The Untouchable by John Banville

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 cansee 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,