The Untouchable (6 page)

He nodded. “Of course, you were a Cambridge man. Not that I saw a great deal of him at Oxford.” Nick had said to me of Querell that in their college days he had been too busy whoring to bother much with friendships. Despite recent rumours to the contrary, Querell was an incorrigible hetero, whose fascination with women ran almost to the level of the gynaecological. I thought he always
smelled
faintly of sex. I hear he is still chasing girls, in his seventies, down there on the Cote d’Azur. “Quite a boy, the Beaver,” he said, and paused, and then gave me a peculiar, sidelong look and asked: “Do you trust him?” I did not know what to answer, and mumbled something about not being sure that I thought that anyone was really to be trusted. He nodded again, seemingly satisfied, and dropped the subject and began to talk instead about a fellow he had bumped into recently, whom he had known at Oxford.

“He’d interest you,” he said. “He’s a red-hot Sinn Feiner.”

I laughed.

“I’m from the other side of the fence, you know,” I said. “My people are black Protestants.”

“Oh, Protestants in Ireland are all Catholics, really.”

“Rather the opposite, I should have thought. Or we’re all just plain pagans, perhaps.”

“Well, anyway, the place is interesting, isn’t it? I mean the politics.”

I wonder—good lord, I wonder if he was putting out feelers with a view to recruiting me, even then? That was the summer of ’thirty-one; was he already with the Department, that early? Or maybe it was just the question of religion that interested him. Although none of us knew it, he was already taking instruction at Farm Street. (Querell’s Catholicism, by the way, has always seemed to me far more of an anachronism than my Marxism.) And in fact now he dropped the subject of politics and went on to talk about religion, in his usual oblique way, telling me a story about Gerard Manley Hopkins preaching at some sort of women’s gathering in Dublin and scandalising the congregation
by comparing the Church to a sow with seven teats representing the seven sacraments. I laughed, and said what a sad poor fool Hopkins was, trying for the common touch like that and failing ridiculously, but Querell gave me another long, measuring look and said: “Yes, he made the mistake of thinking that the way to be convincing is to put on a false front,” and I felt obscurely confounded.

We finished our drinks and left the pub, I very bleary indeed by now, and Querell hailed a taxi and we went to Curzon Street, where there was an opening at Alighieri’s. The work, by an émigré White Russian whose name I have forgotten, was hopeless trash, a combination of supremacist sterility and Russian-icon kitsch that turned my already drink-insulted stomach. He was all the rage, though, this Supremavitch, and the crowd was so large it had overflowed from the gallery, and people were standing about the pavement in the evening sunshine, drinking white wine and sneering at passers-by, and producing that self-congratulatory low roar that is the natural collective voice of imbibers at the fount of art. Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort.

Nick’s party seemed to have transferred itself here intact. There was Nick himself, still tousled, still barefoot, with a pair of trousers pulled on over his nightshirt, and Leo Rothenstein in his three-piece suit, and the silken Daphnes and Daisys, and even the weeping girl, red eyed but laughing now, all of them drunk and embarrassingly loud. When they saw Querell and me approaching they turned on us, and someone shouted something at which everyone laughed, and Querell swore and turned on his heel and stalked away in the direction of the park, narrow head held aloft and elbows pressed tightly to his sides; in his high-shouldered dark-brown suit he reminded me of an HP Sauce bottle.

Remarkable how sobering it is to arrive in the midst of people more drunk than oneself; within minutes of stopping on the pavement among that sodden, billowing crowd I began to taste copper at the back of my mouth and felt a headache starting up and knew that I must have more drink or face the rest of the evening
in a state of ashen melancholy. Boy had buttonholed me and was shouting into my ear some outrageous tale about an encounter with a negro sailor (“… like a length of bloody hawser!”) and breathing garlic fumes all over me. I wanted to talk to Nick but the girls had got him, and were hilariously admiring his bare and extremely dirty feet. I broke away from Boy at last and plunged into the interior of the gallery, where, though crowded, it seemed less confined than outside on the pavement. A glass of wine materialised in my hand. I was at that clear-eyed yet hallucinatory stage of inebriation in which the commonplace takes on a sort of comically transfigured aspect. The people standing about seemed the most bizarre of creatures; it struck me how amazing, and amazingly droll, it was that human beings should go about upright and not on all fours, which would surely be more natural, and that of those gathered here, practically everyone, including myself, was equipped with a glass which he or she must hold upright while at the same time talking at the highest possible speed and volume. It all seemed quite mad and laughable and at the same time acutely, achingly moving. I turned away from the Russian’s daubs, which everyone else was ignoring anyway, and made my way into the back rooms, where Wally Cohen had his offices. Wally, a little roly-poly fellow with curls (“Shylock’s shy locks”—Boy), made a sort of running gag of his Jewishness, rubbing his hands and smiling oilily and referring to his co-religionists as Jewboys and snip-cocks. I suspect he was at heart an anti-Semite, as a lot of the Jews whom I knew were, in those pre-war days. I came upon him in a storeroom, one ham perched on the corner of a table, swinging a chubby little leg and talking animatedly to a dark-haired young woman whom I seemed vaguely to recognise.

“Victor, my boy!” he cried. “You have a haunted, hungry look.”

Wally had been a Marxist since his teens, one of the first of us to contract the virus.

“I’ve been drinking with Querell,” I said.

He chuckled. “Ah, the pontiff; yes.”

The young woman, whom he had not bothered to introduce, was regarding me with a sceptical eye, trying, so it seemed to me, not to laugh. She was short and dark and compactly made, with
bruised shadows under her eyes. She wore one of those tube-shaped dresses of the time, made of layers of bronze-black silk along which the light darkly shimmered and flashed, and I thought of a scarab beetle, locked in its brittle, burnished carapace. Wally resumed his conversation with her and she turned her attention slowly away from me. He was going on about some painter whose work he had lately discovered—Jose Orozco, someone like that. Wally was one of those genuine enthusiasts the world at the time was still capable of producing. He was to die seven years later, with Cornford’s brigade, at the siege of Madrid.

“It’s the only thing that’s possible any longer,” he was saying. “People’s art. The rest is bourgeois self-indulgence, masturbation for the middle classes.”

I glanced at the young woman: words like masturbation were not uttered as lightly then as now. She gave a jaded laugh and said:

“Oh, do shut up, Wally.”

He grinned and turned to me. “What do you say, Victor? Sure and begorrah, isn’t it the revolution itself that’s coming to this land of the oppressor?”

I shrugged. Bumptious Jews like Wally were hard to stomach; the camps had not yet made his tribe into the chosen people once again. Besides, he had never liked me. I suspect he knew how much I hated my name—only bandleaders and petty crooks are called Victor—for he used it at every opportunity.

“If you’re so much in favour of Socialist art,” I said, “why are you exhibiting that White trash out there?”

He lifted his shoulders, grinning, and showed me his merchant’s palms. “It sells, my boy; it sells.”

Nick came wandering in then, his bare feet slapping the floorboards and his drunken smile askew. He exchanged a sardonic and, as it seemed to me, curiously complicit glance with the young woman and a second later I realised who she was.

“Look at us,” he said happily, sweeping his wineglass in an unsteady arc that encompassed himself and the party behind him, as well as Wally and his sister and me. “What a decadent lot.”

“We were just anticipating the revolution,” Wally said.

Nick laughed at that. I turned to Baby.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I knew I knew you but…”

She lifted an eyebrow at me and answered nothing.

The room was painted greyish white and the ceiling was a shallow dome. Two filthy windows side by side looked out on a cobbled yard thick with evening sunlight shining straight from Delft. Pictures were stacked against the walls under a fur of mouse-grey dust. Unnerved by Baby’s challenging, slightly bulbous gaze, I went and poked amongst them. Failed fashions of past years, tired, sad and shamefaced: orchards in April, the odd wan nude, some examples of English cubism that were all soft angles and pastel planes. And then there it was, in its chipped gilt frame, with a cracked coating of varnish that made it seem as if hundreds of shrivelled toenails had been carefully glued to the surface. It was unmistakable what it was, even at first glance, and in poor light. I laid it back quickly against the wall, and a sort of hot something began swelling outward from a point in the centre of my breast; whenever I look at a great picture for the first time I know why we still speak of the heart as the seat of the emotions. My breathing grew shallow and my palms were moist. It was as if I had stumbled on something indecent; this was how I used to feel as a schoolboy when someone would pass me a dirty picture under the desk. I am not exaggerating. I have never cared to examine the roots of my response to art; too many tendrils coiling about each other down there in the dark. I waited a moment, telling myself to be calm—the alcohol in my system had suddenly all evaporated—and then, taking a deep breath, I lifted out the picture and carried it to the window.

Definitely.

Wally was on to me at once.

“Seen something you like, Victor?” he said.

I shrugged, and peered closely at the brushwork, trying to appear sceptical.

“Looks like
The Death of Seneca,
by what’s-his-name,” Nick said, surprising me. “We saw it in the Louvre, remember?” I imagined myself kicking him, hard, on the shin.

Wally came and stood at my shoulder, breathing. “Or another working of the same subject,” he said thoughtfully. “When he
found a subject he liked, he stuck to it until it was done to death.” He was interested now; my reviews annoyed him, but he respected my eye.

“Well, I think it’s school of,” I said, and put the picture back in its place, with its face to the wall, expecting it to cling to my hand like a child about to be abandoned. Wally was eyeing me with malicious speculation. He was not fooled.

“If you want it,” he said, “make me an offer.”

Nick and Baby were sitting side by side on Wally’s table in an oddly crumpled attitude, heads hanging and legs limply dangling, graceful and lifeless as a pair of marionettes. Suddenly I was shy in their presence, and said nothing, and Wally looked at them and then at me and nodded, closing his eyes and slyly smiling, as if he understood my predicament of the moment, which I did not: something to do with art, and embarrassment, and desire, all mixed together.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Five hundred quid and it’s yours.”

I laughed; that was a fortune in those days.

“I could manage a hundred,” I said. “It’s an obvious copy.”

Wally put on one of his shtetl expressions, narrowing his eyes and setting his head to the side and hunching a shoulder. “What are you saying to me, my man—a copy, is it, a copy?” Then he straightened up again and shrugged. “All right: three hundred. That’s as low as I’ll go.”

Baby said: “Why don’t you get Leo Rothenstein to buy it for you? He has pots of money.”

We all looked at her. Nick laughed, and jumped down nimbly from the table, suddenly animated.

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “Come on, let’s find him.”

My heart sank (odd formulation, that; the heart does not seem to fall, but to
swell,
rather, I find, when one is alarmed). Nick would turn the thing into a rag, and Wally would get peeved, and I would lose my chance, the only one I was ever likely to have, to take possession of a small but true masterpiece. I followed him and Baby (I wonder, by the way, why she was called that—her name was Vivienne, cool and sharp, like her) out to the pavement, where the crowd had thinned. Leo Rothenstein was there still, though; we heard his booming, plummy tones before
we saw him. He was talking to Boy and one of the blonde, diaphanous girls. They were discussing the gold standard, or the state of Italian politics, something like that. Small talk on large topics, the chief characteristic of the time. Leo had the matt sheen of the very rich. He was handsome, in an excessively masculine way, tall, full-chested, with a long, swarth, Levantine head.

“Hello, Beaver,” he said. I got a nod, Baby a sharp, appraising look and the shadow of a smile. Leo was parsimonious with his attentions.

“Leo,” Nick said, “we want you to buy a picture for Victor.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. It’s a Poussin, but Wally doesn’t know it. He’s asking three hundred, which is a snip. Think of it as an investment. Better than bullion, a picture is. You tell him, Boy.”

Boy, for reasons that I could never understand, was considered to have something of a feeling for pictures, and on occasion had advised Leo’s family on its art collection. It amused me to imagine him in the company of Leo’s father, an august and enigmatic gentleman with the look of a Bedouin chieftain, the two of them pacing the showrooms and gravely pausing before this or that big brown third-rate canvas, Boy all the while struggling to suppress a laugh. Now he did his gargoyle grin: eyes bulging, nostrils flared, the thick, fleshy mouth turned down at the corners. “
Poussin?
” he said. “Sounds tasty.”

Leo was measuring me with genial distrust.

“I have a hundred,” I said, with the sense of setting a foot down firmly on a sagging tightrope. When Leo laughed his big, soft laugh you could almost see the sound coming out of his mouth spelled out in letters:
Ha, Ha, Ha.