The Untouchable

1

First day of the new life. Very strange. Feeling almost skittish all day. Exhausted now yet feverish also, like a child at the end of a party. Like a child, yes: as if I had suffered a grotesque form of rebirth. Yet this morning I realised for the first time that I am an old man. I was crossing Gower Street, my former stamping ground. I stepped off the path and something hindered me. Odd sensation, as if the air at my ankles had developed a flaw, seemed to turn—what is the word: viscid?—and resisted me and I almost stumbled. Bus thundering past with a grinning blackamoor at the wheel. What did he see? Sandals, mac, my inveterate string bag, old rheumy eye wild with fright. If I had been run over they would have said it was suicide, with relief all round. But I will not give them that satisfaction. I shall be seventy-two this year. Impossible to believe. Inside, an eternal twenty-two. I suppose that is how it is for everybody old. Brr.

Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination. Leave nothing in writing, Boy always said. Why have I started now? I just sat down and began to write, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which of course it is not. My last testament. It is twilight, everything very still and poignant. The trees in the square are dripping. Tiny sound of birdsong. April. I do not like the spring, its antics and agitations; I fear that anguished seething in the heart, what it might make me do. What it might have made me do: one has to be scrupulous with tenses, at my age. I miss my children. Goodness, where did that come from? They are hardly what you could call children any more. Julian must be—well, he must be forty this year, which makes Blanche thirty-eight, is it? Compared to them I seem to myself hardly grown-up at all. Auden wrote somewhere that no matter what the age of the company, he was always convinced he was the youngest in the room; me, too. All the same, I thought they might have called. Sorry to hear about your treachery, Daddums. Yet I am not at all sure I would want to hear Blanche sniffling and Julian tightening his lips at me down the line. His mother’s son. I suppose all fathers say that.

I mustn’t ramble.

Public disgrace is a strange thing. Fluttery feeling in the region of the diaphragm and a sort of racing sensation all over, as of the blood like mercury slithering along heavily just under the skin. Excitement mixed with fright makes for a heady brew. At first I could not think what this state reminded me of, then it came to me: those first nights on the prowl after I had finally admitted to myself it was my own kind that I wanted. The same hot shiver of mingled anticipation and fear, the same desperate grin trying not to break out. Wanting to be caught. To be set upon. To be manhandled. Well, past all that now. Past everything, really. There is a particular bit of blue sky in Et in Arcadia Ego, where the clouds are broken in the shape of a bird in swift flight, which is the true, clandestine centre-point, the pinnacle of the picture, for me. When I contemplate death, and I contemplate it with an ever-diminishing sense of implausibility in these latter days, I see myself swaddled in zinc-white cerements, more a figure out of El Greco than Poussin, ascending in a transport of erotic agony amid alleluias and lip-farts through a swirl of clouds the colour of golden tea head-first into just such a patch of pellucid bleu céleste.

Switch on the lamp. My steady, little light. How neatly it defines this narrow bourn of desk and page in which I have always found my deepest joy, this lighted tent wherein I crouch in happy hiding from the world. For even the pictures were more a matter of mind than eye. Here there is everything that—

That was a call from Querell. Well, he certainly has nerve, I’ll say that for him. The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start.

I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby. My poor heart is still thudding in the most alarming way. Who did I think it would be? He was calling from Antibes. I thought I could hear the sea in the background and I felt envious and annoyed, but more likely it was just the noise of traffic passing by outside his flat, along the Corniche, is it?—or is that somewhere else? Heard the news on the World Service, so he said. “Dreadful, old man, dreadful; what can I say?” He could not keep the eagerness out of his voice. Wanted all the dirty details. “Was it sex they got you on?” How disingenuous—and yet how little he realises, after all. Should I have challenged him, told him I know him for his perfidy? What would have been the point. Skryne reads his books, he is a real fan. “That Querell, now,” he says, doing that peculiar whistle with his dentures, “he has the measure of us all.” Not of me, he hasn’t, my friend; not of me. At least, I hope not.

No one else has called. Well, I hardly expected that he would…

I shall miss old Skryne. No question now of having to deal with him any more; that is all over, along with so much else. I should feel relieved but, oddly, I do not. We had become a kind of double act at the end, he and I, a music hall routine. I say I say I say, Mr. Skryne! Well, bless my soul, Mr. Bones! He was hardly the popular image of an interrogator. Hardy little fellow with a narrow head and miniature features and a neat thatch of very dry, stone-coloured hair. He reminds me of the fierce father of the madcap bride in those Hollywood comedies of the thirties. Blue eyes, not piercing, even a little fogged (incipient cataracts?). The buffed brogues, the pipe he plays with, the old tweed jacket with elbow patches. Ageless. Might be anything from fifty to seventy-five. Nimble mind, though, you could practically hear the cogs whirring. And an amazing memory. “Hold on a sec,” he would say, stabbing at me with his pipe-stem, “let’s run over that bit once more,” and I would have to unpack the delicate tissue of lies I had been spinning him, searching with frantic calmness as I did so for the flaw he had detected in the fabric. By now I was only lying for fun, for recreation, you might say, like a retired tennis pro knocking up with an old opponent.

I had no fear that he would discover some new enormity—I have confessed to everything by now, or almost everything—but it seemed imperative to maintain consistency, for aesthetic reasons, I suppose, and in order to be consistent it was necessary to invent. Ironic, I know. He has the tenacity of the ferret: never let go. He is straight out of Dickens; I picture a crooked little house in Stepney or Hackney or wherever it is he lives, complete with termagant wife and a brood of cheeky nippers. It is another of my besetting weaknesses, to see people always as caricatures. Including myself.

Not that I recognise myself in the public version of me that is being put about now. I was listening on the wireless when our dear PM (I really do admire her; such firmness, such fixity of purpose, and so handsome, too, in a fascinatingly mannish way) stood up in the Commons and made the announcement, and for a moment I did not register my own name. I mean I thought she was speaking of someone else, someone whom I knew, but not well, and whom I had not seen for a long time. It was a very peculiar sensation. The Department had already alerted me to what was to come—terribly rude, the people they have in there now, not at all the easygoing types of my day—but it was still a shock. Then on the television news at midday they had some extraordinary blurred photographs of me, I do not know how or where they got them, and cannot even remember them being taken—apt verb, that, applied to photography: the savages are right, it is a part of one’s soul that is being taken away. I looked like one of those preserved bodies they dig up from Scandinavian bogs, all jaw and sinewy throat and hooded eyeballs. Some writer fellow, I have forgotten or suppressed his name—a “contemporary historian,” whatever that may be—was about to identify me, but the government got in first, in what I must say was a clumsy attempt to save face; I was embarrassed for the PM, really I was. Now here I am, exposed again, and after all this time. Exposed!—what a shiversome, naked-sounding word. Oh, Querell, Querell. I know it was you. It is the kind of thing you would do, to settle an old score. Is there no end to life’s turbulences? Except the obvious one, I mean.

What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself. Am I, like Querrell, out to settle old scores? Or is it perhaps my intention to justify my deeds, to offer extenuations? I hope not. On the other hand, neither do I want to fashion for myself yet another burnished mask… Having pondered for a moment, I realise that the metaphor is obvious: attribution, verification, restoration. I shall strip away layer after layer of grime— the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling—until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. (When I laugh out loud like this the room seems to start back in surprise and dismay, with hand to lip. I have lived decorously here, I must not now turn into a shrieking hysteric.)

I kept my nerve in face of that pack of jackals from the newspapers today. Did men die because of you? ’Yes, dearie, swooned quite away. But no, no, I was superb, if I do say so myself. Cool, dry, balanced, every inch the Stoic: Coriolanus to the general. I am a great actor, that is the secret of my success (Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself?—Nietzsche). I dressed the part to perfection: old but good houndstooth jacket, Jermyn Street shirt and Charvet tie—red, just to be mischievous—corduroy bags, socks the colour and texture of porridge, that pair of scuffed brothel creepers I had not worn in thirty years. Might have just come up from a weekend at Cliveden. I toyed with the idea of a tobacco pipe a la Skryne, but that would have been to overdo it; and besides, it requires years of practice to be a plausible pipeman—never take on cover that you can’t do naturally, that was another of Boy’s dicta. I believe it was a nice piece of strategy on my part to invite the gentlepersons of the press into my lovely home. They crowded in almost sheepishly, jostling each other’s notebooks and holding their cameras protectively above their heads. Rather touching, really: so eager, so awkward. I felt as if I were back at the Institute, about to deliver a lecture. Draw the shades, Miss Twinset, will you? And Stripling, you switch on the magic lantern. Plate one: The Betrayal in the Garden.

I have always had a particular fondness for gardens gone to seed. The spectacle of nature taking its slow revenge is pleasing. Not wilderness, of course, I was never one for wilderness, except in its place; but a general dishevelment bespeaks a right disdain for the humanist’s fussy insistence on order. I am no Papist when it comes to husbandry, and side with Marvell’s mower against gardens. I am thinking, here in this bird-haunted April twilight, of the first time I saw the Beaver, asleep in a hammock deep in the dappled orchard behind his father’s house in North Oxford. Chrysalis. The grass was grown wild and the trees needed pruning. It was high summer, yet I see apple blossoms crowding on the boughs; so much for my powers of recall (I am said to have a photographic memory; very useful, in my line of work— my lines of work). Also I seem to remember a child, a sullen boy standing knee-deep in the grass, knocking the tops off nettles with a stick and watching me speculatively out of the corner of his eye. Who could he have been? Innocence incarnate, perhaps (yes, I am stifling another shriek of terrible mirth). Shaken already after separate encounters with the Beaver’s unnerving sister and mad mother, I felt foolish, dithering there, with grass-stalks sticking up my trousers legs and a truculent bee enamoured of my hair oil zigzagging drunkenly about my head. I was clutching a manuscript under my arm—something earnest on late cubism, no doubt, or the boldness of Cezanne’s draughtsmanship—and suddenly, there in that abounding glade, the idea of these pinched discriminations struck me as laughable. Sunlight, swift clouds; a breeze swooped and the boughs dipped. The Beaver slept on, holding himself in his arms with his face fallen to one side and a gleaming black wing of hair fanned across his forehead. Obviously this was not his father, whom I had come to see, and who Mrs. Beaver had assured me was asleep in the garden. “He drifts off, you know,” she had said with a queenly sniff; “no concentration.” I had taken this as a hopeful sign: the idea of a dreamily inattentive publisher appealed to my already well-developed sense of myself as an infiltrator. But I was wrong. Max Brevoort—known as Big Beaver, to distinguish him from Nick—would turn out to be as wily and unscrupulous as any of his Dutch merchant forebears.

I close my eyes now and see the light between the apple trees and the boy standing in the long grass and that sleeping beauty folded in his hammock and the fifty years that have passed between that day and this are as nothing. It was 1929, and I was— yes—twenty-two.

Nick woke up and smiled at me, doing that trick he had of passing in an instant effortlessly from one world to another.

“Hullo,” he said. That was how chaps said it in those days: hull, not hell. He sat up, running a hand through his hair. The hammock swayed. The small boy, destroyer of nettles, was gone. “God,” Nick said, “I had the strangest dream.”

He accompanied me back to the house. That was how it seemed: not that we were walking together, but that he had bestowed his company on me, for a brief progress, with the ease and diffidence of royalty. He was dressed in whites, and he, like me, was carrying something under his arm, a book, or a newspaper (the news was all bad, that summer, and would get worse). As he walked he kept turning sideways towards me from the waist up and nodding rapidly at everything I said, smiling and frowning and smiling again.

“You’re the Irishman,” he said. “I’ve heard of you. My father thinks your stuff is very good.” He peered at me earnestly. “He does, really.” I mumbled something meant to convey modesty and looked away. What he had seen in my face was not doubt but a momentary gloom: the Irishman.

The house was Queen Anne, not large, but rather grand, and maintained by Mrs. B. in slovenly opulence: lots of faded silk and objets supposedly of great value—Big Beaver was a collector of jade figurines—and a rank smell everywhere of some sort of burnt incense. The plumbing was primitive; there was a lavatory close up under the roof which when it was flushed would make a horrible, cavernous choking noise, like a giant’s death-rattle, that could be heard with embarrassing immediacy all over the house. But the rooms were full of light and there were always fresh-cut flowers, and the atmosphere had something thrillingly suppressed in it, as if at any moment the most amazing events might suddenly begin to happen. Mrs. Brevoort was a large, beaked, bedizened personage, imperious and excitable, who went in for soirees and mild spiritualism. She played the piano—she had studied under someone famous—producing from the instrument great gaudy storms of sound that made the window panes buzz. Nick found her irresistibly ridiculous and was faintly ashamed of her. She took a shine to me straight off, so Nick told me later (he was lying, I’m sure); she had pronounced me sensitive, he said, and believed I would make a good medium, if only I would try. I quailed before her force and relentlessness, like a skiff borne down upon by an ocean-going liner.

“You didn’t find Max?” she said, pausing in the hallway with a copper kettle in her hand. She was darkly Jewish, and wore her hair in ringlets, and displayed a startling, steep-pitched shelf of off-white bosom. “The beast; he must have forgotten you were coming. I shall tell him you were deeply wounded by his thoughtlessness.”

I began to protest but Nick took me by the elbow—after half a century I can still feel that grip, light but firm, with the hint of a tremor in it—and propelled me into the drawing room, where he flung himself down on a sagging sofa and crossed his legs and leaned back and gazed at me with a smile at once dreamy and intent. The moment stretched. Neither of us spoke. Time can stand still, I am convinced of it; something snags and stops, turning and turning, like a leaf on a stream. A thick drop of sunlight seethed in a glass paperweight on a low table. Mrs. Beaver was in the garden dosing hollyhocks with a mixture from her copper kettle. Tinny jazz-band music came hiccuping faintly down from upstairs, where Baby Beaver was in her bedroom practising dance steps to the gramophone (I know that was what she was doing; it was what she did all the time; later on I married her). Then abruptly Nick gave himself a sort of shake and leaned forward briskly and picked up a silver cigarette box from the table and proffered it to me, holding it open with a thumb hooked on the lid. Those hands.

“She’s quite mad, you know,” he said. “My mother. We all are, in this family. You’ll find out.”

What did we talk about? My essay, perhaps. The relative merits of Oxford and Cambridge. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. I can’t remember. Presently Max Brevoort arrived. I do not know what I had expected—The Laughing Publisher, I suppose: apple cheeks and a big moustache and snowy ruff—but he was tall and thin and sallow, with an amazingly long, narrow head, bald and polished at its point. He was the gentile but he looked more Jewish than his wife. He wore black serge, somewhat rusty at the knees and elbows. He gazed at me, or through me, with Nick’s large black eyes and the same still, dreamy smile, though his had a glint in it. I babbled, and he kept talking over me, not listening, saying I know, I know, and chafing his long brown hands together. What a lot we all did talk in those days. When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of Statements.

“Yes, yes, very interesting,” Big Beaver said. “Poetry is very marketable, these days.”

There was a silence. Nick laughed.

“He’s not a poet, Max,” he said.

I had never before heard a son address his father by his first name. Max Brevoort peered at me.

“But of course you’re not!” he said, without the least embarrassment. “You’re the art critic.” He rubbed his hands harder. “Very interesting.”

Then we had tea, served by an impertinent maid, and Mrs. Beaver came in from the garden and Big Beaver told her of his having mistaken me for a poet and they both laughed heartily as if it were a wonderful joke. Nick lifted a sympathetic eyebrow at me.

“Did you drive over?” he asked quietly.

“Train,” I said.

We smiled, exchanging what seemed a kind of signal, conspirators in the making.

And when I was leaving, it was he who took my essay, relieving me of it gently as if it were some wounded, suffering thing, and said he would make sure his father read it. Mrs. Beaver was talking about cigarette ends. “Just pop them in a jam jar,” she said, “and keep them for me.” I must have looked baffled. She lifted the copper kettle and shook it, producing a slushy sound. “For the greenfly,” she said. “Nicotine, you know. They can’t abide it.” I backed out and the three of them held their places, as if waiting for applause, the parents beaming and Nick darkly amused. Baby was still upstairs, playing her jazz and rehearsing for her entrance in act two.

Midnight. My leg has gone to sleep. Wish the rest of me would go with it. Yet it is not unpleasant to be awake like this, awake and alert, like a nocturnal predator, or, better yet, the guardian of the tribe’s resting place. I used to fear the night, its dreads and dreams, but lately I have begun to enjoy it, almost. Something soft and yielding comes over the world when darkness falls. On the threshold of my second childhood, I suppose I am remembering the nursery, with its woolly warmth and wide-eyed vigils. Even as a babe I was already a solitary. It was not so much my mother’s kiss that I Proustianly craved as the having done with it, so that I could be alone with my self, this strange, soft, breathing body in which my spinning consciousness was darkly trapped, like a dynamo in a sack. I can still see her dim form retreating and the yellow fan of light from the hall folding across the nursery floor as she lingeringly closed the door and stepped backwards in silence out of my life. I was not quite five when she died. Her death was not a cause of suffering to me, as I recall. I was old enough to register the loss but too young to find it more than merely puzzling. My father in his well-meaning way took to sleeping on a camp bed in the nursery to keep my brother Freddie and me company, and for weeks I had to listen to him thrashing all night long in the toils of his grief, mumbling and muttering and calling on his God, heaving long, shuddering sighs that made the camp bed crack its knuckles in exasperation. I would lie there intently, trying to listen beyond him to the wind in the trees that ringed the house like sentinels, and, farther off, the boxy collapse of waves on Carrick strand and the drawn-out hiss of waters receding over the shingle. I would not lie on my right side because that way I could feel my heart beating and I was convinced that if I were going to die I would feel it stop before the terrifying final darkness came down.

Strange creatures, children. That wary look they have when adults are about, as if they are worrying whether they are doing a convincing enough impersonation of what we expect them to be. The nineteenth century invented childhood and now the world is full of child actors. My poor Blanche was never any good at it, could not remember her lines or where to stand or what to do with her hands. How my heart would fold into itself in sorrow at the school play or on prize-giving day when the line of little girls being good would develop a kink, a sort of panicky quaver, and I would look along the row of heads and sure enough there she would be, on the point of tripping over her own awkwardness, blushing and biting her lip, and sloping her shoulders and bending her knees in a vain attempt to take a few inches off her height. When she was an adolescent I used to show her photographs of Isadora Duncan and Ottoline Morrell and other big, bold women from whose example she might take comfort and whose extravagance she might emulate, but she would not look at them, only sit in miserable silence with bowed head, picking at her hangnails, her wiry hair standing on end, as if a strong current were passing through it, and the heart-breakingly defenceless pale back of her neck exposed. Now Julian, on the other hand… No; I think not. That subject is the very stuff of insomnia.

Among the newspaper pack this morning there was a girl reporter—how these terms date one!—who reminded me of Blanche, I don’t quite know why. She was not big, like my daughter, but in her manner she had something of the same intent watchfulness. Clever, too: while the rest kept elbowing each other aside in order to ask the obvious questions, such as whether there are more of us still to be unmasked (!), or if Mrs. W. had known all along, she sat fixed on me with what seemed a sort of hunger and hardly spoke at all, and then only to ask for names and dates and places, information which I suspect she already possessed. It was as if she were carrying out some private test on me, checking my responses, measuring my emotions. Perhaps I, in turn, reminded her of her father? Girls, in my admittedly limited experience of them, are ever on the lookout for their Dad. I considered asking her to stay to lunch—that was the kind of giddy mood I was in—for suddenly the thought of being alone after they had vacated the place was not at all attractive. This was strange; I have never suffered from loneliness in the past. Indeed, as I said already, I have always considered myself to be a perfectly reconciled solitary, especially after poor Patrick died. But there was something about this girl, and not just her indefinable resemblance to Blanche, that attracted my attention. A fellow loner? I did not get her name and do not even know which of the papers she works for. I shall read them all tomorrow and see if I can identify her style.

Tomorrow. Dear God, how can I face a tomorrow.

Well, I am everywhere. Pages and pages of me. This must be how it feels to be the leading man on the morning after a stupendously disastrous first night. I went to a number of newsagents, for the sake of decency, though it got increasingly awkward as the bundle of newspapers under my arm steadily thickened. Some of the people behind the counters recognised me and curled a contemptuous lip; reactionaries to a man, shopkeepers, I have noticed it before. One chap, though, gave me a sort of sad, underhand smile. He was a Pakistani. What company I shall be in from now on. Old lags. Child molesters. Outcasts. The lost ones.

It has been confirmed: the K is to be revoked. I mind. I am surprised how much I mind. Just Doctor again, if even that; maybe just plain Mister. At least they have not taken away my bus pass, or my laundry allowance (the latter an acknowledgement, I imagine, that over the age of sixty-five one tends to dribble a lot).

That writer chap telephoned, requesting an interview. What effrontery. Well-spoken, however, and not at all embarrassed. Brisk tone, faintly amused, with a hint almost of fondness: after all, I am his ticket to fame, or notoriety, at least. I asked him to say who it was that betrayed me. That provoked a chuckle. Said even a journalist would go to gaol rather than reveal a source. They love to trot out that particular hobby-horse. I might have said to him, My dear fellow, I have been in gaol for the best part of thirty years. Instead, I rang off.

The Telegraph sent a photographer to Carrickdrum, site of my bourgeois beginnings. The house is no longer the bishop’s residence, and is owned, the paper tells me, by a man who deals in scrap metal. The sentinel trees are gone—the scrap merchant must have wanted more light—and the brickwork has been covered with a new facing, painted white. I am tempted to work up a metaphor for change and loss, but I must beware turning into a sentimental old ass, if I am not one already. St. Nicholas’s (St. Nicholas’s!—I never made the connection before) was a grim and gloomy pile, and a bit of stucco and white paint can only be an improvement. I see myself as a little boy sitting head on hand in the bay window in the parlour, looking out at the rain falling on the sloping lawn and the far-off, stone-grey waters of the Lough, hearing poor Freddie wandering about upstairs crooning like a dreamy banshee. That’s Carrickdrum. When my father married again, with what struck me even at the age of six as unseemly haste, I awaited the appearance of my stepmother— they had married in London—with a mixture of curiosity, anger and apprehension, expecting a witch out of an Arthur Rackham illustration, with violet eyes and fingernails like stilettos. When the happy couple arrived, mounted, with odd appropriateness, on a jaunting car, I was surprised and obscurely disappointed to find that she was nothing like my expectations of her, but a big, jolly woman, broad in the beam and pink of cheek, with a washerwoman’s thick arms and a loud, trembly laugh. Coming up the front steps she spotted me in the hallway and broke into a wallowing run, big red hands lifted, and fell upon my neck, nuzzling me wetly and uttering distressful little grunts of joy. She smelled of face powder and peppermints and female sweat. She unclasped me and stepped back, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of a hand, and threw a histrionically fervent glance back at my father, while I stood frowning, trying to cope with a welter of sensations I did not recognise, among them a faint premonition of that unexpected happiness she was to bring to St. Nicholas’s. My father wrung his hands and grinned sheepishly and avoided my eye. No one said anything, yet there was the sense of loud and continuous noise, as if the unexpected gaiety of the occasion were producing a din of its own. Then my brother appeared on the stairs, descending sideways with his Quasimodo lurch and drooling—no, no, I am exaggerating, he was not really that bad—and brought the moment to its senses. “And this,” said my father, fairly bellowing in his nervousness, “this is Freddie!”

How difficult that day must have been for my mother—I always think of her as that, my natural mother having bowed out so early—and how well she managed it all, settling herself upon the house like a great warm roosting bird. That first day, she embraced poor Freddie stoutly, and listened to the gaggings and strangled howls that with him passed for speech, nodding her head as if she were understanding him perfectly, and even produced a hanky and wiped the spittle from his chin. I’m sure my father must have told her about him, but I doubt if any mere description could have prepared her for Freddie. He gave her his broadest gap-toothed grin and put his arms tightly about her big hips and laid his face against her stomach, as if he were welcoming her home. Most likely he thought she was our real mother come back transformed from the land of the dead. Behind her my father heaved a queer, groaning sort of sigh, like that of someone setting down at long last a toilsome and unmanageable burden.

Her name was Hermione. We called her Hettie. Thank God she did not live to see me disgraced.

Day three. Life goes on. The anonymous telephone calls have abated. They did not start up until first thing yesterday, after the story had appeared in the morning papers (and I thought everyone got their news these days from the telly!). I had to leave the receiver off the hook; whenever I replaced it, the damned instrument would immediately start shrilling at me, seeming to dance in rage. The callers are men, for the most part, belt-and-braces types by the sound of them, but there have been a few females as well, refined old things with gentle, reedy voices and the vocabulary of a navvy. The abuse is entirely personal. It is as if I had embezzled their pensions. At first I was polite, and even got into conversations of a sort with the less mad among them (one chap wanted to know if I had met Beria—I think he was interested in the Georgian’s love life). I should have recorded them, it would have made a revealing cross-section of the English national character. One call, however, I welcomed. She announced herself diffidently while giving the impression that she expected me to know her. And she was right: I did not recognise her name, but I remembered the voice. Which paper was it again? I asked. There was a pause. “I’m freelance,” she said. That explained why I could not find her trace in yesterday’s accounts of my press conference (my press conference!—gosh, how grand it sounds). She is called Vandeleur. I wondered if there was an Irish connection—lots of Vandeleurs in Ireland— but she says not, and even seemed a bit put out by the suggestion. The Irish are not popular these days, with IRA bombs going off in the city every other week. I have forgotten her first name. Sophie? Sibyl? Something quaintly archaic, anyway. I told her to come round in the afternoon. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Then I had an attack of the fidgets while I waited for her, and burned my hand cooking lunch (grilled lamb chop, sliced tomato, a leaf of lettuce; no booze—felt I should keep a clear head). She arrived on the dot, muffled in a big old coat that looked as if it had belonged to her father (there’s Dad again). Dark short hair like fine fur and a little heart-shaped face and tiny, cold-looking hands. She made me think of a delicate, rare, very self-possessed small animal. Josefina the Songstress. What age is she? Late twenties, early thirties. She stood in the middle of the living room, one of those little claws braced in a peculiar, old-womany way on the lacquered edge of the Japanese table, and looked about carefully, as if to memorise what she saw.

“What a nice flat,” she said flatly. “I didn’t notice, last time.”

“Not as nice as the flat at the Institute, where I used to live.”

“Did you have to give it up?”

“Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Someone died there.”

Serena, that is her name, it has just come back to me. Serena Vandeleur. Has a ring to it, certainly.

I took her coat, which she surrendered reluctantly, I thought. “Are you cold?” I said, playing the solicitous old gent. She shook her head. Perhaps she feels less secure without that protective paternal embrace. Though I must say she strikes me as remarkably at ease with herself. It is a little unnerving, this sense of calm that she communicates. No, communicates is the wrong word; she seems wholly self-contained. She wore a nice plain blouse and a cardigan and flat shoes, though a tight, short leather skirt lent a certain slinky raciness to the ensemble. I offered her tea but she said she would prefer a drink. That’s my girl. I said we should have some gin, which gave me an excuse to escape to the kitchen, where the sting of ice cubes and the sharp tang of limes (I always use limes in gin; so much more assertive than the dull old workaday lemon) helped me to regain something of my composure. I do not know why I was so agitated. But then, how would I not be in a state? In the past three days the tranquil pool that was my life has been churned up and all sorts of disturbing things have risen from the depths. I am beset constantly by a feeling the only name for which I can think of is nostalgia. Great hot waves of remembrance wash through me, bringing images and sensations I would have thought I had entirely forgotten or successfully extirpated, yet so sharp and vivid are they that I falter in my tracks with an inward gasp, assailed by a sort of rapturous sorrow. I tried to describe this phenomenon to Miss Vandeleur when I returned to the living room with our drinks on a tray (so much for keeping a clear head). I found her standing as before, her face inclined a little and one hand with steepled fingers pressing on the table, so still and seemingly posed that the suspicion crossed my mind that she had been searching the room and had darted back to this position only when she had heard the approaching tinkle of ice and glass. But I am sure it is just my bad mind that makes me think she had been snooping: it is the kind of thing that I used to do automatically, in the days when I had a professional interest in discovering other people’s secrets.

“Yes,” I said, “I can’t tell you how strange it is, to be suddenly thrust into the public gaze like this.”

She nodded distractedly; she was thinking of something else. It struck me that she was behaving oddly, for a journalist.

We sat opposite each other by the fireplace, with our drinks, in a polite, unexpectedly easy, almost companionable silence, like two voyagers sharing a cocktail before joining the captain’s table, knowing we had a whole ocean of time before us in which to get acquainted. Miss Vandeleur studied with frank though unemphatic interest the framed photographs on the mantelpiece: my father in his gaiters, Hettie in a hat, Blanche and Julian as children, my ill-remembered natural mother wearing silks and a lost look. “My family,” I said. “The generations.” She nodded again. It was one of those volatile April days, with enormous icebergs of silver-and-white cloud hurtling slowly across the sky above the city, bringing rapid alternations of glare and gloom, and now suddenly the sunlight in the window was switched off almost with a click and I thought for a moment I was going to cry, I could not say why, precisely, though obviously the photographs were part of it. Very alarming, it was, and a great surprise; I was never the tearful type, up to now. When was the last time that I wept? There was Patrick’s death, of course, but that does not count—death does not count, when it comes to weeping. No, I think the last time I really cried was when I went round to Vivienne’s that morning after Boy and the Dour Scot had fled. Driving like a madman through Mayfair with the wipers going full belt and then realising it wasn’t rain that was splintering my vision but salt tears. Of course, I was tight, and in an awful funk (it looked as if the whole game was up and that we would all be hauled in), but I was not accustomed to losing control of myself like that, and it was a shock. I learned some remarkable things that day, and not only about my propensity to tears.

Miss Vandeleur had taken on a grey look and was huddling rather in her chair. “But you are cold,” I said, and despite her protests that she was perfectly comfortable I got down on one knee, which startled her and made her shrink back—she must have thought I was going to kneel before her and blurt out some ghastly, final confession and swear her to secrecy—but it was only to light the gas fire. It uttered its gratifying whumpf and did that little trick of sucking the flame from the match, then the delicate filigree of wires glowed and the ashy waffle behind them began slowly to turn blush-pink. I have a great fondness for such humble gadgets: scissors, tin-openers, adjustable reading lamps, even the flush toilet. They are the unacknowledged props of civilisation.

“Why did you do it?” Miss Vandeleur said.

I was in the process of rising creakily from that genuflexion, one hand on a quivering knee, the other pressed to the small of my back, and I almost fell over. But it was a not unreasonable question, in the circumstances, and one which, curiously enough, none of her colleagues had thought to ask. I slumped into my armchair with a laughing sigh and shook my head.

“Why?” I said. “Oh, cowboys and indians, my dear; cowboys and indians.” It was true, in a way. The need for amusement, the fear of boredom: was the whole thing much more than that, really, despite all the grand theorising? “And hatred of America, of course,” I added, a trifle jadedly, I fear; the poor old Yanks are by now a rather moth-eaten bugbear. “You must understand, the American occupation of Europe was to many of us not much less of a calamity than a German victory would have been. The Nazis at least were a clear and visible enemy. Men enough to be damned, to paraphrase Eliot.” At that I gave her a twinkly smile: wise age acknowledges educated youth. I stood up with my drink and walked to the window: sun-polished slates, a skittle-stand of blackened chimney pots, television aerials like a jumbled alphabet consisting mainly of aitches. “The defence of European culture—”

“But you were,” she said evenly, interrupting me, “a spy before the war. Weren’t you?”

Now, such words—spy, agent, espionage, etc.—have always given me trouble. They conjure in my mind images of low taverns and cobbled laneways at night with skulking figures in doublet and hose and the flash of poniards. I could never think of myself as a part of that dashing, subfusc world. Boy, now, Boy had a touch of the Kit Marlowes about him, all right, but I was a dry old stick, even when I was young. I was what was needed, someone safe to chivvy the rest of them along, to look after them and wipe their noses and make sure they didn’t run out into the traffic, but now I cannot help wondering if I sacrificed too much of myself to the… I suppose I must call it the cause. Did I squander my life on the gathering and collating of trivial information? The thought leaves me breathless.

“I was a connoisseur, you know, before I was anything else,” I said. I had turned from the window. She was sitting with shoulders hunched, gazing into the pallid flame of the gas fire. In my glass an ice cube cracked with an agonised plink. “Art was all that ever mattered to me,” I said. “I even tried to be a painter, in my student days. Oh yes. Modest little still-lifes, blue jugs and violent tulips, that kind of thing. I dared to hang one in my rooms at Cambridge. A friend looked at it and pronounced me the finest lady painter since Raoul Dufy.” That was Boy, of course. That wide, cruel, voracious smile. “So you have before you, my dear,” I said, “a failed artist, like so many other egregious scoundrels: Nero, half the Medicis, Stalin, the unspeakable Herr Schicklgruber.” I could see that last one passing her by.

I returned and sat down again in the armchair. She was still gazing into the undulating pale flame of the fire. She had hardly touched her drink. I wondered what it could be that she was pondering with such concentration. Time passed. The gas flame hissed. Sunlight came and went in the window. Idly I admired the little Bonington watercolour behind her, one of my few genuine treasures: oyster-shell mud and a fried-rasher sky, fisher-lads in the foreground, a distant, lofty barquentine with sails furled. At last she raised her eyes and met mine. That inner struggle she had been engaged upon had given her the drawn look of a Carracci madonna. She must have taken my Bonington ogle—Nick always said I looked positively coital when contemplating a picture—for a benison directed upon her, for suddenly she decided to come clean.

“I’m not really a journalist,” she said.

“I know.” I smiled at her surprise. “Takes one deceiver to recognise another. Did Skryne send you?”

She frowned. “Who?”

“Just one of my keepers.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head violently and twisting the gin glass in her fingers, “no, I’m… I’m a writer. I want to write a book on you.”

Oh dear. Another contemporary historian. I suppose my face must have fallen, for she launched at once defensively into a stumbling account of herself and her plans. I hardly listened.

What did I care for her theories on the connection between espionage and the bogus concept of the English gentleman (“I’m not English,” I reminded her, but she took no notice) or the malign influence on my generation of the nihilistic aesthetics of Modernism? I wanted to tell her about the blade of sunlight cleaving the velvet shadows of the public urinal that post-war spring afternoon in Regensburg, of the incongruous gaiety of the rain shower that fell the day of my father’s funeral, of that last night with Boy when I saw the red ship under Blackfriars Bridge and conceived of the tragic significance of my life: in other words, the real things; the true things.

“Do you know philosophy?” I asked. “I mean ancient philosophy. The Stoics: Zeno, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius?” Cautiously she shook her head. She was plainly baffled by this turn in the conversation. “I used to consider myself a Stoic,” I said. “In fact, I was quite proud to think of myself thus.” I put down my glass and joined my fingers at their tips and gazed off in the direction of the window, where light and shade were still jostling for position. I was born to be a lecturer. “The Stoics denied the concept of progress. There might be a little advance here, some improvement there—cosmology in their time, dentistry in ours—but in the long run the balance of things, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, remains constant. Periodically, at the end of aeons, the world is destroyed in a holocaust of fire and then everything starts up again, just as before. This pre-Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence I have always found greatly comforting, not because I look forward to returning again and again to live my life over, but because it drains events of all consequence while at the same time conferring on them the numinous significance that derives from fixity, from completedness. Do you see?” I smiled my kindliest smile. Her mouth had fallen open a tiny way and I had an urge to reach out a finger and tip it shut again. “And then one day I read, I can’t remember where, an account of a little exchange between Josef Mengele and a Jewish doctor whom he had salvaged from the execution line to assist him in his experiments at Auschwitz. They were in the operating theatre. Mengele was working on a pregnant woman, whose legs he had bound together at the knees prior to inducing the onset of the birth of her child, without the benefit of anaesthetics, of course, which were much too valuable to waste on Jews. In the lulls between the mother’s shrieks, Mengele discoursed on the vast project of the Final Solution: the numbers involved, the technology, the logistical problems, and so on. How long, the Jewish doctor ventured to ask—he must have been a courageous man—how long would the exterminations go on? Mengele, apparently not at all surprised or put out by the question, smiled gently and without looking up from his work said, Oh, they will go on, and on, and on… And it struck me that Dr. Mengele was also a Stoic, just like me. I had not realised until then how broad a church it was that I belonged to.”

I liked the quality of the silence that fell, or rather rose—for silence rises, surely?—when I ceased speaking. At the end of a well-made period I always have a sense of ease, a sort of blissful settling back, my mind folding its arms, as it were, and smiling to itself in quiet satisfaction. It is a sensation known to all mental athletes, I am sure, and for me was one of the chief pleasures of the lecture hall, not to mention debriefings (a term that never failed to elicit a chuckle from Boy). It rather took the shine off my bliss, however, when Miss Vandeleur, of whose mousy yet persistent presence I was beginning to tire slightly, mumbled something about not having known the Stoics were a church. Young people are so literal-minded.

I stood up. “Come,” I said to her, “I want you to see something.”

We went through to the study. I could hear her leather skirt creaking as she walked behind me. When she first arrived she had told me her father was an admiral, and I had misheard her to say that her father was admirable. Although this piece of filial piety had struck me as disconcertingly supererogatory, I had hastened to assure her that I had no doubt that he was. There followed an inadvertently comic exchange which at the end subsided into one of those awful, sweaty silences that such glimpses of the world’s essential absurdity always provoke. I remember at one of Mrs. W.’s stiflingly grand occasions conversing with the lady herself as we made our way slowly up an interminable, red-carpeted staircase behind the ample back parts of the Dowager Duchess of Somewhere, and both of us noticing at the same instant, what the Duchess herself was magnificently unaware of, that on her way into the Palace she had trod in corgi-shit. At moments like that I always felt grateful for the difficulties of leading a multiple life, which lent a little weight to matters, or at least provided something for the mind to turn to in a time of need. As a child at school, when I had to keep myself from laughing in the face of a bully or a particularly mad master, I would concentrate on the thought of death; it always worked, and would still, I’m sure, if there were need.

“Here,” I said, “is my treasure, the touchstone and true source of my life’s work.”

It is a curious phenomenon, that paintings are always larger in my mind than in reality—I mean literally larger, in their physical dimensions. This is true even of works with which I am thoroughly intimate, including my Death of Seneca, which I have lived with for nigh on fifty years. I know its size, I know, empirically, that the canvas is seventeen and a quarter inches by twenty-four, yet when I encounter it again even after a brief interval I have the uncanny sense that it has shrunk, as if I were viewing it through the wrong side of a lens, or standing a few paces farther back from it than I really am. The effect is disconcerting, as when you go to the Bible and discover that the entire story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, say, is dispatched in a handful of verses. Now as always the picture did its trick and for a moment as I stood before it with Miss Vandeleur intermittently creaking at my side it seemed diminished not only in scale but in—how shall I say?—in substance, and I experienced a strange little flicker of distress, which, however, I do not think was detectable in my tone; anyway, persons of her age are impervious to the tics and twitches by which the old betray the pain of their predicament.

“The subject,” I said, in what I think of as my Expounding Voice, “is the suicide of Seneca the Younger in the year A.D. 65. See his grieving friends and family about him as his life’s blood drips into the golden bowl. There is the officer of the Guard—Gavius Silvanus, according to Tacitus—who has unwillingly conveyed the imperial death sentence. Here is Pompeia Paulina, the philosopher’s young wife, ready to follow her husband into death, baring her breast to the knife. And notice, here in the background, in this farther room, the servant girl filling the bath in which presently the philosopher will breathe his last. Is it not all admirably executed? Seneca was a Spaniard and was brought up in Rome. Among his works are the Consolationes, the Epistolae morales, and The Apocolocyntosis, or ‘Pumpkinification,’ of the Divine Claudius—this last, as you may guess, is a satire. Although he professed to despise the things of this world, he still managed to amass an enormous fortune, much of it derived from moneylending in Britain; the historian Dio Cassius says that the excessive interest rates charged by Seneca was one of the causes of the revolt of the Britons against the occupier—which means, as Lord Russell has wittily pointed out, that Queen Boadicea’s rebellion was directed against capitalism as represented by the Roman Empire’s leading philosophical proponent of austerity. Such are the ironies of history.” I stole a sideways glance at Miss Vandeleur; her eyes were beginning to glaze; I was wearing her down nicely. “Seneca fell foul of Claudius’s successor, the aforementioned Nero, whose tutor he had been. He was accused of conspiracy, and was ordered to commit suicide, which he did, with great fortitude and dignity.” I gestured at the picture before us. For the first time it occurred to me to wonder if the painter was justified in portraying the scene with such tranquillity, such studied calm. Again the shiver of disquiet. In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt? “Baudelaire,” I said, and this time I did seem to detect the tiniest quaver in my voice, “Baudelaire described Stoicism as a religion with only one sacrament: suicide.”

At this, Miss Vandeleur suddenly gave a sort of shudder, like a pony balking at a jump.

“Why are you doing this?” she said thickly.

I looked at her with a mildly enquiring frown. She stood with her fists clenched in front of her hip bones and her little face thrust forward, sulky-sullen, glaring at an ivory paperknife on my desk. Not so serene after all.

“Why am I doing what, my dear?”

“I know how well read you are,” she said, almost spitting, “I know how cultured you are.”

She made the word sound like an ailment. I thought: she can’t be from Skryne, he would never send someone with so little self-control. After a beat of flushed silence I said softly:

“In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.”

Still fixed on that paperknife, she set her lips so tightly they turned white, and gave her head a quick, stubborn little shake, and I thought, almost with fondness, of Vivienne, my sometime wife, who was the only supposedly grown-up person I ever knew who used actually to stamp her foot when she was angry.

“There are,” she said, in a surprisingly restrained tone, “there are simple questions; there are answers. Why did you spy for the Russians? How did you get away with it? What did you think you would achieve by betraying your country and your country’s interests? Or was it because you never thought of this as your country? Was it because you were Irish and hated us?”

And at last she turned her head and looked at me. What fire! I would never have expected it. Her father, the admirable Admiral, would be proud of her. I looked away from her, smiling my weary smile, and considered The Death of Seneca. How superbly executed are the folds of the dying man’s robe, polished, smooth and dense as fluted sandstone, yet wonderfully delicate, too, like one of the philosopher’s own carven paragraphs. (I must have the picture valued. Not that I would dream of selling it, of course, but just now I find myself in need of financial reassurance.)

“Not the Russians,” I murmured.

I could feel her blink. “What?”

“I did not spy for the Russians,” I said. “I spied for Europe. A much broader church.”

This really is the most unsettling weather. Just now out of nowhere a violent shower started up, pelting big fat splatters against the windows in which the watercolour sunlight shines unabated. I should not like just yet to leave this world, so tender and accommodating even in the midst of its storms. The doctors tell me they got all of it and that there is no sign of any new malignancy. I am in remission. I feel I have been in remission all my life.

2

My father was a great bird’s-nester. I could never learn the trick of it. On Sunday mornings in springtime he would take Freddie and me walking with him in the fields above Carrickdrum. I imagine he was escaping those of his parishioners— he was still rector then—who made it a practice to call to the house after service, the boisterously unhappy country wives in their pony-and-traps, the working people from the back streets of the town, the glittery-eyed mad spinsters who spent their weekdays doing sentry-go behind lace-curtained windows in the villas on the seafront. I wish I could describe these outings as occasions of familial conviviality, with my father discoursing to his wide-eyed sons on the ways and wiles of Mother Nature, but in fact he rarely spoke, and I suspect he was for the most part forgetful of the two little boys scrambling desperately over rock and thorn to keep up with him. It was rough country up there, skimpy bits of field isolated between outcrops of bare grey stone, with whin bushes and the odd stand of mountain ash deformed by the sea gales. I do not know why my father insisted on bringing Freddie with us, for he always grew agitated in those uplands, especially on windy days, and went along uttering little moos of distress and tearing at the skin around his fingernails and gnawing at his lips until they bled. At the farthest limit of our trek, however, we would come down into a little hollow ringed by rocks, a miniature valley, with meadow-grass and gorse bushes and banks of hawthorn, where all was still and hummingly silent, and where even Freddie grew calm, or as near to calm as he ever got. Here my father, in plus-fours and gaiters and an old fawn pullover and still wearing his dog collar, would stop suddenly, with a hand lifted, hearkening to I do not know what secret signal or vibration of the air, and then strike off from the path and approach this or that bush, with surprising lightness of tread for such a large-made man, and carefully part the leaves and peer in and smile. I remember it, that smile. There was simple delight in it, of course—it made him look as I imagined Freddie would have looked if he had not been a half-wit—but also a sort of grim, sad triumph, as if he had caught out the Creator in some impressive yet essentially shoddy piece of fakery. Then with a finger to his lips he would beckon us forward and lift us up one after the other to see what he had discovered: a finch’s or a blackbird’s nest, sometimes with the bird herself still on it, throbbing tinily and looking up at us in dull fright, as at the side-by-side big faces of God and his son. Not the birds, though, but the eggs, were what fascinated me. Pale blue or speckled white, they lay there in the scooped hollow of the nest, closed, inexplicable, packed with their own fullness. I felt that if I took one in my hand, which my father would never have permitted me to do, it would be too heavy for me to hold, like a piece of matter from a planet far more dense than this one. What was most striking about them was their difference. They were like themselves and nothing else. And in this extreme of selfness they rebuked all that stood round about, the dissolute world of bush and briar and riotous green leaf. They were the ultimate artefact. When I first spotted The Death of Seneca, shining amidst the dross in the back room at Alighieri’s, I thought at once of those Sunday mornings of my childhood, and of my father with infinite delicacy parting the foliage and showing me these fragile and yet somehow indestructible treasures nestling at the heart of the world.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first of all fall in love there. I had always known London; my family, although they hardly ever went there, considered it our capital, not dour Belfast, with its rain-coloured buildings and bellowing shipyard sirens. It was only in that summer I spent in London with Nick, however, that the place came fully alive for me. I say I spent the summer with him but that is wishful exaggeration. He was working—another exaggeration—for his father at Brevoort & Klein, and had moved down from Oxford to a flat above a newsagent’s shop off the Fulham Road. I remember that flat with remarkable clarity. There was a small living room at the front with two peaked mansard windows that made an incongruously ecclesiastical effect; the first time Boy came there he clapped his hands and cried: “Fetch me my surplice, we must have a black mass!” The flat was known as the Eyrie, a word neither Nick nor I was sure how to pronounce, but it suited, for certainly it was eerie—Nick favoured tall candles and Piranesi prints—and airy, too, especially in spring, when the windows were filled with flying sky and the timbers creaked like the spars of a sailing ship. Nick, who was by nature a unique mix of the aesthete and the hearty, let the place run to appalling squalor: I still shudder when I think of the lavatory. At the back was a poky bedroom with a sharply canted ceiling, in which there was wedged skew-ways an enormous brass bed Nick claimed to have won in a poker game in a gambling den behind Paddington Station. It was one of Nick’s stories.

He did not often sleep at the flat. His girls refused to stay there, because of the filth, and anyway in those times girls rarely stayed overnight, at least not the kind of girl that Nick consorted with. Mostly it was a place to throw parties in, and to recover in from the resulting hangovers. On these occasions he would take to his bed for two or three days, surrounded by an accumulating clutter of books and boxes of sweets and bottles of champagne, supplied by a succession of friends whom he would summon to him by telephone. I can still hear his voice on the line, an exaggeratedly anguished whisper: “I say, old man, do you think you could come round? I do believe I’m dying.” Usually when I arrived a small crowd would already have assembled, another party in embryo, sitting about on that vast raft of a bed eating Nick’s chocolates and drinking champagne from tooth-glasses and kitchen cups, with Nick in his nightshirt propped against a bank of pillows, pale as ivory, his black hair standing on end, all eyes and angles, a figure out of Schiele. Boy would be there, of course, and Rothenstein, and girls called Daphne and Brenda and Daisy, in silks and cloche hats. Sometimes Querell would come round, tall, thin, sardonic, standing with his back against the wall and smoking a cigarette, somehow crooked, like the villain in a cautionary tale, one eyebrow arched and the corners of his mouth turned down, and a hand in the pocket of his tightly buttoned jacket that I always thought could be holding a gun. He had the look of a man who knew something damaging about everyone in the room. (I realise that I am seeing him not as he was then, young, and gauche, surely, like the rest of us, but as he was in his late thirties, when the Blitz was on, and he seemed the very personification of the times: embittered, tense, offhand, amusedly despairing, older than his, and our, years.)

Those parties: did anyone really enjoy them? What I chiefly recall is the air of suppressed desperation that pervaded them. We drank a lot, but drink seemed only to make us frightened, or despairing, so that we must shriek all the louder, as if to scare off demons. What was it that we feared? Another war, yes, the worldwide economic crisis, all that, the threat of Fascism; there was no end of things to be afraid of. We felt such deep resentments! We blamed all our ills on the Great War and the old men who had forced the young to fight in it, and perhaps Flanders really did destroy us as a nation, but— But there I go, falling into the role of amateur sociologist that I despise. I never thought in terms of us, or the nation; none of us did, I am convinced of it. We talked in those terms, of course—we never stopped talking thus—but it was all no more than a striking of attitudes to make ourselves feel more serious, more weighty, more authentic. Deep down—if we did, indeed, have deeps—we cared about ourselves and, intermittently, one or two others; isn’t that how it always is? Why did you do it? that girl asked me yesterday, and I replied with parables of philosophy and art, and she went away dissatisfied. But what other reply could I have given? I am the answer to her question, the totality of what I am; nothing less will suffice. In the public mind, for the brief period it will entertain, and be entertained by, the thought of me, I am a figure with a single salient feature. Even for those who thought they knew me intimately, everything else I have done or not done has faded to insignificance before the fact of my so-called treachery. While in reality all that I am is all of a piece: all of a piece, and yet broken up into a myriad selves. Does that make sense?

So what we were frightened of, then, was ourselves, each one his own demon.

Querell when he phoned the other day had the grace not to pretend to be shocked. He knows all about betrayal, the large variety and the small; he is a connoisseur in that department. When he was at the height of his fame (he has slipped somewhat from the headlines, since he is old and no longer the hellion he once was) I used to chuckle over newspaper photographs of him hobnobbing with the Pope, since I knew that the lips with which he kissed the papal ring had most likely been between some woman’s thighs a half-hour previously. But Querell too is in danger of being shown up for what he really is, whatever that might be. That fishy look he always had is becoming more pronounced with age. In yet another interview recently—where did he ever get the reputation for shunning publicity?—he made one of those seemingly deep but in fact banal observations that have become his trademark. “I don’t know about God,” he told the interviewer, “but certainly I believe in the Devil.” Oh yes, one always needed a long spoon to sup with Querell.

He was genuinely curious about people—the sure mark of the second-rate novelist. At those parties in the Eyrie he would stand for a long time leaning with his back against the wall, diabolical trickles of smoke issuing from the corners of his mouth, watching and listening as the party took on an air of monkey-house hysteria. He drank as much as the rest of us, but it seemed to have no effect on him except to make those unnervingly pale-blue eyes of his shine with a kind of malicious merriment. Usually he would slip away early, with a girl in tow; you would glance at the spot where he had been standing and find him gone, and seem to see a shadowy after-image of him, like the paler shadow left on a wall when a picture is removed. So I was surprised when during a party one August afternoon he accosted me in the corridor.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, in that insinuatingly truculent way of his, “I can’t take any more of this filthy wine—let’s go and have a real drink.”

My head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton wool and the sunlight in the mansard windows had taken on the colour of urine, and for once I was content to leave. A girl was standing weeping in the bedroom doorway, her face in her hands; Nick was not to be seen. Querell and I walked in silence down the clattery stairs. The air in the street was blued with exhaust fumes; strange to think of a time when one still noticed the smell of petrol. We went to a pub—was it Finch’s then, or had it another name?— and Querell ordered gin and water, “the tart’s tipple,” as he said with a snicker. It was just after opening time and there were few customers. Querell sat with one foot hooked on the rung of his stool and the other delicately braced en pointe on the floor; he did not undo the buttons of his jacket. I noticed the frayed shirt cuffs, the shine on the knees of his trousers. We were of an age, but I felt a generation younger than him. He had a job on the Express, or perhaps it was the Telegraph, writing juicy tidbits for the gossip column, and as we drank he recounted office anecdotes, drolly describing the eccentricities of his fellow journalists and the public-school asininity of the editor of the day in what were obviously pre-prepared paragraphs of admirable fluency and precision. Tight though I was I saw clearly that this was a performance, from behind which he was studying me with the detached intentness that was to become his trademark as a novelist. He was already an expert at putting up smokescreens (literally as well as figuratively: he smoked without cease, apparently the same, everlasting cigarette, for I never seemed able to catch him in the act of lighting up).

He came to the end of his stories and we were silent for a while. He ordered more drinks, and when I tried to pay for them he waved my money away with that matter-of-fact assumption of superiority that was another of his characteristics. I don’t know why he should have assumed I was broke; on the contrary, I was comparatively well off at the time, thanks to my column for the Spectator and occasional lectures at the Institute.

“You’re pretty fond of the Beaver, aren’t you,” he said.

It was said with such studied casualness that I grew wary, despite the gin.

“I haven’t known him for very long,” I said.

He nodded. “Of course, you were a Cambridge man. Not that I saw a great deal of him at Oxford.” Nick had said to me of Querell that in their college days he had been too busy whoring to bother much with friendships. Despite recent rumours to the contrary, Querell was an incorrigible hetero, whose fascination with women ran almost to the level of the gynaecological. I thought he always smelled faintly of sex. I hear he is still chasing girls, in his seventies, down there on the Cote d’Azur. “Quite a boy, the Beaver,” he said, and paused, and then gave me a peculiar, sidelong look and asked: “Do you trust him?” I did not know what to answer, and mumbled something about not being sure that I thought that anyone was really to be trusted. He nodded again, seemingly satisfied, and dropped the subject and began to talk instead about a fellow he had bumped into recently, whom he had known at Oxford.

“He’d interest you,” he said. “He’s a red-hot Sinn Feiner.”

I laughed.

“I’m from the other side of the fence, you know,” I said. “My people are black Protestants.”

“Oh, Protestants in Ireland are all Catholics, really.”

“Rather the opposite, I should have thought. Or we’re all just plain pagans, perhaps.”

“Well, anyway, the place is interesting, isn’t it? I mean the politics.”

I wonder—good lord, I wonder if he was putting out feelers with a view to recruiting me, even then? That was the summer of ’thirty-one; was he already with the Department, that early? Or maybe it was just the question of religion that interested him. Although none of us knew it, he was already taking instruction at Farm Street. (Querell’s Catholicism, by the way, has always seemed to me far more of an anachronism than my Marxism.) And in fact now he dropped the subject of politics and went on to talk about religion, in his usual oblique way, telling me a story about Gerard Manley Hopkins preaching at some sort of women’s gathering in Dublin and scandalising the congregation by comparing the Church to a sow with seven teats representing the seven sacraments. I laughed, and said what a sad poor fool Hopkins was, trying for the common touch like that and failing ridiculously, but Querell gave me another long, measuring look and said: “Yes, he made the mistake of thinking that the way to be convincing is to put on a false front,” and I felt obscurely confounded.

We finished our drinks and left the pub, I very bleary indeed by now, and Querell hailed a taxi and we went to Curzon Street, where there was an opening at Alighieri’s. The work, by an émigré White Russian whose name I have forgotten, was hopeless trash, a combination of supremacist sterility and Russian-icon kitsch that turned my already drink-insulted stomach. He was all the rage, though, this Supremavitch, and the crowd was so large it had overflowed from the gallery, and people were standing about the pavement in the evening sunshine, drinking white wine and sneering at passers-by, and producing that self-congratulatory low roar that is the natural collective voice of imbibers at the fount of art. Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort.

Nick’s party seemed to have transferred itself here intact. There was Nick himself, still tousled, still barefoot, with a pair of trousers pulled on over his nightshirt, and Leo Rothenstein in his three-piece suit, and the silken Daphnes and Daisys, and even the weeping girl, red eyed but laughing now, all of them drunk and embarrassingly loud. When they saw Querell and me approaching they turned on us, and someone shouted something at which everyone laughed, and Querell swore and turned on his heel and stalked away in the direction of the park, narrow head held aloft and elbows pressed tightly to his sides; in his high-shouldered dark-brown suit he reminded me of an HP Sauce bottle.

Remarkable how sobering it is to arrive in the midst of people more drunk than oneself; within minutes of stopping on the pavement among that sodden, billowing crowd I began to taste copper at the back of my mouth and felt a headache starting up and knew that I must have more drink or face the rest of the evening in a state of ashen melancholy. Boy had buttonholed me and was shouting into my ear some outrageous tale about an encounter with a negro sailor (“… like a length of bloody hawser!”) and breathing garlic fumes all over me. I wanted to talk to Nick but the girls had got him, and were hilariously admiring his bare and extremely dirty feet. I broke away from Boy at last and plunged into the interior of the gallery, where, though crowded, it seemed less confined than outside on the pavement. A glass of wine materialised in my hand. I was at that clear-eyed yet hallucinatory stage of inebriation in which the commonplace takes on a sort of comically transfigured aspect. The people standing about seemed the most bizarre of creatures; it struck me how amazing, and amazingly droll, it was that human beings should go about upright and not on all fours, which would surely be more natural, and that of those gathered here, practically everyone, including myself, was equipped with a glass which he or she must hold upright while at the same time talking at the highest possible speed and volume. It all seemed quite mad and laughable and at the same time acutely, achingly moving. I turned away from the Russian’s daubs, which everyone else was ignoring anyway, and made my way into the back rooms, where Wally Cohen had his offices. Wally, a little roly-poly fellow with curls (“Shylock’s shy locks”—Boy), made a sort of running gag of his Jewishness, rubbing his hands and smiling oilily and referring to his co-religionists as Jewboys and snip-cocks. I suspect he was at heart an anti-Semite, as a lot of the Jews whom I knew were, in those pre-war days. I came upon him in a storeroom, one ham perched on the corner of a table, swinging a chubby little leg and talking animatedly to a dark-haired young woman whom I seemed vaguely to recognise.

“Victor, my boy!” he cried. “You have a haunted, hungry look.”

Wally had been a Marxist since his teens, one of the first of us to contract the virus.

“I’ve been drinking with Querell,” I said.

He chuckled. “Ah, the pontiff; yes.”

The young woman, whom he had not bothered to introduce, was regarding me with a sceptical eye, trying, so it seemed to me, not to laugh. She was short and dark and compactly made, with bruised shadows under her eyes. She wore one of those tube-shaped dresses of the time, made of layers of bronze-black silk along which the light darkly shimmered and flashed, and I thought of a scarab beetle, locked in its brittle, burnished carapace. Wally resumed his conversation with her and she turned her attention slowly away from me. He was going on about some painter whose work he had lately discovered—Jose Orozco, someone like that. Wally was one of those genuine enthusiasts the world at the time was still capable of producing. He was to die seven years later, with Cornford’s brigade, at the siege of Madrid.

“It’s the only thing that’s possible any longer,” he was saying. “People’s art. The rest is bourgeois self-indulgence, masturbation for the middle classes.”

I glanced at the young woman: words like masturbation were not uttered as lightly then as now. She gave a jaded laugh and said:

“Oh, do shut up, Wally.”

He grinned and turned to me. “What do you say, Victor? Sure and begorrah, isn’t it the revolution itself that’s coming to this land of the oppressor?”

I shrugged. Bumptious Jews like Wally were hard to stomach; the camps had not yet made his tribe into the chosen people once again. Besides, he had never liked me. I suspect he knew how much I hated my name—only bandleaders and petty crooks are called Victor—for he used it at every opportunity.

“If you’re so much in favour of Socialist art,” I said, “why are you exhibiting that White trash out there?”

He lifted his shoulders, grinning, and showed me his merchant’s palms. “It sells, my boy; it sells.”

Nick came wandering in then, his bare feet slapping the floorboards and his drunken smile askew. He exchanged a sardonic and, as it seemed to me, curiously complicit glance with the young woman and a second later I realised who she was.

“Look at us,” he said happily, sweeping his wineglass in an unsteady arc that encompassed himself and the party behind him, as well as Wally and his sister and me. “What a decadent lot.”

“We were just anticipating the revolution,” Wally said.

Nick laughed at that. I turned to Baby.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I knew I knew you but…”

She lifted an eyebrow at me and answered nothing.

The room was painted greyish white and the ceiling was a shallow dome. Two filthy windows side by side looked out on a cobbled yard thick with evening sunlight shining straight from Delft. Pictures were stacked against the walls under a fur of mouse-grey dust. Unnerved by Baby’s challenging, slightly bulbous gaze, I went and poked amongst them. Failed fashions of past years, tired, sad and shamefaced: orchards in April, the odd wan nude, some examples of English cubism that were all soft angles and pastel planes. And then there it was, in its chipped gilt frame, with a cracked coating of varnish that made it seem as if hundreds of shrivelled toenails had been carefully glued to the surface. It was unmistakable what it was, even at first glance, and in poor light. I laid it back quickly against the wall, and a sort of hot something began swelling outward from a point in the centre of my breast; whenever I look at a great picture for the first time I know why we still speak of the heart as the seat of the emotions. My breathing grew shallow and my palms were moist. It was as if I had stumbled on something indecent; this was how I used to feel as a schoolboy when someone would pass me a dirty picture under the desk. I am not exaggerating. I have never cared to examine the roots of my response to art; too many tendrils coiling about each other down there in the dark. I waited a moment, telling myself to be calm—the alcohol in my system had suddenly all evaporated—and then, taking a deep breath, I lifted out the picture and carried it to the window.

Definitely.

Wally was on to me at once.

“Seen something you like, Victor?” he said.

I shrugged, and peered closely at the brushwork, trying to appear sceptical.

“Looks like The Death of Seneca, by what’s-his-name,” Nick said, surprising me. “We saw it in the Louvre, remember?” I imagined myself kicking him, hard, on the shin.

Wally came and stood at my shoulder, breathing. “Or another working of the same subject,” he said thoughtfully. “When he found a subject he liked, he stuck to it until it was done to death.” He was interested now; my reviews annoyed him, but he respected my eye.

“Well, I think it’s school of,” I said, and put the picture back in its place, with its face to the wall, expecting it to cling to my hand like a child about to be abandoned. Wally was eyeing me with malicious speculation. He was not fooled.

“If you want it,” he said, “make me an offer.”

Nick and Baby were sitting side by side on Wally’s table in an oddly crumpled attitude, heads hanging and legs limply dangling, graceful and lifeless as a pair of marionettes. Suddenly I was shy in their presence, and said nothing, and Wally looked at them and then at me and nodded, closing his eyes and slyly smiling, as if he understood my predicament of the moment, which I did not: something to do with art, and embarrassment, and desire, all mixed together.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Five hundred quid and it’s yours.”

I laughed; that was a fortune in those days.

“I could manage a hundred,” I said. “It’s an obvious copy.”

Wally put on one of his shtetl expressions, narrowing his eyes and setting his head to the side and hunching a shoulder. “What are you saying to me, my man—a copy, is it, a copy?” Then he straightened up again and shrugged. “All right: three hundred. That’s as low as I’ll go.”

Baby said: “Why don’t you get Leo Rothenstein to buy it for you? He has pots of money.”

We all looked at her. Nick laughed, and jumped down nimbly from the table, suddenly animated.

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “Come on, let’s find him.”

My heart sank (odd formulation, that; the heart does not seem to fall, but to swell, rather, I find, when one is alarmed). Nick would turn the thing into a rag, and Wally would get peeved, and I would lose my chance, the only one I was ever likely to have, to take possession of a small but true masterpiece. I followed him and Baby (I wonder, by the way, why she was called that—her name was Vivienne, cool and sharp, like her) out to the pavement, where the crowd had thinned. Leo Rothenstein was there still, though; we heard his booming, plummy tones before we saw him. He was talking to Boy and one of the blonde, diaphanous girls. They were discussing the gold standard, or the state of Italian politics, something like that. Small talk on large topics, the chief characteristic of the time. Leo had the matt sheen of the very rich. He was handsome, in an excessively masculine way, tall, full-chested, with a long, swarth, Levantine head.

“Hello, Beaver,” he said. I got a nod, Baby a sharp, appraising look and the shadow of a smile. Leo was parsimonious with his attentions.

“Leo,” Nick said, “we want you to buy a picture for Victor.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. It’s a Poussin, but Wally doesn’t know it. He’s asking three hundred, which is a snip. Think of it as an investment. Better than bullion, a picture is. You tell him, Boy.”

Boy, for reasons that I could never understand, was considered to have something of a feeling for pictures, and on occasion had advised Leo’s family on its art collection. It amused me to imagine him in the company of Leo’s father, an august and enigmatic gentleman with the look of a Bedouin chieftain, the two of them pacing the showrooms and gravely pausing before this or that big brown third-rate canvas, Boy all the while struggling to suppress a laugh. Now he did his gargoyle grin: eyes bulging, nostrils flared, the thick, fleshy mouth turned down at the corners. “Poussin?” he said. “Sounds tasty.”

Leo was measuring me with genial distrust.

“I have a hundred,” I said, with the sense of setting a foot down firmly on a sagging tightrope. When Leo laughed his big, soft laugh you could almost see the sound coming out of his mouth spelled out in letters: Ha, Ha, Ha.

“Oh, go on,” Nick said and scowled in tipsy petulance from Leo to me and back again, as if it were his game and we were laggards. Leo looked at Boy and something passed between them, then he turned his measuring eye back on me.

“You say it’s genuine?” he said.

“If I had a reputation I’d stake it on it.”

The tightrope thrummed. Leo laughed again and shrugged.

“Tell Wally I’ll send him a cheque,” he said, and turned away.

Nick punched me softly on the shoulder. “There,” he said; “told you.” He seemed suddenly quite drunk. I had a sensation of helpless, happy falling. Baby squeezed my arm. The blonde girl stepped close to Boy and whispered, “What’s a Poussin?”

I wonder if that really was August, or earlier in the summer? I recall a white night, with an endlessly lingering glimmer in the sky over the park and shadows the colour of dirty water lying in the muffled streets. Suddenly the city was a place I had not seen before, mysterious, exotic, lit as if from within by its own dark radiance. We seemed to walk for hours, Nick and Baby and I, strolling aimlessly arm in arm, dreamily drunk. Nick had managed to find a pair of oversized carpet slippers, which he kept stepping out of by mistake, and had to be supported while he backtracked and wriggled into them again, swearing and laughing. The feel of his bony, tremulous fingers on my arm was somehow the physical counterpart of the glow at the back of my mind where the image of the picture, my picture, floated as in a darkened gallery. Fearing a renewed bout of sobriety, we went to a club in Greek Street where Nick got us in; someone had money—Baby, perhaps—and we drank some bottles of vile champagne, and a girl in feathers with a whinnying laugh came and sat on Nick’s lap. Then Boy arrived and took us to a party in a flat in the War Office—I think it was the resident clerk’s billet-where Baby was the only female present. Boy stood with his fists on his hips amidst the cigarette smoke and the drunken squeals and shook his head in disgust and said loudly: “Look at all these bloody pansies!” Later, when we came out into Whitehall, a headachy dawn was breaking, with small rain sifting down out of clouds that were the same plumbeous colour as the shadows under Baby’s eyes. A giant seagull stood on the pavement and looked at us with cold surmise. Boy said, “Damn this climate,” while Nick sadly contemplated his slippers. I was filled with airy elation, a sort of swooning, breathy happiness that not even the acquisition of a picture, no matter how marvellous, could fully account for. We found a taxi to take us to Nick’s flat for breakfast, and in the depths of the back seat—were taxis bigger then than now?—while Boy and Nick exchanged outrageous nuggets of gossip they had picked up at the party, I found myself kissing Baby. She did not resist, as girls were expected to, and I drew back in faint alarm, tasting her lipstick and still feeling in the nerves of my fingertips the brittle, glassy texture of her silk dress. She sat and looked at me, studying me, as if I were a new variety of some hitherto familiar species. We were silent; there did not seem to be any necessary words. Although nothing else was to happen between us for a long time, I think we both knew that in that moment, for better or worse, and it would mostly be for the worse, our lives had become inextricably joined. When I turned my head I found Nick watching us with an intent, small smile.

Miss Vandeleur has not telephoned now for two days. I wonder if she has lost interest in me already? Perhaps she has found a better subject for her attentions. I would not be surprised; I suspect my personality is not one to quicken the pulse of an ambitious biographer. Reading over these pages, I am struck by how little I impinge on them. The personal pronoun is everywhere, of course, propping up the edifice I am erecting, but what is there to be seen behind this slender capital? Yet I must have made a stronger impression than I remember; there were people who hated me, and a few even who claimed to have loved me. My dry jokes were appreciated—I know I was considered quite a wag in some quarters, and I once overheard myself described as an Irish wit (at least, I think that was the word). Why then am I not more vividly present to myself in these recollections I am setting down here with such finicking attention to detail? After a long pause for thought (funny there is no mark in prose to indicate lengthy lapses of time: whole days could pass in the space of a full stop—whole years) I have come to the conclusion that my early espousal of the Stoic philosophy had the inevitable consequence of forcing me to sacrifice an essential vitality of spirit. Have I lived at all? Sometimes the chill thought strikes me that the risks I took, the dangers I exposed myself to (after all, it is not far-fetched to think that I might have been bumped off at any time), were only a substitute for some more simple, much more authentic form of living that was beyond me. Yet if I had not stepped into the spate of history, what would I have been? A dried-up scholar, fussing over nice questions of attribution and what to have for supper (“Shivershanks” was Boy’s nickname for me in later years). That’s all true; all the same, these kinds of rationalisation do not satisfy me.

Let me try another tack. Perhaps it was not the philosophy by which I lived, but the double life itself—which at first seemed to so many of us a source of strength—that acted upon me as a debilitating force. I know this has always been said of us, that the lying and the secrecy inevitably corrupted us, sapped our moral strength and blinded us to the actual nature of things, but I never believed it could be true. We were latter-day Gnostics, keepers of a secret knowledge, for whom the world of appearances was only a gross manifestation of an infinitely subtler, more real reality known only to the chosen few, but the iron, ineluctable laws of which were everywhere at work. This gnosis was, on the material level, the equivalent of the Freudian conception of the unconscious, that unacknowledged and irresistible legislator, that spy in the heart. Thus, for us, everything was itself and at the same time something else. So we could rag about the place and drink all night and laugh ourselves silly, because behind all our frivolity there operated the stern conviction that the world must be changed and that we were the ones who would do it. At our lightest we seemed to ourselves possessed of a seriousness far more deep, partly because it was hidden, than anything our parents could manage, with their vaguenesses and lack of any certainty, any rigour, above all, their contemptibly feeble efforts at being good. Let the whole sham fortress fall, we said, and if we can give it a good hard shove, we will. Destruam et aedificabo, as Proudhon was wont to cry.

It was all selfishness, of course; we did not care a damn about the world, much as we might shout about freedom and justice and the plight of the masses. All selfishness.

And then, for me, there were other forces at work, ambiguous, ecstatic, anguished: the obsession with art, for instance; the tricky question of nationality, that constant drone-note in the bagpipe music of my life; and, deeper again than any of these, the murk and slither of sex. The Queer Irish Spy; it sounds like the title of one of those tunes the Catholics used to play on melodeons in their pubs when I was a child. Did I call it a double life? Quadruple—quintuple—more like.

The newspapers all this week have portrayed me, rather flatteringly, I confess, as an ice-cold theoretician, a sort of philosopher-spy, the one real intellectual in our circle and the guardian of ideological purity. The fact is, the majority of us had no more than the sketchiest grasp of theory. We did not bother to read the texts; we had others to do that for us. The working-class Comrades were the great readers—Communism could not have survived without autodidacts. I knew one or two of the shorter pieces—the Manifesto, of course, that great ringing shout of wishful thinking—and had made a determined start on Kapital—the dropping of the definite article was de rigueur for us smart young men, so long as the pronunciation was echt deutsch—but soon got bored. Besides, I had scholarly reading to do, and that was quite enough. Politics was not books, anyway; politics was action. Beyond the thickets of dry theory milled the ranks of the People, the final, authentic touchstone, waiting for us to liberate them into collectivity. We saw no contradiction between liberation and the collective. Holistic social engineering, as that old reactionary Popper calls it, was the logical and necessary means to achieve freedom—an orderly freedom, that is. Why should there not be order in human affairs? Throughout history the tyranny of the individual had brought nothing but chaos and butchery. The People must be united, must be melded into a single, vast, breathing being! We were like those Jacobin mobs in the early days of the French Revolution, who would go surging through the streets of Paris in a rage for fraternity, clasping the Common Man to their breasts so fiercely they knocked the stuffing out of him. “Oh, Vic,” Danny Perkins used to say to me, shaking his head and laughing his soft laugh, “what sport my old dad would have had out of you and your pals!” Danny’s dad had been a Welsh miner. Died of emphysema. An uncommon man, I have no doubt.

Anyway, of all our ideological exemplars, I always secretly preferred Bakunin, so impetuous, disreputable, fierce and irresponsible compared to stolid, hairy-handed Marx. I once went so far as to copy out by hand Bakunin’s elegantly vitriolic description of his rival: “M. Marx is by origin a Jew. He unites in himself all the qualities and defects of that gifted race. Nervous, some say, to the point of cowardice, he is immensely malicious, vain, quarrelsome, as intolerant and autocratic as Jehovah, the God of his fathers, and like Him, insanely vindictive.” (Now, who else does that bring to mind?) Not that Marx was any less ferocious than Bakunin, in his way; I admired in particular his intellectual annihilation of Proudhon, whose petit-bourgeois post-Hegelianism and country-bumpkin faith in the essential goodness of the little man Marx held up to cruel and exhaustive ridicule. The spectacle of Marx mercilessly destroying his unfortunate predecessor is horribly exciting, like watching a great beast of the jungle plunging its jaws into the ripped-open belly of some still-thrashing, delicate-limbed herbivore. Violence by proxy, that is the thing: stimulating, satisfying, safe.

How they do bring one back to the days of youth, these ancient battles for the soul of man. I feel quite excited, here at my desk, in these last, unbearably expectant days of spring. Time for a gin, I think.

It will seem strange—it seems strange to me—but Boy was the most ideologically driven of the lot of us. God, how he would talk! On and on, superstructure and substructure and the division of labour and all the rest of it, endlessly. I remember coming home to sleep in my room in the house in Poland Street in the early hours one morning during the Blitz—the sky redly lit and the streets loud with fire engines and drunks—and finding Boy and Leo Rothenstein, both in full evening dress, sitting in the first-floor parlour in armchairs on either side of a cold fire, bolt upright, whiskey glasses in hand, the two of them dead asleep, and it was obvious from their slack-jawed expressions that Boy had knocked them both into unconsciousness by an evening of sustained wielding of that ideological bludgeon of his.

Mind you, there was more to Boy than talk. He was quite the activist. At Cambridge he had set about organising the gyps and bedders into a union, and joined in strike protests by bus drivers and sewerage workers in the town. Oh yes, he put us all to shame. I can see him still, marching down King’s Parade on the way to a strike meeting, shirt collar open, dirty old trousers held up with a workman’s broad belt, a figure straight out of a Moscow mural. I was jealous of his energy, his boldness, his freedom from that self-consciousness which froze me solid when it came to practical activism, I mean the activism of the streets. But in my heart I despised him, too, for what I could not but think of as his crassness in seeking to turn theory into action, in the same way that I despised the Cambridge physicists of my day for translating pure mathematics into applied science. This is what I marvel at still, that I could have given myself over to such an essentially vulgar ideology.

Boy. I miss him, despite everything. Oh, I know, he was a clown, cruel, dishonest, slovenly, careless of himself and others, but for all that he maintained a curious kind of—what shall I call it?—a kind of grace. Yes, a kind of splendourous grace, it is not too much to say. When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences moving in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me—Matty was the possessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge—but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux’s infant school in Carrick-drum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six-year-old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child’s crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh. That was Boy. “What did I do?” he would cry, after another of his enormities had come to light, “what did I say…” And of course, everyone would have to laugh.

Odd, but I cannot remember when I first met him. It must have been at Cambridge, yet he seems to have been always present in my life, a constant force, even in childhood. Singular though he may have seemed, I suppose he was of a type: the toddler who pinches the little girls and makes them cry, the boy at the back of the class showing off his erection under the desk, the unabashed queer who can spot instantly the queer streak in others. Despite what people may think, he and I did not have an affair. There was a drunken scuffle one night in my rooms at Trinity in the early thirties, long before I had “come out,” as they say now, that left me shaking with embarrassment and fright, though Boy shrugged it off with his usual insouciance; I recall him going down the ill-lit stairs with half his shirt-tail hanging out and smiling back at me knowingly and wagging a playful, minatory finger. While revelling in its privileges, he held the world of his parents and their circle in jocular contempt (his stepfather, I’ve just remembered, was an admiral; I must ask Miss Vandeleur if she knew that). At home he subsisted mainly on a horrible gruel-like stuff—I can smell it still—that he boiled up from oatmeal and crushed garlic, but when he went out it was always the Ritz or the Savoy, after which he would lumber into a taxi and make his raucous way down to the docks or the East End to trawl through the pubs for what with a smacking of those big lips he referred to as “likely meat.”

He could be subtle, if subtlety was what was needed. When we joined with Alastair Sykes in the putsch on the Apostles in the summer term of 1932, Boy turned out to be not only the most energetic activist of the three of us but also the smoothest plotter. He was skilled too at curbing Alastair’s more hair-raising flights of enthusiasm. “Look here, Psyche,” he would say with cheerful firmness, “you just belt up now, like a good chap, and let Victor and me do the talking.” And Alastair, after a moment’s hesitation during which the tips of his ears would turn bright pink while his pipe belched smoke and sparks like a steam train, would meekly do as he was told, although he was the senior man. He got the credit for packing the society with our people, but I am sure it was really Boy’s doing. Boy’s charm, at once sunny and sinister, was hard to resist. (Miss Vandeleur would be agog; not much is known publicly, even still, about the Apostles, that absurd boys’ club, to which only the most gilded of Cambridge’s golden youth were admitted; being Irish and not yet queer, I had to work hard and scheme long before I managed to worm my way in.)

The Apostles’ meetings that term were held in Alastair’s rooms; as a senior Fellow he had ampler quarters than any of the rest of us. I had met him my first year up. Those were the days when I still thought I had it in me to be a mathematician. The discipline held a deep appeal for me. Its procedures had the mark of an arcane ritual, another secret doctrine like that which I was soon to discover in Marxism. I relished the thought of being privy to a specialised language which even in its most rarefied form is an exact—well, plausible—expression of empirical reality. Mathematics speaks the world, as Alastair put it, with an uncharacteristic rhetorical flourish. Seeing the work that Alastair could do was what convinced me, more than my poor showing in the exams, that my future must lie in scholarship and not science. Alastair had the purest, most elegant intellect I have ever encountered. His father had been a docker in Liverpool, and Alastair had come up to Cambridge on a scholarship. In appearance he was a fierce, choleric little fellow with big teeth and a spiky bush of black hair standing straight up from his forehead like the bristles of a yard-brush. He favoured hob-nailed boots and shapeless jackets made from a peculiar kind of stiff, hairy tweed that might have been run up specially for him. That first year we were inseparable. It was a strange liaison, I suppose; what we shared most deeply, though we would never dream of speaking of it openly, was that we both felt keenly the insecurity of being outsiders. One of the wits dubbed us Jekyll and Hyde, and no doubt we did look an ill-assorted pair, I the gangling youth with pointed nose and already pronounced stoop loping across Great Court pursued by the little man in the boots, his stumpy legs going like a pair of blunt scissors and tobacco pipe fuming. It was the theoretical side of mathematics that interested me, but Alastair had a genius for application. He adored gadgets. At Bletchley Park during the war he found his true and perfect place. “It was like coming home,” he told me afterwards, his eyes shiny with misery. That was in the fifties, the last time I saw him. He had fallen into an enticement trap in the gents in Piccadilly Circus and was due in court the following week. The heavies from the Department had been tormenting him, he knew he could expect no mercy. He would not go to prison: on the eve of his court appearance he injected cyanide into an apple (a Cox’s pippin, the report said; very scrupulous, the heavies) and ate it. Another uncharacteristic flourish. I wonder where he got the poison, not to mention the needle? I had not even known that he was queer. Perhaps he had not known it himself, before that jug-eared copper with his trousers round his ankles beckoned to him from his stall. Poor Psyche. I imagine him in the weeks before he died, lying between army-surplus blankets in that dreary bedsit he had off the Cromwell Road, miserably turning over the ruins of his life. He had broken some of the most difficult of the German army’s codes, thus saving God knows how many Allied lives, yet they hounded him to death. And they call me a traitor. Could I have done something for him, pulled a few strings, put a word in with the internal security people? The thought gnaws at me.

Alastair, now, Alastair had read the sacred texts. Whatever scraps of theory I knew, I learned from him. The cause of Ireland was his great enthusiasm. His Irish mother had made him into a Sinn Feiner. Like me, he regretted that it was in Russia the Revolution had occurred, but I could not agree with him that Ireland would have been a more congenial battleground; the notion seemed to me utterly risible. He had even taught himself the Irish language, and could swear in it—though to my ears, I confess, the language in general sounds like a string of softly vehement oaths strung haphazardly together. He berated me for my lack of patriotism, and called me a dirty Unionist, not wholly in jest. However, when I asked him one day for specific details of his knowledge of my country he grew evasive, and when I pressed him he blushed—those reddening ears—and admitted that in fact he had never set foot in Ireland.

He did not much care for the company of the majority of the Apostles, with their plush accents and aesthete manners. “You could be speaking in bloody code, you lot, when you get started,” he complained, digging a blackened thumb into the burning dottle of his pipe. “Bloody public schoolboys.” I used to laugh at him, with not much malice, but Boy gave him an awful time, mimicking perfectly his Scouse accent and bullying him into drinking too much beer. Alastair thought Boy was not sufficiently serious about the cause, and considered him—with remarkable prescience, as it turned out—to be a security risk. “That Bannister,” he would mutter angrily, “he’ll get us all shopped.”

Here is a snapshot from the bulging album I keep in my head. It is sometime in the thirties. Tea, thick sandwiches and thin beer, the sun of April on Trinity court. A dozen Apostles—some Fellows, such as Alastair and myself, a couple of nondescript dons, one or two earnest postgraduate scholars, every one of us a devout Marxist—are sitting about in Alastair’s big gloomy living room. We favoured dark jackets and fawn bags and open-necked white shirts, except for Leo Rothenstein, always suavely magnificent in his Savile Row blazers. Boy was more flamboyant: I recall crimson ties and purple waistcoats and, on this occasion, plus-fours in a bright-green check. He is pacing up and down the room, dropping cigarette ash on the threadbare carpet, telling us, as I have heard him tell many times before, of the event that, so he insisted, had made him a homosexual.

“God, it was frightful! There she was, poor Mother, flat on her back with her legs in the air, shrieking, and my huge father lying naked on top of her, dead as a doornail. I had the hell of a job getting him off her. The smells! Twelve years old, I was. Haven’t been able to look at a woman since without seeing Mater’s big white breasts, colour of a fish’s belly. The paps that gave me suck. In dreams those nipples still stare up at me cock-eyed. No Oedipus I, or Hamlet, either, that’s certain. When she threw off her widow’s weeds and remarried I felt only relief.”

I used to divide people into two sorts, those who were shocked by Boy’s stories and those who were not, though I could never decide which was the more reprehensible half. Alastair had begun to huff and puff. “Look here, we’ve got a motion before us which we should consider. Spain is going to be the next theatre of operations”—Alastair, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, had a great fondness for military jargon— “and we’ve got to decide where we stand.”

Leo Rothenstein laughed. “That’s obvious, surely? We’re hardly in favour of the Fascists.” At the age of twenty-one Leo had come into an inheritance of two million, along with Maule Park and a mansion in Portman Square.

Alastair fussed with his pipe; he disliked Leo and was at pains to hide the fact, afraid of being thought an anti-Semite.

“But the point is,” he said, “will we fight?”

It strikes me how much talk of fighting there was throughout the thirties, among our set, at least. Did the appeasers talk about appeasement with the same passion, I wonder?

“Don’t be a fathead,” Boy said. “Uncle Joe won’t let it come to that.”

A chap called Wilkins, I’ve forgotten his first name, weedy type with glasses and a bad case of psoriasis, who was to die at El Alamein in command of a tank, turned from the window with a glass of beer in his fist and said:

“According to a man I spoke to the other day who’s been over there, Uncle Joe has too much of a job on his hands trying to feed the masses at home to think of sending aid abroad.”

A silence followed. Bad form on Wilkins’s part: we did not speak of the Comrades’ difficulties. Doubt was a bourgeois self-indulgence. Then Boy gave a nasty little laugh. “Surprising,” he said, “how some of us can’t recognise propaganda when we hear it,” and Wilkins threw him a baleful look and turned back to the window.

Spain, the kulaks, the machinations of the Trotskyites, racial violence in the East End—how antique it all seems now, almost quaint, and yet how seriously we took ourselves and our place on the world stage. I often have the idea that what drove those of us who went on to become active agents was the burden of deep—of intolerable—embarrassment that the talk-drunk thirties left us with. The beer, the sandwiches, the sunlight on the cobbles, the aimless walks in shadowed lanes, the sudden, always amazing fact of sex—a whole world of privilege and assurance, all going on, while elsewhere millions were preparing to die. How could we have borne the thought of all that and not—

But no. It will not do. These fine sentiments will not do. I have told myself already, I must not attempt to impose retrospective significance on what we were and did. Is it that I believed in something then and now believe in nothing? Or that even then I only believed in the belief, out of longing, out of necessity? The latter, surely. The wave of history rolled over us, as it rolled over so many others of our kind, leaving us quite dry.

“Oh, Uncle Joe is sound,” Boy was saying. “Quite sound.”

They are all dead: Boy the outrageous, Leo and his millions, Wilkins the sceptic, burnt to a cinder in his sardine tin in the desert. I ask again: have I lived at all?

3

I do not think I can continue to call this a journal, for it is certainly more than a record of my days, which, anyway, now that the furore has died down, are hardly distinguishable one from another. Call it a memoir, then; a scrapbook of memories. Or go the whole hog and call it an autobiography, notes toward. Miss Vandeleur would be upset if she knew I was pre-empting her. She came round this morning to ask me about my visit to Spain with Nick at Easter in 1936. (How portentous and stirring a mere date can be: Easter, 1936!) The things she wants to know about surprise me. I could understand if she were eager for details of my adventures in Germany in 1945, say, or of the exact nature of my relations with Mrs. W. and her ma (which fascinates everyone), but no, it is the ancient history that she is after.

Spain. Now there’s ancient, all right. A hateful country. I recall rain, and a dispiriting smell everywhere, that seemed a mixture of semen and mildew. There were wall-posters, the hammer and sickle on every street corner, and violent-looking young men in red shirts whose flat, weathered features and evasive glances reminded me of the tinkers who in my childhood used to go about Carrickdrum selling tin cans and leaky saucepans. The Prado of course was a revelation, the Goyas hair-raisingly prophetic in their blood and muck, El Greco frightened out of his wits. I preferred the Zurbaráns, haunting in their stillness, their transcendent mundanity. In Seville in Holy Week we stood glumly in the rain watching a procession of penitents, a spectacle from which my Protestant soul recoiled. A deposition scene was borne aloft on a litter, shaded from the rain by a tasseled baldachin of gold brocade; the plaster Christ, laid out naked at his mother’s plaster feet, was a faintly obscene, orgasmic figure (after The Greek—a long way after), with creamy skin and agonised mouth and copiously spouting wounds. When this thing appeared, swaying and lurching, two or three elderly men near us fell to their knees, making a noise like that of collapsing deckchairs, crossing themselves rapidly, in a kind of holy terror, and one of them with surprising nimbleness ducked under the litter to lend it a supporting shoulder. I remember too a young woman stepping out of the crowd and handing to one of the black-mantillaed penitents—her mother or her aunt—a gaudy red-and-white striped umbrella. At Algeciras we watched the gratifying and thrilling spectacle of a mob desecrating a church and stoning the town’s mayor, a portly man with a shiny, brown bald head, who fled from his tormentors at a rapid walk, trying to hold on to his dignity. Rain rattled in the palm trees and a quicksilver bolt of lightning rent the glans-brown sky above the railway station. Peeling wall-posters flapped in a sudden wind. Later we tried to cross the border but found Gibraltar shut for the night. The inn at La Linea was filthy. I lay awake for a long time listening to the dogs yapping and a wireless set somewhere muttering of war, and watched the rain-light’s faint phosphorescence playing over Nick’s uncovered back where he lay prone and snoring softly on the narrow bed a mile away from me at the other side of the room. His skin had a thick, faintly slimed look to it; I thought of the Saviour’s statue. Next day we took ship for England. There were dolphins in the Strait, and in the Bay of Biscay I was sick.

Will that do, Miss V.?

I have been finding out a little more about her. It is difficult, for she is almost more secretive than I am. I feel like a restorer chipping away the varnish from a damaged portrait. Damaged? Why did I say damaged? There is something about her reticence, her profound, stalled silences, that bespeaks a deep-seated constraint. She is too old for her years. I have the sense of an ineradicable disaffection for things in general. She keeps reminding me of Baby—those silences, the bruised eyes, that surly stare she directs at inanimate objects—and certainly Baby was damaged. When I asked Miss Vandeleur this morning if she lived alone she did not answer, and pretended that she had not heard me, then later on suddenly began to tell me about her young man, with whom she shares a flat in Golders Green (another of my old haunts, by the way). He is a mechanic, in a garage. Sounds like rough trade to me; now I understand the leather skirt. I wonder what the Admiral thinks of this ménage? Or does anyone care about such matters any more? She complained of the rigours of the Northern Line. I told her I had not been on an Underground train in thirty years and she ducked her head and glared resentfully at my hands.

The morning was warm enough for us to have tea on the back balcony. That is, she had tea while I had a small glass of something, despite the early hour. She makes me jittery, I have to take a little fortification when dealing with her. (Balconies make me jittery too, but that is another matter. Patrick! My Patsy, poor Pat.) Besides, at my age I can drink at any hour of the day without the need of an excuse; I foresee a time when I shall be breakfasting on cocktails of gin and Complan. From the balcony we could just see the tops of the trees in the park. They are at their loveliest stage just now, the black boughs lightly dusted with the most delicate puffs of green. I remarked how the city’s pollution imparts to the sky a wonderful depth of colour, like that dense, gulp-inducing blue you see when the aeroplane banks and you peer up into nothingness. Miss Vandeleur was not listening. She sat on the other side of the little metal table, slumped in her greatcoat and frowning into her cup.

“Was he a Marxist?” she asked. “Sir Nicholas?”

I had to think for a second who it was she meant.

“Nick?” I said. “Lord, no! In fact…”

In fact it was on that voyage home from Spain that we had our one and only serious conversation about politics. I can’t remember how it started. I suppose I had attempted a bit of proselytising; I had all the zeal of the convert in those early, heady days, and Nick never did care to be preached at.

“Do shut up, for God’s sake,” he said, not quite managing to laugh. “I’m sick of listening to you and your historical dialectic and all the rest of that tommyrot.”

We were leaning at the rail in the bows, contemplatively smoking, under the dome of the great soft calm marine night. The further north we sailed the warmer the weather was becoming, as if the climate like everything else in the world had been turned topsyturvy. A huge, bone-white moon hung above the prostrate sea, and the ship’s wake flashed and writhed like a great silver rope unravelling behind us. I was giddy and slightly feverish after my recent bout of seasickness.

“There must be action,” I said, with the doggedness of the dogmatist. “We must act, or perish.”

That is, I’m afraid, the way we talked.

“Oh, action!” Nick said, and this time he did laugh. “Words, for you, are action. That’s all you do—jaw jaw jaw.”

That stung; it amused Nick, when he was being the bruiser, to mock me for my sedentary ways.

“We can’t all be soldiers,” I said huffily. “There is a need for theorists, too.”

He flicked his cigarette end over the rail and gazed off at the glimmering horizon. A breeze lifted the hanging lock of hair at his forehead. What did I think it was I felt for him? How did I account for the hopeless, silent sob that welled up in my breast when I looked at him at moments such as this? I suppose school had accustomed us to crushes and all that—though how I could think this was only a crush, I don’t know.

“If I were a Communist,” he said, “I shouldn’t bother with theory at all. I should think only of strategy: how to get things done. I’d use whatever means come to hand—lies, blackmail, murder and mayhem, whatever it takes. You’re all idealists pretending to be pragmatists. You think you care only for the cause while really the cause is only something to lose yourselves in, a way to cancel the ego. It’s half religion and half Romanticism. Marx is your St. Paul, and your Rousseau.”

I was taken aback, and not a little bemused; I had never heard him talk like this before, with his intellect’s lip curled, so to speak. He turned to me, smiling, leaning sideways on an elbow on the rail.

“It’s rather sweet,” he said, “the way you deceive yourselves, but a little contemptible, too, don’t you think?”

“Some of us are ready to fight,” I said. “Some of us are already signing up to go to Spain.”

His smile turned pitying.

“Yes,” he said, “and here you are, sailing home from Spain.” I felt a flash of anger, and had a strong desire to give him a slap— a slap, or something like it. “The trouble with you, Vic,” he said, “is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.”

Miss Vandeleur was saying something, and I came back with a jolt.

“My dear, I’m sorry,” I said, “my attention strayed. I was thinking about the Beaver—Sir Nicholas. Sometimes I wonder if I knew him at all. Certainly I never spotted whatever it was in him—just will-power, I suppose—that would drive him to such giddy heights of power and influence later on.” Miss V. had gone into that state of suspended animation, her head lowered and features fallen slack in a faintly idiotic looking way, that I have come to recognise as her mode of deepest listening. She would not make a good interrogator, she shows her interest too plainly. I told myself to proceed with caution. “But then,” I said, slipping into my bland old-boy routine, “which of us ever really recognises the true nature of others?”

She is very interested in Nick. I would not want to see him harmed. No, I would not want that, at all.

Another ship, another trip, to Ireland, this time. It was just after Munich, and I was glad to get away from London, with its blimps and rumours, and fear pervasive and palpable as fog. While the world was collapsing, however, my personal fortunes were soaring. Yes, that year I was very full of myself, as Nanny Hargreaves would have said. I had a modest but rapidly growing international reputation as a connoisseur and scholar, I had moved up from the Spectator to the altogether more austere and rarefied pages of the Burlington and the Warburg Journal, and in the autumn I was to take up the Deputy Directorship of the Institute. Not bad for a man of thirty-one, and an Irish man, at that. Perhaps more impressive than any of these successes was the fact that I had spent the summer at Windsor, where I had embarked on the task of cataloguing the great and, until I took it in hand, chaotic collection of drawings that had been accumulating there since the days of Henry Tudor. It was hard labour, but I was sustained in it by an acute awareness of its value, not only to art history, but also to the furtherance of my own multiple interests (God, you can’t beat a spy for smugness!). I got on well with HM—he had been up at Trinity not many years before me. Despite his enthusiasm for boys’ clubs and tennis, he was, like his mother, a shrewd and jealous guardian of the royal possessions. Often in those last months before the war, while we all waited in a state of dreamy tension for hostilities to break out, he would come up to the print room and sit on a corner of my desk, swinging one leg, the fingers of his slender, somewhat fidgety hands laced together and resting on his thigh, and talk about the great collectors among his predecessors on the throne, all of whom he spoke of with amused, rueful familiarity, as if they were so many generous but faintly disreputable uncles, which you might say they were, I suppose. Though he was not very much older than me, he reminded me of my father, with his diffidence, and air of vague foreboding, and sudden fits of somewhat unnerving playfulness. Certainly, I preferred him greatly to his bloody wife, with her hats and her drinkies and her after-dinner games of charades, into which I was repeatedly dragooned, to my distress and intense embarrassment. Her name for me was Boots, the origin of which I never could discover. She was a cousin of my dead mother. Moscow, of course, was entranced by these connections. Great snobs, the Comrades.

At the end of that summer I was in a state of profound nervous exhaustion. When, ten years previously, I had failed mathematics, or it had failed me, I had understood clearly what the consequences would be: an entire remaking of the self, with all the dedication and unremitting labour that such an exercise would entail. Now I had managed the transformation, but at great cost in physical and intellectual energy. Metamorphosis is a painful process. I imagine the exquisite agony of the caterpillar turning itself into a butterfly, pushing out eye-stalks, pounding its fat-cells into iridescent wing-dust, at last cracking the mother-of-pearl sheath and staggering upright on sticky, hair’s-breadth legs, drunken, gasping, dazed by the light. When Nick suggested a recuperative jaunt (“You’re looking even more cadaverous than usual, old chap”) I agreed with a suddenness that surprised even myself. It was Nick’s idea that we should go to Ireland. Did he mean, I wondered nervously, to get the goods on me, nose out my family secrets (I had not told him about Freddie), place me in my class? He was full of enthusiasm for the trip. We would go to Carrickdrum to rest up, as he said, then travel on out to the far west, where, I had told him, my father’s people came from. It seemed a wonderful notion. The thought of having Nick to myself for weeks on end was intoxicating, and stilled whatever qualms I might have had.

I bought the tickets. Nick was broke. He had long ago drifted out of his editorial job at Brevoort & Klein and was existing on an allowance from a grudging and ceaselessly complaining Big Beaver, supplemented by numerous small loans from his friends. We took the Friday night steamer, and travelled down from Larne on a rackety train through the glaucous light of a late-September dawn. I sat and watched the landscape making its huge, slow rotation around us. Antrim that morning wore a particularly tight-lipped aspect. Nick was subdued, and sat huddled in a corner of the unheated compartment with his overcoat pulled close around him, pretending to sleep. When the hills of Carrickdrum came into view a kind of panic seized me and I wanted to wrench open the carriage door and leap out and be swallowed in the engine’s steam and flying smoke. “Home,” Nick said in a sepulchral voice, startling me. “You must be cursing me for making you come.” He had an unnerving ability sometimes to guess what one was thinking. The train passed along a raised embankment from which the garden and, presently, the house were to be seen, but I did not point out the view to Nick. Doubt and foreboding had set in.

My father had sent Andy Wilson with the pony-and-trap to meet us. Andy was the gardener and general handyman at St. Nicholas’s, a wiry little man, like a wood-sprite, with bowed arms and legs and a baby’s washed-blue eyes. He was ageless, and seemed not to have changed at all since I was an infant, when he used to terrify me by putting frogs into the pram with me. He was a ferocious and unregenerate Orangeman and played the Lambeg drum in the town’s Twelfth parade every year. He took to Nick straight away and formed a jeering alliance with him against me. “Thon’s the lad won’t lift a finger,” he said as he heaved our bags into the trap, nodding towards me and nudging Nick and winking. “Never would, aye, and never will.” He cackled, shaking his head, and took the reins and clicked his tongue at the pony, and Nick smiled at me lopsidedly, and with a wallowing, backward lurch we were off.

We skirted the town, the little pony going along at a fastidious trot, and began the ascent of the West Road. A weak sun was struggling to shine. With a pang I caught the buttery smell of gorse. Presently the Lough came into view, a great flat flaky sheet of steel, and something in me quailed; I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths. Nick was asleep again, or pretending to be, with his feet on his bags. I thought how much I envied him his ability to escape the tedium of life’s interludes. Andy, wielding the reins, cast a fond glance back at him and softly exclaimed:

“Och, the gentleman!”

The trees surrounding the house looked darker than ever, more blue than green, pointing heavenward in urgent, mute admonishment. Freddie was the first to appear, lumbering diagonally across the lawn to meet us with his arms spread, grinning and gibbering. “Here’s the boss,” said Andy. “Will you look at him, the gawnie!” Nick opened his eyes. Freddie drew level, and putting a hand on the wing of the trap turned and trotted along beside us, moaning in excitement. He gave me one of his sliding glances and did not look at Nick at all. Strange, that one so severely afflicted should be prey to something so subtle as shyness. He was a big fellow, with big feet and big hands and a big head topped by a thatch of straw-coloured hair. To look at him in repose, if he could ever be said to be in repose, you would hardly have known his condition, if it were not for those helplessly flickering eyes, and the scabs around his fingernails and his mouth where he picked and chewed at himself ceaselessly. He was nearly thirty by now, but despite his bulk he still had the rumpled, shirt-tails-and-catapults air of an obstreperous twelve-year-old. Nick raised his eyebrows and nodded in Andy’s direction. “His son?” he murmured. In my agitation and shame all I did was shake my head and look away.

When we drew up at the house my father popped out at once, as if he had been waiting behind the door, which probably he had. He was wearing his dog collar and bishop’s starched front and a moth-eaten pullover, and was clutching a handful of papers—I think I never saw my father at home without a sheaf of scribbled notes in his hand. He greeted us with his usual mixture of warmth and wariness. He looked smaller than I remembered, like a slightly out-of-scale model of himself. Recently he had suffered a second heart attack, and there was a sort of lightness about him, a wispy, tentative something, that I supposed must be the effect of the subdued but ever-present fear of sudden death. Freddie ran up and hugged him and laid his big head on his shoulder and looked back at us with a sly, proprietorial leer. I could tell by the alarmed way my father took in the Beaver that he had forgotten I had said I would be bringing a guest. We got down from the trap, and I tackled the introductions. Andy was making a racket with our bags, and the pony put its snout into the small of my back and tried to push me over, and Freddie, moved by the agitation and awkwardness of the moment, began to howl softly, and just when I thought everything would turn irretrievably into ruinous farce, Nick stepped forward briskly, like a doctor taking over at the scene of an accident, and shook my father’s hand with just the right proportions of deference and familiarity, murmuring something about the weather.

“Yes, well,” my father said, vaguely smiling, and patting Freddie soothingly on the back. “You’re very welcome. Both of you, very welcome. Did you have a good crossing? Usually it’s calm this time of year. Do stop that, Freddie, there’s a good boy.”

Then Hettie appeared. She also seemed to have been lurking in the hallway, waiting for her moment. If my father had shrunk over the years, Hettie had swelled to the dimensions of one of Rowlandson’s royal doxies. She was in her sixties but still retained the bloom of youth, a big pink person with teary eyes and dainty feet and an uncontrollable, wobbly smile.

“Oh, Victor!” she cried, clasping her hands. “How thin you’ve grown!”

Hettie came of a wealthy Quaker family and had spent her youth in a vast grey stone mansion on the south shore of the Lough doing good works and needlepoint. I think that she is the only human being I have ever encountered, apart from poor Freddie, of whom I can say with complete conviction that she had not a trace of wickedness in her (how can there be such people as these, in such a world as this?). If she had not been my stepmother and therefore more or less a part of the furniture, I surely would have found her an object of amazement and awe. When she arrived in our lives I had tried hard to resent and thwart her, but her jollity had been too much for me. She had won me over at once by getting rid of Nanny Hargreaves, a fearsome Presbyterian frump who since my mother’s death had ruled over my life with malevolent efficiency, dosing me weekly with castor oil and subjecting Freddie and me to sulphurous homilies on sin and damnation. Nanny Hargreaves would not have known how to play; Hettie, though, loved children’s games, the rowdier the better—perhaps her Quaker parents had disapproved of such godless frivolities when she was little, and she was making up for lost opportunities. She would get down on hands and knees and chase Freddie and me about the drawing-room floor, growling like a grizzly bear, her face bright red and her great bosom swinging. In the evenings before our bedtime she read us stories of the foreign missions, featuring brave, pure girls and stout-hearted men with beards, and the odd martyr, staked out in the desert to die or boiled in a pot by capering Hottentots.

“Come in, come in,” she said, flustered, I could see, by Nick’s exotic good looks. “Mary will make you an Ulster fry.”

My father disengaged himself from Freddie’s embrace and we all bustled into the hall, Andy Wilson coming behind us with the bags and swearing mildly under his breath. Andy’s son, Matty, had been what I suppose I may call my first, precocious love.

Matty was my age: black curls, blue eyes, and hardy, like his father. Is there any figure in childhood more invitingly vulnerable, any presence more sinisterly suggestive, than the son of a servant? Matty had died, drowned while swimming in Colton Weir. I had not known what to do with my sorrow, it had sat in me for weeks like a great brooding bird. And then one day it just flew off”. Thus does one learn about the limits of love, the limits of grief.

Nick was smiling at me reprovingly. “You didn’t tell me you had a brother,” he said.

By now I had realised the full magnitude of the mistake I had made in bringing him here. The home returned to is a concatenation of sadnesses that makes one want to weep and at the same time sets the teeth on edge. How dingy the place looked. And that smell!—tired, brownish, intimate, awful. I was ashamed of everything, and ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I could hardly bear to look at my shabby father and his fat wife, I flinched at Andy’s mutterings behind me and cringed at the thought of red-haired Mary, our Catholic cook, slapping a plate of rashers and black pudding down in front of Nick (did he eat pork?—Oh God, I had forgotten to ask). My greatest shame, however, was Freddie. When we were children I had not minded him, deeming it right, I suppose, that anyone born into the family after me should be defective. He had been someone for me to order about, a makeweight in the intricate games that I devised, an uncritical witness to my cautiously daring escapades. I used to perform experiments on him just to see how he would react. I gave him methylated spirits to drink—he gagged and retched—and put a dead lizard in his porridge. One day I pushed him into a bed of nettles and made him scream. I thought I would be punished, but my father only looked at me with deep, droop-eyed sadness, shaking his head, while Hettie sat down on the lawn like a squaw and rocked Freddie in her arms and pressed dock leaves to his livid arms and his swollen knock-knees. In adolescence, when I developed a passion for the Romantics, I conceived of him as a noble savage, and even wrote a sonnet about him, composed of Wordsworthian apostrophes (0! thou princely child of Nature, list!), and made him tramp the hills with me in all weathers, to his distress, for he was as much afraid of the outdoors as he had been as a child. Now, suddenly, I saw him through Nick’s eyes, a poor, shambling, damaged thing with my high forehead and prominent upper jaw, and I walked down the hall in a hot sweat of embarrassment and would not meet Nick’s amused, quizzical eye, and was relieved when Freddie sloped off to the garden to take up again whatever obscure doings he had been engaged in when we arrived.

In the dining room, while Nick and I ate breakfast, Hettie and my father sat and watched us in a sort of hazy wonderment, as if we were a pair of immortals who had stopped off at their humble table on the way to some important piece of Olympian business elsewhere. Mary the cook kept bringing us more things to eat, fried bread and grilled kidneys and racks of toast, walking around the table with her apron lifted to protect her fingers from the heat of the plates, glancing at Nick—his hands, that hanging lock of hair—from under her almost invisible, pale eyelashes and blushing. My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.

“Say what you like about Chamberlain,” he said, “but he remembers the Great War, the cost of it.”

I glared at a sausage, thinking what a hopeless booby my father was.

“Peace in our time,” Hettie murmured, sighing.

“Oh, but there will be war,” Nick said equably, “despite the appeasers. What is this, by the way?”

“Fadge,” Mary blurted, and blushed the harder, making for the door.

“Potato cake,” I said between clenched teeth. “Local delicacy.” Two days ago I had been chatting with the King.

“Mm,” Nick said, “delicious.”

My father sat blinking in distress. Light from the leaded window glinted on his balding pate. Trollope, I thought; he’s a character out of Trollope—one of the minor ones.

“Is that what people feel in London,” he said, “that there will be war?”

Nick pondered, head to one side, looking at his plate. I can see the moment: the thin October sunlight on the parquet, a curl of steam from the teapot’s spout, the somehow evil glitter of the marmalade in its cut-glass dish, and my father and Hettie waiting like frightened children to hear what London thought.

“Of course there’ll be a war,” I said impatiently. “The old men have let it happen all over again.”

My father nodded sadly.

“Yes,” he said, “you must consider our generation has rather let you down.”

“Oh, but we want peace!” Hettie exclaimed, as close to indignation as it was possible for her to get. “We don’t want young men to go out again and be killed for… for nothing.”

I glanced at Nick. He was working away unconcernedly at his plate; he always did have a remarkable appetite.

“The fight against Fascism is hardly what you could call nothing,” I said, and Hettie looked so abashed it seemed she might burst into tears.

“Ah, you young people,” my father said softly, batting a hand at the air before him in a gesture which must have been a secular modification of the episcopal blessing, “you have such certainty.”

At this Nick looked up with an expression of real interest.

“Do you think so?” he said. “I feel we’re all rather… well, unfocused” Pensively he buttered a piece of cold toast, lathering on the butter like a painter applying cadmium yellow with a palette knife. “Seems to me that chaps of my age lack any sense of purpose or direction. In fact, I think we could do with a jolly good dose of military discipline.”

“Shove ’em in the army, eh?” I said bitterly. Nick went on calmly buttering his toast and, preparing to take a bite, glanced at me sideways and said:

“Why not? Those louts one sees standing on street corners complaining that they can’t get work—wouldn’t they be better off in uniform?”

“They’d be better off in work!” I said. “Marx makes the point that-”

“Oh, Marx!” Nick said through a crackling mouthful of toast, and chuckled.

I felt my forehead turning red.

“You should try reading Marx,” I said. “Then you might know what you’re talking about.”

Nick only laughed again.

“You mean, then I might know what you are talking about.”

An uneasy silence fell and Hettie looked at me apprehensively but I avoided her eye. My father, troubled, cleared his throat and with anxious fingers traced an invisible pattern on the tablecloth.

“Marxism, now,” he began, but I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.

“Nick and I are thinking of going to the west,” I said loudly. “He wants to see Mayo.”

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion. In my time I have, knowingly or otherwise, sent men and women to terrible deaths, yet I do not feel as sharp a pang when I think of them as I do when I recall the gleam of light on my father’s bowed pate at the table just then, or Hettie’s big sad soft eyes looking at me in silent beseeching, without anger or resentment, asking me to be kind to an ageing, anxious man, to be tolerant of the littleness of their lives; asking me to have a heart.

After breakfast I had to get out of the house, and made Nick walk with me down to the harbour. The day had turned blustery, and the shadows of clouds scudded over the white-flecked sea. The Norman castle on the shore looked particularly dour today, in the pale, autumn light; as a child I had believed it was made of wet sea-sand.

“Good people,” Nick said. “Your father is a fighter.”

I stared at him.

“You think so? Just another bourgeois liberal, I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.”

Nick laughed.

“Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?”

“Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.”

“There you are: a fighter.”

We strolled along the front. Despite the lateness of the season there were bathers down at the water, their cries came to us, tiny and clear, skimming the ribbed sand. Something in me always responds, shamefacedly, to the pastel gaieties of the seaside. I saw, with unnerving clarity, another version of myself, a little boy playing here with Freddie (Wittgenstein accosted me one day by the Cam and clutched me by the wrist and stuck his face close to mine and hissed: “Is the dotard the same being that he was when he was an infant?”), making castles and trying surreptitiously to get him to eat sand, while Hettie sat placidly in the middle of a vast checked blanket doing her knitting, sighing contentedly and talking to herself in a murmur, her big, mottled legs stuck out before her like a pair of windlasses and her yellow toes twitching (a parishioner once complained to my father that his wife was down on the strand “with her pegs on show for all the town to see”).

Nick halted suddenly and gazed about him histrionically at sea and beach and sky, his overcoat billowing in the breeze like a cloak.

“God,” he muttered, “how I loathe nature!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “perhaps we shouldn’t have come.”

He looked at me and put on a glum grin, pulling down his mouth at the sides. “You mustn’t take everything personally, you know,” he said. We walked on and he patted his stomach. “What was that stuff called? Fudge?”

“Fadge.”

“Amazing.”

I had watched him throughout breakfast, while my father talked platitudes and Hettie stoutly nodded her support. One smile from him at their quaintness, I had told myself, and I shall hate him for life. But he was impeccable. Even when Freddie came and pressed his nose and his scabbed lips against the dining room window, smearing the glass with snot and spittle, Nick only chuckled, as at the endearing antics of a toddler, I was the one who had sat with lip curled in contemptuous impatience. Now he said:

“Young people, your father called us. I don’t feel young, do you? The Ancient of Days, rather. It’s we who are the old men now. I shall be thirty next month. Thirty!”

“I know,” I said. “On the twenty-fifth.”

He looked at me in surprise. “How did you remember?”

“I have a head for dates. And that’s a momentous one, after all.”

“What? Oh, yes, I see. Your glorious Revolution. Didn’t it in fact take place in November?”

“Yes. Their November, Old Style. The Julian calendar.”

“Ah, the Julian calendar, yes. What-ho for jolly old Julian.”

I winced; he never sounded more Jewish than when he came out with these Woosterisms.

“Anyway,” I said, “the symbol is all. As Querell likes to remark, the Catholic Church is founded on a pun. Tu es Petrus?

“Eh? Oh, I see. That’s good; that’s very good.”

“Pinched it from someone else, though.”

We walked into the shadow of the castle wall and Nick’s mood darkened with the air.

“What will you do in this war, Victor?” he asked, his voice going gruff and Sydney Cartonish. He stopped and leaned against the harbour rail. The sea wind was chill, and sharp with salt. Far out to sea a flock of gulls was wheeling above a patch of brightness on the water, wheeling and clumsily diving, like blown sheets of newsprint. I fancied I could hear their harsh, hungry cries.

“You really think there will be a war?” I said.

“Yes. No question but.” He walked on and I followed a pace behind him. “Three months, six months—a year at the most. The factories have been given the word, though the War Office hasn’t told Chamberlain about it. You know he and Daladier worked together in secret for months to strike a deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland? And now Hitler can do whatever he pleases. Have you heard what he said about Chamberlain? I feel sorry for him, let him have his piece of paper.”

I was staring at him.

“How do you know all this?” I asked, laughing in surprise. “Chamberlain, the factories, all that stuff?”

He shrugged.

“I’ve been talking to some people,” he said. “You might like to meet them. They’re our sort.”

My sort, I thought, or yours? I let it pass.

“You mean, people in the government?”

He shrugged again.

“Something like that,” he said. We turned from the harbour and set off back up the hill road. While he had talked, a sort of slow, burning blush had come over me from breast to brow. It was as if we were a pair of schoolboys and Nick thought he had discovered the secrets of sex but had got the details all wrong. “Everything’s gone rotten, don’t you think?” he said. “Spain finished the whole thing for me. Spain, and now this beastly Munich business. Peace in our time—ha!” He stopped and turned to me with an earnest frown, brushing the lock of hair back from his forehead. Eyes very black in the pale light of morning, lip trembling with emotion as he struggled to maintain a manful mien. I had to look away to hide my grin. “Something has to be done, Victor. It’s up to us.”

“Our sort, you mean?”

It was said before I knew it. I was terrified of offending him— I had a vision of him sitting grim-faced in the trap, with eyes averted, demanding to be taken back to the station at once, while my father and Hettie, and Andy Wilson, and even the pony, looked at me accusingly. I need not have worried; Nick was not one to spot an irony; egotists never are, I find. We turned to the hill again. He walked with his hands jammed in his overcoat pockets and eyes on the road, his jaw set, a muscle in it working.

“I’ve felt so useless up to now,” he said, “playing the exquisite and guzzling champagne. You’ve at least done something with your life.”

“I hardly think a catalogue of the drawings in the Windsor Castle collection will stop Herr Hitler in his tracks.”

He nodded; he was not listening.

“The thing is to get involved,” he said; “to act.”

“Is this the new Nick Brevoort?” I said, in as light a tone as I could manage. Embarrassment was giving way in me now to a not quite explicable and certainly unjustified annoyance—after all, everyone that autumn was talking like this. “I seem to remember having this conversation with you some years ago, but in reverse. Then I was the one playing at being the man of action.”

He smiled to himself, biting his lip; my annoyance shot up a couple of hot degrees.

“You think I’m playing?” he said, with just the hint of a contemptuous drawl. I did not let myself reply. We went on for a while in silence. The sun had retreated into a milky haze. “By the way,” he said, “I have a job, did you know? Leo Rothenstein has hired me as an adviser.”

I thought this must be one of Leo’s practical jokes.

“An adviser? What kind of an adviser?”

“Well, politics, mostly. And finance.”

“Finance? What on earth do you know about finance?”

He did not reply for a moment. A rabbit came out of the hedge and sat up on its hind legs at the side of the road and looked at us in amazement.

“His family is worried about Hitler. They have money in Germany, and a lot of relations there. He asked me to look in on them. He knew I was going over, you see.”

“Are you? To Germany?”

“Yes—didn’t I say? Sorry. The people I’ve been talking to have asked me to go.”

“And do what?”

“Just… look around. Get the feel of things. Report back.”

I let out a loud laugh.

“Good God, Beaver,” I cried, “you’re going to be a spy!”

“Yes,” he said, with a rueful smirk, proud as a boy scout. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

I did not know why I should have been surprised: after all, I had been in the secret ranks myself for years, though on the other side from him, and his sort. What would have happened, I ask myself, if I had said to him then, Nick, my love, I’m working for Moscow, what do you think of that? Instead I stopped and turned and looked back down the hill to the harbour and the roughening sea.

“I wonder what those gulls were after,” I said.

Nick turned too and vaguely peered.

“What gulls?” he said.

4

We did not go to Mayo. I cannot remember what excuse I made to my father and Hettie, or if I even bothered to offer one. We were both anxious to get back to London, Nick to his spying and I to mine. Father was hurt. The west for him was the land of youth, not only the scene of his childhood holidays— his grandfather had kept a farm on a rocky islet in Clew Bay— but the place where his people had originated, mysterious autochthons stepping out of the mists of the western seaboard, the mighty O Measceoils, warriors, pirates, fierce clansmen all, who just in time to avoid the ravages of the Famine had changed their religion and Anglicised the family name and turned themselves into Yeats’s hard-riding country gentlemen. I had no wish to introduce Nick to these legends, and much less to walk with him through the sites where had stood the stone cottages of my forebears and the base beds from which they had sprung. In these matters he and I observed a decorous silence: he did not speak of his Jewishness nor I of my Catholic blood. We were both, in our own ways, self-made men. Three days at Carrick-drum was enough for us; we packed up our books and our unworn hiking boots and took ship for what I realised now was home. Leaving Ireland and my father’s house, I had the sense of having committed a small but particularly brutish crime. Throughout the journey I could feel my father’s wounded, forgiving gaze fixed like a spot of heat on the already burning back of my neck.

London that autumn had an abstracted, provisional air; the atmosphere was hectic and hollow, like that of the last day of school term, or the closing half-hour of a drunken party. People would drift off into silence in the middle of a sentence and look up at the tawny sunlight in the windows and sigh. The streets were like stage-sets, scaled down, two-dimensional, their bustle and busyness tinged with the pathos of something set in motion only so that it might be violently halted. The squawks of the news-vendors had an infernal ring—cockney chirpiness has always grated on my nerves. At evening the sunset glare in the sky above the roofs seemed the afterglow of a vast conflagration. It was all so banal, these hackneyed signs and wonders. Fear was banal.

For some, the times were grimly congenial. Querell, for instance, was in his element. I remember meeting him in the Strand one drizzly afternoon late in that November. We went to a Lyons Corner House and drank tea that was the same colour as the rain falling on the pavement outside the steamy window where we sat. Querell looked even more the spiv than usual, in his narrow suit and brown trilby. Within minutes, it seemed, he had filled to overflowing the tin ashtray on the table between us. I was well established at the Department by then, but I rarely saw him there—he was on the Balkans desk, I was in Languages— and when we chanced upon each other in the outside world like this we felt embarrassed and constrained, like two clergymen meeting the morning after an accidental encounter in a brothel. At least, I felt embarrassment, I felt constraint; I do not think Querell would ever allow himself to succumb to sensations so weak-kneed and obvious. I could not take seriously the self-deluding, school-brigade, boys-with-men’s-moustaches world of military intelligence; the atmosphere of mingled jollity and earnestness in which the Department went about its work was amusing at first, then obscurely shaming, then merely tedious. Such asses one had to deal with! Querell was different, though; I suspected he despised the place as much as I did. It had taken me a long time, and much vigorous yanking on the lattices of the old-boy network, to get in; in the end Leo Rothenstein managed it for me. He was—and had been for years, I was surprised to discover—something very high up in the Middle East section.

“It’s in the blood,” Querell said, with a pursed smile. “His family has been running spies for centuries. They got early news of Waterloo and made their fortune out of it on the Stock Exchange, did you know that? Crafty; very crafty.” Querell did not care for Jews. He was watching me out of those unblinking, protuberant pale eyes of his, two lazy streams of cigarette smoke flaring out of his nostrils. I busied myself eating a sticky bun. His mention of spies had startled me; it was not a word Department people used, even amongst ourselves. Sometimes it crossed my mind that he too, like me, might be more than he was admitting—he had just published a thriller called The Double Agent. The idea of having Querell as a secret sharer was not appealing. When I looked up from my bun he shifted his gaze to the legs of a passing waitress. I had never succeeded in pinning down his politics. He would talk of the Cliveden crowd or Mosley and his thugs with a sort of wistful admiration, then in the next breath he would be the worker’s champion. In my innocence I thought it was his Catholicism that afforded him this breadth of casuistry. At Maules one weekend when the Moscow show trials were going on he overheard me castigating Stalin. “Thing is, Maskell,” he said, “a bad pope doesn’t make a bad church.” Leo Rothenstein, draped on a sofa, his long legs crossed before him, shifted himself and laughed lazily. “My God,” he said, “a Bolshie in the house! My poor papa would turn in his grave.”

“Have you seen Bannister recently?” Querell asked now, still with his eye on the waitress’s crooked seams. “I hear he’s taken up with the Fascists.”

Boy was working at the BBC, in charge of what he portentously referred to as Talks. He was endearingly proud of this job, and regaled us with stories about Lord Reith and his boyfriends, which at the time we refused to believe. By then he too was with the Department; after Munich, pretty well everyone in our set had joined the Secret Service, or been press-ganged into it. I imagine we were not unaware that intelligence work was likely to be far preferable to soldiering—or am I being unfair to us? Boy took to his undercover role with childish enthusiasm. He would always love the secret life, and missed it painfully after he defected. He enjoyed especially the role-playing; for cover, he had lately joined a Tory ginger group of Nazi sympathisers calling itself the Chain (“I’m pulling the Chain for Uncle Joe,” was Boy’s catchphrase), and had attached himself to a notorious pro-Hitler MP called Richard Someone, I have forgotten the name, an ex-Guards officer and a lunatic, for whom he was acting (the right word) as unofficial private secretary. His chief duty, he told us, was to be a pander for the Captain, who had an insatiable appetite for working-class young men. Recently Boy and his mad Captain had undertaken a jaunt to the Rhineland, escorting a band of schoolboys from the East End on a visit to a Hitler Youth camp. It was the kind of preposterous thing that went on in the run-up to war. The pair had returned in ecstasies (“Oh, those blond beasts!”), though Captain Dick had contracted a painful dose of anal thrush; not so clean-limbed after all, die Hitlerjugend.

“The best part of the joke,” I said, “is that the trip was sponsored by the Foreign Relations Council of the Church of England!”

Querell did not laugh, only gave me one of his swift, bug-eyed glances, which always made me feel as if a bottle had been rolled across my face, the way at country house parties they used to roll empty champagne bottles over the ballroom floors to impart a final polishing (ah, the days of our youth—the youth of the world!).

“Maybe you should have gone with them,” he said.

That gave me pause. I could feel myself beginning to redden.

“Not my kind of thing, old boy,” I said, meaning it to come out lazy and insolent, though it sounded, to my own ears, incriminatingly prim. I passed on quickly. “Boy says the Krauts have finished rearming and are just waiting for the word.”

Querell shrugged. “Well, we hardly needed to send a pansy over to find out that for us, did we.”

“He and the Captain were shown around an aerodrome. Line upon line of Messerschmitts, all pointing at us.”

We were silent. In the traffic noise from the street outside I seemed to hear the whirr of propellers, and I shivered with eager anticipation: let it come, let it all come! Querell looked idly about the room. At the table next to us a fat man in a greasy suit was speaking vehemently in a low voice to a wan young woman with hennaed hair—his daughter, it seemed—telling her in a level undertone that she was nothing but a tart; they were to turn up again a couple of years later, disguised as a Jewish refugee and his doomed young wife, on board The Orient Express, the first of Querell’s overrated Balkan thrillers.

“I wonder if we shall survive,” Querell said. “All this, I mean.” He waved a hand, taking in the other tables, and the waitress, and the woman at the cash register, and the fat man and his miserable daughter, and, beyond them, England.

“What if we don’t?” I said, cautiously. “Something better might take our place.”

“You want Hitler to win?”

“Not Hitler, no.”

It is hard now to recapture the peculiar thrill of moments such as that, when one risked everything on a throwaway remark. It was akin to the rush of vertiginous glee I felt when I made my first parachute jump. There was the same sensation of being light as air and yet far weightier, of far more significance, somehow, than a mere mortal should ever expect to be. Thus a minor god might feel, flying down from the clouds to try out a disguise on one of Arcady’s more experienced nymphs. We sat, Querell and I, unspeaking, looking at each other. That was another thing about those moments of absolute risk: the powerful, charged neutrality that took over one’s facial expressions and one’s tone of voice. When I met T. S. Eliot at a Palace function after the war, I recognised at once in that shadowed, camel-eyed gaze and timbreless voice the marks of the lifelong, obsessive dissembler.

Querell was the first to look away; the moment passed.

“Well,” he said, “it hardly matters who wins, since it will be left to the Yanks as usual to come in and mop up after us.”

We went off then and got drunk together at the Gryphon. When I look back, I am surprised at how much time I have spent in Querell’s company over the years. There was no warmth between us, and we had few interests in common. His Catholicism was as incomprehensible to me as he claimed my Marxism was to him; though each was a believer, neither could credit the other’s faith. Yet there was a bond of some sort between us. Ours was like one of those odd attachments at school, when two unlovely misfits sidle up to each other out of mutual need and form a sort of humid, hapless friendship. The Gryphon and the George were our version of the trees behind the playing fields, where we could sit through long hours of shared melancholy in a haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, indulging in occasional rancorous exchanges, and glaring and grinning at our fellow drinkers. Being with Querell was, for me, a kind of slumming. I did not subscribe—in those days, anyway—to his Manichean version of the world, yet I found myself drawn to the idea of it, this dark, befouled yet curiously dauntless place through which he slouched, always alone, with a fag in his mouth and his hat raked to the side and one hand ever ready in his jacket pocket, cradling that imaginary gun.

It was a tumultuous evening. After the Gryphon, when we were good and soused, we collected his Riley from the RAC garage and drove to an awful dive somewhere off the Edgware Road. Querell had said the place specialised in child prostitutes. There was a low basement room that smelled of carbolic, with a balding, red-velvet sofa and spindle-backed cane chairs and brown lino on the floor scarred from trodden-on cigarette butts. A feebly burning table lamp wore a crooked shade the stuff of which had the uncanny look of dried human skin. The girls sitting about vacantly in their slips had ceased being children a long time ago. The couple who ran the place were out of a seaside postcard, she a big blancmange with a wig of brass curls, he a lean little whippet of a fellow with a Hitler tash and a tic in one eye. Mrs. Gill kept sweeping in and out of the room like a watchful duenna, while Adolf plied us with brown ale, scurrying about at a crouch with a tin tray expertly balanced on the bunched fingers of his left hand while with his right he deftly distributed bottles and grimed glasses. It all seemed to me very jolly, in a bleary, sin-soaked, Stanley Spencerish sort of way (Belshazzar’s Feast at Cookham). I found myself sitting with a freckled, red-haired girl perched on my lap in the attitude of an overgrown infant, her head resting awkwardly on my shoulder and her knees braced sideways against my chest, while under us the cane chair cackled scornfully to itself. She told me with great pride that her mam and dad had once been Pearly King and Queen (do they still have that custom?), and offered to suck me off for ten bob. I fell asleep, or passed out briefly, and when I came to, the girl was gone, and so were her companions, and Querell, too, though presently he reappeared, with a strand of his thin, oiled hair hanging down his forehead; I found it very worrying, that bit of discomposure in one usually so fanatically shined and smoothed.

We left, and climbed the basement steps to the street, not without difficulty, and found that it was raining heavily—what a surprise the weather always is when one is drunk—and Querell said he knew another place where there were definitely children for sale, and when I said I had no wish to sleep with a child he went into a sulk and refused to drive the car, so I took the keys from him, although I had never driven before, and we jerked and juddered off through the rain in the direction of Soho, I leaning forward anxiously with my nose almost touching the streaming windscreen, and Querell slumped beside me in wordless anger, his arms furiously folded. I was so drunk by now I could not focus properly and had to keep one eye shut in order to stop the white line in the middle of the road from splitting in two. Before I knew where I was going we had pulled up outside Leo Rothenstein’s house in Poland Street, where Nick was already living-most of us would lodge there, on and off, in the coming years; it was what would nowadays be called a commune, I suppose. There was a light in Nick’s window. Querell leaned on the bell-by now he had forgotten whatever it was he had been sulking about—while I stood with my face uplifted to the rain, declaiming Blake:

Awake! awake 0 sleeper of the fond of shadows, wake! expand!

Nick opened a window and stuck out his head and swore at us. “For Christ’s sake, go home, Victor, there’s a good chap.” He came down, however, and let us in. He was in evening dress, looking very pale and satanic. We followed him up the narrow stairs, bumping from banisters to wall and back again, and Querell took up the refrain of Jerusalem:I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:Fibres of love from man to man thro’ Albion’s pleasant land.

In the flat a small after-party party was in progress. Boy was there, and Abercrombie the poet, and Lady Mary Somebody, and the Lydon sisters. They had been to a party at the Rothenstein mansion in Portman Square (Why wasn’t I invited?) and were finishing a magnum of champagne. Querell and I stopped in the doorway and goggled at them.

“I say,” I said, “you all do look splendid.”

And they did: like a flock of languorous penguins.

Nick did his nasty laugh.

“How English you’re coming to sound, Vic,” he said. “Quite the native.”

He knew very well how much I hated to be called Vic. Querell drew a bead on him and in a slurred voice said, “At least he didn’t come here via Palestine.”

The Lydon sisters giggled.

Nick fetched a couple of beer glasses from the kitchen and poured a gulp of champagne into each. Now I noticed for the first time, sitting in an armchair in a corner, ankle crossed on knee, an unknown yet disturbingly familiar, delicate youth in a silk evening suit, with brilliantined hair brushed tightly back, smoking a cigarette and watching me with cool amusement out of shadowed eyes.

“Hello, Victor,” this person said. “You look somewhat the worse for wear.”

It was Baby. The others laughed at my astonishment.

“Dodo here bet her a gallon of bubbly she couldn’t get away with it,” Nick said. Lady Mary—Dodo—clasped her hands in her lap and drew her thin shoulders together and put on an expression of comic ruefulness. Nick made a face at her. “She lost,” he said. “It was the damnedest thing. Even Leo didn’t recognise her.”

“And I made a pass at her,” Boy said. “So that will tell you.”

More laughter. Nick crossed the room with the champagne bottle.

“Come on, old girl,” he said, “we’ve got to finish up your winnings.”

Baby, still with her eyes on me, lifted her glass to be filled. Dark-blue velvet curtains were drawn over the tall window behind her chair, and on a low table a clutch of washed-pink roses was expiring in a copper bowl, the packed petals heavy and limp as wetted cloth. The room shrank, became a long, low box, like the inside of something, a camera, or a magic lantern. I stood and swayed, with champagne bubbles detonating in my nostrils, and, as I watched them, in my poor fuddled vision brother and sister seemed to merge and separate and merge again, dark on dark and pale on glimmering pale, Pierrot and Pierrette. Nick glanced at me and smiled and said:

“Better sit down, Victor, you have a distinct look of Ben Turpin.”

A blank then, and then I am sitting on the floor, beside Baby’s chair, my legs crossed under me tailor-fashion and my chin practically leaning on the armrest beside her suddenly significant hand with its short, fatly tapering fingers and blood-red nails; I want to take each one of those fingers between my lips and suck and suck until the painted nails turn transparent as fish-scales. I am telling her earnestly about Diderot’s theory of statues. There is a stage of drunkenness when all at once one seems to step with startling, with laughable, ease through a door that all night one had been struggling in vain to open. On the other side all is light and definition and the calm of certitude.

“Diderot said,” I said, “Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. This is the moral imperative. I think it’s awfully clever, don’t you? I know that’s how I feel. Only there are times when I can’t tell which is the statue and which is me.” This last struck me as profoundly sad and I thought I might cry. Behind me Boy was loudly reciting “The Ball of Inverness” and the Lydon sisters were delightedly shrieking. I covered Baby’s hand with mine. How cool it was; cool, and excitingly unresponsive. “What do you think,” I said in a voice thick with emotion. “Tell me what you think.”

She sat in her chair as motionless as—yes, as motionless as a statue, one silk-trousered leg still crossed on the other and her arms stretched out along the armrests, androgynous, hieratic and faintly, calmly crazed-looking, with her hair drawn back so tight her eyes were slanted at the corners; her head was turned toward me, and she looked at me, saying nothing. Or looked not at me, but around me, rather. It was a way she had. Her gaze would stray no farther than one’s face yet one would seem to be taken in all of a piece, defined, somehow, and set apart, as if by her scrutiny she were generating around one a kind of invisible corona, a forcefield inside of which one stood isolated, inspected, alone. Do I give her too much weight, do I make her seem a sort of sphinx, a sort of she-monster, cruel and cold and impossibly, untouchably distant? She was just a human, like me, groping her way through the world, yet when she looked at me like that I felt my sins shine out of me, illumined forth for all to see. It was an intoxicating sensation, especially for one already so intoxicated.

At four in the morning Querell drove me home. In Leicester Square he ran the car gently into a lamp-post, and we sat for a while listening to the radiator ticking and watching an illuminated advertisement for Bovril blinking on and off. The square was deserted. Squalls of wind pushed dead leaves back and forth over the pavements from which the recently ceased rain was drying in big map-shaped patches. It was all very desolate and beautiful and sad, and I thought again that I might weep.

“Bloody people,” Querell muttered, starting up the stalled engine. “Bloody war will fix ’em.”

At dawn I sprang awake suddenly, completely, in a transport of certitude. I knew exactly what I must do. I did not so much get out of bed as levitate from it; I felt like one of Blake’s shining figures, transformed and aflame. The telephone rattled in my hands. Baby answered on the first ring. She did not sound as if she had been asleep. Behind her voice there lay a vast, waiting silence.

“Look here,” I said, “I have to marry you.” She did not reply. I imagined her floating in that sea of silence, fronds of black silk undulating about her. “Vivienne? Are you there?”

How strange her name sounded.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m here.” She seemed as always to be suppressing laughter, but I did not mind.

“Will you marry me?”

She paused again. A seagull alighted on the sill outside my window and looked at me with a bright, blank eye. The sky was the colour of pale mud. I had the sense that all this had happened before.

“All right,” she said.

And hung up.

We met later that day for lunch at the Savoy. It was a curious occasion, strained and somewhat stagey, as if we were taking part in one of those self-consciously smart drawing-room comedies of the time. The restaurant was littered with people we knew, which intensified our sense of being on display. Baby wore her habitual black, a suit with padded shoulders and a narrow skirt, which in daylight had to my eye the look of widow’s weeds. She was as always both watchful and remote, though I thought I could detect a hint of agitation in the way she kept reaching out and fiddling with my cigarette case, turning it this way and that on the tablecloth. I did not help matters by saying, first thing, how awful I was feeling. And I was: my eyes felt as if they had been torn out and held over hot coals and then thrust back into the throbbing sockets. I showed her my shaking hands, told her how my heart was wobbling. She made a grimace of disdain.

“Why do men always boast about their hangovers?”

“There’s so little else for us to be boastful about, I suppose, these days,” I said sulkily.

We looked away from each other. The silence stretched, thinner and thinner. We were like hesitant swimmers who have come to the water’s grey and uninviting edge. Baby was the first to plunge in.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve never been proposed to over the telephone before.”

Her laughter had a nervous sparkle. She had recently ended a messy affair with some sort of an American. My Yank, was how she would refer to him, with a bitter, resigned little smile. No one seemed to have met him. It came to me with a kind of slow amazement how little I knew about her.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, but it seemed the thing to do, at the time.”

“And does it still?”

“What?”

“Seem the thing to do.”

“Well, yes, of course. Don’t you think?”

She paused. That gaze of hers, it seemed to originate somehow at the back of her eyes.

“Nick is right,” she said, “you are turning into an Englishman.”

The waiter appeared then and we bent with relief over our menus. During lunch we talked in a studiedly desultory fashion about my new post at the Institute, Nick’s bizarre hiring of himself as an adviser to the Rothensteins, Boy Bannister’s latest scrape, the coming war. I had assumed she would have no politics and was obscurely irritated to discover that she was fiercely anti-appeasement—quite bellicose, in fact. While our plates were being cleared away she opened my cigarette case and took a cigarette—from the brusqueness of her movements, she too seemed irritated—and paused with the match burning and said:

“You do love me, I take it?”

The waiter glanced at her quickly and away. I took her wrist and drew her hand toward me and blew out the match. We had started on our second bottle of wine.

“Yes,” I said, “I love you.”

I had never said it to anyone before, except Hettie, when I was little. Baby nodded once, briskly, as if I had cleared up some small, niggling matter that had been on her mind for a long time.

“You’ll have to see Mummy, you know,” she said. I stared blankly. She permitted herself an ironic smile. “To ask for my hand.”

We both looked at where my fingers were still lightly holding her wrist. Had there really been an audience, the moment would have raised a scatter of laughter.

“Shouldn’t it be your father that I talk to?” I said. Big Beaver was about to publish a monograph of mine on German baroque architecture.

“Oh, he won’t care.”

In the taxi we kissed, turning sideways suddenly toward each other and grappling awkwardly, like a pair of shop-window mannequins come jerkily alive. I remembered the same thing happening, what, six, seven years before? and thought how strange life was. Her nose was chill and faintly damp. I touched a breast. A strong cold wind was blowing along Oxford Street. Baby leaned her forehead against my neck. Her fat-fingered little hand rested in mine.

“What shall I call you?” she said. “Victor is hardly a name, is it. More a title. Like someone in ancient Rome.” She lifted her head and looked at me. The lights of the shut shops as we passed them by flashed in miniature across her eyes, like so many slides flickering past the lenses of a faulty projector. In the darkness her smile seemed bright and brave, as if she were holding back tears, “I don’t love you, you know,” she said softly.

I closed my fingers on hers.

“I know that,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter, does it.”

I went up to Oxford by train on one of those deceptively soft, glowing days of late October. Everything was melodramatically aflame, so that the world seemed poised not on the edge of winter but of some grand, blazoned beginning. I was wearing a new and rather smart suit, and as we sped along I admired the line of the trouser-leg and the chestnut gleam on the toecaps of my well-polished shoes. I had a clear and definite image of myself: smooth, well-groomed, primped and pomaded, a man with a mission. I was quite calm about the impending confrontation with Mrs. Beaver, was even looking forward to it, in a mood of amused condescension. What could I have to fear from such a scatter-brain? Yet as we went along, I began to be affected by something in the inexorability of the way the lumbering, seemingly unstoppable train ticked off the station halts, and the smoke rolling past the window took on an infernal aspect, and by the time we drew into Oxford, blank terror had fixed its claw upon my heart.

The maid who opened the door to me was new, a heavy-haunched, flat-faced girl who gave me a sceptical look and took my hat as if it were something dead I had handed her. The Brevoorts were proud of their reputation for keeping impossible servants; it fed Mrs. Beaver’s bohemian notions of herself. “Madam is in the pantry,” the girl said, and I found the nurseryrhyme echo of it oddly disconcerting. There was a warm, sickly-sweet odour. I followed the girl’s joggling haunches through to the drawing room, where she left me, stepping backwards and closing the door on me with a definite smirk. I stood in the middle of the floor listening to my heart and looking through the bottle-glass window panes at the iridescent and somehow derisively gaudy garden. Time passed. I thought of the first time I had been in this room, nearly a decade ago, with Nick lounging on the sofa and Baby upstairs playing her jazz records. I felt suddenly, immensely old, and saw myself now not as the polished man of the world I had seemed at the outset of my journey, but a sort of freak, desiccated and obscenely preserved, like one of those fairground midgets, a man in a boy’s wrinkled body.

Without warning the door flew open and Mrs. Brevoort stood there in her Sarah Bernhardt pose, a hand on the knob and her head thrown back, her bared embonpoint pallidly aheave.

“Plums!” she said. “Such impossible fecundity.”

She was wearing a tasselled shawl affair and a voluminous velvet dress the colour of old blood, and both arms were busy almost to the elbows with fine gold bangles, like a set of springs, which suggested the circus ring more than the seraglio. I realised what it was she always reminded me of in her looks: one of Henry James’s worldly schemers, a Mme. Merle, or a Mrs. Assingham, but without their wit, or their acuity. She advanced, moving as always as if mounted on a hidden trolley, and grasped me by the shoulders and kissed me dramatically on both cheeks, then thrust me from her and held me at arm’s length and gazed at me for a long moment with an expression of tragic weight, slowly nodding her great head.

“Baby spoke to you?” I said tentatively.

She nodded more deeply still, so that her chin almost dropped to her breast.

“Vivienne,” she said, “telephoned. Her father and I have had a long chat. We are so…” It was impossible to tell what might have followed. She went on contemplating me, seemingly lost in thought, then suddenly she roused herself and grew brisk. “Come along,” she said, “I need a man’s help.”

The pantry was a stylised model of a witch’s cave. Through a low little window giving on to the vegetable garden there entered a dense, sinister green glow which seemed something at once more and less than daylight. An enormous vat of plum jam was turbidly boiling on a squat black gas stove that stood with delicate feet braced, like a weightlifter about to bend to his task, while on the draining board beside the chipped sink there was ranged a waiting squadron of jam jars of varying sizes. Mrs. B. bent over the bubbling cauldron, her eyes slitted and the wings of her great beaked nose flaring, and lifted a ladleful of the jam and examined it doubtfully.

“Max expects one to do this sort of thing,” she said, turning off the gas, “I can’t think why.” She glanced at me sideways with a Grimalkin grin. “He’s a great tyrant, you know. Would you like an apron? And do take off your jacket.”

I was to hold the jars while she ladled the jam into them. “You’ve got to do it while the jam is hot, you see, or the seals won’t work.” The first jar cracked from the heat of the boiling fruit, in the second the jam overflowed and burned my fingers, at which I uttered an oath, which Mrs. B. pretended not to hear.

“Well,” she said, “perhaps we should allow it to cool a little. Let’s go into the garden. Such a perfect day. Should I offer you a drink, or is it too early? Maude shall bring us something. Maude! Dear me, where is the girl. Oh, there you are; how you do lurk. What will you take, Mr. Maskell? People tell me my dandelion wine is really quite good. Gin? Well, yes, I’m sure we must have, somewhere. Maude, bring Mr. Maskell some gin. And… tonic, and so on.” Maude looked at me and let another sardonic smile cross her large face briefly, and slouched off. Mrs. Brevoort sighed. “I suspect her of insolence, but I can never quite catch her in the act. They are so sly, you know, and so clever, too, in their way.”

The garden was at its last, glorious gasp, all gold and green and umber and rose madder. A strong autumnal sun was shining. We walked over the crisp grass, smelling eucalyptus and the thin, hot stink of verbena, and sat down on a weather-beaten wooden bench that knelt at a tipsy angle against a rough stone wall under a tangled arch of old roses. A very bower of unbliss.

“Is your hand terribly painful?” Mrs. B. said. “Perhaps we should have put something on it.”

“Dock leaves,” I said.

“What?”

“It was a cure my mother had. My stepmother.”

“I see.” She cast about the garden with an air of vague helplessness. “I don’t know that there are any dock leaves…”

Maude approached then with my gin, and a green goblet of urine-coloured liquid for Mrs. Beaver which I took to be the celebrated dandelion wine. I knocked back half my drink in one go. Mrs. B. once more pretended not to notice.

“You were telling me about your stepmother,” she said, and took a sip of wine, eyeing me keenly over the rim of the glass.

“Was I? Her name is Hermione,” I said, floundering.

“Very… pretty. And is she Irish, too?”

“Yes. Her people were Quakers.”

“Quakers!” she said, uttering the word as a high-pitched squawk, and opened her eyes very wide and clapped a hand with fingers splayed to her sloped chest with an audible little smack. I had the impression she was not at all sure what a Quaker was. “Well, of course, one can’t be held accountable for one’s people,” she said, “I should know that!” And she threw back her head and produced a great full raucous trill of laughter, humourless and mad, like the heroine’s laugh in a tragic opera. I thought of mentioning my maternal connection with the Queen; one isn’t a snob, of course, but it is a thing that does impress.

I had finished my gin, and kept twirling the empty glass ostentatiously in my fingers, but she refused to take the hint.

“And you have a brother, yes?”

She had suddenly become very interested in the nap of the velvet stuff of her dress where it was stretched over her large, round knees.

“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded extraordinarily thin and strained, like that of a meek murderer replying to the prosecution’s first, frightening question.

“Yes,” she said, softly. “Because you did not say.”

“It did not arise.”

“We rather thought you were an only child.”

“I’m sorry.” I was not sure what I was apologising for. A wave of anguished anger broke over me. Nick: Nick had told them. Mrs. Brevoort placed her wineglass on the bench beside her and rose and paced a little way on to the lawn, and stopped and turned, gazing pensively down upon the grass at her feet.

“Of course,” she said, “we should require a certificate.”

“A certificate…?”

“Yes. From a doctor, you know; Max will find a dependable man. So often these things run in the family, and we could not dream of exposing Vivienne to anything of that nature. You do see that, don’t you?” She was standing now canted forward at a slight angle, her hands clasped under her bosom, gazing at me with an earnest, kindly, melancholy little smile. “We have no doubt that you, Mr. Maskell—”

“Call me Victor, please,” I murmured. A bubble of manic, miserable laughter was now pushing its hot way upward in my chest and threatening to choke me.

“We have no doubt,” she pressed on, irresistible as a battleship, “that you, of course, are not personally… infected, if I may put it that way. But it’s the blood, you see.” She brought up her clasped hands and tucked them under her chin in a winsomely histrionic gesture and turned and paced a few steps to the left and back again. “We are, Mr. Maskell, despite extremes of sophistication, a primitive people. I mean, of course, my people. The Hebrew race has suffered much, and no doubt will again in the future”—she was right: her brother and his wife and their three children were to perish in Treblinka—“but throughout the thousands of years of our history we have held fast to essentials. The family. Our children. And blood, Mr. Maskell: blood.” She dropped her hands from under her chin and turned and paced again, this time to the right, and again returned to centre stage. I felt like a theatre-goer trapped in the middle of a long second act who hears, outside, a fire engine howling past in the direction of his own house.

“Mrs. Brevoort—” I began, but she held up a hand as broad as a traffic policeman’s.

“Please,” she said, with a large, icy smile. “Two words more, and then silence, I promise.” I could see the maid moving about behind the drawing room window and toyed desperately with the possibility of shouting for her to bring me another drink—to bring the bloody bottle. Is there anything more dispiriting than an empty, hand-warmed, sticky gin glass? I thought of sucking on the slice of lemon but knew that even that would not have been sufficient sign of desperation for Mrs. B., in full flight as she was. “When Vivienne telephoned,” she was saying, “to tell us of your engagement, which came, you understand, as a great… surprise”—shock was the word she had suppressed—“to her father and to me, I shut myself away in the music room for an entire afternoon. I had much to think about. Music is always a help. I played Brahms. Those great, dark chords. So filled with sadness and yet so… so sustaining.” She bowed her head and let her eyelids gently close and stood for a moment as if in silent prayer, and then looked at me again suddenly, piercingly. “She is our only daughter, Mr. Maskell; our only, precious girl.”

I stood up. The musky smell of roses, along with everything else, was giving me a headache.

“Mrs. Brevoort,” I said, “Vivienne is twenty-nine. She is not a child. We love each other”—at that she shot up her thick, shiny eyebrows and gave her head a dismissive little toss, Mrs. Touchett to the life—“and we think it is time that we should marry.” I faltered; somehow that was not what I had meant to say, or at least not how I had meant to say it. “My brother suffers from a syndrome the name of which would mean nothing to you and which, besides, I have temporarily forgotten.” This was going from bad to worse. “His condition is not hereditary. It is the result of a depletion of oxygen to the brain while he was in the womb.” At that word she gave a definite start; I pressed on. “We would have hoped for your blessing, and that of Mr. Brevoort, but if you withhold it we shall go ahead regardless. I feel you should understand that.” Matters suddenly were improving, as the rhetoric heated. I could feel an invisible starched stock sprouting up about my throat, and would not have been surprised to look down and find myself in frock coat and riding boots: Lord Warburton himself could not have struck a haughtier aspect. I would have felt thoroughly in command were it not for the troubling persistence of that word womb, still wallowing between us like a half-inflated football that neither of us would dare either to pick up or kick away. We were silent. I could hear myself breathe, a soft, stertorous roaring down the nostrils. Mrs. B. made a peculiar little movement of her upper body, half shrug half bridle, and said:

“Of course you shall have our blessing. Vivienne shall have our blessing. That is not the matter at all.”

“Then what is the matter?”

She made to speak but instead stood silent, her mouth working and her eyes going glossily out of focus. I was afraid she might be having a seizure—the word apoplexy popped up in my mind, and I thought, I don’t know why, of the Punch and Judy show that used to be set up on Carrickdrum strand in summer when I was a child, and which filled me with unease even while I shrieked with laughter—but then, to my astonishment and dismay, she began to weep. I had never seen her lose control like this before, and would not see it again. I suspect she was as surprised as I was. She was angry at herself too, which added tears of rage to whatever the other kind were. “Ridiculous, ridiculous,” she muttered, scrubbing at her eyes, her bangles jingling, and shaking her head sideways as if to dislodge something from her ear, and I caught a glimpse of what she would look like as an old, old woman. I felt sorry for her, but there was another feeling also, which I was ashamed of but could not deny: it was exultation; nasty, secret and small-scale, but exultation for all that. These are the moments, rare, and seldom as clear-cut as this one, when power passes from one opponent to another, silently, instantaneously, like an electric charge jumping between electrodes. I began to offer her some futile and probably spurious words of comfort but she brushed them aside with an angry sweep of her hand, as if pushing away a wasp. She was quickly regaining control of herself. Her tears ceased. She gave a great sniff and lifted her head and pointed her chin at me.

“I do not wish us to be enemies, Mr. Maskell.”

“No,” I said, “that would not be wise.”

Max Brevoort arrived a little after that, when I was standing in the drawing room again and Mrs. B. had gone off somewhere to repair her face. I thought the tip of his thin nose quivered as he sniffed carefully at the atmosphere. He had a marvellously fine sense for the danger of an occasion. He did have something of the beaver about him, with his sleekness and his hand-rubbing and that delicately probing snout.

“I’m told we are to gain a son,” he said, and gave me one of his fierce, humourless grins. “Congratulations.”

There seemed nothing more to say after that and we stood awkwardly, looking at our feet. Then we both began to speak at once and lapsed again into painful silence. Mrs. B. came back, and was her accustomed imperial self again, but I caught Max giving her a sharp, searching glance and deciding, on the evidence, to proceed with caution.

“Perhaps we should have a drink?” he said, and added, gingerly: “To mark the occasion.”

“Yes, indeed,” his wife said, flashing at him a brilliant, brittle smile. “Some champagne. We’ve been having a chat.” She turned to me. “Haven’t we, Mr. Maskell.”

“Victor,” I said.

The wedding was a quiet affair, as the saying was in those days. The ceremony took place at Marylebone register office. The Beavers were there, Nick and his parents and an ancient aunt I had never met before—she had money—and Boy Bannister, of course, and Leo Rothenstein, and a couple of Baby’s girlfriends, mature flappers in ridiculous hats. My father and Hettie had come over the night before on the ferry, and looked frightened and country-mousey, and I was embarrassed for them, and by them. Nick was best man. Afterwards we went to Claridges for lunch, and Boy got drunk and made a disgraceful speech, throughout which Mrs. Beaver sat with a terrible, fixed smile, twisting and twisting a napkin in her hands as if she were wringing the neck of some small, white, boneless animal. The honeymoon was spent in Taormina. It was hot, and Mount Etna wore a stationary, menacing plume of smoke. We read a lot, and explored the ruins, and in the evenings, over dinner, Baby told me about her former lovers, of whom there had been an impressive number. I do not know why she felt the need to recount these adventures, which sounded uniformly melancholy, to me; perhaps it was a form of exorcism. I did not mind. It was even pleasant, in a peculiar way, to sit sipping my wine while this ghostly line of bankers and polo players and hapless Americans threaded its way through the hotel’s lugubriously ornate dining room and disappeared into the steamy, starstruck night.

Sex turned out to be easier than I had expected, or feared. I was pleased to encounter a version of Baby—warm, yielding, languorous, even—very different from the alarmingly hard-edged one I had married, while she was amused, and touched, to discover that she had married a thirty-one-year-old virgin. I had some difficulty getting going, and she laughed, and pushed back her hair, and said, “Poor darling, let me help you, I’m a sucker for this sort of thing.” On our last night we made a solemn, if tipsy, vow that we would not have children. And by Christmas she was pregnant.