Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

I supposed he had finished, but he was being handed a note from Golo Mann, which he lifted in acknowledgement, while examining us for signs of exhaustion, dissatisfaction, a meaning glance from the chairman, and had actually stepped back, until protests recalled him. At any instant, brilliant lights would sweep over us, but they remained withheld. The ceiling had vanished, no winged Hermes would snigger cynical improprieties, no Mirabeau thunder wild words, no bronzed epitaphs clatter from on high. Instead, Wilfrid probably ending with a joke, not uproarious, not very amusing.

‘How I have meandered! I have refused to love my enemies, queried religion, obeised myself to history, exalted a man with appalling views and apache behaviour and, I dare say, have mis-quoted Gautier. I will now commit one further iniquity. Unfashionable though it is in current literature, I enjoy stories, and, with your permission – should you refuse, I will shuffle away without grievance – I will tell you one. Your gaiety may not be a hurricane, your applause scanty, but I promise you my story is short, merest trifle. A children’s story.’

My disquiet rushed back, my body winced at one stanza too many, maladroit whimsicality. ‘Wilfrid’s come!’ Some legend of Mickey Rooney or Astaire’s father, a variation of a pied piper or children lost in a forest. ‘They tasted delicious.’ Could he only remind himself that people could no longer be shocked, though some might still dread being alone!

Dimmed, twilit, his colleagues submerged in shadows, Wilfrid was anonymous in all but his voice. ‘Some of us deny the reality of evil, some the notion of free will. I like to believe them mistaken. Free will may, of course, be negligible, but it is more useful, more engaging, to act on the hypothesis that it exists. As for the other, my story, my very short story which I maintain I have freely chosen to tell you…’ Faces strained forward for the treat, my own nerve was paralysed. ‘Let us imagine a green hill in summer. A benevolent sun, playful breeze, innocent grass. Some buildings behind a metal fence and tall gates, polished, hygienic, conforming to all regulations yet known. A village street, respectable citizens, a pastor, children with balloons, footballs, bags of sweets. And a little railway station, a nursery of delight, with colourful flowerpots, a flag, a board pasted “Welcome”, officials braided as archdukes. Had a band been available, it would have played Mozart. Now a train arrives, carriages open and, behold, more children. An operetta? Let us see. The small travellers are herded out. They are timid, perhaps hungry. On the streets, the grown-ups are silent, but their offspring, the home team, are shouting. But what? Are we hearing aright? Surely we are mistaken. But listen. “Up in smoke,” they cry, “on Death Hill.” More officials are rounding up the unhappy newcomers, badly dressed wraiths. The village children change their tune, they are friendly, almost flirting, holding out their gifts, the balloons, footballs, sweets. How delightful! The parents stout with family pride. Still hesitant, the strangers are lured through the gates, to Grandmother Wolf, the Demon Magician and his puff of smoke.’

He was as if issuing a company report, unemotional, glossing over the failure of dividends and with the shareholders absent. ‘We need not condemn those children, though I am disposed to rebuke them. As for the adults, the worthless mayor and godless pastor, you have your own thoughts. Perhaps we should be born fully dressed and without parents!’

He surveyed us, distinguishable only from the gleam of the microphone and a thin light from the window. ‘Goethe – how we conscript him to back our briefs – submitted that only the spectator has a conscience. Can this really be true?’

The Conference induced my own chimeras, of accompanying Malraux to Mexico or Cambodia, following Trilling around respectful universities, even, like Golda Meier, addressing a nation. More lasting were images of those children at Malthausen, Odd Nansen’s ‘Mussulmen’, skeletal splinters, sockets more visible than eyes, boned elbows unnaturally slanted, moving blindly, all thoughts burnt out, pushed by impulse and hunger, attached to nothingness.

More substantial outcomes were still nebulous. The Conference had been summarized as another step towards European unity, a comedy of bourgeois self-regard, a CIA conspiracy, a chance to interview celebrities.

Outwardly, Wilfrid was satisfied. ‘These assemblies are like authors, who so seldom know the effect they have, profound or negligible. Listening, not least to myself, I remembered an epigram ascribed, with whatever likelihood, to the unfortunate Pétain, that a certain individual knew everything, but that was all he did know. I would not entrust my fortunes to Herr Flake if we were stranded on the Great Barrier Reef.’

Disturbed, I thought again of England, an obstinate energy that had sailed cockleshell ships down wind to the edge of the world, scattered banks and language like acorns, hauled cathedrals into the sky. Hegel, so deplored by Father, had condemned the English as unattracted to abstract principles. High praise.

No Inner Emigration for me, no Heimat . Yet I could not forget an incident at the Conference. Wilfrid had, with his habitual solemnity, introduced me as his ‘learned confederate’, to a Herr Felder, very flabby, very dull. I was reserved, probably curt, in haste to escape. Next day, in Le Figaro ’s Conference leader, I was infuriated to read that Josef Felder had recklessly defied the Stuttgart SS and, in the Reichstag, denounced the 1933 Enabling Bill, which established the dictatorship.

Wilfrid’s solicitude, I thought, must now be disguising some impatience, and he could have felt that, in rejecting Felder, I had missed an opportunity most essential to my development. He himself, in the busy Conference aftermath, was often too fatigued to do more than listen to music, and, with him, I believed that he shared Father’s taste not only for achievement but for failure. Uncertain of my future, my position, I overdid efforts to amuse him with stories and gossip and must have irritated him, though he only showed reticent gratitude for permission to hear my exceptional reminiscences. Nevertheless, what had for so long seemed affectionate irony, now, I feared, was faintly hostile sarcasm. We had fewer walks, Marc-Henri, too obviously Lisette’s favourite, may have noted my unease. ‘I am a person.’ He spoke as if reminding me of the universe.

One morning, I was talking to Wilfrid. Gently disengaging, he left the room to find a book and did not return for three weeks, taking Marc-Henri with him. I had apprehension of an emptied stage, unseen hands preparing a new set, actors rebuilding their personalities, rehearsing another cryptic vaudeville.

Alone in the apartment, I was, with disquiet, more aware of its symmetry: books, paintings, flowers arranged in perfect lines, absolute balance, as if in an ideal empyreum in which I could only disappoint.

Simultaneously, life was raging: upheavals with Suzie, embryo poem with Falls and Ascents. Desiring ultimate simplicities, I was stranded in her half-surrenders, sudden retreats, occasional anger, the behaviour, I judged, to be expected from the young and powerful. It was the impact of what Jünger called being drunk without wine and, besotted, I was as uncertain as I had been in childhood, wondering which was more real, my Turret world, or that of adults, with its puzzles and initiations.

We continued our morning strolls, afternoon cafés, less often by night. Any move, however slight, was a move towards victory or defeat. Outside a small bistro, she grabbed my hand and put it to her cheek, a landmark in a week of stratagems and non-sequiturs. ‘Young Berserker !’ She almost sang it, grimacing, head tilted back: small peaked cap, dark glasses, her knowledge of the North still rudimentary: elks, Northern Lights, Lapland forests, all clustered in a single movie-shot. She called me Viking Lars, as if I had been hacked from an iceberg, from a country swarming with beasts elsewhere extinct, where lust-ridden heiresses swung themselves over torrid grooms and pastors galloped into hell. A North unnecessary as St Helena, fugitives like myself strong but pitiable mastiffs roaming Paris, the world’s centre.