The Untouchable

by John Banville

  Why did he go back? He knew as well as I did what awaited him—I had read the accounts of the show trials, hunched over newspapers in solitary horror behind locked doors, my hands damp and face on fire, like an appalled adolescent devouring a manual of obstetrics. He could have made a run for it, he had the contacts, the escape routes, he could have got to Switzerland, or South America. But no; he went back. Why? I brooded on the question; I still do. I have the uneasy conviction that if I could answer it, I could answer a great many other things, too, not only about Felix Hartmann, but about myself. The blank bafflement that comes over me like a fog when I contemplate that final, fateful decision that he made is an awful indictment of a lack of something in me, something perfectly ordinary, the common fellow-feeling that others seem to come by naturally. I would try out the kind of thought experiment old Charkin, my philosophy tutor at Trinity, used to urge us to conduct, imagining myself as best I could into Felix Hartmann’s mind and then plotting a plausible course of action for myself in the same circumstances. But it was no good, I could never get farther than the moment when the choice became unavoidable, whether to face one’s fate, or cut and run. How would it feel to have come to that pass, to be required to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of a cause—and not even for the cause itself, but only to save its face, as it were, to save the phenomena, as the old cosmologists used to say? To know that one would most likely end up in a pit in a forest with a thousand other riddled corpses, and yet to go back, regardless: was that courage, or just pride, foolhardiness, quixotic stubbornness? I felt guilty now for having laughed behind my hand at his poses and pretensions. Like a suicide—which, essentially, he was—he had both earned and verified his own legend. I would lie awake at night thinking of him, a formless heap of pain and despair in the corner of a lightless cell, shivering under a filthy blanket, listening to the skitter of rats’ claws and the water pipes clanking and a young man somewhere crying for his mother. But even that I could not make real, and always it turned into melodrama, an image out of a cheap adventure yarn.

  Boy laughed at me.

  “You’re going soft, Victor,” he said. “Bloody man could be anywhere. They come and go like gypsies, you know that.” We were in Perpignan, in a brasserie by the river. It was August, the last weeks before the war. Purple shadows under the plane trees, and shimmying lozenges of water-light on the grey-green undersides of their big, torpid leaves. We had motored down from Calais in Boy’s white roadster, and were already chafing under the burden of each other’s company. I found exhausting his appetite for boys and drink, and he thought me an old maid. I had decided to go on the trip because Nick was supposed to be with us, but “something had come up,” and instead he had flown to Germany again on some secret mission or other. Now Boy gave me one of his surly, smear-eyed looks. “Obviously you’re smitten, Vic. Hartmann the heart-throb. It must have been the priestly touch, the laying on of hands. In love with your father when you were a lad, were you? Gives a new meaning to the word bishopric.”

  He poured himself the last of the wine and called for another bottle.

  “I suppose you don’t mind at all who they shoot,” I said, “or how many.”

  “Christ, Vic, you’re such a moaner.”

  But he would not meet my eye. It was a bad time for the true believers such as Boy. The London embassy was practically unmanned. One case officer after another—Iosif, Felix Hartmann, half a dozen others—had been recalled and not replaced, leaving us to shift for ourselves as best we might. Lately the stuff I had been pilfering from the Department files, the kind of thing which used to send Felix Hartmann into transports—probably he was exaggerating its worth, out of old-world politeness—I now delivered through a dead-letter drop in an Irish pub in Kilburn, and could not be sure that it was getting through, or, if it was, that anyone was reading it. I do not know why I kept at it, really. If it had not been for the war I might have given up. We had to spur ourselves on, like lost explorers reminding each other of the joys of home. It was hard work. Alastair Sykes had recently published a hopeless piece of self-deluding twaddle in the Spectator arguing the necessity for the Moscow purges in the face of the Fascist threat; I laughed as I read it, imagining him up there in his rooms in Trinity, crouched over that antique typewriter of his, tapping away like mad with two fingers, brow furrowed and the bristles standing up on his head and his pipe firing off showers of sparks.

  Boy forked up a melting wedge of cheese. “Ah, what a stink!” he exclaimed. “Saveur de matelot… “He stopped, and frowned, staring past my shoulder. “I say,” he said, “look at that.” I looked. Shadows and smoke, curved shine on the fat flank of a coffee machine, the silhouette of the head and slender neck of a girl laughing into her hand, and, behind her young man’s head, the window, framing a big, impressionist view of tree and sun-struck stone and dazzled water. This is what we remember, the inconsequential clutter of things. “There, you fool!” Boy hissed, pointing with his fork. At the table next to us a very fat bald man in pince-nez sat with chubby thighs splayed and his snout lifted, short-sightedly reading a copy of Le Figaro and moving his lips silently as he read. The front-page headline, in frightened black type, stood a good three inches high. Boy got up blunderingly, shedding napkin and breadcrumbs from his lap, and made a sort of lunge.

  “Votre journal, monsieur, vous permettez…?”

  The fat man removed his pince-nez and stared at Boy, and frowned, the skin above his delicately whorled ears crinkling into three crescent-shaped, parallel wrinkles.

  “Mais non,” he said, wagging a doughy finger, “ce n’est pas le journal d’aujourd’hui, mais d’hier.” With a fingernail he tapped the front page. “C’est d’hier. You understand? Is the journal of yesterday.”

  Boy, purple-lipped, his eyes bulging—no one as violent as a clown in a rage—tried to snatch the paper out of his hands. The fat man resisted, and the front page tore down the middle, splitting the headline in two, thus sundering briefly the Hitler-Stalin pact, which had been signed in Moscow two days before. Forever after, that momentous alliance, the seeming betrayal of all we believed in, was to be associated in my mind with the look of that fat old fellow’s pince-nez and oedemic thighs, with the sunlight on the river, with the soiled-socks smell of Camembert.

  We went straight to our hotel and collected our bags and set off northwards. We hardly spoke. What we were most keenly conscious of was a sense of deep embarrassment; we were like a pair of siblings whose revered father had just been caught in an act of gross indecency in a public place. By nightfall we had reached Lyon, where we found rooms in a spectral hotel on a wooded road outside the town, and ate dinner in a vast, deserted, ill-lit dining room where leather-covered armchairs lurked in the shadowy corners like the ghosts of former guests, and madame la propriétaire herself, a stately grande dame in black bombazine and fingerless lace gloves, came and sat with us and informed us that Lyon was le centre de la magie of France, and that there was a Jewish cabal in the town that celebrated black masses every Saturday evening in a certain notorious house by the river (“Avec des femmes nues messieurs!”). I spent a restless night in a lumpy, canopied bed, dozing and dreaming (naked harpies, Hitler in a wizard’s spangled hat, that kind of thing), and rose at dawn and sat by the window huddled in a quilt and watched an enormous white sun coming up stealthily through greeny-black trees on a hill behind the hotel. I could hear Boy moving about in his room next to mine, and although I am sure he knew that I too was awake, he did not knock on the wall and summon me to come and have a drink with him, as he would have on any other morning, for he always hated to be alone and sleepless.

  At Calais we passed a fretful Sunday walking about the makeshift town and drinking too much wine at a bar where Boy had taken a fancy to the owner’s teenage son. Next day we could not get a place on the ferry for Boy’s roadster, and he left it behind on the dock, to be dispatched on the next sailing; it stood there looking oddly self-conscious as we pulled away, as if it were awar
e that it was prefiguring another, more celebrated occasion when Boy would abandon his motor car on a quayside. On the crossing to Dover the talk was all of war, and everywhere there was that grim little laugh, chin up and eyebrows ironically twitching, that is one of the things I best remember from that eerily jaunty, desperate time. Nick was there to meet us at Charing Cross. He had joined up the previous month—the Department had arranged a commission for him—and he was in his captain’s uniform, looking very smart and satisfied with himself. He stepped forward out of an angry billow of steam on the platform, like a memory of Flanders. He sported a thin moustache I had not seen before, which looked like a pair of soft black feathers turned up at the tips, and which I thought a mistake. He was in one of his hearty moods.

  “Hullo, you two! I say, Victor, you look distinctly peaky; is it the old mal de mer or are you sick at what your Uncle Joe has gorn and done?”

  “Oh, give over, Nick.”

  He laughed, and took my bag from me and slung it on his shoulder. The station was loud and hot, and smelled of steam and coal-gas and men. There were uniforms everywhere. Those last days before war was declared have stayed with me vividly, the crowds, the sun and smoke, the endless arrivals and departures, the shouts of the newsboys—they had never done such brisk business—the bars full to the doors, and everyone bright-eyed with a sort of hectic, happy fear. We came out of the station into the cacophonous glare of the August afternoon. Taxis in the Strand swarmed and hooted like a herd in rut, their roofs blackly shining in the sun. Nick had his car, and would not hear of it when Boy said he would make his own way home.

  “I’m off duty—let’s go to the Gryphon and get drunk.”

  Boy shrugged. His attitude to Nick—sullen, circumspect, even a touch deferential—used to be a puzzlement to me. Nick put our bags into the boot and did that trick he had of seeming to skip off both feet at once to land in a sort of languid slouch behind the steering wheel. I said I should see Baby.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “of course: the little wife. Or not so little, actually. She says she feels like a barrage balloon. I tell her barrage balloons are light, and she must weigh at least a hundredweight. You are a hound, you know, Victor, going off like that just when she’s ready to pop. Anyway, she’s at my place, unravelling the day’s woof and weft and eagerly awaiting the return of her footloose hero.”

  We drove up Charing Cross Road and at Cambridge Circus almost ran under the back of an army lorry packed with jeering Tommies.

  “General mobilisation,” I said.

  “It’s going to be bloody, without an eastern front, you know,” Nick said, trying to look stern, an effect which that moustache did nothing to help.

  Boy, in the back seat, gave a sarcastic snort. Nick looked at him in the driving mirror and turned to me.

  “What’s the Party line, Vic?”

  I shrugged.

  “We find our friends where we can,” I said. “Winston has Roosevelt, after all.”

  Nick gave a comic groan.

  “Oh, Lor’!” he said. “Urizen speaks.”

  Poland Street was uncharacteristically quiet under the torpor of the summer afternoon. When we were getting out of the car we heard the sound of jazz above us. We climbed to Nick’s rooms and found Baby, in a smock, big-bellied, sitting in a wicker armchair by the window with her knees splayed, a dozen records strewn at her feet and Nick’s gramophone going full blast. I leaned down and kissed her cheek. She smelled, not unpleasantly, of milk, and something like stale flower-water. She was a week overdue; I had hoped to miss the birth.

  “Nice trip?” she said. “So glad for you. Boy, darling: kiss-kiss.”

  Boy lumbered to his knees before her and pressed his face against the great taut mound of her belly, mewling in mock adoration, while she gripped him by the ears and laughed. Boy was good with women. I wondered idly, as I often did, if he and Baby might have had an affair, in one of his hetero phases. She pushed his face away, and he rolled over and sat at her feet with an elbow propped on her knee.

  “Your husband missed you horribly,” he said. “I heard him every night, weeping something awful.”

  She pulled his hair.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “It’s obvious you’ve both had a terrible time. How tanned you are. Quite lust-making, really; I wish I didn’t look such a frump.”

  Nick was pacing restlessly. He glared at the gramophone.

  “Mind if I turn off this nigger racket?” he said. “I can’t hear myself think.”

  He lifted the playing arm and let the needle shriek across the grooves.

  “Pig!” Baby said, indolently.

  “Sow.” He dropped the record into its brown-paper sleeve and tossed it aside. “Let’s have some gin.”

  “Oh, yeth pleath,” Baby said. “Nice dwink for mummy. Or should I? Isn’t it gin that shop-girls take to bring it off? Suppose it’s too late for me to abort, though.”

  Boy clasped her knees. “Never say die, ducky!”

  And so the evening had begun. Nick and Baby danced together for a bit, and we finished the bottle of gin, and Nick changed out of his uniform and we all went down to The Coach and Horses and had some more drinks. Later we went for dinner to the Savoy, where Boy behaved badly, and Baby egged him on, clapping her hands like a seal and laughing, and the people at the next table called the head waiter and complained about us. I tried to join in this ugly fun—we were children of the twenties, after all—but my heart was not in it. I was thirty-two, and on the verge of fatherhood; I was a scholar of no little reputation (how delicately the language allows one to express these things), but that was not sufficient recompense for the fact that I would never be a mathematician, or an artist, which were the only employments I considered worthy of my intellect (it’s true, I did). It is hard, when one has to live a life always at an angle, as it were, to the life one thinks one might be living. I could not wait for the war to start.

  Nick was subdued also, slumped sideways on his chair with an elbow on the table and his forehead propped on an index finger, watching the antics of Boy and his sister with dull-eyed distaste.

  “Are you still playing at spies?” I said.

  He turned his sullen gaze on me.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Oh, but I’m in Languages, that hardly counts. I picture you exchanging briefcases on a station platform in Istanbul, that kind of thing. Lots of derring-do.”

  He scowled.

  “Don’t you think the time for smart-aleckry is past?”

  How lovably ridiculous he sounded when he said such things. And he knew it. What a calculator he was.

  “I’m just envious,” I said, “dull dog that I am.”

  He shrugged. His oiled black hair had the same dark lustre as his evening jacket.

  “You could do something,” he said, “get into something else. It will be all change any day now. All sorts of opportunities opening up.”

  “Such as?”

  Boy was balancing a wineglass on his chin. When he spoke, his clenched, disembodied voice seemed to come down from the ceiling.

  “Why don’t you fix him up as an MP?” he said.

  Baby with an evil smile was tickling Boy’s stretched throat to make him let the glass fall.

  “I don’t think Victor would be much good at politics,” she said. “I can’t picture him at the hustings, or making his maiden speech in the House.”

  “He means the Military Police,” Nick said. “New outfit. Billy Mytchett is in charge. Do give it up, Baby, will you? We’ll have broken glass all over the table.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  Boy flipped the wineglass off his chin and caught it deftly. He called for a bottle of champagne. Already I could feel tomorrow morning’s headache starting up. I touched Baby’s arm; how silky and taut her skin was in this late stage of her pregnancy.

  “I think it’s time we went home,” I said.

  “Gosh,” she said to the table, “doesn’t he sound like a father already
?”

  I realised that I was drunk, in a dull, unwilling sort of way; my lips were numb, and my cheeks felt as if they were coated with some brittle, shiny stuff, a dried-out spume. I was always interested in the effects of drunkenness, wondering, I suppose, if one day I would drink a glass too many and blurt out all my secrets. And then, when I am drunk I think this must be what it is like for other people all the time: impetuous, clumsy, sentimental, dim. Baby and Boy were playing a game with matches and coffee spoons, leaning with their heads together and giggling. Nick had lit up a grotesquely fat cigar. The champagne had a tacky texture.

  “Listen,” I said to him, “tell me about this Military Police business. Would it be amusing?”

  He considered, squinting through a blear of smoke.

  “I should think so,” he said doubtfully.

  “How can I get in?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I can fix that. I’ll have a word with Billy Mytchett. I often run into him about the place.”

  “What about my”—I shrugged—“my past?”

  “You mean the left-wing stuff? But you’ve given up all that, haven’t you? Especially now.”

  “Why don’t you just join the army, like everyone else?” Baby said, giving me an unsteady, out-of-focus stare. “That brigadier that Daddy knows could get you in. If they took Nick they’ll take anyone.”

  “He hankers after the cloak and the dagger,” Boy said. “Don’t you, Vic?”

  Nick glanced about at the nearby tables.

  “Pipe down, will you, Boy?” he said. “We don’t want half of London knowing our business.”

  Baby shook her head in disgust.

  “What a lot of boy scouts you all are.”

  “Boysh scoush?” Boy said. “What are boysh scoush?”

  Baby struck him on the arm.