The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘You don’t know me, do you?’

  ‘Should I?

  ‘You should…we were lovers once. Don’t you remember? We spent a night together in Lisbon,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I would have remembered that.’

  ‘We did,’ he said, ‘…on paper.’

  ‘Jim Wallis,’ she said.

  They kissed on both cheeks.

  ‘Fat and bald,’ he said. ‘I didn’t age well. You look just the same.’

  ‘Give or take a crow’s foot.’

  ‘You married,’ he said, ‘just after they moved me out.’

  ‘Yes. Are you…yet?’

  ‘I’m on my second now. Spent too much time in Berlin to keep my first. But I’m in London these days. Any children?’

  ‘A boy. Julião.’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No. He’s a soldier…in Africa.’

  ‘Ah yes, with his father.’

  ‘You knew that much.’

  ‘I was always interested, Anne,’ he said. ‘And not just on paper.’

  ‘But now you’re married…again.’

  ‘Yes, two children from the last marriage. One of each.’

  ‘And you knew my mother.’

  ‘We all knew Audrey. Very important to be on the right side of Audrey, you know, when you’re putting through your expenses and that. Bit of a stickler, she was. Never let it interfere, though. After the grilling there was always a drink down the pub. Yes, we were regulars at The French in Soho, she and I. Very sad. Going to miss her. We’ll all miss her. Especially Dickie.’

  ‘Dickie?’

  ‘Surprised he didn’t come back for a snort. Dickie Rose.’

  ‘You mean Richard Rose?’

  ‘Lui-même. You remember, took over from Sutherland when he blew up that time in Lisbon in ‘44. Dickie’s heading for the high table now. Had a bit of a clearout after Kim left us in ‘63. Bad year that, with Profumo and all. Given him a clear street though. It’ll be Sir Dickie before long and we’ll all have to bow and scrape.’

  ‘Richard Rose was a friend of my mother’s?’ she said, incredulous.

  ‘Oh yes, Audrey had a knack of picking out the high-flyers. Big fan of Kim’s, too. Bloody mortified when he pushed off. We all were. Smoke?’

  He offered a B&H, lit it with a petrol lighter. They smoked and Wallis helped himself to three sandwiches stacked on top of each other.

  ‘Shouldn’t really,’ he said. ‘Bread’s the killer for me. Got any plans, Anne, or is it Andrea?’

  ‘It’s still Anne.’

  ‘Back to Lisboa?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I did my bit in Angola and Mozambique. I’m not doing it in Guiné with both of them fighting.’

  ‘Quite understand. Don’t know what they’re doing there in the first place. Mad war. Bad war. Can’t afford it. Can’t win it. Best chuck it all in, you ask me. I mean, what’s it all worth? Peanuts. Peanuts and cocoa…some door mats. Can’t go throwing your money after that sort of thing. Pull out, Doc, that’s what I say, pull out. The darkies’ll be at each other’s throats in minutes. Look at Biafra.’

  ‘I thought I’d try and do some research at Cambridge.’

  ‘Still doing your sums?’

  ‘I’ve graduated in long division now, Jim.’

  ‘Well done. Isn’t it all about Game Theory these days? Strategy. How to keep the Russian balls in a vice. That sort of thing.’

  ‘You should be a lecturer, Jim. Bring strategic thinking down to earth.’

  ‘Tried it. Got pelted by the students at the LSE. Called me a fascist. They had a sit-in before my next lecture and that was it. Bloody long-haired…they got somebody to come in and talk to them about disarmament instead. Don’t know how the bloody layabouts learn anything.’

  ‘You’re sounding like a boiled colonel from Bagshot.’

  He wheezed a laugh through his cigarette smoke.

  ‘We’re a dying breed,’ he said, ‘but we’re needed. Have you seen a picture of Brezhnev? D’you think he’s going to listen to someone wearing an Afghan, smoking pot and burning joss sticks? Actually I preferred Khrushchev. He said things, you know, blinked occasionally.’

  ‘You only liked Khrushchev,’ said a voice from the corridor, ‘because you’ve got the same Philistine taste in art.’

  ‘Ah, Dickie. Wondered where you’d got to. Just said to Anne here, unusual of you not to come back for a stiffener.’

  Richard Rose had his greyish hair combed back with tonic. His eyes were still bright and his full lips twitched as if there was the prospect of a kiss. They shook hands. He brushed imaginary lint of his dark blue suit.

  ‘What was it Khrushchev said about modern art, Jim, that you so wholeheartedly agreed with?’

  ‘The lashings of a donkey’s tail,’ said Jim, in cod Yorkshire.

  ‘Pure peasant. Potato farmer, no, shire horse. That was Mr K.’

  ‘Drink, Mr Rose?’ asked Anne, keen to get away from him.

  ‘I’ll fetch,’ said Wallis. ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘Pinkers, I think, if you’ve got it.’

  ‘The angostura’s out there,’ she said, annoyed with Wallis.

  ‘My condolences, Anne,’ said Rose, smoothly. ‘Very fine woman, your mother. Tremendous. When she retired she left an unfillable gap.’

  ‘I don’t think she ever thought her services were that indispensable.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but she gave style to her work, that’s what’s irreplaceable. Conscientious, severe even, but a great sport, too, terrific fun.’

  They ran through the same question and answer exchange as she had with Wallis. That Rose was still unmarried was all the information he parted with.

  ‘Who did you say you were talking to at Cambridge?’ asked Rose.

  ‘I didn’t, but his name is Louis Greig.’

  ‘What’s his game?’

  ‘I’m not sure any more. It used to be Game Theory back in the fifties and early sixties but I think he’s moved over…’

  ‘Ah yes, come to think of it his name has appeared here and there. Strategist. Think-tank bod.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘He was at RAND over in California for a while in the fifties,’ said Rose, confirming it to himself. ‘Research and Development, know what I mean?’

  ‘That must have been after he finished his doctoral thesis at Princeton.’

  ‘He’s not a Yank, is he?’

  ‘Eton and Cambridge.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Rose, running aground on Anne’s frosty shores.

  Wallis turned up with the pink gin.

  ‘To Lisbon station,’ said Wallis, raising his glass.

  ‘The good old days,’ said Rose. ‘My…we were all innocent then.’

  ‘Here’s another from the 1944 team,’ said Wallis. ‘This really is Lisbon station now.’

  A man’s hand thrust a pipe between the two men’s shoulders and struggled through the gap between. He kissed her on both cheeks before she had time to take him in. He held her shoulders at arm’s length and looked her up and down like an uncle.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Meredith Cardew, ‘so terribly sorry, Anne. Shock for us all, wasn’t it, Dickie, when she called us back in July. Brave woman. My God, I don’t think I could have taken it as well as she did.’

  He released her but kept an arm around her shoulder as if she were his protégée.

  ‘Quite a little reunion,’ said Rose. ‘We’re only missing Sutherland.’

  ‘Poor chap,’ said Cardew.

  ‘Pinkers, Merry?’ asked Wallis.

  ‘I should say.’

  ‘How’s Dorothy?’ Anne asked Cardew.

  They were all gone by two in the afternoon. Wallis was the last to leave. He was supporting Peggy White, assistant Banking, who’d neglected the sandwiches and was paying heavily for the seven pink gins on an empty stomach. Anne cleaned up the house and sat at the kitchen table thinking about W
allis and Rose, how the two men, in their own way, had looked her over, sized her up for something. Rose couldn’t be thinking of a job, not given their mutual dislike, but that was how it had felt. Wallis? Maybe Wallis was just looking for an affair. Bored with wife number two already. It seemed that family life was going to the dogs in England. No more sweating in the dark about getting pregnant. You just took the Pill and did what the hell you liked. Salazar would die rather than allow the Pill, Franco too. Her thoughts rushed down that trail until she arrived at her own family, split up, thousands of miles apart, the men fighting, and she found herself crying, alone in her big house, her mother’s clothes already gone to the Oxfam shop, the worms already nosing against the smooth varnish of the coffin.

  Chapter 30

  7th September 1968, England.

  Anne took the train up to Cambridge. She bought a newspaper at the station and for once reading the Guardian made her happy. On the first page of the foreign news section was an article about Dr Salazar, who’d been rushed to the Cruz Vermelha Hospital in Lisbon after suffering a collapse. A doctor announced later that an intercranial subdural haematoma had been found, and she smiled at how typically Portuguese that was, they could never have just said a blood clot on the brain. The article finished with a statement from a consultant brain surgeon who said that the Head of State would have to undergo an operation to remove the clot.

  The sun broke through the clouds and streamed into the railway carriage. Anne lit a celebratory cigarette and mentally toasted the end of the fascist régime and its colonial wars in Africa.

  Louis Greig had rooms in Trinity College overlooking the quad. He smoked cigars, a Swiss brand called Villiger. Anne smelt them from the bottom of the stairs and imagined a place in a state of controlled chaos, full of papers and books filed only in the occupant’s mind. His rooms, though, were unexpectedly tidy. There was no loose paper. A section of the bookshelves was stacked with ring-bound notebooks, several hundred of them, and they were filed in bunches tied with different-coloured ribbons. Greig had not succumbed to the usual sartorial eccentricities of the maths don, such as socks and sandals with shiny grey trousers that ended above the ankle, a tweed jacket with elbow patches and a tie featuring a real bacon and egg motif. He was bald, but his remaining hair was cut close to his head, which was big and square. His body was solid, strong and fatless. From the way his shoulders and chest were packed into his suit jacket he appeared to be a regular at some sort of heavy physical exercise.

  He was lounging back in his chair with a pair of black brogues up on the corner of the desk when she came in. By the time she’d closed the door, he’d leapt to his feet, skirted the desk and was behind her, a dark presence. She held out a hand. His felt hard and calloused like a farmer’s. He kissed her knuckle. She smelt a faint cologne mingled with the cigar tobacco. He didn’t let go of the hand but led her round and lowered her into a leather sofa. He sat opposite her on the front lip of an armchair. Close up she put him somewhere in his early fifties, but well taken care of.

  ‘João Ribeiro did say you were exceptional, although he omitted to say in his letter that it was in a most evident way, too.’

  ‘There were things he didn’t tell me about you as well,’ she said, batting his flattery off into the room. ‘How you met, for instance.’

  ‘Oh, João came here for a symposium on primes, I think. Then I went to Lisbon before I headed off to Princeton and gave a short series of lectures on Diophantine Equations.’

  His eyes didn’t leave her face. His hands, clasped together, fingers steepled, pointed at her. His head was sunk into his muscled shoulders and he’d dug his heels into the base of the armchair as if he was about to launch himself, dive into her. A metallic excitement uncoiled high in her stomach. She hadn’t felt such brazen interest for more than twenty years. She had difficulty trapping questions long enough in her mind to ask them.

  ‘Somebody I met the other day thought you’d been at RAND,’ she said.

  ‘I was. Two years. Bit of a hothouse that, all those brains steaming away under one roof…not totally dissimilar to working at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing during the war. That delayed my doctoral thesis, which was why I ended up in Princeton in the mid fifties. Then RAND…Santa Monica, you know, there’s only two types of weather on the West Coast. Sun and fog. I missed my seasons. Nothing like an iron-hard frost and weak sunshine behind bare trees.’

  ‘I missed the leafy summers and the smell of mown grass.’

  ‘Who was it, who said I’d been at RAND?’

  ‘Someone at my mother’s funeral, I don’t remember who.’

  ‘I’m sorry. João didn’t mention that.’

  ‘I haven’t told him yet.’

  ‘He’s been having a miserable time of it, João. Reading between the lines of his letter.’

  ‘Maybe things will get better now. Did you read the news today?’

  ‘About Salazar, yes. They say he won’t be able to work again.’

  ‘That might be good news for me, too,’ she said, and sensed her reluctance, registered that first twitch of guilt.

  ‘Oh you mean your husband and son fighting out in Guiné, yes, João said that you only might come…but here you are, so…’

  They talked maths for what seemed like a short time because they got lost in the exchange. Greig was aggressive, starting most of his counter arguments with the words: ‘That’s trivial,’ but Anne was an elusive opponent who, as soon as he’d nailed her down, tantalized him with another alluring possibility. By the end they’d hammered out a brief for a research paper. Greig said he would make inquiries about a place for her at one of the women’s colleges.

  She caught the train back to London and sat in a full carriage of American tourists who’d clearly journeyed down from Scotland and had thought that plaid made great jackets. Black Watch, yes, maybe, but Macleod? She couldn’t believe them and suddenly felt like a staring hick. She went out into the corridor to smoke a cigarette and let her mind get crowded out by Louis Greig’s physical presence, their intellectual connection and the smell of his cigars still on her coat. She put her face out of the window, her back to the wind so that her long black hair rushed past her face, blinkering her vision. The silver rails streamed out of the back of the train to Cambridge and she felt that tug again. She turned her face into the wind, the full blast of it too much to bear so that tears started in her eyes. Her hair flew behind in a thick lash and she was laughing at her life picking up speed, at the idea of events rushing towards her. Things, finally, happening.

  The next day it rained and she sat in the dungeon dark of the Clapham house waiting for the telephone to ring, which it didn’t. In the evening the rain stopped and sodden sunshine lapped into the room. She walked to her mother’s grave and found that two expensive wreaths had been laid amongst the other bouquets – no names on them, only that of the florist’s in Pimlico. She wandered amongst the other stones, her heels sticking in the turf, and took tea in a coffee house in Clapham Old Town. She ate cake and thought she might have imagined the attraction between them, overdecorated it in her mind. He was probably married. The lack of a wedding band meant little in England. She turned her own ring which wouldn’t slip over her knuckle any more. Why would he be interested in her when there were all these sexually revolutionized twenty-two-year-olds on campus? She walked back home, skidding on the mash of autumn leaves and soggy litter.

  The telephone was ringing as she opened the door and the five short steps to it made her breathless. Greig told her that he’d had the go-ahead from the head of the maths department, that he’d arranged a postgrad place at Girton, that application forms were being sent and accommodation was being looked into. He’d expect her to be up by the beginning of October.

  She drank gin and tonic that night before supper and enjoyed one of Rawly’s Pomerols with a pair of lamb chops. She went to bed drunk and woke up repentant.

  London, still swinging in the sixties, rejuvenated her – the wi
ld fashions, the incredible variety of music after Portugal’s monotony, the sheer amount of stuff to buy. She bought winter clothes, went to Biba, wore jeans for the first time, smoked Gitanes, wondered why her mother had an entire collection of Herb Albert and his Tijuana Brass and ate her first hamburger at a place called a Wimpy Bar. It tasted like hell in a cotton wool bun. She did some practical things too, like getting the estate agents in to rent out the house on short company lets.

  The application forms for the university arrived on the same day as a letter from João Ribeiro. The letter had been opened and read by the censors in Portugal, the tip of the flap stuck back down with glue. It was written in one of their codes and she had to dig out a copy of Fernando Pessoa’s collected poems from the reference library to translate it.

  Dear Anne,

  You will have heard our good news by now but you will also, no doubt, have seen from the state of this envelope that, whilst the leader of the Estado Novo languishes brainless in hospital, his security measures are still firmly in place. We hoped for much but there has been no change. The government is now in the hands of Marcelo Caetano, who is more approachable than our old friend but, in getting the top job, will now find how much he owes to his pals in big business, the Church and the military. Nothing, I fear, will change. In fact, his first speech was directed at the ultra-right in which he said that the Portuguese, who have grown accustomed to being ruled by a genius, must now adapt to the government of common men. He’s a donkey to Salazar’s stallion and all we will get from him is a sterile old mule. I hope I am wrong. I hope the colonial wars end tomorrow and that the Portuguese can take their place among the civilized people of Europe.