The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  Anne stopped in her tracks across the room and looked up out of herself and realized that steely obsessiveness had returned. In falling back on those memories, she’d forgotten or rather been able to put aside, the moments of…what had she called it? Domestic pain. That made it sound like knife cuts and toe stubs, which is possibly what it had been, but they added up, maybe that was it, they added up.

  In the morning her mother didn’t tell her anything. She was sick and in pain. Anne changed the dressing on the livid, black-stitched scar across her mother’s stomach. Her mother took pills and drifted, floated on a cloud of morphine through the slow, hot day. The next day was the same. Anne called the doctor. He inspected the wound, looked into the old woman’s dull eyes, tried and failed to get any sense out of her. He left saying she’d have to go into hospital if she didn’t come round. It must have penetrated her mother’s unconscious state because it rallied some of her old stubbornness. She didn’t take morphine the next day and slept through the morning.

  The brilliant sunshine of the first days had been taken over by a growing oppression. The clear heat had become thunderous and the pressure leaned against the windows. Her mother ate a little lunch and read the newspaper. Anne took tea with her in the bedroom, sat facing the window with her feet up on the ledge. Her mother was sweating and held a damp flannel in her hand.

  ‘It used to get like this in India before the monsoons came. The later the rains, the worse the heat. Everybody else went up to the north. Houseboats in Kashmir…that sort of thing. We…the missionaries, stayed. Terrible heat,’ she finished savagely.

  ‘It was the same in Angola.’

  ‘What places for women like us to have been. They died in the streets in Bombay…just dropped to the floor like old carpets.’

  ‘The smell,’ said Anne.

  ‘I don’t think I could have lived with all that endless decay.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If I’d stayed in India.’

  ‘Would you have done?’

  ‘No,’ she said, after some time, ‘no, I wouldn’t…I couldn’t have stayed.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Anne, pushing now, sensing that they were coming to the nub of it.

  Her mother stared at the lump of her feet at the end of the bed.

  ‘You’d better bring me that box from the dressing table,’ she said.

  It was a reddish box and on the lid were carved two stylized figures, a man and a woman. Indian. Her mother opened it and tipped the contents of her jewellery on to the bedcover.

  ‘This is beautiful,’ she said and pushed her thumbs into the corners of the box below the hinges. The bottom of the box dropped like a jaw and two pieces of paper fell on to the sheet. ‘You see, on the lid are the lovers and underneath are their secrets.’

  The light outside had turned yellow. The sunlight strained against some dark centre like an old bruise. It screwed the pressure down in the room and the perspiration came up on their skins.

  ‘You’d better sit down,’ said her mother, and reached for her spectacles, which she held in front of her eyes without unfolding.

  ‘Is this going to be a shock?’ Anne asked.

  ‘Yes, it will be. I’m going to show you who your father was.’

  ‘You told me you didn’t have any photographs of him.’

  ‘I lied,’ she said, and handed over one of the pieces of paper from the box.

  On the back was written Joaquim Reis Leitão 1923. She turned it over. There was a photograph of a man in a light suit.

  ‘Is there something wrong with this photograph?’ asked Anne. ‘Or the light? Perhaps it’s just old.’

  ‘No, that’s what he looked like.’

  ‘But…he seems to be very dark-skinned.’

  ‘That’s right. He’s Indian.’

  ‘You said he was Portuguese.’

  ‘He was…partly. His father was a member of the Portuguese garrison, his mother was a Goan. Joaquim was a Catholic and a Portuguese national. His mother,’ she said, and shook her head, ‘his mother was stunning. You take after her, thank heaven. The father…well, he was a good man, so I understand, but beautiful?…Perhaps the Portuguese are different on their own turf.’

  ‘My father was an Indian.’

  ‘Half Indian.’

  Anne took the photograph to the window but the light was so bad she knelt by the bedside lamp trying to discern the features.

  ‘You look like the mother…lighter-skinned but…’

  Anne squeezed the picture as if it was flesh and she was trying to extract something, not a splinter, but a tincture of life.

  ‘So why couldn’t you stay? Was it the cholera?’

  ‘This was before the cholera.’

  ‘What was before the cholera?’

  Her mother dabbed her face and neck with the flannel.

  ‘It’s going to break soon,’ she said. ‘The weather.’

  ‘They did all die in the cholera outbreak, didn’t they?’

  ‘Both my parents died in the cholera outbreak but that wasn’t until 1924. This was in 1923.’

  ‘When you got married? I was born in 1924 so…’

  ‘We were never married. It didn’t happen like that.’

  The thunder rumbled way off in Tooting or Balham. The room was lit only by the bedside lamp which suddenly flickered and went off. The two women sat still in the ghastly light of the approaching storm.

  ‘Was this your confession?’

  ‘Yes. Father Harpur showed me his poem about his father afterwards. It was a great help for me. For the first time I managed to make sense of things…understand my stupid self.

  ‘I fell in love with Joaquim. Madly in love. I was completely crazy for him. I was seventeen. I didn’t know anything. I’d had this strict Catholic upbringing. The convent and then the mission. I knew nothing about boys…men. Joaquim was being trained by the Portuguese in medicine. My father got on well with the Portuguese. All Catholics together, I suppose. The Portuguese used to send the mission medicine and staff. One day they sent Joaquim. I was working as a nurse in the hospital at the time so I met him on his first day and everything I’d ever been taught, all my religious education, all my fear…it all went out of the window when I saw Joaquim.

  ‘It was physical. He was the most beautiful human I’d ever seen. Dark brown eyes with great long lashes and skin like sanded wood. I just wanted to touch him and feel the texture of him on the palm of my hand. He had beautiful hands, too. Hands that you could watch doing anything and they’d lull you. I’m banging on, I know, but it was an incredible thing for me at the time. To have this feeling inside of me of, of…I never know how to say this because it was too many things at once – certainty, beauty, joy. You know what Father Harpur said? “Like faith, you mean?” And that would have been it…if sex was allowed to come into faith.’

  ‘Sex,’ said Anne, the word falling out of her mouth, prickly, like a horse chestnut, which grew to the size of a sea mine in the room.

  ‘Yes. Sex,’ said her mother bluntly. ‘And before marriage, too. You’d have thought they’d only just invented that, the way they go on about it these days. Joaquim and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We had the opportunity in the mission hospital at night. We even had a bed. We were young and reckless. I tried to keep count of the days…tried to be careful, but we were both incapable. I got pregnant.’

  The thunder rolled nearer. The sound of the wooden tumbrel on a cobbled street was south of the Common now, the smell of rain already coming in through the windows. The pressure cracking. The electricity in the air fizzing.

  ‘That was a terrible day. Joaquim was away, back in Goa. I’d been praying to come on. My father couldn’t believe my sudden devotion. And one day it hit me. Two weeks after I should have had my period it came to me that this was it and I panicked. I lay in bed at night, my brain in a flat spin, trying to imagine myself standing in front of my father…you didn’t know my father. It was inconceivable to have
to tell him that I was pregnant and, not only that, I was pregnant by an Indian. I mean, they liked Joaquim very much. They loved the Indians but…mixed marriages. No. The Portuguese were different in that respect, they’ve always mixed with the locals in their colonies, but the British…a white British Catholic girl and a Goan. It wasn’t possible. It was against the laws of nature. No different to homosexuality in those days. So, I panicked. I made up a story. I invented this very detailed account of how I’d been raped and become pregnant.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘A man. A fabricated man. One who didn’t exist. It was easy to act it out. I mean, I was so damned upset anyway…almost mad at what I was having to go through.’

  ‘And Joaquim?’

  ‘He still wasn’t there. The Portuguese had sent another medical student for a couple of weeks. I was on my own. I was in a desperate state and I knew something had to be done. So I told my father I’d been raped, broke down and wept in front of him, fell at his feet. Literally, I was a heap on the floor. I cried until I retched. My father called the police. The local police was headed by a fellow called Longmartin. He was one of those fearsome, muscular types, quite small, wire-brush moustache and with a neck in a permanent state of rage. He came round and took my statement, the statement of my completely flawless story. He also spoke to my father. I don’t know what was discussed. I think perhaps they were asking my father whether he wanted it kept quiet in the district that his daughter had been raped. How open the investigation should be. I don’t know. What I did know was that once those words of mine were uttered, they changed everything. I don’t know where I got this from, my own mind, Father Harpur, a book…I don’t know. The fact is that something started with a lie can only beget other lies, like a bad bloodline it will continue through to its terrible end.’

  The wind thrashed through the trees, rattled the sash windows in their frames.

  ‘What did Joaquim say when you told him?’

  ‘There was nothing to be said. It was a fait accompli. He was racked with guilt that he’d brought this upon me…as if in some way I’d been unwilling in the whole affair. I’ve never seen anyone in such a torment of anguish. He was appalled that I’d had to take this stigma upon myself. The stigma of a defiled woman. He felt totally responsible. He wanted to go to my father. He wanted to take the blame.’

  ‘Oh, my God…and did he?’

  ‘You haven’t heard the half of it yet.’

  The first drops of rain hit the window. The smell of it on the hot tarmac filled the air. Thunder cracked overhead and lightning blitzed through the room. The net curtains billowed in the bay window and the roof took the full force of the colossal downpour.

  ‘The way it happened,’ her mother said, raising her voice over the roar of the rain, ‘was that the police caught somebody. Yes, there’s a crash course in colonial justice in this, too. They came to the house, Longmartin and two of his constables. They wanted me to identify someone. This was ten days after my supposed attack. I had myself under control by then, but when my father came to my room and told me I had to go with Longmartin, I went straight back into the terror. Of course my father said he’d go with me but Longmartin was a clever little bastard, that’s why he’d brought the two constables along with him. There was no room in the car. He wanted me on my own. I rode in the back with him and he told me what was going to happen. There would be a line-up of six men, all Indians. They would be standing under the light behind some mosquito netting and I would be in the dark, so I’d be able to see them but they couldn’t see me. I nodded through all this and then Longmartin started to say something else. He went from being the straightforward, almost brutally frank, police officer to somebody altogether quieter, more threatening, hopping backwards and forwards over the line of implication.

  ‘He said that he was glad that they’d been able to clear this matter up. They were just beginning to have second thoughts about what had happened because they hadn’t had the first glimmer of a clue. None of their informers had come back with anything except some rubbish about a Goan student at the mission. All the locals hate Goans, he said, because they’re Catholics. Little hints but with an accumulative weight. By the time we reached the police station I was convinced he knew my game, so when he whispered in my ear as I went in front of the line up: “Third from the end.” I didn’t hesitate. I walked the line and went straight back to the third man from the end, whom I’d never seen before in my life, and pointed him out.

  ‘Longmartin was very pleased. He took me straight home and handed me back to my father and said: “Very brave girl, your daughter, Mr Aspinall. Very courageous. Looked him in the eye and pointed him out. Very plucky, I must say.” I hung by his side, a broken, spineless creature, while he snapped me up into pieces with his savage little ironies. I even thought I heard derision in his voice. I went to bed and, when I wasn’t lying on my back staring sleepless into the mosquito net seeing that man’s face behind it, I was writhing about as if…as I had been before they took this damned tumour out.’

  ‘So Joaquim wasn’t involved in the end.’

  ‘Things were already going wrong in India. I know it was another quarter of a century before the handover but colonial rule was already in trouble even then. It had only been four years since that terrible business in Amritsar when General Dyer machine-gunned all those unarmed demonstrators. There was unrest everywhere. The man I’d pointed out was a leader of one of the local Hindu resistance militias. Longmartin had wanted him for years. When the Indians heard the charge against their man, they rioted and marched on the mission, but Longmartin was well prepared. The troops stepped in and broke it all up.

  ‘Joaquim couldn’t stand it. Everything had gone to dust. Our physical desire for each other had vanished. We could hardly bear to be in the same room as each other because we were so tormented by the developments. He saw it all as his fault. He was six years older than me and should have known better etcetera, etcetera. Now a man was going to hang in all probability because of him. He was outraged at the injustice. He said it would never have happened in Goa. He demanded to know my lie…how I’d said the rape had occurred. And he was fierce about it, Andrea, totally frightening. I told him everything and he handed himself in to Longmartin, admitted to raping the English girl, gave him my story verbatim.’

  ‘And Longmartin accepted it?’

  ‘I imagine Longmartin was furious. It was probably the one thing he hadn’t anticipated. If you’re ignoble yourself you can’t foresee another’s nobility. I know he would have resisted it strongly. I don’t know what Joaquim said to persuade him but I think he must have scared him, given him a few ideas about how bad the rioting could get if the Hindus had categoric proof of their man’s innocence. The end of it was that the Hindu leader was released and Joaquim was…Joaquim…’

  Her mother was suddenly struggling against the unseen torment. She lay back, head thrown against the bedstead, her mouth wide, black and gaping, her shoulders convulsing with each chest-wrenching hack. She collapsed to her side. Anne sat next to her, put a hand to her shoulder, remembered that night when she was a child, her mother after the party sobbing to herself. Gradually the bird-like body underneath her calmed, the eyes opened and stared blankly into the room.

  ‘Joaquim died in police custody,’ she said. ‘The official line was that he “committed suicide”, hanged himself from the bars of his cell. Another version was that Longmartin was punishing him for ruining his little plan and he overdid it. As far as everybody was concerned, not just my parents and the people at the mission, but the whole town, Hindus and Muslims alike, justice had been done. Ten days later I was put on a ship to England. It was my peculiar fate that I, as the instigator of the whole rotten business, was to survive all of them. Thousands died in the cholera outbreak the following year including my parents, the Hindu resistance leader and Longmartin. As a nurse in the hospital my chances would not have been good. As it was I became a living monument to my own moral cowardi
ce. And Joaquim, the most honourable of men, died…reviled by everyone…even his father wouldn’t collect the body and he was buried in an untouchables’ grave on the outskirts of town.’

  The rain moved off. The air blown into the room was cool and clear and brought with it the freshness of wet earth and mown grass. Her mother strained to sit up. Anne propped her up on the pillows. In her hand was the other piece of paper from the box.

  ‘So that was my tale full of sound and fury. Shakespeare was right. It all comes to nought in the end. The slate is constantly wiped clean,’ she said, and handed Anne a letter. ‘This was the first, last and only letter he wrote to me…from jail. One of the Hindu leader’s men brought it to me. Read it. Read it out loud for me.’

  Dear Audrey,

  I feel clean for the first time in many days. My body is filthy, they don’t let me wash, but inside I am scrubbed clean, the walls newly white-washed and the sun bright against them so that I can hardly bear to look. I am happy in the same way that I was happy when I was a small boy.

  You must believe me when I tell you that what I did was for the best. What would have become of our love with that man’s death between us? Better that we should hold it as something that was good and true although not to be. I know in these short lines that I might not be able to persuade you that none of what has happened is your fault. I am suffering the consequences of my own mistakes. You must sail away from here into the rest of your life with a clear mind and the knowledge that you have been my only true love.

  Joaquim

  ‘It’s not an excuse,’ her mother said, ‘but an explanation.’

  Chapter 29

  Autumn 1968, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.