The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “Ah, Maskell,” he said, delving among the documents on his desk, like a large, tawny bird hunting for worms under a drift of dead leaves. “You’re wanted up in London.” He glanced in the direction of my midriff and frowned. “Stand easy.”

  “Oh, sorry, sir.” I had forgotten to salute.

  His office was in the former gun room; there were hunting prints on the walls, and I seemed to detect a faint lingering tang of fin and bloodied feather. Through the window behind him I could see a hapless squad of my colleagues in camouflage gear crawling on their knees and elbows towards the house in a simulated clandestine attack, a sight that was comic and at the same time unnerving.

  “Ah, here it is,” the Brigadier said, lifting a letter out of the strew of papers before him. He held it close to his nose to read it, moving his head from side to side as he followed the lines, mumbling under his breath. “… Day release… immediate… no escort required… Escort? Escort?… Sixteen hundred hours…” He lowered the sheet and for the first time looked at me directly, his big blue jaw set and nostrils flared, showing alarmingly black, deep cavities. “What the hell have you been up to, Maskell?”

  “Nothing, sir, that I know of.”

  He threw the letter back on the pile and sat casting about him furiously, his hands clasped so tightly together the knuckles whitened.

  “Bloody people,” he muttered. “What do they think we’re running down here, some kind of vetting station? Tell Mytchett from me he’d better stop sending me duds or we may as well shut up shop.”

  “I will, sir.”

  He glanced at me sharply.

  “You think this funny, Maskell?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. There’s a train at noon. You won’t”—with an angry snicker—“require an escort.”

  Glorious day. What a September that was. The station smelled of sun-warmed cinders and cut grass. Soldiers milled on the platforms, stooped in that characteristic, disgruntled S-shaped stance, with their kitbags hoisted on one shoulder, and nursing a fag-end in their fists. I bought a copy of the previous day’s Times and sat blindly pretending to read it in a three-quarters empty first-class carriage. I felt hot all over, yet there was a small cold weight of foreboding inside me, as if an ice cube had been dropped into the pit of my stomach. A young woman sitting opposite me, wearing tortoiseshell spectacles and a black dress and heavy-heeled black shoes—the type that have latterly come back into fashion, I notice—kept glancing at me with an expression of baleful vacancy, as if she were not seeing me but someone I reminded her of. The train meandered along at an agonisingly slow pace, pausing irresolutely at each station, sighing and shuffling, with the air of having forgotten something and wondering whether to go back and fetch it. All the same, I arrived in London with an hour to spare. I took the opportunity to bring my uniform to Denbys to have it altered. I thought of telephoning Vivienne in Oxford, but decided against it; I could not have borne that fondly scathing tone. When I left the tailor’s and was coming out of St. James’s into Piccadilly I almost bumped into the bespectacled young woman from the train. She looked through me and hurried past. A coincidence, I told myself, but I could not help recalling the Brigadier’s snicker at the word escort. Another ice cube dropped inside me with a tingling little plop.

  How lovely London seemed, vivid, and yet mysteriously insubstantial, like the cities in one’s dreams. The air was soft and clear, with half the motor cars and buses off the roads—I had not known such vast, delicate skies since my childhood—and there was a general air of pensiveness, the opposite of that hectic atmosphere of suspense that had prevailed in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of hostilities. In Regent Street, banks of sandbags had been erected in front of the shops, sprayed with concrete and painted in carnival shades of red and blue.

  When I entered his office Billy Mytchett fairly bounced up to greet me, as if propelled by a spring in the seat of his chair. This show of warmth made me more worried than ever. He pulled up a chair for me, and pressed me to take a cigarette, a cup of tea, a drink, even—“though come to think of it, there isn’t any drink in the building, except in the Controller’s office, so I don’t know why I offer, ha ha.” Like Brigadier Bradshaw, he too avoided looking at me directly, and instead made a great business of moving things about on his desk, producing all the while a low, unhappy whirring sound from the back of his throat.

  “How are you getting on down at the Manor?” he said. “Find it interesting?”

  “Very.”

  “Good, good.” A pause, in which even the frozen stones of the arches and the flying buttresses outside the window seemed to participate, hanging in suspenseful wait. He sighed, and picked up his cold pipe and gazed at it gloomily. “The thing is, old man, one of our people has been going through your files— purely routine, you understand—and has come up with… well, with a trace, actually.”

  “A trace?” I said; the word sounded vaguely, frighteningly medical.

  “Yes. It seems—” He threw down the pipe and turned sideways in his chair, throwing out his stubby little legs before him and sinking his chin on his chest, and stared broodingly at his toecaps, his lower lip protruding. “It seems you were something of a Bolshie.”

  I laughed.

  “Oh, that. Wasn’t everyone?”

  He gave me a startled glance.

  “I wasn’t.” He turned back to the desk again, all business suddenly, and took up a mimeographed report and thumbed through it until he found what he was looking for. “There was this trip to Russia that you went on, you and Bannister and these Cambridge people. Yes?”

  “Well, yes. But I’ve been to Germany, too; that doesn’t make me a Nazi.”

  He blinked.

  “That’s true,” he said, impressed despite himself. “That is true.” He consulted the report again. “But look here, what about this stuff you wrote, this art criticism in—what was it?—the Spectator: “A civilisation in decay… baneful influence of American values… unstoppable march of international socialism…” What’s all that got to do with art?—not, mind you, that I’m claiming to know anything about art.”

  I heaved a heavy sigh, meant to denote boredom, disdain, haughty amusement, but also a determination to be patient and a willingness to try to set out complex matters in simple terms. It is an attitude—patrician, condescending, cold but not unkind— that I have found most effective, in a tight corner.

  “Those pieces were written,” I said, “when the Spanish civil war was starting. Do you recall that time, the atmosphere of desperation, of despair, almost? It seems a long time ago now, I know. But the issue was simple: Fascism or Socialism. One had to choose. And of course the choice was inevitable, for us.”

  “But-”

  “And as it proves, we were right. England is now at war with the Fascists, after all.”

  “But Stalin-”

  “—Has bought a little time, that’s all. Russia will be in the fight with us before the year is out. Oh but look”—I lifted a languid hand, waving all this trivia aside—“the point is, Billy, I know I was mistaken, but not for the reason you think. I was never a Communist—I mean, I was never a member of the Party—and that trip to Russia that has so exercised your bloodhounds only served to confirm all my doubts about the Soviet system. But at the time, three years ago, when I was about twenty years younger than I am now, and Spain was the temperature chart of Europe, I thought it was my duty, my moral duty, as did a great many others, to throw whatever weight I had into the battle against evil, the nature of which, for once, seemed perfectly clear and obvious. Instead of going off to Spain to fight, as I probably should have done, I made the one sacrifice it was in my power to make: I abandoned aesthetic purity in favour of an overtly political stance.”

  “Aesthetic purity,” Billy said, nodding vigorously and putting on a deep frown. I had taken a calculated risk in calling him by his first name, thinking it would surely be the kind of thing he would expect a chap to do in the mi
dst of a frank and emotional confession such as I was pretending to make.

  “Yes,” I said, solemn, rueful, appealingly contrite, “aesthetic purity, the one thing a critic must hold on to, if he is to be any good at all. So yes, you are right, and your scouts are right: I am guilty of treachery, but in an artistic, not a political, sense. If that makes me a security risk—if you think a man who betrays his aesthetic convictions is likely also to betray his country—then so be it. I’ll collect my gear from Bingley Manor and see if I can’t join the ARP or the Fire Service. For I’m determined to do some good, in however humble a capacity.”

  Billy Mytchett was still gravely nodding, still frowning. Absorbed in thought, he reached out for his pipe and set it in his mouth and began slowly sucking on it. I waited, gazing out of the window; nothing like a dreamy demeanour for allaying suspicion. At last Mytchett stirred himself, and gave his shoulders a great shake, like a swimmer surfacing, and pushed the mimeographed report away from him with the side of his hand.

  “Look here,” he said, “this is all nonsense. You’ve no idea how much of this bumf I have to wade through in a week. I wake up in a blue funk at night, asking myself if this is how we’re going to fight the war, with reports and queries and signatures required in triplicate. God! And then I’m asked to haul in perfectly decent chaps like you and put them through the wringer over something they said to their prefect when they were at school. It was bad enough before the war, but now…!”

  “Well,” I said, magnanimously, “it’s not unreasonable, after all. There must be spies about.”

  Oops. He gave me a quick, sharp look, to which I returned the blandest of bland stares, trying to control a telltale nerve under my right eye which tends to twitch when I am nervous.

  “There are,” he said grimly. “—And Bingley Manor’s full of ’em!” He gave a muffled shout of laughter and smacked his hands together, then immediately grew sober again. “Listen, old chap,” he said gruffly, “you go back down there and finish your training. I have a job for you, a very nice little number, you’ll like it. Hush! Not a word for now. All in good time.” He stood up and came around the desk and hustled me to the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll give old Bradshaw a tinkle and tell him we’ve vetted you and found you stainless as a choirboy—though when I think of some of the choirboys I’ve known…”

  He shook my hand hurriedly, eager to be rid of me. I lingered, pulling on my gloves.

  “You mentioned Boy Bannister,” I said. “Is he…?”

  Mytchett stared.

  “What—under suspicion? Lord, no. He’s one of our stars. Absolute wizard. No, no, old Bannister’s absolutely sound.”

  How Boy laughed, when I phoned him from the flat later and told him he was one of Billy Mytchett’s stars. “What an ass,” he said. Behind the laughter I thought I detected a note of constraint. “By the way,” he said, stagily loud, “Nick is here. Hold on, he wants a word.”

  When Nick came on the line he too was laughing.

  “Been through the third degree, have you? Yes, Billy told me, I phoned him. Hardly the Grand Inquisitor, is he. I’m going to make sure that trace disappears from your file, by the way—I know a girl in Registry. It’s the kind of thing could dog you for years. And we wouldn’t want that. Especially as you and I are off on a jaunt any day now, all expenses paid.”

  “A jaunt?”

  “That’s right, old bean. Didn’t Billy tell you? No? Well, in that case I’d better keep mum too; idle talk costs whatsit. Oar revwar!”

  And he hung up, laughing still and humming the “Marseillaise.”

  In a letter to his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou in 1649, Poussin, referring to the execution of Charles I, makes the following observation: “It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort.” The remark is expressive of the quietism of the later Stoics, and of Seneca in particular. There are times when I wish I had lived more in accordance with such a principle. Yet who could have remained inactive in this ferocious century? Zeno and the earlier philosophers of his school held that the individual has a clear duty to take a hand in the events of his time and seek to mould them to the public good. This is another, more vigorous form of Stoicism. In my life I have exemplified both phases of the philosophy. When I was required to, I acted, in full knowledge of the ambiguity inherent in that verb, and now I have come to rest—or no, not rest: stillness. Yes: I have come to stillness.

  Today, however, I am all agitation. The Death of Seneca is going for cleaning and valuation. Am I making a mistake? The valuers are very dependable, very discreet, they know me well, yet I cannot suppress the unfocused doubts that keep flying up in me darkly like a flock of restless starlings at the approach of night. What if the cleaners damage it, or in some other way deprive me of it, my last solace? The Irish say, when a child turns from its parents, that it is making strange; it comes from the belief that fairy folk, a jealous tribe, would steal a too-fair human babe and leave a changeling in its place. What if my picture comes back and I find that it is making strange? What if I look up from my desk some day and see a changeling before me?

  It is still on the wall; I cannot summon up the courage to lift it down. It looks at me as my six-year-old son did that day when I told him he was to be sent to boarding school. It is a product of the artist’s last years, the period of the magnificent, late flowering of his genius, of The Seasons, of Apollo and Daphne, and the Hagar fragment. I have dated it tentatively to 1642. It is unusual among these final works, which taken together form a symphonic meditation on the grandeur and power of nature in her different aspects, shifting as it does from landscape to interior, from the outer to the inner world, from public life to the domestic. Here nature is present only in the placid view of distant hills and forest framed in the window above the philosopher’s couch. The light in which the scene is bathed has an unearthly quality, as if it were not daylight, but some other, paradisal radiance. Although its subject is tragic, the picture communicates a sense of serenity and simple grandeur that is deeply, deeply moving. The effect is achieved through the subtle and masterful organisation of colours, these blues and golds, and not-quite-blues and not-quite-golds, that lead the eye from the dying man in his marmoreal pose—already his own effigy, as it were— through the two slaves, and the officer of the Guard, awkward as a warhorse in his buckles and helmet, to the figure of the philosopher’s wife, to the servant girl preparing the bath in which the philosopher will presently be immersed, and on at last to the window and the vast, calm world beyond, where death awaits. I am afraid.

  9

  I have spent a pleasant morning telling Miss Vandeleur about my time in the war. She wrote it all down. She is a great taker of notes. Inevitably, we have fallen into the manner of tutor and student; there is the same mixture of intimacy and indefinable unease that I remember from my teaching days; also, she betrays that thin edge of resentment that is the mark of the postgraduate chafing under the yoke of a deference which she feels by rights should no longer be required of her. I enjoy her visits, in my muted way. She is the only company I have, now. She sits before me on a low chair, with her reporter’s spiral-bound notebook open on her knees and her head bent, showing me the smooth twin wings of her hair and the painfully straight parting which is the colour of slightly soiled snow. She writes at a remarkable pace, with a kind of desperate concentration; I have the impression that at any moment she might lose control of her writing hand and begin to scribble all over the page; it is quite exciting. And of course, I do love the sound of my own voice.

  We speculated about the origin of the phrase, a good war. I said I was not sure that I had ever heard it used outside of books or the theatre. The people who wrote for the pictures were especially fond of it. In the films of the late forties and the fifties, pomaded, soft-faced chaps in cravats were always pausing by the fireplace to knock out implausible pipes and ask over
their shoulders, “Had a good war, did you?” at which the other chap, with moustache and cut-glass tumbler from which he never drank, would give one of those very English shrugs and make a little moue of distaste, in which we were supposed to see expressed the memory of hand-to-hand combat in the Ardennes, or a night landing on Crete, or a best friend’s Spitfire going down in a spiral of smoke and flame over the Channel.

  “And what about you?” Miss Vandeleur said, without looking up from her notes. “Did you have a good war?”

  I laughed, but then paused, struck.

  “Well, you know,” I said, “I do believe I did. Despite the fact that it began for me in an atmosphere of farce. French farce, at that.”

  It was Miss Vandeleur who remarked how many of my memories of Nick Brevoort involve sea journeys. This is true, I have noticed it myself. I do not know the reason for it. I should like to be able to see something grand and heroic in it—the black ships and the bloodied foreshore and Ilium’s fires on the horizon—but I am afraid the atmosphere of these recollections is not so much Homer as Hollywood. Even the crossing we made together to France early in December 1939 had a touch of ersatz, nickel-and-velvet romance to it. The night was preternaturally calm, and our troopship, a converted steamer which before the outbreak of war had ferried day trippers between Wales and the Isle of Man, glided intently as a knife through a milky, unreally moonlit sea. We passed the greater part of the voyage stretched out on wooden deckchairs in the stern, wrapped in our greatcoats and with our caps pulled low over our eyes. The pulsing tips of our cigarettes and the flying breaths of smoke we released to the night air seemed absurdly melodramatic. On board with us was a squad of raw—it is the only word—recruits on their way to join the Expeditionary Force. They had taken over the lounge, where they sprawled amid their strewn kit, staring before them in slack-jawed boredom, looking more like the stragglers from a rout than a troop on its way to join battle. All that could animate them, it seemed, was the frequent ceremony of tea and sandwiches. Did Odysseus’s men look like this as they sat down on the sand to their haunches of roast bullock and goblets of seadark wine? When Nick and I took a turn about the deck and glanced in through the portholes, it was like looking in at a children’s party, the boy-men half happy and half worried as they watched the ship’s stewards—still in their white coats—progress among them disgustedly with mighty tea-kettles and trays of corned-beef sandwiches.