The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘I knew it. It’s come straight from that Parisienne’s scissors in the Chiado. She’s cut one for me.’

  ‘Not the one you’re wearing, I hope,’ said the contessa.

  ‘I think this dress and some riding clothes I wore this morning belonged to an American woman…and Dona Mafalda seems to thinks so, too. She has us confused.’

  ‘Hoody Laberna,’ said the Spaniard, throwing up her hands, triumphant.

  The Argentinian’s coffee cup flipped in its saucer.

  ‘Hoody who?’

  ‘Judy Laverne,’ said Anne. ‘I was told she was deported some months ago.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Another American – Mary Couples.’

  ‘What does she know?’ said the Portuguese.

  ‘The little puta wasn’t even here,’ confirmed the Spaniard, and her Argentinian friend laughed.

  ‘Judy Laverne died in a car accident,’ said the contessa, ‘before she was deported.’

  ‘If you’ve been riding up on the serra you’ll know the road,’ said the Portuguese. ‘She was on her way back to Cascais and she came off on that tight bend, just after the Azoia junction. There’s a very steep drop. It was a terrible thing. The car exploded. She didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘They say she’d been drinking,’ said the other Portuguese.

  ‘I don’t know how they would know that,’ said the contessa. ‘The body was completely burnt.’

  The string of pearls around Anne’s throat felt suddenly tight. She pushed a finger up underneath them. How could Mary Couples not have heard about this?

  ‘But why am I wearing Judy Laverne’s clothes?’ she asked.

  ‘They were left, I suppose…’ said the Portuguese. ‘If you’ve come from England I imagine you don’t have much of a wardrobe.’

  Their eyes dropped away from her, swapped knowing looks amongst themselves. Anne felt hemmed in by the dress, these people and their society. The Argentinian with her hair scraped back so tight her eyebrows were up to her hairline. The Spaniard and her sexual suspicions, her tittering disdain for Mary Couples. The Portuguese and their gossip, sitting on their plump behinds, smoking out of their ridiculous holders. All of them desperate to show how much they knew about absolutely nothing. The contessa seemed to be the only decent person in the room.

  ‘I hope none of you are suffering from the same confusion as Dona Mafalda,’ said Anne. ‘I might be wearing her clothes, but I’m not Judy Laverne.’

  ‘Of course not, dear,’ said the Portuguese, voice oozing. ‘Whoever said you were?’

  The condescension incensed her further and she knew she was going to overstep the mark.

  ‘You all knew that Judy Laverne was Mr Wilshere’s mistress and you’ve all made the assumption that because I’ve stepped into her shoes that I’ll be his mistress too. Well, I’m not and I won’t be, and never will.’

  She should have stormed out then but two things stopped her. She knew how complicated it was to work around all the furniture in the room and…damn them. The contessa patted her on the arm. Anne wasn’t sure whether it was reassurance or some friendly advice to leave it at that.

  The air had stiffened up around the fireplace. Cigarettes and holders were stuck in the silence.

  ‘Who do you think will get to Berlin first?’ asked the contessa.

  The question shot through the gathering and thudded into the wall like a flaming arrow. Everyone ignored it. The Argentinian and the Spaniard started talking about horse racing, the Portuguese went into an important name exchange. The house could have burnt down before they got round to responding.

  Anne was left with the contessa. She asked her how she came to be in Portugal. The contessa told her she was on her own, living in a small pensão in Cascais. Her family had shipped her across to Spain in 1942 with the explanation that the war was getting closer. It was on the boat and the subsequent train journey to Madrid that she found out from other refugees why her family had done this. It was the first she’d heard of the Jews being rounded up all over Europe. There’d been no word from her family since.

  ‘I think they have gone underground,’ she said. ‘They couldn’t expect me to live like that at my age so they sent me away. In a few months this will be over and they will send for me. I am patient.’

  As the contessa spoke her face roamed the objects in the room. The words came out detached from another mental process, which was working on her eyes and jaw. The words forced belief, while the subconscious battled against the unimaginable certainty that she was now alone. The clothes, the hairstyles, the painted lips, the eager teeth behind them, the soft fleshy tongues rooted in the hollow mouths, the incessant chatter in the room suddenly grated on Anne’s ears like a steel butcher’s saw ripping through bone.

  A servant came to tell them the cars were ready. Anne supported the contessa to the door, put her into a car. As she was about to close the door, the contessa leaned forward, took her hand.

  ‘Be careful with Senhor Wilshere,’ she said, ‘or Mafalda will have you deported, just like she did Judy Laverne.’

  She let go of her hand. Anne closed the door. The car moved off after the others. The contessa’s tired half-lit face didn’t turn – the night, her friend, took her in for a few more hours until the start of another interminable, brilliant summer’s day.

  Anne left Wilshere saying goodbye to his guests and retreated to the back terrace, where she smoked in the uncomfortable light, all these lives suddenly pressing in on her own. The last car pulled away and the façade lights drowned in the darkness, dowsed to orange filaments that glowed like night insects. The smell of cigar smoke preceded a red coal crowded with ash. Wilshere sat down across the table from her, crossed his legs. Faint light from the house caught the rim of his glass as it went up to his lips.

  ‘Another long day in paradise gone,’ he said, the man stuffed full of its cloying sweetness.

  She didn’t respond, still thinking about the gross happenings of the day, trying to make them net, trying to see the profit, if there was any. Too much had happened. There was too much to be considered. That was the adult state. You might start swimming against the torrent of events and exchanges but then, after a while, you tired and let it all rush over you, until finally, like the contessa, it wore you away however hard the rock you were made of.

  ‘Thinking anything interesting?’ asked Wilshere.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said, stopping her foot from nodding with the irritation building inside her, ‘I was asking myself, why do you keep dressing me up as Judy Laverne?’

  The words came out with their hard edges and she watched them in amazement as the points and corners of the toppling letters delivered their little blows to the dark face of the man opposite.

  There was a long silence, filled only by the softest whistling of the crickets, in which Wilshere’s presence intensified, his cigar glowing redder as he drew on the smoke.

  ‘I miss her,’ he said.

  ‘What happened to her?’ she asked, but not softly, still angry, and when he didn’t immediately reply, she added: ‘There seems to be some doubt. This afternoon I was told she was deported, this evening that she died in a car accident.’

  ‘No doubt,’ he said, something catching in his throat, the harsh smoke or the brute emotion. ‘She died…in a car accident.’

  Darkness and the descent of the night’s cathedral cool brought the confessional to the table. A nightingale started up with hollow bars of song from the high vaulted trees and Wilshere’s glass resettled on the table. The cigar seemed screwed into the night.

  ‘We’d argued,’ he said. ‘We were up at the house in Pé da Serra. We’d been riding all afternoon and afterwards we started drinking. I was on the whisky, she, as always, drank brandy. The alcohol went to our heads and we started arguing…I can’t remember what it was about even. She’d driven up in her own car so, when she stormed out, she just drove off. I followed her. She was a good driver normally. I
let her drive the Bentley whenever. But, you see, she was angry, angry and drunk. She drove too fast for the road. She went into a tight bend, couldn’t hold it and the car shot over the edge. It’s a terrible drop there, a terrible drop. Even if the petrol tank hadn’t caught she’d have been…’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Some months ago. Early May,’ he said, and the nightingale stopped. ‘I fell for her, you see, fell all the way, Anne. Never happened to me before, and at my age, too.’

  The way he said it, his reaching for the glass, made her think that perhaps the argument had been that Judy Laverne had not fallen in the same way or to the same extent as he.

  ‘That argument…’ she started, but Wilshere leapt to his feet, shook his head and arms, panic-struck, as if he’d felt himself slipping away somewhere to forget who and where he was. The cigar coal rolled to a corner of the terrace.

  Wilshere turned his back on the lawn, let his head rock back to release himself from the thoughts he did not want. Anne was gripping her chair arms with her elbows and didn’t see what Wilshere saw in the window above – Mafalda’s white nightdress, her palms pressed against the glass.

  Wilshere drew Anne up to her feet.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said, and kissed her, the corner of his mouth connecting with hers so that her organs flinched.

  Anne wasn’t tired, too restless with aggregate knowledge. She took a couple of cigarettes from the box and some matches from a glass holder. She kicked her shoes off and walked across the lawn to the path and down to the summerhouse and the bower. She sat under the hanging fronds of the passionflower, pulled her heels up on to the edge of the seat and fitted a cigarette into her mouth, chin resting on her knees. She slashed a match across the stone seat and started in the flare of light. Sitting in the corner, ankles crossed, arms folded, was Karl Voss.

  ‘You can frighten people like that, Mr Voss.’

  ‘But not you.’

  She lit the cigarette, shook the match dead, eased her back against the tiled panel behind.

  ‘Is the military attaché from the German Legation watching this house?’

  ‘Not particularly the house.’

  ‘The people in the house, then?’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  A thin silver thread tugged her stomach tight.

  ‘So what’s going to happen this time?’

  ‘I can’t think what you mean.’

  ‘You have a way of being on hand, Mr Voss.’

  ‘On hand?’

  ‘Around when you’re needed, for carrying and lifesaving, for instance.’

  ‘I seem to have my uses,’ he said. ‘What for this time…who knows?’

  He followed the tip of her cigarette. Her lips, nose and cheek glowed as she drew on it, burning that facial fragment on to his retina. He searched himself for words, like a man who’s put a ticket in too safe a place.

  ‘How well do you know Mr Wilshere?’ she asked.

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘Is that well enough to carry him home when he’s drunk or well enough that you don’t want to get to know him better?’

  ‘I’ve done business with him. He seems honest. That’s all I’ve needed to know about him so far.’

  ‘Did you ever see him with his mistress…Judy Laverne?’

  ‘A few times…they weren’t hiding…at least not when they were in Lisbon. They used to go to nightspots and bars quite openly.’

  ‘How did they look together?’

  A long silence, long enough for Anne to finish the cigarette and crush it out on the underside of the stone seat.

  ‘I didn’t mean the question to be that hard,’ she said.

  ‘In love,’ he said, ‘that’s how they looked.’

  ‘But you had to think about it,’ she said. ‘Do you think it was two-way?’

  ‘Yes, but what does anybody know from just looking?’

  She liked that. It showed an understanding of unspoken languages.

  ‘I’ve a cigarette, only one, if you want to share,’ she offered.

  He had his own in his pocket but he came and sat next to her. She found his hand with hers, put the cigarette into it. The match rasped and ignited between them. He held the back of her hand just as she had imagined somebody would. He drew a knee up and rested his cigarette hand on it.

  ‘Why are you asking me these things about Wilshere?’

  ‘I’ve been billeted with a man who dresses me up in his ex-lover’s – no, his late lover’s clothes. I don’t know what that means except that it upsets his wife. He told me tonight that he missed her…the lover.’

  ‘That could be true.’

  ‘But you, as a man, you don’t think that’s strange?’

  ‘He wishes that she wasn’t dead. He’s playing a trick on his mind.’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘There were things he left unsaid, maybe.’

  ‘Or he feels guilty?’

  ‘Probably.’

  She slid the cigarette out of his hand, drew on it and eased it back between his fingers, feeling bolder with him now. Kissing by proxy.

  ‘Did you hear about the accident?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes…I also heard that she was leaving.’

  ‘Deported.’

  ‘So they said.’

  ‘You mean she might not have been? She might have wanted to leave.’

  ‘I didn’t know her,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say.’

  They smoked again, fingers touching.

  ‘Could you kill someone if they didn’t love you?’ she asked.

  ‘That might depend on some things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How far I’d fallen. How jealous I was…’

  ‘But you could kill…?’

  He didn’t shoot the answer back. It took some ruminative smoking.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘No.’

  ‘That was the right answer, Mr Voss,’ she said, and they both laughed.

  He crushed the cigarette out with his foot. They sat in silence and when their heads turned to each other there was only inches between them. He kissed her. His lips changed physiognomies with a touch, fear and desire became indistinguishable. She had to wrench herself away, get to her feet.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said to her back. ‘I’ll be here.’

  She was already running.

  She ran back up the path, sprinted to the back terrace and collapsed on the chair panting, acid in her lungs, her heart walloping in her throat. She slumped back, looked up at the stars, fought her heart back down behind her ribs, thinking stupid girl, that’s all I am, a stupid little girl. The memory of the slash of her mother’s white hand across her face in the garden in Clapham sat her up straight.

  Fraternizing with the enemy, Wolters had called it. Fraternizing. Brothering. This was more than that. This was crazy and dangerous. She could feel herself coming off the silver tracks. She bent over, gripped her forehead with her fingertips. Why him? Why not Jim Wallis? Why not anybody else but him?

  She picked up her shoes, exhausted now by her behaviour, no better than a heroine from a slushy romance. She went into the house, up the corridor into the hall, thinking how else do we learn about these things? Not from mothers. The clay figurines in their cabinet caught her eye, one in particular. She turned on the light, opened the glass doors. The figurine was one of several, not the same exactly, but developments on the theme. It was of a woman blindfolded. She turned it over, looking for some clue as to its meaning. On the bottom was the maker’s name, nothing more. A blur closed in, a face sharpened as it appeared on the other side of the glass door. The skin on her scalp crawled and tightened.

  Mafalda reached round the door and snatched the figurine from her hands.

  ‘I just wanted to know what it meant,’ said Anne.

  ‘Amor é cego,’ said Mafalda, replacing the figurine, closing the glass doors. ‘Love is blind.’

  Chapter 1
4

  Monday, 17th July 1944, Shell office building, Lisbon.

  Meredith Cardew was writing in pencil on single sheets of paper directly on to his highly polished desktop. Anne was fascinated by the work, which seemed more like brush strokes, Chinese calligraphy, than handwriting. Nothing touched the page apart from the anchor point of his palm, protected by a handkerchief, and the lead of the pencil which he sharpened between bouts. His script was not legible even the right way up and looked Cyrillic or hieroglyphic rather than English. He only wrote on one side of the paper and only drew new sheets from a particular pad in the third drawer down on the right of his desk. Occasionally he lifted the sheet and brushed his handkerchief over the desk’s polished surface. Was this eccentricity or security?

  The debrief was long, more than three hours, because Cardew went over all the conversations at least twice and, in the case of the three-way discussion between Wilshere, Lazard and Wolters, five or six times. The word that seemed to bother him most was ‘Russians’ and he wanted to be certain that it was Wilshere who’d said it, that it had been interrogative and that there’d been no reply.

  ‘Is that it, my dear?’ asked Cardew, as his clock ticked round to midday and the heat outside finally caused him to remove his suit jacket.

  ‘Isn’t that enough, sir?’ she asked, desperate not to fail at her first debrief.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine. It’s very good. A very good weekend’s work. You’ll be coming into the office for a rest. No, excellent. I just wanted to be sure that we’d left nothing out.’

  We? thought Anne and then the name Karl Voss, who’d been mentioned in passing on the beach and having a word with Wolters at the cocktail party but not, never, reappearing later that night down by the summerhouse. None of that exchange had found its way into the report.

  ‘We’ve left nothing out, sir.’

  ‘Well, now,’ said Cardew, laying down his pencil, counting off the sheets and then clawing tobacco into his pipe, ‘we might be about to see a very rare thing.’

  Cardew swung round in his chair to face the window and its view of the heat cramming down on the red rooftops of Lisbon.