The Untouchable (39 page)

“Victor,” he said, in a wondering, wary sort of way, as if I were an old and not much treasured friend come back unexpectedly after a long absence.

“Bad news, old man,” I said.

That fearful something behind his gaze shrank further still
into itself. He gave himself a little shake, frowning in puzzlement, and glanced beyond my shoulder, as if expecting to see someone else advancing on him.

“But why did they send you?” he said.

“Vivienne asked me to find you.”

His frown deepened. “Vivienne …?”

“It’s your father,” I said. “He was in London last night. He was caught in the bombing. I’m sorry.” He turned aside for a moment, jerkily, and released a quick, hissing breath, that might almost have been a sigh of relief. I stepped forward and put my hands on his arms above the elbows. “I’m sorry, Nick,” I said again. I realised I had an erection. He nodded distractedly, and turned to me and slowly laid his forehead on my shoulder. I was still holding him by the arms. From their table the Lydon sisters looked on in unaccustomed solemnity, and Sylvia stood up and I watched her walking toward us in slow motion, shimmering through alternating diagonal slashes of sunlight and shadow, a hand raised, her lips parted to speak. Nick was trembling. I wished that the moment might never end.

Max’s corpse had already been officially identified by that mysterious, disembodied Brevoort—who
can
it have been?—whom I had spoken to on the telephone, but Nick was determined to see his father a last time. While he sat in silence with the Lydons in the Hungaria, each of them holding one of Nick’s hands and gazing at him with sympathy in which there was, on Lydia’s part at least, a frank admixture of lust, I made another series of difficult and frustrating telephone calls to various centres of so-called authority, which resulted in the grudging admission that if the body of a person called Brevoort
had
been discovered in Lisle Street, which all my respondents seemed to doubt—Lisle Street had not been bombed, I was told, and what
was
that name again?—then it was likely to have been taken to Charing Cross station, which was being used this morning as a temporary morgue. So Nick and I walked up Whitehall in the hard-edged spring sunlight, past the statue of Charles I encased in its protective galvanised privy. On all sides were giant mounds of rubble over which ambulance men and Home Guard recruits
were scrambling like ragpickers. In the Strand a cascading water main was incongruously suggestive of Versailles. Yet the destruction, however extensive, was curiously disappointing; the streets seemed not ruined, but rearranged, as if a vast rebuilding scheme were under way. I had, I realised, put too much hope in the air war; what the newspapers nowadays like to call the fabric of society is depressingly strong.

“Funny thing,” Nick was saying, “a father’s death. You lost yours—what was that like?”

“Awful. And yet a kind of release, too.”

We stopped where a small crowd had gathered to peer into a crater in the roadway. Down in the hole two sappers were contemplating in head-scratching dismay a huge, plump bomb, like a giant grub, lying on its side half buried in the clay.

“I thought it would be me who would cop it,” Nick said. “I used to picture Max and poor Ma trailing along to view the bloodied remains.” He paused. “I’m not sure that I can look at him,” he said. “I know I was all for it, but now I’ve lost my nerve. Terrible, isn’t it.”

“We’re almost there,” I said.

He nodded, still absently watching the sappers as they got down gingerly to work.

“I wonder what it would be like,” he said, “if that thing were to go off now.”

“Yes, the same thought occurred to me last night.”

Last night.

“Would we know we were dying,” he said, “or would there just be a flash, and then nothing?”

In the station, an ARP warden directed us to the farthest platform, where the corpses, a great many of them, were laid out side by side in neat rows under canvas sheets. A nurse wearing a tin helmet and a sort of bandolier escorted us down the lines. She was a large, distracted woman, and reminded me of Hettie as she had been in her younger years. As we walked along she counted off numbers under her breath, and at last pounced on one of the shrouded forms and pulled back the canvas sheet. Max wore a troubled expression, as if he were in the throes of a perplexing dream. The mark on his forehead where the shrapnel had struck
was surprisingly small and neat, more like a surgical incision than a wound. Nick knelt awkwardly and leaned down and kissed his father’s cheek; when he stood up again, I tried not to notice him giving his lips a furtive wipe with the back of his hand.

“I need a drink,” he said. “Do you think there are any pubs still standing?” The nurse gave him a bleak, disapproving stare.

We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get drunk, not very successfully. The Gryphon was crowded, the atmosphere even more hysterical than usual. Querell was there, and came and sat at our table. He was predicting a general collapse of morale followed immediately by widespread anarchy and internecine fighting. “There’ll be killing in the streets,” he said, “you wait and see.” He viewed the prospect with obvious satisfaction. Nick did not tell him about his father’s death. I kept thinking of Danny, and each time I did I experienced a secret surge of elation that was all the sweeter for being, in the circumstances, so shaming.

Later, Vivienne telephoned; she had come down to London, and was at Poland Street.

“How did you know where to find us?” I said.

“Telepathy. It’s in the blood. Is Nick all right?”

The telephone was hot and sticky in my hand. I was wondering if Danny were still in the house; I had an image of him appearing in the sitting room in his vest, and of Vivienne and him settling down on the sofa—that sofa—for a nice long chat.

“Nick is not all right,” I said. “No one is all right.”

She was silent for a moment.

“What are you so happy about, Victor? Has Daddy left you something in his will?”

When Nick and I got to Poland Street it was not Danny who was with her, but Boy. They had drunk most of a bottle of champagne. Boy rose and embraced Nick, with unaccustomed awkwardness. Vivienne’s eyes were red rimmed, though she smiled at me brightly. When she patted the place beside her on the sofa I recalled Danny doing the same thing the night before, and I looked away.

“Are you blushing, Victor?” she said. “What
have
you been up to?”

Boy was in full evening dress, except for a pair of carpet slippers.

“Corns,” he said, lifting a foot. “Killing me. But it doesn’t matter, it’s only the BBC, no one will notice.”

Presently Leo Rothenstein arrived, and the Lydons, accompanied by a pair of awkward young RAF pilots, and a woman called Belinda, a washed-out blonde with peculiar, violet eyes, who claimed to be a close friend of Vivienne’s, though I had never encountered her before. The blackout shades were drawn, and Boy forgot about the BBC and instead fetched more champagne, and then someone put on a jazz record, and the party was under way. Later, I came upon Leo Rothenstein in the kitchen, in ponderously playful conversation with the by now drunken blonde Belinda. He gave me his most domineering smile and said:

“You must feel quite at home, Maskell—it’s an Irish wake.”

And later still, when still more guests had arrived, I found myself yet again trapped with Querell, who backed me into a corner and lectured me about religion. “Yes, yes, Christianity is the religion of the slave, of the foot soldier, of the poor and the weak—but of course, you don’t consider such people to be people at all, really, do you, you and your pals the
Übermenschen
.” I half listened to him, nodding and shaking my head at what seemed appropriate moments. I was wondering again where Danny was—I had not stopped wondering that all day— and what he might be doing. I remembered the steely-soft feel of his shoulder, the hot, hard little bristles on his upper lip, and savoured again at the back of my throat the thick, fish-and-sawdust taste of his semen. “At least I
believe
in something,” Querell was saying, pushing his face close to mine and goggling at me drunkenly. “At least I have
faith.”

Danny did not come home that night, or the following night, or the night after that. I held off for as long as I could, and then went to Boy. At first he could not grasp what I was concerned about, and said I should not worry, that Danny knew his way in the world, and could be depended on to look after himself. Then he peered at me more closely, and laughed, not without sympathy, and patted my hand. “Poor Vic,” he said, “you have a lot to
learn; our kind can’t afford that sort of jealousy.” And the following week, when I found Boy one afternoon in bed with Danny, I stood in the doorway and could think of nothing to say, could think of nothing to think. Danny, lying on his side, did not realise I was there until Boy said cheerfully, “Wotcher, Vic, old son,” and then he stirred, and turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder and smiled sleepily, as if I were someone he had known a long time ago, and of whom he retained only a confused and vaguely tender impression. Then something opened in me, briefly, frighteningly, as if a little window had been thrown open on to a vast, far, dark, deserted plain.

THREE

I
t is time for me to speak of Patrick Quilly, my quondam catamite, cook and general housekeeper. I miss him terribly, even still. When I think of him I go hot with guilt and shame, I am not quite sure why. I torment myself with the question of whether he fell or jumped, or even if—dear God!—he might have been pushed. I met him when he was working as a sales assistant in a jewellery shop in the Burlington Arcade. I had dropped in one day to buy a rather nice silver tiepin I had spotted in the window; it was intended as a gift for Nick to mark the occasion of his maiden speech in the House, but I ended up giving it to Patrick, in celebration of another, quite unmaidenly accession, when he came that night into my bed. He was tall, as tall as I am, and very handsome, in a sulky, glowering sort of way. His upper torso was remarkable, all muscle and stretched tendons and excitingly wiry body hair, but his legs were comically thin, and he was knock-kneed, a matter about which he was particularly sensitive, as I discovered when I was unwise enough to make a light-hearted allusion to it (he sulked for a whole day and half a night, but as dawn was breaking we made up, very tenderly; I could not have been more… accommodating). He was, like me, an Ulsterman—Protestant, of course, despite the Christian name— and had joined the army at an early age to get himself out of the Belfast slum where he was born. He went to France in 1940 with the Expeditionary Force; I often wonder if I came across his
letters home, in my capacity as censor. When the Germans invaded, he was captured at Louvain and spent the rest of the war in what seems to have been a not at all disagreeable prison camp in the Black Forest.

After our first night together he moved in with me straight away—I still had the top-floor flat at the Institute then—and immediately set about reordering my domestic life. He was a tireless tidier-up, which suited me, for I am something of an obsessive myself, in that way (queers seem to come in only two varieties, the sloven, like Boy, or the monk, like me). He was quite uneducated, and of course, as was my way, I could not resist trying to introduce him to Culture. The poor boy really did work at it, much more diligently than Danny ever had, but still got nowhere, and was laughed at for his pains by my friends and colleagues. He minded this terribly, and smashed a cut-glass decanter one day in tearful rage after Nick had amused himself throughout a luncheon at the flat by imitating Patrick’s Belfast accent and addressing cod questions to him on the subject of seventeenth-century painting, about which, I should point out, Nick knew somewhat less than Patrick did.

Patrick had a great love of good clothes, and frequented my tailor with enthusiasm and a blithe disregard for the state of my account. But I could not resist indulging him, and besides, he was achingly desirable in a well-cut suit. There were many places to which I could not bring him, of course, for no matter how presentable he might look, he had only to open his mouth to reveal what he was. This was a recurring cause of friction between us, though his resentment was much alleviated when I took the risk and allowed him to accompany me to the Palace on the day my knighthood was conferred. Mrs. W. even had a word for him, and you can imagine the effect. (I often wonder, by the way, if Mrs. W. is aware of her iconic status among the queer fraternity. Certainly her mother in her day revelled in the role of the queers’ goddess, and was fond of making jokes about being the one real royal among a palace full of queens. Mrs. W.’s humour, however, is less broad, though she does like to tease, in her straight-faced way. Dear me, I miss her, too.)

The advent of Patrick marked the beginning of a new phase of
my life—the middle period, one might say—a time of rest and reflection and deep study which I was glad of after the hectic years of the war. The London scene had quietened dramatically anyway, especially after Boy went to America, though the tales of his doings that came back to us from across the Atlantic livened up many an otherwise dull dinner party. In the main, I was uxoriously content. That is only a technical misuse of the adverb. Patrick had all the best qualities of a wife, and was blessedly lacking in two of the worst: he was neither female, nor fertile (I ask myself, in these days of protest and the pursuit of so-called liberation, if women fully realise how deeply, viscerally,
sorrowfully,
men hate them). He took very good care of me. He was an amusing companion, an excellent cook, and a superb if unadventurous lover. He was also a resourceful pander. Utterly free of sexual jealousy, he brought me boys with the shy eagerness of a cat depositing half-chewed mice at its master’s feet. He was something of a voyeur, too, and it took me some time to get over my instinctive prudery and let him watch while I cavorted in bed with these half-wild creatures.