Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Claire was hunched on a mound, an ingénue Titania blessedly unaccompanied by tutu-clad entourage, though momentarily I saw myself with a head unnaturally hairy and brutish. The louder Sinclair spoke, the more she seemed to withdraw behind serious or downcast eyes.

She was quickly up, leading us through beeches, birds squabbling, the verve of sheer existence. Birds were only birds, the brushwood harmless, the sun simple. Only Sinclair jarred, as if on unstoppable LP.

‘I once thought music the solution, but then I was twenty-three. Now I’m eighteen.’ Again and again he hoped for dissent, quarrel, but received only my discreet smile. I wanted not to hear his prattle but to see this new England: a pond like a blue eye, harvested acres, farmers counting their losses, warm, rich lands over which, through cloud-capes, the Reichsmarschall’s knights had charged towards London.

In mid-sentence, Sinclair was startled by a breeze, sudden as an exclamation. Though it almost immediately subsided, so, for a little, did he, slowing his walk, giving me chance to ingratiate myself with Claire by relating the start of a Siberian poem, Uncle Wind unrolling his precious ball of white silk. Pulled off print, however, it sounded whimsical, childish, and I desisted, though her shy, tilted face was, I convinced myself, encouraging.

Our path was now up, now down. Back with us, Sinclair began identifying moths swarming above a decayed branch. ‘That’s Death Head. Crimson under-wing. The swarthy ones… quite rare.’ Cupping hands over a pallid Ghost Moth, gratified by his expertise, he showed me its streaks, before dropping it, dead, like soiled tissue. Claire was reproachful but dreamily, without force. He was too easily imaginable, quietly, gleeful, kicking away a blind man’s stick.

‘We’ll go.’ But, reaching a cropped, clover-covered bulge tapped by a broken stone, he again stopped, as if greeting something, or someone, familiar. His eyebrows contracted, dark on the unlined face, which, like the sister’s, remained dry and pale, despite the heat that was soaking me.

‘The Invisible Man.’ His affected, birdlike croak was as if winning some fourth-grade dare, before, to a class not backward but dull, he explained that Truth was the firebird, unlikely to be seen, never to be caught, though a feather, still glowing, was occasionally found. I judged him striving to imitate some favourite character in juvenile fiction: insolently know-all, annoyed by rules, success, the existence of others. Claire was both accepting and protective, difficult, probably impossible, to separate from him.

‘Better, Erich, a shining glimpse than a task force nothing.’

We were heading towards another small group of beech and oak, constellation of green and dark brown. ‘Trees’ – he was inflated by the insights he wished me to envy – ‘should relate to the body. Like archery. Archery’ – he addressed only me, the barbarian – ‘holds all of yourself in complete balance, so that you acquire perfect selfhood. Or should do,’ he amended, as if realizing that he must have sounded as if reading from a guidebook. His smile, though, a thin curved rim, doubted whether I was capable of glimpsing any archer. A correct supposition.

‘If you really know and understand your body, Erich, you possess all. What your cumbersome stage-manager Wotan never achieved, despite all help from that bore Wagner. Under hypnosis even an ignorant tramp can utter unknown language, quantum data, see marvels with bandaged eyes.’

Undeniably incapable of such feats, I was sceptical about his own strength to pull an adult bow. He might dance on a toadstool, but privation, muggery, threat from a bayonet would extinguish him easily as he had the Ghost Moth.

My expression must have discouraged him. Changing tactics, he went appeasing, flirtatious, almost affectionate, thus more suspect. ‘I’m only at the start. But I can control my hands when they’re disobedient.’ These hands, evidently obedient, well tapered as if for Central Casting, he pointed down at the nearest village, mellow, drowsy.

‘Rustic charms! Little England’s excuse. But milk and bacon aren’t steak.’

That he ever devoured steak was improbable as von Karajan dancing cancan.

Claire was again a little ahead and I hastened after her, expecting the coolness of the little wood ahead.

In ancient tradition, twins had uncanny aura, like cripples and the red-headed, like changelings and May-tide children in Thuringian folklore, beguiling creatures, no pure children of light but off-beam, from dew, moon, shadows. Yet a conceit ludicrous in this travel agent’s afternoon, a drool over epicene kids very much of today.

Claire at last spoke, returning to an earlier question.

‘I would hear the street cry “Any Old Iron?” and thought it must mean unwanted children for sale.’ Her laugh, though small, was always more mature than Sinclair’s snigger, sometimes irking him into calling her Mummy.

Musing, she said, more to the turf than to me, ‘Also, there was a song. Listen.’ Not singing, but in the same near-whisper, she recited:

More normally, she said, ‘It upset me. Where could they go?’

Sinclair finished what must have been familiar. ‘I can tell you. Where else could they go but to a wretched hut on the very edge of a canyon. They would be pushed inside, the front door locked. The back door…’ His sibilant tone implied a consequence both fatal and deserved.

She drooped, then looked at me, as if to a referee, but neither of us spoke.

And then . Trees were closing together, leaves were tiny shields silvered by the light. I uttered some banality about the powers of trees, the Black Forest resisting Rome, which Sinclair accepted as challenge to his own erudition. ‘That Berlin rampart, Erich, is less powerful than you think. It’s little more than Kurfürstendamm cake. Anyway, walls look both ways, like cross-eyed Picasso.’ My disinclination to argue sharpened his acumen. ‘I can also tell you to avoid our most expensive shrink. Lance-Courier. A natural hangman. He charged very hard cash for telling a Bankside dwarf that she needed not him but a vet.’

He might be intending to convey some meaning quite different but hot, restive, I could keep interested only in the valleys and white roads. And Claire.

She understood. ‘One more pull-up, Erich, before the wood. Then down to the farm. We’ve been here before. Farmer’s wife, giving you real English teatime. Scones, cake, red jam, cream.’

Sinclair, upstaged, pretended to assess another valley, one side blazing, the other in shadow. ‘There’s a church to see if you don’t want tea. Early English with some Romanesque brickwork, Perpendicular pillars with quatrefoils, long flushwork panels. The river dries up every seventh year. Rather poor taste, you’ll think. Not everyone knows why. And deep in the rowans traces of a sacred dike.’

‘Sacred to whom?’

Eager for tea, I was also at last to learn something interesting, but he only pouted, then put fingers to his lips. Sunlight leapt the hills as a cloud drifted, the path dividing at the plantation edge. We could bypass a thick smudge of brambles and descend or push through to some further track beyond the trees. Claire was insistent. ‘Can’t we go down? We should hurry.’ But, sing-songing ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today’, he was already pushing aside thorns, nettles, overhanging branches wrapped with misty cobwebs.

Sunlessness enveloped us, not lifted by Sinclair calling back that the sun was now denser, brighter, than ever before recorded. Changing pitch, he hummed: