Greene Sort of

 From a Sort of Life

Something she remembered from a women’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only cliches ‘My boy, my boy, why did you not wait till I came?’ The father sat silent with his hat on his knees, and you could tell that even in his unhappiness he was embarrassed by the banality of his wife’s words, by the scene she was so badly playing to the public ward, and he wanted desperately to get away home and be alone. ‘Human language,’ Flaubert wrote, ‘is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.’ 

When eleven struck in a Bayswater church tower I would cross the road, turn a corner and go into the little house in Lancaster Gate. If I couldn’t remember the last night’s dream I would be asked to invent one (for some reason if I invented a dream it always began with a pig). Richmond belonged to no dogmatic school of psycho-analysis, so far as I can make out now: he was nearer to Freud than Jung, but Adler probably contributed, There had been a tragedy twenty years before when a patient had killed himself and the coroner had been brutally unsympathetic, and I have the impression that he proceeded very carefully, very tentatively. My life with him did me a world of good, but how much was due to the analysis and how much to the breakfasts in bed, the quiet of Kensington Gardens, the sudden independence of my life I would not like to say, nor whether the analysis went deep enough. In any case, as Freud wrote, ‘much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiess’, 

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 Coming back one early evening to my rooms in balliol I found my armchair occupied my only bottle of brandy almost finished and a fat blonde stranger who rose and introduced himself Count Von burnstorf. He was the first secretary of the German Embassy, a man who loved luxury and boys and who frequented a shady club called the Abyssinia in Archer Street, Soho. No one could have foretold that hidden in those folds of flesh was a hero who was to run a Jewish escape-route from Germany to Switzerind during the last war and be executed in Moabit prison. 

My days after that seemed to be filled by Germans - there was a very pretty Countess von Bernstorff, the diplomats cousin, who left a scented glove behind in my room to be added to my adolescent harem of inanimate objects, a young man with a long complicated title, who claimed a nobler and longer descent than the Hohenzollerns, and a mysterious wizened narrow figure with a scarred face, Captain P., whose full name I have now forgotten, Captain P. would turn up at irregular intervals, like someone who looks in at a kitchen door to see if the kettle is boiling. Now that I have worked in the Secret Service myself, I feel I should have smelt him out immediately as an intelligence officer. The day arrived when I called at Carlton Gardens and Count Bernstorff handed me a packet and told me to burn the envelope ~ which, of course, I kept for some years as a souvenir. Inside were twenty-five pound notes — more than sufficient in those days for a fortnight’s holiday down the Rhine and the Moselle. 

My father took the affair very seriously. He told me how Lord Haldane’s career had been wrecked by his too great friendship for the Germans, and he offered to pay for my holiday himself. I knew that he could ill afford his generosity and I refused the offer. After all, I argued, I was not going to follow the same career as 

Haldane and was unlikely to attain his eminence. _ T asked Claud Cockburn to come with me; we were to be Joined in Germany by my cousin Tooter, for neither Claud nor I Could speak German. We went inexpensively by the Hook, and &s we were laughing with pleasure in the railway compartment to Harwich at the thought of our free holiday and the confiding aature of German diplomats, there slid in beside us thin narrow Captain P. with his duel-scarred face. Our laughter broke abruptly off and we tried to appear the serious observers we were meant to be. I was very sea-sick on the crossing in spite of Mothersil and saw no more of Captain P. — perhaps he was sea-sick too