The Untouchable

by John Banville

  Miss Vandeleur had taken on a grey look and was huddling rather in her chair. “But you are cold,” I said, and despite her protests that she was perfectly comfortable I got down on one knee, which startled her and made her shrink back—she must have thought I was going to kneel before her and blurt out some ghastly, final confession and swear her to secrecy—but it was only to light the gas fire. It uttered its gratifying whumpf and did that little trick of sucking the flame from the match, then the delicate filigree of wires glowed and the ashy waffle behind them began slowly to turn blush-pink. I have a great fondness for such humble gadgets: scissors, tin-openers, adjustable reading lamps, even the flush toilet. They are the unacknowledged props of civilisation.

  “Why did you do it?” Miss Vandeleur said.

  I was in the process of rising creakily from that genuflexion, one hand on a quivering knee, the other pressed to the small of my back, and I almost fell over. But it was a not unreasonable question, in the circumstances, and one which, curiously enough, none of her colleagues had thought to ask. I slumped into my armchair with a laughing sigh and shook my head.

  “Why?” I said. “Oh, cowboys and indians, my dear; cowboys and indians.” It was true, in a way. The need for amusement, the fear of boredom: was the whole thing much more than that, really, despite all the grand theorising? “And hatred of America, of course,” I added, a trifle jadedly, I fear; the poor old Yanks are by now a rather moth-eaten bugbear. “You must understand, the American occupation of Europe was to many of us not much less of a calamity than a German victory would have been. The Nazis at least were a clear and visible enemy. Men enough to be damned, to paraphrase Eliot.” At that I gave her a twinkly smile: wise age acknowledges educated youth. I stood up with my drink and walked to the window: sun-polished slates, a skittle-stand of blackened chimney pots, television aerials like a jumbled alphabet consisting mainly of aitches. “The defence of European culture—”

  “But you were,” she said evenly, interrupting me, “a spy before the war. Weren’t you?”

  Now, such words—spy, agent, espionage, etc.—have always given me trouble. They conjure in my mind images of low taverns and cobbled laneways at night with skulking figures in doublet and hose and the flash of poniards. I could never think of myself as a part of that dashing, subfusc world. Boy, now, Boy had a touch of the Kit Marlowes about him, all right, but I was a dry old stick, even when I was young. I was what was needed, someone safe to chivvy the rest of them along, to look after them and wipe their noses and make sure they didn’t run out into the traffic, but now I cannot help wondering if I sacrificed too much of myself to the… I suppose I must call it the cause. Did I squander my life on the gathering and collating of trivial information? The thought leaves me breathless.

  “I was a connoisseur, you know, before I was anything else,” I said. I had turned from the window. She was sitting with shoulders hunched, gazing into the pallid flame of the gas fire. In my glass an ice cube cracked with an agonised plink. “Art was all that ever mattered to me,” I said. “I even tried to be a painter, in my student days. Oh yes. Modest little still-lifes, blue jugs and violent tulips, that kind of thing. I dared to hang one in my rooms at Cambridge. A friend looked at it and pronounced me the finest lady painter since Raoul Dufy.” That was Boy, of course. That wide, cruel, voracious smile. “So you have before you, my dear,” I said, “a failed artist, like so many other egregious scoundrels: Nero, half the Medicis, Stalin, the unspeakable Herr Schicklgruber.” I could see that last one passing her by.

  I returned and sat down again in the armchair. She was still gazing into the undulating pale flame of the fire. She had hardly touched her drink. I wondered what it could be that she was pondering with such concentration. Time passed. The gas flame hissed. Sunlight came and went in the window. Idly I admired the little Bonington watercolour behind her, one of my few genuine treasures: oyster-shell mud and a fried-rasher sky, fisher-lads in the foreground, a distant, lofty barquentine with sails furled. At last she raised her eyes and met mine. That inner struggle she had been engaged upon had given her the drawn look of a Carracci madonna. She must have taken my Bonington ogle—Nick always said I looked positively coital when contemplating a picture—for a benison directed upon her, for suddenly she decided to come clean.

  “I’m not really a journalist,” she said.

  “I know.” I smiled at her surprise. “Takes one deceiver to recognise another. Did Skryne send you?”

  She frowned. “Who?”

  “Just one of my keepers.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head violently and twisting the gin glass in her fingers, “no, I’m… I’m a writer. I want to write a book on you.”

  Oh dear. Another contemporary historian. I suppose my face must have fallen, for she launched at once defensively into a stumbling account of herself and her plans. I hardly listened.

  What did I care for her theories on the connection between espionage and the bogus concept of the English gentleman (“I’m not English,” I reminded her, but she took no notice) or the malign influence on my generation of the nihilistic aesthetics of Modernism? I wanted to tell her about the blade of sunlight cleaving the velvet shadows of the public urinal that post-war spring afternoon in Regensburg, of the incongruous gaiety of the rain shower that fell the day of my father’s funeral, of that last night with Boy when I saw the red ship under Blackfriars Bridge and conceived of the tragic significance of my life: in other words, the real things; the true things.

  “Do you know philosophy?” I asked. “I mean ancient philosophy. The Stoics: Zeno, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius?” Cautiously she shook her head. She was plainly baffled by this turn in the conversation. “I used to consider myself a Stoic,” I said. “In fact, I was quite proud to think of myself thus.” I put down my glass and joined my fingers at their tips and gazed off in the direction of the window, where light and shade were still jostling for position. I was born to be a lecturer. “The Stoics denied the concept of progress. There might be a little advance here, some improvement there—cosmology in their time, dentistry in ours—but in the long run the balance of things, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, remains constant. Periodically, at the end of aeons, the world is destroyed in a holocaust of fire and then everything starts up again, just as before. This pre-Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence I have always found greatly comforting, not because I look forward to returning again and again to live my life over, but because it drains events of all consequence while at the same time conferring on them the numinous significance that derives from fixity, from completedness. Do you see?” I smiled my kindliest smile. Her mouth had fallen open a tiny way and I had an urge to reach out a finger and tip it shut again. “And then one day I read, I can’t remember where, an account of a little exchange between Josef Mengele and a Jewish doctor whom he had salvaged from the execution line to assist him in his experiments at Auschwitz. They were in the operating theatre. Mengele was working on a pregnant woman, whose legs he had bound together at the knees prior to inducing the onset of the birth of her child, without the benefit of anaesthetics, of course, which were much too valuable to waste on Jews. In the lulls between the mother’s shrieks, Mengele discoursed on the vast project of the Final Solution: the numbers involved, the technology, the logistical problems, and so on. How long, the Jewish doctor ventured to ask—he must have been a courageous man—how long would the exterminations go on? Mengele, apparently not at all surprised or put out by the question, smiled gently and without looking up from his work said, Oh, they will go on, and on, and on… And it struck me that Dr. Mengele was also a Stoic, just like me. I had not realised until then how broad a church it was that I belonged to.”

  I liked the quality of the silence that fell, or rather rose—for silence rises, surely?—when I ceased speaking. At the end of a well-made period I always have a sense of ease, a sort of blissful settling back, my mind folding its arms, as it were, and smiling to itself
in quiet satisfaction. It is a sensation known to all mental athletes, I am sure, and for me was one of the chief pleasures of the lecture hall, not to mention debriefings (a term that never failed to elicit a chuckle from Boy). It rather took the shine off my bliss, however, when Miss Vandeleur, of whose mousy yet persistent presence I was beginning to tire slightly, mumbled something about not having known the Stoics were a church. Young people are so literal-minded.

  I stood up. “Come,” I said to her, “I want you to see something.”

  We went through to the study. I could hear her leather skirt creaking as she walked behind me. When she first arrived she had told me her father was an admiral, and I had misheard her to say that her father was admirable. Although this piece of filial piety had struck me as disconcertingly supererogatory, I had hastened to assure her that I had no doubt that he was. There followed an inadvertently comic exchange which at the end subsided into one of those awful, sweaty silences that such glimpses of the world’s essential absurdity always provoke. I remember at one of Mrs. W.’s stiflingly grand occasions conversing with the lady herself as we made our way slowly up an interminable, red-carpeted staircase behind the ample back parts of the Dowager Duchess of Somewhere, and both of us noticing at the same instant, what the Duchess herself was magnificently unaware of, that on her way into the Palace she had trod in corgi-shit. At moments like that I always felt grateful for the difficulties of leading a multiple life, which lent a little weight to matters, or at least provided something for the mind to turn to in a time of need. As a child at school, when I had to keep myself from laughing in the face of a bully or a particularly mad master, I would concentrate on the thought of death; it always worked, and would still, I’m sure, if there were need.

  “Here,” I said, “is my treasure, the touchstone and true source of my life’s work.”

  It is a curious phenomenon, that paintings are always larger in my mind than in reality—I mean literally larger, in their physical dimensions. This is true even of works with which I am thoroughly intimate, including my Death of Seneca, which I have lived with for nigh on fifty years. I know its size, I know, empirically, that the canvas is seventeen and a quarter inches by twenty-four, yet when I encounter it again even after a brief interval I have the uncanny sense that it has shrunk, as if I were viewing it through the wrong side of a lens, or standing a few paces farther back from it than I really am. The effect is disconcerting, as when you go to the Bible and discover that the entire story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, say, is dispatched in a handful of verses. Now as always the picture did its trick and for a moment as I stood before it with Miss Vandeleur intermittently creaking at my side it seemed diminished not only in scale but in—how shall I say?—in substance, and I experienced a strange little flicker of distress, which, however, I do not think was detectable in my tone; anyway, persons of her age are impervious to the tics and twitches by which the old betray the pain of their predicament.

  “The subject,” I said, in what I think of as my Expounding Voice, “is the suicide of Seneca the Younger in the year A.D. 65. See his grieving friends and family about him as his life’s blood drips into the golden bowl. There is the officer of the Guard—Gavius Silvanus, according to Tacitus—who has unwillingly conveyed the imperial death sentence. Here is Pompeia Paulina, the philosopher’s young wife, ready to follow her husband into death, baring her breast to the knife. And notice, here in the background, in this farther room, the servant girl filling the bath in which presently the philosopher will breathe his last. Is it not all admirably executed? Seneca was a Spaniard and was brought up in Rome. Among his works are the Consolationes, the Epistolae morales, and The Apocolocyntosis, or ‘Pumpkinification,’ of the Divine Claudius—this last, as you may guess, is a satire. Although he professed to despise the things of this world, he still managed to amass an enormous fortune, much of it derived from moneylending in Britain; the historian Dio Cassius says that the excessive interest rates charged by Seneca was one of the causes of the revolt of the Britons against the occupier—which means, as Lord Russell has wittily pointed out, that Queen Boadicea’s rebellion was directed against capitalism as represented by the Roman Empire’s leading philosophical proponent of austerity. Such are the ironies of history.” I stole a sideways glance at Miss Vandeleur; her eyes were beginning to glaze; I was wearing her down nicely. “Seneca fell foul of Claudius’s successor, the aforementioned Nero, whose tutor he had been. He was accused of conspiracy, and was ordered to commit suicide, which he did, with great fortitude and dignity.” I gestured at the picture before us. For the first time it occurred to me to wonder if the painter was justified in portraying the scene with such tranquillity, such studied calm. Again the shiver of disquiet. In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt? “Baudelaire,” I said, and this time I did seem to detect the tiniest quaver in my voice, “Baudelaire described Stoicism as a religion with only one sacrament: suicide.”

  At this, Miss Vandeleur suddenly gave a sort of shudder, like a pony balking at a jump.

  “Why are you doing this?” she said thickly.

  I looked at her with a mildly enquiring frown. She stood with her fists clenched in front of her hip bones and her little face thrust forward, sulky-sullen, glaring at an ivory paperknife on my desk. Not so serene after all.

  “Why am I doing what, my dear?”

  “I know how well read you are,” she said, almost spitting, “I know how cultured you are.”

  She made the word sound like an ailment. I thought: she can’t be from Skryne, he would never send someone with so little self-control. After a beat of flushed silence I said softly:

  “In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.”

  Still fixed on that paperknife, she set her lips so tightly they turned white, and gave her head a quick, stubborn little shake, and I thought, almost with fondness, of Vivienne, my sometime wife, who was the only supposedly grown-up person I ever knew who used actually to stamp her foot when she was angry.

  “There are,” she said, in a surprisingly restrained tone, “there are simple questions; there are answers. Why did you spy for the Russians? How did you get away with it? What did you think you would achieve by betraying your country and your country’s interests? Or was it because you never thought of this as your country? Was it because you were Irish and hated us?”

  And at last she turned her head and looked at me. What fire! I would never have expected it. Her father, the admirable Admiral, would be proud of her. I looked away from her, smiling my weary smile, and considered The Death of Seneca. How superbly executed are the folds of the dying man’s robe, polished, smooth and dense as fluted sandstone, yet wonderfully delicate, too, like one of the philosopher’s own carven paragraphs. (I must have the picture valued. Not that I would dream of selling it, of course, but just now I find myself in need of financial reassurance.)

  “Not the Russians,” I murmured.

  I could feel her blink. “What?”

  “I did not spy for the Russians,” I said. “I spied for Europe. A much broader church.”

  This really is the most unsettling weather. Just now out of nowhere a violent shower started up, pelting big fat splatters against the windows in which the watercolour sunlight shines unabated. I should not like just yet to leave this world, so tender and accommodating even in the midst of its storms. The doctors tell me they got all of it and that there is no sign of any new malignancy. I am in remission. I feel I have been in remission all my life.

  2

  My father was a great bird’s-nester. I could never learn the trick of it. On Sunday mornings in springtime he would take Freddie and me walking with him in the fields above Carrickdrum. I imagine he was escaping those of his parishioners— he was still rector then—who made it a practice to call to the house after service, the boisterously unhappy country wives
in their pony-and-traps, the working people from the back streets of the town, the glittery-eyed mad spinsters who spent their weekdays doing sentry-go behind lace-curtained windows in the villas on the seafront. I wish I could describe these outings as occasions of familial conviviality, with my father discoursing to his wide-eyed sons on the ways and wiles of Mother Nature, but in fact he rarely spoke, and I suspect he was for the most part forgetful of the two little boys scrambling desperately over rock and thorn to keep up with him. It was rough country up there, skimpy bits of field isolated between outcrops of bare grey stone, with whin bushes and the odd stand of mountain ash deformed by the sea gales. I do not know why my father insisted on bringing Freddie with us, for he always grew agitated in those uplands, especially on windy days, and went along uttering little moos of distress and tearing at the skin around his fingernails and gnawing at his lips until they bled. At the farthest limit of our trek, however, we would come down into a little hollow ringed by rocks, a miniature valley, with meadow-grass and gorse bushes and banks of hawthorn, where all was still and hummingly silent, and where even Freddie grew calm, or as near to calm as he ever got. Here my father, in plus-fours and gaiters and an old fawn pullover and still wearing his dog collar, would stop suddenly, with a hand lifted, hearkening to I do not know what secret signal or vibration of the air, and then strike off from the path and approach this or that bush, with surprising lightness of tread for such a large-made man, and carefully part the leaves and peer in and smile. I remember it, that smile. There was simple delight in it, of course—it made him look as I imagined Freddie would have looked if he had not been a half-wit—but also a sort of grim, sad triumph, as if he had caught out the Creator in some impressive yet essentially shoddy piece of fakery. Then with a finger to his lips he would beckon us forward and lift us up one after the other to see what he had discovered: a finch’s or a blackbird’s nest, sometimes with the bird herself still on it, throbbing tinily and looking up at us in dull fright, as at the side-by-side big faces of God and his son. Not the birds, though, but the eggs, were what fascinated me. Pale blue or speckled white, they lay there in the scooped hollow of the nest, closed, inexplicable, packed with their own fullness. I felt that if I took one in my hand, which my father would never have permitted me to do, it would be too heavy for me to hold, like a piece of matter from a planet far more dense than this one. What was most striking about them was their difference. They were like themselves and nothing else. And in this extreme of selfness they rebuked all that stood round about, the dissolute world of bush and briar and riotous green leaf. They were the ultimate artefact. When I first spotted The Death of Seneca, shining amidst the dross in the back room at Alighieri’s, I thought at once of those Sunday mornings of my childhood, and of my father with infinite delicacy parting the foliage and showing me these fragile and yet somehow indestructible treasures nestling at the heart of the world.