Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Satisfaction was swiftly revoked by scarlet gloves on my arm, by pink breeches, tinsel buttons, narrow mask, sugary confidential drawl.

‘Ah, you’re taking time off from propaganda. Sticky thoughts après avoir couché .’

The apparition glided away. Fiery sundown was transforming this enclave to a dazzle of suggestion and surreptitious movement. Ahead, the crowds shimmered and gestured, infectiously good-natured. Had a Herr General drawn a gun, faces would have smiled, bows and mock-alarm been displayed, in the minuet of social occasion.

Alex might at any moment reappear, as Marat, as a padishah. Here might be his true centre: a ludicrous seriousness, a sort of forgetting.

Chinese lanterns were competing, still feebly, with violet sunset streaks, gold networks of gnats hung beneath trees, music galloped and spun, a Groucho Marx loped towards a would-be Audrey Hepburn. Turning away, in a heightened instant, a tremor, I saw as though they awaited me, a slender duo, identical in green tights, white doublets, flat pearly caps – Cherubinos, Pierrots, Pierrettes – but no, more likely brother and sister, hazel-eyed, pert, poised to smirk at the witch with dry, phosphorescent bones in the larder. Or Medici favourites, one with diamond ring, probably a boy, the other, with ruby bracelet, almost certainly a girl. In frail light, scarcely breathing.

They stared, in unison allowing me a nod like a pourboire , then sauntered away, sharing a low, ambiguous giggle. Startled, I followed over a curved oriental bridge towards another leafy recess, but, now half seen, now unseen, they were part of the evening trickery. Amused, I pushed further between trees, towards the tunes, chatter, the erratic sparkle of figures in and out of lamplight.

I soon overtook them, was doubtless intended to, playing my part in this rippling idleness, yet wary, feeling outsize and predatory. A false gesture might scatter them like birds.

Their paper-smooth, almost childish faces were neither friendly nor aloof but accepting me as a familiar, perhaps to be baited or mocked. Softly painted, they were further improvisation in an unwritten script of half-realized pastoral comedy in which a queen slobbers over an ass’s head, statues breathe, letters appear on trees, a white hand offers the fateful apple or, from waters, catches the sword of peril.

Had they spoken I might have spoilt the suspense by a heavy joke, but they stood, mute, tremulous, waiting. Expecting another giggle, flirtatious and insolent, I gave my name, at which they genuflected in sham-deference but as though already knowing without much liking it. The boy, slightly girlish, his sister somewhat boyish. Satin faces. Then a rajah, robed blue and green, with jewelled belt stepped between us and they receded into the dropping dusk and the array of archducal froggings, straw hats, mountebank cloaks. From random greetings I heard their names. Claire and Sinclair, seeming to parallel Hansel and Gretel.

The rajah’s hands were clasped like a Raphael Madonna, dark eyes liquefying in melancholy reproach, though I had said nothing.

‘You are correct but mistaken.’ The eyes, tender as pansies, changed to grievance. ‘In all most amplitude… I pass muster periodically…’ The Welsh missionary lilt lost credibility; he could be Alex in a further impersonation or a Dr Coppelius, Dr Miracle, Mr Kaplan or figment of lantern light which changed a strip of box-hedge to a bridge, lattice-work under yellow light to a tiger. I was fractured by the masked and disguised but strove for fixed identity. The English, in pomp and grandeur, might condescend, girls ignore my appeal, spies watch the Embassy, but I possessed thoughts inviolately my own. Though scared of finding him, I had sought Forest Uncle, had communed with Frodi the Unthinking, with Kostchei the Deathless, had told their tales to waifs famished, criminalized, dying. I had gazed up at Robespierre’s windows. In descent of Pahlen, attempting to restore a country, I had as much a claim as any here.

I moved back into light, where some stout, lacy Marquis de Carabas addressed a crescent of respectful followers. ‘No, Petra, dear, that was built in Santiago for her sister, Paca. Duchess, as you know, of Alba.’

Other voices were silkily at odds.

‘Actually, my favourite remains Pushkin.’

‘I apologize. I did not realize you knew Russian.’

‘Well, actually… you see…’

‘I see very well.’

Neither drunk nor sober, I felt etherialized, about to drift away. The moon, ready to appear, had not yet done so. A bell sounded a single, deep note, apparently unheard by all save me. Broken-off silhouettes flickered across bushes. Lawns were now iridescent, now pools of dark. A head moved, like a pasty football, Churchill; Byron limped, on the wrong foot, to a dinner-jacketed Arab turf millionaire; Shakespeare, quill behind his ear. I had a few placid words with both peroxided Eva Peron then, of known provenance, a professor who had lectured the Embassy on the Advantages of Dispersal. She at once resumed another lecture. ‘Most thinkers, I can hear you agree, merely shift old furniture.’ The smile, ringed with tiny hairs, exempted herself, but further exposition was crushed by a Polar explorer, of a literary eminence much admired by himself, rated by the Modern Dickens a flawed genius.

‘Exactly, Flora. But doesn’t Jane Austen’s persona suggest young persons, looking older than they would today, always looking past you, seeking someone better endowed?’

‘No.’

This is what I was actually doing, seeking the twins within the medley of Sioux feathers, a belt ashine with daggers, a racing driver’s helmet glittering like a heap of silver nails. The meringue pair, at once sickly and sterile, coalesced into a Princess Lontaine , dancing alone on grass beginning already sprinkled with dew. The Garden of Earthly Delights.

‘Ah!’ Alex, Dean of Peculiar, stumbled forward, with duck salad, cream cake, lobster mayonnaise on the same plate, with a goblet almost high as a vase. ‘Stomping at the Savoy! I told you it’d be more than the Old Pig and Whistle with the Roses Round the Door.’

He was knowing, in a new word, streetwise. ‘Watch and wait. A Thousand Lights Are Shining There, It’s the Broadway Melodee!”

He ate, he gulped, he slightly hiccupped. ‘But who’d have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ He inclined towards a statuesque Doge, satined in black and gold under what seemed a huge, sagging toadstool. ‘He once told me he’d helped Brahms compose the Coriolan Overture.’ Surely overhearing, the Doge grasped a youthful arm. ‘I do feel so very ancient, darling,’ his cracked voice suggesting he might have spelt it ‘antient’.

Alex shrugged, surveying further, clumsily manipulating the plate. ‘That creature behind Magda. The mask’s unnecessary, even at the Palace his aroma’s unmistakable. A criminologist, inasmuch he wrote a book praising Mussolini.’

He looked smudged, distant, momentarily lost, until, placing the half-filled plate on a bush though retaining the wine, he again recognized me. ‘It’s not whether you really believe it but whether it believes you. But his trench warfare’s in MI6, very ineffective.’

Without apparent movement he again vanished, as if at a swish from Merlin, reabsorbed in the Nicks and Jonathans, Samanthas and Petronellas, the bare shoulders and green straplines. The Chosen. I recognized one of the Royal Household, in normal suit and with Mao impassivity. He was long whispered to be the Fifth Man, who had sent Moscow the Bletchley Park code-breaking secrets, been mentor of the Cambridge spies, inexplicably immune, world expert not on politics but on Poussin.

In the gossip columnist’s stalking ground, most had alternative existence. Tomorrow they would be opening red boxes, addressing boardrooms, cowing shareholders, choosing new hats; also rootling for lovers, twisting expense accounts, selling the country. Dolly’s was neutral ground, surely free of arcane surveillance.