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.