John Banville - The Untouchable

“Come in, come in,” she said, flustered, I could see, by Nick’s exotic good looks. “Mary will make you an Ulster fry.”

My father disengaged himself from Freddie’s embrace and we all bustled into the hall, Andy Wilson coming behind us with the bags and swearing mildly under his breath. Andy’s son, Matty, had been what I suppose I may call my first, precocious love.

Matty was my age: black curls, blue eyes, and hardy, like his father. Is there any figure in childhood more invitingly vulnerable, any presence more sinisterly suggestive, than the son of a servant? Matty had died, drowned while swimming in Colton Weir. I had not known what to do with my sorrow, it had sat in me for weeks like a great brooding bird. And then one day it just flew off”. Thus does one learn about the limits of love, the limits of grief.

Nick was smiling at me reprovingly. “You didn’t tell me you had a brother,” he said.

By now I had realised the full magnitude of the mistake I had made in bringing him here. The home returned to is a concatenation of sadnesses that makes one want to weep and at the same time sets the teeth on edge. How dingy the place looked. And that smell!—tired, brownish, intimate, awful. I was ashamed of everything, and ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I could hardly bear to look at my shabby father and his fat wife, I flinched at Andy’s mutterings behind me and cringed at the thought of red-haired Mary, our Catholic cook, slapping a plate of rashers and black pudding down in front of Nick (did he eat pork?—Oh God, I had forgotten to ask). My greatest shame, however, was Freddie. When we were children I had not minded him, deeming it right, I suppose, that anyone born into the family after me should be defective. He had been someone for me to order about, a makeweight in the intricate games that I devised, an uncritical witness to my cautiously daring escapades. I used to perform experiments on him just to see how he would react. I gave him methylated spirits to drink—he gagged and retched—and put a dead lizard in his porridge. One day I pushed him into a bed of nettles and made him scream. I thought I would be punished, but my father only looked at me with deep, droop-eyed sadness, shaking his head, while Hettie sat down on the lawn like a squaw and rocked Freddie in her arms and pressed dock leaves to his livid arms and his swollen knock-knees. In adolescence, when I developed a passion for the Romantics, I conceived of him as a noble savage, and even wrote a sonnet about him, composed of Wordsworthian apostrophes (0! thou princely child of Nature, list!), and made him tramp the hills with me in all weathers, to his distress, for he was as much afraid of the outdoors as he had been as a child. Now, suddenly, I saw him through Nick’s eyes, a poor, shambling, damaged thing with my high forehead and prominent upper jaw, and I walked down the hall in a hot sweat of embarrassment and would not meet Nick’s amused, quizzical eye, and was relieved when Freddie sloped off to the garden to take up again whatever obscure doings he had been engaged in when we arrived.

In the dining room, while Nick and I ate breakfast, Hettie and my father sat and watched us in a sort of hazy wonderment, as if we were a pair of immortals who had stopped off at their humble table on the way to some important piece of Olympian business elsewhere. Mary the cook kept bringing us more things to eat, fried bread and grilled kidneys and racks of toast, walking around the table with her apron lifted to protect her fingers from the heat of the plates, glancing at Nick—his hands, that hanging lock of hair—from under her almost invisible, pale eyelashes and blushing. My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.

“Say what you like about Chamberlain,” he said, “but he remembers the Great War, the cost of it.”

I glared at a sausage, thinking what a hopeless booby my father was.

“Peace in our time,” Hettie murmured, sighing.

“Oh, but there will be war,” Nick said equably, “despite the appeasers. What is this, by the way?”

“Fadge,” Mary blurted, and blushed the harder, making for the door.

“Potato cake,” I said between clenched teeth. “Local delicacy.” Two days ago I had been chatting with the King.

“Mm,” Nick said, “delicious.”

My father sat blinking in distress. Light from the leaded window glinted on his balding pate. Trollope, I thought; he’s a character out of Trollope—one of the minor ones.

“Is that what people feel in London,” he said, “that there will be war?”

Nick pondered, head to one side, looking at his plate. I can see the moment: the thin October sunlight on the parquet, a curl of steam from the teapot’s spout, the somehow evil glitter of the marmalade in its cut-glass dish, and my father and Hettie waiting like frightened children to hear what London thought.

“Of course there’ll be a war,” I said impatiently. “The old men have let it happen all over again.”

My father nodded sadly.

“Yes,” he said, “you must consider our generation has rather let you down.”

“Oh, but we want peace!” Hettie exclaimed, as close to indignation as it was possible for her to get. “We don’t want young men to go out again and be killed for… for nothing.”

I glanced at Nick. He was working away unconcernedly at his plate; he always did have a remarkable appetite.

“The fight against Fascism is hardly what you could call nothing, ” I said, and Hettie looked so abashed it seemed she might burst into tears.

“Ah, you young people,” my father said softly, batting a hand at the air before him in a gesture which must have been a secular modification of the episcopal blessing, “you have such certainty.”

At this Nick looked up with an expression of real interest.

“Do you think so?” he said. “I feel we’re all rather… well, unfocused ” Pensively he buttered a piece of cold toast, lathering on the butter like a painter applying cadmium yellow with a palette knife. “Seems to me that chaps of my age lack any sense of purpose or direction. In fact, I think we could do with a jolly good dose of military discipline.”

“Shove ’em in the army, eh?” I said bitterly. Nick went on calmly buttering his toast and, preparing to take a bite, glanced at me sideways and said:

“Why not? Those louts one sees standing on street corners complaining that they can’t get work—wouldn’t they be better off in uniform?”

“They’d be better off in work !” I said. “Marx makes the point that-”

“Oh, Marx!” Nick said through a crackling mouthful of toast, and chuckled.

I felt my forehead turning red.

“You should try reading Marx,” I said. “Then you might know what you’re talking about.”

Nick only laughed again.

“You mean, then I might know what you are talking about.”

An uneasy silence fell and Hettie looked at me apprehensively but I avoided her eye. My father, troubled, cleared his throat and with anxious fingers traced an invisible pattern on the tablecloth.

“Marxism, now,” he began, but I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.

“Nick and I are thinking of going to the west,” I said loudly. “He wants to see Mayo.”

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion. In my time I have, knowingly or otherwise, sent men and women to terrible deaths, yet I do not feel as sharp a pang when I think of them as I do when I recall the gleam of light on my father’s bowed pate at the table just then, or Hettie’s big sad soft eyes looking at me in silent beseeching, without anger or resentment, asking me to be kind to an ageing, anxious man, to be tolerant of the littleness of their lives; asking me to have a heart.