Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Distress had crushed her to trembling eyes, weakened shoulders, before she regained composure, assumed indifference. ‘Enough of this. But cruelty… whaling, circuses…’

Despite the heat and our déjeuner , I was chilled, almost in darkness, until from the farmhouse a man began singing an old Midi melody. Surely not Pierre, whose tone was a tavern growl. The notion restored our buoyancy, as if Laurel and Hardy had surfaced in Wagner.

High and firm, the voice changed to Parisian cabaret, ‘Si tu veux dormir’, then ceased in mid-phrase, a door slammed, a figure slid away, a blur already lost amid poplars, shadows, barns. However, we were facing each other, wavering between doubt and hilarity.

‘It can’t be.’

‘It’s impossible. But it is.’

Despite swiftness, the squarish, tousled head, broad torso, soiled cap were irrefutable, the haystack man, a tiny mystery adding spice to a day almost satiate with gifts.

The singing had recalled Tolstoy and happiness. ‘If there are no games, what is left?’ I hummed:

Over emptied bottles, plundered bowls, black smudges of flies, Nadja lifted her head in some remote satisfaction, musing, ‘I, too, can… someone I knew. He flushed whenever he spoke the truth, red as a stork’s leg. Not often.’

Her gesture as apologetic, fluffy, as if having bumped against a stranger.

We paid, gave and received lavish compliments, a strain on our French, then set face for home. The sun was past its peak. Disliking exact repetition of the morning’s walk, feigning mistrust of the haystack, and choosing a parched mule track, curling over small mounds to the sea. All was mute in afternoon stupor, sheep by a spindly hedge standing like carved, weathered blocks. Still elated, weswung arms like soldiers, parting at a bog, at thistles, rejoining with humorous, ceremonious courtesy. We risked a shaky bridge over a pebbly, dried-up streambed. Occasionally, at a bend, the sea glittered. To the left the white mountains had slightly receded, as if for shade. An Estonian labourer, I told her, had likened mountains, which he had never seen, to a broken, gap-toothed comb. Then Father, comparing irregularly ranked mountains, to his view of history, the constant ascent and decline of civility.

‘You remember so much, Erich. Like a lawyer. But what have I said! Multitudes of apologies. Yet it can alarm.’

She was affectionate, herself remembering perhaps too much.

We are making a short detour, attracted by a grey blob alone in a treeless dip, promising a cool rest. A little chapel, hunched, lichened, without tower or steeple, threatened by ivy, the porch crumbling, cobwebbed, a few gravestones protruding from dock and dandelion, memento of a community long departed.

She hesitates, almost deterred by the cobwebs. A bird croaks, without movement.

I am masterful. ‘We must go inside. A risk but not a grave one. We might, do you think, pray for rain?’

‘But rain is not yet very much needed.’ Good comrade, she echoes my casual manner, adding, ‘We might be interfering. The commune, half swamped, might consider it an offence.’

‘But the garden. One thick soak. Do consider it.’

Her small flourish, quiver of eyes and mouth, make this sound delectably outrageous. ‘At your orders, Erich…’ Determined, she pulls at the knobbed door, eventually triumphant.

All is shadowy, abode of bats, sickly with warmth hanging like a blanket, light squeezing through lunettes and squint-holes. I feel the tinge of lost presences: the hush of the Rose Room, the damp stillness of the Conciergerie. The stone altar is bare save for mouldy droppings and a withered flower. Benches have been torn away; only the base is left of the font. No power remains but blotched traces of a fresco, a hell-wain trundling the dead, all teeth and shrieks. No soul, only extinction and airlessness, in a squalid stone shed.

Nadja, by the door, is abstracted, in some small trance. She may be craning for pre-Christian, Saracenic or Albigensian emblem, mason’s signs, a grinning face on a cornice, a Templar mark. I wait until she steps towards me, slender, almost fragile in the uneven shadow, her face hollowed, though a raised eyebrow invites a question, scholarly or facetious. I can contrive neither, only point at the ruined fresco. She gazes at it, then touches my hand, her own surprisingly cold. ‘A Youngest Son found Hell not a departure from life but a return to it.’

We both need release from this dankness, a foetid cell withstanding summer radiance, in which Sinclair would have been at home, his smile sidelong, his stare eerie, his interest unclean.

Closing eyes, I see a violet haze, then realize that Nadja is at the altar, head bowed, hieratic, hair massed like a black halo in the wispy light. Turning, her high, ridged features have softened to youth. Her shrug is characteristic, when I ask whether she has prayed for rain. Then she laughs, in assumed wonder. ‘Naturally. You demanded, I obeyed. What else?’ In another voice, serious, reflective, ‘I do sometimes pray. No one hears, only myself. But it matters. Concentration. Compression of will. Sometimes answered, usually sarcastically.’

She implies a mild rebuke at whatever scepticism I have left unuttered. Despite my glance at the door she refuses to move. As if affected by the lowering, indistinct decay, she is momentarily childlike, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, in need to admit what adults might scorn.

Of her deepest beliefs I am still ignorant and can now only remember her refusal to travel on the ninth of the month, explaining nothing, seemingly instinctive as a bird’s recoil from an inhabited dwelling.

‘There may be something, Erich, which, for want of the more concrete, I can call divine. But inert, unless I contact it. Like music waiting release from the page. Or electricity still to be switched on. Muddle of wires, then Bang! Or else, we speak messages into a silent pool. If we really care, the water stirs.’

She frowns, analytical, on the scent but dissatisfied with data. ‘There’s an Orphic hymn, Erich: For all things Zeus has hidden within him and reveals them again in joyous Light . That flash of light unites Sky and Underworld. Like dancing. In a Gnostic text, Christ is a dancer. In a Vedic tradition, initiates Dance the God.’

I indulge in thoughts of her, masked, feathered, gyrating in a Mayan circle or Left Bank revue. ‘Oh!’ she interrupts, ‘There’s something else…’ but it eludes her, she looks around at the worn pillars, the drabness. ‘People imagined spirits trapped in buildings, in ships, by some curse, sin, mistake, and straining towards us, Merlin trapped in a tree, old people imprisoned in rest homes.’

Her voice tightens, is harsh, between the stone walls. ‘One day was dark as this place, with thunder lurking. Gypsies had vanished, like cattle during drought. Their tents, horses, zithers, pots, their hats, rings, great bracelets, their bears… all gone. They were very foreign; they frightened me but were part of our lives, like Jews. Like seasons and the wind. Strays from history, forgotten empires. From legend.’

Despite the warmth, she shivers, is stricken. ‘That terrible word, Resettlement.’ At last, back in the porch, she recovers. ‘If none of it were true, I would always believe it.’

Renewed by sunlight, we were glad of high air in spaces minutely deranged by heat. Far-off pastures gleamed, blinked under a passing cloud, then went clear as children’s cut-outs, the sea like a blue sash, a lorry fiery on a slice of road. Until reaching the cliffs, we were content to stay silent.

The sun lay on the horizon like a wounded dragon, as the Chinese might say, and must too often have done so. Golden florins were scattered over the wide, liquid mass.