The Untouchable by John Banville

Author:John Banville
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307560926
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

The Gryphon Club in Dean Street really was an awful dive. Much sentimental nonsense has been talked about it latterly, but the truth is it was little more than a shebeen where unemployed actors and poets with time on their hands could while away the afternoons in drinking and back-stabbing. One of that old rip Betty Bowler’s many lovers, a gangland boss, so it was said, had paid her off after a botched abortion by setting her up in the club and finagling an all-day licence from someone in his pay at Scotland Yard. (Take note, Miss V.; Ancient Soho is always good for a colourful page or two.) Betty was still a handsome woman, big and blowsy, with curls and creamy skin and a fat, puckered little mouth—a sort of good-looking Dylan Thomas—and the fact that she had a wooden leg only enhanced her aura of slightly overripe magnificence. She was a little too self-consciously a character for my taste (it takes one actor to spot another). She was no fool, though; I always felt she had the measure of me, somehow. The club was a dank basement underneath a porn shop. Betty, who was a suburbanite at heart, favoured pink-shaded lamps and fringed tablecloths. Tony, the queer barman, could run up a decent sandwich, if he was in a good mood, and there was a doltish boy who for a penny tip would fetch in a plate of oysters from the fish place across the street. Goodness, how archaic and quaint and almost innocent it all seems now; Dickens’s London lasted right up to the Blitz. Querell caught quite well the wartime atmosphere of the city in that thriller of his about the murderer with the club foot. What was it called? Now and in the Hour, something pretentiously Papist like that.

He was at the bar when I arrived, I spotted him at once despite being purblind in the gloom after the sunny street. How did he manage always to make it seem as if one had in some way compromised oneself merely by having agreed to meet him? That tilted, white-lipped smile was particularly unsettling today. He was looking more prosperous than when I had last seen him; his suit, as ever tight as a snake’s skin, was expensively cut, and he was wearing a tie-pin set with what looked like a real diamond.

“Have a martini,” he said. “One of the Yanks from the embassy told me the proper way to make them, and I’ve been instructing Tony here. The secret is to run the vermouth over the ice cubes and then throw the ice away. Has the taste of a reserved sin—simony, incest, one of those really interesting ones. Chin-chin.”

I smiled at him coldly. I understood, of course, that this bright talk was meant to be a parody of the trivial world of cocktails and heartless banter to which I supposedly belonged. I asked for a gin and tonic. Tony, who enjoyed watching Querell in operation,

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