The Untouchable

by John Banville

  The Major shrugged, and winked at me again.

  The meal was served in a vast, timbered hall with mullioned windows overlooking the courtyard. Liveried footmen came and went wordlessly on creaking shoon, and the pair of hunting dogs padded about under the table, snapping up dropped scraps and collapsing noisily on to their haunches now and then to scratch their fleas. We ate some kind of cold game, venison, I think, with dumplings, which looked like the testicles of a giant albino, and were so dense and sticky that after my knife had gone through them the lips of the wound would shut again with a repulsive, kissing sound. Half a dozen members of the Prince’s family appeared. There was a large, stately woman, with the prominent chest and bright cheeks and glassy stare of a ship’s figurehead, who must have been the Prinzessin, and her adult daughter, a washed-out version of her mother, white-faced and unreachably distant, with ash-blonde plaits coiled at the sides of her head like a pair of earphones. Two sturdy, crop-headed boys, big-bottomed and virtually neckless, were evidently, if implausibly, the young Princess’s sons. Every so often they would scramble down from their chairs and set to wrestling with each other like bear cubs, rolling about the floor, their shrieks flying up to the timbered ceiling and falling back again, nerve-janglingly. The Countess sat at the head of the table with me on her left hand and the Prince on the other, while Major Stirling was banished below the salt. To my left there was an unidentified, very deaf old man, who spoke to me in largely incomprehensible dialect on the subject, if I understood him correctly, of the proper method of killing and butchering wild boar. Opposite me sat a shaggy young man with a twitch, dressed in a kind of dusty clerical garb, who addressed not a word to me and who, when I tried to talk to him, stared at me wildly, his eyes rolling, as if he might be about to jump up from the table and take to his heels. It occurred to me that on other planets there might be organisms of such delicate refinement that to them human life, even at its most developed, would surely seem a state of unremitting agony and insanity and squalor.

  Luncheon ended, or I should say, petered out, and my deaf neighbour excused himself with apologetic leers and mutterings and withdrew, and the bear cubs were led away by their wild-eyed keeper, their spectral mother following after, seeming not to walk out the door but fade through it, and the Countess on her stick gondoliered off to her afternoon nap, a hand clamped on the Prince’s arm, and I was left with Major Stirling and the boar hounds, noisily sleeping now—the dogs, that is.

  “Some set-up, eh?” the Major said, looking about with cheerful disdain.

  A footman refilled our hock glasses, and she moved up the table and sat beside me, one of those big shoulders almost touching mine. She had a faint sharp piney smell. I imagined myself being overborne by her in some vague, cruel, irresistible fashion. I loosened my tie. Discovering that I was Irish, she said that Ireland was another place she had always wanted to visit. She claimed she had an Irish grandmother. I seized on this, and discoursed at some length on the charms of my native land. I really did work very hard, but to no avail; when, delicately, I brought up the subject of the royal papers again, she laid a hand on my wrist—a flash, a fizz—and gave me her iciest smile and said:

  “Major Maskell, we’re waiting for Frankfurt to contact us, all right? Meantime, why don’t you relax and enjoy the beauties of Bavaria?” Another jauntily lewd twinkle. “I hear you’re staying at The Turk’s Head? Lots of our boys billeted there. Must be a real lively spot.”

  Of course, I blushed.

  I found Captain Smith waiting for me on the steps above the courtyard, wrapped up in his greatcoat and smoking a cigarette; as I came up, a flaw of smoke swirled briefly about his head, as if it had come out of his ears. He was looking particularly fierce and bristly this afternoon. “Get what you came for?” he asked, and grinned with satisfaction at my glum demeanour. The dogs were morosely prowling, and at two little windows high up in the wing opposite us the globular heads of the bear cubs appeared, gloatingly grinning down on us. Smith exhaled another ragged cloud of smoke and put two fingers into his mouth and produced a piercing whistle. Immediately the jeep came roaring through the gate and cut a semi-circular sweep across the courtyard, scattering the dogs, and drew up at the foot of the steps with a screech of smoking tyres. The driver looked at neither of us. “Bloody tyke,” Smith muttered, and gave a bark of laughter.

  We were about to depart when the little pale Princess came sidling out on to the steps with her mouse-claws clasped under her meagre bosom and, eyes modestly cast down, addressed me obliquely, in German, in a papery voice so faint that at first I could hardly catch what she was saying. Her grandmother wished to speak to me. She would show me the way.

  “Wait here, Smith, will you?” I said.

  We climbed, the Princess Rapunzel and I, through a maze of stone back-staircases and mildewed corridors, in silence, except for a faint crepitation made by the Princess’s petticoats. At length she stopped, and I looked up, and there was the Countess, on the landing above us, leaning over the banister rail with a lace shawl wrapped about her, beckoning through the gloom with a crook’d finger and jerky, upward sweeps of her arm, like a figure in a clock tower. By the time I got up to her level, she had retreated to her room, with what must have been remarkable spryness, and was reclining now against a bank of pillows on a vast, ornate bed. She wore a faded brocade bed gown, and her shawl, and an antique little cap. She gazed at me stonily as I stood in the doorway feeling somehow villainous, and without a word pointed a finger in the direction of a large, deep cupboard in a corner. The Princess moved past me and went to the cupboard and drew open the doors and stood back, folding her pale thin hands on her breast again. Inside the cupboard was a chest, a solid wooden affair with brass hinges and an ancient padlock; the fastening was further secured with two thick leather straps lashed tight and stoutly buckled. The Princess murmured something and went out. From the bed the Countess watched me with a fierce, watery eye. I advanced toward her, my eyes fastened upon her gaze.

  “Danke schön, gnädige Gräfin,” I said, and even made her a little bow. “Your cousins in England will be extremely appreciative.” I thought of mentioning my relation by marriage to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, but her look was not encouraging. “I shall tell His Majesty how helpful you were.”

  I have never been able quite to carry off these emblematic gestures—more than once I caught out Mrs. W. in that characteristic po-faced little smirk of hers, when I was in the midst of attempting some courtly flourish—and the Countess was not one to miss the hairline cracks in the enamel of even the most polished performance. Still she did not speak, but yet she made a reply, by means of a subtle transformation of her gaze, which thickened somehow, her face filling up like a wineskin with a sort of glutinous, an almost tumescent, contempt, before which I blenched, and took a faltering step backward, as if something might suddenly come squirting out of her to burn and blind me. She shrugged, making the bedsprings creak.

  “My son will not forgive me,” she said, and gave a thin, throaty laugh. “Tell that to our cousin the King.”

  The Princess returned, bringing Captain Smith and the driver, whose name (it has just come back to me; one’s memory is such a hoarder) was Dixon. Smith regarded the scene— frightened Princess, dowager in mob-cap, chest of family secrets—with wolfish amusement, his eyebrows and his moustache twitching. Between the three of us we lifted up the chest, which was extremely heavy and awkward to hold, and staggered with it out the door and down the stairs, Smith swearing and Dixon effortfully snorting through distended, porcine nostrils, with the Princess following murmurously behind us. We stowed our booty on the back of the jeep. Who says I am not a man of action? I half expected that Major Stirling would come flying down the steps and bring me to the ground in a football tackle, but there was no sign of her; I was disappointed; my wrist still tingled where she had touched it. As we were driving out of the courtyard, I looked up at the windows where the children had appeared earlier, and saw the Prince look
ing down on us impassively. What was he thinking, I wonder?

  “Hope they haven’t raised the bloody drawbridge,” Smith said, and gave a squawk of mad laughter, and snatched off Dixon’s cap and began to beat him hilariously about the head with it.

  On the outskirts of Regensburg I had Dixon pull up at the side of the road and stand guard while Smith and I jemmied open the chest. The papers were neatly sorted and stored in oilskin pouches. I looked forward to an evening’s entertaining reading in my room at The Turk’s Head. Smith raised a questioning eyebrow; I winked at him. And later, in a public urinal in the town square, among delicious smells, I encountered a blond young man in a tattered uniform who detained me with an evil smile, laying a thin hand on my wrist and quite banishing all memory of Major Stirling’s mannish touch. He claimed he was a deserter, and that he had been on the run for months. He was appealingly emaciated. As he knelt and ministered to me I ran my trembling fingers through his hair thick with dirt and fondled his neat little ears—I always had a weakness for these strange organs, on close inspection so excitingly repulsive, with their frills and delicate pink volutes, like primitive genitalia that have fallen into disuse—and goggled in blissful stupor at a shaft of sunlight falling athwart the beautiful, glistening, grass-green slime growing on the wall behind him, above the clogged trench, and in my head everything swirled, Smith’s mad eye and the Prince’s scaly hand and Major Stirling’s boyish shoulders, all swirled and spasmed and sank, into the hot throat of the whirlpool.

  I have been brooding on the word malignant. Naturally it has a special resonance for me. I looked it up just now; really, the dictionary is full of delightful surprises. Malignant, according to the OED, derives from “late L. malignantem, malignare, -ari,” and its first cited definition is, “Disposed to rebel; disaffected, malcontent.” However, I am also informed that the word was applied “between 1641 and 1690 by the supporters of the Parliament and the Commonwealth to their adversaries.” In other words, a “malignant” was a Cavalier, or a Royalist. This discovery provoked in me a delighted chuckle. A malcontent, and a Royalist. How accommodating the language is. Other definitions are: “having an evil influence”; “keenly desirous of the misfortune of another, or of others generally”; and of course, this time according to Chambers, “tending to cause death, or to go from bad to worse, esp. cancerous.” Mr. Chambers never was one to beat about the bush.

  14

  I have always derived a deep satisfaction from working in places that were made for repose. When the title of Keeper of the King’s Pictures was conferred on me, directly after my triumphant homecoming from Regensburg (HM was gruffly grateful; I was modesty itself, of course), the Royal collection was still in underground storage in North Wales, and my first task was to oversee the return of the pictures and their rehanging in Buckingham Palace, at Windsor, and at Hampton Court. How I treasure now the recollection of the peace and pleasure of those days: the hushed voices in great rooms; the Vermeer light, a kind of gold gas, spreading its rich effulgence down from leaded panes; the perspiring young men, in shirt-sleeves and long aprons, solemnly trotting back and forth like sedan-chair porters, bearing between them a Holbein grandee or Velazquez queen; and I in the midst of all this muted bustle, with my clipboard and my dusty checklists, eyes uplifted and best foot forward, The King’s Man at His Duties, consulted by all, deferred to by all, a master among men. (Oh, indulge me, Miss V., I am old and sick, it comforts me to recall the days of my glory.)

  There were, of course, other, less transcendent advantages to my elevated position in the Royal household. At the time, I was embroiled in a tiresome, often ugly, though not uninvigorating power struggle at the Institute, where a lifelong overindulgence in port and a resultant fit of apoplexy had suddenly left the Director’s chair vacant. I explained the matter to HM, and shyly indicated that I would not object were he to bring his influence to bear on the Trustees when they came to make their choice of a successor. This was the post I had always aimed to secure; it was, you might say, my life’s ambition; indeed, even above my scholarly achievements, it is for my work as head of the Institute that I expect to be remembered, after these present unpleasantnesses have been forgotten. When I took over, the place was moribund, a dusty refuge for superannuated university lecturers and third-rate connoisseurs, and a sort of ghetto for fugitive European Jews too clever for their down-at-heel boots. I soon knocked it into shape. By the beginning of the 1950s it was recognised as one of the greatest—no, I shall say it: as the greatest centre of art teaching in the West. My activities as an agent were nothing compared to the wholesale infiltration of the world of art scholarship achieved by the young men and women whose sensibilities I shaped in my years at the Institute. Look at any of the significant galleries in Europe or America and you will find my people at the top, or if not at the top, then determinedly scaling the rigging, with cutlasses in their teeth.

  And then, I loved the place, I mean the surroundings, the building itself, one of Vanbrugh’s most inspired designs, at once airy and wonderfully grounded, imposing yet indulgent, delicate yet infused with manly vigour, an example of English architecture at its finest. By day I found soothing the atmosphere of studiousness and quiet learning, the sense one had all around of young heads bent over old books. My students had an earnestness and grace that one does not encounter in their present-day successors. The girls fell in love with me, the young men were restrainedly admiring. I suppose I must have seemed something of a legend to them, not only a champion of art but, if rumour were to be believed, a veteran of those clandestine operations that had contributed so much to our victory in the war. And then, at night the place was mine, a vast town house entirely at my disposal. I would sit in my flat on the top floor, reading, or listening to the gramophone—I have hardly mentioned my love of music, have I?—calm, reflective, sustained aloft, as it were, by the thronging silence peculiar to the spaces in which great art resides. Later, Patrick would come home from his nocturnal rambles, perhaps with a couple of ruffianly young men in tow, whom I would set loose in the galleries, among the spectral pictures, and watch them frisk and tumble in the chiaroscuro lamplight like so many Caravaggian fauns. What a risk I took—my God, when I think of it, the damage they could have wrought! But then, it was precisely in the danger of it that the pleasure lay. I would not wish to give the impression that my time at the Institute was all high talk and low frolics. There was a great deal of bothersome and time-consuming administration to be seen to. My detractors muttered that I was incapable of delegating duties, but how is one expected to delegate to cretins? In an institution such as ours—closed, intense, hot with messianic fervour: I was moulding an international generation of art historians, after all—a single controlling sensibility was an absolute requirement. When I became Director, I immediately set about imposing my will on every corner of the Institute. There was nothing too trivial to merit my attention. I am thinking of Miss Winterbotham. Oh dear yes. Her name was the least of her misfortunes. She was a large person in her fifties, with tree-trunk legs and a mighty bust and myopic, frightened eyes, and also, incidentally, the most incongruously beautiful, slender hands. She was a minor scholar—baroque altarpieces of South Germany—and an enthusiast for madrigals; I think it was madrigals. She lived with her mother in a large house on the Finchley Road. I suspect she had never been loved. Her ineradicable unhappiness she disguised under a gratingly hearty cheerfulness. One day, in my office, while we were discussing some not very important piece of Institute business, she suddenly broke down and began to weep. I was aghast, of course. She stood before my desk, helpless in her cardigan and sensible skirt, shoulders shaking and great fat tears blurting from her squeezed-up eyes. I made her sit down and drink some whiskey, and after long and tedious cajoling I got out of her what the matter was. A bright young scholar in the same field as hers, who had lately joined us, had at once set about undermining Miss Winterbotham’s position. The old academic story, but a particularly cruel version of it.
I called in the younger woman, the clever daughter of French refugees. She did not deny Miss Winterbotham’s charges, and smiled in my face in that feline way that French girls do, confident I would approve her ruthlessness. Her confidence was misplaced. Of course, after Mile. Rogent’s abrupt departure from our midst, I had to deal with Miss Winterbotham’s speechlessly rapturous gratitude, which came in the form of coy little gifts, such as homemade cakes, and bottles of noisome aftershave lotion that I passed on to Patrick, and, every Christmas, a violently hideous necktie from Pink’s. Eventually her mother became incapacitated, and Miss Winterbotham had to give up her career to look after the invalid, as daughters did, in those days. I never saw her again, and after a year or two the plum cakes and the silk ties stopped coming. Why do I remember her, why do I bother to speak of her? Why do I speak of any of them, these nebulous figures milling restlessly, unappeasably, on the margins of my life? Here at my desk, in this lamplight, I feel like Odysseus in Hades, pressed upon by shades beseeching a little warmth, a little of my life’s blood, so that they might live again, however briefly. What am I doing here, straying amongst these importunate wraiths? A moment ago I tasted on my palate— tasted, not imagined—the stingy-sweet flavour of those boiled blackcurrant drops that I used to suck trudging home from infant school on autumn afternoons along the Back Road at Carrickdrum a lifetime ago; where was it stored, that taste, through all those years? These things will be gone when I go. How can that be, how can so much be lost? The gods can afford to be wasteful, but not us, surely?