The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  It opened the bottom drawer; inside was a single thick book bound in very soft untooled leather, its plain unlined pages covered in the same handwriting as the stanza of poetry. There were dates. A diary, which at a quick glance she could tell was personal. Day after day with no mention of business. Started 1st January 1944. The initial entries were rarely more than a couple of lines long – observations such as: ‘4th January. A rare frost. The lawn quite white. The low sun turns it back to green in a matter of moments. Not what you’d call an Irish frost. It would be quite something to have real foot-stamping weather for once.’ ‘23rd January. Heavy storm out at sea. Drove out to Cabo da Roca, walked the coast to Praia Adraga. The rain driven off the ocean, lacerating. Waves clawed at the rocks and shot up the cliff faces. Rollers on the beach like I’ve never seen. Thunderous. Had to run to stay out of their clutches.’

  A man overwhelmed by tedium or positively reflective? Hard to tell. The first entry of more than a few lines came on 3rd February and coincided with Beecham Lazard introducing his new assistant, Judy Laverne. ‘I’ve never seen such a mouth. So wide and what lips! The bottom one so plump I just wanted to put my finger to it, feel its soft cushion. And bright red lipstick which rings all her cigarette stubs, which I’ve kept.’ Infatuated from the first moment. Karl Voss shuttled through her brain.

  She skimmed the pages. They ride almost every day, in invigorating rain, in sunshine that was never so brilliant, under magnificent turbulent skies. There’s no such thing as bad weather now. They sleep together in the house at Pé da Serra. Wilshere has fallen. He can’t keep the pen off the page. Her blue-black hair, her marble breasts, her hard, pink, shilling-sized nipples, her jet strip, not triangle, of pubic hair. It was embarrassing, it was touching, it was so private it made the sweat trickle down Anne’s ribs. Until the end of April.

  ‘25th April. Lazard has lost his head. He spends too much time in Lisbon. He’s reading bizarre things into normal everyday life. That’s what happens if you spend too much time in that city – everybody watching each other – anyone’s bound to look odd eventually. Why shouldn’t Judy meet another American? She’s American. She wants to talk to her own people. So what if they go for a walk through the Igreja do Carmo. It’s something to do. Were they holding hands? No. I don’t see what he’s getting at…’

  The tirade continued to the bottom of the page, by which time Lazard’s words had wormed their way into his mind and laid their eggs. The parasites proliferated. Doubt scuttled from page to page, a black spider against the white paper, desperate for the dark safety of the book’s spine. The lyricism vanished. Wilshere’s open, flowing italics tightened, his hand cramped on the page. Lazard reported another meeting in A Brasileira café with a different American. He has them followed to the Pensão Londres where they stayed for an hour. Jealousy took root, spreading, ravaging like couch grass. Wilshere was in a torment. Lazard haunted the pages, as reliable as any Iago. Then in early May Judy Laverne announced that the PVDE had refused to extend her visa. She was going to have to leave. Wilshere was sick. He wrote things. Terrible things. Things that should never have been written down, in language that shouldn’t be known, couldn’t be known by anybody outside hell. The page was spattered with ink dried to a coppery blood, the paper had been torn up by the blade of the dry, frustrated nib. Anne turned the pages, the empty pages, pages that could have been full and ripe, to the end of the book where, on the inside of the back cover, were six sets of numbers and letters – R12, R6, L4, R8, L13, R1.

  This time the creak of the wooden stair was followed by the slap of a leather slipper on the tiled floor of the hall. Anne wiped the diary clean with her sleeve, replaced it in the drawer, shut it, turned the key. Light from the corridor appeared in a line at the foot of the door. She found the resin in the central drawer, restuck the key, straightened the chair, stepped on to the sill and out of the window, pulled the plant across, shut the window. The door opened. The light came on in the study. She crouched, her back was as cold as cod, her nightdress soaked through. Wilshere drew up his chair, sat down. She ran across the lawn and down the path to the summerhouse.

  In the study, Wilshere leaned back in his chair rubbing his fingers. He sniffed the air. Wisteria. He stood and pushed the unfastened window open, rubbed his fingers again. He looked below the window ledge and then up at his shadow reaching out across the empty lawn.

  Anne slowed at the bottom of the path. Her heart rattled against her ribs. Her throat was tight, constricted, as if the neckline of the nightdress was strangling her. She pulled up the hem and wiped her face, pushed the torch into her knickers. She looked back up the path, shook herself out and went into the bower. Voss lay on his back on the stone seat, asleep. She started to turn. He sat up, ran his hand down his face.

  ‘I’d given up on you,’ he said.

  Her breasts were still heaving under the cotton.

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to come,’ said Voss, pinching the sleep out of his eyes.

  ‘I didn’t intend to,’ she said, moving into the darkest corner behind him.

  He swivelled on the seat.

  ‘You didn’t intend to,’ he repeated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re scared,’ he said. ‘I can see.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t I be?’ she said, the blade of her mother’s voice in her own.

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘We’re enemies, aren’t we?’

  ‘Out there,’ he said, and his hand caught the edge of the moonlight.

  ‘There’s more of out there than there is in here.’

  ‘True…but what’s in here is ours.’

  ‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that? How am I to know that?’

  ‘Because we’re talking like this.’

  ‘We can talk, but I still don’t know if you’re…honourable.’

  ‘Which is why you didn’t intend to come,’ he said. ‘So why did you?’

  ‘I ran out of cigarettes.’

  He laughed. Her organs went back to their places. Spies in love. Bloody hopeless. Would they ever tell each other anything? He offered a cigarette.

  ‘You’re probably a spy, Mr Military Attaché,’ she said, taking one. ‘I work for Shell, the oil company. A sensitive economic commodity.’

  ‘Everybody’s a spy,’ said Voss, searching himself for a lighter.

  ‘In Lisbon, maybe.’

  ‘Anywhere,’ he said, lighting their cigarettes. ‘We all have our secrets.’

  ‘Spies have even more.’

  ‘It’s just their job and they’re dull secrets.’

  ‘You seem to know.’

  ‘It’s wartime and I work in the German Legation; there are secrets all over.’

  ‘Which is the problem. Where does the job end?’

  ‘So you think, for instance, that attraction is easy to act,’ he said. ‘Love, too?’

  She sucked on the cigarette, her cheeks sinking in sharply, drawing in the smoke to disguise the race around her heart, the fast blood standing the hairs up on her arms, itching around her teeth.

  ‘It depends,’ she said, flicking her ash, dizzy now from the nicotine rush.

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said.

  ‘It depends, say, if the object of your affection is predisposed to that kind of attention.’

  ‘That sounds like experience.’

  ‘Not personal.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I read it in a book.’

  ‘Is that the sum total of your experience?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with learning from people who write books.’

  ‘My mother told me that in affairs of the heart no rules apply. No one’s love is the same as anybody else’s. Comparisons don’t work. Even love between two people can’t be relied on to stay the same,’ said Voss.

  ‘Your mother told you that?’

  ‘I was her child. My elder brother was my father’s.’

  ‘Do you know what she meant?
’

  ‘Probably that loving my father was hard work. She did it, but he never made it easy for her,’ said Voss.

  Silence, Anne waiting for him to continue, praying for him to continue. Voss, staring into the ground, prepared himself to tell it for the first time.

  ‘In the beginning,’ he said, as if this was now legend, ‘my father was an exciting man, an army officer, my mother…a beautiful…well, girl, I suppose. She was sixteen and she thought she’d found true romantic love until one day he told her that there’d been someone else. A girl he’d loved, who’d died. Those few words wrung out all the romance from their so-called “true love”. But what was she to do? Suddenly not love him when she knew she did? They married the next year in 1910. Four years later he went to war and for four years she hardly saw him. He had some leave…enough to create my brother and then me but when he did come back home in 1918, on the losing side, he was a different man. Damaged. He wasn’t exciting any more. My mother said he was like a house with the windows bricked in. So she had to find a different way of loving him, and she made it work for twenty-odd years…until the next war.

  ‘My father was a principled man – one of those generals who spoke out against some of the orders given to the army before the Russian campaign – it cost him his job. They retired him, sent him home. Now he was a man who was not only no longer exciting, but bitter, too. Then my brother was killed at Stalingrad and that was the end for my father. He shot himself, because as far as he was concerned he’d lost everything. He didn’t say it, but my mother was not enough. That was how I found out. In a letter he asked me to spread his ashes over the first woman’s grave and my mother, who still loved him, made sure that I did it.’

  Silence while Voss turned that over, reploughed it into his mind.

  ‘That, I think, is what she meant,’ he said. ‘Are you still scared of me?’

  ‘Not of you.’

  ‘By me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Someone’s scared you.’

  ‘Patrick Wilshere.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I read his diary tonight,’ she said, drawn in by the intimacy.

  ‘Like I said, we’re all spies.’

  ‘I find his behaviour…threatening. I wanted to know what he was thinking.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘More so. It wasn’t a relaxing read.’

  ‘What did the diary say?’

  ‘That he was madly in love with Judy Laverne until Lazard told him he’d seen her in Lisbon with other men. He became insanely jealous and, although it wasn’t actually in the diary, there were things written that would suggest that he would have happily seen her dead.’

  ‘I don’t see what bearing this has on you.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know why he has invited me into his house but I’m certain that it wasn’t to give a secretary somewhere to sleep.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She told him about the riding incident on the serra and the subsequent conversation with Wilshere. He lit two more cigarettes from the coal of his own, handed her one.

  ‘And when you confronted him he did not appear to have been aware of his actions,’ Voss repeated. ‘So now you think that Wilshere is deranged, has drawn another woman into his orbit to punish her for the crimes, real or imagined, committed by the first. No, I don’t think so.’

  That annoyed her. Dismissing the silly girl.

  ‘What does the omniscient Military Attaché think, then?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t being patronizing. I don’t disbelieve you. I just think there is more to it. Wilshere is a complicated individual. He wouldn’t position you simply to satisfy his need for vengeance, although sexual jealousy is a very potent force. No. He has seen an opportunity in having you there. By confronting him with the riding incident you have revealed a weakness to him. He can no longer rely on himself. He is…leaking. It could make him more dangerous.’

  ‘And everything had been going so well,’ said Anne.

  ‘It’s strange that the English don’t have a word for sang froid, and yet the French, who rarely exhibit it, do.’

  ‘If you take things too seriously it could feed your inclination to give up.’

  ‘We Germans take everything seriously.’

  ‘But unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with you.’

  Voss’s laugh was barely a grunt. He hadn’t expected to find anything funny after what he’d been told.

  They sat in the accumulative silence of a moment when life goes one way or the other. Two people who knew that words would not continue the thing. A move was needed, possibly two. Then the words could restart but in a different light, in a light that others wouldn’t be able to see and would shake their heads at, mystified.

  He threw his cigarette on the floor, hers went after it, the coals smouldered on the black floor, smoke strayed into the moonlight. Their lips searched the dark. Touched. It was not a tender moment. There was too much desperation. And just as she’d thought she would let him have her there, on the stone seat, at the edge of moonlight, she remembered the torch in her knickers and other small details fell in afterwards so that she knew there would have to be another time and place.

  He told her to come to his apartment after work the following afternoon. He would leave the downstairs door open for her. She stroked the bones in his face with her hands, like a blind person wanting to remember.

  She went back up to the house, adrenalin slick in her system. Her feet found the steps of the back terrace, her nose the smell of cigar smoke. She stepped into a sudden funnel of torchlight.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Wilshere, voice liquid, floating between inquiry and menace.

  ‘It was too hot to sleep. I’ve been walking in the garden,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  His slippers clapped his heels as the beam of light compressed between them. She put a hand up to shield her face.

  ‘I wasn’t tired,’ he said. ‘I was lying in bed thinking too much.’

  He snapped off the torch, slipped it into his pocket, tossed his cigar.

  ‘You look cold now,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she replied, her skin tight as blubber, ‘not cold.’

  He held her arms and kissed her. Tobacco bitter. Whisky sour.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said in a voice that wasn’t asking. ‘You were irresistible.’

  She unwelded her feet from the stone floor.

  ‘I’ll lead the way,’ he said almost gaily, and set off torch in hand through the french windows, the beam swaggering from wall to wall. She followed him up the protesting stairs, revulsion seething in her chest.

  As she entered her room, Wilshere blew her a kiss.

  On the other side of the gallery, Mafalda’s door shut.

  Voss arrived back in Lisbon close to 4.00 a.m. He was beyond tiredness. He parked outside his apartment and checked his dead-letter drop in the gardens. Although he checked it regularly this particular one was used infrequently and he was surprised to find something in it. A coded message asking him to go, whatever the time, to an address in Madragoa which belonged to a colonel of the Free Poles. He walked down the Calçada da Estrela and turned right into the narrow streets of Madragoa.

  He found Rua Garcia da Horta and went into the building, which was always open, and up the narrow stairs to the first floor. He knocked on the door twice, then three times, then twice again. The door opened a crack and then all the way. He went into the dark apartment, following the colonel, who didn’t speak but pointed to the open windows where he spent most of the night trying to get cool. Still not used to the heat after a lifetime in Warsaw.

  Even without being able to see the man in the room clearly, he knew that sitting in a chair to the side of the window was the same man he’d spoken to in the Hotel Lutecia in Paris at the end of January.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked, holding up a bottle.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Voss.

  ‘I don’
t know what the colonel called it,’ he said, ‘but it’s rough.’

  He poured him a measure into a wine glass.

  ‘How is it going with the British?’ he asked.

  ‘Very badly,’ said Voss. ‘They don’t believe a word I say except, of course, after it has happened. Then they thank me and tell me how much they have suffered and follow that up with threats.’

  ‘Threats?’

  ‘They’re threatening to drop an atomic device on Dresden in mid August unless they get an unconditional German surrender.’

  ‘Doesn’t that sound like bluff ?’

  ‘They’re very nervous about our nonexistent bomb programme. The Americans even more so.’

  ‘What more do they want?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Voss, scathing. ‘The deaths of all our major scientists – Heisenberg, Hahn, Weizsäcker, the lot. The location of all our research laboratories so that they can be bombed to rubble, and the death of the Führer, as long as he’s not replaced by another National Socialist leader.’

  Silence while the man turned his head and lit a cigarette.

  ‘You have been alone a long time, I know. It has been very hard. The British are making what they see as necessarily cruel demands. But they are the only ones we can rely on. We have to tell them everything we can in the hope that they will relent,’ he said. ‘You will tell them about the V2 rockets. You can tell them they can bomb the laboratories in Berlin-Dahlem to dust if that will make them feel better. And you may tell them that the Führer will be assassinated around midday Berlin time in his bunker in the Wolfsschanze on 20th July.’

  Voss was stunned. The alcohol trembled in his glass. He drank it automatically. The man continued in his quiet voice.