Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Yet a Sinclair, devious and cold, could outstep any Greg. Brother and sister were very pale, almost translucent, and I remembered Trudi’s fear of ghosts. Contrasted with these ethereal, balletic pubescents, she and Greg were giants, misshapen trolls from a blackened woodcut. So was Alex, blaspheming, shouldering himself head-on through audiences, congregations, football crowds, as he might once have confronted Italians on a bloodied foreshore.

I barely credited the twins’ very existence when not flitting into candle-lit suppers, late-night cinemas, taxis. Sinclair’s eyes were usually half-closed, occasionally brilliant, seldom meeting my own. Hers were more personal, responsive, clouding only when I directly asked her opinion. Brother and sister often gave appearance of having reached different conclusions from identical experience. At Dolly’s, in mild derangement of senses, I judged them playthings of Merlin or Dr Coppelius, to be changed at whim to sprites or leopards. A delusion. Independent, secretive, they might survive Alex.

Eyes like thrown stars , Mr Spender wrote.

Above England, on leafy Surrey heights, Sinclair was unchanged, alternating with rancour and studied boredom. Like a marksman, specialist in the shot in the back, he seldom blinked, seeing more than he would admit. Freelance art critic and designer, he was astringent, frequently spiteful, condemning Kitchen Sink as slabbed ugliness, maintaining that Picasso’s versatility matched his gullibility as spokesman for peace on Russian terms. Accomplished draughtsman and colourist, Sinclair himself had worked on two Sadler’s Wells ballets though refusing to be credited. Proud of his analysis of colours, he had been oblivious to those we had passed in wayside hedges. Fellow art critics exasperated him. ‘Most literary reviewers may at least know how to read.’ He nicely expleted the Kennedys as monied stripteasers, their culture bogus as the supreme whore, Duchess of Windsor.

‘You’ve met her?’

‘Only as much as you’d notice.’

Of Alex, he was less charitable. ‘Your babblemouth father-figure’s a brass top, spinning giddy for good notices. A busybody.’

As always, he spoke gently, slowly, as though speech was an art, acquired with difficulty. ‘He respects Freud. That’s a give-away. The blind man is untrustworthy on quicksand. Freud was ruthless as Gandhi, his vanity larger than Dalí’s, his cures miserable as a Hindu holy man’s spit, his disciples noosed by leptonic jargon. Brassey trips head first over his own thirsty tongue. He sits on a committee – and enjoys it!’ Scorn could go no further, but fatigue dispersed his slow-power vehemence; he shrugged, moved to Claire, who had listened like a careful nurse.

To their art-gallery clique she always introduced me as a writer, meant as compliment, though to him no more superior than the Order of Ranjitsinhji. Literature, he considered chloroform, though he had read widely; she read less, preferring ballet and the Impressionists. She had, however, borrowed my edition of Rannit’s poems, with their crystal evocations of Calypso’s ‘Ogygia’.

He scoffed at my pamphlets as political detritus, ephemeral as Solzhenitsyn. This did not matter, but for her, with snippets about Rose Room, Forest and Lake, Wotan, Lord of War and Music, the dank Conciergerie, empty yet crowded, I implied myself a poet too busy to publish.

Below lay a broad, postcard landscape of hedged meadows, varied as patchwork, bright villages, sunlit steeple, a midget train speeding, remnants of a forest. Behind us, a dew pond older than legions. The sky, still meridian fresh, was looped between quiet, barely populated hills and distant downs. A solitary scab was an ageing concrete tank-trap, useful, Sinclair considered, for Concrete Poets, Kitchen Sink painters and dramatists. For myself, it reminded me of the Embassy map of a clandestine England, redesigned for atomic war, thus speculation of what these placid slopes might conceal. But no, surely not. Merely green profiles carved between blue and gold fathoms of air.

Sinclair was more concerned with bending over a leaf, detached, appraising, approving. Then he straightened. ‘Leaves contain the secret of the universe. I’d like a leaf-shaped box, very small, containing one germ which, should you open the lid, would destroy the world. Try it.’

An unappetizing command or joke. He strolled on. With slim physique enviable to a Leonardo, he must yet see himself not as a lover, a Storm Prince’s mignon , but the Outsider, discussed so seriously in congested cities.

Claire was complete in herself, indeterminate though that self might be. This allowed far more allure than her brother, so talkative about very little.

Up here, high in Surrey, both were weak; a gale would toss them downhill.

Over-sized, sergeant-strong, exhilarated by summer air, walking, new sights, and from abstruse desires, I imagined them naked together, on a black divan, slender legs overhanging, daisy-white buttocks indistinguishable.

Checked by delusion that Sinclair could mind-read, I thought back to their context, the mêlée of Dolly’s Follies, exotic version of what little I knew of English thought: unsystematic but rooted, and, like Shakespeare and Dickens, not cynical but humorously undeceived by outward motive. High commanders played the game at whatever cost, never quite losing it. The question was now how far their troops would follow. Their humour might have some affinity to Estonian.

The game, if game it were, now being played by this precocious pair, had not yet set rules or purpose, though, oddly, they seemed anxious to meet me, perhaps as novelty. Always over-impatient for friendship, like reading poetry too fast, I hurried to obey. Yet Sinclair, in his fretful beauty, was unlikable, an adolescent dandy feigning astonishment or contempt at whatever was said.

We met for a Soho dinner, Cork Street private view, at which he was markedly ignored, a small Hampstead party where aged thinkers unravelled the Infinite by swapping platitudes from Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, and I at once realized that, in the blunt English phrase, we had gate-crashed. American space missions were much derided. ‘America,’ Sinclair, spoon-fed princeling, winced as if at castor oil, ‘should first reach itself.’ He looked around for admiration, though no one appeared to hear.

Claire, prettier, more deep in herself and saying little, was moved only by a Magnani, a Mastroianni, in the cinema they frequented. He unfailingly disparaged movies, his slack mouth wrenched crooked by her enjoyment. When fractious, he irritated by addressing me as ‘Sir’. He appeared to consider me a freak of semi-barbaric Europe damaged by a squalid and unnecessary war, its enormities exaggerated, its veterans charmless, and which, he thought, might well have hastened the death of James Joyce. I was thus an interesting specimen of dumb ox romanticism and Prussian zeal. That I worked for a country non-existent, probably imaginary, endowed me not with fairy-tale glamour but a preposterous gravitas , almost tragic in ponderous absurdity. I needed, perhaps, a sort of protection. Sinclair, without context, had pointed at me and intoned, ‘Dawn over death beds.’

By mid-afternoon, in rebuke of my own sturdiness, they were frequently sinking to rest on mound, stile, tree stump, Sinclair teasing me with questions. Had I travelled much? ‘Travel, you know, needs talent.’ Did I prefer boys? Had I joined the Hitler Youth, and was it sexy? He was less interested in my responses than was Claire, her light eyes seemed following my words. He began speaking of himself and his current interest in Zen. His smile conveyed awareness of superior knowledge. ‘Whoever Knows, does not Tell. Whoever Tells, confesses he does not Know.’ A rebuke to my knowledge of politics, of Rannit.