John Banville - The Untouchable

I was to hold the jars while she ladled the jam into them. “You’ve got to do it while the jam is hot, you see, or the seals won’t work.” The first jar cracked from the heat of the boiling fruit, in the second the jam overflowed and burned my fingers, at which I uttered an oath, which Mrs. B. pretended not to hear.

“Well,” she said, “perhaps we should allow it to cool a little. Let’s go into the garden. Such a perfect day. Should I offer you a drink, or is it too early? Maude shall bring us something. Maude! Dear me, where is the girl. Oh, there you are; how you do lurk. What will you take, Mr. Maskell? People tell me my dandelion wine is really quite good. Gin? Well, yes, I’m sure we must have, somewhere. Maude, bring Mr. Maskell some gin. And… tonic, and so on.” Maude looked at me and let another sardonic smile cross her large face briefly, and slouched off. Mrs. Brevoort sighed. “I suspect her of insolence, but I can never quite catch her in the act. They are so sly, you know, and so clever, too, in their way.”

The garden was at its last, glorious gasp, all gold and green and umber and rose madder. A strong autumnal sun was shining. We walked over the crisp grass, smelling eucalyptus and the thin, hot stink of verbena, and sat down on a weather-beaten wooden bench that knelt at a tipsy angle against a rough stone wall under a tangled arch of old roses. A very bower of unbliss.

“Is your hand terribly painful?” Mrs. B. said. “Perhaps we should have put something on it.”

“Dock leaves,” I said.

“What?”

“It was a cure my mother had. My stepmother.”

“I see.” She cast about the garden with an air of vague helplessness. “I don’t know that there are any dock leaves…”

Maude approached then with my gin, and a green goblet of urine-coloured liquid for Mrs. Beaver which I took to be the celebrated dandelion wine. I knocked back half my drink in one go. Mrs. B. once more pretended not to notice.

“You were telling me about your stepmother,” she said, and took a sip of wine, eyeing me keenly over the rim of the glass.

“Was I? Her name is Hermione,” I said, floundering.

“Very… pretty. And is she Irish, too?”

“Yes. Her people were Quakers.”

“Quakers!” she said, uttering the word as a high-pitched squawk, and opened her eyes very wide and clapped a hand with fingers splayed to her sloped chest with an audible little smack. I had the impression she was not at all sure what a Quaker was. “Well, of course, one can’t be held accountable for one’s people,” she said, “ I should know that!” And she threw back her head and produced a great full raucous trill of laughter, humourless and mad, like the heroine’s laugh in a tragic opera. I thought of mentioning my maternal connection with the Queen; one isn’t a snob, of course, but it is a thing that does impress.

I had finished my gin, and kept twirling the empty glass ostentatiously in my fingers, but she refused to take the hint.

“And you have a brother, yes?”

She had suddenly become very interested in the nap of the velvet stuff of her dress where it was stretched over her large, round knees.

“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded extraordinarily thin and strained, like that of a meek murderer replying to the prosecution’s first, frightening question.

“Yes,” she said, softly. “Because you did not say.”

“It did not arise.”

“We rather thought you were an only child.”

“I’m sorry.” I was not sure what I was apologising for. A wave of anguished anger broke over me. Nick: Nick had told them. Mrs. Brevoort placed her wineglass on the bench beside her and rose and paced a little way on to the lawn, and stopped and turned, gazing pensively down upon the grass at her feet.

“Of course,” she said, “we should require a certificate.”

“A certificate…?”

“Yes. From a doctor, you know; Max will find a dependable man. So often these things run in the family, and we could not dream of exposing Vivienne to anything of that nature. You do see that, don’t you?” She was standing now canted forward at a slight angle, her hands clasped under her bosom, gazing at me with an earnest, kindly, melancholy little smile. “We have no doubt that you, Mr. Maskell—”

“Call me Victor, please,” I murmured. A bubble of manic, miserable laughter was now pushing its hot way upward in my chest and threatening to choke me.

“We have no doubt,” she pressed on, irresistible as a battleship, “that you, of course, are not personally… infected, if I may put it that way. But it’s the blood, you see.” She brought up her clasped hands and tucked them under her chin in a winsomely histrionic gesture and turned and paced a few steps to the left and back again. “We are, Mr. Maskell, despite extremes of sophistication, a primitive people. I mean, of course, my people. The Hebrew race has suffered much, and no doubt will again in the future”—she was right: her brother and his wife and their three children were to perish in Treblinka—“but throughout the thousands of years of our history we have held fast to essentials. The family. Our children. And blood, Mr. Maskell: blood.” She dropped her hands from under her chin and turned and paced again, this time to the right, and again returned to centre stage. I felt like a theatre-goer trapped in the middle of a long second act who hears, outside, a fire engine howling past in the direction of his own house.

“Mrs. Brevoort—” I began, but she held up a hand as broad as a traffic policeman’s.

“Please,” she said, with a large, icy smile. “Two words more, and then silence, I promise.” I could see the maid moving about behind the drawing room window and toyed desperately with the possibility of shouting for her to bring me another drink—to bring the bloody bottle. Is there anything more dispiriting than an empty, hand-warmed, sticky gin glass? I thought of sucking on the slice of lemon but knew that even that would not have been sufficient sign of desperation for Mrs. B., in full flight as she was. “When Vivienne telephoned,” she was saying, “to tell us of your engagement, which came, you understand, as a great… surprise”— shock was the word she had suppressed—“to her father and to me, I shut myself away in the music room for an entire afternoon. I had much to think about. Music is always a help. I played Brahms. Those great, dark chords. So filled with sadness and yet so… so sustaining.” She bowed her head and let her eyelids gently close and stood for a moment as if in silent prayer, and then looked at me again suddenly, piercingly. “She is our only daughter, Mr. Maskell; our only, precious girl.”

I stood up. The musky smell of roses, along with everything else, was giving me a headache.

“Mrs. Brevoort,” I said, “Vivienne is twenty-nine. She is not a child. We love each other”—at that she shot up her thick, shiny eyebrows and gave her head a dismissive little toss, Mrs. Touchett to the life—“and we think it is time that we should marry.” I faltered; somehow that was not what I had meant to say, or at least not how I had meant to say it. “My brother suffers from a syndrome the name of which would mean nothing to you and which, besides, I have temporarily forgotten.” This was going from bad to worse. “His condition is not hereditary. It is the result of a depletion of oxygen to the brain while he was in the womb.” At that word she gave a definite start; I pressed on. “We would have hoped for your blessing, and that of Mr. Brevoort, but if you withhold it we shall go ahead regardless. I feel you should understand that.” Matters suddenly were improving, as the rhetoric heated. I could feel an invisible starched stock sprouting up about my throat, and would not have been surprised to look down and find myself in frock coat and riding boots: Lord Warburton himself could not have struck a haughtier aspect. I would have felt thoroughly in command were it not for the troubling persistence of that word womb, still wallowing between us like a half-inflated football that neither of us would dare either to pick up or kick away. We were silent. I could hear myself breathe, a soft, stertorous roaring down the nostrils. Mrs. B. made a peculiar little movement of her upper body, half shrug half bridle, and said: