The Untouchable (26 page)
“Aesthetic purity,” Billy said, nodding vigorously and putting on a deep frown. I had taken a calculated risk in calling him by his first name, thinking it would surely be the kind of thing he would expect a chap to do in the midst of a frank and emotional confession such as I was pretending to make.
“Yes,” I said, solemn, rueful, appealingly contrite, “aesthetic purity, the one thing a critic must hold on to, if he is to be any good at all. So yes, you are right, and your scouts are right: I
am
guilty of treachery, but in an artistic, not a political, sense. If that makes me a security risk—if you think a man who betrays his aesthetic convictions is likely also to betray his country—then so be it. I’ll collect my gear from Bingley Manor and see if I can’t join the ARP or the Fire Service. For I’m determined to do some good, in however humble a capacity.”
Billy Mytchett was still gravely nodding, still frowning. Absorbed in thought, he reached out for his pipe and set it in his mouth and began slowly sucking on it. I waited, gazing out of the window; nothing like a dreamy demeanour for allaying suspicion. At last Mytchett stirred himself, and gave his shoulders a great shake, like a swimmer surfacing, and pushed the mimeographed report away from him with the side of his hand.
“Look here,” he said, “this is all nonsense. You’ve no idea how much of this bumf I have to wade through in a week. I wake up in a blue funk at night, asking myself if this is how we’re going to fight the war, with reports and queries and signatures required in triplicate. God! And then I’m asked to haul in perfectly decent chaps like you and put them through the wringer over something they said to their prefect when they were at school. It was bad enough before the war, but now …!”
“Well,” I said, magnanimously, “it’s not unreasonable, after all. There must be spies about.”
Oops. He gave me a quick, sharp look, to which I returned the blandest of bland stares, trying to control a telltale nerve under my right eye which tends to twitch when I am nervous.
“There are,” he said grimly. “—And Bingley Manor’s full of ’em!” He gave a muffled shout of laughter and smacked his
hands together, then immediately grew sober again. “Listen, old chap,” he said gruffly, “you go back down there and finish your training. I have a job for you, a very nice little number, you’ll like it. Hush! Not a word for now. All in good time.” He stood up and came around the desk and hustled me to the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll give old Bradshaw a tinkle and tell him we’ve vetted you and found you stainless as a choirboy—though when I think of some of the choirboys I’ve known …”
He shook my hand hurriedly, eager to be rid of me. I lingered, pulling on my gloves.
“You mentioned Boy Bannister,” I said. “Is he …?”
Mytchett stared.
“What—under suspicion? Lord, no. He’s one of our stars. Absolute wizard. No, no, old Bannister’s absolutely sound.”
How Boy laughed, when I phoned him from the flat later and told him he was one of Billy Mytchett’s stars. “What an ass,” he said. Behind the laughter I thought I detected a note of constraint. “By the way,” he said, stagily loud, “Nick is here. Hold on, he wants a word.”
When Nick came on the line he too was laughing.
“Been through the third degree, have you? Yes, Billy told me, I phoned him. Hardly the Grand Inquisitor, is he. I’m going to make sure that trace disappears from your file, by the way—I know a girl in Registry. It’s the kind of thing could dog you for years. And we wouldn’t want that. Especially as you and I are off on a jaunt any day now, all expenses paid.”
“A jaunt?”
“That’s right, old bean. Didn’t Billy tell you? No? Well, in that case I’d better keep mum too; idle talk costs whatsit. Oar revwar!”
And he hung up, laughing still and humming the “Marseillaise.”
In a letter to his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou in 1649, Poussin, referring to the execution of Charles I, makes the following observation: “It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take
shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort.” The remark is expressive of the quietism of the later Stoics, and of Seneca in particular. There are times when I wish I had lived more in accordance with such a principle. Yet who could have remained inactive in this ferocious century? Zeno and the earlier philosophers of his school held that the individual has a clear duty to take a hand in the events of his time and seek to mould them to the public good. This is another, more vigorous form of Stoicism. In my life I have exemplified both phases of the philosophy. When I was required to, I acted, in full knowledge of the ambiguity inherent in that verb, and now I have come to rest—or no, not rest: stillness. Yes: I have come to stillness.
Today, however, I am all agitation.
The Death of Seneca
is going for cleaning and valuation. Am I making a mistake? The valuers are very dependable, very discreet, they know me well, yet I cannot suppress the unfocused doubts that keep flying up in me darkly like a flock of restless starlings at the approach of night. What if the cleaners damage it, or in some other way deprive me of it, my last solace? The Irish say, when a child turns from its parents, that it is
making strange;
it comes from the belief that fairy folk, a jealous tribe, would steal a too-fair human babe and leave a changeling in its place. What if my picture comes back and I find that it is making strange? What if I look up from my desk some day and see a changeling before me?
It is still on the wall; I cannot summon up the courage to lift it down. It looks at me as my six-year-old son did that day when I told him he was to be sent to boarding school. It is a product of the artist’s last years, the period of the magnificent, late flowering of his genius, of
The Seasons,
of
Apollo and Daphne,
and the
Hagar
fragment. I have dated it tentatively to 1642. It is unusual among these final works, which taken together form a symphonic meditation on the grandeur and power of nature in her different aspects, shifting as it does from landscape to interior, from the outer to the inner world, from public life to the domestic. Here nature is present only in the placid view of distant hills and forest framed in the window above the philosopher’s couch. The light in which the scene is bathed has an unearthly quality, as if it were not daylight, but some other, paradisal radiance.
Although its subject is tragic, the picture communicates a sense of serenity and simple grandeur that is deeply, deeply moving. The effect is achieved through the subtle and masterful organisation of colours, these blues and golds, and not-quite-blues and not-quite-golds, that lead the eye from the dying man in his marmoreal pose—already his own effigy, as it were— through the two slaves, and the officer of the Guard, awkward as a warhorse in his buckles and helmet, to the figure of the philosopher’s wife, to the servant girl preparing the bath in which the philosopher will presently be immersed, and on at last to the window and the vast, calm world beyond, where death awaits. I am afraid.
I
have spent a pleasant morning telling Miss Vandeleur about my time in the war. She wrote it all down. She is a great taker of notes. Inevitably, we have fallen into the manner of tutor and student; there is the same mixture of intimacy and indefinable unease that I remember from my teaching days; also, she betrays that thin edge of resentment that is the mark of the postgraduate chafing under the yoke of a deference which she feels by rights should no longer be required of her. I enjoy her visits, in my muted way. She is the only company I have, now. She sits before me on a low chair, with her reporter’s spiral-bound notebook open on her knees and her head bent, showing me the smooth twin wings of her hair and the painfully straight parting which is the colour of slightly soiled snow. She writes at a remarkable pace, with a kind of desperate concentration; I have the impression that at any moment she might lose control of her writing hand and begin to scribble all over the page; it is quite exciting. And of course, I do love the sound of my own voice.
We speculated about the origin of the phrase,
a good war.
I said I was not sure that I had ever heard it used outside of books or the theatre. The people who wrote for the pictures were especially fond of it. In the films of the late forties and the fifties, pomaded, soft-faced chaps in cravats were always pausing by the fireplace to knock out implausible pipes and ask over their shoulders, “Had a good war, did you?” at which the
other chap, with moustache and cut-glass tumbler from which he never drank, would give one of those very English shrugs and make a little moue of distaste, in which we were supposed to see expressed the memory of hand-to-hand combat in the Ardennes, or a night landing on Crete, or a best friend’s Spitfire going down in a spiral of smoke and flame over the Channel.
“And what about you?” Miss Vandeleur said, without looking up from her notes. “Did
you
have a good war?”
I laughed, but then paused, struck.
“Well, you know,” I said, “I do believe I did. Despite the fact that it began for me in an atmosphere of farce. French farce, at that.”
It was Miss Vandeleur who remarked how many of my memories of Nick Brevoort involve sea journeys. This is true, I have noticed it myself. I do not know the reason for it. I should like to be able to see something grand and heroic in it—the black ships and the bloodied foreshore and Ilium’s fires on the horizon—but I am afraid the atmosphere of these recollections is not so much Homer as Hollywood. Even the crossing we made together to France early in December 1939 had a touch of ersatz, nickel-and-velvet romance to it. The night was preternaturally calm, and our troopship, a converted steamer which before the outbreak of war had ferried day trippers between Wales and the Isle of Man, glided intently as a knife through a milky, unreally moonlit sea. We passed the greater part of the voyage stretched out on wooden deckchairs in the stern, wrapped in our greatcoats and with our caps pulled low over our eyes. The pulsing tips of our cigarettes and the flying breaths of smoke we released to the night air seemed absurdly melodramatic. On board with us was a squad of raw—it is the only word—recruits on their way to join the Expeditionary Force. They had taken over the lounge, where they sprawled amid their strewn kit, staring before them in slack-jawed boredom, looking more like the stragglers from a rout than a troop on its way to join battle. All that could animate them, it seemed, was the frequent ceremony of tea and sandwiches. Did Odysseus’s men look like this as they sat down on the sand to their haunches of roast bullock and goblets of seadark
wine? When Nick and I took a turn about the deck and glanced in through the portholes, it was like looking in at a children’s party, the boy-men half happy and half worried as they watched the ship’s stewards—still in their white coats—progress among them disgustedly with mighty tea-kettles and trays of corned-beef sandwiches.
“There it is,” Nick said. “Your proletariat.”
“What a snob you are,” I said.
We were terribly excited, for all the studied world-weariness of our demeanour. From Billy Mytchett’s winks and hints we imagined we were being sent to France on a secret and possibly dangerous mission; we had not actually spoken, even to ourselves, the thrilling formula,
infiltrating enemy lines,
but each knew the words were trembling on the tip of the other’s tongue. In the final weeks at Bingley Manor I had conceived a great curiosity as to what it would be like actually to kill a man. While swabbing out floors or polishing my Sam Browne, I would conjure up scenes of sleek, balletic violence. It was very stirring; I was like a schoolboy entertaining dirty thoughts. Usually these imaginary, clean killings took place at night, and involved sentries. I saw myself rising up out of the darkness, deft and silent as a cat, and at the last moment saying something, making some sound, just to give poor Fritz a chance. He would whirl about, fumbling for his rifle, his eyes flashing in equine fear, and I would smile at him, briefly, coldly, before the knife went in and he collapsed on the grass in a puddle of his own black blood and expired with a soft, gargling sound, his eyes blank now and already filming over, while the reflection of an approaching searchlight steadily dilated, like another, astonished, cyclopian eye, on the brow of his helmet. I hasten to say that I never got to kill anyone, not with my bare hands, anyway. I did have a revolver, of which I was very proud. It was a six-round, .455 Webley Mark VI Service revolver, eleven and a quarter inches long, thirty-eight ounces, UK manufacture, what our shooting instructor at Bingley called a man-stopper. Never have I held anything so
serious
in my hand (with one obvious exception, of course). It came with a rather complicated holster, to which it was attached by a leather lanyard which in steamy conditions
gave off a rawhide stink that seemed to me the very smell of manly daring and adventure. Although I would have been happy to fire a shot, or many shots, in anger (Wild Bill Maskell on the rampage), the opportunity did not come my way. The weapon is still somewhere about. I must see if I can find it; I’m sure Miss Vandeleur would be interested to have a look at it, if that does not sound too tiresomely Freudian.
What was I saying? This tendency to ramble is worrying. I sometimes think I am going gaga.
We spent five months in France, Nick and I, stationed in Boulogne. It was all a grave disappointment. Our job was just what Billy Mytchett had said it would be: to keep watch on the doings of the men of the Expeditionary Force in our area. “Bloody snoops, that’s all we are,” Nick said disgustedly. Officially, we had been assigned to guard against infiltration by spies, on the basis, I suppose, that it takes one to know one; in fact, we found ourselves dividing our energies between day-today security administration, and eavesdropping on the private lives of the battalion. I confess I derived a certain nasty enjoyment from the task of censoring the men’s letters home; a prurient interest in other’s people’s privacy is one of the first requirements for a good spy. But this pleasure soon palled. I have a high regard for the English fighting man—I do, really— but his prose style, I am afraid, is not among his more admirable qualities.
(“Dear Mavis, What a crummy place thisBolongeis. Frogs everywhere and not a decent pint to be had. Are you wearing your lacy knickers tonight I wonder? Not a sign ofJerry”—the
excisions, of course, are the work of my blue pencil.)