Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

There was no hurry to know her more precisely than it was to finish an exacting, very enjoyable book. Indeed, she was a book, rare but not antique, elaborately bound, written in language I imperfectly understood, often to be put down, for query, rereading, repetition of delight. A book without message or moral but inexhaustible.

Language could be inadequate, my sensations at times analogous to birds that, in medieval belief, could fly into heaven but were powerless to report what they had seen.

An old château stands outside Quebec, with five courtyards and numerous rooms. Likewise, Nadja possessed selves, some free to sky and light, others locked, desolate, forbidden. A ripple of laughter or indignation could abruptly end in silence, never sullen, but meditative, cautious, perhaps painful, a reticence that enhanced the mystery that sustains love. Direct questions were best avoided. Those most important in my life had been conspicuously incomplete.

Often she seemed one move ahead in an intricate game. In Sweden, after a supposed rebuff, I resolved to ignore her telephone calls. None came. To disregard her letters. None were delivered. Eventually, I had to seek her out.

She spoke of poems she would like to write, though they remained only titles: ‘The Garden’s Retort’, ‘The Barn’, ‘Hangers-On’.

‘Erich, there are always hangers-on. At ceremonies, in offices, at bars. The credits are longer than the story. We do not know who they are, what they do, the producers who produce the producers. Gossiping, intriguing or just looking. Bad smells of the day. Toads in lace and shirtfronts. Like selfish kings.’

She pondered Like ; magic key transforming clouds to souls, a drum to a chief, as a pencil alters a sun to a skull, to a swastika, forest to brothel, dome to a virgin, a flat, empty terrace to Death.

A Paris song, ‘Knock on the Barn Door’, had agitated her, beneath her composure; she said nothing but, in Sweden, more to herself than to me, murmured about smoke and a barred door. Also she disliked fire; in a grate, in a spirit lamp. Though she was not herself Jewish, she might remember Germans, or Polish endeks , burning Jews in a barn.

Laughing at her absurdity, she flinched at moonlight through glass, while gaily pleading Novalis’s epigram, compact as a bud, that the only truth is that which in time and place never occurs.

I could see her hunting naked in a midnight wood or, spear aloft, atop a temple, gazing seawards. But her smile was almost a grin. ‘Your sexual fantasies, monsieur, cannot always be obeyed.’

Bad dreams were one reason for her sleeping alone. She refused to touch dead birds, disliked crossroads but could laugh at her obsessions, publishing a spoof comparison of Hollywood stars to Mystery candidates: studio initiation, ritual rebirth by cosmetics, surgery, new name, before acquiring illumination or, failing the final test, sinking to the Underworld.

‘Only once, Erich, have I been really frightened. A peddler came, offering nylons. Nylons! What paradise! It was illegal, so we had to meet him secretly, amongst high corn. Then, horror, a soldier rose up, red-capped, red-starred, enormous. My blood really did freeze. One could be shot for speculation, as they called it. I was actually holding the nylons, but he only asked how much I wanted. I could have kissed him. But,’ her hand became a fist, ‘not liking infection, I did not.’

My volume of Estonian lament verse, given me in Canada by Arved Viirlaid, she found valuable:

Once she mentioned ‘my father’s wife’, adding, though reluctantly, ‘Father was an architect. Handsome, like his buildings. He probably loved me but never said so. Never at all.’

Alexei Karenin. Much she never divulged to me. Especially to me.

In lovemaking, we both relished some pain but, after vigorous grippings, scratchings, bitings, thrustings, we easily resumed banter. The promiscuity, safeguarded by the Pill, not yet smirched by new disease, lightly practised on plage and meadow, we had no need to join. We learnt from each other. ‘That’s what you like,’ she murmured, offering it. No Snow Queen, she would artfully rearrange her bedroom, like a movie director stimulating desires by subtle disposition of light, mirror, colour. Lust could waylay me at a party, as she gleamed in low green gown, amusing yet reserved, lifting her dark head, smiling a reply to what had bored her.

Unpredictable, after a serious dissention about very little, she had hurriedly withdrawn, returning with an envelope. I feared my dismissal but found a drawing of herself, naked, in demure fun parodying the classical pose by shielding her crotch with an invitation card.

Her laughter, itself frequent, like her tears, could disconcert, as at news of Alex, killed crossing the road to avoid cutting an old friend who had treated him badly. I had always failed to convey him as anything but a ramshackle Englishman, covering a mean heart with swagger and chatter. ‘Your Mr Alex…’ It sounded disreputable. She could not distinguish the coughing, obdurate fellow queuing in frozen London, in Hour of the Wolf, for a last pilgrimage for Sir Winston. Writing an obituary in parts harsh, he had ended with the old warrior’s plea, never to flinch, weary or despair.

‘Might not Mr Alex have had one face too many?’

Despite slang dated as a circus, his voice remained vibrant, assertive, a complicity against dullness, as he recalled the boy Ziegfeld selling tickets to fellow pupils for an exhibition of invisible goldfish. Dying, he mumbled that, on the whole, he had treated life rather well.

Nadja knew my fear of borrowing too much light from others, the pathology of the semi-finalist scared of winning. For Wilfrid, she had respect, though grudging, suspecting my gullibility while relishing his favourite Chinese saying: Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away.

Once, abruptly, throatily, she said, ‘I would not be surprised if Chekhov was not his favourite.’

True. He had relished exceptions, oddities of circumstance, endings that could be beginnings. Like Paris, our own district provided a live mosaic of incongruities. As if in a theatre, we saw a stately Austrian slowly, creakily, lower himself on to his silk hat, a prim American idealist opening her umbrella, unaware that it concealed a half-eaten melon, the Spanish waiter at Antibes with a perpetual response, ‘No Problem, No Waiting’, applied to the loss of a spaniel, a sunset, the deathbed of a Pope, a platoon of ducks, marshalled like delinquents on parade, before one comfortably at rest. One favourite exception was Luisa, hunched, withered, solitary, with legs wrapped in newspaper. She claimed to have been personal maid to the last Queen of Portugal, a status we had no means of disproving. Nadja would listen to her reminiscences, oblivious to the squalor of her cabin, but interested in the cracked photographs of King Manuel, Wilhelm II, Franz-Josef, Edward VII, inscribed with such endearments as ‘To darling Luisa’. All in identical handwriting. In previous existence she claimed to have been a hare. Alain was censorious. ‘No asset. A creature of many limitations.’

Socially adept, Nadja was seldom sociable, preferring to sit quietly in the garden. ‘Stillness creates soul,’ Father said.

We were too autonomous to be much liked in a colony mostly of British expatriates, ageing so rapidly that Alain named the place Departure Lounge. German tourists were numerous, noisy, in ugly shorts, though French estate agents adroitly frustrated their attempts at land purchase. Of Americans, Dick Haylock was sniffy. ‘Verbal gadgetry. Wisecrack culture.’

Of immediate neighbours, the men were mostly retired, the women, several ex- dames de carrière , were not, in Nadja’s phrase, cuntworthy. We shamelessly preferred vintage wine in cut glass to airport coffee in cardboard, eating at home to fast-food joints, books to television, despite my addiction to old movies. Worse, we saw our acquaintances as sleepy fruits in a moribund orchard: at Terror , they would jump, at Love , lower their eyes, going early to bed while, in jazzy, hedonistic towns, the young saw green suns, crystal explosions, violet harvests sprouting through the cosmos.