The Untouchable by John Banville Page A

I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.”
    Nick laughed.
    “Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?”
    “Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.”
    “There you are: a fighter.”
    We strolled along the front. Despite the lateness of the season there were bathers down at the water, their cries came to us, tiny and clear, skimming the ribbed sand. Something in me always responds, shamefacedly, to the pastel gaieties of the seaside. I saw, with unnerving clarity, another version of myself, a little boy playing here with Freddie (Wittgenstein accosted me one day by the Cam and clutched me by the wrist and stuck his face close to mine and hissed: “Is the dotard the same being that he was when he was an infant?”), making castles and trying surreptitiously to get him to eat sand, while Hettie sat placidly in the middle of a vast checked blanket doing her knitting, sighing contentedly and talking to herself in a murmur, her big, mottled legs stuck out before her like a pair of windlasses and her yellow toes twitching (a parishioner once complained to my father that his wife was down on the strand “with her pegs on show for all the town to see”).
    Nick halted suddenly and gazed about him histrionically at sea and beach and sky, his overcoat billowing in the breeze like a cloak.
    “God,” he muttered, “how I loathe nature!”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, “perhaps we shouldn’t have come.”
    He looked at me and put on a glum grin, pulling down his mouth at the sides. “You mustn’t take everything personally, you know,” he said. We walked on and he patted his stomach. “What was that stuff called? Fudge?”
    “Fadge.”
    “Amazing.”
    I had watched him throughout breakfast, while my father talked platitudes and Hettie stoutly nodded her support. One smile from him at their quaintness, I had told myself, and I shall hate him for life. But he was impeccable. Even when Freddie came and pressed his nose and his scabbed lips against the dining room window, smearing the glass with snot and spittle, Nick only chuckled, as at the endearing antics of a toddler, I was the one who had sat with lip curled in contemptuous impatience. Now he said:
    “Young people, your father called us. I don’t feel young, do you? The Ancient of Days, rather. It’s we who are the old men now. I shall be thirty next month. Thirty!”
    “I know,” I said. “On the twenty-fifth.”
    He looked at me in surprise. “How did you remember?”
    “I have a head for dates. And that’s a momentous one, after all.”
    “What? Oh, yes, I see. Your glorious Revolution. Didn’t it in fact take place in November?”
    “Yes. Their November, Old Style. The Julian calendar.”
    “Ah, the Julian calendar, yes. What-ho for jolly old Julian.”
    I winced; he never sounded more Jewish than when he came out with these Woosterisms.
    “Anyway,” I said, “the symbol is all. As Querell likes to remark, the Catholic Church is founded on a pun. Tu es Petrus?
    “Eh? Oh, I see. That’s good; that’s very good.”
    “Pinched it from someone else, though.”
    We walked into the shadow of the castle wall and Nick’s mood darkened with the air.
    “What will you do in this war, Victor?” he asked, his voice going gruff and Sydney Cartonish. He stopped and leaned against the harbour rail. The sea wind was chill, and sharp with salt. Far out to sea a flock of gulls was wheeling above a patch of brightness on the water, wheeling and clumsily diving, like blown sheets of newsprint. I fancied I could hear their harsh, hungry cries.
    “You really think there will be a war?” I said.
    “Yes. No question but.” He walked on and I followed a pace behind him. “Three months, six months—a year at the most. The factories have been given the word, though the War Office hasn’t told Chamberlain about it. You know he and Daladier worked together in secret for months to strike a deal with Hitler over