Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

She comprehended something of this. ‘Some people made me feel important but never free.’

Around the farm, the light melted, shredded by trees. A silence was unpropitious, the yard and its few crude tables deserted. Where was bearded Pierre, where burly, gurgling Marcelline? A neigh would now startle, like a voice from the sky. My spirit groaned at the note on the gate. Fermé.

At once resigned, about to retreat, I should have been more sapient. Nadja was already thrusting open the gate, glancing at the notice, then shrugging as if at a joke in poor taste. Her knock was aggressive, so that I was about to warn, with Stendhal , the door remaining intact.

More knocks. I quailed with embarrassment as a window opened and Marcelline peered out, swart, brigandish, under a red kerchief, wrathful and, I judged, powerful.

Nadja’s versatility was very seldom repressed. She could, within instants, be pert, flirtatious, pleading, disdainful, head nicely lifted, eyes about to moisten, a smile promised in return for agreement. A smile I coveted. She was now the fine lady in distress. ‘Madame… chère madame… we would…’

She faltered, wearied, despairing, her bright clothes and trim legs suddenly pitiful. The bristly face at the window somewhat relaxed ‘But, madame, but, monsieur…’ My bulk, if not my personality, could register. ‘We are not able today. You must realize…’

Where I would stutter or gabble Nadja was resolute. ‘Of course you are not able. What an idea!’ Her expression was incredulous, shocked, though she spoke as if to a refractory child. ‘But we need a few moments’ rest. And know so well that your repute is so justly earned. We have tramped so far to reach you…’ Touching her foot, she implied torn muscles, bleeding soles, agonized veins, while I reconsidered the Silk Road, the Santa Fe Trail. ‘On so beautiful a day, madame, a day for a festival. Yet so exhausting. But, horror, the very thought of troubling you…’ Unscrupulous, she hesitated, as if groping for a handle. She was famished, perhaps stricken, certainly ready to faint, her sign surely over-melodramatic. But no. Marcelline’s smile was a broad caress, the door swung, her rough voice as if released on a spring.

‘Oh, madame!’ Nadja was already critically surveying the sorry tables, before changing to the businesslike, commanding, though seeming to ask questions.

‘Some of your admired vin de passage . A few crumbs and, could you but manage it, possibly a scrap of butter. Your cheese is, of course, widely esteemed. And should you, by merest chance… seafood…’

The list lengthened, Marcelline joined us, shirt, blouse, black crumpled hat clearly intended for an occasion more formal. Nadja’s smile, back at me, was a virtual leer, though I managed to halt her before she added canard à l’orange , crème brûlée, my intervention nevertheless provoking a look from Marcelline suggesting I had uttered an obscenity.

With a flourish just short of an embrace, Nadja concluded. She scorned one table, deigned to accept another, waited for a chair to be wiped, Marcelline calling, ‘Pierre, Pierre… it’s Madame,’ while, feeling myself a second-class convict, we sat and waited, haystacks and Latvians forgotten, the surroundings luxuriant as Muslim Paradise, naked houris tactfully in abeyance.

‘There!’ Nadja watched chickens strolling around the yard pump. ‘These things matter.’

‘Indeed they matter.’

We were shaded by eucalyptus, shabby but still fibrous and sticky. Pierre lurched out, heavy, clean, in black Sunday suit, bowing like an ill-constructed robot, then, from a stone jug striped yellow and scarlet, brimming with green wine which, Nadja reminded me, very distinctly, was internationally famous, a laudation delivered with a private wink, for, though deliciously cool, it was sourer than Alain’s notorious vin du maison.

Scrub oak drowsed on slopes behind the barns, dark amongst a yellow spread of charlock. A convoy of crows flew through unclouded blue.

‘How good it is, Monsieur Erich. Just as if…’

Her brows contracted, not in pleasure but as if at an untoward memory, then, hastily, she took her glass, gulped wine like a stevedore and, recovering, gazed appreciatively at inquisitive chickens; a dog, almost hairless, like worn carpet, slunk forward, blearily examined us, but we failed his requirements and he subsided near dusty nettles and marigolds. Undismayed, we listened to murmurs, kitchen clatter, a cork popping. A butterfly, velvety tropical orange, sank me into jungle fantasies. Basking pumas, abnormally swollen trees, drums pounding acclaim or fear.

Nadja spoke, impersonal, dropping her usual, rather hurried manner.

‘I was thinking of an old lady, dwelling in a place of shades and torments, though dressed in jewels, in grandeur. And, Erich… she was allowed no calendars, behind the bars and shutters, all seasons were alike. But once a year, always on the same date, she called for traveller’s clothes, a carriage, servants and, very orderly and calm, announced to the nurses that she must leave, to visit her son.’

A story at odds with the setting, disturbed only by flies, though, whatever its promptings, not unexpected from Nadja, always unpredictable, oblivious to the demands of setting, propriety, social decorum. But Pierre and Marcelline were upon us, with cutlery, napkins, fresh glasses, plates. Daisies covered baguettes, olives were heaped on a black saucer, a wad of creamy butter lay in glass. There followed a stash of prawns, cold trout on lettuce, endives, circlets of radish, beetroot, tomato, sliced egg, crisp tangy chicory, criss-crossed with rivulets of farm mayonnaise. Lastly, a Figaro without guile, Pierre presented a damp luscious brie, a second bottle, a flask of fin .

We exclaimed, we praised, we gloated and we ate. ‘Une Partie de campagne’, if not quite Déjeuner sur l’herbe . I remembered a day on the Surrey hills that had led to so little and hastened to wave a radish and mentioned that our Estonian cook called it Apple of Youth. Dreamily, Nadja was virtually purring, my least action – passing butter, refilling her glass, allowing her the last tomato – eliciting deathless gratitude, my most trivial remark considered witty as Haydn. We were both sunk in exquisite well-being, beguiled by colours, slightly unreal, noises of a horse, an unseen cart, cows theatrical in an amplitude encouraged by the young, strong liquor. A bird, of barely credible blue and red, white tufts at the eyes, alighted on a mossy roof, preened itself as one grossly over-privileged, unfolded, fluttered, squawked some complaint, was gone.

Nadja was talking, as so often, as if not to myself alone.

‘Orinoco, Tashkent, Cathay. Exotic and elusive as Sappho. They were maps of quest and discovery. Hindu Kush, Lands of the Golden Horde, Dome of Mohammed Abdin. Sonorous as orchestras. And Cities of the Dead, empty but with spirits drifting like veils. Bluebeard’s castle was more real than Cracow.’

She herself was more real than these. She tapped my plate, as if to awaken me. ‘I have walked on mountains named the Sorrows of the Retired Ladies. Do not think that I am yet one of them.’

In this sleepy, lolling afternoon, she was still emphatic. ‘I never wanted to know too much. The Exarchate of Ravenna… could this be a ruler, a place, an anthem? I did not care to know, it was exciting as a locked casket. Like Steppes of Central Asia, caravan out of mists, pausing, in sunlight waiting on dull dusty plains, then moving on. But today…’ she shook her head, repentant, ‘I want to know everything. The recesses and confusions of mind. That’s my Fall. Not exactly from Paradise.’

She went into the sadness of last week when, tearful, confessional, she told me of having read of the death of the last of Europe’s court fools, 1763. She had choked in desolation. ‘Once he would have been allowed total immunity. Capering, joking, jeering at great ones. But then, old, exhausted, banished from splendours, coughing life away in a horrid attic. Forgotten. Clutching bells that never sounded.’