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.’
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