The Untouchable by John Banville Page B

the Sudetenland? And now Hitler can do whatever he pleases. Have you heard what he said about Chamberlain? I feel sorry for him, let him have his piece of paper.”
    I was staring at him.
    “How do you know all this?” I asked, laughing in surprise. “Chamberlain, the factories, all that stuff?”
    He shrugged.
    “I’ve been talking to some people,” he said. “You might like to meet them. They’re our sort.”
    My sort, I thought, or yours? I let it pass.
    “You mean, people in the government?”
    He shrugged again.
    “Something like that,” he said. We turned from the harbour and set off back up the hill road. While he had talked, a sort of slow, burning blush had come over me from breast to brow. It was as if we were a pair of schoolboys and Nick thought he had discovered the secrets of sex but had got the details all wrong. “Everything’s gone rotten, don’t you think?” he said. “Spain finished the whole thing for me. Spain, and now this beastly Munich business. Peace in our time—ha!” He stopped and turned to me with an earnest frown, brushing the lock of hair back from his forehead. Eyes very black in the pale light of morning, lip trembling with emotion as he struggled to maintain a manful mien. I had to look away to hide my grin. “Something has to be done, Victor. It’s up to us.”
    “Our sort, you mean?”
    It was said before I knew it. I was terrified of offending him— I had a vision of him sitting grim-faced in the trap, with eyes averted, demanding to be taken back to the station at once, while my father and Hettie, and Andy Wilson, and even the pony, looked at me accusingly. I need not have worried; Nick was not one to spot an irony; egotists never are, I find. We turned to the hill again. He walked with his hands jammed in his overcoat pockets and eyes on the road, his jaw set, a muscle in it working.
    “I’ve felt so useless up to now,” he said, “playing the exquisite and guzzling champagne. You’ve at least done something with your life.”
    “I hardly think a catalogue of the drawings in the Windsor Castle collection will stop Herr Hitler in his tracks.”
    He nodded; he was not listening.
    “The thing is to get involved,” he said; “to act.”
    “Is this the new Nick Brevoort?” I said, in as light a tone as I could manage. Embarrassment was giving way in me now to a not quite explicable and certainly unjustified annoyance—after all, everyone that autumn was talking like this. “I seem to remember having this conversation with you some years ago, but in reverse. Then I was the one playing at being the man of action.”
    He smiled to himself, biting his lip; my annoyance shot up a couple of hot degrees.
    “You think I’m playing?” he said, with just the hint of a contemptuous drawl. I did not let myself reply. We went on for a while in silence. The sun had retreated into a milky haze. “By the way,” he said, “I have a job, did you know? Leo Rothenstein has hired me as an adviser.”
    I thought this must be one of Leo’s practical jokes.
    “An adviser? What kind of an adviser?”
    “Well, politics, mostly. And finance.”
    “Finance? What on earth do you know about finance?”
    He did not reply for a moment. A rabbit came out of the hedge and sat up on its hind legs at the side of the road and looked at us in amazement.
    “His family is worried about Hitler. They have money in Germany, and a lot of relations there. He asked me to look in on them. He knew I was going over, you see.”
    “Are you? To Germany?”
    “Yes—didn’t I say? Sorry. The people I’ve been talking to have asked me to go.”
    “And do what?”
    “Just… look around. Get the feel of things. Report back.”
    I let out a loud laugh.
    “Good God, Beaver,” I cried, “you’re going to be a spy!”
    “Yes,” he said, with a rueful smirk, proud as a boy scout. “Yes, I suppose I am.”
    I did not know why I should have been surprised: after all, I had been in the secret