John Banville - The Untouchable

At the end of that summer I was in a state of profound nervous exhaustion. When, ten years previously, I had failed mathematics, or it had failed me, I had understood clearly what the consequences would be: an entire remaking of the self, with all the dedication and unremitting labour that such an exercise would entail. Now I had managed the transformation, but at great cost in physical and intellectual energy. Metamorphosis is a painful process. I imagine the exquisite agony of the caterpillar turning itself into a butterfly, pushing out eye-stalks, pounding its fat-cells into iridescent wing-dust, at last cracking the mother-of-pearl sheath and staggering upright on sticky, hair’s-breadth legs, drunken, gasping, dazed by the light. When Nick suggested a recuperative jaunt (“You’re looking even more cadaverous than usual, old chap”) I agreed with a suddenness that surprised even myself. It was Nick’s idea that we should go to Ireland. Did he mean, I wondered nervously, to get the goods on me, nose out my family secrets (I had not told him about Freddie), place me in my class? He was full of enthusiasm for the trip. We would go to Carrickdrum to rest up, as he said, then travel on out to the far west, where, I had told him, my father’s people came from. It seemed a wonderful notion. The thought of having Nick to myself for weeks on end was intoxicating, and stilled whatever qualms I might have had.

I bought the tickets. Nick was broke. He had long ago drifted out of his editorial job at Brevoort & Klein and was existing on an allowance from a grudging and ceaselessly complaining Big Beaver, supplemented by numerous small loans from his friends. We took the Friday night steamer, and travelled down from Larne on a rackety train through the glaucous light of a late-September dawn. I sat and watched the landscape making its huge, slow rotation around us. Antrim that morning wore a particularly tight-lipped aspect. Nick was subdued, and sat huddled in a corner of the unheated compartment with his overcoat pulled close around him, pretending to sleep. When the hills of Carrickdrum came into view a kind of panic seized me and I wanted to wrench open the carriage door and leap out and be swallowed in the engine’s steam and flying smoke. “Home,” Nick said in a sepulchral voice, startling me. “You must be cursing me for making you come.” He had an unnerving ability sometimes to guess what one was thinking. The train passed along a raised embankment from which the garden and, presently, the house were to be seen, but I did not point out the view to Nick. Doubt and foreboding had set in.

My father had sent Andy Wilson with the pony-and-trap to meet us. Andy was the gardener and general handyman at St. Nicholas’s, a wiry little man, like a wood-sprite, with bowed arms and legs and a baby’s washed-blue eyes. He was ageless, and seemed not to have changed at all since I was an infant, when he used to terrify me by putting frogs into the pram with me. He was a ferocious and unregenerate Orangeman and played the Lambeg drum in the town’s Twelfth parade every year. He took to Nick straight away and formed a jeering alliance with him against me. “Thon’s the lad won’t lift a finger,” he said as he heaved our bags into the trap, nodding towards me and nudging Nick and winking. “Never would, aye, and never will.” He cackled, shaking his head, and took the reins and clicked his tongue at the pony, and Nick smiled at me lopsidedly, and with a wallowing, backward lurch we were off.

We skirted the town, the little pony going along at a fastidious trot, and began the ascent of the West Road. A weak sun was struggling to shine. With a pang I caught the buttery smell of gorse. Presently the Lough came into view, a great flat flaky sheet of steel, and something in me quailed; I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths. Nick was asleep again, or pretending to be, with his feet on his bags. I thought how much I envied him his ability to escape the tedium of life’s interludes. Andy, wielding the reins, cast a fond glance back at him and softly exclaimed:

“Och, the gentleman!”

The trees surrounding the house looked darker than ever, more blue than green, pointing heavenward in urgent, mute admonishment. Freddie was the first to appear, lumbering diagonally across the lawn to meet us with his arms spread, grinning and gibbering. “Here’s the boss,” said Andy. “Will you look at him, the gawnie!” Nick opened his eyes. Freddie drew level, and putting a hand on the wing of the trap turned and trotted along beside us, moaning in excitement. He gave me one of his sliding glances and did not look at Nick at all. Strange, that one so severely afflicted should be prey to something so subtle as shyness. He was a big fellow, with big feet and big hands and a big head topped by a thatch of straw-coloured hair. To look at him in repose, if he could ever be said to be in repose, you would hardly have known his condition, if it were not for those helplessly flickering eyes, and the scabs around his fingernails and his mouth where he picked and chewed at himself ceaselessly. He was nearly thirty by now, but despite his bulk he still had the rumpled, shirt-tails-and-catapults air of an obstreperous twelve-year-old. Nick raised his eyebrows and nodded in Andy’s direction. “His son?” he murmured. In my agitation and shame all I did was shake my head and look away.

When we drew up at the house my father popped out at once, as if he had been waiting behind the door, which probably he had. He was wearing his dog collar and bishop’s starched front and a moth-eaten pullover, and was clutching a handful of papers—I think I never saw my father at home without a sheaf of scribbled notes in his hand. He greeted us with his usual mixture of warmth and wariness. He looked smaller than I remembered, like a slightly out-of-scale model of himself. Recently he had suffered a second heart attack, and there was a sort of lightness about him, a wispy, tentative something, that I supposed must be the effect of the subdued but ever-present fear of sudden death. Freddie ran up and hugged him and laid his big head on his shoulder and looked back at us with a sly, proprietorial leer. I could tell by the alarmed way my father took in the Beaver that he had forgotten I had said I would be bringing a guest. We got down from the trap, and I tackled the introductions. Andy was making a racket with our bags, and the pony put its snout into the small of my back and tried to push me over, and Freddie, moved by the agitation and awkwardness of the moment, began to howl softly, and just when I thought everything would turn irretrievably into ruinous farce, Nick stepped forward briskly, like a doctor taking over at the scene of an accident, and shook my father’s hand with just the right proportions of deference and familiarity, murmuring something about the weather.

“Yes, well,” my father said, vaguely smiling, and patting Freddie soothingly on the back. “You’re very welcome. Both of you, very welcome. Did you have a good crossing? Usually it’s calm this time of year. Do stop that, Freddie, there’s a good boy.”

Then Hettie appeared. She also seemed to have been lurking in the hallway, waiting for her moment. If my father had shrunk over the years, Hettie had swelled to the dimensions of one of Rowlandson’s royal doxies. She was in her sixties but still retained the bloom of youth, a big pink person with teary eyes and dainty feet and an uncontrollable, wobbly smile.

“Oh, Victor!” she cried, clasping her hands. “How thin you’ve grown!”

Hettie came of a wealthy Quaker family and had spent her youth in a vast grey stone mansion on the south shore of the Lough doing good works and needlepoint. I think that she is the only human being I have ever encountered, apart from poor Freddie, of whom I can say with complete conviction that she had not a trace of wickedness in her (how can there be such people as these, in such a world as this?). If she had not been my stepmother and therefore more or less a part of the furniture, I surely would have found her an object of amazement and awe. When she arrived in our lives I had tried hard to resent and thwart her, but her jollity had been too much for me. She had won me over at once by getting rid of Nanny Hargreaves, a fearsome Presbyterian frump who since my mother’s death had ruled over my life with malevolent efficiency, dosing me weekly with castor oil and subjecting Freddie and me to sulphurous homilies on sin and damnation. Nanny Hargreaves would not have known how to play; Hettie, though, loved children’s games, the rowdier the better—perhaps her Quaker parents had disapproved of such godless frivolities when she was little, and she was making up for lost opportunities. She would get down on hands and knees and chase Freddie and me about the drawing-room floor, growling like a grizzly bear, her face bright red and her great bosom swinging. In the evenings before our bedtime she read us stories of the foreign missions, featuring brave, pure girls and stout-hearted men with beards, and the odd martyr, staked out in the desert to die or boiled in a pot by capering Hottentots.