The Untouchable (34 page)

In the mornings I was lecturing on Borromini at the Institute—what a sense of urgency and profound pathos was lent to these occasions by the sound of bombs falling on the city—and in the afternoons I was at my desk in the Department. The crypt-analysts at Bletchley Park had broken the Luftwaffe signal codes and I was able to pass a great deal of valuable information to Oleg on the strength and tactics of the German Air Force. (No, Miss V., however you may urge me, I shall not deign to engage with criticism of my dealings with a country which at the time was supposedly in league with Hitler against us; surely by now it is clear where my loyalties would always lie, whatever worthless treaty this or that vile tyrant might put his name to.) I was, I realised, happy. Amidst the schoolroom smells of the Department—pencil shavings, cheap paper, the mouth-drying reek of ink—or pacing under the great windows of the Institute’s third-floor lecture room, looking down on one of Vanbrugh’s finest courtyards and paying out to an attentive handful of students the measured ribbon of my thoughts on the great themes of seventeeth-century art, I was, yes, happy. As I have already remarked, I did not fear the bombing; I confess I even exulted a little, in secret, at the spectacle of such enormous, ungovernable destruction. Are you shocked? My dear, you cannot imagine the strangeness of those times. No one now speaks about
the sense of vast comedy that the Blitz engendered. I don’t mean the flying chamber pots or the severed legs thrown up on to rooftops, all that mere grotesquerie. But sometimes in the running rumble of a stick of bombs detonating along a nearby avenue one seemed to hear a kind of—what shall I call it?—a kind of celestial laughter, as of a delighted child-god looking down on the glory of these things that he had wrought. Oh, sometimes, Miss Vandeleur—Serena—sometimes I think I am no more than a cut-price Caligula, wishing the world had a single throat, so that I might throttle it at one go.

The summer is ending. So too with my season. At the close of these reddened evenings especially I feel the proximal dark. My tremor, my tumour.

London in the Blitz. Yes. Everyone had a story, an incident. The minesweepers on the Thames. The hundreds of barrels of paint in a burning warehouse going up like rockets. The woman with her skirt blown off staggering down Bond Street in her suspenders, her husband skipping along backwards in front of her with his jacket vainly held out to her like a bullfighter’s cape. After a stray bomb fell on the zoo, Nick, returning at dawn from a trip to Oxford, swore he had seen a pair of zebras trotting down the middle of Prince Albert Road; he remarked their fine black manes, their delicate hoofs.

Und so wetter
…

I was in the kitchen one morning shortly after my return from Ireland when Boy came down to breakfast in his dressing gown, barefoot and hungover. He made fried bread and drank champagne from a tumbler. He reeked of semen and stale garlic.

“You chose a bloody good time to skulk off,” he said. “The Germans haven’t stopped since you left. Boom boom boom, day and night.”

“My father died,” I said, “did I mention it?”

“Pah!—call that an excuse?” He considered me with a merrily spiteful smile; he was half drunk already. “You do look a toothsome old thing in that uniform, you know. Such a waste. I met a chap the other day in the bar at the Reform. Spitfire pilot, hardly more than a schoolboy. He’d been out that morning flying sorties. Got shot down over the Channel, baled out, was picked up
by a lifeboat, would you believe, and there he was, three hours later, having a Pimm’s. Scared eyes, big grin, very fetching bandage over one eye. We went to Ma Bailey’s and took a room. Christ, it was like fucking a young horse, all nerves and teeth and flying lather. It was his first time, too—and his last, most likely. This war: it’s an ill wind, I say.” He sat chewing and watched me while I prepared my breakfast. My finicking ways with these things always amused him. “By the by,” he said, “there’s a job going that I think might be right up your street. There are these couriers for so-called friendly governments that travel up to Edinburgh on the night train every week to get their dispatches sent out by the navy. We’ve been told to get a look at their stuff. Frogs and Turks and so on; a tricky lot.” He poured himself another measure of champagne. The foam overflowed and he scooped it up from the greasy table top and sucked it from his fingers. “Nick, of all people, has come up with a plan,” he said. “Very clever, really, I was amazed. He’s got this chap, some sort of bootmaker or master cobbler or whatever, who’ll unpick the stitches of the dispatch bags, leaving the seals in place, you see; you take a look at the documents, committing the juicy bits to your famous photographic memory, then slip them back into the bags, and Nobbs or Dobbs the cobbler will redo the stitching and no one will be the wiser—except us, that is.”

I studied a puddle of watered sunlight on the floor at my feet. There is something about midmorning, something dulled and headachy, that I always find both depressing and obscurely affecting.

“And who is
us?
” I said.

“Well, the Department, of course. And anyone else we might care to take into our confidence.” He winked. “What do you think? Super wheeze, what?”

He grinned woozily, tick-tocking his head from side to side like a happy flapper; he was having trouble keeping his eyes in focus.

“How do we get the bags away from the couriers?” I said.

“Eh?” He blinked. “Yes, well, that’s where Danny comes in.”

“Danny?”

“Danny Perkins. He can get anyone to do anything. You’ll see.”

Sometimes Boy displayed an impressive prophetic gift.

“Danny Perkins,” I said. “Where on earth did you turn up a person with a name like that?”

Boy laughed, and the laugh turned into one of his horrible, twangy coughs.

“Christ, Vic,” he said, smiting himself on the chest with a flattened fist, “you’re such a prig.” He stood up. “Come on,” he said, breathing heavily down his big, pitted nose. “You can find out his pedigree for yourself.”

He swept ahead of me unsteadily up the stairs, and threw open the door of his bedroom. The first thing that struck me was the marked amelioration of the usual feral stink in the room. Boy’s smell was still there—body grime, garlic, a rancid, cheesy something the possible sources of which the mind did not care to seek after—but underneath it there was a softer though no less pungent savour, as if a flock of pigeons, say, had been introduced into a lion house. Boy’s bed was a mattress thrown on the floor, and lying there now in a nest of wadded blankets and soiled sheets was a short, compact young man with that special kind of very white skin, suety and almost translucent, that used to be the sure mark of the working class. He was wearing a vest and khaki trousers and unlaced army boots. He had one arm behind his head and an ankle crossed on a lifted knee, and he was reading a copy of
Titbits.
I found myself looking at the humid, blue-shadowed hollow of his armpit. His head was a size too small for his broad shoulders and thick trunk of neck, and the disproportion lent him a delicate, almost girlish aspect. His very fine, very black hair was cropped short at the sides, and fell across his pale and, I am sorry to say, acne-stippled forehead in a darkly gleaming scoop, and I found myself recalling that Edenic moment when I had first caught sight of the Beaver, asleep in the orchard in his father’s garden in Oxford, years before.

“Ten-shun, Private Perkins!” Boy shouted. “Don’t you see there’s an officer present? This is Captain Maskell. Let’s have a salute there.”

Danny only smiled at him lazily, and put aside the paper and rolled himself on to his knees and squatted amidst the disordered bed things, quite at his ease, looking me up and down with frank, friendly interest.

“Pleased, I’m sure,” he said. “Mr. Bannister’s told me all about you, so he has.”

His voice was a sort of soft purr, so that everything he said seemed a shared confidence. He had a Welsh accent that seemed almost a parody. Boy laughed.

“Don’t believe it, Victor,” he said, “he’s a hopeless liar. I’ve never mentioned your name to him.”

Danny smiled again, not minding at all, and went on with his examination of me; his regard was that of a benevolent opponent in a wrestling match, searching out the hold that would bring me down with the least discomfort to us both. I realised that my palms were damp.

Lumberingly, laughing, Boy sat himself down cross-legged on the mattress and put his arm around Danny’s waist. Boy’s dressing gown had fallen open over his knees, and I tried not to look at his big flaccid sex lolling in its bush.

“I’ve been telling Captain Maskell about our plan to nobble the couriers,” he said. “He wants to know how we’re going to get the bags away from them. I said that was your department.”

Danny shrugged, making the bunched muscles of his shoulders ripple.

“Well, we’ll just have to ask them nicely, won’t we,” he said, in his cooing voice.

Boy laughed, and coughed again, and again struck himself on the breastbone.

“Look you, bach,” he said, imitating Danny’s accent, “just you hand over those papers now and I’ll give you a big juicy kiss.”

He made a fumbling attempt to embrace Danny, who dealt him a good-natured push with his hip, and he went sprawling on the bed, still laughing and coughing, his gown undone and his hairy legs bicycling in the air. Danny Perkins gazed upon the spectacle and shook his head.

“Isn’t he a terrible sot, Captain Maskell?”

“Victor,” I said. “Call me Victor.”

Presently Boy fell into a tipsy slumber, his big head resting babyishly on his joined hands and his hirsute backside sticking up. Danny laid a blanket over him tenderly, and together we went down to the kitchen, where Danny, still in his vest, poured himself a mug of tepid tea and stirred four big spoonfuls of sugar into it.

“Oh, I am parched,” he said. “He made me drink that champagne last night, and it never agrees with me.” The patch of sunlight had moved from the floor to the chair, and he was bathed in it now, a grinning, big-shouldered, dingy angel. He lifted an eye towards the ceiling. “Have you known him for long, then?”

“We were at Cambridge together,” I said. “We’re old friends.”

“Are you another leftie, like him?”

“Is he a leftie?” For answer he only shook his head and chuckled. “And you,” I said, “how long have you known him?”

He picked at a pimple on his arm.

“Well, I’m a singer, see.”

“A singer!” I said. “Good Lord …”

He smiled at me quizzically, without resentment, letting the silence last. “My dad used to sing in chapel,” he said. “Lovely sweet voice he had.”

I blushed. “I’m sorry,” I said, and he nodded, taking it as his due, which it was.

“I got a place in the chorus of
Chu Chin Chow
” he said. “It was lovely. That was how I met Mr. Bannister. He was in his car at the stage door one night. He was waiting for someone else but then he saw me, and, well…” He gave a sort of roguish, melancholy grin. “Romantic, isn’t it.” He grew pensive, and sat with hunched shoulders, supping his tea and gazing wistfully into the footlit depths of his memories. “Then this blooming war started up,” he said, “and that was the end of me on the boards.” He gloomed for a while, then brightened. “But we’ll have some fun with this courier lark, won’t we? I’ve always been fond of trains.”

Nick arrived then. He was got up in loud checks and a yellow waistcoat, and was carrying a rolled umbrella in one hand and a brown trilby hat in the other.

“Weekend at Maules,” he said. “Winston was there.” He cast
a sour glance in Danny’s direction. “I see you two have met. By the way, Vic, Baby was looking for you.”

“Yes?”

He looked at the teapot. “Is that char still hot? Pour us out a cup, Perkins, like a good chap, will you? Christ, my head. We were drinking brandy until four in the morning.”

“You and Winston?”

He gave me one of his wooden stares.

“He had gone to bed,” he said.

Danny passed him the tea and he leaned against the sink with his ankles crossed, nursing the smoking mug in both hands. Soft morning, the pale sunlight of September, and, like a mirage shimmering at the very edge of vision, the limitless possibilities of the future; where do they come from, these moments of unlooked-for happiness?

“Leo Rothenstein says he had a long talk with the PM before the rest of us arrived,” Nick said, in his serious voice. “It seems we’ve won the air war, despite appearances to the contrary.”

“Well, good for us,” Danny said. Nick looked at him sharply, but Danny only smiled back at him blandly.

Boy reappeared from upstairs, and stood swaying in the doorway. The cord of his dressing gown was still undone, but he had put on a pair of drooping grey underpants.

“For Christ’s sake, Beaver,” he said, “have you been to a fancy-dress party? You look like a bookie. Hasn’t anyone ever told you Jews are not allowed to wear tweeds? There’s an ordinance against it.”

“You’re drunk,” Nick said, “and it’s not half-eleven yet. And for God’s sake put on some clothes, can’t you?”

Boy, swaying, hesitated, regarding Nick with an unsteady, sullen stare, then muttered something and stumbled away upstairs again, and presently we heard him above us, kicking things and swearing drunkenly.

“Oh, listen to that,” Danny Perkins said, shaking his head.

“Go and smooth his brow, will you?” Nick said, and Danny shrugged amiably and went out, whistling, and thumped up the stairs in his outsize boots. Nick turned to me. “You’ve talked to Perkins about the couriers and so on?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you really dream up the scheme?”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Yes; why?”

“Oh, I just wondered. Ingenious, if it works.”

He snorted.

“Of course it will work. Why wouldn’t it?” He came and sat in Danny’s chair and put his head in his hands. “Do you think,” he said weakly, “you could make me some more tea? My head really is splitting.”

I went to the sink and filled the kettle. I remember the moment: the nickel glint of light on the kettle’s cheek, the greyish whiff from the drain, and, through the window above the sink, the red-brick backs of houses on Berwick Street.