Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

He is tolerant of Khrushchev, recently in London and, at taunts of the Pact, bawled at Labour leaders that were he British he would vote Tory. In America, clowning, shouting at insults from Wall Street, from Gary Cooper, he had sworn to bury them all alive. ‘A rubber ball,’ Alex says, ‘but I agree we’d better do the bouncing.’

He pushes away uneaten food, in his tiresome routine of studying the menu as he might J.S. Mill, order the most expensive dish, abandon it after a peck, bay for more wine, reluctantly agree to share the bill.

Like many Englishmen, he seldom strays far from his school-days. ‘Schools were nests of lying, cheating, stealing, useful in adult hurly-burly. Thieves and poets prevent stagnation. At school I played a deaf-and-dumb hag in The Tales of Hoffmann , which came in handy for journalism. One master walked in beauty like the night, seduced the under-matron and taught me the difference between Night and Evening . He enjoyed things crooked. His son gave him ample opportunity, once getting acquitted by pleading he didn’t know bigamy was illegal.’

‘You think language…’

‘I think of little else. Neither of us is a French puritan, whining that language is a deceiving, distorting, tyrannical bourgeois prison. Language is the escape from prison. Auden’s text: Clear from our heads the masses of impressive rubbish .’

He sways between bottles, though the deep voice remains steady. ‘Verbs are depth-charges, adjectives the resource of the unimaginative, weakening or defusing them.’ His grimace in the candlelight is itself an adjective, affectionate, excited or shrewd. ‘Joyce thought the extraordinary best left to journalists. You yourself are very soberly, and rightly, restoring Estonia to the map. You quote Solzhenitsyn, that a writer is a rival government. Just so. Language changed me from a swarthy-minded wing-forward to a useful chucker of words into necessary places. A sort of lover. Pain and joy. From dissonance, behold harmony.’ As if eager for dissonance his ravaged face crumples, then relaxes. ‘Do Estonians actually believe that touching your mother-in-law can cause suicide?’

During August vacation, he drove me, with scant concern for the public good, into deeper England, in his wasp-coloured roadster that conformed, with its coughings, snarlings, roarings, stumblings, to his respect for verbs. Trips to Greenwich masts and classical frontages; to a Slough youth club for erratic table tennis and intolerable weightlifting; to a Hertfordshire pub gleaming with horse brasses and sporting prints, where he forced me to a Ploughman’s Lunch at which Greg would have stared with indignant incredulity. Like a riverboat gambler producing an ace, he astonished me by having memorized an Estonian poet, Ivar Ivash:

Sharing love of the sagas, we swapped names we thought private to ourselves – Bifrost, Grimnir, Jotenheim, Ragnarok, he trumping me with Gullinbursti. His tales I could counter with my own: the girl who ran, Vello triumphant, amputation without anaesthetics in a dirty shed. For Alex I did not always need to complete the childhood drama of a scarlet slipper washed on to ‘Ogygia’, unknown words found in a bottle, great-grandfather Rolf, very old, waiting on the high road for a carriage drawn by black-plumed horses; it arrives, he clambers in, and a green-faced, yellow-eyed creature, bony, toothless, hauls him away for ever.

Summer folk, we enjoyed each other. I was live in skin and thought. When we could not meet, he sent postcards. ‘St John Nepumuk is Patron of Tongue Cancer.’ ‘For her Civil War efforts, Franco has promoted the Virgin Mary, Field Marshal.’ ‘The Soviet Yearbook announces that Russian Happiness has increased by 78 per cent.’ I opened an envelope, found a cutting, ‘Pope Cracks Filthy Joke’, without explanation that Pope was a disc jockey.

Our duet must be too extravagant to long continue. Once, with misgiving, I scrutinized his head in a triptych mirror. One profile harshly vindictive, the other slacker, irresolute. Full-faced, an undergraduate, rather simple energy, enthusiasm, seeking complicity. They added up to a general with a plan, exciting but hazardous, a declassed nobleman belching over an empty bowl, to avoid admitting poverty and hunger. An earlier English type, Elizabethan, jewelled, flattered but in pain, hideously alone.

‘Most of us,’ Alex said, ‘have little to say and some sophistication in saying it.’

Ragnarok or the Second Coming he would have resented as wilful interruption.

‘You’re unfreezing, Erich. Brisker in gait and statement. At first you were stiff as a coffin, as if at the short truce at the waterhole. Charmingly unaware of the stirrings you provoked. Always fresh and ruddy from the sauna, so we automatically thought you naked. But your basalt exterior is at least melting to limestone, in time, chalk. But you blond heroes have excess, the prodigious. Though laughter is supreme fount of humanity, your jokes can be clod. The soul… the Greeks, over-rated by the professors, ignored by the plebs, conceived it as a toxic bean. You’ve too much of it; so, for that matter have I, which explains a lot. Someone, English, says we live our lives in quiet desperation. I’ve not found it so. But you do sometimes look in need of fleshpots. As if frozen by some Alpine horror. But a girl, preferably not Louise, waits to tear you to shreds. Your magnetic eyes see beyond politics, not always seeing through it.’

Still dissatisfied, he knew my discomfort. ‘You’ve presence, like a pastor or Bernard Shaw. One never thinks of him as Bernie. You look what you are, stalwart from polar fastness, head up, shoulders squared, while virgins spin like tops in chilly bedrooms and waxen-faced Grafs go mad in the library. Or some Günter Grass character gibbering on the Vistula or drinking from skulls on the Elbe.’

For the Miscellany he secured gratifying reviews and a radio discussion and on television thrust in a lengthy if irrelevant mention. Sales pleased the Ambassador; Mr Tortoise was tearful.

Always curious about my feelings for Germany, Alex demanded my comment on a German-born London professor booed for his determinist genetic theories. ‘Yet, as a Berlin schoolboy at a mass Nazi rally, he blithely whistled our own “Land of Hope and Glory”. I’d have hid under an anonymous epigram. Effective but contemptible, like sarcasm towards children. What about you?’

‘Very little about me.’

‘Good! A hero of our time.’

August flamed, no rain, only pleasure. We drove to Brighton, its domes and pinnacles, flossy hotels by a placid sea; to Salisbury, its bells clanging in what he called Wet Bob Minor, fearless of contradiction: to the Home Counties mansion of a left-wing Christian publisher, its bunker against atomic attack forbidden to the servants. On a tripper’s steamer, we sailed towards Tilbury – towards Sweden, towards Estonia – where a barge slumped off an empty dock excited East London stories: a grotesque Triad murder, a seventeenth-century Wapping ghost with a crooked neck. ‘You see that old place with the smashed roof? In it, a marquis, Wellington’s pal, turned over in bed and strangled himself with the sheets. Flunkeys heard his gasps but didn’t dare investigate, fancying a boar was loose. Very malapert. Only Russians and Germans prefer pain to nothing. Did you know that, in bed, Wellington would use his mistress’s buttocks as a writing table?’

I did not.

At Arundel, beneath a grandly secure castle, we watched cricket, of which I was ignorant as the African who supposed it a reliable rain-making ceremony. All around were club marquees, regimental tents, temporary boxes, beflagged and patrician, rows of deckchairs for hundreds in many-coloured dresses, blazers, caps. I enjoyed the peaceful good cheer, the champagne, the white forms gliding across green in arcs and diagonals, the flowing ball, like red silk unwinding or soaring, falling to cupped hands, the wavelets of applause. At my enquiry about rules, ladies smiled sympathetically, gentlemen were forbearing. Alex shook his head. ‘Best left to the imagination. Like Browning. Like Stockhausen. Like me.’ To the girl beside him, prim as a lily, he was in fluent public voice. ‘I myself was a bowler. Very fast, very bad. And I loved it. Charging in, free of the earth, leaping. But…’ He struck his forehead, a ham Shakespearian Richard.