Peace Talks

by Tim Finch

  ‘Of course,’ he started off, as ever, quite cautiously. But then his enthusiasm ratcheted up.

  ‘Come to the launch party.’ And up. ‘We’ll have dinner. We’ll go out on the town.’ And up. ‘This is great news. Good man!’

  I remember hearing the words ‘good man’ for the first time during my first proper cricket match at my first English boarding school. Another boy had been hit by a fast ball in the box, that most intriguing (to a half-Norwegian boy at least) piece of kit, a sort of plastic codpiece, which is worn inside the jockstrap (another wonder), to mitigate against the ill-effects of just the eventuality that befell my teammate. Though ‘mitigate’ is the word: it still hurt like hell. It was to happen to me later in the season. And on that occasion, as with the first one, the games master used the commendation ‘good man’ to approve our relative bravery – our eyes were watering, but there was no actual crying – while at the same time suggesting that it was only to be expected of us. Personal goodness did not come into being a ‘good man’, I realised. For ‘good man’ was not a shortening of ‘you are a good man’ but rather of ‘good, you are a man’. In other words, ‘good’ was not an adjective that attached to any individual because of their own virtue, but rather it attached to all men by virtue of their being men, assuming that they behaved in a suitably male way, which was very much to be assumed, hence the general approbation inherent in the expression.

  There was a proviso, however, buttressed by the accent in which ‘good man’ was then, and has always been, conveyed in my hearing; that is to say, the man behaving in a suitably male way, out of an innate sense that to behave in any other way would simply not do, was assumed to be an Englishman being an Englishman, rather than men in general conforming to type. And while there is a colossal national arrogance in this assumption, there is also a certain generosity in it too, I feel, because first on that cricket field, but also many times since, I have found that honorary English status can be conferred on any man who steps up to the mark, such that ‘good man’ can also be read as ‘Good, you are a man, as is proved by your acting like an Englishman, which any man can do if he puts his mind to it.’

  All of which I instinctively warm to, for whatever you say about English maleness – and I sense you are poised to come up with quite a list – it has the virtue of not being aggressively macho, but rather is characterised by a certain restraint, an essential decency and a genuine – if self-regarding – sense of the ridiculous. It is in large part why I have, over the years, cultivated an English sensibility, albeit one that doesn’t care for cricket (and not just because of that ball in the balls), and why, most of the time, I do not mind being taken for an Englishman – which, as can be imagined from this digression, happens often, even if it is, more and more, a disadvantage in the world of diplomacy. If not life in general.

  I mention all this because, with conversation flagging at the lunch table, I embarked on just this extended riff on the meaning of the term ‘good man’ to Max, who enjoyed it hugely – as I knew he would, he being an Englishman of just the type to do so, even though his other persona, that of rock star of the art world, might seem at odds with this disposition. (On managing that tension, by the way, think the members of the Monty Python team or ‘Sir’ Mick Jagger.) I mention it also because of what Max said next.

  ‘Ah, but you are a good man more generally, Ed,’ he said. ‘I’m always saying that to other people.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ I said, partly because I genuinely felt it, but also because what else could I say in the circumstances? I don’t want to go back over the same ground, but if ‘good man’ etiquette teaches you anything it is that you demur at any suggestion that you are a good man in the wider sense.

  I should have said as much to Max as it would have punctured the sudden seriousness; it would have made him laugh. But I didn’t think to. And so there we were, left smiling awkwardly at each other, if only for a moment.

  ‘If you knew what I sometimes thought, what lurks inside, you certainly wouldn’t say it – or think it,’ I went on eventually.

  ‘Oh, that …’ Max said. ‘Morose delectation. Old Aquinas. If that’s sin then we are all in hell. What I mean is you have good intentions, you do good acts, you get to do good acts. Perhaps another way of putting it is, you are a lucky man.’

  ‘Now, there I would agree with you.’

  ‘Of course—’ he added quickly, panic flaring in his eyes. He was about to explain. But I of coursed him back. Waved it away. For I am a lucky man. Lucky to have been lucky for so long, to still be so on so many counts. Can you imagine how I would have coped if I hadn’t been?

  At the launch, I excused myself as soon as I decently could, the non-demands of being Max’s brother-in-law having worn thin as they always do. Max protested. I was to join ‘them’ for dinner and then ‘who knows?’ But I have spent a lifetime absenting myself from such open-ended evenings, regretting and yet not regretting it. It’s not me; it can’t be or I wouldn’t keep doing it. Have I missed out on a lot of life? No doubt. Could I have lived differently? I haven’t.

  Max hauled me into another man-hug before letting me go. He smelt better: of paraffin, of smoke, of the roasted skin of wild boar, of the most expensive women’s perfume. Perhaps there was even paint in there somewhere. Turps. It was a heady mixture, anyway.

  It will be another few months before we meet again and who knows where that will happen? Do either of us even know where the other one is living these days? And I don’t mean the actual address, I mean the city, or even the country. I think he is ‘based’ in Helsinki. But also ‘has homes’ in New York and Chile. I may be wrong. Apart from my old Aunt Else, in Alesund, Max is my one living relative. (I’m not counting cousins I haven’t seen for fifty years.) As I was driven back to my hotel through the frozen city, I thought about that and I was strangely content that it was so. How many more times will we see each other? If it was twice a year for the next twenty years, our meetings would number forty. Quite enough. I will look forward to them in advance, talk about them to friends afterwards, but not enjoy them as much at the time. Not feel entirely comfortable, at least.

  I almost forgot. He had that son. The past tense seems right somehow, for all that the ‘boy’ is very much alive. I don’t believe Max has seen him in many years. I certainly haven’t. Did you see him a year or two before your death? I should remember. Max didn’t mention him anyway. And I didn’t bring him up. But he is out there somewhere, still living with his mother in France or the United States – or perhaps not. He’d be eighteen or nineteen now. He could be at university or film school or art college. Christoph, then: I have one more relative – of a sort – than I thought I had only moments ago. Did he come to your funeral? (I don’t remember much of that day.) Now I think of it, I think he did.

  Well, he certainly won’t come to mine.

  PHIL AND BABS

  Next day I had the usual round of meetings with ministers and officials. I mention these even though I have nothing to say about them: they were routine, useful in their way, satisfactory on the whole. As with the merry-go-round of summits, conferences and bi-laterals I also attend, the main purpose of these meetings is to keep meeting, to keep talking. We meet so we can meet again. Talk again. It might seem nothing much, nothing at all, is achieved by all this meeting. We, more than anyone, are oppressed by this thought. But just consider for a moment what happens when these meetings stop.

  Pregnant pause.

  What?

  (You’re back then.)

  No, tell me.

  (It’s as if you never went away.)

  I give up.

  Okay, the future of the human race doesn’t hang on them. Much of the diplomatic round is about maintaining the diplomatic round. And now I am repeating myself. But …

  Some of these dull meetings are quite important. They help to end wars, to keep the peace. We get it. Keep it up.

  It was often observed that you were not the typical diplo
mat’s wife. Though never more than once in your hearing.

  ‘You see, Kevin, that is at best a dubious compliment to me, while at the same time downright offensive about other wives and partners …’

  But let me tell you what I wanted to tell you.

  As I was walking from one ministry to another, up Unter den Linden, it occurred to me that I never pay much, indeed any, attention to the linden trees themselves. It being winter, the trees were not in leaf. But I have walked down the famous boulevard many times, in spring, summer and autumn, and while appreciating that it is tree-lined, and certainly that it is named after its trees, the lindens have always passed me by, so to speak. The thought led me to make a close inspection of them this time. Of their bark, of the pattern of the branches, of the structure of the trees against the background of a leaden sky. I can’t say I found the exercise very interesting for long. Within a minute or two, the intense cold and the need to get to my next meeting in good time provided me with the excuse to resume my walk.

  When I told Martin, the deputy foreign affairs minister, about this incident he laughed and told me a story. Apparently, Hitler had the linden trees cut down in 1936 and replaced with smaller trees which wouldn’t, as the lindens had, obscure the giant Nazi flags. There was such a public outcry, however, that he had to back down and have the lindens replanted.

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘The lesser-known side of the Führer,’ I said. ‘The one ready to say, “Hey! Hands up, I got it wrong.”’

  Martin looked troubled. I hadn’t meant it in this way, but it struck me that my remark must raise the thought in a German that if public pressure had saved the lindens then why had so little been exerted to save the Jews? I regard Martin as a friend; someone I can talk to frankly. But we have only once discussed the degree of culpability of the German people for the rise of Nazism, for the devastation of a continent, for the Holocaust. We had been enjoying a light-hearted lunch at a little lakeside place in Wannsee and had got through a couple of excellent bottles of Piesporter when the subject came up. Martin’s mood darkened dramatically. Such was the ferocity with which he denounced the conduct of his grandparents’ generation that I was almost moved to defend them. His grandfather had been a customs and excise official, I recall, and so necessarily a member of the Nazi Party. But there was no suggestion that he had been anything other than one of those good men who do nothing. No hero certainly, but then how many of us are? Personally, I am not in the least confident that in the same situation I would have acted differently – risked Dachau or the piano wire. Was Martin so certain he would? I doubted it. But then he is a German, a senior German politician moreover, and as such could not be seen to show the slightest empathy towards his grandfather for fear of how that would look to me, a non-German diplomat, albeit a friend.

  It is the burden all his fellow countrymen and women carry – not unreasonably, perhaps. Martin would certainly never complain, for all that he would like to be rid of this guilt by association. You, I remember, felt no twenty-first-century Briton should ever suggest that the evils of empire, of the slave trade, and all the rest, have nothing to do with them. There is no sloughing off all the dead tissue, you felt; no pretending that a new generation emerges clean-skinned, unstained by the sins of fathers and grandfathers. ‘And mothers and grandmothers,’ I suggested teasingly. ‘Them too,’ you conceded sulkily. Part of our work, for all that we must look forward and live in our own time, is due reparation for the misdeeds of our forebears, you continued. Not useless shame, but active recompense. Not direct financial compensation, perhaps – though we might argue about that – but fairer trade deals and greater access to markets, and certainly due respect and parity of esteem in international affairs.

  Martin – now rather uncomfortably – was sitting behind his huge, dark wood desk, in his high-ceilinged office, double doors leading to a balcony that Martin had told me on a previous visit he only once had stepped on to. It was the sort of balcony from which a politician might wave to crowds of supporters chanting his name in the street below, I had observed. There you are then, Martin had responded drily. Heavy net curtains, made of a soft metal mesh material designed to stop glass being blown inwards in the event of a bomb explosion nearby, hung in front of the double doors. One of the things we discussed was the threat of such an atrocity. After Ghent there was much nervousness across Europe. There had been several arrests in Berlin in recent days.

  I had spent the day in grand public buildings like this one. I had entered through columned porticos and waited in marble halls with frescoed ceilings. I had been ushered down endless corridors, their walls hung with portraits of nineteenth-century statesmen or panoramic battle scenes.

  Or all was glass and freakish palms, walls of sheet water and carelessly commissioned abstraction, bul-let lifts shooting up through the inevitable atrium. There were buildings too in which the shell of the old contributed to the new vernacular – stripped back, reclaimed, an eye for flaw and imperfection. In this city of successive twentieth-century nightmares, the German architect has the smashed and blackened brick of bomb and conflagration, bullet holes from street fighting, the scratched messages of political prisoners, the daub of ideological graffiti, the ghost of a deported race, to work with if he dares.

  Then there are the mausoleums of the old GDR to which a certain institutional stink clings for all their incorporation into, and reinvention by, the new Germany. The young Turk knows how to play with the grim ironies to achieve maximum frisson. There is none of that in London or Paris, never mind Geneva or Stockholm. I couldn’t live here for this reason, for all that I love to visit.

  But I mention the grandness of the buildings only to make the point that they impress so little on proceedings. A meeting in a mirrored stateroom or mosaicked palazzo is just another meeting. Sometimes I do look up into a domed ceiling or vaulted hall and try to soar. But something – the hardness of my chair, a man over there sneezing, a trivial and irrelevant thought – always brings me down to earth. Is it any different for world leaders, for great – or supposedly great – men or women? Quite probably. And the thought is rather alarming if anything. Better to be a modest man dwarfed by the immensity of the task, doing his best, failing more often than not. These cathedrals to power should not delude one as to one’s importance.

  On the expanse of desk, facing Martin but just visible to me, was a framed photograph of his wife and young children. His second go at it. In conformity to the modern way, Martin has changed a lot of nappies this time around. He makes a point of getting home for the family evening meal. He reads bedtime stories. He says he enjoys it.

  ‘You don’t, I’m told,’ Martin said. ‘Have children, I mean.’

  This was at a drinks party in New York soon after we were first introduced. We were both attending something UN-related. I can’t remember what now.

  ‘No, that’s right,’ I said.

  One of the reasons I was drawn to Martin was that he showed such frank curiosity about our not having children.

  ‘I find them interesting, that’s all,’ he continued, reaching across to take a piece of chicken satay on a bamboo skewer from a passing waiter. ‘Childless couples.’

  I will risk it: there’s a German bluntness about Martin. You would say I was guilty of crude stereotyping, but his straightforwardness seems typically German to me. It is not unfriendly. In his case anyway. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  ‘They seem odd to me.’

  By now, I was laughing. Martin had finished his chicken satay and was looking around for a waiter on to whose platter he could deposit the bamboo skewer.

  ‘Both times we – my wives and I – had children within a couple of years of meeting, never mind marrying.’

  The daughter from his first marriage has a serious eating disorder; one of the sons is a relatively famous actor. Martin is close to them now. And on amicable terms with his first wife, also an actor, despite her vocal opposition to the government of which he is a member. The
re is something quite German about all that too.

  ‘Anna, my wife, never wanted them,’ I said.

  This telling him outright – that it was you, not me, who didn’t want children – was another sign somehow. Of my very much trusting and liking this Martin Frink fellow. Who was now accepting his third or fourth top-up from the wine waiter. Who was reaching out for another of the canapés: this time, strips of Oriental beef, with a sweet chilli sauce. The red plastic cocktail stick on which the beef was impaled resembled a tiny fencing sword, I recall. (Funny the minutest details one remembers at times. My recollection of the whole of this exchange is photographically precise.) Not spotting a passing platter on to which he could deposit the tiny red sword, Martin popped it instead into the chest pocket of his jacket. A few other cocktail sticks went that way as we talked. I remember thinking that these would only be discovered when the jacket went for dry-cleaning. For some reason that was a thought which made me sad.

  ‘Agnostic’ was the word I always use to describe my own view of having children, I told him. But you were certain we would enjoy a better life together without them.

  ‘And did you?’

  See what I mean about Martin?

  ‘Yes, I think so. Of course, there is no counterfactual.’

  The significance of this exchange will not have escaped you. You can see why it stands out as being so important to me. For I know you haven’t approved of my not making things as clear to others. In the many interviews I gave, for instance. Or when I am giving public talks, as I still do, though less frequently as time goes on.

  My fear was that saying you never wanted children would make you seem less sympathetic somehow; rather cold and hard-hearted; rather overly focused on your career and your own pleasures. It is a deeply conventional view, no doubt, even a reactionary one, and I can hear you saying: Well, for a start, that is deeply sexist. No man … But it was why also – you will have to forgive me; this gets worse – I have tended not to refer to your quick temper, or that you were not very romantic, or indeed sentimental at all. It wasn’t just children. You didn’t much care for animals either. Or suffer fools – or charlatans – at all. Or have a high opinion – Let’s be frank, I had a low opinion – of most of your fellow Britons. Of most people generally, for that matter.