Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Hobbyhorses swarm in imitation cloth-of-gold caps, then a hunchback Scaramouche with tricoloured horns, a lascivious Punchinello, Pierrot jiving with Columbine. Anthology of popular culture, language of distilled memories. Fleeting celebrities – female Olympic equestrian, tennis champion, rawhide footballers showered with petals from windows. I see through the magic spectacles of near-intoxication, which stretch faces like elastic, transform colours to the incredible. Deranged planets re-form into ‘Crédit Lyonnais’. Time for St André to discharge a hosedown of sudden tears. Cooling. Instead, relentless heat matched by trumpet salvoes, vivacious, archaic hunting-calls, panoplies of holiday sound in this phantasmagoria of Europe’s Spirit World; the wolf, red-fanged, white-gloved, wringing falsetto bleats from a popinjay saxophone, a mulatto witch bestowing blessings on whorish mermaids, and prancing demons, preceding a Société Joyeuse platoon, brocaded surcoats, peaked caps askew, diamond hues, grotesquely lengthened noses. They caper to shrill pipes, swipe each other with bladders and, strung with tiny bells, jeer and sourpuss the crowds. Claire and Sinclair could earn bit parts, mincing alongside a platform of phallic confectionary driven by a darkly cowled Doctor with swollen yellow beak and briefcase twinkling ‘L’Imposture’.

A man, naked save for mistletoe sprigs – to propitiate oncoming winter, Nadja explains – wears bull-mask and displays corn-cob genitals, hugely popular, target for marigolds. Within the Garde Républicaine band ambles the mayor, Légionnaire d’Honneur, sashed, medalled, bobbing, one hand stilling imagined applause while he ignores a chorus of ‘Stolen Funds’. First mistaking him for ‘blasted Musso’, Dick, rather unsteady, worries Daisy by calling ‘Blasted Eurocrat. Superstate Barmy!’ then looking about him as if this was uttered by somebody else.

By now fatigued, bored, hungry, about to urge Nadja homewards, I am unexpectedly stalled. I know something of Arthurian legend, from Breton and Welsh traditions, some researches of Lars Ivar Ringborn and Nadja’s more cabbalistic works of Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz. I see that, for the first time, she is really interested, opening her notebook.

The cacophony has fallen apart, the gap filled with a single vicious groan, some ritual curse, trained on a tinpot knight bareheaded, elevated in a workaday cart pulled by two mules. He is downcast, disgraced, now flinching from a scurry of dead blossom, cabbage stalks, condoms, broken shoes, to repeated shouts of ‘Elaine’ and farmyard neighs and crows. French political feuds? Some desperado of boudoir scandal or casino morals? Certainly not. Elaine, a word from Nadja, my own diehard memory, reminds me of a Breton tale of a southern lake goddess, confused with Mary Magdalene, simultaneously mother and wife of Arthur’s blood-brother Lancelot du Lac, adulterous paragon who betrayed him. Historically negligible but with a thin patina of psychic truth. Unhorsed in combat, this Lancelot had been forced to return to the royal cuckold in a peasant’s barrow, customary for a condemned felon, the populace discharging stones, dung and, particularly, cast-off shoes.

No more. I expect, vainly, an electrically lit Grail safeguarded by mini-skirted initiates with star-tipped wands advertising Cointreau. The dazzle dwindles to a trickle: a posse of police cadets, quartet of oarsmen in broad, hillbilly hats, uniformed pupils, their party squeakers shooting orange tongues back at gate-crashing scrapings of dosshouse, souk, estaminet, barfly derelicts, a collection of clumping boots and tattered shawls. Vigilantes, I suggest, seeking Latvians, but Nadja does not smile.

We all depart to Hôtel Montmorency. I escort Daisy, herself silent, drunk or redrafting her will in favour of buntings. Dick and Ray argue about the Fête, its expense, absurdity, Frenchness. Certainly, it would not have been envied by such as Malraux and Jacques-Louis David, whose political tableaux have sunk into history. Children are over-tired, anxious for home. Nadja, unusually sociable, perhaps exhilarated by the Knight in the Cart, holds court. Dick, after glancing at Daisy, heaped beside me, inert, asleep or dead, approves not of her but Nadja. ‘She’s sparkling, like a house on fire. Where would we be without her? But, my God, what we’ve endured! Worse than opera. The educated man, my dear fellow… Shakespeare, Galsworthy… Miss Sayers… laws unto themselves. I’m sometimes sorry that fate never cast me upon the shores of our national showcase, Eton. But what did Hamlet say? “I could a tale unfold”?’

He unfolds nothing, scrutinizes me from beneath sandy, ragged eyebrows, sighs, mumbles ‘Bread of Heaven’, nods at the barman.

Returning, we listen to Wagner, his pomp overwhelming the streets below: shouts, rockets, tom-tom beat. Towards Cannes, darkness is pierced by fires, apparently uncontrolled, reddened clouds drifting seawards. Local radio announces a riot from an unnamed port, presumably one of the sporadic outbreaks of vandalism and vendetta to which we are accustomed.

I sleep badly, dreaming of enraged faces, poisoned fireworks, fragmented appearance at a roofless courthouse, lawyers duelling with rolls of blotting paper, umpired by a judge almost submerged by an immense cocked hat.

Near dawn we are both fully wakened by an explosion, terrifyingly close. Nadja is at once with me and, still naked, vulnerable, we see, in scrappy light, smoke and flame swirling from the Villa, monstrous, volcanic.

By late morning only a few blackened walls remain. No bodies found, debris revealing little. Alain reports rumours. The Latvians had mishandled their own bomb; had already left for Cuba; had been invaded by the Matelots under cover of the Fête. With nervy frivolity I blame Mr Kaplan but, in the garden, see a court, perfectly roofed, myself in the dock, the jury returning, the judge leaning forward.

October. Mistral, vines stripped, olives harvested, winter ploughing begun. ‘Another gate of the year,’ Jules thought, or quoted.

The garden had aged, darkened, the damp lawns having their last cut. I headed dead roses and dahlias, wandered in tarnished light, urn, bench, moon-daisies misty; then retired into a novel by the Estonian Jaan Kross, though more aware of Alex’s story, made plausible by minutely observed details of a civil servant metamorphosed into a shed by a chatty, courteous stranger. An actual incident, in keeping with the present, soon forced me to close the book.

In Canada I entrained to lecture at a distant Estonian settlement where no planes went and, though substantiated by the travel agency, was ignored on maps. I shared a compartment with a slate-faced man, mute, scarcely moving throughout and of indeterminate age. When the train halted at a small empty station surrounded by waste, he stood up, pulling his hat lower, stepped out. Another man flitted from a doorway in similar hat, and together they paced the platform. The utter stillness of the train unpleasantly suggested that I was now the only passenger, until three others, in silky Italian suits, joined me, complaining in foreign English of the delay, as if unaware of me but watching the couple outside. Finally, my original companion returned, gazed without surprise but with some disdain at the newcomers, then gave me a smile, small but attractive, reassuring. While the others remained oblivious to us, the compartment uncomfortably crowded, he addressed me in fluent German. ‘To talk about it would destroy it.’ Nothing more, but making me certain that he knew my name and errand, knew also the other three. They were staring at their shoes as if at exceptional phenomena. The silence was gangsters’ truce.

The train, after the unexpected delay, was now speeding. The German, or apparent German, left us, a parcel remaining on his seat, though by his light manner of placing it I was certain that it was empty. The spell broken, the three conversed indifferently, about a snowstorm, a car accident, a hijack. At the next station, another with no community attached, they departed, superintending the removal, further down, of a large packing case. Movie addict, I at once suspected that the parcel on the empty seat would not be retrieved. Safe, I was yet icy with sweat. My journey continued without incident save that, on arrival, I found that I was not expected.