John Banville - The Untouchable

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first of all fall in love there. I had always known London; my family, although they hardly ever went there, considered it our capital, not dour Belfast, with its rain-coloured buildings and bellowing shipyard sirens. It was only in that summer I spent in London with Nick, however, that the place came fully alive for me. I say I spent the summer with him but that is wishful exaggeration. He was working—another exaggeration—for his father at Brevoort & Klein, and had moved down from Oxford to a flat above a newsagent’s shop off the Fulham Road. I remember that flat with remarkable clarity. There was a small living room at the front with two peaked mansard windows that made an incongruously ecclesiastical effect; the first time Boy came there he clapped his hands and cried: “Fetch me my surplice, we must have a black mass!” The flat was known as the Eyrie, a word neither Nick nor I was sure how to pronounce, but it suited, for certainly it was eerie—Nick favoured tall candles and Piranesi prints—and airy, too, especially in spring, when the windows were filled with flying sky and the timbers creaked like the spars of a sailing ship. Nick, who was by nature a unique mix of the aesthete and the hearty, let the place run to appalling squalor: I still shudder when I think of the lavatory. At the back was a poky bedroom with a sharply canted ceiling, in which there was wedged skew-ways an enormous brass bed Nick claimed to have won in a poker game in a gambling den behind Paddington Station. It was one of Nick’s stories.

He did not often sleep at the flat. His girls refused to stay there, because of the filth, and anyway in those times girls rarely stayed overnight, at least not the kind of girl that Nick consorted with. Mostly it was a place to throw parties in, and to recover in from the resulting hangovers. On these occasions he would take to his bed for two or three days, surrounded by an accumulating clutter of books and boxes of sweets and bottles of champagne, supplied by a succession of friends whom he would summon to him by telephone. I can still hear his voice on the line, an exaggeratedly anguished whisper: “I say, old man, do you think you could come round? I do believe I’m dying.” Usually when I arrived a small crowd would already have assembled, another party in embryo, sitting about on that vast raft of a bed eating Nick’s chocolates and drinking champagne from tooth-glasses and kitchen cups, with Nick in his nightshirt propped against a bank of pillows, pale as ivory, his black hair standing on end, all eyes and angles, a figure out of Schiele. Boy would be there, of course, and Rothenstein, and girls called Daphne and Brenda and Daisy, in silks and cloche hats. Sometimes Querell would come round, tall, thin, sardonic, standing with his back against the wall and smoking a cigarette, somehow crooked, like the villain in a cautionary tale, one eyebrow arched and the corners of his mouth turned down, and a hand in the pocket of his tightly buttoned jacket that I always thought could be holding a gun. He had the look of a man who knew something damaging about everyone in the room. (I realise that I am seeing him not as he was then, young, and gauche, surely, like the rest of us, but as he was in his late thirties, when the Blitz was on, and he seemed the very personification of the times: embittered, tense, offhand, amusedly despairing, older than his, and our, years.)

Those parties: did anyone really enjoy them? What I chiefly recall is the air of suppressed desperation that pervaded them. We drank a lot, but drink seemed only to make us frightened, or despairing, so that we must shriek all the louder, as if to scare off demons. What was it that we feared? Another war, yes, the worldwide economic crisis, all that, the threat of Fascism; there was no end of things to be afraid of. We felt such deep resentments! We blamed all our ills on the Great War and the old men who had forced the young to fight in it, and perhaps Flanders really did destroy us as a nation, but— But there I go, falling into the role of amateur sociologist that I despise. I never thought in terms of us, or the nation; none of us did, I am convinced of it. We talked in those terms, of course—we never stopped talking thus—but it was all no more than a striking of attitudes to make ourselves feel more serious, more weighty, more authentic. Deep down—if we did, indeed, have deeps—we cared about ourselves and, intermittently, one or two others; isn’t that how it always is? Why did you do it? that girl asked me yesterday, and I replied with parables of philosophy and art, and she went away dissatisfied. But what other reply could I have given? I am the answer to her question, the totality of what I am; nothing less will suffice. In the public mind, for the brief period it will entertain, and be entertained by, the thought of me, I am a figure with a single salient feature. Even for those who thought they knew me intimately, everything else I have done or not done has faded to insignificance before the fact of my so-called treachery. While in reality all that I am is all of a piece: all of a piece, and yet broken up into a myriad selves. Does that make sense?

So what we were frightened of, then, was ourselves, each one his own demon.

Querell when he phoned the other day had the grace not to pretend to be shocked. He knows all about betrayal, the large variety and the small; he is a connoisseur in that department. When he was at the height of his fame (he has slipped somewhat from the headlines, since he is old and no longer the hellion he once was) I used to chuckle over newspaper photographs of him hobnobbing with the Pope, since I knew that the lips with which he kissed the papal ring had most likely been between some woman’s thighs a half-hour previously. But Querell too is in danger of being shown up for what he really is, whatever that might be. That fishy look he always had is becoming more pronounced with age. In yet another interview recently—where did he ever get the reputation for shunning publicity?—he made one of those seemingly deep but in fact banal observations that have become his trademark. “I don’t know about God,” he told the interviewer, “but certainly I believe in the Devil.” Oh yes, one always needed a long spoon to sup with Querell.

He was genuinely curious about people—the sure mark of the second-rate novelist. At those parties in the Eyrie he would stand for a long time leaning with his back against the wall, diabolical trickles of smoke issuing from the corners of his mouth, watching and listening as the party took on an air of monkey-house hysteria. He drank as much as the rest of us, but it seemed to have no effect on him except to make those unnervingly pale-blue eyes of his shine with a kind of malicious merriment. Usually he would slip away early, with a girl in tow; you would glance at the spot where he had been standing and find him gone, and seem to see a shadowy after-image of him, like the paler shadow left on a wall when a picture is removed. So I was surprised when during a party one August afternoon he accosted me in the corridor.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, in that insinuatingly truculent way of his, “I can’t take any more of this filthy wine—let’s go and have a real drink.”

My head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton wool and the sunlight in the mansard windows had taken on the colour of urine, and for once I was content to leave. A girl was standing weeping in the bedroom doorway, her face in her hands; Nick was not to be seen. Querell and I walked in silence down the clattery stairs. The air in the street was blued with exhaust fumes; strange to think of a time when one still noticed the smell of petrol. We went to a pub—was it Finch’s then, or had it another name?— and Querell ordered gin and water, “the tart’s tipple,” as he said with a snicker. It was just after opening time and there were few customers. Querell sat with one foot hooked on the rung of his stool and the other delicately braced en pointe on the floor; he did not undo the buttons of his jacket. I noticed the frayed shirt cuffs, the shine on the knees of his trousers. We were of an age, but I felt a generation younger than him. He had a job on the Express, or perhaps it was the Telegraph, writing juicy tidbits for the gossip column, and as we drank he recounted office anecdotes, drolly describing the eccentricities of his fellow journalists and the public-school asininity of the editor of the day in what were obviously pre-prepared paragraphs of admirable fluency and precision. Tight though I was I saw clearly that this was a performance, from behind which he was studying me with the detached intentness that was to become his trademark as a novelist. He was already an expert at putting up smokescreens (literally as well as figuratively: he smoked without cease, apparently the same, everlasting cigarette, for I never seemed able to catch him in the act of lighting up).