The Untouchable (51 page)

Suddenly it strikes me: are my children mine?

Just now a most unpleasant exchange over the telephone with an impudent young man at the valuers. Outrageous imputations. He actually used the word fake. Do you realise, I said, who I am? And I swear I heard him stifle a snigger. I told him to return the painting to me at once. I had already decided to whom I shall bequeath it; I do not think I need to change my mind.

He answered the telephone himself, on the first ring. Had he been waiting for me to call? Perhaps Querell tipped him off, a last piece of mischief-making before he flew south again to the
sun and his child mistress. I was terribly nervous, and stammered like a fool. I asked if I might come round. There was a long pause, then he simply said yes, and hung up. I spent the next half-hour going through the flat in search of the Webley, and found it at last, with a cry of triumph, at the back of a bureau drawer, wrapped in an old shirt which, I realised with an absent-minded pang, had been one of Patrick’s. Strange sensation, hefting the weapon in my hand. How antiquated it seems, like one of those domestic gadgets you see in displays of Victoriana, ponderous, weighty, of uncertain use. But no, not uncertain, certainly not uncertain. It has not been oiled since the war, but I expect it will work. Two rounds only—what can have become of the other four?—but that will be more than sufficient. I could not find the holster for it, and was in a quandary how to carry it, since it was too big for my pocket, and when I tucked it into my waistband it slithered down inside the leg of my trousers and fetched me a nasty crack on the instep. A wonder it didn’t go off. That would not do; I had suffered enough ignominy without shooting myself in the foot. In the end I wrapped it up again in the shirt—broad pink stripes, plain white collar; Patsy went in for that kind of thing—and put it in my string bag. Umbrella, raincoat, latchkey. It was not until I got down to the street that I noticed I was wearing slippers. No matter.

The taxi driver was one of those tiresome monologuists: weather, traffic, Pakis, bleeding pedestrians. How unprepossessing they are, the helmsmen that are sent to ferry us through the most momentous passages of our lives. I diverted myself by imagining the consternated howls that will rise from certain stagnant backwaters of academe over a posthumous article of mine on the erotic symbolism in Poussin’s
Echo and Narcissus
—I wonder, by the way, why in this picture the artist chose to portray Narcissus without nipples?—that will appear shortly in an adventurous and somewhat irreverent new American art journal. I do like to shock, even still. The sun was occluded and Holland Park had a sullen, brooding aspect, despite all those big cream mansions and toy-coloured motor cars. I got down with relief from the taxi and gave the fellow a shilling tip, or five pee, as we must say now; he looked at the coin in disgust and swore under
his breath and dieseled away. I grinned; offending taxi drivers is one of life’s small pleasures. Wet patches on the pavement and a smell of rain and rot. A lilac bush beside the front door was about to blossom. A furtive thrush flitted among the leaves, keeping a beady eye on me as I waited. The maid was a Filipina, a tiny, dark, infinitely sad-seeming person who said something incomprehensible and stood aside meekly as I stepped into the hall. Marble floor, Italian table, big copper bowl of daffodils, a convex mirror in a baroque gilt frame. I caught the nurse, I mean the maid, looking dubiously at my string bag, my slippers, my funereal umbrella. She spoke again, again incomprehensibly, and, pointing the way with a little brown bat’s claw, led me off into the silent interior of the house. As I walked past the mirror my reflection fleetingly grew a monstrous head while the rest of me tapered off into a sort of complicated umbilical tail.

Pale rooms, dim pictures, a magnificent Turkey carpet all gules and purples and desert browns. Imelda’s rubber soles discreetly squeaked. We entered an octagonal conservatory with potted plants, their unreally green, polished leaves intently leaning, and she opened a glass door on to the garden and stood back, smiling a mournful, encouraging smile. I stepped past her and out. A path of paving stones set flush in the grass led across the lawn to a great dense dark-green stand of laurel. There was a sudden swish of sunlight and something quivered in the air, quivered, and sank. I walked along the path. Wind, cloud, a swooping bird. Nick was waiting in the watery light under the laurels. Very still, hands in pockets, watching me. White shirt, black trousers, unsuitable shoes. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up.

Here it is:
The Agony in the Garden.

“Hello, Victor.”

Now, after all, I could not think what to say. I said:

“How is Sylvia?”

He gave me a quick, hard look, as if I had made a tasteless allusion.

“She’s in the country. She prefers it there, these days.”

“I see.” A fearless robin dropped from a twig on to the grass close by Nick’s foot and seized a speck of something and flew up
soundlessly into the tree again. Nick looked cold. Was it for me he had got himself up in this nice silk shirt, these slim-fitting slacks and slip-on shoes (with a decorative gold buckle on the instep, of course) and posed himself here against all this green? Another actor, playing his part, not very convincingly. “I’m dying, you know,” I said.

He looked away, frowning.

“Yes, I heard. Sorry.”

Shadow, sun a second, then shadow again. Such agitated weather. Somewhere a blackbird began to cluck warningly; there must have been magpies nearby; I know about magpies.

“Who told you?” I said.

“Julian.”

“Ah. See a lot of him, do you?”

“Quite a bit.”

“You must be a father figure for him,” I said.

“Something like that.”

He was eyeing my slippers, my string bag.

“Well, I’m glad,” I said. “A man needs a father.”

He gave me another hard look.

“Are you drunk?” he said.

“Certainly not. Just somewhat wrought. I have been hearing things.”

“Yes,” he said grimly, “I saw Querell talking to you at the funeral. Interesting chat, was it?”

“It was.”

I crossed my ankles and leaned on the umbrella, trying to seem nonchalant; the ferrule sank into the grass and I almost lost my balance. I am at an age when one does tend to fall down. I’m afraid I rather lost control, then, and began to upbraid him, coming out with all sorts of awful things—recriminations, insults, threats—that were no sooner said than I regretted them. But I could not stop; it all came out in a scalding, shameful flood, a lifetime of bitterness and jealousy and pain, gushing out, like—forgive me—like vomit. I think I may even have unsheathed my brolly from the clay and brandished it at him threateningly. What now of my stoic resolve? Nick just stood and listened, watching me with mild attention, waiting
for me to finish, as if I were a wilful child having a foot-stamping tantrum.

“You’ve even subverted my son!” I cried.

He lifted an eyebrow, trying not to smile.

“Subverted?”

“Yes, yes!—with your filthy Jewish nonsense. I saw you together at the funeral, praying.”

I would have gone on, but I choked on spit and had to cough and cough, beating myself on the chest. Abruptly my tremor started up, as if a vague small engine inside me had been switched on.

“Let’s go into the house,” Nick said. He shivered in his shirtsleeves. “We’re too old for this.”

Apple trees, April, a young man in a hammock; yes, it must have been April, that first time. Why did I think it was high summer? My memory is not as good as it is supposed to be. I may have misrecalled everything, got all the details wrong. What do you think, Miss V.?

In the conservatory we sat in wicker armchairs on either side of a low wicker table. The maid came and Nick asked for tea.

“Gin, for me,” I said, “if you don’t mind.” I smiled at the maid; I was quite calm again, after my little moment of catharsis in the garden. “Bring the bottle, dear, will you?”

Nick studied the garden, his elbows on the arms of his chair and his fingertips joined before him. A tiny speck of wet laurel leaf clung to his balding brow, seeming symbolic of something or other. A gust of wind sprinted through the willows and a moment later smacked its palms against the glass beside me. A rain shower started, but faltered almost at once. All sorts of things were going through my head, bits and scraps of the past, as if a maddened projectionist in there were throwing together a jumble of old, flickering film clips. I recalled a midsummer night party that Leo Rothenstein gave in the great park at Maules fifty years ago, the masquers strolling under the murmurous trees, and frock-coated footmen gravely pacing the greensward with bottles of champagne wrapped in wetted napkins; the soft, still darkness, and stars, and skittering bats, and a vast, osseous moon. On an ornate bench beside a grassy
bank a boy and girl were kissing, the girl with one glimmering breast bared. For a moment now I was there again. I was with Nick, and Nick was with me, and the future was limitless. The maid returned with a tray then, and I started awake again into the awful present.

Only yesterday all this happened; hard to credit.

While Nick—old, paunched, pouchy Nick—was pouring his tea, I grasped the gin bottle by the neck and glugged out a good half-tumblerful.

“Do you remember,” I said, “that summer when we first came down to London, and we used to walk through Soho at night, reciting Blake aloud, to the amusement of the tarts?
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
He was our hero, do you remember? Scourge of hypocrisy, the champion of freedom and truth.”

“We were usually drunk, as I recall,” he said, and laughed; Nick does not really laugh, it is only a noise that he makes which he has learned to imitate from others. Thoughtfully he stirred his tea, round and round. Those hands. “
The tygers of wrath,” he
said. “Is that what you thought we were?”

I drank my gin. Cold fire, hot slivers of ice. The furled umbrella, which I had leaned against the arm of my chair, fell on the marble floor with a muffled clatter. My props were not behaving themselves at all today.

“Yeats insisted Blake was Irish, you know,” I said. “Imagine that—London Blake, an Irishman! I’ve been thinking of that time when he and his friend Stothard sailed up the Medway on a sketching trip, and were arrested on suspicion of spying for the French. Blake got into a great state of agitation, convinced some false friend had denounced him to the authorities. Silly, of course.”

Nick sighed, making a sound like something deflating, and leaned back in his chair, the woven wicker crackling under him like a bonfire. The cup and saucer were balanced on his knee; he seemed to be studying the cup’s design. The silence beat like a heart.

“I had to be shielded,” he said at last, weary and impatient. “You know that.”

“Did you?” I said. “Do I?”

“I was the one who was going to be in government. If we hadn’t given you to them, they would have got to me sooner or later. It was a collective decision. There was nothing personal in it.”

“No,” I said, “nothing personal.”

He looked at me stonily.

“You did all right,” he said. “You got your job, your place at the Palace. You got your knighthood.”

“I haven’t got it any more.”

“You were always too fond of honours, and having letters after your name, all that capitalist rot.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got someone coming shortly.”

“When did you start?” I said. “Was it Felix Hartmann, or before that?”

He shrugged.

“Oh, before. Long before. With Querell. He and I went in together. Even though he always hated me, I don’t know why.”

“And are you still working for them?”

“Of course.”

He smiled, with lips shut tight and the tip of his nose depressed; age has accentuated his Jewishness, yet the one he has come most to resemble is his gentile father—that sinuous look, the pointed bald pate, those watchful, hooded eyes. The rain, having taken a deep breath, started up again with determination. I have always loved the sound of rain on glass. Tremor getting very bad now, hands all ashake and one leg going like the arm of a sewing machine.

“Was it Vivienne who told you?” he said. “I always suspected she had. And you never let on, all these years. What a sly old body you are, Doc.”

“Why didn’t
you
tell me?”

He transferred the cup and saucer carefully to the table and sat for a moment, thinking.

“Do you remember Boulogne,” he said, “that last morning, on the ammunition ship, when you lost your nerve? I knew then I could never trust you. Besides, you weren’t serious; you were just in it for amusement, and something you could pretend to
believe in.” He looked at me. “I tried to make it up to you. I helped you. I passed you all that stuff from Bletchley for you to impress Oleg with. And when you wanted to get out and devote yourself to”—a faint smirk—“art, I was there. Why do you think they let you go? Because they had me.”

I poured another mighty gin. I was realising that I preferred it without tonic; it was brighter, more emphatic, steely-sharp. A bit late to be acquiring new tastes.

“Who else knew?” I said.

“What? Oh, everyone, really.”

“Sylvia, for instance? Did you tell Sylvia?”

“She guessed. We didn’t discuss it.” He glanced at me and gave a rueful shrug, biting his lip. “She felt sorry for you.”

“Why did you give my name to that fellow?” I said. “Why did you have to betray me a second time? Why couldn’t you have left me in peace?”

He heaved a sigh and shifted in his chair. He had the bored, impatient air of a man being forced to listen to an unwelcome declaration of love. As he was, I suppose.

“They were after me again.” He smiled; it was Vivienne’s icy glitter. “I’ve told you,” he said. “I have to be protected.” He looked at his watch. “And now, really—”

“What if I talk to the papers?” I said. “What if I call them up today and tell them everything.”

He shook his head.

“You won’t do that.”

“I could tell Julian. That would dull some of his filial admiration.”