The Untouchable (45 page)

I wondered what story Oleg had told Moscow. I was tempted to contact him again, so that I might ask him. I pictured him in the Kremlin, standing in the middle of the shiny floor in one of those vast high featureless rooms, unhappily wheezing, twisting his hat in his hands, while a shadowy Politburo listened in terrible silence from behind its long table as he made his bumbling excuses for me. All fantasy, of course. My case was probably dealt with by a third secretary at the London embassy. They did not need me—they never had, really, not in the way I believed— and so they simply cut the link. They always were practical fellows, unlike the mad fantasists who ran the Department. They even made a gesture of appreciation for my years of loyal service: six months after that meeting in the Odeon in Ruislip, Oleg contacted me to say that Moscow wished to offer me a gift of money, I think it was five thousand pounds. I refused—none of us ever made a penny out of our work for Russia—and tried not to feel slighted. I told Boy that I was out, but he did not believe me, suspecting
that I was only going into deeper cover, a suspicion he thought vindicated years later when everything fell apart and I was the one who was called in to deal with the mess.

There was no formal procedure for resigning from the Department, either; I simply drifted away, as so many others had done in the past year. I met Billy Mytchett by chance one evening in a pub in Piccadilly and we were both embarrassed, like a pair of former schoolmates who had not seen each other since the days of pranks and scrapes. I ran across Querell, too, at the Gryphon. He claimed to have left the Department before I did. As always, I found myself immediately on the defensive before that thinly smiling, measuring, pale gaze. Boy, who was about to leave for Washington, had just returned from a tumultuous binge across North Africa—on which he had been accompanied by his mother, of all people, a still spry and famously handsome woman only slightly less given to outrageous behaviour than her son— and Querell had all the details: how Boy had got drunk at an embassy cocktail party in Rabat and pissed out of the window into a bed of bougainvillaea in full view of the ambassador’s wife, that kind of thing.

“Seems he sat for a whole evening in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo telling anyone who would listen that he’s been a Russian spy for years.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s an old joke. He likes to shock.” “If I put him into a book no one would believe in him.” “Oh, I don’t know; he would certainly add colour.” He glanced at me sharply and grinned; his bleak little novels had at last caught on, reflecting as they did the spiritual exhaustion of the times, and he was enjoying sudden and lavish success, which was a surprise to everyone except him. “You think my stuff lacks colour?” he said. I shrugged.

“I don’t read much, in that line.”

We came across each other again the following week, at the farewell party for Boy that Leo Rothenstein threw in the Poland Street house. The occasion later became legendary, but what I retain most strongly is the memory of the headache that began as
soon as I arrived and that did not leave me until well into the following day. Everyone was there, of course. Even Vivienne ventured down from her Mayfair retreat. She gave me her cool cheek to kiss, and for the rest of the night we avoided each other. As usual, the party started without preliminaries, all instant noise and smoke and the tingling stink of alcohol. Leo Rothenstein played jazz on the piano, and a girl danced on a table, showing her stocking-tops. On the way from the Foreign Office Boy had picked up two young thugs, who stood about nursing cigarette ends in cupped hands and watching the increasingly intoxicated goings-on with a mixture of slit-eyed contempt and rather affecting uncertainty. Later, they started a fight with each other, more for something to do than out of anger, I think, though one of them was knifed, not seriously. (Later still, so I heard, they both went home with one of my colleagues from the Institute, a harmless connoisseur and small-time collector, who woke up the next afternoon to find the thugs gone, and with them everything of value in the flat.)

Querell cornered me in the kitchen. His eyes had that odd glitter, like marine phosphorescence, that they took on when he had been drinking heavily; it was the only physical sign of inebriation I could ever detect in him.

“I hear Queen Mary sent you a present of a handbag,” he said. “Is it true?”

“A reticule,” I said stiffly. “Georgian; quite a good piece. It was an expression of gratitude. I had put her in the way of a bargain—a Turner, as it happens. I don’t know what everyone finds so funny.”

Nick came by, morosely tipsy; Sylvia had just produced their first child, and he was still supposedly celebrating the birth. He stopped, and stood swaying, regarding me with a soiled glare, breathing noisily, his jaw working.

“I hear you’ve left the Department,” he said. “Another bloody rat diving off the poor old ship and leaving the rest of us to keep her afloat.”

“Steady on, old chap,” Querell said, smirking. “There might be spies about.”

Nick scowled at him.

“Not a decent bloody patriot among the lot of you. What will you do when the Russian tanks come rolling across the Elbe, eh? What will you do then?”

“Do give over, Nick,” I said. “You’re drunk.”

“I may be drunk, but I know what’s what. There’s bloody Boy hiving off to bloody America. What’s the good of going to America?”

“I thought it was you who organised it,” Querell said.

Beside us, a young woman in a pink dress began to be sick into the sink.

“Organised what?” Nick said indignantly. “What did I organise?”

Querell, laughing softly, played with his cigarette, twirling it between fingers and thumb.

“Oh, I heard you were the one who arranged for Bannister to go to Washington, that’s all,” he said. He was enjoying himself. “Did I hear wrong?”

Nick was watching with bleary interest the vomiting girl.

“What influence have I got?” he said. “What influence has any of us got, now that the bloody Bolshies have taken over.”

Vivienne was passing by, and Querell reached out and caught her wrist deftly in his thin, bony, bloodless hand.

“Come on, Viv,” he said, “aren’t you going to talk to us?”

I watched them. No one ever called her Viv.

“Oh, I thought you must be discussing men’s things,” she said, “you all looked so earnest and conspiratorial. Victor, you do seem grim—has Querell been teasing you again? How is poor Sylvia, Nick? Childbirth can be so
draining,
I find. Goodness, what
has
that young woman been eating? Seems to be all tomato skins. It is tomato, isn’t it, and not blood? Haemorrhages in one so young are not a good sign. I must go back; I was speaking to such an interesting man. A negro. He seemed very angry about something. Which reminds me, did you hear what Boy replied when that Mytchett person was urging caution on him in his new life in the New World? Mytchett said that where Americans are concerned, one mustn’t on any account bring up matters of race, homosexuality or Communism, and Boy said,
What you’re telling me is not to make a pass at Paul Robeson.”

“Wonderful woman,” Querell said when she had gone. He put a hand on my arm. “You’re not divorced yet, are you?”

And Nick gave a loud, slurred laugh.

At midnight I found myself trapped in uneasy conversation with Leo Rothenstein. We were on the landing outside Boy’s room, with drunken people sitting on the stairs above and below us.

“They say you’re leaving the ranks,” he said. “Bowing out gracefully, eh? Well, you’re probably right. Not much left for us here, is there? Boy’s had the right idea—America is the place. And of course, you have your work; I see your name about frequently. They want me to be something on the Board of Trade. Can you imagine it? Our friends will be pleased, I suppose, given their passion for tractors and suchlike. But it’s hardly Bletchley Park, is it. One does miss the old days. Much more fun, and that nice warm sense of really doing something for the cause.”

He produced an impossibly slender gold cigarette case and opened it with an elegant flick of his thumb, and I saw again a sunlit garden room in Oxford long ago and the young Beaver opening another cigarette box with just that gesture, and something happened inside my chest, as if it had begun to drizzle in there. I realised I must be drunk.

“Nick is going to stand for parliament,” I said.

Leo chuckled softly.

“Yes, so I hear. Bit of a joke, don’t you think? At least they’ve found him a safe seat, so humiliation will be avoided. I can just see him on the hustings.”

Briefly, gratifyingly, I imagined myself landing a punch in the middle of Leo’s big sallow face and smashing his raptor’s nose.

“He may surprise us all,” I said.

Leo gazed at me for a moment with peculiar, boggle-eyed intensity, and then laughed heartily, in his humourless way.

“Oh, he may,” he said, nodding vigorously. “He may indeed!”

Below us, someone struck a shaky chord on the piano, and Boy began to sing an obscene version of “The Man I Love.”

Everybody nowadays disparages the 1950s, saying what a dreary decade it was—and they are right, if you think of McCarthyism, and Korea, the Hungarian rebellion, all that serious, historical stuff; I suspect, however, that it is not public but private affairs that people are complaining of. Quite simply, I think they did not get enough of sex. All that fumbling with corsetry and woollen undergarments, all those grim couplings in the back seats of motor cars, the complaints and tears and resentful silences, while the wireless crooned callously of everlasting love— faugh! what dinginess, what soul-sapping desperation. The best that could be hoped for was a shabby deal marked by the exchange of a cheap ring, followed by a life of furtive relievings on one side and of ill-paid prostitution on the other. Whereas— O my friends!—to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear. At night before I went out cottaging I would have to spend an hour downing jorums of gin to steady my nerves and steel myself for the perils that lay ahead. The possibility of being beaten up, robbed, infected with disease, was as nothing compared with the prospect of arrest and public disgrace. And the higher one had climbed in society, the farther one would fall. I had recurring, sweat-inducing images of the Palace gates clanging shut against me, or of myself tumbling head over heels down the steps of the Institute and Porter the porter—yes, but it had long ago ceased to be amusing—above me in the doorway brushing his hands and turning away with a sneer. Yet what a sweet edge these terrors gave to my adventures in the night, what throat-thickening excitement they provoked. I loved the fashions of the fifties, the wonderful three-piece suits, the rich cotton shirts and silk bow ties and chunky, handmade shoes. I loved all the appurtenances of life in those days that are so sneered at now, the cuboid white armchairs, the crystal ashtrays, the moulded-wood wireless sets with their
glowing valves and mysteriously erotic mesh fronts—and the motor cars, of course, sleek, black, big-bottomed, like the negro jazzmen whom on occasion I used to be lucky enough to pick up at the stage door of the London Hippodrome. When I look back, these are the things I remember most vividly, not the great public events, not the politics—which was not politics at all, only a hysterical squaring up for more war—and not even, I am sorry to say, the doings of my children, so uncertain and needful in their fatherless teens; above all, I remember the fizz and swirl of the queer life, the white-silk-scarfed enchantment of it all, the squabbles and sorrows, the menace, the unspeakable, always abundant pleasures. This was what Boy missed so much, in his American exile (“I am like Ruth,” he wrote to me, “amid the alien cornballs”). Nothing could make up for the fact of not being in London, not the Cadillacs or the Camels or the crew-cutted football players of the New World. Perhaps, if he had not gone to America, if he had got out, like me, or remained and gone on doing desultory work for Oleg, he might not have brought all that trouble on himself, might have ended up a sprightly old queen toddling between the Reform Club and the public lavatory beside Green Park Tube station. But Boy suffered from an incurable commitment to the cause. Pitiful, really. I have always thought Boy went a little mad in America. He was being watched all the time—the FBI had always been suspicious of him, not seeing the point of the joke—and he was drinking too much. We were used to his enormities—the brawls, the three-day binges, the public displays of satyriasis—but now the stories grew darker, the deeds more desperate. At a party thrown for our embassy people by one of Washington’s legendary hostesses—I am glad to say I have forgotten her name—he made a clumsy pass at a young man in full view of the other guests, and when the poor fellow demurred Boy knocked him down. He drove in that ridiculous car of his—a pink convertible, with a genuine Klaxon horn which he employed with enthusiasm at every intersection—at breakneck speeds all over Washington and the surrounding states, collecting speeding tickets, three or four a day, which he would tear up under the noses of the traffic policemen, claiming diplomatic immunity.

Poor Boy; he did not realise how dated he had become. This kind of thing might have been amusing back in the twenties, when we were so easily amused, but now his indiscretions were merely embarrassing. Oh, of course we went on regaling each other with accounts of his latest scrapes, and we would laugh, and shake our heads, saying,
Good old Boy, he never changes!
But then a silence would fall, and someone would cough and someone else would begin loudly ordering another round, and quietly the subject would be dropped.

And then, one humid evening in late July, I came out of the Institute and found myself staring at a splotch of crushed chalk on the rain-washed, steaming pavement. In the old days this had been Oleg’s signal to summon me to a rendezvous. The sight of that white stain provoked in me a medley of sensations: alarm, of course, quickening to fright; curiosity, and a kind of childish expectancy; but, most strongly, and most surprisingly, nostalgia, fed no doubt by the evening smell of summer rain on the pavement and the oceanic hushing of the plane trees above me. I walked along for a little way, with my raincoat over my arm, outwardly calm, while my thoughts were in turmoil; then, feeling not a little ridiculous, I ducked into a phone box—check the street corners, the windows opposite, that parked car—and dialled the old number, and stood in hot suspense listening to the blood beating in my temples. The voice that answered was unfamiliar, but my call had been expected. Regent’s Park, at seven: the old routine. While the strange voice was relaying its instructions—how blank and timbreless they are, those drilled Russian voices—I thought I heard Oleg chuckle in the background. I hung up and left the booth, dry mouthed and a little dizzy, and hailed a taxi. The old routine.