Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  Embassy routine continued. Visitors arrived, secretaries stacked and filed, safes were emptied, the Miscellany Two proofs punctually delivered, though all attention was beamed on Washington, Moscow, Havana. An Oxford historian broadcast that for the first time since 1740 Britain, an allotment gone to seed, had no world role. ‘A refreshing historical turning-point.’

  When the Foreign Office admitted that Mr K had ordered the fateful sailing, switchboards were slurred, then jammed. Head teachers reported hysteria in schools, mass truancy; pro-Castro marchers were assaulted near the Monument by youths arm-banded with Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes. Several councils reminded voters that they had established themselves as nuclear-free zones. Experts debated whether the Pentagon would usurp the White House, whether the crisis was best understood by those born under Libra. Hotels and restaurants lamented cancellations, though bars were crowded.

  The last flick of the Great Wrath. In twenty-four hours the Soviets would sight the Line of Steel, while Cuba seethed, Congress demanded Resolute Action and Bertrand Russell denounce Kennedy and Macmillan as the wickedest men in history, worse than Hitler. Crossing roads, pedestrians glanced more at the sky than at advancing traffic. Clouds might conceal monstrosity. A tabloid guaranteed that thousands of coffins were being stacked in Epping Forest. My landlady confessed that her stomach felt like a trapped bird.

  Work over, I sought nothing but streets. Cleopatra’s Needle was draped with No War. Don’t Vote. Be. A group beneath the Achilles statue remained motionless, held tight, as if frightened to move. A pub saloon exhibited a blood-red rash: MAD = Mutually Assured Destruction. My journalistic credentials gained me admittance to a college cafeteria where several recognized me as the North Star, a girl handing me a sheaf of leaflets. Action without UN remit was criminal, a Kennedy was excluded from any moral stance. Another girl clasped my arm. ‘You can tell us where to go.’ I could not, but my silence won respect and a Sudanese lecturer congratulated me for a pamphlet that he misconstrued as anti-British, supporting Russell’s Committee of One Hundred.

  They were all at last alarmed, beads, tattoos, joss sticks, plastic roses, mantras failing them. Where had all the Flowers Gone? A few began a chant and counter-chant:

  What do we want?

  We want Peace.

  But it trailed away, disconsolate, helpless.

  Other youth, other times: on eve of a pogrom, a Jewish child had sung:

  Mother, Mother, see the moon,

  Tonight it’s as red as blood.

  Last spring, in this little hall, under the admonition, Support Academic Freedom, Professor Eysenck had been refused hearing for his lecture on genetics. Fascists Have No Right to Speak.

  On all sides, young people were surrounding me, urging me, as if I possessed secret influence, even power. Could I telegram Khrushchev, get Russell to address them, organize a Scandinavian bloc? A Grapevine Charley excited them by relaying that three army divisions, influenced by the Sovereign Powers of Albion, had mutinied between Amesbury and Stonehenge. A vast youth in double-breasted gabardine and rainbow belt handed me an LP. ‘Top charts, man. Swings you senseless.’

  Sleeve of gold trumpets, bald naked girl. Blurb in black and gold: ‘Cast Deep in Your Pocket for Loot. If You Don’t Have Bread, Knock Over that Blind Man, His Wallet’s There. If You Put the Boot In, Another Copy Sold.’

  The Chimera Club, Soho, cavernous, hard-benched, smoky with candles in bottles, costly, reminded me of Left Bank boîtes I had known with Suzie: intimate, closed to the brutalities above, lulled by drink and canned jazz. The minute floor square was jammed with clasped, barely upright dancers, heads on each other’s shoulders, hot, unsteady, affecting unconcern with headlines and turmoil, though near us, an Observer literary critic, sprawled over a table, was mumbling invitations to his Welsh bunker. Opposite, the painter, Moynihan, sat brooding, muscular amongst over-bright eyes and brittle outlines. Bottles continually replaced those only half-finished, a young bearded sculptor suddenly shouted incoherently, then collapsed over his drink like a heap of washing. Mirrors, dulled, as if already scorched, distorted the angles of heads, sliced eyes apart, pumped hands into the swollen and flabby. Drooling over a blond youth, a wealthy Labourite drooled, ‘Wagner scares me rotten’, his grimace blaming the throbbing, insipid Creole rag, his voice faking what he must think proletarian.

  Alex returned after a few steps with a green-suited girl, heavily mascara’d, stiff cheeked, probably drugged. A jowled, mottled face loomed between us, blue eyes moist and smeared. ‘Thank God we’re finished. Where were you in 1940, Alex?’

  Alex, rumpled, scowling pantomime ruffian, coughed unmelodiously. ‘In Moscow, of course. Selling the country.’ Then resumed his account of afternoon adventures. He, too, had been entangled with the young. ‘They rushed to me for advice, as though I was a committee of public safety. Except, of course, for a few cheers for the IRA and a need to abolish the Lords, they didn’t know what they wanted. I told them that I loathed all they said and would fight to the death to prevent them saying it, but they’d not heard of Voltaire, so the joke fell flat as Mao’s profile.’

  In this flamey atmosphere, he was easily, too easily, imaginable as the footballing bully, some medieval quad resounding with ‘Good old Alexei.’

  At a distant thud, near silence, unease, until voices clawed back and the dancers restarted their shuffle. Alex was drinking lavishly. ‘There’s supercilious old Woodrow, down in Sleepy Hollow. Not sitting but roosting, as Stevie says. Whirled into hopes of glory by this Cuban pitter-patter. K and K, conmen manning the beaches. They do us good, like wildcat strikes, keeping us on the boil. Even your Nordic intensity sometimes needs ginger. One K, the unfunny comic, the other, the inflated Galahad.’

  His grey face slightly smarted, his voice lumbered at me in affectionate protection. Fiery-headed Jason. ‘Resist your inclination to enthrone yourself seriously in your igloo, flogging dead horses so thoroughly that they sit up and neigh. You, too, should stride out and plunder.’ He shook himself like a dog after swimming. ‘Comedy, like marriage, needs space. Time to go. The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’

  Yet he remained fixed, fondling a bottle while, on my other side, a girl leant against me, thinly clad, scented. ‘You’re lovely!’ Her whisper velvety, another invitation to plunder, almost irresistible against faces shuttered, eyes set in Molotov concrete, hands scuttling as if in rock pools while piano and sax urged us not forward but to sit content and order more over-priced liquor, safe beneath midnight, targeted London.

  Alex pulled me up, to the almost deserted streets, saying nothing until reaching the moonlit river, bypassing several groups staring at a sky still harmless.

  After the Chimera fug, we were refreshed by coolness drifting from the estuary. Behind us, boots slurped, mutters followed, then again we were alone.

  The silence was abnormal, traffic was stilled though County Hall, Shell Mex, Big Ben still shone, then a starry train rattled, exceptionally harsh, along Hungerford Bridge. Most houses were dark, shrunk into themselves. Such silence forecast a dawn of steel-hatted officials in unknown uniforms. Down-river, beyond bridges dotted with white and yellow, hovered columned flood-light, a beam jewelled as the Reichsmarschall’s baton. Terraces, wharves, the Embankment were motionless. Cranes loomed, gaunt, apocalyptic. Somewhere past St Paul’s, frosty mass, a fire had started. A police launch with a red lamp abruptly roughed the water, and, caught in nacreous light from behind the Festival Hall, an arc of angry gulls, pale commas, wheeled towards Black-friars.

  Under builders’ acetylene, Alex’s pitted face was blanched, twisted, atrocious as Danton’s, his hair tumbled patchwork, slow voice troubled. ‘The West fears its own strengths. The worst isn’t from the K twosome but from touch-and-go show-offs like us. Massaging the foolish, convincing the witless, while Castro’s held aloft like some poor vintage Caesar acclaimed by whoever’s seeking salvation. Well, I was once a rebel and with a cause. A bad one. Rebels, from DH
L to Californian freak-outs are mostly would-be Caligulas, though without the humour. Who was it that said that one should be serious even at the height of folly? Meanwhile, addicts go hysterical when a painter tells them that an artist is a solitary with something on his mind. So is the nearest burglar.’

  We moved on, into darkness, then halted. ‘At Oxford, Erich, I was crazed with incompatibles. Like all bigots, feeling licensed to be saint and criminal. Devoted both to FDR and Stalin. My head thick as pampas with theories, exciting but useless. I sought a mapless ocean while despising the compass. In the army, I was unpopular as a traffic warden. And here we are, a couple of superior dustbins, stranded in what’s been called, quite wrongly, London’s last week. At least we’re not setting the place on fire, quarrelling about milk quotas and the awfulness of parents. My own were rather good. Too busy to notice me, they let me be.’

  We were leaning on a parapet. A dim shape floated past. Log? Suicide? A hooter sounded; ordinary, reassuring, though far away, the Soviet ships were advancing through seas mined with deepwater weaponry. Like beasts painted in prehistoric caves, monstrosities from the undergrowth of time, pushing up through cities. By noon, explosion, or someone’s surrender. But Alex’s laugh was again full-blooded. ‘I doubt whether even you knew that crocodiles emit eighteen different sounds. More even than Khrushchev!’

  He peered forwards at a beached, toppled barge, resembling not a crocodile but an inert, shadowy whale. ‘You may smile, but before we met at the Chimera I stepped into a church. I needed a particular silence, stiffening our old friends the psychic processes. Gods, like history, make me feel at home in the world. Expelling the slovenly. Lost reputations show the laws of gravity are not mocked. ’Twas Grace That Taught My Heart to Fear. I believe in Good and Evil, in Newman’s aboriginal calamity. I’d enjoy being a well-endowed Benedictine abbot.’

  I had impulse to embrace him but feared his English mockery or Caligula humour. Mistaking my hesitation for demur, he continued more emphatically. ‘At least we can round up the reckonings. There was much about our Empire I hated. Hypocrisy, extortions, double-dealing. Yet, what a story it made!’ His profile, hitherto strict, now shifted; turned to me, eyes almost invisible, he was ruminative, less severe.

  ‘I’d love to make an old-fashioned, Goldwyn movie. Not about some junkie dribbling on the Unknown Warrior’s slab or a transvestite affair in a Manchurian slum but, wait for it, about the Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny. Cast-iron plot, all sides riddled with treachery, fear, cruelty. Siege of Lucknow … split souls, strange loyalties, bloody panorama and human details. The Scottish lassie straining to hear the relief force,’ – he affected an accent soft, sing-song, oddly moving – ‘“Dinna ye hear it … the Pipes o’ Havelock sound!” Guns,’ he resumed, more carelessly, ‘thirst, children, devotion, horror, guile. The officer code, the Sepoy mind. I could smuggle in John Lawrence, Justice on Horseback the Indians called him, with the Koh-i-Noor diamond, very doubtfully acquired, lying forgotten in his pocket. Boarding-school reduced my estimate of fellow creatures, the army rather restored it. I exclude Bond Street Harry, sacked from Sandhurst for wearing mittens. But nothing matters very much, and very little matters at all. And mind this, old lad, never confuse Britain with Englishness.’

  As though in myth, in art, frontiers had dissolved. The past was now; primeval Ragnarok loomed, moments were prolonged, hours were shattered by bulletins. The Left continued savaging Kennedy, son of the millionaire ambassador who had so lovingly foretold Britain’s wartime defeat, while the Pact still held; the Right denounced Khrushchev, peasant Butcher of Ukraine. I remembered a verse I had begun, prompted by the vanished Tuileries Palace:

  You dreamed of those who took you seriously,

  You made a war because of it.

  ‘High Noon,’ a typist sniggered. ‘Gosh! Gracious!’ Then looked startled, overhearing herself. Someone chattered about codes concealed in telephone kiosks, behind radiators, beneath park chairs, so that normality ceased, all was provisional, each of us wandering Hamlet. Tracked by fate, by doom, by anguished ghosts and plausible, irresponsible kings, entire populations held breath. Richer suburbs appeared abandoned. Walls were match-board, street corners armoured traps, the grey sky curved down to the Line of Steel. Bad policy, a press lord declared, is better than no policy, and a historian reiterated his lifelong thesis that worse than power is powerlessness. From Jersey, a popular novelist gave her opinion, her considered opinion, that danger was wholesome to the unjust spirit.

  Crowds, in Haymarket, Mall, Parliament Square, were patient as horses or as if secreting some craving for punishment. The philosopher, seen at Dolly’s Follies, wrote that existentialism was being proved and disproved.

  In the Embassy we discussed, answered telephones, listened, while outside footballers trained in the park, men left for the office, children were washed, fed, mended, as they had been even during Terror. Parliament debated animal rights, awaiting Front Bench announcements that did not come. The Security Council vouched for twenty-four Soviet warships flanked by submarines and armed tankers now within eight hours of Cuba, to collide with a hundred American vessels protected by a thousand bombers, figures angrily or nervously disputed. A young dramatist read aloud on radio a sonnet, of flashpoint ripping open the planet.

  Ambassador August Thoma, calm as marble, warned us to expect a Russian grab at West Berlin, revenging the air lift, should American paras descend on Cuba. From Moscow, a general gave voice, ‘We will first target the jackal, London.’ Our minds turned over, shrinking from chasms within.

  Crisis, mounting for so long, revived the Goebbels idyll of a fearful brilliance cascading over New York, the skyscrapers swaying, sagging, crumbling in a roar unheard beneath the flames, then a new blaze, now orange, now bone-white as the moors around that phantom, northern ‘aerodrome’, then a petrified waste, with shadows scorched on a few concrete shards.

  Moods were changeful, weathercock. Levity was roused by a tabloid report of falcons ranged from Scarborough to Yarmouth, to attack pigeons attached to explosives or germ phials, at once refuted by the London Zoological Society as impractical, nonsensical and, furthermore, un-British.

  Work ended early, and I was at once pushing through slow-footed pedestrians, past the news stalls – Crisis Latest. Fingers on the Trigger. Mobilization? – towards Ebury Street. Larger crowds were overflowing on to roads, heaving, drifting into Trafalgar Square, attracted by hearing that a giant television screen was being erected beneath the Column. Low sunlight sharpened faces almost to the bone.

  I hurried, though for what? To offer useless protection, absurd consolation? Thoughts blinked, without answers. Beauty, ugliness, deceit, pleasure had lost meaning.

  Side streets were eerily lengthened, most shops and dwellings boarded up, perhaps against looters. Snipers might be concealed on roofs. Only cats seemed alive and the hum of unseen cars.

  At my ring, nothing stirred from within. Finally I knocked, and the door immediately opened. Sinclair, dapper as a chorus-boy, barefooted, in fluffy, tawny dressing-gown, ivory wrist bracelet, gold mandala on black chain. Not speaking, without apparent recognition, even paler than usual, as if powdered, he allowed me into a large, white studio, tidy as a dictionary, with black curtains and carpet, three gilded chairs, smoked glass, oval table, a dart-board. By the window, Claire, in silky, old gold wrap. Her expression, flat and neutral on a washed-out face, greeted me, not as an unknown but as if I were a social worker or elderly relative, familiar but scarcely welcome. The silence lay between the three of us, an instrument waiting to be plucked. Some enormity must long ago have taught them to trust no one.

  Already superfluous, I fumbled for an opening. The smile starting from Sinclair showed lips artificially red. ‘Ah, yes. Erich! Squashmothers’ bouncer-boy. Steadfast and without reproach. Herr von Geneva. You’re primed to defend us against Yank banshee and barbarian Tarn,’ forcing sight of myself as irredeemably dull, unsuggestive as a worn, all-in wrestler.

 
The three of us stood silent, even a breath a surreptitious threat or reproach, until Claire, barely awake, seated herself near the window, face averted.

  Sinclair’s eyes. Mottled glass. ‘At best, Erich, a few bombs will screw up some palaces of culture and British Council parasites. You’re right. This country’s finished, not before time.’

  ‘I have not said that.’

  ‘Actually, you believe you’ve said it.’

  Undersized, negligible, he was a wisp of spite posing to charm those too busy to look.

  ‘My turn.’ From a fancy bag he picked a dart, orange feathered, and made as if to aim at me so that I instinctively ducked, the dart speeding over me into the board’s centre.

  Indifferent, he turned away. ‘How I hate noise. The rattle and squeak.’ He looked past Claire, into the street, soundless as an abandoned back lot.

  Could he be sourly, sulkily, jealous of his sister? But, as if his throw had dislodged rancour, he gave his most practised smile. ‘Season in hell, isn’t it! The week’s been like a murderer at the dinner table. All guests know it but none his identity. Rare but not rare enough.’

  He crossed to remove the dart, caressing it with clever-clever fingers. ‘Champions win before they even throw. Inner direction clear and clean as bamboo.’

  His pause invited friendly question, even admiration, Claire glanced at us in turn. Missiles, explosive fleets, the puppetry of crisis, shrinking to a futile three-hander in a white room.

  With gambler’s deliberation, he selected another dart, hoped, vainly, to see me brace myself, then, with the languid shrug of a dandy, jabbed it into his wrist. But no trickle of blood or alarmed wail from Claire; the dart was collapsible, a stage prop.