The Untouchable

by John Banville

  Boy. I miss him, despite everything. Oh, I know, he was a clown, cruel, dishonest, slovenly, careless of himself and others, but for all that he maintained a curious kind of—what shall I call it?—a kind of grace. Yes, a kind of splendourous grace, it is not too much to say. When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences moving in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me—Matty was the possessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge—but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux’s infant school in Carrick-drum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six-year-old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child’s crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh. That was Boy. “What did I do?” he would cry, after another of his enormities had come to light, “what did I say…” And of course, everyone would have to laugh.

  Odd, but I cannot remember when I first met him. It must have been at Cambridge, yet he seems to have been always present in my life, a constant force, even in childhood. Singular though he may have seemed, I suppose he was of a type: the toddler who pinches the little girls and makes them cry, the boy at the back of the class showing off his erection under the desk, the unabashed queer who can spot instantly the queer streak in others. Despite what people may think, he and I did not have an affair. There was a drunken scuffle one night in my rooms at Trinity in the early thirties, long before I had “come out,” as they say now, that left me shaking with embarrassment and fright, though Boy shrugged it off with his usual insouciance; I recall him going down the ill-lit stairs with half his shirt-tail hanging out and smiling back at me knowingly and wagging a playful, minatory finger. While revelling in its privileges, he held the world of his parents and their circle in jocular contempt (his stepfather, I’ve just remembered, was an admiral; I must ask Miss Vandeleur if she knew that). At home he subsisted mainly on a horrible gruel-like stuff—I can smell it still—that he boiled up from oatmeal and crushed garlic, but when he went out it was always the Ritz or the Savoy, after which he would lumber into a taxi and make his raucous way down to the docks or the East End to trawl through the pubs for what with a smacking of those big lips he referred to as “likely meat.”

  He could be subtle, if subtlety was what was needed. When we joined with Alastair Sykes in the putsch on the Apostles in the summer term of 1932, Boy turned out to be not only the most energetic activist of the three of us but also the smoothest plotter. He was skilled too at curbing Alastair’s more hair-raising flights of enthusiasm. “Look here, Psyche,” he would say with cheerful firmness, “you just belt up now, like a good chap, and let Victor and me do the talking.” And Alastair, after a moment’s hesitation during which the tips of his ears would turn bright pink while his pipe belched smoke and sparks like a steam train, would meekly do as he was told, although he was the senior man. He got the credit for packing the society with our people, but I am sure it was really Boy’s doing. Boy’s charm, at once sunny and sinister, was hard to resist. (Miss Vandeleur would be agog; not much is known publicly, even still, about the Apostles, that absurd boys’ club, to which only the most gilded of Cambridge’s golden youth were admitted; being Irish and not yet queer, I had to work hard and scheme long before I managed to worm my way in.)

  The Apostles’ meetings that term were held in Alastair’s rooms; as a senior Fellow he had ampler quarters than any of the rest of us. I had met him my first year up. Those were the days when I still thought I had it in me to be a mathematician. The discipline held a deep appeal for me. Its procedures had the mark of an arcane ritual, another secret doctrine like that which I was soon to discover in Marxism. I relished the thought of being privy to a specialised language which even in its most rarefied form is an exact—well, plausible—expression of empirical reality. Mathematics speaks the world, as Alastair put it, with an uncharacteristic rhetorical flourish. Seeing the work that Alastair could do was what convinced me, more than my poor showing in the exams, that my future must lie in scholarship and not science. Alastair had the purest, most elegant intellect I have ever encountered. His father had been a docker in Liverpool, and Alastair had come up to Cambridge on a scholarship. In appearance he was a fierce, choleric little fellow with big teeth and a spiky bush of black hair standing straight up from his forehead like the bristles of a yard-brush. He favoured hob-nailed boots and shapeless jackets made from a peculiar kind of stiff, hairy tweed that might have been run up specially for him. That first year we were inseparable. It was a strange liaison, I suppose; what we shared most deeply, though we would never dream of speaking of it openly, was that we both felt keenly the insecurity of being outsiders. One of the wits dubbed us Jekyll and Hyde, and no doubt we did look an ill-assorted pair, I the gangling youth with pointed nose and already pronounced stoop loping across Great Court pursued by the little man in the boots, his stumpy legs going like a pair of blunt scissors and tobacco pipe fuming. It was the theoretical side of mathematics that interested me, but Alastair had a genius for application. He adored gadgets. At Bletchley Park during the war he found his true and perfect place. “It was like coming home,” he told me afterwards, his eyes shiny with misery. That was in the fifties, the last time I saw him. He had fallen into an enticement trap in the gents in Piccadilly Circus and was due in court the following week. The heavies from the Department had been tormenting him, he knew he could expect no mercy. He would not go to prison: on the eve of his court appearance he injected cyanide into an apple (a Cox’s pippin, the report said; very scrupulous, the heavies) and ate it. Another uncharacteristic flourish. I wonder where he got the poison, not to mention the needle? I had not even known that he was queer. Perhaps he had not known it himself, before that jug-eared copper with his trousers round his ankles beckoned to him from his stall. Poor Psyche. I imagine him in the weeks before he died, lying between army-surplus blankets in that dreary bedsit he had off the Cromwell Road, miserably turning over the ruins of his life. He had broken some of the most difficult of the German army’s codes, thus saving God knows how many Allied lives, yet they hounded him to death. And they call me a traitor. Could I have done something for him, pulled a few strings, put a word in with the internal security people? The thought gnaws at me.

  Alastair, now, Alastair had read the sacred texts. Whatever scraps of theory I knew, I learned from him. The cause of Ireland was his great enthusiasm. His Irish mother had made him into a Sinn Feiner. Like me, he regretted that it was in Russia the Revolution had occurred, but I could not agree with him that Ireland would have been a more congenial battleground; the notion seemed to me utterly risible. He had even taught himself the Irish language, and could swear in it—though to my ears, I confess, the language in general sounds like a string of softly vehement oaths strung haphazardly together. He berated me for my lack of patriotism, and called me a dirty Unionist, not wholly in jest. However, when I asked him one day for specific details of his knowledge of my country he grew evasive, and when I pressed him he blushed—those reddening ears—and admitted that in fact he had never set foot in Ireland.

  He did not much care for the company of the majority of the Apostles, with their plush accents and aesthete manners. “You could be speaking in bloody code, you lot, when you get started,” he complained, digging a blackened thumb into the burning dottle of his pipe. “Bloody public schoolboys.” I used to laugh at him, with not much malice, but Boy gave him an awful time, mimicking perfectly his Scouse accent and bullying him into drinking too much beer. Alastair thought Boy was not sufficiently serious about the cause, and considered him—with remarkable prescience, as it turned out—to be a security risk. “That Banni
ster,” he would mutter angrily, “he’ll get us all shopped.”

  Here is a snapshot from the bulging album I keep in my head. It is sometime in the thirties. Tea, thick sandwiches and thin beer, the sun of April on Trinity court. A dozen Apostles—some Fellows, such as Alastair and myself, a couple of nondescript dons, one or two earnest postgraduate scholars, every one of us a devout Marxist—are sitting about in Alastair’s big gloomy living room. We favoured dark jackets and fawn bags and open-necked white shirts, except for Leo Rothenstein, always suavely magnificent in his Savile Row blazers. Boy was more flamboyant: I recall crimson ties and purple waistcoats and, on this occasion, plus-fours in a bright-green check. He is pacing up and down the room, dropping cigarette ash on the threadbare carpet, telling us, as I have heard him tell many times before, of the event that, so he insisted, had made him a homosexual.

  “God, it was frightful! There she was, poor Mother, flat on her back with her legs in the air, shrieking, and my huge father lying naked on top of her, dead as a doornail. I had the hell of a job getting him off her. The smells! Twelve years old, I was. Haven’t been able to look at a woman since without seeing Mater’s big white breasts, colour of a fish’s belly. The paps that gave me suck. In dreams those nipples still stare up at me cock-eyed. No Oedipus I, or Hamlet, either, that’s certain. When she threw off her widow’s weeds and remarried I felt only relief.”

  I used to divide people into two sorts, those who were shocked by Boy’s stories and those who were not, though I could never decide which was the more reprehensible half. Alastair had begun to huff and puff. “Look here, we’ve got a motion before us which we should consider. Spain is going to be the next theatre of operations”—Alastair, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, had a great fondness for military jargon— “and we’ve got to decide where we stand.”

  Leo Rothenstein laughed. “That’s obvious, surely? We’re hardly in favour of the Fascists.” At the age of twenty-one Leo had come into an inheritance of two million, along with Maule Park and a mansion in Portman Square.

  Alastair fussed with his pipe; he disliked Leo and was at pains to hide the fact, afraid of being thought an anti-Semite.

  “But the point is,” he said, “will we fight?”

  It strikes me how much talk of fighting there was throughout the thirties, among our set, at least. Did the appeasers talk about appeasement with the same passion, I wonder?

  “Don’t be a fathead,” Boy said. “Uncle Joe won’t let it come to that.”

  A chap called Wilkins, I’ve forgotten his first name, weedy type with glasses and a bad case of psoriasis, who was to die at El Alamein in command of a tank, turned from the window with a glass of beer in his fist and said:

  “According to a man I spoke to the other day who’s been over there, Uncle Joe has too much of a job on his hands trying to feed the masses at home to think of sending aid abroad.”

  A silence followed. Bad form on Wilkins’s part: we did not speak of the Comrades’ difficulties. Doubt was a bourgeois self-indulgence. Then Boy gave a nasty little laugh. “Surprising,” he said, “how some of us can’t recognise propaganda when we hear it,” and Wilkins threw him a baleful look and turned back to the window.

  Spain, the kulaks, the machinations of the Trotskyites, racial violence in the East End—how antique it all seems now, almost quaint, and yet how seriously we took ourselves and our place on the world stage. I often have the idea that what drove those of us who went on to become active agents was the burden of deep—of intolerable—embarrassment that the talk-drunk thirties left us with. The beer, the sandwiches, the sunlight on the cobbles, the aimless walks in shadowed lanes, the sudden, always amazing fact of sex—a whole world of privilege and assurance, all going on, while elsewhere millions were preparing to die. How could we have borne the thought of all that and not—

  But no. It will not do. These fine sentiments will not do. I have told myself already, I must not attempt to impose retrospective significance on what we were and did. Is it that I believed in something then and now believe in nothing? Or that even then I only believed in the belief, out of longing, out of necessity? The latter, surely. The wave of history rolled over us, as it rolled over so many others of our kind, leaving us quite dry.

  “Oh, Uncle Joe is sound,” Boy was saying. “Quite sound.”

  They are all dead: Boy the outrageous, Leo and his millions, Wilkins the sceptic, burnt to a cinder in his sardine tin in the desert. I ask again: have I lived at all?

  3

  I do not think I can continue to call this a journal, for it is certainly more than a record of my days, which, anyway, now that the furore has died down, are hardly distinguishable one from another. Call it a memoir, then; a scrapbook of memories. Or go the whole hog and call it an autobiography, notes toward. Miss Vandeleur would be upset if she knew I was pre-empting her. She came round this morning to ask me about my visit to Spain with Nick at Easter in 1936. (How portentous and stirring a mere date can be: Easter, 1936!) The things she wants to know about surprise me. I could understand if she were eager for details of my adventures in Germany in 1945, say, or of the exact nature of my relations with Mrs. W. and her ma (which fascinates everyone), but no, it is the ancient history that she is after.

  Spain. Now there’s ancient, all right. A hateful country. I recall rain, and a dispiriting smell everywhere, that seemed a mixture of semen and mildew. There were wall-posters, the hammer and sickle on every street corner, and violent-looking young men in red shirts whose flat, weathered features and evasive glances reminded me of the tinkers who in my childhood used to go about Carrickdrum selling tin cans and leaky saucepans. The Prado of course was a revelation, the Goyas hair-raisingly prophetic in their blood and muck, El Greco frightened out of his wits. I preferred the Zurbaráns, haunting in their stillness, their transcendent mundanity. In Seville in Holy Week we stood glumly in the rain watching a procession of penitents, a spectacle from which my Protestant soul recoiled. A deposition scene was borne aloft on a litter, shaded from the rain by a tasseled baldachin of gold brocade; the plaster Christ, laid out naked at his mother’s plaster feet, was a faintly obscene, orgasmic figure (after The Greek—a long way after), with creamy skin and agonised mouth and copiously spouting wounds. When this thing appeared, swaying and lurching, two or three elderly men near us fell to their knees, making a noise like that of collapsing deckchairs, crossing themselves rapidly, in a kind of holy terror, and one of them with surprising nimbleness ducked under the litter to lend it a supporting shoulder. I remember too a young woman stepping out of the crowd and handing to one of the black-mantillaed penitents—her mother or her aunt—a gaudy red-and-white striped umbrella. At Algeciras we watched the gratifying and thrilling spectacle of a mob desecrating a church and stoning the town’s mayor, a portly man with a shiny, brown bald head, who fled from his tormentors at a rapid walk, trying to hold on to his dignity. Rain rattled in the palm trees and a quicksilver bolt of lightning rent the glans-brown sky above the railway station. Peeling wall-posters flapped in a sudden wind. Later we tried to cross the border but found Gibraltar shut for the night. The inn at La Linea was filthy. I lay awake for a long time listening to the dogs yapping and a wireless set somewhere muttering of war, and watched the rain-light’s faint phosphorescence playing over Nick’s uncovered back where he lay prone and snoring softly on the narrow bed a mile away from me at the other side of the room. His skin had a thick, faintly slimed look to it; I thought of the Saviour’s statue. Next day we took ship for England. There were dolphins in the Strait, and in the Bay of Biscay I was sick.

  Will that do, Miss V.?

  I have been finding out a little more about her. It is difficult, for she is almost more secretive than I am. I feel like a restorer chipping away the varnish from a damaged portrait. Damaged? Why did I say damaged? There is something about her reticence, her profound, stalled silences, that bespeaks a deep-seated constraint. She is too old for her years. I have the sense o
f an ineradicable disaffection for things in general. She keeps reminding me of Baby—those silences, the bruised eyes, that surly stare she directs at inanimate objects—and certainly Baby was damaged. When I asked Miss Vandeleur this morning if she lived alone she did not answer, and pretended that she had not heard me, then later on suddenly began to tell me about her young man, with whom she shares a flat in Golders Green (another of my old haunts, by the way). He is a mechanic, in a garage. Sounds like rough trade to me; now I understand the leather skirt. I wonder what the Admiral thinks of this ménage? Or does anyone care about such matters any more? She complained of the rigours of the Northern Line. I told her I had not been on an Underground train in thirty years and she ducked her head and glared resentfully at my hands.

  The morning was warm enough for us to have tea on the back balcony. That is, she had tea while I had a small glass of something, despite the early hour. She makes me jittery, I have to take a little fortification when dealing with her. (Balconies make me jittery too, but that is another matter. Patrick! My Patsy, poor Pat.) Besides, at my age I can drink at any hour of the day without the need of an excuse; I foresee a time when I shall be breakfasting on cocktails of gin and Complan. From the balcony we could just see the tops of the trees in the park. They are at their loveliest stage just now, the black boughs lightly dusted with the most delicate puffs of green. I remarked how the city’s pollution imparts to the sky a wonderful depth of colour, like that dense, gulp-inducing blue you see when the aeroplane banks and you peer up into nothingness. Miss Vandeleur was not listening. She sat on the other side of the little metal table, slumped in her greatcoat and frowning into her cup.

  “Was he a Marxist?” she asked. “Sir Nicholas?”

  I had to think for a second who it was she meant.