The Untouchable (37 page)

Alastair giggled again, and detached himself from me and walked away, staggering a little. “Why don’t you put in for a transfer?” he said over his shoulder. He laughed again. I failed to see what was funny.

I caught up with him, and we went along together blindly through the darkness and the motionless fog.

“When all this is over,” he said grandly, “I shall go to America, where I’ll become famous. Oops, here’s my squat.”

He let himself into the hut and switched on the light; I had an impression of chaos and squalor. He remembered the blackout, and turned off the light again. I was suddenly tired of him, of his weariness and his bad breath and his air of obscure anguish. Yet we went on standing there, I on the cinder path and he in the deeper darkness of the doorway.

“Alastair,” I said, “you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to row in.”

“No.”

He sounded like a recalcitrant child.

“Then get me in here. I won’t involve you, once I’m here. Just get me in.”

He was silent for so long I wondered if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Then he sighed heavily, and dimly I could see him shaking his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s not… it’s just not…” Another sigh, and then a tremendous sniff; was he weeping? Close by, on another pathway, someone unseen went by, whistling a snatch of the overture to
Tannhäuser.
I listened to the crunching footsteps fade. I turned away. As I walked off along the path he said behind me out of the darkness: “Tell them I’m sorry, Victor.”

Nevertheless, someone did help me. Suddenly the flow of Bletchley material crossing my desk became a flood, as if someone at the source had opened a sluice-gate. Years later, when I encountered Alastair by chance one day in the Strand, I asked him if he had changed his mind after I had driven up to see him that evening. He denied it. By then he had been to America. “And are you famous?” I asked, and he nodded judiciously and
said that he supposed he was, in certain specialised circles. We were silent for a while, watching the traffic, and then he shuffled up close to me, suddenly agitated.

“You didn’t tell them about Bletchley, did you?” he said. “I mean, you didn’t tell them about the machines and all that, surely?”

“Good heavens, Psyche,” I said, “what you must think of me! Besides, you refused to cooperate, remember?”

It was the Bletchley leaks which led eventually to my greatest triumph, the part I played in the great tank battle of the Kursk Salient in the summer of 1943. I shall not bore you with the details, Miss V.; probably these ancient fights seem to you as far off as the Punic wars. Suffice to say that it was a matter of a new German tank design, details of which I got via Bletchley and passed on to Oleg. I am told, and modesty will not prevent me from believing it, that it was thanks in no small part to my intervention that the Russian forces prevailed in that momentous engagement. For these and other contributions to the Soviet war effort—I am determined to keep some secrets to myself—I was presented with the Order of the Red Banner, one of the highest Soviet decorations. I was sceptical, of course, and when, at a table by the window of our caff in the Mile End Road, in the drifting, brass-coloured sunlight of a late-summer evening, Oleg produced a shoddily made wooden box and, glancing about cautiously, opened it to show me the unreal-looking medal—so shiny and unfingered, like a false coin preserved in the police museum as evidence of a foiled counterfeiter’s flashy skill—I was surprised to discover that I was moved. I lifted the medal briefly from its bed of crimson velvet, and, although I had only the vaguest idea of where Kursk was, for a moment I saw the scene, as in one of those old scratchy, noisy propaganda pictures Mosfilm used to churn out: the Soviet tanks racing across the battlefield, a helmeted hero in the turret of each one, with smoke flying, and a huge, transparent flag rippling in front of everything, and an invisible choir of mighty basses bellowing out a victory hymn. Then Oleg reverently closed the lid and stowed the box away in an inner pocket of his shiny blue suit; there was of course no question of my keeping the medal. “Perhaps,” Oleg
said quietly, with wheezy wistfulness, “perhaps, someday, in Moscow …” What a hope, Oleg; what a hope.

On the 10th of May, 1941 (those were the days of Significant Dates), I went to Oxford to see Vivienne. She had just borne our second child. The weather was warm, and we sat in the sunlit conservatory, with the baby in a Moses basket beside us shaded by a potted palm and Julian sprawled on a rug at our feet playing with his building blocks. “How nice,” Vivienne said brightly, looking about her at the scene. “One might almost think we were a family.” The maid brought us tea, and Mrs. Beaver kept popping in and out nervously to observe us, as if she feared the familial scene must necessarily break down into some terrible altercation, perhaps with attendant violence. I wondered what account of our marriage Vivienne gave to her parents. Perhaps none; she never was one to explain herself. Big Beaver also made an appearance, shifty as always, and stood and absentmindedly ate a biscuit, and said that he and I must have a serious talk (“On business, that is,” he added hastily, with an anxious roll of the eye), but not today, as he had to go to London. Maliciously, I offered him a lift, and looked on with enjoyment as he performed his snake dance of demurral and squirming apology; the prospect of a couple of hours on the road together was as welcome to him as it would have been to me.

“How I envy you big brave men,” Vivienne said, “free to venture into the very heart of the inferno. I wouldn’t mind watching a few buildings burn to the ground, I’m sure it must be terribly thrilling. Does one hear the cries of the dying, or are they drowned out by the fire sirens and so on?”

“They say the raids are coming to an end,” I said. “Hitler is going to attack Russia.”

“Is that so?” Big Beaver said, brushing biscuit crumbs from the front of his waistcoat. “That will be a relief.”

“Not for the Russians,” I said.

He gave me a glum look. Vivienne laughed.

“Didn’t you know, Daddy?—Victor is a secret admirer of Stalin.”

He smiled at her with his teeth, and then grew brisk, rubbing his hands together sinuously.

“Well,” he said, “I must be off. Vivienne, do rest. Victor, perhaps we shall meet in London”—a man-of-the-world chuckle— “groping our way like blind men through the blackout.” Gingerly he laid a hand on Julian’s head—the child, taciturn already, ignored him—and leaned over to peer into the baby’s basket, his long nose quivering at the tip. “Darling girl,” he breathed. “Beautiful, beautiful.” Then, drolly waving a dusky hand, he gave each of us in turn a sort of glazed, smiling glance, and departed, tiptoeing past the sleeping baby with a finger to his lips in extravagant dumbshow. In the early hours of the following morning, as he was walking down a side street off Charing Cross Road, for what purpose no one knew or cared to speculate, he was struck on the forehead by a very large piece of shrapnel that was flung over the rooftops from a bomb exploding in Shaftesbury Avenue, and died on the pavement, where his body was discovered by a professional young lady as she was making her way home after a night’s work in an establishment in Greek Street. I picture poor Max, sauntering along gaily, whistling a tune, hands in pockets and hat on the back of his head, an
ageing flâneur
whose very own Belle Époque was about to be brought to an abrupt close by a hurtling piece of Luftwaffe
materiel.
I wonder what time it was exactly when he died; I am interested, because in those same early hours I too underwent a profound and transformative experience.

The attack that night was the last great air raid of the Blitz. Driving down from Oxford, I was stopped at a police barrier on Hampstead Heath. I got out of the car and stood in the moonlight, the ground shuddering under my feet, and looked down, fascinated, on the city half submerged in a sea of flame. The sky was hung with the tracery of anti-aircraft fire, and searchlight beams swung and swayed, now and then snagging on one of the bombers, a stubby, comical-looking thing, reduced by distance to the size of a toy and seemingly held aloft by the dense ice-white beam fixed on it. “Twilight of the gods, sir, eh?” an eerily cheerful policeman beside me remarked. “Good old St. Paul’s is still standing, though.” I showed him my Department pass, and he scrutinised it by the light of his torch with amiable scepticism. In the end, however, he let me through. “You really intending to drive down into that, sir?” he said.

I should have been thinking of Bosch, of Grünewald and Altdorfer of Regensburg, those great apocalyptics, but really, I cannot remember anything in particular going through my mind, except what might be the best route to take to Poland Street. When I got there, after many vicissitudes, and stopped the car, the full weight of the noise fell on me, making my eardrums vibrate painfully. On the pavement, I looked up and saw in the direction of Bloomsbury a ragged trail of bombs tumbling flabbily down the vertical chute of a searchlight beam. Blake would have been fascinated by the Blitz. As I was letting myself into the house, it struck me that I had never seen anything so bizarre as this key going into this lock. The livid sky shed a tender pink glow on the back of my hand. Inside, the entire house was trembling, minutely, rapidly, like a dog dragged out of an icy river. A lamp was burning in the first-floor sitting room, but the room was empty. The chairs and sofa crouched in what seemed an apprehensive silence, their arms braced, as if at any moment they might get up and scuttle for safety. These raids could be extremely tedious, and one of the abiding problems was to find a way to pass the time. Reading was difficult, and if the bombing was close by it was impossible to listen to music on the gramophone, not only because of the racket, but because the shocks kept making the needle jump out of the groove of the record. Sometimes I would browse through a volume of Poussin reproductions; the classical stillness of the compositions was a calmative, but I was conscious how banal, not to say absurd, it would be for me to be killed with such a book in my hands (Boy always had a laugh about a doctor he once knew who had been found dead of a heart attack, sitting in an armchair with a medical textbook on his lap open at a chapter dealing with the subject of angina pectoris). Drink, of course, was a possibility, but I always found that hangovers were worse than usual on the mornings after raids, I suppose because one’s drunken sleep had been all din and flashing lights and shaking bedsprings. So I was pacing the sitting room, somewhat at a loss, when Danny Perkins came down, in striped calico pyjamas and slippers and Boy’s ratty dressing gown, from which the cord was missing. His eyes were swollen and his hair was on end. He was annoyed.

“Asleep, I was,” he said, “and those blooming bombs woke me up.” He might have been referring to the doings of a noisy neighbour. He stood, scratching, and peered at me. “Been to see the wifey, have you?”

“I have a new daughter,” I said.

“Oh, that’s nice.” He looked about the shadowed room vaguely, stretching sleep-gummed lips and running an explorative grey tongue-tip over his teeth. “I wonder if the pox-doctor’s office has any sleeping pills in it. I could break open a cabinet, maybe?” A tremendous explosion occurred close by, and the floor buckled and sagged alarmingly and the windows boomed and rattled. “Listen to that,” Danny said peevishly, clicking his tongue, and briefly, although I had never met the woman, I could clearly see his mother in him.

“Aren’t you at all afraid, Danny?” I said.

He considered the question.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. Not what you’d call properly afraid. I do get nervous, like, sometimes.”

I laughed.

“Boy should put you on the wireless,” I said, “broadcasting to Germany. You’d be a perfect counter to Lord Haw Haw. Why don’t we sit down, since it doesn’t seem either of us is going to be able to sleep tonight.”

Danny sat on the sofa, and I took an armchair on the other side of the fireplace. There were charred papers in the grate, like a bunch of soot-black roses; I admired the convoluted, whorled and pleated shapes, their rich velvet texture. Boy often burned sensitive documents here. He had no sense of security.

“Is Boy in?” I asked.

Danny made a put-upon face, throwing up his eyes. The dressing gown had fallen open, and the buttonless fly of his pyjamas revealed a patch of mossy darkness.

“Oh, don’t talk to me about him,” he said. “Drunk again, and passed out up there, snoring like a hog. I say to him, I say, Mr. Bannister, you’ll have to leave your liver to science.” To the east of us another stick of bombs went off, crackcrack crackcrack craack. Danny grew pensive. “When we were children,” he said, “our dad used to tell us to count how many seconds it took for
the thunder to come after a flash of lightning, and that way we’d know how many miles away the storm was. Seems silly now, doesn’t it. But we believed him.”

“Is that what you always call him?” I said. He looked at me, his eyes refocusing as he came back from the valleys. “Boy,” I said. “Do you always call him Mr. Bannister?”

He did not answer, only gave one of his sly, lewd little smiles.

“Like a cup of tea?” he said.

“No.” The silence in the room was a pool of calm in the midst of a raging storm. Danny softly hummed a snatch of song. “I wonder what it would be like,” I said, “if a bomb were to hit the house now. I mean, I wonder if one would know, in the second before everything collapsed?”

“Makes you think, sir, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Danny, it makes you think.”

He smiled that blameless smile of his again.

“And tell me, sir, what would you be thinking now—apart, like, from worrying about a bomb falling on our heads?”

Suddenly it felt as if there were a marble in my throat; I heard myself swallow.

“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I would not like to die before I have lived.”

He shook his head and gave a wondering little whistle.

“Oh, that’s terrible. Have you not lived, sir?”

“There are things I haven’t done.”

“Well now, that’s true of all of us, sir, isn’t it? Why don’t you come over here and sit beside me.”