John Banville - The Untouchable

He did not reply for a moment. A rabbit came out of the hedge and sat up on its hind legs at the side of the road and looked at us in amazement.

“His family is worried about Hitler. They have money in Germany, and a lot of relations there. He asked me to look in on them. He knew I was going over, you see.”

“Are you? To Germany?”

“Yes—didn’t I say? Sorry. The people I’ve been talking to have asked me to go.”

“And do what?”

“Just… look around. Get the feel of things. Report back.”

I let out a loud laugh.

“Good God, Beaver,” I cried, “you’re going to be a spy!”

“Yes,” he said, with a rueful smirk, proud as a boy scout. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

I did not know why I should have been surprised: after all, I had been in the secret ranks myself for years, though on the other side from him, and his sort. What would have happened, I ask myself, if I had said to him then, Nick, my love, I’m working for Moscow, what do you think of that? Instead I stopped and turned and looked back down the hill to the harbour and the roughening sea.

“I wonder what those gulls were after,” I said.

Nick turned too and vaguely peered.

“What gulls?” he said.

We did not go to Mayo. I cannot remember what excuse I made to my father and Hettie, or if I even bothered to offer one. We were both anxious to get back to London, Nick to his spying and I to mine. Father was hurt. The west for him was the land of youth, not only the scene of his childhood holidays— his grandfather had kept a farm on a rocky islet in Clew Bay— but the place where his people had originated, mysterious autochthons stepping out of the mists of the western seaboard, the mighty O Measceoils, warriors, pirates, fierce clansmen all, who just in time to avoid the ravages of the Famine had changed their religion and Anglicised the family name and turned themselves into Yeats’s hard-riding country gentlemen. I had no wish to introduce Nick to these legends, and much less to walk with him through the sites where had stood the stone cottages of my forebears and the base beds from which they had sprung. In these matters he and I observed a decorous silence: he did not speak of his Jewishness nor I of my Catholic blood. We were both, in our own ways, self-made men. Three days at Carrick-drum was enough for us; we packed up our books and our unworn hiking boots and took ship for what I realised now was home. Leaving Ireland and my father’s house, I had the sense of having committed a small but particularly brutish crime. Throughout the journey I could feel my father’s wounded, forgiving gaze fixed like a spot of heat on the already burning back of my neck.

London that autumn had an abstracted, provisional air; the atmosphere was hectic and hollow, like that of the last day of school term, or the closing half-hour of a drunken party. People would drift off into silence in the middle of a sentence and look up at the tawny sunlight in the windows and sigh. The streets were like stage-sets, scaled down, two-dimensional, their bustle and busyness tinged with the pathos of something set in motion only so that it might be violently halted. The squawks of the news-vendors had an infernal ring—cockney chirpiness has always grated on my nerves. At evening the sunset glare in the sky above the roofs seemed the afterglow of a vast conflagration. It was all so banal, these hackneyed signs and wonders. Fear was banal.

For some, the times were grimly congenial. Querell, for instance, was in his element. I remember meeting him in the Strand one drizzly afternoon late in that November. We went to a Lyons Corner House and drank tea that was the same colour as the rain falling on the pavement outside the steamy window where we sat. Querell looked even more the spiv than usual, in his narrow suit and brown trilby. Within minutes, it seemed, he had filled to overflowing the tin ashtray on the table between us. I was well established at the Department by then, but I rarely saw him there—he was on the Balkans desk, I was in Languages— and when we chanced upon each other in the outside world like this we felt embarrassed and constrained, like two clergymen meeting the morning after an accidental encounter in a brothel. At least, I felt embarrassment, I felt constraint; I do not think Querell would ever allow himself to succumb to sensations so weak-kneed and obvious. I could not take seriously the self-deluding, school-brigade, boys-with-men’s-moustaches world of military intelligence; the atmosphere of mingled jollity and earnestness in which the Department went about its work was amusing at first, then obscurely shaming, then merely tedious. Such asses one had to deal with! Querell was different, though; I suspected he despised the place as much as I did. It had taken me a long time, and much vigorous yanking on the lattices of the old-boy network, to get in; in the end Leo Rothenstein managed it for me. He was—and had been for years, I was surprised to discover—something very high up in the Middle East section.

“It’s in the blood,” Querell said, with a pursed smile. “His family has been running spies for centuries. They got early news of Waterloo and made their fortune out of it on the Stock Exchange, did you know that? Crafty; very crafty.” Querell did not care for Jews. He was watching me out of those unblinking, protuberant pale eyes of his, two lazy streams of cigarette smoke flaring out of his nostrils. I busied myself eating a sticky bun. His mention of spies had startled me; it was not a word Department people used, even amongst ourselves. Sometimes it crossed my mind that he too, like me, might be more than he was admitting—he had just published a thriller called The Double Agent. The idea of having Querell as a secret sharer was not appealing. When I looked up from my bun he shifted his gaze to the legs of a passing waitress. I had never succeeded in pinning down his politics. He would talk of the Cliveden crowd or Mosley and his thugs with a sort of wistful admiration, then in the next breath he would be the worker’s champion. In my innocence I thought it was his Catholicism that afforded him this breadth of casuistry. At Maules one weekend when the Moscow show trials were going on he overheard me castigating Stalin. “Thing is, Maskell,” he said, “a bad pope doesn’t make a bad church.” Leo Rothenstein, draped on a sofa, his long legs crossed before him, shifted himself and laughed lazily. “My God,” he said, “a Bolshie in the house! My poor papa would turn in his grave.”

“Have you seen Bannister recently?” Querell asked now, still with his eye on the waitress’s crooked seams. “I hear he’s taken up with the Fascists.”

Boy was working at the BBC, in charge of what he portentously referred to as Talks. He was endearingly proud of this job, and regaled us with stories about Lord Reith and his boyfriends, which at the time we refused to believe. By then he too was with the Department; after Munich, pretty well everyone in our set had joined the Secret Service, or been press-ganged into it. I imagine we were not unaware that intelligence work was likely to be far preferable to soldiering—or am I being unfair to us? Boy took to his undercover role with childish enthusiasm. He would always love the secret life, and missed it painfully after he defected. He enjoyed especially the role-playing; for cover, he had lately joined a Tory ginger group of Nazi sympathisers calling itself the Chain (“I’m pulling the Chain for Uncle Joe,” was Boy’s catchphrase), and had attached himself to a notorious pro-Hitler MP called Richard Someone, I have forgotten the name, an ex-Guards officer and a lunatic, for whom he was acting (the right word) as unofficial private secretary. His chief duty, he told us, was to be a pander for the Captain, who had an insatiable appetite for working-class young men. Recently Boy and his mad Captain had undertaken a jaunt to the Rhineland, escorting a band of schoolboys from the East End on a visit to a Hitler Youth camp. It was the kind of preposterous thing that went on in the run-up to war. The pair had returned in ecstasies (“Oh, those blond beasts!”), though Captain Dick had contracted a painful dose of anal thrush; not so clean-limbed after all, die Hitlerjugend.