Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

‘On dry land,’ Alex said, ‘we need not cling to the wreckage.’

I look back to Nadja in a mood of Rilke’s, when he saw dead roses, their hereafter now beginning between our favourite pages. Final truths are unreachable, all ends in semi-colons. Nadja was one from the hordes wounded by a terrible century. Love can flourish on memories. For several years I may have helped pull her free. Greater men have done less. I believe that we remain in each other. Her tale is made banal by novels, movies, charity appeals, but for me she is a classic, out of print, but with my own copy periodically reread.

From the Ministry, books, memoranda, requests arrive daily. For respite, I attend concerts, watch birds, inspect swan-ringing, explore countrysides, see herons return, listen to villagers. ‘Small as the scales on a roach,’ a buckwheat seller confided. Far away, a new Chinese cult claims that devotees, for a fee, would find levitation commonplace. A two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor apparently existed in Central Africa. Plans for new Europe promise a supra-national Public Prosecutor. They do not detract from the dusky moment of the white owl and the invitation to translate for a magazine, revived after forced closure, 1939. Aleksis Rannit’s verse restores a summer afternoon on ‘Ogygia’, the sun laying slats of light across dark blue water, Mother, perched on a tree, hat askew, tossing me bon-bons.

Fate, the past, should be discarded, like the silvery, elusive lure of distances that might have enchanted Nadja, who had once said that sleeping princesses needed a jolt. And Wilfrid, whose quiet amusement concealed sermons, considered inevitable dangerously deceptive.

Today, a manic cyclist, careless electrician, sex-trafficker threaten more than gauleiter, commissar or prospecting for titanium. Lately, my clapboard room, dusty, stuffy, blazed with a pot of flowers – purple, red, blue – that implies, just possibly, nothing inevitable , that Eeva, in her shrugging, matey way, might suggest we go home. Meanwhile, I must cope with the importunate stranger who regularly stops me in the street. ‘Come for a drink, sir. My treat’, wistful or cunning, lisping. ‘I’ll pay. Don’t worry.’

And then.

‘One of our most ingenious, daring and brilliant novelists, and one admired by other writers.’

‘Inventive and witty, exceptionally exhilarating … His prose is a delight.’

‘A teeming, vivid, unruly fairground of experience, jostling with brilliant detail and palpable immediacy.’

‘Unsurpassed at rendering with compelling immediacy the terrors and furies of catastrophic change.’

‘His prose shimmers like a mosaic … Peter Vansittart has a genuine historical imagination.’

PETER VANSITTART (1920–2008) was educated at Haileybury and Worcester College, Oxford. He taught and lectured on English and history, and he reviewed for a number of national newspapers and periodicals. He wrote more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction, many published by Peter Owen.

PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS

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First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

Peter Owen Publishers

This ebook edition 2014

© Peter Vansittart 2006

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No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

PAPERBACK ISBN 0-7206-1264-0

EPUB ISBN 978-0-7206-1762-7

MOBIPOCKET ISBN 978-0-7206-1763-4

PDF ISBN 978-0-7206-1764-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library