The Untouchable (30 page)

“I hear you were in France,” Querell said, regarding me over the rim of his glass with a glint of amusement.

“Got back this morning. Bit of a flap, all right.”

“Our finest hour.”

“Um. What about you?”

“Oh, no chance of heroics for me. I’m just a desk man.”

Tony placed my drink before me, setting the glass down on its cork coaster with a deft little flourish of the wrist, as if he were giving a start to a spinning-top. Boy claimed that Tony—all quiff and crooked teeth and lardy pallor—was a demon in bed. One gin-numbed afternoon during the Suez crisis I made a pass at him, and was rebuffed with a scornful laugh. Sometimes I think I should have stuck to women.

Querell and I went and sat at a table in a corner under a small, rather good watercolour nude by someone whose signature I could not read—Betty Bowler had an eye for a picture, and sometimes would take work from indigent club members in return for a cleared slate; when she died in the sixties I bought a couple of things from her collection. She turned out to have a son, a plump, unhappy-looking fellow with bad breath and a wheeze; also, he had a limp, a curious echo of his mother’s wooden leg, I thought. He drove a damned hard bargain, but still, on the Institute’s behalf I got that early Francis Bacon out of him for a song.

“Did it ever occur to you,” Querell said, surveying the room with its scattering of shadowed, solitary drinkers, “that this business is just an excuse for people like you and me to spend our afternoons in places like this?”

“Which business?”

He gave me a wry look. Presently he said:

“They’re setting up a code-breaking centre. Place near Oxford. Very hush-hush. They’re looking for people with a mathematical bent—chess players, puzzle solvers,
Times
crossword addicts, that sort of thing. Mad professors. They’ve asked me to ask around.”

It was a conceit of Querell’s to behave as if his connection with the Department were entirely casual, a matter of his being called upon once in a way to do a favour, or carry a message.

“It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing,” I said; never show eagerness, that is one of the first rules.

“Not suggesting it would be,” he said. “You’re no Albert Einstein, are you. No, I just thought you might be able to suggest some names. I don’t know many Cambridge men: not the boffins, anyway.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s Alastair Sykes, he’s one of the best maths people I know of.” I pointed to his empty glass. “Want another?”

When I came back with our drinks Querell was gazing before him vacantly and picking his teeth with a matchstick. When two agents, even from the same side, begin to discuss important business, an odd effect occurs, a kind of general deceleration, as if the wave pattern of everything, the ordinary noise of self and the world, had lengthened to twice its normal frequency; through these broad highs and troughs one seems to drift, with aimless intent, buoyant and taut as a hair suspended in water. Querell said:

“As a matter of fact, Sykes is already in. He’s going to be a top man in the operation.”

“Good.”

Yes, indeed.

“Another leftie, is he?” Querell said.

“He was never in the Party, if that’s what you mean.”

He chuckled.

“No,” he said, “that’s
not
what I mean.” He fished the olive from his drink and nibbled on it thoughtfully. “Not that it matters much; even the Comrades are being called on to do their bit for the realm. He needs keeping an eye on, though.” He gave
me a malignant, sidelong leer.
“All
you lot do.” He finished his drink with a snap of the wrist and stood up. “Come and see me tomorrow in the office and I’ll put you in the picture. The Department is setting up a special section to monitor the decrypts. You might want to give them a hand. Not much chance of anything swashbuckling, but you’ve probably had enough of that, after France.”

“It really wasn’t much fun, you know, France,” I said. “Not at the end, anyway.”

He stood, on the point of going, one hand in his jacket pocket, looking down at me with the pursed remains of that evil smile.

“Oh, I know that,” he said softly, in a tone of intimate contempt. “Everyone knows that.”

When Oleg Davidovich Kropotsky waddled into my life, the first thing that struck me was how remarkable an embodiment he was of his name, with its crowding syllables, its preponderance of fat
o
’s and
d
’s, that jaggedly angled capital
K—
he had something of the air of one of Kafka’s clerks, did Oleg—and the
pot,
as in pot belly, sitting plump in the middle. He was not much above five feet tall. Little tubular legs, a broad, low-slung torso and spreading blue-grey jowls that sat toad-fashion on his shirt collar, all made it seem as if he might once have been tall and thin but over the years had succumbed in a spectacular manner to the compressive effects of gravity, Boy used to tease him by telling him he was turning into a Chinaman—Oleg despised all Orientals—and it is true that he did bear a resemblance to one of those fat little squatting jade figures that Big Beaver used to collect. Sweat was his medium; even on the coldest days he was coated in a dully shining, putty-grey film of moisture, as if he had just been lifted out of a tank of embalming fluid. He wore a soiled mac and a squashed brown hat, and shapeless electric-blue suits with concertina trousers. When he sat down—with Oleg, the act of sitting down seemed a form of general collapse—he always kicked off his shoes, and they would stand splayed before him with their laces trailing and tongues hanging out, scuffed, cracked, turned up at the toes Turkish-slipper fashion, the very emblems of his dolefulness and physical distress.

His cover was a second-hand bookshop in a side street off
Long Acre. He knew nothing about books, and was rarely at the shop, which hardly mattered, since the place attracted few customers. He detested London, because of its rigid class distinctions and the hypocrisy of its ruling elite, so he said; I suspect the real reason was that he was afraid of the place, its wealth and assurance, its cold-eyed men and svelte, terrifying women. Boy and I introduced him to the East End, where he was more at ease amid the squalor and the raucousness, and for our meetings we settled on a workman’s cafe in the Mile End Road, with steamy windows and spit on the floor and a big brown-stained tea-urn that rumbled in its depths, like a steel stomach, all day long.

Our first encounter took place in Covent Garden. I told him of my interesting conversation with Querell at the Gryphon Club.

“Place called Bletchley Park,” I said. “Monitoring German signals traffic.”

Oleg was inclined to be suspicious.

“And this man has offered you a job?”

“Well, hardly a job.”

I had seen right away that Oleg was not greatly impressed with me. I think the Comrades all found me a little—how shall I say?—a little uncanny. I suspect I exude a faint odour of sanctity, inherited from a long line of clerical forebears, which Oleg and his like would have mistaken for a sign of zealotry, and which would worry them, for they were practical men, and chary of ideology. They were happier with Boy’s avidity and schoolboy hunger for action, and even with Leo Rothenstein’s patrician disdain—though of course, being good Russians, they were all of them vigorously anti-Semitic. As we walked together round and round the market in the sunshine, smelling the pleasurably nauseating, greeny smells from the vegetable stalls, Oleg launched into an earnest apologia for the Nazi-Stalin pact. I listened politely, going along with my hands clasped at my back and an ear judiciously inclined to his tortured elucidations, all the while amusing myself by studying the antics of the sparrows hopping about nimbly under our feet. When he had done, I said:

“Look here, Mr. Kropotkin—”

“Hector, please; Hector is my code name.”

“Yes, well-”

“And Kropotsky is my own name.”

“Well, Mr.… Hector, I want to make something clear. I don’t at all care for your country, I’m afraid, or for your leaders. Forgive me for saying so, but it’s true. I believe in the Revolution, of course; I just wish it had happened somewhere else. Sorry.”

Oleg only nodded, smiling to himself. His head was big and round, like the globe on the pillar of a gate.

“Where do you think the Revolution should have happened?” he said. “In America?”

I laughed.

“To anticipate Brecht,” I said, “I think America and Russia are both whores—but my whore is pregnant.”

He stopped, and stood, a finger and thumb palping his babyish lower lip, and gave a kind of burbling snort, which it took me a moment to identify as laughter.

“John, you are right. Russia is an old whore.”

Two sparrows were fighting under a barrowload of cabbages, going at each other like a pair of amputated, feathery claws. Oleg turned aside to buy a bag of apples, counting out the pennies from a little leather purse, softly snorting still and shaking his head, his hat pushed back. I could see him as a schoolboy, fat, funny, troubled, the butt of playground jokes. We walked on again. I watched him sidelong as he ate his apple, the pink prehensile lips and yellow teeth mumbling the white mush, and was reminded of Carrickdrum and Andy Wilson’s pony, which used to turn its mouth inside out at me and try to bite my face.

“A whore, yes,” he said happily. “And if they heard me saying it…” He put a finger to his temple. “
Bang.
” And laughed again.

Another IRA bomb in Oxford Street tonight. No one killed, but a glorious amount of damage and disruption. How determined they are. All that rage, that race-hatred. We should have been like that. We should have had no mercy, no qualms. We would have brought down a whole world.

I
t was during one of the first of the great daylight bombing raids on London that I received the news of my father’s death. I am convinced this is the reason that I was never as frightened in the Blitz as I should have been. The shock somehow deadened my susceptibility to terror. I like to think of it as my father’s final kindness to me. I had returned to Gloucester Terrace after delivering a lecture at the Institute when the telegram arrived. I was in uniform—I always wore my uniform when lecturing, being an incorrigible dresser-up—and the telegraph boy eyed my captain’s pips enviously. In fact, he was not a boy but a cadaverous oldster with a smoker’s cough and a Hitlerian cowlick. He also had a lazy eye, so that when I looked up from the stark news—
Father dead stop Hermione Maskell
—I thought that he was giving me a broad, conspiratorial wink. Death chooses the most unprepossessing messengers. We could hear the bombs exploding, a muffled crumpling sound like that of something vast and wooden falling slowly down a series of stone steps, and under our feet the floor quaked. He cocked an ear and grinned.

“Old Adolf’s paying us a daylight visit,” he said cheerfully. I gave him a shilling. He nodded at the telegram in my hand. “Not bad news, I hope, sir?”

“No no,” I heard myself say. “My father has died.”

I went back into the flat. The door closed behind me with a
solemn thud; how obligingly at times like this the most commonplace procedures take on an air of pomp and finality. I sat down slowly on a straight-backed chair, hands on my knees and my feet planted side by side on the carpet; what is that Egyptian god, the dog-headed one? The afternoon around me had settled into a dreamy stillness, except for the sunlight falling in the window, a pale-gold tube of teeming particles. And still the bombs were falling afar in dulled funereal cannonades. Father. A weight of guilt and dry grief descended on me, and I shouldered it wearily. How familiar it seemed! It was like putting on an old overcoat. Was I somehow remembering back to my mother’s death, thirty years before?

But the person I found myself thinking of, to my surprise, was Vivienne, as if it were she and not my father I had lost. She was in Oxford, with the child. I attempted to telephone her, but the lines were down. I sat for a while listening to the bombing. I tried to imagine the people dying—now, at this moment, and close by—but could not. I recalled a phrase from my lecture that morning:
The problem for Poussin in the depiction of suffering is how to stylise it, as the rules of classical art demand, while yet making it immediately felt.

That night I took the mail boat to Dublin. The crossing was unseasonably rough. I spent it in the bar, in the company of English travelling salesmen and Irish hod carriers mad on porter. I got vilely drunk, and tried to make maudlin conversation with the barman, who was from Tipperary, and whose mother had recently died. I leaned my forehead on the back of my wrist and wept, in that odd, detached way one does when one is drunk; it only made me feel worse. We arrived in Kingstown at three in the morning. I collapsed on a bench under a tree on the harbourfront. The wind had died, and I sat in the soft cool late-summer darkness and listened in melancholy rapture to a lone bird warbling in the leaves above me. I dozed for a while, and presently at my back the dawn came up, and I woke in anguish, not knowing for a moment where I was or what I should be doing. I found a taxi, the driver still half asleep, and travelled into the city, where I had to sit for another hour nursing my burgeoning hangover in a deserted and eerily echoing railway
station while I waited for the first train to Belfast. On the platform, ill-tempered, putteed pigeons swaggered about under my feet, and a strong, heatless sun beat upon the grimed glass roof high above me. These are the moments that lodge in the memory.

It was afternoon by the time I got to Carrickdrum. I was numb from travelling and the night’s drinking. Andy Wilson was at the station with the pony-and-trap. He greeted me warily, avoiding my eye.

“Didn’t think I would outlast him,” he said, “I surely didn’t.”

We set off up the West Road. The gorse; the pony’s straw-and-sacking smell; the ash-blue sea.

“How is Mrs. Maskell?” I said. For answer Andy only shrugged. “And Freddie? Does he realise what’s happened?”

“Och, he knows, right enough; how would he not?”