The Untouchable

by John Banville

  “The children are asleep,” Antonia said, not looking at us. “I won’t offer you a drink.”

  Boy, ignoring her, cleared his throat.

  “I say, Phil,” he said, “we need to have a talk. Get your coat, there’s a good chap.”

  MacLeish nodded, slowly, miserably, and stood up, his knee joints creaking. His wife turned aside and walked to the window, took a cigarette from a silver box on the table there, lit it, and stood, elbow in hand, gazing out into the impenetrable dark. I saw us all there, clear and unreal as if we were on a stage. MacLeish looked at her in baggy-eyed anguish and lifted a beseeching hand towards her.

  “Tony,” he said.

  She made no reply, and did not turn, and he let fall his hand.

  “Time to go, old man,” Boy said. He was tapping his foot on the carpet. “Just a chat, that’s all.”

  I had an urge to laugh.

  MacLeish put on a camel-hair overcoat, and we went out. He had not even packed a bag. At the front door he paused, and slipped back into the hall. Boy and I looked at each other glumly, expecting sobs, shouts, hurled recriminations. In a moment he was back, however, carrying a furled umbrella. He looked at us sheepishly.

  “Well, you never know,” he said.

  It was midnight when we got to Folkestone. The night had turned windy, and the little ship, lit like a Christmas tree, was bobbing and rearing on the swell.

  “Christ,” Boy said, “it looks bloody small. There’s bound to be someone on board who’ll know us.”

  “Tell them you’re on a secret mission,” I said, and MacLeish glared at me.

  There was the question of Boy’s car. No one had thought what to do with it; obviously I could not drive it back to London. He loved the thing, and got quite agitated contemplating its possible fates. In the end he decided he would simply leave it on the quayside.

  “That way, I can think of it as being here always, waiting for me.”

  “Dear me, Boy,” I said, “I never knew you were such a sentimental old thing.”

  He grinned mournfully and wiped his nose with his knuckles.

  “Betty Bowler was right,” he said. “I’m not man enough.” We stood irresolute, the three of us, at the end of the gangplank, our trouser legs whipping in the warm night wind and the light from the lamps shivering at our feet. On board, a bell clanged dolefully. “The watches of the night,” Boy said, and tried to laugh.

  MacLeish, lost somewhere in the tormented deeps of himself, was staring at the narrow channel of darkly roiling waters between the ship’s flank and the dock. I thought he might be contemplating throwing himself in.

  “Well then,” I said briskly.

  We shook hands awkwardly, the three of us. I thought of giving Boy a kiss, but could not bring myself to do it, with the Dour Scot looking on.

  “Say goodbye to Vivienne for me,” Boy said. “And the children. I shall miss seeing them grow up.”

  I shrugged. “So will I.”

  He went up the gangplank, heavy-footed, lugging his bag. He turned.

  “Pop over and see us sometime,” he said. “All that caviare, that good vodka.”

  “Of course. I’ll sail out on the Liberation.”

  I could see him not remembering. He was thinking of something else.

  “And Victor—” he said; the wind caught the skirts of his overcoat and flapped them. “Forgive me.”

  Before I could respond—how would I have responded?— MacLeish beside me suddenly stirred himself and fixed a hand urgently on my arm.

  “Listen, Maskell,” he said, in a voice that shook, “I never liked you—still don’t, really—but I appreciate this, I mean your helping me like this. I want you to know that. I appreciate it.”

  He stood a moment, nodding, those crazed Presbyterian eyes fixed on mine, then he turned and lurched up the gangplank. Finding Boy blocking his way, he gave him a hard push in the back and said something sharply which I did not catch. In my last sight of them they were standing side by side at the metal rail, and all I could see were their heads and shoulders; they were looking down at me, like a pair of Politburo members viewing the May Day parade, MacLeish expressionless, and Boy slowly, wistfully waving.

  I caught the mail train back to London, and as we clattered along—why do trains always seem so much noisier at night?— the last effects of the alcohol in my blood drained all away, and I panicked. Thank God there was no one in the compartment to see me huddled in a corner of the seat, grey-faced, stark-eyed, my hands shaking and jaw involuntarily working. It was not arrest that I feared, not exposure, not even prison; that is, I did fear these things, but not in any immediate, felt way. I was just frightened, frightened of everything. My mind whizzed, all out of kilter, as if some component inside it had come loose and was flapping madly, like a broken fan belt. It is a good thing I was trapped on a train, or I do not know what I might have done— gone haring back to the quayside, perhaps, and leaped on board that ship with Boy and MacLeish as it pulled out to sea and so-called freedom. The thought of London filled me with terror. I had a Blakean vision of the city, all eerily aglow and thronged with aimlessly toiling figures into whose boiling midst the swaying, shuddering train would soon eject me. A sense of desolation and irremediable woe took hold of me, and brought me back all the way to the nights of my earliest childhood, when I would lie in bed in the swooping candlelight, while Freddie crooned in his cot and Nanny Hargreaves preached to us of hellfire and the fate of sinners; and now, hurtling through the dark towards London and the suddenly real possibility of damnation, in this world if not the next, I prayed. I did, Miss V., I prayed, incoherently, wriggling in terror and shame, but pray I did. And to my surprise, I was comforted. Somehow, the great Nobodaddy in the sky reached down a marmoreal hand and laid it on my burning brow and soothed me. When the train pulled into Charing Cross at three in the morning I had got my nerves back under control. As I walked along the empty platform, past the panting, sweating engine, squaring my shoulders and clearing my throat, I scoffed at myself for my fears of the night. What had I expected, I asked myself—a posse of police waiting for me at the ticket barrier?

  I found a taxi and went home. Sleep was impossible. Patrick was in Ireland, on his yearly visit to see his aged mother. I was glad; I could not have faced the prospect of trying to account for my overnight absence—he always knew when I was lying, which must make him unique in my life. How he would have enjoyed it all, though; later, when he heard what I had been up to, he laughed and laughed. Never took me really seriously, did Patrick. I drank a cup of black coffee, but it gave me palpitations, and then I downed a beaker of brandy, and that made the palpitations worse. I stood at the window in the living room and watched the summer dawn come up bloodily over the rooftops of Bloomsbury. The birds had woken, and were making a frightful racket. I had a fluttery, hollow sensation, that was not just the effect of the caffeine; it was the same feeling that I used to have when I was still with Vivienne and would come home in the small hours after a night of trawling through the public lavatories. In every wrongdoer there lurks the desire to be caught.

  At nine I called the number Boy had given me for Danny Perkins and arranged to meet him in Poland Street. I slipped out of the house, feeling watched. Lemon-sharp sunlight, the smoky summer smell of London. I had not shaved. I felt like one of Querell’s surreptitious villains.

  Danny Perkins was working for a bookie now, in what capacity I did not care to enquire, and was all swagger and hair oil, like a real cockney. When I arrived at the house he was lounging in the doorway in the sun smoking a cigarette with studied panache. Sharp suit, loud tie, black suede shoes with crepe soles an inch thick. The sight of him stirred up in me the old stew of emotions. He had been my first queer love, and the one who first tied me to the stake of jealousy; it was hard to know which was the more profound experience. We were flustered at first, not knowing what to do: shaking hands seemed somehow absurd, and an embrace was out of the question. In the end he contented
himself with punching me softly on the upper arm, and doing that boxer’s sideways ducking motion of his head and shoulders that I remembered so well.

  “Hello, Vic,” he said jauntily, “you’re looking fit.”

  “And so are you, Danny. Not a day older.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. I was thirty-five last week. Where does it go to, eh?”

  “Still got an eye on the stage?”

  “No, no; my professional days are over. I do a bit of warbling still, but it’s mostly in the bath, now.”

  We went into the house. The hall retained a medicinal smell, though the dodgy doctor was long gone. Where his surgery had been was a betting office now—“One of ours,” Danny said, with a proprietorial frown—and the floor was strewn with cigarette ends and soiled racing sheets. What had been my life was disappearing under time’s detritus. We climbed the stairs, Danny going ahead and I trying not to look at his narrow, neatly packed bum. In the parlour I watched his eyes slide over the sofa without a flicker of remembrance.

  He had not yet mentioned Boy.

  I found a half-full bottle of Scotch and we had a drink, standing in silence by the parlour window looking down into the narrow, sun-bright street. They would be in Paris by now, probably; I pictured Boy in the bar of the Gare du Nord, with an absinthe and a Gauloise, while the Dour Scot paced the pavement outside. We would all be hauled in, of course. I flinched at the prospect; I had been an interrogator, I knew what it would be like. But I was not afraid; no, I was not afraid.

  I poured Danny and myself another whisky.

  Boy’s room bore the signs of his precipitate departure: books thrown everywhere, the grate stuffed with half-burned papers, a white shirt spreadeagled on the floor suggestive of the chalk marks at the scene of a murder. In a wardrobe I found the old brown leather suitcase with the brass corners in which he kept his love letters. Trust Boy not to bother taking them with him. He was never one for blackmail. Unlike me.

  “Were you looking for something in particular, then?” Danny Perkins asked. He was standing in the bedroom doorway, nonchalantly wielding another cigarette. I shrugged. Danny gave an odd little laugh. “He’s gone, isn’t he,” he said.

  “Yes, Danny, he’s gone.”

  “Will he be back?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, no. He’s gone rather a long way off.”

  He nodded.

  “We’ll miss him, won’t we,” he said. “He was always a laugh.” He took a drag of his cigarette, and coughed for half a minute; he never could smoke properly. I picked up a letter and read: My dearest Boy, you missed a real knees-up at the palace last night, with all the lads in full regalia and Dickie simply rampant… “Funny, that, when you think of it,” Danny said hoarsely, “the good time we had, things being so bad, what with the war and all. It’s like we hardly noticed. But it’s all over now, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that, Danny?”

  “I say, it’s all over. Mr. Bannister gone, the old place empty…”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right; it is over.”

  Extraordinary, how careless people could be; half the letters seemed to be on House of Commons notepaper; there was even one with a Lambeth Palace crest.

  “Well,” Danny said, “I better be going: things to do, bets to be made good, that kind of thing.” He winked, grinning. He turned to go, then paused. “Listen, Victor, if there’s anything I can do, give me a bell. I know a lot of people, see.”

  “Oh, yes? What sort of people?”

  “Well, if you were ever to get yourself in trouble, like Mr. Bannister has, you might be in need of shelter, say, or transport…”

  “Thank you, Danny. I’m grateful.”

  He winked again, and sketched a mock salute, and was gone.

  I spent the better part of the afternoon going over the flat. Incriminating material everywhere, of course; I burnt most of it. The flames made so much heat I had to throw open the windows. Why does the smell of burning paper always remind me of childhood? I was taking a last, beady look around when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Danny coming back to offer me a hot tip, perhaps? I walked out on to the landing. A window there, that I had never noticed in all the years I had lodged in the house, gave on to a distant haze of summer greenery, a patch of park, or public gardens, with trees, and toylike figures at work, or play, or simply idle, I could not tell which; I can still see that view, perfect in all its miniature detail, a little window looking out into a lost world.

  “Danny?” I called down. “Is that you?”

  It was not.

  Everything was done with politeness and decorum; you could never fault the Department on its manners. The first one up the stairs was Moxton, from Security; I knew him slightly, a sandy-haired, weasel-faced fellow with oddly inexpressive eyes. He stopped on the return and twisted his head back to look up at me, one hand holding his hat, the other resting lightly on the banister rail. “Hello, Maskell,” he said pleasantly. “You’re the very chap we wanted to see.” Behind him came a large, bearish young man with a baby face splotched with pimples; Security, I thought, with remarkable inconsequence, always did get the least appetising recruits. “This is Brocklebank,” Moxton said, and his lips twitched.

  So here it was at last. I was not even surprised; what I felt was a huge settling sensation, as if a tremendous weight inside me had shifted, dropping an inch with a soundless crash. Moxton and the boy Brocklebank had reached the landing. Brocklebank gave me a measuring look, narrowing his eyes in the way the thrillers told him to. A new recruit, brought out for a bit of training in the field. I smiled at him.

  “Phew,” Moxton said, “isn’t it hot.” He glanced past my shoulder into the bedroom. “Been tidying up, have you? Bannister always was a slovenly sod. Having a bonfire, too, by the smell. What do they call it? Felo de se?”

  “Auto-da-fé, actually, sir,” Brocklebank said, in a surprisingly plummy accent; I would not have taken him for a public-school type.

  “That’s right,” Moxton said, without looking at him. “Burning of heretics.” He strolled into the bedroom and stopped in the middle of the floor and surveyed the disarray. Security people love this kind of thing; justifies their existence, after all. Beside me Brocklebank stood breathing, a big, soft engine, smelling of sweat and expensive cologne. “I imagine you’ve tied everything up here?” Moxton said, looking at me sideways from inside the room with those dead eyes, “the loose ends, and so on?” He stood a moment longer, pondering, then roused himself and came back out on the landing. “Look here,” he said, “why don’t you come down with us to the office. We can have a chat. You haven’t been round to the old place in ages.”

  “Are you arresting me?” I said, and was surprised by the cracked flute-note that sounded in my voice.

  Moxton put on a look of bland startlement.

  “Well now, what an idea! Takes the rozzers to do that. No, no—as I say, just a chat. The Chief wants a word.” He squeezed out a chill, flinty smile. “They’ve called in Skryne, too. Bit of a flap on, as you can imagine. They’ll be fretting if we delay.” He touched my arm, as if to reassure me, then nodded to Brocklebank. “Lead on, Rodney, will you?” As we went down the stairs in the wake of Brocklebank’s fat back, Moxton hummed to himself and tossed his hat lightly in his hand. “You’re a Cambridge man, aren’t you?” he said. “Like Bannister?”

  “We were up together, yes.”

  “I was at Birmingham.” Another wintry glitter. “Not the same thing at all, eh?”

  Brocklebank drove the car while Moxton and I sat in the back seat side by side, with our faces turned from each other, looking out of our respective windows. How calm the streets seemed, a glassy, distant anti-world, adrift with the dense soft smoke of summer. My mind churned sluggishly, in a kind of hindered, underwater panic, like a fish entangled in a net.

  “You realise,” I said, “I have no idea what’s going on.”

  Moxton did not turn from the window, and only chuckled. He was righ
t, of course: you must start acting the moment they challenge you, not when you are already in the car, with the cuffs on. Or rather, you must never stop acting, not for an instant, even when you are alone, in a locked room, with the lights off and the blankets over your head.

  Billy Mytchett had the wounded, anguished look of a fifth-former who has heard a rumour in the dorm that his mother has bolted and his father’s firm gone smash. “Christ, Maskell,” he said, “this is a hell of a business.” I had never heard him swear before; it seemed encouraging, for some reason. We were in a safe house in a suburban avenue somewhere south of the river. Safe houses always seem to me to have something of an ecclesiastical atmosphere; a domestic setting that is not lived in must remind me of my father’s study, which he never used except on Saturday nights when he was preparing the next day’s sermon. There was always a chill in that room, and a faint, flat stink generated, I suppose, by years of devout labour, impassioned self-delusion, and the ever-present fear of a loss of faith. It was the same fusty smell that trickled like dust in my nostrils now as I sat on a hard chair in the middle of a brown-painted parlour, with Moxton and Brocklebank loitering silently behind me in the umber gloom, and Billy Mytchett pacing up and down in front of me on the threadbare carpet with his fists jammed in the pockets of his old tweed jacket, doing tight turns at every third pace, like an agitated sentry who suspects the assassin has already slipped past him and is even now forcing his way into the king’s bedchamber. Skryne, on the other hand, was quite comfy and at his ease, sitting in an armchair at an angle to me, spruce as a visiting uncle in his neat suit and speckled tie and argyle socks, his perennial pipe going nicely. I had known him only by repute. Uneducated, but very sharp, so they said. He had been a policeman in Palestine. He did not worry me. In fact, none of it worried me; I was almost enjoying it all, as if it were a bit of foolery laid on for my entertainment and I had no real part to play in it except that of a mildly interested spectator. Then Skryne began to speak, in his pleasant, mild, pigeon-fancier’s voice. They knew all about me, he said, my work during the war for the Bolsheviks (that was the term he used—so quaint, so charmingly old-world!), my meetings with Oleg, everything. “MacLeish, Bannister and you,” he said. “Others as well, of course; but you were the three.” Silence. He waited, chin tilted, eyebrows lifted, smiling. You will think me ridiculously fanciful, I know, but I felt exactly as I had felt that morning many years before when I had woken up in the dawn light and knew that I would marry Baby: I had the same sense of levitating, somehow, as if a seraphic version of myself were rising up out of me, gilded and afire, into the suddenly shining air. Skryne softly slapped a hand down on his knee. “Come on, now,” he said good-humouredly, “aren’t you going to say anything?”