The Untouchable (29 page)

That kind of sweaty, bladder-tightening terror is not like, for instance, the dull dread that I feel nowadays when I contemplate the painful and extremely messy death that I know awaits me, sooner rather than later. What made it different was the element of chance. I have never been a gambler, but I can understand how it must feel when at the end of its counter-clockwise run the little wooden ball, making a rattle that is distractingly reminiscent of the nursery, jumps tantalisingly in and out of the slots of the roulette wheel, first the red and then the black and then the red again, with everything hanging on its whim, money, the wife’s pearl necklace, the children’s education, the deeds to the chateau in the hills, not to mention that little pied-à-terre behind the
tabac
on the sea front that no one is supposed to know about. The suspense, the anguish of it, the almost sexual expectancy—
now?
is it going to be
now?
is it
now?—
and all the time that fevered, horror-stricken sense of everything being about to
change, completely, unrecognisably, for ever. That is what it is to be truly, horribly, jubilantly alive, in the magnesium glare of intensest terror.

Nick of course was not afraid. Or if he was, the effect on him was even more remarkable than it was on me. He was exultant. A kind of radiance came off him, as if he were inwardly on fire. I could smell him; above the smell of the sea and the salt reek of the deck-boards where we sat, I could smell him, and I sucked it in, the raw stink of him, sweat and leather and wet wool and the rank afterburn of the flask of coffee he had drunk in the jeep an hour ago outside the house in rue du Cloître while he and Haig waited for me and the German tanks began firing on the town. I wanted to take his hands in mine, I wanted to clasp him to me, to immolate myself in that fire. I cannot tell you how embarrassed I feel now, warbling this queasy
Liebestod,
but it is not often in life that one finds oneself so quakingly close to violent death. I hoped my terror was not visible. I smiled at him, and shrugged, trying to seem ironical and insouciant, as an officer should be, though for all the stiffness of my upper lip, I had to bite the lower one to keep it from trembling. When at last we had pulled beyond the range of the guns, and the men were cheering and dancing about the deck, Nick’s eyes went dead, and he turned away from me and watched the sea, frowning, silent, spent, and I thanked God for his obliviousness to the feelings of anyone save himself.

London too was silent. Six months before, the mood of the place had been almost festive. The bombers had not come, the storm troopers had not taken the south coast, and everything had seemed as light and distant and unreal as the elephantine barrage balloons floating above the city like an image out of Magritte. Now all that was changed, and a thoughtful, oppressive silence hung everywhere. I crossed the park, under the hazy, murmurous trees, still feeling the sway of the deck under my feet, and in my light-headed state I thought it possible that I might be dead after all, and these green acres the Elysian Fields. Black-clad nannies stark as Erinyes plied their prams. Near Clarendon Gate a big man on a little horse thudded past, a centaur in a bowler hat. In Gloucester Terrace a driverless taxi
stood gasping in the sun, one of its rear doors inexplicably hanging open in suggestive invitation. I climbed the stairs to the flat and my feet seemed turned to lead and my heart to stone. Surely Odysseus himself, back from the war, must have experienced such a moment of strange dread on the threshold of home. I stopped in the hallway outside the familiar door and seemed to myself trapped at the point of intolerable pressure where two planets touched, and something swelled inside me and for a moment I could not breathe. The gristly feel of the key going into the lock made me shiver.

The flat had a different smell. Before, it had smelled of the dust of books, centuries-old pigment, bed-must, and a faint, sharp, exotic tang that I suppose must have been just gin—I used to drink a lot of it, even then. Now there was added wool and milk and watery faeces, and something like the stomach-turning pong of school dinners. Vivienne was in the living room, sitting in sunlight on the floor in front of the sofa in a puddle of strewn magazines with her stockinged feet tucked under her. She might have been posing for one of those sentimental wartime daubs—
Waiting for a Letter,
or
The Home Fires Burning—which.
Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information used to commission from Royal Academy hacks. She was wearing a voluminous pleated skirt and a salmon-pink blouse. I noted her scarlet mouth and matching nails and experienced a silky, libidinous shiver. I set my cap down on the table and began to say something but she shot up a silencing hand and contorted her face into a look of horror.

“Ssh!” she hissed, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. “You’ll wake the slumbering fiend.”

I went to the sideboard.

“Want a drink?” I said. “I do.”

She had everything ready: the blued gin in its high-shouldered bottle, the slices of bitter lemon, the cut-glass bowl of ice cubes. She lit a cigarette. I could feel her cool gaze, and lifted a shoulder defensively against it.

“How smart you look,” she said, “in your uniform.”

“I don’t feel smart.”

“Don’t snap, dear.”

“Sorry.”

I brought her the drink. She lifted both hands to receive it, looking up at me with a pursed, quizzical smile.

“Darling, are you shaking?” she said.

“Bit of a chill. It was nippy in the Channel.” I went and stood by the fireplace, leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece. Sunlight and leaves thronged the window. The street outside hummed to itself, dazed with the first full intimations of summer. The ice cubes congregated excitedly in my glass, tinkling and cracking. Silence. Vivienne put her drink down on the carpet beside her and looked carefully at the tip of her cigarette, nodding to herself.

“Yes,” she said, in a flat voice, “I’m very well, thank you. The war hardly impinges. It’s not as much fun, of course, with everybody amusing being away, or frightfully busy at their hush-hush jobs in the War Office. I go up to Oxford every other weekend. My parents ask after you. I tell them, no, he has not written; I’m sure he must be terribly busy, rooting out Nazi agents and so on.” She was still examining the ash of her cigarette. “And yes, your son too is very well. His name is Julian, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I should have written, I know. It was just…”

I went and sat down on the sofa and she leaned against me with an arm on my knees and looked up at me. She lifted a hand and laid the back of it against my forehead, as if to test for a sign of fever.

“Oh, don’t look so grim, darling,” she said. “It’s how we are, that’s all. Now, tell me about the war. How many Germans did you kill?”

I slipped a hand inside her blouse and touched her breasts; they were chill and unfamiliar, the tips coarsened from feeding the child. I rehearsed for her the escape from Boulogne. She listened distractedly, picking at a loose tuft in the carpet.

“I can’t believe it was this morning,” I said. “It seems like a lifetime ago. Nick thought it was all great fun. Sometimes I wonder if he’s really human.”

“Yes,” she said absently. We were very still. I could feel the
slight rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. I took my hand from her blouse and she stood up and brought my glass to the sideboard and made me another drink. Something had ended, just like that, we had both registered it, a last, thin thread severing. “By the way,” she said brightly, not looking at me, “someone has been telephoning for you. A Russian, by the sound of him. Something-lotsky, or potsky; I wrote it down. He was terribly insistent. What odd acquaintances you have.”

“Someone from the Department, I imagine,” I said. “What did you say his name was?”

She went to the kitchen and returned with a crumpled envelope and smoothed it out and squinted at it; she was shortsighted, but too vain to wear spectacles.

“Kropotsky,” she said. “Oleg Kropotsky.”

“Never heard of him.”

Which was true.

Julian woke up from his nap, with the hair-raising, drawn-out wail that he employed throughout his infancy, an attenuated but extraordinarily penetrating banshee cry the sound of which never failed to send a shiver rippling along my scalp and down the back of my neck; Nick said it was the poor child’s Irish ancestry coming out.

“Oh, blimey,” Vivienne said, hurrying to the bedroom, “there goes the siren.”

Julian, even at nine months, had Nick’s crow-black hair and Vivienne’s lustrous, unwavering gaze. The one he most resembled, though, as I saw now with a shock, was Freddie. As an adult he looks more like his poor late uncle than ever, with that big Caesarean head and those weightlifter’s shoulders, so incongruous in a City gent. I wonder if he sees the resemblance? Probably not; Freddie does not figure much in the family’s photograph albums. Now he squirmed inside the wrappings of his blanket, smacking his lips and blinking. He smelled like hot bread. My son.

“How big he’s grown,” I said.

Vivienne nodded seriously.

“Yes, they do that, babies. Grow, I mean. Others have remarked it, down the generations.”

Presently Nick arrived, tipsy and in truculent high spirits. He
was dressed in black tie and tails, his bow tie askew, like the sails of a stalled windmill.

“It’s still afternoon,” Vivienne said, frowning at his dress. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

Nick threw himself on to the sofa and scowled.

“Sick of that bloody uniform,” he said. “Thought I’d put on something entirely different. Have you got any champagne? I’ve been drinking champagne with Leo Rothenstein. Bloody Jew-boy.” He wanted to hold the child but Vivienne would not let him. He scowled more blackly still and slumped back on the cushions. “Did Victor tell you we were nearly blown up? I expect he’s been very offhand about it, but it was a damn close thing. You’d have got him back in a gunny-sack, what they could find of him.”

The telephone rang. Vivienne took the child from my arms.

“That will be your Mr. Kropotsky,” she said.

Nick sat up and peered blearily, weaving his head from side to side. He seemed drunker now than he had been when he arrived.

“Eh?” he said. “Mr. Who?”

“Some Russian that Victor is in league with,” Vivienne said. “A spy, most likely.”

But it was Querell.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, “you used to be a mathematician, isn’t that right?”

He was all business, yet as always I had the impression that he was laughing somehow, in that sour, muffled way that he had.

“Not really,” I said carefully. “Not what you’d call a mathematician. Why?”

“There’s a general alert out for people who are good with numbers. Can’t say more on the phone. Meet me in an hour at the Gryphon.”

“I’ve just got back,” I said. “Nick is here.”

There was a pause, filled with ethereal fizzes and clicks.

“Don’t bring that bastard.” A pause, with breathing. “Sorry, he’s your in-law, I forgot. But don’t bring him.”

Nick was at the sideboard noisily delving among the bottles.

“Who was that?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Querell,” I said. “He sent you his regards.”

The child, swaddled in Vivienne’s arms, began to cry again, but pensively this time, with a kind of wistfulness.

The Gryphon Club in Dean Street really was an awful dive. Much sentimental nonsense has been talked about it latterly, but the truth is it was little more than a shebeen where unemployed actors and poets with time on their hands could while away the afternoons in drinking and back-stabbing. One of that old rip Betty Bowler’s many lovers, a gangland boss, so it was said, had paid her off after a botched abortion by setting her up in the club and finagling an all-day licence from someone in his pay at Scotland Yard. (Take note, Miss V.; Ancient Soho is always good for a colourful page or two.) Betty was still a handsome woman, big and blowsy, with curls and creamy skin and a fat, puckered little mouth—a sort of good-looking Dylan Thomas—and the fact that she had a wooden leg only enhanced her aura of slightly overripe magnificence. She was a little too self-consciously a character for my taste (it takes one actor to spot another). She was no fool, though; I always felt she had the measure of me, somehow. The club was a dank basement underneath a porn shop. Betty, who was a suburbanite at heart, favoured pink-shaded lamps and fringed tablecloths. Tony, the queer barman, could run up a decent sandwich, if he was in a good mood, and there was a doltish boy who for a penny tip would fetch in a plate of oysters from the fish place across the street. Goodness, how archaic and quaint and almost innocent it all seems now; Dickens’s London lasted right up to the Blitz. Querell caught quite well the wartime atmosphere of the city in that thriller of his about the murderer with the club foot. What was it called?
Now and in the Hour,
something pretentiously Papist like that.

He was at the bar when I arrived, I spotted him at once despite being purblind in the gloom after the sunny street. How did he manage always to make it seem as if one had in some way compromised oneself merely by having agreed to meet him? That tilted, white-lipped smile was particularly unsettling today. He was looking more prosperous than when I had last seen him; his suit, as ever tight as a snake’s skin, was expensively cut, and he was wearing a tie-pin set with what looked like a real diamond.

“Have a martini,” he said. “One of the Yanks from the
embassy told me the proper way to make them, and I’ve been instructing Tony here. The secret is to run the vermouth over the ice cubes and then throw the ice away. Has the taste of a reserved sin—simony, incest, one of those really interesting ones. Chin-chin.”

I smiled at him coldly. I understood, of course, that this bright talk was meant to be a parody of the trivial world of cocktails and heartless banter to which I supposedly belonged. I asked for a gin and tonic. Tony, who enjoyed watching Querell in operation, shot him a sly little grin of acknowledgement, like a magician showing the corner of a card before palming it.