The Untouchable (49 page)

They kept coming back to me, year after year; whenever there was a flap on, when some new gaping hole was found in the State’s so-called security, Skryne would wander into my life again, diffident, deferential, relentless as ever. During our interrogations—I say
our,
because I always think of them as something that we shared, like a series of tutorials, or a course of spiritual exercises—he would maunder on for hours in that dry, mild, schoolmasterly way that he had, asking the same question over and over, in slightly altered forms, and then all at once he would seize on a name, a word, an involuntary flicker of response in me that I had hardly been aware of, and everything would shift, and the questioning would go off in an entirely new direction. Yet it was all very relaxed and mannerly and, well,
chummy. In time we even took to exchanging Christmas cards— honestly, we did. He was a match for me in patience, in concentration, in his eye for the telling detail, in his ability to take a fragment and build up a picture of the whole; but in the end I was the one with the greater endurance. In all that time—I wonder how many hours we spent together: a thousand, two thousand?—I do not think I ever gave him anything he could not have got elsewhere. I named only the dead, or those who had been so peripheral to our circle that I knew the Department would not bother with them, or not for long, anyway. Chess is too serious, too warlike, an analogy for what we were engaged in. A cat-and-mouse game, then—but who was the mouse, and who the cat?

I remember the first time Skryne came to the flat. He had been angling for a long time, not very subtly, to get in and have a look at what he called my gaff. I objected that it would be an unconscionable invasion of privacy if he were to question me in my home, but in the end I weakened and said that he might come round for a sherry at six some evening. I suppose I thought I might get an advantage by granting his harmless and in a way quite touching wish: the cocktail hour is a tricky and uncertain part of the social day for persons of his class, who think of it as teatime, and fret, I find, when they have to forgo this important repast. However, he seemed perfectly at ease. Perhaps he was a little intimidated by the empty, echoing galleries as we ascended through them, but once inside the flat he began to make himself at home right away. He was even about to light up his pipe, without asking my leave, but I stopped him, saying the fumes would be bad for the pictures, as indeed they might have been, for the black shag that he smoked gave off an acrid stink that shrivelled my nostrils and made my eyes prickle. I caught him taking a quick look round; he seemed not very impressed— indeed, I think he was disappointed. I wonder what he had been expecting? Purple silk hangings, perhaps, and a catamite posed upon a chaise longue (Patrick had not been well pleased when I asked him to absent himself for the duration of the visit, and had taken himself off to the pictures in a sulk). He became animated, though, when he spotted the little Degas drawing I had borrowed from the French Room downstairs to hang over the fireplace;
I have never succeeded in liking the work of this painter, and had brought the piece up to live with it for a while in the hope that it might win me over. (It did not.)

“That’s a lovely thing, isn’t it,” he said, pointing the stem of his cold pipe at it. “Degas. Beautiful.” He blinked shyly. “I dabble a bit myself, you know.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Watercolours. It’s just a hobby, though my missus will insist on getting my things framed and hanging them about the place. As a matter of fact, I did a copy of that very one, from a book. Mine’s only on cardboard, though.”

“So is the original.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s
Degas,
by the way; the
s
is pronounced.”

We drank our sherry in the study. He did not remark the Poussin. There were two chairs—one of them already waiting for you, Miss V., although it did not know it—yet we remained standing. I wondered what account of me he would give his missus.
The dry type, Mabel; and stuck-up, too.
It was a chrome and copper evening in October. Boy and the Dour Scot had made their first appearance in Moscow to talk to reporters, spouting a lot of solemn claptrap about peace and fraternity and world revolution; Party Congress stuff, written for them, probably, by our friends in the Kremlin. The thing was televised, apparently in a snowstorm—I owned a primitive set by then; it was supposed to be for Patrick’s amusement, but I was already a secret addict—and I found it a depressing and slightly nauseating spectacle. Heartbreaking, really, that all that passion, that conviction, should have shrunk to this, two raddled, middle-aged men sitting at a bare table in a windowless room in the Lubyanka, putting on a brave face and desperately smiling, trying to convince themselves and the world that they had come home at long last to the Promised Land. I dreaded to think how Boy might be faring. I remembered, that night in the thirties when I was whisked off to the Kremlin, the wife of the Commissar of Soviet Culture looking at the champagne in my glass with a curled lip and saying, “Georgian.” A fellow from the British embassy claimed to have spotted Boy one night in a
Moscow hotel, slumped at the bar with his forehead on his arm, noisily weeping. I hoped that they were whiskey tears.

“Think they’re happy, your two chums?” Skryne said. “Not much in the way of beer and skittles over there.”

“Caviare is more their taste,” I said coldly, “and there is plenty of that.”

He was toying with things on my desk; I had an urge to slap his hand away. I do hate people to
fiddle.

“Would you go over?” he said.

I took a sip of sherry. It was very good; I hoped Skryne could appreciate it.

“They urged me to,” I said. They had; Oleg had been anxiously solicitous. “I asked them, if I went, could they arrange regular working visits for me to the National Gallery and the Louvre? They consulted Moscow and came back very apologetic. No sense of irony, the Russians. Just like the Americans, in that.”

“You don’t like Americans, do you.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re perfectly decent people, individually. It’s just that I’m not a democrat, you see; I fear mob rule.”

“What about the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

“Oh please,” I said, “let us not descend to polemics. Some more sherry? It’s not at all bad, you know.”

I poured. I like the oleaginous quality of this drink, but otherwise even the best of it has a bitter edge that reminds me of some unpleasant taste from childhood—Nanny Hargreaves’s castor oil, perhaps. No, I prefer gin, with its mysterious hints of frost and forest, metal and flame. In the first days after Boy’s flight I practically bathed in the stuff from first thing in the morning until the dead hours of the night. My poor liver. Probably it was then, all those years ago, that the cells essayed the first drunken steps of their dervish dance that is now consuming my insides. Skryne stood gazing glassy-eyed before him, the thimble of drink seemingly forgotten in his fingers. He often went blank like that; it was unnerving. Concentration? Deep thought? A trap for the unwary, perhaps?—one did tend to let one’s vigilance slip when he went absent in this way. Late light from the window was throwing a nickel-bright sheen across the surface of the Poussin,
picking out the points of the pigment and shading in the hollows. Someone at the valuers has raised a question as to its authenticity; preposterous, of course.

“Consider this picture,” I said. “It is called
The Death of Seneca.
It was painted in the middle of the seventeenth century by Nicholas Poussin. You are something of an artist, you tell me: the civilisation that this picture represents, isn’t it worth fighting for?” I noticed the faint shiver on the surface of the sherry in the glass I was holding; I had thought I was quite calm. “The Spartan youth,” I said, “complained to his mother that his sword was too short, and her only reply was,
Step closer.”

Skryne gave a curious, creaky sigh. I had to acknowledge, there in the confined space of the study, that he exuded a faint but definite smell: tobacco, naturally, but something behind that as well, something drab and unsavoury; something very—well, very
Hackney.

“Wouldn’t it be better, Dr. Maskell,” he said, “if we were to sit down now, here, and get it all over and done with?”

“I told you, I am not willing to undergo interrogation in my own home.”

“Not interrogation. Just a … just a general clearing up, you might say. I’m a Catholic—well, my mother was a Catholic; Irish, like you. I still remember how it used to feel, when I was a lad, to come out of the confession box, that feeling of… lightness. Know what I mean?”

“I have told you everything I know,” I said.

He smiled, and gently shook his head, and set his glass down carefully on a corner of my desk. He had not touched the sherry.

“No,” he said. “You’ve told us everything that
we
know.”

I sighed. Was there to be no end to this?

“What you are asking me to do is betray my friends,” I said. “I won’t do that.”

“You’ve betrayed everything else.” Still smiling, still gently avuncular.

“But what you mean by everything,” I said, “is nothing to me. To be capable of betraying something you must first believe in it.” I too put down my glass, with a clunk of finality. “And now, Mr. Skryne, I think, really …”

In the hall I handed him his hat. He had a way of putting it on, fitting it carefully to his head with rotating motions, using both hands and crouching forward a little, that seemed as if he were screwing the lid on to a container of some precious, volatile stuff. At the door he paused.

“By the way, did you see that thing that Bannister said when he met the chap from the
Daily Mail
in Moscow? We haven’t let him publish it yet.”

“Then how would I have seen it?”

He smiled cannily, as if I had made a sly and telling point.

“I wrote it down,” he said, “I think I have it here.” He produced a bulging wallet and extracted from it a slip of paper carefully folded. I could see he had planned this little gesture, even down to the last-minute timing; after all, he was a fellow thespian. He put on a pair of wire-frame spectacles, threading the earpieces carefully behind his ears and adjusting the bridge, then cleared his throat preparatory to reading aloud. “
Don’t think I’m starry-eyed about this place,
he says.
I miss my friends. I’m lonely sometimes. But here I’m lonely for the unimportant things. In England I was lonely for what is really important—for Socialism.
Sad, eh?” He proffered the slip. “Here, why don’t you keep it?”

“No, thank you. The
Daily Mail
is not my paper.”

He nodded, thinking, his gaze fixed on the knot of my tie.

“Are you lonely for Socialism, Dr. Maskell?” he said gently.

I could hear the clank and gurgle of the lift ascending; it would be Patrick returning from the pictures, probably still in a huff. Life can be very trying, sometimes.

“I’m not lonely for anything,” I said. “I have done my work. That’s all that matters.”

“And your friends,” he said softly. “Don’t forget your friends. They matter, don’t they?”

M
iss Vandeleur has just left, in rather hangdog fashion, I’m afraid. She will not be seeing me again; or, more accurately, I shall not be seeing her. Her visit was a moving occasion; last things, and so on—and
not
so on. I had bought a cake—it turned out to be somewhat stale—and put a small candle on it. I have a special licence to be silly, now. She eyed the cake suspiciously, in some bafflement. Our first anniversary, I said, handing her a glass of champagne with what I judged to be just the right shading of old-world gallantry; I would not want her to think I harbour any feelings of rancour against her. But in fact, as she pointed out when she checked back to the beginning of her by now dog-eared notebook, this was not the date on which she first came to me. I waved aside these petty details. We were sitting in the study. Although she did not seem to notice it, I was acutely conscious of the awful blank space on the wall where the Poussin should have been hanging. Miss V. was in her greatcoat, yet still seemed cold, as she always does; her mechanic must have the devil of a time warming her up—girls always blame their young men for the prevailing temperature, don’t ask me how I know. She also had on her leather skirt, as of old. How account for the pathos of people’s clothes? I envisioned her in her room in Golders Green, in the grey light and fetid air of morning, with a mug of cold coffee on the dressing table, creakily getting into that skirt and contemplating another day of… of what? Perhaps
there is no such room in Golders Green. Perhaps it is all an invention, her father the Admiral, her uncouth mechanic, the glum commutings on the Northern Line, my biography. I asked her how the book was coming along and she gave me a resentful stare, looking like a sullen schoolgirl who has been caught smoking behind the bicycle shed. I assured her I did not feel harshly toward her, and she put on a show of incomprehension, saying she was sure she did not know what I was talking about. We regarded each other for a moment in silence, I smiling, she with a cross frown. Oh, Miss Vandeleur, my dear Serena. If these really are her names.

“Despite appearances,” I said, indicating the champagne bottle and the ruined cake with its Pisan candle, “I am officially in mourning.” I watched her closely for a reaction; none came, as I had expected; she already knew. “Yes,” I said, “you see, my wife died.”

Silence for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said faintly, looking at my hands.

April. Such wonderful skies today, great drifting ice-mountains of cloud, and beyond them that delicate, breakable blue, and the sunlight going on and off as if a capricious someone somewhere had control of a switch. I do not like the springtime; have I said that before? Too disturbing, too distressing, all this new life blindly astir. I feel left behind, half buried, all withered bough and gnarled root. Something is stirring in me, though. I often fancy, at night especially, that I can feel it in there, not the pain, I mean, but the thing itself, malignantly flourishing, flexing its pincers. Well, I shall soon put a stop to its growth. Mouth very dry now, all of a sudden. Strange effects. I am quite calm.