Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

After a week I had not ventured the Manor, foreseeing an abandoned shell, desolate as a ghost town. After its SS captors had been shot, it became a workers’ rest home, a kolkhoz , collective, where children would have learnt that wicked people had lived there. Now, it was occasionally occupied by a new owner. Who? But it was as though I had not spoken.

I preferred to explore deeper in Forest. Though depleted at the edges, it was otherwise the same, strewn with old friends. Mushrooms – sunshades, the estate hands called them – brown boletus, stunted second-growth acacia, runic boulders, paths criss-crossing, where I once imagined the greybeard awaiting me. ‘Young man, to win your kingdom you need the strength of a bear, the resolution of a swallow and the cunning of a wolf.’

A particular ash survived, on which I had once cut my name. A protection from witches.

Everywhere I was met without open friendliness but with no rebuff. Younger men had left for the towns. Freddi and Max, Iliana and Frieda had left nothing.

Days were clearer, skies icily blue. Forest gave signs of a healthy spring. Clumps of wood anemones and wild violet, lapwings in jagged, erratic flight and melancholy cries, moles active, the ground ivy purple-blue, a faint green smudge on the trees. Buds, the sharp scuffle of hares mating, new nests, though one night snow fell, flurries of white shreds against lamplit windows. Fumes, stiffly aromatic, rank, drifted from stoves I had formerly considered of Iron Age antiquity, in an immemorial atmosphere of leather, damp, hay, linseed.

More sights. Blueberries on a mottled green plate, grey blubber of cloud above the Sound, the blur of an island, with its games, picnics, little assignments. A branch, still bare, slender as a young leg bent at the knee.

Only after ten such days I risked the road where the girl had run, carriages, motors, riders had passed, for hunts, balls, tennis, long dinners. The sky was cloudless, the sun warm, elderberries were in tiny leaf, the willows unfolding silver.

The Manor was at once substance and illusion, like a movie seen again after many years, encrusted with lush memories, rare poignancies, sharp disillusions from the fates, often distressing, of stars that had lost the world’s love.

The tall, intricately embossed gates must have been commandeered for scrap metal. From isolated pillars, the weed-lumbered drive curved towards the old mansion. The Turret was cracked and scaffolded, everywhere white plaster was discoloured, blistered, fallen; some chimneys were missing. Fruit bushes, still dewy, were being throttled by dock and thistle that had already overwhelmed the lawns. Most of the orchard had gone, two donkeys motionless between haggard stumps and fallen branches. Limes glimmered. All was desultory, silent, though smoke hovered above west gables, a reminder of the kitchen and talk of golden ones who move by moonlight.

Desisting from further search, I yet did not return to Tallinn. Days headed faster towards spring. Walking long distances, around ploughed fields, through budding groves, I must be ringed by village gossip. Tongues lived wildly, someone must soon recognize me, though perhaps pleasantly, forgivingly. Dour as pumice, skin dry and featureless as uncooked haddock, my landlady had several times released a smile, as if from a trap, and was now offering coffee, hot though brackenish, fit, she assured me, for a lord and his swans.

Traipsing back to the Manor, I again lingered at the pillars, aged sentinels, contemplating under a red, heavy sun the dishevelled gardens, the scrawled brushwork of smoke. Elegy for a lost life. All seemed diminished, more fragile: gables, roofs, mansards, timbered arches, portico, parterre.

I was ready to depart when, as if in a rerun movie, the long black limousine again swept towards me, halted, and, not melodramatic, but precisely timed, and, in beige overcoat open, showing well-pressed grey, blue-and-white bow-tie, the Elk Lord, Bear Victor, stepped out. The Herr General, whom I had subliminally expected.

I had envisaged a head bald as a helmet, sunken shoulders, a deposed figure despite association with high-rise Prince Louis-Ferdinand and Hollywood, stooping from errors too shameful.

Though less broad and commanding than I remembered, he at once made me absurdly young and, though the taller, still looking up at him. No Bismarck, he was at least a senior executive, without sag, in command. Beneath carefully set grey hair, his eyes were no longer cobalt blue but keen, fixed above folds only slightly stained by age and now glinting with polite, slightly ironic goodwill.

While we stood silent, appraising, I was aware that though he had lost huntsman’s vigour he retained a measure of youth, that of the lotioned, cold-bath Englishman. The brown, creased face had left its nose isolated, a citadel resisting decay, complementing the eyes. There still lurked amusement at a gullible world. The tie, with its discreet stars and diagonals, his patrician brogues, must contrast with my boots and jacket, as if I were a groom seeking employment. Examining me, he was now the champion golfer assessing a longish putt, then was first to move. He had always been first to do anything.

He extended hands, not to shake mine, or embrace, but as though holding a package as he had done so often, the welcome family intimate, bringing a bottle of Cointreau, epicene box of chocolates, a waisted jar of sprats.

With trained negligence, voice still deep, well oiled, he nodded. ‘They told me you had come. The revalidated mortgage gives me rights of possession.’

They? Father borrowing unwisely? Suddenly, that long-remembered elder-brother smile was unnerving. Confused, I scarcely realized that we were walking not to the house but on the old track into Forest. The ground was frosty but damp, the narrow path manageable despite bramble and sapling. Blurred thoughts solidified into guarded curiosity while he strode ahead, speaking over his shoulder as though no war or crime had interrupted us and giving an uncanny illusion of marching towards horizons, trees dissolving before him. Expertly, intent on his fine clothes, he evaded mole-casts, thorn, branches, nettles, while, lumbering behind, I was already scratched and muddied.

As always, his words rolled as if on castors, like a barrister’s.

‘I enjoy the young, perhaps in what the Viennese conjurors term sadomasochism.’ The path widened, and I was alongside him, being regarded with the hint of malice due to an old friend. He resumed more softly, as it were between parentheses.

‘You were always responsive; your smile must have brought you many friends, though, like myself, you probably doubted whether social converse gave authentic insights. Did not Voltaire or Talleyrand believe that man was given speech in order to conceal his thoughts? You were a handsome boy, shyly unaware of your charm, the gift from your mother. Later…’ he paused, not, as I was intended to believe, to find a way around a pool of mud but surely more carefully to select his words, ‘the vaudeville of wartime life and livelihood deposited me in the USSR, for a while enduring the barely endurable. Until certain of my abilities were commandeered. I soon realized that Marxist disdain of capitalist materialism had not influenced the officialdom. Naturally, I often wondered about you. I had provided you with some refuge from storms.’

He was now the mountain guide, supple, omnipotent, imaginative. Unable to query, ask questions, I nevertheless told myself that his fluency could effortlessly revise his career to fit new circumstances, repel accusations. The small, dry twitch of one edge of his mouth somehow placed me at further disadvantage, the dumb schoolboy. That I was now the physically superior embarrassed me with intimations of disloyalty. Count Pahlen would not have been proud of me.