John Banville - The Untouchable

The tightrope thrummed. Leo laughed again and shrugged.

“Tell Wally I’ll send him a cheque,” he said, and turned away.

Nick punched me softly on the shoulder. “There,” he said; “told you.” He seemed suddenly quite drunk. I had a sensation of helpless, happy falling. Baby squeezed my arm. The blonde girl stepped close to Boy and whispered, “What’s a Poussin?”

I wonder if that really was August, or earlier in the summer? I recall a white night, with an endlessly lingering glimmer in the sky over the park and shadows the colour of dirty water lying in the muffled streets. Suddenly the city was a place I had not seen before, mysterious, exotic, lit as if from within by its own dark radiance. We seemed to walk for hours, Nick and Baby and I, strolling aimlessly arm in arm, dreamily drunk. Nick had managed to find a pair of oversized carpet slippers, which he kept stepping out of by mistake, and had to be supported while he backtracked and wriggled into them again, swearing and laughing. The feel of his bony, tremulous fingers on my arm was somehow the physical counterpart of the glow at the back of my mind where the image of the picture, my picture, floated as in a darkened gallery. Fearing a renewed bout of sobriety, we went to a club in Greek Street where Nick got us in; someone had money—Baby, perhaps—and we drank some bottles of vile champagne, and a girl in feathers with a whinnying laugh came and sat on Nick’s lap. Then Boy arrived and took us to a party in a flat in the War Office—I think it was the resident clerk’s billet-where Baby was the only female present. Boy stood with his fists on his hips amidst the cigarette smoke and the drunken squeals and shook his head in disgust and said loudly: “Look at all these bloody pansies!” Later, when we came out into Whitehall, a headachy dawn was breaking, with small rain sifting down out of clouds that were the same plumbeous colour as the shadows under Baby’s eyes. A giant seagull stood on the pavement and looked at us with cold surmise. Boy said, “Damn this climate,” while Nick sadly contemplated his slippers. I was filled with airy elation, a sort of swooning, breathy happiness that not even the acquisition of a picture, no matter how marvellous, could fully account for. We found a taxi to take us to Nick’s flat for breakfast, and in the depths of the back seat—were taxis bigger then than now?—while Boy and Nick exchanged outrageous nuggets of gossip they had picked up at the party, I found myself kissing Baby. She did not resist, as girls were expected to, and I drew back in faint alarm, tasting her lipstick and still feeling in the nerves of my fingertips the brittle, glassy texture of her silk dress. She sat and looked at me, studying me, as if I were a new variety of some hitherto familiar species. We were silent; there did not seem to be any necessary words. Although nothing else was to happen between us for a long time, I think we both knew that in that moment, for better or worse, and it would mostly be for the worse, our lives had become inextricably joined. When I turned my head I found Nick watching us with an intent, small smile.

Miss Vandeleur has not telephoned now for two days. I wonder if she has lost interest in me already? Perhaps she has found a better subject for her attentions. I would not be surprised; I suspect my personality is not one to quicken the pulse of an ambitious biographer. Reading over these pages, I am struck by how little I impinge on them. The personal pronoun is everywhere, of course, propping up the edifice I am erecting, but what is there to be seen behind this slender capital? Yet I must have made a stronger impression than I remember; there were people who hated me, and a few even who claimed to have loved me. My dry jokes were appreciated—I know I was considered quite a wag in some quarters, and I once overheard myself described as an Irish wit (at least, I think that was the word). Why then am I not more vividly present to myself in these recollections I am setting down here with such finicking attention to detail? After a long pause for thought (funny there is no mark in prose to indicate lengthy lapses of time: whole days could pass in the space of a full stop—whole years) I have come to the conclusion that my early espousal of the Stoic philosophy had the inevitable consequence of forcing me to sacrifice an essential vitality of spirit. Have I lived at all? Sometimes the chill thought strikes me that the risks I took, the dangers I exposed myself to (after all, it is not far-fetched to think that I might have been bumped off at any time), were only a substitute for some more simple, much more authentic form of living that was beyond me. Yet if I had not stepped into the spate of history, what would I have been? A dried-up scholar, fussing over nice questions of attribution and what to have for supper (“Shivershanks” was Boy’s nickname for me in later years). That’s all true; all the same, these kinds of rationalisation do not satisfy me.

Let me try another tack. Perhaps it was not the philosophy by which I lived, but the double life itself—which at first seemed to so many of us a source of strength—that acted upon me as a debilitating force. I know this has always been said of us, that the lying and the secrecy inevitably corrupted us, sapped our moral strength and blinded us to the actual nature of things, but I never believed it could be true. We were latter-day Gnostics, keepers of a secret knowledge, for whom the world of appearances was only a gross manifestation of an infinitely subtler, more real reality known only to the chosen few, but the iron, ineluctable laws of which were everywhere at work. This gnosis was, on the material level, the equivalent of the Freudian conception of the unconscious, that unacknowledged and irresistible legislator, that spy in the heart. Thus, for us, everything was itself and at the same time something else. So we could rag about the place and drink all night and laugh ourselves silly, because behind all our frivolity there operated the stern conviction that the world must be changed and that we were the ones who would do it. At our lightest we seemed to ourselves possessed of a seriousness far more deep, partly because it was hidden, than anything our parents could manage, with their vaguenesses and lack of any certainty, any rigour, above all, their contemptibly feeble efforts at being good. Let the whole sham fortress fall, we said, and if we can give it a good hard shove, we will. Destruam et aedificabo, as Proudhon was wont to cry.

It was all selfishness, of course; we did not care a damn about the world, much as we might shout about freedom and justice and the plight of the masses. All selfishness.

And then, for me, there were other forces at work, ambiguous, ecstatic, anguished: the obsession with art, for instance; the tricky question of nationality, that constant drone-note in the bagpipe music of my life; and, deeper again than any of these, the murk and slither of sex. The Queer Irish Spy; it sounds like the title of one of those tunes the Catholics used to play on melodeons in their pubs when I was a child. Did I call it a double life? Quadruple—quintuple—more like.

The newspapers all this week have portrayed me, rather flatteringly, I confess, as an ice-cold theoretician, a sort of philosopher-spy, the one real intellectual in our circle and the guardian of ideological purity. The fact is, the majority of us had no more than the sketchiest grasp of theory. We did not bother to read the texts; we had others to do that for us. The working-class Comrades were the great readers—Communism could not have survived without autodidacts. I knew one or two of the shorter pieces—the Manifesto, of course, that great ringing shout of wishful thinking—and had made a determined start on Kapital —the dropping of the definite article was de rigueur for us smart young men, so long as the pronunciation was echt deutsch—but soon got bored. Besides, I had scholarly reading to do, and that was quite enough. Politics was not books, anyway; politics was action. Beyond the thickets of dry theory milled the ranks of the People, the final, authentic touchstone, waiting for us to liberate them into collectivity. We saw no contradiction between liberation and the collective. Holistic social engineering, as that old reactionary Popper calls it, was the logical and necessary means to achieve freedom—an orderly freedom, that is. Why should there not be order in human affairs? Throughout history the tyranny of the individual had brought nothing but chaos and butchery. The People must be united, must be melded into a single, vast, breathing being! We were like those Jacobin mobs in the early days of the French Revolution, who would go surging through the streets of Paris in a rage for fraternity, clasping the Common Man to their breasts so fiercely they knocked the stuffing out of him. “Oh, Vic,” Danny Perkins used to say to me, shaking his head and laughing his soft laugh, “what sport my old dad would have had out of you and your pals!” Danny’s dad had been a Welsh miner. Died of emphysema. An uncommon man, I have no doubt.