The Untouchable (10 page)

Then Hettie appeared. She also seemed to have been lurking in the hallway, waiting for her moment. If my father had shrunk over the years, Hettie had swelled to the dimensions of one of
Rowlandson’s royal doxies. She was in her sixties but still retained the bloom of youth, a big pink person with teary eyes and dainty feet and an uncontrollable, wobbly smile.

“Oh, Victor!” she cried, clasping her hands. “How thin you’ve grown!”

Hettie came of a wealthy Quaker family and had spent her youth in a vast grey stone mansion on the south shore of the Lough doing good works and needlepoint. I think that she is the only human being I have ever encountered, apart from poor Freddie, of whom I can say with complete conviction that she had not a trace of wickedness in her (how can there be such people as these, in such a world as this?). If she had not been my stepmother and therefore more or less a part of the furniture, I surely would have found her an object of amazement and awe. When she arrived in our lives I had tried hard to resent and thwart her, but her jollity had been too much for me. She had won me over at once by getting rid of Nanny Hargreaves, a fearsome Presbyterian frump who since my mother’s death had ruled over my life with malevolent efficiency, dosing me weekly with castor oil and subjecting Freddie and me to sulphurous homilies on sin and damnation. Nanny Hargreaves would not have known how to play; Hettie, though, loved children’s games, the rowdier the better—perhaps her Quaker parents had disapproved of such godless frivolities when she was little, and she was making up for lost opportunities. She would get down on hands and knees and chase Freddie and me about the drawing-room floor, growling like a grizzly bear, her face bright red and her great bosom swinging. In the evenings before our bedtime she read us stories of the foreign missions, featuring brave, pure girls and stout-hearted men with beards, and the odd martyr, staked out in the desert to die or boiled in a pot by capering Hottentots.

“Come in, come in,” she said, flustered, I could see, by Nick’s exotic good looks. “Mary will make you an Ulster fry.”

My father disengaged himself from Freddie’s embrace and we all bustled into the hall, Andy Wilson coming behind us with the bags and swearing mildly under his breath. Andy’s son, Matty, had been what I suppose I may call my first, precocious love.

Matty was my age: black curls, blue eyes, and hardy, like his father. Is there any figure in childhood more invitingly vulnerable, any presence more sinisterly suggestive, than the son of a servant? Matty had died, drowned while swimming in Colton Weir. I had not known what to do with my sorrow, it had sat in me for weeks like a great brooding bird. And then one day it just flew off”. Thus does one learn about the limits of love, the limits of grief.

Nick was smiling at me reprovingly. “You didn’t tell me you had a brother,” he said.

By now I had realised the full magnitude of the mistake I had made in bringing him here. The home returned to is a concatenation of sadnesses that makes one want to weep and at the same time sets the teeth on edge. How dingy the place looked. And that smell!—tired, brownish, intimate, awful. I was ashamed of everything, and ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I could hardly bear to look at my shabby father and his fat wife, I flinched at Andy’s mutterings behind me and cringed at the thought of red-haired Mary, our Catholic cook, slapping a plate of rashers and black pudding down in front of Nick (did he eat pork?—Oh God, I had forgotten to ask). My greatest shame, however, was Freddie. When we were children I had not minded him, deeming it right, I suppose, that anyone born into the family after me should be defective. He had been someone for me to order about, a makeweight in the intricate games that I devised, an uncritical witness to my cautiously daring escapades. I used to perform experiments on him just to see how he would react. I gave him methylated spirits to drink—he gagged and retched—and put a dead lizard in his porridge. One day I pushed him into a bed of nettles and made him scream. I thought I would be punished, but my father only looked at me with deep, droop-eyed sadness, shaking his head, while Hettie sat down on the lawn like a squaw and rocked Freddie in her arms and pressed dock leaves to his livid arms and his swollen knock-knees. In adolescence, when I developed a passion for the Romantics, I conceived of him as a noble savage, and even wrote a sonnet about him, composed of Wordsworthian apostrophes
(0! thou princely child of Nature, list!),
and made him tramp the hills with me in all weathers, to his distress, for he was as much
afraid of the outdoors as he had been as a child. Now, suddenly, I saw him through Nick’s eyes, a poor, shambling, damaged thing with my high forehead and prominent upper jaw, and I walked down the hall in a hot sweat of embarrassment and would not meet Nick’s amused, quizzical eye, and was relieved when Freddie sloped off to the garden to take up again whatever obscure doings he had been engaged in when we arrived.

In the dining room, while Nick and I ate breakfast, Hettie and my father sat and watched us in a sort of hazy wonderment, as if we were a pair of immortals who had stopped off at their humble table on the way to some important piece of Olympian business elsewhere. Mary the cook kept bringing us more things to eat, fried bread and grilled kidneys and racks of toast, walking around the table with her apron lifted to protect her fingers from the heat of the plates, glancing at Nick—his hands, that hanging lock of hair—from under her almost invisible, pale eyelashes and blushing. My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.

“Say what you like about Chamberlain,” he said, “but he remembers the Great War, the cost of it.”

I glared at a sausage, thinking what a hopeless booby my father was.

“Peace in our time,” Hettie murmured, sighing.

“Oh, but there
will
be war,” Nick said equably, “despite the appeasers. What is this, by the way?”

“Fadge,” Mary blurted, and blushed the harder, making for the door.

“Potato cake,” I said between clenched teeth. “Local delicacy.” Two days ago I had been chatting with the King.

“Mm,” Nick said, “delicious.”

My father sat blinking in distress. Light from the leaded window glinted on his balding pate. Trollope, I thought; he’s a character out of Trollope—one of the minor ones.

“Is that what people feel in London,” he said, “that there will be war?”

Nick pondered, head to one side, looking at his plate. I can
see the moment: the thin October sunlight on the parquet, a curl of steam from the teapot’s spout, the somehow evil glitter of the marmalade in its cut-glass dish, and my father and Hettie waiting like frightened children to hear what London thought.

“Of course there’ll be a war,” I said impatiently. “The old men have let it happen all over again.”

My father nodded sadly.

“Yes,” he said, “you must consider our generation has rather let you down.”

“Oh, but we want peace!” Hettie exclaimed, as close to indignation as it was possible for her to get. “We don’t want young men to go out again and be killed for … for nothing.”

I glanced at Nick. He was working away unconcernedly at his plate; he always did have a remarkable appetite.

“The fight against Fascism is hardly what you could call
nothing,
” I said, and Hettie looked so abashed it seemed she might burst into tears.

“Ah, you young people,” my father said softly, batting a hand at the air before him in a gesture which must have been a secular modification of the episcopal blessing, “you have such certainty.”

At this Nick looked up with an expression of real interest.

“Do you think so?” he said. “I feel we’re all rather … well,
unfocused
” Pensively he buttered a piece of cold toast, lathering on the butter like a painter applying cadmium yellow with a palette knife. “Seems to me that chaps of my age lack any sense of purpose or direction. In fact, I think we could do with a jolly good dose of military discipline.”

“Shove ’em in the army, eh?” I said bitterly. Nick went on calmly buttering his toast and, preparing to take a bite, glanced at me sideways and said:

“Why not? Those louts one sees standing on street corners complaining that they can’t get work—wouldn’t they be better off in uniform?”

“They’d be better off in
work
!” I said. “Marx makes the point that-”

“Oh, Marx!” Nick said through a crackling mouthful of toast, and chuckled.

I felt my forehead turning red.

“You should try reading Marx,” I said. “Then you might know what you’re talking about.”

Nick only laughed again.

“You mean, then I might know what
you
are talking about.”

An uneasy silence fell and Hettie looked at me apprehensively but I avoided her eye. My father, troubled, cleared his throat and with anxious fingers traced an invisible pattern on the tablecloth.

“Marxism, now,” he began, but I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.

“Nick and I are thinking of going to the west,” I said loudly. “He wants to see Mayo.”

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion. In my time I have, knowingly or otherwise, sent men and women to terrible deaths, yet I do not feel as sharp a pang when I think of them as I do when I recall the gleam of light on my father’s bowed pate at the table just then, or Hettie’s big sad soft eyes looking at me in silent beseeching, without anger or resentment, asking me to be kind to an ageing, anxious man, to be tolerant of the littleness of their lives; asking me to have a heart.

After breakfast I had to get out of the house, and made Nick walk with me down to the harbour. The day had turned blustery, and the shadows of clouds scudded over the white-flecked sea. The Norman castle on the shore looked particularly dour today, in the pale, autumn light; as a child I had believed it was made of wet sea-sand.

“Good people,” Nick said. “Your father is a fighter.”

I stared at him.

“You think so? Just another bourgeois liberal, I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.”

Nick laughed.

“Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?”

“Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.”

“There you are: a fighter.”

We strolled along the front. Despite the lateness of the season there were bathers down at the water, their cries came to us, tiny and clear, skimming the ribbed sand. Something in me always responds, shamefacedly, to the pastel gaieties of the seaside. I saw, with unnerving clarity, another version of myself, a little boy playing here with Freddie (Wittgenstein accosted me one day by the Cam and clutched me by the wrist and stuck his face close to mine and hissed:
“Is the dotard the same being that he was when he was an infant?”),
making castles and trying surreptitiously to get him to eat sand, while Hettie sat placidly in the middle of a vast checked blanket doing her knitting, sighing contentedly and talking to herself in a murmur, her big, mottled legs stuck out before her like a pair of windlasses and her yellow toes twitching (a parishioner once complained to my father that his wife was down on the strand “with her pegs on show for all the town to see”).

Nick halted suddenly and gazed about him histrionically at sea and beach and sky, his overcoat billowing in the breeze like a cloak.

“God,” he muttered, “how I loathe nature!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “perhaps we shouldn’t have come.”

He looked at me and put on a glum grin, pulling down his mouth at the sides. “You mustn’t take everything personally, you know,” he said. We walked on and he patted his stomach. “What was that stuff called? Fudge?”

“Fadge.”

“Amazing.”

I had watched him throughout breakfast, while my father talked platitudes and Hettie stoutly nodded her support. One smile from him at their quaintness, I had told myself, and I shall hate him for life. But he was impeccable. Even when Freddie came and pressed his nose and his scabbed lips against the dining room window, smearing the glass with snot and spittle, Nick only chuckled, as at the endearing antics of a toddler,
I
was the one who had sat with lip curled in contemptuous impatience. Now he said:

“Young people,
your father called us. I don’t feel young, do you? The Ancient of Days, rather. It’s we who are the old men now. I shall be thirty next month. Thirty!”

“I know,” I said. “On the twenty-fifth.”

He looked at me in surprise. “How did you remember?”

“I have a head for dates. And that’s a momentous one, after all.”

“What? Oh, yes, I see. Your glorious Revolution. Didn’t it in fact take place in November?”

“Yes. Their November, Old Style. The Julian calendar.”

“Ah, the Julian calendar, yes. What-ho for jolly old Julian.”

I winced; he never sounded more Jewish than when he came out with these Woosterisms.

“Anyway,” I said, “the symbol is all. As Querell likes to remark, the Catholic Church is founded on a pun.
Tu es Petrus?

“Eh? Oh, I see. That’s good; that’s very good.”

“Pinched it from someone else, though.”

We walked into the shadow of the castle wall and Nick’s mood darkened with the air.

“What will you do in this war, Victor?” he asked, his voice going gruff and Sydney Cartonish. He stopped and leaned against the harbour rail. The sea wind was chill, and sharp with salt. Far out to sea a flock of gulls was wheeling above a patch of brightness on the water, wheeling and clumsily diving, like blown sheets of newsprint. I fancied I could hear their harsh, hungry cries.

“You really think there will be a war?” I said.

“Yes. No question but.” He walked on and I followed a pace behind him. “Three months, six months—a year at the most. The factories have been given the word, though the War Office hasn’t told Chamberlain about it. You know he and Daladier worked together in secret for months to strike a deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland? And now Hitler can do whatever he pleases. Have you heard what he said about Chamberlain?
I feel sorry for him, let him have his piece of paper.”