Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

We begin feeling more friendly to our new neighbours. ‘One remembers certain things.’ He swiftly forgets them, leaving us to greet several affluent regulars, though placing a stained finger under his nose. ‘Look out for those mauvais sujets , I can lend you a telescope, without deposit. The husband I have seen already, walking like a queer on a quarterdeck.’

Alone, at one with ourselves, we follow last red glints on the darkening opalescent sea, in the hour not of wolf but of moth, frog, cicada, of oleander shadows, iron Second Empire lamps glimmering along the esplanade. Soon the bar behind us will be invaded by noise of those who fail to make private affairs interesting to outsiders. Time to go.

Back home, we see lights in the Villa. I translate it into a bedtime fable, the glare of an imaginary planet sweeping too close.

Khrushchev had blinked first, the Missile Crisis dispersing not into Ragnarok but into Kennedy mythology the 40,000 Russian troops as vague as the Blues and Greens of Byzantium. The Red Fleet turned back. White House and Wall Street were heartened by Pentagon assurance that it was ill-disciplined, badly equipped, that the Soviet megaton bomb was incomplete, its H-bombs few, its launching pads inadequate. Soviet rockets were removed from Cuba, and, in return, Kennedy offered abandonment of the Jupiter bases in Turkey, themselves obsolete. At White House praise of Mr K’s statesmanship and guarantee of Cuban independence, a five-star general lamented witnessing the greatest American defeat ever.

In world theatre, a peasant clown had postured as Tamerlane, been outfaced by the dauntless Knight of the West, soon, after Dallas, rosy in martyr’s aura, though many saw only two thick-skinned croupiers rigging the board. Both were now dated as Flower Children. The Balance of Terror resumed, intensifying with Chinese in Tibet, decreeing that Buddhist culture must be eliminated to secure scientific freedom.

Claire’s appeal hit me at my weakest. A guest at a St James’s club, Sinclair had been discovered in a cloakroom theft. This could have been discreetly overlooked in milord anglais restraint had he not insulted the attendant as an officious hog. This was bad enough. Rudeness to a club servant was unforgivable, like hacking a referee or cheating at cards. Refusing to apologize, he was thrust outside, then, on the steps, assaulted his escorts and was now booked for the magistrate’s court. Would I, Claire pleaded, volunteer as a character witness? I was horrified, not for Sinclair but for myself. Sinclair possessed character, though one perverse and objectionable. But, if no longer expecting any emotional meltdown from Claire, I shirked reproaches of cowardly betrayal.

All others had refused. Alex was obdurate. ‘I’d lie like a trooper to help a friend. I did it for Donald Maclean, while vomiting at his politics. I defended David Lister at his court-martial for assisting the enemy. But listen. His real crime was that, in the mess, he wasn’t considered quite the gentleman, a sort of social Trot. In fact, in the Crete mess-up he was chased weaponless by Panzers. One of them tripped and fell. David, instinctively, in Pavlovian or Harrovian response, stopped to help him up and was captured. After the war I, of course, testified for him, like a stalwart fisher of men. Of course. But, for precious Sinclair, I use my feet and hold my nose. Consolations for a misspent life?’

Dismayed, I recalled insignificant losses of my own. A scarf, some coins in a restaurant, a favourite pen from Suzie. Negligible, but to blurb of Sinclair’s high-mindedness, puritan honesty, ingrained decency was an unhappy prospect, and I envied Alex’s ‘Of course’.

Had Claire appeared tearful in my room, I must have capitulated, but I could only envisage her brother contemptuous of help, giving replies in court with the slick insolence of his art reviews.

I had finally to consult the First Secretary, his response giving me relief I subsequently thought shameful. He considered my court appearance would be exploited politically, be unwelcome publicity, possible danger to the Embassy.

‘Can he rely on you?’ Claire had asked. A single word can cancel obligation, correctness, even simple charity. Had she said We not He, I might not have made that hesitation, fractional but which she at once recognized. She said, ‘I understand. You need time’, knowing I did not.

I nerved myself for no more than a letter to solicitors of generalized euphemism, knowing that henceforward she would despise me, breaker of unuttered vows. I flushed with guilt, then with romantic wound, eventually felt nothing very much, save an ebbing poignancy, that of an old Estonian poem, of a birch tree lingering on the wind.

Sinclair was fined, cautioned, the case barely reported. He and his sister vanished from London, easily forgotten. Minor lutanists with a tune catchy but ephemeral, suddenly extinct.

Alex left for Iran, ‘Special Correspondent’, scooped an interview with the Shah from generosity to a waiter ignored by a rival journalist but actually a paid informer. For my final Miscellany , remembering David Lister, I obituarized an elderly Forest Brother who, refusing to leave his wounded horse, was captured and promptly executed.

Life had changed, other horizons beckoned. I was easily, in retrospect too easily, transferred to New York, delegate to an obscure relief committee for Estonian refugees, with propagandist duties. American hospitality was profuse, my propaganda only doubtfully effective, forbidden allusions to British spy systems in the Soviet Bloc, the commandos shipped to lonely shores, parachuted to heaths and woods. At a state university, addressing exiles, I found my German accent allowed me only hostile hearing.

An invitation on Plaza notepaper came from a celebrity, the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, to meet him at the downtown Rougemont, but a curt voice soon telephoned cancellation. In Boston, I was stylishly entertained at an Estonian production of Eugen Tasuleigid , ‘Fires of Vengeance’, exalting the defeat of the Teutonic Knights.

Back in New York, with inessential work, entering the UN building, I was stopped by a headline, ‘Death of Children’s Friend’, Wilfrid’s face staring from the front page. The range of notices was surprising. His confidential reports to the Oval Office, Whitehall, Chatham House, correspondence with his mother’s friend, FDR, work for UNICEF, endowment of children’s hospitals in Damascus and Haifa, a Dutch youth settlement, an Israeli theatre, a forest named after him. Tributes from Einstein, Dag Hammerskold, Linus Pauling, Russell, the Huxley brothers, Hannah Arendt, Mr Spender. His friendship with Simone Weil and Adam von Trott was quoted, his sojourn at Meinnenberg dismissed as a brief interregnum, following participation in preliminaries of the July Plot and threatened arrest. He had been consultant to a Quaker peace and reconstruction mission to West Germany. A formal catalogue of righteous deeds but failing to convey his style, his flavour, save for an account of him in Lausanne, smiling with courteous modesty but also enjoyment, perched on the ornately decorated elephant, mistaken by applauding multitudes not for a maharajah but for a movie star with awesome sexual proclivities.

The appreciations resembled criticism of a painting seen only in postcard reproduction. In traditional German sense, Wilfrid had been an artist, transmitting the incalculable. Had I followed him I could have accomplished more. Yet, immediately, his death gave me less dismay than relief. He had hardened into a principle, moral thermometer, rebuke, his protection genuine, his affection suspect.

What also dissatisfied me were reports of his dying in a car accident, alone, or apparently alone, in a West German side road near the eastern border. Details were unknown or concealed, the accident one of several, insufficiently probed, involving an ex-communist Viennese banker, an adviser to the Bonn cabinet and former Stasi chief, a Tallinn-born actor, outspoken Estonian nationalist, shot in his Ottawa garden.