Yet I had seen them before, might have become one of them, these crumbling von und zus clutching brandy glasses and evening bags as they once had racquets and sporting guns. The High Folk, blunted alabaster faces, fierce noses, shrunken cheeks, monosyllabic talk painfully dredged from ebbing memory, slow-motion recognitions, enquiries about health, dogs, relatives. Some might be my distant cousins, static as photographs, without the isness – Eckhart’s word – of outside London, its calypsos, demonstrations, sports fever, the English verve for the comic and bawdy even within solemnity.
Estates had been confiscated, children lost in Meinnenbergs, bank deposits had withered, castle and Schloss refashioned as clinics, hotels, museums, union rest-homes, the High Folk left stranded, commissioned in regiments long disbanded, with entry to palaces bombed out or sold; sons had died on Crete, at Stalin-grad, daughters been raped or lay as bone-splinters under Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, these elderly makeweights were furniture, oblivious to Common Market, presidential elections, the Bomb. To Londoners, ‘Nach dem Osten …’ would be ludicrous as a banana on a statesman’s coffin. More momentous here would be an old ballad, a Thuringian frog-prince tale, poignant as a distant sail.
I myself was giving what I imagined a last-century bow to some Princess of Tonnage. Presumably Dolly-like, she displayed flesh tones evaporating into the parched and flaccid, the eyes left isolated, not vapid but appearing to see not me but someone else. At my name she did nod, then, in a voice unexpectedly firm, enquired after my parents, as though they had yet to arrive. Then the Prince, white-whiskered, rheumy-eyed, shook my hand, like his wife addressing me in German.
‘You’re the chronicler … not yet quite Mommsen, you will concede.’ He was dignified, magnanimous, scion of the Prussian White Eagle. ‘To whom do you allow admiration? Trevelyan? Toynbee?’ Not awaiting answer, his bushy brows were already greeting the couple behind me.
There was opportunity for little more than to bend over mottled, bejewelled hands, mutter, then withdraw to shadows between pillars and watch. Flakes of memory enlarged as if from mescaline. A swan, a woodcutter’s falling axe. These misshapen somnabulists, some held upright as if only by invisible props, must once have sailed with Bülows and Eulenbergs on the Imperial yacht, dined at the Automobile Club, assembled for the Schleppencour Reception, manned the Guard of Honour costumed like die Alte Friedrich, cadets in powdered wigs straightening ladies’ trains with long, glistening canes. They were trash of a period swollen beyond its needs, knights with duties fossilized into superstition. Despite their disdain of the Gutter King, they would have rejoiced at the fall of Paris.
In an alcove like a side chapel, above heads white, dyed, gun grey, bald, hung portraits in oil edged with gold-leaf crust, of the three Hohenzollern Kaisers, successively more resplendent, not needing to demand allegiance but accepting it as natural due. His moustache fiercely upturned, under an eagled helmet, was the High Gentleman, former Allerhöchste, so often toasted at the Manor. Further away, lower down, was a fourth portrait, more solid: Bismarck, aged and discarded, staring, grimly resigned, at the latest iron warship, realizing that a new era had begun.
My surroundings narrowed. A greybeard stumped towards me, hand outstretched, blue eyes friendly, very real.
‘I am Sulzbach. Dr Herbert Sulzbach.’
Of him I knew something definite. A soldier, decorated first by Wilhelm II, then, as a British officer, by George VI, after the Potsdam Conference, and now prominent in work for Anglo-German cultural relations. Still soldierly, though benign, skin as if freshly laundered, he gave me a handshake remarkably strong. He was speaking in English less rough than my own.
‘I’ve heard your talks, young man. They have rebuked my ignorance of what is occurring further east. At times history bursts its banks, like my suitcase whenever I am allowed to pack it. For myself …’ his sigh was genial, ‘one life ended in November 1918. I was a captain in the 63rd Frankfurters, and, that morning, I realized my men were no longer saluting me. But I was young, ready for new chances, new salutes.’
He must certainly know of the Herr General, though I dreaded a gruff response to a question now forming. But he was being recalled to duty by two statuesque women, evidence for Alex’s conviction that too many men regard women as a thousand years old.
The Herr General! How would I greet him? Unanswerable. I could only remember that in the Turret I had once gazed into the mirror and seen a face not my own.
I was receiving only glances incurious or, at too obviously the youngest guest, cautiously suspicious. Some, knowing my lineage, might regard me as renegade, virtually Untermensch, one of the worthless Mischlinge. At this distance, Dolly’s Garden Party, should it exist, promised relief, the bloom of comedy laced with erotics dangerous but alive. Before departing, I cautiously mentioned the Herr General to a lean couple who had allowed me a dim cordiality. This vanished as if by a switch. They exchanged a glance that ensured my dismissal.
10
‘There’s Nimble Lord Nelson, the Pride of the Fleet! But you’re insufficiently primped.’
Alex thumbed my sober Embassy suit, quiet tie. ‘I advertised you in wolf-pelts, tusked helmet, foaming in berserker delirium.’
He pinned on me a blue-green enamel star. ‘The Order of Ranjitsinhji. It’ll entitle you to spontaneous acclaim. Life is Now, like Virginia’s breathless prose.’
He himself, Now, was in a clean grey robe, diagonal purple sash, hair slammed down flat as a ducat.
We were in butterfly day of chatter and costume, perfected by six o’clock sun lighting Dolly’s bow windows, her demesne sloping to the river flowing smooth as if polished and between luxuriant trees and shrubberies, pointillistic with pageantry colour: nautical bell bottoms, brocaded sleeves, musical comedy blazers, blending with ruffs, tights, masks, satin and astrakhan; the peachy, flamey, cardinal scarlet, peony-cool skins under hats steepled, tasselled, plumed. A gloss of history without irony or nostalgia, sensitive English at play, in Wonderland, murmuring, sipping, handshaking, flunkeyed by Figaros, mostly in white wigs and green knee-breeches. Stately opera-house curtains could have parted, displaying an island of nonsense, commedia dell’arte, and open to Third World notables: a black Robin Hood, a brown Henry VIII. Mr K strutted, in rough red pyjamas.
Alex was showing the satisfaction of the host at a children’s treat. ‘They masquerade as Woosters, but we both know the irons they keep well placed in the fire. Don’t forget their holsters!’
Shedding misgivings that had stuck since the Benckendorff seance, though not my lifetime superstition that the bizarre, grotesque, unorthodox were plots targeting myself alone. I resolved to enjoy all the illusions present.
‘We’ll meet up anon, comfortably non-sober. Bottled beer’s not on offer. On with the motley.’ Leaving the terrace, he was at once receiving stagy bows, the offer of snuff from a severe figure whose stick presumably denoted Black Rod, a curtsy from a crinolined countess. I was content to linger, as if on a quarterdeck, by urns like flowered capstans and surveying a pantomime crew. The charade quivered and changed as if on a turntable, was now a European fantasia, now a London caste entrenched in mannered superiority. Beyond, draped over spacious hills with few houses, clouds were floury on dwindling blue, the river like silver coins between leaves.
A foaming goblet was presented, some faces smiled at me, but for the moment I was happy to watch spectacle without drama, a tideless gorgeousness without dates or import. Zouaves, Cossacks, Beefeaters, Chasseurs mingled with catwalk starlets and theatrical knights. Bedouin burnouses, foppish, V-shaped waistcoats, huge crystalline buttons, red scarabs, fairy-gold chains, yellow-and-black leggings, the violet, tangerine and primrose, kilts made patterns instantly dissolved, reforming, altered. A Plantagenet lord’s slippers seemed miniature gondolas; a Merlin, in high, starry hat, wrapped in green mantle strewn with black diagonals, held a double-headed wand flashing alternate crimson and yellow. A toga’d, bandana’d ex-proconsul, surely Gold Stick in Waiting, lea
nt towards a white coped prelate. Sultans and tycoons aptly merged, before upstaged by sly libels – Bernard Shaw awash with champagne, Gandhi in glistening dhoti, stuffed with pâté. Thickly white and red Aztec mouths jutted at the Master of the Rolls, primly pin-striped but with the third arm of an old-time pickpocket from Montmartre or Seven Dials. Children, tailed imps, moonbred Pucks, pirouetted in their private worlds. In jumbled chronology, fluff of time, a Versailles aristo, jewelled, but with neck circled by a red stripe, conferred with wild-haired Einstein, touched glass with Othello in turquoise cloak and tall, frock-coated Mr Lincoln, austere as cathedral stone. In old tweeds, without gold earrings or Star of India, the Poet Laureate, diffident, courteous, was himself late Victorian, now blinking with surprise at a kiss from Mlle Bardot, decently wrapped.
Jeu des Sots. Toute Vie. Gala-à-go-go, without theme or message. The winged, the double bearded; the meaty, porcelain, earthy; the daubed, the powdered. A Sicilian bandit advancing towards me with glittering tray might be hired or a guest. One layer of London, at its blandest, despite a morning report of a secret, anti-socialist cabal of press-lords, generals, a royal, some doubtless present, as Tarot King, de Gaulle, Mr Punch. Don Juan in auburn, crinkled peruke was caressing hollow-cheeked black-trousered Juliette Greco. The Modern Dickens cloaked in broad Latin Quarter hat was holding his pipe like a pistol, for photographers.
I looked down at a seething forest of headgear: crowns, helmets, mitres, Sioux feathers, antlers, berets, topis, panamas, Spanish tricornes, blood-red Phrygians, toques, a floppy, rose-rimmed Tudor cap, bonnets, pork-pies, mortarboards, straw boaters, cloches, deerstalkers, school caps, cloth caps. I myself could mingle with ancient names and City moneybags, perhaps token union leaders, the Right Hons and Hons, Your Graces, club members, chief executives, proconsuls, the resplendent deposed and the unobtrusive masters. I could invite Privy Seal to explain policy, shake a bag at Solicitor-General, collect for Estonian exiles. In a manner, I had arrived. I could offer respect to a dignified, burnished memsahib, known as the Clapper from her method of summoning servants and junior officials.
A combo had started a medley of pre-war tunes, agile shifts of mood – Mercer, Cole Porter, Ellington, Coward, Gershwin – from clarinet, guttural percussion, whispering treble of a 1920s’ Swanee-whistle, a sexless voice sweeping the gardens:
West wind, wandrin’ over land and sea,
Find my Wandrin’ Love.
Basking on false memories, Time was mischievous. A once-famous minister had resurrected as a cherished English ‘character’. Years ago, he had publicly praised the Reichsmarschall for sincerity and tolerance, then, following the Pact, reviled him as a corrupt head gardener. He was conferring with a worthy successor, lately discussed at the United Nations for supervising arms sales to assist a former colony in genocide. Displayed beneath me was what journalists were calling the Establishment, still featured in expensive monthlies with horses, gun dogs, well-dowered daughters on offer. Their titles were absurd chips of chivalry and tired romance, but they themselves were not negligible. Ribbentrop had assured his employer that they would rally against Churchill and the Jews. They had not. At the Pact, coolly, without panic, they grumbled that Hitler had sold Stalin false weight, had deceived him by what Alex called a googly. Even in the egalitarian age, ancient names retained muscle, their possessors joking about everything save cowardice and the unsporting, shrugging at terrorists as lunatic children. They still manoeuvred towards riches, with affability supercilious, guileful, or innocent, assisted inferiors as natural to their position, though positions had shrivelled with their Empire. New voices were questioning Britain’s right to Security Council status. Many, picking at fois gras, selecting a strawberry, had flinched at Munich, fought and killed in North Africa and Normandy, been side-stepped at Suez.
Behind me, new arrivals, damasked, water-silked, gauzy, fragrant, were twittering compliments, sweetly, as if to infants. ‘Precious …’ ‘But, my darling …’ In no hurry to join them or meet Dolly, did she exist, I abandoned quarterdeck, down to the operetta, to hear dialogue collegiate, clubbish, and to find the Order of Ranjitsinhji almost insulting unexplosive.
‘Lovely comment, Jonathan …’ ‘Prince Philip says …’ ‘Scarcely surprising.’
Not one of us, I was now the cabin boy seeking promotion amongst seasoned admirals. Ignored by City nabobs and young adventurers, I was ready, though not eager, to listen to Prince Philip, bump against an archimandrite and, better, win a handshake from Mr Spender.
Dolly, even if unreal, had presence. Had anyone come as Frau Simpson? Apparently not. I made no effort to reach a Labour intellectual, with whom I had briefly corresponded: I had never appreciated him declaring, a few years back, that reaching Russia from England was stepping from Hell to Heaven. ‘I say, Dick …’ A lama was embracing him. Then a skinny-eyed personage, mauve tights, crimson blouse and leggings, stopped by me.
‘You are related, sir, to Herr von Bülow.’
‘I am not related to Herr von Bülow.’
‘Exactly.’
Alex soon rejoined me, now with gold-beaked barley-sugar stick and in Judas-yellow, tasselled gown.
‘Striving for footing? Rambling agog with a notebook! Very proper. Dolly’s steaming to meet you, has talked for five weeks about nothing else.’
I had drunk well, he had drunk better, was unsteady, unpredictable, as a chimp handling a Sèvres. He pointed upwards, gave me a push less slight than he supposed, setting me to ascend another wing of the terrace where an undoubted Dolly was enthroned under a rose-clustered trellis, Great Catherine amongst courtiers.
Small, she had faded, flaxen prettiness, seen closer, was more shepherdess than Catherine, though with long lashes and black patches, one red-booted foot resting on a purple cushion, from beneath a flounced bell-skirt embroidered with multi-hued butter-flies. Some resemblance to what Mother might have become.
Her hand, ringed like a miniature Saturn, reached me, and when I introduced myself her musical-box voice enquired when I had last met dear Simon. Such largesse was withdrawn when I was displaced by an elderly grandee attired like an air vice-marshal, which he probably was.
Given congé, I butted through crowds as if through Neapolitan ice cream, making for bulging rhododendrons, azaleas, the low scarlet sun. Here, music was indistinct, voices dwindled, oblique sunlight sharpened a stone goddess reflected, like Ophelia, in a small lily pond dabbed white and mauve. In a recess, several old couples were slanted on deck chairs, sharing a champagne bottle. Severe gowns, formal shirt fronts, pearls ovalled on warped necks, combat medals. Near by, a child, belted, sworded, strained on tiptoe for what no one else could see. Voices creaked. ‘She said, Sir Mark, that she would kill herself if she failed to get it. I thought of Fleur Forsyte. She did get it, spent a fortune at Asprey’s and was found dead in the morning.’
Chuckles like a faulty tap, then a deep, comfortable tone. ‘Never trouble Trouble, until Trouble troubles you. In the Medes’ parlance.’
From the rhododendrons a laugh tinkled, fresh, happy, then abruptly, too abruptly, ceased, while, for me, sunset and champagne induced delusions of enlarged leaves, dappled air, a cockcrow unnaturally shrill, indeed operatic.
This was replaced by an actual phenomenon, a dapper, youngish television philosopher, known as Casanova, Inc., whose skilfully publicized permissiveness had not survived his daughter’s liaison with a Thai jazzman. Dressed – no, arrayed – as Fred Astaire, white tie, top hat encircled by a yellow Easter ribbon, he was accepting admiration from a sinuous Nefertiti in a single-sheeted robe. His rapid, authoritative speech belied his impersonation. ‘Dysfunctional pluralism … mere historical relativity … Genetic structuralism … in the strictest meaning of the word, Nonsense.’
‘That’s what I always say.’
In the deck chairs, the old voices continued, ‘My nephew, I shouldn’t say it myself …’ She paused, then said it herself. ‘At Alamein, he was bravest of all. Yet he’s always been scar
ed of animals. And, after all that, what does he do? He sells furs!’
I was soothed, wandering through evening scents of phlox and rose, the beds flaring as the sun touched suburban hilltops with last brilliance.
Satisfaction was swiftly revoked by scarlet gloves on my arm, by pink breeches, tinsel buttons, narrow mask, sugary confidential drawl.
‘Ah, you’re taking time off from propaganda. Sticky thoughts après avoir couché.’
The apparition glided away. Fiery sundown was transforming this enclave to a dazzle of suggestion and surreptitious movement. Ahead, the crowds shimmered and gestured, infectiously good-natured. Had a Herr General drawn a gun, faces would have smiled, bows and mock-alarm been displayed, in the minuet of social occasion.
Alex might at any moment reappear, as Marat, as a padishah. Here might be his true centre: a ludicrous seriousness, a sort of forgetting.
Chinese lanterns were competing, still feebly, with violet sunset streaks, gold networks of gnats hung beneath trees, music galloped and spun, a Groucho Marx loped towards a would-be Audrey Hepburn. Turning away, in a heightened instant, a tremor, I saw as though they awaited me, a slender duo, identical in green tights, white doublets, flat pearly caps - Cherubinos, Pierrots, Pierrettes – but no, more likely brother and sister, hazel-eyed, pert, poised to smirk at the witch with dry, phosphorescent bones in the larder. Or Medici favourites, one with diamond ring, probably a boy, the other, with ruby bracelet, almost certainly a girl. In frail light, scarcely breathing.
They stared, in unison allowing me a nod like a pourboire, then sauntered away, sharing a low, ambiguous giggle. Startled, I followed over a curved oriental bridge towards another leafy recess, but, now half seen, now unseen, they were part of the evening trickery. Amused, I pushed further between trees, towards the tunes, chatter, the erratic sparkle of figures in and out of lamplight.
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