The Untouchable (35 page)

“What did Vivienne want with me?” I said.

Nick gave a gloomy laugh. “I think you’ve put her in pod again, old boy.” The kettle clanged against the tap. He looked at me through his fingers with a death’s-head grin. “Or someone has, anyway.”

And so, for the second time in my life, I found myself, in autumn, on a train bound for Oxford, with a difficult encounter in view; before, it was Mrs. Beaver I had been going to see, before the whole thing started, and now it was her daughter. Funny, that: I still thought of Vivienne as one of the Brevoorts. A daughter, that is; a sister;
wife
was a word to which I had never quite become reconciled. The train was slow, and extremely smelly— where did the notion of the romance of steam travel come from, I wonder?—and the first-class seats had all been taken by the time I got to the ticket window. Every compartment had its contingent of soldiers, other ranks, mostly, with the odd bored officer smoking jadedly and watching in bitter wistfulness the sunlit fields of England flowing past. I had settled down as best I could to work—I was revising the Borromini lectures, which I hoped to persuade Big Beaver to bring out in book form—when someone folded himself sinuously into the seat beside me and said:

“Ah, the admirable detachment of the scholar.”

It was Querell. I was not pleased to see him, and must have
shown it, for he smiled thinly in satisfaction, and crossed his arms and his long, spidery legs and settled back happily in the seat. I told him I was going to Oxford. “And you?”

He shrugged. “Oh, further than that. But I’ll be changing there.” Bletchley, then, I thought, with a twinge of jealousy. “How do you find the work now, in your section?”

“Fascinating.”

He turned his head and leaned a little way forward to look at me.

“That’s good,” he said, with no particular emphasis. “I hear you’re sharing a billet these days with Bannister and Nick Brevoort.”

“I have a room in Leo Rothenstein’s place in Poland Street,” I said, sounding defensive even to my own ears. He nodded, tapping a long finger on the barrel of his cigarette.

“Wife left you, has she?”

“No. She’s in Oxford, with our child. I’m on my way to see her.”

Why did I always feel it necessary to explain myself to him? Anyway, he was not listening.

“Bannister’s a bit of a worry, don’t you think?” he said.

Cows, a farmer on a tractor, the sudden, sun-dazzled windows of a factory.

“A worry?”

Querell shifted, and threw back his head and emitted a rapid thin stream of smoke towards the carriage ceiling.

“I hear him around town, at the Reform, or in the Gryphon. Always drunk, always shouting about this or that. One day it’s Goebbels, who he says he hopes will take over the BBC when the Germans win, the next it’s what a sound chap Stalin is. I can’t make him out.” He turned his head again to look at me. “Can you?”

“It’s just talk,” I said. “He’s quite sound.”

“You think so?” he said thoughtfully. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.” He mused for a while, working at his cigarette. “Mind you, I do wonder what you fellows would consider
sound
.” He smiled his lizard smile, and then leaned forward again, craning towards the window. “Here we are,” he said, “Oxford.” He looked at the
papers on my knee. “You didn’t get any work done, did you. Sorry.” He watched me while I gathered up my things. I had got down to the platform when he appeared in the door behind me. “By the way,” he said, “give my regards to your wife. I hear she’s expecting again.”

I was leaving the station when I saw him. He had got off the train after all, and was hanging back in the ticket office, pretending to read the timetable.

Vivienne was reclining in a deckchair on the lawn, with a tartan rug over her knees and a sheaf of glossy magazines on the grass beside her. At her feet there was a tray with the remains of tea things, jam and buttered bread and a pot of clotted cream; apparently her condition had not affected her appetite. The bruised hollows under her eyes were a deeper shade of mauve than usual, and her black hair, Nick’s hair, had shed something of its lustre. She greeted me with a smile, extending a cool, queenly hand for me to kiss. That smile: one plucked and painted eyebrow arched, the lips compressed as if to prevent an outbreak of the mocking laughter that was already there, that was always there, in her eyes. “Do I look pale and interesting?” she said. “Tell me I do.” I stood before her awkwardly on the grass. From the corner of my eye I could see her mother lurking among the flowerbeds at the side of the house, pretending she had not yet noticed my arrival. I wondered if Big Beaver was home; he had already written to me moaning about paper rationing and the loss of his best compositors to the army.

“How smart you look,” Vivienne said, lifting an arm to shade her eyes and scanning me up and down. “Quite the steadfast soldier.”

“That’s what Boy Bannister says, too.”

“Does he? I thought he preferred the rougher types.” She moved the magazines to make a space for me on the grass beside her chair. “Sit; tell me all the gossip. I suppose everybody is being terribly brave despite the bombs. Even the Palace is not immune. Wasn’t it gulp-inducing how the Queen made common cause with the plucky East Enders? I feel such a shirker, cowering up here; I shouldn’t be surprised if one of the
Oxford matrons presses a yellow feather on me in the High some morning. Or was it white feathers they used to hand out to the conchies last time round? Perhaps I should hang a placard about my neck advertising my condition. Breeding for Britain, you know.”

Idly I watched my mother-in-law creeping along a bed of dahlias, plucking up snails and tossing them into a bucket of brine.

“Querell was on the train,” I said. “Have you been seeing him?”

“
Seeing
him?” She laughed. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I just wondered. He knew about the … he knew you were …”

“Oh, Nick will have told him.”

How cool she was! Mrs. Beaver put down her bucket and straightened up with a hand pressed to the small of her back, and looked all about with a great show of absent-mindedness, still ignoring me.

“Nick?” I said. “Why would Nick tell him?”

“He’s going about telling everyone. He thinks it’s a scream, for some reason. I wish I could see the funny side of it.”

“But why would he tell Querell? I thought they detested each other.”

“Oh, no; they’re thick as thieves, those two, aren’t they?” She turned in the chair to look at me. “What
did
you mean, have I been seeing Querell?” I said nothing, and her face emptied and grew hard. “You don’t want this child, do you,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s true, isn’t it.”

I shrugged.

“The times are hardly propitious,” I said, “with this war, and worse to come, probably, when it’s over.”

She studied me, smiling.

“What a heartless beast you are, Victor,” she said, wonderingly.

I looked away.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She sighed, and picked with scarlet fingernails at the rug on her lap.

“So am I,” she said. Faintly we could hear the bell for evensong at Christ Church. “It’s going to be a girl.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.” She sighed again, so lightly it was almost a laugh. “Poor little blighter.”

Big Beaver, wearing plus-fours and a sort of shooting jacket—what a ridiculous man—came out of the conservatory, apparently intending to say something to his wife, who was on her knees now, delving in the clay with a trowel, her broad behind turned towards the lawn; seeing Vivienne and me, he stepped back smartly into the doorway and faded like a shadow behind glass and greenery.

“Have you been to the flat?” Vivienne said. “It hasn’t been blown up or anything?”

“No. I mean, it hasn’t been bombed. Of course I’ve been there.”

“Because I rather had the impression from Nick that you were spending most of your time nowadays at Poland Street. I suppose the parties must be fun. Nick tells me you raid the doctor’s surgery for rubber bones to bite on when the bombings start.” She paused. “I hate it here, you know,” she said with quiet vehemence. “I feel like someone in the Bible, sent unto the house of her fathers to atone for her uncleanness. I want my life. This is not my life.”

Mrs. Beaver, straightening up again to ease her back, and unable decently to go on pretending I was not there, gave an exaggerated start, peering at me, and waved her trowel.

“Do you think,” I said quickly, “you might … terminate it?”

Vivienne gave me that look again, stonier than before.

“
She,
” she said. “Or he, if by some mad chance my feminine intuition is mistaken. But not
it;
don’t say
it.”

“Because,” I went on doggedly, “something that has no past is not alive yet, is it. Life is memory; life is the past.”

“Goodness,” she said brightly, her eyes sparkling with tears, “such a perfect statement of your philosophy! Whereas to human beings, darling, life is the present, the present and the future. Don’t you see?” Mrs. B. had lumbered to her feet and was bearing down on us, her great skirts billowing. Vivienne was still regarding me brightly, the tears standing in her eyes. “I’ve
just realised something,” she said. “You came up here to ask for a divorce, didn’t you.” She gave a little silvery laugh. “You did; I can see it in your eyes.”

“Victor!” Mrs. Beaver cried. “What a lovely surprise!”

I stayed to dinner. All the talk was of Nick’s engagement. The senior Beavers were quietly exultant: Sylvia Lydon, a prospective heiress, was a catch, even if she was a trifle shop-soiled. Julian, a year old now, cried piteously when I picked him up and sat him on my knee. Everyone was embarrassed, and tried to cover it with laughter and baby-talk. The child would not be mollified, and in the end I relinquished him to his mother. I remarked how much he looked like Nick—he didn’t, really, but I thought the Beavers would be pleased—at which Vivienne for some reason gave me a bleak stare. Big Beaver spoke bitterly of the French collapse; he seemed to regard it as a personal affront, as if General Blanchard’s First Army had shirked its main duty, which, surely, was to act as a buffer between the advancing German forces and the purlieus of North Oxford. I said I understood that Hitler had changed his mind and would not now attempt an invasion. Big Beaver scowled. “Attempt?” he said loudly. “Attempt? The south-east coast is being defended by retired insurance clerks armed with wooden rifles. The Germans could row over in rubber dinghies after lunch and be in London by dinner time.” He had worked himself into a high state of agitation; he sat fuming at the head of the table, convulsively rolling pellets of bread in his long brown fingers; I had been casting about for a way to introduce the topic of my Borromini book; now, gloomily, I thought better of it. Mrs. B. attempted to lay her hand comfortingly on his, but he shook her off impatiently. “Europe is finished,” he said, glaring about at us and grimly nodding. “Finished.” The child, nestled proprietorially against his mother’s breast, sucked his thumb and watched me with steady, unblinking resentment. I found myself inwardly giving a kind of wolf-howl—
Oh God, release me, release me!
—and glanced about guiltily, not sure that my silent cry had not been intense enough to be heard. When I was leaving, Vivienne stood with me on the front steps while Big Beaver, grumbling about his petrol ration, got out the car to drive me to the station.

“I won’t do it, you know,” she said. She was smiling, but a nerve was twitching in her eyelid.

“You won’t do what?”

(Release me!)

“I won’t divorce you.” She touched my hand. “Poor darling, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

How nice!—Miss Vandeleur has given me an Xmas (her spelling) present of a bottle of wine. I could not wait for her to leave so that I might unwrap it. Bulgarian claret. I sometimes suspect her of a sense of humour. Or am I being churlish? The gesture may have been quite sincere. Should I tell her what my wine merchant once told me, that the South Africans sell their wine clandestinely in bulk to the Bulgars, who bottle it under their own more politically acceptable labels and sell it on to all those unsuspecting left-wing liberals in the West? But of course I shan’t. What a cantankerous old so-and-so I am, even to think of it.

W
e made a splendid team, Danny Perkins, Albert Clegg and me. Albert had served his apprenticeship at Lobb’s the bootmaker; he was one of those vernacular geniuses that the working class used to produce in abundance before the advent of universal literacy. He was a tiny fellow, shorter even than Danny, and much slighter. When the three of us were together, proceeding in single file down a railway platform, say, we must have looked like an illustration from a natural history textbook, showing the evolution of man from primitive but not unattractive pygmy, through sturdy villein, to the blandly upright, married and mortgaged
Homo sapiens
of the modern day. Albert did love his craft, though it tormented and maddened him, too. He was a maniacal perfectionist. When he was at work he had two states: profound, well-nigh autistic concentration, and frustrated rage. Nothing was ever right for him, or right enough; the equipment he had to work with was always shoddy, the threads too coarse or too fine, the needles blunt, the awls made from inferior steel. Nor was there ever enough time to complete the job to the standard that he imagined would have satisfied him.

He and Danny squabbled constantly, in hissing undertones; if I had not been there I believe they would have descended to scuffles. It was not my rank that inhibited them, I think, but that reserve, that genteel unwillingness to show themselves up in the presence of their betters, which used to be one of the more
attractive traits of their kind. Danny would stand in the doorway of our compartment, shifting agitatedly from foot to foot and doing that tense, almost soundless whistle that he did, while Albert, perched on the swaying seat opposite me like a furious, khaki-clad elf, with the dispatch bag of the Polish government-in-exile on his knee, unpicked a line of stitching he had just painstakingly completed, preparatory to starting the job all over again. Meanwhile, in the next compartment, Jaroslav the courier, comatose on the vodka and best Baltic caviare with which Danny had been plying him all evening, would be turning over in his couchette, dreaming of duels and cavalry charges, or whatever it is the minor Polish nobility dreams about.