Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

The Neighbourhood Festival discoloured the summer of gardens and tourists, planting behind me a dark shape, hooded and soundless. A joke from the Eastern Bloc was ‘anything permitted is compulsory’. London itself seemed enforcing permissiveness. Only for an instant I expected any relief from Mr Brassey, a zany striving to kiss his own forehead in the mirror. His careless attention had gratified. His depth of tone blotted out the gnawed fingers, cold, rather naked eyes, corrugated skin. But he could be not Baldur but tricky Loki, scaring children by transforming string to a ferret. One of those who, at noon, cast no shadow.

Like a newly discovered word, he was suddenly inescapable in articles, reviews, on radio and television: a Lord of Misrule, correcting incorrectly a classicist’s translation of Sophocles, interrupting a Cabinet Minister with urchin jokes, snapped in metal cap amongst Clydeside ship-builders, in dinner-jacket outside the Garrick, in white flannels on a millionaire’s field. A columnist gibed that, contrary to his appearance, he habitually stole soap when a guest. At a Birmingham snooker final, he sat between East End protection mobsters. Britain’s plea to de Gaulle, to join Europe, he diagnosed as the repentance of an ex-convict.

His career was easily charted. At Cambridge, feared not as headstrong footballer but as Stalinist bully, applauding the Pact as a mousetrap laid for the Führer . His closest friend, a Pole, hanged himself when Brassey denounced Chamberlain for starting an imperialist war at behest of a pride of Warsaw colonels. He showed conquistador courage fighting in Italy, though only Old Boy connections saved him from court martial for drunken outrage to a girl who disappointed him. He confessed gut fears of combat and brute enjoyment of it, dismissed his Marxism as juvenile cant, though, ‘of course’, still corresponding with a Cambridge spy who had defected to Moscow. He extolled a French publisher for sheltering Camus from the Gestapo while himself fraternizing with all Nazis available, accepting on his board the fanatic Hitlerite, Drieu la Rochelle. In a review, he gave an elegy to the White Rose Martyrs. He admired Winston’s blazing mind and abused Gandhi’s sainthood as the best-known way of getting through life undisputed. Intellectuals were angered when he savaged Sartre for his taunt that by rejecting Stalinism Camus had betrayed History. Enemies, disbelieving his switch of loyalty, rumoured that he was an associate of Burgess, Philby and Maclean, and a satirical weekly jeered at him as Comrade Brassballs. He had published a novel in Paris and a collection of surrealist stories.

Whatever his actual self, if any, he attracted anecdotes like income. Asked his opinion of Roosevelt, he enquired whether he was the Yank who rejected Ezra Pound’s advice to avert war by surrendering Wake Island to Japan in return for some haiku translated by Pound. On a radio chat show, he considered the second most interesting character in the New Testament was undeniably Jesus.

My home address I never divulged to strangers, I soon doubted whether we would meet up again, but one Saturday the landlady summoned me to the telephone. Mr Tortoise with a discovery. But no. ‘Alex here. I got your number by the usual method. Café Royal, second floor, 7.30. OK?’

Drinkers, luminous, affluent, were reflected in sham-baroque mirrors so that the saloon appeared larger, more crowded than reality. Brassey, lounging on crimson banquette, a bottle on the suet-pale table, was unmistakably amongst the slick and polished, the bald and fluffy, endlessly repeated in the florid mirrors and reduced to microscopic flashes in the massed chandelier cubes.

‘Milk? Probably not.’ Whisky glimmered. Again, the raunchy face, teeth like irregular italics, the chuckle, like the eyes, impetuous or calculating.

‘Louise couldn’t come. She’s not altogether weatherproof. Raised in LA. Her brother lost his bearings and wanted to be an air-hostess.’ His patter, sound without substance, suited the plush theatrical décor and gabble and was unlikely to cease. ‘Her first husband, a trifle mean, left her only an owl, a chauffeur and foul memories.’ Alarming me, he reached to touch my face. ‘Those rampant cheek-bones! Shield-bosses noosed by light between your scowls. Ajax of the Tundra. They don’t suggest you get yourself to sleep by counting cricketers beginning with C. Compton, Cowdrey, Close… You can look like Baldur von Shirach, a dreadful thing to say, even to Baldur von Shirach. Now, I must repeat that you mustn’t take seriously my nonsense about Europe. I spend whole weeks admiring Finnish architecture – Erick Brygman, Alva Aalto – far livelier than that pretentious heave-up Corbusier. Danish-folk high schools, admirable chunks of proper living. Even Bulgaria resisted the armpit Jew-hunters more valiantly than sniffy France. But instinct tells me that you, too, like me, often contemplate the world as metaphor.’

While speaking, he was acknowledging short greetings, affected deference. ‘Alex, old boy…’ ‘We revelled in your fracas with Julian…’

I was more interested in the portrait, above us, of Empress Eugénie, crowned, in pearl collar and purple velvet train, one hand resting on a gilded chair. Sadness in her sapphire-blue gaze haunted, very understandably, by Marie-Antoinette.

‘I’m watching Africa.’ He spoke as if of someone within reach. ‘Now that the Brits are absconding, the new Canoodle Dums won’t despise privilege and, to put it so, loot. It’s nice to see Ghana’s forbidden magic for use at elections.’

My grunts did not discourage him, though he quietened; surprisingly was almost shy.

‘I enjoy playing solo and baiting the marshmallows, all begging for celebrity, if only as sugarplum fairies. Reading each other, to discover what next to think. We enjoy playing our Third Eleven. Giving Blues for the latest thesis on Henry James’s laundry bills or the vibrations of turbots. Over there is a poet who’s tipped himself as the next Poet Laureate, though Masefield doesn’t believe in death. If you look closer, you’ll see the plaque on his forehead. The real genius was his mother, actress in early Sheridan, who rested so long she became a sofa. In the war, he volunteered for the Rifle Corps, so as to face things lying down.’

His foxy scruff, urgency to convince, entertain or merely pass time, promised little, while having the appeal of a tune, frivolous yet nagging.

‘My attitudes, good sir, are almost always provisional. Like love or political conscience. With a sunny morning, all paintings, except Bacons of course, are exciting. On wet mornings, they droop from the canvas. I usually find Hamlet rivalled only by Mill’s On Liberty . Though Cicero once remarked, not to me, that there’s nothing so absurd that some philosopher hasn’t already said it. He hadn’t much small talk, would discuss fish sauce as he might political crisis. I myself, your look confirms it, have little else but small talk. God…’ His alarm, theatrical, could have benefited Hamlet: ‘I see approaching Jacob Silverson, art critic. He once reproached Cézanne for being false to nature, though in Dolly’s garden he confused a lime with a poplar.’

A new act. London ghouls simpered and departed. The empty car in the mews, the repellent stalker on the escalator, were phantoms, though Alex, calmly assured as a movie naval officer, offered me one of his closest friends, a highly experienced bloodhound. Alex was what Father called a Querkopf , odd head, though possibly one of the Herr General’s Ten Per Cents. He claimed my weekends. We drank at a Soho nacht-lokal , at a South Bank gig, at a Hampstead Heath pub. I at last found voice and we argued about Europe, the French Revolution, J.F. Kennedy. He ridiculed my enthusiasm for the Nuremburg Trials. ‘With Soviet judges on the bench, moral centre was kicked into mid-Caspian, as you were the first to know. I’m happy about spontaneous retribution, but don’t call it justice. I’d like to believe that I’d copy that young Yank officer liberating Dachau, so crazed by what he found that he lined up all SS in sight and personally machine-gunned them. At once. Without remorse. Indefensible, but I’d at least cheer him on.’ So, I supposed, would I. He, moreover, had actually fought, then covered some Nuremburg Trials, hearing Ribbentrop complain that his collar was becoming too tight. ‘Nevertheless…’ I heard myself protest, with some mutter about legalities.