The Untouchable Read Online Free PDF Page A

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