Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Nadja was envied, not for her charm, often inoperative, or her beauty, frequently chilled, or her wit, too caustic, but for what she once called her invisible limp, potent by being indefinable.

‘You’re both such old friends…’ Dick Haylock could begin. ‘Could you possibly…’ Their bungalow was noted for its odour, that of furniture polish laced with beef stew. Dick’s assiduity in lending money was attributed to his pleasure in showing cheques drawn on Coutts Bank, with royal connections. I tolerated them more easily than Nadja, always suspecting the English were more devious, Machiavellian, cabbalistic, than they usually were. Actually, the Haylocks were simple to a degree of near lunacy. Daisy was saddened by the ingratitude of birds, taking bacon rind as if by right. Her most vivid occasion was evidently not marriage but when in childhood she saw, or thought she saw, a gold-crested bunting.

Thick-set, in too youthful polka-dot, last week she had shyly taken my hand. ‘I once believed I deserved the very best. But where is that girl now?’ The very best might not have included Dick. I gave my most bucolic smile, assuring her that I knew what she meant. Her worn face under the fair, dyed hair strengthened indignantly. ‘My dear Erich, you certainly do not.’

The French were mostly polite but inaccessible. Many farmers and black-marketers had resented Libération for depriving them of high prices extorted from the Germans and were still rumoured to pay protection money to Red Maquis veterans, expert blackmailers.

Occasionally, very occasionally, over-lulled by the garden, music, esoteric books, in paradisiacal stasis, I wished for a gust from the North, freshening what Wilfrid called the airless complexities of the simple life. The South could etherialize into an Otherworld of dreams without sleep, people neither naked nor clothed, flowers growing from the waves; a sheen of simultaneous dance and stillness.

Days were unhurried, often starting – once again – with Let’s : ‘Let’s drive’, ‘Let’s swim’, ‘Let’s walk’. We ate, explored, slept, made love impulsively, feared life only a little. In her absence I would watch the broken pharos on the cape, the white house above the bay, so distinct from our windows but, when we trudged towards it, it receded like a mirage. I agreed with Nadja that it must store the raspberry-flavoured condoms sold in Antibes.

Today, she was gazing into massed, golden mimosa. In white, sleeveless shirt, black trousers, she was not Ishtar, but at her most feminine, most slender, her face never staling in summer, its pallor startling amongst so many tanned and withered under the meddle-some sun of Africa.

She seated herself beside me, appreciative of the butterflies, leaves flat on the light, the bird song, glanced at my book, Maigret and Monsieur Charles , her cat, after a look of hatred at me, arranging itself at her feet.

‘Erich…’ Faint worry lurked beneath unconcern. ‘I’ve seen them. The people on the hill.’ It sounded tribal. I was instantly alert. Despite our peace, my instincts never rested. Newcomers needed scrutiny, advance information, check-up. We were both stateless, dwelling on sufferance, dogged by signs, however imaginary, of pursuit, of being watched. Once, seeing a man holding a shotgun, we spontaneously gripped hands and fled, doubtless to his indignation or perplexity. Following de Gaulle’s renunciation of Algeria, pieds-noir were more numerous, blamed for gang-rape, blasting a sports centre and for bad weather. More disturbing than la Terre Gaste derelicts was a fraternity, secret, perhaps non-existent, said to be rapidly expanding, of disaffected police and military, ex-paratroopers, Poujardists, jobless and workshy, Breton nationalists, naval deserters, too disparate for credibility, thus virtually supernatural. Our suspicions were raked by an empty car, a stranger with a map, a dead dolphin. Once, heavy feet approached our house from the port below. No one knocked, and the footprints on the dusty road came from the hill above.

‘One day… we can inspect them. The newcomers. Give them imprimatur ?’

A few minutes above us, the pink and white Villa Florentine was always let by a Paris finance house, lately to a young French couple with whom we had thought ourselves unusually intimate. They were young, easy, intelligent, and, as foursome, we dined, drove to movies and galleries, sailed, until, without warning, abrupt as a shot, they had gone, the Villa locked and empty. Puzzled, dismayed, hurt, we were primed to resent and suspect their successors. Reviewing past jaunts and talks, we detected no clues: no cool glance, no tension, nothing but the friendly and cheerful.

The Villa’s vacancy for some weeks might have been only a result of faulty wiring, neglected plastering or, Nadja suggested, a ghost. Alain, unfailing transmitter of news, usually bad, told us that another couple had now arrived, nationality undisclosed. After several days we had not yet seen or heard them, though at night their windows shone. The place, we agreed, was more soundless than it had been when unoccupied.

Empty houses worried me, less from fear but from an obscure residue of my infant belief that, like the Rose Room, they were mysterious, lonely and craved affection.

In her slightly breathless way, Nadja continued, ‘At a distance, I judged them human. Almost certainly. On the balcony. Man and woman. Or man and man. Like sentries. Or snipers.’

As if with an effort her eyes widened. Pools of darkness.

At my question she shook her head. ‘Not young, M. Erich. Middle-aged, like us.’ With unnecessary energy she added, ‘And very much unlike us. Neither with much hair, unless the light played tricks. The woman, possible woman, was stiffer, greyer, a hunk of skin and wire and thick flesh. Braced, maybe, to clean the sink. Both had shoulders like boards.’

Scarcely reassuring, though ‘M. Erich’ was always playful. Up there, however, on the rocky hillside, strangers were encamped, overlooking us. Perhaps innocuous as deckchairs, though these could be traps.

Life, we had long realized, was an armistice always likely to be violated. Appearances deceived, though seaboard vandalism, minor thefts and frauds were nuisances but not evils. Evil was slow, methodical, the dry rot of spirit I had felt like an itch in certain North American towns, decaying in heat and lack of purpose. Our small ports, beflagged, with trim boats and crowded, open-air cafés, seemed orderly as libraries, though buying early-morning stock on a quay we discerned metal barely covered by fish. Riots, unorganized, unexplained, would erupt, raving, vicious, then subsiding like a summer squall.

Riviera playground. Yet we heard of powerboats concealed in caves, and bodies were sometimes washed up, shot or strangled, even on the ‘Strictly Private’ yacht-club beach. These, however, were too rare seriously to perturb. The swollen cities, where a delicately drawn peach tree could be a Triad signature, a smile a terrorist’s stratagem, were safely distant.

‘Villa Florentine!’ Nadja said no more, and the click-clack of her old typewriter soon resumed. This could force awareness of my own nullity. I could assist her, but a row of pamphlets, some forgotten broadcasts, a single book, had made me no Patton sweeping through France. I had stilled no riot, like an English dandy with a tired shrug and lift of an eyebrow, or John Rabe in Nanking. Providing notes and quotations, tracing light settled on scarlet-cheeked petunias, appreciating stardust above far-away homes, rendered me neither poet nor commando. I must at least risk calling at the Villa, risking confrontation with bogus narcotics officers, gunrunners, immigration racketeers. To be extravagantly wrong, we both agreed, was more interesting than merely to be mistaken.