The Untouchable (3 page)

Among the newspaper pack this morning there was a girl reporter—how these terms date one!—who reminded me of Blanche, I don’t quite know why. She was not big, like my daughter, but in her manner she had something of the same intent watchfulness. Clever, too: while the rest kept elbowing each other aside in order to ask the obvious questions, such as whether there are more of us still to be unmasked (!), or if Mrs. W. had known all along, she sat fixed on me with what seemed a sort of hunger and hardly spoke at all, and then only to ask for names and dates and places, information which I suspect she already possessed. It was as if she were carrying out some private test on me, checking my responses, measuring my emotions. Perhaps I, in turn, reminded her of her father? Girls, in my admittedly limited experience of them, are ever on the lookout for their Dad. I considered asking her to stay to lunch—that was the kind of giddy mood I was in—for suddenly the thought of being alone after they had vacated the place was not at all attractive.
This was strange; I have never suffered from loneliness in the past. Indeed, as I said already, I have always considered myself to be a perfectly reconciled solitary, especially after poor Patrick died. But there was something about this girl, and not just her indefinable resemblance to Blanche, that attracted my attention. A fellow loner? I did not get her name and do not even know which of the papers she works for. I shall read them all tomorrow and see if I can identify her style.

Tomorrow. Dear God, how can I face a tomorrow.

Well, I am everywhere. Pages and pages of me. This must be how it feels to be the leading man on the morning after a stupendously disastrous first night. I went to a number of newsagents, for the sake of decency, though it got increasingly awkward as the bundle of newspapers under my arm steadily thickened. Some of the people behind the counters recognised me and curled a contemptuous lip; reactionaries to a man, shopkeepers, I have noticed it before. One chap, though, gave me a sort of sad, underhand smile. He was a Pakistani. What company I shall be in from now on. Old lags. Child molesters. Outcasts. The lost ones.

It has been confirmed: the K is to be revoked. I mind. I am surprised how much I mind. Just Doctor again, if even that; maybe just plain Mister. At least they have not taken away my bus pass, or my laundry allowance (the latter an acknowledgement, I imagine, that over the age of sixty-five one tends to dribble a lot).

That writer chap telephoned, requesting an interview. What effrontery. Well-spoken, however, and not at all embarrassed. Brisk tone, faintly amused, with a hint almost of fondness: after all, I am his ticket to fame, or notoriety, at least. I asked him to say who it was that betrayed me. That provoked a chuckle. Said even a journalist would go to gaol rather than reveal a source. They love to trot out that particular hobby-horse. I might have said to him,
My dear fellow, I have been in gaol for the best part of thirty years.
Instead, I rang off.

The
Telegraph
sent a photographer to Carrickdrum, site of my bourgeois beginnings. The house is no longer the bishop’s
residence, and is owned, the paper tells me, by a man who deals in scrap metal. The sentinel trees are gone—the scrap merchant must have wanted more light—and the brickwork has been covered with a new facing, painted white. I am tempted to work up a metaphor for change and loss, but I must beware turning into a sentimental old ass, if I am not one already. St. Nicholas’s (St. Nicholas’s!—I never made the connection before) was a grim and gloomy pile, and a bit of stucco and white paint can only be an improvement. I see myself as a little boy sitting head on hand in the bay window in the parlour, looking out at the rain falling on the sloping lawn and the far-off, stone-grey waters of the Lough, hearing poor Freddie wandering about upstairs crooning like a dreamy banshee. That’s Carrickdrum. When my father married again, with what struck me even at the age of six as unseemly haste, I awaited the appearance of my stepmother— they had married in London—with a mixture of curiosity, anger and apprehension, expecting a witch out of an Arthur Rackham illustration, with violet eyes and fingernails like stilettos. When the happy couple arrived, mounted, with odd appropriateness, on a jaunting car, I was surprised and obscurely disappointed to find that she was nothing like my expectations of her, but a big, jolly woman, broad in the beam and pink of cheek, with a washerwoman’s thick arms and a loud, trembly laugh. Coming up the front steps she spotted me in the hallway and broke into a wallowing run, big red hands lifted, and fell upon my neck, nuzzling me wetly and uttering distressful little grunts of joy. She smelled of face powder and peppermints and female sweat. She unclasped me and stepped back, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of a hand, and threw a histrionically fervent glance back at my father, while I stood frowning, trying to cope with a welter of sensations I did not recognise, among them a faint premonition of that unexpected happiness she was to bring to St. Nicholas’s. My father wrung his hands and grinned sheepishly and avoided my eye. No one said anything, yet there was the sense of loud and continuous noise, as if the unexpected gaiety of the occasion were producing a din of its own. Then my brother appeared on the stairs, descending sideways with his Quasimodo lurch and drooling—no, no, I am exaggerating, he was not
really that bad—and brought the moment to its senses. “And this,” said my father, fairly bellowing in his nervousness, “this is Freddie!”

How difficult that day must have been for my mother—I always think of her as that, my natural mother having bowed out so early—and how well she managed it all, settling herself upon the house like a great warm roosting bird. That first day, she embraced poor Freddie stoutly, and listened to the gaggings and strangled howls that with him passed for speech, nodding her head as if she were understanding him perfectly, and even produced a hanky and wiped the spittle from his chin. I’m sure my father must have told her about him, but I doubt if any mere description could have prepared her for Freddie. He gave her his broadest gap-toothed grin and put his arms tightly about her big hips and laid his face against her stomach, as if he were welcoming her home. Most likely he thought she was our real mother come back transformed from the land of the dead. Behind her my father heaved a queer, groaning sort of sigh, like that of someone setting down at long last a toilsome and unmanageable burden.

Her name was Hermione. We called her Hettie. Thank God she did not live to see me disgraced.

Day three. Life goes on. The anonymous telephone calls have abated. They did not start up until first thing yesterday, after the story had appeared in the morning papers (and I thought everyone got their news these days from the telly!). I had to leave the receiver off the hook; whenever I replaced it, the damned instrument would immediately start shrilling at me, seeming to dance in rage. The callers are men, for the most part, belt-and-braces types by the sound of them, but there have been a few females as well, refined old things with gentle, reedy voices and the vocabulary of a navvy. The abuse is entirely personal. It is as if I had embezzled their pensions. At first I was polite, and even got into conversations of a sort with the less mad among them (one chap wanted to know if I had met Beria—I think he was interested in the Georgian’s love life). I should have recorded them, it would have made a revealing cross-section of the
English national character. One call, however, I welcomed. She announced herself diffidently while giving the impression that she expected me to know her. And she was right: I did not recognise her name, but I remembered the voice. Which paper was it again? I asked. There was a pause. “I’m freelance,” she said. That explained why I could not find her trace in yesterday’s accounts of my press conference (my press conference!—gosh, how grand it sounds). She is called Vandeleur. I wondered if there was an Irish connection—lots of Vandeleurs in Ireland— but she says not, and even seemed a bit put out by the suggestion. The Irish are not popular these days, with IRA bombs going off in the city every other week. I have forgotten her first name. Sophie? Sibyl? Something quaintly archaic, anyway. I told her to come round in the afternoon. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Then I had an attack of the fidgets while I waited for her, and burned my hand cooking lunch (grilled lamb chop, sliced tomato, a leaf of lettuce; no booze—felt I should keep a clear head). She arrived on the dot, muffled in a big old coat that looked as if it had belonged to her father (there’s Dad again). Dark short hair like fine fur and a little heart-shaped face and tiny, cold-looking hands. She made me think of a delicate, rare, very self-possessed small animal. Josefina the Songstress. What age is she? Late twenties, early thirties. She stood in the middle of the living room, one of those little claws braced in a peculiar, old-womany way on the lacquered edge of the Japanese table, and looked about carefully, as if to memorise what she saw.

“What a nice flat,” she said flatly. “I didn’t notice, last time.”

“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.