Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

‘I suppose,’ she was slow, musing, ‘we really do have to meet them.’

I looked towards the shuttered Villa Florentine. Had this been occupying her silence? Then I said, ‘We can protect ourselves with your scissors.’

Holding hands, we saw roofs below, now red, now purple, in the thickening sunset. ‘Erich, it could be the test of faith. To jump from this cliff, perfectly confident that we would at once grow wings.’

This I was reluctant to risk, and we were soon at Alain’s, hearing his praise of Americans in Vietnam. ‘We needed such boys in Algeria. During my Resistance days…’ After he resumed duties we drank well, outside, above the darkened but twinkling sea, enjoying the shuffle of waves, coastal lights, occasional glimpses of the movie behind the bar, young Alain leaping to horse, swiping the Cardinal’s Guards, receiving thanks from His Majesty.

‘I was reading, Nadja, of two French dukes, stranded in a wretched inn. Only one bed. But who should claim it?’

‘Why ask? He with the longest pedigree.’

‘Yes. So they disputed. One traced his descent from Philip the Fair, the other to Philip Augustus. Citations of Montmorencys, Condés, Longuevilles, Alençons, were countered like fireworks by Valois, Rohans, Talleyrand-Périgords, then back to Charlemagne, to Pepin le Bref. Solomon was mentioned, Adam invoked…’

‘Such are dukes! And so? But do not tell me. By dawn, unable to agree, they must both have slept on the floor, the bed empty between them.’

Affection kept pace with the wine. Within, regulars were arriving, Alain in foreground, filling glasses, in background, receiving not dukes’ expostulations but insolence from a Palais Royal pastry cook.

That night, rain fell, unpredicted, blowing in from the sea, falling in noisy gushes. Refusing credit, Nadja ascribed it to André of Sudden Tears, local saint, with a flair for responding to popular woes, often clumsily; once, when a village pump cracked, sending a catastrophic flood.

‘Don’t you think it is time…?’

‘Whenever is it not?’

We had for too long shirked decision, the Villa suspended above us, foreboding, as if a wolf might grin at our window. Simply by existing, the Latvians threatened our peace, whether or not they were, in truth, part of the dim, frontierless trade in lives, identities, turncoat deals with nameless surveillance committees, alternative regimes. Once more, I pondered the possibility, scientific or self-induced, of fate.

‘We are,’ Nadja spoke as if to a seminar, ‘about to go. I cannot imagine why you wait around.’

So, in early evening, our nonchalance unconvincing, we sauntered up the white, warm road, expecting the Villa’s gates to be triple locked, safeguarding a midget fortress with mantraps and Cocteau deceptions. Disappointingly, they opened at a touch.

‘You have not been correctly right.’ Stress always dislocated her syntax.

Safely penetrating a garden as if sterilized by some malign sorcerer, we lost bravado, were children risking a dare. The Villa, off-white, pinkish, was stained, flaking, soundless and, with its tight shutters and curtains, as if blind, though eyes must be watching, weapons greased. Birds, leaves, even a cloud, were in suspense, that in which the western hero and villain stare each other down, throwing long, sharp shadows, hands hovering for the final shot.

At the door I stepped aside, eyes averted but with marked graciousness allowing her rights of leadership. She bowed, then imperiously pointed from me to the knocker, and, outstaged, I intended a tentative tap, though producing a bang emphatic as a declamation. This induced from Nadja a chortle, subdued, misplaced, but nothing more. Another attempt, less tempestuous, again unavailing, and, relieved, duty done, we turned to depart, only, wrong-footed, to confront a man who had silently stalked us. Without resemblance to the haystack uitlander , he was middle-aged, stocky, with bleached, untidy wisps of hair, high forehead, a face wide and creased, small pale-blue eyes, one of which, in the Herr General’s term, lazy, not blind but loose, probably focusing incorrectly. In denim and clean cotton shirt, he appeared Baltic in appearance and lack of spontaneous, uproarious welcome, though more enquiring than threatening, and his small smile made foolish our expectations of uncontrolled ferocity.

Nadja, in her ruthless mood, left me to introduce ourselves as neighbours anxious to be, well, neighbourly. It sounded grotesquely, insultingly false. The smile opposite relapsed into suspicion, suggesting he was not hearing but smelling my words, testing them for health precautions, preliminary to an unfavourable verdict, until in harsh, cracked French he jerked an arm, like a traffic cop, and delivered sentence.

‘You may enter.’

Meekly, we followed him into a large, unshuttered, frowsty, all-purpose back room, with stove and sink, overlooking a protective shrubbery. No trace of our former friends, their framed reproductions, cheerful records, colourful cushions. Instead, a Monet was replaced by a dirty mirror from which a fragment of sky accosted us like a warrant. Also, it would reveal anyone approaching the house from behind. Overall, a fortification of books, heavy table and lamps, boxes, plates, bottles, overseen by a big, lumpy woman, fair, straggle-haired, without make-up, muddy brown eyes unmistakably hostile. In coarse green jacket and trousers, she was motionless for a minute, before moving to her man’s side, so that we were facing each other in pairs, as if for a square dance.

Nadja, captious, freakish, would be an unsatisfactory partner. As though in a joke intended only for me, she feigned immediate fascination in a dictionary of Finnish slang, open at a caricature of perhaps a human face, perhaps a diagram of some transport scheme. Perched on a pile of shabby notebooks was a wooden bowl of fruits-des-bois .

The silence was awkward, that of bare forbearance of householders awaiting explanations or excuses, while I scanned the dishevelled room for evidence of conspiracy, dangerous information, prejudice, even looking for my own Secret Protocol amongst the many volumes, not from vanity but for confirmation that the couple were at very least political.

We were still standing. My hopes of a strawberry were, so to speak, fruitless, but the woman, with a minute intimation of thaw, did then indicate two stools, from which Nadja, mouth set against outward humour, waited for me to remove papers. The man stayed on his feet, in authority; the stools were low, so that we crouched beneath him. Nadja, at last deciding that some courtesy was due, told them in a slow French calculated to appease infants that Monsieur Alain had expressed much pleasure and very considerable eloquence about their arrival, the honour dispensed to our community, our own anxiety to be of all possible service. While respecting her strategy, I judged such extravagance maladroit, she herself afterwards admitting that it would have sounded well only to cretins.

The woman had withdrawn nearer the sink and was apparently deaf, but the man was scowling, his hands, deeply scratched, over-large. Neither face showed signs of suffering, fear, cruelty, only granite patience or sullenness. Both figures, statuesque, almost monumental, implied powers considerable but imprecise. In some abrupt non-sequitur I remembered Alex’s account of the gift of levitation granted to St Teresa of Avila, though frequently on occasions demanding utmost decorum.

Nadja uncaged her largest, most devious smile, crinkling into facial embrace, prompting the two to veer towards the human, the host deigning to seat himself.

From curt, wrenched-off sentences we learnt that they were Andrejs and Margarita Ulmanis, himself cousin to a pre-war Latvian statesman, though whether hero, crook or nonentity was unascertainable. Thus these relatives could be targets or agents of the vengeful and implacable.