The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “Yes, yes, very interesting,” Big Beaver said. “Poetry is very marketable, these days.”

  There was a silence. Nick laughed.

  “He’s not a poet, Max,” he said.

  I had never before heard a son address his father by his first name. Max Brevoort peered at me.

  “But of course you’re not!” he said, without the least embarrassment. “You’re the art critic.” He rubbed his hands harder. “Very interesting.”

  Then we had tea, served by an impertinent maid, and Mrs. Beaver came in from the garden and Big Beaver told her of his having mistaken me for a poet and they both laughed heartily as if it were a wonderful joke. Nick lifted a sympathetic eyebrow at me.

  “Did you drive over?” he asked quietly.

  “Train,” I said.

  We smiled, exchanging what seemed a kind of signal, conspirators in the making.

  And when I was leaving, it was he who took my essay, relieving me of it gently as if it were some wounded, suffering thing, and said he would make sure his father read it. Mrs. Beaver was talking about cigarette ends. “Just pop them in a jam jar,” she said, “and keep them for me.” I must have looked baffled. She lifted the copper kettle and shook it, producing a slushy sound. “For the greenfly,” she said. “Nicotine, you know. They can’t abide it.” I backed out and the three of them held their places, as if waiting for applause, the parents beaming and Nick darkly amused. Baby was still upstairs, playing her jazz and rehearsing for her entrance in act two.

  Midnight. My leg has gone to sleep. Wish the rest of me would go with it. Yet it is not unpleasant to be awake like this, awake and alert, like a nocturnal predator, or, better yet, the guardian of the tribe’s resting place. I used to fear the night, its dreads and dreams, but lately I have begun to enjoy it, almost. Something soft and yielding comes over the world when darkness falls. On the threshold of my second childhood, I suppose I am remembering the nursery, with its woolly warmth and wide-eyed vigils. Even as a babe I was already a solitary. It was not so much my mother’s kiss that I Proustianly craved as the having done with it, so that I could be alone with my self, this strange, soft, breathing body in which my spinning consciousness was darkly trapped, like a dynamo in a sack. I can still see her dim form retreating and the yellow fan of light from the hall folding across the nursery floor as she lingeringly closed the door and stepped backwards in silence out of my life. I was not quite five when she died. Her death was not a cause of suffering to me, as I recall. I was old enough to register the loss but too young to find it more than merely puzzling. My father in his well-meaning way took to sleeping on a camp bed in the nursery to keep my brother Freddie and me company, and for weeks I had to listen to him thrashing all night long in the toils of his grief, mumbling and muttering and calling on his God, heaving long, shuddering sighs that made the camp bed crack its knuckles in exasperation. I would lie there intently, trying to listen beyond him to the wind in the trees that ringed the house like sentinels, and, farther off, the boxy collapse of waves on Carrick strand and the drawn-out hiss of waters receding over the shingle. I would not lie on my right side because that way I could feel my heart beating and I was convinced that if I were going to die I would feel it stop before the terrifying final darkness came down.

  Strange creatures, children. That wary look they have when adults are about, as if they are worrying whether they are doing a convincing enough impersonation of what we expect them to be. The nineteenth century invented childhood and now the world is full of child actors. My poor Blanche was never any good at it, could not remember her lines or where to stand or what to do with her hands. How my heart would fold into itself in sorrow at the school play or on prize-giving day when the line of little girls being good would develop a kink, a sort of panicky quaver, and I would look along the row of heads and sure enough there she would be, on the point of tripping over her own awkwardness, blushing and biting her lip, and sloping her shoulders and bending her knees in a vain attempt to take a few inches off her height. When she was an adolescent I used to show her photographs of Isadora Duncan and Ottoline Morrell and other big, bold women from whose example she might take comfort and whose extravagance she might emulate, but she would not look at them, only sit in miserable silence with bowed head, picking at her hangnails, her wiry hair standing on end, as if a strong current were passing through it, and the heart-breakingly defenceless pale back of her neck exposed. Now Julian, on the other hand… No; I think not. That subject is the very stuff of insomnia.

  Among the newspaper pack this morning there was a girl reporter—how these terms date one!—who reminded me of Blanche, I don’t quite know why. She was not big, like my daughter, but in her manner she had something of the same intent watchfulness. Clever, too: while the rest kept elbowing each other aside in order to ask the obvious questions, such as whether there are more of us still to be unmasked (!), or if Mrs. W. had known all along, she sat fixed on me with what seemed a sort of hunger and hardly spoke at all, and then only to ask for names and dates and places, information which I suspect she already possessed. It was as if she were carrying out some private test on me, checking my responses, measuring my emotions. Perhaps I, in turn, reminded her of her father? Girls, in my admittedly limited experience of them, are ever on the lookout for their Dad. I considered asking her to stay to lunch—that was the kind of giddy mood I was in—for suddenly the thought of being alone after they had vacated the place was not at all attractive. This was strange; I have never suffered from loneliness in the past. Indeed, as I said already, I have always considered myself to be a perfectly reconciled solitary, especially after poor Patrick died. But there was something about this girl, and not just her indefinable resemblance to Blanche, that attracted my attention. A fellow loner? I did not get her name and do not even know which of the papers she works for. I shall read them all tomorrow and see if I can identify her style.

  Tomorrow. Dear God, how can I face a tomorrow.

  Well, I am everywhere. Pages and pages of me. This must be how it feels to be the leading man on the morning after a stupendously disastrous first night. I went to a number of newsagents, for the sake of decency, though it got increasingly awkward as the bundle of newspapers under my arm steadily thickened. Some of the people behind the counters recognised me and curled a contemptuous lip; reactionaries to a man, shopkeepers, I have noticed it before. One chap, though, gave me a sort of sad, underhand smile. He was a Pakistani. What company I shall be in from now on. Old lags. Child molesters. Outcasts. The lost ones.

  It has been confirmed: the K is to be revoked. I mind. I am surprised how much I mind. Just Doctor again, if even that; maybe just plain Mister. At least they have not taken away my bus pass, or my laundry allowance (the latter an acknowledgement, I imagine, that over the age of sixty-five one tends to dribble a lot).

  That writer chap telephoned, requesting an interview. What effrontery. Well-spoken, however, and not at all embarrassed. Brisk tone, faintly amused, with a hint almost of fondness: after all, I am his ticket to fame, or notoriety, at least. I asked him to say who it was that betrayed me. That provoked a chuckle. Said even a journalist would go to gaol rather than reveal a source. They love to trot out that particular hobby-horse. I might have said to him, My dear fellow, I have been in gaol for the best part of thirty years. Instead, I rang off.

  The Telegraph sent a photographer to Carrickdrum, site of my bourgeois beginnings. The house is no longer the bishop’s residence, and is owned, the paper tells me, by a man who deals in scrap metal. The sentinel trees are gone—the scrap merchant must have wanted more light—and the brickwork has been covered with a new facing, painted white. I am tempted to work up a metaphor for change and loss, but I must beware turning into a sentimental old ass, if I am not one already. St. Nicholas’s (St. Nicholas’s!—I never made the connection before) was a grim and gloomy pile, and a bit of stucco and white paint can only be an improvement. I see myself as a little boy sitting head on hand
in the bay window in the parlour, looking out at the rain falling on the sloping lawn and the far-off, stone-grey waters of the Lough, hearing poor Freddie wandering about upstairs crooning like a dreamy banshee. That’s Carrickdrum. When my father married again, with what struck me even at the age of six as unseemly haste, I awaited the appearance of my stepmother— they had married in London—with a mixture of curiosity, anger and apprehension, expecting a witch out of an Arthur Rackham illustration, with violet eyes and fingernails like stilettos. When the happy couple arrived, mounted, with odd appropriateness, on a jaunting car, I was surprised and obscurely disappointed to find that she was nothing like my expectations of her, but a big, jolly woman, broad in the beam and pink of cheek, with a washerwoman’s thick arms and a loud, trembly laugh. Coming up the front steps she spotted me in the hallway and broke into a wallowing run, big red hands lifted, and fell upon my neck, nuzzling me wetly and uttering distressful little grunts of joy. She smelled of face powder and peppermints and female sweat. She unclasped me and stepped back, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of a hand, and threw a histrionically fervent glance back at my father, while I stood frowning, trying to cope with a welter of sensations I did not recognise, among them a faint premonition of that unexpected happiness she was to bring to St. Nicholas’s. My father wrung his hands and grinned sheepishly and avoided my eye. No one said anything, yet there was the sense of loud and continuous noise, as if the unexpected gaiety of the occasion were producing a din of its own. Then my brother appeared on the stairs, descending sideways with his Quasimodo lurch and drooling—no, no, I am exaggerating, he was not really that bad—and brought the moment to its senses. “And this,” said my father, fairly bellowing in his nervousness, “this is Freddie!”

  How difficult that day must have been for my mother—I always think of her as that, my natural mother having bowed out so early—and how well she managed it all, settling herself upon the house like a great warm roosting bird. That first day, she embraced poor Freddie stoutly, and listened to the gaggings and strangled howls that with him passed for speech, nodding her head as if she were understanding him perfectly, and even produced a hanky and wiped the spittle from his chin. I’m sure my father must have told her about him, but I doubt if any mere description could have prepared her for Freddie. He gave her his broadest gap-toothed grin and put his arms tightly about her big hips and laid his face against her stomach, as if he were welcoming her home. Most likely he thought she was our real mother come back transformed from the land of the dead. Behind her my father heaved a queer, groaning sort of sigh, like that of someone setting down at long last a toilsome and unmanageable burden.

  Her name was Hermione. We called her Hettie. Thank God she did not live to see me disgraced.

  Day three. Life goes on. The anonymous telephone calls have abated. They did not start up until first thing yesterday, after the story had appeared in the morning papers (and I thought everyone got their news these days from the telly!). I had to leave the receiver off the hook; whenever I replaced it, the damned instrument would immediately start shrilling at me, seeming to dance in rage. The callers are men, for the most part, belt-and-braces types by the sound of them, but there have been a few females as well, refined old things with gentle, reedy voices and the vocabulary of a navvy. The abuse is entirely personal. It is as if I had embezzled their pensions. At first I was polite, and even got into conversations of a sort with the less mad among them (one chap wanted to know if I had met Beria—I think he was interested in the Georgian’s love life). I should have recorded them, it would have made a revealing cross-section of the English national character. One call, however, I welcomed. She announced herself diffidently while giving the impression that she expected me to know her. And she was right: I did not recognise her name, but I remembered the voice. Which paper was it again? I asked. There was a pause. “I’m freelance,” she said. That explained why I could not find her trace in yesterday’s accounts of my press conference (my press conference!—gosh, how grand it sounds). She is called Vandeleur. I wondered if there was an Irish connection—lots of Vandeleurs in Ireland— but she says not, and even seemed a bit put out by the suggestion. The Irish are not popular these days, with IRA bombs going off in the city every other week. I have forgotten her first name. Sophie? Sibyl? Something quaintly archaic, anyway. I told her to come round in the afternoon. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Then I had an attack of the fidgets while I waited for her, and burned my hand cooking lunch (grilled lamb chop, sliced tomato, a leaf of lettuce; no booze—felt I should keep a clear head). She arrived on the dot, muffled in a big old coat that looked as if it had belonged to her father (there’s Dad again). Dark short hair like fine fur and a little heart-shaped face and tiny, cold-looking hands. She made me think of a delicate, rare, very self-possessed small animal. Josefina the Songstress. What age is she? Late twenties, early thirties. She stood in the middle of the living room, one of those little claws braced in a peculiar, old-womany way on the lacquered edge of the Japanese table, and looked about carefully, as if to memorise what she saw.

  “What a nice flat,” she said flatly. “I didn’t notice, last time.”

  “Not as nice as the flat at the Institute, where I used to live.”

  “Did you have to give it up?”

  “Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Someone died there.”

  Serena, that is her name, it has just come back to me. Serena Vandeleur. Has a ring to it, certainly.

  I took her coat, which she surrendered reluctantly, I thought. “Are you cold?” I said, playing the solicitous old gent. She shook her head. Perhaps she feels less secure without that protective paternal embrace. Though I must say she strikes me as remarkably at ease with herself. It is a little unnerving, this sense of calm that she communicates. No, communicates is the wrong word; she seems wholly self-contained. She wore a nice plain blouse and a cardigan and flat shoes, though a tight, short leather skirt lent a certain slinky raciness to the ensemble. I offered her tea but she said she would prefer a drink. That’s my girl. I said we should have some gin, which gave me an excuse to escape to the kitchen, where the sting of ice cubes and the sharp tang of limes (I always use limes in gin; so much more assertive than the dull old workaday lemon) helped me to regain something of my composure. I do not know why I was so agitated. But then, how would I not be in a state? In the past three days the tranquil pool that was my life has been churned up and all sorts of disturbing things have risen from the depths. I am beset constantly by a feeling the only name for which I can think of is nostalgia. Great hot waves of remembrance wash through me, bringing images and sensations I would have thought I had entirely forgotten or successfully extirpated, yet so sharp and vivid are they that I falter in my tracks with an inward gasp, assailed by a sort of rapturous sorrow. I tried to describe this phenomenon to Miss Vandeleur when I returned to the living room with our drinks on a tray (so much for keeping a clear head). I found her standing as before, her face inclined a little and one hand with steepled fingers pressing on the table, so still and seemingly posed that the suspicion crossed my mind that she had been searching the room and had darted back to this position only when she had heard the approaching tinkle of ice and glass. But I am sure it is just my bad mind that makes me think she had been snooping: it is the kind of thing that I used to do automatically, in the days when I had a professional interest in discovering other people’s secrets.

  “Yes,” I said, “I can’t tell you how strange it is, to be suddenly thrust into the public gaze like this.”

  She nodded distractedly; she was thinking of something else. It struck me that she was behaving oddly, for a journalist.

  We sat opposite each other by the fireplace, with our drinks, in a polite, unexpectedly easy, almost companionable silence, like two voyagers sharing a cocktail before joining the captain’s table, knowing we had a whole ocean of time before us in which to get acquainted. Miss Vandeleur studied with frank though unemphati
c interest the framed photographs on the mantelpiece: my father in his gaiters, Hettie in a hat, Blanche and Julian as children, my ill-remembered natural mother wearing silks and a lost look. “My family,” I said. “The generations.” She nodded again. It was one of those volatile April days, with enormous icebergs of silver-and-white cloud hurtling slowly across the sky above the city, bringing rapid alternations of glare and gloom, and now suddenly the sunlight in the window was switched off almost with a click and I thought for a moment I was going to cry, I could not say why, precisely, though obviously the photographs were part of it. Very alarming, it was, and a great surprise; I was never the tearful type, up to now. When was the last time that I wept? There was Patrick’s death, of course, but that does not count—death does not count, when it comes to weeping. No, I think the last time I really cried was when I went round to Vivienne’s that morning after Boy and the Dour Scot had fled. Driving like a madman through Mayfair with the wipers going full belt and then realising it wasn’t rain that was splintering my vision but salt tears. Of course, I was tight, and in an awful funk (it looked as if the whole game was up and that we would all be hauled in), but I was not accustomed to losing control of myself like that, and it was a shock. I learned some remarkable things that day, and not only about my propensity to tears.