John Banville - The Untouchable

What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself. Am I, like Querrell, out to settle old scores? Or is it perhaps my intention to justify my deeds, to offer extenuations? I hope not. On the other hand, neither do I want to fashion for myself yet another burnished mask… Having pondered for a moment, I realise that the metaphor is obvious: attribution, verification, restoration. I shall strip away layer after layer of grime— the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling—until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. (When I laugh out loud like this the room seems to start back in surprise and dismay, with hand to lip. I have lived decorously here, I must not now turn into a shrieking hysteric.)

I kept my nerve in face of that pack of jackals from the newspapers today. Did men die because of you? ’Yes, dearie, swooned quite away. But no, no, I was superb, if I do say so myself. Cool, dry, balanced, every inch the Stoic: Coriolanus to the general. I am a great actor, that is the secret of my success (Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself? —Nietzsche). I dressed the part to perfection: old but good houndstooth jacket, Jermyn Street shirt and Charvet tie—red, just to be mischievous—corduroy bags, socks the colour and texture of porridge, that pair of scuffed brothel creepers I had not worn in thirty years. Might have just come up from a weekend at Cliveden. I toyed with the idea of a tobacco pipe a la Skryne, but that would have been to overdo it; and besides, it requires years of practice to be a plausible pipeman—never take on cover that you can’t do naturally, that was another of Boy’s dicta. I believe it was a nice piece of strategy on my part to invite the gentlepersons of the press into my lovely home. They crowded in almost sheepishly, jostling each other’s notebooks and holding their cameras protectively above their heads. Rather touching, really: so eager, so awkward. I felt as if I were back at the Institute, about to deliver a lecture. Draw the shades, Miss Twinset, will you? And Stripling, you switch on the magic lantern. Plate one: The Betrayal in the Garden.

I have always had a particular fondness for gardens gone to seed. The spectacle of nature taking its slow revenge is pleasing. Not wilderness, of course, I was never one for wilderness, except in its place; but a general dishevelment bespeaks a right disdain for the humanist’s fussy insistence on order. I am no Papist when it comes to husbandry, and side with Marvell’s mower against gardens. I am thinking, here in this bird-haunted April twilight, of the first time I saw the Beaver, asleep in a hammock deep in the dappled orchard behind his father’s house in North Oxford. Chrysalis. The grass was grown wild and the trees needed pruning. It was high summer, yet I see apple blossoms crowding on the boughs; so much for my powers of recall (I am said to have a photographic memory; very useful, in my line of work— my lines of work). Also I seem to remember a child, a sullen boy standing knee-deep in the grass, knocking the tops off nettles with a stick and watching me speculatively out of the corner of his eye. Who could he have been? Innocence incarnate, perhaps (yes, I am stifling another shriek of terrible mirth). Shaken already after separate encounters with the Beaver’s unnerving sister and mad mother, I felt foolish, dithering there, with grass-stalks sticking up my trousers legs and a truculent bee enamoured of my hair oil zigzagging drunkenly about my head. I was clutching a manuscript under my arm—something earnest on late cubism, no doubt, or the boldness of Cezanne’s draughtsmanship—and suddenly, there in that abounding glade, the idea of these pinched discriminations struck me as laughable. Sunlight, swift clouds; a breeze swooped and the boughs dipped. The Beaver slept on, holding himself in his arms with his face fallen to one side and a gleaming black wing of hair fanned across his forehead. Obviously this was not his father, whom I had come to see, and who Mrs. Beaver had assured me was asleep in the garden. “He drifts off, you know,” she had said with a queenly sniff; “no concentration.” I had taken this as a hopeful sign: the idea of a dreamily inattentive publisher appealed to my already well-developed sense of myself as an infiltrator. But I was wrong. Max Brevoort—known as Big Beaver, to distinguish him from Nick—would turn out to be as wily and unscrupulous as any of his Dutch merchant forebears.

I close my eyes now and see the light between the apple trees and the boy standing in the long grass and that sleeping beauty folded in his hammock and the fifty years that have passed between that day and this are as nothing. It was 1929, and I was— yes—twenty-two.

Nick woke up and smiled at me, doing that trick he had of passing in an instant effortlessly from one world to another.

“Hullo,” he said. That was how chaps said it in those days: hull, not hell. He sat up, running a hand through his hair. The hammock swayed. The small boy, destroyer of nettles, was gone. “God,” Nick said, “I had the strangest dream.”

He accompanied me back to the house. That was how it seemed: not that we were walking together, but that he had bestowed his company on me, for a brief progress, with the ease and diffidence of royalty. He was dressed in whites, and he, like me, was carrying something under his arm, a book, or a newspaper (the news was all bad, that summer, and would get worse). As he walked he kept turning sideways towards me from the waist up and nodding rapidly at everything I said, smiling and frowning and smiling again.

“You’re the Irishman,” he said. “I’ve heard of you. My father thinks your stuff is very good.” He peered at me earnestly. “He does, really.” I mumbled something meant to convey modesty and looked away. What he had seen in my face was not doubt but a momentary gloom: the Irishman.

The house was Queen Anne, not large, but rather grand, and maintained by Mrs. B. in slovenly opulence: lots of faded silk and objets supposedly of great value—Big Beaver was a collector of jade figurines—and a rank smell everywhere of some sort of burnt incense. The plumbing was primitive; there was a lavatory close up under the roof which when it was flushed would make a horrible, cavernous choking noise, like a giant’s death-rattle, that could be heard with embarrassing immediacy all over the house. But the rooms were full of light and there were always fresh-cut flowers, and the atmosphere had something thrillingly suppressed in it, as if at any moment the most amazing events might suddenly begin to happen. Mrs. Brevoort was a large, beaked, bedizened personage, imperious and excitable, who went in for soirees and mild spiritualism. She played the piano—she had studied under someone famous—producing from the instrument great gaudy storms of sound that made the window panes buzz. Nick found her irresistibly ridiculous and was faintly ashamed of her. She took a shine to me straight off, so Nick told me later (he was lying, I’m sure); she had pronounced me sensitive, he said, and believed I would make a good medium, if only I would try. I quailed before her force and relentlessness, like a skiff borne down upon by an ocean-going liner.

“You didn’t find Max?” she said, pausing in the hallway with a copper kettle in her hand. She was darkly Jewish, and wore her hair in ringlets, and displayed a startling, steep-pitched shelf of off-white bosom. “The beast; he must have forgotten you were coming. I shall tell him you were deeply wounded by his thoughtlessness.”