The Untouchable (16 page)

“I shot him through the heart,” he said, making a pistol of finger and thumb and silently firing it. “There was nothing else to do for him. I see his eyes still in my dreams.”

I nodded, and I too looked grimly at my shoes, to show how thoroughly ashamed I was of that facetious reference to Holy Mother Russia; but just below the lid of my sobriety there was squeezed a cackle of disgraceful laughter, as if there were an evil, merry little elf curled up inside me, hand clapped to mouth and cheeks bulging and weasel eyes malignantly aglitter. It was not that I thought the horrors of war were funny, or Hartmann completely ridiculous; that was not the sort of laughter that was threatening to break out. Perhaps laughter is the wrong word. What I felt at moments such as this—and there would be many such: solemn, silent, fraught with portent—was a kind of hysteria, made up of equal parts of disgust and shame and appalling mirth. I cannot explain it—or could, perhaps, but do not want to. (One can know too much about oneself, that is a thing I have learned.) Someone has written somewhere, I wish I could remember who, of the sensation of gleeful anticipatory horror he experiences in the concert hall when in the middle of a movement the orchestra grinds to a halt and the virtuoso draws back his arm preparatory to plunging his bow into the quivering heart of the cadenza. Although the writer is a cynic, and as a Marxist
(am I a Marxist, still?) I should disapprove of him, I know exactly what he means and secretly applaud his baleful honesty. Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one’s feet.

Alastair came back. Seeing Hartmann and me sunk in what must have looked like silent communion, and perhaps was, he grew more cross than ever.

“Well,” he said, “have you decided the future of art?”

When neither of us responded—Hartmann looked up at him with a vacant frown as if trying to remember who he was—he threw himself down on the deckchair, which gave a loud, pained grunt of protest, and clamped his stubby arms across his chest and glared at a bush of shell-pink roses.

“What do you think, Alastair?” I said. “Mr. Hartmann—”

“Felix,” Hartmann said smoothly, “please.”

“—has offered me a trip to Russia.”

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.”

Suddenly I found his Mitteleuropan unctuousness intensely irritating.

“Am I one of the initiated?” I said.

He turned his head slowly and let his glance slide over me from toe to brow.

“I am trusting that you are,” he said. “Or that you
will
be …”

There it was again, that word: trust. Yet I could not resist that hooded, meaning gaze. Slender, black suited, with his pale, priestly hands clasped before him, he sat in the sunlight not so much watching as attending me, waiting for… for what? For me to surrender to him. Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understood what it would be like to be a woman whom he desired. My own gaze faltered and slipped as the ratchets of my self-possession disengaged for a second with a soft jolt, and I brushed busily at a nonexistent patch of dust on the sleeve of my jacket and in a voice that sounded to my ears like a querulous squeak I said:

“I hope your trust is not misplaced.”

Hartmann smiled and relaxed and sat back on his chair with a look of satisfaction, and I turned my face aside, feeling gulpy and shy all of a sudden. Yes, how deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.

“Your ship will sail in three weeks’ time from London port,” he said. “Amsterdam, Helsinki, Leningrad. She is called the
Liberation.
A good name, don’t you think?”

A good name, but a poor thing. The
Liberation
was a blunt-ended, low-slung merchant vessel carrying a cargo of pig iron, whatever that is, destined for the People’s smelters. The North Sea was rough, a jostling waste of clay-coloured waves, each one half the size of a house, through which the little ship snuffled and heaved, like an iron pig, indeed, going along with its snout rising and falling in the troughs and tail invisibly twirling behind us. Our captain was a black-bearded Dutchman of vast girth who had spent the early years of his career in the East Indies engaged in activities which from his colourful but deliberately vague
descriptions of them sounded to me suspiciously like the slave trade. He spoke of the Soviet Union with jovial detestation. His crew, made up of a medley of races, were a slovenly, furtive, piratical-looking bunch. Boy could hardly believe his luck; he spent most of the voyage below decks, changing bunks and partners with each watch. We would catch the noise of drunken revels rising from the bowels of the ship, with Boy’s voice dominant, singing sea shanties and roaring for rum. “What a filthy gang!” he would croak happily, emerging red-eyed and barefoot on to the passenger deck in search of cigarettes and something to eat. “Talk about close quarters!” It always baffled me, how Boy could get away with so much. Despite his disgraceful doings on that voyage, he remained a favourite at Captain Kloos’s table, and even when a complaint was lodged against him by one of the younger crewmen, a Friesian Islander pining for his girl, the matter was hushed up.

“It’s that famous charm of his,” Archie Fletcher said sourly. “Some day it will let him down, when he’s old and fat and clapped-out.”

Fletcher, himself a charmless hetero, was disapproving of our party in general, considering it far too frolicsome for a delegation handpicked by the Comintern to be the spearhead of its English undercover drive. (Yes, Miss V., I mean Sir Archibald Fletcher, who today is one of the most poisonous spokesmen of the Tory right; how we do oscillate, we ideologues.) There was also a couple of Cambridge dons—pipes, dandruff, woollen mufflers— whom I knew slightly; Bill Darling, a sociologist from the LSE, who even then I could see was too neurotic and excitable to be a spy; and a rather pompous young aristo named Belvoir, the same Toby Belvoir who in the sixties would renounce his title to serve in a Labour cabinet, for which piece of Socialist good faith he was rewarded with a junior ministry in charge of sport or some such. So there we were, a boatload of superannuated boys, bucketing through autumn storms along the Skagerrak and down into the Baltic, on our way to encounter the future at first-hand. Needless to say, what I see is a
Ship of Fools
by one of the anonymous medieval masters, with curly whitecaps and a stylised porpoise bustling through the waves, and our party, in robes and
funny hats, crowded on the poop deck, peering eastwards, an emblem of hope and fortitude and, yes, innocence.

I know that this, my first and last visit to Russia, should have been, and perhaps was, one of the formative experiences of my life, yet my recollections of it are curiously blurred, like the features of a weather-worn statue; the form is still there, the impression of significance and stony weight: only the details are largely gone. Petersburg was an astonishment, of course. I had the sense, looking down those noble prospects (poor Psyche!), of a flare of trumpets sounding all around me, announcing the commencement of some grand imperial venture: the declaration of a war, the inauguration of a peace. Years later, when the Comrades were urging me to defect, I passed a sleepless night weighing in the scales the losing of the Louvre against the gaining of the Hermitage, and the choice, I can tell you, was not as straightforward as I might have expected.