The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  The days shortened inch by inch towards the end of summer. The number of ‘bad days’ increased. If Audrey got out of bed it was only for a few hours in the afternoon. They spoke in the lucid moments before the pain took hold and the morphine smothered it.

  Anne made a study in the room next to her mother’s, put a desk in front of the window with one of her many photographs of Julião at one corner and read Number Theory books during the day and Jane Austen at night. When she wasn’t reading she was thinking and smoking and watching the way the smoke was drawn up through the lampshade and into the dark.

  One afternoon there were kids playing in the street, all gathered around one boy who was explaining the rules, and she saw herself years earlier looking out on to the lawn in Estoril at Julião and his friends. He’d only been eight years old and yet all the boys looked up to him, faces rapt with admiration, and she could only think of Julius and his last letter from the Kessel at Stalingrad. His men. It had started an ache in her chest. It was during the time they were launching O Camponês and she realized then that Julião was a passion she could have allowed herself, a cleaner, warmer passion than the politics she’d chosen, except it was a passion she didn’t feel she deserved and it was one she feared, too. She could never rid herself of that sense of a payment due. She photographed Julião all the time, despite some dim memory telling her that primitive people thought that it was a theft of the soul. To her it had been a constant confirmation of his existence but now, fingering the frame on the corner of her desk, she wondered if it was her way of loving him at a distance.

  She didn’t sleep much in this period. Her mother would call out at all times of night and Anne would sit with her until she drifted off again. They covered old ground, her mother added detail to incomplete pictures.

  The great aunt who, on Audrey’s parents’ death, had inherited and lived in the Clapham house with her niece and the illegitimate child, had died and left it all to Audrey when Anne was barely seven years old. Audrey had been working in Whitehall as a secretary for five years. The job had been arranged for her by her aunt and when she died it meant there was no one to look after the child, which was why Anne was sent to the nuns early.

  ‘It was your Great Aunt, my Aunt G, G for Gladys, who started this régime of discipline. She was strict with both of us and I just carried it on. It wasn’t me at all but it was a useful persona to hide behind.’

  ‘What were you hiding from?’

  ‘Your curiosity,’ she said. ‘My own guilt. I was quite different at work. I think I was seen as a bit of a good-time girl, always on for a drink, always ready for a party. I learned how to laugh. A loud laugh is very useful in England.’

  ‘You must have had…offers.’

  ‘Of course, but I didn’t want anybody getting too close. Rawlinson was perfect. I have to say, there was something about his missing leg that attracted me. I couldn’t fathom it at the time, especially as the only man I’d ever known had been physically perfect. It occurred to me only the other day that this was what I thought I deserved. I didn’t want the full commitment so I didn’t go after the whole man. I certainly wasn’t his only girlfriend, either.’

  ‘I followed him to Flood Street.’

  ‘That was his wife. They didn’t do much together. She never knew about the wine even. Terrible…the secrets, aren’t they? We were bloody masters, Rawly and I. It’s funny how they know, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Company. Once the war got going I was transferred into the Ministry of Economic Warfare. I was good with numbers…only numbers, mind, not your hieroglyphics. Secretaries in those days did most of the work and it was all top-secret stuff. They liked me. And when they moved Section V up from St Albans to Ryder Street they sent me over there to keep an eye on the money.’

  ‘What was Section V?’

  ‘Counter Intelligence. And you know who was running it? Kim Philby. Yes, Philby was there from the beginning. I couldn’t believe it when he fled to Moscow. 1963. It was a cold day. January some time.’

  ‘You were talking about how they know.’

  ‘Yes. How they know the ones who can keep a secret.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They find the ones who’ve already got a secret to keep. I’d be useless now. Thrown it all away. Tell anybody anything, me. They’d call me Blabbermouth Aspinall and give me my cards.’

  ‘And you were still working for the Company after you retired?’

  ‘Oh yes, still in banking. You’ll see them all at the funeral…except him.’

  ‘You liked Philby?’

  ‘Everybody did. Great charmer.’

  Audrey suddenly directed her to the chest of drawers, left-hand side, under the bras and knickers, to a small leather box. Inside was a medal on a length of ribbon.

  ‘That’s my gong,’ said Audrey. ‘My OBE.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘My great triumph!’ she said, punching the air weakly. ‘Not much of one after forty years’ service.’

  ‘I’d liked to have known.’

  ‘Now, yes. Now that we’re talking,’ she said. ‘You know, it wasn’t just because of Rawly that I sent you away. I did want you to be safe but…I wanted you out of my sight, too. You were a constant reminder of my weakness, my cowardice. You remember I couldn’t stand the heat either. It brought back India. Terrible headaches.’

  That night Anne sat even longer at her desk, the Jane Austen open but unread in front of her, just her own still reflection in the dark glass of the window pane and the trail of smoke rippling from the ashtray. After the afternoon’s revelations she was thinking of her own secret life, which had continued after she graduated from Lisbon University with an offer from João Ribeiro to do a postgrad thesis on the new hot topic – Game Theory.

  She’d snatched at the chance. Julião, under Luís’s constant supervision, was becoming more embroiled in his young male world and drifting further from her already weakening orbit. Two years later she was stunned and a little sickened when he announced that he’d joined the boy’s brigade, Mocidade, without asking her. To Anne, Mocidade was no better than the Hitler Jugend and it was only João Ribeiro who was able to mollify her, by saying it was a completely natural thing for a boy to want to do, to go off walking and camping in the hills with his friends.

  It was then that the secret work had become even more important to her. She knew it was irrational but she saw Julião’s actions as defiance, even, God help us, betrayal. The boy spent all his time with Luís, he was a brilliant sportsman and horseman, he was good at maths but not brilliant and he had a complete blindspot for physics. All that, and his pride in the Mocidade uniform, made her think that her son was all Almeida, that there wasn’t a drop of Voss left in him.

  It had come to her one day, as she was taking the train into Lisbon and looking at the faces in the carriage, that it was her secret life that made her different. She knew it brought her excitement but it was at that moment that she began to think it was bringing meaning, too. She lived for her document encryption sessions with João Ribeiro, the long meandering walks to the safe houses and secret printing presses of O Camponês and Avante, the role-playing sessions, the whole mechanics of the clandestine struggle.

  For her husband she felt occasional affection, for her son – unconditional, if distant, love, for her mathematics –an objective, intellectual interest, and for her secret work – a deep need, an addiction stronger than the cigarettes she smoked end to end with João Ribeiro and the caffeine in the coffee they drank. It was what defined her.

  She even recalled lying in bed one night next to Luís’s snoring and feeling suddenly sufficient, enclosed, whole. She was thinking that guilt was being assuaged. Her secret work for social justice was an endless ‘Hail Mary’, penance for her self-confessed sins. It was part of the process of purification. And just as she arrived at this point she’d shaken the nonsense out of her head. She was a communist, an atheist – it had been
muddled thinking.

  She replenished her glass of brandy, found another packet of cigarettes and couldn’t help immersing herself in the real glory years. In 1959 João Ribeiro and Anne planned what became, a year later, the brilliant and successful escape of their leader Alvaro Cunhal from the Peniche prison in the north of Portugal. They followed this with an even more outrageous scheme which would bring the attention of the world to the suffering of the Portuguese people. In January 1961 a group of Portuguese communists hijacked the cruise liner Santa Maria in the Caribbean. She referred to those two operations as the glory years but, looking back on it, they’d been short-lived. That was the high point of João Ribeiro’s fame within the PCP. It was downhill after that. Members of the central committee became uncomfortable with his success and, when there followed a number of inexplicable arrests of communist cadres, suspicion seemed to fall automatically on João Ribeiro and his foreign assistant. João was sidelined into dull Party work but heard there was a plot to have Anne deported. He split away from her, told her to stay at home and destroy anything that could compromise her with PIDE.

  Anne spent a month pacing the drawing room of the house in Estoril, smoking severely, waiting for the knock. Luís was away on exercise almost constantly. The knock never came. Her exit from the resistance stage arrived when Angola blew up in February 1961 and Luís and his regiment were sent out to quell the rebellion. Six months later, when the initial crisis was over and the fighting contained in the north of the country, she’d arrived by boat in Luanda with a sixteen-year-old Julião.

  She sat back from the desk, turning the tumbler of brandy in her hands. She’d expected more from her memories. She’d expected some kind of emotional intensity to come with them but, as when she’d woken up from the nightmare back in Lisbon, it had come back to her as newsreel. She looked in on her mother who was fast asleep, the air rushing into her gaping mouth, and realized that she’d been more replenished in a matter of weeks than she had been by two decades of living.

  Before the end of August the weather changed. A chill wind blew in from the north-east and summer was over. Audrey remained in bed all day, sailing on morphine. She muttered to herself, babbled lines of poetry while kids screamed outside and a football boomed against a car. A man, cross, roared at them and after a pause a small voice piped up:

  ‘Can we have our ball back?’

  ‘No, you bloody can’t.’

  Anne sat with her mother, holding her hand most of the day, squeezing it like a pulse, mulling over those endless days spent on the verandah in Angola while Luís fought the rebels and Julião played war in the garden. How it had all been leading to what she saw at the time as Julião’s next betrayal, which was his dramatic announcement in 1963 on his eighteenth birthday that he’d been accepted by the Military Academy for Officer’s Training. Why did she still think of it as betrayal? As if she’d spent years developing his political consciousness. A crack opened up in her mind and she’d just got her eye to it, her eye to a small chink of truth, when her mother suddenly said:

  ‘You never told me about Karl Voss.’

  It jolted her, whipped her head round to her mother, whose eyes were closed, her breath baffling and ricocheting in her throat.

  ‘Mother?’ she asked, but there was no reply.

  Now there was regret at a chance missed. Her mother, working in Section V, must have seen the progress reports, must have read about her indiscretion with their double agent, the military attaché of the German Legation. In all their time together Anne hadn’t spoken about Karl Voss and she’d had no intention of doing so. This was her mother’s time, her mother’s confessional. Earlier Audrey had urged her to go to Father Harpur several times. Anne even liked Father Harpur but she wasn’t going to see him because she knew what he’d ask of her. He would compel her to tell Luís and Julião the truth and, whilst she could live with Luís’s contempt, she would not be able to bear Julião’s disdain. Now she thought that she should have told her mother, that it wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t have made any demands. She would have listened and taken the secret to the grave with her.

  She wrote a letter to a friend of João Ribeiro’s, a mathematics professor at Cambridge called Louis Greig. His name and address had been given to her on her last afternoon in Lisbon while she’d put into action a half-measure, as she’d called it. She’d given João Ribeiro a wooden box from Angola containing the Voss family photograph and letters for safe-keeping. She didn’t want Luís to come across them if it ever came to him clearing her out of his life.

  Louis Greig replied to her letter by return, urging her to visit. She responded, telling him about her mother but also jotting down some of her recent ideas and asking if there were any course possibilities, not in her doctoral thesis subject, Game Theory, which was a dead duck by now, but more in the line of pure maths. He wrote back saying that João Ribeiro had made contact and that there were definite possibilities for someone of her calibre. It was then that she began to see her half-measure as a full one and asked herself if she was ever going back to Portugal.

  When she’d gone back to Lisbon in the past, from the various African wars, she’d gone back as the same person to find everything changed. Arriving back from Angola in 1964 she’d found the whole resistance movement stalled. Alvaro Cunhal had gone to the Soviet Union. João Ribeiro had spent two years in prison, his wife had died, he’d lost his job at the university and was now living in a single room in the Bairro Alto on very little money. The PCP had shunned him and he’d told her it was all over.

  As it happened, she hadn’t had much time to take it all in because the Mozambique rebellion started and Luís, with all his experience, was immediately posted to Lourenço Marques. It was in that tactically more brutal war that she and Luís began to fall apart. The Mozambique commander introduced techniques used by the British in Malaya and the Americans in Vietnam, giving the locals a stark choice – co-operate or face unrelenting suffering and death. News of the atrocities reached Anne in the army compound. She had pointless, violent rows with Luís. She threw things at him. She taunted him about the justice of the colonial wars, whether wars designed to maintain Salazar as an emperor were fit wars for his son. Luís spent more time in the mess. Anne drank cheap brandy and fulminated on the verandah.

  She remembered the rage of that time as she sat with her first gin and tonic of the evening, with Louis Greig’s reply on the desk in front of her, and knew she wasn’t going back to that. She’d made the break. She’d had all that time to change, sitting on verandahs in Africa, but it had taken these few weeks with her mother, in the middle of a city striding into the future, to shrug off half a lifetime’s inertia.

  On 30th August she sat with her mother for the last time. Father Harpur had given her the Last Rites. She hadn’t spoken a coherent word for twenty-four hours and it was clear the end was coming. At 2.00 a.m. Anne couldn’t stay awake any longer. She stood to leave. Her mother’s hand tightened and her eyes sprang open.

  ‘They will come for you,’ she said. ‘But you must not go with them.’

  Her eyes shut. Anne checked her pulse, shuddering at the ideas behind her mother’s lurid visions. She was still there, breathing shallowly. Anne went to bed and overslept until midday. She woke up groggy, with her face crushed and creased. Her mother’s room seemed more silent than usual and she knew there was nobody living beyond her door.

  Her mother lay on her back, eyes closed, one arm out on the bedclothes. The slightly decaying lilies brought by Father Harpur from his church could not mask the odour of life’s fluids curdling. Her face was quite cold. Anne looked at the body with a total absence of grief and realized the body meant nothing to her, that this was something that could be put in the ground.

  She called the doctor and Father Harpur. She made herself coffee and smoked a cigarette in the kitchen. The doctor came and pronounced her dead and wrote out the death certificate. Father Harpur called a funeral director and stayed until tea, when
the men came and removed the body. He left saying he would give a Mass for her mother the following morning. She went up to her mother’s room after they’d gone. The bed was made. Audrey’s slippers, swollen by the shape of her feet, lay beside the bed and it was that which reminded Anne of her loss.

  The funeral was held on a cold, wind-whipped day. She’d followed her mother’s instructions that a large party was to be held afterwards. The house was stocked with sherry, gin and whisky and she’d made a hundred sandwiches by dawn. She was still stunned by the extent of her mother’s legacy, which included the Clapham house and a little over fifty thousand pounds in cash and investments. The solicitor said she never touched any of the capital left by her aunt. He also gave her a key to a safe-deposit box, number 718, held at the Arab Bank on the Edgware Road.

  In the church she sat alone in her pew. Father Harpur gave a moving sermon about service to God, one’s country and oneself. Afterwards, as the congregation converged on the grave site, Anne felt that unmistakable tug of the silver thread. As the men and women and a few older children moved through the old stones towards the dark oblong hole, she suddenly felt part of the race. This is what we humans do. We live and we die. The living salute the dead, however small the life, because we have all trodden the same hard track and know its difficulties. We will all go this way, into the ground or the air, president or pauper, and we will have all succeeded in one thing.

  As they lowered the coffin it began to rain, as if on cue. Umbrellas exploded overhead, droplets formed on the varnished wood. Father Harpur said the blessing. Anne threw the first handful of soil and remembered something, but incorrectly, ‘In your end was my beginning.’

  Back at the house she began to see faces, rather than heavy coats and hats. They introduced themselves: Peggy White – assistant in Banking. Dennis Broadbent – Archives. Maude West – Library. Occasionally people just gave a name and she knew not to pursue it further. All the time one man kept finding his way into the corner of her eye. A fat, balding man. Someone waiting for his moment. Anne went into the kitchen for more sandwiches. He followed her, stood in the doorway, brushing the strands of hair across his bald pate with his hand.