The Portuguese Escape

by Ann Bridge

  ‘What is it?’ Torrens asked—she told him, and he laughed shortly.

  ‘Yes, we’re almighty lucky—having you there, and the old man being so splendid about it all. What a charmer he is—and so superbly off-hand about having people arrive in the middle of the night. I must say I’m looking forward to that omelette and consommé!’

  ‘There’s one thing,’ Julia said; the omelette had reminded her of it. ‘Do we pick up Father Antal on our way-back or drop the Monsignor first and then go and fetch him?’

  ‘I was thinking about that. It’s between not putting all your eggs in one basket, and making as few calls as possible at the Duke’s. On balance, I think the second is more important; anyhow I’ll risk it. You know that big lift that goes up from near the Rossio—do you know your way to the top of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well you can wait there, and I’ll go down, collect Hetta’s late employer, and bring him up in it.’

  ‘That’s all right except for one thing, Hugh,’ Julia said.

  ‘What?’ He sounded impatient; she realised that the slightest check or hindrance played on his nerves tonight.

  ‘It’s easily got round,’ she said tranquilly. ‘That stub of street that leads down to the lift is a blind alley, and a car could block it; all I’m thinking is that it might be better for me to wait in the square near the other end, where I can’t be blocked. It’s barely a hundred yards from the lift.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you’re right. But don’t just sit in the square; drive round a bit.’

  ‘I will. Don’t worry, Hugh—I won’t bog it.’ She reached out a hand to his.

  ‘Bless you, I know you won’t.’

  Mgr Subercaseaux lived in a small house with a garden in one of the shady streets between Estoril and Monte Estoril—the road was empty under the lamps as they turned into it; a light shone in one of the lower windows of the house. Torrens sprang out almost before the car stopped, and went up the little path to the door—at that moment the light in the window was quenched, and ten minutes later the two men appeared with a typewriter and a couple of suit-cases; the latter Torrens pitched into the boot, while the priest, clutching his machine, got into the back of the car.

  ‘See anything?’ Torrens asked as he got in beside Julia.

  ‘Not a thing,’ the girl replied as she shot off down the road.

  Cruising back along the Tagus speed-way towards Lisbon, a small thought came into Julia’s mind and nagged and fretted there. It was more a picture than a thought, really—a picture of a long line of goods trucks clanking slowly over that level crossing leading from the docks (whence the engine-whistles so troubled Lady Loseley at night) and of cars held up and standing stationary on either side of it, for as much as five minutes on end. She had a curious, insistent feeling that it would be better not to be immobilised for five minutes on the road tonight.

  ‘Hugh, I’m going to turn up at Ajuda, onto the by-pass that goes out past the Stadium, and get into Lisbon from the top,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ Again he sounded irritated.

  ‘There’s a level crossing if we don’t, and at this time of night we might be held up by a train,’ she said, swinging sharply left as she spoke; the car climbed a hill, past the great Palace of Ajuda, past one of Dr. Salazar’s new garden suburbs, and emerged onto the by-pass; this led into the city near the great aqueduct, whose gothic arches were as sharply defined in black and silver as the Tower of Belém had been. Torrens quite lost his bearings; he was surprised when Julia suddenly pulled up and said— ‘There. The lift’s at the end of that short street.’

  He got out, glanced round sharply, looked at his watch.

  ‘All right. Give me nine minutes. If I’m not back then go on cruising about, but close by. Keep moving.’ He was gone.

  Julia too looked at her watch; it was ten minutes past twelve. As she drove away, Mgr Subercaseaux, for the first time, spoke from the back seat.

  ‘Had you any particular reason for wishing to avoid the level crossing tonight?’

  ‘Not what you could call a reason—except that there often are trains there as late as this. I just had a hunch that I’d rather not wait there, like a sitting duck, tonight.’ She was driving at considerable speed through the lamp-lit, almost empty streets; they came out by the Estrela Gardens, went up past the parsonage of St. George’s, the English church, where among cypresses and judas-trees the novelist Fielding lies buried, and fetched a compass round; on the return journey they crossed the end of a long street filled on either side with the lofty frontages of baroque mansions—Julia slowed down as she passed it, and peered up its empty length.

  ‘Nothing there,’ Subercaseaux said.

  ‘No car, anyhow,’ Julia replied, accelerating again—it was the street in which the Ericeira palace stood.

  ‘Is this your profession? You seem very good at it,’ the priest said, clutching the back of the front seat as the car swung sharply round a corner.

  ‘Oh Lord no—I’m a journalist. I’m just helping Major Torrens out. I was governess for some time to the Duke’s child, Luzia, so I know them.’

  ‘Do you come with us to the country, then?’

  ‘For a few days—I’ve got to come back to cover this wedding.’

  ‘Ah. Do you know Countess Hetta Páloczy?’

  ‘Indeed yes. She’s a splendid girl.’

  ‘Splendid is the right word,’ Subercaseaux was beginning, when the car swung round another corner. ‘Don’t talk now—do you mind?’ the girl said, as they passed across the end of a square. She turned down one side of it, driving slowly now, and almost halted at the end of a short street. There was not a soul in it. Julia held her wrist-watch out towards the dash-board light. ‘Nine and a half,’ she muttered—‘Drive round the block!’ Rather slowly, now, she made the circuit of the square, and for a second time slowed down at the street. At that moment two figures appeared at the farther end, one carrying a small case. ‘Here they are—good-oh,’ she said.

  Torrens and a small man got into the car, Torrens in front—Julia had kept the engine running, and even as the door slammed she shot off up the square.

  ‘That’s right—drive like hell,’ Torrens muttered. He was panting like a man who has been running. ‘I heard a car pull up outside the shop in a hurry, brakes squealing, as we left by the back way; and two men came racing up the passage to the lift just as it got moving. They yelled like mad, but I showed the man a huge note, and he kept on, thank God. I heard them swear—in Spanish, of course —before they ran back down the passage, and then I saw a car flash past along the bottom. They’re after us all right.’

  ‘They’ve got to go all round by the Chiado,’ Julia said —she was driving very fast indeed, taking her turns with careful skill; nevertheless the two priests in the back were constantly ricochetting off one another. ‘We ought to be all right,’ she said, in her slow, tranquillising tones.

  ‘Yes, but they were after us, damn them! They must have been keeping a round-the-clock watch on the Mon-signor’s house. I can’t think how they missed us—six minutes sooner, and we were done.’

  ‘The level-crossing, I expect,’ Julia said.

  ‘Oh, that’s why you came round by the by-pass! You thrice-blessed girl!’ Hugh Torrens said, slapping his hand down hard on her knee, shining silken close beside his in the faint light from the dashboard.

  Julia made no response. She was fully engaged in slinging her rather large car safely round a last corner—they passed now along a street which Torrens recognised. She pulled up on the left, hooted three times, leapt out and ran across to the great double gates of the Duke of Ericeira’s stables; even as she reached them there came the dull clanking sound of heavy bolts being withdrawn, and one of the massive portals began to swing open. Julia nipped back and got into the car; she had placed it skilfully, and as the second big leaf of the high doors swung back the machine shot into the huge cobbled stable-yard. She switched off lights and engine instantly and ran o
ver to the great gates, adjuring Fausto as she went—‘Come— close everything. But softly, softly; do not make a clamour with your bolts.’ Noiselessly they eased the immense irons home into place; Fausto fastened a gigantic padlock, pocketed the key, and began a cheerful remark to Julia— ‘The Menina sees that I did not keep her waiting.’

  ‘Não falar,’ Julia hissed at him—’Por favor, silence, Fausto. You did very well,’ she whispered to him then; ‘but silence for a few moments.’ She tiptoed back across the cobbles towards the others, who had got out of the car and were standing by it; Torrens had removed the suitcases from the boot, which he closed, like the car doors, without a sound. Then they all stood in that open court, so strangely large in the middle of a city, listening. Julia stole a glance at Father Antal, but the moon was almost down, and a solitary electric bulb burning over the servants’ entrance at the back of the house only cast a faint light immediately below it; all she saw was the silhouette of a small man in an overcoat, clutching an out-size brief-case. There was complete silence in the street outside, at that hour. They stood so for two minutes, three, four.

  ‘We’ve diddled them,’ Julia murmured. ‘Let’s go in.’

  ‘No, wait; isn’t that a car?’ Torrens said—listening again, Julia too heard, faint and some distance away, a car’s engine. The note altered, then grew louder— ‘Changing down at the corner,’ Julia whispered. The sound approached very gradually—a car was evidently being driven extremely slowly along the street. But it did not stop, and presently the noise of the engine died away altogether.

  ‘They must have spotted you at the Zoo and followed you home, or put two and two together somehow,’ Torrens said—‘and so they were just taking a look at this place.’

  ‘Well they’ve drawn a blank,’ Julia said. ‘Now let’s come in and you get something to eat; it’s five-and-twenty to one!’

  Torrens never forgot that meal in the Ericeira palace in the small hours. Fausto was horrified at the bare idea of guests coming in at the back door, and wished to send them all out into the street again to make a proper entrance, but Julia over-ruled him in rapid friendly Portuguese; as a compromise she sent him in to fetch old Manoel, the night-watchman, to escort them through into the front part of the house. While he was gone she greeted the Monsignor and Father Antal in French—‘I have treated you very brusquely so far, I am afraid, but chauffeurs are not really expected to talk!’

  ‘Chauffeurs as good as you, Miss Probyn, do better than talk—your driving is a poem in itself,’ Subercaseaux replied at once; the Hungarian bowed, but said nothing. Then Manoel came shuffling out and led them in, through stone-flagged passages with azulejos on the walls: they caught glimpses of vaulted recesses piled high with wine barrels, with billets of chopped wood, with mata, the fragrant heathy prickly undershrub always used in Lisbon for kindling fires, with masses of the deep-green lopped-off boughs of Pinus pinaster, throughout Portugal the fuel habitually used for baking bread. They passed the open door of the vast kitchen, where a chef in a high white cap stood before an enormous range; oval azulejo plaques of hams, fish, and game—hares, partridges, wild duck, quail —stared down, astonishingly life-like, from its walls. At last through a final door they emerged into the hall, where Elidio, bowing, awaited them—he almost gasped with horror at the sight of Major Torrens carrying the Monsignor’s suitcases, and fairly snatched them from his hands; an underling bore them away, while Elidio grumbled at Manoel in Portuguese for having let such a thing occur.

  Then they were seated in the vast dining-room at one end of the long table. Elidio held out a chair for Julia, and a footman brought cups of hot consommé, and a big rack of Melba toast. The chef had obviously decided, that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, so there were omelettes all round, followed by an enormous whole cold turkey, which Elidio displayed to Julia before taking it to carve at the sideboard—also Chippendale, Torrens noticed, and at least fourteen feet in length. Only Julia and the Major partook of the turkey, since it was Friday; but there was salad, and red wine and white wine; both light, flowery, delicious. No one spoke much at first; in the soft light from the three big silver candelabras on the shining table Julia studied the face of the Hungarian. It was square-set, with the usual Central European prominence of lips and cheek-bones, but what she noticed was how rugged it was—the brow channelled with thought, round the mouth lines begotten of determination or courage, over all a strong expression of calm and benevolence. He really did look to be a splendid person; worthy even of Hetta’s unbounded admiration, the girl thought. And at that moment Father Antal raised his deep-set eyes to hers, smiled at her, and said in French—

  ‘This is very good. Merci, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Does Hetta make omelettes as well as the chef does?’ Julia asked, smiling.

  ‘Oh, you know my little Hetta? Yes, she makes wonderful omelettes—though not often at one o’clock in the morning! How is she getting on, here?’

  ‘Beginning to swim,’ Julia said—the priest smiled.

  ‘I must see her before I leave,’ he said—he turned to Torrens. ‘This can be arranged?’

  ‘Well, really, I don’t know—’ he was beginning, when Julia intervened.

  ‘Oh yes, Father, easily. The Duke, your host, is a great admirer of hers—in fact he has already suggested that she should join us at Gralheira.’

  ‘Is our host a Duke? Which?’ Father Antal asked calmly—and Julia was struck suddenly by his complete tranquillity and incuriosity on being whisked off in the middle of the night without having the faintest idea, obviously, of where he was going, or to whom.

  ‘The Duke of Ericeira,’ she said.

  ‘Ah yes. A great supporter of Catholic Action.’ Father Antal, it seemed, could place Dukes all right—Catholic ones anyhow.

  But Torrens, having been set worrying again, apparently could not stop.

  ‘Julia, we ought to tell the Duke about this,’ he said in a lowered tone, leaning towards her.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘All this business tonight, and that car coming past the house. It means that there’s a certain element of risk about his having them.’

  ‘Well it’s too late now,’ Julia said flatly. ‘They’re here —and if you think the Duke will change his mind because of a vague risk, or any risk, you’re greatly mistaken. Stop fussing, Hugh, and eat your turkey. Do you want coffee?’

  ‘My God, no!’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ She put the same question to the two priests, but they did not want coffee either—‘No coffee,’ she told Elidio. The manservant, looking disappointed that he might not serve coffee at one-thirty a.m., when most of the household was leaving at ten that same morning, muttered a question in Julia’s ear.

  ‘Hugh, Elidio wants to know if you’re sleeping here too, or if you want a taxi fetched?’

  ‘Good God!’ Major Torrens exploded—’ What a place! A taxi, please.’ And in a taxi he presently drove away, while Julia and the two priests, the latter escorted by Elidio, climbed the shadowy staircase and betook themselves to bed.

  Chapter 9

  The main road from São Pedro do Sul, like all Portuguese main roads nowadays, is broad, and faultlessly surfaced with tarmac. Where it passes through a cutting the banks are planted with the horrible mesembryanthemum; elsewhere it is often bordered with neat little hedges, just high enough to obscure the view—every few kilometres a trim house stands back from it, built to accommodate the road-menders. But after several miles a small side-road turns up a valley to the north-east, through pinewoods which could make one imagine oneself in Scotland—especially when the mists from the Serra behind hang low over them—were it not for the fact that the banks, sandy like the road itself, are here draped with the dark foliage and brilliant blue flowers of Lithospermum, which English enthusiasts grow laboriously in their rock-gardens. In spring, if you were to leave the road and wander through the woods towards one of the many streams coming down off the Serra, the chances are tha
t you would come on clumps of Narcissus cyclamineus, the exquisite little wild daffodil whose pale petals turn back and upwards like those of a cyclamen.

  Presently, however, the pinewoods cease and cultivation begins: fields of arable, well-tended olive-orchards, terraced vineyards on south-facing slopes; the whole, as the road climbs, with an ever-increasing aspect of the tidiness that wealth and good husbandry bring: the motorist in England entering the Dukeries gets much the same impression. At last, on the right, one encounters a high demesne wall of grey stone with the formal, grey-green, plumed shapes of great cypresses rising behind it, and finally an enormous house, more formal even than the cypresses—rich with pediments over the windows, with sculptured swags, with all the splendour and glory of a baroque mansion of the best period in northern Portugal. A tall wrought-iron gate, between stone pillars bearing armorial shields, opens from the countrified little road onto a driveway which, skirting a courtyard surrounded by less ornamental buildings, leads up to the big front door, approached by a flight of wide shallow stone steps; beyond, open to the south and the sun, extends the great knot-garden of geometrical patterns of dwarf clipped box hedges with gravel walks between.

  Strangely enough, this is the Portuguese idea of the sort of garden appropriate to a great house. It involves almost as much work as lawns and herbaceous borders, and is not nearly so pretty, but it is the local conception, and is practically inevitable as an adjunct to houses of a certain period and status. In fact the knot-garden at Gralheira had an added attraction: the house stood so high that its low parapet commanded a remarkable view over the rolling country of Beira Alta—small fertile fields, pink-and-white villages, patches of pinewood—stretching away farther and farther, fainter and fainter, to the dusty pallor of the sand-dunes along the coast near Aveiro, and the dim, barely visible blue line of the Atlantic.