The Untouchable (31 page)

He talked enthusiastically about the war. Everyone was saying, he said, that Belfast and the shipyards would be bombed; he spoke of the prospect in a tone of gleeful expectation, as of a promised treat of fireworks and staying up all night.

“There was a raid on London yesterday,” I said. “In daylight.”

“Aye, so we heard on the wireless.” He gave a wistful sigh. “A terrible thing.”

The house as always startled me with its familiarity: all still there, all still going on, careless of my absence. As I alighted on the gravel below the front steps, Andy unprecedentedly offered me a helping hand. His palm seemed made of warm, malleable stone. I realised that in his eyes I was the master of St. Nicholas’s now.

I found Hettie in the big stone-flagged back kitchen, sitting on a spindle-backed chair listlessly shelling peas into a battered saucepan. Her hair, those big auburn tresses of which she had once been guiltily proud, had turned into a matted nest, with grey wisps dangling over her forehead and trailing down the back of her cardigan. She was wearing a sack-shaped brown dress and those fur-lined ankle-boots that are exclusive to decaying old women. She greeted me without surprise and
cracked open another pea-pod. I leaned down awkwardly and kissed her forehead, and she shied away from me in a sort of sullen alarm, like a beast of burden more used to blows than endearments. I smelled her smell.

“Hettie,” I said, “how are you?”

She nodded dully, giving a tremendous sniff. A tear rolled down at the side of her fat nose and plopped into the saucepan on her lap.

“You’re good to have come,”, she said. “Was it dangerous, travelling?”

“No. The bombings have only been in London.”

“I read in the newspaper about these submarines.”

“Not in the Irish Sea, I think, Hettie. Not yet, anyway.”

She made a sound that was half sigh, half sob, hunching her back and letting it fall slack again, a big old bag of bones. I looked beyond her through the window to the garden, where the sunlight glistened in the leaves of the sycamore standing there in its solitude, vastly atremble, its green already tinged with autumnal grey. One day when I was small I fell out of that tree, and lay motionless in the lush grass in a kind of misty languor, with a numbed arm twisted under me, watching Hettie running in slow motion towards me across the lawn, barefoot, her arms outstretched, like one of Picasso’s mighty maenads, and in that moment I experienced an inexplicable and perfect happiness, such as I had not known before, nor have since, and for which even a broken arm seemed a not unreasonable price to pay.

“How are you, Hettie?” I said again. “How are you managing?” She seemed not to hear me. I took the saucepan from her and set it on the table. She continued to sit with shoulders hunched and head bowed, a sorrowing old buffalo, picking distractedly at her fingernails. “Where’s Freddie?” I said. “Is he all right?”

She lifted her eyes to the sunlight and September’s fading green in the window.

“He was so calm,” she said, “so calm and good.” For a moment I thought she was speaking of my brother. She heaved another sighing sob. “He was there in the garden, you know, putting out scraps for a fox that comes down at night from the
hills. I saw him bending over, and he gave a kind of start, as if he had remembered something important. And then he just fell down.” I saw her again, billowing towards me across the lawn, bare arms outstretched, her big white legs flexing and her feet hardly seeming to touch the grass over which she ran. “He held my hand. He told me not to worry myself. I hardly knew it when he was gone.” She put her hands on her knees and heaved herself to her feet and went to the sink and ran the cold tap and pressed wetted fingers hard into the sockets of her eyes. “You were good to come,” she said again. “We know how busy you must be, with the war on.”

She made tea for us, moving from sink to table to sideboard at a flat-footed, leaden pace. A friend of hers, she told me, had taken Freddie to the seaside for the afternoon—Freddie had always been fascinated by the sea, and would sit on the shingle for hours gazing out with rapt attention over this strange, unknowable, shifting element, as if he had once seen something rising out of it, a sea monster, or a tridented god, and was patiently waiting for it to appear again.

“Have you spoken to him about… about Father?” I said.

She peered at me in momentary puzzlement.

“Oh, but he was here,” she said. “We were both here. He came and sat beside your father on the lawn, and held his hand as well. He knew what was happening. He cried. He wouldn’t come away, I had to get Andy to help me make him go indoors while we waited for the ambulance. And when they were taking your father away he wanted to go with him.”

The teapot smoked in the pale light from the window; soon it would be full autumn. I had a sudden vision of a world in flames.

“We shall have to think about his future, now,” I said.

She became very busy with the tea things.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “we’ll need to find a position for him.”

I thought of Freddie sitting splay-legged on the seashore, in his jersey and his stained trousers, his face lifted to the horizon, grinning happily into that vast emptiness.

“Yes, of course,” I said, faintly. “A position.”

I went for a walk, alone, up in the hills. Even on the clearest days the sunlight here seemed hazy and somehow aswarm,
falling like gauze over rocks and bushes, thickening to a milky blur the tremulous blue distances. How cunningly the grieving heart seeks comfort for itself, conjuring up the softest of sorrows, the most sweetly piercing recollections, in which it is always summer, replete with birdsong and the impossible radiance of a transfigured past. I leaned on a rock and gently wept, and saw myself, leaning, weeping, and was at once gratified and ashamed.

When I returned to the house Hettie was plying the teapot again and the kitchen seemed filled with people. Hettie’s friend was there, a Mrs. Blenkinsop, tall, thin, pale visaged, in a frightening hat, and Freddie, sitting with an ankle crossed on a knee and his right arm flung over the back of his chair, looking uncannily like my father in one of his rare relaxed moments. Most startling of all was the presence of Andy Wilson. He was sitting at the table with a mug of tea before him, hardly recognisable with his cap off, his bald pate pale as a blanched leek above his narrow little weather-beaten weaselly face. I had never in my life known him to come inside the house, and now that he had got in I did not like his defiantly easy, proprietorial air. I gave him a hard look, at which he refused to flinch, and he made no move to rise. The Blenkinsop woman in turn was looking hard at me, and seeming not to approve of what she saw. It is always the most unexpected people who see through one. She offered me brisk condolences and went back to talking of church matters to Hettie, who, it was evident, was not listening. Freddie was shooting me shy glances from under colourless lashes. The corner of his mouth was gnawed to pulp, always a sign in him of acute distress. I laid a hand on his shoulder, and he went into a paroxysm of affection, shivering like a gun dog, and stroking my hand convulsively with his own.

“We had a grand time at the seaside,” Mrs. Blenkinsop said to me loudly in her knife-edged, Presbyterian voice. “Isn’t that right, Freddie?”

Freddie did not look at her, but another, different sort of spasm passed through him, and I knew exactly what he thought of Mrs. Blenkinsop.

“Aye,” said Andy, “he do love the strand.”

The funeral was a grim affair, even for a funeral, with urns of flesh-smelling trumpet lilies in the church, and quavery organ music, and much stylised lamentation by a succession of alternately rotund and shrivelled churchmen. Hettie stood in the front pew with Freddie clinging to her arm; they were like a pair of lost, ancient children. Now and then Freddie would send up one of his werewolf ululations to the varnished rafters, and the congregation would stir uneasily, hymnals fluttering. The weather, though fine before and after, laid on a pretty little sun-shower for the interment. Afterwards, as we walked back to the motor cars along an avenue of dripping yews, I engaged in covert consultation with a jolly old hypocrite by the name of Wetherby, who was to be my father’s successor to the bishopric, and whom I knew to have special responsibility for a number of Belfast’s charitable institutions. When he understood my purpose he tried to sidle away from me, but I would not let him go until I had got out of him what I needed to know, along with a reluctant promise of help. Back at the rectory I shut myself into my father’s study with the telephone, and by dinnertime that evening I had the plan ready to put to Hettie. She could not take it in at first.

“You know there is no other way,” I told her. “He’ll be taken care of there; they have facilities.”

We were in the upstairs drawing room. Hettie in her widow’s weeds had a monumental aspect, sitting squarely in an armchair by the window, like the figure of an ancient idol on display on a temple altar, with a rhomb of late sunlight smouldering redly on the carpet at her feet. She gazed at me unblinkingly from under hanging straggles of hair, frowning in an effort of concentration, and agitatedly twining and twining her fingers, as if she were wielding a pair of knitting needles.

“Facilities,” she said; it might have been a word in a foreign language.

“Yes,” I said. “They’ll look after him. It will be for the best. I spoke to Canon Wetherby, and I telephoned the Home. I can bring him in today.”

She opened her eyes very wide.

“Today…?”

“There is no reason to delay. You have enough to cope with.”

“But-”

“And besides, I must get back to London.”

She turned her great head slowly—I could almost hear the gears working—and looked out unseeing at the hills and a distant thin brushstroke of purplish sea. Mingled gorse and heather glowed on the hillsides.

“That’s what Myra Blenkinsop says too,” Hettie said, grown sullen now.

“What does Myra Blenkinsop say?”

She turned her head to look at me again, with a kind of puzzled curiosity, as if I were someone she thought she had known but now did not recognise at all.

“She says what you say, that poor Freddie should be in a Home.”

We were silent then, and sat for a long time, looking away from each other, adrift in ourselves. I wonder what it will be like to die. I imagine it as a slow, helpless stumbling into deeper and deeper confusion, a kind of mute, maundering drunkenness from which there will be no sobering up. Did my father really hold Hettie’s hand and tell her not to worry herself, or did she invent the scene? How do we die? I should like to know. I should like to be prepared.

On the next day I had Andy bring out the Daimler—the Bishop’s Car, as even we in the family had always called it—from the tumbledown shed behind the house, where for most of the year it bided its time in clay-smelling darkness, vast, sleek and intent, like a wild beast that had blundered into captivity and could only be let out, coughing and growling, on occasions of rare significance. Andy treated it as a sentient being, manipulating it delicately and with circumspection, sitting bolt upright and clutching the wheel and the gearstick as if they were a chair and pistol. Freddie became greatly excited, and stumped about the lawn in agitated circles, grinning and crowing. He associated the car with Christmas, and summer jaunts, and those colourful church ceremonials which he loved, and which I suspect he thought were laid on specially for his delight. Hettie brought the suitcase she had packed for him. It was an old one, stuck all over with faded travel labels, testaments of my father’s
Wanderjahre;
Freddie fingered them wonderingly, as if they were the petals of
rare plants from foreign lands plastered to the leather. Hettie wore a black straw hat and black gloves; she clambered into the back seat and settled herself with henlike subsidences, sweating and sighing. I had a bad moment when I got behind the wheel and Freddie leaned over from the passenger seat and put his head lovingly on my shoulder and pressed his straw-dry hair against my cheek. My nostrils filled up with his milk-and-biscuits smell—Freddie never lost the smell of childhood—and my hands faltered on the controls. But then I saw Andy Wilson standing on the grass watching me with spiteful surmise, and I put my foot down on the accelerator with merciless force, and the vast old motor surged forward on the gravel, and in the mirror I saw the house abruptly shrinking to a miniature of itself, complete with toy trees and cotton wool clouds and a toy-sized Andy Wilson with one arm lifted in hieratic and, so it seemed, scornful farewell.

The day was bright, the blue air shimmering with freshets of wind. As we progressed sedately southwards along the Lough Freddie looked out with lively interest at the scenery. Every so often a doggy shiver of excitement would make his knees knock. What can he have been anticipating? My mind kept touching the thought of the prospect before him and flinching away from it like a snail from salt. In the back seat Hettie was muttering under her breath and heaving little sighs. It struck me that soon I might well be travelling this road again, with her beside me this time, and her things in a bag in the boot, on the way to another betrayal dressed up as necessity. I saw my father’s face before me, half smiling in his tentative, quizzical way, and then turning sadly aside, and fading.

The Nursing Home, as it was misleadingly referred to, was big and square, made of dark brick, standing in a dispiritingly well-tended garden in a sombre cul de sac off the Malone Road. As we turned in at the gate Freddie leaned close to the windscreen to look up at the stern frontage of the place, and I thought I detected in him the first tremor of unease. He turned to me with an enquiring smile.

“This is where you’re going to live now, Freddie,” I said. He nodded vehemently, making gagging noises. It was always
impossible to know how much he might understand of what was being said to him. “But only if you like it,” I added, cravenly.

In the vestibule were cracked tiles, brown shadows, a big clay pot of dried-out geraniums; there we were greeted by a sort of nun, or lay sister, in a grey wool outfit and a complicated wimple, something like a bee-keeper’s headdress, in which her small sharp beaky face, the face of a baby owl, was rigidly framed. (Where on earth did a nun come from?—was the place run by Catholics? Surely not; my memory must be up to its old tricks again.) Freddie did not like the look of her at all, and balked, and I had to take him by one quivering arm and press him forward. I was by now in a state of truculent ill-temper. This is, I have noticed, a common response in me when there is something unpleasant to be done. Freddie in particular always provoked my ire. Even when we were children, and he used to stumble along beside me in the mornings to Miss Molyneaux’s infant school, I would have worked myself into such a rage by the time we got there that I would hardly notice the other children gloating at the spectacle of the rector’s snooty son hustling his imbecile brother into the classroom by the scruff of his neck.