The Untouchable (40 page)

The staff at the Institute accepted Patrick’s presence in my life without remark. Of course, we were exquisitely discreet, at least during the hours when the galleries were open to the public. Patrick loved to throw parties, a few of which did become worryingly rowdy, for his friends tended to be on the rough side. The following morning, though, by the time my hangover and I had struggled up, the flat would be set completely to rights, the stragglers ejected, the cigarette stubs and the empty beer bottles cleared away, the carpets swept, the atmosphere as cool and calm as the bluish interior of Seneca’s bedroom in the Poussin above my desk, which had not, after all, been stolen by one of the guests, or smashed in a romp, as I in my drunken nightmares had envisioned it would be.

Vivienne never came to the flat. I met her in Harrods one day when I was with Patrick, and after I had made the mumbled introductions we stood talking for a minute, and I was the only one who was embarrassed. Nick thought Patrick a joke. I had hoped he would be jealous—Nick, I mean. Yes, pathetic, I know. Patrick on the other hand took a great shine to Nick, and
had an irritating way when he came to visit of following him about, like a large, friendly and not very bright dog. It did not seem to matter how badly Nick behaved, Patrick always forgave him. Nick was advancing into middle age at a stately, seigneurial pace. He had put on flesh, but what would have been a coarsening in others was in him the assumption of a lordly mantle. He was no longer the downy, fascinatingly demonic beauty he had been in his twenties; let us be honest, he looked like a typical High Tory grandee, portly, pinstriped, with that marvellous, all-over pale-gold sheen that the very rich and powerful acquire with the years, I do not know how. That youthful pomposity, which I used to find both comic and endearing, had, like his physical self, grown steadily heavier, squashing the last traces of a sense of humour that anyway had never been one of his stronger qualities. Where once he asserted, with the enthusiasm and certainty of youth, now he pontificated, fastening on to one with the fixed, menacing stare of the bully, daring one to contradict him. He had progressed through the years, a one-man caravan, accumulating the precious goods of life, money, power, renown, a wife and children—two big bright girls, one the image of their mother, the other of her Aunt Lydia—and now wherever he appeared he carried the weight of these riches with him, like an Eastern potentate padding along in front of his retinue of veiled women and burdened slaves. Yet I still loved him, helplessly, hopelessly, ashamed of myself, laughing at myself, a prim, middle-aged scholar pining after this overfed, overconfident, pompous pillar of the Establishment. How deluded I was. Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.

At the end of one of those drunken, revelrous parties at the flat I confessed everything to Patrick about my other secret life. He laughed. This was not the response I had expected. He said he had not had such a good laugh since the day his commanding officer in France was shot in the backside by a German machine-gunner. He had known that I had been something significant in the shadowy world of the Department, but that I had also been working for Moscow he thought a grand joke. He knew what it was to live clandestinely, of course. He wanted all the details; he
was greatly excited, and was particularly ardent in bed afterwards. I should not have told him all those things. I got carried away. I even named names, Boy, Alastair, Leo Rothenstein. It was foolish and boastful of me, but oh, I did enjoy myself, just letting it all spill out.

We had a row, Patrick and I, on the night that he died. This is a source of continuing, hardly bearable remorse for me. There had been squabbles before, of course, but this was the first real, stand-up, no-holds-barred fight I had permitted between us; the first, and the last. I cannot remember how it started—something trivial, I’m sure. Before we knew it we were going at it hammer-and-tongs, raving at each other, lost to ourselves in an exultant transport of fury, like a pair of demented, doomed lovers at the climax of a bad opera. I wish I had known of the real doom that awaited poor Patrick just a few hours later, for then I would not have said such dreadful, dreadful things to him, and he would not have sat up brooding into the early hours, would not have got drunk on my best brandy, would not have staggered out on to the balcony and plummeted through the whistling dark to his death four flights below in the moonlit courtyard. I was asleep when he fell. I wish I could report some bodeful dream, or say that I started awake in inexplicable dread at the moment of his death, but I cannot. I slept on, and he lay there on the stones, his poor neck broken, with no one to see him die or hear his last breath. The porter found him, when he was doing his morning rounds; the sound of the fellow’s boots on the stairs woke me.
“Beg pardon, sir, I’m afraid there’s been an accident…
”

At the time I was undergoing yet another round of interrogations by the Department, and curiously enough, this turned out to my advantage, for Billy Mytchett and his people were as anxious as I was to keep the matter quiet. They thought that after years of questioning I was about to crack and tell all, and the last thing they wanted was the
canaille
of the press sniffing about. So someone had a word with the police and, later, with the coroner, and in the end not a mention of the matter appeared in the papers. I was so relieved; a scandal like that would have gone down very badly at the Palace, where I was still pleasurably ensconced. I stayed inside the flat for weeks, frightened of outdoors.
Miss McIntosh, my secretary, brought me groceries and bottles of gin, carrying them up all those flights of stairs herself, despite her years and her arthritis, bless her virgin’s kindly heart. I soon realised, however, that I would have to give up the flat. Patrick’s mark was everywhere; how I wept, bent double at the kitchen table, rolling my forehead on my fist, when I picked up a tumbler one day and found his five fingerprints clearly visible on the fluted sides. I found something else, too. When eventually I worked up the courage to go out on to the balcony, I noticed that the catch on the French window was broken, in such a way that it seemed it might have been forced. I asked Skryne if the heavies had been in the flat, rummaging for evidence against me, but he swore he had sent no snoopers in at all. I believed him. Yet the doubt lingers in my mind; did Patrick come upon an intruder in the flat that night, some stealthy searcher who left no trace, unless you count a smashed body lying all aheap in the silence and the moonlight? Surely I am being fanciful? Patrick, ah, poor Patsy!

By the time hostilities in Europe were drawing to a noisy close I held the rank of major and had taken part in some of the most significant Allied intelligence offensives of the war (imagine here a simper of modesty, a gruff clearing of the throat). Despite my diligence, however, and my successes, I was never able to climb to the very highest reaches of the Department hierarchy. This was, I confess, a source of resentment and humiliation. Nick was at the top, and Querell, and Leo Rothenstein, and even Boy was sometimes given a hand and hauled up to take part in the Olympian deliberations on the Fifth Floor. (What a comedy they must have played out up there, the four of them!) I could not understand why I was excluded. Hints were dropped which suggested that I was seen to be a shade too raffish, that I enjoyed the deceptions and the double-bluffs too much to be taken completely seriously. I thought that rich, especially when I considered Nick’s capriciousness and frequent negligence in matters of security. And if I was regarded as dangerously louche, what about Boy? No, I decided: the real reason I was consistently blackballed was that I was being punished for my sexual deviation.
Nick may never have mentioned my affair with Danny Perkins, or the many other such affairs I had enjoyed
après
Danny, but he was, after all, my wife’s brother, and the uncle of my children. The fact of his own scandalous liaisons—for example, the simultaneous affairs he had carried on with the Lydon sisters right up to and, some said, well after his marriage to Sylvia—did not count, apparently. I need hardly say that I refrained from voicing these complaints. One must not whine. It is the first rule of the Stoics.

Deep down I was afraid that my exclusion from the Fifth Floor might be due to something far more sinister than mere prejudice, or a poisoned word from Nick. My fear was fed by the persistence of that curious echo, that faint sonar blip, which I seemed to catch at certain significant turns in my term of service at the Department. Sometimes I would stop dead in my tracks, like a traveller halting on a country road at night, convinced he is being followed, though when he stops, the footsteps he imagines behind him stop as well. The strangest aspect of it was that I could not distinguish whether this shadowy stalker, if he existed, was friend or foe. Things came into my possession, pieces of information, documents, maps, names, which it was no real business of mine to have; these unlooked for, choice
trouvailles
made Oleg nervous, though he always allowed his greed to overcome his misgivings. There was an opposite effect, too, when this or that scrap of information that Moscow had asked for, often very low-grade stuff, would suddenly acquire a security classification that put it beyond my reach. In all of this I thought I detected a whimsically malicious note; it was as if I were being made to dance for someone’s amusement, and no matter how I might struggle, the strings, impossibly delicate and fine, remained tightly attached to my ankles and my wrists.

I suspected everyone. For a time I even suspected Nick. During the war, one fog-muffled afternoon deep in winter, when I was with Oleg in Rainer’s—-yes, we went on meeting there almost to the end, even though it was just around the corner from the Department—I saw Nick in the street passing by the smeary window and could have sworn that he had spotted me, though he gave no sign and just pulled down his hat brim and
disappeared into the fog. I went on tenterhooks for days afterwards, but nothing happened. I told myself it was all nonsense. Was it likely that Nick would go in for the kind of cat-and-mouse game that I suspected was being played with me—would he have had the subtlety, the wit, for it? No, I said, no, if Nick were to spot one of his top people, even if it
was
his brother-in-law, hugger-muggering with a Soviet controller—and Oleg was known to pretty well everyone by now—he would have pulled out his Service revolver and strode into the tea shop Richard Hannay fashion, pushing chairs and waitresses aside, and marched me off to be dealt with by the Department’s internal security people. The straight-as-a-die, no-nonsense man of impulse and precipitate action, that was the image of himself that Nick chose to put forward.

Boy, then? No: he might have started the thing as a practical joke, but he would have tired of it rapidly. Leo Rothenstein was a more likely suspect. That kind of elegantly contemptuous game would have appealed to a Levantine parvenu and money-aristocrat like him, but I did not believe he had the subtlety for it, either, nor the sense of mischievousness, despite his parties and his ponderous jests and his boogie-woogie piano playing. Billy Mytchett, needless to say, I did not consider at all. So that left Querell. It would have been perfectly in character for him to make a plaything of me and push me this way and that, just to amuse himself. I remember him once saying, when he was drunk, that a sense of humour is nothing but the other face of despair; I believe that was true of him, although I am not sure that
humour
is the word to apply to that malignantly playful way he had of toying with the world. Despair is not quite the word either, though I cannot think what is. I never thought that he believed in anything, really, despite all his high talk of faith and prayer and sanctifying grace.

In my calmer moments I accepted that these fears and suspicions were a delusion. No one was able to think straight in those last, frantic years of the war, and I had more to be frantic about than most. My life had become a kind of hectic play-acting in which I took all the parts. It might have been more tolerable had I been allowed to see my predicament in a tragic, or at least a
serious, light, if I could have been Hamlet, driven by torn loyalties to tricks and disguises and feigned madness; but no, I was more like one of the clowns, scampering in and out of the wings and desperately doing quick-changes, putting on one mask only to whip it off immediately and replace it with another, while all the time, out beyond the footlights, the phantom audience of my worst imaginings hugged itself in ghastly glee. Boy, who revelled in the theatricality and peril of the double life, used to laugh at me (“Oh, God, here’s Shivershanks with his scruples again!”), and sometimes I suspected that even Oleg was mocking me for my worries and my caution. But mine was more than a double life. By day I was husband and father, art historian, teacher, discreet and hard-working agent of the Department; then night fell, and Mr. Hyde went out prowling, in mad excitement, with his dark desires and his country’s secrets clutched to his breast. When I began to go in search of men it was all already familiar to me: the covert, speculative glance, the underhand sign, the blank exchange of passwords, the hurried, hot unburdening—all, all familiar. Even the territory was the same, the public lavatories, the grim, suburban pubs, the garbage-strewn back-alleyways, and, in summer, the city’s dreamy, tenderly green, innocent parks, whose clement air I sullied with my secret whisperings. Often, at pub closing time, I would find myself sidling up to some likely looking red-knuckled soldier or twitching, Crombie-coated travelling salesman in this or that George, or Coach, or Fox and Hounds, at the very same corner of the bar where earlier in the day I had stood with Oleg and passed to him a roll of film or a sheaf of what the Department supposed were top-secret documents.

Art was the only thing in my life that was untainted. At the Institute I would sometimes slip away from my students and go down to the basement and take out something, not any of the big pieces, not my
Seneca,
still in storage there, not one of the great Cézannes, but a Tiepolo sketch, say, or Sassoferrato’s
Virgin in Prayer,
and bathe my senses, swollen with guilt and dread, in the picture’s serenity and orderliness, giving myself up wholly to its insistent silence. I know, and who should know better, that art is supposed to teach us to see the world in all its solidity and truth,
but in those years it was the possibility of transcendence, even for the space of a quarter of an hour, that I sought after repeatedly, like a prelate returning nightly to the brothel. And yet, the magic never quite worked. There was something wrong, something too deliberate, too self-conscious, in these occasions of intense contemplation. A suspicion of fraudulence always attended the moment. I seemed to be looking not at the pictures, but at myself looking at them. And they in turn looked back at me, resentful, somehow, and stubbornly withholding that benison of tranquillity and brief escape that I so earnestly desired of them. Unsettled, inexplicably chagrined, I would at last give up and cover up the painting and put it away, in embarrassed haste, as if I had been guilty of an indecency. The dreadful thought comes to me that perhaps I do not understand art at all, that what I see in it and seek in it is not there, or, if it is, that I have put it there. Have I any authenticity at all? Or have I double dealt for so long that my true self has been forfeit? My true self. Ah.