The Untouchable

by John Banville

  My mind is wandering. This must be the anteroom of death.

  Those were the years of some of my most intense work, when I conceived and began to write my definitive monograph on Nicholas Poussin. It was to take me nearly twenty years to finish. Certain pygmies skulking in the groves of academe have dared to question the book’s scholarly foundations, but I shall treat them with the silent disdain they deserve. I do not know of any other work, and nor do they, which comprehensively, exhaustively and—I shall dare to say it—magisterially captures the essence of an artist and his art as this one does. One might say, I have invented Poussin. I frequently think this is the chief function of the art historian, to synthesise, to concentrate, to fix his subject, to pull together into a unity all the disparate strands of character and inspiration and achievement that make up this singular being, the painter at his easel. After me, Poussin is not, cannot be, what he was before me. This is my power. I am wholly conscious of it. From the start, from the time at Cambridge when I knew I could not be a mathematician, I saw in Poussin a paradigm of myself: the stoical bent, the rage for calm, the unshakeable belief in the transformative power of art. I understood him, as no one else understood him, and, for that matter, as I understood no one else. How I used to sneer at those critics—the Marxists especially, I am afraid—who spent their energies searching for the meaning of his work, for those occult formulas upon which he was supposed to have built his forms. The fact is, of course, there is no meaning. Significance, yes; affects; authority; mystery—magic, if you wish—but no meaning. The figures in the Arcadia are not pointing to some fatuous parable about mortality and the soul and salvation; they simply are. Their meaning is that they are there. This is the fundamental fact of artistic creation, the putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing. (Why did he paint it?— Because it was not there.) In the ever shifting, myriad worlds through which I moved, Poussin was the singular, unchanging, wholly authentic thing. Which is why I had to attempt to destroy him. —What? Why did I say that? I did not expect to say that. What can I mean by it? Leave it; it is too disturbing. The hour is late. Ghosts ring me round, gibbering. Away.

  Perhaps the most significant, personal, result of my Royal elevation was that it enabled me to give up being a spy. I know everyone believes that I never stopped; there is a convention in the popular mind which insists that such a thing is impossible, that the secret agent is tied to his work by a blood oath from which only death will release him. This is fantasy, or wishful thinking, or both. In fact, in my case, retirement from active service was surprisingly, not to say disconcertingly, easy. The Department was one thing; with the end of the war, amateur agents such as myself were being gently but insistently encouraged to bow out. The Americans, who now hold power, were demanding that professionals be put in charge, company men like themselves, whom they could bully and coerce, not mavericks like Boy or, to a far less colourful extent, me. On the other hand, we were exactly the kind of agents—familiar, trusted, dedicated—that Moscow desired to keep in place, now that the Gold War had set in, and we were urged, and sometimes, indeed, threatened, to hold on at all costs to our connections with the Department. Oleg, however, was oddly complaisant when I told him that I wished to be released. “I’m sick of the game,” I said, “literally sick of it. The strain is making me ill.” He shrugged, and I pressed on, complaining that war work, and the difficulty of serving two opposing systems in their uneasy alliance against a third, had put intolerable pressure on my nerves. I suppose I did rather pile it on. I ended by warning that I was close to cracking. This was Moscow’s nightmare, that one of us would lose his nerve and put the entire network at risk. Like all totalitarians, they had a very low regard for those who helped them most. In truth, my nerve was not about to crack. What I had felt most strongly at the end of the war, what we had all felt, was a sudden sense of deflation. For myself, I dated the onset of this depression to the morning following the announcement of Hitler’s death, when after that night of celebratory boozing with Boy I had woken up on the sofa in Poland Street with the taste of wetted ashes in my mouth and felt as Jack the Giant Killer must have felt, when the beanstalk came crashing down and the man-eating monster lay dead at his feet. After such trials and such triumphs, what could the world in peacetime offer us?

  “But this is not peace,” Oleg said, with another listless shrug. “Now the real war is starting.”

  It was a summer afternoon, and we were sitting in a cinema in Ruislip. The lights had just come up between features. I remember the sombre, shadowless glow descending from the vaulted ceiling, the hot, dead air, the prickly feel of the nap of the seat covers and a broken spring sticking in the back of my thigh—I suppose sprung cinema seats went before your time, Miss V.?—and that oddly weightless, muffled sensation that you only got in picture-houses, in those days of double bills, in the intervals between features. It was Oleg’s idea that we should meet in cinemas. They offered excellent cover, it is true, but the real reason was that he was a passionate fan of the movies, especially the smooth American comedies of the day, with their sleek-haired, effeminate men and marvellous, mannish, silk-gowned women over whom he sighed like a love-sick prince-turned-frog, gazing up at them, these Claudettes and Gretas and Deannas, in a kind of entranced anguish, as they swam before him in their shimmering tanks of soot-and-silver light. He and Patrick would have got on famously.

  “I rather think, Oleg,” I said, “that one war is enough for me; I’ve done my bit.”

  He nodded unhappily, the fat at either side of his neck froggily wobbling, and began to drone on about the nuclear threat and the need for the Soviets to get their hands on the secrets of the West’s atomic weapons technology. Such talk made me feel quite antiquated; I had still not got over my amazement at the V2s.

  “That’s the business of your people in America,” I said.

  “Yes, Virgil is being sent there.”

  Virgil was Boy’s code name. I laughed.

  “What—Boy in America? You must be joking.”

  He nodded again; it seemed to be turning into a kind of tic.

  “Castor has been told to find a posting for him at the embassy.”

  I laughed again. Castor was Philip MacLeish, otherwise known as the Dour Scot, who the previous year had managed to get himself appointed first secretary in Washington, from where he was reporting regularly to Moscow. I had met him a couple of times, in the war, when he was something minor at the Department, and had disliked him, finding his solemnity of manner ridiculous, and his fanatical Marxism unbearably tiresome.

  “Boy will drive him mad,” I said. “They’ll both be sent home in disgrace.” Odd, how accurate the more offhand prophecies can prove to be. “And I suppose you want me to act as their control from here, do you?” I imagined it, the endless eavesdropping, the combing through signals, the casually probing conversations with visiting Americans, the whole horrible tightrope-walking effort of keeping agents in place in foreign territory. “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t do it.”

  The house lights were dimming, the dusty plush curtains were creakily opening. Oleg said nothing, gazing up expectantly at the preliminary crackle of scratched white light fizzing and boiling on the screen.

  “I have been appointed Keeper of the King’s Pictures,” I said, “did I tell you?” He turned his eyes unwillingly from Jean Harlow’s satin-sheathed backside and peered at me incredulously in the watery glow from the screen. “No, Oleg,” I said wearily, “not this kind of picture: paintings. You know: art. I shall be working in the Palace, at the King’s right hand. Do you see? That’s what you can tell your masters in Moscow: that you have a source right beside the throne, a former agent at the very seat of power. They’ll be terribly impressed. You’ll probably get a medal. And I shall get my freedom. What do you say?”

  He said nothing, only turned back to the screen. I was a little piqued; I thought he could at least have argued with me.

  “Here,” I said,
and pressed into his moist warm paw the miniature camera he had issued me with years ago. “I never learned how to use it properly, anyway.” In the flickering light from the screen—what a grating voice that Harlow woman had— he looked at the camera and then at me, babyishly solemn, but still did not speak. “I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out sounding cross. I stood up, and patted him on the shoulder. He made a half-hearted attempt to seize my hand, but I withdrew it quickly, and turned and made my way stumblingly out of the place. The noise of traffic in the sunlit street seemed a kind of sardonic cheer. I felt at once buoyant and leaden, as if in shrugging off the burden I had borne for years I had suddenly become aware again of the long-forgotten weight of my own, all too familiar self.

  At first I did not believe that Moscow would let me go, or not so easily, at least. Aside from any other consideration, my vanity was wounded. Had I been of so little worth to them, that they should drop me so unceremoniously? I waited confidently and in trepidation for the first signs of pressure being applied. I wondered how I would stand up to blackmail. Would I be prepared to risk my position in the world in order merely to be free? Perhaps I should not have made so bold a break, I told myself, perhaps I should have gone on supplying them with scraps of Department gossip, which I could have gleaned from Boy and the others and which no doubt would have kept them happy. They had the power to ruin me. I knew they would not reveal the work I had done for them—if they let one thread go, the whole network would unravel—but they could easily find a means of exposing me as a queer. Public disgrace I might have been able to bear, but I did not at all relish the prospect of a stretch in prison. Yet the days passed, and the weeks, then the months, and nothing happened. I drank a great deal; there were days when I was drunk before ten o’clock in the morning. When I went out on the prowl at night I was more frightened than ever; the sex and the spying had sustained a kind of equilibrium, each a cover for the other. Loitering in wait for Oleg, I was guilty but also innocent, since I was spying, riot soliciting, while in my tense vigils on the shadowy steps of the city’s public lavatories I was only another queer, not a betrayer of my country’s most precious secrets. Do you see? When you live the kind of life that I was living, reason makes many questionable deals with itself.

  I wondered what story Oleg had told Moscow. I was tempted to contact him again, so that I might ask him. I pictured him in the Kremlin, standing in the middle of the shiny floor in one of those vast high featureless rooms, unhappily wheezing, twisting his hat in his hands, while a shadowy Politburo listened in terrible silence from behind its long table as he made his bumbling excuses for me. All fantasy, of course. My case was probably dealt with by a third secretary at the London embassy. They did not need me—they never had, really, not in the way I believed— and so they simply cut the link. They always were practical fellows, unlike the mad fantasists who ran the Department. They even made a gesture of appreciation for my years of loyal service: six months after that meeting in the Odeon in Ruislip, Oleg contacted me to say that Moscow wished to offer me a gift of money, I think it was five thousand pounds. I refused—none of us ever made a penny out of our work for Russia—and tried not to feel slighted. I told Boy that I was out, but he did not believe me, suspecting that I was only going into deeper cover, a suspicion he thought vindicated years later when everything fell apart and I was the one who was called in to deal with the mess.

  There was no formal procedure for resigning from the Department, either; I simply drifted away, as so many others had done in the past year. I met Billy Mytchett by chance one evening in a pub in Piccadilly and we were both embarrassed, like a pair of former schoolmates who had not seen each other since the days of pranks and scrapes. I ran across Querell, too, at the Gryphon. He claimed to have left the Department before I did. As always, I found myself immediately on the defensive before that thinly smiling, measuring, pale gaze. Boy, who was about to leave for Washington, had just returned from a tumultuous binge across North Africa—on which he had been accompanied by his mother, of all people, a still spry and famously handsome woman only slightly less given to outrageous behaviour than her son— and Querell had all the details: how Boy had got drunk at an embassy cocktail party in Rabat and pissed out of the window into a bed of bougainvillaea in full view of the ambassador’s wife, that kind of thing.

  “Seems he sat for a whole evening in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo telling anyone who would listen that he’s been a Russian spy for years.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s an old joke. He likes to shock.” “If I put him into a book no one would believe in him.” “Oh, I don’t know; he would certainly add colour.” He glanced at me sharply and grinned; his bleak little novels had at last caught on, reflecting as they did the spiritual exhaustion of the times, and he was enjoying sudden and lavish success, which was a surprise to everyone except him. “You think my stuff lacks colour?” he said. I shrugged.

  “I don’t read much, in that line.”

  We came across each other again the following week, at the farewell party for Boy that Leo Rothenstein threw in the Poland Street house. The occasion later became legendary, but what I retain most strongly is the memory of the headache that began as soon as I arrived and that did not leave me until well into the following day. Everyone was there, of course. Even Vivienne ventured down from her Mayfair retreat. She gave me her cool cheek to kiss, and for the rest of the night we avoided each other. As usual, the party started without preliminaries, all instant noise and smoke and the tingling stink of alcohol. Leo Rothenstein played jazz on the piano, and a girl danced on a table, showing her stocking-tops. On the way from the Foreign Office Boy had picked up two young thugs, who stood about nursing cigarette ends in cupped hands and watching the increasingly intoxicated goings-on with a mixture of slit-eyed contempt and rather affecting uncertainty. Later, they started a fight with each other, more for something to do than out of anger, I think, though one of them was knifed, not seriously. (Later still, so I heard, they both went home with one of my colleagues from the Institute, a harmless connoisseur and small-time collector, who woke up the next afternoon to find the thugs gone, and with them everything of value in the flat.)

  Querell cornered me in the kitchen. His eyes had that odd glitter, like marine phosphorescence, that they took on when he had been drinking heavily; it was the only physical sign of inebriation I could ever detect in him.

  “I hear Queen Mary sent you a present of a handbag,” he said. “Is it true?”

  “A reticule,” I said stiffly. “Georgian; quite a good piece. It was an expression of gratitude. I had put her in the way of a bargain—a Turner, as it happens. I don’t know what everyone finds so funny.”

  Nick came by, morosely tipsy; Sylvia had just produced their first child, and he was still supposedly celebrating the birth. He stopped, and stood swaying, regarding me with a soiled glare, breathing noisily, his jaw working.

  “I hear you’ve left the Department,” he said. “Another bloody rat diving off the poor old ship and leaving the rest of us to keep her afloat.”

  “Steady on, old chap,” Querell said, smirking. “There might be spies about.”

  Nick scowled at him.

  “Not a decent bloody patriot among the lot of you. What will you do when the Russian tanks come rolling across the Elbe, eh? What will you do then?”

  “Do give over, Nick,” I said. “You’re drunk.”

  “I may be drunk, but I know what’s what. There’s bloody Boy hiving off to bloody America. What’s the good of going to America?”

  “I thought it was you who organised it,” Querell said.

  Beside us, a young woman in a pink dress began to be sick into the sink.

  “Organised what?” Nick said indignantly. “What did I organise?”

  Querell, laughing softly, played with his cigarette, twirling it between fingers and thumb.

  “Oh, I heard you were the one who arranged for Bannister to go to Washington, that’s
all,” he said. He was enjoying himself. “Did I hear wrong?”

  Nick was watching with bleary interest the vomiting girl.

  “What influence have I got?” he said. “What influence has any of us got, now that the bloody Bolshies have taken over.”

  Vivienne was passing by, and Querell reached out and caught her wrist deftly in his thin, bony, bloodless hand.

  “Come on, Viv,” he said, “aren’t you going to talk to us?”

  I watched them. No one ever called her Viv.

  “Oh, I thought you must be discussing men’s things,” she said, “you all looked so earnest and conspiratorial. Victor, you do seem grim—has Querell been teasing you again? How is poor Sylvia, Nick? Childbirth can be so draining, I find. Goodness, what has that young woman been eating? Seems to be all tomato skins. It is tomato, isn’t it, and not blood? Haemorrhages in one so young are not a good sign. I must go back; I was speaking to such an interesting man. A negro. He seemed very angry about something. Which reminds me, did you hear what Boy replied when that Mytchett person was urging caution on him in his new life in the New World? Mytchett said that where Americans are concerned, one mustn’t on any account bring up matters of race, homosexuality or Communism, and Boy said, What you’re telling me is not to make a pass at Paul Robeson.”