The Untouchable (11 page)

I was staring at him.

“How do you know all this?” I asked, laughing in surprise. “Chamberlain, the factories, all that stuff?”

He shrugged.

“I’ve been talking to some people,” he said. “You might like to meet them. They’re our sort.”

My sort,
I thought,
or yours?
I let it pass.

“You mean, people in the government?”

He shrugged again.

“Something like that,” he said. We turned from the harbour and set off back up the hill road. While he had talked, a sort of slow, burning blush had come over me from breast to brow. It was as if we were a pair of schoolboys and Nick thought he had discovered the secrets of sex but had got the details all wrong. “Everything’s gone rotten, don’t you think?” he said. “Spain finished the whole thing for me. Spain, and now this beastly Munich business. Peace in our time—ha!” He stopped and turned to me with an earnest frown, brushing the lock of hair back from his forehead. Eyes very black in the pale light of morning, lip trembling with emotion as he struggled to maintain a manful mien. I had to look away to hide my grin. “Something has to be done, Victor. It’s up to us.”

“Our sort, you mean?”

It was said before I knew it. I was terrified of offending him— I had a vision of him sitting grim-faced in the trap, with eyes averted, demanding to be taken back to the station at once, while my father and Hettie, and Andy Wilson, and even the pony, looked at me accusingly. I need not have worried; Nick was not one to spot an irony; egotists never are, I find. We turned to the hill again. He walked with his hands jammed in his overcoat pockets and eyes on the road, his jaw set, a muscle in it working.

“I’ve felt so useless up to now,” he said, “playing the exquisite and guzzling champagne. You’ve at least done something with your life.”

“I hardly think a catalogue of the drawings in the Windsor Castle collection will stop Herr Hitler in his tracks.”

He nodded; he was not listening.

“The thing is to get involved,” he said; “to
act.”

“Is this the new Nick Brevoort?” I said, in as light a tone as I could manage. Embarrassment was giving way in me now to a not quite explicable and certainly unjustified annoyance—after all, everyone that autumn was talking like this. “I seem to remember having this conversation with you some years ago, but in reverse. Then I was the one playing at being the man of action.”

He smiled to himself, biting his lip; my annoyance shot up a couple of hot degrees.

“You think I’m playing?” he said, with just the hint of a contemptuous drawl. I did not let myself reply. We went on for a while in silence. The sun had retreated into a milky haze. “By the way,” he said, “I have a job, did you know? Leo Rothenstein has hired me as an adviser.”

I thought this must be one of Leo’s practical jokes.

“An adviser? What kind of an adviser?”

“Well, politics, mostly. And finance.”

“Finance?
What on earth do you know about finance?”

He did not reply for a moment. A rabbit came out of the hedge and sat up on its hind legs at the side of the road and looked at us in amazement.

“His family is worried about Hitler. They have money in Germany, and a lot of relations there. He asked me to look in on them. He knew I was going over, you see.”

“Are you? To Germany?”

“Yes—didn’t I say? Sorry. The people I’ve been talking to have asked me to go.”

“And do what?”

“Just… look around. Get the feel of things. Report back.”

I let out a loud laugh.

“Good God, Beaver,” I cried, “you’re going to be a spy!”

“Yes,” he said, with a rueful smirk, proud as a boy scout. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

I did not know why I should have been surprised: after all, I had been in the secret ranks myself for years, though on the other side from him, and his sort. What would have happened, I ask myself, if I had said to him then,
Nick, my love, I’m working for Moscow, what do you think of that?
Instead I stopped and turned and looked back down the hill to the harbour and the roughening sea.

“I wonder what those gulls were after,” I said.

Nick turned too and vaguely peered.

“What gulls?” he said.

W
e did not go to Mayo. I cannot remember what excuse I made to my father and Hettie, or if I even bothered to offer one. We were both anxious to get back to London, Nick to his spying and I to mine. Father was hurt. The west for him was the land of youth, not only the scene of his childhood holidays— his grandfather had kept a farm on a rocky islet in Clew Bay— but the place where his people had originated, mysterious autochthons stepping out of the mists of the western seaboard, the mighty O Measceoils, warriors, pirates, fierce clansmen all, who just in time to avoid the ravages of the Famine had changed their religion and Anglicised the family name and turned themselves into Yeats’s hard-riding country gentlemen. I had no wish to introduce Nick to these legends, and much less to walk with him through the sites where had stood the stone cottages of my forebears and the base beds from which they had sprung. In these matters he and I observed a decorous silence: he did not speak of his Jewishness nor I of my Catholic blood. We were both, in our own ways, self-made men. Three days at Carrick-drum was enough for us; we packed up our books and our unworn hiking boots and took ship for what I realised now was home. Leaving Ireland and my father’s house, I had the sense of having committed a small but particularly brutish crime. Throughout the journey I could feel my father’s wounded, forgiving gaze fixed like a spot of heat on the already burning back of my neck.

London that autumn had an abstracted, provisional air; the atmosphere was hectic and hollow, like that of the last day of school term, or the closing half-hour of a drunken party. People would drift off into silence in the middle of a sentence and look up at the tawny sunlight in the windows and sigh. The streets were like stage-sets, scaled down, two-dimensional, their bustle and busyness tinged with the pathos of something set in motion only so that it might be violently halted. The squawks of the news-vendors had an infernal ring—cockney chirpiness has always grated on my nerves. At evening the sunset glare in the sky above the roofs seemed the afterglow of a vast conflagration. It was all so banal, these hackneyed signs and wonders. Fear was banal.

For some, the times were grimly congenial. Querell, for instance, was in his element. I remember meeting him in the Strand one drizzly afternoon late in that November. We went to a Lyons Corner House and drank tea that was the same colour as the rain falling on the pavement outside the steamy window where we sat. Querell looked even more the spiv than usual, in his narrow suit and brown trilby. Within minutes, it seemed, he had filled to overflowing the tin ashtray on the table between us. I was well established at the Department by then, but I rarely saw him there—he was on the Balkans desk, I was in Languages— and when we chanced upon each other in the outside world like this we felt embarrassed and constrained, like two clergymen meeting the morning after an accidental encounter in a brothel. At least,
I
felt embarrassment,
I
felt constraint; I do not think Querell would ever allow himself to succumb to sensations so weak-kneed and obvious. I could not take seriously the self-deluding, school-brigade, boys-with-men’s-moustaches world of military intelligence; the atmosphere of mingled jollity and earnestness in which the Department went about its work was amusing at first, then obscurely shaming, then merely tedious. Such asses one had to deal with! Querell was different, though; I suspected he despised the place as much as I did. It had taken me a long time, and much vigorous yanking on the lattices of the old-boy network, to get in; in the end Leo Rothenstein managed it for me. He was—and had been for years, I was surprised to discover—something very high up in the Middle East section.

“It’s in the blood,” Querell said, with a pursed smile. “His family has been running spies for centuries. They got early news of Waterloo and made their fortune out of it on the Stock Exchange, did you know that? Crafty; very crafty.” Querell did not care for Jews. He was watching me out of those unblinking, protuberant pale eyes of his, two lazy streams of cigarette smoke flaring out of his nostrils. I busied myself eating a sticky bun. His mention of spies had startled me; it was not a word Department people used, even amongst ourselves. Sometimes it crossed my mind that he too, like me, might be more than he was admitting—he had just published a thriller called
The Double Agent.
The idea of having Querell as a secret sharer was not appealing. When I looked up from my bun he shifted his gaze to the legs of a passing waitress. I had never succeeded in pinning down his politics. He would talk of the Cliveden crowd or Mosley and his thugs with a sort of wistful admiration, then in the next breath he would be the worker’s champion. In my innocence I thought it was his Catholicism that afforded him this breadth of casuistry. At Maules one weekend when the Moscow show trials were going on he overheard me castigating Stalin. “Thing is, Maskell,” he said, “a bad pope doesn’t make a bad church.” Leo Rothenstein, draped on a sofa, his long legs crossed before him, shifted himself and laughed lazily. “My God,” he said, “a Bolshie in the house! My poor papa would turn in his grave.”

“Have you seen Bannister recently?” Querell asked now, still with his eye on the waitress’s crooked seams. “I hear he’s taken up with the Fascists.”

Boy was working at the BBC, in charge of what he portentously referred to as Talks. He was endearingly proud of this job, and regaled us with stories about Lord Reith and his boyfriends, which at the time we refused to believe. By then he too was with the Department; after Munich, pretty well everyone in our set had joined the Secret Service, or been press-ganged into it. I imagine we were not unaware that intelligence work was likely to be far preferable to soldiering—or am I being unfair to us? Boy took to his undercover role with childish enthusiasm. He would always love the secret life, and missed it painfully after he
defected. He enjoyed especially the role-playing; for cover, he had lately joined a Tory ginger group of Nazi sympathisers calling itself the Chain (“I’m pulling the Chain for Uncle Joe,” was Boy’s catchphrase), and had attached himself to a notorious pro-Hitler MP called Richard Someone, I have forgotten the name, an ex-Guards officer and a lunatic, for whom he was acting (the right word) as unofficial private secretary. His chief duty, he told us, was to be a pander for the Captain, who had an insatiable appetite for working-class young men. Recently Boy and his mad Captain had undertaken a jaunt to the Rhineland, escorting a band of schoolboys from the East End on a visit to a Hitler Youth camp. It was the kind of preposterous thing that went on in the run-up to war. The pair had returned in ecstasies (“Oh, those blond beasts!”), though Captain Dick had contracted a painful dose of anal thrush; not so clean-limbed after all,
die Hitlerjugend.

“The best part of the joke,” I said, “is that the trip was sponsored by the Foreign Relations Council of the Church of England!”

Querell did not laugh, only gave me one of his swift, bug-eyed glances, which always made me feel as if a bottle had been rolled across my face, the way at country house parties they used to roll empty champagne bottles over the ballroom floors to impart a final polishing (ah, the days of our youth—the youth of the world!).

“Maybe you should have gone with them,” he said.

That gave me pause. I could feel myself beginning to redden.

“Not my kind of thing, old boy,” I said, meaning it to come out lazy and insolent, though it sounded, to my own ears, incriminatingly prim. I passed on quickly. “Boy says the Krauts have finished rearming and are just waiting for the word.”

Querell shrugged. “Well, we hardly needed to send a pansy over to find out that for us, did we.”

“He and the Captain were shown around an aerodrome. Line upon line of Messerschmitts, all pointing at us.”

We were silent. In the traffic noise from the street outside I seemed to hear the whirr of propellers, and I shivered with eager anticipation:
let it come, let it all come!
Querell looked idly about
the room. At the table next to us a fat man in a greasy suit was speaking vehemently in a low voice to a wan young woman with hennaed hair—his daughter, it seemed—telling her in a level undertone that she was nothing but a tart; they were to turn up again a couple of years later, disguised as a Jewish refugee and his doomed young wife, on board
The Orient Express,
the first of Querell’s overrated Balkan thrillers.

“I wonder if we shall survive,” Querell said. “All this, I mean.” He waved a hand, taking in the other tables, and the waitress, and the woman at the cash register, and the fat man and his miserable daughter, and, beyond them, England.

“What if we don’t?” I said, cautiously. “Something better might take our place.”

“You want Hitler to win?”

“Not Hitler, no.”

It is hard now to recapture the peculiar thrill of moments such as that, when one risked everything on a throwaway remark. It was akin to the rush of vertiginous glee I felt when I made my first parachute jump. There was the same sensation of being light as air and yet far weightier, of far more significance, somehow, than a mere mortal should ever expect to be. Thus a minor god might feel, flying down from the clouds to try out a disguise on one of Arcady’s more experienced nymphs. We sat, Querell and I, unspeaking, looking at each other. That was another thing about those moments of absolute risk: the powerful, charged neutrality that took over one’s facial expressions and one’s tone of voice. When I met T. S. Eliot at a Palace function after the war, I recognised at once in that shadowed, camel-eyed gaze and timbreless voice the marks of the lifelong, obsessive dissembler.

Querell was the first to look away; the moment passed.

“Well,” he said, “it hardly matters who wins, since it will be left to the Yanks as usual to come in and mop up after us.”