The Untouchable
Page 41
“You did all right,” he said. “You got your job, your place at the Palace. You got your knighthood.”
“I haven’t got it any more.”
“You were always too fond of honours, and having letters after your name, all that capitalist rot.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got someone coming shortly.”
“When did you start?” I said. “Was it Felix Hartmann, or before that?”
He shrugged.
“Oh, before. Long before. With Querell. He and I went in together. Even though he always hated me, I don’t know why.”
“And are you still working for them?”
“Of course.”
He smiled, with lips shut tight and the tip of his nose depressed; age has accentuated his Jewishness, yet the one he has come most to resemble is his gentile father—that sinuous look, the pointed bald pate, those watchful, hooded eyes. The rain, having taken a deep breath, started up again with determination. I have always loved the sound of rain on glass. Tremor getting very bad now, hands all ashake and one leg going like the arm of a sewing machine.
“Was it Vivienne who told you?” he said. “I always suspected she had. And you never let on, all these years. What a sly old body you are, Doc.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He transferred the cup and saucer carefully to the table and sat for a moment, thinking.
“Do you remember Boulogne,” he said, “that last morning, on the ammunition ship, when you lost your nerve? I knew then I could never trust you. Besides, you weren’t serious; you were just in it for amusement, and something you could pretend to believe in.” He looked at me. “I tried to make it up to you. I helped you. I passed you all that stuff from Bletchley for you to impress Oleg with. And when you wanted to get out and devote yourself to”—a faint smirk—“art, I was there. Why do you think they let you go? Because they had me.”
I poured another mighty gin. I was realising that I preferred it without tonic; it was brighter, more emphatic, steely-sharp. A bit late to be acquiring new tastes.
“Who else knew?” I said.
“What? Oh, everyone, really.”
“Sylvia, for instance? Did you tell Sylvia?”
“She guessed. We didn’t discuss it.” He glanced at me and gave a rueful shrug, biting his lip. “She felt sorry for you.”
“Why did you give my name to that fellow?” I said. “Why did you have to betray me a second time? Why couldn’t you have left me in peace?”
He heaved a sigh and shifted in his chair. He had the bored, impatient air of a man being forced to listen to an unwelcome declaration of love. As he was, I suppose.
“They were after me again.” He smiled; it was Vivienne’s icy glitter. “I’ve told you,” he said. “I have to be protected.” He looked at his watch. “And now, really—”
“What if I talk to the papers?” I said. “What if I call them up today and tell them everything.”
He shook his head.
“You won’t do that.”
“I could tell Julian. That would dull some of his filial admiration.”
“You won’t do that, either.” Distantly we heard the doorbell ring. He stood up, and bent and retrieved my umbrella. “Your socks are wet,” he said. “Why are you wearing slippers, in this weather?”
“Bunions,” I said, and laughed, a touch hysterically, I fear; it was the gin, no doubt. He was looking at the string bag again. I shook it. “I brought a gun,” I said.
He glanced aside, clicking his tongue in annoyance.
“Are they taking care of you?” he said. “The Department, I mean. Pensions, that kind of thing?” I said nothing. We set off through the house. As we walked, he turned from the waist up and looked into my face. “Listen, Victor, I—”
“Don’t, Nick,” I said. “Don’t.”
He began to say something more, but changed his mind. I could feel the presence of someone else in the house. (Was it you, my dear? Come, was it you, skulking in one of those gilded antechambers?) The maid—why do I keep wanting to call her the nurse?—materialised out of the shadows in the hall and opened the front door for me. I went out quickly on to the step. The rain had stopped again, the lilac leaves were dripping. Nick put a hand on my shoulder but I squirmed away from his touch.
“By the way,” I said, “I’m leaving you the Poussin.”
He nodded, not surprised at all; that bit of laurel was still stuck to his brow. And to think I once thought him a god. He stepped back and lifted his arm in a curious, grave salute that seemed less a farewell than a sort of sardonic blessing. I walked away rapidly down the wet street, through sunlight and fleet shadow, swinging my umbrella, the string bag dangling at my side. At every other step the bag and its burden banged against my shin; I did not mind.
I hope Miss Vandeleur will not be too disappointed when she comes around to do the final clearing-up—I have no doubt it will be she that he will send. Most of the sensitive things I have already destroyed; there is a very efficient incinerator in the basement. As to this—what, this memoir? this fictional memoir?—I shall leave it to her to decide how best to dispose of it. I imagine she will bring it straight to him. He always did have his girls. How could I ever have thought that it was Skryne who had put her on to me? I got so many things so drearily wrong. Now we are sitting here, Webley and myself, in silent commune. Some playwright of the nineteenth century, I cannot recall for the moment who it was, wittily observed that if a revolver appears in the first act it is bound to go off in the third. Well, le dernier acte est sanglant… So much for my Pascalian wager; a vulgar concept, anyway.
What a noble sky, this evening, pale blue to cobalt to rich purple, and the great bergs of cloud, colour of dirty ice, with soft copper edgings, progressing from west to east, distant, stately, soundless. It is the kind of sky that Poussin loved to set above his lofty dramas of death and love and loss. There are any number of clear patches; I am waiting for a bird-shaped one.
In the head or through the heart? Now, there is a dilemma.
Father, the gate is open.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Very many books have been written on the subject of the Cambridge spies; the majority of these I have not read.
However, the following three have been of great help to me:
Conspiracy of Silence, by Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman (Grafton, London, 1986)
Mask of Treachery, by John Costello (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1988)
My Five Cambridge Friends, by Yuri Modin (Headline, London, 1994)
I should also mention:
Code Breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, edited by F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993)
London at War 1939-1945, by Philip Ziegler (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1995)
Louis MacNeice, by Jon Stallworthy (Faber & Faber, London, 1995)
Poussin, by Anthony Blunt (Pallas Athene, London [reprint], 1995)
Karl Marx, by Isaiah Berlin (Thornton Butterworth, London, 1939)
Acclaim for JOHN BANVILLE’s THE UNTOUCHABLE
“Maskell takes his place with John le Carré’s Alec Leamas as one of spy fiction’s greatest characters. Poetic and deeply affecting.”
—People
“[Banville’s] books are not only an illumination to read—for they are always packed with information and learning—but a joyful and durable source of aesthetic satisfaction.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Enthralling…. Victor Maskell is a thinly disguised Anthony Blunt Banville has pulled off a marvelous series of tricks.”
—Anita Brookner, The Spectator
“Banville has the skill, ambition and learning to stand at the end of the great tradition of modernist writers.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“It must by now be an open secret that on this [U.K.] side of the Atlantic, Banville is the most intelligent and stylish novelist at work.”
—George
Steiner, The Observer
“Banville’s acute characterization and laceratingly witty prose capture perfectly the paradoxically idealistic yet cynical mood of the upper classes in 1930s Britain.”
—Time Out
“An icy detailed portrait of a traitor, and a precise meditation on the nature of belief and betrayal… a subtle, sad, and deeply moving work.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Delectably droll and masterful The rich fabric of this novel blends the shrewd humor of a comedy of manners with the suspense of a tale of espionage.”
—Booklist
“[Written with] grace and intelligence…. His story is so well told that why he spied—and who betrayed him—become secondary.”
—Library Journal
BY JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Shroud
Eclipse
Athena
Ghosts
The Book of Evidence
Mefisto
The Newton Letter
Kepler
Doctor Copernicus
Birchwood
Nightspawn
Long Lankin
About the Author
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of more than ten novels, including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea in 2005. He lives in Dublin.
ALSO BY JOHN BANVILLE
“[Banville is] one of the most remarkable living writers…. Everything he touches turns to memorable literature.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
ATHENA
At once a literary thriller and a sumptuously perverse love story, Athena is a tour de force of the narrative imagination. Banville’s narrator calls himself “Morrow.” He knows a great deal about seventeenth-century Flemish art, and while “authenticating” some suspicious paintings meets “A,” a woman who in time becomes his mistress and nemesis, his anguish and addiction.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73685-9
DOCTOR COPERNICUS
It is the sixteenth century. Princes and bishops send armies careening across Europe and order assassins into the bedchambers of their enemies. And in a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73799-5
GHOSTS
On an unnamed island, a dayboat runs aground, forcing its group of shaken travelers to wade ashore. There they encounter a reclusive art historian and his assistant. But is the meeting truly an accident? If so, why does one of the castaways appear to know the reclusive scholar— and why is the latter so afraid of him?
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75512-8
KEPLER
John Banville re-creates the life of Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Wars, witchcraft, and disease rage throughout Europe, and for this court mathematician, astronomy is a quest for some form of divine order.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74370-7
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only)
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by John Banville
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Banville, John.
The Untouchable: a novel / by John Banville.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56092-6
1. Espionage, Soviet—Great Britain—History—20th century—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6052.A57U58 1997
843′.914—dc21 96-49637
CIP
Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com
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