Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

That week we decided to call on the Latvians but did not do so.

‘We are patient, Erich, like books.’

‘Like eggs.’

We smiled, selected a bottle, drifted into the garden, at risk of aggrieving the cat. Afternoon heat was weakening, the owl was preoccupied, leaves hung very still. We were in sanctuary. Dick’s half-drunken apprehensions, my own qualms, were superstitious as fears of a tidal wave, plague, red frogs; improbable as a legacy from an unknown or free champagne from Alain. We had love, like genius unattainable by prayer, guile, labour, like a chance stumble into a glistening Otherworld.

Chance, mystery were vital to existence, were pungent as mackerel. I enjoyed plots and oddities being left unsatisfactorily explained. Earlier, sober folk vowed they had seen riders in golden helmets, crimson boots, riding from dusty hills, vanishing into more dust. Hallucination? Time warp? Movie actors? Fête rehearsal? No matter they were merely appropriate to the region and its past. One story, unbelievable from an American police chief, sounded almost convincing from Alex: a London editor, transformed to a camel by an astral hermeticist of vicious reputation, was exhibited for eighteen months in an Alexandrian zoo.

Nadja, professionally sceptical of oral tradition, had yet pondered over a Paraguayan herb, which, crushed and boiled, gave speech in purest Latin to a sick villager.

Enjoying wine, she shook her head. ‘My friend, these people will never wave a broomstick and compel us to dance. Life is too good.’

‘ Let’s …’

Neither of us was as unconcerned as we outwardly showed. Our new neighbours might be refugees, but few who survived hatreds and oppression entirely escaped them. They were scarred into queer twists of character and motive.

Under continued silence from Villa Florentine, I could feel, as in childhood sickness, that patterns were shifting: ceiling cracks, wall bulges, familiar pictures suggesting strange secrets. Today, homely sounds – a gate opening, birds scattering, a car halting – seemed unnaturally loud, while the Villa’s balcony stayed empty, its shutters closed, the garden a morass of seeding sunflower and marigold.

Phelps’s assertion that he had seen a nondescript couple burning papers in the backyard suggested the discarding of incriminating archives, forged documents, counterfeit banknotes, and, Ray imagined, his smile hideously dividing his face, photographs of abstruse sexual practices. ‘Funderland, of a sort. Very foreign.’ A Peruvian doctor, flashing his rings, was convinced that the Latvians were artists. ‘Art, you should both understand, is apt to produce creatures of doubtful identity.’

Jungle messages, common in small communities, then agreed that the new arrivals were not from distant Latvia but only from Montpellier – Nostradamus’ birthplace, Nadja mused – possessed immaculate references, paid huge advance rent, could be trusted unreservedly.

Very unconvincing, we agreed, deprived of drama, fantasy jokes, until these revived at news that their telephone had been disconnected. ‘Ah!’ Nadja’s exclamation was almost a giggle. ‘Taking cover.’ But, alas, the news was false. The Latvians, Ray Phelps concluded, should not be shot but quietly drowned.

Nadja, however, was soon delighted by a letter from Robert Graves, detailing elicio , Roman technique for discovering the secret names of enemies’ gods, exploiting this to cajole or threaten them to desert or betray; I matched this with a tale of Louis XI bribing the patron saint of his rival, Charles the Rash, who soon died, atrociously, in battle. We laughed further when, on the hottest day of the year, Dick Haylock demanded curry, which he hated, to commemorate some victory in British India. He could not, we agreed, afford to bribe Krishna. Merriment resumed at a new rumour that a Brussels commission, lavishly funded, was debating whether ‘Black Comedy’ and ‘Cinéma Noir’ infringed race-relations regulations, and the ruler of the USSR had awarded himself the Lenin Prize for Literature.

Still exhilarated by Mr Graves, Nadja looked up from rereading his letter.

‘Let’s take a holiday. All day.’ Her impetuosity made it thrilling as bed. She hurried upstairs, swiftly reappearing in yellow beach shirt, black slacks, a hat vaguely cowboy. Eyes and voice were those of a student in love with the morning.

The blue was perfect, distant mountains clear, nothing was yet hardened by sun of Aztec ferocity. We wanted no crepuscular Terre Gaste, derelict Venusbergs , smitten heaths, only outdoor energy, happy fatigue, open vistas, spendthrift pasture.

Before moving inland we took the upper cliff walk, savouring fresh Mediterranean sparkle, blue and green whorls like magnified thumbprints, white frizzle barely knocking the pebbles. Nadja loved water, claiming visions of fata morgana , pale mirage of columns edged with turquoise, wreathed in sea-mist. Of this I kept silent; any doubt of her honesty, especially from Robert Graves, distressed or enraged her.

On our right, gently slanted fields were sparsely dotted with pink farms, oak coppices, stunted and pollarded from over-cutting. Dry light was smooth against rocky scarps, then a boulder high and grooved as an elephant. No one was about, the landscape tight as a drum, now sun-baked rinds of vineyard, now green, now reddish earth. Soon, the old sarcophagus, popularly identified, without evidence, with King Arthur’s Lancelot, in this region discredited as perjurious seducer. Raw, sweet smells of hay, nettle, dung, occasionally salty, were warming. Far below, continuous traffic, glinting, metallic, streamed through coloured roofs, promenades, neat plane trees, bleached squares.

The sea, dense, molten, was starting to glare, and we left the coast for the grassy steppe and tangled blue-purple growth, which stretched to the foothills, mild preliminaries to mountains blocking the horizon.

‘Flax.’ She pointed to a bluish tinge some way ahead, always liking to name species, sometimes erroneously. We took shade at a doorless cabin, where I put hands on her shoulders, and at once she looked worried, as though our contentment hazarded too much, risking what she called the evil eye of the universe.

‘Erich… You like it here? With me?’

‘But of course. Especially with you.’

‘You don’t sometimes think…?’

‘I never think – not once.’

She at once reclaimed the day’s promises, laying her head on my shoulder. ‘Monsieur Here and There.’

‘By no means. Monsieur Hermes. Guide of Souls.’

Looking up, she shone. ‘I do not enjoy saying this, but he was also lover of secret messages and underhand dealings, even thieves.’

Back in sunlight, we breathed in the free expanse, where the mountains seemed about to move, trampling the little hills. About half a kilometre ahead a man was leaning against a sallow haystack, bare-armed, in jeans and singlet. Seen nearer, flat cheeks and narrow eyes. Mongolian? Latvian? Movies often used haystacks for hideaways for arms caches, fugitives, murderous trysts, but we gave him friendly greeting. His expression remained fixed, he said nothing, his silence like a smack, so we offered no more. Refusing to quicken our step, we soon braced ourselves to look back but could see no one.

‘A M. Cunning Fox.’ Nadja was unperturbed. ‘Or, perhaps a Paraiyan who has been eating beef, thus polluting any Brahmin at sixty-four paces. He must have a lair under the hay.’

Fox or Paraiyan, he had matched no pastoral serenity but older unsettled Badlands, though unable to spoil our delight in the day and each other.

By noon we were hungry. Objecting to carrying picnic paraphernalia on a hot day, Nadja would trust, sometimes woefully, to a good fortune. We knew, however, a trustworthy farm, already visible, shambling, whitewashed, in the folds of lesser hills. Now hot, we skirted a beef-red landslip, glowered at a board, Acquired for Development , hastened on, eager for lunch, while continuing exchanges not serious but seldom altogether stock. She considered my soul pale grey streaked with black. I retorted that hers was dark crimson and saw her, years back, small, dark, not scared but angered, wandering lost between village shacks and a treeless plain.