Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  I had heard too many solutions, mostly trash, and slid towards half-sleep. The Modern Dickens had slumped into real sleep or was counting his royalties. I was present only in obedience to the Embassy’s instruction to report the mood of the meeting. I would have little to say. Applause was equally divided between the speakers. Brassey might receive the loudest, not for his opinions, increasingly random, off the mark, but for his gusto, though he was wrecking serious debate. Often shown in newspapers wearing outsize football scarf, he was a ramshackle exhibitionist, ready to perform a somersault or changing-room song, or grimace with eye-patch and parrot on his shoulder.

  ‘Blake tells you that the fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.’ His pirate-king smile taunted us, ‘But folly we no longer need and we, or rather you, despise wisdom. Like all left-wingers, I’ve been one, you prefer hard cash. Britain was once rich, very rich. But not only so. Now, we’re merely rich, like a retired profiteer, somewhat disgruntled.’

  The Modern Dickens was certainly disgruntled, a heap of weary impatience, the Girton lady’s mouth looked a scar, the chairman eventually gave a short summing-up, followed by a rush to the bar. I remained, scribbling a few dismissive notes, then felt entitled to a drink, seating myself at a table to wait until the crowd subsided. Brassey was perched on a high stool at the counter, head flushed, as acolytes restocked his glass. He was now the ringmaster, exercising young animals, exchanging vivid repartee, his performance making me contemptuous yet envying.

  Unexpectedly he waved a tankard at me, spraying a girl, who squeaked gratefully, then jumped down, lurching alarmingly towards me, sat down opposite.

  ‘Don’t buy a single drink, mein Herr. Tony here needs practice. No need to touch forelock.’ His hands, their nails bitten as Suzie’s, jerked at a fresh-faced courtier who quickly dumped two bottles and a tankard between us, lingering for further orders.

  Seen closer, the eyes, grey above deep, haphazard lines and tiny pits, were what the English termed shifty. The rebellious hair complemented the unshaven chin and rough cheeks, in the naked lights abnormally ravaged. Only the voice was agreeable: deep, changeable and, under the clatter, curiously confidential.

  ‘With your notebook you were oversized, an unmistakable Baron Dambusterstein, obviously wired for sound but silent as a present-day lighthouse. Formidable, though. A Hartz Mountain danger.’

  He nodded away downy, disappointed faces. ‘These brats won’t understand that romanticism proceeds from waffle. They get transfixed by plain rot, can’t understand paradox. Perhaps because of seven decades of GBS. But, you’ll agree, universities should at least foster a high line in low comedy. I can usually raise a laugh, even when raising hackles. You’re looking as if you’ve felt nothing else. Understand that I am apt to say the first thing that comes into my head, like students acting Shakespeare. I was irritated by the earlier nonsense about Europe needing to be a single state, a common identity. That lady who spoke first … we call her Mrs Round the Bend, from her drinking habits, not really from her shape.’

  He was examining me, carefully, while we gulped beer, his gaze heavier than his tone. ‘I know Europe, from the fighting man’s view. Much of it is not worth knowing. It leaves me a sort of Dean of Peculiar. Like India, dazed by too many gods. Or the captain, first to leave the sinking ship. Well, gods, captains, lady dons can need a helping hand. The worthy Pope John urged us to open the windows. Jesus, perhaps, was too self-obsessed, harassed by impatience. Well …’ He was suddenly boyish, rueful. ‘Tonight you heard a welter of blatherjacks. I’m a kettle of European life and letters, of course … but remote government must always be bad government. No need to go on. A mad German taught that convictions are prisons.’

  He apparently expected no replies, and I expected him to leave me, having made his form of apology, but instead, he again rebuffed the sycophants, detaining only Tony, delivering more bottles.

  ‘Thanks, Tony. Now go and play. Yes …’ – again he gave me his assessive stare – ‘weave a circle around us thrice. I, too, carry a notebook.’ He patted his coat. ‘In our notebooks begin depths and failures. Mine may upset history by sheer illegibility. While I was talking, though, I saw your heroic face dip headlamps and felt that I wasn’t conducting Lohengrin but waving a dead bouquet.’

  His grin was again intimate. ‘Last week, lecturing, I’d lost my notes, misquoted Wordsworth. Not the wind howling at all hours but howling on all fours. But the pack obediently jotted it down, sighing with admiration. Brave lads, darling girls. But, lip-service to culture is worse than no service.’

  He stood up, shakily, briefly fingered my hair. ‘You’re the Viking who causes hurricane, though needing a mite more cynicism. Like Her Majesty. You must visit our riverside smallholding. You’ll like Louise. She’s built to last, very unlikely to set up a flower-stall in mid-Sahara. I myself, something of a libertine, not a word in current use, am inclined to do gracious things ungraciously. So, roll dem wagons, we’ll be meeting. A maenad occasion.’

  The Neighbourhood Festival discoloured the summer of gardens and tourists, planting behind me a dark shape, hooded and soundless. A joke from the Eastern Bloc was ‘anything permitted is compulsory’. London itself seemed enforcing permissiveness. Only for an instant I expected any relief from Mr Brassey, a zany striving to kiss his own forehead in the mirror. His careless attention had gratified. His depth of tone blotted out the gnawed fingers, cold, rather naked eyes, corrugated skin. But he could be not Baldur but tricky Loki, scaring children by transforming string to a ferret. One of those who, at noon, cast no shadow.

  Like a newly discovered word, he was suddenly inescapable in articles, reviews, on radio and television: a Lord of Misrule, correcting incorrectly a classicist’s translation of Sophocles, interrupting a Cabinet Minister with urchin jokes, snapped in metal cap amongst Clydeside ship-builders, in dinner-jacket outside the Garrick, in white flannels on a millionaire’s field. A columnist gibed that, contrary to his appearance, he habitually stole soap when a guest. At a Birmingham snooker final, he sat between East End protection mobsters. Britain’s plea to de Gaulle, to join Europe, he diagnosed as the repentance of an ex-convict.

  His career was easily charted. At Cambridge, feared not as headstrong footballer but as Stalinist bully, applauding the Pact as a mousetrap laid for the Führer. His closest friend, a Pole, hanged himself when Brassey denounced Chamberlain for starting an imperialist war at behest of a pride of Warsaw colonels. He showed conquistador courage fighting in Italy, though only Old Boy connections saved him from court martial for drunken outrage to a girl who disappointed him. He confessed gut fears of combat and brute enjoyment of it, dismissed his Marxism as juvenile cant, though, ‘of course’, still corresponding with a Cambridge spy who had defected to Moscow. He extolled a French publisher for sheltering Camus from the Gestapo while himself fraternizing with all Nazis available, accepting on his board the fanatic Hitlerite, Drieu la Rochelle. In a review, he gave an elegy to the White Rose Martyrs. He admired Winston’s blazing mind and abused Gandhi’s sainthood as the best-known way of getting through life undisputed. Intellectuals were angered when he savaged Sartre for his taunt that by rejecting Stalinism Camus had betrayed History. Enemies, disbelieving his switch of loyalty, rumoured that he was an associate of Burgess, Philby and Maclean, and a satirical weekly jeered at him as Comrade Brassballs. He had published a novel in Paris and a collection of surrealist stories.

  Whatever his actual self, if any, he attracted anecdotes like income. Asked his opinion of Roosevelt, he enquired whether he was the Yank who rejected Ezra Pound’s advice to avert war by surrendering Wake Island to Japan in return for some haiku translated by Pound. On a radio chat show, he considered the second most interesting character in the New Testament was undeniably Jesus.

  My home address I never divulged to strangers, I soon doubted whether we would meet up again, but one Saturday the landlady summoned me to the telephone. Mr Tortoise with a discovery. But no. ‘Alex here. I
got your number by the usual method. Café Royal, second floor, 7.30. OK?’

  8

  Drinkers, luminous, affluent, were reflected in sham-baroque mirrors so that the saloon appeared larger, more crowded than reality. Brassey, lounging on crimson banquette, a bottle on the suet-pale table, was unmistakably amongst the slick and polished, the bald and fluffy, endlessly repeated in the florid mirrors and reduced to microscopic flashes in the massed chandelier cubes.

  ‘Milk? Probably not.’ Whisky glimmered. Again, the raunchy face, teeth like irregular italics, the chuckle, like the eyes, impetuous or calculating.

  ‘Louise couldn’t come. She’s not altogether weatherproof. Raised in LA. Her brother lost his bearings and wanted to be an air-hostess.’ His patter, sound without substance, suited the plush theatrical décor and gabble and was unlikely to cease. ‘Her first husband, a trifle mean, left her only an owl, a chauffeur and foul memories.’ Alarming me, he reached to touch my face. ‘Those rampant cheek-bones! Shield-bosses noosed by light between your scowls. Ajax of the Tundra. They don’t suggest you get yourself to sleep by counting cricketers beginning with C. Compton, Cowdrey, Close … You can look like Baldur von Shirach, a dreadful thing to say, even to Baldur von Shirach. Now, I must repeat that you mustn’t take seriously my nonsense about Europe. I spend whole weeks admiring Finnish architecture – Erick Brygman, Alva Aalto – far livelier than that pretentious heave-up Corbusier. Danish-folk high schools, admirable chunks of proper living. Even Bulgaria resisted the armpit Jew-hunters more valiantly than sniffy France. But instinct tells me that you, too, like me, often contemplate the world as metaphor.’

  While speaking, he was acknowledging short greetings, affected deference. ‘Alex, old boy …’ ‘We revelled in your fracas with Julian …’

  I was more interested in the portrait, above us, of Empress Eugénie, crowned, in pearl collar and purple velvet train, one hand resting on a gilded chair. Sadness in her sapphire-blue gaze haunted, very understandably, by Marie-Antoinette.

  ‘I’m watching Africa.’ He spoke as if of someone within reach. ‘Now that the Brits are absconding, the new Canoodle Dums won’t despise privilege and, to put it so, loot. It’s nice to see Ghana’s forbidden magic for use at elections.’

  My grunts did not discourage him, though he quietened; surprisingly was almost shy.

  ‘I enjoy playing solo and baiting the marshmallows, all begging for celebrity, if only as sugarplum fairies. Reading each other, to discover what next to think. We enjoy playing our Third Eleven. Giving Blues for the latest thesis on Henry James’s laundry bills or the vibrations of turbots. Over there is a poet who’s tipped himself as the next Poet Laureate, though Masefield doesn’t believe in death. If you look closer, you’ll see the plaque on his forehead. The real genius was his mother, actress in early Sheridan, who rested so long she became a sofa. In the war, he volunteered for the Rifle Corps, so as to face things lying down.’

  His foxy scruff, urgency to convince, entertain or merely pass time, promised little, while having the appeal of a tune, frivolous yet nagging.

  ‘My attitudes, good sir, are almost always provisional. Like love or political conscience. With a sunny morning, all paintings, except Bacons of course, are exciting. On wet mornings, they droop from the canvas. I usually find Hamlet rivalled only by Mill’s On Liberty. Though Cicero once remarked, not to me, that there’s nothing so absurd that some philosopher hasn’t already said it. He hadn’t much small talk, would discuss fish sauce as he might political crisis. I myself, your look confirms it, have little else but small talk. God …’ His alarm, theatrical, could have benefited Hamlet: ‘I see approaching Jacob Silverson, art critic. He once reproached Cézanne for being false to nature, though in Dolly’s garden he confused a lime with a poplar.’

  A new act. London ghouls simpered and departed. The empty car in the mews, the repellent stalker on the escalator, were phantoms, though Alex, calmly assured as a movie naval officer, offered me one of his closest friends, a highly experienced bloodhound. Alex was what Father called a Querkopf, odd head, though possibly one of the Herr General’s Ten Per Cents. He claimed my weekends. We drank at a Soho nacht-lokal, at a South Bank gig, at a Hampstead Heath pub. I at last found voice and we argued about Europe, the French Revolution, J.F. Kennedy. He ridiculed my enthusiasm for the Nuremburg Trials. ‘With Soviet judges on the bench, moral centre was kicked into mid-Caspian, as you were the first to know. I’m happy about spontaneous retribution, but don’t call it justice. I’d like to believe that I’d copy that young Yank officer liberating Dachau, so crazed by what he found that he lined up all SS in sight and personally machine-gunned them. At once. Without remorse. Indefensible, but I’d at least cheer him on.’ So, I supposed, would I. He, moreover, had actually fought, then covered some Nuremburg Trials, hearing Ribbentrop complain that his collar was becoming too tight. ‘Nevertheless …’ I heard myself protest, with some mutter about legalities.

  He showed those unhealthy teeth, chuckled like an emptying siphon. ‘Sometimes, old lad, I’m uncertain whether you need a thumping kiss or a Bavarian wallop. Your forebear, Pahlen, knew when to wield the hammer, didn’t suffer the English disease, fear of winning. Don’t catch it. Over here, die Helden sind müde.’

  Meinnenberg interested him. Skeleton predators, the slashed body in the ditch, the mute orphan whistling Mozart, the improvised leadership, Vello, my teaching efforts. Those stories. Baba Yaga riding the sky in pestle and mortar, evilly cackling in her hut that moved on chickens’ legs, the boy dead on the Tuileries throne, Robespierre’s fall.

  ‘I’m apt to think, Erich, of your Robespierre as the licensed buffoon of the Committees, while they attended to the really serious. Still …’

  Our talks helped my self-belief, my sense of having stepped towards the frontiers of history. I had sudden vision of my pamphlets scattered like wings over the Baltic: an anthem, silent but stinging. True, vision, like the sublime, is too often followed by the pompous or silly.

  Alex surprised me by knowing that Wilfrid was a vice-president of UNICEF, collecting millions for children around the world. He had also criticized the July Plotters’ determination to retain many of Hitler’s conquests after destroying him. Of Wilfrid’s oriental figurines, Alex considered the Bodhisattva’s smile looked like that of a man after winning a substantial bet.

  With him, further Londons opened for me: a regimental mess, a decayed Edgware Road music hall, Edwardian ghosts still performing, badly; Clapham shop-window cards: ‘Miss Henry Does What You Like;’ ‘Model with Hard Face;’ ‘Masseuse with Royal Experience’. In Camden Town, ‘Life After Death Proved’.

  Arguments notwithstanding, only when remembering the Manor and Meinnenberg was I his equal. I had seen Malraux, Alex had interviewed him; I had survived war, he had known battle. Mention of almost anyone galvanized him like a computer. I mentioned the historian Barney Skipton who had accused me of exaggerating Soviet repression.

  ‘Barney! He hurtles through truth as if dodging slates.’ I praised the political correspondent, Felix Spanier, for exposing a post-war pogrom committed not by Russians but by Poles. ‘Ah! Felix. He once drove through an Arab–Israeli set-to without a visa, merely showing an admission ticket to a private view. We were at the same school, moral slaughterhouse, place of wood demons, huge dwarfs, tiny giants. I loved it.’

  He read my pamphlets. ‘Yes. Yes indeed! You discard your polar introspection and hit the funny bone. High praise!’ Not wholly, for his enthusiasms could be short-lived, sudden attempts to render me virtually speechless in admiration for fifteenth-century Burgundy, Machiavelli’s international peace proposals, de Gaulle’s memoirs, before discarding them as if afflicted by total loss of memory. His good humour might cease in mid-flow, silence, brooding or sullen, would follow, before some chance sight, random suggestion, restored it. Always in some game, he might see himself as a triumphant loser, myself doubtless a fresh face, a new audience, to be flattered, then, like an ageing alt
ar boy, abandoned.

  Meanwhile, he exalted my status. Invitations began descending: crested, embossed, scented, with archaic lettering, elaborate courtesies. In opulent drawing-rooms, editorial offices, smart book launches, I was the promising newcomer, slightly exotic and of debatable potential, like a Third World statesman.

  Alex’s Dolphin Square flat was another surprise. Plain, empty walls, carelessly stacked books and newspapers, a white desk with six black knobbed drawers on either side arching to a seventh, all slightly open, so that black shadows gleamed against the pallor, forming an abstract design. Plastic ducks in the bath. From sky and river, light fluctuated between variations of drabness. The only picture, above a narrow bed and its White Hart Hotel coverlet, was a poster of a green girl naked at a mirror that returned a face harsh, stricken, years older than her body. Clothes draped on chairs, strewn on uncarpeted, unpolished floors stained by pale circles. At my approach to the only armchair, he pretended alarm. ‘That chair … Three men came visiting, only two departed.’