Free The Untouchable by John Banville Page A

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 nondescriptdons, 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