The Untouchable (2 page)

What is my purpose here? I may say,
I just sat down to write,
but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that
did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself. Am I, like Querrell, out to settle old scores? Or is it perhaps my intention to justify my deeds, to offer extenuations? I hope not. On the other hand, neither do I want to fashion for myself yet another burnished mask … Having pondered for a moment, I realise that the metaphor is obvious: attribution, verification, restoration. I shall strip away layer after layer of grime— the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling—until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. (When I laugh out loud like this the room seems to start back in surprise and dismay, with hand to lip. I have lived decorously here, I must not now turn into a shrieking hysteric.)

I kept my nerve in face of that pack of jackals from the newspapers today.
Did men die because of you?
’Yes, dearie, swooned quite away. But no, no, I was superb, if I do say so myself. Cool, dry, balanced, every inch the Stoic: Coriolanus to the general. I am a great actor, that is the secret of my success
(Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself?
—Nietzsche). I dressed the part to perfection: old but good houndstooth jacket, Jermyn Street shirt and Charvet tie—red, just to be mischievous—corduroy bags, socks the colour and texture of porridge, that pair of scuffed brothel creepers I had not worn in thirty years. Might have just come up from a weekend at Cliveden. I toyed with the idea of a tobacco pipe
a la
Skryne, but that would have been to overdo it; and besides, it requires years of practice to be a plausible pipeman—never take on cover that you can’t do naturally, that was another of Boy’s dicta. I believe it was a nice piece of strategy on my part to invite the gentlepersons of the press into my lovely home. They crowded in almost sheepishly, jostling each other’s notebooks and holding their cameras protectively above their heads. Rather touching, really: so eager, so awkward. I felt as if I were back at the Institute, about to deliver a lecture. Draw the shades, Miss Twinset, will you? And Stripling, you switch on the magic lantern. Plate one:
The Betrayal in the Garden.

I have always had a particular fondness for gardens gone to seed. The spectacle of nature taking its slow revenge is pleasing. Not
wilderness, of course, I was never one for wilderness, except in its place; but a general dishevelment bespeaks a right disdain for the humanist’s fussy insistence on order. I am no Papist when it comes to husbandry, and side with Marvell’s mower against gardens. I am thinking, here in this bird-haunted April twilight, of the first time I saw the Beaver, asleep in a hammock deep in the dappled orchard behind his father’s house in North Oxford. Chrysalis. The grass was grown wild and the trees needed pruning. It was high summer, yet I see apple blossoms crowding on the boughs; so much for my powers of recall (I am said to have a photographic memory; very useful, in my line of work— my
lines
of work). Also I seem to remember a child, a sullen boy standing knee-deep in the grass, knocking the tops off nettles with a stick and watching me speculatively out of the corner of his eye. Who could he have been? Innocence incarnate, perhaps (yes, I am stifling another shriek of terrible mirth). Shaken already after separate encounters with the Beaver’s unnerving sister and mad mother, I felt foolish, dithering there, with grass-stalks sticking up my trousers legs and a truculent bee enamoured of my hair oil zigzagging drunkenly about my head. I was clutching a manuscript under my arm—something earnest on late cubism, no doubt, or the boldness of Cezanne’s draughtsmanship—and suddenly, there in that abounding glade, the idea of these pinched discriminations struck me as laughable. Sunlight, swift clouds; a breeze swooped and the boughs dipped. The Beaver slept on, holding himself in his arms with his face fallen to one side and a gleaming black wing of hair fanned across his forehead. Obviously this was not his father, whom I had come to see, and who Mrs. Beaver had assured me was asleep in the garden. “He drifts off, you know,” she had said with a queenly sniff; “no concentration.” I had taken this as a hopeful sign: the idea of a dreamily inattentive publisher appealed to my already well-developed sense of myself as an infiltrator. But I was wrong. Max Brevoort—known as Big Beaver, to distinguish him from Nick—would turn out to be as wily and unscrupulous as any of his Dutch merchant forebears.

I close my eyes now and see the light between the apple trees and the boy standing in the long grass and that sleeping beauty
folded in his hammock and the fifty years that have passed between that day and this are as nothing. It was 1929, and I was— yes—twenty-two.

Nick woke up and smiled at me, doing that trick he had of passing in an instant effortlessly from one world to another.

“Hullo,” he said. That was how chaps said it in those days:
hull,
not
hell.
He sat up, running a hand through his hair. The hammock swayed. The small boy, destroyer of nettles, was gone. “God,” Nick said, “I had the strangest dream.”

He accompanied me back to the house. That was how it seemed: not that we were walking together, but that he had bestowed his company on me, for a brief progress, with the ease and diffidence of royalty. He was dressed in whites, and he, like me, was carrying something under his arm, a book, or a newspaper (the news was all bad, that summer, and would get worse). As he walked he kept turning sideways towards me from the waist up and nodding rapidly at everything I said, smiling and frowning and smiling again.

“You’re the Irishman,” he said. “I’ve heard of you. My father thinks your stuff is very good.” He peered at me earnestly. “He does, really.” I mumbled something meant to convey modesty and looked away. What he had seen in my face was not doubt but a momentary gloom:
the Irishman.

The house was Queen Anne, not large, but rather grand, and maintained by Mrs. B. in slovenly opulence: lots of faded silk and
objets
supposedly of great value—Big Beaver was a collector of jade figurines—and a rank smell everywhere of some sort of burnt incense. The plumbing was primitive; there was a lavatory close up under the roof which when it was flushed would make a horrible, cavernous choking noise, like a giant’s death-rattle, that could be heard with embarrassing immediacy all over the house. But the rooms were full of light and there were always fresh-cut flowers, and the atmosphere had something thrillingly suppressed in it, as if at any moment the most amazing events might suddenly begin to happen. Mrs. Brevoort was a large, beaked, bedizened personage, imperious and excitable, who went in for soirees and mild spiritualism. She played the piano—she had studied under someone famous—producing
from the instrument great gaudy storms of sound that made the window panes buzz. Nick found her irresistibly ridiculous and was faintly ashamed of her. She took a shine to me straight off, so Nick told me later (he was lying, I’m sure); she had pronounced me sensitive, he said, and believed I would make a good medium, if only I would try. I quailed before her force and relentlessness, like a skiff borne down upon by an ocean-going liner.

“You didn’t find Max?” she said, pausing in the hallway with a copper kettle in her hand. She was darkly Jewish, and wore her hair in ringlets, and displayed a startling, steep-pitched shelf of off-white bosom. “The beast; he must have forgotten you were coming. I shall tell him you were deeply wounded by his thoughtlessness.”

I began to protest but Nick took me by the elbow—after half a century I can still feel that grip, light but firm, with the hint of a tremor in it—and propelled me into the drawing room, where he flung himself down on a sagging sofa and crossed his legs and leaned back and gazed at me with a smile at once dreamy and intent. The moment stretched. Neither of us spoke. Time can stand still, I am convinced of it; something snags and stops, turning and turning, like a leaf on a stream. A thick drop of sunlight seethed in a glass paperweight on a low table. Mrs. Beaver was in the garden dosing hollyhocks with a mixture from her copper kettle. Tinny jazz-band music came hiccuping faintly down from upstairs, where Baby Beaver was in her bedroom practising dance steps to the gramophone (I know that was what she was doing; it was what she did all the time; later on I married her). Then abruptly Nick gave himself a sort of shake and leaned forward briskly and picked up a silver cigarette box from the table and proffered it to me, holding it open with a thumb hooked on the lid. Those hands.

“She’s quite mad, you know,” he said. “My mother. We all are, in this family. You’ll find out.”

What did we talk about? My essay, perhaps. The relative merits of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
I can’t remember. Presently Max Brevoort arrived. I do not know what I had expected—
The Laughing
Publisher,
I suppose: apple cheeks and a big moustache and snowy ruff—but he was tall and thin and sallow, with an amazingly long, narrow head, bald and polished at its point. He was the gentile but he looked more Jewish than his wife. He wore black serge, somewhat rusty at the knees and elbows. He gazed at me, or through me, with Nick’s large black eyes and the same still, dreamy smile, though his had a glint in it. I babbled, and he kept talking over me, not listening, saying
I know, I know,
and chafing his long brown hands together. What a lot we all did talk in those days. When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of Statements.

“Yes, yes, very interesting,” Big Beaver said. “Poetry is very marketable, these days.”

There was a silence. Nick laughed.

“He’s not a poet, Max,” he said.

I had never before heard a son address his father by his first name. Max Brevoort peered at me.

“But of course you’re not!” he said, without the least embarrassment. “You’re the art critic.” He rubbed his hands harder. “
Very
interesting.”

Then we had tea, served by an impertinent maid, and Mrs. Beaver came in from the garden and Big Beaver told her of his having mistaken me for a poet and they both laughed heartily as if it were a wonderful joke. Nick lifted a sympathetic eyebrow at me.

“Did you drive over?” he asked quietly.

“Train,” I said.

We smiled, exchanging what seemed a kind of signal, conspirators in the making.

And when I was leaving, it was he who took my essay, relieving me of it gently as if it were some wounded, suffering thing, and said he would make sure his father read it. Mrs. Beaver was talking about cigarette ends. “Just pop them in a jam jar,” she said, “and keep them for me.” I must have looked baffled. She lifted the copper kettle and shook it, producing a slushy sound. “For the greenfly,” she said. “Nicotine, you
know. They can’t abide it.” I backed out and the three of them held their places, as if waiting for applause, the parents beaming and Nick darkly amused. Baby was still upstairs, playing her jazz and rehearsing for her entrance in act two.

Midnight. My leg has gone to sleep. Wish the rest of me would go with it. Yet it is not unpleasant to be awake like this, awake and alert, like a nocturnal predator, or, better yet, the guardian of the tribe’s resting place. I used to fear the night, its dreads and dreams, but lately I have begun to enjoy it, almost. Something soft and yielding comes over the world when darkness falls. On the threshold of my second childhood, I suppose I am remembering the nursery, with its woolly warmth and wide-eyed vigils. Even as a babe I was already a solitary. It was not so much my mother’s kiss that I Proustianly craved as the having done with it, so that I could be alone with my self, this strange, soft, breathing body in which my spinning consciousness was darkly trapped, like a dynamo in a sack. I can still see her dim form retreating and the yellow fan of light from the hall folding across the nursery floor as she lingeringly closed the door and stepped backwards in silence out of my life. I was not quite five when she died. Her death was not a cause of suffering to me, as I recall. I was old enough to register the loss but too young to find it more than merely puzzling. My father in his well-meaning way took to sleeping on a camp bed in the nursery to keep my brother Freddie and me company, and for weeks I had to listen to him thrashing all night long in the toils of his grief, mumbling and muttering and calling on his God, heaving long, shuddering sighs that made the camp bed crack its knuckles in exasperation. I would lie there intently, trying to listen beyond him to the wind in the trees that ringed the house like sentinels, and, farther off, the boxy collapse of waves on Carrick strand and the drawn-out hiss of waters receding over the shingle. I would not lie on my right side because that way I could feel my heart beating and I was convinced that if I were going to die I would feel it stop before the terrifying final darkness came down.

Strange creatures, children. That wary look they have when adults are about, as if they are worrying whether they are doing
a convincing enough impersonation of what we expect them to be. The nineteenth century invented childhood and now the world is full of child actors. My poor Blanche was never any good at it, could not remember her lines or where to stand or what to do with her hands. How my heart would fold into itself in sorrow at the school play or on prize-giving day when the line of little girls being good would develop a kink, a sort of panicky quaver, and I would look along the row of heads and sure enough there she would be, on the point of tripping over her own awkwardness, blushing and biting her lip, and sloping her shoulders and bending her knees in a vain attempt to take a few inches off her height. When she was an adolescent I used to show her photographs of Isadora Duncan and Ottoline Morrell and other big, bold women from whose example she might take comfort and whose extravagance she might emulate, but she would not look at them, only sit in miserable silence with bowed head, picking at her hangnails, her wiry hair standing on end, as if a strong current were passing through it, and the heart-breakingly defenceless pale back of her neck exposed. Now Julian, on the other hand … No; I think not. That subject is the very stuff of insomnia.