John Banville - The Untouchable

We looked away from each other. The silence stretched, thinner and thinner. We were like hesitant swimmers who have come to the water’s grey and uninviting edge. Baby was the first to plunge in.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve never been proposed to over the telephone before.”

Her laughter had a nervous sparkle. She had recently ended a messy affair with some sort of an American. My Yank, was how she would refer to him, with a bitter, resigned little smile. No one seemed to have met him. It came to me with a kind of slow amazement how little I knew about her.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, but it seemed the thing to do, at the time.”

“And does it still?”

“What?”

“Seem the thing to do.”

“Well, yes, of course. Don’t you think?”

She paused. That gaze of hers, it seemed to originate somehow at the back of her eyes.

“Nick is right,” she said, “you are turning into an Englishman.”

The waiter appeared then and we bent with relief over our menus. During lunch we talked in a studiedly desultory fashion about my new post at the Institute, Nick’s bizarre hiring of himself as an adviser to the Rothensteins, Boy Bannister’s latest scrape, the coming war. I had assumed she would have no politics and was obscurely irritated to discover that she was fiercely anti-appeasement—quite bellicose, in fact. While our plates were being cleared away she opened my cigarette case and took a cigarette—from the brusqueness of her movements, she too seemed irritated—and paused with the match burning and said:

“You do love me, I take it?”

The waiter glanced at her quickly and away. I took her wrist and drew her hand toward me and blew out the match. We had started on our second bottle of wine.

“Yes,” I said, “I love you.”

I had never said it to anyone before, except Hettie, when I was little. Baby nodded once, briskly, as if I had cleared up some small, niggling matter that had been on her mind for a long time.

“You’ll have to see Mummy, you know,” she said. I stared blankly. She permitted herself an ironic smile. “To ask for my hand.”

We both looked at where my fingers were still lightly holding her wrist. Had there really been an audience, the moment would have raised a scatter of laughter.

“Shouldn’t it be your father that I talk to?” I said. Big Beaver was about to publish a monograph of mine on German baroque architecture.

“Oh, he won’t care.”

In the taxi we kissed, turning sideways suddenly toward each other and grappling awkwardly, like a pair of shop-window mannequins come jerkily alive. I remembered the same thing happening, what, six, seven years before? and thought how strange life was. Her nose was chill and faintly damp. I touched a breast. A strong cold wind was blowing along Oxford Street. Baby leaned her forehead against my neck. Her fat-fingered little hand rested in mine.

“What shall I call you?” she said. “Victor is hardly a name, is it. More a title. Like someone in ancient Rome.” She lifted her head and looked at me. The lights of the shut shops as we passed them by flashed in miniature across her eyes, like so many slides flickering past the lenses of a faulty projector. In the darkness her smile seemed bright and brave, as if she were holding back tears, “ I don’t love you, you know,” she said softly.

I closed my fingers on hers.

“I know that,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter, does it.”

I went up to Oxford by train on one of those deceptively soft, glowing days of late October. Everything was melodramatically aflame, so that the world seemed poised not on the edge of winter but of some grand, blazoned beginning. I was wearing a new and rather smart suit, and as we sped along I admired the line of the trouser-leg and the chestnut gleam on the toecaps of my well-polished shoes. I had a clear and definite image of myself: smooth, well-groomed, primped and pomaded, a man with a mission. I was quite calm about the impending confrontation with Mrs. Beaver, was even looking forward to it, in a mood of amused condescension. What could I have to fear from such a scatter-brain? Yet as we went along, I began to be affected by something in the inexorability of the way the lumbering, seemingly unstoppable train ticked off the station halts, and the smoke rolling past the window took on an infernal aspect, and by the time we drew into Oxford, blank terror had fixed its claw upon my heart.

The maid who opened the door to me was new, a heavy-haunched, flat-faced girl who gave me a sceptical look and took my hat as if it were something dead I had handed her. The Brevoorts were proud of their reputation for keeping impossible servants; it fed Mrs. Beaver’s bohemian notions of herself. “Madam is in the pantry,” the girl said, and I found the nurseryrhyme echo of it oddly disconcerting. There was a warm, sickly-sweet odour. I followed the girl’s joggling haunches through to the drawing room, where she left me, stepping backwards and closing the door on me with a definite smirk. I stood in the middle of the floor listening to my heart and looking through the bottle-glass window panes at the iridescent and somehow derisively gaudy garden. Time passed. I thought of the first time I had been in this room, nearly a decade ago, with Nick lounging on the sofa and Baby upstairs playing her jazz records. I felt suddenly, immensely old, and saw myself now not as the polished man of the world I had seemed at the outset of my journey, but a sort of freak, desiccated and obscenely preserved, like one of those fairground midgets, a man in a boy’s wrinkled body.

Without warning the door flew open and Mrs. Brevoort stood there in her Sarah Bernhardt pose, a hand on the knob and her head thrown back, her bared embonpoint pallidly aheave.

“Plums!” she said. “Such impossible fecundity.”

She was wearing a tasselled shawl affair and a voluminous velvet dress the colour of old blood, and both arms were busy almost to the elbows with fine gold bangles, like a set of springs, which suggested the circus ring more than the seraglio. I realised what it was she always reminded me of in her looks: one of Henry James’s worldly schemers, a Mme. Merle, or a Mrs. Assingham, but without their wit, or their acuity. She advanced, moving as always as if mounted on a hidden trolley, and grasped me by the shoulders and kissed me dramatically on both cheeks, then thrust me from her and held me at arm’s length and gazed at me for a long moment with an expression of tragic weight, slowly nodding her great head.

“Baby spoke to you?” I said tentatively.

She nodded more deeply still, so that her chin almost dropped to her breast.

“Vivienne,” she said, “telephoned. Her father and I have had a long chat. We are so…” It was impossible to tell what might have followed. She went on contemplating me, seemingly lost in thought, then suddenly she roused herself and grew brisk. “Come along,” she said, “I need a man’s help.”

The pantry was a stylised model of a witch’s cave. Through a low little window giving on to the vegetable garden there entered a dense, sinister green glow which seemed something at once more and less than daylight. An enormous vat of plum jam was turbidly boiling on a squat black gas stove that stood with delicate feet braced, like a weightlifter about to bend to his task, while on the draining board beside the chipped sink there was ranged a waiting squadron of jam jars of varying sizes. Mrs. B. bent over the bubbling cauldron, her eyes slitted and the wings of her great beaked nose flaring, and lifted a ladleful of the jam and examined it doubtfully.

“Max expects one to do this sort of thing,” she said, turning off the gas, “I can’t think why.” She glanced at me sideways with a Grimalkin grin. “He’s a great tyrant, you know. Would you like an apron? And do take off your jacket.”