The Untouchable Read online

  The Untouchable

  John Banville

  One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?

  As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell’s co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre.

  Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.

  John Banville

  THE UNTOUCHABLE

  to Colm and Douglas

  ONE

  1

  First day of the new life. Very strange. Feeling almost skittish all day. Exhausted now yet feverish also, like a child at the end of a party. Like a child, yes: as if I had suffered a grotesque form of rebirth. Yet this morning I realised for the first time that I am an old man. I was crossing Gower Street, my former stamping ground. I stepped off the path and something hindered me. Odd sensation, as if the air at my ankles had developed a flaw, seemed to turn—what is the word: viscid?—and resisted me and I almost stumbled. Bus thundering past with a grinning blackamoor at the wheel. What did he see? Sandals, mac, my inveterate string bag, old rheumy eye wild with fright. If I had been run over they would have said it was suicide, with relief all round. But I will not give them that satisfaction. I shall be seventy-two this year. Impossible to believe. Inside, an eternal twenty-two. I suppose that is how it is for everybody old. Brr.

  Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination. Leave nothing in writing, Boy always said. Why have I started now? I just sat down and began to write, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which of course it is not. My last testament. It is twilight, everything very still and poignant. The trees in the square are dripping. Tiny sound of birdsong. April. I do not like the spring, its antics and agitations; I fear that anguished seething in the heart, what it might make me do. What it might have made me do: one has to be scrupulous with tenses, at my age. I miss my children. Goodness, where did that come from? They are hardly what you could call children any more. Julian must be—well, he must be forty this year, which makes Blanche thirty-eight, is it? Compared to them I seem to myself hardly grown-up at all. Auden wrote somewhere that no matter what the age of the company, he was always convinced he was the youngest in the room; me, too. All the same, I thought they might have called. Sorry to hear about your treachery, Daddums. Yet I am not at all sure I would want to hear Blanche sniffling and Julian tightening his lips at me down the line. His mother’s son. I suppose all fathers say that.

  I mustn’t ramble.

  Public disgrace is a strange thing. Fluttery feeling in the region of the diaphragm and a sort of racing sensation all over, as of the blood like mercury slithering along heavily just under the skin. Excitement mixed with fright makes for a heady brew. At first I could not think what this state reminded me of, then it came to me: those first nights on the prowl after I had finally admitted to myself it was my own kind that I wanted. The same hot shiver of mingled anticipation and fear, the same desperate grin trying not to break out. Wanting to be caught. To be set upon. To be manhandled. Well, past all that now. Past everything, really. There is a particular bit of blue sky in Et in Arcadia Ego, where the clouds are broken in the shape of a bird in swift flight, which is the true, clandestine centre-point, the pinnacle of the picture, for me. When I contemplate death, and I contemplate it with an ever-diminishing sense of implausibility in these latter days, I see myself swaddled in zinc-white cerements, more a figure out of El Greco than Poussin, ascending in a transport of erotic agony amid alleluias and lip-farts through a swirl of clouds the colour of golden tea head-first into just such a patch of pellucid bleu céleste.

  Switch on the lamp. My steady, little light. How neatly it defines this narrow bourn of desk and page in which I have always found my deepest joy, this lighted tent wherein I crouch in happy hiding from the world. For even the pictures were more a matter of mind than eye. Here there is everything that—

  That was a call from Querell. Well, he certainly has nerve, I’ll say that for him. The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start.

  I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby. My poor heart is still thudding in the most alarming way. Who did I think it would be? He was calling from Antibes. I thought I could hear the sea in the background and I felt envious and annoyed, but more likely it was just the noise of traffic passing by outside his flat, along the Corniche, is it?—or is that somewhere else? Heard the news on the World Service, so he said. “Dreadful, old man, dreadful; what can I say?” He could not keep the eagerness out of his voice. Wanted all the dirty details. “Was it sex they got you on?” How disingenuous—and yet how little he realises, after all. Should I have challenged him, told him I know him for his perfidy? What would have been the point. Skryne reads his books, he is a real fan. “That Querell, now,” he says, doing that peculiar whistle with his dentures, “he has the measure of us all.” Not of me, he hasn’t, my friend; not of me. At least, I hope not.

  No one else has called. Well, I hardly expected that he would…

  I shall miss old Skryne. No question now of having to deal with him any more; that is all over, along with so much else. I should feel relieved but, oddly, I do not. We had become a kind of double act at the end, he and I, a music hall routine. I say I say I say, Mr. Skryne! Well, bless my soul, Mr. Bones! He was hardly the popular image of an interrogator. Hardy little fellow with a narrow head and miniature features and a neat thatch of very dry, stone-coloured hair. He reminds me of the fierce father of the madcap bride in those Hollywood comedies of the thirties. Blue eyes, not piercing, even a little fogged (incipient cataracts?). The buffed brogues, the pipe he plays with, the old tweed jacket with elbow patches. Ageless. Might be anything from fifty to seventy-five. Nimble mind, though, you could practically hear the cogs whirring. And an amazing memory. “Hold on a sec,” he would say, stabbing at me with his pipe-stem, “let’s run over that bit once more,” and I would have to unpack the delicate tissue of lies I had been spinning him, searching with frantic calmness as I did so for the flaw he had detected in the fabric. By now I was only lying for fun, for recreation, you might say, like a retired tennis pro knocking up with an old opponent.

  I had no fear that he would discover some new enormity—I have confessed to everything by now, or almost everything—but it seemed imperative to maintain consistency, for aesthetic reasons, I suppose, and in order to be consistent it was necessary to invent. Ironic, I know. He has the tenacity of the ferret: never let go. He is straight out of Dickens; I picture a crooked little house in Stepney or Hackney or wherever it is he lives, complete with termagant wife and a brood of cheeky nippers. It is another of my besetting weaknesses, to see people always as caricatures. Including myself.

  Not that I recognise myself in the public version of me that is being put about now. I was listening on the wireless when our dear PM (I really do admire her; such firmness, such fixity of purpose, and so handsome, too, in a fascinatingly mannish way) stood up in the Commons and made the announcement, and for a moment I did not register m
y own name. I mean I thought she was speaking of someone else, someone whom I knew, but not well, and whom I had not seen for a long time. It was a very peculiar sensation. The Department had already alerted me to what was to come—terribly rude, the people they have in there now, not at all the easygoing types of my day—but it was still a shock. Then on the television news at midday they had some extraordinary blurred photographs of me, I do not know how or where they got them, and cannot even remember them being taken—apt verb, that, applied to photography: the savages are right, it is a part of one’s soul that is being taken away. I looked like one of those preserved bodies they dig up from Scandinavian bogs, all jaw and sinewy throat and hooded eyeballs. Some writer fellow, I have forgotten or suppressed his name—a “contemporary historian,” whatever that may be—was about to identify me, but the government got in first, in what I must say was a clumsy attempt to save face; I was embarrassed for the PM, really I was. Now here I am, exposed again, and after all this time. Exposed!—what a shiversome, naked-sounding word. Oh, Querell, Querell. I know it was you. It is the kind of thing you would do, to settle an old score. Is there no end to life’s turbulences? Except the obvious one, I mean.

  What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself. Am I, like Querrell, out to settle old scores? Or is it perhaps my intention to justify my deeds, to offer extenuations? I hope not. On the other hand, neither do I want to fashion for myself yet another burnished mask… Having pondered for a moment, I realise that the metaphor is obvious: attribution, verification, restoration. I shall strip away layer after layer of grime— the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling—until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. (When I laugh out loud like this the room seems to start back in surprise and dismay, with hand to lip. I have lived decorously here, I must not now turn into a shrieking hysteric.)

  I kept my nerve in face of that pack of jackals from the newspapers today. Did men die because of you? ’Yes, dearie, swooned quite away. But no, no, I was superb, if I do say so myself. Cool, dry, balanced, every inch the Stoic: Coriolanus to the general. I am a great actor, that is the secret of my success (Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself?—Nietzsche). I dressed the part to perfection: old but good houndstooth jacket, Jermyn Street shirt and Charvet tie—red, just to be mischievous—corduroy bags, socks the colour and texture of porridge, that pair of scuffed brothel creepers I had not worn in thirty years. Might have just come up from a weekend at Cliveden. I toyed with the idea of a tobacco pipe a la Skryne, but that would have been to overdo it; and besides, it requires years of practice to be a plausible pipeman—never take on cover that you can’t do naturally, that was another of Boy’s dicta. I believe it was a nice piece of strategy on my part to invite the gentlepersons of the press into my lovely home. They crowded in almost sheepishly, jostling each other’s notebooks and holding their cameras protectively above their heads. Rather touching, really: so eager, so awkward. I felt as if I were back at the Institute, about to deliver a lecture. Draw the shades, Miss Twinset, will you? And Stripling, you switch on the magic lantern. Plate one: The Betrayal in the Garden.

  I have always had a particular fondness for gardens gone to seed. The spectacle of nature taking its slow revenge is pleasing. Not wilderness, of course, I was never one for wilderness, except in its place; but a general dishevelment bespeaks a right disdain for the humanist’s fussy insistence on order. I am no Papist when it comes to husbandry, and side with Marvell’s mower against gardens. I am thinking, here in this bird-haunted April twilight, of the first time I saw the Beaver, asleep in a hammock deep in the dappled orchard behind his father’s house in North Oxford. Chrysalis. The grass was grown wild and the trees needed pruning. It was high summer, yet I see apple blossoms crowding on the boughs; so much for my powers of recall (I am said to have a photographic memory; very useful, in my line of work— my lines of work). Also I seem to remember a child, a sullen boy standing knee-deep in the grass, knocking the tops off nettles with a stick and watching me speculatively out of the corner of his eye. Who could he have been? Innocence incarnate, perhaps (yes, I am stifling another shriek of terrible mirth). Shaken already after separate encounters with the Beaver’s unnerving sister and mad mother, I felt foolish, dithering there, with grass-stalks sticking up my trousers legs and a truculent bee enamoured of my hair oil zigzagging drunkenly about my head. I was clutching a manuscript under my arm—something earnest on late cubism, no doubt, or the boldness of Cezanne’s draughtsmanship—and suddenly, there in that abounding glade, the idea of these pinched discriminations struck me as laughable. Sunlight, swift clouds; a breeze swooped and the boughs dipped. The Beaver slept on, holding himself in his arms with his face fallen to one side and a gleaming black wing of hair fanned across his forehead. Obviously this was not his father, whom I had come to see, and who Mrs. Beaver had assured me was asleep in the garden. “He drifts off, you know,” she had said with a queenly sniff; “no concentration.” I had taken this as a hopeful sign: the idea of a dreamily inattentive publisher appealed to my already well-developed sense of myself as an infiltrator. But I was wrong. Max Brevoort—known as Big Beaver, to distinguish him from Nick—would turn out to be as wily and unscrupulous as any of his Dutch merchant forebears.

  I close my eyes now and see the light between the apple trees and the boy standing in the long grass and that sleeping beauty folded in his hammock and the fifty years that have passed between that day and this are as nothing. It was 1929, and I was— yes—twenty-two.

  Nick woke up and smiled at me, doing that trick he had of passing in an instant effortlessly from one world to another.

  “Hullo,” he said. That was how chaps said it in those days: hull, not hell. He sat up, running a hand through his hair. The hammock swayed. The small boy, destroyer of nettles, was gone. “God,” Nick said, “I had the strangest dream.”

  He accompanied me back to the house. That was how it seemed: not that we were walking together, but that he had bestowed his company on me, for a brief progress, with the ease and diffidence of royalty. He was dressed in whites, and he, like me, was carrying something under his arm, a book, or a newspaper (the news was all bad, that summer, and would get worse). As he walked he kept turning sideways towards me from the waist up and nodding rapidly at everything I said, smiling and frowning and smiling again.

  “You’re the Irishman,” he said. “I’ve heard of you. My father thinks your stuff is very good.” He peered at me earnestly. “He does, really.” I mumbled something meant to convey modesty and looked away. What he had seen in my face was not doubt but a momentary gloom: the Irishman.

  The house was Queen Anne, not large, but rather grand, and maintained by Mrs. B. in slovenly opulence: lots of faded silk and objets supposedly of great value—Big Beaver was a collector of jade figurines—and a rank smell everywhere of some sort of burnt incense. The plumbing was primitive; there was a lavatory close up under the roof which when it was flushed would make a horrible, cavernous choking noise, like a giant’s death-rattle, that could be heard with embarrassing immediacy all over the house. But the rooms were full of light and there were always fresh-cut flowers, and the atmosphere had something thrillingly suppressed in it, as if at any moment the most amazing events might suddenly begin to happen. Mrs. Brevoort was a large, beaked, bedizened personage, imperious and excitable, who went in for soirees and mild spiritualism. She played the piano—she had studied under someone famous—producing from the instrument great gaudy storms of sound that made the window panes buzz. Nick found her irresistibly ridiculous and was faintly ashamed of her. She took a shine to me straight off, so Nick told me later (he was lying, I’m sure); she had pronounced me sensitive, he said, and believed I would make a good medium, if only I would try. I quailed before
her force and relentlessness, like a skiff borne down upon by an ocean-going liner.

  “You didn’t find Max?” she said, pausing in the hallway with a copper kettle in her hand. She was darkly Jewish, and wore her hair in ringlets, and displayed a startling, steep-pitched shelf of off-white bosom. “The beast; he must have forgotten you were coming. I shall tell him you were deeply wounded by his thoughtlessness.”

  I began to protest but Nick took me by the elbow—after half a century I can still feel that grip, light but firm, with the hint of a tremor in it—and propelled me into the drawing room, where he flung himself down on a sagging sofa and crossed his legs and leaned back and gazed at me with a smile at once dreamy and intent. The moment stretched. Neither of us spoke. Time can stand still, I am convinced of it; something snags and stops, turning and turning, like a leaf on a stream. A thick drop of sunlight seethed in a glass paperweight on a low table. Mrs. Beaver was in the garden dosing hollyhocks with a mixture from her copper kettle. Tinny jazz-band music came hiccuping faintly down from upstairs, where Baby Beaver was in her bedroom practising dance steps to the gramophone (I know that was what she was doing; it was what she did all the time; later on I married her). Then abruptly Nick gave himself a sort of shake and leaned forward briskly and picked up a silver cigarette box from the table and proffered it to me, holding it open with a thumb hooked on the lid. Those hands.

  “She’s quite mad, you know,” he said. “My mother. We all are, in this family. You’ll find out.”

  What did we talk about? My essay, perhaps. The relative merits of Oxford and Cambridge. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. I can’t remember. Presently Max Brevoort arrived. I do not know what I had expected—The Laughing Publisher, I suppose: apple cheeks and a big moustache and snowy ruff—but he was tall and thin and sallow, with an amazingly long, narrow head, bald and polished at its point. He was the gentile but he looked more Jewish than his wife. He wore black serge, somewhat rusty at the knees and elbows. He gazed at me, or through me, with Nick’s large black eyes and the same still, dreamy smile, though his had a glint in it. I babbled, and he kept talking over me, not listening, saying I know, I know, and chafing his long brown hands together. What a lot we all did talk in those days. When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of Statements.