The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  Anne’s insides froze and her breathing shallowed.

  ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

  ‘I want to know everything,’ she said with vehemence.

  Rose fetched a thick file from the grey metal cabinets that now lined the room.

  ‘The operation you were involved in with Voss took place at a very sensitive moment for the Third Reich.’

  ‘The coup attempt, you mean?’

  ‘SS General Wolters was running an intelligence operation which he hoped was going to be one of the great successes of the war. It’s in the nature of the losing team to believe that they can suddenly turn things around with a miracle. His operation was a disaster. He’s lost a lot of money and one of the main pipelines for diamonds to the Reich. Voss is his scapegoat. Taken by itself, the botched operation might earn Voss a reprimand and a nasty transfer, but in the light of the 20th July assassination attempt it becomes more serious, which is better for Wolters. Wolters will want to implicate him in the coup attempt, which, at this distance, you might think is improbable except that we know that Voss knew what was going to happen. He gave us notice, so it was clear he was involved. Given that he’s an old Abwehr man, the only one left out here, we’re of the opinion that his part was to take control of the legation in Lisbon. If that is the case and there’s a single strand of evidence pointing to that sort of level of involvement…’

  Rose let his sentence drift, lit himself a cigarette.

  ‘Then what, sir?’

  He opened the file, picked the pages apart with his nail and turned them as if they were ancient scriptures.

  ‘The investigation of senior Wehrmacht officers is being carried out by the head of the Reich Main Security Office, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He’s a lawyer, which you might think is a good sign until you’ve seen a photograph of him. Sinister-looking brute. Total fanatic…intensely loyal. He will…he hasn’t shirked his duties. Thousands of people have been rounded up. Men, women, children…anybody with a family connection or otherwise to any of the known conspirators has been brought in for questioning. All other suspects are being interrogated by an SS Colonel Bruno Weiss. He used to be head of security at the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s Rastenburg HQ in East Prussia. If he were younger he could be taken for Kaltenbrunner’s son. I don’t know where they breed them.

  ‘I have no doubt that these men will find something amongst the thousands of depositions because it is in the nature of ordinary people to write things down when they shouldn’t, say things that should never be said and babble uncontrollably when they’re scared. Voss’s chances are not good. If he is charged he will appear in the so-called People’s Court presided over by the most disgraceful judge ever to find his way into the law, Roland Freisler, where, if the evidence is even vaguely positive, he will be sentenced to be executed, and if it’s not, he will certainly end up in a concentration camp where he’s very unlikely to survive.’

  Rose flicked through the file. Anne sat rigid in the chair.

  ‘Apart from what we’ve heard from von Treuberg there is no other news,’ said Rose, more concerned with his file. ‘If I were you, Miss Ashworth, I’d forget about him. Live your life. It’s the nature of war.’

  Anne stood on shaking legs, on knees that unless she locked them straight would buckle. She turned to the door.

  ‘You’ll continue with Cardew, then?’ he said to the back of her head.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, and staggered out of the room into the corridor.

  Anne worked with an intensity that unnerved Cardew. She rarely looked up and took no more than a quarter of an hour for lunch. On Wednesday evening she went out with Major Luís Almeida. They drove to Cascais and ate a fish meal. She didn’t recall what fish. She remembered the way the major didn’t take his eyes off her throughout the meal and even when he was driving, so that she had to brace herself occasionally to get him to look ahead. She knew then that she would be all right because she didn’t want to die. She feared death, which she hadn’t a week ago. She began to orbit nearer to the outer edges of normality as each day passed and another onion skin of insulation wrapped itself around her disease, her growth, which had been rendered benign now by the absence of any trace of menstrual blood.

  The major, on holiday for the whole of August, intensified his campaign and took her out nearly every night. She never turned him down. She only refused to ride horses. His presence was a comfort, his attention close to avuncular. Their talk was formal, inquisitive without being intimate. She preferred that. She could retreat into herself while she was with him and he wouldn’t pressure her. She knew that she was changing and that it was for her own protection. It was making her different and she couldn’t help that difference materializing into distance. She would find herself in a crowd at a lunch, never aloof but always alone. Society took her in and she let herself become a part of its edifice, not as a brick in its wall but more of a gargoyle spouting out of a corner.

  On a mid August Saturday night Anne sat with the major outside a café in the main square in Estoril. He’d tried to persuade her into the casino but she wasn’t ready for that yet, if ever. It was eleven o’clock and still hot. She had no appetite for food or drink. She proposed a walk along the front, away from the holiday bustle, the family scenes, the fractious palm trees. The major was glad to stretch his legs.

  They walked the promenade above the beach. There was a little light from a crescent moon, no wind and the air was soft. Waves came in as phosphorescent ripples, collapsing on to the beach and running up to merge into the sand. She took his arm. Her heels made the only sound above the muted ocean.

  She stopped to breathe it in and the major put his arm around her and she realized that he’d misinterpreted her motives. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected it. It was just that she’d never managed to think any further than it happening. She turned to him and put her hands up on his chest to keep him at bay but he wasn’t tentative like Voss. He crushed her to him and kissed her on the mouth for the first time, long and hard, so that she was struggling for breath and completely unmoved.

  His staidness vanished. His manner, which was normally governed by a stronger gravitational pull than that on most humans, giving him his granite-like dependability and solidity, broke its moorings and he became all ardour and expression. She was stunned by the transformation. He held her face in his hands and told her over and over how much he loved her, so that the words lost their meaning and she didn’t listen to them, but began to think whether this was perhaps a Portuguese trait – to be hermetically sealed receptacles for mad passion.

  He was breathing the words into her mouth, as if trying to make her say them back to him, and she was remembering his profound enjoyment of food, how eating one meal would remind him of the wonder of another. Wine to him was like a favourite piece of music. He drank it with his eyes closed, let it flow through him as if it was Grand Premier Cru Mozart. The flowers he bought for her he seemed to enjoy more himself – plucking a bloom, he wouldn’t just sniff it, he would inhale it. It struck her that he was a sensualist and she’d hardly been aware of it because he had no talent for conversation but only physical pleasure.

  He snapped her back into reality. He was holding her by the shoulders and willing her to respond, his forearms trembling as if he was restraining himself from crushing her. He was demanding that she marry him, but she couldn’t find any words to begin to explain the complexity of her situation.

  ‘Will you? Will you?’ he asked, again and again, his English heavily accented so that each demand came from deeper and deeper down his throat like a man drowning in a well.

  ‘You’re hurting me, Luís,’ she said.

  He let her go, running his hands down her arms, hanging his head, suddenly ashamed.

  ‘It’s not so easy,’ she said.

  ‘It is easy,’ he replied. ‘It is very easy. You only have to say one word. Yes. That’s it. It is the easiest “yes” you will ever say.’

&nb
sp; ‘There are complications.’

  ‘Then I am happy.’

  ‘How can you be happy?’

  ‘Complications are surmountable. I will talk to anybody. I will talk to the British Ambassador. I will talk to the Chairman of Shell. I will talk to your parents. I will…’

  ‘My mother. I only have a mother.’

  ‘I will talk to your mother.’

  ‘Stop, Luís. You must stop and let me think for a moment.’

  ‘I will only let you think if it is to overcome these complications, if it is to see that complications…’ he said, running out of words for a second until he announced, ‘Complications mean nothing to me. There is no complication that I cannot…that I cannot…Raios!…what is the word?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want to say…overleap?’

  ‘Overleap!’ he roared in agreement. ‘No, no, not overleap. Overleap means that it is still there…behind you maybe, but still there. Vanquish. There is no complication that I cannot vanquish.’

  She laughed at a vision of Luís with sword and shield flashing in the sun, blinding the complications.

  ‘I can’t answer you,’ she said.

  ‘I am still happy.’

  ‘You can’t still be happy, Luís. I haven’t said anything.’

  ‘I am happy,’ he repeated, and he knew why, but he didn’t want to say that it was because she hadn’t given him the alternative, perhaps even easier, reply.

  She crawled into bed at two in the morning. Luís wouldn’t let her go home. His earlier boldness had given him new fuel to burn and he couldn’t stop. He took her into Lisbon and they danced at the Dancing Bar Cristal. Luís had never been so animated and she realized that he could only speak when he was doing something else. As soon as they went back to the table for a rest he would fall back into silent contemplation of unknown complications until he could bear it no longer and he’d drag her back on to the floor. There he talked as if he knew something she didn’t. His family, their estate outside Estremoz in the rural Alentejo, 150 miles east of Lisbon, his work, the barracks he was posted to, which luckily was in Estremoz, and all was related to how their life would be together, how she would fit into his world.

  Anne slept and dreamt her dream and woke in a panic with the certainty that she would not be able to survive this pace. Like a fallen rider with a foot still trapped in the stirrup, dragged along at the whim of the horse, she needed a release, she needed control, but she could not bring her intelligence to bear down on the complications. The different strands knotted too quickly.

  She asked herself a question. Why shouldn’t she marry Luís? She didn’t love him was not an answer, it was the reason she wanted to be with him. That she was still in love with Voss did not make any sense. Richard Rose had been brutal in his prognosis. The whole point of her involvement with Luís was to survive her guilt. That she was carrying Voss’s embryo was the impediment, which, as soon as the thought occurred, was dispatched. It scared her, not in shivers of panic, they were surface qualms. This was core fear, a deep moral fear. Only religion did this to you, she thought. All that stuff the nuns had crammed into her head about guilt and evil, it shook her up, disorientated her. She paced the room to confirm the ground under her feet, to calm herself, to tether herself to what she now understood, which was that she had to marry Luís because she was carrying Voss’s child.

  She sat on the bed inspecting her hands. She had been young. She had been green and whippy, but now she could feel the brittleness of age creeping in and the breakability that came with it. Alone on her single bed, in the high August heat, with the cells multiplying inside her, she shivered in the cold shadows of society, the Church, her mother. She made her decision and even while making it the Catholic inside her knew that there would be some cost, some bloody awful price to pay later on. She would marry Luís da Cunha Almeida and her secret would sit with her other one, they would be joined like Siamese twins, individual but dependent on each other.

  The morning light had a new clarity. The thick heat of the last few days and nights had been cut by a fresh, saltine zest from the Atlantic. The sun still shone in a clear sky but bodies felt less like carcasses. The Serra de Sintra was no longer vague in the haze and the palm trees applauded in the square. Out from under the close doom of night, Anne saw things differently. There was hope of a solution. She would talk to Dorothy Cardew. The women, between them, would get things out on the table where they could be examined.

  The maid took the Cardew girls to the beach midmorning and Anne found Dorothy on her own, sitting with her sewing box in the living room. She was working on a sampler, tackling the ‘e’ of ‘Home’. Meredith was outside reading in the garden, his pipe signalling his enjoyment. Anne moved around the room, circling before landing, waiting for a way in. The needlepoint was badly at odds with what she had trampling through her mind. Dorothy Cardew eyed her, made mistakes in the sampler, gave up on it.

  ‘Luís has asked me to marry him,’ said Anne, which knocked Dorothy back into the cushions.

  Anne registered the total relief in Dorothy’s face. Good news after all.

  ‘That’s marvellous,’ she said. ‘Wonderful news…such a good man, Luís.’

  And that was the end of it. This was not a day for trouble. The clear air, the breeze in the pines, the birds talking up the day so that anything other than good news would seem ill-mannered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne, the word dropping out of her like a drunk from a bar.

  ‘You must let me tell Meredith.’

  The scene developed, transformed from the one Anne had inside her head. Dorothy skipped to the french windows and called for her husband, hopping up on to one leg as she did so.

  ‘Good news, darling,’ she called.

  Meredith slammed his book shut and scrambled like a fighter pilot. He joined his wife at the french windows, breathless, eager.

  ‘Luís has asked Anne to marry him.’

  A flicker of disappointment. Hitler hadn’t surrendered after all.

  ‘Congratulations!’ he roared. ‘Terrific chap, Luís.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne, another brawler ejected into the street.

  A quizzical look from Cardew. Had he seen something? Had he sensed something other than spoken words in the room?

  ‘Have you said anything to anyone?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Best talk to Richard first…could be complicated.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Marvellous news, though…couldn’t hope for a better chap than Luís. Terrific horseman, too,’ he finished, as if that could be an enormous help in a marriage.

  Anne’s smile creaked into position. This was the future – words taken from her and put into a common language, the language of the receiver, never her own. It pricked her eyeballs because that was one of Voss’s talents – an understanding of many languages but more especially the silent ones.

  The following Tuesday Anne sat in the Estrela Gardens watching children, waiting for time to pass before heading into Lapa for her meeting with Rose. The children ran over the thousand changing shapes on the ground as the breeze rippled the sunlight through the trees. The pace was slowing at last. The relentlessness was still there but that breathless speed had gone. Now there was the sense of large forces manoeuvring, something perhaps to do with what was happening in Europe as the Russian, American and British armies bore down on the rubble of the Reich.

  She walked to the gates opposite the basilica and looked up to the room where she’d been waiting only a few weeks ago. A maid was cleaning the window, a disembodied hand appeared and flicked a cigarette out. At her feet the silver tramlines embedded in the cobbles headed off down the hill of the Calçada da Estrela towards São Bento and the Bairro Alto where they would cross and connect with other rails but would never deviate from their dedicated path. What on one night had seemed like an exquisite thread tugging her to a hopeful future, now appeared as a terrible certainty from which the only way out was derailmen
t and disaster.

  She sat in front of Richard Rose again, who was not ignoring her but, because it was after lunch, was lounging back in his chair with a cigarette in his hand and either smoke in his eye or contempt tempered only by shrewdness.

  ‘Cardew told me your news,’ he said.

  My news, thought Anne, dissociated from it already, a messenger for someone else.

  Rose waved his match at her, tossed it into the ashtray. It enraged her, God knows why.

  ‘When we trained you as an…’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, you did not train me as a translator. I arrived with that ability on board.’

  ‘When we trained you as an agent and the subsequent assessment of your training arrived here in Lisbon, I…we didn’t perceive you as an emotional character. Everything pointed towards you being logical, rational, even clinical. That was why we liked you.’

  ‘Liked me?’

  ‘On paper you were perfect for the assignment,’ he said, sitting back, flourishing his cigarette, stabbing the smoking end in her direction, goading her. ‘You were female, very intelligent, excellent at role-play, of…beguiling looks, but also determined, clear-headed, detached…in short, perfect for the work.’

  Silence while Rose inspected his cigarette box, seeing if that had been enough to elicit more reaction.

  ‘You arrived,’ he continued, ‘and we were immediately impressed by the way you entered into your role. Good information. Strong social involvement. Excellent handling of some difficult personalities. Everything going swimmingly until…’

  Rose blew out smoke in an exasperated jet.

  ‘Even logical, rational, clinical people can fall in love,’ said Anne.

  ‘Twice?’ asked Rose.

  The cold, cutting edge of the word sliced into her. Its unjustness pushed her on to the defensive.

  ‘It was you who told me to forget about Voss,’ she said, ‘that there was no hope for him.’