The Untouchable (52 page)

Authors: John Banville

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: The Untouchable

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“You won’t do that, either.” Distantly we heard the doorbell ring. He stood up, and bent and retrieved my umbrella. “Your socks are wet,” he said. “Why are you wearing slippers, in this weather?”

“Bunions,” I said, and laughed, a touch hysterically, I fear; it was the gin, no doubt. He was looking at the string bag again. I shook it. “I brought a gun,” I said.

He glanced aside, clicking his tongue in annoyance.

“Are they taking care of you?” he said. “The Department, I mean. Pensions, that kind of thing?” I said nothing. We set off
through the house. As we walked, he turned from the waist up and looked into my face. “Listen, Victor, I—”

“Don’t, Nick,” I said. “Don’t.”

He began to say something more, but changed his mind. I could feel the presence of someone else in the house. (Was it you, my dear? Come, was it you, skulking in one of those gilded antechambers?) The maid—why do I keep wanting to call her the nurse?—materialised out of the shadows in the hall and opened the front door for me. I went out quickly on to the step. The rain had stopped again, the lilac leaves were dripping. Nick put a hand on my shoulder but I squirmed away from his touch.

“By the way,” I said, “I’m leaving you the Poussin.”

He nodded, not surprised at all; that bit of laurel was still stuck to his brow. And to think I once thought him a god. He stepped back and lifted his arm in a curious, grave salute that seemed less a farewell than a sort of sardonic blessing. I walked away rapidly down the wet street, through sunlight and fleet shadow, swinging my umbrella, the string bag dangling at my side. At every other step the bag and its burden banged against my shin; I did not mind.

I hope Miss Vandeleur will not be too disappointed when she comes around to do the final clearing-up—I have no doubt it will be she that he will send. Most of the sensitive things I have already destroyed; there is a very efficient incinerator in the basement. As to this—what, this memoir? this fictional memoir?—I shall leave it to her to decide how best to dispose of it. I imagine she will bring it straight to him. He always did have his girls. How could I ever have thought that it was Skryne who had put her on to me? I got so many things so drearily wrong. Now we are sitting here, Webley and myself, in silent commune. Some playwright of the nineteenth century, I cannot recall for the moment who it was, wittily observed that if a revolver appears in the first act it is bound to go off in the third. Well,
le dernier acte est sanglant
… So much for my Pascalian wager; a vulgar concept, anyway.

What a noble sky, this evening, pale blue to cobalt to rich purple, and the great bergs of cloud, colour of dirty ice, with soft
copper edgings, progressing from west to east, distant, stately, soundless. It is the kind of sky that Poussin loved to set above his lofty dramas of death and love and loss. There are any number of clear patches; I am waiting for a bird-shaped one.

In the head or through the heart? Now, there is a dilemma.

Father, the gate is open.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Very many books have been written on the subject of the
Cambridge spies; the majority of these I have not read.
However, the following three have been of great help to me:

Conspiracy of Silence,
by Barrie Penrose and Simon
Freeman (Grafton, London, 1986)

Mask of Treachery,
by John Costello (William Morrow
and Company, New York, 1988)

My Five Cambridge Friends,
by Yuri Modin (Headline,
London, 1994)

I should also mention:

Code Breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park,
edited
by F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1993)

London at War 1939-1945,
by Philip Ziegler
(Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1995)

Louis MacNeice,
by Jon Stallworthy (Faber
& Faber, London, 1995)

Poussin,
by Anthony Blunt (Pallas Athene, London
[reprint], 1995)

Karl Marx,
by Isaiah Berlin (Thornton Butterworth,
London, 1939)

ALSO BY
JOHN BANVILLE

“[Banville is] one of the most remarkable living writers.… Everything he touches turns to memorable literature.” —
San Francisco Chronicle

ATHENA

At once a literary thriller and a sumptuously perverse love story,
Athena
is a tour de force of the narrative imagination. Banville’s narrator calls himself “Morrow.” He knows a great deal about seventeenth-century Flemish art, and while “authenticating” some suspicious paintings meets “A,” a woman who in time becomes his mistress and nemesis, his anguish and addiction.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73685-9

DOCTOR COPERNICUS

It is the sixteenth century. Princes and bishops send armies careening across Europe and order assassins into the bedchambers of their enemies. And in a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73799-5

GHOSTS

On an unnamed island, a dayboat runs aground, forcing its group of shaken travelers to wade ashore. There they encounter a reclusive art historian and his assistant. But is the meeting truly an accident? If so, why does one of the castaways appear to know the reclusive scholar— and why is the latter so afraid of him?

Fiction/Literature/0-679-75512-8

KEPLER

John Banville re-creates the life of Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Wars, witchcraft, and disease rage throughout Europe, and for this court mathematician, astronomy is a quest for some form of divine order.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74370-7

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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Banville, John.
The Untouchable: a novel / by John Banville.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56092-6
1. Espionage, Soviet—Great Britain—History—20th century—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6052.A57U58 1997
843′.914—dc21 96-49637
CIP

Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com

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