Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Not tender, not encouraging, I was merely embarrassed, as I had been when Wilfrid introduced me to a blind man. She was near tears.

‘We’re poorly bred. Neither of us can…’ Defeated, she contrived an apologetic smile, straightening her Queen of Sheba garment. ‘Erich, try to be more grateful to yourself.’

Signal for my departure.

Back in Guilford Street I tried to compress conflicting thoughts, shamed by my unresponsiveness, my treachery, almost limbless in an apathy immune to midnight bulletins and the periodic roar of planes. A U-2 spy plane was missing, de Gaulle was orating against Ahmed Ben Bella, the Russians were within sight of Cuba. Then the landlady, who had not risked retiring to bed, called me to the telephone, to hear Claire’s imploring outcry, telling me of Sinclair’s arrest.

High walls protected us from goats, neighbours, the nagging mistral. Also, we had many trees: planes, Spanish oaks, a few palms, magnolia, rowan – bane of the witches. Also lemon and cactus, emblems of fiery suns and rites more cruel than bullfight, and Basque or Algerian terrorism. Sheets of blossom, green, then reds and golds, accompanied the fountain’s murmur, the bird’s flutter. Undisturbed even when wind leapt from the sea, we were open only to the sky.

Despite such peace, all was in surreptitious movement, like a clock. Sunlight grappled with shadow, colours shifted, so that green rims and yellow surfaces glittered while a branch, a stone seat, faded. Garden scents mingled with those from hills, soft air rested now on pearl-grey water, now on scarlet, glossy petals. With so much branch and leaf under rich Mediterranean blue we could step from noon into dusk, from luminous shade to dappled clarities. In moonlight, all rejoined in massed yet skeletal silver that sea-mist could transform to a maze. Patterns were readable as a book. Under cloud, marigolds lapsed into moon-daisies, a marble Hermes, smiling at secret motives, could dissolve into the shimmering laurel, which, I joked, Nadja polished before breakfast.

We had never wished to observe all at a glance, preferring the half-glimpsed, suggestive, surprising, like those side alleys of Vermeer and de Hooch. Imagination peoples deserts. We had tamed wilderness into leafy aisles, arched side chapels, hedged confessionals, vistas arresting the light, hinting at more than they first revealed. Awareness of the sea heaving far below was countered by the shadows, striped tints, unexpected angles, the gaps fruitful in gardens as in people. Comprehension – Beauty’s love for the Beast, Theseus’ treachery, Matisse, Rilke – was best approached by the slow, the oblique. From lacunae came discussion, debate. What happened to Lazarus afterwards ? Did mythical descents to the Underworld require further interpretations? From such talk we lived both in and through each other.

Summer had returned, perfectly launched, laden with flowers, deep colours, sunsets of long, bee-buzzing afternoons, the toneless drone of cicadas. Heliotrope turned with the sun, lingering in fierce, mustard slats before sinking into crimson afterglow. Closing eyes, I could almost feel colours drifting against me: mauve water-lilies, blue and red geranium, rough at noon, smoothed by twilight, when poplars stilled, the moth flew above dark red Ingrid Bergman roses and bats looped between the laurels.

Dropping my book, savouring woodiness of box-hedge and phlox, I noticed yet again how Jules’s mowing brightened the air, like rain purifying coastal lights usually gaudy as costume jewellery flaunted in the rash of pleasure resorts which the Nazi invaders had called a perfumed ghetto.

Along the coast decayed fishing ports, villages, châteaux were now marinas, gasoline complexes, candied hotels, beach huts, wedding-cake casinos, Club Med marzipan bungalow estates, golf clubs, a bright frieze of villas, Moorish, Grecian, Hollywood, pinnacled, domed, castellated, gleaming between spurs of palm, tamarisk, orange, bougainvillaea, facing a sea often radiant, always polluted, massed above NATO sonics, submarines and a wrecked plane with nuclear weaponry. Pink glimmered on headlands, the sands beneath crowded with swimmers equipped with nets, tridents, masks, flippers, water skis.

Nature was conscripted into soundless warfare. The nearest bird, dog, cat, dolphin might carry Semtex or microphone. Also, a children’s theme park was famed for illicit sale of Xanax, Valium, morphine, Prozac.

The littoral, source of myth and commerce, had been softened to foppish playgrounds for sun addict, surfers, skin divers, gamblers, footballers and pensioners. Near us, an Italianate launderette and jardin publique had replaced cottages painted by Dufy and where a veteran, born 1870, was christened Plébiscite and several successors Libération.

Like fugitives from plague, we had sanctuary from the shiny cavalcade of cars swarming between Nice, Menton, Italy, to son et lumière at Monte Carlo, to a Cocteau chapel, a Picasso home, to prettified villages or an hour of absinthe and losses at a casino.

Reading, strolling, watching a sulphur-yellow butterfly or gold-rimmed cloud, I was what Father called a Faulenzer , idle bag of bones. We could not readily define neurons and, though respectful, were not envious of two passing Swedes in light-green, perma-creased suits, teeth glittering on ochred faces under fleecy hair, who, in an hour, calculated Mexican oil reserves to the last barrel. We eschewed the Global Village, microchip gadgetry, biotechnology, multifarious busyness within which physicists separated genetic acids, scrutinized plasmas, created pills to outwit Fate. More immediate were North African alcaids huddled in the Old Port and Lebanese with vivid eloquence and morals, failing to sell us ten acres of the Sahara.

After northern greys and sodden greens, the south touched me dead centre: shocks of fiery sunflowers lolling by a road, dew still shining on torrid cow-meadows, mottled blue-and-white seas, red roofs and green shutters, terraced vines twisted by mistral.

Many hills, florid, bare, ransacked for long-vanished fleets, sloped to the sea as if for coolness. Some retained straggling trees, were former refuges for Maquis snipers and allegedly still sheltered illegal immigrants and refugees from the Politics of Understanding. More discernable, wartime feuds festered within tourist scenery, one family remaining ostracized for betraying a Jewish family hitherto unpopular. Chromium, plastic, artificial intelligence had yet to subdue hunting instincts.

Hinterlands were never crushed by Rome, monarchy, anarchist communes, squatters. In summer, men descended, in imitation peasant attire, selling fruit, begging or standing silent, baleful, clutching a mule or rusty bicycle, shreds of a dispensation which New Europe’s hygiene and educational regulations were pledged to eliminate.

Frenchmen, our friend Alain said too often and with some pride, are like brothers: they hate each other more than their enemies.

Behind the hills and remote, scantily charted valleys, white mountains were sharp against the blue or blocked by storms and mist, at other times seeming to advance. I never approached them, never losing horror of isolated peaks, deadly chasms, silences freezing the bone, bequeathed by German movies.

For long weeks, the sea, curving between cliffs, would be exquisitely calm, polite, tints keeping pace with the sky, until abruptly tumbling, darkening, flecks of silver rattling the shore, and as swiftly flattened, scrawled with golden lines at evening, primrose at dawn.

Such was montage for Nadja, tall by waves, beside a groyne, under a palm. Her daytime kiss or embrace, always rare but never perfunctory, could alter landscapes. With her, stone, flower, water were new, her talk a remedy against fossilization, memories over-adhesive. I believe in yesterday , the Beatles still moaned. Though no man is an island, most are peninsulas tied both to dates and events, many painful, and to the inexorable now . Nevertheless, within our walls, by Nadja’s work, the quiet delights of a garden, music, books, we were protected. A greeting on the road, the arrival of swallows affected us more than a hijack, reputed murder of a Pope, the sorrows of Indonesia, the resurgence of international students – Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible:Sex, Drugs, Treason. ‘Milksops,’ grumbled our neighbour, Dick Haylock. Brecht’s thin voice lingered, ‘Civilians are guilty.’