Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

In near darkness, the sky mere chinks, broken porcelain, the air damp and malodorous, this was no enchanted wood near Athens but an annoying obstruction, until Claire thrilled me by suddenly clutching my hand, with Sinclair invisible. She must feel the chill, fear being stung or slipping on mud. Perhaps more. Only Sinclair, beyond us, and our own thrashings through undergrowth disturbed a solitude where no wing twitched, no dry leaf clicked, no insect shrilled from dock and fern and blotched grass. Though fairly ordinary, the place was simultaneously irregular, untoward, like finding one’s signature in a stranger’s book.

Claire might be reacting from some previous experience here, not alarming but depressing.

We stumbled towards light and found Sinclair, now silent, where trees had thinned, standing within a group of short, elephant-grey stones, cracked, lichened, the air tauter, sourly masculine, heavy with stale seasons.

‘Now’ – he lost disdain, had scarcely suppressed eagerness – ‘you’re here, Erich. The exact centre of Sanctuary Wood.’ In his new mood he may not have seen Claire’s hand still in mine, and she now pulled it away, as if repelled by the stones, thrusting through foliage, explaining nothing, leaving Sinclair in some private communion, deserted by Mummy.

She relented when, in the warmth, the freshness, we saw him slip from the shadows, discontented, aggrieved at least by my failure to rhapsodize his stones. Claire remained the elder, the capable, almost skipping to tap his chest and, in some nursery code, exclaim, ‘Peacock!’

‘Peacock, yourself.’ Mollified, he uttered a harsh screech, before courteously including me, said, ‘Lush eternal. Out of body isn’t out of mind. Out, Out, my Pretty Parson’, as though unwrapping an arcane secret.

Against décor of sunlight rippling like pennants along the line of hills, they bowed to each other, decorative extras on the verge of a pas de deux , their smiles as if pencilled, voices high and identical chanting, ‘Seven for a secret that can’t be told.’

Like the castaways from Meinnenberg, they were far away.

Easily fatigued, Sinclair was first to desist. Formally saluting sky and hills, he remembered me, off-handedly remarking, ‘Having no heart to show, he bares his teeth’, as if not wholly relinquishing private trance.

Claire, already matter-of-fact, restored the solid dimension of farmer’s wife, red jam, butterflies above lavender. Sinclair, however, had not finished. ‘Look!’ Holding before me an inked sketch, myself above the dwarf stone circle, carelessly impressioned, a mass of black slants, tall and bulky, merging with leaves and shadows, almost a tree myself. Held to the sunlight, I was weakened, mouth slackened, shoulders as if padded, several lines of middle age until, shaded by his other hand, these vanished.

Before I could take it, he slid away, crumpling it.

‘Next week, Erich… the Day of the Comet. Violet ribbons, exquisite brocade. Your birthday.’

True, though I had not mentioned it. Firefly child, he was pleased. One up, and Claire said gently, ‘At Dolly’s we recognized you at once.’

Throughout, his hothouse grace, her catwalk poise, would remain as out of place as Swan Lake in a second-feature western.

In dreams, I was at once climbing and descending empty hills, stones growing faces, one of them my own, Sinclair’s drawing, thinned, scarred, aged. Undeterred, I returned to the Embassy refreshed and energetic. The second Miscellany boded well. Writers sought me, accepted criticism, the occasional rejection. One poem pleased Mr Tortoise.

My birthday passed unnoticed. Reluctantly admitting some minute upset, I busied myself with the latest leak, a forthcoming British query at the UN Assembly, of the legality of the Soviet Baltic annexations. The Spectator commissioned me to write on Moscow’s supposed offer, at Nuremburg, to acquit Ribbentrop in return for his refusal to confess the Secret Protocol.

Another pamphlet, examining Forest Brothers, had flavour of an obituary. Contacts with Estonia were ceasing, one partisan captain exposed as a Russian plant.

I still delayed application for British citizenship, partly through dislike of the irrevocable and finalized, partly to lingering belief in some idyll beyond nationality and flags. Father had spoken of Stoics, recognizing each other by no more than a particular poise, smile, tone of voice.

Those first months in London still appeared stage-fire and grotesque villainy. The surreptitious footfall on the stairs, the shadow in the car park, the dangerous balcony, the exaggerations of solitude and of clutching a dead past. Alex, with sea breeze buoyancy, affected anxiety for my future.

‘Don’t be fooled, old lad, by bogus cream-cake messengers tickling your imagination, not your horse sense. Don’t be too scatheless – though I’ve never been quite sure what this means. You’ll never be, yes, catonic, but more fierce than you actually are. No one is less besotted by some ponce maestro or dotty Herr Doktor crouching behind the arras. You’ll never commit hara-kiri for imaginary treasure or sacrifice a kingdom for Bessie Couldn’t Help It. But…’ The juicy voice fell into solemnity almost certainly genuine. ‘Erich, I’ve seen soldiers, experienced, tall and spiked as hat stands, in battle, with loaded guns, yet suddenly unable to press the trigger. The Colonel raised an eyebrow. And I myself, when I first played on Big Side, ran up to bowl a stinker, and the ball just stuck to my hand. I couldn’t deliver, was changed to stone. I know writers of real talent but who’ll never publish, scared of submitting their work. Yet they, all of us, started as if marching to Gorky’s proclamation that he came into the world in order to disagree. But you’re different, slightly annoying though it is to admit it. You don’t change, despite your fits of wishful thinking. Spendthrift. I won’t say more.’

Unhesitatingly, he said more. ‘You mustn’t wilt like a dahlia insufficiently strawed. You’ve long realized that inflexible love starts up the Inquisition. You’ve got yourself into position of attack, so don’t ever surrender it.’

I assumed him softening me for a knock-out. But no. ‘Your publications are breaching our insularity. Very good. But don’t rate we Brits too low, too high. Did you read of me with old Maugham yesterday? He almost lost his teeth blasting New Towns, Angry Young Men and Porn Playwrights. New Universities he thought contradiction in terms. Calling them factories for the unthinking. He’d probably been invited to endow a Chair for Knitting. He wondered whether Winston’s interest in art was mere zest for assaulting a defenceless canvas. Afterwards, I wanted to play in the nursery.’

‘But were you ever a child?’

‘Intermittently. Wild Wood days.’ His unruly head sagged, though his voice held steady between badinage and crafty affection. ‘You yourself, Erich, you arrive uninvited, you make good at nobody’s cost. High praise. Myself, well, I’m me. Almost better. Every day leaps into clamour of minor miracles. Early-morning radio told me that a Californian computer has calculated that the Great War never happened.’

As if playing a card, he leant forward. ‘You’re visibly on the up. But I’m really jammed in the Jazz Age, which your home never knew. Saxophones and midnight frolics. Jade cigarette holders, Gatsby’s blue lawn, dancers like white moths amongst stars and champagne.’Worried, he muttered, ‘So bloody few at the funeral. I’m biting my own elbow.’

Unlike many compatriots, he always used ‘I’, never the defensive ‘one’. His face, though, so pocked, prematurely lined, its teeth so ragged, was as if depleted, by some faulty connection, and I remembered an Estonian belief that elves had once been giants.