Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

‘Erich, Kierkegaard may be correct, the unhappy dwell in either past or future, never in the present. I once spent all day hard and wet, about a girl but when we met in the evening I found myself reading a newspaper, thus realizing that all was over. That’ll be your fate with that eldritch pair. Splendid word, eldritch. But they’re not as awful as they seem. They’re worse.’

He had become vehement as a suitor. ‘Their gifts are treacherous. They’re temporary pets, seen everywhere but with no friends. You’re their potluck. We stroke their Fabergé heads but don’t open our front doors. They’ll let you down, plain as a button. Tinselled juvenile leads, in mind and texture, in a play that never gets production. As for you, you should become more a Heinrich der Horrid.’

Could he, in his swagger, resent my straying from him? His possessiveness flattered, then amused.

‘Alex, it’s not only Sinclair…’

‘He’s not a critic, only a wasp. His notion of artistry is to tell a geranium to water itself, then watch it die. He never gets inside words, merely strokes them like peaches, with no more interest in painting than Noel Coward has in Swahili folksongs. He’s off-side, damned, barely legal.’

‘And Claire?’

To utter her name gave a sharp spasm instantly dowsed by his ugly cough. ‘Over her, our sun shines even less. She’s got the balls, of course, one too many. Should you get her clothes off – doubtful as Macmillan’s flair for foreign affairs – you’ll find the mark of Medea. More than dry loins, black toes, lack of vitamin D.’ His insistence could have been that of a lawyer objecting to a bequest to charity. ‘It’s all summed up by Aquinas. Unanswerable.’

‘What is it?’

His coarse grin infuriated. ‘Very sadly, it’s untranslatable. Let’s forget them. When you’re next in your Embassy, you may find the bosses polishing their gunwales. Things are in the wind.’

Things might be in the wind, but colleagues reported nothing. Revising a pamphlet, trimming the Miscellany ’s lay-out, I thought of eldritch . The word opened into the green and unearthly, persisting beneath crisis and turmoil, while courageous human refuseniks perished. A Sinclair risks only a muttered witticism, anonymously denounces a Malraux, a Nansen, at most extreme dances few insouciant steps on the scaffold, certain that he’s unable to die.

Despite Alex, the two hovered near me, in off-moments and midnight hours.

‘We make a family, Erich.’ Sinclair allowed a lazy smile. ‘You may wish to smear our foreheads with elk-blood. And actually…’

‘Actually?’

‘Yes.’

Still uninvited, I inspected their Ebury Street house, in a jumble of small hotels and where the child Mozart had composed early symphonies.

No Claire stood at a window. Provocative by her reticence, she was also competent, reserving tables, booking tickets, checking cinema and late bus times, paying bills.

My attempts at discovering their real natures were stalemated. Alex had correctly pointed to their lack of friends; they needed my company, if only as camp follower and on terms decidedly their own. Or his own. In return, I received his flip strictures delivered with monotonous moroseness, her reserve. I watched more than I listened, hoping a gesture, unconsidered remark or glance would reveal more.

I read little of his criticism, discouraged by his feline talk. He approved Marcel Duchamp’s recommendation that a Rembrandt should be used as an ironing board;T.E. Lawrence was interesting only as a memorial to British duplicity; very few animals felt pain; Bergman’s The Seventh Seal could be forgiven only because it catered for my own ‘solitary and farouche being’. His favourite term of abuse was ‘Harmless’, employed too frequently. I practised Wilfrid’s cryptic, shadowy smile, not to refute him but in hopes of stirring Claire into the outright and rebellious.

Did they share a bed? Had their parents ever hugged, even raised them? I flinched from answers likely from Alex.

They sent me opulent Pralines Leonidas, perhaps knowing my dislike of them. He considered my The Forest Brothers worse than harmless; the perfect liberal Foreign Office brief. Claire only murmured that forests no longer had chance.

Their silences differed, Sinclair’s vindictive or bored, hers inconclusively wondering. Faulkner’s death saddened her; he retorted that it was overdue, his books stifled. She did demur at what he considered the most useful work of art since the tiresome war: this was when a fashionable audience bayed applause for a composer who sat at a piano for a longish time, playing nothing.

Each, like saints and devils, had symbolic colour. His, the artful sheen of midnight marble, hers the subdued gloss of a lawn under cloud. They made a sexless hybrid, an illuminator’s fancy, but, could she but be detached, Claire might be brought into some semblance of a wider day.

Nonsense, I could hear Alex say, you’ll ride the emotions and survive disgracefully.

Sinclair, nevertheless, surprised me by admitting he had a favourite song, a medieval lyric often heard on the BBC Third Programme, blending boys’ voices and deep maturity, tender harmonies and harsh descants, the words disconcertingly obscene.

Another occasion was more startling. Having looked at Claire as if for permission, he hesitated. Always pale, delicate in skin and physique, he seemed, very exceptionally, nerving himself to speak.

‘We had to go north, for an exhibition. Later, we went walka-bout on the moors. And there we saw something. It made us remember you.’ I had to wait, showing and feeling unconcern, while he treasured his treat. ‘Your gold-braided Excellencies will have missed a note if they don’t know it. It wasn’t a Regency parlour lined with Persian lambskin, for Britten and Pears on a spree.’ His little laugh was malicious. ‘No. Not much better. A New Town, probably being raised on Yank money. No roads seemed to lead to it. All access forbidden. One vast aerodrome – I don’t use airport – ugly as a fart. Armed sentries everywhere. It was designed like a Peruvian temple, visible only to eyes in the sky. Locals wouldn’t talk of it, or swore it didn’t exist, but we saw more than we were meant to. We’ve the knack of not being seen.’ His own eyes gloated, but I at once remembered the First Secretary’s hidden diagram, illustrating a hypothetical Britain in atomic crisis.

Realizing he had startled me, Sinclair spoke faster, perhaps more inventively. ‘All around it was white, not quite natural. Like painted snow. Or fungoid grass. Further off, scorched. We met one man, like us, slightly lost. He was scared, said the moor wouldn’t recover, then wished he hadn’t.’

He had embroidered too much. Now, unconvinced, I looked at Claire for tolerant dissent, but she sat in silence, trim, hands folded, as a child might to a story that changes with each telling while remaining believable.

No child, Sinclair was the dwarf who cackles at crossroads, with riddles like traps. He now looked as if about to dance, creamy with satisfaction, eyes as if carved. Even his dark-green tailored jacket seemed to glow. But the more he spoke, the less his impact. He seldom knew how to cut a story. ‘I believe in omens. What we saw, really did see, was one. I can tell you another. Alex has a short lifespan. Outcome of treacherous planets and of having climbed a rocky plinth. At best, he’s got five years. But you, dearest Erich, will last centuries. Longer than the pangs of the Messiah. Though, for Claire and me…’ For that instance, his new, troubled silence humanized him, a critic overtaken by doubts. At the wilful reference to Alex, I wanted Alex’s outdoor spirit, vigorous, if not scatheless.