John Banville - The Untouchable

After breakfast I had to get out of the house, and made Nick walk with me down to the harbour. The day had turned blustery, and the shadows of clouds scudded over the white-flecked sea. The Norman castle on the shore looked particularly dour today, in the pale, autumn light; as a child I had believed it was made of wet sea-sand.

“Good people,” Nick said. “Your father is a fighter.”

I stared at him.

“You think so? Just another bourgeois liberal, I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.”

Nick laughed.

“Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?”

“Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.”

“There you are: a fighter.”

We strolled along the front. Despite the lateness of the season there were bathers down at the water, their cries came to us, tiny and clear, skimming the ribbed sand. Something in me always responds, shamefacedly, to the pastel gaieties of the seaside. I saw, with unnerving clarity, another version of myself, a little boy playing here with Freddie (Wittgenstein accosted me one day by the Cam and clutched me by the wrist and stuck his face close to mine and hissed: “Is the dotard the same being that he was when he was an infant?”), making castles and trying surreptitiously to get him to eat sand, while Hettie sat placidly in the middle of a vast checked blanket doing her knitting, sighing contentedly and talking to herself in a murmur, her big, mottled legs stuck out before her like a pair of windlasses and her yellow toes twitching (a parishioner once complained to my father that his wife was down on the strand “with her pegs on show for all the town to see”).

Nick halted suddenly and gazed about him histrionically at sea and beach and sky, his overcoat billowing in the breeze like a cloak.

“God,” he muttered, “how I loathe nature!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “perhaps we shouldn’t have come.”

He looked at me and put on a glum grin, pulling down his mouth at the sides. “You mustn’t take everything personally, you know,” he said. We walked on and he patted his stomach. “What was that stuff called? Fudge?”

“Fadge.”

“Amazing.”

I had watched him throughout breakfast, while my father talked platitudes and Hettie stoutly nodded her support. One smile from him at their quaintness, I had told myself, and I shall hate him for life. But he was impeccable. Even when Freddie came and pressed his nose and his scabbed lips against the dining room window, smearing the glass with snot and spittle, Nick only chuckled, as at the endearing antics of a toddler, I was the one who had sat with lip curled in contemptuous impatience. Now he said:

“Young people, your father called us. I don’t feel young, do you? The Ancient of Days, rather. It’s we who are the old men now. I shall be thirty next month. Thirty!”

“I know,” I said. “On the twenty-fifth.”

He looked at me in surprise. “How did you remember?”

“I have a head for dates. And that’s a momentous one, after all.”

“What? Oh, yes, I see. Your glorious Revolution. Didn’t it in fact take place in November?”

“Yes. Their November, Old Style. The Julian calendar.”

“Ah, the Julian calendar, yes. What-ho for jolly old Julian.”

I winced; he never sounded more Jewish than when he came out with these Woosterisms.

“Anyway,” I said, “the symbol is all. As Querell likes to remark, the Catholic Church is founded on a pun. Tu es Petrus?

“Eh? Oh, I see. That’s good; that’s very good.”

“Pinched it from someone else, though.”

We walked into the shadow of the castle wall and Nick’s mood darkened with the air.

“What will you do in this war, Victor?” he asked, his voice going gruff and Sydney Cartonish. He stopped and leaned against the harbour rail. The sea wind was chill, and sharp with salt. Far out to sea a flock of gulls was wheeling above a patch of brightness on the water, wheeling and clumsily diving, like blown sheets of newsprint. I fancied I could hear their harsh, hungry cries.

“You really think there will be a war?” I said.

“Yes. No question but.” He walked on and I followed a pace behind him. “Three months, six months—a year at the most. The factories have been given the word, though the War Office hasn’t told Chamberlain about it. You know he and Daladier worked together in secret for months to strike a deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland? And now Hitler can do whatever he pleases. Have you heard what he said about Chamberlain? I feel sorry for him, let him have his piece of paper.”

I was staring at him.

“How do you know all this?” I asked, laughing in surprise. “Chamberlain, the factories, all that stuff?”

He shrugged.

“I’ve been talking to some people,” he said. “You might like to meet them. They’re our sort.”

My sort, I thought, or yours? I let it pass.

“You mean, people in the government?”

He shrugged again.

“Something like that,” he said. We turned from the harbour and set off back up the hill road. While he had talked, a sort of slow, burning blush had come over me from breast to brow. It was as if we were a pair of schoolboys and Nick thought he had discovered the secrets of sex but had got the details all wrong. “Everything’s gone rotten, don’t you think?” he said. “Spain finished the whole thing for me. Spain, and now this beastly Munich business. Peace in our time—ha!” He stopped and turned to me with an earnest frown, brushing the lock of hair back from his forehead. Eyes very black in the pale light of morning, lip trembling with emotion as he struggled to maintain a manful mien. I had to look away to hide my grin. “Something has to be done, Victor. It’s up to us.”

“Our sort, you mean?”

It was said before I knew it. I was terrified of offending him— I had a vision of him sitting grim-faced in the trap, with eyes averted, demanding to be taken back to the station at once, while my father and Hettie, and Andy Wilson, and even the pony, looked at me accusingly. I need not have worried; Nick was not one to spot an irony; egotists never are, I find. We turned to the hill again. He walked with his hands jammed in his overcoat pockets and eyes on the road, his jaw set, a muscle in it working.

“I’ve felt so useless up to now,” he said, “playing the exquisite and guzzling champagne. You’ve at least done something with your life.”

“I hardly think a catalogue of the drawings in the Windsor Castle collection will stop Herr Hitler in his tracks.”

He nodded; he was not listening.

“The thing is to get involved,” he said; “to act.”

“Is this the new Nick Brevoort?” I said, in as light a tone as I could manage. Embarrassment was giving way in me now to a not quite explicable and certainly unjustified annoyance—after all, everyone that autumn was talking like this. “I seem to remember having this conversation with you some years ago, but in reverse. Then I was the one playing at being the man of action.”

He smiled to himself, biting his lip; my annoyance shot up a couple of hot degrees.

“You think I’m playing?” he said, with just the hint of a contemptuous drawl. I did not let myself reply. We went on for a while in silence. The sun had retreated into a milky haze. “By the way,” he said, “I have a job, did you know? Leo Rothenstein has hired me as an adviser.”

I thought this must be one of Leo’s practical jokes.

“An adviser? What kind of an adviser?”

“Well, politics, mostly. And finance.”

“Finance? What on earth do you know about finance?”