John Banville - The Untouchable

Alastair, now, Alastair had read the sacred texts. Whatever scraps of theory I knew, I learned from him. The cause of Ireland was his great enthusiasm. His Irish mother had made him into a Sinn Feiner. Like me, he regretted that it was in Russia the Revolution had occurred, but I could not agree with him that Ireland would have been a more congenial battleground; the notion seemed to me utterly risible. He had even taught himself the Irish language, and could swear in it—though to my ears, I confess, the language in general sounds like a string of softly vehement oaths strung haphazardly together. He berated me for my lack of patriotism, and called me a dirty Unionist, not wholly in jest. However, when I asked him one day for specific details of his knowledge of my country he grew evasive, and when I pressed him he blushed—those reddening ears—and admitted that in fact he had never set foot in Ireland.

He did not much care for the company of the majority of the Apostles, with their plush accents and aesthete manners. “You could be speaking in bloody code, you lot, when you get started,” he complained, digging a blackened thumb into the burning dottle of his pipe. “Bloody public schoolboys.” I used to laugh at him, with not much malice, but Boy gave him an awful time, mimicking perfectly his Scouse accent and bullying him into drinking too much beer. Alastair thought Boy was not sufficiently serious about the cause, and considered him—with remarkable prescience, as it turned out—to be a security risk. “That Bannister,” he would mutter angrily, “he’ll get us all shopped.”

Here is a snapshot from the bulging album I keep in my head. It is sometime in the thirties. Tea, thick sandwiches and thin beer, the sun of April on Trinity court. A dozen Apostles—some Fellows, such as Alastair and myself, a couple of nondescript dons, one or two earnest postgraduate scholars, every one of us a devout Marxist—are sitting about in Alastair’s big gloomy living room. We favoured dark jackets and fawn bags and open-necked white shirts, except for Leo Rothenstein, always suavely magnificent in his Savile Row blazers. Boy was more flamboyant: I recall crimson ties and purple waistcoats and, on this occasion, plus-fours in a bright-green check. He is pacing up and down the room, dropping cigarette ash on the threadbare carpet, telling us, as I have heard him tell many times before, of the event that, so he insisted, had made him a homosexual.

“God, it was frightful! There she was, poor Mother, flat on her back with her legs in the air, shrieking, and my huge father lying naked on top of her, dead as a doornail. I had the hell of a job getting him off her. The smells! Twelve years old, I was. Haven’t been able to look at a woman since without seeing Mater’s big white breasts, colour of a fish’s belly. The paps that gave me suck. In dreams those nipples still stare up at me cock-eyed. No Oedipus I, or Hamlet, either, that’s certain. When she threw off her widow’s weeds and remarried I felt only relief.”

I used to divide people into two sorts, those who were shocked by Boy’s stories and those who were not, though I could never decide which was the more reprehensible half. Alastair had begun to huff and puff. “Look here, we’ve got a motion before us which we should consider. Spain is going to be the next theatre of operations”—Alastair, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, had a great fondness for military jargon— “and we’ve got to decide where we stand.”

Leo Rothenstein laughed. “That’s obvious, surely? We’re hardly in favour of the Fascists.” At the age of twenty-one Leo had come into an inheritance of two million, along with Maule Park and a mansion in Portman Square.

Alastair fussed with his pipe; he disliked Leo and was at pains to hide the fact, afraid of being thought an anti-Semite.

“But the point is,” he said, “will we fight?”

It strikes me how much talk of fighting there was throughout the thirties, among our set, at least. Did the appeasers talk about appeasement with the same passion, I wonder?

“Don’t be a fathead,” Boy said. “Uncle Joe won’t let it come to that.”

A chap called Wilkins, I’ve forgotten his first name, weedy type with glasses and a bad case of psoriasis, who was to die at El Alamein in command of a tank, turned from the window with a glass of beer in his fist and said:

“According to a man I spoke to the other day who’s been over there, Uncle Joe has too much of a job on his hands trying to feed the masses at home to think of sending aid abroad.”

A silence followed. Bad form on Wilkins’s part: we did not speak of the Comrades’ difficulties. Doubt was a bourgeois self-indulgence. Then Boy gave a nasty little laugh. “Surprising,” he said, “how some of us can’t recognise propaganda when we hear it,” and Wilkins threw him a baleful look and turned back to the window.

Spain, the kulaks, the machinations of the Trotskyites, racial violence in the East End—how antique it all seems now, almost quaint, and yet how seriously we took ourselves and our place on the world stage. I often have the idea that what drove those of us who went on to become active agents was the burden of deep—of intolerable—embarrassment that the talk-drunk thirties left us with. The beer, the sandwiches, the sunlight on the cobbles, the aimless walks in shadowed lanes, the sudden, always amazing fact of sex—a whole world of privilege and assurance, all going on, while elsewhere millions were preparing to die. How could we have borne the thought of all that and not—

But no. It will not do. These fine sentiments will not do. I have told myself already, I must not attempt to impose retrospective significance on what we were and did. Is it that I believed in something then and now believe in nothing? Or that even then I only believed in the belief, out of longing, out of necessity? The latter, surely. The wave of history rolled over us, as it rolled over so many others of our kind, leaving us quite dry.

“Oh, Uncle Joe is sound,” Boy was saying. “Quite sound.”

They are all dead: Boy the outrageous, Leo and his millions, Wilkins the sceptic, burnt to a cinder in his sardine tin in the desert. I ask again: have I lived at all?

I do not think I can continue to call this a journal, for it is certainly more than a record of my days, which, anyway, now that the furore has died down, are hardly distinguishable one from another. Call it a memoir, then; a scrapbook of memories. Or go the whole hog and call it an autobiography, notes toward. Miss Vandeleur would be upset if she knew I was pre-empting her. She came round this morning to ask me about my visit to Spain with Nick at Easter in 1936. (How portentous and stirring a mere date can be: Easter, 1936!) The things she wants to know about surprise me. I could understand if she were eager for details of my adventures in Germany in 1945, say, or of the exact nature of my relations with Mrs. W. and her ma (which fascinates everyone), but no, it is the ancient history that she is after.

Spain. Now there’s ancient, all right. A hateful country. I recall rain, and a dispiriting smell everywhere, that seemed a mixture of semen and mildew. There were wall-posters, the hammer and sickle on every street corner, and violent-looking young men in red shirts whose flat, weathered features and evasive glances reminded me of the tinkers who in my childhood used to go about Carrickdrum selling tin cans and leaky saucepans. The Prado of course was a revelation, the Goyas hair-raisingly prophetic in their blood and muck, El Greco frightened out of his wits. I preferred the Zurbaráns, haunting in their stillness, their transcendent mundanity. In Seville in Holy Week we stood glumly in the rain watching a procession of penitents, a spectacle from which my Protestant soul recoiled. A deposition scene was borne aloft on a litter, shaded from the rain by a tasseled baldachin of gold brocade; the plaster Christ, laid out naked at his mother’s plaster feet, was a faintly obscene, orgasmic figure (after The Greek—a long way after), with creamy skin and agonised mouth and copiously spouting wounds. When this thing appeared, swaying and lurching, two or three elderly men near us fell to their knees, making a noise like that of collapsing deckchairs, crossing themselves rapidly, in a kind of holy terror, and one of them with surprising nimbleness ducked under the litter to lend it a supporting shoulder. I remember too a young woman stepping out of the crowd and handing to one of the black-mantillaed penitents—her mother or her aunt—a gaudy red-and-white striped umbrella. At Algeciras we watched the gratifying and thrilling spectacle of a mob desecrating a church and stoning the town’s mayor, a portly man with a shiny, brown bald head, who fled from his tormentors at a rapid walk, trying to hold on to his dignity. Rain rattled in the palm trees and a quicksilver bolt of lightning rent the glans-brown sky above the railway station. Peeling wall-posters flapped in a sudden wind. Later we tried to cross the border but found Gibraltar shut for the night. The inn at La Linea was filthy. I lay awake for a long time listening to the dogs yapping and a wireless set somewhere muttering of war, and watched the rain-light’s faint phosphorescence playing over Nick’s uncovered back where he lay prone and snoring softly on the narrow bed a mile away from me at the other side of the room. His skin had a thick, faintly slimed look to it; I thought of the Saviour’s statue. Next day we took ship for England. There were dolphins in the Strait, and in the Bay of Biscay I was sick.