Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

‘You want it, Mr Continent? To wake it up?’ A country accent, words, as it were, out of balance, scarcely comprehensible. A wraith, exhalation of another London mood, from wreckage, with sores and worse. ‘It’s safe.’ She was not urgent, merely stating, like an indifferent tourist guide. ‘I don’t scream.’

Her attempted laugh, mirthless, was yet warmer, showing teeth clean and regular as a drill squad, uncanny on the dirty face. ‘I come here with Wendy. A lush. Petal. No kids. Her tubes…’ She nodded towards a lair scooped from bricks and twigs, but did not move, as if trying to sell Wendy. ‘But the bandages on her wrists… Overdosed three times. Thrice, as they say. Got a cig? I’m strapped.’

The face minutely thickened, the eyes sickened. ‘She let the blood run into the sink, said it was Sue’s scratches, but I threw that. In the toilet, red and white. It’d scare you rotten. By all rights she’d hate me, though I can say nice things. I can say, Lampedusa. Joe Tom Lampshade. Her friend Max burnt down the Wandsworth.’

My need for flight was obstructed by scraps of ingrained courtesy. Father would have lifted his hat, Mother be grandly solicitous, opening her purse, the Herr General stand his ground, as if in a museum of objects curious but inessential.

‘Did you know, whoever you are, that the lone attacker scarcely ever threatens the underaged? That most crimes are at home? Patriarchal or otherwise.’ She lingered over this with queer pride. ‘I’d want to help, but can be insincere, wanting jam with the loaf. Bread’s something else. Sometimes I need six of the best. What are you thinking?’ I was still thinking of headlong escape, possible pursuit. Her smile ceased midway, leaving only a stare empty as a parrot’s.

As if repeating a lesson imperfectly understood, she said, ‘It’s all doubling the greengage. So he says. He likes calling it syndrome.’

A fear rippled through me, seeking the bone. Despite the undernourishment, she was wiry as gristle, a graveyard creature from German UFA movies. Speechless, I felt my head shaking, she did not shrink, merely sink back to the grit, tins, over-bright plants.

Later, in some shame, I knew that war, deaths, Meinnenberg had not left me compassionate. Possibly, my Germanic strain made me impatient of waste, the crippled, deranged, lost. I sought a forgetting and for some days muffled disquiet, even shame, in cinemas, needing Bogart’s glinty eye, Cagney’s swagger, Astaire’s electric feet and supernatural cane. Childhood fantasies, Forest Uncle, cruel but beloved, dainty swan-dancers, transmuted to Marlene’s blue, languid stare. Rita’s swirling skirt, Orson’s hauteur, Laughton’s ogreish satisfaction, spitfire women and beefsteak men careening in honky-tonk Dodge City or on the Santa Fé trail.

I still needed to share. Tortured by isolation, God must have invented the Devil. Loneliness was more fearful than the Kaplans and Miracles. Hungrily watching the noisy, bewitched young, I remembered Spender’s line, I longed to forgive them, but they never smiled.

In simplicity of genius, Stefan George began, She came alone from far away. With Suzie, I had shared Fun. Meinnenberg had permitted brief, disconcerting, impulsive comradeships, even with Greg and Trudi I had been intimate with coarse, frostbitten pasture, windy harvests, the silence of north German night. I could now only await the soothsayer’s promise.

A giant red balloon, soundless, motionless, a touch sinister, was suspended above Kensington, from one angle a question mark, from another a missile. It was appropriate to Cold War anxiety, also to my workaday routine, harshly won against emotional odds like a Viking raid, then finding solace in mystery.

Lust could not sizzle unremittingly. Prolonged labours dampened it. My monkish cell was filling with documents stale yet engrossing, letters useless but curious. So little reliable, so much obsolete information, like the Embassy itself with its creaking typewriters, inability to afford electronic dials and flashes. Even Mr Tortoise, tireless in help, in chores, admitted we were a hoax perpetrated on a complacent, indulgent kingdom. I envied Spender, reported addressing seventeen conferences in four continents within six weeks, then imagined him in an army, mildly raising his cap instead of saluting.

Nevertheless, my position did not abate my need for recognition and satisfaction with work. Unexpected discoveries restored the future. From an overlooked cache we learnt that Himmler’s behaviour could be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, that Stalin, 1938, agreed to join Britain and France against Hitler in return for regaining the Baltic States. Halifax, devout nobleman, friend of Gandhi, had allegedly refused to sacrifice democratic Christians to atheist dictatorship, Ambassador Thoma inviting us to consider whether the sacrifice of seven million Balts to prevent world war and holocaust was a worthwhile moral question.

My self-importance was enhanced by handling packages and microfilms marked ‘Strictly Confidential’. Increasingly, came names from long ago. Father’s uncle, fettered with barbed wire and thrown down a mineshaft, an Estonian minister deported to the Urals, on suspicion of reading Herzen. Echo of that victim of Jacobin Terror, guillotined for suspicion of being suspect.

Another name surfaced like a snout. A 1946 Soviet memo, leaked to General Oliver Lynne, Military Governor of the British Zone, Berlin, described how, with the Reich ablaze, four SS seniors prised themselves free of Reichsführer Himmler, seeking help from the Swede, Count Bernadotte, later assassinated by Israelis. He was unofficially conferring with an old friend, the Herr General. Captured Abwehr archives also disclosed the Herr General’s connections with Swedish, Swiss, Anglo-American and Argentinian dummy companies selling the Nazis contraband lorries, oceanic maps, spare parts, fuses, electrical components, fed through conduits of such global complexes as I.G. Farben, the chemico-industrial monopoly, refining fats, lime, nitric acid and manufacturing synthetic rubber in one section of Auschwitz, place of bodies rotting for strange purpose. Farben specialists had provided very original analysis of blood, bone, hair, skin.

An uncoded letter was a précis of the Herr General’s correspondence with Helmuth Poensgen, Ruhr tycoon, subsequently accused of wartime deals with Wall Street and London banks. In one file many pages had been ripped out, but the Herr General must still be surmised as Soviet prisoner, executed or starved in a permacold camp, a fate more convincing than being strung from a Plötenzee meat-hook for complicity in the July Plot. Or, such were the conditions of War, Pact, Peaceful Co-Existence, just possibly residing on Long Island, courted by long-sighted undesirables.

More sharply edged was Mr George Blake, accused of betraying an Anglo-American tunnel dug beneath East Berlin, a project sufficiently plausible to make me halt on the Embankment and wonder whether the road-menders spoke English.

The French, whom their president had proclaimed as guardians of European culture, of civilization itself, having acquired forty boxes of gold from wartime Hungarian Jews, were refusing to release them. Today’s Times claimed that Soviet minders of the future Cambridge spies had, following the Pact, been summoned to Moscow. They handed over Maginot Line secrets, then were shot.

The First Secretary was giving us some hopes of Khrushchev as a liberal, good-natured man of the peasants so reverenced by Tolstoy, despite Moscow’s current dispute with Washington over Congo disturbances and Castro denouncing the 1952 Cuban–American Treaty.

An Estonian poet, hulking, affectionate, drunk, lurched into the Embassy and assured me that I possessed ‘Destiny’, though we agreed that Destiny, dark sister, was captious as weather. He then said that Wagner told Baudelaire that, of all worldly gifts, the best were Beauty and Friendship. I had none of the former, little of the latter. Only work gave purpose.