then. “But it’s impossible. They can’t stand each other.”

  “I rather think they’ll probably separate, you know, once they get to… where they’re going.”

  “To Moscow, you mean. That is where they’ve gone, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I suppose so.”

  She nodded, still with her eyes on mine.

  “And you?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Why have you not gone with them?”

  “Why should I do that? I just gave them a lift down to the coast. Boy asked me. He was my friend.”

  “Was?”

  “Well, he’s gone now. I doubt we shall ever see him again.”

  She poured the tea, watching the twisting amber arc clatter into the cups. I asked if she would give me something to lace it with, but she was not listening.

  “You always lied to me,” she said pensively. “From the very start, you lied. Why should I forgive that now?”

  I stared at her.

  “Lied to you?” I said. “What did I lie about?”

  “About everything. Is your tea all right? Perhaps you’d like some breakfast? I’m beginning to feel quite peckish, myself. Shocks always make me hungry—do you find that? Let me fry some eggs or something.” She did not move, but sat with her fingers resting on the handle of the teapot, gazing before her and slowly nodding. “So Boy is gone,” she said. “I should like to have been able to say goodbye.” She blinked, and turned her gaze on me again. “You knew he was planning to bolt, didn’t you.”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t even know he had a reason to bolt.”

  “You knew, and you didn’t tell anyone. Such… such discretion!”

  Her eyes glittered. I looked away from her.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “I knew nothing.”

  She went on staring at me in silence, and clenched her fist and laid it on the table before her, like a weapon. Then, suddenly, she laughed.

  “Oh, Victor,” she said, and she relaxed her fist and lifted her hand and laid it tenderly along the length of my cheek, as she had so many times before had cause to do. “Poor, poor Victor. You’re right, you knew nothing, even less than you thought you did. He kept it all from you.”

  The tea tasted of clay. In the silence I could clearly hear the pips for the six o’clock news from a wireless set in the house next door. I had not realised there were so many early risers in May-fair. A jade figurine of a pot-bellied monk—one of Big Beaver’s pieces—sat smirking to itself on the window sill beside me. Things, in their silence, endure so much better than people.

  Chrysalis.

  “He?” I said dully. “What are you saying? What he?”

  I could not bear her pitying smile.

  “Don’t you see?” she said. “It was him. It was always him…”

  I really must look out that pistol.

  They kept coming back to me, year after year; whenever there was a flap on, when some new gaping hole was found in the State’s so-called security, Skryne would wander into my life again, diffident, deferential, relentless as ever. During our interrogations—I say our, because I always think of them as something that we shared, like a series of tutorials, or a course of spiritual exercises—he would maunder on for hours in that dry, mild, schoolmasterly way that he had, asking the same question over and over, in slightly altered forms, and then all at once he would seize on a name, a word, an involuntary flicker of response in me that I had hardly been aware of, and everything would shift, and the questioning would go off in an entirely new direction. Yet it was all very relaxed and mannerly and, well, chummy. In time we even took to exchanging Christmas cards— honestly, we did. He was a match for me in patience, in concentration, in his eye for the telling detail, in his ability to take a fragment and build up a picture of the whole; but in the end I was the one with the greater endurance. In all that time—I wonder how many hours we spent together: a thousand, two thousand?—I do not think I ever gave him anything he could not have got elsewhere. I named only the dead, or those who had been so peripheral to our circle that I knew the Department would not bother with them, or not for long, anyway. Chess is too serious, too warlike, an analogy for what we were engaged in. A cat-and-mouse game, then—but who was the mouse, and who the cat?

  I remember the first time Skryne came to the flat. He had been angling for a long time, not very subtly, to get in and have a look at what he called my gaff. I objected that it would be an unconscionable invasion of privacy if he were to question me in my home, but in the end I weakened and said that he might come round for a sherry at six some evening. I suppose I thought I might get an advantage by granting his harmless and in a way quite touching wish: the cocktail hour is a tricky and uncertain part of the social day for persons of his class, who th
ink of it as teatime, and fret, I find, when they have to forgo this important repast. However, he seemed perfectly at ease. Perhaps he was a little intimidated by the empty, echoing galleries as we ascended through them, but once inside the flat he began to make himself at home right away. He was even about to light up his pipe, without asking my leave, but I stopped him, saying the fumes would be bad for the pictures, as indeed they might have been, for the black shag that he smoked gave off an acrid stink that shrivelled my nostrils and made my eyes prickle. I caught him taking a quick look round; he seemed not very impressed— indeed, I think he was disappointed. I wonder what he had been expecting? Purple silk hangings, perhaps, and a catamite posed upon a chaise longue (Patrick had not been well pleased when I asked him to absent himself for the duration of the visit, and had taken himself off to the pictures in a sulk). He became animated, though, when he spotted the little Degas drawing I had borrowed from the French Room downstairs to hang over the fireplace; I have never succeeded in liking the work of this painter, and had brought the piece up to live with it for a while in the hope that it might win me over. (It did not.)