Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Crowds, in Haymarket, Mall, Parliament Square, were patient as horses or as if secreting some craving for punishment. The philosopher, seen at Dolly’s Follies, wrote that existentialism was being proved and disproved.

In the Embassy we discussed, answered telephones, listened, while outside footballers trained in the park, men left for the office, children were washed, fed, mended, as they had been even during Terror. Parliament debated animal rights, awaiting Front Bench announcements that did not come. The Security Council vouched for twenty-four Soviet warships flanked by submarines and armed tankers now within eight hours of Cuba, to collide with a hundred American vessels protected by a thousand bombers, figures angrily or nervously disputed. A young dramatist read aloud on radio a sonnet, of flashpoint ripping open the planet.

Ambassador August Thoma, calm as marble, warned us to expect a Russian grab at West Berlin, revenging the air lift, should American paras descend on Cuba. From Moscow, a general gave voice, ‘We will first target the jackal, London.’ Our minds turned over, shrinking from chasms within.

Crisis, mounting for so long, revived the Goebbels idyll of a fearful brilliance cascading over New York, the skyscrapers swaying, sagging, crumbling in a roar unheard beneath the flames, then a new blaze, now orange, now bone-white as the moors around that phantom, northern ‘aerodrome’, then a petrified waste, with shadows scorched on a few concrete shards.

Moods were changeful, weathercock. Levity was roused by a tabloid report of falcons ranged from Scarborough to Yarmouth, to attack pigeons attached to explosives or germ phials, at once refuted by the London Zoological Society as impractical, nonsensical and, furthermore, un-British.

Work ended early, and I was at once pushing through slow-footed pedestrians, past the news stalls – Crisis Latest . Fingers on the Trigger . Mobilization? – towards Ebury Street. Larger crowds were overflowing on to roads, heaving, drifting into Trafalgar Square, attracted by hearing that a giant television screen was being erected beneath the Column. Low sunlight sharpened faces almost to the bone.

I hurried, though for what? To offer useless protection, absurd consolation? Thoughts blinked, without answers. Beauty, ugliness, deceit, pleasure had lost meaning.

Side streets were eerily lengthened, most shops and dwellings boarded up, perhaps against looters. Snipers might be concealed on roofs. Only cats seemed alive and the hum of unseen cars.

At my ring, nothing stirred from within. Finally I knocked, and the door immediately opened. Sinclair, dapper as a chorus-boy, barefooted, in fluffy, tawny dressing-gown, ivory wrist bracelet, gold mandala on black chain. Not speaking, without apparent recognition, even paler than usual, as if powdered, he allowed me into a large, white studio, tidy as a dictionary, with black curtains and carpet, three gilded chairs, smoked glass, oval table, a dart-board. By the window, Claire, in silky, old gold wrap. Her expression, flat and neutral on a washed-out face, greeted me, not as an unknown but as if I were a social worker or elderly relative, familiar but scarcely welcome. The silence lay between the three of us, an instrument waiting to be plucked. Some enormity must long ago have taught them to trust no one.

Already superfluous, I fumbled for an opening. The smile starting from Sinclair showed lips artificially red. ‘Ah, yes. Erich! Squashmothers’ bouncer-boy. Steadfast and without reproach. Herr von Geneva. You’re primed to defend us against Yank banshee and barbarian Tarn,’ forcing sight of myself as irredeemably dull, unsuggestive as a worn, all-in wrestler.

The three of us stood silent, even a breath a surreptitious threat or reproach, until Claire, barely awake, seated herself near the window, face averted.

Sinclair’s eyes. Mottled glass. ‘At best, Erich, a few bombs will screw up some palaces of culture and British Council parasites. You’re right. This country’s finished, not before time.’

‘I have not said that.’

‘Actually, you believe you’ve said it.’

Undersized, negligible, he was a wisp of spite posing to charm those too busy to look.

‘My turn.’ From a fancy bag he picked a dart, orange feathered, and made as if to aim at me so that I instinctively ducked, the dart speeding over me into the board’s centre.

Indifferent, he turned away. ‘How I hate noise. The rattle and squeak.’ He looked past Claire, into the street, soundless as an abandoned back lot.

Could he be sourly, sulkily, jealous of his sister? But, as if his throw had dislodged rancour, he gave his most practised smile. ‘Season in hell, isn’t it! The week’s been like a murderer at the dinner table. All guests know it but none his identity. Rare but not rare enough.’

He crossed to remove the dart, caressing it with clever-clever fingers. ‘Champions win before they even throw. Inner direction clear and clean as bamboo.’

His pause invited friendly question, even admiration, Claire glanced at us in turn. Missiles, explosive fleets, the puppetry of crisis, shrinking to a futile three-hander in a white room.

With gambler’s deliberation, he selected another dart, hoped, vainly, to see me brace myself, then, with the languid shrug of a dandy, jabbed it into his wrist. But no trickle of blood or alarmed wail from Claire; the dart was collapsible, a stage prop.

‘Another’s pain should never be welcome. It usually is.’ He preened himself on nonsense, then, as if I had only that instant arrived, bowed. ‘Regrets. It’s bathtime for baby.’ The smile had degenerated to simper. ‘Ties will be worn, decorum preserved. Ties for the tidy. I’m dining with moustaches. Clubland warriors.’

Critikin on the make. Anything more? No guidance would come from Claire, now standing, apart, brooding, bound to him by whatever offshoots of blood and necessity.

At the door, he regarded me with a polite recognition, small, slender half-man, then lightened, was almost radiant, with the silent whoop of a child finding a coin. ‘You’re really more than them, Erich. Thousands of them already here, on the hunt. Even Ukrainians. The Eighth Galician Division. To quote the monks, Throwmerunapiece.’

One finger on the door, he was reluctant to leave us together. His legs fidgeted, as if about to skip. ‘You’re not a wooden block. But there’s a time to go thinking. People should be silent when they weep. In music, the simplest…’

In feeble crucifixion parody, he spread arms, head tilting as if too heavy. ‘Don’t think I’ve flipped. I’ll be back, like Doug MacWhatsit, the Jap-baiting clown.’

Losing poise, moving as if by remote control, he left for the stairs. Involuntarily, I felt a sudden poignancy, then a twinge of self-pity. Product of European disintegration, I had hankered for romantic England, inordinate love, and attracted only misfits.

Claire’s hands were quivering like broken birds, her face a waste between darkish page-boy hair and within the wrap now cheap against the stark white, a body tremulous, feathery.

Very tentative, she stepped towards me but stopped, as if at water, not Rheingold glimmer but a soggy ditch. She was almost inaudible.

‘What will happen to us?’

Us . The ambiguity revived a flicker of desire, then failed. Still distanced, she was calm but spiritless, as if dutifully reading aloud.

‘I don’t have much left. Feelings. Certainties. Even things to admire. It has been a long while since a stranger stopped our father in the street and asked permission to shake hands with a gentleman so beautifully dressed.’

Her stance awaited permission to continue, though I was at once convinced that the gentlemanly father was a charlatan, child-abuser. Whatever the truth, he was more plausible than my Surrey hills fantasy of twins born without parents, surviving on honeydew amid laurel and myrtle, vulnerable only to sunrise that could strike them to dust. Silliness is its own reward.