The Untouchable (32 page)

The Sister led us down a hallway, up a sombre staircase, along a green-painted corridor with a window at the far end through the frosted panes of which the sun shone whitely, the light of another world. Hettie and the Sister seemed to know each other—Hettie in her heyday had been on countless boards of visitors of institutions such as this—and they walked ahead of Freddie and me, talking about the weather, the Sister brisk and faintly contemptuous, Hettie at once vague and frantic, tottering in her unaccustomed outdoor shoes. Halfway down the corridor we stopped, and while I waited politely as the Sister searched importantly among the keys on a big metal ring attached to her belt, another self inside me yearned toward that window with its milky effulgence, that seemed the very promise of escape and freedom.

“And this,” said the Sister, hauling open a dirty-cream door, “this will be Frankie’s room.”

Metal cot with folded blanket, a rudimentary chair; on the blank white wall a framed daguerreotype of a frock-coated
worthy with mutton-chop whiskers. I noted the wire mesh outside the window, the Bakelite bowl and pitcher on the wash-stand, the metal loops along the frame of the cot where restraining bands could be attached. Freddie stepped forward tentatively, clutching the suitcase before him in both arms and peering about him in apprehensive wonder. I looked at the back of his head, the delicate, unblemished neck, the pink ears and little whorl of hair at the crown, and had to close my eyes for a moment. He was quite quiet. He looked back at me over his shoulder and smiled, his tongue lolling out briefly and then popping back in. This was his being-good mode; he knew something large was expected of him. Behind me Hettie sighed in unfocused distress.

“He’ll be grand, here,” the Sister said. “We’ll take the best of care of him.” She turned to Hettie confidingly. “The Bishop, you know, was very good to us.”

Hettie, wandering lost somewhere inside herself, stared at the woman in wild-eyed incomprehension. Freddie sat on the bed and began to bounce up and down happily, still clutching the suitcase to him as if it were a big, awkward baby. The bedsprings jangled angrily. The Sister went forward and touched him on the shoulder, not without kindness, and immediately he was still, and sat gazing up at her meekly, smiling his slow-blinking smile, his blood-pink lower lip hanging loose.

“Come along with me now,” she shouted at him cheerily, “and we’ll show you the rest of the house.”

Then it was the corridor again, with its smudged thumbprint of white light at the window end, and as we went towards the stairs the Sister came close to me and murmured, “The poor chap, has he no words at all?”

At the foot of the stairs our little party—the Sister and me, with Hettie behind us, and Freddie, unburdened of his suitcase now, trotting at her heels and holding on to the sleeve of her coat with a finger and thumb—turned towards the interior of the house, from whence there began to come to us a noise, a muffled tumult, as of many large children at boisterous and unruly play. Freddie heard it, and set up a low, worried moaning. We stopped at a broad set of double doors, from behind
which the hubbub was emanating, and the Sister, pausing for effect, looked at us over her shoulder with a tight-lipped little smile, her eyes fairly sparkling, as if she were about to give us a wonderful treat, and whispered:

“This is what we call the Common Room.”

She threw open the doors on a scene that was bizarre and at the same time eerily, though inexplicably, familiar. What struck me first was the sunlight, great pale meshes of it falling down from a long row of tall, many-paned arched windows that seemed, although we were on the ground floor, to give on to nothing but an empty expanse of white, strangely shining sky. The floor was of bare wood, which intensified the uproar, adding a deep drum-rolling effect. The people in the room were of all ages, men and women, girls, youths, but in the first moment, by some trick of expectation, I suppose, to me they all seemed to be youngish men, all of Freddie’s age, with the same big hands and straw-coloured hair and agonisedly blithe, vacant smiles. They were dressed in white smocks (like doctors!) and wore no shoes, only thick woollen socks. They milled about in an oddly arbitrary, disarranged way, as if just a moment before our entrance something had fallen into their midst and scattered them like ninepins out of strictly ordered ranks. The noise was that of a menagerie. We stood in the doorway, staring, ignored by all save one or two distracted souls who peered at us suspiciously as if convinced we were no more than uncommonly solid-looking specimens of the usual daytime apparitions. Freddie was silent, his eyes wide, glazed with awe and a kind of manic delight—so many, and so mad! The Sister beamed at us, her plump, mottled little hands clasped under her breast; she might have been a mother showing off with rueful pride her numerous and happily undisciplined progeny.

But why did it all seem so familiar? What was it in the scene that made me think I had been here before—or, more accurately, what was it made me think that I, or some essential part of me, had
always
been here? The room looked like nothing so much as the inside of my own head: bone white, lit by a mad radiance, and thronged with lost and aimlessly wandering figures who might be the myriad rejected versions of my self, of my soul. A
small man approached me, cherubic, pinkly bald, with baby-blue eyes and tufts of woolly grey curls above his ears, conspiratorially smiling, one eyebrow roguishly arched, and took me delicately by the lapel and said:

“I’m here for safe keeping, you know. Everyone is afraid.”

The Sister stepped forward and lowered an arm between us like a level-crossing gate.

“Now now, Mr. McMurty,” she said with grim good humour, “none of that, thank you very much.”

Mr. McMurty smiled again at me, and with a regretful shrug stepped backward into the milling throng. I would not have been surprised to see sprouting from his back a pair of miniature golden wings.

“Come along now, Frankie,” the Sister was saying to Freddie, “come along and we’ll get you settled in.”

He leaned toward her docilely, but then, as if he had bethought himself, he gave a violent start and shied away from her, goggling, and shaking his head, and making a choking noise at the back of his throat. He clutched at me, sinking his shockingly strong fingers into my arm. He had realised at last what was happening, that this was no treat laid on for him, a sort of pantomime, or an anarchic version of the circus, but that here was where he was to be abandoned, the bold corner where, for misdemeanours he could not recall committing, he was to be made to stand for the rest of his life. That blustering anger boiled up inside me all the stronger, and I felt violently sorry for myself, and cruelly wronged. Hettie then, to the surprise of all, gave herself a sort of rattly shake, like one waking with an effort from a drugged sleep, and without a word took Freddie firmly by the hand and led him back along the hall and up the stairs to his room. I followed, and loitered in the corridor, watching through the half-open door as she and the Sister busied themselves unpacking Freddie’s bag and putting his things away. Freddie wandered about the room for a while, crooning to himself, then stopped at the bed and sat down, holding his back very straight, and with his knees together and his hands placed flat on the mattress at his sides. And then, having settled himself, the good boy once more, he lifted his eyes and looked at me where I stood cowering in the doorway, and smiled his most ingenuous, most
beatific, smile, and seemed—surely I imagined it?—seemed to nod, once, as if to say,
Yes, yes, don’t worry, I understand.

I travelled back to Dublin that evening and took the mailboat to Holyhead. Troop movements had disrupted the trains, and I did not get to London until eight o’clock in the morning. I telephoned Oleg from Euston, waking him up, and summoned him to meet me at Rainer’s. The day was crisp and clear, and the fighter planes were out already, their contrails scattered in the zenith like knotted pipe-cleaners. In Tottenham Court Road the traffic was being diverted around a hole in the middle of the street from which the back end of an unexploded bomb stuck up at a drunken angle. The size of the thing was remarkable. It was also remarkably ugly. This weapon had nothing of the sleek, Luciferian elegance of my revolver. It was just a big stubby iron canister with tail fins shaped like a jumbo biscuit tin. The taxi driver chuckled at the sight. Outside the blasted wreckage of John Lewis, naked plaster mannequins were strewn on the pavement like so many bloodless corpses. “Madame Tussaud’s copped it last night,” the driver said. “You should have seen it: Hitler’s head under some queen’s arm!”

Oleg was at a corner table, with a cup of tea and a cigarette, looking greyly unwell; he was not a morning man. He was wearing his macintosh, and his squashed hat sat on the table beside a smeared, rolled-up copy of the
Daily Mail.
He had the look of a run-down Napoleon, with those puffy blue jowls and soft-boiled eyes and greasy widow’s peak. I sat down. He considered me warily.

“Well, John?” he said. “You have something for me?”

I asked the waitress for coffee and a bun. There was no coffee, of course.

“Listen, Oleg,” I said, “I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me by that ridiculous name. No one is paying us the slightest attention; no one ever does.”

He only smiled his fat, roguish smile.

“You are always so angry,” he said fondly.

The girl brought thin tea and a bun stuck with a glace cherry. Oleg eyed the bun hungrily. I said:

“There is an agent of ours—I mean, of the Department’s— on the Moscow Politburo staff. He has been in place for five
or six years. His name is Petrov. He’s one of Mikoyan’s private secretaries.”

Oleg greeted this news with disconcerting equanimity. He stirred his tea slowly, gazing thoughtfully into the cup. He sighed. His sausagey fingers were deeply stained by nicotine; one does not see that kind of stain any more, even on the fingers of the heaviest smokers—I wonder why?

“Petrov,” he said, turning over the syllables. “Petrov …” He glanced up at me. “How long have you known this?”

“Why? What does it matter?” He lifted his shoulders and turned down his frog’s mouth at the corners. “I’ve known since I joined the Department,” I said. He nodded again, his jowls wobbling, and went back to studying the tea in his cup.

“You know what will happen, when I tell Moscow,” he said.

“They’ll shoot him, I imagine?”

Another big shrug, with a glistening, mauve lower lip stuck out.

“Eventually, yes,” he said.

“Eventually.”

He turned up his eggy eyes to mine and again did that smile of a dissolute baby.

“Are you sorry now,” softly, “that you told me?”

I shrugged impatiently.

“He’s a spy,” I said. “He knew the risks.”

Still smiling, Oleg slowly shook his head.

“So angry,” he murmured. “So angry.” I turned away from him, and was startled by my own spectral reflection in the window beside me. Such a look in those eyes! “Well, don’t worry, John,” he said. “We already know about this Petrov.”

I stared.

“Who told you?—Boy?”

He could resist no longer, and reached out and delicately tweaked the cherry from my untouched bun and popped it into his mouth.

“Perhaps,” he said happily. “Perhaps.”

When I got to Poland Street the house reeked of cigarette smoke and bodies and stale beer. There had been a party the night
before. Empty bottles everywhere, fag ends ground into the carpets, on the bathroom floor a puddle of carrot-coloured puke. I went about opening windows. In the parlour I found a large, blond young man—he turned out to be a Latvian seaman— asleep in his overcoat in an armchair. Boy too was asleep. I cleared a space in the kitchen and made tea and sat drinking it and watching a patch of sunlight move across the floor. Presently Nick arrived, with Sylvia Lydon in tow. He was in uniform.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“In Ireland.”

“Oh, yes. Sorry about your dad.”

Sylvia kept shooting sly little glances at me, biting her lip to keep from giggling. They had both been up all night.

“Doing?” Nick said. “Oh, nothing. Just ragging about.”

Sylvia spluttered.

“Well, you both look remarkably fresh,” I said.

I had a very bad headache. Nick searched about for something to eat, while Sylvia leaned against the table and played with the string of pearls at her neck. She was wearing a green satin gown and elbow-length white gloves.

“Oh, Nicky,” she said, “we may as well tell him.”

Nicky.

“Tell me what?”

I recalled dancing with Sylvia Lydon on shipboard as we plunged through the Baltic, her sharp, foxy scent, the feel of her meagre breasts against me.

“Go on,” she said.

Nick avoided my eye. He opened a bread bin and peered into it gloomily. Sylvia went to him and draped an arm across his shoulder and looked at me again and smiled her thin-lipped, triumphant smile. I stood up. Pounding headache now; really, very bad.

“Well, congratulations,” I said. He had not given me a word of warning, not a word. “I’ll see if I can borrow some champagne from Boy, shall I?”

A charming interlude: dinner last night with my children—I mean, my grown-up son and daughter. It was my birthday
yesterday. They took me to one of those ghastly grand hotels off Berkeley Square. It was not my choice. I suppose it is the kind of place where Julian brings his more important clients, mostly Arabs, apparently, these days. The dead air in the darkly lit vestibule was thick with the cloying, cottony smell of over-rich food. We were met in the entrance to the dining room by a sleek-headed, fawning head waiter with a marionette’s blank smile and furtive eyes, who greeted Julian with a special intimacy, spotting what he surmised was a big tipper (he was wrong). When we were seated he stood over us flourishing an outsize menu like a ringmaster cracking his whip. Julian ordered a glass of mineral water; I asked for an extra-dry martini. “… And for the lady?” Poor Blanche was so intimidated by now she could hardly look at the fellow. She sat hunched in a flattened Z-shape, her broad back bowed and her head drawn down between her shoulders, trying in vain to make herself small. She was wearing an unbecoming dress made from yards and yards of startling crimson stuff. Her hair stood up like clumps of wire.