An emotional young nun, convinced that she has betrayed her vows, runs away from her Portuguese convent and wades into the sea to expiate her disgrace by drowning. Unconscious, and at the ultimate moment, she is rescued by an easygoing, unambitious Englishman, Richard Farley. The next day, in a comfortable villa, the late Sister Luiza wakes to a new existence as Sarah Branton.
Sarah, an English girl dowered with an antique jewelled girdle of great value through her long-dead and highly unorthodox mother, Lady Jean Branton, finds the idyllic life now opening before her and her lover, Richard Farley, remorselessly threatened by the pitiless servants of State Security in London.
Set in Portugal, Gloucestershire and London, Birdcage is a poignant story of love and suspense that magnificently demonstrates Victor Canning’s unrivalled position as a master story-teller.
BIRDCAGE
A novel by
Victor Canning
Copyright © 1978 by Victor Canning
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 79-83541
ISBN 0-688-03453-5
And you all know, Security
is Mortals’ chiefest enemy.
Shakespeare (Macbeth)
CHAPTER ONE
THE BUS, BECAUSE of the unevenness of the road, lurched and swayed so that the old man sitting across the way from Sister Luiza had trouble with his eating. Cradled in a red handkerchief spread over his knees were fish croquettes and a piece of queijo da serra. With the flat of an old bone-handled knife he scooped up the runny mountain cheese and carried it to his mouth, holding a croquette under it to catch the drips. From behind him in the crowded bus someone called out to him and laughed. He turned, grinned, and then made a jerky upward thrust of the knife, his old face crinkling with pleasure, and mumbled an answer. The words were mildly lewd, suggestive. They gave her no offence. From long-held habit she shut them from her mind. A transistor radio began to play loudly from the back of the bus and a woman’s voice, deep, husky and sensual, complained of a lost love.
She turned her head away and looked out of the window. The road was flanked by a growth of green cork oaks. Against their dark background she saw the reflection of her own face as though in a mirror and the flight of a hoopoe across the crests of the trees. She made no attempt to avoid her own reflection; seeing her own face was no longer a lapse. For her now there was no longer any mea culpa to make, no chapter of faults to lay before her confessor. For a little while now she was free to turn back to a personal liberty which she had renounced when she had entered the convent. Three months ago her body had betrayed her. The victory of flesh over spirit had been no sudden triumph. Her own spirit and nature, she knew now, for eight years had slowly worked against the anguish of her longing for the true calm of deep love and holy devotion to the service of the Saviour. Now there was nothing that could move or touch her except an earthly pride strong enough to bring her here in this bus and to serve her for a few more short hours.
The old man reached beneath his seat and lifted a wine skin to his mouth. As he drank his adam’s apple pulsed above the brass stud of his collarless shirt neck and a small purple floret of a fading lupin bloom in the band of his shabby black trilby hat shed itself and lodged in his lap on his red handkerchief. A youth with a jacket slung over his shoulder moved past her and stood by the driver who took half a cigarette from behind his ear. The youth lit it for him. His patched blue shirt was stretched tightly across his shoulders and his hips were as slender as a girl’s. Sister Luiza dropped her eyes and her fingers smoothed the surface of the letter which rested in the pouch made by her belt across her scapular. Across the way from her the old man belched, and the radio began to play a military march. Sister Luiza watched the road. There had been a time in the distant past when she had known it well and had been happy sitting with her mother in the back of the big Rolls while Giorgio drove, green-liveried with silver buttons, the sun flashing from the polished blackness of his peaked cap, hating the moment soon to come when he would have to turn off the road and take the rough track to the beach with his beloved car, and her mother chattering away, restless as a bird, flourishing her cigarette holder, leaving little trails of blue smoke from the Balkan Soubranie cigarette . . . her mother dead now for years.
The bus began to slow down. When it stopped she got up and moved forward. The youth jumped down to the road. They were the only two leaving the bus. She took out the letter and handed it to the bus driver.
“Would you be kind enough to post this for me when you get to Lagos?” She spoke in Portuguese.
“Of course, Sister.” He nodded absently. She spoke his language confidently and without fault, but he knew at once that she had no claim to it by birth. He took the letter and put it on the windscreen shelf.
“Thank you.”
She got down and stood at the side of the road until the bus had passed on. The young man was already striding away down the road, whistling to himself. He raised a hand to the bus as it passed him. She waited until he was out of sight round a corner. Crossing the road she took a path through low umbrella pines, a path that sloped and twisted gently finally to join the rough road, gullied and worn with winter rains, which Giorgio had hated. The last time she had come down this way was when she had been fifteen, a year before her mother died. Her father had been with them, a rare event.
The sun was low now and the western sky had a brilliant green and blue glow, bold kingfisher colours. Through the trees she now and then caught a glimpse of the sea, calm under the windless evening. For that calmness she was grateful.
She walked on, void of any disturbing emotion, passing along the side of a tile-capped villa wall overhung with swatches of bougainvillaea and trailing geraniums. Some late-flowering wild white irises grew along its foot and the yellow plaster of the wall was daubed with political slogans in red paint. At the bottom of the slope the road swung right, became soft with drifted sand, and ran between a handful of small, poor houses and reed-thatched beach cabins. Outside a wine shop three fishermen sat at a rough table drinking. They watched her go by without curiosity, but a long and low-bodied brown and white nondescript dog with a high curled tail joined her and trotted ahead.
A woman stringing beans under the reed-thatch of a cabin watched her pass, giving her a brief nod as her hands worked automatically at her task. The dog led her away from the houses out on to a stretch of sandy ground. On either side it was furrowed and green with the growths of vegetables and young maize. The circular wall of an irrigation well carried a notice that the water was unfit for drinking. Swallows and swifts flew low over the ground, hawking the flies and gnats. From ahead came the sound of crying gulls. Between the red rocks of the small valley mouth she saw the smooth run of the sand edged with the gentle foam break of an idle sea. It was here that Giorgio had always stopped the Rolls, carried the beach baskets and umbrellas to the sands and had then driven off to return eventually at his bidden hour, Giorgio with his hard, brown impassive mask of a face that never changed expression no matter her mother’s uncertain moods.
With the dog still trotting ahead she walked clumsily across the sand. Behind her far, far down the long beach fishing boats were pulled up clear of the water and a few men were working around them. The tide was high, almost at its turn, and she felt that there was a righteousness about this small chance. The tide would take her where she wanted to go. Seeing its calmness the serenity which was in her grew, leaving no room for fears or doubts. As she walked she turned her head to the left, freeing her eyes from the limiting coi
f and the stiff frame of the guimpe about her face, to give herself a full view of the far-reaching waters. She had been taught to swim here by her mother who loved the sea, and here, too, her father had once raised an arm in anger to strike her for spilling a glass of red wine over his white, immaculately creased trousers. The blow had never fallen but she could remember even now the fine shake and tremble of his body and raised hand as he had forced control on himself. Released now from the disciplines of charity and forgiveness she could frankly acknowledge that he had never had any great love for her. From her mother, yes . . . love and affection poured out, bright, warm and enveloping, spendthrift and bounteous with her caresses and tenderness.
She moved over a footing of low, bare rocks, around the point of a headland covered with tamarisk bushes, and came to a small cove, still with solitude, the dying shimmer of rising heat from the sun-baked rocks breaking the clarity of sea and beach. Far out where sea and sky met there was no firm break, only a nacreous haze of pale colour like the inside of the sun-dried mussel shells that littered the beach.
She sat down in the shelter of the low cliff. The dog came to her and gave a short bark. When she ignored it the dog turned away to the sea’s edge and began to forage along the drift line. She watched it, unmoved by its company, Then, because long-held discipline had no force now, she freed her hidden hands from her habit and idly picked up a small stick, bleached ash-grey by the sea and sun, and took a mild pleasure in the smooth run of the wood under her fingers. The dog came back and curled to sleep on the sand at her feet. The sun died slowly into the sea, the rock shadows lengthened and over the fast-darkening waters the gulls cried with a monotonous melancholy. With the polished stick in her hands, her fingers turning and working over it as though it were the rosary which she carried in the big pocket of her long serge skirt, she sat until full darkness came. The dog still stayed with her. A high thin mist almost shrouded the stars. The sea drew away from her as the tide ran out.
She stood up and slowly began to undress. The dog, expecting true movement, ran to and fro for a while and then came back and whined in disappointment. With a deftness gained over the years she shed her clothing, folding, arranging and laying each item neatly over a flat rock top. The clothes were not hers, they belonged to the Order. Not wishing to know her own nakedness she kept on her undershift and her long coarse woollen stockings. She set her heavy black shoes on top of the pile of garments. Last of all she undid the tight drawstrings of the cap which covered her head, folding it and then tucking it into one of her shoes. For a while the night air, moving over her close-cropped hair, surprised her gently with its cool caresses.
She walked down to the sea’s edge and the dog came with her. Without hesitation she waded into the water, only a little aware of the cold as it rose above her thighs. She stopped, feeling the drag of the wet shift growing, and then dropped her hands so that they took the freshness of the sea. Behind her the dog barked and whined, running to and fro along the water’s edge. She felt the slow roll of the sea move across her belly and she lowered herself until the lip of a rising swell moved smoothly over her shoulders. She swam out with easy, unhurried breast strokes, the strength of her limbs bearing her up against the drag of her shift and the slack pull of her black stockings. A few hundred yards out she turned and looked back to the shore. Distantly a car’s headlights wheeled briefly and low against the sky. To the east a cluster of lights from an hotel and its garden chalets trembled in the night. Above the beach where she had undressed a villa’s lighted window was cut by the black shape of an almond tree. From the slow movement of the tree’s silhouette across the window she knew that the tide was under her now and, setting her offshore, was taking her steadily westwards. She was content to go with it, content to wait for coldness and fatigue to league with her will. As she turned her face away from the shore she felt the stocking on her left leg slip down to her ankle. Without thinking she reached down and pulled it free from her foot. The tide took her away from the land faster now. A little later she freed herself of the other stocking.
The curly-tailed dog went back to the wine shop and settled on the sandy wooden steps of the terrace. Sitting outside still the three fishermen were drinking the red vinho da casa and eating grilled slices of tunny-fish, the aturn di direito which were now running in shoals along the coast, heading for the Mediterranean to find its river mouths for their spawning. None of them gave a thought to the nun who had passed by. Mosquitoes whined around the naked light bulb that hung from the vine-laced terrace roof. One of the men belched against the sourness of the wine and threw a scrap of tunny-fish to the dog.
A rat foraging the stranded tidal sea-wrack along the shore scented strangeness in the air and turned from the water’s edge to find the nun’s clothing neatly piled on its rock. It nibbled for a while at the starched edge of the guimpe and then went back to the sea as, far to the west, its lights distantly seen, its four engines faintly heard, a TAP Boeing 707 headed for Las Palmas, the Cape Verde Islands and Rio de Janeiro.
As the lights of the Boeing faded into the night Sister Luiza, who had been born Sarah Branton, the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel John Branton and his wife Jean, and who knew herself to be nearly three months gone with child, felt coldness and exhaustion possessing her to the point where she longed for the charity of oblivion. She raised her arms above her head and let herself sink below the water. She went down deep only to find that the body, the spirit’s great betrayer, fights always for survival and lives at war with death. In the brief darkness she found her body traitor to her will and her beating arms and legs brought her back to the surface, retching and choking. She found breath and for a long time hung with slow, feeble strokes of her arms on the strong swell which a freshening breeze had raised.
* * * *
Richard Farley sat with his feet outstretched, his heels on the edge of the stone curb of the fireplace. A pile of old pine cones flared with yellow, blue and green flames in the grate, spitting and crackling. Lie sipped his brandy and found it tepid from the warmth of his hand about the bowl of the glass. He was a man close to his forties, dark-haired and dark-eyed, his face hard and brown, carrying a battered look and close to being ugly. He wore a loose blue linen shirt patched on one shoulder and with two of the front buttons missing. His light-coloured drill trousers bore ancient stains of oil and tar. He was nothing much to look at, knew it and had long ceased to care. He heard Herman Ragge moving about upstairs, heard the sound of running water from the bathroom and then the familiar knock-thump, knock-thump of the villa’s ancient cistern filling. He sipped at his brandy and then leaned back in his chair and began to doze, the glass cradled in his hands on his lap. He was awakened by Herman Ragge taking the glass from his hands some time later.
“You were spilling it over your trousers.” Herman went to the sideboard, helped himself to brandy and topped up Farley’s glass. Coming back he squatted on a stool by the fire, gave Farley his glass and said, “Another of your strays?”
Farley lit a cigarette. “I suppose so. It seems that there’s always someone who wants a bed, or a boost or a handout. Like calling to like, maybe. Or perhaps I haven’t learnt the trick of saying no to the wrong people. However, I didn’t have any option tonight.”
“Why did you call me?”
Farley considered Herman. He was a big, rugged man who could give him ten years in age. He had a lion-tawny head of hair, a great smiling gash of a mouth and he was as safe as a father confessor with any confidences. He played guitar in the band at the Palomares Hotel by night and worked a few hectares of olives and lemons by day. He was a Berlin-trained medical man but had never gone into practice because his guitar and a taste for a carefree life had claimed him. They liked and understood one another.
“I had the feeling she might not want anything official made of it. If I’d called a pukka doctor he would have had to report it. And anyway, Marsox brought the launch in to the beach just below and we carried her up here—and you we
re handy. The nearest doctor would have been a couple of hours getting out here. How is she?”
“I gave her an injection and a sponge down. Don’t worry if she sleeps the clock round.”
“How does a woman dressed like that fall overboard unnoticed? Or was she pushed?”
“How far out were you?”
“Couple of miles—we’d just begun to get into some fish.”
Herman unhooked the stethoscope from around his neck and pushed it into his jacket pocket. “She could have come off the beach and the tide got under her.”
“It’s a bit early in the year for night swimming. And just wearing a shift? And what’s she doing with her hair cropped like that?”
Herman grinned. “You can ask her when she comes to. She’s a well-made, good-looking woman. Late twenties, I’d say. Perhaps she just swam out wanting to end things.”
“If she did she changed her mind. She was screaming like a banshee and when I got to her she damned nearly ripped me apart in her panic. Look——” Farley pulled his shirt open to show the deep scratches on his chest. “I had to hit her hard to quieten her before I could do a thing.”
“You want something for those scratches?”
“No, thanks. I rubbed some stuff in that the Holdems had in their cabinet when I changed.” He breathed deeply. “I tell you there was a time when I thought we were both going to go under for good, but old Marsox got alongside and fished her aboard, where she just passed out——” he grinned suddenly, “as near stark naked as didn’t matter a damn all among the tunny we’d caught.”
Herman stood up. “All right, Richard. I’ll look in tomorrow evening. But if you want me sooner give me a call.”
“Thanks, Herman.” Farley went with him to the door. “Did she say anything to you at all?”
“No. But I think she was conscious until I put her under. I’d say she was in a state of shock . . . or maybe just didn’t want to have to face anything or anybody for a while. See you tomorrow.”
Birdcage Page 1