Not quite sober, he was rheumily nostalgic, ignoring Ray’s attempt to intervene. ‘Dear old Richmond! The Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill!’ His attempt to whistle petered out, and he resumed, ‘Glorious Goodwood! Better times. Lord’s, the Club, people going in and out. Ministers asking you not to pass things on. Wightman Cup girls, Indian judges, Trevor Howard. I had very strong feelings, but…’ his sudden glumness made him more sympathetic, ‘I didn’t always know what they were.’
Daisy, probably despairing of more drink, lowered her head. I felt she knew only too well the nature of Dick’s feelings. No herb-grace o’Sunday.
The dry clatter of frogs had begun, slightly less interesting than the talk. Nadja’s restlessness at Mon Repos was, as always, inadequately concealed. I recognized incipient rudeness, until she suddenly sat up very straight. ‘Has anyone met the Swiss? At Villa Florentine?’
‘I think…’ Ray Phelps began, but Dick cut in like an efficient volleyer. ‘Dear Lady, there’s a mistake. They are not Swiss. But Latvians. Less good for business.’
Latvians. At least Alain could cease deploring prevalence of Swiss. Latvians, Vello’s countrymen, possible refugees, heroes of underground Europe. But suspect, even dangerous.
Ray was insisting on free speech. He must have seen my doubts and hastened to agree. ‘Such people usually have something to hide. Still, as the Russians say – or is it the Jews? – don’t worry, it’ll get worse. This Mr Beckett is always telling us, inasmuch as we can understand him. Don’t you think?’
About to signal to Nadja, and rise, I was detained by Dick’s solemnity. ‘We’re safe as houses here. We don’t need a Home Guard. All the same… I’ve been aware of something not quite shipshape. Not urban socialist spite or would-be Maquis. Something more than the usual grumbles. Some… I can’t find a word to put it.’
We waited for him to find a word to put it. He swallowed, grunted, shook his head, then produced it, nodding as if at applause. ‘Method. That’s it. Method.’ More conversationally, he said, ‘I seem to remember Pompeii. Earth tremors, odd quivers on the sea, priests with their omens. Well, occasionally the wild ass talks sense.’
Latvians. Newcomers. Shadows of watchtowers along the Berlin Wall, on frontiers, above camps. The wild ass mouthing sense. I was watching the Villa more attentively, though Nadja only shrugged, then drove away for two nights on rumour of the latest ‘find’: a broken vase, possibly Ligurian, a blackened coin, an empty podium inscribed ‘Freer of Waters’ in dog-Latin. Returning quietly triumphant, she showed me a stone cut with seven lines radiating from an almost obliterated oval, possibly a fish, root of life, emblem of saviours, ‘Lords of the Net’.
Even after so brief an interval, reunions were always festive, and we hurried for a walk on our favourite path, beneath hills, wooded or terracotta, very straight, ending at a bay, resuming, exactly opposite. With assurance, perhaps accuracy, she had earlier explained that the water between was reserved for ghosts, usually undeviating in their movements.
‘Like sha.’
‘Very like sha. And the quicksilver speed of the hunted.’
Yet, after all, she had not wholly overlooked the wild ass. Yesterday, in the garden, under languid summer sky, we both felt a windlike motion beneath our feet. Then nothing, but, she considered, a nothing stretched to its limit, and we spontaneously raised glasses to Pompeii, before again – at this moment it seemed appropriate – reminding ourselves of that promised venture to swarthy, outlandish la Terre Gaste. With straight faces we promised each other the call of a bird, hitherto unknown, of an unlikely horn, from descendents, worshippers, of cauldrons and cannibal gods. A place barren, yet of unseen Watchers. In peasant lore it had been scorched by a lightning power, which, Nadja continued, Etruscans and Romans called bibental, a warning against touching such soil, lest it take vengeance.
We agreed that it might be public duty to inveigle the Latvians there, then abandon them to dire, nocturnal presences. ‘You should,’ she then admonished me, ‘feel the shame of unkindness,’ displaying none herself.
We discussed our dreams, she more wholeheartedly than me in crediting Freudian analysis. ‘I would dream, Erich, of tall old ladies, slanting forward over a floor always wet. My doll learnt to talk, but I was always dumb. I used…’ – she gauged my interest, was reassured – ‘I used to imagine that sleep was death, during which I wandered at will. Sometimes between stars, huge, rather sickly, like too many biscuits. Or deep beneath the ground. With luck, life might return in the morning, as, I hope, you can see it did. I would leave shoes in certain positions, to discover whether they had moved in the dark. And…’ she gleamed, with astonishment playful or real, ‘sometimes they had!’
My latest dream was stolid though unpleasant. I am lost in a Forest townlet, unknown yet eerily familiar. Black-and-red triangular roofs, steeple pointing to a cloud like a dark beard, crucifix starkly ominous above dense trees, a tracker hound sniffing behind me. ‘Your illusions in pursuit.’ But our smiles were not in unison. Privately, I connected the hound with Latvians.
There was more. On the beach, lying as if in wait, was a damp copy of Combat, containing a denunciation of the gross profits of Wiesbaden, once supplier of gas ovens to the camps. Named amongst its executives was the Herr General. Though for Nadja he was ignoble war criminal, for me he had never entirely lost elder-brother comradeship. I could see him dancing with Mother, reading, shooting, attending reviews, joining in the Reichsmarschall’s toy-soldier games.
The Reichsmarschall, swollen, toga’d, broad face drugged and painted, lion cub at his feet, in the phantasmagoria of medieval-style hunts, huge curled horns and bottle-green verderers. Or, in English plus-fours, talking with Paul Klee and raggle-taggle Munich ‘bohemians’.
Europe had long shivered with interconnections. Combat continued that, before the war the Herr General had been Vice-Chairman of the Riga Commercial Bank, investing heavily in Britain and America, in Baltic and North German steel. With Goering, Hess, Ley, he had helped integrate German heavy industry, operating mainly through I.G. Farben and subsidizing pro-Nazi elements in thirty-seven countries, in parliaments, business, sport, the press, universities. Farben had been prosecuted at Nuremburg for slave labour, but most sentences had been nominal.
Combat added that, after Stalingrad, the Herr General had initiated treasonable correspondence with Eisenhower, Eden and de Gaulle and, as I knew, Bernadotte. Captured near Budapest by the Russians, he had been released, probably ransomed, in 1948. In an unsubstantiated report, he had warned Tito against a staff-officers’ conspiracy. The piece closed with news that his flight to Washington with Prince Louis Ferdinand, the Kaiser’s grandson, had been postponed.
I needed to tell Nadja. She was curt. ‘He appears very like an all-purpose district official I once had to beg from. So clever in giving and receiving, enjoying placing the pauper’s cloak on the millionaire’s back.’ She reflected. ‘Retribution is healthy. Very. But this…’