Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Constantly under her inspection, I was conscious of new facial resources: careless, stricken, insouciant, would-be mysterious, none of which she appeared to notice, chasing her own quick chatter. Did I realize…? Could I not see…? Surely…?

She shrugged away Mon Général , calling him a blind oculist on cracked sticks, almost as pitiful as Bardot. The Conference was a publishers’ racket. Reading little, she thought of Camus only as an Algerian goalkeeper. Americans she admired, even a few outside Hollywood. ‘They rush through. Full-throated.’ An embargo was placed on my historical anecdotes, and my nose for street names deplored. Place du Colonel-Fabien, rue Descartes, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Mouldy things. Forget them, please.’ They were insignificant as McCarthy, Cold War, Reconstruction, the Conference, my concern for them perverse.

Despite my exasperation, this somehow made her droll, even witty. When I referred to the war, she mischievously demanded, ‘Who won?’, the question later sounding less silly than I had thought. I dared not risk her chortle at the White Rose or her bemused incredulity, real or adopted, at my pilgrimage to the Conciergerie. I desisted from asking her to traipse through Père Lachaise in reverence to mouldy things: Maupassant, Baudelaire, Wilde. She insisted that recent weather forecasts were politically coded: disturbance over Biscay meant detection of a nuclear submarine, thundery rain, the expectation of riots. Her eyes widened within circles of mascara. I must realize…

For myself, a chrysalis prepared for marvellous change, she was professionally unexceptional, assisting some very junior movie executive, assisting, as it were, the assistant, seeking bit parts, rewarded with an occasional crowd scene or line of dialogue. Like most of us, she wanted more. More money, more adventure, more applause. I would have preferred her to have a career less raffish and open to plunder: her invitations from unnamed producers, jobless directors, hungry script-writers aggrieved me like Wilfrid’s telephonists treating him like a doctor on call. She might be laid nightly, over-drinking, over-dancing, under-dressing, stroking the hairy cheeks of the ass-headed or straggled and pierced by a troll eager for more. ‘ Bon appetit ,’ she would say, insinuating depraved pleasure. ‘ Nous les gosses .’

Unaffected by our disdain, Conference arrangements were being finalized. Lord Russell had been voted into the shared presidency; something of a prima donna, he then resigned, but, to a blast of publicity, recanted. Good wishes came from Robert Schuman, former premier, resistance leader, whose Plan had internationalized West European coal, iron, steel: from Willi Brandt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Aldous Huxley, André Malraux. Opponents howled that Malraux, writer, explorer, art critic, film-maker, Gaullist, was class traitor. Humanité reiterated the accusation of anti-Soviet conspiracy and proposed a Peace Rally in Cairo, where revolution had destroyed the monarchy, republican generals anxious for support from both Washington and Moscow, already disputing with London over the Canal Zone. An article, unsigned, but attributed to Simone de Beauvoir, alleged American Zionist hopes of sabotaging the only realistic instrument of peace, the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. A transport strike was threatened. ‘Dollar Princess’ was splashed on Martha Gellhorn’s car; a neo-fascist royalist sheet sneered that the Conference was sullied by pacifists, Freemasons, Jews, failed Olympic athletes and tennis players from a fetid nest miscalling itself Toute Vie . Wilfrid, like others, received threats, one on fragrant, crinkling paper ennobled with crossed swords, anonymously accused him of being subsidized by Mexico. This was a bizarre addition to references overheard at parties, theatres or seen in gossip columns: he had been observed in Rome, with Via Margutta artists, had lectured at the American University, Beirut, once, hugely smiling, had been mistaken for a maharajah in Lausanne.

How had Suzie first met him? Shaded by a marble cascading Neptune, she flicked my hand, slightly husky against the splash, her faintly yellow face half concealed by the smoked, ovalled glasses.

‘What matter? He just appeared beside me in the Tuileries. I was learning a part. Actually, half a line. “Your hat, monsieur…”’ Her giggle was unmelodious, she stood, legs apart, smiling up at me as if delivering the hat and expecting too many francs. ‘Almost no one was around. He seemed to have pushed away the air to continue a talk. With anyone else… Well, men! I see straight, my fine Erich, I don’t miss a horse in the yard. Most just want my rear end. But he was like a family lawyer you see in ancient plays, who settles the will, finds the papers, keeps everyone to the final curtain. Though’ – her voice went brittle as she shrugged – ‘I’ve lost family. Stupidity… Anyway, he made some remark about a vanished palace, but, quite soon, very strange, he strolled away, asking for nothing. Yet, next week I was back, counting tulips, and, just imagine, he was there, not near me, actually walking away. I had to run after him. He was very polite, not exactly deferential but never almighty or sniffy. And, do you know, he did me a conjuring trick. He told me I was being considered for a role, in the new Gabin. Yet, think of it, I didn’t remember telling him anything! Certainly not about work. But that very evening, God in Heaven, out of oblivion the offer came. Only sitting at a desk and saying the Gabin character was busy. But Gabin himself, at close quarters smaller than I had expected…’

Resenting her in such quarters, I did not listen until, grasping my arm, she moved us away. Glasses removed, her eyes were amused. ‘I don’t see Wilfrid often. Once he took me and another girl to a gallery. Très aristo. I behaved not too well, said the stuff, sculptures, had insufficient bone. How awful!’ Her artificial shudder could have been rehearsal for Gabin, her hands spread like a fan. ‘The nudes, birds, abstracts. The sculptor, on the card, was called Gaxotte. But, tell you what, I thought, while not quite believing, that Wilfrid had done them himself.’

I hurried alone to the gallery, in a fashionable area, but the catalogue only revealed that Gaxotte had exhibited abroad and lived in France. The curator refused to divulge more. Spare, pale grey, taut and angular, heads blank, the exhibits had some, if inconclusive, resemblance to Wilfrid’s collection but nothing further. He remained impossible to question, iconic, motionless as if at prayer, surveying the microscopic but exact tints of a Bokharan miniature or a Brancusi bird, cut smooth without blandness, poised in calm exposition of line, alternately curved and straight, still, yet about to tremble into flight, the head imperious yet unearthly.

An article in Les Temps modernes , exalting the roman novelle had thumb-nosed the classic novels with their perpetual ‘and then… and then…’, but, for that summer, my days were just that: and then. Each day with Suzie was renewal, a birthday. In rue de Rivoli, under lingering sunset and long shadows, she brattishly stuck tongue out, not at Brancusi but at a plaster Jeanne d’Arc in a Maison Doré window, then lewdly gesticulated at a poster cartoon of de Gaulle, as Wild Man of Martinique. Why Martinique? She responded as if to the witless. ‘Explanations don’t explain.’ Flushed, oddly vindictive. ‘I’ll turn up to laugh at his funeral.’

Despite her rapture at brilliant scarves, flamboyant shirts and the hot, powerfully lit studios, she insisted on avoiding the crowded and voguish – Bar Meraude, Tournon – for dim Left Bank places where youths with frilled cuffs, swollen rings, string ties, glowered at serious students, lounged over empty cups, eyed ageing women with little-girl voices; or cellar pit reeking with fumes, for easy tunes and dances, myself the slower, less inventive. She suspected I lived in unwholesome luxury and was, I thought, mocking, attempting to please me, yet securing her escape-routes. I had no ready-made analysis; she was in and out of reality, like my toys’ escapades while I slept in the Turret. Girls wove life differently, sometimes abruptly aged.