Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Yet we were in an urgent, throbbing, moment, a perpetual ‘Is’. I attempted to entertain her with Forest Uncle, Margarita-Who-Grieves, huge winter suns over the Sound, bows cutting water as summer folk sailed to ‘Ogygia’. I boasted of Count Pahlen, enthused more energetically about Gulf Wind with its scraps of salt, pine, sand, and attempted to excite her by descriptions of wild geese soaring for the moon, the Lake sprinkled with fancy, the girl running, but, in stagy patience, she was silent. Yet, never breathless for adventure, she saw other things and shrank from them behind her mimes, spurts of ribaldry, her dances. War and Occupation remained unmentionable. She wished to forget.

I had my own preoccupations – commissars’ eyes like straps, like hooks, Meinnenberg, scrap-heap disregarded by history but surfacing in dreams. That I could have led partisans, sabotaged a train, was as unlikely as Wilfrid stoning a cat, Trilling betraying friends to McCarthy or Primo Levi choosing to forget, but Let’s cancelled misgivings, regrets, indecisions, and concern with the illusion of self, the non-existence of evil. With her, clichés were original, action not despicable but trite. Not violence, not news, not slogans, but windows, lamps, advertisements gleamed with possibility, like souls. Air sparkled, parks glittered, walls had spirit, the dyed hair was thrillingly appropriate. When our hands met, they dispersed all else. Only the nebulous was solid. Images flashed hysterically, the dull tree actually ashine with Iduna’s apples as if freshly risen from the Underworld: a cracked mirror was a vista into myth, a fountain was the exuberant surge of existence, thoughts worthy of Frodi the Unthinking and which, if spoken, would have provoked her mockery, make her the elder, more determined, always in command.

Freed from Conference jargon, words hitherto colourless – table, jug, tile – were repolished. Light noosed the Dôme, silver rippled the Seine, woods were Corots, all goading me towards less talk, more writing, but yet again, when pen touched paper, fragmentary vision collapsed.

However, in side streets, recesses, buses, Suzie was irresistible, caustic, joking, scowling at passers-by, pulling me into a shop, never buying. Sometimes she sent a postcard, often with an obscene picture, Lisette disapproving, though usually only to apologize for failing a date – ‘studio business’ – or cancelling another with less explanation. In brisk switches of mood, we were, and were not, like the gods. Whether or not she used drugs I never cared to ask. Wary of Lisette, she never rang.

Autumn was near, the year sagging, streaking trees with gold, emptying the parks of afternoon children. The news was stiff with portents, as though the Conference had never been. Words had fallen like snowflakes and, like snowflakes, died. An exiled Lithuanian poet, Conference delegate, was found hanged in the Bois; Americans, often black, complained of being trailed by the CIA; we read of a father kept locked in a garden cage.

As if affected by lower skies, capricious suns, Suzie became less animated. ‘I’m a drying pond, Lars. Eggshell in a flood.’ Sexual politics were corrupting the studios, vilifying or obstructing talent. A last-minute story change had wrecked a promise, Gabin had reneged, a modelling contract had been returned, unsigned.

One evening she abruptly decided we should ‘go club’ in a drab Left Bank subterranean hideaway. We arrived during in an Italian movie, a jumble of discordant sequences without clear narrative. A child was disembowelled by hooded women, live goldfish gnawed by naked revellers, gorillas sparred in boxing gloves, a swastika slowly straightened into the Cross of Lorraine, a dance was staged like flamingo mating-habits, echo of a Rathaus ball, the Duce’s bald head peeled to a skull, perhaps fulfilling the programme’s promise to illustrate the Metaphysical Absurd, the Intricacies of Nothing, the Folly of Purpose. Soughs of rapture shook an audience in which the fashionable, the workaday and pin-table loungers awash with plonk sat in unsteady mass. Once a voice breathed ‘Now’, primed for the ghoulish as a knife hovered before a flower transforming to a delicate, adolescent throat. Another conference, also dedicated, but to what?

Suzie was professionally intent, though the tensions suited her, creature of sunless noons.

In climax, a smiling, androgynous youth, in leaves and panther-skin, face soft as candy-floss, gypsum-white, with cruel lips and eyes, minced from pines and dunes, naked adolescents capering around him waving garlands to shrill pipes, before rushing to maul a cloaked voyeur . A crone, his unwitting mother, spied with sickly interest and received, gloating, his severed head and rigid penis, the audience at one in laughter, bravos, rhythmical stamps.

Afterwards, red wall-lamps glowed, benches were stacked away, dancing began to a tinny record player, jewelled girls clasping unshaven, denimed youths, both sexes earringed, braceleted, with fluorescent ties, cheap stones on noses, and naked bellies, all jigging, twirling, swaying in toxic intimacy while Suzie and I clung together as if on a shifting raft, enclosed by faces, spoilt or unfinished in the Mars-light. The beat was ruthless; from a mask, yellow and black as a pansy, someone murmured that I should shout when I whispered. Suzie, eyes half-closed, fondled my hair, but her words were inaudible. Clasping her tight I was numbed, the stolid outsider amongst children of hideous sales, deals, scuffles of Occupation. But her hand was on mine, I muttered stock endearments, feeling neither alone nor fully with her, but in a bubble which distorted feelings, even appearances, to agitated flakes, spun by saxophone and trumpet, the drum, a clarinet’s dissent, febrile screeches; or were blurred by the low ceiling, the crush of mouths, jutting breasts, close walls.

A seamed face on a young body thrust between us, the owner one-armed, his grey shirt dripping. ‘They rush for answers. Sartre, Sagan. And Bardot. But find only Sartre, Sagan. And Bardot. Me, I never left my room for two years. Didn’t need to. So much went on, I had only to lie back and watch. And, mark that, to count.’

He giggled uncontrollably, Suzie steered me away, more masks and faces, hemming us in like a just-alive stockade until her own face abruptly awoke, her eyes widened in dismay, pricked by mutters, thrilled, scared or expressionless, that an Algerian snake-charmer was amongst us and had released his pet, uncharmed, charmless. Suzie tugged me. ‘Outside. Quick.’

For the first time she permitted me to escort her home, towards low-living Saint-Antoine. A momentous instant, though she was brooding, rapt in herself, small. Disdaining a bus, she finally halted at a tenement lit by a feeble lamp over the central door. At the concierge’s lodge she was dejected. ‘These goodbyes…’ As if to herself, but giving me hope, she mumbled, ‘something gone. It needn’t be so. Shouldn’t.’

She blinked rapidly, tweaked my coat, gave a short indeterminate laugh, her lips touched my mouth. The night made her small; with an incomplete swirl of her cloak she was gone. The door slammed, I was trudging away, indignant, self-pitying, wondering. Could she be ashamed of some physical blemish? Was she the dangerous woman of folk-memory, the seal-maiden, vixen-girl, snake-bride?

The week was rainy, cold, threatening premature winter, an ambiguous, surreal season, the Column halved by mist, Notre Dame in wide separated pieces, trees swollen, women furred and feathered, moving fast, overgrown. As if in repertory, I enacted the stalled lover, imperturbable officer, the spy, ready to lurk beneath her window, not yodelling to a guitar but counting her clients.

We quarrelled when I suggested we travel south, to the sun, speaking, as if from experience, of red roofs, Roman stone, midget harbours; of Antibes, Saint-Tropez, Le Touquet, Cap Ferrat, Cannes, names of pleasure and corruption, each, as the list mounted, making her angrier, her refusal adamant as a warrant. She, too, was playing parts, changeable as clouds.