John Banville - The Untouchable

“Not as nice as the flat at the Institute, where I used to live.”

“Did you have to give it up?”

“Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Someone died there.”

Serena, that is her name, it has just come back to me. Serena Vandeleur. Has a ring to it, certainly.

I took her coat, which she surrendered reluctantly, I thought. “Are you cold?” I said, playing the solicitous old gent. She shook her head. Perhaps she feels less secure without that protective paternal embrace. Though I must say she strikes me as remarkably at ease with herself. It is a little unnerving, this sense of calm that she communicates. No, communicates is the wrong word; she seems wholly self-contained. She wore a nice plain blouse and a cardigan and flat shoes, though a tight, short leather skirt lent a certain slinky raciness to the ensemble. I offered her tea but she said she would prefer a drink. That’s my girl. I said we should have some gin, which gave me an excuse to escape to the kitchen, where the sting of ice cubes and the sharp tang of limes (I always use limes in gin; so much more assertive than the dull old workaday lemon) helped me to regain something of my composure. I do not know why I was so agitated. But then, how would I not be in a state? In the past three days the tranquil pool that was my life has been churned up and all sorts of disturbing things have risen from the depths. I am beset constantly by a feeling the only name for which I can think of is nostalgia. Great hot waves of remembrance wash through me, bringing images and sensations I would have thought I had entirely forgotten or successfully extirpated, yet so sharp and vivid are they that I falter in my tracks with an inward gasp, assailed by a sort of rapturous sorrow. I tried to describe this phenomenon to Miss Vandeleur when I returned to the living room with our drinks on a tray (so much for keeping a clear head). I found her standing as before, her face inclined a little and one hand with steepled fingers pressing on the table, so still and seemingly posed that the suspicion crossed my mind that she had been searching the room and had darted back to this position only when she had heard the approaching tinkle of ice and glass. But I am sure it is just my bad mind that makes me think she had been snooping: it is the kind of thing that I used to do automatically, in the days when I had a professional interest in discovering other people’s secrets.

“Yes,” I said, “I can’t tell you how strange it is, to be suddenly thrust into the public gaze like this.”

She nodded distractedly; she was thinking of something else. It struck me that she was behaving oddly, for a journalist.

We sat opposite each other by the fireplace, with our drinks, in a polite, unexpectedly easy, almost companionable silence, like two voyagers sharing a cocktail before joining the captain’s table, knowing we had a whole ocean of time before us in which to get acquainted. Miss Vandeleur studied with frank though unemphatic interest the framed photographs on the mantelpiece: my father in his gaiters, Hettie in a hat, Blanche and Julian as children, my ill-remembered natural mother wearing silks and a lost look. “My family,” I said. “The generations.” She nodded again. It was one of those volatile April days, with enormous icebergs of silver-and-white cloud hurtling slowly across the sky above the city, bringing rapid alternations of glare and gloom, and now suddenly the sunlight in the window was switched off almost with a click and I thought for a moment I was going to cry, I could not say why, precisely, though obviously the photographs were part of it. Very alarming, it was, and a great surprise; I was never the tearful type, up to now. When was the last time that I wept? There was Patrick’s death, of course, but that does not count—death does not count, when it comes to weeping. No, I think the last time I really cried was when I went round to Vivienne’s that morning after Boy and the Dour Scot had fled. Driving like a madman through Mayfair with the wipers going full belt and then realising it wasn’t rain that was splintering my vision but salt tears. Of course, I was tight, and in an awful funk (it looked as if the whole game was up and that we would all be hauled in), but I was not accustomed to losing control of myself like that, and it was a shock. I learned some remarkable things that day, and not only about my propensity to tears.

Miss Vandeleur had taken on a grey look and was huddling rather in her chair. “But you are cold,” I said, and despite her protests that she was perfectly comfortable I got down on one knee, which startled her and made her shrink back—she must have thought I was going to kneel before her and blurt out some ghastly, final confession and swear her to secrecy—but it was only to light the gas fire. It uttered its gratifying whumpf and did that little trick of sucking the flame from the match, then the delicate filigree of wires glowed and the ashy waffle behind them began slowly to turn blush-pink. I have a great fondness for such humble gadgets: scissors, tin-openers, adjustable reading lamps, even the flush toilet. They are the unacknowledged props of civilisation.

“Why did you do it?” Miss Vandeleur said.

I was in the process of rising creakily from that genuflexion, one hand on a quivering knee, the other pressed to the small of my back, and I almost fell over. But it was a not unreasonable question, in the circumstances, and one which, curiously enough, none of her colleagues had thought to ask. I slumped into my armchair with a laughing sigh and shook my head.

“Why?” I said. “Oh, cowboys and indians, my dear; cowboys and indians.” It was true, in a way. The need for amusement, the fear of boredom: was the whole thing much more than that, really, despite all the grand theorising? “And hatred of America, of course,” I added, a trifle jadedly, I fear; the poor old Yanks are by now a rather moth-eaten bugbear. “You must understand, the American occupation of Europe was to many of us not much less of a calamity than a German victory would have been. The Nazis at least were a clear and visible enemy. Men enough to be damned, to paraphrase Eliot.” At that I gave her a twinkly smile: wise age acknowledges educated youth. I stood up with my drink and walked to the window: sun-polished slates, a skittle-stand of blackened chimney pots, television aerials like a jumbled alphabet consisting mainly of aitches. “The defence of European culture—”

“But you were,” she said evenly, interrupting me, “a spy before the war. Weren’t you?”

Now, such words—spy, agent, espionage, etc.—have always given me trouble. They conjure in my mind images of low taverns and cobbled laneways at night with skulking figures in doublet and hose and the flash of poniards. I could never think of myself as a part of that dashing, subfusc world. Boy, now, Boy had a touch of the Kit Marlowes about him, all right, but I was a dry old stick, even when I was young. I was what was needed, someone safe to chivvy the rest of them along, to look after them and wipe their noses and make sure they didn’t run out into the traffic, but now I cannot help wondering if I sacrificed too much of myself to the… I suppose I must call it the cause. Did I squander my life on the gathering and collating of trivial information? The thought leaves me breathless.

“I was a connoisseur, you know, before I was anything else,” I said. I had turned from the window. She was sitting with shoulders hunched, gazing into the pallid flame of the gas fire. In my glass an ice cube cracked with an agonised plink. “Art was all that ever mattered to me,” I said. “I even tried to be a painter, in my student days. Oh yes. Modest little still-lifes, blue jugs and violent tulips, that kind of thing. I dared to hang one in my rooms at Cambridge. A friend looked at it and pronounced me the finest lady painter since Raoul Dufy.” That was Boy, of course. That wide, cruel, voracious smile. “So you have before you, my dear,” I said, “a failed artist, like so many other egregious scoundrels: Nero, half the Medicis, Stalin, the unspeakable Herr Schicklgruber.” I could see that last one passing her by.