Free The Untouchable by John Banville

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 whichI 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 hedied, 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