The Untouchable

by John Banville

  I studied a puddle of watered sunlight on the floor at my feet. There is something about midmorning, something dulled and headachy, that I always find both depressing and obscurely affecting.

  “And who is us?” I said.

  “Well, the Department, of course. And anyone else we might care to take into our confidence.” He winked. “What do you think? Super wheeze, what?”

  He grinned woozily, tick-tocking his head from side to side like a happy flapper; he was having trouble keeping his eyes in focus.

  “How do we get the bags away from the couriers?” I said.

  “Eh?” He blinked. “Yes, well, that’s where Danny comes in.”

  “Danny?”

  “Danny Perkins. He can get anyone to do anything. You’ll see.”

  Sometimes Boy displayed an impressive prophetic gift.

  “Danny Perkins,” I said. “Where on earth did you turn up a person with a name like that?”

  Boy laughed, and the laugh turned into one of his horrible, twangy coughs.

  “Christ, Vic,” he said, smiting himself on the chest with a flattened fist, “you’re such a prig.” He stood up. “Come on,” he said, breathing heavily down his big, pitted nose. “You can find out his pedigree for yourself.”

  He swept ahead of me unsteadily up the stairs, and threw open the door of his bedroom. The first thing that struck me was the marked amelioration of the usual feral stink in the room. Boy’s smell was still there—body grime, garlic, a rancid, cheesy something the possible sources of which the mind did not care to seek after—but underneath it there was a softer though no less pungent savour, as if a flock of pigeons, say, had been introduced into a lion house. Boy’s bed was a mattress thrown on the floor, and lying there now in a nest of wadded blankets and soiled sheets was a short, compact young man with that special kind of very white skin, suety and almost translucent, that used to be the sure mark of the working class. He was wearing a vest and khaki trousers and unlaced army boots. He had one arm behind his head and an ankle crossed on a lifted knee, and he was reading a copy of Titbits. I found myself looking at the humid, blue-shadowed hollow of his armpit. His head was a size too small for his broad shoulders and thick trunk of neck, and the disproportion lent him a delicate, almost girlish aspect. His very fine, very black hair was cropped short at the sides, and fell across his pale and, I am sorry to say, acne-stippled forehead in a darkly gleaming scoop, and I found myself recalling that Edenic moment when I had first caught sight of the Beaver, asleep in the orchard in his father’s garden in Oxford, years before.

  “Ten-shun, Private Perkins!” Boy shouted. “Don’t you see there’s an officer present? This is Captain Maskell. Let’s have a salute there.”

  Danny only smiled at him lazily, and put aside the paper and rolled himself on to his knees and squatted amidst the disordered bed things, quite at his ease, looking me up and down with frank, friendly interest.

  “Pleased, I’m sure,” he said. “Mr. Bannister’s told me all about you, so he has.”

  His voice was a sort of soft purr, so that everything he said seemed a shared confidence. He had a Welsh accent that seemed almost a parody. Boy laughed.

  “Don’t believe it, Victor,” he said, “he’s a hopeless liar. I’ve never mentioned your name to him.”

  Danny smiled again, not minding at all, and went on with his examination of me; his regard was that of a benevolent opponent in a wrestling match, searching out the hold that would bring me down with the least discomfort to us both. I realised that my palms were damp.

  Lumberingly, laughing, Boy sat himself down cross-legged on the mattress and put his arm around Danny’s waist. Boy’s dressing gown had fallen open over his knees, and I tried not to look at his big flaccid sex lolling in its bush.

  “I’ve been telling Captain Maskell about our plan to nobble the couriers,” he said. “He wants to know how we’re going to get the bags away from them. I said that was your department.”

  Danny shrugged, making the bunched muscles of his shoulders ripple.

  “Well, we’ll just have to ask them nicely, won’t we,” he said, in his cooing voice.

  Boy laughed, and coughed again, and again struck himself on the breastbone.

  “Look you, bach,” he said, imitating Danny’s accent, “just you hand over those papers now and I’ll give you a big juicy kiss.”

  He made a fumbling attempt to embrace Danny, who dealt him a good-natured push with his hip, and he went sprawling on the bed, still laughing and coughing, his gown undone and his hairy legs bicycling in the air. Danny Perkins gazed upon the spectacle and shook his head.

  “Isn’t he a terrible sot, Captain Maskell?”

  “Victor,” I said. “Call me Victor.”

  Presently Boy fell into a tipsy slumber, his big head resting babyishly on his joined hands and his hirsute backside sticking up. Danny laid a blanket over him tenderly, and together we went down to the kitchen, where Danny, still in his vest, poured himself a mug of tepid tea and stirred four big spoonfuls of sugar into it.

  “Oh, I am parched,” he said. “He made me drink that champagne last night, and it never agrees with me.” The patch of sunlight had moved from the floor to the chair, and he was bathed in it now, a grinning, big-shouldered, dingy angel. He lifted an eye towards the ceiling. “Have you known him for long, then?”

  “We were at Cambridge together,” I said. “We’re old friends.”

  “Are you another leftie, like him?”

  “Is he a leftie?” For answer he only shook his head and chuckled. “And you,” I said, “how long have you known him?”

  He picked at a pimple on his arm.

  “Well, I’m a singer, see.”

  “A singer!” I said. “Good Lord…”

  He smiled at me quizzically, without resentment, letting the silence last. “My dad used to sing in chapel,” he said. “Lovely sweet voice he had.”

  I blushed. “I’m sorry,” I said, and he nodded, taking it as his due, which it was.

  “I got a place in the chorus of Chu Chin Chow” he said. “It was lovely. That was how I met Mr. Bannister. He was in his car at the stage door one night. He was waiting for someone else but then he saw me, and, well…” He gave a sort of roguish, melancholy grin. “Romantic, isn’t it.” He grew pensive, and sat with hunched shoulders, supping his tea and gazing wistfully into the footlit depths of his memories. “Then this blooming war started up,” he said, “and that was the end of me on the boards.” He gloomed for a while, then brightened. “But we’ll have some fun with this courier lark, won’t we? I’ve always been fond of trains.”

  Nick arrived then. He was got up in loud checks and a yellow waistcoat, and was carrying a rolled umbrella in one hand and a brown trilby hat in the other.

  “Weekend at Maules,” he said. “Winston was there.” He cast a sour glance in Danny’s direction. “I see you two have met. By the way, Vic, Baby was looking for you.”

  “Yes?”

  He looked at the teapot. “Is that char still hot? Pour us out a cup, Perkins, like a good chap, will you? Christ, my head. We were drinking brandy until four in the morning.”

  “You and Winston?”

  He gave me one of his wooden stares.

  “He had gone to bed,” he said.

  Danny passed him the tea and he leaned against the sink with his ankles crossed, nursing the smoking mug in both hands. Soft morning, the pale sunlight of September, and, like a mirage shimmering at the very edge of vision, the limitless possibilities of the future; where do they come from, these moments of unlooked-for happiness?

  “Leo Rothenstein says he had a long talk with the PM before the rest of us arrived,” Nick said, in his serious voice. “It seems we’ve won the air war, despite appearances to the contrary.”

  “Well, good for us,” Danny said. Nick looked at him sharply, but Danny only smiled back at him blandly.

  Boy reappeared from upstairs, and stood swaying in the doorway. The
cord of his dressing gown was still undone, but he had put on a pair of drooping grey underpants.

  “For Christ’s sake, Beaver,” he said, “have you been to a fancy-dress party? You look like a bookie. Hasn’t anyone ever told you Jews are not allowed to wear tweeds? There’s an ordinance against it.”

  “You’re drunk,” Nick said, “and it’s not half-eleven yet. And for God’s sake put on some clothes, can’t you?”

  Boy, swaying, hesitated, regarding Nick with an unsteady, sullen stare, then muttered something and stumbled away upstairs again, and presently we heard him above us, kicking things and swearing drunkenly.

  “Oh, listen to that,” Danny Perkins said, shaking his head.

  “Go and smooth his brow, will you?” Nick said, and Danny shrugged amiably and went out, whistling, and thumped up the stairs in his outsize boots. Nick turned to me. “You’ve talked to Perkins about the couriers and so on?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did you really dream up the scheme?”

  He looked at me suspiciously.

  “Yes; why?”

  “Oh, I just wondered. Ingenious, if it works.”

  He snorted.

  “Of course it will work. Why wouldn’t it?” He came and sat in Danny’s chair and put his head in his hands. “Do you think,” he said weakly, “you could make me some more tea? My head really is splitting.”

  I went to the sink and filled the kettle. I remember the moment: the nickel glint of light on the kettle’s cheek, the greyish whiff from the drain, and, through the window above the sink, the red-brick backs of houses on Berwick Street.

  “What did Vivienne want with me?” I said.

  Nick gave a gloomy laugh. “I think you’ve put her in pod again, old boy.” The kettle clanged against the tap. He looked at me through his fingers with a death’s-head grin. “Or someone has, anyway.”

  And so, for the second time in my life, I found myself, in autumn, on a train bound for Oxford, with a difficult encounter in view; before, it was Mrs. Beaver I had been going to see, before the whole thing started, and now it was her daughter. Funny, that: I still thought of Vivienne as one of the Brevoorts. A daughter, that is; a sister; wife was a word to which I had never quite become reconciled. The train was slow, and extremely smelly— where did the notion of the romance of steam travel come from, I wonder?—and the first-class seats had all been taken by the time I got to the ticket window. Every compartment had its contingent of soldiers, other ranks, mostly, with the odd bored officer smoking jadedly and watching in bitter wistfulness the sunlit fields of England flowing past. I had settled down as best I could to work—I was revising the Borromini lectures, which I hoped to persuade Big Beaver to bring out in book form—when someone folded himself sinuously into the seat beside me and said:

  “Ah, the admirable detachment of the scholar.”

  It was Querell. I was not pleased to see him, and must have shown it, for he smiled thinly in satisfaction, and crossed his arms and his long, spidery legs and settled back happily in the seat. I told him I was going to Oxford. “And you?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, further than that. But I’ll be changing there.” Bletchley, then, I thought, with a twinge of jealousy. “How do you find the work now, in your section?”

  “Fascinating.”

  He turned his head and leaned a little way forward to look at me.

  “That’s good,” he said, with no particular emphasis. “I hear you’re sharing a billet these days with Bannister and Nick Brevoort.”

  “I have a room in Leo Rothenstein’s place in Poland Street,” I said, sounding defensive even to my own ears. He nodded, tapping a long finger on the barrel of his cigarette.

  “Wife left you, has she?”

  “No. She’s in Oxford, with our child. I’m on my way to see her.”

  Why did I always feel it necessary to explain myself to him? Anyway, he was not listening.

  “Bannister’s a bit of a worry, don’t you think?” he said.

  Cows, a farmer on a tractor, the sudden, sun-dazzled windows of a factory.

  “A worry?”

  Querell shifted, and threw back his head and emitted a rapid thin stream of smoke towards the carriage ceiling.

  “I hear him around town, at the Reform, or in the Gryphon. Always drunk, always shouting about this or that. One day it’s Goebbels, who he says he hopes will take over the BBC when the Germans win, the next it’s what a sound chap Stalin is. I can’t make him out.” He turned his head again to look at me. “Can you?”

  “It’s just talk,” I said. “He’s quite sound.”

  “You think so?” he said thoughtfully. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.” He mused for a while, working at his cigarette. “Mind you, I do wonder what you fellows would consider sound.” He smiled his lizard smile, and then leaned forward again, craning towards the window. “Here we are,” he said, “Oxford.” He looked at the papers on my knee. “You didn’t get any work done, did you. Sorry.” He watched me while I gathered up my things. I had got down to the platform when he appeared in the door behind me. “By the way,” he said, “give my regards to your wife. I hear she’s expecting again.”

  I was leaving the station when I saw him. He had got off the train after all, and was hanging back in the ticket office, pretending to read the timetable.

  Vivienne was reclining in a deckchair on the lawn, with a tartan rug over her knees and a sheaf of glossy magazines on the grass beside her. At her feet there was a tray with the remains of tea things, jam and buttered bread and a pot of clotted cream; apparently her condition had not affected her appetite. The bruised hollows under her eyes were a deeper shade of mauve than usual, and her black hair, Nick’s hair, had shed something of its lustre. She greeted me with a smile, extending a cool, queenly hand for me to kiss. That smile: one plucked and painted eyebrow arched, the lips compressed as if to prevent an outbreak of the mocking laughter that was already there, that was always there, in her eyes. “Do I look pale and interesting?” she said. “Tell me I do.” I stood before her awkwardly on the grass. From the corner of my eye I could see her mother lurking among the flowerbeds at the side of the house, pretending she had not yet noticed my arrival. I wondered if Big Beaver was home; he had already written to me moaning about paper rationing and the loss of his best compositors to the army.

  “How smart you look,” Vivienne said, lifting an arm to shade her eyes and scanning me up and down. “Quite the steadfast soldier.”

  “That’s what Boy Bannister says, too.”

  “Does he? I thought he preferred the rougher types.” She moved the magazines to make a space for me on the grass beside her chair. “Sit; tell me all the gossip. I suppose everybody is being terribly brave despite the bombs. Even the Palace is not immune. Wasn’t it gulp-inducing how the Queen made common cause with the plucky East Enders? I feel such a shirker, cowering up here; I shouldn’t be surprised if one of the Oxford matrons presses a yellow feather on me in the High some morning. Or was it white feathers they used to hand out to the conchies last time round? Perhaps I should hang a placard about my neck advertising my condition. Breeding for Britain, you know.”

  Idly I watched my mother-in-law creeping along a bed of dahlias, plucking up snails and tossing them into a bucket of brine.

  “Querell was on the train,” I said. “Have you been seeing him?”

  “Seeing him?” She laughed. “What on earth do you mean?”

  “I just wondered. He knew about the… he knew you were…”

  “Oh, Nick will have told him.”

  How cool she was! Mrs. Beaver put down her bucket and straightened up with a hand pressed to the small of her back, and looked all about with a great show of absent-mindedness, still ignoring me.

  “Nick?” I said. “Why would Nick tell him?”

  “He’s going about telling everyone. He thinks it’s a scream, for some reason. I wish I could see the funny side of it.”

  “But why would he tell Querell? I thought
they detested each other.”

  “Oh, no; they’re thick as thieves, those two, aren’t they?” She turned in the chair to look at me. “What did you mean, have I been seeing Querell?” I said nothing, and her face emptied and grew hard. “You don’t want this child, do you,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it.”

  I shrugged.

  “The times are hardly propitious,” I said, “with this war, and worse to come, probably, when it’s over.”

  She studied me, smiling.

  “What a heartless beast you are, Victor,” she said, wonderingly.

  I looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.