Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

I quickly received a role. As author, traveller, colleague of the renowned Stephen Spender, surely primed with the latest American artistic and liberal fashions, I was welcome in many homes, comfortable, well-stocked vital citadels against winter. A Frau Professor, having been assured that Secret Protocol was the most searching novel of the decade, held a reception for me in an apartment where fittings, audio-machines, plants shone like coffin-plates. Her husband, Herr Senior Engineer, told me that Estonia was very pretty. She herself occupied the Chair of Horticulture as Welfare. Their daughter was foremost in Temperament Sculpture, designed to collapse after five months, to avoid the staleness of Thorwaldsen and Michelangelo.

To escape well-documented information of cybernetics, neutrons, Vietnam, Paul Newman’s eyes and ‘the End of History’, I regularly sought watersides, watching ships leave for islands. The poetry of masts. Contrasting Strindberg’s torments, clouds were fleecy, skies soft blue; flowers striped and frilled, stationed in public places regular as hussars; bronzed swimmers bonding with glassy waves, divers reporting subaqueous realms dazzling as ducal Burgundy.

Swedish silence was graded to new niceties. Silence of water, of a fisherman alone on Mälaren Lake under a red moon, silence of woods lit by midnight sun with rich, damp, green elfin hues, silence of great bells in repose, of a consulting-room after a dreadful verdict. In testing myself against silence, I hoped to retrieve perceptions almost lost since Meinnenberg. Alone, I relived Forest noons, pungencies of bark and mushroom, the gleam of Old Men of the Earth, the dense musk of hay. High Folk obsolete as peruke and quizzing-glass, gulping kvass in the saddle, dancing with servants in Stille Nacht , when a medieval banner depicted the Christ Child clutching a reindeer – an icon that had once fostered belief that Jesus had been suckled by animals.

Fatigue, anxiety, lassitude dropped like towels from such play of light, pagan hedonism, elated bodies. Only my sexuality was out of condition, on hold. In Canada, there had passed a slim Norwegian girl, without tinsel beauty but of Grail magnetism, glowing, so extraordinarily alive that I was content only to observe, like a veteran from campaigns strenuous though futile, like Charles XII.

Swedes, like handsome children slightly overtired, generously eased me into cliques, sailed me to islands of runic stones, antlers nailed above porches, herrings smelted on shores. In seas strewn with sunrise, we all swam naked, laughing, thoughtless, ready for a long day of happy triviality.

By autumn, I was almost nightly guest at dinners with formal toasts, tiresome traps for the novice; at nightclubs, yacht clubs, literary clubs, I was deferred to by Cold War specialists, gossip journalists, even biotechnologists, myself listening more than contributing to quack about Federal Europe, high-tech planning, world health, from those who at elections were too busy or idle to vote. I parried with local movie stars, all identical blondes, usually recovering from plastic surgery and to be met only by candlelight. Discussions wove around such urgencies as the Practicality of Improbability, which sent me back to the sharp scurry of waves, salt breezes, the aftermath of a storm, wash-up of coiled weed, an orange shirt, Coca-Cola bottle, a slab of glass, such debris once, so long ago, messages from Never-Never. I strained towards the frisky blue water around ‘Ogygia’ and to names jagged as pirate teeth – Skagerrak, Cattegat, Hakuyt – a sound from a cliff, like the hum of church-owls in the Manor park.

Inescapable in Stockholm was the Cold War journalist, Herr Doktor Kauffler, proudly declaring his flat was bugged. By whom? By everyone. His smile was rubbery. ‘Sweden’s frail as a meringue. Seas… ringed with atomic mines. The archipelago, covered with the unidentified. To a soldier like yourself’ – his respect rang like a false coin – ‘this is very familiar. You keep watch, you have your weapon primed. But even you may not have informed yourself that they’re scheming to divert the Gulf Stream. Super-hydraulics.’ Pleased, he could have been taking a salute. ‘While our students shirk their Finals, you and I could count the body-bags.’

Another, more popular habitué was the New York novelist originally from Texas, who, flaxen-headed, athletic fellow guests assured me, was hurrying to transform literature. He agreed. ‘These good folk see captions as proper writing. At Yale…’ before producing a notebook in which to scribble my recollections of the white-haired British Poet Laureate murmuring that had he known how to lie his verse would have been better.

The three serious crimes here were to be virgin, black and over thirty. Though greying, I was reprieved by rumours that my German war record was to be subject of a new movie and that a mountainous advance had been offered for my memoirs. Goggle-eyed young and respectful veterans plastered me with questions. How well had I known Goering’s Swedish wife? Was I really involved in a plot against Saigon? I was swiftly recognized as friend of Gene Kelly, quarreller with Gore Vidal, associate of Susan Sontag, for meeting Churchill and Malraux. Did Herr Capote really…? Was it true that Herr Bellow…? Demands often smothered by an infantile gurgle or singsong joke.

None of this deceived me. With popularity spurious as a Vatican title, I was a transient fad, like Hare Krishna, Democracy without Taxes, Elvis for Pope.

Parties on any impulse were incessant as darkness lengthened: a Feldpartie to honour a Persian cat who received with boredom, exquisite and understandable, a black-pearled collar; a fiesta on the collier moored near the City Hall, for the Nobel Laureates Martinson and Johnson; a gala to applaud Mick Jagger’s lip imprint on linen; a motorboat rally to hear, though briefly, Concrete Poets; a costume-ball at Skansen, its colours under lamplight as if dripping from a Pollock canvas. Parties on skateboards, parties in royal parks and Tivoli towers or swirling on the helter-skelters, frolics in shirts stamped with such texts as India’s Smallpox Kills.

Anna Wilhemson, Professor of Advanced Literature, though more admired for her crème brûlée , entertained freely but enforced such penalties as nursery attire. Here I met Nadja, in dark-gold gown, with the éclat of an Alpine champion or French beautician, at first glance about twenty-five, at second, beneath very delicate make-up, some years older. She was soon sitting with a younger girl, very close. They ignored the rest of us, sometimes stroking each other’s arms, occasionally kissing, to my unreasonable resentment. The younger was beautiful, Nadja something more, though their collusion was broken by Anna’s ukase. We were all to play Mon Plaisir , no exceptions. Very severe, she arbitrarily paired off men and women to sit for five minutes in silence facing each other. I was allotted Nadja, who had already directed at the Professor a black stare that failed to stun her. I received only a fraction less.

Her ridged, serious face, its contours with that Asiatic hint, packaged between dark flops of hair, black eyes faintly shadowed, still regarded me with horror until, at the reluctant but submissive silence, loosening into sudden mischief. This completed an attraction I could define no more than I could a musical phrase, which it somewhat resembled. Other couples were showing mutual dissatisfaction, even hatred, not soothed by the arrival of the Texan, noisily apologizing for arriving late, at a party to which, we heard later, he had not been invited.

Nadja and I had been directed to chairs at a french window. Surrounded by embarrassed smiles, artificial intensities, we were forced to inspect each other, like fellow prisoners.