Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

In this flamey atmosphere, he was easily, too easily, imaginable as the footballing bully, some medieval quad resounding with ‘Good old Alexei.’

At a distant thud, near silence, unease, until voices clawed back and the dancers restarted their shuffle. Alex was drinking lavishly. ‘There’s supercilious old Woodrow, down in Sleepy Hollow. Not sitting but roosting, as Stevie says. Whirled into hopes of glory by this Cuban pitter-patter. K and K, conmen manning the beaches. They do us good, like wildcat strikes, keeping us on the boil. Even your Nordic intensity sometimes needs ginger. One K, the unfunny comic, the other, the inflated Galahad.’

His grey face slightly smarted, his voice lumbered at me in affectionate protection. Fiery-headed Jason. ‘Resist your inclination to enthrone yourself seriously in your igloo, flogging dead horses so thoroughly that they sit up and neigh. You, too, should stride out and plunder.’ He shook himself like a dog after swimming. ‘Comedy, like marriage, needs space. Time to go. The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’

Yet he remained fixed, fondling a bottle while, on my other side, a girl leant against me, thinly clad, scented. ‘You’re lovely!’ Her whisper velvety, another invitation to plunder, almost irresistible against faces shuttered, eyes set in Molotov concrete, hands scuttling as if in rock pools while piano and sax urged us not forward but to sit content and order more over-priced liquor, safe beneath midnight, targeted London.

Alex pulled me up, to the almost deserted streets, saying nothing until reaching the moonlit river, bypassing several groups staring at a sky still harmless.

After the Chimera fug, we were refreshed by coolness drifting from the estuary. Behind us, boots slurped, mutters followed, then again we were alone.

The silence was abnormal, traffic was stilled though County Hall, Shell Mex, Big Ben still shone, then a starry train rattled, exceptionally harsh, along Hungerford Bridge. Most houses were dark, shrunk into themselves. Such silence forecast a dawn of steel-hatted officials in unknown uniforms. Down-river, beyond bridges dotted with white and yellow, hovered columned flood-light, a beam jewelled as the Reichsmarschall’s baton. Terraces, wharves, the Embankment were motionless. Cranes loomed, gaunt, apocalyptic. Somewhere past St Paul’s, frosty mass, a fire had started. A police launch with a red lamp abruptly roughed the water, and, caught in nacreous light from behind the Festival Hall, an arc of angry gulls, pale commas, wheeled towards Black-friars.

Under builders’ acetylene, Alex’s pitted face was blanched, twisted, atrocious as Danton’s, his hair tumbled patchwork, slow voice troubled. ‘The West fears its own strengths. The worst isn’t from the K twosome but from touch-and-go show-offs like us. Massaging the foolish, convincing the witless, while Castro’s held aloft like some poor vintage Caesar acclaimed by whoever’s seeking salvation. Well, I was once a rebel and with a cause. A bad one. Rebels, from DHL to Californian freak-outs are mostly would-be Caligulas, though without the humour. Who was it that said that one should be serious even at the height of folly? Meanwhile, addicts go hysterical when a painter tells them that an artist is a solitary with something on his mind. So is the nearest burglar.’

We moved on, into darkness, then halted. ‘At Oxford, Erich, I was crazed with incompatibles. Like all bigots, feeling licensed to be saint and criminal. Devoted both to FDR and Stalin. My head thick as pampas with theories, exciting but useless. I sought a mapless ocean while despising the compass. In the army, I was unpopular as a traffic warden. And here we are, a couple of superior dustbins, stranded in what’s been called, quite wrongly, London’s last week. At least we’re not setting the place on fire, quarrelling about milk quotas and the awfulness of parents. My own were rather good. Too busy to notice me, they let me be.’

We were leaning on a parapet. A dim shape floated past. Log? Suicide? A hooter sounded; ordinary, reassuring, though far away, the Soviet ships were advancing through seas mined with deepwater weaponry. Like beasts painted in prehistoric caves, monstrosities from the undergrowth of time, pushing up through cities. By noon, explosion, or someone’s surrender. But Alex’s laugh was again full-blooded. ‘I doubt whether even you knew that crocodiles emit eighteen different sounds. More even than Khrushchev!’

He peered forwards at a beached, toppled barge, resembling not a crocodile but an inert, shadowy whale. ‘You may smile, but before we met at the Chimera I stepped into a church. I needed a particular silence, stiffening our old friends the psychic processes. Gods, like history, make me feel at home in the world. Expelling the slovenly. Lost reputations show the laws of gravity are not mocked. ’Twas Grace That Taught My Heart to Fear . I believe in Good and Evil, in Newman’s aboriginal calamity. I’d enjoy being a well-endowed Benedictine abbot.’

I had impulse to embrace him but feared his English mockery or Caligula humour. Mistaking my hesitation for demur, he continued more emphatically. ‘At least we can round up the reckonings. There was much about our Empire I hated. Hypocrisy, extortions, double-dealing. Yet, what a story it made!’ His profile, hitherto strict, now shifted; turned to me, eyes almost invisible, he was ruminative, less severe.

‘I’d love to make an old-fashioned, Goldwyn movie. Not about some junkie dribbling on the Unknown Warrior’s slab or a transvestite affair in a Manchurian slum but, wait for it, about the Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny. Cast-iron plot, all sides riddled with treachery, fear, cruelty. Siege of Lucknow… split souls, strange loyalties, bloody panorama and human details. The Scottish lassie straining to hear the relief force,’ – he affected an accent soft, sing-song, oddly moving – ‘“Dinna ye hear it… the Pipes o’ Havelock sound!” Guns,’ he resumed, more carelessly, ‘thirst, children, devotion, horror, guile. The officer code, the Sepoy mind. I could smuggle in John Lawrence, Justice on Horseback the Indians called him, with the Koh-i-Noor diamond, very doubtfully acquired, lying forgotten in his pocket. Boarding-school reduced my estimate of fellow creatures, the army rather restored it. I exclude Bond Street Harry, sacked from Sandhurst for wearing mittens. But nothing matters very much, and very little matters at all. And mind this, old lad, never confuse Britain with Englishness.’

As though in myth, in art, frontiers had dissolved. The past was now; primeval Ragnarok loomed, moments were prolonged, hours were shattered by bulletins. The Left continued savaging Kennedy, son of the millionaire ambassador who had so lovingly foretold Britain’s wartime defeat, while the Pact still held; the Right denounced Khrushchev, peasant Butcher of Ukraine. I remembered a verse I had begun, prompted by the vanished Tuileries Palace:

‘High Noon,’ a typist sniggered. ‘Gosh! Gracious!’ Then looked startled, overhearing herself. Someone chattered about codes concealed in telephone kiosks, behind radiators, beneath park chairs, so that normality ceased, all was provisional, each of us wandering Hamlet. Tracked by fate, by doom, by anguished ghosts and plausible, irresponsible kings, entire populations held breath. Richer suburbs appeared abandoned. Walls were match-board, street corners armoured traps, the grey sky curved down to the Line of Steel. Bad policy, a press lord declared, is better than no policy, and a historian reiterated his lifelong thesis that worse than power is powerlessness. From Jersey, a popular novelist gave her opinion, her considered opinion, that danger was wholesome to the unjust spirit.