The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “Have you seen Bannister recently?” Querell asked now, still with his eye on the waitress’s crooked seams. “I hear he’s taken up with the Fascists.”

  Boy was working at the BBC, in charge of what he portentously referred to as Talks. He was endearingly proud of this job, and regaled us with stories about Lord Reith and his boyfriends, which at the time we refused to believe. By then he too was with the Department; after Munich, pretty well everyone in our set had joined the Secret Service, or been press-ganged into it. I imagine we were not unaware that intelligence work was likely to be far preferable to soldiering—or am I being unfair to us? Boy took to his undercover role with childish enthusiasm. He would always love the secret life, and missed it painfully after he defected. He enjoyed especially the role-playing; for cover, he had lately joined a Tory ginger group of Nazi sympathisers calling itself the Chain (“I’m pulling the Chain for Uncle Joe,” was Boy’s catchphrase), and had attached himself to a notorious pro-Hitler MP called Richard Someone, I have forgotten the name, an ex-Guards officer and a lunatic, for whom he was acting (the right word) as unofficial private secretary. His chief duty, he told us, was to be a pander for the Captain, who had an insatiable appetite for working-class young men. Recently Boy and his mad Captain had undertaken a jaunt to the Rhineland, escorting a band of schoolboys from the East End on a visit to a Hitler Youth camp. It was the kind of preposterous thing that went on in the run-up to war. The pair had returned in ecstasies (“Oh, those blond beasts!”), though Captain Dick had contracted a painful dose of anal thrush; not so clean-limbed after all, die Hitlerjugend.

  “The best part of the joke,” I said, “is that the trip was sponsored by the Foreign Relations Council of the Church of England!”

  Querell did not laugh, only gave me one of his swift, bug-eyed glances, which always made me feel as if a bottle had been rolled across my face, the way at country house parties they used to roll empty champagne bottles over the ballroom floors to impart a final polishing (ah, the days of our youth—the youth of the world!).

  “Maybe you should have gone with them,” he said.

  That gave me pause. I could feel myself beginning to redden.

  “Not my kind of thing, old boy,” I said, meaning it to come out lazy and insolent, though it sounded, to my own ears, incriminatingly prim. I passed on quickly. “Boy says the Krauts have finished rearming and are just waiting for the word.”

  Querell shrugged. “Well, we hardly needed to send a pansy over to find out that for us, did we.”

  “He and the Captain were shown around an aerodrome. Line upon line of Messerschmitts, all pointing at us.”

  We were silent. In the traffic noise from the street outside I seemed to hear the whirr of propellers, and I shivered with eager anticipation: let it come, let it all come! Querell looked idly about the room. At the table next to us a fat man in a greasy suit was speaking vehemently in a low voice to a wan young woman with hennaed hair—his daughter, it seemed—telling her in a level undertone that she was nothing but a tart; they were to turn up again a couple of years later, disguised as a Jewish refugee and his doomed young wife, on board The Orient Express, the first of Querell’s overrated Balkan thrillers.

  “I wonder if we shall survive,” Querell said. “All this, I mean.” He waved a hand, taking in the other tables, and the waitress, and the woman at the cash register, and the fat man and his miserable daughter, and, beyond them, England.

  “What if we don’t?” I said, cautiously. “Something better might take our place.”

  “You want Hitler to win?”

  “Not Hitler, no.”

  It is hard now to recapture the peculiar thrill of moments such as that, when one risked everything on a throwaway remark. It was akin to the rush of vertiginous glee I felt when I made my first parachute jump. There was the same sensation of being light as air and yet far weightier, of far more significance, somehow, than a mere mortal should ever expect to be. Thus a minor god might feel, flying down from the clouds to try out a disguise on one of Arcady’s more experienced nymphs. We sat, Querell and I, unspeaking, looking at each other. That was another thing about those moments of absolute risk: the powerful, charged neutrality that took over one’s facial expressions and one’s tone of voice. When I met T. S. Eliot at a Palace function after the war, I recognised at once in that shadowed, camel-eyed gaze and timbreless voice the marks of the lifelong, obsessive dissembler.

  Querell was the first to look away; the moment passed.

  “Well,” he said, “it hardly matters who wins, since it will be left to the Yanks as usual to come in and mop up after us.”

  We went off then and got drunk together at the Gryphon. When I look back, I am surprised at how much time I have spent in Querell’s company over the years. There was no warmth between us, and we had few interests in common. His Catholicism was as incomprehensible to me as he claimed my Marxism was to him; though each was a believer, neither could credit the other’s faith. Yet there was a bond of some sort between us. Ours was like one of those odd attachments at school, when two unlovely misfits sidle up to each other out of mutual need and form a sort of humid, hapless friendship. The Gryphon and the George were our version of the trees behind the playing fields, where we could sit through long hours of shared melancholy in a haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, indulging in occasional rancorous exchanges, and glaring and grinning at our fellow drinkers. Being with Querell was, for me, a kind of slumming. I did not subscribe—in those days, anyway—to his Manichean version of the world, yet I found myself drawn to the idea of it, this dark, befouled yet curiously dauntless place through which he slouched, always alone, with a fag in his mouth and his hat raked to the side and one hand ever ready in his jacket pocket, cradling that imaginary gun.

  It was a tumultuous evening. After the Gryphon, when we were good and soused, we collected his Riley from the RAC garage and drove to an awful dive somewhere off the Edgware Road. Querell had said the place specialised in child prostitutes. There was a low basement room that smelled of carbolic, with a balding, red-velvet sofa and spindle-backed cane chairs and brown lino on the floor scarred from trodden-on cigarette butts. A feebly burning table lamp wore a crooked shade the stuff of which had the uncanny look of dried human skin. The girls sitting about vacantly in their slips had ceased being children a long time ago. The couple who ran the place were out of a seaside postcard, she a big blancmange with a wig of brass curls, he a lean little whippet of a fellow with a Hitler tash and a tic in one eye. Mrs. Gill kept sweeping in and out of the room like a watchful duenna, while Adolf plied us with brown ale, scurrying about at a crouch with a tin tray expertly balanced on the bunched fingers of his left hand while with his right he deftly distributed bottles and grimed glasses. It all seemed to me very jolly, in a bleary, sin-soaked, Stanley Spencerish sort of way (Belshazzar’s Feast at Cookham). I found myself sitting with a freckled, red-haired girl perched on my lap in the attitude of an overgrown infant, her head resting awkwardly on my shoulder and her knees braced sideways against my chest, while under us the cane chair cackled scornfully to itself. She told me with great pride that her mam and dad had once been Pearly King and Queen (do they still have that custom?), and offered to suck me off for ten bob. I fell asleep, or passed out briefly, and when I came to, the girl was gone, and so were her companions, and Querell, too, though presently he reappeared, with a strand of his thin, oiled hair hanging down his forehead; I found it very worrying, that bit of discomposure in one usually so fanatically shined and smoothed.

  We left, and climbed the basement steps to the street, not without difficulty, and found that it was raining heavily—what a surprise the weather always is when one is drunk—and Querell said he knew another place where there were definitely children for sale, and when I said I had no wish to sleep with a child he went into a sulk and refused to drive the car, so I took the keys from him, although I had never driven before, and we jerked and juddered off through the ra
in in the direction of Soho, I leaning forward anxiously with my nose almost touching the streaming windscreen, and Querell slumped beside me in wordless anger, his arms furiously folded. I was so drunk by now I could not focus properly and had to keep one eye shut in order to stop the white line in the middle of the road from splitting in two. Before I knew where I was going we had pulled up outside Leo Rothenstein’s house in Poland Street, where Nick was already living-most of us would lodge there, on and off, in the coming years; it was what would nowadays be called a commune, I suppose. There was a light in Nick’s window. Querell leaned on the bell-by now he had forgotten whatever it was he had been sulking about—while I stood with my face uplifted to the rain, declaiming Blake:

  Awake! awake 0 sleeper of the fond of shadows, wake! expand!

  Nick opened a window and stuck out his head and swore at us. “For Christ’s sake, go home, Victor, there’s a good chap.” He came down, however, and let us in. He was in evening dress, looking very pale and satanic. We followed him up the narrow stairs, bumping from banisters to wall and back again, and Querell took up the refrain of Jerusalem:I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:Fibres of love from man to man thro’ Albion’s pleasant land.

  In the flat a small after-party party was in progress. Boy was there, and Abercrombie the poet, and Lady Mary Somebody, and the Lydon sisters. They had been to a party at the Rothenstein mansion in Portman Square (Why wasn’t I invited?) and were finishing a magnum of champagne. Querell and I stopped in the doorway and goggled at them.

  “I say,” I said, “you all do look splendid.”

  And they did: like a flock of languorous penguins.

  Nick did his nasty laugh.

  “How English you’re coming to sound, Vic,” he said. “Quite the native.”

  He knew very well how much I hated to be called Vic. Querell drew a bead on him and in a slurred voice said, “At least he didn’t come here via Palestine.”

  The Lydon sisters giggled.

  Nick fetched a couple of beer glasses from the kitchen and poured a gulp of champagne into each. Now I noticed for the first time, sitting in an armchair in a corner, ankle crossed on knee, an unknown yet disturbingly familiar, delicate youth in a silk evening suit, with brilliantined hair brushed tightly back, smoking a cigarette and watching me with cool amusement out of shadowed eyes.

  “Hello, Victor,” this person said. “You look somewhat the worse for wear.”

  It was Baby. The others laughed at my astonishment.

  “Dodo here bet her a gallon of bubbly she couldn’t get away with it,” Nick said. Lady Mary—Dodo—clasped her hands in her lap and drew her thin shoulders together and put on an expression of comic ruefulness. Nick made a face at her. “She lost,” he said. “It was the damnedest thing. Even Leo didn’t recognise her.”

  “And I made a pass at her,” Boy said. “So that will tell you.”

  More laughter. Nick crossed the room with the champagne bottle.

  “Come on, old girl,” he said, “we’ve got to finish up your winnings.”

  Baby, still with her eyes on me, lifted her glass to be filled. Dark-blue velvet curtains were drawn over the tall window behind her chair, and on a low table a clutch of washed-pink roses was expiring in a copper bowl, the packed petals heavy and limp as wetted cloth. The room shrank, became a long, low box, like the inside of something, a camera, or a magic lantern. I stood and swayed, with champagne bubbles detonating in my nostrils, and, as I watched them, in my poor fuddled vision brother and sister seemed to merge and separate and merge again, dark on dark and pale on glimmering pale, Pierrot and Pierrette. Nick glanced at me and smiled and said:

  “Better sit down, Victor, you have a distinct look of Ben Turpin.”

  A blank then, and then I am sitting on the floor, beside Baby’s chair, my legs crossed under me tailor-fashion and my chin practically leaning on the armrest beside her suddenly significant hand with its short, fatly tapering fingers and blood-red nails; I want to take each one of those fingers between my lips and suck and suck until the painted nails turn transparent as fish-scales. I am telling her earnestly about Diderot’s theory of statues. There is a stage of drunkenness when all at once one seems to step with startling, with laughable, ease through a door that all night one had been struggling in vain to open. On the other side all is light and definition and the calm of certitude.

  “Diderot said,” I said, “Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. This is the moral imperative. I think it’s awfully clever, don’t you? I know that’s how I feel. Only there are times when I can’t tell which is the statue and which is me.” This last struck me as profoundly sad and I thought I might cry. Behind me Boy was loudly reciting “The Ball of Inverness” and the Lydon sisters were delightedly shrieking. I covered Baby’s hand with mine. How cool it was; cool, and excitingly unresponsive. “What do you think,” I said in a voice thick with emotion. “Tell me what you think.”

  She sat in her chair as motionless as—yes, as motionless as a statue, one silk-trousered leg still crossed on the other and her arms stretched out along the armrests, androgynous, hieratic and faintly, calmly crazed-looking, with her hair drawn back so tight her eyes were slanted at the corners; her head was turned toward me, and she looked at me, saying nothing. Or looked not at me, but around me, rather. It was a way she had. Her gaze would stray no farther than one’s face yet one would seem to be taken in all of a piece, defined, somehow, and set apart, as if by her scrutiny she were generating around one a kind of invisible corona, a forcefield inside of which one stood isolated, inspected, alone. Do I give her too much weight, do I make her seem a sort of sphinx, a sort of she-monster, cruel and cold and impossibly, untouchably distant? She was just a human, like me, groping her way through the world, yet when she looked at me like that I felt my sins shine out of me, illumined forth for all to see. It was an intoxicating sensation, especially for one already so intoxicated.

  At four in the morning Querell drove me home. In Leicester Square he ran the car gently into a lamp-post, and we sat for a while listening to the radiator ticking and watching an illuminated advertisement for Bovril blinking on and off. The square was deserted. Squalls of wind pushed dead leaves back and forth over the pavements from which the recently ceased rain was drying in big map-shaped patches. It was all very desolate and beautiful and sad, and I thought again that I might weep.

  “Bloody people,” Querell muttered, starting up the stalled engine. “Bloody war will fix ’em.”

  At dawn I sprang awake suddenly, completely, in a transport of certitude. I knew exactly what I must do. I did not so much get out of bed as levitate from it; I felt like one of Blake’s shining figures, transformed and aflame. The telephone rattled in my hands. Baby answered on the first ring. She did not sound as if she had been asleep. Behind her voice there lay a vast, waiting silence.

  “Look here,” I said, “I have to marry you.” She did not reply. I imagined her floating in that sea of silence, fronds of black silk undulating about her. “Vivienne? Are you there?”

  How strange her name sounded.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m here.” She seemed as always to be suppressing laughter, but I did not mind.

  “Will you marry me?”

  She paused again. A seagull alighted on the sill outside my window and looked at me with a bright, blank eye. The sky was the colour of pale mud. I had the sense that all this had happened before.

  “All right,” she said.

  And hung up.

  We met later that day for lunch at the Savoy. It was a curious occasion, strained and somewhat stagey, as if we were taking part in one of those self-consciously smart drawing-room comedies of the time. The restaurant was littered with people we knew, which intensified our sense of being on display. Baby wore her habitual black, a suit with pa
dded shoulders and a narrow skirt, which in daylight had to my eye the look of widow’s weeds. She was as always both watchful and remote, though I thought I could detect a hint of agitation in the way she kept reaching out and fiddling with my cigarette case, turning it this way and that on the tablecloth. I did not help matters by saying, first thing, how awful I was feeling. And I was: my eyes felt as if they had been torn out and held over hot coals and then thrust back into the throbbing sockets. I showed her my shaking hands, told her how my heart was wobbling. She made a grimace of disdain.

  “Why do men always boast about their hangovers?”

  “There’s so little else for us to be boastful about, I suppose, these days,” I said sulkily.

  We looked away from each other. The silence stretched, thinner and thinner. We were like hesitant swimmers who have come to the water’s grey and uninviting edge. Baby was the first to plunge in.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve never been proposed to over the telephone before.”

  Her laughter had a nervous sparkle. She had recently ended a messy affair with some sort of an American. My Yank, was how she would refer to him, with a bitter, resigned little smile. No one seemed to have met him. It came to me with a kind of slow amazement how little I knew about her.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, but it seemed the thing to do, at the time.”

  “And does it still?”

  “What?”

  “Seem the thing to do.”

  “Well, yes, of course. Don’t you think?”

  She paused. That gaze of hers, it seemed to originate somehow at the back of her eyes.