The Untouchable (9 page)

The morning was warm enough for us to have tea on the back balcony. That is, she had tea while I had a small glass of something, despite the early hour. She makes me jittery, I have to take a little fortification when dealing with her. (Balconies make me jittery too, but that is another matter. Patrick! My Patsy, poor Pat.) Besides, at my age I can drink at any hour of the day without the need of an excuse; I foresee a time when I shall be breakfasting on cocktails of gin and Complan. From the balcony we could just see the tops of the trees in the park. They are at their loveliest stage just now, the black boughs lightly dusted with the most delicate puffs of green. I remarked how the city’s pollution imparts to the sky a wonderful depth of colour, like that dense, gulp-inducing blue you see when the aeroplane banks and you peer up into nothingness. Miss Vandeleur was not listening. She sat on the other side of the little metal table, slumped in her greatcoat and frowning into her cup.

“Was he a Marxist?” she asked. “Sir Nicholas?”

I had to think for a second who it was she meant.

“Nick?” I said. “Lord, no! In fact…”

In fact it was on that voyage home from Spain that we had our one and only serious conversation about politics. I can’t remember how it started. I suppose I had attempted a bit of proselytising; I had all the zeal of the convert in those early, heady days, and Nick never did care to be preached at.

“Do shut up, for God’s sake,” he said, not quite managing to laugh. “I’m sick of listening to you and your historical dialectic and all the rest of that tommyrot.”

We were leaning at the rail in the bows, contemplatively smoking, under the dome of the great soft calm marine night. The further north we sailed the warmer the weather was becoming, as if the climate like everything else in the world had been turned topsyturvy. A huge, bone-white moon hung above the prostrate sea, and the ship’s wake flashed and writhed like a great silver rope unravelling behind us. I was giddy and slightly feverish after my recent bout of seasickness.

“There must be action,” I said, with the doggedness of the dogmatist. “We must act, or perish.”

That is, I’m afraid, the way we talked.

“Oh, action!” Nick said, and this time he did laugh. “Words, for you, are action. That’s all you do—jaw jaw jaw.”

That stung; it amused Nick, when he was being the bruiser, to mock me for my sedentary ways.

“We can’t all be soldiers,” I said huffily. “There is a need for theorists, too.”

He flicked his cigarette end over the rail and gazed off at the glimmering horizon. A breeze lifted the hanging lock of hair at his forehead. What did I think it was I felt for him? How did I account for the hopeless, silent sob that welled up in my breast when I looked at him at moments such as this? I suppose school had accustomed us to crushes and all that—though how I could think
this
was only a crush, I don’t know.

“If I were a Communist,” he said, “I shouldn’t bother with theory at all. I should think only of strategy: how to get things done. I’d use whatever means come to hand—lies, blackmail, murder and mayhem, whatever it takes. You’re all idealists pretending to be pragmatists. You think you care only for the cause while really the cause is only something to lose yourselves in, a way to cancel the ego. It’s half religion and half Romanticism. Marx is your St. Paul, and your Rousseau.”

I was taken aback, and not a little bemused; I had never heard him talk like this before, with his intellect’s lip curled, so to speak. He turned to me, smiling, leaning sideways on an elbow on the rail.

“It’s rather sweet,” he said, “the way you deceive yourselves, but a little contemptible, too, don’t you think?”

“Some of us are ready to fight,” I said. “Some of us are already signing up to go to Spain.”

His smile turned pitying.

“Yes,” he said, “and here you are, sailing home from Spain.” I felt a flash of anger, and had a strong desire to give him a slap— a slap, or something like it. “The trouble with you, Vic,” he said, “is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.”

Miss Vandeleur was saying something, and I came back with a jolt.

“My dear, I’m sorry,” I said, “my attention strayed. I was thinking about the Beaver—Sir Nicholas. Sometimes I wonder if I knew him at all. Certainly I never spotted whatever it was in him—just will-power, I suppose—that would drive him to such giddy heights of power and influence later on.” Miss V. had gone into that state of suspended animation, her head lowered and features fallen slack in a faintly idiotic looking way, that I have come to recognise as her mode of deepest listening. She would not make a good interrogator, she shows her interest too plainly. I told myself to proceed with caution. “But then,” I said, slipping into my bland old-boy routine, “which of us ever really recognises the true nature of others?”

She is very interested in Nick. I would not want to see him harmed. No, I would not want that, at all.

Another ship, another trip, to Ireland, this time. It was just after Munich, and I was glad to get away from London, with its blimps and rumours, and fear pervasive and palpable as fog. While the world was collapsing, however, my personal fortunes were soaring. Yes, that year I was very full of myself, as Nanny Hargreaves would have said. I had a modest but rapidly growing international reputation as a connoisseur and scholar, I had moved up from the
Spectator
to the altogether more austere and rarefied pages of the
Burlington
and the Warburg
Journal,
and in the autumn I was to take up the Deputy Directorship of the Institute. Not bad for a man of thirty-one, and an Irish man, at
that. Perhaps more impressive than any of these successes was the fact that I had spent the summer at Windsor, where I had embarked on the task of cataloguing the great and, until I took it in hand, chaotic collection of drawings that had been accumulating there since the days of Henry Tudor. It was hard labour, but I was sustained in it by an acute awareness of its value, not only to art history, but also to the furtherance of my own multiple interests (God, you can’t beat a spy for smugness!). I got on well with HM—he had been up at Trinity not many years before me. Despite his enthusiasm for boys’ clubs and tennis, he was, like his mother, a shrewd and jealous guardian of the royal possessions. Often in those last months before the war, while we all waited in a state of dreamy tension for hostilities to break out, he would come up to the print room and sit on a corner of my desk, swinging one leg, the fingers of his slender, somewhat fidgety hands laced together and resting on his thigh, and talk about the great collectors among his predecessors on the throne, all of whom he spoke of with amused, rueful familiarity, as if they were so many generous but faintly disreputable uncles, which you might say they were, I suppose. Though he was not very much older than me, he reminded me of my father, with his diffidence, and air of vague foreboding, and sudden fits of somewhat unnerving playfulness. Certainly, I preferred him greatly to his bloody wife, with her hats and her drinkies and her after-dinner games of charades, into which I was repeatedly dragooned, to my distress and intense embarrassment. Her name for me was Boots, the origin of which I never could discover. She was a cousin of my dead mother. Moscow, of course, was entranced by these connections. Great snobs, the Comrades.

At the end of that summer I was in a state of profound nervous exhaustion. When, ten years previously, I had failed mathematics, or it had failed me, I had understood clearly what the consequences would be: an entire remaking of the self, with all the dedication and unremitting labour that such an exercise would entail. Now I had managed the transformation, but at great cost in physical and intellectual energy. Metamorphosis is a painful process. I imagine the exquisite agony of the caterpillar turning itself into a butterfly, pushing out eye-stalks, pounding
its fat-cells into iridescent wing-dust, at last cracking the mother-of-pearl sheath and staggering upright on sticky, hair’s-breadth legs, drunken, gasping, dazed by the light. When Nick suggested a recuperative jaunt (“You’re looking even more cadaverous than usual, old chap”) I agreed with a suddenness that surprised even myself. It was Nick’s idea that we should go to Ireland. Did he mean, I wondered nervously, to get the goods on me, nose out my family secrets (I had not told him about Freddie), place me in my class? He was full of enthusiasm for the trip. We would go to Carrickdrum to rest up, as he said, then travel on out to the far west, where, I had told him, my father’s people came from. It seemed a wonderful notion. The thought of having Nick to myself for weeks on end was intoxicating, and stilled whatever qualms I might have had.

I bought the tickets. Nick was broke. He had long ago drifted out of his editorial job at Brevoort & Klein and was existing on an allowance from a grudging and ceaselessly complaining Big Beaver, supplemented by numerous small loans from his friends. We took the Friday night steamer, and travelled down from Larne on a rackety train through the glaucous light of a late-September dawn. I sat and watched the landscape making its huge, slow rotation around us. Antrim that morning wore a particularly tight-lipped aspect. Nick was subdued, and sat huddled in a corner of the unheated compartment with his overcoat pulled close around him, pretending to sleep. When the hills of Carrickdrum came into view a kind of panic seized me and I wanted to wrench open the carriage door and leap out and be swallowed in the engine’s steam and flying smoke. “Home,” Nick said in a sepulchral voice, startling me. “You must be cursing me for making you come.” He had an unnerving ability sometimes to guess what one was thinking. The train passed along a raised embankment from which the garden and, presently, the house were to be seen, but I did not point out the view to Nick. Doubt and foreboding had set in.

My father had sent Andy Wilson with the pony-and-trap to meet us. Andy was the gardener and general handyman at St. Nicholas’s, a wiry little man, like a wood-sprite, with bowed arms and legs and a baby’s washed-blue eyes. He was ageless,
and seemed not to have changed at all since I was an infant, when he used to terrify me by putting frogs into the pram with me. He was a ferocious and unregenerate Orangeman and played the Lambeg drum in the town’s Twelfth parade every year. He took to Nick straight away and formed a jeering alliance with him against me. “Thon’s the lad won’t lift a finger,” he said as he heaved our bags into the trap, nodding towards me and nudging Nick and winking. “Never would, aye, and never will.” He cackled, shaking his head, and took the reins and clicked his tongue at the pony, and Nick smiled at me lopsidedly, and with a wallowing, backward lurch we were off.

We skirted the town, the little pony going along at a fastidious trot, and began the ascent of the West Road. A weak sun was struggling to shine. With a pang I caught the buttery smell of gorse. Presently the Lough came into view, a great flat flaky sheet of steel, and something in me quailed; I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths. Nick was asleep again, or pretending to be, with his feet on his bags. I thought how much I envied him his ability to escape the tedium of life’s interludes. Andy, wielding the reins, cast a fond glance back at him and softly exclaimed:

“Och, the gentleman!”

The trees surrounding the house looked darker than ever, more blue than green, pointing heavenward in urgent, mute admonishment. Freddie was the first to appear, lumbering diagonally across the lawn to meet us with his arms spread, grinning and gibbering. “Here’s the boss,” said Andy. “Will you look at him, the gawnie!” Nick opened his eyes. Freddie drew level, and putting a hand on the wing of the trap turned and trotted along beside us, moaning in excitement. He gave me one of his sliding glances and did not look at Nick at all. Strange, that one so severely afflicted should be prey to something so subtle as shyness. He was a big fellow, with big feet and big hands and a big head topped by a thatch of straw-coloured hair. To look at him in repose, if he could ever be said to be in repose, you would hardly have known his condition, if it were not for those helplessly flickering eyes, and the scabs around his fingernails and
his mouth where he picked and chewed at himself ceaselessly. He was nearly thirty by now, but despite his bulk he still had the rumpled, shirt-tails-and-catapults air of an obstreperous twelve-year-old. Nick raised his eyebrows and nodded in Andy’s direction. “His son?” he murmured. In my agitation and shame all I did was shake my head and look away.

When we drew up at the house my father popped out at once, as if he had been waiting behind the door, which probably he had. He was wearing his dog collar and bishop’s starched front and a moth-eaten pullover, and was clutching a handful of papers—I think I never saw my father at home without a sheaf of scribbled notes in his hand. He greeted us with his usual mixture of warmth and wariness. He looked smaller than I remembered, like a slightly out-of-scale model of himself. Recently he had suffered a second heart attack, and there was a sort of lightness about him, a wispy, tentative something, that I supposed must be the effect of the subdued but ever-present fear of sudden death. Freddie ran up and hugged him and laid his big head on his shoulder and looked back at us with a sly, proprietorial leer. I could tell by the alarmed way my father took in the Beaver that he had forgotten I had said I would be bringing a guest. We got down from the trap, and I tackled the introductions. Andy was making a racket with our bags, and the pony put its snout into the small of my back and tried to push me over, and Freddie, moved by the agitation and awkwardness of the moment, began to howl softly, and just when I thought everything would turn irretrievably into ruinous farce, Nick stepped forward briskly, like a doctor taking over at the scene of an accident, and shook my father’s hand with just the right proportions of deference and familiarity, murmuring something about the weather.

“Yes, well,” my father said, vaguely smiling, and patting Freddie soothingly on the back. “You’re very welcome. Both of you, very welcome. Did you have a good crossing? Usually it’s calm this time of year. Do stop that, Freddie, there’s a good boy.”