Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

At lunch under badges and festoons, people were diligently polite, enquiring after Herr Brandt’s health, the state of the Rhine, patting my arm, filling my plate, while Alex commented that the booze was almost first-rate and that I should watch the slow bowler’s drift to leg.

Returning to London through long twilight, we stopped at a roadside lorry-driver’s cabin. Rough faces were jovial, ‘Here’s Alex’, good-naturedly gibing at our smooth suits and ties, over vile coffee, fearful pies. At once he was transformed, ramshackle, coarse, the delinquent officer barely escaping court-martial and who, in battle, might defend us all to the last or casually abandon us.

Outside again, he perhaps guessed my uncertainties. ‘They liked you, these chaps. The more I talked, the more they looked at you. You’ll survive me, as fresh wind outlasts Bing Crosby.’

I braced myself for his driving, exercise in low flying. At Guilford Street, we lingered, unwilling to relinquish a well-shaped day, his face in lamplight anxious to repair something amiss. Then glimmered relief. ‘Ah! I’d forgotten Dolly. Aphrodite Kallipygoi. Solid as a junk, unafflicted by pulmonary emphysema. Heart of gold and lavish thighs. Like Mr Toad, she owns a substantial hunk of Thame-side, rather more than a rapscallion pothouse. One knows her by eating her dinners, like getting a law degree. Anyway, she needs you for the Garden Party. Pure flame of hospitality, though it’s said that no good deed goes unpunished. Fear nothing, the armed and truculent are bounced out and drowned. Put on a funny hat, uncage your smile, remember you’re not a married couple. When you see eyes flitting like a blue-tit, voice honking like a goose… that’s Dolly.’

Looming, no goose but ice-lit Norn, Dolly was no more believable than Louise, the flick of another story. More important, I was planning another Miscellany and enjoying the action. A Russian monarchist wrote, accusing me of treason; an Estonian surgeon thanked me for defending the standard. The London press quoted me, usually inaccurately. I had achieved some standing independent of Alex, my foreign name adding decorative ambiguity.

Estonia was a particle netted in the quivering web of world connections beneath the panoply of cabinets, titles, handshakes, state visits, ideologies, summits. Oil politics masqueraded as concern for human rights; nurses smuggled anthrax and cholera virus into the Middle East; colluding with Moscow, Indonesians massacred their communists with American support. A biological warfare laboratory in Russia, designed and staffed by captured Nazis, still sported a huge Red Cross. Italian neo-Fascists were developing the heroin mart, International Charities Inc.; in Athens, Arab-controlled girls had been abducted and sold to Libya by West German Alliance, sometime insurer of death-camps against revolt.

In my wanderings in pubs and coffee bars, the young nicknamed me North Star, with the good-humoured indifference that called God the Dean of Admissions. They sat at coloured tables, juries without judges. Kennedy was glamorized as Prince of Camelot, then reviled for attempting to overthrow Castro. The Berlin Wall suffered suspended verdict, along with cybernetics, telekinesis, the latest UFO.

‘Forcemeat Balls Are Highly Indigestible,’ a young voice carolled under my window, while I read of Mao’s fury at Khrushchev for advocating not Terror but Peaceful Co-Existence. Mr K’s peasant joviality, lack of stuffiness, retained some popularity here, not only from the young.

In Moscow, Macmillan’s white fur hat had caused him to be mistaken for a Finn. Nearer home, a nanny kissed two babies, then threw them into the Round Pond, explaining that she was fed up.

A personal invitation was delivered to me by a uniformed youth. Embossed with armorial crests, signed by a Princess von Benckendorff, it was for an Eaton Square reception.

This required some hesitation, suspicion of enticement into West German politics, a means of suppressing my Estonian propaganda, the charm of undesirables.

‘You’ll go, of course,’ Alex was emphatic, ‘then snipe the snipers.’

As so often, I was as compliant to invitations as to tunes. They were part of interminable search, of curiosity, of muted ambition. The chores of loneliness.

I never ceased to wonder about houses, outside so familiar; the interior so unknown. The Benckendorff mansion lacked a heraldic flag and sentries in tricornes but inside had resemblance to a pre-1914 Atlantic liner, luxuriant with soft reds flecked with violet, cartouche ceilings of blue-and-damson mazes, rock-crystal chandelier droplets eclipsed streaks of sunlight from windows flanked by thick gold curtains, malachite pillars glowed faintly, as if from within.

The main salon was heavy: towering mahogany cabinets and bookcases, ponderous doors, an overweight clock, bronze busts, black marble fireplace. Mirrors framed with cupids like infant deckhands, portraits of bustled Wilhelmine ladies delicately stepping from woodland haze, a bleached moon over a castle aloft on a misty crag, stern hunters in a clearing, solitaries brooding over empty sunset landscapes.

They foreboded no more than the failed pull of Germania, the knick-knacks of Bismarck’s Reich. Unthinkable here were the shouts of pulp anarchists and the millionaire hustle of West Germany. History had stalled, trapping elderly makeweights, breathing but harmless, by the frowning cabinets over-filled with porcelain shepherdesses, fawns, centaurs, dainty milkmaids; a white-chased regimental glove under a glass bell, Dresden powder boxes, slender ivory-handled pistols; Persian faience on velvet, blue against black; medieval chessmen, medallions, miniatures of forgotten electors and dukes; dulled amethysts, brooches, insects in green glass cubes, leering toy mandarins, all extinct as Cathay.

The gleaming grand piano paraded iconic photographs; massive beards, paunches like half-filled black sacks, proud crinolines and décolletage , uniforms sprayed with the stars, medals, epaulettes, sashes, ribbons of long-demoted regimes. I could recognize only the spindly, feeble-chinned Crown Prince and impassive, monolithic Hindenburg. ‘God was in this man,’ Gerhart Hauptmann said. Added as if in afterthought were my fellow guests, relics of my grandparents’ age, so that I inspected them for fans, lorgnettes, monocles, until slow voices recalled me to good manners. I was standing, however, disregarded by clusters of old men in formal, antiquated blacks and whites, their ladies in sombre, high-set gowns and thick jewels which, reflecting the chandeliers, made them too vehement, almost vulgar or coercive. One elderly matron wore black mittens, several had half-veils, at which London students would have gaped incredulously.

Yet I had seen them before, might have become one of them, these crumbling von und zus clutching brandy glasses and evening bags as they once had racquets and sporting guns. The High Folk, blunted alabaster faces, fierce noses, shrunken cheeks, monosyllabic talk painfully dredged from ebbing memory, slow-motion recognitions, enquiries about health, dogs, relatives. Some might be my distant cousins, static as photographs, without the isness – Eckhart’s word – of outside London, its calypsos, demonstrations, sports fever, the English verve for the comic and bawdy even within solemnity.

Estates had been confiscated, children lost in Meinnenbergs, bank deposits had withered, castle and Schloss refashioned as clinics, hotels, museums, union rest-homes, the High Folk left stranded, commissioned in regiments long disbanded, with entry to palaces bombed out or sold; sons had died on Crete, at Stalin-grad, daughters been raped or lay as bone-splinters under Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, these elderly makeweights were furniture, oblivious to Common Market, presidential elections, the Bomb. To Londoners, ‘Nach dem Osten…’ would be ludicrous as a banana on a statesman’s coffin. More momentous here would be an old ballad, a Thuringian frog-prince tale, poignant as a distant sail.