Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

I myself was giving what I imagined a last-century bow to some Princess of Tonnage. Presumably Dolly-like, she displayed flesh tones evaporating into the parched and flaccid, the eyes left isolated, not vapid but appearing to see not me but someone else. At my name she did nod, then, in a voice unexpectedly firm, enquired after my parents, as though they had yet to arrive. Then the Prince, white-whiskered, rheumy-eyed, shook my hand, like his wife addressing me in German.

‘You’re the chronicler… not yet quite Mommsen, you will concede.’ He was dignified, magnanimous, scion of the Prussian White Eagle. ‘To whom do you allow admiration? Trevelyan? Toynbee?’ Not awaiting answer, his bushy brows were already greeting the couple behind me.

There was opportunity for little more than to bend over mottled, bejewelled hands, mutter, then withdraw to shadows between pillars and watch. Flakes of memory enlarged as if from mescaline. A swan, a woodcutter’s falling axe. These misshapen somnabulists, some held upright as if only by invisible props, must once have sailed with Bülows and Eulenbergs on the Imperial yacht, dined at the Automobile Club, assembled for the Schleppencour Reception, manned the Guard of Honour costumed like die Alte Friedrich, cadets in powdered wigs straightening ladies’ trains with long, glistening canes. They were trash of a period swollen beyond its needs, knights with duties fossilized into superstition. Despite their disdain of the Gutter King, they would have rejoiced at the fall of Paris.

In an alcove like a side chapel, above heads white, dyed, gun grey, bald, hung portraits in oil edged with gold-leaf crust, of the three Hohenzollern Kaisers, successively more resplendent, not needing to demand allegiance but accepting it as natural due. His moustache fiercely upturned, under an eagled helmet, was the High Gentleman, former Allerhöchste , so often toasted at the Manor. Further away, lower down, was a fourth portrait, more solid: Bismarck, aged and discarded, staring, grimly resigned, at the latest iron warship, realizing that a new era had begun.

My surroundings narrowed. A greybeard stumped towards me, hand outstretched, blue eyes friendly, very real.

‘I am Sulzbach. Dr Herbert Sulzbach.’

Of him I knew something definite. A soldier, decorated first by Wilhelm II, then, as a British officer, by George VI, after the Potsdam Conference, and now prominent in work for Anglo-German cultural relations. Still soldierly, though benign, skin as if freshly laundered, he gave me a handshake remarkably strong. He was speaking in English less rough than my own.

‘I’ve heard your talks, young man. They have rebuked my ignorance of what is occurring further east. At times history bursts its banks, like my suitcase whenever I am allowed to pack it. For myself…’ his sigh was genial, ‘one life ended in November 1918. I was a captain in the 63rd Frankfurters, and, that morning, I realized my men were no longer saluting me. But I was young, ready for new chances, new salutes.’

He must certainly know of the Herr General, though I dreaded a gruff response to a question now forming. But he was being recalled to duty by two statuesque women, evidence for Alex’s conviction that too many men regard women as a thousand years old.

The Herr General! How would I greet him? Unanswerable. I could only remember that in the Turret I had once gazed into the mirror and seen a face not my own.

I was receiving only glances incurious or, at too obviously the youngest guest, cautiously suspicious. Some, knowing my lineage, might regard me as renegade, virtually Untermensch , one of the worthless Mischlinge . At this distance, Dolly’s Garden Party, should it exist, promised relief, the bloom of comedy laced with erotics dangerous but alive. Before departing, I cautiously mentioned the Herr General to a lean couple who had allowed me a dim cordiality. This vanished as if by a switch. They exchanged a glance that ensured my dismissal.

‘There’s Nimble Lord Nelson, the Pride of the Fleet! But you’re insufficiently primped.’

Alex thumbed my sober Embassy suit, quiet tie. ‘I advertised you in wolf-pelts, tusked helmet, foaming in berserker delirium.’

He pinned on me a blue-green enamel star. ‘The Order of Ranjitsinhji. It’ll entitle you to spontaneous acclaim. Life is Now, like Virginia’s breathless prose.’

He himself, Now, was in a clean grey robe, diagonal purple sash, hair slammed down flat as a ducat.

We were in butterfly day of chatter and costume, perfected by six o’clock sun lighting Dolly’s bow windows, her demesne sloping to the river flowing smooth as if polished and between luxuriant trees and shrubberies, pointillistic with pageantry colour: nautical bell bottoms, brocaded sleeves, musical comedy blazers, blending with ruffs, tights, masks, satin and astrakhan; the peachy, flamey, cardinal scarlet, peony-cool skins under hats steepled, tasselled, plumed. A gloss of history without irony or nostalgia, sensitive English at play, in Wonderland, murmuring, sipping, handshaking, flunkeyed by Figaros, mostly in white wigs and green knee-breeches. Stately opera-house curtains could have parted, displaying an island of nonsense, commedia dell’arte , and open to Third World notables: a black Robin Hood, a brown Henry VIII. Mr K strutted, in rough red pyjamas.

Alex was showing the satisfaction of the host at a children’s treat. ‘They masquerade as Woosters, but we both know the irons they keep well placed in the fire. Don’t forget their holsters!’

Shedding misgivings that had stuck since the Benckendorff seance, though not my lifetime superstition that the bizarre, grotesque, unorthodox were plots targeting myself alone. I resolved to enjoy all the illusions present.

‘We’ll meet up anon, comfortably non-sober. Bottled beer’s not on offer. On with the motley.’ Leaving the terrace, he was at once receiving stagy bows, the offer of snuff from a severe figure whose stick presumably denoted Black Rod, a curtsy from a crinolined countess. I was content to linger, as if on a quarterdeck, by urns like flowered capstans and surveying a pantomime crew. The charade quivered and changed as if on a turntable, was now a European fantasia, now a London caste entrenched in mannered superiority. Beyond, draped over spacious hills with few houses, clouds were floury on dwindling blue, the river like silver coins between leaves.

A foaming goblet was presented, some faces smiled at me, but for the moment I was happy to watch spectacle without drama, a tideless gorgeousness without dates or import. Zouaves, Cossacks, Beefeaters, Chasseurs mingled with catwalk starlets and theatrical knights. Bedouin burnouses, foppish, V-shaped waistcoats, huge crystalline buttons, red scarabs, fairy-gold chains, yellow-and-black leggings, the violet, tangerine and primrose, kilts made patterns instantly dissolved, reforming, altered. A Plantagenet lord’s slippers seemed miniature gondolas; a Merlin, in high, starry hat, wrapped in green mantle strewn with black diagonals, held a double-headed wand flashing alternate crimson and yellow. A toga’d, bandana’d ex-proconsul, surely Gold Stick in Waiting, leant towards a white coped prelate. Sultans and tycoons aptly merged, before upstaged by sly libels – Bernard Shaw awash with champagne, Gandhi in glistening dhoti , stuffed with pâté. Thickly white and red Aztec mouths jutted at the Master of the Rolls, primly pin-striped but with the third arm of an old-time pickpocket from Montmartre or Seven Dials. Children, tailed imps, moonbred Pucks, pirouetted in their private worlds. In jumbled chronology, fluff of time, a Versailles aristo, jewelled, but with neck circled by a red stripe, conferred with wild-haired Einstein, touched glass with Othello in turquoise cloak and tall, frock-coated Mr Lincoln, austere as cathedral stone. In old tweeds, without gold earrings or Star of India, the Poet Laureate, diffident, courteous, was himself late Victorian, now blinking with surprise at a kiss from Mlle Bardot, decently wrapped.