The Untouchable (46 page)

Oleg seemed pudgier, but otherwise he was unchanged since I had last seen him. He was wearing his blue suit, his grey mac, his brown hat. He greeted me warmly, ducking his Christmas-pudding head and making happy burbling noises. Regent’s Park was all hazy golds and pale grey-greens in the soft summer evening. There was the smell of recent rain on grass. We met by the Zoo, as always in former days, and struck off in the direction of
the lake. Dreamy lovers drifted across the greensward arm in arm. Children ran and shrieked. A lady walked a little dog. “Like Watteau,” I said. “A painter. French. What do you like, Oleg? I mean, what are you interested in?” Oleg only waggled his head and did that bubbly chuckle again.

“Castor wants to go,” he said. “He says it is time to go.”

I thought of MacLeish tramping the windy grey wastes of Moscow. Well, he might feel quite at home there—he was born in Aberdeen, after all.

“And Boy?” I said.

Grown men were sailing model boats on the lake. A quite beautiful young man in a white shirt and corduroy trousers, a ghost out of my youth, was lounging in a deckchair, moodily smoking a cigarette.

“Yes, Virgil too,” Oleg said. “They will go together.”

I sighed.

“So,” I said, “it’s come to this. I never really believed it would, you know.” I looked at the young man in the deckchair; he caught my eye and smiled, insolent and inviting, and a familiar something happened in my throat. “Why have you come to me?” I said to Oleg.

He turned on me his blankest, most blameless bug-eyed stare.

“We have to get them to France,” he said, “or northern Spain, maybe. Anywhere on the Continent. After that it will be easy.”

Moscow had suggested sending a submarine to pick the pair up from the shores of some Highland lough. I had a vision of Boy and the Dour Scot stumbling in the dark over wet rocks, their city shoes sodden, trying to get their flashlight to work, while out in the night the submarine captain scoured the shore for their signal, muttering Russian oaths.

“For goodness’ sake, Oleg,” I said, “surely you can come up with something less melodramatic than a submarine? Why can’t they just take the ferry to Dieppe?—or one of those boats that cruise along the French coast for forty-eight hours? Businessmen use them for dirty weekends with their secretaries. They call into St. Malo, places like that; no one ever bothers to check papers or count the passenger lists.”

Oleg suddenly reached out and squeezed my arm; he had never touched me before; odd sensation.

“You see, John, why I came to you?” he said fondly. “Such a cool head.” I could not suppress a smirk; the need to be needed, you see, that was always my weakness. We walked on. The low sun shone on the molten water beside us, throwing up flakes of gold light. Oleg giggled, snuffling through his flat, piggy nose. “And tell me, John,” he said roguishly, “have
you
been with your secretary on these boats?” And then he remembered, and blushed, and hurried on ahead of me, waddling along like a fat old babushka.

Boy came back. I telephoned him at the Poland Street flat. He sounded worryingly hearty. “Tip-top, old chap, never better, glad to be home,
bloody
Americans.” We met at the Gryphon. He was bloated and hunched, and his skin had a fishy sheen. He reeked of drink and American cigarettes. I noticed the torn skin around his fingernails and thought of Freddie. He was rigged out in tight tartan slacks, tennis shoes, a Hawaiian shirt of scarlets and vivid greens; a fawn stetson hat with a leather band sat on the bar by his elbow like a giant, malign mushroom. “Have a drink, for Christ’s sake. We’ll get completely blotto, shall we? My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness, et cetera.” He laughed and coughed. “Have you seen Nick? How is he, I missed him. Missed you all. They don’t know how to have fun over there. Work work work, worry worry worry. And there I was, Boyston Alastair St. John Bannister, trapped in a madhouse with nothing to do but drink myself silly and bugger black men. I had to get out; you see that, don’t you? I had to get out.”

“Heavens,” I said, “is that really your name—Boyston? I never knew.”

Betty Bowler was on her stool behind the bar, smoking cocktail cigarettes and clanking her bracelets. Betty by now had become the kind of big, blowsy disaster that buxom young beauties always turn into. In her prime she had been famously painted by Mark Gertler—cream flesh, blue eyes, burnt-sienna nipples, a pyramid of portentous apples in a pink bowl—but now, as she waddled into her late fifties, the Bloomsbury look
was all lost, sunken in fat, and she had become one of Lucian Freud’s potato people. I was always a little afraid of her. She had a tendency to go too far, lurching from raillery into sudden bursts of venomous abuse. It was a conceit of hers to pretend to believe there was no such thing as homosexuality.

“Thought as how you was going to bring home a war bride, Boy Bannister,” she said, doing her cockney voice. “One of those Yank heiresses, nice big blonde with plenty of assets behind her.”

“Betty,” Boy said, “you should be in the pantomime.”

“So should you, tub-of-guts. You could play the Dame, except you don’t look man enough for the part.”

Querell turned up, wearing a crumpled white linen suit and two-tone shoes. He was in his Solitary Traveller phase. He was about to leave for Liberia, or maybe it was Ethiopia; somewhere distant, hot and uncivilised, anyway. It was said he was fleeing an unhappy love affair—
Love’s Labour
had just come out—but he had probably started the rumour himself. He sat between us at the bar looking bored and world-weary and drinking triple gins. I watched a smoky pale patch of sunlight at the foot of the steps inside the door, and thought how stealthily the world goes about its business, trying not to be noticed.

“Well, Bannister,” Querell said, “the Americans finally rumbled you, did they?”

Boy gave him a sullen, slithery look.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I hear Hoover kicked you out. You know he’s a notorious queen. They always have a kink, don’t they, the Hoovers and the Berias.”

Much later—the light at the foot of the steps had turned red-gold—Nick came in, with Leo Rothenstein, both in evening dress, sleek and faintly ridiculous, like a pair of toffs in a
Punch
cartoon. I was surprised to see them here. Since his election Nick had steered clear of the old dives, and Leo Rothenstein, whose father was on his deathbed, was about to inherit a peerage and the family’s banks. “Just like old times,” I said, and they both regarded me in silence with a peculiar, flat stare. I suppose I was drunk. Nick peevishly ordered a bottle of champagne. He
was wearing a crimson cummerbund; he never did have any taste. We lifted our glasses and toasted Boy’s return. Our hearts were not in it. When we had finished the first bottle, Betty Bowler brought out another, on the house.

“Absent friends!” Leo Rothenstein said, and looked at me over the rim of his glass and winked.

“Christ,” Boy mumbled, pressing a fat, sunburned arm to his eyes, “I think I’m going to blub.”

Then Oleg telephoned. The code word was
Icarus.
Somewhat unfortunate, I agree.

O
dd, the air of melancholy burlesque the whole thing had. It was all absurdly simple. Boy made an excuse, and we left the Gryphon together and I drove him to Poland Street. Above the twilit streets the sky was a tender deep dark blue, like an upside-down river. In the flat I waited, sitting by myself on the sofa, while he got his things together. The champagne was still fizzing in my sinuses, and I too felt weepy, in a distracted sort of way, and kept heaving great sobby sighs and slowly blinking and peering about me, like a drunken tortoise. Vividly I recalled tussling here with Danny Perkins, and experienced an awful pang, like a spasm of physical pain. I could hear Boy crashing around upstairs, talking to himself and groaning. Presently he came down, carrying an ancient gladstone bag.

“Wanted to bring everything,” he said mournfully. “Left it all, in the end. How do I look?”

He was dressed in a dark-grey three-piece suit, striped shirt, cufflinks, school tie with gold pin.

“You look ridiculous,” I said. “The Comrades will be wonderfully impressed.”

We went down the stairs, wordless and solemn, like a pair of disappointed undertakers.

“I’ve locked the flat,” Boy said. “Danny Perkins has a key. I’ll keep this one, if you don’t mind. Souvenir, you know.”

“You’re not coming back, then?” I said lightly, and he gave me a wounded look and went on, past the doctor’s surgery, and
out into the glimmering night. God knows why I was feeling so frolicsome.

Again, I drove the big white car eating up the miles with callous eagerness. As we were crossing the river I wound down my window and the night howled and leaped into the car. I looked down past the bridge and saw a red ship at anchor there, and something about the scene—the glossy darkness, the bulging, restless river, that fauve-bright vessel—sent a shiver through me, and suddenly, with a tigerish thrill, I saw my life as grand and dark and doomed. Then we left the bridge and plunged among warehouses and weed-grown bomb-sites again.

Beside me, Boy was weeping, in silence, with a hand over his eyes.

Soon we were speeding over the Downs. In my memory of it, this part of the journey is all a smooth irresistible headlong dash through the startled, silvery night. I see the car swirling along, headlights sweeping over tree-trunks and moss-grown signposts, and Boy and me, two grim-faced figures tensed behind the windscreen, lit from below, jaws set and eyes fixed unblinkingly upon the onrushing road. I too have read my Buchan and my Henty.

“Wish it was day,” Boy said. “This is probably my last sight of Blighty.”

Philip MacLeish was at his mother’s place in Kent, a genuine rose-covered cottage complete with wooden gate and gravel path and bottle-glass windows all aglow. Antonia MacLeish opened the door to us and without a word showed us into the living room. She was a tall, angular woman with a great mane of black hair. She seemed always to be brooding on some smouldering private resentment. I associated her with horses, though I had never seen her mounted on one. MacLeish was sitting in an armchair, morosely drunk, staring into a cold grate. He was wearing an old pair of flannel trousers and an incongruous, canary-yellow cardigan. He glanced up unenthusiastically at Boy and me, said nothing, and went back to his contemplation of the fireplace.

“The children are asleep,” Antonia said, not looking at us. “I won’t offer you a drink.”

Boy, ignoring her, cleared his throat.

“I say, Phil,” he said, “we need to have a talk. Get your coat, there’s a good chap.”

MacLeish nodded, slowly, miserably, and stood up, his knee joints creaking. His wife turned aside and walked to the window, took a cigarette from a silver box on the table there, lit it, and stood, elbow in hand, gazing out into the impenetrable dark. I saw us all there, clear and unreal as if we were on a stage. MacLeish looked at her in baggy-eyed anguish and lifted a beseeching hand towards her.

“Tony,” he said.

She made no reply, and did not turn, and he let fall his hand.

“Time to go, old man,” Boy said. He was tapping his foot on the carpet. “Just a chat, that’s all.”

I had an urge to laugh.

MacLeish put on a camel-hair overcoat, and we went out. He had not even packed a bag. At the front door he paused, and slipped back into the hall. Boy and I looked at each other glumly, expecting sobs, shouts, hurled recriminations. In a moment he was back, however, carrying a furled umbrella. He looked at us sheepishly.

“Well, you never know,” he said.

It was midnight when we got to Folkestone. The night had turned windy, and the little ship, lit like a Christmas tree, was bobbing and rearing on the swell.

“Christ,” Boy said, “it looks bloody small. There’s bound to be someone on board who’ll know us.”

“Tell them you’re on a secret mission,” I said, and MacLeish glared at me.

There was the question of Boy’s car. No one had thought what to do with it; obviously I could not drive it back to London. He loved the thing, and got quite agitated contemplating its possible fates. In the end he decided he would simply leave it on the quayside.

“That way, I can think of it as being here always, waiting for me.”

“Dear me, Boy,” I said, “I never knew you were such a sentimental old thing.”

He grinned mournfully and wiped his nose with his knuckles.

“Betty Bowler was right,” he said. “I’m not man enough.” We stood irresolute, the three of us, at the end of the gangplank, our trouser legs whipping in the warm night wind and the light from the lamps shivering at our feet. On board, a bell clanged dolefully. “The watches of the night,” Boy said, and tried to laugh.

MacLeish, lost somewhere in the tormented deeps of himself, was staring at the narrow channel of darkly roiling waters between the ship’s flank and the dock. I thought he might be contemplating throwing himself in.

“Well then,” I said briskly.

We shook hands awkwardly, the three of us. I thought of giving Boy a kiss, but could not bring myself to do it, with the Dour Scot looking on.

“Say goodbye to Vivienne for me,” Boy said. “And the children. I shall miss seeing them grow up.”

I shrugged. “So will I.”

He went up the gangplank, heavy-footed, lugging his bag. He turned.

“Pop over and see us sometime,” he said. “All that caviare, that good vodka.”

“Of course. I’ll sail out on the
Liberation
.”

I could see him not remembering. He was thinking of something else.

“And Victor—” he said; the wind caught the skirts of his overcoat and flapped them. “Forgive me.”

Before I could respond—how would I have responded?— MacLeish beside me suddenly stirred himself and fixed a hand urgently on my arm.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, in a voice that shook, “I never liked you—still don’t, really—but I appreciate this, I mean your helping me like this. I want you to know that. I appreciate it.”

He stood a moment, nodding, those crazed Presbyterian eyes fixed on mine, then he turned and lurched up the gangplank. Finding Boy blocking his way, he gave him a hard push in the back and said something sharply which I did not catch. In my last sight of them they were standing side by side at the metal rail, and all I could see were their heads and shoulders; they were looking down at me, like a pair of Politburo members viewing
the May Day parade, MacLeish expressionless, and Boy slowly, wistfully waving.