The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  The path up to the house seemed longer. She stumbled across the lawn and went into the house through the french windows at the back. There were voices in the drawing room. She put her head in. The Contessa della Trecata and Mafalda stopped talking. Sutherland hadn’t mentioned Mafalda, probably written her off as a sad case. The contessa patted the sofa.

  ‘Come and tell us about the real world,’ she said.

  Mafalda, in a blue tea gown, was wearing the plaster cast of her own face – white, still and void.

  ‘The real world of dictation and typing has not been very interesting today.’

  She tried to excuse herself but the contessa insisted. She sat on the sofa.

  ‘Don’t they let you out?’

  ‘I went to the PVDE for my papers, that was all.’

  ‘But lunch, you have to have lunch.’

  ‘Mr Cardew is very demanding.’

  ‘I’m surprised a young girl like you should want to come to a backwater like Lisbon…to be a secretary.’

  ‘I tried to join the WRENS. They wouldn’t have me. Medical. Lungs.’

  ‘You seem to be running around here all right,’ said Mafalda, as if this was the kind of cat-house behaviour she’d had to get used to.

  ‘In London I can hardly get to the end of the street without…’

  ‘Those peasoupers,’ said the contessa. ‘Shocking.’

  ‘My mother thought it was the bombing.’

  ‘Yes, well that would fit, wouldn’t it?’ said Mafalda, as if it was meant to but didn’t, not in her mind. ‘Nerves can do strange things.’

  ‘What does your father have to say on the matter?’

  From nowhere came the image of her mother sitting on her like a bully girl at school.

  ‘My father? I don’t have…’ She checked herself, the image of her real mother had crowded out her surrogate parents. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea. He doesn’t have an opinion.’

  ‘Most odd,’ said Mafalda. ‘My father was always inquiring after our health. Probably should have been a doctor.’

  ‘I never knew my father,’ said the contessa.

  ‘You’ve never mentioned him,’ confirmed Mafalda.

  ‘He was overseeing the loading of one of his ships in Genoa. A piece of cargo swept him overboard. He drowned before they got to him. My mother never recovered from it. It made her a very bitter, difficult woman. Nothing ever came up to standard in her view. She survived to a great age on the strength of it.’

  ‘My mother’s a very difficult woman too,’ said Anne, the words out before her teeth could clamp down on them.

  ‘Well, I’m sure there was some sadness in her life which has made her like that.’

  ‘Does your mother do anything with herself?’ asked Mafalda.

  She lost it. The thread was just plucked out of her hand. She couldn’t think what her mother did. Even her name had gone. Ashworth, yes, but her first name.

  ‘She does what everybody’s doing these days,’ she said slowly, waiting for the jog which never came. ‘She works for the government.’

  That wasn’t it. It would have to do. She would have to relearn that. Why couldn’t she think of her name? It was like forgetting the most famous person in the world at the moment. Retrain the mind. Gone with the Wind, lead actress…Clark Gable was the lead man and the lead actress was…Scarlett O’Hara…come on, think.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ said the contessa. ‘This heat today has been…’

  ‘I’m sorry, did you ask something? It has been a long day. I should really…’

  Why has this happened? This has never happened before. Your role is Miss Ashworth. You play the part. The lines are…

  But reality had crept back in. All she saw was the audience. There were no lines. In her head there was only panic.

  ‘Mafalda just asked about your father, that was all. Is he in the fighting?’

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to swallow but not being able to, her mind even forgetting the motor reflexes.

  ‘No?’ asked the contessa, both women riveted to Anne’s crisis.

  ‘No,’ she reiterated, tears coming now, tears of frustration. She couldn’t think of his name either, nor his profession. The only name that arrived in her head was Joaquim Reis Leitão. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Not in the bombing?’ said Mafalda, appalled.

  ‘You’re upset,’ said the contessa, ‘perhaps you should lie down.’

  ‘No, not in the bombing,’ said Anne, buying herself seconds, waiting, hoping for the part to come back to her. She looked down at Mafalda’s feet, exactly where the prompter would have been in the theatre.

  All I need is a name and it will all fit again.

  ‘So what happened, dear girl?’ asked the contessa, insistent, interested.

  A car pulled up outside, the radiator grille visible at the corner of the window. Mafalda announced her husband’s return.

  ‘This heat,’ said Anne, getting to her feet. ‘Will you excuse me.’

  She staggered from the room, set off down the corridor at a half run, a whining in her ears, a whining buzz like a reel paying out line to a sounding fish. She ran past Wilshere coming through the front door, swung up the stairs, felt his eyes rippling on her through the mahogany bannisters. She got to the bedroom door, shut it behind her. Sick. Had she thrown it away? She collapsed on the bed. The breathing came back. The swallowing, too. How had she become this fragile? She took stock, an egg count. Cracks only. No omelette. She drank some warm water from the jug at her bedside.

  The simplest cover story known to man…but who knows it? She undressed, ran a thumb down her wet spine, held her dress up to the window. A dark patch ran down the centre of the back. Nobody knows. She stood under the tepid shower, soaped herself, rinsed off the sweat. Nobody knows. She towelled herself dry, lay naked on the bed with just the towel over her. The PVDE knows. She wrote it on their form. Graham Ashworth. Accountant. But not deceased. It had all come back. Finally. The simplest cover story ever.

  Another car arrived. She levered herself off the bed, wrapped herself in the towel, went to the window. Just who she didn’t want to see. Karl Voss got out of the driver’s seat, went round to the passenger side and pulled out a briefcase which hung heavily on his arm. Her stomach tightened. The silver thread tugged again. He stopped in front of the door. Anne pressed her eye to the glass to see him at that acute angle to the house. He ran a hand over his bony features, preparing a new face.

  She dressed and went down the corridor to the empty bedroom over the study. Voss’s voice came up the stairwell. She sat at the fireplace. Small talk, the clink of bottles on glass, the gush of soda. She imagined his lips on the thin rim of the crystal.

  ‘Another brutally hot day in Lisbon?’ said Wilshere.

  ‘There’s more to come…so they say.’

  ‘When it’s like this I think of Ireland and the soft rain falling endlessly.’

  ‘And when you’re in Ireland…?’

  ‘Exactly, Herr Voss. It’s only variety we’re after.’

  ‘I never think of Berlin,’ he said.

  ‘There’s a different rain falling over there.’

  ‘My mother’s moved out to relatives in Dresden. She was in Schlachtensee. All the bombers flew over her on their way to Neukölln and…perhaps you don’t know this, but air bombing is a very inaccurate science. She had three land in the garden. Unexploded, fortunately.’

  ‘I didn’t know that about air bombing.’

  ‘But if you bomb enough…’ Voss trailed off. ‘Tell me something, Mr Wilshere. What do you think of the idea of a single bomb that could completely annihilate a whole city? People, buildings, trees, parks, monuments…all life and the product of life?’

  Silence. The wood ticked. A huff of breeze shambled through the exhausted trees outside. A cigarette was offered and accepted. Chairs creaked.

  ‘I wouldn’t think it possible,’ said Wilshere.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ asked Voss. �
��But if you look at history it’s the only logical conclusion. In the last century we were standing in formation, blasting each other with inaccurate muskets. By the beginning of this century we were cutting each other down with very precise machine-gun fire and shelling each other from miles away. Twenty years later we have thousand bomber raids, tanks crash through countries bringing them to heel in a matter of weeks, unmanned rockets fall on cities hundreds of miles away. It stands to reason, given man’s creativity for destruction, that someone will invent the ultimately destructive device. Believe me, it’s going to happen. My only question is…what does it mean?’

  ‘Perhaps it will mean the end of war.’

  ‘A good thing then?’

  ‘Yes…in the long run.’

  ‘A good observation, Mr Wilshere. It’s the short run that’s the problem, isn’t it? In the short run there would have to be a demonstration of the power of the device and, of course, a demonstration of the ruthlessness to use it, too. So it’s possible that before the end of this war, depending on which side has the device, Berlin, Moscow or London could cease to exist.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thought,’ said Wilshere, without conveying it.

  ‘But the only logical one. I’m predicting that this war generation will invent what H. G. Wells said they would invent at the end of the last century.’

  ‘I’ve never read H. G. Wells.’

  ‘He called them atomic bombs.’

  ‘You’ve taken an interest in this.’

  ‘I studied physics at Heidelberg University before the war. I keep up with the journals.’

  It was difficult to judge the silence that followed, whether awkward or ruminative. Voss broke it.

  ‘Still, this is nothing to worry us here in Lisbon, where the sun shines whether we like it or not. I have brought your gold. It has been weighed at the bank as you will see from their receipt, but if you wish to verify that…’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Wilshere, moving across the room. ‘I’ll want you to count these to confirm that you’ve received one hundred and sixty-eight stones.’

  ‘We’ve arranged for the quality to be checked tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I’m sure there won’t be any problem but I’ll be here all day tomorrow if there is.’

  The trickling of metal slipping against metal as Wilshere dialled in the combination to his safe. Silence while Voss counted the diamonds and Wilshere paced the room. A signature was applied to paper. The door opened. Voices entered the hall. Anne went back to her room and hung her wet towel out of the window. Her sign to Wallis.

  Voss drove back to Lisbon, followed by Wallis. He went straight to Lapa and the German Legation where he presented Wolters with the receipt and the stones, watched him count them out and put them in the safe.

  Voss walked back in the darkening evening to his apartment overlooking the Estrela Gardens and basilica. He showered and lay on his bed smoking and sinking into a drowsy sensuality. He wanted to bring her here, not that it was Lisbon’s best apartment, but it was a place to be alone, away from the eyes, a place where the moment wouldn’t have to be snatched. There would be time for…there would be time and intimacy. He ran his hand up his stomach and chest, drew on the thick white end of the cigarette, felt the blood rush, the prickle and the brain smoothing out into the warm evening.

  ‘I am not alone,’ he said, out loud, conscious of being absurdly dramatic – the melodrama of the Berlin cabaret singer to a bored audience.

  He laughed at his insanity and ramped his head up on his elbow. With no warning the faces of his father and brother came to him. His eyes filled, blurring the room, and the long hot day drew to a close.

  Chapter 16

  Monday, 17th July 1944, Estrela, Lisbon.

  At 9.30 p.m. Voss got up, dressed, picked up a newspaper, drank a coffee at the corner café and went to his customary bench in the Estrela Gardens. He sat with the newspaper on his lap. People walked under the trees. There was a sense of relief after the brutal heat of the day. Most of the women were well dressed – in expensive silks if they could afford it or high-quality cottons if they couldn’t. The men, if they were Portuguese, wore dark suits and hats. If they were foreigners, the richer ones were dressed in linen, the poorer in material too thick for the weather. Money had filtered through Lisbon.

  Voss blinked, saw the scene through a different lens, saw the other people in the gardens. These were not men and women enjoying an evening stroll. These were the sweat of the city. They oozed out of the dark, polluted buildings, seeped out of the cheap pensões, which stank of the drains, leaked out of the stuffy attics in rinsed underwear dried crisp in the sun. They were looking for the odd escudo to weigh down the damp pockets creeping up their thighs. They were the watchers, the listeners, the whisperers, the fabricators, the rumourmongers – the liars, the cheats, the conmen and the crows.

  One of this number sat on Voss’s bench. He was small, emaciated, unshaven and toothless with black eyebrows that sprouted an inch from his head. Voss tapped the bench with his newspaper and some of the man’s sour smell wafted towards him. His name was Rui.

  ‘Your Frenchman hasn’t been out of his room for three days,’ said Rui.

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked Voss.

  ‘No, no, I mean he’s only been out for coffee.’

  ‘And he drank that on his own?’

  ‘Yes. He bought some bread and tinned sardines too,’ added Rui.

  ‘Did he speak to anyone?’

  ‘He’s scared, this one. I haven’t seen anyone so scared. He’d turn on his own shadow and kick at it in the street.’

  You would too, thought Voss. Olivier Mesnel had come from Paris where he had only one enemy, to Lisbon where he has two, the Germans and the PVDE. Who’d be a French communist here?

  ‘Has he made any more trips to the outskirts of town?’

  ‘Those trips to Monsanto, they seem to drain him too much. This is a man who has few reserves left…not for what he’s doing.’

  ‘Tell me when he does something. You know the form,’ said Voss, getting up and leaving the newspaper, which Rui started flicking though to find the twenty-escudo note slipped between the sports pages.

  Voss left the gardens at the exit closest to the basilica and headed for the Bairro Alto down the Calçada da Estrela, looking behind him for a taxi but also checking that there was no bufos on him. A cab pulled up and he let it take him to the Largo do Chiado. He thought about Mesnel. He worried about him. Always the same worries. Why would the Russians choose such a man for intelligence work? The hopeless loner, the seedy neurotic, the unwashed loser, the…the liver fluke, the mattress flea.

  Voss left the cab and walked at pace up through the grid of the battered cobbled streets of the Bairro Alto to a tasca where they where grilling horse mackerel outside. He took a seat in the darkest corner with views out of two doors. He ordered the mackerel and a small jug of white wine. He ate with no enthusiasm and washed it back with the wine, fast so that he couldn’t taste its sharpness. Nobody showed at the two doors. He ordered a bagaço. He wanted that ferocity of the pure, colourless alcohol in is throat. He smoked. The cigarette stuck to the sweat between his fingers.

  Anne tried the study door. It was unlocked and empty. She moved on to the sitting room. Dark. On the back terrace Wilshere sat alone at the small table smoking and drinking undiluted whisky from a tumbler. She sat. He didn’t seem to notice her but kept up his silent vigil on the empty lawn, while moving the heavy, dark furniture of his doubts and concerns around in his head.

  She was trying to work out how she was going to fit Sutherland’s orders into her strange relationship with Wilshere. She had no ease with the man. Whatever charm Cardew said he possessed must be reserved for men. With her he was either disconcertingly intimate or unfathomably distant. Either stroking her, kissing the corner of her mouth or thrashing the hide off her horse. The man’s wealth had insulated him from ordinary mortals, it was always a job to think how to
tease his brain towards interest.

  ‘Dinner ready?’ he asked, exhausted by the notion.

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve been upstairs.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘I’m all right, thank you.’

  ‘Smoke?’

  He lit her cigarette, tossed his own and lit another.

  ‘I will have that drink, after all,’ she decided.

  ‘João?’ called Wilshere, to no response. ‘I thought it was awfully quiet. You know, I don’t know whether we’re going to get any dinner tonight.’

  He fixed Anne a brandy and soda from the tray.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.

  ‘They should give us something. Mafalda confuses them sometimes, I think.’

  ‘When we were riding yesterday,’ said Anne, deciding on a frontal assault, ‘why did you hit my horse?’

  ‘Hit your horse?’ he said, sitting slowly.

  ‘You remember my horse bolted?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but careful now, uncertain of other things, ‘she did bolt.’

  ‘It was because you hit her with your crop as you rode past.’

  ‘I did,’ he said, a statement, but on the edge of a question.

  ‘Why was that? I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the major. I was thinking that it might have had something to do with this girl Judy Laverne. I’ve been worrying about it.’

  ‘Worrying?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, realizing now that she’d drawn a blank.

  His eyes turned furtive in his head. It scared her. Sutherland had been wrong. This had not been the right thing to do.

  ‘I thought it was…I thought it was maybe my mare that had spooked the filly, coming up on you so fast like that.’

  She had the image of him clear in her head – half standing out of the saddle, crop arm raised, intent on damage.

  ‘Perhaps that was it,’ she said, grasping at anything conciliatory. ‘Was Judy Laverne a good horsewoman?’

  ‘No,’ he said, close to vehement now, ‘she was a brilliant horsewoman. Fearless, too.’

  He socked back the whisky, drew savagely on the cigarette and bit his thumbnail, staring through her, wild for a moment.