The Untouchable (15 page)

“Funny you should say that,” he said. “There’s a chap coming round shortly who used to be a priest. You’ll like him.”

“You forget,” I said sourly, “I come from a family of clergymen.”

“Well, you’ll have a lot to talk about then, won’t you.”

Presently Alastair’s gyp appeared, a cringing, forelock-pulling semi-dwarf—God, how I despised those people!—to announce that there was a visitor. Felix Hartmann wore black: black suit, black shirt, and, remarkably in the surroundings, a pair of narrow, patent-leather black shoes as delicate as dancing pumps. As he crossed the lawn to meet us I noticed how he tried to hide his limp. Alastair introduced us and we shook hands. I should like to be able to say that a spark of excited recognition of each other’s potential passed between us, but I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect. His handshake, a brief pressure quickly released, communicated nothing other than a mild and not wholly impolite indifference. (Yet what a strange ceremony it is, shaking hands; I always see it in heraldic terms: solemn, antiquated, a little ridiculous, slightly indecent, and yet, for all that, peculiarly affecting.) Felix’s soft, Slavic eyes, the colour of toffee—that toffee which, when I would come home from Miss Molyneaux’s school on winter evenings, Hettie used to help me make from burnt sugar poured out in a pan—rested on my face a moment, and then he turned them vaguely aside. It was one of his tactics to seem always just a bit distracted; he would pause for a second in the middle of a sentence and frown, then give himself a sort of infinitesimal shake, and go on again. He had a habit also, when being spoken to, no matter how earnestly, of turning very slowly on his heel and limping a little way away, head bowed, and then stopping to stand with his back turned and hands clasped behind him, so that one could not be sure that he was still listening to what one was saying, or had sunk into altogether more
profound communings with himself. I could never finally decide whether these mannerisms were genuine, or if he was merely trying things out, rehearsing in mid-play, as it were, like an actor walking into the wings to have a quick practice of a particularly tricky move while the rest of the cast went on with the drama. (I hope you do not wonder, Miss V., at my use of the word
genuine
in this context; if you do, you understand nothing about us and our little world.)

“Felix is in furs,” Alastair said, and giggled.

Hartmann smiled wanly.

“You are such a wit, Alastair,” he said.

We stood about awkwardly on the grass, the three of us, there being only two deckchairs, and Felix Hartmann studied the glossy toes of his shoes. Presently Alastair, squinting in the sunlight, put down his cup and muttered something about fetching another chair, and scuttled off. Hartmann shifted his gaze to the roses and sighed. We listened to the buzz of summer about us.

“You are the art critic?” he said.

“More an historian.”

“But of art?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, looking now in the vicinity of my knees.

“I know something of art,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” I waited, but he offered nothing more. “I have a great fondness for the German baroque,” I said, speaking over-loudly. “Do you know that style at all?”

He shook his head.

“I am not German,” he said, with a lugubrious intonation, frowning to one side.

And we were silent again. I wondered if I had offended him somehow, or if I were being a bore, and I felt faintly annoyed; we cannot all be winged in skirmishes in the Carpathians. Alastair came back with a third deckchair and set it up with much struggling and cursing, pinching his thumb badly in the process. He offered to make a fresh pot of tea but Hartmann silently declined, with a throwaway motion of his left hand. We sat down. Alastair heaved a happy sigh; gardeners have a particularly irritating way of sighing when they contemplate their handiwork.

“Hard to think of Spain and a war starting,” he said, “while we sit here in the sun.” He touched the sleeve of Felix’s black suit. “Aren’t you hot, old chap?”

“Yes,” Hartmann said, nodding again with that peculiar mixture of indifference and frowning solemnity.

Pause. The bells of King’s began to chime, the bronzen strokes beating thickly high up through the dense blue air.

“Alastair thinks we should all go to Spain and fight Franco,” I said lightly, and was startled and even a little unnerved when Hartmann lifted his gaze and fixed it on me briefly, with a positively theatrical intensity.

“And perhaps he is right?” he said.

If not a Hun, I thought, then Austrian, surely—somewhere German-speaking, at any rate; all that gloom and soulfulness could only be the result of an upbringing among compound words.

Alastair sat forward earnestly and clasped his hands between his knees, putting on that look, like that of a constipated bulldog, that always heralded an attack of polemics. Before he could get started, however, Hartmann said to me:

“Your theory of art: what is it?”

Strange now to think how natural a question like that seemed then. In those days we were constantly asking each other such things, demanding explanations, justifications; challenging; defending; attacking. Everything was gloriously open to question. Even the most dogmatic Marxists among us knew the giddy and intoxicating excitement of exposing to doubt all that we were supposed to believe in, of taking our essential faith, like a delicate and fantastically intricate piece of spun glass, and letting it drop into the slippery and possibly malevolent hands of a fellow ideologue. It fed the illusion that words are actions. We were young.

“Oh, don’t get him started,” said Alastair. “We’ll have significant form and the autonomy of the object until the cows come home. His only belief is in the uselessness of art.”

“I prefer the word inutility,” I said. “And anyway, my position has shifted on that, as on much else.”

There was a beat of silence and the atmosphere thickened
briefly. I glanced from one of them to the other, seeming to detect an invisible something passing between them, not so much a signal as a sort of silent token, like one of those almost impalpable acknowledgements that adulterers exchange when they are in company. The phenomenon was strange to me still but would become increasingly familiar the deeper I penetrated into the secret world. It marks that moment when a group of initiates, in the midst of the usual prattle, begin to go to work on a potential recruit. It was always the same: the pause, the brief tumescence in the air, then the smooth resumption of whatever the subject was, though all, even the target, were aware that in fact the subject had been irretrievably changed. Later, when I was an initiate myself, this little secret flurry of speculative activity always stirred me deeply. Nothing so tentative, nothing so thrilling, excepting, of course, certain manoeuvres in the sexual chase.

I knew what was going on; I knew I was being recruited. It was exciting and alarming and slightly ludicrous, like being summoned from the sideline to play in the senior-school game. It was
amusing.
This word no longer carries the weight that it did for us. Amusement was not amusement, but a test of the authenticity of a thing, a verification of its worth. The most serious matters amused us. This was something the Felix Hartmanns never understood.

“Yes,” I said, “it is the case that I did once argue for the primacy of pure form. So much in art is merely anecdotal, which is what attracts the bourgeois sentimentalist. I wanted something harsh and studied, the truly lifelike: Poussin, Cezanne, Picasso. But these new movements—this surrealism, these arid abstractions—what do they have to do with the actual world, in which men live and work and die?”

Alastair did a soundless slow handclap. Hartmann, frowning thoughtfully at my ankle, ignored him.

“Bonnard?” he said. Bonnard was all the rage just then.

“Domestic bliss. Saturday night sex.”

“Matisse?”

“Hand-tinted postcards.”

“Diego Rivera?”

“A true painter of the people, of course. A great painter.”

He ignored the lip-biting little smile I could not suppress; I remember catching Bernard Berenson smiling like that once, when he was making a blatantly false attribution of a tawdry piece of fakery some unfortunate American was about to purchase at a fabulous price.

“As great as … Poussin?” he said.

I shrugged. So he knew my interests. Someone had been talking to him. I looked at Alastair, but he was engrossed in examining his sore thumb.

“The question does not arise,” I said. “Comparative criticism is essentially Fascist. Our task”—how gently I applied the pressure on that
our
—“is to emphasise the progressive elements in art. In times such as this, surely that is the critic’s first and most important duty.”

There followed another significant silence, while Alastair sucked his thumb and Hartmann sat and nodded to himself and I gazed off, showing him my profile, all proletarian modesty and firmness of resolve, looking, I felt sure, like one of those figures in fanned-out relief on the pedestal of a socialist-realist monument. It is odd, how the small dishonesties are the ones that snag in the silk of the mind. Diego Rivera—God! Alastair was watching me now with a sly grin.

“More to the point,” he said to Hartmann, “Victor’s looking forward to being made Minister of Culture when the Revolution comes, so he can ransack the stately homes of England.”

“Indeed,” I said, prim as a postmistress, “I see no reason why masterpieces pillaged by our hunting fathers in successive European wars should not be taken back for the people and housed in a central gallery.”

Alastair heaved himself forward again, his deckchair groaning, and tapped Hartmann on the knee. “You see?” he said happily. It was obvious he was referring to something more than my curatorial ambitions; Alastair prided himself on his talent-spotting abilities. Hartmann frowned, a pained little frown like that of a great singer when his accompanist hits a wrong note, and this time made a point of paying him no heed.

“So, then,” he said to me slowly, with a judicious tilt of the
head, “you are opposed to the bourgeois interpretation of art as luxury—”

“Bitterly opposed.”

“—and consider the artist to have a clear political duty.”

“Like the rest of us,” I said, “the artist must contribute to the great forward movement of history.”

Oh, I was shameless, like a hoyden set on losing her virginity.

“Or…?” he said.

“Or he becomes redundant, and his art descends to the level of mere decoration and self-indulgent revery …”

Everything went still then, subsided softly to a stop, and I was left hanging in vague consternation; I had thought we were in the middle and not at the end of this interesting discussion. Hartmann was looking at me directly for what seemed the first time, and I realised two things: first, that he had not for a moment been taken in by my stout declarations of political rectitude, and, second, that instead of being disappointed or offended, he was on the contrary gratified that I had lied to him, or at least that I had offered a carefully tinted version of what might be the truth. Now, this is difficult; this is the nub of the matter, in a way. It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you
give
yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer’s conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo’s operating table. That is how it is, for the likes of us—I mean the likes of Felix Hartmann, and myself, though not, perhaps, Alastair, who was essentially an innocent, with an innocent’s faith in the justice and inevitability of the cause. So when Hartmann looked at me that day, in the lemon-and-blue light of
Psyche’s sun-dazzled garden in Cambridge, as the Falangist guns were firing five hundred miles to the south of us, he saw that I was exactly what was required: harder than Alastair, more biddable than Boy, a casuist who would split an ideological hair to an infinitesimal extreme of thinness—in other words, a man in need of a faith
(No one more devout than a sceptic on his knees—
Querell
dixit),
and so there was nothing left to say. Hartmann distrusted words, and made it a point of pride never to use more of them than the occasion required.

Alastair suddenly stood up and began fussily gathering the teacups, making a great show of not treading on our toes, and walked off, muttering, with a sort of resentful flounce, bearing the tea tray aloft before him like a grievance: I suppose he too was a little in love with Felix—more than a little, probably—and was jealous, now that his matchmaking exercise had proved so successful so quickly. Hartmann, however, seemed hardly to notice his going. He was leaning forward intently, head bowed, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped (it must be a mark of true grace to be able to sit in a deckchair without looking like a discommoded frog). After a moment he glanced up at me sideways with a crooked, oddly feral smile.

“You know Boy Bannister, of course,” he said.

“Of course; everyone knows Boy.”

He nodded, still with that fierce leer, an eyetooth glinting.

“He is going to make a journey to Russia,” he said. “It’s time for him to become disenchanted with the Soviet system.” By now his look was positively wolfish. “Perhaps you would care to accompany him? I could arrange it. We—they—have many art treasures. In public galleries, of course.”

We both laughed at once, which left me feeling uneasy. It will sound strange, coming from me, but the complicity suggested by that kind of thing—the soft laugh exchanged, the quick pressure of the hand, the covert wink—always strikes me as faintly improper, and shaming, a small conspiracy got up against a world altogether more open and decent than I or my accomplice in intimacy could ever hope to be. Despite all Felix Hartmann’s dark charm and elegant intensity, I really preferred the goons and the thugs with whom I had to deal later on, such as
poor Oleg Kropotsky, with his awful suits and his pasty face like that of a debauched baby; at least they made no bones about the ugliness of the struggle in which we were unlikely partners. But that was much later; as yet the eager virgin was only at the kissing stage, and still intact. I smiled back into Felix Hartmann’s face and with an insouciance I did not fully feel said that yes, a couple of weeks in the arms of great Mother Rus might be just the thing to harden up my ideological position and strengthen my ties of solidarity with the proletariat. At this his look turned wary—the Comrades never were very strong in the irony department—and he frowned again at his shiny toecaps and began to speak earnestly of his experiences in the war against the Whites: the burned villages, the raped children, the old man he had come upon one rainy evening somewhere in the Crimea, crucified on his own barn door, and still alive.