The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  Anne would be in his apartment.

  They would go to his apartment. They would find her and they wouldn’t just kill her.

  He stopped a cab going in the opposite direction and directed the driver to the rear of the Estrela Gardens. He sat in the back, a stripe of sun across his thighs, and felt himself suddenly on the other side of the impossible knot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves as the cab pulled in by the roundabout at the bottom of Avenida Álvares Cabral. He paid the driver and went into the gardens, heading for the basilica. He walked, a brisk walk through still, hot, empty gardens – the shade, the sun, the black, the white. He felt a strange exhilaration and in other times he would have stopped to examine it in his head, but this time he knew. He was happy. My God, he was happy. And he remembered Julius writing from the Kessel at Stalingrad and knew now what he’d meant. He was free.

  He stepped out of the gardens, through the iron railings and looked up and she was there at the window, waiting for him just as he’d expected. At that instant he knew that out there in the blinding sunlight of the square, in the whirling hub of the paranoid city, he was not alone and that nothing else mattered.

  She saw him as soon as he stepped out of the gardens and threw her cigarette down the slope of the tiled roof. She leaned out of the window, kneeling on the back of the sofa. She was going to wave at him, but now she saw he was in shirtsleeves and that he’d raised his arms above his head, a strange thing to do. They came at him, running across the square and from left and right. A car appeared from nowhere. He was making no attempt to run. He stood like a sporting hero, expecting adulation from the crowd. He let one arm fall by his side, leaving the right arm raised in a salute. He swiped the air above him and with that gesture said it all – goodbye and get out.

  The car pulled up in front of him. They scrummed him in. Anne ran for the apartment door, heard boots thundering up the wooden stairs. She turned back to the dresser and grabbed the package of letters and the Voss family photograph. She climbed out on to the roof, up and over the dormer window and lay there under the brutal sun while they crashed about in the room beneath her, chiselling and hacking at the air with their German voices.

  Above her the sky was rediscovering itself in an aching blue after the slow bleaching of the long afternoon. A flight of pigeons took off from the bell towers of the basilica, the first of the evening strollers arrived in the fading gardens and a knife-grinder played on his sad pipes in the street below.

  Chapter 25

  30th July 1944.

  This is not a diary. I am not allowed to write a diary. I think it must be rule number one of spycraft. I know that if I’m to survive this, with my mind intact and my nerves not so close to the surface that I bristle like a cat at the slightest movement, I must find a way of getting, if not all, then at least a part of it out of me. A release of pressure…is that what I mean? At the moment it is like a tumour which, because it is of the body, even if it is cell structure gone mad, it is treasured and nurtured by my biology. I can’t do anything about it. More blood supply attaches to it. It grows bigger, sucking from all corners like some beastly embryo. I’ve tried to contain it. I’ve tried to cordon it off. I’ve tried to shut it away in an attic room like a crazed aunt. But I can’t get the lid down, it broke through the ropes, it’s rampaging around the house breaking everything it can lay its hands on.

  I’ve tried to breathe it out of me, speak it out of me, even vomit it out of me, anything to stop what it’s doing, which is taking me over. I lie on my back at night, the package of his letters and the Voss family photograph on my chest with only the grainy ceiling in my vision. I breathe very shallowly. The breath coming out in an ooze like bad air from a swamp and through this ooze I say the words, the words that are a part of it. ‘Are you alive or dead?’ I couldn’t keep this up for long because it didn’t seem to be a question any more about KV’s continuing existence. I began to take it personally. There…I’ve smiled, nearly laughed reading that back. This could be working, except that even now I can see what I’m doing. I’m describing it and what it does to me but I’m not writing what it is.

  What has happened to me? Nothing. I have sustained no physical injury apart from a bump on the head. I have only seen and felt things. This is how my brain works. Rationally. Logically. I am only two weeks older than when I left London. I am still the same height and weight. There is only one physical difference. I am no longer a virgin. But what was that? A hymen. An unseen membrane. There was hardly any pain, perhaps a little blood – I didn’t inspect the sheets. No, what I’ve come to realize is that the difference between now and then is that rather than living in a state of expectation, I am living in hope. Why am I hoping? Why am I desperately hoping?

  All that time ago, in that different age, that first night in the casino, Voss was just a presence, nothing more. When he carried Wilshere up to the house he was just a body, mechanically useful. We didn’t meet until we clashed in the sea and we hardly spoke afterwards. How is it that in nearly drowning me he came to take responsibility for my life? I saw him again at the party. What did we talk about then? Nothing much. Fate…that was it, what else would we have talked about? What did he say? ‘It’s as if God’s lost control of the game and the children have taken over…naughty children.’ He said something else but down at the bottom of the garden, something about Wilshere and Judy. ‘What does anybody know from just looking?’ A spy’s words, or maybe not. He said something else along those lines too. ‘Everybody’s a spy…we all have our secrets.’ His parents and theirs. Mine. What do I know about mine? We are formed by our secrets. They enter us like bullets. No, that’s not it. Like diseases. Bullets are a sweet release if they kill you, crippling if they don’t. Disease is more like it. One moment you are healthy, the next you are ill. You have caught something. Secrets are an emotional disease. You cope with it or you don’t. Stubbornness helps. My mother is a stubborn woman. Am I? What is my disease?

  The next time we met was in his flat. I was so angry. I’ve never known anger like that. Hot rage. With my mother I’m like ice. A sentence from Rose and I was mad. A few lines from KV and I wasn’t. Tender and making love and then the walk. The walk. I’m crying now. Why am I crying about the walk? Yes, it was on the walk that he said, ‘I’ve only been in love once.’ I died at that moment, until he said, ‘With you, crazy.’ When the world dropped away from me then, I saw how anything could happen. How Lazard could have infected Wilshere’s mind. How he would believe Lazard over the veracity of his own heart. I know because I’d been falling into the ravine until he said those words: ‘You…crazy.’ How could that be? Amor é cego. Mad Mafalda’s blindfolded doll.

  The last time. Not the very last time. The last time to touch. After the horror. He took charge of me again. He bathed me, towelled me dry, put me to bed as if I was a child. That’s what a lover is. Everything. Father, brother, friend, lover. Then lying there with the importance of it all in the briefcase, in the room. That first time he’d said something about ‘when we’re in here I want it to be just us’, and it was, but only that once. The other times we always had our terrible guests.

  He made the decision, the important, noble decision, the only one a man like that could make. Wolters will not get his hands on those plans. And for what? All for nothing. Some trick by the Americans. Is that my disease? That he put himself in terrible danger for somebody else’s idiotic game, which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. He would have been a hero to both sides if he hadn’t been so damned noble. No. That’s not it. That’s just the world’s disease. What’s mine? What am I going to have to grow around?

  The last time, only to see, not to touch. The irony is in the brevity of the moment. Voss’s economy has produced the heaviest burden of all. That fearless walk from out of the dark gardens into the fierce heat and sunlight, his hands up, telling me he was caught. The salute, like my own when I left him that morning with the briefcase in my hand. Love and admiration in one. And the warning. Swiping
the air as they came for him. Get out. I was the only one who would have understood him. Get out, Andrea.

  I know things now that I didn’t know then. Rose and Sutherland were having their first planning meeting about how to get Voss out of Lisbon when Sutherland collapsed. Rose has told me that the PVDE were looking for two people whom they believed had left the Quinta da Águia alive that night. Wallis told me that one of the bufos from the Pensão Rocha had seen Voss and I together in the Bairro Alto. The bufo, a Galician, had been seen going into the German Legation on that last afternoon. Voss had got out of the legation. He was on the run but he’d come back. It was thought that he’d left something in his flat, something vital to the Allied cause. That could have been the only reason why he would do such a foolish thing as to go back. Nobody knew. But I knew.

  This is my disease. But can I write it? I wish it were as impersonal as an equation, all algebra meaning something else. My disease is that I made him go for a walk in the Bairro Alto and we were seen. My disease is that he came back to get me out of his flat. To save me…again. My disease is that I have almost nothing of him and yet he has left me with everything.

  This is my hope. This is my desperate hope. Not a cure. The cure is to have him back. This is a remission. How many times have I counted the days? How many times have I gone back to 30th June and counted. I was due the day before yesterday and I’m never late.

  Chapter 26

  30th July 1944, Cardew’s House, Carcavelos, near Lisbon.

  Anne burnt the crumpled pages in the grate, including the blank pages underneath, all the way down to the first undented sheet. She lit a cigarette with the same match and drew on it, knowing that these would be her friends for life. The writing of her disease, her assessment of it, her diagnosis of it was consumed in a green flame until only the blackened negative remained, the copper of the ink still legible. She beat it with her shoe until it had all broken up and showered in flakes and specks on to the swept stone below the grate.

  There had been only fractions of seconds when her thoughts had not been full of Voss. Even the lighting of a cigarette brought thoughts of his unwavering hand in the darkness of the garden. Nothing else came to her. Numbers didn’t matter any more. Her work was automatic. Every thought, however disconnected, found its way back to Voss or a reference to him.

  Now there was a difference. The written confession had brought about some containment. Her mind no longer galloped away from her, which it had done when she’d heard that Voss had been smuggled out of Portugal and back to Germany for interrogation. During those days she’d found herself amongst terrible imaginings of dark, sobbing cells punctuated by bright, searing light and questions, endless questions. Questions to which there were no answers, and questions to which all possible answers would be inadequate. She’d been told about torture, and the detail, which had been at a manageable distance in a rainy springtime lecture theatre in Oxford, could now make her writhe in the morning sunshine.

  She crushed out the cigarette and for the first time in a week lay down on her bed and slept six straight hours, no dreams. She woke up without the normal electrical jolt as her mind hit the thousand-volt reality. She was on top of the bed. The room warm and glowing pink from the setting sun. Her body felt languorous, as if she’d been walking all day. An exquisite lassitude seeped through her muscles. She stretched to full length like a cat with all day on its mind and had a memory flash so vivid she rolled over to check that the room was empty.

  She was six years old, her mother was sitting by her on the bed, cigarettes and cocktails mingled with her perfume, which was different for parties – spiky, exotic. She had her hand on Anne’s shoulder, who had been sleeping. The material of her dress wasn’t making the usual quiet rustlings but was racked with creaks and convulsive friction. Anne had seen through the slits of her eyes that her mother was crying and not quiet tears. She had been too sleepy, too overwhelmed by the weight of slumber to even put a finger to her mother’s knee. In the morning her mother had returned to her usual cool strictness and Anne had forgotten the moment.

  A thought unravelled itself. Rawlinson and his missing leg. An odd notion about the integrity of integers, the missing fraction ruining the completeness. What about the invisible missing fraction or the unseen additional one? The structure altered, the equation would never work out. Mad thoughts manipulating maths to emotions, and yet there was such a thing as a nuance.

  The Cardew children were already in bed. Anne went down for dinner which was eaten late in high summer and, this evening, out in the garden under the liquid yellow light from Cardew’s hurricane lamps. There was a crowd. A chair was pulled out for her and, when the face of the man who had helped her re-entered the light, she saw that it was Major Luís da Cunha Almeida, the man who’d stopped her horse from bolting.

  They ate cheese, presunto and olives with fresh bread. Cardew poured wine brought by the major from his family estate in the Alentejo. Mrs Cardew served the fresh seafood while the servants went to the village bread oven to collect the lamb, which the cook believed tasted better having been slow-roasted since the middle of the afternoon.

  They all ate the lamb, even the servants in the dimly lit kitchen. The potatoes, which were glued to the bottom and sides of the clay roasting tray, were sticky with meat juice and pungent from the garlic and rosemary. The meal returned Anne to her tribe like a rider, horseless on the open plain, who’d made it back to civilization.

  At the end of the evening the major asked her if she would like to go out for a drive with him one evening the following week. She didn’t say no. He settled on Wednesday.

  As she went up to bed, Cardew intercepted her at the bottom of the stairs. He patted her shoulder, gripped it.

  ‘Glad to see you’ve pulled through, Anne,’ he said. ‘Terrible shock, I imagine…but good show.’

  In bed she thought that this was what it was like to be English. This is how we handle things. We’re natural spies. We never wear anything on the outside. Napoleon was wrong, we were not une nation de boutiquiers but a nation of secretkeepers. We all know you can’t say a word with a stiff upper lip.

  Richard Rose agreed to see her on Monday afternoon. A positive psychological report must have made its way to him because until now he’d refused to see her. They’d said he was busy, but Wallis had told her that, unlike Sutherland, Rose preferred to keep his distance. He wasn’t going to risk discomfort in front of an emotional woman. Rose into women didn’t go. They were indivisible.

  It was the last day of July and there’d been no relenting of the heat. Rose sat behind Sutherland’s desk in the room shuttered against the sun which hammered that side of the embassy building in the afternoons. She sat in the hot gloom, an indistinct, ignorable figure, while Rose read through papers, signed them off. He rubbed his bare elbows as if they were sore from desk work. He muttered excuses. She didn’t respond. She knew she wasn’t a welcome presence. Sutherland’s secretary had been replaced by someone called Douggie who didn’t look up when he was spoken to but pointed with his pen. Rose spoke while stacking his papers.

  ‘How d’you fancy staying with Cardew?’

  ‘As his secretary?’

  ‘Thinks a lot of you, he does,’ said Rose. ‘You’d still be doing the translation work, of course. Very important work, that.’

  ‘I thought that was just my cover.’

  ‘It was, yes. But you can’t work as an agent any more, can you? Not here in Lisbon. And given the flap on at the moment we’re going to have a job to replace you immediately. London don’t want to move you yet. Cautious buggers. They’ll have a file on you by now…in Berlin.’

  That word ‘Berlin’ shot past her like a bird in the room.

  ‘If you think that’s the best use of my abilities…’

  ‘We do,’ he said, too quickly, ‘…for the moment.’

  ‘You know that I do want to continue with the Company, sir.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If m
y involvement in the last operation is going to have any bearing on my future…’

  ‘Your involvement?’ he said, pinching his lips, looking her in the eye for the first time.

  ‘That my actions resulted in the loss of a valuable double agent.’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself for that, you know,’ he said, his face bearing an approximation of pity. ‘You were inexperienced. Voss…yes…he should have known better. A terrible risk he took. Madness, really, for such an old hand.’

  ‘Has there been any news?’ she asked, matter of fact, wringing the pathos out of her voice.

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Only that he was taken back to Germany.’

  ‘There were two others on the same plane. Men who’d been kidnapped off the streets of Lisbon just like Voss. One of them, Count von Treuberg, has since been released. He told us that Voss had been packed in a trunk for the flight. They were all taken from Tempelhof to the Gestapo HQ in Prinz Albrechtstrasse in the back of a van. Von Treuberg spoke to Voss, who was not in good shape. He saw him once more on the day he was released.’

  Rose fell silent. Anne stared into the floor. Her head weighed heavily on the cords of muscle in her neck.

  ‘Voss had undergone three days of intensive interrogation. Von Treuberg was shocked.’