The Untouchable (5 page)

And at last she turned her head and looked at me. What fire! I would never have expected it. Her father, the admirable Admiral, would be proud of her. I looked away from her, smiling my weary smile, and considered
The Death of Seneca.
How superbly executed are the folds of the dying man’s robe, polished, smooth and dense as fluted sandstone, yet wonderfully delicate, too, like one of the philosopher’s own carven paragraphs. (I must have the picture valued. Not that I would dream of selling it, of course, but just now I find myself in need of financial reassurance.)

“Not the Russians,” I murmured.

I could feel her blink. “What?”

“I did not spy for the Russians,” I said. “I spied for Europe. A
much
broader church.”

This really is the most unsettling weather. Just now out of nowhere a violent shower started up, pelting big fat splatters against the windows in which the watercolour sunlight shines
unabated. I should not like just yet to leave this world, so tender and accommodating even in the midst of its storms. The doctors tell me they got all of it and that there is no sign of any new malignancy. I am in remission. I feel I have been in remission all my life.

M
y father was a great bird’s-nester. I could never learn the trick of it. On Sunday mornings in springtime he would take Freddie and me walking with him in the fields above Carrickdrum. I imagine he was escaping those of his parishioners— he was still rector then—who made it a practice to call to the house after service, the boisterously unhappy country wives in their pony-and-traps, the working people from the back streets of the town, the glittery-eyed mad spinsters who spent their weekdays doing sentry-go behind lace-curtained windows in the villas on the seafront. I wish I could describe these outings as occasions of familial conviviality, with my father discoursing to his wide-eyed sons on the ways and wiles of Mother Nature, but in fact he rarely spoke, and I suspect he was for the most part forgetful of the two little boys scrambling desperately over rock and thorn to keep up with him. It was rough country up there, skimpy bits of field isolated between outcrops of bare grey stone, with whin bushes and the odd stand of mountain ash deformed by the sea gales. I do not know why my father insisted on bringing Freddie with us, for he always grew agitated in those uplands, especially on windy days, and went along uttering little moos of distress and tearing at the skin around his fingernails and gnawing at his lips until they bled. At the farthest limit of our trek, however, we would come down into a little hollow ringed by rocks, a miniature valley, with meadow-grass and gorse
bushes and banks of hawthorn, where all was still and hummingly silent, and where even Freddie grew calm, or as near to calm as he ever got. Here my father, in plus-fours and gaiters and an old fawn pullover and still wearing his dog collar, would stop suddenly, with a hand lifted, hearkening to I do not know what secret signal or vibration of the air, and then strike off from the path and approach this or that bush, with surprising lightness of tread for such a large-made man, and carefully part the leaves and peer in and smile. I remember it, that smile. There was simple delight in it, of course—it made him look as I imagined Freddie would have looked if he had not been a half-wit—but also a sort of grim, sad triumph, as if he had caught out the Creator in some impressive yet essentially shoddy piece of fakery. Then with a finger to his lips he would beckon us forward and lift us up one after the other to see what he had discovered: a finch’s or a blackbird’s nest, sometimes with the bird herself still on it, throbbing tinily and looking up at us in dull fright, as at the side-by-side big faces of God and his son. Not the birds, though, but the eggs, were what fascinated me. Pale blue or speckled white, they lay there in the scooped hollow of the nest, closed, inexplicable, packed with their own fullness. I felt that if I took one in my hand, which my father would never have permitted me to do, it would be too heavy for me to hold, like a piece of matter from a planet far more dense than this one. What was most striking about them was their
difference.
They were like themselves and nothing else. And in this extreme of selfness they rebuked all that stood round about, the dissolute world of bush and briar and riotous green leaf. They were the ultimate artefact. When I first spotted
The Death of Seneca,
shining amidst the dross in the back room at Alighieri’s, I thought at once of those Sunday mornings of my childhood, and of my father with infinite delicacy parting the foliage and showing me these fragile and yet somehow indestructible treasures nestling at the heart of the world.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first of all fall in love there. I had always known London; my family, although they hardly ever went there, considered it
our capital, not dour Belfast, with its rain-coloured buildings and bellowing shipyard sirens. It was only in that summer I spent in London with Nick, however, that the place came fully alive for me. I say I spent the summer with him but that is wishful exaggeration. He was working—another exaggeration—for his father at Brevoort & Klein, and had moved down from Oxford to a flat above a newsagent’s shop off the Fulham Road. I remember that flat with remarkable clarity. There was a small living room at the front with two peaked mansard windows that made an incongruously ecclesiastical effect; the first time Boy came there he clapped his hands and cried: “Fetch me my surplice, we must have a black mass!” The flat was known as the Eyrie, a word neither Nick nor I was sure how to pronounce, but it suited, for certainly it was eerie—Nick favoured tall candles and Piranesi prints—and airy, too, especially in spring, when the windows were filled with flying sky and the timbers creaked like the spars of a sailing ship. Nick, who was by nature a unique mix of the aesthete and the hearty, let the place run to appalling squalor: I still shudder when I think of the lavatory. At the back was a poky bedroom with a sharply canted ceiling, in which there was wedged skew-ways an enormous brass bed Nick claimed to have won in a poker game in a gambling den behind Paddington Station. It was one of Nick’s stories.

He did not often sleep at the flat. His girls refused to stay there, because of the filth, and anyway in those times girls rarely stayed overnight, at least not the kind of girl that Nick consorted with. Mostly it was a place to throw parties in, and to recover in from the resulting hangovers. On these occasions he would take to his bed for two or three days, surrounded by an accumulating clutter of books and boxes of sweets and bottles of champagne, supplied by a succession of friends whom he would summon to him by telephone. I can still hear his voice on the line, an exaggeratedly anguished whisper: “I say, old man, do you think you could come round? I do believe I’m dying.” Usually when I arrived a small crowd would already have assembled, another party in embryo, sitting about on that vast raft of a bed eating Nick’s chocolates and drinking champagne from tooth-glasses and kitchen cups, with Nick in his nightshirt propped against a
bank of pillows, pale as ivory, his black hair standing on end, all eyes and angles, a figure out of Schiele. Boy would be there, of course, and Rothenstein, and girls called Daphne and Brenda and Daisy, in silks and cloche hats. Sometimes Querell would come round, tall, thin, sardonic, standing with his back against the wall and smoking a cigarette, somehow crooked, like the villain in a cautionary tale, one eyebrow arched and the corners of his mouth turned down, and a hand in the pocket of his tightly buttoned jacket that I always thought could be holding a gun. He had the look of a man who knew something damaging about everyone in the room. (I realise that I am seeing him not as he was then, young, and gauche, surely, like the rest of us, but as he was in his late thirties, when the Blitz was on, and he seemed the very personification of the times: embittered, tense, offhand, amusedly despairing, older than his, and our, years.)

Those parties: did anyone really enjoy them? What I chiefly recall is the air of suppressed desperation that pervaded them. We drank a lot, but drink seemed only to make us frightened, or despairing, so that we must shriek all the louder, as if to scare off demons. What was it that we feared? Another war, yes, the worldwide economic crisis, all that, the threat of Fascism; there was no end of things to be afraid of. We felt such deep resentments! We blamed all our ills on the Great War and the old men who had forced the young to fight in it, and perhaps Flanders really did destroy us as a nation, but— But there I go, falling into the role of amateur sociologist that I despise. I never thought in terms of
us,
or
the nation;
none of us did, I am convinced of it. We
talked
in those terms, of course—we never
stopped
talking thus—but it was all no more than a striking of attitudes to make ourselves feel more serious, more weighty, more authentic. Deep down—if we did, indeed, have deeps—we cared about ourselves and, intermittently, one or two others; isn’t that how it always is?
Why did you do it?
that girl asked me yesterday, and I replied with parables of philosophy and art, and she went away dissatisfied. But what other reply could I have given?
I
am the answer to her question, the totality of what I am; nothing less will suffice. In the public mind, for the brief period it will entertain, and be entertained by, the thought of me, I am a figure with a
single salient feature. Even for those who thought they knew me intimately, everything else I have done or not done has faded to insignificance before the fact of my so-called treachery. While in reality all that I am is all of a piece: all of a piece, and yet broken up into a myriad selves. Does that make sense?

So what we were frightened of, then, was ourselves, each one his own demon.

Querell when he phoned the other day had the grace not to pretend to be shocked. He knows all about betrayal, the large variety and the small; he is a connoisseur in that department. When he was at the height of his fame (he has slipped somewhat from the headlines, since he is old and no longer the hellion he once was) I used to chuckle over newspaper photographs of him hobnobbing with the Pope, since I knew that the lips with which he kissed the papal ring had most likely been between some woman’s thighs a half-hour previously. But Querell too is in danger of being shown up for what he really is, whatever that might be. That fishy look he always had is becoming more pronounced with age. In yet another interview recently—where did he ever get the reputation for shunning publicity?—he made one of those seemingly deep but in fact banal observations that have become his trademark. “I don’t know about God,” he told the interviewer, “but certainly I believe in the Devil.” Oh yes, one always needed a long spoon to sup with Querell.

He was genuinely curious about people—the sure mark of the second-rate novelist. At those parties in the Eyrie he would stand for a long time leaning with his back against the wall, diabolical trickles of smoke issuing from the corners of his mouth, watching and listening as the party took on an air of monkey-house hysteria. He drank as much as the rest of us, but it seemed to have no effect on him except to make those unnervingly pale-blue eyes of his shine with a kind of malicious merriment. Usually he would slip away early, with a girl in tow; you would glance at the spot where he had been standing and find him gone, and seem to see a shadowy after-image of him, like the paler shadow left on a wall when a picture is removed. So I was surprised when during a party one August afternoon he accosted me in the corridor.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, in that insinuatingly truculent way of his, “I can’t take any more of this filthy wine—let’s go and have a real drink.”

My head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton wool and the sunlight in the mansard windows had taken on the colour of urine, and for once I was content to leave. A girl was standing weeping in the bedroom doorway, her face in her hands; Nick was not to be seen. Querell and I walked in silence down the clattery stairs. The air in the street was blued with exhaust fumes; strange to think of a time when one still noticed the smell of petrol. We went to a pub—was it Finch’s then, or had it another name?— and Querell ordered gin and water, “the tart’s tipple,” as he said with a snicker. It was just after opening time and there were few customers. Querell sat with one foot hooked on the rung of his stool and the other delicately braced
en pointe
on the floor; he did not undo the buttons of his jacket. I noticed the frayed shirt cuffs, the shine on the knees of his trousers. We were of an age, but I felt a generation younger than him. He had a job on the
Express,
or perhaps it was the
Telegraph,
writing juicy tidbits for the gossip column, and as we drank he recounted office anecdotes, drolly describing the eccentricities of his fellow journalists and the public-school asininity of the editor of the day in what were obviously pre-prepared paragraphs of admirable fluency and precision. Tight though I was I saw clearly that this was a performance, from behind which he was studying me with the detached intentness that was to become his trademark as a novelist. He was already an expert at putting up smokescreens (literally as well as figuratively: he smoked without cease, apparently the same, everlasting cigarette, for I never seemed able to catch him in the act of lighting up).

He came to the end of his stories and we were silent for a while. He ordered more drinks, and when I tried to pay for them he waved my money away with that matter-of-fact assumption of superiority that was another of his characteristics. I don’t know why he should have assumed I was broke; on the contrary, I was comparatively well off at the time, thanks to my column for the
Spectator
and occasional lectures at the Institute.

“You’re pretty fond of the Beaver, aren’t you,” he said.

It was said with such studied casualness that I grew wary, despite the gin.

“I haven’t known him for very long,” I said.