The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘But after McCarthy’s witch hunts and anyway he’s always been…safe.’

  ‘His wealth, you mean.’

  ‘His father owns a few thousand hectares of Scotland and is a Conservative MP, who I think was even in the shadow cabinet for a while. Louis went to Eton and never bothered with politics as an undergraduate. He kept himself clean and his eye on the larger game.’

  ‘What about those lectures he gave here?’ she asked. ‘You, João Ribeiro, renowned communist, Head of Maths, must have invited him?’

  ‘Me? No. That was the beauty of it. Dr Salazar invited him. Louis’s father had business interests in Porto. Wine, I think. Connections were made, the invitation given. Louis was delighted. It looked like cast iron on his CV.’

  ‘And you and he talked.’

  ‘I was looking after him.’

  ‘So he knew about you?’

  ‘At his level the Communist Party is global.’

  In the morning she sat outside Café Suiça in the Rossio square, taking a coffee and a last pastel de nata for what she thought would be a long time. Beggars nagged at her table – a man with no hands and his pocket held open with a stick, a woman with one side of her face burned, barefoot kids swatted away by waiters. She paid for her coffee and went to a street of jewellers nearby and had her wedding band sawn off. The jeweller weighed it for her and paid her cash. She went back to the Rossio, distributed the money around the beggars, got into a taxi and left with a flight of pigeons for the airport.

  The plane taxied to the end of the runway. As the engines built up power she waited for her favourite moment except that, as they were throttling up, she felt a rising surge of panic instead. She was terrified by the juddering of the plane’s structure as it hurtled down the runway, had to close her eyes and fight the panic back down her throat as the wheels left the ground. The sense of nothing under her feet had never occurred to her before but now, as the plane powered into a steep climb, she felt powerless, rigid with fear at the approaching moment, when God might give up the pretence, let them drop from the sky and she would die in the company of strangers, unknown and unloved. They levelled out. A stewardess walked the aisle. The No Smoking light went out and Anne fought her way into her bag for her stalwart supporters.

  Back in London Wallis came round for a drink on his own. He had a passport in the name of Andrea Aspinall, a national insurance number, everything she would need. They talked about Lisbon. He looked at the red dent left on her finger by the missing wedding band. Andrea steered the conversation round to his wife.

  ‘She’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘We get on, you know. She’s self-sufficient, too. Doesn’t need me around all the time. Don’t have to worry about her at parties.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘Don’t like them clingy, Anne. Sorry, Andrea. Bit of space, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘To play the field?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose that’s what I mean. Not that I have much luck these days.’

  ‘Did you ever have any luck with that French songbird in Lisbon?’

  ‘Everybody had luck with her except me,’ he said, and rubbed his money fingers. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Maybe you wear your heart on your sleeve, Jim.’

  ‘You think that’s it?’

  ‘We all want a bit of mystery, don’t you think? You should be good at it. You are a spy, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Never much good at that malarkey, Andrea. Admin, that’s me now. I was always talking too much. Not like you. Very spare with words, you are.’

  ‘I wasn’t then.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Had a bit of my stuffing knocked out, that’s all.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be glib,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity you’re off to Cambridge.’

  ‘You don’t need me to give you mystery lessons.’

  ‘No, no. Thought you’d come and work for us. Get you a job at the drop of a hat, you know that.’

  ‘Even with Richard Rose in charge?’

  ‘Dickie’s not operating at a departmental level any more. He’s practically government. Way back from the front line, he is.’

  ‘Why’s he going on about my mother’s irreplaceability then?’

  ‘Old school…they went back to the forties. He still took her out to tea once a week even after she retired.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Their euphemism for a four-hour session in The Wheatsheaf. Christ, Audrey could put it away. Never saw her even stagger. Bloody marvellous sight. It was Dickie’s way of keeping his finger in the pie. Audrey…Auders, as he called her. Follow Auders, he used to say. She knew everything. You always do if you’re running the money.’

  ‘I’m going to Cambridge, Jim.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course you are. All I’m saying is that if it doesn’t work out…I’m, we’re, the Company is here.’

  Wallis tried to kiss her on the mouth as he left – five double G&Ts inside him and one down his shirt – she turned her face the fraction necessary so that he wouldn’t feel bad. He stumbled down the path. She closed the door and watched him through one of the unstained diamonds of glass. He got into his car, started the motor and looked through the windscreen straight at her before pulling away. She didn’t understand that look. It wasn’t disappointment, vague humiliation or even anger. It was the look of a man who was working on something and it was a long way from the bluff bonhomie that he churned out in her company.

  She rented the house out to an American couple for a year. She went up to Cambridge on the train to find herself suppressing that same surge of panic she’d had on the plane coming back from Lisbon. Louis Greig had arranged a flat for her on the first floor of a semi-detached house in a leafy street not far from the station. She started work straight away but couldn’t seem to remember the old social skills to make friends in her department. She became afraid of dead time. The English autumn was dark and squally. The rain scratched at her windows and she kept her head down because, if she stopped to look at her reflection in the glass, she might see dread in the empty room behind her.

  Greig was away in Washington for the first two weeks which meant she had two Sundays when, in the early evening, Songs of Praise would come up from the television below her and Julião would appear in her head, lodge himself in her chest and she would pace the room until the pain went back into its crack, like a snake into a wall. At seven o’clock the pubs opened and she was always there with a half of lager, orbiting some sporty crowd of raucous and ebullient undergrads.

  Greig came back in mid October and Andrea presented her first paper to him which he crushed as mercilessly as one of his cigar butts. He sent her out into the rain feeling empty, useless. She went back to her flat and lay on the bed, wondering whether her middle-aged brain was too hardened into its old patterns to be able to think originally any more. Greig came by in the late evening, hung his mac and umbrella behind the door and apologized for his brutality. Relief spread through her. He brought wine, something good from the Trinity cellars and a triangle of brie stolen from high table. She asked about Washington. He grumbled about the Yanks, how spoilt they were over there. He asked about Lisbon. Apologized for not inquiring earlier, he’d just had an ugly meeting with the dean about budgets. They talked about the Portuguese, the Almeidas, João Ribeiro.

  ‘He’s teaching arithmetic,’ said Greig, amazed. ‘The man could knock off Diophantine Equations before breakfast. What’s he playing at?’

  ‘Being a true communist, he says.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have to teach long division to street kids, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘He’s satisfying local demand. They don’t need Diophantine Equations to sell their fish door to door.’

  Greig’s eyebrows seemed to float from his head with boredom.

  ‘Isn’t Salazar dead yet?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but still hors de combat.’

  ‘That man’s driving his country back to the Middle Age
s,’ he said. ‘A thousand miles from his hospital bed there’ve been students rioting in the streets of Paris. The whole of European youth is on the move. We’re in the middle of a cultural revolution while the Iberian Peninsula is in the hands of Edwardian stiffs, throwing money away on empire and grinding their people down into some preindustrial slavery. They’ll never recover. Sorry, Anne, I’m ranting…nothing like a good rail against our old fascist friends.’

  ‘It’s Andrea now…I wrote to you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course it is. What’s all that about?’

  ‘I was a field agent for the Secret Intelligence Services in Lisbon during the war.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘For some complicated reasons and a smattering of political embarrassment I had to get married under my cover name, which I was stuck with for twenty-four years until last month. Now I’m starting again. A clean slate for Andrea Aspinall.’

  She was surprised to find Greig impressed. Bletchley Park hadn’t perhaps had the kudos of action in the field. Cracking Enigma didn’t have the dashing image. The keenness she’d seen in their first interview returned to his eyes, nailing her to the bed she was sitting on, did something strange to the muscles in her thighs.

  ‘You’re lucky we don’t bother too much with proof of qualifications.’

  ‘You’re lucky I’m here at all,’ she said, playing to him now, hands reaching shakily for some self-confidence. ‘They wanted me for a job.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The Company, as we call ourselves. The SIS. My mother worked for them, too. All her work cronies turned up at her funeral. Some of them I knew from the forties in Lisbon. They were looking for staff.’

  Greig leaned back in his chair. Andrea stretched herself out on the bed, propped her head up with a hand, sucked on her cigarette and tried to remember whether this was how seduction worked…if she ever knew.

  ‘You’re a dark horse,’ he said.

  ‘I’m dark,’ she said, flatly.

  He laughed, uneasily, suddenly finding blood converging on parts of his body – neck, groin – finding swallowing and crossing his legs suddenly a problem.

  Her mother had been wrong. Sex had been revolutionized over the last twenty years or maybe Rawly had been much more of an interesting partner than Luís. After their first kiss she’d reached to stub out her cigarette and Greig had told her to carry on smoking. He put his hands up her skirt and she felt his hands shake as he found her suspenders and the bare skin above her stocking tops. He stripped down her knickers, roughly. He knelt before her, bent his head down between her thighs, cupped her buttocks with his rough hands and drew her to him.

  He made love to her expertly. He was unembarrassed at making his demands and, continuing the tutor/pupil relationship, taught her things about men, like a tennis coach demonstrating grip. He asked her not to close her eyes in mock ecstasy but to keep them open, looking at him at all times, especially when she was kneeling in front of him. She ricocheted between embarrassment, lust and disgust. She was doing things within a matter of hours that Luís had probably never heard of and the discovery of this deep carnality in herself was disturbing, but oddly gratifying, too.

  She fell asleep in the early morning and woke up alone, the morning so dark that she thought it was dawn when in fact it was close to eleven o’clock. She fingered her lips, which were sensitive, bruised. Her legs were as stiff as if she’d been out riding. In her gut she was both desolate and rampant. In her head she was ashamed and excited.

  She had a bath and found herself rooting around for her best lingerie. She made herself up as she’d never done to go to the maths department and dressed in her new autumn clothes. He wasn’t in the department. Her postgrad colleagues stared at her from beneath their crackling nylon shirts, their drip-dry, ever-creased Crimplene trousers. She moved on to Trinity and bumped into him coming out of the porter’s lodge. He had his face turned back and he was holding his hand out.

  ‘Come on, Martha,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

  A woman, dazzlingly kempt, with styled blonde and lustrous hair, and a floor-length brown coat with a French silk scarf around her neck, took Greig’s hand. Andrea stepped back, preparing to run. Greig turned, saw her.

  ‘Anne,’ he said.

  ‘Andrea,’ she replied.

  ‘You’re so awful with names,’ said Martha, whose American accent grabbed the adjective and made of it innards on a butcher’s floor.

  Greig introduced his wife, asked Andrea to drop by his rooms at tea time. He pressed the automatic release on his umbrella, which burst open like a giant bat, and they headed out into the rain.

  It had happened as quick as murder and the change was no less devastating. Andrea watched his broad back heading into town, Martha’s narrow shoulders leaning into him. Desolation, bleak as the rain-slivered wind off the Fens, sliced into her.

  She went home and thumped into the bed in her damp coat. The earlier emptiness had now been replaced by a full roll of barbed wire jealousy. Why anybody thought it was green, she couldn’t fathom. Jealousy was a multiedged blade and whichever way it turned it cut you.

  By tea time she was exhausted and the walk back to Trinity in the rain was the trudge of a soldier making his way back to the front but, and she couldn’t fail to notice this, she was going back. It was that inevitable. Choice was not in it.

  Greig took the coat from her antagonistic shoulders, hung it up and showed her the leather sofa.

  ‘I could see you were surprised by Martha,’ he said softly. ‘I thought João would have told you that much, but then it’s not a natural way for his mind to think. Must have been a terrible shock. I’m sorry.’

  She had nothing to say. All the savagely planned words suddenly seemed amateur, naïve.

  ‘I hope you don’t think that last night meant nothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t just a one-off.’

  Hope surged to absurd heights. What was she? Twenty again? Not one inch of emotional progress since girlhood.

  ‘You’re a beautiful woman. Extraordinarily gifted. Mysterious…’

  ‘And your wife?’ she asked, the word hacking through the air, serrated edge.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, simply – no excuses, no apologies, no denials.

  She had questions stacked up inside her like punch cards for a computer programme but they were all binary banal and some of them, if asked, might have answers she didn’t want to hear. What am I to you? A comfortable lay. A convenient screw. A charitable poke. That last one hurt because she knew how needy she was.

  Greig sat next to her on the sofa, took her hand as if she was a patient. Where did he get those rough hands from? Nobody got hands like that from chalking equations on a board. His words leaked into her head like myrrh – exotic, nearly meaningless, except her insides quivered at them.

  ‘The first time I met you I knew you were going to be important to me. I didn’t intend to stay last night with you, but I just thought we’d suddenly connected and I couldn’t resist that connection. The chance of knowing you, of getting closer to you. The way you smoked that cigarette, stretched across the bed…I was yours.’

  As he spoke his hand came to rest on her knee. She knew, she saw what he was doing and did nothing about it, because she wanted this to happen. The coarse skin of his hand snagged on the nylon stocking as he pushed it up between her legs, over the stocking top, the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, until he brushed a hard finger over the outline of her sex beneath her best silk. The carnal jolt rushed up her spine, but something older, atavistic, recoiled. She stood and lashed her hand across his face. The slap fizzed on her palm. His face reddened. She slammed the door as she left.

  Hours later she was back looking for him in the quad. No lights on in his room. She found his address from the porter’s lodge and stood outside his house on the other side of the street, still wearing the same clothes, her make-up repaired. At 11.30 p.m. a light came on upstairs and Martha appeared in a bay window to close the c
urtains. Another light came on in the hall. The front door opened and Louis came out with a short-haired dachshund on a lead. She crossed the street, came at him between two parked cars and startled him as surely as if she’d had a knife.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, partly for startling him, partly for the slap.

  ‘I probably deserved it,’ he replied, and continued on his way.

  ‘You were taking advantage of me,’ she said, catching up with him.

  ‘I was,’ he said. ‘I admit it, but I couldn’t help it.’

  The dog trotted between them, doggedly disinterested in human drama.

  ‘Do you have any idea what this is like for me?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been married for twenty-four years. You’re only the second man I’ve known.’

  The lie so smooth she even believed it herself. It stopped him in his tracks. The dog continued, yanked the lead tight, walked back huffily, looked at their feet.

  ‘How am I supposed to know these things?’ he asked. ‘You don’t tell me anything about yourself. And from my side, well, I sensed something. I was attracted to you. I did what any man would do. I went for you. It has nothing to do with my past, my marriage, your past or your previous marriage. It was just the moment.’

  ‘And this afternoon?’

  ‘I couldn’t help myself. I find you irresistibly sexy.’

  ‘Your wife,’ she said, the word cutting her at the back of the throat, ‘she looks…she seems very…’

  ‘If I want strength, pragmatism, and efficiency, she’s my girl. You have to understand, Andrea, Martha runs our lives, hers and mine, as a controlled experiment. My career, my work – what’s that geared to? To achieving pinnacles of logic, zeniths of rationale. That’s a mathematician’s lot. Somewhere along the road I need passion, mystery, humour, for God’s sake.’

  They carried on walking. The dog leading, jaunty now that they were on the move again. They came on to an open expanse, a football pitch, and he let the dog off the lead.