The Untouchable (23 page)

“Do sit down, Victor,” Nick muttered irritably. “People are staring.”

I sat. We drank some more champagne. After what seemed a long time Baby came back, stepping gingerly and holding in place a fixed, ashen smile. When she reached the table she put down a hand to steady herself and stood surveying us with an air of bright surprise.

“Who’d have believed it?” she said. “There
is
water. It
does
break.”

Our son was born in the small hours of the following morning. I did not register the exact time of his birth—I was still half tight— and afterwards it did not seem tactful to ask. I suppose that might be considered the first instance of that general neglect of my son which he has always tacitly accused me of. When I heard his first cry I was pacing and smoking, as expectant fathers are supposed to do, outside the delivery room—no nonsense in those days of dragging the father in to witness the birth—and I experienced a jolt, a kind of leap, in the region of my diaphragm, as if all along there had been new life growing in me, too, unnoticed until now. I wish I could say that I felt joy, excitement, the giddy realisation of being all of a sudden spiritually increased—and I must have, surely I must have—but what I recall most clearly is a sensation of dullness, of heaviness, as if this birth had somehow really added to me, I mean to my physical self, as if Vivienne had passed over to me an unhandy extra weight that from now on I would have to carry about with me everywhere. The real infant, on the other hand, weighed almost nothing. I held him in my arms with awkward tenderness, trying to think of something to say. It was only when I tasted warm salt water dribbling in at the corners of my mouth that I realised I was weeping. Vivienne, groggy on her still bloodied bed, her eyes red-rimmed and her hair lank with sweat, tactfully ignored my tears.

“Well,” she said thickly, working her tongue, grey-hued and
interestingly fat, over her cracked lips, “at least people will have to call me by my proper name from now on. Who could speak of Baby’s baby and keep a straight face?”

The sun was well up when I got home—home then was a flat in Bayswater that we were to keep until well into the war, though neither of us spent much time there—but the park with its newly dug, zigzag trenches was still greyed with dew and there were wisps of mist under the boughs of the already faltering trees. I lay on a sofa and tried to sleep, but the night’s drink was still working in me and my mind was racing. I got up and drank coffee laced with brandy, and sat in the kitchen watching the pigeons on the fire escape preening and pushing at each other. The morning silence coming in from the streets brought with it a curious sense of lightness, as if the world were dreamily afloat, waiting for the day’s noise to get going and give everything its proper weight. When I had finished eating I could not think what else to do. I drifted about the flat like an uneasy ghost. Vivienne’s absence was more like a presence. The gaps on the walls added to the melancholy sense of things being somehow there and not there—anticipating air raids, I had got the Institute to let me store my pictures, including
The Death of Seneca,
in the basement vault. It was morning, and I was a father, but I seemed to be at an ending rather than a beginning. I listened to the seven o’clock news on the wireless. It was all bad. I sat down on the sofa again, just to rest for a moment and nurse my throbbing brow, and three hours later found myself struggling out of sleep, with burning eyelids and a stiff neck and a horrible coating of dried gum on my tongue. I remember it as mysteriously significant, that little sleep; it seemed a stepping out of the world, and out of myself, like the sleep the hero in a magical tale might be granted before setting off on his perilous adventures. I shaved, trying not to meet my eyes in the mirror, and went down to Whitehall to talk to Billy Mytchett.

He was a young man of thirty-five, one of those eternal public-school types who were to come into their own in the early years of the war. He was a short, sturdy little fellow, with a touchingly open, pink face, and a shock of coarse blond hair that hung low
on his forehead and rose into a complicated whorl on the crown of his head, giving him the aspect of an untidy stook of wheat. He wore tweeds, and an Eton tie with a knot that looked as if it had been tied for him by his mother on his first day at school and had not been undone since. He affected a tobacco pipe, which did not suit him and which he clearly could not manage, and kept poking at it and tamping it and plying it ineffectually with sputtering matches. His cramped office looked out on a startlingly noble prospect of arches and buttressed roofs and imperial-blue sky. He was Deputy Controller of Military Intelligence; it was hard to believe.

“‘Lo, Billy,” Nick said, and perched himself on a corner of Mytchett’s desk, swinging one leg. I had called him from the flat, and he had been waiting for me at the security desk when I arrived, and had grinned at my drawn countenance and puffy eyes; Nick no longer suffered from hangovers: that kind of thing was for Other Ranks. “Billy, this is Maskell,” he said now, “chap I was telling you about. I’ll expect you to treat him as you would any brother-in-law of mine.”

Mytchett hopped up, knocking a sheaf of papers off the desk, and shook hands with me vigorously.

“Splendid!” he said, grinning with mouth and eyes and ears. “Absolutely!”

Nick deftly scooped up the papers Billy had spilled and put them back on the desk. He was always doing that, tidying things, setting things to right, as if it were his special task to smooth away without fuss the little catastrophes that others less graceful than he could not help causing as they stumbled their way through the world.

“If you’re thinking he looks green around the gills,” he said, “it’s because he has been up all night—my sis, who is married to him, God help her, produced their first nipper a few hours ago.”

Mytchett’s grin grew even wider and he pumped my hand again, with renewed forcefulness, though an uneasy, furtive something had come into his look; babies, now, babies were not a subject a chap should be asked to consider at the kind of moment in history at which we now found ourselves.

“Splendid!” he said again, fairly barking the word. “Boy, was it? Jolly good. Boys are best, all round. Do sit. Have a fag?” He retreated behind the desk and sat down again. “Now—Nick tells me you’re fed up being a pen-pusher? Understandable. I hope to get out in the field myself, ASAP.”

“You think there will be war?” I said. It was a question I liked to ask these days, for it never failed to produce an amusing response. Billy Mytchett’s reaction was particularly gratifying, as he mugged at me in pop-eyed, pitying surprise, and smacked a hand down on the desk and looked about him at an imaginary audience, calling its attention to my naivety.

“No question, old man. Matter of days. We may have let Johnny Czecko down—disgracefully, if you want to know moy’umble opinion—but we’re not going to desert the Poles. Friend Adolf is in for a nasty surprise this time.”

Nick, still swinging his leg, was beaming down on Mytchett proudly, as if he had invented him.

“And Billy’s boys,” he said, “are going to be at the forefront of the surprise party. Right, Bill?”

Mytchett, sucking at his pipe, nodded happily, and folded his arms tight about his chest as if to keep himself from jumping up and capering a few steps of a jig.

“We’ve got a place down near Aldershot,” he said. “Big old house and grounds. That’s where you’ll do your basic training.”

There was a silence, through which they both sat and smiled at me.

“Basic training?” I said, faintly.

“Fraid so,” Mytchett said. “You’re in the army now, and all that. Well, not the army, exactly, but as near as dammit. See, what we are is Field Security, which is a branch of the Corps of Military Police. Lot of nonsense, these fancy monikers, but there you are.” He got up again and began pacing the patch of floor in front of his desk, pipe clamped in his teeth and one hand behind him pressed to the small of his back, a bearing he must have borrowed from some hero of his youth, an admired military uncle or an old headmaster; everything about Billy Mytchett had come from somewhere else. Nick winked at me. “You’re in Languages,
yes?” Mytchett said. “That’s good, that’s good. How are you with the old parley-voo?”

“French? I can get by.”

“He’s being modest,” Nick said. “He speaks it like a native.”

“Excellent. Because we’re going to need French speakers. This is classified, you understand, but since you’re already in the Department, I can tell you: as soon as the balloon goes up, a sizeable expedition of our troops will be dispatched over there to stiffen the morale of the Froggies—you know what they’re like. Our chaps will need keeping an eye on—possible infiltration, vetting of letters, that kind of thing—which is where we come in. Know Normandy at all, that area? Good. I haven’t said so”— he closed one eye and pointed a finger at me as if it were the barrel of a gun—“but I think it’s not impossible that you might be stationed not a million miles from that neck of the woods. So: get your kit together, kiss the wife and sprog day-day, and get yourself down to Bingley Manor by the first available train.”

Startled, I looked from Mytchett to Nick and back again.

“Today?” I said.

Mytchett nodded.

“Certainly. If not before.”

“But,” I said, “what about … what about my present posting?”

“I told you I’d fix that,” Nick said. “I spoke this morning to your head of section. You’re released as of”—he consulted his watch—“as of now, actually.”

Mytchett threw himself down at his desk again and rubbed his hands and chuckled.

“Nick’s a doer,” he said. “We’ll all need to be doers, soon.” He frowned suddenly. “But hang on: what about a conflict of loyalties?”

I stared.

“A conflict of…?”

“Yes. You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

“Well, I… Of course I…”

Nick leaned forward and patted me gently on the shoulder.

“He’s pulling your leg, Victor.”

Mytchett spluttered delightedly.

“Sorry, old chap,” he said. “Terrible tease, I am. You should have known me at school, I was a terror.” He stood up, and offered me his hand across the desk. “Welcome aboard. You won’t regret it. And France, they tell me, is really not at all a bad place to be, in the autumn.”

When we got outside, Nick took me to Rainer’s in Jermyn Street to buy me a celebratory cup of tea “—Or char,” he said, “as I suppose we shall have to call it from now on. The fighting man’s nectar.”

A beam of thick yellow sunlight beat on the table between us, vibrating in time with the throbbing in my temples. Despite the dreamy, late-summer softness of the day, the cars passing by in the street seemed to me to have a hunched, anxious aspect.

“Jesus Christ, Nick,” I said, “are they all going to be like that?”

“Billy, you mean? Oh, Billy’s all right.”

“He’s a bloody child!”

He laughed, and nodded, rolling the tip of his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray to shape it into a cone.

“Yes, he is a bit hard to take. But he’s useful.” He glanced at me and away, smiling and biting his lip. “The war will make him grow up.” The waitress brought our tea. Absent-mindedly he gave her a dazzling smile; he was always practising, was Nick. “So,” he said when the woman had gone, “what are you going to call this boy of yours?”

Vivienne, when I arrived to see her at the hospital at noon, had undergone a transformation. She was sitting up in bed wearing a pearl-white satin bed-jacket and buffing her nails. Her hair was waved (“Sacha himself came in to do me”) and she had put on lipstick, and there were florin-sized dabs of rouge on her cheekbones.

“You look like a harlequin,” I said.

She made a mouth at me.

“Better than a harlot, I suppose. Or is that what you meant to say?”

There were flowers everywhere, on the window sill, on the bedside table, even on the floor, some bunches still in their tissue
paper; their musky perfume cloyed the air of the room. I walked to the window and stood with my hands in my pockets looking out at a blackened brick wall webbed over with a complicated geometry of drainpipes. Diagonals of sunlight and shadow on the brick bespoke the hot summer noon going on elsewhere.

“How is the … how is the baby?” I said.

“The what? Dear me, for a moment I didn’t know what you meant. He’s here, if you must see him.” She pushed aside a hanging frond of fern to reveal a cot with a blue blanket, above the fold of which there was visible a vague small patch of angry pink. I did not move from the window. She smiled at me, an eyebrow twitching. “Yes, irresistible, isn’t he. And yet when you saw him first you wept. Or was that just from all the champagne you drank last night?”

I came and sat on the side of the bed and leaned down and gingerly drew back the blanket and contemplated the infant’s hot cheek and miniature, rosebud mouth. He was asleep, and breathing very fast, a tiny, soft engine. I felt… shy, is the only word. Vivienne sighed.

“Have we made a mistake,” she said, “bringing another poor mite into this awful world?” I told her about my interview with Billy Mytchett, and that I would be going away. She hardly listened, and went on gazing pensively at the child. “I’ve decided on a name,” she said, “did I tell you? Daddy will be disappointed, and I suppose your father will be too. But I do think it’s wrong to burden a child with the name of a grandparent. So much to live up to—or so little. Bad either way.”

An ambulance siren started up close by, very loud, and somehow comic, and stopped as abruptly as it had started.

“Practising, perhaps,” I said.

“Mm. We had blackout drill last night. It was all very exciting and cosy. Like school. I’m sure they had a lovely time in the public wards, being cheery and so on. The nurses thought it was all a great lark.”

I took her hand. It was a little swollen, and feverishly hot. I could feel the blood swarming under the skin.

“I shan’t be far away,” I said. “Hampshire. Just down the road, really.”

She nodded, nibbling distractedly at her lip. Still she kept her gaze fixed on the child.