The Untouchable (19 page)

We were in The Fox in Roundleigh. He had motored up from London in the afternoon and picked me up at my rooms. I had not invited him in, from a combination of shyness and distrust— distrust of myself, that is. The little world with which I had surrounded myself—my books, my prints, my Bonington, my
Death of Seneca
—was a delicate construct, and I feared it might not bear without injury the weight of Felix’s scrutiny. His car was an unexpectedly fancy model, low and sleek with spoked wheels and worryingly eager-looking globe headlights, over the chrome cheeks of which, as we approached, our curved reflections slid, rippling amid a speckle of raindrops. The back seat was piled with mink coats, the polished fur agleam and sinister; they looked like a large dead soft brown bloodless beast thrown there, a yak, or yeti, or whatever it is called. Hartmann saw me looking at them, and sighed sepulchrally and said, “Business.” The bucket seat clasped me in a muscular embrace. There was a warm, womanly afterbreath of perfume; Hartmann’s love life was as covert as his spying. He drove through the rain-smeared streets at a sustained forty—that was terrifically fast in those days—skidding on the cobbles, and almost ran down one of my graduate students who was crossing the road outside Peterhouse. Beyond the town the fields were retreating into a sodden twilight. Suddenly, as I looked out at the rain and the crepuscular bundles of shadow falling away on either side of our steadily strengthening, burrowing headlights, a wave of homesickness rose up and drenched me in an extravagant wash of sorrow that lasted for a second and then dispersed as quickly as it had gathered. When, next morning, a telegram arrived to tell me that my father had suffered his first heart attack the previous day, I wondered with a shiver if somehow it was an intuition of his distress that I had felt, if it was at the same moment that he was being stricken that, out on the wet road, the thought of Ireland and home had come to me unbidden and my heart, too, in
its own way, had suffered a minor seizure. (What an incorrigible solipsist I am!)

Hartmann that day was in a strange mood, a sort of slow-burning, troubled euphoria—lately, with so much talk of drugs, I have wondered if he may have been an addict—and was avid for details of my pilgrimage to Russia. I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I could tell I was disappointing him. As I spoke, he grew increasingly restless, fiddling with the gearstick and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. We came to a crossroads and he pulled the car to a lurching stop and got out and stamped into the middle of the road and stood looking in all directions, as if in desperate search of an escape route, with his fists in his overcoat pockets and his lips moving, billowed about by dark-silver wraiths of rain. Because of his bad leg he leaned at a slight angle, so that he seemed to be canted sideways against a strong wind. I waited with misgiving, not knowing quite what to do. When he came back he sat for a long moment staring through the windscreen, suddenly haggard and hollow-seeming. A tracery of raindrops fine as lace was delicately draped across the shoulders of his coat. I could smell the wetted wool. He began to speak in a gabbling way about the risks he was taking, the pressures he was under, stopping abruptly every so often and sighing angrily and staring out at the rain. This was not at all like him.

“I can trust no one,” he muttered. “No one.”

“I don’t think you need fear any of us,” I said mildly, “Boy or Alastair, Leo—me.”

He went on looking out at the deepening dark as if he had not heard me, then stirred.

“What? No, no, I don’t mean you. I mean”—he gestured— “over there.” I thought of Leathercoat and his faceless driver, and recalled, with a not quite explicable shudder, the speck of shaving soap under Leathercoat’s earlobe. Hartmann gave a brief laugh that sounded like a cough. “Perhaps I should defect,” he said, “what do you think?” It did not seem entirely a joke.

We drove on then to Roundleigh and parked in the village square. It was fully dark by now, and the lamps under the trees stood glowing whitely in the fine rain, like big, streaming seed-heads. The Fox in those days—I wonder if it is still there?—was a tall, teetering, crooked place, with a public bar and a chophouse,
and rooms upstairs where travelling salesmen and illicit couples sometimes stayed. The ceilings, stained by centuries of tobacco smoke, were a wonderfully delicate, honeysuckle shade of yellowy-brown. There were fish mounted in glass cases on the wall, and a stuffed fox cub under a bell jar. Hartmann, I could see, found it all irresistibly charming; he had a weakness for English kitsch—they all had. The publican, Noakes, was a big brute with meaty arms and broad side-whiskers and a brow furrowed like a badly ploughed field; he made me think of a pugilist from Regency times, one of those bruisers who might have gone a few rounds with Lord Byron. He had a fierce, ferrety little wife who nagged him in public, and whom, so it was said, he beat in private. We used the place for years, right up to the war, for meetings and letter drops and even once in a while for conferences with embassy people or visiting agents, but each time we gathered there Noakes behaved as if he had never laid eyes on us before. I suspect, from the sardonic way in which he surveyed us from behind his row of beer-pulls, that he thought we were what the papers would have called a homosexual ring; a case, to some extent, of misplaced prescience.

“But tell me what it is I’m expected to
do
,” I said to Hartmann, when we had settled ourselves with our halves of bitter on high-backed benches facing each other on either side of the coke fire. (Coke: that is something else that has gone; if I try, I can still smell the fumes and feel their acid prickle at the back of my palate.)

“Do?” he said, putting on an arch, amused expression; his earlier, violent mood had subsided and he was his smooth self again. “You do not
do
anything, really.” He took a draught of beer and with relish licked the fringe of foam from his upper lip. His blue-black oiled hair was combed starkly back from his forehead, giving him the pert, suave look of a raptor. He had rubber galoshes on over his dancer’s dainty shoes. It was said that he wore a hairnet in bed. “Your value for us is that you are at the heart of the English establishment—”

“I am?”

“—and from the information you and Boy Bannister and the others supply to us we shall be able to build a picture of the power bases of this country.” He loved these expositions, the
setting out of aims and objectives, the homilies on strategy; every spy is part priest, part pedant. “It is like—what is it called …?”

“A jigsaw puzzle?”

“Yes!” He frowned. “How did you know that was what I meant?”

“Oh, just a guess.”

I sipped my beer; I only ever drank beer when I was with the Comrades—class solidarity and all that; I was as bad as Alastair, in my way. A miniature but distinctly detailed horned red devil was glowing and grinning at me from the pulsing heart of the fire.

“So,” I said, “I am to be a sort of social diarist, am I? The Kremlin’s answer to William Hickey.”

At mention of the Kremlin he flinched, and glanced over at the bar, where Noakes was polishing a glass and whistling silently, his puckered big lips swivelled to one side.

“Please,” Hartmann whispered, “who is William Hickey?”

“A joke,” I said wearily, “just a joke. I had rather thought I would be required to do more than pass on cocktail party gossip. Where is my code book, my cyanide pill? Sorry—another joke.”

He frowned and began to say something but thought better of it, and instead smiled his crookedest, most winning smile, and did his exaggerated European shrug.

“Everything,” he said, “must go so slowly in this strange business of ours. In Vienna once I had the task of watching one man for a year—a whole year! Then it turned out he was the wrong man. So you see.”

I laughed, which I should not have done, and he gave me a reproachful look. Then he began to speak very earnestly of how the English aristocracy was riddled with Fascist sympathisers, and passed me a list of the names of a number of people in whom Moscow was particularly interested. I glanced down the list and stopped myself from laughing again.

“Felix,” I said, “these people are of no consequence. They’re just common-or-garden reactionaries; cranks; dinner-party speech-makers.”

He shrugged, and said nothing, and looked away. I felt a
familiar depression descending upon me. Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy’s world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching on to things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriadness that the world takes on, is both the attraction and the terror of being a spy. Attraction, because in the midst of such uncertainty you are never required to
be yourself;
whatever you do, there is another, alternative you standing invisibly to one side, observing, evaluating, remembering. This is the secret power of the spy, different from the power that orders armies into battle; it is purely personal; it is the power to be and not be, to detach oneself from oneself, to be oneself and at the same time another. The trouble is, if I were always at least two versions of myself, so all others must be similarly twinned with themselves in this awful, slippery way. And so, laughable as it seemed, it was not impossible that the people on Felix’s list might be not only the society hostesses and double-barrelled bores whom I thought I knew, but a ruthless and efficient ring of Fascists poised to wrest power from the elected government and set an abdicated king back on a swastika-draped throne. And there lay the fascination, and the fear—not of plots and pacts and royal shenanigans (I could never take the Duke or that awful Simpson woman seriously), but of the possibility that nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems.

“Look here, Felix,” I said, “are you seriously proposing that I should spend my time attending dinners and going to weekend house parties so that I can report back to you on what I overheard Fruity Metcalfe telling Nancy Astor about the German armaments industry? Do you have any idea what conversations are like on these occasions?”

He considered his beer glass. Light from the fire lay along his jaw like a polished, dark-pink scar. This evening his eyes had a distinctly Eastern cast; did mine look Irish, to him, I wonder?

“No, I do not know what these occasions are like,” he said stiffly. “A fur trader from the East End of London is not likely to be invited for weekends to Cliveden.”

“It’s Clivden,” I said absently. “It’s pronounced Clivden.”

“Thank you.”

We supped the last of our warm beer in silence, me irritated and Hartmann bridling. A few locals had come in and sat about lumpily in the reddish gloom, their ovine, steamy smell insinuating itself amid the coke fumes. The early-evening murmur in English public houses, so wan and weary, so circumspect, always depresses me. Not that I go into public houses very often, nowadays. I sometimes find myself yearning for the ramshackle hilarity of the pubs of my childhood. When I was a boy in Carrickdrum I often ventured at night into Irishtown, a half acre of higgledy-piggledy shacks behind the seafront where the Catholic poor lived in what seemed to me euphoric squalor. There was a pub in every alleyway, low, one-roomed establishments whose front windows were painted with a lacy brown effect almost to the top, where a strip of buttery, smoke-clogged light, jolly, furtive, enticing, shone out blearily into the dark. I would creep up to Murphy’s Lounge or Maloney’s Select Bar and stand outside the shut door, my heart beating in my throat— it was known for a fact that if the Catholics caught a Protestant child he would be spirited away and buried alive in a shallow grave in the hills above the town—and listen to the din inside, the laughter and the shouted oaths and jagged snatches of song, while a white moon hung above me on its invisible gibbet, sliming the cobbles of the alley with a suggestive smear of tarnished pewter. These pubs made me think of weather-beaten galleons, shut fast against the sea of night, bobbing along in mutinous merriment, the crew drunk, the captain in chains, and I, the dauntless cabin boy, ready to plunge into the midst of the roisterers and seize the key to the musket chest. Ah, the romance of forbidden, brute worlds!

“Tell me, Victor,” Hartmann said, and I could tell, by the breathy, consonantal way he uttered my name
(“Vikh-torr
…”), that he was about to shift into the realm of the personal, “why do you do this?”

I sighed. I had thought he would ask it, sooner or later.

“Oh, the rottenness of the system,” I said gaily. “Miners’ wages, children with rickets—you know. Here, let me buy you a whiskey; this beer is so dreary.”

He held up his glass to the weak light and contemplated it solemnly.

“Yes,” he said, with a mournful catch. “But it reminds me of home.”

Dear me; I could almost hear the twang of a phantom zither. When I brought back the whiskey he looked at it doubtfully, sipped, and winced; no doubt he would have preferred plum brandy, or whatever it is they drink on rainy autumn nights on the shores of Lake Balaton. He drank again, more deeply this time, and huddled tightly into himself, elbows pressed to his ribs and his legs twined about each other corkscrew fashion with one slender foot tucked behind an ankle like a cocked trigger. They do love a cosy chat, these international spies.

“And you,” I said, “why
do you
do it?”

“England is not my country—”

“Nor mine.”

He shrugged grumpily.

“But it is your
home
,” he said, with a stubborn set of the jaw. “This is where you live, where your friends are. Cambridge, London…” He made a sweeping gesture with his glass, and the measure of whiskey tilted and in its depths a sulphurous gemlike fire flashed. “Home.”

Another phantom slither of strings. I sighed.

“Do
you
get homesick?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I have no home.”

“No,” I said, “I suppose you haven’t. I should have thought that would make you feel quite … free?”