The Untouchable (44 page)

And then, I loved the place, I mean the surroundings, the building itself, one of Vanbrugh’s most inspired designs, at once airy and wonderfully grounded, imposing yet indulgent, delicate yet infused with manly vigour, an example of English architecture at its finest. By day I found soothing the atmosphere of studiousness and quiet learning, the sense one had all around of young heads bent over old books. My students had an earnestness and grace that one does not encounter in their present-day successors. The girls fell in love with me, the young men were restrainedly admiring. I suppose I must have seemed something of a legend to them, not only a champion of art but, if rumour were to be believed, a veteran of those clandestine operations that had contributed so much to our victory in the war. And then, at night the place was mine, a vast town house entirely at my disposal. I would sit in my flat on the top floor, reading, or listening to the gramophone—I have hardly mentioned my love of music, have I?—calm, reflective, sustained aloft, as it were, by the thronging silence peculiar to the spaces in which great art
resides. Later, Patrick would come home from his nocturnal rambles, perhaps with a couple of ruffianly young men in tow, whom I would set loose in the galleries, among the spectral pictures, and watch them frisk and tumble in the chiaroscuro lamplight like so many Caravaggian fauns. What a risk I took—my God, when I think of it, the damage they could have wrought! But then, it was precisely in the danger of it that the pleasure lay. I would not wish to give the impression that my time at the Institute was all high talk and low frolics. There was a great deal of bothersome and time-consuming administration to be seen to. My detractors muttered that I was incapable of delegating duties, but how is one expected to delegate to cretins? In an institution such as ours—closed, intense, hot with messianic fervour: I was moulding an international generation of art historians, after all—a single controlling sensibility was an absolute requirement. When I became Director, I immediately set about imposing my will on every corner of the Institute. There was nothing too trivial to merit my attention. I am thinking of Miss Winterbotham. Oh dear yes. Her name was the least of her misfortunes. She was a large person in her fifties, with tree-trunk legs and a mighty bust and myopic, frightened eyes, and also, incidentally, the most incongruously beautiful, slender hands. She was a minor scholar—baroque altarpieces of South Germany—and an enthusiast for madrigals; I think it was madrigals. She lived with her mother in a large house on the Finchley Road. I suspect she had never been loved. Her ineradicable unhappiness she disguised under a gratingly hearty cheerfulness. One day, in my office, while we were discussing some not very important piece of Institute business, she suddenly broke down and began to weep. I was aghast, of course. She stood before my desk, helpless in her cardigan and sensible skirt, shoulders shaking and great fat tears blurting from her squeezed-up eyes. I made her sit down and drink some whiskey, and after long and tedious cajoling I got out of her what the matter was. A bright young scholar in the same field as hers, who had lately joined us, had at once set about undermining Miss Winterbotham’s position. The old academic story, but a particularly cruel version of it. I called in the younger woman, the clever daughter of French
refugees. She did not deny Miss Winterbotham’s charges, and smiled in my face in that feline way that French girls do, confident I would approve her ruthlessness. Her confidence was misplaced. Of course, after Mile. Rogent’s abrupt departure from our midst, I had to deal with Miss Winterbotham’s speechlessly rapturous gratitude, which came in the form of coy little gifts, such as homemade cakes, and bottles of noisome aftershave lotion that I passed on to Patrick, and, every Christmas, a violently hideous necktie from Pink’s. Eventually her mother became incapacitated, and Miss Winterbotham had to give up her career to look after the invalid, as daughters did, in those days. I never saw her again, and after a year or two the plum cakes and the silk ties stopped coming. Why do I remember her, why do I bother to speak of her? Why do I speak of any of them, these nebulous figures milling restlessly, unappeasably, on the margins of my life? Here at my desk, in this lamplight, I feel like Odysseus in Hades, pressed upon by shades beseeching a little warmth, a little of my life’s blood, so that they might live again, however briefly. What am I doing here, straying amongst these importunate wraiths? A moment ago I tasted on my palate— tasted, not imagined—the stingy-sweet flavour of those boiled blackcurrant drops that I used to suck trudging home from infant school on autumn afternoons along the Back Road at Carrickdrum a lifetime ago; where was it stored, that taste, through all those years? These things will be gone when I go. How can that be, how can so much be lost? The gods can afford to be wasteful, but not us, surely?

My mind is wandering. This must be the anteroom of death.

Those were the years of some of my most intense work, when I conceived and began to write my definitive monograph on Nicholas Poussin. It was to take me nearly twenty years to finish. Certain pygmies skulking in the groves of academe have dared to question the book’s scholarly foundations, but I shall treat them with the silent disdain they deserve. I do not know of any other work, and nor do they, which comprehensively, exhaustively and—I shall dare to say it—magisterially captures the essence of an artist and his art as this one does. One might say, I have invented Poussin. I frequently think this is the chief function of
the art historian, to synthesise, to concentrate,
to fix
his subject, to pull together into a unity all the disparate strands of character and inspiration and achievement that make up this singular being, the painter at his easel. After me, Poussin is not, cannot be, what he was before me. This is my power. I am wholly conscious of it. From the start, from the time at Cambridge when I knew I could not be a mathematician, I saw in Poussin a paradigm of myself: the stoical bent, the rage for calm, the unshakeable belief in the transformative power of art. I
understood
him, as no one else understood him, and, for that matter, as I understood no one else. How I used to sneer at those critics—the Marxists especially, I am afraid—who spent their energies searching for the meaning of his work, for those occult formulas upon which he was supposed to have built his forms. The fact is, of course, there is no meaning. Significance, yes; affects; authority; mystery—magic, if you wish—but no meaning. The figures in the
Arcadia
are not pointing to some fatuous parable about mortality and the soul and salvation; they simply
are.
Their meaning is that they are there. This is the fundamental fact of artistic creation, the putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing.
(Why did he paint it?— Because it was not there.)
In the ever shifting, myriad worlds through which I moved, Poussin was the singular, unchanging, wholly authentic thing. Which is why I had to attempt to destroy him. —What? Why did I say that? I did not expect to say that. What can I mean by it? Leave it; it is too disturbing. The hour is late. Ghosts ring me round, gibbering. Away.

Perhaps the most significant, personal, result of my Royal elevation was that it enabled me to give up being a spy. I know everyone believes that I never stopped; there is a convention in the popular mind which insists that such a thing is impossible, that the secret agent is tied to his work by a blood oath from which only death will release him. This is fantasy, or wishful thinking, or both. In fact, in my case, retirement from active service was surprisingly, not to say disconcertingly, easy. The Department was one thing; with the end of the war, amateur agents such as myself were being gently but insistently encouraged
to bow out. The Americans, who now hold power, were demanding that professionals be put in charge, company men like themselves, whom they could bully and coerce, not mavericks like Boy or, to a far less colourful extent, me. On the other hand, we were exactly the kind of agents—familiar, trusted, dedicated—that Moscow desired to keep in place, now that the Gold War had set in, and we were urged, and sometimes, indeed, threatened, to hold on at all costs to our connections with the Department. Oleg, however, was oddly complaisant when I told him that I wished to be released. “I’m sick of the game,” I said, “literally sick of it. The strain is making me ill.” He shrugged, and I pressed on, complaining that war work, and the difficulty of serving two opposing systems in their uneasy alliance against a third, had put intolerable pressure on my nerves. I suppose I did rather pile it on. I ended by warning that I was close to cracking. This was Moscow’s nightmare, that one of us would lose his nerve and put the entire network at risk. Like all totalitarians, they had a very low regard for those who helped them most. In truth, my nerve was not about to crack. What I had felt most strongly at the end of the war, what we had all felt, was a sudden sense of deflation. For myself, I dated the onset of this depression to the morning following the announcement of Hitler’s death, when after that night of celebratory boozing with Boy I had woken up on the sofa in Poland Street with the taste of wetted ashes in my mouth and felt as Jack the Giant Killer must have felt, when the beanstalk came crashing down and the man-eating monster lay dead at his feet. After such trials and such triumphs, what could the world in peacetime offer us?

“But this is not peace,” Oleg said, with another listless shrug. “Now the real war is starting.”

It was a summer afternoon, and we were sitting in a cinema in Ruislip. The lights had just come up between features. I remember the sombre, shadowless glow descending from the vaulted ceiling, the hot, dead air, the prickly feel of the nap of the seat covers and a broken spring sticking in the back of my thigh—I suppose sprung cinema seats went before your time, Miss V.?—and that oddly weightless, muffled sensation that you only got in picture-houses, in those days of double bills, in the
intervals between features. It was Oleg’s idea that we should meet in cinemas. They offered excellent cover, it is true, but the real reason was that he was a passionate fan of the movies, especially the smooth American comedies of the day, with their sleek-haired, effeminate men and marvellous, mannish, silk-gowned women over whom he sighed like a love-sick prince-turned-frog, gazing up at them, these Claudettes and Gretas and Deannas, in a kind of entranced anguish, as they swam before him in their shimmering tanks of soot-and-silver light. He and Patrick would have got on famously.

“I rather think, Oleg,” I said, “that one war is enough for me; I’ve done my bit.”

He nodded unhappily, the fat at either side of his neck froggily wobbling, and began to drone on about the nuclear threat and the need for the Soviets to get their hands on the secrets of the West’s atomic weapons technology. Such talk made me feel quite antiquated; I had still not got over my amazement at the V2s.

“That’s the business of your people in America,” I said.

“Yes, Virgil is being sent there.”

Virgil was Boy’s code name. I laughed.

“What—Boy in America? You must be joking.”

He nodded again; it seemed to be turning into a kind of tic.

“Castor has been told to find a posting for him at the embassy.”

I laughed again. Castor was Philip MacLeish, otherwise known as the Dour Scot, who the previous year had managed to get himself appointed first secretary in Washington, from where he was reporting regularly to Moscow. I had met him a couple of times, in the war, when he was something minor at the Department, and had disliked him, finding his solemnity of manner ridiculous, and his fanatical Marxism unbearably tiresome.

“Boy will drive him mad,” I said. “They’ll both be sent home in disgrace.” Odd, how accurate the more offhand prophecies can prove to be. “And I suppose you want me to act as their control from here, do you?” I imagined it, the endless eavesdropping, the combing through signals, the casually probing conversations with visiting Americans, the whole horrible
tightrope-walking effort of keeping agents in place in foreign territory. “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t do it.”

The house lights were dimming, the dusty plush curtains were creakily opening. Oleg said nothing, gazing up expectantly at the preliminary crackle of scratched white light fizzing and boiling on the screen.

“I have been appointed Keeper of the King’s Pictures,” I said, “did I tell you?” He turned his eyes unwillingly from Jean Harlow’s satin-sheathed backside and peered at me incredulously in the watery glow from the screen. “No, Oleg,” I said wearily, “not this kind of picture: paintings. You know: art. I shall be working in the Palace, at the King’s right hand. Do you see? That’s what you can tell your masters in Moscow: that you have a source right beside the throne, a former agent at the very seat of power. They’ll be terribly impressed. You’ll probably get a medal. And I shall get my freedom. What do you say?”

He said nothing, only turned back to the screen. I was a little piqued; I thought he could at least have argued with me.

“Here,” I said, and pressed into his moist warm paw the miniature camera he had issued me with years ago. “I never learned how to use it properly, anyway.” In the flickering light from the screen—what a grating voice that Harlow woman had— he looked at the camera and then at me, babyishly solemn, but still did not speak. “I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out sounding cross. I stood up, and patted him on the shoulder. He made a half-hearted attempt to seize my hand, but I withdrew it quickly, and turned and made my way stumblingly out of the place. The noise of traffic in the sunlit street seemed a kind of sardonic cheer. I felt at once buoyant and leaden, as if in shrugging off the burden I had borne for years I had suddenly become aware again of the long-forgotten weight of my own, all too familiar self.

At first I did not believe that Moscow would let me go, or not so easily, at least. Aside from any other consideration, my vanity was wounded. Had I been of so little worth to them, that they should drop me so unceremoniously? I waited confidently and in trepidation for the first signs of pressure being applied. I wondered how I would stand up to blackmail. Would I be prepared to risk my position in the world in order merely to be free? Perhaps
I should not have made so bold a break, I told myself, perhaps I should have gone on supplying them with scraps of Department gossip, which I could have gleaned from Boy and the others and which no doubt would have kept them happy. They had the power to ruin me. I knew they would not reveal the work I had done for them—if they let one thread go, the whole network would unravel—but they could easily find a means of exposing me as a queer. Public disgrace I might have been able to bear, but I did not at all relish the prospect of a stretch in prison. Yet the days passed, and the weeks, then the months, and nothing happened. I drank a great deal; there were days when I was drunk before ten o’clock in the morning. When I went out on the prowl at night I was more frightened than ever; the sex and the spying had sustained a kind of equilibrium, each a cover for the other. Loitering in wait for Oleg, I was guilty but also innocent, since I was spying, riot soliciting, while in my tense vigils on the shadowy steps of the city’s public lavatories I was only another queer, not a betrayer of my country’s most precious secrets. Do you see? When you live the kind of life that I was living, reason makes many questionable deals with itself.