John Banville - The Untouchable

In the flat a small after-party party was in progress. Boy was there, and Abercrombie the poet, and Lady Mary Somebody, and the Lydon sisters. They had been to a party at the Rothenstein mansion in Portman Square (Why wasn’t I invited?) and were finishing a magnum of champagne. Querell and I stopped in the doorway and goggled at them.

“I say,” I said, “you all do look splendid.”

And they did: like a flock of languorous penguins.

Nick did his nasty laugh.

“How English you’re coming to sound, Vic,” he said. “Quite the native.”

He knew very well how much I hated to be called Vic. Querell drew a bead on him and in a slurred voice said, “At least he didn’t come here via Palestine.”

The Lydon sisters giggled.

Nick fetched a couple of beer glasses from the kitchen and poured a gulp of champagne into each. Now I noticed for the first time, sitting in an armchair in a corner, ankle crossed on knee, an unknown yet disturbingly familiar, delicate youth in a silk evening suit, with brilliantined hair brushed tightly back, smoking a cigarette and watching me with cool amusement out of shadowed eyes.

“Hello, Victor,” this person said. “You look somewhat the worse for wear.”

It was Baby. The others laughed at my astonishment.

“Dodo here bet her a gallon of bubbly she couldn’t get away with it,” Nick said. Lady Mary—Dodo—clasped her hands in her lap and drew her thin shoulders together and put on an expression of comic ruefulness. Nick made a face at her. “She lost,” he said. “It was the damnedest thing. Even Leo didn’t recognise her.”

“And I made a pass at her,” Boy said. “So that will tell you.”

More laughter. Nick crossed the room with the champagne bottle.

“Come on, old girl,” he said, “we’ve got to finish up your winnings.”

Baby, still with her eyes on me, lifted her glass to be filled. Dark-blue velvet curtains were drawn over the tall window behind her chair, and on a low table a clutch of washed-pink roses was expiring in a copper bowl, the packed petals heavy and limp as wetted cloth. The room shrank, became a long, low box, like the inside of something, a camera, or a magic lantern. I stood and swayed, with champagne bubbles detonating in my nostrils, and, as I watched them, in my poor fuddled vision brother and sister seemed to merge and separate and merge again, dark on dark and pale on glimmering pale, Pierrot and Pierrette. Nick glanced at me and smiled and said:

“Better sit down, Victor, you have a distinct look of Ben Turpin.”

A blank then, and then I am sitting on the floor, beside Baby’s chair, my legs crossed under me tailor-fashion and my chin practically leaning on the armrest beside her suddenly significant hand with its short, fatly tapering fingers and blood-red nails; I want to take each one of those fingers between my lips and suck and suck until the painted nails turn transparent as fish-scales. I am telling her earnestly about Diderot’s theory of statues. There is a stage of drunkenness when all at once one seems to step with startling, with laughable, ease through a door that all night one had been struggling in vain to open. On the other side all is light and definition and the calm of certitude.

“Diderot said,” I said, “Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. This is the moral imperative. I think it’s awfully clever, don’t you? I know that’s how I feel. Only there are times when I can’t tell which is the statue and which is me.” This last struck me as profoundly sad and I thought I might cry. Behind me Boy was loudly reciting “The Ball of Inverness” and the Lydon sisters were delightedly shrieking. I covered Baby’s hand with mine. How cool it was; cool, and excitingly unresponsive. “What do you think,” I said in a voice thick with emotion. “Tell me what you think.”

She sat in her chair as motionless as—yes, as motionless as a statue, one silk-trousered leg still crossed on the other and her arms stretched out along the armrests, androgynous, hieratic and faintly, calmly crazed-looking, with her hair drawn back so tight her eyes were slanted at the corners; her head was turned toward me, and she looked at me, saying nothing. Or looked not at me, but around me, rather. It was a way she had. Her gaze would stray no farther than one’s face yet one would seem to be taken in all of a piece, defined, somehow, and set apart, as if by her scrutiny she were generating around one a kind of invisible corona, a forcefield inside of which one stood isolated, inspected, alone. Do I give her too much weight, do I make her seem a sort of sphinx, a sort of she-monster, cruel and cold and impossibly, untouchably distant? She was just a human, like me, groping her way through the world, yet when she looked at me like that I felt my sins shine out of me, illumined forth for all to see. It was an intoxicating sensation, especially for one already so intoxicated.

At four in the morning Querell drove me home. In Leicester Square he ran the car gently into a lamp-post, and we sat for a while listening to the radiator ticking and watching an illuminated advertisement for Bovril blinking on and off. The square was deserted. Squalls of wind pushed dead leaves back and forth over the pavements from which the recently ceased rain was drying in big map-shaped patches. It was all very desolate and beautiful and sad, and I thought again that I might weep.

“Bloody people,” Querell muttered, starting up the stalled engine. “Bloody war will fix ’em.”

At dawn I sprang awake suddenly, completely, in a transport of certitude. I knew exactly what I must do. I did not so much get out of bed as levitate from it; I felt like one of Blake’s shining figures, transformed and aflame. The telephone rattled in my hands. Baby answered on the first ring. She did not sound as if she had been asleep. Behind her voice there lay a vast, waiting silence.

“Look here,” I said, “I have to marry you.” She did not reply. I imagined her floating in that sea of silence, fronds of black silk undulating about her. “Vivienne? Are you there?”

How strange her name sounded.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m here.” She seemed as always to be suppressing laughter, but I did not mind.

“ Will you marry me?”

She paused again. A seagull alighted on the sill outside my window and looked at me with a bright, blank eye. The sky was the colour of pale mud. I had the sense that all this had happened before.

“All right,” she said.

And hung up.

We met later that day for lunch at the Savoy. It was a curious occasion, strained and somewhat stagey, as if we were taking part in one of those self-consciously smart drawing-room comedies of the time. The restaurant was littered with people we knew, which intensified our sense of being on display. Baby wore her habitual black, a suit with padded shoulders and a narrow skirt, which in daylight had to my eye the look of widow’s weeds. She was as always both watchful and remote, though I thought I could detect a hint of agitation in the way she kept reaching out and fiddling with my cigarette case, turning it this way and that on the tablecloth. I did not help matters by saying, first thing, how awful I was feeling. And I was: my eyes felt as if they had been torn out and held over hot coals and then thrust back into the throbbing sockets. I showed her my shaking hands, told her how my heart was wobbling. She made a grimace of disdain.

“Why do men always boast about their hangovers?”

“There’s so little else for us to be boastful about, I suppose, these days,” I said sulkily.