Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

He showed those unhealthy teeth, chuckled like an emptying siphon. ‘Sometimes, old lad, I’m uncertain whether you need a thumping kiss or a Bavarian wallop. Your forebear, Pahlen, knew when to wield the hammer, didn’t suffer the English disease, fear of winning. Don’t catch it. Over here, die Helden sind müde .’

Meinnenberg interested him. Skeleton predators, the slashed body in the ditch, the mute orphan whistling Mozart, the improvised leadership, Vello, my teaching efforts. Those stories. Baba Yaga riding the sky in pestle and mortar, evilly cackling in her hut that moved on chickens’ legs, the boy dead on the Tuileries throne, Robespierre’s fall.

‘I’m apt to think, Erich, of your Robespierre as the licensed buffoon of the Committees, while they attended to the really serious. Still…’

Our talks helped my self-belief, my sense of having stepped towards the frontiers of history. I had sudden vision of my pamphlets scattered like wings over the Baltic: an anthem, silent but stinging. True, vision , like the sublime , is too often followed by the pompous or silly.

Alex surprised me by knowing that Wilfrid was a vice-president of UNICEF, collecting millions for children around the world. He had also criticized the July Plotters’ determination to retain many of Hitler’s conquests after destroying him. Of Wilfrid’s oriental figurines, Alex considered the Bodhisattva’s smile looked like that of a man after winning a substantial bet.

With him, further Londons opened for me: a regimental mess, a decayed Edgware Road music hall, Edwardian ghosts still performing, badly; Clapham shop-window cards: ‘Miss Henry Does What You Like;’ ‘Model with Hard Face;’ ‘Masseuse with Royal Experience’. In Camden Town, ‘Life After Death Proved’.

Arguments notwithstanding, only when remembering the Manor and Meinnenberg was I his equal. I had seen Malraux, Alex had interviewed him; I had survived war, he had known battle. Mention of almost anyone galvanized him like a computer. I mentioned the historian Barney Skipton who had accused me of exaggerating Soviet repression.

‘Barney! He hurtles through truth as if dodging slates.’ I praised the political correspondent, Felix Spanier, for exposing a post-war pogrom committed not by Russians but by Poles. ‘Ah! Felix. He once drove through an Arab–Israeli set-to without a visa, merely showing an admission ticket to a private view. We were at the same school, moral slaughterhouse, place of wood demons, huge dwarfs, tiny giants. I loved it.’

He read my pamphlets. ‘Yes. Yes indeed! You discard your polar introspection and hit the funny bone. High praise!’ Not wholly, for his enthusiasms could be short-lived, sudden attempts to render me virtually speechless in admiration for fifteenth-century Burgundy, Machiavelli’s international peace proposals, de Gaulle’s memoirs, before discarding them as if afflicted by total loss of memory. His good humour might cease in mid-flow, silence, brooding or sullen, would follow, before some chance sight, random suggestion, restored it. Always in some game, he might see himself as a triumphant loser, myself doubtless a fresh face, a new audience, to be flattered, then, like an ageing altar boy, abandoned.

Meanwhile, he exalted my status. Invitations began descending: crested, embossed, scented, with archaic lettering, elaborate courtesies. In opulent drawing-rooms, editorial offices, smart book launches, I was the promising newcomer, slightly exotic and of debatable potential, like a Third World statesman.

Alex’s Dolphin Square flat was another surprise. Plain, empty walls, carelessly stacked books and newspapers, a white desk with six black knobbed drawers on either side arching to a seventh, all slightly open, so that black shadows gleamed against the pallor, forming an abstract design. Plastic ducks in the bath. From sky and river, light fluctuated between variations of drabness. The only picture, above a narrow bed and its White Hart Hotel coverlet, was a poster of a green girl naked at a mirror that returned a face harsh, stricken, years older than her body. Clothes draped on chairs, strewn on uncarpeted, unpolished floors stained by pale circles. At my approach to the only armchair, he pretended alarm. ‘That chair… Three men came visiting, only two departed.’

An opportunity to tell him the Lagerkvist story, ‘The Lift That Went Down to Hell’.

‘Yes. You wouldn’t have needed to tell it at Meinnenberg. But you knew what teaching’s actually about. Are kids today permitted tales, marvellous tales? I doubt it.’

‘Your own stories, Alex. To be really understood…’

‘I distrust anything that can be really understood. Nothing’s so mad as paper. Perhaps the wisest books are only written in dust. Buddha told monks that blank scrolls were more truthful than written scripts. The real writer shows the obvious which nobody else has seen, Pound’s nightingale too far off to be heard – though he also excused the inexcusable. My stories are never signs of the times, only signs of my own time.’

‘You don’t stay long on one note.’

‘Naturally, though the best remain written on the air. Stories, extraordinary shapes, starting from something small then exploding. I myself need several extra letters of the alphabet to really tackle their gist. My The Stuffed Ones outwardly caricatures Whitehall charlatans; inwardly, it seeks linkage with the unseen and unknown – a shudder after dark, an unopened envelope, an imaginary telephone. The fallacy of appearances. But I began writing from, less pretentiously, hearing of Mr Teinbaum.’

‘A Whitehall charlatan?’

He is grave, head flaring in the featureless room. ‘Every week, Mr Teinbaum of Battersea walked two miles to place flowers on his wife’s grave. Year after year, children watched, and, after he’d gone, stole them, to sell. They grew up, passed the scheme to others. Yet neither they nor him directly entered my eventual story. Only a single flower.’

We listen to gulls circling above the Thames, a ship’s hoot, the stir of traffic. He is reluctant to end whatever was absorbing him. ‘We’re apt to be out of tune, Erich. Like a gypsy band at a Romanian wedding.’ Looking at the dusty floor, he jerks a thumb downward. ‘We’ve both some talent. People listen. You, no doubt, stir continents. The glibness of authority. But, like Ministries of Information assiduously misinforming and intelligent lunatics braying regardless, we achieve little. Speaking, though, of intelligence, can anyone seriously credit this quack about IQs? Mine is two points above zero, yours almost as high. Most of those at Nuremburg were of respectable height. Still, returnez . My favourite story?’- he leans back, hands behind his head – ‘ Monte Cristo , of course. My own first story sprang from my first night at boarding school, vital stage of initiation. Each dorm had its bard, storyteller, chronicler. Lights out, and a piping voice was scaring us with inside knowledge. That behind jewellers’ windows hung a knife. You smashed the glass, stretched your hand, then… wham!’ He rolls eyes, subsides into a cough, recovers for my account of Pasternak, when a child, seeing African women exhibited in a Russian zoo.

‘Excellent, Erich. One day I’ll tell you about a certain Alexandrian zoo. But now, my choicest single line in all literature. It’s not an old song resung.’

I brace myself for a stiff wad of Joyce, Pound, Proust, the thud of Hugo or Whitman, though he is manifestly offhand. ‘Just this: “Pauline needed money that year, so Turgenev mortgaged an estate, sold a forest and proceeded to Paris.” There. Scarcely an elegy for missed chances.’

Later, we resume in the corner of a small restaurant. Bottles glimmer under candles, other diners are almost invisible. He chortles over an English wartime joke. Hitler, anxious to cross the Channel, heard of the existence of Moses’ Rod that divided the Red Sea, only to be told, yes, it did exist but was in the British Museum.