Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Alex’s departure was a relief. His buccaneer tongue was too loose. He would have cheerfully accepted the Reichsmarschall’s invitation to injure elk, have asked Himmler whether he knew the Rothschilds or demanded of Stalin what his job actually was. Had the Herr General strode by, saturnine in full Nazi regimentals, gun in his pocket, Alex would have offered to discuss the Pact. How, I wondered, would I greet him?

Another sighting of the twins revoked my misgivings. Thinly opalescent under a flowering buddleia, they had also seen me, were already advancing in step, simultaneously removing caps, revealing black heads, cropped, like small helmets, before retreating into shades.

All was permitted, but nothing would happen. No Herr General, brazen and admired, no Dolly aloft in a winged chariot, no marvellous telegram announcing ‘You’ve won.’ Instead, merely my desire for the lobster, the salmon, hitherto refused. Moreover, no willing girl had presented herself. I withdrew to another secluded arbour. Watch and Wait, in Scaramouche time. Dancers’ silhouettes melted before reaching me, mirages in frailty. Like a phantom mask, a Japanese face hovered in an angle of green light, its eyebrows painted inches above the real ones pasted over in matt white. It hung, quivered, vanished, and, as if from flowers, Claire and Sinclair were facing me. In dance of expectation I saw Sinclair pouting, his dark gaze unblinking, as if on audio-cue; hers, inquisitive, almost friendly. A scarlet altar boy, standing near, at one quick glance at them, to my surprise scuttled away, as if in fear, at odds with the atmosphere of dancers, tunes, expensiveness.

Sinclair spoke, his voice not quite natural, probably trained. ‘Dolly collects them. Her heart, sometimes good, gets things wrong.’

‘I would like to know more of her.’

‘So would she.’

Claire seemed not to have heard. The music purred, gently throbbed, prising out memories, and, on cue, a few stars and a slice of moon crept over the hills, in what my ancestors called the Blue Hour and servants the Edge of Night, that wavering frontier between dusk and nightfall when all is disjointed, expectant, sometimes wolfish. Horizons wilted, the demesne lost shape. Lamplit, petals and bush flickered with false hues, my two companions evanescent, touches of blue on their pallid skins.

Seen closer, they had discrepancies. Sinclair’s petal features scarcely completed yet those of a stripling souteneur , Claire’s more decisive and candid. Thoughtful but not remote, she was attentive to my presence, before change of light transformed them both to dolls, hole-eyed, sexless, virtually idiotic .

‘Shoes, move off!’ Sinclair was negligent, detached, but the air quivered and yet again I was deserted, fretting between uncertainties of curiosity, desire, age and once more conscious of being amateur, debarred from Old Boy bonhomie , alien as a Bavarian roughneck blundering about the Palace and wondering whether to tip the Duke.

A few voices were by now tetchy, frayed, as celebrations passed their peak, lapsing further into the Blue Hour when the lustrous Flower Girl reveals scales and forked tongue, comedians turn terrible. As though confirming this, a girl in taffeta skirt and powder-blue jacket clasped my arm. ‘How I wish…’ She was soggy, tearful, nervously about to continue but was at once reclaimed by a Sultan, long hair still fresh from the blow-dryer.

Sunset streaks had sunk into mothy purples. Again I heard, or thought I heard, the bell. A City magnate, Companion of the Golden Handshake, enriched beyond deserving by supplying luxuries to an African dictator, saluted me, then turned aside to avoid my response. The dancers seethed to Mother’s favourite song, ‘These Foolish Things’, a mottle-nosed Romeo was deploring the vulgarity of Churchill’s wartime oratory. I once more realized that I had refused food too often, accepted drink too frequently, thus was expecting a night sky torn apart by the Wild Hunt followed Grünhüll, Green Hat Rider, one of the few mythological stalwarts unlikely to be present.

A silver-buttoned glove was fingering my shoulder. ‘ Wie gehst, mein Herr? ’ Lumberjack face, horse-dealer’s wiliness. Alex! ‘Erich, I feel tall enough to lean over the moon. You’ll need Jacob’s ladder to find me. I think it’s by the conservatory. Your new friends… tasty enough, almost winged. They may need your help. But…’ his sigh was amplified, ‘help is so seldom welcome.’

Portly tones began ahead before he could embarrass me further, at which he mimed alarm, then nausea, and left me, perforce to listen.

‘I myself, dear ladies, was honoured, if that is truly the mot juste , by inclusion at La Tussaud’s alongside Dulles and indeed Selwyn. But I am now very properly humiliated by being reduced to less even than the ranks. I am allowed to purchase myself at a very mean price, otherwise to be melted down into literal thin air. You may laugh, indeed you are doing so, but…’

Broad herbaceous quilts were now ghostly. Was Ophelia still lying amongst the lilies or only another phosphorescent illusion of an evening of trickery and pretence, like the bell, costumes, les enfants ? I was glad to find an empty stone bench, shrouded by bulky yews, and steady head and nerves.

Damp smells were rising, intermittently sweet, under richly lit branches. By some rightness of a rococo occasion, soft-footed, unreal, Claire and Sinclair reappeared, their waves implying an indelicate assignation.

‘We wondered,’ Claire seated herself by me, patting a space for Sinclair, who ignored it, glancing at me as if obliging a crony, seedy, not much favoured. ‘We thought,’ she resumed, ‘that we’d lost you.’

Both had beauty, though his was as if contrived from a blueprint and without charm. Silent, he could yet be shrill or insolent. Claire had more warmth, an inner sparkle, her head turned to me alone.

‘Do you get interested in how people say hello or goodbye? The language of hands. Once, they used fans, quizzing glasses, snuff boxes…’

Possibly nineteen, she seemed to be remembering another’s childhood, while Sinclair lowered himself to a deckchair, ostentatiously yawning.

‘We saw you looking too much alone. You looked like a fighter, but Sinclair said you would win the fight but lose the trophy.’

She was grave. Beneath Renaissance display might lurk Victorian Alice, inquiring, fearless, at one with herself and multiple, grotesque metamorphoses, the sad comics and talkative beasts.

Despite his dim repose, Sinclair was fully awake, even on guard. Interrupting, he said, ‘They’re all not weeping for Jerusalem but scared of dropping what they’ve ceased to hold.’ Too glib, as if constantly repeated, this reminder that the two were transient dusk spirits, without part in the morning realm of jobs and taxes. The girl’s smile had uncertain meaning; he was fidgeting to leave, probably to join no dance but to seek another earthbound misfit. Or, unbalanced suspicion warned, to join chauffeurs and waiters easily imagined scavenging the wines and leftovers, hidden by vast cars covered with the dim sheen of dead mackerel. Dolly’s patrician home, through eyes unfocused by drink, was now garish, a décor with nothing behind it. The frail shorthand of trickery.

‘Gaze into the camera and concentrate on, let’s say, Bond, James Bond. You’ll get the likeness of Mr Bond. En air , the soul expands.’

Sinclair’s smile was angled between tease and challenge. Like Claire, he wore what they must reckon country style; bluish jackets, primrose shirts dotted with tiny red circles, spruce, minutely flared slacks, black caps perkily tilted. Thankfully, they had foregone hobbled skirts and Max Factor make-up, though her nails were varnished green; his were not, though as if freshly polished. They were an indoor duo, bred as if for special occasions, their small, fixed eyes, coloured bright but vague, their sharp chins, liable to wither in full light, on these steep, solid hills. Greg, on his farm, muddied, laborious, would spit at their long lashes and prettiness, confident that they would flee at a jerk of his hoe.