‘Erich …’ Faint worry lurked beneath unconcern. ‘I’ve seen them. The people on the hill.’ It sounded tribal. I was instantly alert. Despite our peace, my instincts never rested. Newcomers needed scrutiny, advance information, check-up. We were both stateless, dwelling on sufferance, dogged by signs, however imaginary, of pursuit, of being watched. Once, seeing a man holding a shotgun, we spontaneously gripped hands and fled, doubtless to his indignation or perplexity. Following de Gaulle’s renunciation of Algeria, pieds-noir were more numerous, blamed for gang-rape, blasting a sports centre and for bad weather. More disturbing than la Terre Gaste derelicts was a fraternity, secret, perhaps non-existent, said to be rapidly expanding, of disaffected police and military, ex-paratroopers, Poujardists, jobless and workshy, Breton nationalists, naval deserters, too disparate for credibility, thus virtually supernatural. Our suspicions were raked by an empty car, a stranger with a map, a dead dolphin. Once, heavy feet approached our house from the port below. No one knocked, and the footprints on the dusty road came from the hill above.
‘One day … we can inspect them. The newcomers. Give them imprimatur?’
A few minutes above us, the pink and white Villa Florentine was always let by a Paris finance house, lately to a young French couple with whom we had thought ourselves unusually intimate. They were young, easy, intelligent, and, as foursome, we dined, drove to movies and galleries, sailed, until, without warning, abrupt as a shot, they had gone, the Villa locked and empty. Puzzled, dismayed, hurt, we were primed to resent and suspect their successors. Reviewing past jaunts and talks, we detected no clues: no cool glance, no tension, nothing but the friendly and cheerful.
The Villa’s vacancy for some weeks might have been only a result of faulty wiring, neglected plastering or, Nadja suggested, a ghost. Alain, unfailing transmitter of news, usually bad, told us that another couple had now arrived, nationality undisclosed. After several days we had not yet seen or heard them, though at night their windows shone. The place, we agreed, was more soundless than it had been when unoccupied.
Empty houses worried me, less from fear but from an obscure residue of my infant belief that, like the Rose Room, they were mysterious, lonely and craved affection.
In her slightly breathless way, Nadja continued, ‘At a distance, I judged them human. Almost certainly. On the balcony. Man and woman. Or man and man. Like sentries. Or snipers.’
As if with an effort her eyes widened. Pools of darkness.
At my question she shook her head. ‘Not young, M. Erich. Middle-aged, like us.’ With unnecessary energy she added, ‘And very much unlike us. Neither with much hair, unless the light played tricks. The woman, possible woman, was stiffer, greyer, a hunk of skin and wire and thick flesh. Braced, maybe, to clean the sink. Both had shoulders like boards.’
Scarcely reassuring, though ‘M. Erich’ was always playful. Up there, however, on the rocky hillside, strangers were encamped, overlooking us. Perhaps innocuous as deckchairs, though these could be traps.
Life, we had long realized, was an armistice always likely to be violated. Appearances deceived, though seaboard vandalism, minor thefts and frauds were nuisances but not evils. Evil was slow, methodical, the dry rot of spirit I had felt like an itch in certain North American towns, decaying in heat and lack of purpose. Our small ports, beflagged, with trim boats and crowded, open-air cafés, seemed orderly as libraries, though buying early-morning stock on a quay we discerned metal barely covered by fish. Riots, unorganized, unexplained, would erupt, raving, vicious, then subsiding like a summer squall.
Riviera playground. Yet we heard of powerboats concealed in caves, and bodies were sometimes washed up, shot or strangled, even on the ‘Strictly Private’ yacht-club beach. These, however, were too rare seriously to perturb. The swollen cities, where a delicately drawn peach tree could be a Triad signature, a smile a terrorist’s stratagem, were safely distant.
‘Villa Florentine!’ Nadja said no more, and the click-clack of her old typewriter soon resumed. This could force awareness of my own nullity. I could assist her, but a row of pamphlets, some forgotten broadcasts, a single book, had made me no Patton sweeping through France. I had stilled no riot, like an English dandy with a tired shrug and lift of an eyebrow, or John Rabe in Nanking. Providing notes and quotations, tracing light settled on scarlet-cheeked petunias, appreciating stardust above far-away homes, rendered me neither poet nor commando. I must at least risk calling at the Villa, risking confrontation with bogus narcotics officers, gunrunners, immigration racketeers. To be extravagantly wrong, we both agreed, was more interesting than merely to be mistaken.
I followed Nadja indoors to await her re-emergence and was quickly content. The long room always satisfied. Egg-white walls contrasting Nadja’s black piano, the strict line of discs – Bach, Teleman, Bechet, Brubeck – between slabs of books, a Juan Gris, subdued yet glowing with fruit and guitars.
The hour soon passed, we rejoined, kissing as if completing a rhyme, disproving the proverb that love is nourished by discontent. By late afternoon we were sauntering downhill. On one side the bay was greeny-blue flecked with lucid white, meeting slopes ridged with vine and olive; on the other, steeper, black pines encircled the Saracen Citadel, in the descending sun like a lion glaring at the sea. Far behind us, white-peaked mountains were very clear, promising a hot tomorrow. Nadja chuckled at an anecdote, heard at the Paris Conference, of one Dr Taut, aggrieved by the Alps’ lack of symmetry, who petitioned the League of Nations for a grant to redesign them.
‘Successful?’
‘Unsuccessful.’
‘He must have been a German.’
‘He was.’
Over the gently shuffling sea the sun was gradually splintering, irradiating the red musée tiles. A black horse-carriage with crimson wheels trundled past us, the driver apparently asleep. A few shambling hovels remained overlooked by developers, old people sunning themselves in porches and giving us friendly greetings. A cobbled lane under an arch pointed and crumbling wound towards light blue summer huts with tiny, freshly sprinkled lawns, sham-baroque lamps, gates sporting such names as Trianon, Winter Palace, Fontainebleau, Balmoral and, twice, Hairdresser’s.
At a faint moon above the furthest cliffs, Nadja remembered Scott Fitzgerald’s quip that America was the story of a moon that never rose. She pronounced ‘America’ with sceptical wonder, that country being alongside Britain in her list of opportunities lost or mistaken.
We were ascending towards the Moorish Garden, its palms, frayed by sea-wind, like witch doctors’ plumes. Giant cacti and more old folk enjoying slow, ruminative gossip. Dwellings were larger, bougainvillaea-draped chalets. We hastened past the Haylocks’ Mon Repos, the Union Jack astir, its neighbour cheaply bright though upside down, as Dick would have noticed, sourly dissatisfied. This was outpost of Lost Empire, still upholding the flag once guarded by towering proconsuls. French was little spoken, though Daisy might use alumette and Dick exclaim hélas with non-negotiable accent. Daisy, who probably regretted their move to France, moved so quickly with news from England that Nadja supposed she wore a speedometer.
Alain’s Hôtel Particulière, unable to compete with the nightclubs, Nous les Gosses, Paradiso à Go-go, Jeunesse, packed with the pigtailed, over-painted, almost nude, catered for early drinkers like ourselves. The terrace, with garish awnings and tall pots, was brilliant above the white esplanade and sandy beach, the sea grounding on clean shingle as if perpetually clearing its throat.
The place is almost empty, the English at home, finishing tea, the Americans not yet ready for martinis or bourbon. We choose to sit outside and watch camel-yellow waves, sunset and, against the horizon, a motionless warship, grey, implacable.
‘Can you believe it, Erich?’ She looks at the gulls swooping, crying. ‘The Chinese bray and shout and bang, to exhaust, then kill all birds. Each one. Transistors blaring all night!’
‘It’s part of their programme for a rosy future. The East is Red.’
‘Nadja and Erich!’
Alain is with us, his face under the dark toupée like damp, crumpled mackintosh, eyes Formica-black. In youth he had been a minor acrobat and heldentenor, insufficiently useful in silent cinema, though later a versatile romantic lead, once bemusing us by confessing inability to remember all his titles, until understanding that these were his movies. Gabin had said that Alain would walk sideways to show his profile. During Occupation he maintained the precarious role of court jester to Wehrmacht and Gestapo officers until Mussolini’s fate advised prudence. Retiring south, he accommodated himself to the Résistance and, at Libération, had himself photographed on an American tank, acknowledging plaudits and bouquets like a priest giving blessings. He was apt to flourish a Médaille de la Résistance with the éclat of his screen feats. However, post-war Paris studios he found dominated by what he called the Mafia, the de Gaulle–Malraux axis, then by ‘Stalinist Hoppers’. Inexorably banned, he was marooned here. A fixer, he would have introduced Lenin to Trotsky and paid the penalty.
Nadja had drawn him as a map of tangled curves: curved head, nose, back, legs. Each night, on a screen behind the bar, one of his old films blinked, its sound reduced to a twitter, so that, in double vision, drinkers saw one Alain, white-shirted, red-trousered, aged, mincing between tables like an orchestra leader expecting his flutter of applause, and the younger, sprinting from a gangster’s car, leaping between roofs, duelling with the Cardinal’s Guard.
‘Alain!’
Without much liking him, we enjoy his company. His gossip, our hotline to the coast, is automatic as smoothing a tie. We learn of presidential jewels acquired from an African grandee, followed by a promise of French Aid; of an impending Bourse inside-trading arrest, a socialite’s suicide, revelations Nadja compared with taking the pulse of a distinguished patient past her best.
With monkey-grin satisfaction, he will have news of the Villa becoming a rest home for union leaders or Corsican mobsters, asylum for vagabond artists, refuge for immigrants. He never admits ignorance. To avoid enquiring the name of the author of Lolita, he asked Nadja how she spelt it.
Always, with dramatic gestures, he enacts roles denied him in Paris, the stain on his shirt suggesting a decoration sold him by an impoverished regime. His double-smile could have been designed by Picasso. For myself, the supple condescension of an adept croupier, but, for Nadja, one glistening as if from a devoted stage-husband.
Clicking for a menial to bring the bottle, he seats himself between us. Delaying our question, we await information about Bardot, Hallyday, an unexplained crater, while a sea-path goes sallow, then gold, as the sun droops, and, from a radio in a nearby garden, an American sings.
Alain shrugs disapprovingly. We drink, we toast, we relax, surveying a poster-like South until, with overdone indifference, I mention the Villa. His face screws into a scowl, mechanically, as if I had dropped a coin into it. The black, polished eyes are censorious, from decayed, though powdered, folds. He makes an apache gesture of throat cutting. ‘New people. They pretend to be Swiss.’
Little, apparently, can be worse. He spreads his hands. ‘My friends, we have no need of any Swiss. Surplus to requirement. We in France have imperfections; I may have some myself, though I am undecided what they may be. The Marshal may have been right in teaching us how to learn from faults. France should have allowed herself more casualties. The Swiss never have any casualties, and we can all see the result.’
Nadja’s glance conveys that the Marshal’s lesson has been inadequately learnt. Alain chats on.
He pours himself more wine, for which we will overpay. His voice has trained, patriotic indignation. ‘Swiss are worse than Algerians, even Corsicans. Their country is what the respectable and well-spoken like yourselves, cool, as the Anglo-Saxons say … may deserve as a shit-house. What English call the cut-below. Swiss behaviour is food for messieurs the rats, disgusting as their fondue.’ He mouches, swallows, removes an unsavoury taste. ‘They consider a strong vault can hold the world. Aphids! Cold as their lakes. They need no bombs or satellite-stars, they merely sit, stealthy as interest rates. They’re fatter than theatre rentiers. Citizens we do not want.’
We begin feeling more friendly to our new neighbours. ‘One remembers certain things.’ He swiftly forgets them, leaving us to greet several affluent regulars, though placing a stained finger under his nose. ‘Look out for those mauvais sujets, I can lend you a telescope, without deposit. The husband I have seen already, walking like a queer on a quarterdeck.’
Alone, at one with ourselves, we follow last red glints on the darkening opalescent sea, in the hour not of wolf but of moth, frog, cicada, of oleander shadows, iron Second Empire lamps glimmering along the esplanade. Soon the bar behind us will be invaded by noise of those who fail to make private affairs interesting to outsiders. Time to go.
Back home, we see lights in the Villa. I translate it into a bedtime fable, the glare of an imaginary planet sweeping too close.
3
Khrushchev had blinked first, the Missile Crisis dispersing not into Ragnarok but into Kennedy mythology the 40,000 Russian troops as vague as the Blues and Greens of Byzantium. The Red Fleet turned back. White House and Wall Street were heartened by Pentagon assurance that it was ill-disciplined, badly equipped, that the Soviet megaton bomb was incomplete, its H-bombs few, its launching pads inadequate. Soviet rockets were removed from Cuba, and, in return, Kennedy offered abandonment of the Jupiter bases in Turkey, themselves obsolete. At White House praise of Mr K’s statesmanship and guarantee of Cuban independence, a five-star general lamented witnessing the greatest American defeat ever.
In world theatre, a peasant clown had postured as Tamerlane, been outfaced by the dauntless Knight of the West, soon, after Dallas, rosy in martyr’s aura, though many saw only two thick-skinned croupiers rigging the board. Both were now dated as Flower Children. The Balance of Terror resumed, intensifying with Chinese in Tibet, decreeing that Buddhist culture must be eliminated to secure scientific freedom.
Claire’s appeal hit me at my weakest. A guest at a St James’s club, Sinclair had been discovered in a cloakroom theft. This could have been discreetly overlooked in milord anglais restraint had he not insulted the attendant as an officious hog. This was bad enough. Rudeness to a club servant was unforgivable, like hacking a referee or cheating at cards. Refusing to apologize, he was thrust outside, then, on the steps, assaulted his escorts and was now booked for the magistrate’s court. Would I, Claire pleaded, volunteer as a character witness? I was horrified, not for Sinclair but for myself. Sinclair possessed character, though one perverse and objectionable. But, if no longer expecting any emotional meltdown from Claire, I shirked reproaches of cowardly betrayal.
All others had refused. Alex was obdurate. ‘I’d lie like a trooper to help a friend. I did it for Donald Maclean, while vomiting at his politics. I defended David Lister at his court-martial for assisting the enemy. But listen. His real crime was that, in the mess, he wasn’t considered quite the gentleman, a sort of social Trot. In fact, in the Crete mess-up he was chased weaponless by Panzers. One of them tripped and fell. David, instinctively, in Pavlovian or Harrovian response, stopped to help him up and was captured. After the war I, of course, testified for him, like a stalwart fisher of men. Of course. But, for precious Sinclair, I use my feet and hold my nose. Consolations for a misspent life?’
Dismayed, I recalled insignificant losses of my own. A scarf, some coins in a restaurant, a favourite pen from Suzie. Negligible, but to blurb of Sinclair’s high-mindedness, puritan honesty, ingrained decency was an unhappy prospect, and I envied Alex’s ‘Of course’.
Had Claire appeared tearful in my room, I must have capitulated, but I could only envisage her brother contemptuous of help, giving replies in court with the slick insolence of his art reviews.
I had finally to c
onsult the First Secretary, his response giving me relief I subsequently thought shameful. He considered my court appearance would be exploited politically, be unwelcome publicity, possible danger to the Embassy.
‘Can he rely on you?’ Claire had asked. A single word can cancel obligation, correctness, even simple charity. Had she said We not He, I might not have made that hesitation, fractional but which she at once recognized. She said, ‘I understand. You need time’, knowing I did not.
I nerved myself for no more than a letter to solicitors of generalized euphemism, knowing that henceforward she would despise me, breaker of unuttered vows. I flushed with guilt, then with romantic wound, eventually felt nothing very much, save an ebbing poignancy, that of an old Estonian poem, of a birch tree lingering on the wind.
Sinclair was fined, cautioned, the case barely reported. He and his sister vanished from London, easily forgotten. Minor lutanists with a tune catchy but ephemeral, suddenly extinct.
Alex left for Iran, ‘Special Correspondent’, scooped an interview with the Shah from generosity to a waiter ignored by a rival journalist but actually a paid informer. For my final Miscellany, remembering David Lister, I obituarized an elderly Forest Brother who, refusing to leave his wounded horse, was captured and promptly executed.
Life had changed, other horizons beckoned. I was easily, in retrospect too easily, transferred to New York, delegate to an obscure relief committee for Estonian refugees, with propagandist duties. American hospitality was profuse, my propaganda only doubtfully effective, forbidden allusions to British spy systems in the Soviet Bloc, the commandos shipped to lonely shores, parachuted to heaths and woods. At a state university, addressing exiles, I found my German accent allowed me only hostile hearing.
An invitation on Plaza notepaper came from a celebrity, the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, to meet him at the downtown Rougemont, but a curt voice soon telephoned cancellation. In Boston, I was stylishly entertained at an Estonian production of Eugen Tasuleigid, ‘Fires of Vengeance’, exalting the defeat of the Teutonic Knights.
Secret Protocols Page 28