The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Thirty-seven years ago. It did take several days.’

  ‘Well, that was probably the last time she sat out in the garden, too.’

  ‘No, that would have been when she was in India.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was.’

  ‘You must go to her,’ he said. ‘I must get back to the church.’

  They shook hands and he slipped out the door, black and silent as a cat burglar, a soul saver. She took her bags up to her room, which had been painted and new curtains hung. There were flowers on the dressing table. All her old books were on their shelves, even her battered, balding teddy lay on her bed like a valued but stinking hound. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted up from the garden and she saw herself twenty-four years younger sitting in front of the mirror, pretending to light a cigarette from a suitor’s hand. She ducked to see herself in the glass, to inspect twenty-four years’ worth of damage, but there was little on the surface. She could still grow her hair long if she wanted to and it was still thick and black with only the odd white strand, which she plucked out. Her forehead was smooth, although there was a little creasing around the eyes, but the skin of her face rested on the bones, there was no sag in her cheeks. Well preserved, they called it. Pickled. Pickled in her own genetic recipe.

  On the lower floor she pushed open her mother’s bedroom door. There was the strong scent of lilies masking another odour – not death, but the decay of live flesh. She shied away from it, went down to the hall, clicked across the black and white tiles to the kitchen and out into the garden. Her mother sat in the sun under a broad-brimmed straw hat with a tail of red ribbon. She had her neck back, her face up to the sun and the high trees which, in full leaf, screened the back of the houses behind. Smoke from a cigarette rippled out of her dangling hand. A tray sat on a stool and an empty chair next to it.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ she said, nothing more momentous coming to mind.

  Her mother’s eyes sprang open in shock – shock and, she saw, joy.

  ‘Andrea,’ she said, as if she was crying the name out of a dream.

  She kissed her mother. There was a moment’s awkwardness as she crossed over to kiss the other cheek.

  ‘Oh yes, of course, both cheeks in Portugal.’

  Bony fingers fumbled across Anne’s shoulders, thumbed her clavicle, seemed to be searching for something.

  ‘Sit, sit, have some tea. It’s a bit stewed but have some all the same. Did Father Harpur leave you a scone? He’s a bugger for those scones.’

  Her mother was thin. Her body had lost its compactness, the sturdiness. If there was any creaking now it wasn’t from the bra or corsetry clasped to her but from old bones unoiled in their joints. She was wearing a flowery tea gown, and a loose light coat, cream and sky blue. Her pale face when kissed had lost its cool firmness. Now it was slack and soft, warm from the sun. Her features were still fine but faded and she’d lost that severity that had been so tiresome. For someone who was dying she looked good, or perhaps it was just what she was emanating.

  ‘You met Father Harpur.’

  ‘He let me in. I was surprised, I must say.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘But he was very cheerful.’

  ‘Yes, we do get on, James and I. We have such a giggle.’

  ‘Giggle’ wriggled like a worm in her mouth. Anne shifted in her seat.

  ‘He told me he was your confessor.’

  ‘He is, yes. And no, that wasn’t much of a laugh, I have to say. He’s a poet too, did he tell you?’

  ‘We only met on the doorstep.’

  ‘A good poet, as well. He wrote a very fine poem about his father. The death of his father.’

  ‘I didn’t think you liked poetry.’

  ‘I didn’t. I don’t. I mean, I don’t like that self-important stuff. People wandering lonely as clouds…you know. It’s not me.’

  There was a long pause while a wind worked its way through the trees and Anne had the feeling that she was being prepared for something. Softened up.

  ‘Poetry’s different these days,’ said her mother. ‘Like music, clothes, the sexual revolution. Everything’s changing. You probably saw it on the way back from the airport. We even won the World Cup…was it last year, or the year before…anyway that was novel. How are Luís and Julião?’

  Silence, while her mother smoked the cigarette to the end, her eyes closed, eyeballs fluttering against the thin lids.

  ‘Tell me about Luís and my grandson,’ she insisted gently.

  ‘Luís and I had a bad falling out.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About the wars in Africa,’ she said, immediately steeling up, not wanting to, but that was what politics did to her.

  ‘Well, at least it wasn’t about boiling his egg too hard.’

  ‘He knows that these wars are not…if there is such a thing…good wars. They’re not just.’

  ‘He’s an army officer, they’re not normally given the choice, are they?’

  ‘He should have kept Julião out of them, though…and now they’re both in Guiné, or at least they will be in a few days’ time.’

  ‘It’s what men do if they join the army. Combat is what they think they’ve always wanted from that life, until they get into it and come face to face with the horror.’

  ‘Luís has even seen the horror. That first time back in ‘61 when we went to Angola…terrible…the things he told me he’d seen up in the north. But he’s been hardened…inured to it. God knows, he might have even perpetrated some of the appalling atrocities they reported in Mozambique. No, there’s no doubt that Luís knows. He knows absolutely what it’s like. But the fact is, he’s a full colonel, it’s Julião who’ll be in the front line. Julião’s going to be the one who’s leading the patrols out into the bush. The guerrillas…sorry, I have to stop, I don’t really want to…I just can’t think about it.’

  Her mother reached out her hand and Anne thought she wanted more tea at first but found it clawing a way up her leg towards her own. She gave it over and her mother stroked it with a papery palm.

  ‘There’s nothing to be done. You’ll just have to wait it out.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s why we had the falling out. I was supposed to go with them and I refused. Your call saved us from a formal separation.’

  Some drops fell on the back of her hand and she thought it was raining and looked up to find the trees blurred as tears leaked down her cheeks. She was crying without knowing it, without understanding why. The start of some difficult unbuckling.

  The sun dropped behind the trees. They went inside. Anne rattled ice cubes into glasses, poured the gin and tonics, sliced the lemon, thinking about the new openness of this undiscovered person she’d known all her life, working out the best way in.

  ‘You mustn’t spend any of your own money while you’re here,’ said her mother, shouting from the living room. ‘I know what life’s like in Portugal and I have plenty. It’s all going to be yours in a few weeks so you might as well use it now.’

  ‘Father Harpur said it’d be better if you told me what was wrong with you,’ said Anne, handing over the G&T, blurting it out, unable to keep up the light pretence.

  Her mother took the drink, shrugged as if it was nothing much.

  ‘Well, it started as a stomach ache, one that went on all the time, no respite. Nothing would cure it – camomile tea, milk of magnesia – nothing would even ease it. I went to the doctor. They prodded and probed, said there was nothing to worry about. Ulcer, perhaps. The pain got worse and the men in white coats got their machines out and had a look inside. There was nothing wrong with the stomach but there was a large growth in the womb,’ she said, and sipped her drink, frowned.

  Anne’s own insides quivered at the news, at the thought of something terrible and life-threatening growing inside of her.

  ‘Could I have a tad more gin in mine?’ asked her mother. ‘They always want to tell you how big it is – the tumour, I mean – as if it’s going to be some
thing that you’re proud of, like those gardeners at country shows with spuds the size of their grandmother and tomatoes like boxers’ faces. I’ve also noticed that the smaller tumours are always fruit. It’s about the size of an orange, they say. I assume it’s to give you the impression that it can be easily picked. Once it’s bigger than a grapefruit they give up and thereafter it’s bladders. They told me mine was the size of a rugby ball, which is a game I’ve never even followed.’

  They roared at that, the glib release, the gin slipping into their veins.

  ‘They took it out. I told them to send the damn thing to Twickenham. These chaps, though, they didn’t laugh. Deadly serious. Said they’d taken everything out, kit bag, tubes, the lot – but they didn’t think it had been enough. I told them I wasn’t sure I had anything else to hand over and they said it was too late anyway. The secondaries were already established. A black day that was. Mind you, I never thought I was going to go on and on, not with the Aspinall track record. Death,’ she said finally, ‘it runs in the family.’

  Anne cooked a piece of lamb, slow-cooked it with garlic and potatoes in white wine.

  ‘I’m dying in here,’ her mother shouted, still in the living room. ‘I’m dying for another drink and from the wonderful smell of your cooking.’

  ‘It’s the way the Portuguese cook lamb,’ said Anne, appearing at the door.

  ‘Marvellous. We’ll have some wine too, and none of that Hirondelle rubbish I give to Father Harpur. No. In the cellar there’s a 1948 Chateau Battailley Grand Cru Classé which I think will suit the occasion of my daughter’s return.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in wine.’

  ‘I’m not. Not enough to go out buying that sort of stuff. It’s all Rawly’s. You remember old peg-leg Rawlinson. He left it to me in his will.’

  ‘You were still seeing him?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’

  ‘But you were, weren’t you? Back in ‘44.’

  ‘Is something burning?’

  ‘Nothing’s burning, Mother,’ said Anne. ‘That was why I was packed off to Lisbon, wasn’t it? You and Rawlinson.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s something…’

  ‘There’s no point in denying it, Mother, I saw the two of you in St James’s Park after my interview with Rawlinson.’

  ‘Did you now?’ she said. ‘I knew something had happened that day.’

  ‘I followed you from your office in Charity House in Ryder Street.’

  ‘Yes, well, I was working for Section V in those days. That’s where Section V was. Rawlinson was in recruitment. I recruited you…’

  ‘You recruited me?’ said Anne.

  ‘Yes, I recruited you, with Rawly’s help, and made sure you didn’t get sent anywhere dangerous. Thought you’d be safe in Lisbon.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, going a little sheepish.

  ‘But you wanted me out of the way as well, didn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t the sort of thing a young girl should know about her mother,’ she said, writhing in her chair. ‘It was embarrassing.’

  ‘But not now.’

  ‘God, no. Nothing embarrasses me now. Not even dying embarrasses me.’

  They sat down to eat. Her mother drank the wine and ate tiny scraps of the food. She apologized for not having an appetite. After dinner her mother was sleepy and Anne took her up to bed, helped her get undressed. She saw that frail white body, the small breasts gone to flaps of skin, her belly still swathed in bandages.

  ‘We’ll have to change the dressing tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Anne said, pulling the nightie down over her mother’s head.

  Her mother washed, cleaned her teeth, got into bed and asked for a goodnight kiss. Anne felt a pang at the roles reversed. Her mother’s eyes fluttered against sleep and the alcohol.

  ‘I’m sorry I was such a useless mother,’ she said, the words slurred and gargling in her throat.

  Anne went to the door, turned out the light and found herself thinking about what she’d started on the plane – of her own inadequacy, how she’d loved Julião but always kept him at a distance.

  ‘I’ll explain everything,’ her mother said, into the dark. ‘I’ll explain everything tomorrow.’

  Chapter 28

  17th August 1968, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.

  Anne sat on her window ledge in the dark, the soft breeze blew through the cotton of her nightdress, rustled the trees at the bottom of the garden, drowned out the slow thunder of the city. A half-moon lit the lawn blue and there was the occasional faint few bars of music coming from a record player a few houses down. If she could have disembodied the sharp chunk of anxiety over Julião’s safety she could have called herself happy. She was home and, after all the bitterness between her and Luís, now found herself near someone who had suddenly become reliable and all because of words, a few hours of words. A few hours to break the deadlock of forty-four years. Her mother not the person she’d ever known, behaving as if nothing was any different, as if she’d always been like this. Had the prospect of death done that? Given her a sense of freedom, of nothing to lose. She shivered. Old Rawly had been the tip of the iceberg, something that had broken the surface at the time. There was more. ‘I’ll explain everything.’ That was the problem with becoming a different person, or returning to the original, everybody around you is changed as well. A little sickness crept into her stomach, a flutter in the gut. The nausea of truth taking off.

  She was trying not to remember things but it was impossible, under these circumstances, not to look back. She tried to concentrate on the easy details – how she’d carried on working even after the war to the disgust of the Almeidas, Cardew leaving Shell at the end of ‘45 to go back to a different career in London and how that prompted her to start studying for her seventh-year exams to get a place to read maths at Lisbon University, none of her own qualifications being acceptable. But cutting into these bland facts were the other sharp, undeniable truths. Luís had drawn Julião to him, made him his son, not hers, and she hadn’t resisted it and, at the time, she couldn’t think why.

  She’d busied herself with her maths and political observations. The harsh treatment meted out to the ganhões, the day labourers, employed at subsistence wages by the Almeidas’ foremen was little different from what the city workers suffered in the factories and on construction sites. Under Salazar’s fascist régime the conditions were terrible and any treacherous talk of union representation was rooted out by the bufos and the troublemakers handed over to the renamed, but equally brutal, PIDE. Her perception of these injustices hardened her and not just to the perpetrators. Luís became less of a husband, a more distant figure because he was away a lot, but also she thought of him as the father of her child – a job description whose irony never failed to make her uncomfortable.

  She veered away from the start of that kind of thinking, lit a cigarette and paced the room, saw her first day at the university back in the autumn of 1950. The meeting with her tutor and mentor, João Ribeiro, a stick man built from pipe cleaners, a deathly pale individual who ate nothing, drank endless coffee in the form of small strong bicas and smoked packets and packets of Três Vintes. He was in constant pain from his teeth, of which only two were a yellowish white, the rest being brown, black or not there. From their first meeting, since he’d interviewed her for the place, he’d known that he had a brilliant student in front of him and they became close. When, a few months later, looking out of his window, they saw the arrest of several students and a professor by the PIDE, they exchanged a look and then risked some views on the matter. He felt safe because she was a foreigner but he was taking a risk, especially knowing that her husband was an army officer. After that groundbreaking moment their tutorials became maths and political symposiums and after some weeks João Ribeiro received permission to introduce her to some officials of the Portuguese Communist Party.

 
They were interested in her curriculum vitae although the written version didn’t include her war service, but because there’d been Portuguese communist collaboration with the British Secret Intelligence Services at that time, they were aware of her role and were interested in her training. The communists had been decimated by a series of successful PIDE infiltrations and the subsequent arrests had included one of the main resistance leaders, Alvaro Cunhal. They wanted to make use of her SIS training to implement some safety measures within the cadres.

  It became routine that after their tutorials João Ribeiro and Anne would throw themselves into Party work. She introduced a protection system whereby cell members would never know the identity of their controller, and all new members were given passwords, which were regularly changed. With João Ribeiro she developed new encryption codes for documents which, even when the PIDE raided a safe house in April 1951, proved to be uncrackable as there were no further arrests. Over the spring she introduced the whole idea of cover and initiated training programmes in role-play.

  After the arrest of Alvaro Cunhal, the central committee had begun to suspect that they had a highly placed traitor in their ranks. Anne and João Ribeiro concocted a series of dummy operations in which each member of the central committee’s discretion was tested with specific pieces of information leaked to them. Manuel Domingues, one of the most senior party members, failed the test. If Anne still thought she was engaged in intellectual games it changed that night. Domingues was interrogated and revealed to be a government spy and provocateur. A Voz, the Salazarist newspaper, reported the discovery of the body the next day, 4th May 1951, in the Belas pine forest north of Lisbon. He’d been shot, or rather executed, as she’d forced herself to accept.

  In 1953 they launched the rural Communist Party newspaper, O Camponês, whose avowed aim was so close to Anne’s heart – to campaign for a daily minimum wage of fifty escudos. The workers won their demands after a series of punishing strikes and brutal pitched battles between peasants and police, but not before a young and pregnant woman from Beja, Catarina Eufémia, was shot by a GNR lieutenant to become a martyr and symbol of the brutality of the régime. Her image emblazoned the front of O Camponês countrywide.