The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘I thought you were walking into this with your eyes open,’ he said.

  ‘I was, but not with full information.’

  The wind buffeted them. His mac flapped open. Her hair streaked across her mouth and nose as if she were under the veil. He peeled her hair back, pushed his hand round the back of her neck and pulled her to his face. They kissed as they had done the night before. She pushed her hand into his jacket and up his shirted back. The dog reappeared, circled, snorted and tore off again.

  The ground rules laid out, they started their affair. In that first term, the longest they ever spent together was after Sunday dinner when Martha, who was bored by the Senior Common Room, had an early night and Louis, instead of passing round the port, cycled to Andrea’s flat and stayed there until 2.00 a.m. He also had a brass bed in his rooms in Trinity and they would occasionally take a tutorial in there. On spring afternoons they would go to his allotment, he was a gardener (those rough hands were from digging and planting), and she would read her paper to him while he worked and afterwards they’d lie down on the rough wooden floor of the shed amongst the forks and spades. Some evenings, if she became desperate, she would wait for him to walk the dog and join him on black, blustery nights. The dog would run off and they’d manage as best they could on a park bench, Louis looking around wildly as car headlights skirted the common.

  The next term, when it was too cold to sustain anything in the frost-hardened air, they would slip into the back of his car, which he took to parking down the street from his house. They would trap the dog lead in the door and she’d end up with her face pressed against the quarterlight of a window, her breath fogging the glass, the dog outside looking up at her, questioning.

  She couldn’t believe what was happening, what she was doing. He would ask her to do things. Things like role-playing, which at first thought seemed absurd and, in practice, faintly disgusting but then she found herself doing them and as she did them more they would become less repellent, until they didn’t seem revolting but were stimulating and then almost normal.

  When he left her, as he did all summer to go to the States to idle on the beach with Martha and her family in Cape Cod, she stayed in Cambridge, researching to forget him. She lay awake at night, at first trying to work out what it was all about without ever being able to define her nebulous need for him and then realizing that she knew all along. With her mother, son and husband gone she felt unmoored, empty. Louis, her mentor and teacher, tethered her, filled her up. But the realization made no difference to her state and she saw that although this was what she expected of Louis, it never quite happened and yet it could…it could.

  She had thought, at first, that Martha was the only barrier to her future happiness until it had occurred to her that Martha’s presence was a part of the intensity. She and Louis were both hooked on the subterfuge – the secret meetings, the late-night assignations, the sense of the forbidden.

  Memories of another age, another secret love leaked into her head to confuse the present.

  During the next academic year Louis sensed a change in her, a change he did not like. She appeared confident. Louis responded by becoming slapdash about his other liaisons. Andrea would arrive just as another girl left, reapplying her lipstick. She found an earring in his room, a tiny pair of knickers, a used condom. Andrea never mentioned any of these finds. He had already become hostile and she didn’t want to antagonize him further. That next summer he left for Cape Cod without saying goodbye.

  She became prone to spontaneous bursts of crying which stopped as abruptly as they started. When the library shut for that summer she couldn’t bear to go off on her own for a lonely holiday near families and lovers. Even when Jim Wallis invited her down to his cottage in the south of France, she couldn’t face being with him and his not-so-new wife.

  She stayed in Cambridge and counted the days to the beginning of term like a child with an advent calendar. As her loneliness crowded around her in her first-floor flat and the usual haunts of the undergrads fell silent, she sought out other pubs with life and noise, pubs whose regulars were labourers and builders, people who actually ordered pickled eggs from the jars behind the bar and ate them. She woke up in the mornings feeling as if she’d drunk everything including the wringings from the beer mats. She shuddered and squeezed the pillow to her face in a pathetic attempt to block out the creature she’d become.

  Louis turned up late, three weeks into term. She was happy even when he trashed her summer’s work, even when she could smell another woman on him.

  As the Christmas break of 1970 approached she didn’t know what to do with herself. She saw no way out. She was disgusted by her own weakness – announcing to herself every morning that this was the last time, that she was going to abandon the project, go back to London. Then she would methodically get dressed in her best clothes and go and visit the man who had made her into this.

  Waking at four in the morning she would force herself to think of the good things from her life. She couldn’t touch on Julião because her failure there was still too painful, but she went back to those last days with her mother and found things to sustain her. Her father’s nobility. Her mother’s honesty. Her own feelings of love for the woman she’d despised so much. She replayed conversations, thought about Rawly and his wine. His wife. And Audrey telling her that she only deserved the three-quarters man that Rawly was. Had the same happened to her? Was Louis all that she deserved, all that she wanted?

  At the end of November she went to his rooms in Trinity, as usual, like the programmed toy she’d become. He barked at her from the door to go straight to the bedroom. He’d begun to enjoy command. She’d just undressed with Louis standing in the doorway, when they both heard Martha’s voice at the bottom of the stairs. Martha never came to his rooms. It was an unspoken agreement. He shut Andrea in the bedroom. Martha came into his rooms without knocking. Her New England voice cracked like a whip. They were continuing a row they’d had the night before about going to New England for Christmas, rather than up to Louis’s father in Scotland. Andrea, paralysed, sat naked on the bed and stared at the door. She thought she was praying for it not to open, but realized that this was just some superficial horror of social embarrassment, that in fact she wanted Martha to open the door. It would do something. It would move her situation one way or another.

  Martha was breaking Louis down, dismantling him so effectively that Andrea thought that it wasn’t a row about holidays at all. What was Martha doing here? Martha answered the question as if she’d heard it.

  Martha opened the door.

  She didn’t open it gently. She was making a point. She flung it open. It swung round, smacked against the wall and slammed back shut in a fraction of a second – shutter speed. The image from both sides indelibly printed. Andrea naked on the bed. Martha transfixed.

  The door was not reopened. It didn’t have to be.

  The silence was as crystalline as frost.

  This time it wasn’t Martha’s voice that cracked like a whip. The slap must have stilled the quad. A door slammed. Louis burst into the room, tore off his trousers, wrestled her back on to the bed and pinning her wrists lunged into her and rammed her with directed, shuddering vehemence. It didn’t take long and he collapsed on top of her. She shifted under his weight. He released her wrists, rolled off her and sat with his head in his hands for minutes.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, after some time.

  Andrea sat on the other side of the bed, back to him.

  ‘I’ve always wondered how you and Martha stayed together,’ she said, as if this might be some consolation.

  ‘Because her father’s a senator,’ he said.

  ‘Was that all?’

  She rolled up a stocking and pulled it on, another.

  ‘There’s somebody I’ve been wanting you to meet for some time,’ he said.

  His words nauseated her. It was as if he’d been preparing her, bringing her to the right psychological pitch for some bad n
ews. He went to the sink, washed himself, towelled between his legs. He pulled on his undershorts, trousers, flipped the braces over his shoulders, looking at her all the time, contemplating the new situation.

  She reached for a cigarette and some tissues, wiped herself between her legs, lit the cigarette. She dressed without washing. She needed to soak for a week to get rid of this sordidness.

  He made tea in his study. They sat at his desk. He stirred his tea a long time for a man who didn’t take sugar.

  ‘Who do you want me to meet?’ she asked.

  ‘Someone in London.’

  ‘In London,’ she said on automatic, now that the situation was changing she didn’t want it to.

  ‘We can’t continue here.’

  ‘You mean I can’t.’

  He went back to stirring his tea.

  ‘This is an opportunity, a unique opportunity.’

  ‘For you to get rid of me,’ she said. ‘I know bad news, Louis. I don’t need it sweetened.’

  ‘This is a job,’ he said. ‘And I know you’ll be good at it.’

  Chapter 32

  1970, London.

  They went to London on separate trains. Andrea had a nasty British Rail breakfast, cardboard toast and grey coffee. She smoked instead and wanted it to be pink gin time. Louis still hadn’t told her who she was going to meet and he was no clearer on his cryptic remarks about the unique opportunity. This was what they had become. Not telling. Not talking. Circlers of each other. Unequal lovers. Bad maths. Mere satisfiers of each other’s strange psychosexual needs.

  Louis’s intensity emanated from one source – his cock. What he admired in her was not what stirred him. He never talked about her beauty, her brain, her mystery as he had done before in those days which a madman might have called their courting. He was driven by the sex, but she had no idea what the connection was in Louis’s head that was running his desire. As for herself, she didn’t want to think about herself – a pair of scaley claws scratching about in the dust.

  The train came into King’s Cross Station. As it shunted to a halt and she reached for her bag she nearly grasped something about Louis, a nuance which wouldn’t come back to her, but which had something to do with control. She went to the RAC club in Pall Mall as instructed and asked for Louis Greig. The man at the desk gave her an envelope which contained a very long list of instructions. Go to Waterloo, take a train to Clapham Junction, then a bus to Streatham, another train to Tulse Hill, a bus back to Brixton and on and on. She set off on the interminable journey, annoyed with Louis for not telling her so that she could have worn flatter heels. She thought about the instructions as she made her way to Waterloo and found herself instinctively checking her tail. The instructions had the quality of spycraft about them. And on the bus from Tulse Hill to Brixton the man sitting next to her leaned over and said:

  ‘Ours is the next stop.’

  They got off on the Norwood Road and went into Brockwell Park. Her new companion took her to the bowling green in the middle, nodded her towards the clubhouse and disappeared. She was unaccountably excited as she tried the loose Bakelite handle of the clubhouse door. The interior was unlit and dark on what was now an overcast late November afternoon. In the weak light by the window, Louis sat with his back to the wall next to a thickset man in a dark, heavy overcoat and a grey-brimmed hat with a black band. She trod the wooden boards to where the men were sitting. The smell of creosote filled her nostrils. They were talking in low voices and she realized they weren’t speaking English. They were talking in a language which she thought she should understand, it had the same sounds as Portuguese.

  Louis and the man stood up and the light caught their faces. Andrea realized that this man must be a Russian. He took off his hat. His hair had the quality of wire wool.

  ‘This is Alexei Gromov,’ said Louis. ‘He’ll tell you where to go afterwards.’

  He shook hands with the Russian and left, his retreating feet sounding like those of the first lord vacating the stage for the tragedians’ big scene. Her heart was pounding in her chest, her system so shot through with adrenalin that breathing became a concentrated act and sweat formed on odd patches of her body.

  Gromov’s face had the stillness of someone accustomed to very cold weather, as if evolution had made the nerves retreat from the surface, to make life more bearable. His eyes seemed deep set in his head, not wary, but viewing with the advantage of cover. He showed her to a chair which he positioned so that her face was in the weak daylight and his head was backlit.

  ‘We’ve been following your career with interest,’ he said slowly in English.

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever had one.’

  ‘Politics is a belief. You might not practise it all the time, but it’s always there.’

  ‘You mean we communists never suffer from disillusionment?’

  ‘Only if you’ve decided against the human race. Communism is of the people, for the people, by the people,’ he said, opening his hands in front of him.

  ‘And the state?’

  ‘The state is merely structure,’ he said, boxing his hands this time.

  ‘Can’t you be disillusioned by mere structure and still be for the people?’

  Gromov found himself down an alleyway he didn’t want to be in. He wasn’t an ideologue, he’d never been strong on dialectic, and anyway it wasn’t the purpose of the meeting. Greig had warned him of her cleverness, but seemed to have made a massive assumption about her commitment.

  ‘We had heard that you were very committed to the cause,’ he said.

  ‘That depends on who you’ve been talking to.’

  ‘One of our guests in the Soviet Union. A Portuguese guest.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I know any.’

  ‘Comrade Alvaro Cunhal.’

  ‘I don’t believe we ever met.’

  ‘You planned his escape. A very bold and daring strategy.’

  ‘I planned it, yes, but not alone,’ she said, and for some reason it triggered off an old strain of anger. ‘Do you know who planned that with me?’

  ‘I think it was João Ribeiro, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

  Gromov shifted in his seat, the ride still uncomfortable, silently cursing Greig, who’d said she was psychologically prepared for the work.

  ‘He left the party, didn’t he?’

  ‘They kicked him out, Mr Gromov. After nearly forty years of active, anti-fascist resistance, after some of the best operations ever planned against the Estado Novo, they kicked him out. Why was that?’

  ‘The report said there’d been a security breach.’

  ‘No. It was structure, Mr Gromov. Structure kicked him out.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The central committee thought he was getting too big for his boots. They thought he was threatening their positions in the party. So they planted their innuendo and rumour and João Ribeiro, one of the best, most loyal servants to the cause was removed from his office in the party. He ended up in prison and lost his job, Mr Gromov.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Ask the central committee of the Portuguese Communist Party of 1961–2.’

  ‘I can see you’re angry.’

  ‘He’s a good and trusted friend. The PCP treated him badly.’

  ‘I promise you a full investigation,’ said Gromov, having no intention.

  ‘Now tell me what you want,’ she said, surprised at herself, angry and forceful now that she was out of Louis’s orbit.

  Gromov’s hands were fists turned in on his knees. He’d lost the initiative in this meeting and he badly needed to get it back if this woman was to do what he wanted.

  ‘We are entering a critical phase in our relationship with the West,’ he said.

  ‘And with the East, now that China’s got the H-bomb.’

  ‘It’s not relevant to our relationship with the West.’

  ‘Except that you’re surrounde
d and you’ve made the West nervous after the Prague Spring.’

  Maybe he should have asked Louis to stay and bring this wretched woman under control. She was impossible.

  ‘In order for us to proceed into the next phase, the negotiating phase, we need to ensure that we have the very best quality information.’

  ‘You want me to spy for you,’ she said. ‘You want me to give up my life, my research, my…’

  ‘Love affair?’ he asked. ‘No, not necessarily. You’d only be in London.’

  Love affair. That unbalanced her. How much detail had Louis given him? Those words. Love and Affair. They didn’t really describe what was going on between Louis and her. But he’d said love affair and that meant that Louis must have said the same. She found herself suddenly on the downward spiral, clutching at the ludicrous to find hope.

  ‘We want you to go and work for the British Secret Intelligence Service,’ said Gromov, leaning in on her, seeing he’d hit home with something, but not sure what. ‘If you are still sympathetic – no, I mean if you still believe in what we are trying to achieve, then we would like you to contact your old friend, Jim Wallis.’

  ‘Jim’s in Administration.’

  ‘That is very good,’ said Mr Gromov thickly, as if advertising cakes.

  ‘Does that mean your aim is for specific or general intelligence?’

  ‘You unnerved me earlier, Miss Aspinall.’

  ‘I apologize if I was over-aggressive.’

  ‘I thought you might have suffered an ideological shift,’ said Gromov, thinking that’s better, this is the tone.

  ‘My argument was with the central committee of the PCP of 1961–2.’

  ‘Some people when they come into some money, property…experience a change of view,’ said Gromov, turning the knife now that it was in, punishing a little. ‘From being in the street they are suddenly up high, looking down.’

  ‘I’ve spent more than half my life in Portugal and its colonies under the dictatorship of Dr Salazar. You should have no fear of the bourgeoisie claiming me.’