John Banville - The Untouchable

There was something about Alastair—the combination of that not quite convincing bulldog ferocity and an almost girlish tentativeness, not to mention the hobnailed boots and hairy tweeds—that made it impossible to resist being cruel to him.

“Oh?” he said. He would not look at me, but folded his arms more tightly still, while under his glare the roses seemed to blush a deeper shade of pink. “How interesting for you.”

“Yes,” I said blithely, “Boy and I are going to go.”

“And one or two others,” Hartmann murmured, looking at his fingernails.

“Boy, eh?” Alastair said, and essayed a nasty little laugh. “He’ll probably get you both arrested on your first night in Moscow.”

“Yes,” I said, faltering a little (Others?—what others?), “I’m sure we’ll have some amusing times.”

Hartmann was still examining his nails.

“Of course, we shall arrange guides for you, and so on,” he said.

Yes, Comrade Hartmann, I’m sure you will.

Did I mention that we were all smoking away like railway engines? Everyone smoked then, we stumbled about everywhere in clouds of tobacco fumes. I recall with a pang, in this Puritan age, the Watteauesque delicacy of those grey-blue, gauzy billows we breathed out everywhere on the air, suggestive of twilight and misted grass and thickening shadows under great trees—although Alastair’s belching pipe was more the Potteries than Versailles.

“I’d like to see Russia,” Alastair said, his irritation giving way to wistfulness. “Moscow, the Nevsky Prospect…”

Hartmann coughed.

“Perhaps,” he said, “another time…”

Alastair did a sort of flip and wriggle, as if the canvas of his chair had turned into a trampoline.

“Oh, I say, old chap,” he said, “I didn’t mean… I mean I…”

Where exactly had it occurred, I wondered, the moment when Hartmann and I had joined in tacit alliance against poor Alastair? Or was it only me?—I am not sure that Hartmann was capable of keeping in mind anyone or anything that was not the immediate object of his attention. Yes, probably it was just me, pirouetting alone there, a Nijinsky of vanity and petty spitefulness. I do not want to exaggerate the matter, but I cannot help wondering if the disappointment he suffered that day—no gallops across the steppes, no earnest talks with horny-handed sons of the soil, no stroll down Moscowburg’s Nevsky Prospect with a handsome spoiled priest by his side—was not a biggish pebble lobbed on to the steadily accumulating mountain of woe that Psyche would disappear under twenty years later, crouched on his bunk in his dank room and gnawing on a poisoned apple. I have said it before, I shall say it again: it is the minor treacheries that weigh most heavily on the heart.

“Tell me,” I said to Hartmann, when Alastair had stopped bouncing on the springs of his embarrassment, “how many will be travelling?”

I had a terrible vision of myself being shown around a tractor factory in the company of psoriatic City clerks and dumpy, fur-hatted spinsters from the Midlands, and cloth-capped Welsh miners who after borscht and bear-paw dinners in our hotel would entertain us with evenings of glee-singing. Do not imagine, Miss Vandeleur, that Marxists, at least the ones of my variety, are gregarious. Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance. Hartmann smiled, and showed me his upturned innocent hands.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just some people. You will find them interesting.”

I would not.

“Party people?” I said.

(By the way, Miss V., you do know, don’t you, that I was never a Party member? None of us was. Even at Cambridge in my—picture an ironic smile here—firebrand days, the question of joining never arose. The Apostles was Party enough for us. We were undercover agents before we had heard of the Comintern or had a Soviet recruiter whispering blandishments in our ears.)

Hartmann shook his head, still smiling, and lightly let drop his dark-shadowed, long-lashed eyelids.

“Just… people,” he said. “Trust me.”

Ah, trust: now there is a word to which I could devote a page or two, its shades and gradations, the nuances it took on or shed according to circumstance. In my time I have put my trust in some of the most egregious scoundrels one could ever hope not to meet, while there were things in my life, and I am not speaking only of sins, that I would not have revealed to my own father. In this I was not so different from other people, burdened with far fewer secrets than I was, as a moment’s reflection will show. Would you, dear Miss Vandeleur, tell the Admiral of what you and your young man get up to below decks in Golders Green of a night? If my life has taught me anything it is that in these matters there are no absolutes, of trust, or belief, or anything else. And a good thing, too. (No, I suppose I am not a Marxist, still.)

Above us in the dream-blue zenith a tiny silver plane was laboriously buzzing. I thought of bombs falling on the white towns of Spain and was struck, as earlier Alastair had been, by the hardly comprehensible incongruity of time and circumstance; how could I be here, while all that was happening there? Yet I could feel nothing for the victims; distant deaths are weightless.

Alastair attempted to introduce the topic of Ireland and Sinn Fein, but was ignored, and went back to sulking again, and refolded his arms and glared off, trying, it seemed, to wither those poor roses on their stems.

“Tell me,” I said to Hartmann, “what did you mean when you said it was time for Boy to become disenchanted with Marxism?”

Hartmann had a peculiar way of holding a cigarette, in his left hand, between the third and middle fingers and cocked against his thumb, so that when he lifted it to his lips he seemed to be not smoking, but taking a tiny sip of something from a slim, white phial. A standing shape of smoke, the same shade of silver-grey as the aeroplane, that was gone now, drifted sideways away from us on the pulsing light of noon.

“Mr. Bannister is a… a person of consequence, shall we say,” Hartmann said carefully, squinting into the middle distance. “His connections are excellent. His family, his friends—”

“Not forgetting his boyfriends,” Alastair said sourly, and, I could see, immediately regretted it. Hartmann did his smiling nod again, with eyelids lowered, dismissing him.

“The advantage of him for us—you understand by now, I am sure, who it is I mean when I say us? —the advantage is that he can move easily at any level of society, from the Admiralty to the pubs of the East End. That is important, in a country such as this, in which the class divisions are so strong.” Abruptly he sat up straight and clapped his hands on his knees. “So we have plans for him. It will be, of course, a long-term campaign. And the first thing, the truly important thing, is for him to be seen to abandon his past beliefs. You understand?” I understood. I said nothing. He glanced at me. “You have doubts?”

“I imagine,” Alastair said, trying to sound arch, “that Victor, like me, finds it hard to believe that Boy will be capable of the kind of discipline necessary for the campaign of dissimulation you have in mind.”

Hartmann pursed his lips and examined the ashy tip of his cigarette.

“Perhaps,” he said mildly, “you do not know him as well as you think you do. He is a man of many sides.”

“As we all are,” I said.

He nodded with excessive courtesy.

“But yes. That is why we are here”—by which he meant, that is why I am here—“having this important conversation, which to the ears of the uninitiated would seem no more than an aimless chat between three civilised gentlemen in this charming garden on a beautiful summer day.”