LONDON EMBASSY

1

‘You have languages, very important. Despite unfortunate familial associations, you appear unconcerned with East Germany. You can be useful in our Secretariat.’

The First Secretary, bald and careworn, examining me as if measuring for a suit, was speaking in poor German, very softly, as if the rooms were bugged. He had silverish skin, as if permitted only a dry shave. At a desk too wide for the office, a leather-bound volume open before him, he could be some genre illustration not of the pleasures but duties of work. Thick green windows behind him, meshed with wire, gave an illusion of being in a fishtank.

Despite Soviet reconquest, pre-war Estonia was still officially recognized by Britain and retained Embassy and Consulate in South Kensington, housed in a high, sooty, late-Victorian mansion, sporting the flag forbidden by the USSR: white, blue, with a black central stripe, the Bar of Pain.

The First Secretary folded and unfolded documents, demanded signatures, murmured about British Official Secrets requirements. The badly distributed light almost obliterated the flower patterns on heavy curtains and rugs, making them remnants of an abandoned garden.

The building was cavernous, overloaded with the ponderous. Stained alabaster pillars had cracked, tinted glass of a fashion long eclipsed, depicting yellow oblongs, sickly blue curlicues, bilious leaves, tessellated periwinkles. Corridors were obstructed by packing cases, disused standard-lamps, rolls of damask, a broken kennel. A smell pervaded everywhere, like that of Greg’s clothes drying on the stove.

Lake and Forest, islands and gardens, the silken rhythms of fêtes, had sunk to dusty files and yearbooks and a portrait of Konstantin Päts, a heavy face glum as if with presentiments of Siberian death. No Camus or Malraux would enter, no clarion-sound advance. Instead, this tired voice, monotonous as a clock.

‘Actually, your background will assist your comprehension not of the 1917 Bolsheviks but of Imperial Germany’s attempt to establish an Estonian fiefdom, to which your family might not have been averse. You may later need to examine the careers of our former leaders – Päts, Tonison, Poska, Laidiner – you may care to study Estonian literature, indigenous not Germanic, H.H. Tammsaare, for instance. You should investigate the British–Soviet Friendship Society, the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, the pro-Soviet elements within CND. And scrutinize the British press daily.’

His voice lowered further, was conspiratorial. ‘We exist on sufferance from those not hostile but who pretend not to notice us. With more resolution, less looking too far backwards, peacetime London could have halted Germany and conciliated Russia. Now the British no longer look not to themselves alone. You will find them polite but no more.’

He paused, wondering perhaps whether to rate me a jot superior to the British. Then nodded, in my favour. ‘You know of the Cambridge spies, and this new crop … you’ll read of Lonsdale, a Mr Vassall … they have forced the Pentagon to refuse to share atomic secrets with London. In matters of national and individual security, conditions here are lax, sometimes fatally so. Let me warn you against casual acquaintances, unfrequented streets, particularly the late-night Underground. Sit in central carriages, never use stairs, always lifts. Avoid eye contact. Even at diplomatic parties I always stand in corners. Remember, each one of us is watched. KGB, CIA, MI6. Remember Prague, Mr Masaryk dead under his window …’

He hesitated, then rallied. ‘You yourself had role in a well-publicized, American-backed Paris event and could be a target. A man, not always white, glancing at you on an omnibus may be less of a stranger than you imagine.’

My fears of prolonged indolence, lack of adventure, non-being, might be misplaced. Hitherto I had seen only innocuous crowds, good manners, tolerant smiles. Also, no Toute Vie, only party politics, what Mother had called ding-dong.

The First Secretary was dry, severe, insisting full attention. How often had he repeated his warnings to cadets? What had been their fates?

‘The British Joint Intelligence Committee has listed some fifty KGB agents here, liaising with dissident units in factories, labour clubs, unions, five church charities, the universities, Fleet Street, even prostitutes. In certain regions of Europe the Cold War is also a shooting war.’

London, renowned through centuries for subtlety, finesse, stylish opportunism, was, new colleagues insisted, hesitating between the rival empires of Washington and Moscow. To soothe the latter, Whitehall, black hats and bolted faces, was refusing permission for a memorial to the Poles massacred at Katyn. Virtual embargo was levied on reporting the extermination of Baltic professional and intellectual classes. Thermonuclear parity was nearly achieved between the USA and USSR and old Chatterbox spoke of God wearying of mankind.

The Baltic States were Soviet provinces, their histories rewritten, their exiles, scarcely heard, cherishing their lost independence like Australian Aboriginals the songs of dreamtime. Despite Khrushchev’s sensational onslaught on his tutor, Stalin, safely dead, as a paranoiac, criminal incompetent, the Embassy, with punctilious courtesy, was denied access to most Fleet Street and BBC sanctums and Westminster lobbies. No country had dared remind the Kremlin of wartime promise to respect Baltic freedoms. Several thousand Estonians were granted British asylum; some, known to be in Soviet pay, left undisturbed. Of nineteen Estonian quislings, eleven had been summoned to Moscow, unlikely to return, the remainder holding Party positions in Tallinn, formerly Reval.

At first, I had merely to scrutinize visas, dossiers, suspect photographs, investigate the disappearance of a portfolio or identity card, the forgery of a signature, a non-existent address, occasionally meeting mild, solemn British Council officials. My German associations at first assured if not suspicion then considerable reserve and perhaps would obstruct promotion. However, determined to reach higher and, with staff too few and underpaid, I was soon promoted to the Research Department, a small basement room, musty, neglected. Yet its files could astonish me like fiction, which some surely must be: a 1942 Nazi plot to invade Ulster and collaborate with the IRA; Lithuanian crowbars battering Jews to death, 1943, a Bishop Brzgyes forbidding all succour; Khrushchev jovially assuring Budapest writers that had he shot some of them he need not have had to defeat the 1956 Counter-Revolution.

From a back room in Portobello Place, a monthly news sheet, Eesti Hääl, ‘Voice of Estonia’, was published. To this I contributed a poem, very old, very bad, then, rather better, a short memoir of my pre-war days. Their impact was insignificant, but publication was ascent.

For the February Independence Rally, a few scores of ageing people assembled in a church hall, decorated with national flags, faded posters, proclamations signed by defunct notables, a few blown-up photographs, amongst them Päts, so often scorned at the Manor.

The First Secretary addressed us. We should be resolute, we should be ready. But for what? He implied, for very little. Following a brief choir performance, several readings, obscure or merely dull, the Ambassador pronounced the finale, in tones in keeping with his long, narrow features.

‘At home, our people preserve courage, hope, continuity. There will be false dawns, false prophets, Great Power amorality, cynicism. Our own resistance can falter. Josef Stalin once declared that the chief saboteurs are those who never commit sabotage, and, God preserve us, he was right.’ He finished, inclining towards a solitary press representative, by commemorating British sailors’ brave help for Estonians fighting Red Army, White Guards, in 1918, winning Independence and free Baltic waters.

My cubbyhole, cramped by drab brown walls, patched where pictures had once hung, was nevertheless mine alone, like the Turret where, Emperor Earth, I had watched the Pole Star, Nail of the Sky. At liberty to explore, I could ignore the Swabian warning against selling the dog and barking myself. The full text of the Pact demonstrated Goethe’s observation of Hatred in love with Hatred. Its Secret Protocol divided Poland into two slave settlements, recognized Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, outlined future treatment of Finland and Romania. Signing, Ribbentrop, I read, cock-crowed that he had the world in his pocket. His smirk at Hitler’s praise that he was greater than Bismarck smeared German history. He promised the Party that he had reduced Britain to trembling submission.

Ribbentrop ended on the rope, but Europe was simmering with nuclear threats. Balance of Power, Balance of Terror. The First Secretary issued constant warnings of SMERSH, Moscow’s Special Branch.

The Paris Conference had sprouted many replicas, Cold War manoeuvres financed by Moscow and Washington: concerts, exhibitions, books, journals, university posts, peace rallies. The Ambassador quoted Marx, that history is made behind backs. In the Germanies, communist and capitalist, ex-Nazis had unobtrusively climbed to high position, helped by Stille Hilfe, Silent Aid, conspirators bankrolled by the unrepentant and satyric. Lately, the West German security chief resigned, fled east, returned, pleading that he had been abducted under the influence of drugs.

The British, strangely late, were hunting a Fourth and perhaps a Fifth Man, leagued with the Cambridge Old Boy spies. The Wiesenthal Centre informed us of the East German secret police, Stasi, employing former Gestapo experts in pornography and drugs. A Stasi agent, Mr Allen, we knew, but could not prove, sat on CND National Council. Three KGB agents worked in the Royal Institution of International Affairs. The Odessa Association, said to receive Vatican funds, still flew Nazi scientists to Syria, North Africa, Ireland and across the Atlantic. The First Secretary learnt that Downing Street had considered reviving the Home Guard, against parachutists.

In our own street a bomb had been defused. Yesterday, a Baltic exile had been front-paged, lying on a Blackfriars railway track like a smashed crab.

In Europe’s black underside, Hungarian ministers had suddenly gibbered that they were British spies, a Bulgarian general was hanged for unbelievable deals with Israel. A famous American atomic scientist was dismissed on suspicion of pro-Soviet sympathies. McCarthy inquisitors spread black wings over Hollywood, several of my favourite stars displaying timidity – or need to engineer rivals’ eclipse.

Samizdats from Estonia divulged underground resistance throughout the Soviet Bloc, organized by Dr Vilem Bernard, Czech Social Democrat.

Elementary research disclosed to me that, with the Pact shattered, many Estonians had welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators, and even a Soviet-managed bank co-operated with the Nazis in melting down gold from victims’ teeth. Balts had volunteered for the SS Einsatzkommando, Special Employment Unit, execution squads corralling Jews, Nationalists, commissars, for the bullet in the neck, electrodes clamped to the testicles, exhaustion in oil-shale compounds. There was also what Wilfrid called Urfeindschaft, the motiveless or mischievous. ‘I wanted to see,’ a Latvian youth explained, ‘how they fell … whether they squawked.’

Today, imported wholesale into the Baltic States, Russians had priority in housing, tax relief, universities. Farms, ports, factories, banks were collectivized, Russian enforced in schools, supervised by another Special Branch, Spelssluzhba. Robespierre’s wit, ‘He who trembles is guilty’, was little disputed.

Nevertheless, not all Estonians were Mussulmen, listless dokodzaga. Some were joining Bernhard’s crusade; others were Forest Brothers, sabotaging ships and railways, raiding arsenals, ambushing lorries. Quislings were knifed behind the shed, shot in the woods. Subversive cells flickered, some had vanished, betrayed by the Third Man, head of British Intelligence’s Soviet Section.

From barely legible papers I knew that Soviet deserters were amongst the Forest Brothers. At fearful Stalingrad 14,000 had been executed for attempted flight. Some might have reached Meinnenberg. I remembered the lines of Walther von der Vogelweide:

The World is fair to look on, white and green and red,

But within, it is black of hue, dismal as the dead.

The British, resourceful, leisured, had, with sporting generosity, acclaimed the first Russian sputnik, the young imagining it as overture to a second creation, which supported a Labour politician’s foretelling as mathematical certainty the West collapsing in competition with Communism. A satirist reviled Churchill as confederate of Bomber Harris, murderer of Dresden and Berlin, Never to Be Forgotten, Never to Be Forgiven.

My own prospects were further encouraged when the First Secretary suggested I write booklets on Estonian culture and history. Here I found friendship with the librarian. Elderly, his head, yellowy and chipped as a walnut, was always slightly askew, as if badly reset after an operation ambitious though illegal, so that I was tempted to straighten it, despite likelihood of a sharp crack. Nicknamed Mr Tortoise, he had published some youthful novels, later a thesis, accepted by Tartu University, on the symbolism of black in medieval art, his argument structured on a very dark fourteenth-century Sienese painting. Subsequent cleaning, however, proved that, originally, it had been exceptionally vivid. This destroyed his competitive ardour, but he was now tireless in supplying texts, translations, long-forgotten knowledge.

The pamphlets satisfied my seniors, who then demanded I compile a more literary miscellany for distribution to North America, Scandinavia, and to be smuggled into Estonia itself. This was testing, adventurous. I was encouraged to contact genuine writers and scholars, though response from Baltic Nobel Laureates, while possible, was improbable, like addressing the Queen as ‘Babe’.

Estonia’s sole world figure, already hanged, filling few sentences, was Alfred Rosenberg, the Führer’s racial Mephisto.

Mr Tortoise quickly listed likely contributors from Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Princeton, Ottawa, and I immersed myself in novels, verse, plays, rural traditions. Oral Livonian verse seemed hinged on protecting land, roof, family and on hopes flying like gulls over the Sound, black and white upon blue and grey. I read lamentations of Tsarist conscripts, epic hunts, clan feuds, the propitiation of ancestors, the recipes of shamans. Of talking eagles, bears mating with humans – Forest Uncle on the way – elks in the sky, a star-god seducing a housewife, trees with runes, some scrawled by themselves, cow-girls outspread naked on brilliant meadows, dun landscapes patient as cattle.

Short-haired, taciturn, alien, I was most at home ranging pre-Christian Estonia and a personal, hallucinatory London, city of the scared boy-king in the Tower, Fagin and Copperfield, Holmes and Watson, all so distinct from the masses in an indifferent, international metropolis, still visibly torn by the Reichsmarschall. I would not forget St Paul’s, giant head and shoulders intact above flame and smoke. Westminster Hall, lofty, spare, testified a people upright into my own time, when others cowered, appealing to worthless treaties, pledges from cheats. But Londoners could now be stifled in what the Ambassador deplored as the New Appeasement, though maybe awaiting some call, some marvellous gesture, if not from what had been so admired in the Manor, some mannered, debonair Sir Anthony. Abbey and Palace kept elaborate façades, but power lay quiet within briefcases and where puny Estonia had no being.

A foreigner’s England could be extraordinary, if theatrical. The clash of Shakespeare’s eloquent, brutal nobles and the witty repartee of their ladies were alike gritted in animal independence. Rulers had stood trial, barely credible voyages had succeeded, Churchill in his pomp been sturdily ejected, still gripping the Flag, soon to be slowly lowered over far-away lands, provoking shrugs or complex silence.

British scepticism might show superior insight, a belief that authority is justified only when creating conditions for its own abdication. Having helped salvage Europe, these perplexing people disowned their authority, rejected European leadership offered almost without bargaining, withdrawing as if from sha.

Mother had been proud of the British Empire, deceived by pageantry. Father studied but rarely mentioned it. The Herr General praised techniques by which the few manipulated the many.

Unlike Paris, London, loaded with heroic symbols, statues, memorials, titles, discouraged conceit. A junior, employed by another and unreal authority, I needed to discover London beyond plush ceremonial and sour nostalgia and was unable to forget a message from a statesman no longer recognizable by any Londoner, ‘England is either great or is nothing.’

2

After my paralysis in Suzie’s bedroom, we continued as if before, laughing at small incidents, talking incessantly, but I ceased manoeuvres towards her bed.

I had no rights of judgement, was myself probably a natural collaborator. Meinnenberg was evidence that, in fear, despair, hunger, behaviour is unpredictable and unprincipled. The Pact dissolved opposites in an hour; opposites might be identical. The most popular boy at school had been ostracized, overthrown, at news that his mother had died in a car crash. Why? None of us spoke of it, none of us knew, but we all united in hating him.

That photo of Suzie throbbed like torn flesh. The bald scalp, pink as Greg’s swine, exuded repellent images over the spirited, independent girl with whom I had imagined a future. Hair from collaborators had been waved as if in witches’ Sabbath. Hair from criminal camps insulated submarines, stuffed mattresses of Party whores and of M. Bousquet, merciless dandy; hair from the Gestapo guillotine at Breslau, and from those who died on the gallows towering over Taptvere Park, Tartu, stark as Leningrad’s Bronze Horseman.

We wandered shadowy places, giggled, laughed, but like children on a birthday of disappointments. She sensed change, but in silence. Rain and Seine mist quietened the boulevards. Days were smaller, colder and when, queerly defiant, she at last drew me to bed, my ardour convinced neither of us. Her play, inventiveness, climatic shudders had been learnt in other and unappetizing quarters. Our grapplings, twists, heaves were the transitory glitter of fireworks, her nakedness mere camouflage, and, despite gasps and murmurs, our deeper silence could not be dislodged.

Winter stiffened like pack ice. My joylessness was infectious. Priggish, conformist, I could give her only good manners. Reprieve would not arrive. One day she failed an appointment; we would not meet again.

Not desolate but sad, oppressed by dishonest evasions, I immured myself with Wilfrid’s books, records, wine, he himself reported by Le Soir to be in Vienna.

A curtain had fallen, removing dazzle. Paris was bleak. The girl who ran might have been fleeing some poisoned love.

Dependence on Wilfrid was too soft an option, a benevolent prison, which, perhaps, with infinite tact and very deftly, he was unlocking. Like God, he experimented and, if dissatisfied, withdrew.

Impasse. A useless life, Goethe wrote, is an early death. Imagination is quickened by gaps, by not knowing too much, and, rather too glibly, I began suspecting impatience or malice lurking beneath Wilfrid’s forbearance. I was diseased by uncertainties, seeing myself in a Blue Train, stationary on the wrong track. Instinct urged me towards Mother’s people, her Landed gentry, on the island of Byron and Dickens, juicy milords, flawless police, red buses. Her fables exuded perpetual scarlet-and-gold parades, resplendent bishops with sermons beginning, ‘Those of you who read Greek …’ In one anecdote, the patrician Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, mistook Hitler for a footman and handed him his hat. Unlikely. Unfortunately.

Arrival in post-Suez London was no bugle-call rag. Knowing no one, anonymous as a burglar, I was bidden to no grandee mansion, no candle-lit banquet or crimson opera-box. Landed gentry, of hunt balls and royal polo, brick-faced countesses, had apparently disfavoured Mother’s defection to a Baltic Baron and her son, Herr Nobody. Had they allowed me any, their smiles would have been sunlight on ice. I was a misfit, quaint, like the great Mr Bevin, ‘not one of us’, first tasting caviar and remarking that the jam tasted fishy. Not a Sir Anthony observation. They might fear me urinating on the Persian rug.

3

Silent voices of stone, fumes, cloud, dirt, more amorphous than Paris, slowly seeping into me, were concealing other contours of grey, monarchical London, socially ramped like a ziggurat, while wooing all with parks, street theatre, movement. Giant cranes slanted like surreal giraffes, high-rises mounted further, behind Victorian terraces and Regency columns grew immigrant enclaves. Immigrant myself, as if wearing the Tarnhelm, cap of invisibility, I attracted few glances, my friendliest exchange was with a little Malaysian waitress. ‘Kinda worried,’ she said, after my short absence.

I had hoped for some welcome in coffee bars – Che, Partisan, Lumumba, Vega à Go-Go – brimming with sumptuous rubber plants, radical posters, the exuberance of youth, denimed, duffled, embracing with madcap clamour or teenage sullenness. But the young, too, ignored me, while jeering amongst themselves at taxpayers and literates. They were more generous to striking miners and unmarried mothers than to beggars. Denied immediate fellowship, I could only watch, in cavern or small indoor stadium, their dervish jives, their flashes of unicorn grace. Occasionally, sloping in all weather at outdoor tables, they offered me sale of an ‘anti-Fascist biro’ or wanted my signature for a petition against Belgian imperialism, censorship of an underground paper or for Princess Margaret, to assuage racialism, to marry a Jamaican. They invited me not to a party, a jive, a happening but only to join their hilarity when a wealthy socialist sent his son to Eton, the better to meet his social equals.

In the USA Trilling was accused by students for teaching Jane Austen, thus showing support for US foreign policy. Zealots wrecked a Hampstead cinema for showing a film anti-Mau Mau, and, in a Bristol church, ‘Logic Is Fascist, Clarity Confuses’ was sung to a hymn tune. The Pill was promised, like Iduna’s Apples of Perpetual Youth. A girl offered me mescaline, guaranteeing visions of minute Alps, dust particles enlarging to Arizona, a trouser thread to green veins of Antarctica. I was allowed to subscribe for the funeral of a drugs martyr, a trainee doctor, blinding himself by seeking a third eye.

Did any such joylets read, ponder or, despite a vogue for meditation, risk solitude? They were rowdily post-war, post-Christianity, post-democracy, unpatriotic without being international. Mother’s remembered music-hall song, ‘Be British was the cry / As the ship went down’, would have baffled them, like Greek, Sanskrit, Esperanto. The Vice-Supremo of the Holocaust was, illegally but righteously, kidnapped, then hanged, by Israelis. ‘Who’, a young agitator against capital punishment, demanded, ‘is, I’d say was, this Eichmann?’ The newly erected Berlin Wall was accepted as protecting the People from Imperialism, and a student leader was wildly applauded for announcing that, had he to choose between the destruction of the venerable Abbey and the death of a human being, however worthless, he would unhesitatingly save the latter.

The Saturday Knights, helmeted, visored, black-leathered, sat motionless on motor cycles, awaiting signal to crouch low, then roar off, to pillage seasides and maul flick-knife rivals. The young had the mystique of cabals and élites, though regularly rebuked by their elders as too rich, too happy, too irresponsible. The obsolescence of Empire. One youth winked at me, tapping his military greatcoat. ‘Redistributed from supplies, mate. We’re doing the country good, armies aren’t needed now. Aldous says …’

Roxanas and Sandras, Jakes and Garys tossed words like crackers. ‘Fantastic. Greatest ever.’ Beads, mantras, joss-sticks, bizarre coiffures were no access to the Infinite, but I envied freedom from caste, habit, agility. Youth discarded the past, danced on the present, the electric moment, turned backs on all future save the Bomb. I could not risk confessing that I had rejoiced at Hiroshima, as destroying thousands to save millions. Marxism explained, Marc-Henri retorted. Perhaps sincerely, young Londoners feared the limbless cretin and two-headed baby, saw a Japanese girl’s eyes crumble at a touch.

For them, I was conformist, ‘square’, short-haired, my head almost page-boy. Their admission prices were too drastic. They would scream for Vello, as they did for Castro, Guevara, for Sinatra and Joan Baez. They delighted in rumours that the Fourth Man was a spy in the Palace. With sex easy as oil, the perils of beauty exciting, the slave camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta were only the invention of right-wing scribblers. An Estonian was freak of nature, a German had glamour of jackboot and truncheon, even of the New Economic Miracle.

I enjoyed protest songs but was unable to bawl for unearned rights or use the Bomb as an excuse for misbehaviour, or suicide, and was thus debarred. ‘See you morrow-day,’ youngsters said, but I knew I never would.

I was like a hyphen between a lost Paris and hypothetical Londons, was threatened by Rising Tide.

Accident, or apparent accent, tyche, intervened. I chanced on a tiny north London art-house cinema, showing a blurred silent Lubitch movie, The Patriot, Emil Jannings twitching, slobbering, as Tsar Paul, clinging to his murderer, Lewis Stone, who else but Count von der Pahlen. Uniformed conspirators stalked weird palaces, limitless, mirrored corridors ornate with giant guards and dwarfs in immense hats spitting and capering while, outside, His Majesty inspected grenadiers motionless as toys which he imagined they were, while, heads bending towards each other in shuttered rooms, Pahlen and his conspirators planned to save Russia from a madman. Some tick in my blood revived, quivered, restoring me to history.

My Guilford Street lodging-house was surrounded by cheap hotels, Italian restaurants, foreign tourists, my bedroom opposite a nurses’ hostel so that, in theatre, I could watch a live frieze of girls chatting, eating, reading, undressing, stinging me with recollections of Suzie, the pizzicato of foreplay, versatility of hands and mouth, the magnetic pull of thigh and buttock towards flashpoint. Through open windows drifted conversational codes resolutely English: ‘Quite warm at last.’ ‘Yes, very cool.’ ‘Adam’s Apple.’

The Embassy had a play-reading group, a choir affiliated to the Estonian Lutheran Service at Gresham’s Church, a tennis squad, an occasional dance. Also, a note periodically circulated. If Mr Kaplan arrives, he is to be given the arrangement. Latterly, however, this was reversed. Mr Kaplan? The old librarian put finger to his lips, so that I immediately envisaged dull green eyes, emaciated face, B-movie mackintosh crammed with forgeries.

A brief affair, not with a nymphet but with a solid Scottish typist, won me no access to what she termed her Diploma, and she soon departed to the superior Norwegian Embassy, Diploma intact.

Undismayed, remembering Pahlen, I energetically explored Thameside pubs, dank, slimy jetties, empty warehouses still tinged with spices, rank straw and sacking, the coarse vigour of tar and rope, of what had been the busiest port in Europe. Its moonlit waters had guided the Luftwaffe, and, like a hiccup, came temptation to throw into them wallet, visas, identity, renewing myself as a vagrant, stagehand, international courier.

This was lunacy. Rainy pavements, half-lights, uncertain vistas were exhilarating, and I remained eager for plaques, street names, statues to surrender meanings. I remembered Mother’s bewilderment by Dickens’s confession that only in crowds could he rid himself of spectres and that, without streets, he was not happy. No real gentleman, Mother ended, settling everything. London’s high-rise population must seclude other spectres, many who were not happy.

On buses, in pubs, at corners, I strove to understand London, by observing, by listening.

‘The Queen’s not interested in you, Dad.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

Apathetic to the blare of Haley and Presley, the unction and rhetoric of modish Theatre of Anger, of the Absurd, I saw more poignant drama in unexpected vistas of tree and lawn, the sumptuous squares – Residents Only – an old man in Richmond Park, London’s Umgebung, staring at a vandalized tree like Wilfrid before a Brancusi, a tiny child in a back alley gravely skipping, wordlessly singing, as she might have done in Troy. Off Goodge Street, a row of neat, tinted cottages must be residence of expensive whores, though when I repeated this a year later to a BBC drama producer drama was extended in her terse reply that she lived there.

London crowds, slangy, tolerant, joking, incurious, were less concerned with a Europe of Common Market, show trials, one-party despotism than with shallow war movies, the recriminations of retired generals, royal occasions, scandal. Mr Tortoise lamented that Britain was fatigued, embarrassed by past grandeurs, rebuffment at Yalta, supplication for US aid, the Suez farce. Self-mockery had replaced stoicism and purpose. He added that, in 1940, with Europe toppling, ravaged by military defeat and corruption, the British deftly convinced themselves that defeat was victory and, Blitz and invasion looming, had laughed, glad to be rid of futile Continental allies.

We stood with the Ambassador at the November Cenotaph rites, annual cohesion of monarch, arms, politics, the populace: plumes and metal, horse-hair head-dresses, flowers, sacred emblems, incantations, sacrificial solemnity. ‘But’ – Mr Tortoise was ambiguous – ‘don’t be misled.’

Sundays closed on London like a lid, darkening a fierce spirit once fanned by a rasping voice and a large cigar. Oh, to pull down the sky, wrap my head, become intoxicated with thought, free of the mournful silence, closed cafés, ill-tempered tourists. Spires threatened, passages echoed, shops were empty barracks. Yet surely, from behind corner or monument, must appear Baldur or Iduna, givers of happiness, who need no ticket, to whom managers defer, police touch caps, doors open without hands, wolves slink away.

These occur, literature emblazons them, but waiting is all, deliberate search is useless.

Any lustrous redeemer was buried in sterile winter. A wounded sun was reflected in icy puddles, flowerbeds were black. In days still short and dark, Mr Kaplan might be prowling a shadowy tunnel, a shabby tobacconist be front for conspiracy. In silly bravado, I dared myself to stand defenceless under a Kentish Town railway arch frequented by gangs. Behind drab curtains, a genius, bitter and vengeful, might be fingering codes for wholesale destruction. Baldur might prove a charming strangler, SMERSH stalker, imitation cowboy desperate for a name, Iduna a besmirching ogress or resentful ex-star.

In Hyde Park, nuclear disarmers held placards like riot shields, watched by a woman, furred, pearled, indignant. She had been very tenderly feeding robins and now straightened, glowering at me. ‘Why isn’t everything cleaned up? Abroad …’ she looked wistful, almost attractive, ‘they were allowed, well … gas.’

Becoming ethnically mixed as ancient Rome or Antioch, the capital remained unknowable, often alarming. I felt panic in a subterranean car park on brooding, thinly lit levels, familiar from gangster movies, when a sudden footfall seemed gunshot; also when an inscrutable van halted alongside me, my head within range. A fruit barrow stationed near the Embassy might hide explosives, like the single boot beneath a Clapham bench. The furtive was rival government. Our shelves had catalogues of lethal inks, poisoned washing powder and vests, hollow canes, diagrams of crossed wires and inconspicuous knobs. New versions of the Hidden Hand, World Plotters, Wise Men of Zion, the Four Just Men, Professor Moriarty, once sold on railway platforms.

In this London, doorstep salesmen were suspect. In a surreptitious leaflet a turbaned head was captioned, ‘I Want Your Job, Your Woman, Your Boys.’ Strangers’ eyes could be clues in the plot: screwed hard, they menaced.

Aerosol Man sprayed silent chorus, signatures of terror. Kill for Peace, Kaffirs Out, Jewful of Greed, Fuck Work: dark passwords, though scarcely Lenin in October. How many realized danger from an Oxfordshire house where insufficient evidence protected a woman who had placed a Russian spy as a secretary within the British atomic arms organization?

4

Early spring. Another London uncovering itself, graceful stages of seduction. Light broadened, trees were clotted with green, feet quickened. Madame Katrina, Earl’s Court clairvoyant, foresaw that Midsummer would give me a momentous encounter. Pending this, a thick-bearded Indian in the gardens accosted me. ‘Great Britain!’ Moist brown eyes protruded, stiffened, ‘Queen, Duke. Top Grade? No.’ Then clapped hands and disappeared. Not a miraculous saviour from golden air, nevertheless, green leaf, red blossom in patrician, electronically protected Belgravia, daffodils flaunting in the Embassy garden, all signalled good fortune. Not so the sirens floating around me, always intent on someone else. Sallow girls in the tube, dark girls on grass, girls with thrilling bottoms and Arletty eyes, laughing Italians and discreet Spaniards, Bengalis gliding in saris, glistening athletic Swedes, festive American girls high on repartee, all with escorts, making for tennis, swimming or palais de dance, to jitter like crazed marmosets.

A clear eye glittered like a key, perfume lingered after she had gone, frustration smudged the wet dream. Copulations must be seething throughout April, Bacchic seizures of life, but I had to attempt solace from scents of a box hedge, at once transporting me to Mother’s rose garden, or from a disused north London railway line vanishing into tunnels, woods, into stories. Anticipating summer harlequinades, a park band restored the Europe of Strauss and Lehar, Auber and Offenbach. I was always helpless against tunes, lulling, reclining, jaunty, teasing, thumping. An old, once loved Austrian song caught my breath:

Only one Emperor’s City,

Only one Wien.

Prayers get answered, usually ironically, stamping the month like a thumb print. I needed what the English called Fun, but, in a mischievous English way, received only answer to prayer.

On broken pavement, desolate, yet within sight of St Paul’s, I found a bomb site, a jagged turmoil of bricks, rubble, rusted metal, smashed glass, befouled tins, dark filth amongst the saplings, nettles, foxgloves – puzzling nursery name – barely natural sunflowers, swollen and garish after centuries of oblivion, now lolling over slabs of stucco. The ruin must have been preserved by City speculators, though Poles or Germans could have cleared it in a fortnight. Flowers were scentless as blisters. From them rose an apparition, not slender but thin, female, in blotched jeans, hair in Medusa tangles, eyes, circled by mascara, fixed as a lip-reader’s but cat-like with spite. The face, ill or defiant, tightened. Young but not youthful, she must see a foreigner, thus more willing to pay, and finally she touched her crotch.

‘You want it, Mr Continent? To wake it up?’ A country accent, words, as it were, out of balance, scarcely comprehensible. A wraith, exhalation of another London mood, from wreckage, with sores and worse. ‘It’s safe.’ She was not urgent, merely stating, like an indifferent tourist guide. ‘I don’t scream.’

Her attempted laugh, mirthless, was yet warmer, showing teeth clean and regular as a drill squad, uncanny on the dirty face. ‘I come here with Wendy. A lush. Petal. No kids. Her tubes …’ She nodded towards a lair scooped from bricks and twigs, but did not move, as if trying to sell Wendy. ‘But the bandages on her wrists … Overdosed three times. Thrice, as they say. Got a cig? I’m strapped.’

The face minutely thickened, the eyes sickened. ‘She let the blood run into the sink, said it was Sue’s scratches, but I threw that. In the toilet, red and white. It’d scare you rotten. By all rights she’d hate me, though I can say nice things. I can say, Lampedusa. Joe Tom Lampshade. Her friend Max burnt down the Wandsworth.’

My need for flight was obstructed by scraps of ingrained courtesy. Father would have lifted his hat, Mother be grandly solicitous, opening her purse, the Herr General stand his ground, as if in a museum of objects curious but inessential.

‘Did you know, whoever you are, that the lone attacker scarcely ever threatens the underaged? That most crimes are at home? Patriarchal or otherwise.’ She lingered over this with queer pride. ‘I’d want to help, but can be insincere, wanting jam with the loaf. Bread’s something else. Sometimes I need six of the best. What are you thinking?’ I was still thinking of headlong escape, possible pursuit. Her smile ceased midway, leaving only a stare empty as a parrot’s.

As if repeating a lesson imperfectly understood, she said, ‘It’s all doubling the greengage. So he says. He likes calling it syndrome.’

A fear rippled through me, seeking the bone. Despite the undernourishment, she was wiry as gristle, a graveyard creature from German UFA movies. Speechless, I felt my head shaking, she did not shrink, merely sink back to the grit, tins, over-bright plants.

Later, in some shame, I knew that war, deaths, Meinnenberg had not left me compassionate. Possibly, my Germanic strain made me impatient of waste, the crippled, deranged, lost. I sought a forgetting and for some days muffled disquiet, even shame, in cinemas, needing Bogart’s glinty eye, Cagney’s swagger, Astaire’s electric feet and supernatural cane. Childhood fantasies, Forest Uncle, cruel but beloved, dainty swan-dancers, transmuted to Marlene’s blue, languid stare. Rita’s swirling skirt, Orson’s hauteur, Laughton’s ogreish satisfaction, spitfire women and beefsteak men careening in honky-tonk Dodge City or on the Santa Fé trail.

I still needed to share. Tortured by isolation, God must have invented the Devil. Loneliness was more fearful than the Kaplans and Miracles. Hungrily watching the noisy, bewitched young, I remembered Spender’s line, I longed to forgive them, but they never smiled.

In simplicity of genius, Stefan George began, She came alone from far away.With Suzie, I had shared Fun. Meinnenberg had permitted brief, disconcerting, impulsive comradeships, even with Greg and Trudi I had been intimate with coarse, frostbitten pasture, windy harvests, the silence of north German night. I could now only await the soothsayer’s promise.

5

A giant red balloon, soundless, motionless, a touch sinister, was suspended above Kensington, from one angle a question mark, from another a missile. It was appropriate to Cold War anxiety, also to my workaday routine, harshly won against emotional odds like a Viking raid, then finding solace in mystery.

Lust could not sizzle unremittingly. Prolonged labours dampened it. My monkish cell was filling with documents stale yet engrossing, letters useless but curious. So little reliable, so much obsolete information, like the Embassy itself with its creaking typewriters, inability to afford electronic dials and flashes. Even Mr Tortoise, tireless in help, in chores, admitted we were a hoax perpetrated on a complacent, indulgent kingdom. I envied Spender, reported addressing seventeen conferences in four continents within six weeks, then imagined him in an army, mildly raising his cap instead of saluting.

Nevertheless, my position did not abate my need for recognition and satisfaction with work. Unexpected discoveries restored the future. From an overlooked cache we learnt that Himmler’s behaviour could be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, that Stalin, 1938, agreed to join Britain and France against Hitler in return for regaining the Baltic States. Halifax, devout nobleman, friend of Gandhi, had allegedly refused to sacrifice democratic Christians to atheist dictatorship, Ambassador Thoma inviting us to consider whether the sacrifice of seven million Balts to prevent world war and holocaust was a worthwhile moral question.

My self-importance was enhanced by handling packages and microfilms marked ‘Strictly Confidential’. Increasingly, came names from long ago. Father’s uncle, fettered with barbed wire and thrown down a mineshaft, an Estonian minister deported to the Urals, on suspicion of reading Herzen. Echo of that victim of Jacobin Terror, guillotined for suspicion of being suspect.

Another name surfaced like a snout. A 1946 Soviet memo, leaked to General Oliver Lynne, Military Governor of the British Zone, Berlin, described how, with the Reich ablaze, four SS seniors prised themselves free of Reichsführer Himmler, seeking help from the Swede, Count Bernadotte, later assassinated by Israelis. He was unofficially conferring with an old friend, the Herr General. Captured Abwehr archives also disclosed the Herr General’s connections with Swedish, Swiss, Anglo-American and Argentinian dummy companies selling the Nazis contraband lorries, oceanic maps, spare parts, fuses, electrical components, fed through conduits of such global complexes as I.G. Farben, the chemico-industrial monopoly, refining fats, lime, nitric acid and manufacturing synthetic rubber in one section of Auschwitz, place of bodies rotting for strange purpose. Farben specialists had provided very original analysis of blood, bone, hair, skin.

An uncoded letter was a précis of the Herr General’s correspondence with Helmuth Poensgen, Ruhr tycoon, subsequently accused of wartime deals with Wall Street and London banks. In one file many pages had been ripped out, but the Herr General must still be surmised as Soviet prisoner, executed or starved in a permacold camp, a fate more convincing than being strung from a Plötenzee meat-hook for complicity in the July Plot. Or, such were the conditions of War, Pact, Peaceful Co-Existence, just possibly residing on Long Island, courted by long-sighted undesirables.

More sharply edged was Mr George Blake, accused of betraying an Anglo-American tunnel dug beneath East Berlin, a project sufficiently plausible to make me halt on the Embankment and wonder whether the road-menders spoke English.

The French, whom their president had proclaimed as guardians of European culture, of civilization itself, having acquired forty boxes of gold from wartime Hungarian Jews, were refusing to release them. Today’s Times claimed that Soviet minders of the future Cambridge spies had, following the Pact, been summoned to Moscow. They handed over Maginot Line secrets, then were shot.

The First Secretary was giving us some hopes of Khrushchev as a liberal, good-natured man of the peasants so reverenced by Tolstoy, despite Moscow’s current dispute with Washington over Congo disturbances and Castro denouncing the 1952 Cuban–American Treaty.

An Estonian poet, hulking, affectionate, drunk, lurched into the Embassy and assured me that I possessed ‘Destiny’, though we agreed that Destiny, dark sister, was captious as weather. He then said that Wagner told Baudelaire that, of all worldly gifts, the best were Beauty and Friendship. I had none of the former, little of the latter. Only work gave purpose.

Life was disciplined into sections, footnotes, references, mostly suggested by Mr Tortoise, who wagged delightedly at my own discoveries. The Miscellany was nearing completion, helped by grants from the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, and the European Broadcasting Union. One poem, ‘Sad Carrion’, derived from a girl buried alive by militia, 1898. Another nagged at me for days:

Bright ones were away, golden ones on the wing,

Off by night’s gleam.

Golden ones move by moonlight.

My head in the ages, I felt words, now brilliant as a carillon, now sombre as an undertaker’s parlour, but leaping over frontiers. They hauled me from doubt, Verwirrung, and the sticky cobweb of half-truths, whispers, insinuations, the mannered hypocrisies and gloved elegancies of professional diplomacy, for I was now allowed to attend minor official receptions. At these I heard discreet clucks about Pentagon and Ministry of Defence still employing trusted colleagues of Herr Adolf Eichmann.

As further fillip, the BBC World Service invited me to broadcast, during slack periods, on Baltic affairs. Censorship, no less drastic by being unofficial, forbade mention of Operation Cock-Up, British submarines’ attempt at undercover conveyance of Estonian partisans for training in East Anglia. Throughout, it had been divulged to Moscow, British officers had been amongst the victims.

All embassies must secrete shadow regions, doctored histories, desperate options, careers carefully left ambiguous. One such was Evai Miksa, Police Chief in Nazi-occupied Estonia, now an Icelandic citizen but, in his London Bishop’s Avenue millionaire stockade, entertaining newspaper owners and high-ups of all parties. We had been sent, anonymously, data of a recently dead physician who had punctiliously assisted the elimination of Estonian ‘sub-humans’. He had contrived peacetime employment in an Argentinian clinic, before retiring to Leicester, a dignified gentleman eating cakes in the Kardomah café, regular at church and charity dinners, lifting his hat to old ladies. Included, was his prospectus for culling ‘racially deficient offspring’.

MI6 had requested information of a Nazi fugitive murdered in Prague, the Nobel physicist who had reviled Einstein as a Jewish fraud.

The First Secretary, on my pledge of secrecy, showed me a stolen diagram of bunkers secretly built in nine British cities against atomic attack. A handwritten postscript detailed underground bases in London, Birmingham, Manchester, their concrete two yards thick and with electronically maintained stores, radio communication, hundreds of miles of cable.

True? His Excellency only shrugged while I, as Holmes, as Maigret, as Perry Mason, burrowed for more of the Herr General. Before the war, he owed large sums to the Estonian Treasury; at this, Mr Tortoise gave a tragedian’s sigh. ‘He was blatnoi. A thief who could sometimes be trusted.’

I had to reconsider tales of him commanding Whites in 1919, his contacts with the British Navy and the future Field-Marshal, Harold Alexander, his negotiating with the Reds. Multilingual reports, cuttings, clandestine letters, featured him on a commission supplying them with guns, tractors, grain, his ability to extract British loans, his signature amongst dozens on the Tartu Treaty by which Lenin recognized ‘for Perpetuity’ the independence of the Baltic States. He had been with Bernadotte, Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, helping draft the telegram to the frantic Himmler, that the Allies rejected him as Guarantor of Order in a post-Hitler Reich. A text unenviable to deliver to der Treue Heinrich.

Much was supposition, notably an FBI note of the Herr General’s covert meeting with the Duke of Windsor in Lisbon after the capture of Paris.

Such a man joins no White Rose or July Plot. He flickers in shadow play, a dim hand poised above ciphered missives, to demolish, dispossess, bargain, condemn; a blur, passing in an armoured car with obscure number plates.

Father, rather apologetically, once said that though the Herr General never lied; he enjoyed truth indirect. I myself was to find that, if three say identical words, two are untruthful. Mother reproached him, then, seeing me escaping to bed, murmured in very different voice, ‘Good night, my pet. Sleep with angels.’ Yet it was from the Herr General that I craved denial that the Manor, like all Big Houses, contained a scaffold, explaining business once done in the Rose Room.

Now, would-be Londoner, pamphleteer, editor, with newcomer’s zest, I was a counter-Marat, an anti-McCarthy, exposing crimes, denouncing the unclean, in territory without barriers, where the dead stalked the living. With sudden optimism, I judged that my pamphlets, and the lyrics and sub-epics of the Miscellany, would fortify the Forest Brothers.

Easily indictable was Alexander Seroff, of Soviet State Security, Moscow’s henchman in destroying the last of the Estonian intelligentsia, responsible to Khrushchev.

My mail swelled, mostly supportive, though one scrawl complained that I was a lackey of General Motors, another that, as a gentile, I would never see God, a third denouncing me as a police spy.

I was permitted a broadcast on Independent Estonia, Mr Tortoise supplying notes on Nationel no Trudovay, National Unity Society, dissolved by the Pact. Many survivors joined the Forest Brothers, though several were communists, their loyalties equivocal.

A few sentences tapped from Estonia revealed that a former National Unity member, Georgi Okolovitch, fleeing to West Germany, had been trailed by Nikolai Khokhloff of SMERSH, the Bloodhound. At Frankfurt, confronting each other, they made friends, recklessly held press conference, then vanished.

Other reports were less highly coloured, more like muffled bleats from a submerged and wrecked submarine. A twilit scenario of dubious allegiances, currency fraud, pornography, bugged rooms and telephones, supra-national linkages. A known KGB officer sat in the Bonn government, another was a UNESCO prominente. Yet another, protégé of U. Thant, UN Secretary-General, spoke regularly on Radio Free World. CIA was tussling with KGB, to finance aspects of the World Council of Churches and the Congress of Cultural Freedom. CIA money was said to underpin Mr Spender’s influential monthly. Moscow maintained that mafiosi had secured the recent election of the young, vivid JFK, who then shared a girl with a Midwest godfather.

A Himalayan guru, revered and overpaid by Western youth, to reduce fears of the Bomb, denied the existence of Existence.

Mr Tortoise found me a photostat of a 1940 Foreign Office map of Brazil, some provinces coloured, denoting Nazi plans for occupation, in another forgery, to induce US entry into the war. Eesti Hääl accepted an appeal from Manifeste des 121 to French soldiers to desert rather than use torture in Algeria, where Estonians served as Foreign Legionaries. We designed a European chart, reducing hallowed cities to strokes, circles, initials, synonyms of pharmaceutical laboratories, armament and toxic gas fortresses, airfields disguised as colleges, real estate offices, undeveloped areas. Italicized dots co-ordinated a Belfast rifle club, Amsterdam bookshop, Milan Masonic lodge, Marseilles insurance company.

Tiny incidents I remembered from Paris were now magnified, loaded with meaning. The soft-spoken philanthropist enquiring whether Wilfrid travelled by air, a royalist’s anxiety to discover Malraux’s telephone number. Next week, ‘for kicks’, wealthy teenagers had placed a plastic bomb near his flat. ‘I can offer you perfect style,’ an elderly German had promised, ‘also, absolute protection’, mistaking my importance.

Such massed information was fatiguing, but the Miscellany revived me, presenting friendship with the unseen, some alive, others dead. Maria Under, the poet, Bernard Kangro, authority on Estonian folk traditions, sent me new work. With Mr Tortoise, I persuaded UNESCO to publish Karl Bistikvi’s Hohenstaufen Trilogy. From Oslo exile, Ivar Günthal sent extracts from his polemical journal Mana. We edited translations from Gerd Hetbemäe’s periodicals. Estonian humour became more understandable, akin to its landscapes, often bleak and sunless, then revealing subtleties: it had the sardonic slyness of the subjected, the dumb-insolence grin of Good Soldier Svejk. A moving resistance story, ‘Partisans’, arrived from Arved Viirlaid, of Toronto.

A character in a play that London had frenziedly applauded, brayed that no good causes were left. The Miscellany was now sent to the author, though without response.

Under the heavens we know, Gods still richly bestowing, Move as in former years.

Would Rilke have discerned gods in managerial England, of planning, City and parliamentary scandals, vomiting drunks and television aristocracy? But, this morning, a new Estonian poem shone like light compressed to a jewel, flashing golds and blues against London greys and vernal greens. From stories I regained old kitchen talk of learned birds, miraculous wells, trees inventing speech, the village ‘Shrewd One’ stating that no animal save the occasional bear possessed souls. For illiterates, like detectives and partisans, a bridge, footprint, low whistle had significance outside stories.

Not a poet, I planted myself in poems, with delight almost sexual chancing on Bernard Kangro’s verses.

I have been prone here for millennia,

My face – crumbling stone

Yet my heart beats eternally, my soul

Is the roar and groan of forests.

Field, meadow, paddock, village,

The tall ancient birch at the gate-way,

Are flickering, fugitive glints,

Long thoughts, looming, waiting.

My breast has weathered tempest,

Hail has brutally lashed my eyelids.

Very tactfully, Mr Tortoise reminded me that the word soul had been the death of many poets.

6

In parodies of a heroic career, I was building a grandiose self: Malraux’s confidante, Trilling’s assistant, Spender’s intimate and rival editor, BBC reliable, almost a new being like Soviet Man, American Youth.

The facts dowsed such mish-mash. Midsummer was approaching, but Destiny refused an appearance. I would receive no curtain calls from posterity, was no more than prey to exile’s disease: irrational hopes and fears. Alarm at a posse of ambulances ranked opposite the Embassy, vanishing as soundlessly as it arrived. Late-night trains rushing unscheduled through post-midnight London allegedly loaded with nuclear waste. Morbid expectations dripped into dreams, telescoping the years. Rats fled Stalingrad, as, forewarned, at fire, earthquake, the voles and martens abandoned Helice, the island crushed by the sea, two millennia ago. My Midsummer Baldur, saviour and friend, princely, what Dutch called deftig, was as unlikely as Her Majesty tattooing on her thigh ‘Ban the Bomb’.

Summer offered flimsy treats: butterflies scattered above delphiniums, streets flashing with bare legs, children light-footed, perhaps light-fingered, ‘Got a fag?’ as if demanding protection money. A small coloured boy, serious, trusting, thrust at me with a leaf. ‘Is this Nature?’ A Barbados squad gaily collecting for Battle of Britain widows.

My landlady, herself a dumpling war widow, recommended the Midsummer Neighbourhood Festival. ‘It’ll do you good. Saturday. You’ll mix with the Right People.’

Possible, though with its transient population the neighbour-hood lacked neighbours.

Saturday was missal blue and green, my mood a kite, aloft yet tied to the earth of sparkling cafés and bandstands. In Paris, A Midsummer Night’s Dream had made me crave baroque transformations, passionate illusions. An English summer day could exorcize the glance over the shoulder, dangerous staircases, a warning to keep close to the wall. Morning and afternoon, merged in a pageant of calm Regency terraces, mellow gardens, sedate churches, the England of privacy, lordly strength reserved but powerful. Blemish stared down only towards evening, from a poster of a trollish riding-master, black-jacketed, peak-capped, with metallic face and belt, striding the future on huge letters, He Is Coming.

By now, the sky over the Museum was tinged red, and, beyond Bedford Square, in Coram Fields, dusk was filling with tinny, carnival percussion. Uneasy, but obedient to the landlady, I joined the crowds under coloured lights and garish advertisements: Toothpaste Cures, Have Another Pint, Flowers for All. Children’s playgrounds were ashine with stalls, kiosks, strippers’ tents, hot dog and ice cream tables, booths of Madame Katrinas, cosmic tricksters waiting behind zodiacal emblems, shuffling promises like counterfeit florins. A steamy, floodlit oval was ribboned off for tombola, small figures bouncing as if scalded for the waiters’ race and coronation of Miss Bloomsbury. Urchins smeared with chocolate and fudge capered wildly, as drums and guitars surged in swollen, electric rhythms and, ahead, dancers stamped, twisted, in fluid whirligig, swept by ever-changing lights, scarlet, violet, banana yellow, though with little exuberance. They were professional, mechanical; even the children seemed more scheming than carefree. Under a gilded canopy, youths in singlets marked Peace, Arsenal, were throwing darts into the enlarged, dark-eyed face of Anne Frank. A dim, impervious line of police stretched along Mecklenburg Square.

I hastened to a makeshift bar, drinking myself into other illusions. I was the Secret Agent, Hidden Hand, inconspicuous, negligent but, alone, armed against the underswell of crowds: favours withdrawn without warning, the guillotine at the end of the avenue. The rock beat, dodgem cars, mauve and amber flash-boards, the invitation in the latrine, assignations behind canvas, the cannabis whiff and warm, sex-ridden flesh, were all in some unconscious magnetic current, swirling towards an unseen goal, in a glare that made children’s games incongruous, the motionless police explicit and deadly.

An explosion of crimson, rush and good particles. In the manic hues, faces were dried, genderless, unfinished, emitting dull cheers for a giant, dazzling gin bottle, ‘Spinster’s Revenge’, above a piebald tower. Girls with bright-red grins hovered behind planks, selling balloons, toy bears, cakes, cosmetics. The music crashed, heavy air drooped, a flame waved like a sash beside a black, spring-heeled juggler jittering on a huge phallic cone frilled with blue bulbs, performing to a canned, Dionysiac scream, ‘Lovin’ you …’ All was muddled, congealing into a stew of teddy bears, candyfloss Queens and Mountbattens, a dwarf on crutches, a blow-up of Anthony Eden and Nasser fisting in boxer’s shorts. And then. Leaflets fluttered from the tower like shot gulls, someone stooped, picked one up, and, relay runner, slipped it to me. Europe for the Europeans. On cue, voices harsh as crowbars dragged across concrete acclaimed the unfurling of Union Jacks, distribution of The European, headlining, ‘One Free People, One Free Britain, One Free Europe’, some women yelling polecat against ‘Hordes’.

Trapped in hallucination, yet with rear-gunner attention, I glimpsed a Suzie twirling through kaleidoscopic rays clasping a blonde hippie, heard hoarse babble about the Age of Aquarius. ‘Dynamic Change Is Looming. Pisces Decadents Vanquish Hierarchical Powers of Europa and Albion.’

A chilly wind had begun, clouds sagged, dense with rain. A boy scowled, ‘She won’t go the whole hog.’ Leathered Freikorps in square black glasses barged past, whistling at a crude pennant, telegrams of hate, depicting Khrushchev as an ogling pudding, then more, Union Jacks, glaring birds from a diseased tropic and, in searchlight strength, a screen was covered with a bearded, fur-capped ape bayoneting a map of Europe.

7

‘More words to the square breath. To ditch the international punt-about, political anarchy, we must scrap potty nation-states, what Buchan called shoddy little countries. If I knew how to spit I’d do it now, at Northern Ireland and the promise of independent Scotland, let alone talkative Wales. Who in cock-robin needs Maltas, Luxemburgs, a Basque land, with UN votes outnumbering their betters? The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein is as obsolete as stout Cortez. Petty loyalties corrode like bad ink. To weep for Lithuania is tinker-bell sentimentality. I haven’t much time to explain, though see that it’s necessary.’

The speaker, Alex Brassey, youngish, controversialist, with red, coarse, jumbled hair, more rust than rich tawny. He was covered, rather than dressed, in dark-blue cord jacket and baggy greys and, unlike those ranged behind him on the platform, was tieless. He inspected us, tolerant but slightly reproachful auctioneer. ‘I’m not’, he assured everybody, including his fellow speakers, ‘ridiculing patriotism. Probably I’m alone amongst you down there who can understand, indeed spell, escutcheon. But my patriotism is personal as a toothbrush. Not place but atmosphere. England doesn’t mean green fields and holiday camps. But …’ he hesitated, as if risking a joke unlikely to elicit laughter, ‘values, civilized give-and-take.’

A few did laugh, jeeringly: his own chuckle was barman’s assent, in this college debate about the feasibility of a Britain independent of Europe and the USA. In the arc behind him, backed by flamboyant posters – Federate for Peace, USE, Elvis Rules – were a Tory politician who had lost his seat for opposing Suez, a Girton don advocating total British integration with Europe, a composer once gaoled for refusing conscription and, tireless bemoaner of Britain’s lost opportunities, jowled and piggy-eyed, a CND vice-president, novelist, the Modern Dickens. He had grumbling mouth, possibly discontented by Brassey’s assumptions about escutcheon. I remembered that he had once, though not recently, asserted that the genius of humanity was Soviet Literature. Upholder of traditional English decency, he had lately been divorced, in discreditable circumstances.

Brassey was flowing like tap water. ‘Blast Latvia and Belgium, archaic as Assyrian bas-reliefs or airport coffee.’ His grin, around yellow, irregular teeth, was craftily confidential. ‘But each to his own.’ A throat-cutting gesture induced more rowdy laughter and indulgent nods from behind, save from the Modern Dickens. ‘But yes. Atmosphere. We can forget King Arthur, the Golden Years of Elizabeth, Palmerston’s handy gunboats. Of course, whether you like it or not, probably not, we’ll be shoved into Europe. That’s not the real issue. Understand this …’ – the chin jutting from the narrow, too conspicuous head was blotched as a pub table, as if disturbed in mid-shave; I listened only fitfully, to a mixture of arrogant contradictions and puzzling allusions – ‘nationalism isn’t patriotism, as, except in your cafeteria, chalk isn’t cheese. I’m not against provincialism. A society in which provincial is pejorative is lopsided. But nor am I parochial. I loathe flags, morally, politically, aesthetically. Pre-war nations were mostly huge, unpleasant, tinny dictatorships or midget fire-bombs, all like Sweden and Switzerland profiteering on neighbours’ blood and pickled in self-righteousness. The solution …’

I had heard too many solutions, mostly trash, and slid towards half-sleep. The Modern Dickens had slumped into real sleep or was counting his royalties. I was present only in obedience to the Embassy’s instruction to report the mood of the meeting. I would have little to say. Applause was equally divided between the speakers. Brassey might receive the loudest, not for his opinions, increasingly random, off the mark, but for his gusto, though he was wrecking serious debate. Often shown in newspapers wearing outsize football scarf, he was a ramshackle exhibitionist, ready to perform a somersault or changing-room song, or grimace with eye-patch and parrot on his shoulder.

‘Blake tells you that the fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.’ His pirate-king smile taunted us, ‘But folly we no longer need and we, or rather you, despise wisdom. Like all left-wingers, I’ve been one, you prefer hard cash. Britain was once rich, very rich. But not only so. Now, we’re merely rich, like a retired profiteer, somewhat disgruntled.’

The Modern Dickens was certainly disgruntled, a heap of weary impatience, the Girton lady’s mouth looked a scar, the chairman eventually gave a short summing-up, followed by a rush to the bar. I remained, scribbling a few dismissive notes, then felt entitled to a drink, seating myself at a table to wait until the crowd subsided. Brassey was perched on a high stool at the counter, head flushed, as acolytes restocked his glass. He was now the ringmaster, exercising young animals, exchanging vivid repartee, his performance making me contemptuous yet envying.

Unexpectedly he waved a tankard at me, spraying a girl, who squeaked gratefully, then jumped down, lurching alarmingly towards me, sat down opposite.

‘Don’t buy a single drink, mein Herr. Tony here needs practice. No need to touch forelock.’ His hands, their nails bitten as Suzie’s, jerked at a fresh-faced courtier who quickly dumped two bottles and a tankard between us, lingering for further orders.

Seen closer, the eyes, grey above deep, haphazard lines and tiny pits, were what the English termed shifty. The rebellious hair complemented the unshaven chin and rough cheeks, in the naked lights abnormally ravaged. Only the voice was agreeable: deep, changeable and, under the clatter, curiously confidential.

‘With your notebook you were oversized, an unmistakable Baron Dambusterstein, obviously wired for sound but silent as a present-day lighthouse. Formidable, though. A Hartz Mountain danger.’

He nodded away downy, disappointed faces. ‘These brats won’t understand that romanticism proceeds from waffle. They get transfixed by plain rot, can’t understand paradox. Perhaps because of seven decades of GBS. But, you’ll agree, universities should at least foster a high line in low comedy. I can usually raise a laugh, even when raising hackles. You’re looking as if you’ve felt nothing else. Understand that I am apt to say the first thing that comes into my head, like students acting Shakespeare. I was irritated by the earlier nonsense about Europe needing to be a single state, a common identity. That lady who spoke first … we call her Mrs Round the Bend, from her drinking habits, not really from her shape.’

He was examining me, carefully, while we gulped beer, his gaze heavier than his tone. ‘I know Europe, from the fighting man’s view. Much of it is not worth knowing. It leaves me a sort of Dean of Peculiar. Like India, dazed by too many gods. Or the captain, first to leave the sinking ship. Well, gods, captains, lady dons can need a helping hand. The worthy Pope John urged us to open the windows. Jesus, perhaps, was too self-obsessed, harassed by impatience. Well …’ He was suddenly boyish, rueful. ‘Tonight you heard a welter of blatherjacks. I’m a kettle of European life and letters, of course … but remote government must always be bad government. No need to go on. A mad German taught that convictions are prisons.’

He apparently expected no replies, and I expected him to leave me, having made his form of apology, but instead, he again rebuffed the sycophants, detaining only Tony, delivering more bottles.

‘Thanks, Tony. Now go and play. Yes …’ – again he gave me his assessive stare – ‘weave a circle around us thrice. I, too, carry a notebook.’ He patted his coat. ‘In our notebooks begin depths and failures. Mine may upset history by sheer illegibility. While I was talking, though, I saw your heroic face dip headlamps and felt that I wasn’t conducting Lohengrin but waving a dead bouquet.’

His grin was again intimate. ‘Last week, lecturing, I’d lost my notes, misquoted Wordsworth. Not the wind howling at all hours but howling on all fours. But the pack obediently jotted it down, sighing with admiration. Brave lads, darling girls. But, lip-service to culture is worse than no service.’

He stood up, shakily, briefly fingered my hair. ‘You’re the Viking who causes hurricane, though needing a mite more cynicism. Like Her Majesty. You must visit our riverside smallholding. You’ll like Louise. She’s built to last, very unlikely to set up a flower-stall in mid-Sahara. I myself, something of a libertine, not a word in current use, am inclined to do gracious things ungraciously. So, roll dem wagons, we’ll be meeting. A maenad occasion.’

The Neighbourhood Festival discoloured the summer of gardens and tourists, planting behind me a dark shape, hooded and soundless. A joke from the Eastern Bloc was ‘anything permitted is compulsory’. London itself seemed enforcing permissiveness. Only for an instant I expected any relief from Mr Brassey, a zany striving to kiss his own forehead in the mirror. His careless attention had gratified. His depth of tone blotted out the gnawed fingers, cold, rather naked eyes, corrugated skin. But he could be not Baldur but tricky Loki, scaring children by transforming string to a ferret. One of those who, at noon, cast no shadow.

Like a newly discovered word, he was suddenly inescapable in articles, reviews, on radio and television: a Lord of Misrule, correcting incorrectly a classicist’s translation of Sophocles, interrupting a Cabinet Minister with urchin jokes, snapped in metal cap amongst Clydeside ship-builders, in dinner-jacket outside the Garrick, in white flannels on a millionaire’s field. A columnist gibed that, contrary to his appearance, he habitually stole soap when a guest. At a Birmingham snooker final, he sat between East End protection mobsters. Britain’s plea to de Gaulle, to join Europe, he diagnosed as the repentance of an ex-convict.

His career was easily charted. At Cambridge, feared not as headstrong footballer but as Stalinist bully, applauding the Pact as a mousetrap laid for the Führer. His closest friend, a Pole, hanged himself when Brassey denounced Chamberlain for starting an imperialist war at behest of a pride of Warsaw colonels. He showed conquistador courage fighting in Italy, though only Old Boy connections saved him from court martial for drunken outrage to a girl who disappointed him. He confessed gut fears of combat and brute enjoyment of it, dismissed his Marxism as juvenile cant, though, ‘of course’, still corresponding with a Cambridge spy who had defected to Moscow. He extolled a French publisher for sheltering Camus from the Gestapo while himself fraternizing with all Nazis available, accepting on his board the fanatic Hitlerite, Drieu la Rochelle. In a review, he gave an elegy to the White Rose Martyrs. He admired Winston’s blazing mind and abused Gandhi’s sainthood as the best-known way of getting through life undisputed. Intellectuals were angered when he savaged Sartre for his taunt that by rejecting Stalinism Camus had betrayed History. Enemies, disbelieving his switch of loyalty, rumoured that he was an associate of Burgess, Philby and Maclean, and a satirical weekly jeered at him as Comrade Brassballs. He had published a novel in Paris and a collection of surrealist stories.

Whatever his actual self, if any, he attracted anecdotes like income. Asked his opinion of Roosevelt, he enquired whether he was the Yank who rejected Ezra Pound’s advice to avert war by surrendering Wake Island to Japan in return for some haiku translated by Pound. On a radio chat show, he considered the second most interesting character in the New Testament was undeniably Jesus.

My home address I never divulged to strangers, I soon doubted whether we would meet up again, but one Saturday the landlady summoned me to the telephone. Mr Tortoise with a discovery. But no. ‘Alex here. I got your number by the usual method. Café Royal, second floor, 7.30. OK?’

8

Drinkers, luminous, affluent, were reflected in sham-baroque mirrors so that the saloon appeared larger, more crowded than reality. Brassey, lounging on crimson banquette, a bottle on the suet-pale table, was unmistakably amongst the slick and polished, the bald and fluffy, endlessly repeated in the florid mirrors and reduced to microscopic flashes in the massed chandelier cubes.

‘Milk? Probably not.’ Whisky glimmered. Again, the raunchy face, teeth like irregular italics, the chuckle, like the eyes, impetuous or calculating.

‘Louise couldn’t come. She’s not altogether weatherproof. Raised in LA. Her brother lost his bearings and wanted to be an air-hostess.’ His patter, sound without substance, suited the plush theatrical décor and gabble and was unlikely to cease. ‘Her first husband, a trifle mean, left her only an owl, a chauffeur and foul memories.’ Alarming me, he reached to touch my face. ‘Those rampant cheek-bones! Shield-bosses noosed by light between your scowls. Ajax of the Tundra. They don’t suggest you get yourself to sleep by counting cricketers beginning with C. Compton, Cowdrey, Close … You can look like Baldur von Shirach, a dreadful thing to say, even to Baldur von Shirach. Now, I must repeat that you mustn’t take seriously my nonsense about Europe. I spend whole weeks admiring Finnish architecture – Erick Brygman, Alva Aalto – far livelier than that pretentious heave-up Corbusier. Danish-folk high schools, admirable chunks of proper living. Even Bulgaria resisted the armpit Jew-hunters more valiantly than sniffy France. But instinct tells me that you, too, like me, often contemplate the world as metaphor.’

While speaking, he was acknowledging short greetings, affected deference. ‘Alex, old boy …’ ‘We revelled in your fracas with Julian …’

I was more interested in the portrait, above us, of Empress Eugénie, crowned, in pearl collar and purple velvet train, one hand resting on a gilded chair. Sadness in her sapphire-blue gaze haunted, very understandably, by Marie-Antoinette.

‘I’m watching Africa.’ He spoke as if of someone within reach. ‘Now that the Brits are absconding, the new Canoodle Dums won’t despise privilege and, to put it so, loot. It’s nice to see Ghana’s forbidden magic for use at elections.’

My grunts did not discourage him, though he quietened; surprisingly was almost shy.

‘I enjoy playing solo and baiting the marshmallows, all begging for celebrity, if only as sugarplum fairies. Reading each other, to discover what next to think. We enjoy playing our Third Eleven. Giving Blues for the latest thesis on Henry James’s laundry bills or the vibrations of turbots. Over there is a poet who’s tipped himself as the next Poet Laureate, though Masefield doesn’t believe in death. If you look closer, you’ll see the plaque on his forehead. The real genius was his mother, actress in early Sheridan, who rested so long she became a sofa. In the war, he volunteered for the Rifle Corps, so as to face things lying down.’

His foxy scruff, urgency to convince, entertain or merely pass time, promised little, while having the appeal of a tune, frivolous yet nagging.

‘My attitudes, good sir, are almost always provisional. Like love or political conscience. With a sunny morning, all paintings, except Bacons of course, are exciting. On wet mornings, they droop from the canvas. I usually find Hamlet rivalled only by Mill’s On Liberty. Though Cicero once remarked, not to me, that there’s nothing so absurd that some philosopher hasn’t already said it. He hadn’t much small talk, would discuss fish sauce as he might political crisis. I myself, your look confirms it, have little else but small talk. God …’ His alarm, theatrical, could have benefited Hamlet: ‘I see approaching Jacob Silverson, art critic. He once reproached Cézanne for being false to nature, though in Dolly’s garden he confused a lime with a poplar.’

A new act. London ghouls simpered and departed. The empty car in the mews, the repellent stalker on the escalator, were phantoms, though Alex, calmly assured as a movie naval officer, offered me one of his closest friends, a highly experienced bloodhound. Alex was what Father called a Querkopf, odd head, though possibly one of the Herr General’s Ten Per Cents. He claimed my weekends. We drank at a Soho nacht-lokal, at a South Bank gig, at a Hampstead Heath pub. I at last found voice and we argued about Europe, the French Revolution, J.F. Kennedy. He ridiculed my enthusiasm for the Nuremburg Trials. ‘With Soviet judges on the bench, moral centre was kicked into mid-Caspian, as you were the first to know. I’m happy about spontaneous retribution, but don’t call it justice. I’d like to believe that I’d copy that young Yank officer liberating Dachau, so crazed by what he found that he lined up all SS in sight and personally machine-gunned them. At once. Without remorse. Indefensible, but I’d at least cheer him on.’ So, I supposed, would I. He, moreover, had actually fought, then covered some Nuremburg Trials, hearing Ribbentrop complain that his collar was becoming too tight. ‘Nevertheless …’ I heard myself protest, with some mutter about legalities.

He showed those unhealthy teeth, chuckled like an emptying siphon. ‘Sometimes, old lad, I’m uncertain whether you need a thumping kiss or a Bavarian wallop. Your forebear, Pahlen, knew when to wield the hammer, didn’t suffer the English disease, fear of winning. Don’t catch it. Over here, die Helden sind müde.’

Meinnenberg interested him. Skeleton predators, the slashed body in the ditch, the mute orphan whistling Mozart, the improvised leadership, Vello, my teaching efforts. Those stories. Baba Yaga riding the sky in pestle and mortar, evilly cackling in her hut that moved on chickens’ legs, the boy dead on the Tuileries throne, Robespierre’s fall.

‘I’m apt to think, Erich, of your Robespierre as the licensed buffoon of the Committees, while they attended to the really serious. Still …’

Our talks helped my self-belief, my sense of having stepped towards the frontiers of history. I had sudden vision of my pamphlets scattered like wings over the Baltic: an anthem, silent but stinging. True, vision, like the sublime, is too often followed by the pompous or silly.

Alex surprised me by knowing that Wilfrid was a vice-president of UNICEF, collecting millions for children around the world. He had also criticized the July Plotters’ determination to retain many of Hitler’s conquests after destroying him. Of Wilfrid’s oriental figurines, Alex considered the Bodhisattva’s smile looked like that of a man after winning a substantial bet.

With him, further Londons opened for me: a regimental mess, a decayed Edgware Road music hall, Edwardian ghosts still performing, badly; Clapham shop-window cards: ‘Miss Henry Does What You Like;’ ‘Model with Hard Face;’ ‘Masseuse with Royal Experience’. In Camden Town, ‘Life After Death Proved’.

Arguments notwithstanding, only when remembering the Manor and Meinnenberg was I his equal. I had seen Malraux, Alex had interviewed him; I had survived war, he had known battle. Mention of almost anyone galvanized him like a computer. I mentioned the historian Barney Skipton who had accused me of exaggerating Soviet repression.

‘Barney! He hurtles through truth as if dodging slates.’ I praised the political correspondent, Felix Spanier, for exposing a post-war pogrom committed not by Russians but by Poles. ‘Ah! Felix. He once drove through an Arab–Israeli set-to without a visa, merely showing an admission ticket to a private view. We were at the same school, moral slaughterhouse, place of wood demons, huge dwarfs, tiny giants. I loved it.’

He read my pamphlets. ‘Yes. Yes indeed! You discard your polar introspection and hit the funny bone. High praise!’ Not wholly, for his enthusiasms could be short-lived, sudden attempts to render me virtually speechless in admiration for fifteenth-century Burgundy, Machiavelli’s international peace proposals, de Gaulle’s memoirs, before discarding them as if afflicted by total loss of memory. His good humour might cease in mid-flow, silence, brooding or sullen, would follow, before some chance sight, random suggestion, restored it. Always in some game, he might see himself as a triumphant loser, myself doubtless a fresh face, a new audience, to be flattered, then, like an ageing altar boy, abandoned.

Meanwhile, he exalted my status. Invitations began descending: crested, embossed, scented, with archaic lettering, elaborate courtesies. In opulent drawing-rooms, editorial offices, smart book launches, I was the promising newcomer, slightly exotic and of debatable potential, like a Third World statesman.

Alex’s Dolphin Square flat was another surprise. Plain, empty walls, carelessly stacked books and newspapers, a white desk with six black knobbed drawers on either side arching to a seventh, all slightly open, so that black shadows gleamed against the pallor, forming an abstract design. Plastic ducks in the bath. From sky and river, light fluctuated between variations of drabness. The only picture, above a narrow bed and its White Hart Hotel coverlet, was a poster of a green girl naked at a mirror that returned a face harsh, stricken, years older than her body. Clothes draped on chairs, strewn on uncarpeted, unpolished floors stained by pale circles. At my approach to the only armchair, he pretended alarm. ‘That chair … Three men came visiting, only two departed.’

An opportunity to tell him the Lagerkvist story, ‘The Lift That Went Down to Hell’.

‘Yes. You wouldn’t have needed to tell it at Meinnenberg. But you knew what teaching’s actually about. Are kids today permitted tales, marvellous tales? I doubt it.’

‘Your own stories, Alex. To be really understood …’

‘I distrust anything that can be really understood. Nothing’s so mad as paper. Perhaps the wisest books are only written in dust. Buddha told monks that blank scrolls were more truthful than written scripts. The real writer shows the obvious which nobody else has seen, Pound’s nightingale too far off to be heard – though he also excused the inexcusable. My stories are never signs of the times, only signs of my own time.’

‘You don’t stay long on one note.’

‘Naturally, though the best remain written on the air. Stories, extraordinary shapes, starting from something small then exploding. I myself need several extra letters of the alphabet to really tackle their gist. My The Stuffed Ones outwardly caricatures Whitehall charlatans; inwardly, it seeks linkage with the unseen and unknown – a shudder after dark, an unopened envelope, an imaginary telephone. The fallacy of appearances. But I began writing from, less pretentiously, hearing of Mr Teinbaum.’

‘A Whitehall charlatan?’

He is grave, head flaring in the featureless room. ‘Every week, Mr Teinbaum of Battersea walked two miles to place flowers on his wife’s grave. Year after year, children watched, and, after he’d gone, stole them, to sell. They grew up, passed the scheme to others. Yet neither they nor him directly entered my eventual story. Only a single flower.’

We listen to gulls circling above the Thames, a ship’s hoot, the stir of traffic. He is reluctant to end whatever was absorbing him. ‘We’re apt to be out of tune, Erich. Like a gypsy band at a Romanian wedding.’ Looking at the dusty floor, he jerks a thumb downward. ‘We’ve both some talent. People listen. You, no doubt, stir continents. The glibness of authority. But, like Ministries of Information assiduously misinforming and intelligent lunatics braying regardless, we achieve little. Speaking, though, of intelligence, can anyone seriously credit this quack about IQs? Mine is two points above zero, yours almost as high. Most of those at Nuremburg were of respectable height. Still, returnez. My favourite story?’- he leans back, hands behind his head – ‘Monte Cristo, of course. My own first story sprang from my first night at boarding school, vital stage of initiation. Each dorm had its bard, storyteller, chronicler. Lights out, and a piping voice was scaring us with inside knowledge. That behind jewellers’ windows hung a knife. You smashed the glass, stretched your hand, then … wham!’ He rolls eyes, subsides into a cough, recovers for my account of Pasternak, when a child, seeing African women exhibited in a Russian zoo.

‘Excellent, Erich. One day I’ll tell you about a certain Alexandrian zoo. But now, my choicest single line in all literature. It’s not an old song resung.’

I brace myself for a stiff wad of Joyce, Pound, Proust, the thud of Hugo or Whitman, though he is manifestly offhand. ‘Just this: “Pauline needed money that year, so Turgenev mortgaged an estate, sold a forest and proceeded to Paris.” There. Scarcely an elegy for missed chances.’

Later, we resume in the corner of a small restaurant. Bottles glimmer under candles, other diners are almost invisible. He chortles over an English wartime joke. Hitler, anxious to cross the Channel, heard of the existence of Moses’ Rod that divided the Red Sea, only to be told, yes, it did exist but was in the British Museum.

He is tolerant of Khrushchev, recently in London and, at taunts of the Pact, bawled at Labour leaders that were he British he would vote Tory. In America, clowning, shouting at insults from Wall Street, from Gary Cooper, he had sworn to bury them all alive. ‘A rubber ball,’ Alex says, ‘but I agree we’d better do the bouncing.’

He pushes away uneaten food, in his tiresome routine of studying the menu as he might J.S. Mill, order the most expensive dish, abandon it after a peck, bay for more wine, reluctantly agree to share the bill.

Like many Englishmen, he seldom strays far from his school-days. ‘Schools were nests of lying, cheating, stealing, useful in adult hurly-burly. Thieves and poets prevent stagnation. At school I played a deaf-and-dumb hag in The Tales of Hoffmann, which came in handy for journalism. One master walked in beauty like the night, seduced the under-matron and taught me the difference between Night and Evening. He enjoyed things crooked. His son gave him ample opportunity, once getting acquitted by pleading he didn’t know bigamy was illegal.’

‘You think language …’

‘I think of little else. Neither of us is a French puritan, whining that language is a deceiving, distorting, tyrannical bourgeois prison. Language is the escape from prison. Auden’s text: Clear from our heads the masses of impressive rubbish.’

He sways between bottles, though the deep voice remains steady. ‘Verbs are depth-charges, adjectives the resource of the unimaginative, weakening or defusing them.’ His grimace in the candlelight is itself an adjective, affectionate, excited or shrewd. ‘Joyce thought the extraordinary best left to journalists. You yourself are very soberly, and rightly, restoring Estonia to the map. You quote Solzhenitsyn, that a writer is a rival government. Just so. Language changed me from a swarthy-minded wing-forward to a useful chucker of words into necessary places. A sort of lover. Pain and joy. From dissonance, behold harmony.’ As if eager for dissonance his ravaged face crumples, then relaxes. ‘Do Estonians actually believe that touching your mother-in-law can cause suicide?’

During August vacation, he drove me, with scant concern for the public good, into deeper England, in his wasp-coloured roadster that conformed, with its coughings, snarlings, roarings, stumblings, to his respect for verbs. Trips to Greenwich masts and classical frontages; to a Slough youth club for erratic table tennis and intolerable weightlifting; to a Hertfordshire pub gleaming with horse brasses and sporting prints, where he forced me to a Ploughman’s Lunch at which Greg would have stared with indignant incredulity. Like a riverboat gambler producing an ace, he astonished me by having memorized an Estonian poet, Ivar Ivash:

Here a steep limestone coast watches the Northern Lights,

But in the caves the breakers carve dead history out of the rocks;

A giant lake wards off Eastern endlessness.

Sharing love of the sagas, we swapped names we thought private to ourselves – Bifrost, Grimnir, Jotenheim, Ragnarok, he trumping me with Gullinbursti. His tales I could counter with my own: the girl who ran, Vello triumphant, amputation without anaesthetics in a dirty shed. For Alex I did not always need to complete the childhood drama of a scarlet slipper washed on to ‘Ogygia’, unknown words found in a bottle, great-grandfather Rolf, very old, waiting on the high road for a carriage drawn by black-plumed horses; it arrives, he clambers in, and a green-faced, yellow-eyed creature, bony, toothless, hauls him away for ever.

Summer folk, we enjoyed each other. I was live in skin and thought. When we could not meet, he sent postcards. ‘St John Nepumuk is Patron of Tongue Cancer.’ ‘For her Civil War efforts, Franco has promoted the Virgin Mary, Field Marshal.’ ‘The Soviet Yearbook announces that Russian Happiness has increased by 78 per cent.’ I opened an envelope, found a cutting, ‘Pope Cracks Filthy Joke’, without explanation that Pope was a disc jockey.

Our duet must be too extravagant to long continue. Once, with misgiving, I scrutinized his head in a triptych mirror. One profile harshly vindictive, the other slacker, irresolute. Full-faced, an undergraduate, rather simple energy, enthusiasm, seeking complicity. They added up to a general with a plan, exciting but hazardous, a declassed nobleman belching over an empty bowl, to avoid admitting poverty and hunger. An earlier English type, Elizabethan, jewelled, flattered but in pain, hideously alone.

‘Most of us,’ Alex said, ‘have little to say and some sophistication in saying it.’

Ragnarok or the Second Coming he would have resented as wilful interruption.

‘You’re unfreezing, Erich. Brisker in gait and statement. At first you were stiff as a coffin, as if at the short truce at the waterhole. Charmingly unaware of the stirrings you provoked. Always fresh and ruddy from the sauna, so we automatically thought you naked. But your basalt exterior is at least melting to limestone, in time, chalk. But you blond heroes have excess, the prodigious. Though laughter is supreme fount of humanity, your jokes can be clod. The soul … the Greeks, over-rated by the professors, ignored by the plebs, conceived it as a toxic bean. You’ve too much of it; so, for that matter have I, which explains a lot. Someone, English, says we live our lives in quiet desperation. I’ve not found it so. But you do sometimes look in need of fleshpots. As if frozen by some Alpine horror. But a girl, preferably not Louise, waits to tear you to shreds. Your magnetic eyes see beyond politics, not always seeing through it.’

Still dissatisfied, he knew my discomfort. ‘You’ve presence, like a pastor or Bernard Shaw. One never thinks of him as Bernie. You look what you are, stalwart from polar fastness, head up, shoulders squared, while virgins spin like tops in chilly bedrooms and waxen-faced Grafs go mad in the library. Or some Günter Grass character gibbering on the Vistula or drinking from skulls on the Elbe.’

For the Miscellany he secured gratifying reviews and a radio discussion and on television thrust in a lengthy if irrelevant mention. Sales pleased the Ambassador; Mr Tortoise was tearful.

Always curious about my feelings for Germany, Alex demanded my comment on a German-born London professor booed for his determinist genetic theories. ‘Yet, as a Berlin schoolboy at a mass Nazi rally, he blithely whistled our own “Land of Hope and Glory”. I’d have hid under an anonymous epigram. Effective but contemptible, like sarcasm towards children. What about you?’

‘Very little about me.’

‘Good! A hero of our time.’

August flamed, no rain, only pleasure. We drove to Brighton, its domes and pinnacles, flossy hotels by a placid sea; to Salisbury, its bells clanging in what he called Wet Bob Minor, fearless of contradiction: to the Home Counties mansion of a left-wing Christian publisher, its bunker against atomic attack forbidden to the servants. On a tripper’s steamer, we sailed towards Tilbury – towards Sweden, towards Estonia – where a barge slumped off an empty dock excited East London stories: a grotesque Triad murder, a seventeenth-century Wapping ghost with a crooked neck. ‘You see that old place with the smashed roof? In it, a marquis, Wellington’s pal, turned over in bed and strangled himself with the sheets. Flunkeys heard his gasps but didn’t dare investigate, fancying a boar was loose. Very malapert. Only Russians and Germans prefer pain to nothing. Did you know that, in bed, Wellington would use his mistress’s buttocks as a writing table?’

I did not.

At Arundel, beneath a grandly secure castle, we watched cricket, of which I was ignorant as the African who supposed it a reliable rain-making ceremony. All around were club marquees, regimental tents, temporary boxes, beflagged and patrician, rows of deckchairs for hundreds in many-coloured dresses, blazers, caps. I enjoyed the peaceful good cheer, the champagne, the white forms gliding across green in arcs and diagonals, the flowing ball, like red silk unwinding or soaring, falling to cupped hands, the wavelets of applause. At my enquiry about rules, ladies smiled sympathetically, gentlemen were forbearing. Alex shook his head. ‘Best left to the imagination. Like Browning. Like Stockhausen. Like me.’ To the girl beside him, prim as a lily, he was in fluent public voice. ‘I myself was a bowler. Very fast, very bad. And I loved it. Charging in, free of the earth, leaping. But …’ He struck his forehead, a ham Shakespearian Richard.

At lunch under badges and festoons, people were diligently polite, enquiring after Herr Brandt’s health, the state of the Rhine, patting my arm, filling my plate, while Alex commented that the booze was almost first-rate and that I should watch the slow bowler’s drift to leg.

Returning to London through long twilight, we stopped at a roadside lorry-driver’s cabin. Rough faces were jovial, ‘Here’s Alex’, good-naturedly gibing at our smooth suits and ties, over vile coffee, fearful pies. At once he was transformed, ramshackle, coarse, the delinquent officer barely escaping court-martial and who, in battle, might defend us all to the last or casually abandon us.

Outside again, he perhaps guessed my uncertainties. ‘They liked you, these chaps. The more I talked, the more they looked at you. You’ll survive me, as fresh wind outlasts Bing Crosby.’

I braced myself for his driving, exercise in low flying. At Guilford Street, we lingered, unwilling to relinquish a well-shaped day, his face in lamplight anxious to repair something amiss. Then glimmered relief. ‘Ah! I’d forgotten Dolly. Aphrodite Kallipygoi. Solid as a junk, unafflicted by pulmonary emphysema. Heart of gold and lavish thighs. Like Mr Toad, she owns a substantial hunk of Thame-side, rather more than a rapscallion pothouse. One knows her by eating her dinners, like getting a law degree. Anyway, she needs you for the Garden Party. Pure flame of hospitality, though it’s said that no good deed goes unpunished. Fear nothing, the armed and truculent are bounced out and drowned. Put on a funny hat, uncage your smile, remember you’re not a married couple. When you see eyes flitting like a blue-tit, voice honking like a goose … that’s Dolly.’

9

Looming, no goose but ice-lit Norn, Dolly was no more believable than Louise, the flick of another story. More important, I was planning another Miscellany and enjoying the action. A Russian monarchist wrote, accusing me of treason; an Estonian surgeon thanked me for defending the standard. The London press quoted me, usually inaccurately. I had achieved some standing independent of Alex, my foreign name adding decorative ambiguity.

Estonia was a particle netted in the quivering web of world connections beneath the panoply of cabinets, titles, handshakes, state visits, ideologies, summits. Oil politics masqueraded as concern for human rights; nurses smuggled anthrax and cholera virus into the Middle East; colluding with Moscow, Indonesians massacred their communists with American support. A biological warfare laboratory in Russia, designed and staffed by captured Nazis, still sported a huge Red Cross. Italian neo-Fascists were developing the heroin mart, International Charities Inc.; in Athens, Arab-controlled girls had been abducted and sold to Libya by West German Alliance, sometime insurer of death-camps against revolt.

In my wanderings in pubs and coffee bars, the young nicknamed me North Star, with the good-humoured indifference that called God the Dean of Admissions. They sat at coloured tables, juries without judges. Kennedy was glamorized as Prince of Camelot, then reviled for attempting to overthrow Castro. The Berlin Wall suffered suspended verdict, along with cybernetics, telekinesis, the latest UFO.

‘Forcemeat Balls Are Highly Indigestible,’ a young voice carolled under my window, while I read of Mao’s fury at Khrushchev for advocating not Terror but Peaceful Co-Existence. Mr K’s peasant joviality, lack of stuffiness, retained some popularity here, not only from the young.

In Moscow, Macmillan’s white fur hat had caused him to be mistaken for a Finn. Nearer home, a nanny kissed two babies, then threw them into the Round Pond, explaining that she was fed up.

A personal invitation was delivered to me by a uniformed youth. Embossed with armorial crests, signed by a Princess von Benckendorff, it was for an Eaton Square reception.

This required some hesitation, suspicion of enticement into West German politics, a means of suppressing my Estonian propaganda, the charm of undesirables.

‘You’ll go, of course,’ Alex was emphatic, ‘then snipe the snipers.’

As so often, I was as compliant to invitations as to tunes. They were part of interminable search, of curiosity, of muted ambition. The chores of loneliness.

I never ceased to wonder about houses, outside so familiar; the interior so unknown. The Benckendorff mansion lacked a heraldic flag and sentries in tricornes but inside had resemblance to a pre-1914 Atlantic liner, luxuriant with soft reds flecked with violet, cartouche ceilings of blue-and-damson mazes, rock-crystal chandelier droplets eclipsed streaks of sunlight from windows flanked by thick gold curtains, malachite pillars glowed faintly, as if from within.

The main salon was heavy: towering mahogany cabinets and bookcases, ponderous doors, an overweight clock, bronze busts, black marble fireplace. Mirrors framed with cupids like infant deckhands, portraits of bustled Wilhelmine ladies delicately stepping from woodland haze, a bleached moon over a castle aloft on a misty crag, stern hunters in a clearing, solitaries brooding over empty sunset landscapes.

They foreboded no more than the failed pull of Germania, the knick-knacks of Bismarck’s Reich. Unthinkable here were the shouts of pulp anarchists and the millionaire hustle of West Germany. History had stalled, trapping elderly makeweights, breathing but harmless, by the frowning cabinets over-filled with porcelain shepherdesses, fawns, centaurs, dainty milkmaids; a white-chased regimental glove under a glass bell, Dresden powder boxes, slender ivory-handled pistols; Persian faience on velvet, blue against black; medieval chessmen, medallions, miniatures of forgotten electors and dukes; dulled amethysts, brooches, insects in green glass cubes, leering toy mandarins, all extinct as Cathay.

The gleaming grand piano paraded iconic photographs; massive beards, paunches like half-filled black sacks, proud crinolines and décolletage, uniforms sprayed with the stars, medals, epaulettes, sashes, ribbons of long-demoted regimes. I could recognize only the spindly, feeble-chinned Crown Prince and impassive, monolithic Hindenburg. ‘God was in this man,’ Gerhart Hauptmann said. Added as if in afterthought were my fellow guests, relics of my grandparents’ age, so that I inspected them for fans, lorgnettes, monocles, until slow voices recalled me to good manners. I was standing, however, disregarded by clusters of old men in formal, antiquated blacks and whites, their ladies in sombre, high-set gowns and thick jewels which, reflecting the chandeliers, made them too vehement, almost vulgar or coercive. One elderly matron wore black mittens, several had half-veils, at which London students would have gaped incredulously.

Yet I had seen them before, might have become one of them, these crumbling von und zus clutching brandy glasses and evening bags as they once had racquets and sporting guns. The High Folk, blunted alabaster faces, fierce noses, shrunken cheeks, monosyllabic talk painfully dredged from ebbing memory, slow-motion recognitions, enquiries about health, dogs, relatives. Some might be my distant cousins, static as photographs, without the isness – Eckhart’s word – of outside London, its calypsos, demonstrations, sports fever, the English verve for the comic and bawdy even within solemnity.

Estates had been confiscated, children lost in Meinnenbergs, bank deposits had withered, castle and Schloss refashioned as clinics, hotels, museums, union rest-homes, the High Folk left stranded, commissioned in regiments long disbanded, with entry to palaces bombed out or sold; sons had died on Crete, at Stalin-grad, daughters been raped or lay as bone-splinters under Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, these elderly makeweights were furniture, oblivious to Common Market, presidential elections, the Bomb. To Londoners, ‘Nach dem Osten …’ would be ludicrous as a banana on a statesman’s coffin. More momentous here would be an old ballad, a Thuringian frog-prince tale, poignant as a distant sail.

I myself was giving what I imagined a last-century bow to some Princess of Tonnage. Presumably Dolly-like, she displayed flesh tones evaporating into the parched and flaccid, the eyes left isolated, not vapid but appearing to see not me but someone else. At my name she did nod, then, in a voice unexpectedly firm, enquired after my parents, as though they had yet to arrive. Then the Prince, white-whiskered, rheumy-eyed, shook my hand, like his wife addressing me in German.

‘You’re the chronicler … not yet quite Mommsen, you will concede.’ He was dignified, magnanimous, scion of the Prussian White Eagle. ‘To whom do you allow admiration? Trevelyan? Toynbee?’ Not awaiting answer, his bushy brows were already greeting the couple behind me.

There was opportunity for little more than to bend over mottled, bejewelled hands, mutter, then withdraw to shadows between pillars and watch. Flakes of memory enlarged as if from mescaline. A swan, a woodcutter’s falling axe. These misshapen somnabulists, some held upright as if only by invisible props, must once have sailed with Bülows and Eulenbergs on the Imperial yacht, dined at the Automobile Club, assembled for the Schleppencour Reception, manned the Guard of Honour costumed like die Alte Friedrich, cadets in powdered wigs straightening ladies’ trains with long, glistening canes. They were trash of a period swollen beyond its needs, knights with duties fossilized into superstition. Despite their disdain of the Gutter King, they would have rejoiced at the fall of Paris.

In an alcove like a side chapel, above heads white, dyed, gun grey, bald, hung portraits in oil edged with gold-leaf crust, of the three Hohenzollern Kaisers, successively more resplendent, not needing to demand allegiance but accepting it as natural due. His moustache fiercely upturned, under an eagled helmet, was the High Gentleman, former Allerhöchste, so often toasted at the Manor. Further away, lower down, was a fourth portrait, more solid: Bismarck, aged and discarded, staring, grimly resigned, at the latest iron warship, realizing that a new era had begun.

My surroundings narrowed. A greybeard stumped towards me, hand outstretched, blue eyes friendly, very real.

‘I am Sulzbach. Dr Herbert Sulzbach.’

Of him I knew something definite. A soldier, decorated first by Wilhelm II, then, as a British officer, by George VI, after the Potsdam Conference, and now prominent in work for Anglo-German cultural relations. Still soldierly, though benign, skin as if freshly laundered, he gave me a handshake remarkably strong. He was speaking in English less rough than my own.

‘I’ve heard your talks, young man. They have rebuked my ignorance of what is occurring further east. At times history bursts its banks, like my suitcase whenever I am allowed to pack it. For myself …’ his sigh was genial, ‘one life ended in November 1918. I was a captain in the 63rd Frankfurters, and, that morning, I realized my men were no longer saluting me. But I was young, ready for new chances, new salutes.’

He must certainly know of the Herr General, though I dreaded a gruff response to a question now forming. But he was being recalled to duty by two statuesque women, evidence for Alex’s conviction that too many men regard women as a thousand years old.

The Herr General! How would I greet him? Unanswerable. I could only remember that in the Turret I had once gazed into the mirror and seen a face not my own.

I was receiving only glances incurious or, at too obviously the youngest guest, cautiously suspicious. Some, knowing my lineage, might regard me as renegade, virtually Untermensch, one of the worthless Mischlinge. At this distance, Dolly’s Garden Party, should it exist, promised relief, the bloom of comedy laced with erotics dangerous but alive. Before departing, I cautiously mentioned the Herr General to a lean couple who had allowed me a dim cordiality. This vanished as if by a switch. They exchanged a glance that ensured my dismissal.

10

‘There’s Nimble Lord Nelson, the Pride of the Fleet! But you’re insufficiently primped.’

Alex thumbed my sober Embassy suit, quiet tie. ‘I advertised you in wolf-pelts, tusked helmet, foaming in berserker delirium.’

He pinned on me a blue-green enamel star. ‘The Order of Ranjitsinhji. It’ll entitle you to spontaneous acclaim. Life is Now, like Virginia’s breathless prose.’

He himself, Now, was in a clean grey robe, diagonal purple sash, hair slammed down flat as a ducat.

We were in butterfly day of chatter and costume, perfected by six o’clock sun lighting Dolly’s bow windows, her demesne sloping to the river flowing smooth as if polished and between luxuriant trees and shrubberies, pointillistic with pageantry colour: nautical bell bottoms, brocaded sleeves, musical comedy blazers, blending with ruffs, tights, masks, satin and astrakhan; the peachy, flamey, cardinal scarlet, peony-cool skins under hats steepled, tasselled, plumed. A gloss of history without irony or nostalgia, sensitive English at play, in Wonderland, murmuring, sipping, handshaking, flunkeyed by Figaros, mostly in white wigs and green knee-breeches. Stately opera-house curtains could have parted, displaying an island of nonsense, commedia dell’arte, and open to Third World notables: a black Robin Hood, a brown Henry VIII. Mr K strutted, in rough red pyjamas.

Alex was showing the satisfaction of the host at a children’s treat. ‘They masquerade as Woosters, but we both know the irons they keep well placed in the fire. Don’t forget their holsters!’

Shedding misgivings that had stuck since the Benckendorff seance, though not my lifetime superstition that the bizarre, grotesque, unorthodox were plots targeting myself alone. I resolved to enjoy all the illusions present.

‘We’ll meet up anon, comfortably non-sober. Bottled beer’s not on offer. On with the motley.’ Leaving the terrace, he was at once receiving stagy bows, the offer of snuff from a severe figure whose stick presumably denoted Black Rod, a curtsy from a crinolined countess. I was content to linger, as if on a quarterdeck, by urns like flowered capstans and surveying a pantomime crew. The charade quivered and changed as if on a turntable, was now a European fantasia, now a London caste entrenched in mannered superiority. Beyond, draped over spacious hills with few houses, clouds were floury on dwindling blue, the river like silver coins between leaves.

A foaming goblet was presented, some faces smiled at me, but for the moment I was happy to watch spectacle without drama, a tideless gorgeousness without dates or import. Zouaves, Cossacks, Beefeaters, Chasseurs mingled with catwalk starlets and theatrical knights. Bedouin burnouses, foppish, V-shaped waistcoats, huge crystalline buttons, red scarabs, fairy-gold chains, yellow-and-black leggings, the violet, tangerine and primrose, kilts made patterns instantly dissolved, reforming, altered. A Plantagenet lord’s slippers seemed miniature gondolas; a Merlin, in high, starry hat, wrapped in green mantle strewn with black diagonals, held a double-headed wand flashing alternate crimson and yellow. A toga’d, bandana’d ex-proconsul, surely Gold Stick in Waiting, leant towards a white coped prelate. Sultans and tycoons aptly merged, before upstaged by sly libels – Bernard Shaw awash with champagne, Gandhi in glistening dhoti, stuffed with pâté. Thickly white and red Aztec mouths jutted at the Master of the Rolls, primly pin-striped but with the third arm of an old-time pickpocket from Montmartre or Seven Dials. Children, tailed imps, moonbred Pucks, pirouetted in their private worlds. In jumbled chronology, fluff of time, a Versailles aristo, jewelled, but with neck circled by a red stripe, conferred with wild-haired Einstein, touched glass with Othello in turquoise cloak and tall, frock-coated Mr Lincoln, austere as cathedral stone. In old tweeds, without gold earrings or Star of India, the Poet Laureate, diffident, courteous, was himself late Victorian, now blinking with surprise at a kiss from Mlle Bardot, decently wrapped.

Jeu des Sots. Toute Vie. Gala-à-go-go, without theme or message. The winged, the double bearded; the meaty, porcelain, earthy; the daubed, the powdered. A Sicilian bandit advancing towards me with glittering tray might be hired or a guest. One layer of London, at its blandest, despite a morning report of a secret, anti-socialist cabal of press-lords, generals, a royal, some doubtless present, as Tarot King, de Gaulle, Mr Punch. Don Juan in auburn, crinkled peruke was caressing hollow-cheeked black-trousered Juliette Greco. The Modern Dickens cloaked in broad Latin Quarter hat was holding his pipe like a pistol, for photographers.

I looked down at a seething forest of headgear: crowns, helmets, mitres, Sioux feathers, antlers, berets, topis, panamas, Spanish tricornes, blood-red Phrygians, toques, a floppy, rose-rimmed Tudor cap, bonnets, pork-pies, mortarboards, straw boaters, cloches, deerstalkers, school caps, cloth caps. I myself could mingle with ancient names and City moneybags, perhaps token union leaders, the Right Hons and Hons, Your Graces, club members, chief executives, proconsuls, the resplendent deposed and the unobtrusive masters. I could invite Privy Seal to explain policy, shake a bag at Solicitor-General, collect for Estonian exiles. In a manner, I had arrived. I could offer respect to a dignified, burnished memsahib, known as the Clapper from her method of summoning servants and junior officials.

A combo had started a medley of pre-war tunes, agile shifts of mood – Mercer, Cole Porter, Ellington, Coward, Gershwin – from clarinet, guttural percussion, whispering treble of a 1920s’ Swanee-whistle, a sexless voice sweeping the gardens:

West wind, wandrin’ over land and sea,

Find my Wandrin’ Love.

Basking on false memories, Time was mischievous. A once-famous minister had resurrected as a cherished English ‘character’. Years ago, he had publicly praised the Reichsmarschall for sincerity and tolerance, then, following the Pact, reviled him as a corrupt head gardener. He was conferring with a worthy successor, lately discussed at the United Nations for supervising arms sales to assist a former colony in genocide. Displayed beneath me was what journalists were calling the Establishment, still featured in expensive monthlies with horses, gun dogs, well-dowered daughters on offer. Their titles were absurd chips of chivalry and tired romance, but they themselves were not negligible. Ribbentrop had assured his employer that they would rally against Churchill and the Jews. They had not. At the Pact, coolly, without panic, they grumbled that Hitler had sold Stalin false weight, had deceived him by what Alex called a googly. Even in the egalitarian age, ancient names retained muscle, their possessors joking about everything save cowardice and the unsporting, shrugging at terrorists as lunatic children. They still manoeuvred towards riches, with affability supercilious, guileful, or innocent, assisted inferiors as natural to their position, though positions had shrivelled with their Empire. New voices were questioning Britain’s right to Security Council status. Many, picking at fois gras, selecting a strawberry, had flinched at Munich, fought and killed in North Africa and Normandy, been side-stepped at Suez.

Behind me, new arrivals, damasked, water-silked, gauzy, fragrant, were twittering compliments, sweetly, as if to infants. ‘Precious …’ ‘But, my darling …’ In no hurry to join them or meet Dolly, did she exist, I abandoned quarterdeck, down to the operetta, to hear dialogue collegiate, clubbish, and to find the Order of Ranjitsinhji almost insulting unexplosive.

‘Lovely comment, Jonathan …’ ‘Prince Philip says …’ ‘Scarcely surprising.’

Not one of us, I was now the cabin boy seeking promotion amongst seasoned admirals. Ignored by City nabobs and young adventurers, I was ready, though not eager, to listen to Prince Philip, bump against an archimandrite and, better, win a handshake from Mr Spender.

Dolly, even if unreal, had presence. Had anyone come as Frau Simpson? Apparently not. I made no effort to reach a Labour intellectual, with whom I had briefly corresponded: I had never appreciated him declaring, a few years back, that reaching Russia from England was stepping from Hell to Heaven. ‘I say, Dick …’ A lama was embracing him. Then a skinny-eyed personage, mauve tights, crimson blouse and leggings, stopped by me.

‘You are related, sir, to Herr von Bülow.’

‘I am not related to Herr von Bülow.’

‘Exactly.’

Alex soon rejoined me, now with gold-beaked barley-sugar stick and in Judas-yellow, tasselled gown.

‘Striving for footing? Rambling agog with a notebook! Very proper. Dolly’s steaming to meet you, has talked for five weeks about nothing else.’

I had drunk well, he had drunk better, was unsteady, unpredictable, as a chimp handling a Sèvres. He pointed upwards, gave me a push less slight than he supposed, setting me to ascend another wing of the terrace where an undoubted Dolly was enthroned under a rose-clustered trellis, Great Catherine amongst courtiers.

Small, she had faded, flaxen prettiness, seen closer, was more shepherdess than Catherine, though with long lashes and black patches, one red-booted foot resting on a purple cushion, from beneath a flounced bell-skirt embroidered with multi-hued butter-flies. Some resemblance to what Mother might have become.

Her hand, ringed like a miniature Saturn, reached me, and when I introduced myself her musical-box voice enquired when I had last met dear Simon. Such largesse was withdrawn when I was displaced by an elderly grandee attired like an air vice-marshal, which he probably was.

Given congé, I butted through crowds as if through Neapolitan ice cream, making for bulging rhododendrons, azaleas, the low scarlet sun. Here, music was indistinct, voices dwindled, oblique sunlight sharpened a stone goddess reflected, like Ophelia, in a small lily pond dabbed white and mauve. In a recess, several old couples were slanted on deck chairs, sharing a champagne bottle. Severe gowns, formal shirt fronts, pearls ovalled on warped necks, combat medals. Near by, a child, belted, sworded, strained on tiptoe for what no one else could see. Voices creaked. ‘She said, Sir Mark, that she would kill herself if she failed to get it. I thought of Fleur Forsyte. She did get it, spent a fortune at Asprey’s and was found dead in the morning.’

Chuckles like a faulty tap, then a deep, comfortable tone. ‘Never trouble Trouble, until Trouble troubles you. In the Medes’ parlance.’

From the rhododendrons a laugh tinkled, fresh, happy, then abruptly, too abruptly, ceased, while, for me, sunset and champagne induced delusions of enlarged leaves, dappled air, a cockcrow unnaturally shrill, indeed operatic.

This was replaced by an actual phenomenon, a dapper, youngish television philosopher, known as Casanova, Inc., whose skilfully publicized permissiveness had not survived his daughter’s liaison with a Thai jazzman. Dressed – no, arrayed – as Fred Astaire, white tie, top hat encircled by a yellow Easter ribbon, he was accepting admiration from a sinuous Nefertiti in a single-sheeted robe. His rapid, authoritative speech belied his impersonation. ‘Dysfunctional pluralism … mere historical relativity … Genetic structuralism … in the strictest meaning of the word, Nonsense.’

‘That’s what I always say.’

In the deck chairs, the old voices continued, ‘My nephew, I shouldn’t say it myself …’ She paused, then said it herself. ‘At Alamein, he was bravest of all. Yet he’s always been scared of animals. And, after all that, what does he do? He sells furs!’

I was soothed, wandering through evening scents of phlox and rose, the beds flaring as the sun touched suburban hilltops with last brilliance.

Satisfaction was swiftly revoked by scarlet gloves on my arm, by pink breeches, tinsel buttons, narrow mask, sugary confidential drawl.

‘Ah, you’re taking time off from propaganda. Sticky thoughts après avoir couché.’

The apparition glided away. Fiery sundown was transforming this enclave to a dazzle of suggestion and surreptitious movement. Ahead, the crowds shimmered and gestured, infectiously good-natured. Had a Herr General drawn a gun, faces would have smiled, bows and mock-alarm been displayed, in the minuet of social occasion.

Alex might at any moment reappear, as Marat, as a padishah. Here might be his true centre: a ludicrous seriousness, a sort of forgetting.

Chinese lanterns were competing, still feebly, with violet sunset streaks, gold networks of gnats hung beneath trees, music galloped and spun, a Groucho Marx loped towards a would-be Audrey Hepburn. Turning away, in a heightened instant, a tremor, I saw as though they awaited me, a slender duo, identical in green tights, white doublets, flat pearly caps - Cherubinos, Pierrots, Pierrettes – but no, more likely brother and sister, hazel-eyed, pert, poised to smirk at the witch with dry, phosphorescent bones in the larder. Or Medici favourites, one with diamond ring, probably a boy, the other, with ruby bracelet, almost certainly a girl. In frail light, scarcely breathing.

They stared, in unison allowing me a nod like a pourboire, then sauntered away, sharing a low, ambiguous giggle. Startled, I followed over a curved oriental bridge towards another leafy recess, but, now half seen, now unseen, they were part of the evening trickery. Amused, I pushed further between trees, towards the tunes, chatter, the erratic sparkle of figures in and out of lamplight.

I soon overtook them, was doubtless intended to, playing my part in this rippling idleness, yet wary, feeling outsize and predatory. A false gesture might scatter them like birds.

Their paper-smooth, almost childish faces were neither friendly nor aloof but accepting me as a familiar, perhaps to be baited or mocked. Softly painted, they were further improvisation in an unwritten script of half-realized pastoral comedy in which a queen slobbers over an ass’s head, statues breathe, letters appear on trees, a white hand offers the fateful apple or, from waters, catches the sword of peril.

Had they spoken I might have spoilt the suspense by a heavy joke, but they stood, mute, tremulous, waiting. Expecting another giggle, flirtatious and insolent, I gave my name, at which they genuflected in sham-deference but as though already knowing without much liking it. The boy, slightly girlish, his sister somewhat boyish. Satin faces. Then a rajah, robed blue and green, with jewelled belt stepped between us and they receded into the dropping dusk and the array of archducal froggings, straw hats, mountebank cloaks. From random greetings I heard their names. Claire and Sinclair, seeming to parallel Hansel and Gretel.

The rajah’s hands were clasped like a Raphael Madonna, dark eyes liquefying in melancholy reproach, though I had said nothing.

‘You are correct but mistaken.’ The eyes, tender as pansies, changed to grievance. ‘In all most amplitude … I pass muster periodically …’ The Welsh missionary lilt lost credibility; he could be Alex in a further impersonation or a Dr Coppelius, Dr Miracle, Mr Kaplan or figment of lantern light which changed a strip of box-hedge to a bridge, lattice-work under yellow light to a tiger. I was fractured by the masked and disguised but strove for fixed identity. The English, in pomp and grandeur, might condescend, girls ignore my appeal, spies watch the Embassy, but I possessed thoughts inviolately my own. Though scared of finding him, I had sought Forest Uncle, had communed with Frodi the Unthinking, with Kostchei the Deathless, had told their tales to waifs famished, criminalized, dying. I had gazed up at Robespierre’s windows. In descent of Pahlen, attempting to restore a country, I had as much a claim as any here.

I moved back into light, where some stout, lacy Marquis de Carabas addressed a crescent of respectful followers. ‘No, Petra, dear, that was built in Santiago for her sister, Paca. Duchess, as you know, of Alba.’

Other voices were silkily at odds.

‘Actually, my favourite remains Pushkin.’

‘I apologize. I did not realize you knew Russian.’

‘Well, actually … you see …’

‘I see very well.’

Neither drunk nor sober, I felt etherialized, about to drift away. The moon, ready to appear, had not yet done so. A bell sounded a single, deep note, apparently unheard by all save me. Broken-off silhouettes flickered across bushes. Lawns were now iridescent, now pools of dark. A head moved, like a pasty football, Churchill; Byron limped, on the wrong foot, to a dinner-jacketed Arab turf millionaire; Shakespeare, quill behind his ear. I had a few placid words with both peroxided Eva Peron then, of known provenance, a professor who had lectured the Embassy on the Advantages of Dispersal. She at once resumed another lecture. ‘Most thinkers, I can hear you agree, merely shift old furniture.’ The smile, ringed with tiny hairs, exempted herself, but further exposition was crushed by a Polar explorer, of a literary eminence much admired by himself, rated by the Modern Dickens a flawed genius.

‘Exactly, Flora. But doesn’t Jane Austen’s persona suggest young persons, looking older than they would today, always looking past you, seeking someone better endowed?’

‘No.’

This is what I was actually doing, seeking the twins within the medley of Sioux feathers, a belt ashine with daggers, a racing driver’s helmet glittering like a heap of silver nails. The meringue pair, at once sickly and sterile, coalesced into a Princess Lontaine, dancing alone on grass beginning already sprinkled with dew. The Garden of Earthly Delights.

‘Ah!’ Alex, Dean of Peculiar, stumbled forward, with duck salad, cream cake, lobster mayonnaise on the same plate, with a goblet almost high as a vase. ‘Stomping at the Savoy! I told you it’d be more than the Old Pig and Whistle with the Roses Round the Door.’

He was knowing, in a new word, streetwise. ‘Watch and wait. A Thousand Lights Are Shining There, It’s the Broadway Melodee!”

He ate, he gulped, he slightly hiccupped. ‘But who’d have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ He inclined towards a statuesque Doge, satined in black and gold under what seemed a huge, sagging toadstool. ‘He once told me he’d helped Brahms compose the Coriolan Overture.’ Surely overhearing, the Doge grasped a youthful arm. ‘I do feel so very ancient, darling,’ his cracked voice suggesting he might have spelt it ‘antient’.

Alex shrugged, surveying further, clumsily manipulating the plate. ‘That creature behind Magda. The mask’s unnecessary, even at the Palace his aroma’s unmistakable. A criminologist, inasmuch he wrote a book praising Mussolini.’

He looked smudged, distant, momentarily lost, until, placing the half-filled plate on a bush though retaining the wine, he again recognized me. ‘It’s not whether you really believe it but whether it believes you. But his trench warfare’s in MI6, very ineffective.’

Without apparent movement he again vanished, as if at a swish from Merlin, reabsorbed in the Nicks and Jonathans, Samanthas and Petronellas, the bare shoulders and green straplines. The Chosen. I recognized one of the Royal Household, in normal suit and with Mao impassivity. He was long whispered to be the Fifth Man, who had sent Moscow the Bletchley Park code-breaking secrets, been mentor of the Cambridge spies, inexplicably immune, world expert not on politics but on Poussin.

In the gossip columnist’s stalking ground, most had alternative existence. Tomorrow they would be opening red boxes, addressing boardrooms, cowing shareholders, choosing new hats; also rootling for lovers, twisting expense accounts, selling the country. Dolly’s was neutral ground, surely free of arcane surveillance.

Alex’s departure was a relief. His buccaneer tongue was too loose. He would have cheerfully accepted the Reichsmarschall’s invitation to injure elk, have asked Himmler whether he knew the Rothschilds or demanded of Stalin what his job actually was. Had the Herr General strode by, saturnine in full Nazi regimentals, gun in his pocket, Alex would have offered to discuss the Pact. How, I wondered, would I greet him?

Another sighting of the twins revoked my misgivings. Thinly opalescent under a flowering buddleia, they had also seen me, were already advancing in step, simultaneously removing caps, revealing black heads, cropped, like small helmets, before retreating into shades.

All was permitted, but nothing would happen. No Herr General, brazen and admired, no Dolly aloft in a winged chariot, no marvellous telegram announcing ‘You’ve won.’ Instead, merely my desire for the lobster, the salmon, hitherto refused. Moreover, no willing girl had presented herself. I withdrew to another secluded arbour. Watch and Wait, in Scaramouche time. Dancers’ silhouettes melted before reaching me, mirages in frailty. Like a phantom mask, a Japanese face hovered in an angle of green light, its eyebrows painted inches above the real ones pasted over in matt white. It hung, quivered, vanished, and, as if from flowers, Claire and Sinclair were facing me. In dance of expectation I saw Sinclair pouting, his dark gaze unblinking, as if on audio-cue; hers, inquisitive, almost friendly. A scarlet altar boy, standing near, at one quick glance at them, to my surprise scuttled away, as if in fear, at odds with the atmosphere of dancers, tunes, expensiveness.

Sinclair spoke, his voice not quite natural, probably trained. ‘Dolly collects them. Her heart, sometimes good, gets things wrong.’

‘I would like to know more of her.’

‘So would she.’

Claire seemed not to have heard. The music purred, gently throbbed, prising out memories, and, on cue, a few stars and a slice of moon crept over the hills, in what my ancestors called the Blue Hour and servants the Edge of Night, that wavering frontier between dusk and nightfall when all is disjointed, expectant, sometimes wolfish. Horizons wilted, the demesne lost shape. Lamplit, petals and bush flickered with false hues, my two companions evanescent, touches of blue on their pallid skins.

Seen closer, they had discrepancies. Sinclair’s petal features scarcely completed yet those of a stripling souteneur, Claire’s more decisive and candid. Thoughtful but not remote, she was attentive to my presence, before change of light transformed them both to dolls, hole-eyed, sexless, virtually idiotic.

‘Shoes, move off!’ Sinclair was negligent, detached, but the air quivered and yet again I was deserted, fretting between uncertainties of curiosity, desire, age and once more conscious of being amateur, debarred from Old Boy bonhomie, alien as a Bavarian roughneck blundering about the Palace and wondering whether to tip the Duke.

A few voices were by now tetchy, frayed, as celebrations passed their peak, lapsing further into the Blue Hour when the lustrous Flower Girl reveals scales and forked tongue, comedians turn terrible. As though confirming this, a girl in taffeta skirt and powder-blue jacket clasped my arm. ‘How I wish …’ She was soggy, tearful, nervously about to continue but was at once reclaimed by a Sultan, long hair still fresh from the blow-dryer.

Sunset streaks had sunk into mothy purples. Again I heard, or thought I heard, the bell. A City magnate, Companion of the Golden Handshake, enriched beyond deserving by supplying luxuries to an African dictator, saluted me, then turned aside to avoid my response. The dancers seethed to Mother’s favourite song, ‘These Foolish Things’, a mottle-nosed Romeo was deploring the vulgarity of Churchill’s wartime oratory. I once more realized that I had refused food too often, accepted drink too frequently, thus was expecting a night sky torn apart by the Wild Hunt followed Grünhüll, Green Hat Rider, one of the few mythological stalwarts unlikely to be present.

A silver-buttoned glove was fingering my shoulder. ‘Wie gehst, mein Herr?’ Lumberjack face, horse-dealer’s wiliness. Alex! ‘Erich, I feel tall enough to lean over the moon. You’ll need Jacob’s ladder to find me. I think it’s by the conservatory. Your new friends … tasty enough, almost winged. They may need your help. But …’ his sigh was amplified, ‘help is so seldom welcome.’

Portly tones began ahead before he could embarrass me further, at which he mimed alarm, then nausea, and left me, perforce to listen.

‘I myself, dear ladies, was honoured, if that is truly the mot juste, by inclusion at La Tussaud’s alongside Dulles and indeed Selwyn. But I am now very properly humiliated by being reduced to less even than the ranks. I am allowed to purchase myself at a very mean price, otherwise to be melted down into literal thin air. You may laugh, indeed you are doing so, but …’

Broad herbaceous quilts were now ghostly. Was Ophelia still lying amongst the lilies or only another phosphorescent illusion of an evening of trickery and pretence, like the bell, costumes, les enfants? I was glad to find an empty stone bench, shrouded by bulky yews, and steady head and nerves.

Damp smells were rising, intermittently sweet, under richly lit branches. By some rightness of a rococo occasion, soft-footed, unreal, Claire and Sinclair reappeared, their waves implying an indelicate assignation.

‘We wondered,’ Claire seated herself by me, patting a space for Sinclair, who ignored it, glancing at me as if obliging a crony, seedy, not much favoured. ‘We thought,’ she resumed, ‘that we’d lost you.’

Both had beauty, though his was as if contrived from a blueprint and without charm. Silent, he could yet be shrill or insolent. Claire had more warmth, an inner sparkle, her head turned to me alone.

‘Do you get interested in how people say hello or goodbye? The language of hands. Once, they used fans, quizzing glasses, snuff boxes …’

Possibly nineteen, she seemed to be remembering another’s childhood, while Sinclair lowered himself to a deckchair, ostentatiously yawning.

‘We saw you looking too much alone. You looked like a fighter, but Sinclair said you would win the fight but lose the trophy.’

She was grave. Beneath Renaissance display might lurk Victorian Alice, inquiring, fearless, at one with herself and multiple, grotesque metamorphoses, the sad comics and talkative beasts.

Despite his dim repose, Sinclair was fully awake, even on guard. Interrupting, he said, ‘They’re all not weeping for Jerusalem but scared of dropping what they’ve ceased to hold.’ Too glib, as if constantly repeated, this reminder that the two were transient dusk spirits, without part in the morning realm of jobs and taxes. The girl’s smile had uncertain meaning; he was fidgeting to leave, probably to join no dance but to seek another earthbound misfit. Or, unbalanced suspicion warned, to join chauffeurs and waiters easily imagined scavenging the wines and leftovers, hidden by vast cars covered with the dim sheen of dead mackerel. Dolly’s patrician home, through eyes unfocused by drink, was now garish, a décor with nothing behind it. The frail shorthand of trickery.

11

‘Gaze into the camera and concentrate on, let’s say, Bond, James Bond. You’ll get the likeness of Mr Bond. En air, the soul expands.’

Sinclair’s smile was angled between tease and challenge. Like Claire, he wore what they must reckon country style; bluish jackets, primrose shirts dotted with tiny red circles, spruce, minutely flared slacks, black caps perkily tilted. Thankfully, they had foregone hobbled skirts and Max Factor make-up, though her nails were varnished green; his were not, though as if freshly polished. They were an indoor duo, bred as if for special occasions, their small, fixed eyes, coloured bright but vague, their sharp chins, liable to wither in full light, on these steep, solid hills. Greg, on his farm, muddied, laborious, would spit at their long lashes and prettiness, confident that they would flee at a jerk of his hoe.

Yet a Sinclair, devious and cold, could outstep any Greg. Brother and sister were very pale, almost translucent, and I remembered Trudi’s fear of ghosts. Contrasted with these ethereal, balletic pubescents, she and Greg were giants, misshapen trolls from a blackened woodcut. So was Alex, blaspheming, shouldering himself head-on through audiences, congregations, football crowds, as he might once have confronted Italians on a bloodied foreshore.

I barely credited the twins’ very existence when not flitting into candle-lit suppers, late-night cinemas, taxis. Sinclair’s eyes were usually half-closed, occasionally brilliant, seldom meeting my own. Hers were more personal, responsive, clouding only when I directly asked her opinion. Brother and sister often gave appearance of having reached different conclusions from identical experience. At Dolly’s, in mild derangement of senses, I judged them playthings of Merlin or Dr Coppelius, to be changed at whim to sprites or leopards. A delusion. Independent, secretive, they might survive Alex.

Eyes like thrown stars, Mr Spender wrote.

Above England, on leafy Surrey heights, Sinclair was unchanged, alternating with rancour and studied boredom. Like a marksman, specialist in the shot in the back, he seldom blinked, seeing more than he would admit. Freelance art critic and designer, he was astringent, frequently spiteful, condemning Kitchen Sink as slabbed ugliness, maintaining that Picasso’s versatility matched his gullibility as spokesman for peace on Russian terms. Accomplished draughtsman and colourist, Sinclair himself had worked on two Sadler’s Wells ballets though refusing to be credited. Proud of his analysis of colours, he had been oblivious to those we had passed in wayside hedges. Fellow art critics exasperated him. ‘Most literary reviewers may at least know how to read.’ He nicely expleted the Kennedys as monied stripteasers, their culture bogus as the supreme whore, Duchess of Windsor.

‘You’ve met her?’

‘Only as much as you’d notice.’

Of Alex, he was less charitable. ‘Your babblemouth father-figure’s a brass top, spinning giddy for good notices. A busybody.’

As always, he spoke gently, slowly, as though speech was an art, acquired with difficulty. ‘He respects Freud. That’s a give-away. The blind man is untrustworthy on quicksand. Freud was ruthless as Gandhi, his vanity larger than Dalí’s, his cures miserable as a Hindu holy man’s spit, his disciples noosed by leptonic jargon. Brassey trips head first over his own thirsty tongue. He sits on a committee – and enjoys it!’ Scorn could go no further, but fatigue dispersed his slow-power vehemence; he shrugged, moved to Claire, who had listened like a careful nurse.

To their art-gallery clique she always introduced me as a writer, meant as compliment, though to him no more superior than the Order of Ranjitsinhji. Literature, he considered chloroform, though he had read widely; she read less, preferring ballet and the Impressionists. She had, however, borrowed my edition of Rannit’s poems, with their crystal evocations of Calypso’s ‘Ogygia’.

Now that evening broadens, moist and ashen –

Ancient twilight myth of space –

Waves awakened thrust up sword-like flashes,

Someone calls, and urges ‘Stay!’

He scoffed at my pamphlets as political detritus, ephemeral as Solzhenitsyn. This did not matter, but for her, with snippets about Rose Room, Forest and Lake, Wotan, Lord of War and Music, the dank Conciergerie, empty yet crowded, I implied myself a poet too busy to publish.

Below lay a broad, postcard landscape of hedged meadows, varied as patchwork, bright villages, sunlit steeple, a midget train speeding, remnants of a forest. Behind us, a dew pond older than legions. The sky, still meridian fresh, was looped between quiet, barely populated hills and distant downs. A solitary scab was an ageing concrete tank-trap, useful, Sinclair considered, for Concrete Poets, Kitchen Sink painters and dramatists. For myself, it reminded me of the Embassy map of a clandestine England, redesigned for atomic war, thus speculation of what these placid slopes might conceal. But no, surely not. Merely green profiles carved between blue and gold fathoms of air.

Sinclair was more concerned with bending over a leaf, detached, appraising, approving. Then he straightened. ‘Leaves contain the secret of the universe. I’d like a leaf-shaped box, very small, containing one germ which, should you open the lid, would destroy the world. Try it.’

An unappetizing command or joke. He strolled on. With slim physique enviable to a Leonardo, he must yet see himself not as a lover, a Storm Prince’s mignon, but the Outsider, discussed so seriously in congested cities.

Claire was complete in herself, indeterminate though that self might be. This allowed far more allure than her brother, so talkative about very little.

Up here, high in Surrey, both were weak; a gale would toss them downhill.

Over-sized, sergeant-strong, exhilarated by summer air, walking, new sights, and from abstruse desires, I imagined them naked together, on a black divan, slender legs overhanging, daisy-white buttocks indistinguishable.

Checked by delusion that Sinclair could mind-read, I thought back to their context, the mêlée of Dolly’s Follies, exotic version of what little I knew of English thought: unsystematic but rooted, and, like Shakespeare and Dickens, not cynical but humorously undeceived by outward motive. High commanders played the game at whatever cost, never quite losing it. The question was now how far their troops would follow. Their humour might have some affinity to Estonian.

The game, if game it were, now being played by this precocious pair, had not yet set rules or purpose, though, oddly, they seemed anxious to meet me, perhaps as novelty. Always over-impatient for friendship, like reading poetry too fast, I hurried to obey. Yet Sinclair, in his fretful beauty, was unlikable, an adolescent dandy feigning astonishment or contempt at whatever was said.

We met for a Soho dinner, Cork Street private view, at which he was markedly ignored, a small Hampstead party where aged thinkers unravelled the Infinite by swapping platitudes from Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, and I at once realized that, in the blunt English phrase, we had gate-crashed. American space missions were much derided. ‘America,’ Sinclair, spoon-fed princeling, winced as if at castor oil, ‘should first reach itself.’ He looked around for admiration, though no one appeared to hear.

Claire, prettier, more deep in herself and saying little, was moved only by a Magnani, a Mastroianni, in the cinema they frequented. He unfailingly disparaged movies, his slack mouth wrenched crooked by her enjoyment. When fractious, he irritated by addressing me as ‘Sir’. He appeared to consider me a freak of semi-barbaric Europe damaged by a squalid and unnecessary war, its enormities exaggerated, its veterans charmless, and which, he thought, might well have hastened the death of James Joyce. I was thus an interesting specimen of dumb ox romanticism and Prussian zeal. That I worked for a country non-existent, probably imaginary, endowed me not with fairy-tale glamour but a preposterous gravitas, almost tragic in ponderous absurdity. I needed, perhaps, a sort of protection. Sinclair, without context, had pointed at me and intoned, ‘Dawn over death beds.’

By mid-afternoon, in rebuke of my own sturdiness, they were frequently sinking to rest on mound, stile, tree stump, Sinclair teasing me with questions. Had I travelled much? ‘Travel, you know, needs talent.’ Did I prefer boys? Had I joined the Hitler Youth, and was it sexy? He was less interested in my responses than was Claire, her light eyes seemed following my words. He began speaking of himself and his current interest in Zen. His smile conveyed awareness of superior knowledge. ‘Whoever Knows, does not Tell. Whoever Tells, confesses he does not Know.’ A rebuke to my knowledge of politics, of Rannit.

Claire was hunched on a mound, an ingénue Titania blessedly unaccompanied by tutu-clad entourage, though momentarily I saw myself with a head unnaturally hairy and brutish. The louder Sinclair spoke, the more she seemed to withdraw behind serious or downcast eyes.

She was quickly up, leading us through beeches, birds squabbling, the verve of sheer existence. Birds were only birds, the brushwood harmless, the sun simple. Only Sinclair jarred, as if on unstoppable LP.

‘I once thought music the solution, but then I was twenty-three. Now I’m eighteen.’ Again and again he hoped for dissent, quarrel, but received only my discreet smile. I wanted not to hear his prattle but to see this new England: a pond like a blue eye, harvested acres, farmers counting their losses, warm, rich lands over which, through cloud-capes, the Reichsmarschall’s knights had charged towards London.

In mid-sentence, Sinclair was startled by a breeze, sudden as an exclamation. Though it almost immediately subsided, so, for a little, did he, slowing his walk, giving me chance to ingratiate myself with Claire by relating the start of a Siberian poem, Uncle Wind unrolling his precious ball of white silk. Pulled off print, however, it sounded whimsical, childish, and I desisted, though her shy, tilted face was, I convinced myself, encouraging.

Our path was now up, now down. Back with us, Sinclair began identifying moths swarming above a decayed branch. ‘That’s Death Head. Crimson under-wing. The swarthy ones … quite rare.’ Cupping hands over a pallid Ghost Moth, gratified by his expertise, he showed me its streaks, before dropping it, dead, like soiled tissue. Claire was reproachful but dreamily, without force. He was too easily imaginable, quietly, gleeful, kicking away a blind man’s stick.

‘We’ll go.’ But, reaching a cropped, clover-covered bulge tapped by a broken stone, he again stopped, as if greeting something, or someone, familiar. His eyebrows contracted, dark on the unlined face, which, like the sister’s, remained dry and pale, despite the heat that was soaking me.

‘The Invisible Man.’ His affected, birdlike croak was as if winning some fourth-grade dare, before, to a class not backward but dull, he explained that Truth was the firebird, unlikely to be seen, never to be caught, though a feather, still glowing, was occasionally found. I judged him striving to imitate some favourite character in juvenile fiction: insolently know-all, annoyed by rules, success, the existence of others. Claire was both accepting and protective, difficult, probably impossible, to separate from him.

‘Better, Erich, a shining glimpse than a task force nothing.’

We were heading towards another small group of beech and oak, constellation of green and dark brown. ‘Trees’ – he was inflated by the insights he wished me to envy – ‘should relate to the body. Like archery. Archery’ – he addressed only me, the barbarian – ‘holds all of yourself in complete balance, so that you acquire perfect selfhood. Or should do,’ he amended, as if realizing that he must have sounded as if reading from a guidebook. His smile, though, a thin curved rim, doubted whether I was capable of glimpsing any archer. A correct supposition.

‘If you really know and understand your body, Erich, you possess all. What your cumbersome stage-manager Wotan never achieved, despite all help from that bore Wagner. Under hypnosis even an ignorant tramp can utter unknown language, quantum data, see marvels with bandaged eyes.’

Undeniably incapable of such feats, I was sceptical about his own strength to pull an adult bow. He might dance on a toadstool, but privation, muggery, threat from a bayonet would extinguish him easily as he had the Ghost Moth.

My expression must have discouraged him. Changing tactics, he went appeasing, flirtatious, almost affectionate, thus more suspect. ‘I’m only at the start. But I can control my hands when they’re disobedient.’ These hands, evidently obedient, well tapered as if for Central Casting, he pointed down at the nearest village, mellow, drowsy.

‘Rustic charms! Little England’s excuse. But milk and bacon aren’t steak.’

That he ever devoured steak was improbable as von Karajan dancing cancan.

Claire was again a little ahead and I hastened after her, expecting the coolness of the little wood ahead.

In ancient tradition, twins had uncanny aura, like cripples and the red-headed, like changelings and May-tide children in Thuringian folklore, beguiling creatures, no pure children of light but off-beam, from dew, moon, shadows. Yet a conceit ludicrous in this travel agent’s afternoon, a drool over epicene kids very much of today.

Claire at last spoke, returning to an earlier question.

‘I would hear the street cry “Any Old Iron?” and thought it must mean unwanted children for sale.’ Her laugh, though small, was always more mature than Sinclair’s snigger, sometimes irking him into calling her Mummy.

Musing, she said, more to the turf than to me, ‘Also, there was a song. Listen.’ Not singing, but in the same near-whisper, she recited:

He had no hair on the top of his head,

And he’s gone where the old folks go.

More normally, she said, ‘It upset me. Where could they go?’

Sinclair finished what must have been familiar. ‘I can tell you. Where else could they go but to a wretched hut on the very edge of a canyon. They would be pushed inside, the front door locked. The back door …’ His sibilant tone implied a consequence both fatal and deserved.

She drooped, then looked at me, as if to a referee, but neither of us spoke.

And then. Trees were closing together, leaves were tiny shields silvered by the light. I uttered some banality about the powers of trees, the Black Forest resisting Rome, which Sinclair accepted as challenge to his own erudition. ‘That Berlin rampart, Erich, is less powerful than you think. It’s little more than Kurfürstendamm cake. Anyway, walls look both ways, like cross-eyed Picasso.’ My disinclination to argue sharpened his acumen. ‘I can also tell you to avoid our most expensive shrink. Lance-Courier. A natural hangman. He charged very hard cash for telling a Bankside dwarf that she needed not him but a vet.’

He might be intending to convey some meaning quite different but hot, restive, I could keep interested only in the valleys and white roads. And Claire.

She understood. ‘One more pull-up, Erich, before the wood. Then down to the farm. We’ve been here before. Farmer’s wife, giving you real English teatime. Scones, cake, red jam, cream.’

Sinclair, upstaged, pretended to assess another valley, one side blazing, the other in shadow. ‘There’s a church to see if you don’t want tea. Early English with some Romanesque brickwork, Perpendicular pillars with quatrefoils, long flushwork panels. The river dries up every seventh year. Rather poor taste, you’ll think. Not everyone knows why. And deep in the rowans traces of a sacred dike.’

‘Sacred to whom?’

Eager for tea, I was also at last to learn something interesting, but he only pouted, then put fingers to his lips. Sunlight leapt the hills as a cloud drifted, the path dividing at the plantation edge. We could bypass a thick smudge of brambles and descend or push through to some further track beyond the trees. Claire was insistent. ‘Can’t we go down? We should hurry.’ But, sing-songing ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today’, he was already pushing aside thorns, nettles, overhanging branches wrapped with misty cobwebs.

Sunlessness enveloped us, not lifted by Sinclair calling back that the sun was now denser, brighter, than ever before recorded. Changing pitch, he hummed:

They hadna’ gone a league, a league,

A league but barely three.

In near darkness, the sky mere chinks, broken porcelain, the air damp and malodorous, this was no enchanted wood near Athens but an annoying obstruction, until Claire thrilled me by suddenly clutching my hand, with Sinclair invisible. She must feel the chill, fear being stung or slipping on mud. Perhaps more. Only Sinclair, beyond us, and our own thrashings through undergrowth disturbed a solitude where no wing twitched, no dry leaf clicked, no insect shrilled from dock and fern and blotched grass. Though fairly ordinary, the place was simultaneously irregular, untoward, like finding one’s signature in a stranger’s book.

Claire might be reacting from some previous experience here, not alarming but depressing.

We stumbled towards light and found Sinclair, now silent, where trees had thinned, standing within a group of short, elephant-grey stones, cracked, lichened, the air tauter, sourly masculine, heavy with stale seasons.

‘Now’ – he lost disdain, had scarcely suppressed eagerness – ‘you’re here, Erich. The exact centre of Sanctuary Wood.’ In his new mood he may not have seen Claire’s hand still in mine, and she now pulled it away, as if repelled by the stones, thrusting through foliage, explaining nothing, leaving Sinclair in some private communion, deserted by Mummy.

She relented when, in the warmth, the freshness, we saw him slip from the shadows, discontented, aggrieved at least by my failure to rhapsodize his stones. Claire remained the elder, the capable, almost skipping to tap his chest and, in some nursery code, exclaim, ‘Peacock!’

‘Peacock, yourself.’ Mollified, he uttered a harsh screech, before courteously including me, said, ‘Lush eternal. Out of body isn’t out of mind. Out, Out, my Pretty Parson’, as though unwrapping an arcane secret.

Against décor of sunlight rippling like pennants along the line of hills, they bowed to each other, decorative extras on the verge of a pas de deux, their smiles as if pencilled, voices high and identical chanting, ‘Seven for a secret that can’t be told.’

Like the castaways from Meinnenberg, they were far away.

Easily fatigued, Sinclair was first to desist. Formally saluting sky and hills, he remembered me, off-handedly remarking, ‘Having no heart to show, he bares his teeth’, as if not wholly relinquishing private trance.

Claire, already matter-of-fact, restored the solid dimension of farmer’s wife, red jam, butterflies above lavender. Sinclair, however, had not finished. ‘Look!’ Holding before me an inked sketch, myself above the dwarf stone circle, carelessly impressioned, a mass of black slants, tall and bulky, merging with leaves and shadows, almost a tree myself. Held to the sunlight, I was weakened, mouth slackened, shoulders as if padded, several lines of middle age until, shaded by his other hand, these vanished.

Before I could take it, he slid away, crumpling it.

‘Next week, Erich … the Day of the Comet. Violet ribbons, exquisite brocade. Your birthday.’

True, though I had not mentioned it. Firefly child, he was pleased. One up, and Claire said gently, ‘At Dolly’s we recognized you at once.’

Throughout, his hothouse grace, her catwalk poise, would remain as out of place as Swan Lake in a second-feature western.

12

In dreams, I was at once climbing and descending empty hills, stones growing faces, one of them my own, Sinclair’s drawing, thinned, scarred, aged. Undeterred, I returned to the Embassy refreshed and energetic. The second Miscellany boded well. Writers sought me, accepted criticism, the occasional rejection. One poem pleased Mr Tortoise.

Look hard at others’ eyes. No one sees his own.

Life’s seal can be unsealed; its hidden knowledge known.

My birthday passed unnoticed. Reluctantly admitting some minute upset, I busied myself with the latest leak, a forthcoming British query at the UN Assembly, of the legality of the Soviet Baltic annexations. The Spectator commissioned me to write on Moscow’s supposed offer, at Nuremburg, to acquit Ribbentrop in return for his refusal to confess the Secret Protocol.

Another pamphlet, examining Forest Brothers, had flavour of an obituary. Contacts with Estonia were ceasing, one partisan captain exposed as a Russian plant.

I still delayed application for British citizenship, partly through dislike of the irrevocable and finalized, partly to lingering belief in some idyll beyond nationality and flags. Father had spoken of Stoics, recognizing each other by no more than a particular poise, smile, tone of voice.

Those first months in London still appeared stage-fire and grotesque villainy. The surreptitious footfall on the stairs, the shadow in the car park, the dangerous balcony, the exaggerations of solitude and of clutching a dead past. Alex, with sea breeze buoyancy, affected anxiety for my future.

‘Don’t be fooled, old lad, by bogus cream-cake messengers tickling your imagination, not your horse sense. Don’t be too scatheless – though I’ve never been quite sure what this means. You’ll never be, yes, catonic, but more fierce than you actually are. No one is less besotted by some ponce maestro or dotty Herr Doktor crouching behind the arras. You’ll never commit hara-kiri for imaginary treasure or sacrifice a kingdom for Bessie Couldn’t Help It. But …’ The juicy voice fell into solemnity almost certainly genuine. ‘Erich, I’ve seen soldiers, experienced, tall and spiked as hat stands, in battle, with loaded guns, yet suddenly unable to press the trigger. The Colonel raised an eyebrow. And I myself, when I first played on Big Side, ran up to bowl a stinker, and the ball just stuck to my hand. I couldn’t deliver, was changed to stone. I know writers of real talent but who’ll never publish, scared of submitting their work. Yet they, all of us, started as if marching to Gorky’s proclamation that he came into the world in order to disagree. But you’re different, slightly annoying though it is to admit it. You don’t change, despite your fits of wishful thinking. Spendthrift. I won’t say more.’

Unhesitatingly, he said more. ‘You mustn’t wilt like a dahlia insufficiently strawed. You’ve long realized that inflexible love starts up the Inquisition. You’ve got yourself into position of attack, so don’t ever surrender it.’

I assumed him softening me for a knock-out. But no. ‘Your publications are breaching our insularity. Very good. But don’t rate we Brits too low, too high. Did you read of me with old Maugham yesterday? He almost lost his teeth blasting New Towns, Angry Young Men and Porn Playwrights. New Universities he thought contradiction in terms. Calling them factories for the unthinking. He’d probably been invited to endow a Chair for Knitting. He wondered whether Winston’s interest in art was mere zest for assaulting a defenceless canvas. Afterwards, I wanted to play in the nursery.’

‘But were you ever a child?’

‘Intermittently. Wild Wood days.’ His unruly head sagged, though his voice held steady between badinage and crafty affection. ‘You yourself, Erich, you arrive uninvited, you make good at nobody’s cost. High praise. Myself, well, I’m me. Almost better. Every day leaps into clamour of minor miracles. Early-morning radio told me that a Californian computer has calculated that the Great War never happened.’

As if playing a card, he leant forward. ‘You’re visibly on the up. But I’m really jammed in the Jazz Age, which your home never knew. Saxophones and midnight frolics. Jade cigarette holders, Gatsby’s blue lawn, dancers like white moths amongst stars and champagne.’Worried, he muttered, ‘So bloody few at the funeral. I’m biting my own elbow.’

Unlike many compatriots, he always used ‘I’, never the defensive ‘one’. His face, though, so pocked, prematurely lined, its teeth so ragged, was as if depleted, by some faulty connection, and I remembered an Estonian belief that elves had once been giants.

‘Erich, Kierkegaard may be correct, the unhappy dwell in either past or future, never in the present. I once spent all day hard and wet, about a girl but when we met in the evening I found myself reading a newspaper, thus realizing that all was over. That’ll be your fate with that eldritch pair. Splendid word, eldritch. But they’re not as awful as they seem. They’re worse.’

He had become vehement as a suitor. ‘Their gifts are treacherous. They’re temporary pets, seen everywhere but with no friends. You’re their potluck. We stroke their Fabergé heads but don’t open our front doors. They’ll let you down, plain as a button. Tinselled juvenile leads, in mind and texture, in a play that never gets production. As for you, you should become more a Heinrich der Horrid.’

Could he, in his swagger, resent my straying from him? His possessiveness flattered, then amused.

‘Alex, it’s not only Sinclair …’

‘He’s not a critic, only a wasp. His notion of artistry is to tell a geranium to water itself, then watch it die. He never gets inside words, merely strokes them like peaches, with no more interest in painting than Noel Coward has in Swahili folksongs. He’s off-side, damned, barely legal.’

‘And Claire?’

To utter her name gave a sharp spasm instantly dowsed by his ugly cough. ‘Over her, our sun shines even less. She’s got the balls, of course, one too many. Should you get her clothes off – doubtful as Macmillan’s flair for foreign affairs – you’ll find the mark of Medea. More than dry loins, black toes, lack of vitamin D.’ His insistence could have been that of a lawyer objecting to a bequest to charity. ‘It’s all summed up by Aquinas. Unanswerable.’

‘What is it?’

His coarse grin infuriated. ‘Very sadly, it’s untranslatable. Let’s forget them. When you’re next in your Embassy, you may find the bosses polishing their gunwales. Things are in the wind.’

Things might be in the wind, but colleagues reported nothing. Revising a pamphlet, trimming the Miscellany’s lay-out, I thought of eldritch. The word opened into the green and unearthly, persisting beneath crisis and turmoil, while courageous human refuseniks perished. A Sinclair risks only a muttered witticism, anonymously denounces a Malraux, a Nansen, at most extreme dances few insouciant steps on the scaffold, certain that he’s unable to die.

Despite Alex, the two hovered near me, in off-moments and midnight hours.

‘We make a family, Erich.’ Sinclair allowed a lazy smile. ‘You may wish to smear our foreheads with elk-blood. And actually …’

‘Actually?’

‘Yes.’

Still uninvited, I inspected their Ebury Street house, in a jumble of small hotels and where the child Mozart had composed early symphonies.

No Claire stood at a window. Provocative by her reticence, she was also competent, reserving tables, booking tickets, checking cinema and late bus times, paying bills.

My attempts at discovering their real natures were stalemated. Alex had correctly pointed to their lack of friends; they needed my company, if only as camp follower and on terms decidedly their own. Or his own. In return, I received his flip strictures delivered with monotonous moroseness, her reserve. I watched more than I listened, hoping a gesture, unconsidered remark or glance would reveal more.

I read little of his criticism, discouraged by his feline talk. He approved Marcel Duchamp’s recommendation that a Rembrandt should be used as an ironing board;T.E. Lawrence was interesting only as a memorial to British duplicity; very few animals felt pain; Bergman’s The Seventh Seal could be forgiven only because it catered for my own ‘solitary and farouche being’. His favourite term of abuse was ‘Harmless’, employed too frequently. I practised Wilfrid’s cryptic, shadowy smile, not to refute him but in hopes of stirring Claire into the outright and rebellious.

Did they share a bed? Had their parents ever hugged, even raised them? I flinched from answers likely from Alex.

They sent me opulent Pralines Leonidas, perhaps knowing my dislike of them. He considered my The Forest Brothers worse than harmless; the perfect liberal Foreign Office brief. Claire only murmured that forests no longer had chance.

Their silences differed, Sinclair’s vindictive or bored, hers inconclusively wondering. Faulkner’s death saddened her; he retorted that it was overdue, his books stifled. She did demur at what he considered the most useful work of art since the tiresome war: this was when a fashionable audience bayed applause for a composer who sat at a piano for a longish time, playing nothing.

Each, like saints and devils, had symbolic colour. His, the artful sheen of midnight marble, hers the subdued gloss of a lawn under cloud. They made a sexless hybrid, an illuminator’s fancy, but, could she but be detached, Claire might be brought into some semblance of a wider day.

Nonsense, I could hear Alex say, you’ll ride the emotions and survive disgracefully.

Sinclair, nevertheless, surprised me by admitting he had a favourite song, a medieval lyric often heard on the BBC Third Programme, blending boys’ voices and deep maturity, tender harmonies and harsh descants, the words disconcertingly obscene.

Another occasion was more startling. Having looked at Claire as if for permission, he hesitated. Always pale, delicate in skin and physique, he seemed, very exceptionally, nerving himself to speak.

‘We had to go north, for an exhibition. Later, we went walka-bout on the moors. And there we saw something. It made us remember you.’ I had to wait, showing and feeling unconcern, while he treasured his treat. ‘Your gold-braided Excellencies will have missed a note if they don’t know it. It wasn’t a Regency parlour lined with Persian lambskin, for Britten and Pears on a spree.’ His little laugh was malicious. ‘No. Not much better. A New Town, probably being raised on Yank money. No roads seemed to lead to it. All access forbidden. One vast aerodrome – I don’t use airport – ugly as a fart. Armed sentries everywhere. It was designed like a Peruvian temple, visible only to eyes in the sky. Locals wouldn’t talk of it, or swore it didn’t exist, but we saw more than we were meant to. We’ve the knack of not being seen.’ His own eyes gloated, but I at once remembered the First Secretary’s hidden diagram, illustrating a hypothetical Britain in atomic crisis.

Realizing he had startled me, Sinclair spoke faster, perhaps more inventively. ‘All around it was white, not quite natural. Like painted snow. Or fungoid grass. Further off, scorched. We met one man, like us, slightly lost. He was scared, said the moor wouldn’t recover, then wished he hadn’t.’

He had embroidered too much. Now, unconvinced, I looked at Claire for tolerant dissent, but she sat in silence, trim, hands folded, as a child might to a story that changes with each telling while remaining believable.

No child, Sinclair was the dwarf who cackles at crossroads, with riddles like traps. He now looked as if about to dance, creamy with satisfaction, eyes as if carved. Even his dark-green tailored jacket seemed to glow. But the more he spoke, the less his impact. He seldom knew how to cut a story. ‘I believe in omens. What we saw, really did see, was one. I can tell you another. Alex has a short lifespan. Outcome of treacherous planets and of having climbed a rocky plinth. At best, he’s got five years. But you, dearest Erich, will last centuries. Longer than the pangs of the Messiah. Though, for Claire and me …’ For that instance, his new, troubled silence humanized him, a critic overtaken by doubts. At the wilful reference to Alex, I wanted Alex’s outdoor spirit, vigorous, if not scatheless.

Trees were turning gold, then russet. Several times Claire appeared about to speak to me alone, to confide, but always desisted. There would be no twists of soul, no gleam from ‘Ogygia’, only a couple of London kids who would vanish in the first cold of winter, skating arm in arm in dainty lines on a thinning surface.

13

History, never in short supply but often procrastinating, abruptly went into quickstep, entire populations gathering like volunteers for the block. With few warnings, embassies were alerted by coded telegrams, the public alarmed by tall headlines, watching the sky as ancestors had awaited Spanish topsails or Old Bony’s grenadiers. Or in summer 1939, the last weeks of peace when the Pact was signed. All London slowed, in a brief silence that Estonians compared with that when a student pays his debts and Mother to a goose passing over her grave. No Danger, a Downing Street spokesman reassured, No Danger as such.

The Balance of Terror had tilted, Russia testing thermonuclear weapons, the Soviet Bloc and Maoist newspapers rejoicing in the Soviet megaton bomb. Fleet Street accused Russia of establishing suspect fishing bases on Cuba.

Tensions quickened. The Organization of American States expelled Cuba: Kennedy’s anti-Castro invasion fiasco in the Bay of Pigs had earlier incited angry demonstrations in many European cities. Not yet refuted were allegations that the CIA had dispatched poisoned cigars to Castro.

At the Embassy nerves were frayed, with scenes over misplaced memos, cryptic communiqués, dubious translations. What was Uthant? Who was Maria An Two Venus? How interpret Chudid or Fossil Algae? Even Mr Tortoise unexpectedly swore, very coarsely.

The First Secretary announced that aerial photography had exposed those fishing bases as installations of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, only a short flight from Florida. This was at once official. The entire world paused as Kennedy demanded their instant removal. Indignant, in professional righteousness, he listed long-range missiles trained on the USA, fortified by plutonium stockpile, 40,000 Russians, Castro’s victorious Red Army. On screens, Khrushchev, bumptious, pudgy, explosive, denied such bases as lying excuses for imperialist aggression which had stolen not only Texas and California but castrated America’s rightful inhabitants.

In Britain, Mr K kept his precarious popularity, the young relishing his ill-fitting suits and anti-American shoe-thumping at the UN. The likes of Dolly thought him ill-bred but a tub of folksy wisdom. At the Embassy, we remembered his merciless cruelty as Stalin’s satrap, his anti-Semitism and greed for power. By the weekend, however, in London, in most cities, eyes were taut, breath unsteady, children kept indoors, in a new stillness, like that when Stalin died or when, in appalled hush, London multitudes heard that Elizabeth Tudor was dying and waited as if for plague or famine.

Queues formed for unlikely buses, for stationary trains or for no apparent purpose. Zealots wanting to raise cheers for Castro and Che only met faces blank as windows. Newsagents sold out of maps of Cuba, black and red circles showing the Soviet emplacements, the statistics of American skyscrapers within missile capability. As crisis escalated, many were not stoical but listless, bored, helpless.

A parliamentary question elicited a reply that the USA possessed two hundred atomic reactors, Britain thirty-nine, its H-bomb in gift of the Super Mac nod. The USSR’s stocks were unknown, fanciful or limited by incompetence. This reassured few, though for two days most protest was silent, Hands off Cuba appearing overnight on walls, striking at Kennedy’s pledge, ‘We’re going to take out those missiles.’ A bloodless riot convulsed Liverpool, and angry crowds outside the US Embassy, within which Marines stood armed. Several women, patient, with bowed heads, lined in silent protest outside the Soviet Embassy.

London editors were rivals in irony, one remedy for weakness. A leading article weightily congratulated White House for heroically supporting altruism and fair play and praised the Kremlin for magnanimity in sacrificing Marxist dogma for bulk purchase of Middle West grain. A radio psychologist revealed that, under wartime pressure, 5,190 people showed traits of a criminal species, classified, that recoils from praise. He added that father-fears could now be expected from 43 per cent of children. An evangelist quoted Martin Luther to the respectful in a Highbury park, ‘Christ and John the Baptist praised war. Scripture teaches that God has ordained man to make war and to strangle. War is a very small misfortune. In truth, it is very special love.’

On television, Alex ignored Cuba, save for remarking that the Children’s Crusade was now believable. In London and Paris, the Left rallied, printing illustrations not of Castro’s defences but of American military bases ringing the USSR: Okinawa, Japan, Turkey, Spain, West Germany, Britain; arms dumps in Greece, Pakistan, Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam. Daubed on our Embassy, Who is the Real Aggressor? Old kerosene lamps were already almost unobtainable, in fear of power failure and sabotage.

Alex and I were too busy to meet, but he often telephoned, on odd corners of the day, unflurried by visions of mountains crumbling, seas mounting to Andean heights, electronics demented.

‘Most crises are bluff. I’ve a biggish bet with Louise that Mr K will kick for touch. He’s got sharp-shooting Mao not only backing him but behind his back. People always overrate Russia. Cringe, it wallops you. Stand up straight, and it falters. It’s cruel but almost as corrupt as the JFK kitchen lot. Personally, I’ve always found Kennedy’s charm offensives highly offensive. Meanwhile, mein Herr, we’ll meet soon and rearrange the world. Don’t waste time mooning for Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair. We may have to die in harness. More likely, by sly fortune, prosper greatly.’

He had been seen in a Trafalgar Square demonstration, without witness to which faction he supported.

Ticker tapes were choking with events, real or supposed: Scottish picketing an atomic submarine dock, laser vibrators trained on Birmingham, protestors besieging Harwell and Aldermaston. The First Secretary imposed food-hoarding and reported issues of arms to police.

Rumour stalked the streets, as if in Shakespearian drama. Kennedy, almost one of us, youth had said, was sick, diplomatically or from failure of nerve. Macmillan had invited himself to Washington, Macmillan had been rebuffed, Macmillan was reading Trollope. The White House announced that the President, never fitter, had ordered a Line of Steel, naval blockade of Cuba. A congressman addressed millions, ‘We’re either a first-class power or we are not. Clear the bastards out!’ Kennedy followed. ‘A clandestine and reckless threat to world peace.’ Fleet Street urged Macmillan to advise and consent. To what? The pre-emptive Bomb, as Russell had once urged? A conference? Dignified retreat? A Syrian spokesman accused Israel of fomenting global peril to distract attention from an impending attack on Egypt. A ‘device’ was reported defused in Red Square, Moscow; two suspects were arrested in the White House garden. Simultaneously in Paris, West Berlin, Stockholm appeared a cartoon of Khrushchev dangling puppets – Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia – bawling ‘I’m Not Stalin’s Shit.’ From Ecole Normal Supérieure, a former Maoist philosopher asserted that a black triangular object seen over Marseilles confirmed Jung’s belief that such phenomena fill psychic vacuum. With Mr Tortoise, I speculated on Kensington, exhumed centuries ahead, with books and pens incomprehensible as dinosaur and pterodactyl.

Telegrams multiplied; we had insufficient cipherists. South American ministers were huddling over Red Agents’ instructions, a military coup threatened Argentina. Spies were arrested in Mexico, were mysteriously released, had never existed. From Estonia, an underground estimate of Russian naval strength was so inordinate that we reckoned it a KGB trick. The Ambassador reminded us that, until his mid-term elections were past, Kennedy could not risk loss of face.

Inexorably, tapes ground on. Dow Jones, Stock Exchange, Bourse and Tokyo falls. Scared parents begging Canadian visas, a CND warrior decamping to Ireland, teenage truancy rampant, peace placards everywhere quivering like geese. A Sydenham couple allegedly gassed their baby, pleading compassion. A Bristol teacher complained that her husband and herself shared an identical nightmare of a bloody thumb-print staining a mushroom cloud. Grounds for divorce, Alex said, in seven American states. A girl rushed naked across Barnes Common, agitating for peace. Bookshops were briskly selling Atlantic charts and astrological patterns, tabloids repeating the prophecy of the fall of a citadel in a month of troubles, attributed to Nostradamus. A postcard appeared of two bandits, K and K, astride the globe, wrangling over a Cuban cigar, while midgets crawled into caves. On the Sunday, jivers massed in Piccadilly Circus, Eros draped with a poster of two bowler hats inscribed Another Fine Mess. In churches, prayers strove to avert black snow, pilotless bombers, vengeance powerful as gale force sha. As they had done a decade ago, in the last great London fog, pedestrians buckled, folded hands, knelt. The ordinary – office, school, football, bed – must soon be an act of bravado. Letters to the press foretold mobsters’ rule, a Ragnarok, Arabs and Lefties desecrating St Paul’s, Christians and looters violating mosques and synagogues. In such delirium, Eulenspiegels would caper in the Mall, the Queen light a pipe in the Abbey, dressy Warren Street car-touts transform to fuckall sharpshooters.

In Ipswich, a Rastafarian prophet promised cataclysmic retribution for regicide, adding, in afterthought, that no death was complete. Faces, upturned from shoulders drooping, shrinking, must be seeking a charismatic saviour, a John Rabe, amoral but cleansing.

A ministerial statement denied any necessity of underground shelters, adding that few were available to the general public, making the General Public sound like an unlicensed pub. Industrial absenteeism soared, roads and railways were congested, strikes were promised. Another White House bulletin declared that though the missile sites must be dismantled blockade was more effective than invasion, preferably supervised by the UN. Khrushchev retorted by indicting degenerate imperialism. On television, a science-fiction novelist, unusually cheerful, showed an animated tableau of European cathedrals rendered fragile as wax, statues melting, white flame then dissolving islands, forests, Edinburgh, to spectral blossom, whales dwindling to bone and gristle, seas rolling up in a screaming universe, the Atlantic a monstrous bubble, then a venomous drain, exposing the barnacled Grand Staircase of the Titanic. All this, he ended, smile splitting his face, should Soviet warships head for Cuba.

Embassy routine continued. Visitors arrived, secretaries stacked and filed, safes were emptied, the Miscellany Two proofs punctually delivered, though all attention was beamed on Washington, Moscow, Havana. An Oxford historian broadcast that for the first time since 1740 Britain, an allotment gone to seed, had no world role. ‘A refreshing historical turning-point.’

When the Foreign Office admitted that Mr K had ordered the fateful sailing, switchboards were slurred, then jammed. Head teachers reported hysteria in schools, mass truancy; pro-Castro marchers were assaulted near the Monument by youths arm-banded with Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes. Several councils reminded voters that they had established themselves as nuclear-free zones. Experts debated whether the Pentagon would usurp the White House, whether the crisis was best understood by those born under Libra. Hotels and restaurants lamented cancellations, though bars were crowded.

The last flick of the Great Wrath. In twenty-four hours the Soviets would sight the Line of Steel, while Cuba seethed, Congress demanded Resolute Action and Bertrand Russell denounce Kennedy and Macmillan as the wickedest men in history, worse than Hitler. Crossing roads, pedestrians glanced more at the sky than at advancing traffic. Clouds might conceal monstrosity. A tabloid guaranteed that thousands of coffins were being stacked in Epping Forest. My landlady confessed that her stomach felt like a trapped bird.

Work over, I sought nothing but streets. Cleopatra’s Needle was draped with No War. Don’t Vote. Be. A group beneath the Achilles statue remained motionless, held tight, as if frightened to move. A pub saloon exhibited a blood-red rash: MAD = Mutually Assured Destruction. My journalistic credentials gained me admittance to a college cafeteria where several recognized me as the North Star, a girl handing me a sheaf of leaflets. Action without UN remit was criminal, a Kennedy was excluded from any moral stance. Another girl clasped my arm. ‘You can tell us where to go.’ I could not, but my silence won respect and a Sudanese lecturer congratulated me for a pamphlet that he misconstrued as anti-British, supporting Russell’s Committee of One Hundred.

They were all at last alarmed, beads, tattoos, joss sticks, plastic roses, mantras failing them. Where had all the Flowers Gone? A few began a chant and counter-chant:

What do we want?

We want Peace.

But it trailed away, disconsolate, helpless.

Other youth, other times: on eve of a pogrom, a Jewish child had sung:

Mother, Mother, see the moon,

Tonight it’s as red as blood.

Last spring, in this little hall, under the admonition, Support Academic Freedom, Professor Eysenck had been refused hearing for his lecture on genetics. Fascists Have No Right to Speak.

On all sides, young people were surrounding me, urging me, as if I possessed secret influence, even power. Could I telegram Khrushchev, get Russell to address them, organize a Scandinavian bloc? A Grapevine Charley excited them by relaying that three army divisions, influenced by the Sovereign Powers of Albion, had mutinied between Amesbury and Stonehenge. A vast youth in double-breasted gabardine and rainbow belt handed me an LP. ‘Top charts, man. Swings you senseless.’

Sleeve of gold trumpets, bald naked girl. Blurb in black and gold: ‘Cast Deep in Your Pocket for Loot. If You Don’t Have Bread, Knock Over that Blind Man, His Wallet’s There. If You Put the Boot In, Another Copy Sold.’

The Chimera Club, Soho, cavernous, hard-benched, smoky with candles in bottles, costly, reminded me of Left Bank boîtes I had known with Suzie: intimate, closed to the brutalities above, lulled by drink and canned jazz. The minute floor square was jammed with clasped, barely upright dancers, heads on each other’s shoulders, hot, unsteady, affecting unconcern with headlines and turmoil, though near us, an Observer literary critic, sprawled over a table, was mumbling invitations to his Welsh bunker. Opposite, the painter, Moynihan, sat brooding, muscular amongst over-bright eyes and brittle outlines. Bottles continually replaced those only half-finished, a young bearded sculptor suddenly shouted incoherently, then collapsed over his drink like a heap of washing. Mirrors, dulled, as if already scorched, distorted the angles of heads, sliced eyes apart, pumped hands into the swollen and flabby. Drooling over a blond youth, a wealthy Labourite drooled, ‘Wagner scares me rotten’, his grimace blaming the throbbing, insipid Creole rag, his voice faking what he must think proletarian.

Alex returned after a few steps with a green-suited girl, heavily mascara’d, stiff cheeked, probably drugged. A jowled, mottled face loomed between us, blue eyes moist and smeared. ‘Thank God we’re finished. Where were you in 1940, Alex?’

Alex, rumpled, scowling pantomime ruffian, coughed unmelodiously. ‘In Moscow, of course. Selling the country.’ Then resumed his account of afternoon adventures. He, too, had been entangled with the young. ‘They rushed to me for advice, as though I was a committee of public safety. Except, of course, for a few cheers for the IRA and a need to abolish the Lords, they didn’t know what they wanted. I told them that I loathed all they said and would fight to the death to prevent them saying it, but they’d not heard of Voltaire, so the joke fell flat as Mao’s profile.’

In this flamey atmosphere, he was easily, too easily, imaginable as the footballing bully, some medieval quad resounding with ‘Good old Alexei.’

At a distant thud, near silence, unease, until voices clawed back and the dancers restarted their shuffle. Alex was drinking lavishly. ‘There’s supercilious old Woodrow, down in Sleepy Hollow. Not sitting but roosting, as Stevie says. Whirled into hopes of glory by this Cuban pitter-patter. K and K, conmen manning the beaches. They do us good, like wildcat strikes, keeping us on the boil. Even your Nordic intensity sometimes needs ginger. One K, the unfunny comic, the other, the inflated Galahad.’

His grey face slightly smarted, his voice lumbered at me in affectionate protection. Fiery-headed Jason. ‘Resist your inclination to enthrone yourself seriously in your igloo, flogging dead horses so thoroughly that they sit up and neigh. You, too, should stride out and plunder.’ He shook himself like a dog after swimming. ‘Comedy, like marriage, needs space. Time to go. The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’

Yet he remained fixed, fondling a bottle while, on my other side, a girl leant against me, thinly clad, scented. ‘You’re lovely!’ Her whisper velvety, another invitation to plunder, almost irresistible against faces shuttered, eyes set in Molotov concrete, hands scuttling as if in rock pools while piano and sax urged us not forward but to sit content and order more over-priced liquor, safe beneath midnight, targeted London.

Alex pulled me up, to the almost deserted streets, saying nothing until reaching the moonlit river, bypassing several groups staring at a sky still harmless.

After the Chimera fug, we were refreshed by coolness drifting from the estuary. Behind us, boots slurped, mutters followed, then again we were alone.

The silence was abnormal, traffic was stilled though County Hall, Shell Mex, Big Ben still shone, then a starry train rattled, exceptionally harsh, along Hungerford Bridge. Most houses were dark, shrunk into themselves. Such silence forecast a dawn of steel-hatted officials in unknown uniforms. Down-river, beyond bridges dotted with white and yellow, hovered columned flood-light, a beam jewelled as the Reichsmarschall’s baton. Terraces, wharves, the Embankment were motionless. Cranes loomed, gaunt, apocalyptic. Somewhere past St Paul’s, frosty mass, a fire had started. A police launch with a red lamp abruptly roughed the water, and, caught in nacreous light from behind the Festival Hall, an arc of angry gulls, pale commas, wheeled towards Black-friars.

Under builders’ acetylene, Alex’s pitted face was blanched, twisted, atrocious as Danton’s, his hair tumbled patchwork, slow voice troubled. ‘The West fears its own strengths. The worst isn’t from the K twosome but from touch-and-go show-offs like us. Massaging the foolish, convincing the witless, while Castro’s held aloft like some poor vintage Caesar acclaimed by whoever’s seeking salvation. Well, I was once a rebel and with a cause. A bad one. Rebels, from DHL to Californian freak-outs are mostly would-be Caligulas, though without the humour. Who was it that said that one should be serious even at the height of folly? Meanwhile, addicts go hysterical when a painter tells them that an artist is a solitary with something on his mind. So is the nearest burglar.’

We moved on, into darkness, then halted. ‘At Oxford, Erich, I was crazed with incompatibles. Like all bigots, feeling licensed to be saint and criminal. Devoted both to FDR and Stalin. My head thick as pampas with theories, exciting but useless. I sought a mapless ocean while despising the compass. In the army, I was unpopular as a traffic warden. And here we are, a couple of superior dustbins, stranded in what’s been called, quite wrongly, London’s last week. At least we’re not setting the place on fire, quarrelling about milk quotas and the awfulness of parents. My own were rather good. Too busy to notice me, they let me be.’

We were leaning on a parapet. A dim shape floated past. Log? Suicide? A hooter sounded; ordinary, reassuring, though far away, the Soviet ships were advancing through seas mined with deepwater weaponry. Like beasts painted in prehistoric caves, monstrosities from the undergrowth of time, pushing up through cities. By noon, explosion, or someone’s surrender. But Alex’s laugh was again full-blooded. ‘I doubt whether even you knew that crocodiles emit eighteen different sounds. More even than Khrushchev!’

He peered forwards at a beached, toppled barge, resembling not a crocodile but an inert, shadowy whale. ‘You may smile, but before we met at the Chimera I stepped into a church. I needed a particular silence, stiffening our old friends the psychic processes. Gods, like history, make me feel at home in the world. Expelling the slovenly. Lost reputations show the laws of gravity are not mocked. ’Twas Grace That Taught My Heart to Fear. I believe in Good and Evil, in Newman’s aboriginal calamity. I’d enjoy being a well-endowed Benedictine abbot.’

I had impulse to embrace him but feared his English mockery or Caligula humour. Mistaking my hesitation for demur, he continued more emphatically. ‘At least we can round up the reckonings. There was much about our Empire I hated. Hypocrisy, extortions, double-dealing. Yet, what a story it made!’ His profile, hitherto strict, now shifted; turned to me, eyes almost invisible, he was ruminative, less severe.

‘I’d love to make an old-fashioned, Goldwyn movie. Not about some junkie dribbling on the Unknown Warrior’s slab or a transvestite affair in a Manchurian slum but, wait for it, about the Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny. Cast-iron plot, all sides riddled with treachery, fear, cruelty. Siege of Lucknow … split souls, strange loyalties, bloody panorama and human details. The Scottish lassie straining to hear the relief force,’ – he affected an accent soft, sing-song, oddly moving – ‘“Dinna ye hear it … the Pipes o’ Havelock sound!” Guns,’ he resumed, more carelessly, ‘thirst, children, devotion, horror, guile. The officer code, the Sepoy mind. I could smuggle in John Lawrence, Justice on Horseback the Indians called him, with the Koh-i-Noor diamond, very doubtfully acquired, lying forgotten in his pocket. Boarding-school reduced my estimate of fellow creatures, the army rather restored it. I exclude Bond Street Harry, sacked from Sandhurst for wearing mittens. But nothing matters very much, and very little matters at all. And mind this, old lad, never confuse Britain with Englishness.’

As though in myth, in art, frontiers had dissolved. The past was now; primeval Ragnarok loomed, moments were prolonged, hours were shattered by bulletins. The Left continued savaging Kennedy, son of the millionaire ambassador who had so lovingly foretold Britain’s wartime defeat, while the Pact still held; the Right denounced Khrushchev, peasant Butcher of Ukraine. I remembered a verse I had begun, prompted by the vanished Tuileries Palace:

You dreamed of those who took you seriously,

You made a war because of it.

‘High Noon,’ a typist sniggered. ‘Gosh! Gracious!’ Then looked startled, overhearing herself. Someone chattered about codes concealed in telephone kiosks, behind radiators, beneath park chairs, so that normality ceased, all was provisional, each of us wandering Hamlet. Tracked by fate, by doom, by anguished ghosts and plausible, irresponsible kings, entire populations held breath. Richer suburbs appeared abandoned. Walls were match-board, street corners armoured traps, the grey sky curved down to the Line of Steel. Bad policy, a press lord declared, is better than no policy, and a historian reiterated his lifelong thesis that worse than power is powerlessness. From Jersey, a popular novelist gave her opinion, her considered opinion, that danger was wholesome to the unjust spirit.

Crowds, in Haymarket, Mall, Parliament Square, were patient as horses or as if secreting some craving for punishment. The philosopher, seen at Dolly’s Follies, wrote that existentialism was being proved and disproved.

In the Embassy we discussed, answered telephones, listened, while outside footballers trained in the park, men left for the office, children were washed, fed, mended, as they had been even during Terror. Parliament debated animal rights, awaiting Front Bench announcements that did not come. The Security Council vouched for twenty-four Soviet warships flanked by submarines and armed tankers now within eight hours of Cuba, to collide with a hundred American vessels protected by a thousand bombers, figures angrily or nervously disputed. A young dramatist read aloud on radio a sonnet, of flashpoint ripping open the planet.

Ambassador August Thoma, calm as marble, warned us to expect a Russian grab at West Berlin, revenging the air lift, should American paras descend on Cuba. From Moscow, a general gave voice, ‘We will first target the jackal, London.’ Our minds turned over, shrinking from chasms within.

Crisis, mounting for so long, revived the Goebbels idyll of a fearful brilliance cascading over New York, the skyscrapers swaying, sagging, crumbling in a roar unheard beneath the flames, then a new blaze, now orange, now bone-white as the moors around that phantom, northern ‘aerodrome’, then a petrified waste, with shadows scorched on a few concrete shards.

Moods were changeful, weathercock. Levity was roused by a tabloid report of falcons ranged from Scarborough to Yarmouth, to attack pigeons attached to explosives or germ phials, at once refuted by the London Zoological Society as impractical, nonsensical and, furthermore, un-British.

Work ended early, and I was at once pushing through slow-footed pedestrians, past the news stalls – Crisis Latest. Fingers on the Trigger. Mobilization? – towards Ebury Street. Larger crowds were overflowing on to roads, heaving, drifting into Trafalgar Square, attracted by hearing that a giant television screen was being erected beneath the Column. Low sunlight sharpened faces almost to the bone.

I hurried, though for what? To offer useless protection, absurd consolation? Thoughts blinked, without answers. Beauty, ugliness, deceit, pleasure had lost meaning.

Side streets were eerily lengthened, most shops and dwellings boarded up, perhaps against looters. Snipers might be concealed on roofs. Only cats seemed alive and the hum of unseen cars.

At my ring, nothing stirred from within. Finally I knocked, and the door immediately opened. Sinclair, dapper as a chorus-boy, barefooted, in fluffy, tawny dressing-gown, ivory wrist bracelet, gold mandala on black chain. Not speaking, without apparent recognition, even paler than usual, as if powdered, he allowed me into a large, white studio, tidy as a dictionary, with black curtains and carpet, three gilded chairs, smoked glass, oval table, a dart-board. By the window, Claire, in silky, old gold wrap. Her expression, flat and neutral on a washed-out face, greeted me, not as an unknown but as if I were a social worker or elderly relative, familiar but scarcely welcome. The silence lay between the three of us, an instrument waiting to be plucked. Some enormity must long ago have taught them to trust no one.

Already superfluous, I fumbled for an opening. The smile starting from Sinclair showed lips artificially red. ‘Ah, yes. Erich! Squashmothers’ bouncer-boy. Steadfast and without reproach. Herr von Geneva. You’re primed to defend us against Yank banshee and barbarian Tarn,’ forcing sight of myself as irredeemably dull, unsuggestive as a worn, all-in wrestler.

The three of us stood silent, even a breath a surreptitious threat or reproach, until Claire, barely awake, seated herself near the window, face averted.

Sinclair’s eyes. Mottled glass. ‘At best, Erich, a few bombs will screw up some palaces of culture and British Council parasites. You’re right. This country’s finished, not before time.’

‘I have not said that.’

‘Actually, you believe you’ve said it.’

Undersized, negligible, he was a wisp of spite posing to charm those too busy to look.

‘My turn.’ From a fancy bag he picked a dart, orange feathered, and made as if to aim at me so that I instinctively ducked, the dart speeding over me into the board’s centre.

Indifferent, he turned away. ‘How I hate noise. The rattle and squeak.’ He looked past Claire, into the street, soundless as an abandoned back lot.

Could he be sourly, sulkily, jealous of his sister? But, as if his throw had dislodged rancour, he gave his most practised smile. ‘Season in hell, isn’t it! The week’s been like a murderer at the dinner table. All guests know it but none his identity. Rare but not rare enough.’

He crossed to remove the dart, caressing it with clever-clever fingers. ‘Champions win before they even throw. Inner direction clear and clean as bamboo.’

His pause invited friendly question, even admiration, Claire glanced at us in turn. Missiles, explosive fleets, the puppetry of crisis, shrinking to a futile three-hander in a white room.

With gambler’s deliberation, he selected another dart, hoped, vainly, to see me brace myself, then, with the languid shrug of a dandy, jabbed it into his wrist. But no trickle of blood or alarmed wail from Claire; the dart was collapsible, a stage prop.

‘Another’s pain should never be welcome. It usually is.’ He preened himself on nonsense, then, as if I had only that instant arrived, bowed. ‘Regrets. It’s bathtime for baby.’ The smile had degenerated to simper. ‘Ties will be worn, decorum preserved. Ties for the tidy. I’m dining with moustaches. Clubland warriors.’

Critikin on the make. Anything more? No guidance would come from Claire, now standing, apart, brooding, bound to him by whatever offshoots of blood and necessity.

At the door, he regarded me with a polite recognition, small, slender half-man, then lightened, was almost radiant, with the silent whoop of a child finding a coin. ‘You’re really more than them, Erich. Thousands of them already here, on the hunt. Even Ukrainians. The Eighth Galician Division. To quote the monks, Throwmerunapiece.’

One finger on the door, he was reluctant to leave us together. His legs fidgeted, as if about to skip. ‘You’re not a wooden block. But there’s a time to go thinking. People should be silent when they weep. In music, the simplest …’

In feeble crucifixion parody, he spread arms, head tilting as if too heavy. ‘Don’t think I’ve flipped. I’ll be back, like Doug MacWhatsit, the Jap-baiting clown.’

Losing poise, moving as if by remote control, he left for the stairs. Involuntarily, I felt a sudden poignancy, then a twinge of self-pity. Product of European disintegration, I had hankered for romantic England, inordinate love, and attracted only misfits.

Claire’s hands were quivering like broken birds, her face a waste between darkish page-boy hair and within the wrap now cheap against the stark white, a body tremulous, feathery.

Very tentative, she stepped towards me but stopped, as if at water, not Rheingold glimmer but a soggy ditch. She was almost inaudible.

‘What will happen to us?’

Us. The ambiguity revived a flicker of desire, then failed. Still distanced, she was calm but spiritless, as if dutifully reading aloud.

‘I don’t have much left. Feelings. Certainties. Even things to admire. It has been a long while since a stranger stopped our father in the street and asked permission to shake hands with a gentleman so beautifully dressed.’

Her stance awaited permission to continue, though I was at once convinced that the gentlemanly father was a charlatan, child-abuser. Whatever the truth, he was more plausible than my Surrey hills fantasy of twins born without parents, surviving on honeydew amid laurel and myrtle, vulnerable only to sunrise that could strike them to dust. Silliness is its own reward.

Not tender, not encouraging, I was merely embarrassed, as I had been when Wilfrid introduced me to a blind man. She was near tears.

‘We’re poorly bred. Neither of us can …’ Defeated, she contrived an apologetic smile, straightening her Queen of Sheba garment. ‘Erich, try to be more grateful to yourself.’

Signal for my departure.

Back in Guilford Street I tried to compress conflicting thoughts, shamed by my unresponsiveness, my treachery, almost limbless in an apathy immune to midnight bulletins and the periodic roar of planes. A U-2 spy plane was missing, de Gaulle was orating against Ahmed Ben Bella, the Russians were within sight of Cuba. Then the landlady, who had not risked retiring to bed, called me to the telephone, to hear Claire’s imploring outcry, telling me of Sinclair’s arrest.