Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  An unappetizing command or joke. He strolled on. With slim physique enviable to a Leonardo, he must yet see himself not as a lover, a Storm Prince’s mignon, but the Outsider, discussed so seriously in congested cities.

  Claire was complete in herself, indeterminate though that self might be. This allowed far more allure than her brother, so talkative about very little.

  Up here, high in Surrey, both were weak; a gale would toss them downhill.

  Over-sized, sergeant-strong, exhilarated by summer air, walking, new sights, and from abstruse desires, I imagined them naked together, on a black divan, slender legs overhanging, daisy-white buttocks indistinguishable.

  Checked by delusion that Sinclair could mind-read, I thought back to their context, the mêlée of Dolly’s Follies, exotic version of what little I knew of English thought: unsystematic but rooted, and, like Shakespeare and Dickens, not cynical but humorously undeceived by outward motive. High commanders played the game at whatever cost, never quite losing it. The question was now how far their troops would follow. Their humour might have some affinity to Estonian.

  The game, if game it were, now being played by this precocious pair, had not yet set rules or purpose, though, oddly, they seemed anxious to meet me, perhaps as novelty. Always over-impatient for friendship, like reading poetry too fast, I hurried to obey. Yet Sinclair, in his fretful beauty, was unlikable, an adolescent dandy feigning astonishment or contempt at whatever was said.

  We met for a Soho dinner, Cork Street private view, at which he was markedly ignored, a small Hampstead party where aged thinkers unravelled the Infinite by swapping platitudes from Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, and I at once realized that, in the blunt English phrase, we had gate-crashed. American space missions were much derided. ‘America,’ Sinclair, spoon-fed princeling, winced as if at castor oil, ‘should first reach itself.’ He looked around for admiration, though no one appeared to hear.

  Claire, prettier, more deep in herself and saying little, was moved only by a Magnani, a Mastroianni, in the cinema they frequented. He unfailingly disparaged movies, his slack mouth wrenched crooked by her enjoyment. When fractious, he irritated by addressing me as ‘Sir’. He appeared to consider me a freak of semi-barbaric Europe damaged by a squalid and unnecessary war, its enormities exaggerated, its veterans charmless, and which, he thought, might well have hastened the death of James Joyce. I was thus an interesting specimen of dumb ox romanticism and Prussian zeal. That I worked for a country non-existent, probably imaginary, endowed me not with fairy-tale glamour but a preposterous gravitas, almost tragic in ponderous absurdity. I needed, perhaps, a sort of protection. Sinclair, without context, had pointed at me and intoned, ‘Dawn over death beds.’

  By mid-afternoon, in rebuke of my own sturdiness, they were frequently sinking to rest on mound, stile, tree stump, Sinclair teasing me with questions. Had I travelled much? ‘Travel, you know, needs talent.’ Did I prefer boys? Had I joined the Hitler Youth, and was it sexy? He was less interested in my responses than was Claire, her light eyes seemed following my words. He began speaking of himself and his current interest in Zen. His smile conveyed awareness of superior knowledge. ‘Whoever Knows, does not Tell. Whoever Tells, confesses he does not Know.’ A rebuke to my knowledge of politics, of Rannit.

  Claire was hunched on a mound, an ingénue Titania blessedly unaccompanied by tutu-clad entourage, though momentarily I saw myself with a head unnaturally hairy and brutish. The louder Sinclair spoke, the more she seemed to withdraw behind serious or downcast eyes.

  She was quickly up, leading us through beeches, birds squabbling, the verve of sheer existence. Birds were only birds, the brushwood harmless, the sun simple. Only Sinclair jarred, as if on unstoppable LP.

  ‘I once thought music the solution, but then I was twenty-three. Now I’m eighteen.’ Again and again he hoped for dissent, quarrel, but received only my discreet smile. I wanted not to hear his prattle but to see this new England: a pond like a blue eye, harvested acres, farmers counting their losses, warm, rich lands over which, through cloud-capes, the Reichsmarschall’s knights had charged towards London.

  In mid-sentence, Sinclair was startled by a breeze, sudden as an exclamation. Though it almost immediately subsided, so, for a little, did he, slowing his walk, giving me chance to ingratiate myself with Claire by relating the start of a Siberian poem, Uncle Wind unrolling his precious ball of white silk. Pulled off print, however, it sounded whimsical, childish, and I desisted, though her shy, tilted face was, I convinced myself, encouraging.

  Our path was now up, now down. Back with us, Sinclair began identifying moths swarming above a decayed branch. ‘That’s Death Head. Crimson under-wing. The swarthy ones … quite rare.’ Cupping hands over a pallid Ghost Moth, gratified by his expertise, he showed me its streaks, before dropping it, dead, like soiled tissue. Claire was reproachful but dreamily, without force. He was too easily imaginable, quietly, gleeful, kicking away a blind man’s stick.

  ‘We’ll go.’ But, reaching a cropped, clover-covered bulge tapped by a broken stone, he again stopped, as if greeting something, or someone, familiar. His eyebrows contracted, dark on the unlined face, which, like the sister’s, remained dry and pale, despite the heat that was soaking me.

  ‘The Invisible Man.’ His affected, birdlike croak was as if winning some fourth-grade dare, before, to a class not backward but dull, he explained that Truth was the firebird, unlikely to be seen, never to be caught, though a feather, still glowing, was occasionally found. I judged him striving to imitate some favourite character in juvenile fiction: insolently know-all, annoyed by rules, success, the existence of others. Claire was both accepting and protective, difficult, probably impossible, to separate from him.

  ‘Better, Erich, a shining glimpse than a task force nothing.’

  We were heading towards another small group of beech and oak, constellation of green and dark brown. ‘Trees’ – he was inflated by the insights he wished me to envy – ‘should relate to the body. Like archery. Archery’ – he addressed only me, the barbarian – ‘holds all of yourself in complete balance, so that you acquire perfect selfhood. Or should do,’ he amended, as if realizing that he must have sounded as if reading from a guidebook. His smile, though, a thin curved rim, doubted whether I was capable of glimpsing any archer. A correct supposition.

  ‘If you really know and understand your body, Erich, you possess all. What your cumbersome stage-manager Wotan never achieved, despite all help from that bore Wagner. Under hypnosis even an ignorant tramp can utter unknown language, quantum data, see marvels with bandaged eyes.’

  Undeniably incapable of such feats, I was sceptical about his own strength to pull an adult bow. He might dance on a toadstool, but privation, muggery, threat from a bayonet would extinguish him easily as he had the Ghost Moth.

  My expression must have discouraged him. Changing tactics, he went appeasing, flirtatious, almost affectionate, thus more suspect. ‘I’m only at the start. But I can control my hands when they’re disobedient.’ These hands, evidently obedient, well tapered as if for Central Casting, he pointed down at the nearest village, mellow, drowsy.

  ‘Rustic charms! Little England’s excuse. But milk and bacon aren’t steak.’

  That he ever devoured steak was improbable as von Karajan dancing cancan.

  Claire was again a little ahead and I hastened after her, expecting the coolness of the little wood ahead.

  In ancient tradition, twins had uncanny aura, like cripples and the red-headed, like changelings and May-tide children in Thuringian folklore, beguiling creatures, no pure children of light but off-beam, from dew, moon, shadows. Yet a conceit ludicrous in this travel agent’s afternoon, a drool over epicene kids very much of today.

  Claire at last spoke, returning to an earlier question.

  ‘I would hear the street cry “Any Old Iron?” and thought it must mean unwanted children for sale.’ Her laugh, though small, was always more mature than Sinclair’s sni
gger, sometimes irking him into calling her Mummy.

  Musing, she said, more to the turf than to me, ‘Also, there was a song. Listen.’ Not singing, but in the same near-whisper, she recited:

  He had no hair on the top of his head,

  And he’s gone where the old folks go.

  More normally, she said, ‘It upset me. Where could they go?’

  Sinclair finished what must have been familiar. ‘I can tell you. Where else could they go but to a wretched hut on the very edge of a canyon. They would be pushed inside, the front door locked. The back door …’ His sibilant tone implied a consequence both fatal and deserved.

  She drooped, then looked at me, as if to a referee, but neither of us spoke.

  And then. Trees were closing together, leaves were tiny shields silvered by the light. I uttered some banality about the powers of trees, the Black Forest resisting Rome, which Sinclair accepted as challenge to his own erudition. ‘That Berlin rampart, Erich, is less powerful than you think. It’s little more than Kurfürstendamm cake. Anyway, walls look both ways, like cross-eyed Picasso.’ My disinclination to argue sharpened his acumen. ‘I can also tell you to avoid our most expensive shrink. Lance-Courier. A natural hangman. He charged very hard cash for telling a Bankside dwarf that she needed not him but a vet.’

  He might be intending to convey some meaning quite different but hot, restive, I could keep interested only in the valleys and white roads. And Claire.

  She understood. ‘One more pull-up, Erich, before the wood. Then down to the farm. We’ve been here before. Farmer’s wife, giving you real English teatime. Scones, cake, red jam, cream.’

  Sinclair, upstaged, pretended to assess another valley, one side blazing, the other in shadow. ‘There’s a church to see if you don’t want tea. Early English with some Romanesque brickwork, Perpendicular pillars with quatrefoils, long flushwork panels. The river dries up every seventh year. Rather poor taste, you’ll think. Not everyone knows why. And deep in the rowans traces of a sacred dike.’

  ‘Sacred to whom?’

  Eager for tea, I was also at last to learn something interesting, but he only pouted, then put fingers to his lips. Sunlight leapt the hills as a cloud drifted, the path dividing at the plantation edge. We could bypass a thick smudge of brambles and descend or push through to some further track beyond the trees. Claire was insistent. ‘Can’t we go down? We should hurry.’ But, sing-songing ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today’, he was already pushing aside thorns, nettles, overhanging branches wrapped with misty cobwebs.

  Sunlessness enveloped us, not lifted by Sinclair calling back that the sun was now denser, brighter, than ever before recorded. Changing pitch, he hummed:

  They hadna’ gone a league, a league,

  A league but barely three.

  In near darkness, the sky mere chinks, broken porcelain, the air damp and malodorous, this was no enchanted wood near Athens but an annoying obstruction, until Claire thrilled me by suddenly clutching my hand, with Sinclair invisible. She must feel the chill, fear being stung or slipping on mud. Perhaps more. Only Sinclair, beyond us, and our own thrashings through undergrowth disturbed a solitude where no wing twitched, no dry leaf clicked, no insect shrilled from dock and fern and blotched grass. Though fairly ordinary, the place was simultaneously irregular, untoward, like finding one’s signature in a stranger’s book.

  Claire might be reacting from some previous experience here, not alarming but depressing.

  We stumbled towards light and found Sinclair, now silent, where trees had thinned, standing within a group of short, elephant-grey stones, cracked, lichened, the air tauter, sourly masculine, heavy with stale seasons.

  ‘Now’ – he lost disdain, had scarcely suppressed eagerness – ‘you’re here, Erich. The exact centre of Sanctuary Wood.’ In his new mood he may not have seen Claire’s hand still in mine, and she now pulled it away, as if repelled by the stones, thrusting through foliage, explaining nothing, leaving Sinclair in some private communion, deserted by Mummy.

  She relented when, in the warmth, the freshness, we saw him slip from the shadows, discontented, aggrieved at least by my failure to rhapsodize his stones. Claire remained the elder, the capable, almost skipping to tap his chest and, in some nursery code, exclaim, ‘Peacock!’

  ‘Peacock, yourself.’ Mollified, he uttered a harsh screech, before courteously including me, said, ‘Lush eternal. Out of body isn’t out of mind. Out, Out, my Pretty Parson’, as though unwrapping an arcane secret.

  Against décor of sunlight rippling like pennants along the line of hills, they bowed to each other, decorative extras on the verge of a pas de deux, their smiles as if pencilled, voices high and identical chanting, ‘Seven for a secret that can’t be told.’

  Like the castaways from Meinnenberg, they were far away.

  Easily fatigued, Sinclair was first to desist. Formally saluting sky and hills, he remembered me, off-handedly remarking, ‘Having no heart to show, he bares his teeth’, as if not wholly relinquishing private trance.

  Claire, already matter-of-fact, restored the solid dimension of farmer’s wife, red jam, butterflies above lavender. Sinclair, however, had not finished. ‘Look!’ Holding before me an inked sketch, myself above the dwarf stone circle, carelessly impressioned, a mass of black slants, tall and bulky, merging with leaves and shadows, almost a tree myself. Held to the sunlight, I was weakened, mouth slackened, shoulders as if padded, several lines of middle age until, shaded by his other hand, these vanished.

  Before I could take it, he slid away, crumpling it.

  ‘Next week, Erich … the Day of the Comet. Violet ribbons, exquisite brocade. Your birthday.’

  True, though I had not mentioned it. Firefly child, he was pleased. One up, and Claire said gently, ‘At Dolly’s we recognized you at once.’

  Throughout, his hothouse grace, her catwalk poise, would remain as out of place as Swan Lake in a second-feature western.

  12

  In dreams, I was at once climbing and descending empty hills, stones growing faces, one of them my own, Sinclair’s drawing, thinned, scarred, aged. Undeterred, I returned to the Embassy refreshed and energetic. The second Miscellany boded well. Writers sought me, accepted criticism, the occasional rejection. One poem pleased Mr Tortoise.

  Look hard at others’ eyes. No one sees his own.

  Life’s seal can be unsealed; its hidden knowledge known.

  My birthday passed unnoticed. Reluctantly admitting some minute upset, I busied myself with the latest leak, a forthcoming British query at the UN Assembly, of the legality of the Soviet Baltic annexations. The Spectator commissioned me to write on Moscow’s supposed offer, at Nuremburg, to acquit Ribbentrop in return for his refusal to confess the Secret Protocol.

  Another pamphlet, examining Forest Brothers, had flavour of an obituary. Contacts with Estonia were ceasing, one partisan captain exposed as a Russian plant.

  I still delayed application for British citizenship, partly through dislike of the irrevocable and finalized, partly to lingering belief in some idyll beyond nationality and flags. Father had spoken of Stoics, recognizing each other by no more than a particular poise, smile, tone of voice.

  Those first months in London still appeared stage-fire and grotesque villainy. The surreptitious footfall on the stairs, the shadow in the car park, the dangerous balcony, the exaggerations of solitude and of clutching a dead past. Alex, with sea breeze buoyancy, affected anxiety for my future.

  ‘Don’t be fooled, old lad, by bogus cream-cake messengers tickling your imagination, not your horse sense. Don’t be too scatheless – though I’ve never been quite sure what this means. You’ll never be, yes, catonic, but more fierce than you actually are. No one is less besotted by some ponce maestro or dotty Herr Doktor crouching behind the arras. You’ll never commit hara-kiri for imaginary treasure or sacrifice a kingdom for Bessie Couldn’t Help It. But …’ The juicy voice fell into solemnity almost certainly genuine. ‘Erich, I’ve seen so
ldiers, experienced, tall and spiked as hat stands, in battle, with loaded guns, yet suddenly unable to press the trigger. The Colonel raised an eyebrow. And I myself, when I first played on Big Side, ran up to bowl a stinker, and the ball just stuck to my hand. I couldn’t deliver, was changed to stone. I know writers of real talent but who’ll never publish, scared of submitting their work. Yet they, all of us, started as if marching to Gorky’s proclamation that he came into the world in order to disagree. But you’re different, slightly annoying though it is to admit it. You don’t change, despite your fits of wishful thinking. Spendthrift. I won’t say more.’

  Unhesitatingly, he said more. ‘You mustn’t wilt like a dahlia insufficiently strawed. You’ve long realized that inflexible love starts up the Inquisition. You’ve got yourself into position of attack, so don’t ever surrender it.’

  I assumed him softening me for a knock-out. But no. ‘Your publications are breaching our insularity. Very good. But don’t rate we Brits too low, too high. Did you read of me with old Maugham yesterday? He almost lost his teeth blasting New Towns, Angry Young Men and Porn Playwrights. New Universities he thought contradiction in terms. Calling them factories for the unthinking. He’d probably been invited to endow a Chair for Knitting. He wondered whether Winston’s interest in art was mere zest for assaulting a defenceless canvas. Afterwards, I wanted to play in the nursery.’

  ‘But were you ever a child?’

  ‘Intermittently. Wild Wood days.’ His unruly head sagged, though his voice held steady between badinage and crafty affection. ‘You yourself, Erich, you arrive uninvited, you make good at nobody’s cost. High praise. Myself, well, I’m me. Almost better. Every day leaps into clamour of minor miracles. Early-morning radio told me that a Californian computer has calculated that the Great War never happened.’

  As if playing a card, he leant forward. ‘You’re visibly on the up. But I’m really jammed in the Jazz Age, which your home never knew. Saxophones and midnight frolics. Jade cigarette holders, Gatsby’s blue lawn, dancers like white moths amongst stars and champagne.’Worried, he muttered, ‘So bloody few at the funeral. I’m biting my own elbow.’