John Banville - The Untouchable

He came to the end of his stories and we were silent for a while. He ordered more drinks, and when I tried to pay for them he waved my money away with that matter-of-fact assumption of superiority that was another of his characteristics. I don’t know why he should have assumed I was broke; on the contrary, I was comparatively well off at the time, thanks to my column for the Spectator and occasional lectures at the Institute.

“You’re pretty fond of the Beaver, aren’t you,” he said.

It was said with such studied casualness that I grew wary, despite the gin.

“I haven’t known him for very long,” I said.

He nodded. “Of course, you were a Cambridge man. Not that I saw a great deal of him at Oxford.” Nick had said to me of Querell that in their college days he had been too busy whoring to bother much with friendships. Despite recent rumours to the contrary, Querell was an incorrigible hetero, whose fascination with women ran almost to the level of the gynaecological. I thought he always smelled faintly of sex. I hear he is still chasing girls, in his seventies, down there on the Cote d’Azur. “Quite a boy, the Beaver,” he said, and paused, and then gave me a peculiar, sidelong look and asked: “Do you trust him?” I did not know what to answer, and mumbled something about not being sure that I thought that anyone was really to be trusted. He nodded again, seemingly satisfied, and dropped the subject and began to talk instead about a fellow he had bumped into recently, whom he had known at Oxford.

“He’d interest you,” he said. “He’s a red-hot Sinn Feiner.”

I laughed.

“I’m from the other side of the fence, you know,” I said. “My people are black Protestants.”

“Oh, Protestants in Ireland are all Catholics, really.”

“Rather the opposite, I should have thought. Or we’re all just plain pagans, perhaps.”

“Well, anyway, the place is interesting, isn’t it? I mean the politics.”

I wonder—good lord, I wonder if he was putting out feelers with a view to recruiting me, even then? That was the summer of ’thirty-one; was he already with the Department, that early? Or maybe it was just the question of religion that interested him. Although none of us knew it, he was already taking instruction at Farm Street. (Querell’s Catholicism, by the way, has always seemed to me far more of an anachronism than my Marxism.) And in fact now he dropped the subject of politics and went on to talk about religion, in his usual oblique way, telling me a story about Gerard Manley Hopkins preaching at some sort of women’s gathering in Dublin and scandalising the congregation by comparing the Church to a sow with seven teats representing the seven sacraments. I laughed, and said what a sad poor fool Hopkins was, trying for the common touch like that and failing ridiculously, but Querell gave me another long, measuring look and said: “Yes, he made the mistake of thinking that the way to be convincing is to put on a false front,” and I felt obscurely confounded.

We finished our drinks and left the pub, I very bleary indeed by now, and Querell hailed a taxi and we went to Curzon Street, where there was an opening at Alighieri’s. The work, by an émigré White Russian whose name I have forgotten, was hopeless trash, a combination of supremacist sterility and Russian-icon kitsch that turned my already drink-insulted stomach. He was all the rage, though, this Supremavitch, and the crowd was so large it had overflowed from the gallery, and people were standing about the pavement in the evening sunshine, drinking white wine and sneering at passers-by, and producing that self-congratulatory low roar that is the natural collective voice of imbibers at the fount of art. Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort.

Nick’s party seemed to have transferred itself here intact. There was Nick himself, still tousled, still barefoot, with a pair of trousers pulled on over his nightshirt, and Leo Rothenstein in his three-piece suit, and the silken Daphnes and Daisys, and even the weeping girl, red eyed but laughing now, all of them drunk and embarrassingly loud. When they saw Querell and me approaching they turned on us, and someone shouted something at which everyone laughed, and Querell swore and turned on his heel and stalked away in the direction of the park, narrow head held aloft and elbows pressed tightly to his sides; in his high-shouldered dark-brown suit he reminded me of an HP Sauce bottle.

Remarkable how sobering it is to arrive in the midst of people more drunk than oneself; within minutes of stopping on the pavement among that sodden, billowing crowd I began to taste copper at the back of my mouth and felt a headache starting up and knew that I must have more drink or face the rest of the evening in a state of ashen melancholy. Boy had buttonholed me and was shouting into my ear some outrageous tale about an encounter with a negro sailor (“… like a length of bloody hawser!”) and breathing garlic fumes all over me. I wanted to talk to Nick but the girls had got him, and were hilariously admiring his bare and extremely dirty feet. I broke away from Boy at last and plunged into the interior of the gallery, where, though crowded, it seemed less confined than outside on the pavement. A glass of wine materialised in my hand. I was at that clear-eyed yet hallucinatory stage of inebriation in which the commonplace takes on a sort of comically transfigured aspect. The people standing about seemed the most bizarre of creatures; it struck me how amazing, and amazingly droll, it was that human beings should go about upright and not on all fours, which would surely be more natural, and that of those gathered here, practically everyone, including myself, was equipped with a glass which he or she must hold upright while at the same time talking at the highest possible speed and volume. It all seemed quite mad and laughable and at the same time acutely, achingly moving. I turned away from the Russian’s daubs, which everyone else was ignoring anyway, and made my way into the back rooms, where Wally Cohen had his offices. Wally, a little roly-poly fellow with curls (“Shylock’s shy locks”—Boy), made a sort of running gag of his Jewishness, rubbing his hands and smiling oilily and referring to his co-religionists as Jewboys and snip-cocks. I suspect he was at heart an anti-Semite, as a lot of the Jews whom I knew were, in those pre-war days. I came upon him in a storeroom, one ham perched on the corner of a table, swinging a chubby little leg and talking animatedly to a dark-haired young woman whom I seemed vaguely to recognise.

“Victor, my boy!” he cried. “You have a haunted, hungry look.”

Wally had been a Marxist since his teens, one of the first of us to contract the virus.

“I’ve been drinking with Querell,” I said.

He chuckled. “Ah, the pontiff; yes.”

The young woman, whom he had not bothered to introduce, was regarding me with a sceptical eye, trying, so it seemed to me, not to laugh. She was short and dark and compactly made, with bruised shadows under her eyes. She wore one of those tube-shaped dresses of the time, made of layers of bronze-black silk along which the light darkly shimmered and flashed, and I thought of a scarab beetle, locked in its brittle, burnished carapace. Wally resumed his conversation with her and she turned her attention slowly away from me. He was going on about some painter whose work he had lately discovered—Jose Orozco, someone like that. Wally was one of those genuine enthusiasts the world at the time was still capable of producing. He was to die seven years later, with Cornford’s brigade, at the siege of Madrid.

“It’s the only thing that’s possible any longer,” he was saying. “People’s art. The rest is bourgeois self-indulgence, masturbation for the middle classes.”