The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Where did you get this table?’ asked Dorothy Cardew, determined to have her say. ‘It’s a Queen Anne refectory, isn’t it?’

  ‘A copy, Dorothy. A copy.’

  ‘He says all the right things – Gorby,’ said Cardew, scathing. ‘All this glasnost and perestroika…’

  Dorothy rolled her eyes.

  ‘I always thought that was a horse-drawn sleigh,’ said Venetia, trying to keep it light.

  ‘That’s a troika,’ said Rose. ‘Perestroika is reconstruction.’

  ‘How dull,’ said Boo, who’d learned most of his vocabulary from Rose.

  ‘I rather like the sound of sleigh bells,’ said Dorothy, trying to pinch the conversation back.

  ‘And glasnost is openness,’ added Rose, explaining to the morons.

  ‘I don’t think you’re right,’ said Venetia, deciding to puncture Rose. ‘I’m sure it’s a Moscow directive that everybody should get out their open-top sleighs, put on their best fur mufflers and jingle about in the snow.’

  Rose threw up his hands. Boo slapped him on the leg.

  ‘Amounts to the same thing,’ said Wallis. ‘If you ask me, Gorby’s a tricky customer. Whatever anybody says, he’s still a red. We only like him because he’s got a cracking wife.’

  ‘It’s impossible to hate someone with such a tache de vin on ‘is ‘ead,’ said Thérèse. ‘Il est très, très sympa.’

  ‘What’s she on about?’ asked Cardew.

  ‘She likes Gorby’s birthmark, dear,’ said Dorothy. ‘That archipelago on his head…it is rather endearing.’

  ‘He’ll come down with the iron fist eventually,’ said Cardew. ‘You’ll see. The politburo will rough him over and he’ll be breaking heads by Christmas.’

  ‘I think he’ll do it,’ said Andrea.

  ‘What?’ said Cardew, spoiling for a fight.

  ‘You said it yourself – “talking of knocking down walls”. I think he’ll open it all up. Get shot of all the satellite states. He can’t afford them any more. He’ll tell them to get on with it on their own.’

  ‘Not in my lifetime, he won’t,’ said Cardew. ‘Mind you, that might not be so long.’

  ‘But you’re so young,’ insisted Thérèse, flashing her jewelled fingers. ‘And so ‘andsome.’

  ‘He’s depressed about being eighty in November,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘No need to go telling everybody,’ said her husband.

  Andrea bought a television and a dog at the beginning of October. They were both things she’d thought she’d never buy, but she liked the feeling of someone else in the house. The dog, a long-haired dachshund, seemed superior enough to be called Ashley.

  A week later the television rewarded her. Gorbachev went to Berlin and told that dry old stick Honecker, ‘When we delay, life punishes us.’ Andrea punched the air. Ashley was more circumspect.

  She sat on the floor of the still empty living room and read the newspapers, watched and listened to every minute of news on the TV and radio. She felt that excitement again, the tug of the silver thread.

  The beginning of November was even better, the boldness of the East Germans was building. She started living in her own world now, just as she’d seen other oldies, who’d committed themselves to a golf tournament, a tennis championship, or worst of all World Snooker. She didn’t dare go out in case she missed something. She lived on coffee and cigarettes. Ashley went next door and was fed by Venetia.

  On 9th November she’d just poured her first gin and tonic of the evening when she heard the bizarre announcement that free travel would be permitted for East Germans with immediate effect. Andrea didn’t know what this meant. It was too banal. It sounded as if they’d just given up their strongest card – the Wall. Was this how such a régime ended…with a blunder?

  Five hours later she was kneeling in the middle of the living room, a full ashtray and a bottle of champagne on her right and the phone on her left. The scenes on the television were beyond belief. People were standing on the Wall, Wessies were dancing with Ossies in the street, they were all drenched in beer and sekt, a lot of them were in their nightgowns and slippers, some were holding babies aloft and a drift of super-strength Kleenex was building up behind Andrea. Ashley lay with his chin on the ground, swivelling his eyes, wanting it all to be over so that they could go back to regular meals and walks.

  Jim Wallis had been the first to call.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ he roared.

  ‘Have I seen it? I’ve been living it, Jim. This is better than twenty-fifth April ‘74.’

  ‘Twenty-fifth April?’

  ‘The Portuguese Revolution. The end of European fascism, Jim.’

  ‘Completely forgot about that, old girl. End of fascism, of course.’

  ‘But this is the end, the real end of all that…all that stuff.’

  ‘Thought you were going to say the “H” word for a minute.’

  She woke up at 4.00 a.m. lying on the floor, the television screen blank, the champagne bottle on its side, the ashtray overflowing and her mouth like the inside of an animal-feed sack. Was this any way for a pensioner to behave? She dragged herself up to bed. She slept and woke up feeling dead and empty, as if the whole point of her existence had been removed at a stroke. She drifted from room to room, most of them still empty of furniture because she’d sold every stick from the Clapham house. She decided that this was the day to give up smoking. When depressed, deepen the depression by doing something that’s good for you.

  She wanted the phone to ring. She wanted him to call, but how would he know where she was? Jim Wallis had dropped operational contact with him years ago. They’d lost track because it was too dangerous to keep track. She thought about flying to Berlin and trying to root him out. Then she started worrying because he was Stasi and there were bound to be reprisals, lynch parties. He’d have to keep his head down and it would do no good to have her poking about in the cadaver of the system, trying to find him.

  She put it from her mind. She went to work on the house. She refurbished the attic for no other reason than it seemed right to start at the top, to reorder the head first. She redecorated the bedrooms, put beds in them even though she rarely had visitors who stayed. She made a study downstairs, bought a new computer which sat on her desk and had the same power as the one she’d used at Cambridge years ago which had occupied a whole room. She decided to involve herself more in village life and began to frequent the village shop, buying little and staying long because she liked the divorcée, Kathleen Thomas, who was running it with the proviso that she was always going to shut the next day because of the competition from Waitrose in Witney.

  Only five people used the village shop until that Christmas, when a sixth joined this very expensive club. Morgan Trent was forty-five, he was a major who’d just left the army and was renting whilst trying to find somewhere to buy. He wanted to set up a garden centre. Andrea didn’t like him. He fitted her mother’s description of Longmartin, which seemed as good a reason as any for some natural animosity. Also, Kathleen Thomas fancied him, which meant Andrea had to listen to their endless badinage while Morgan bought things that he didn’t need three or four times a day.

  Maybe it was because of Trent’s business plans that she decided to start work on the garden in the spring. She didn’t want to have to buy anything from him when his garden centre opened, although those plans didn’t seem to be maturing with the speed that he implied. That summer she hired a skinny little kid from the council houses at the end of the village to come and mow her lawns. He was sixteen and called Gary Brock. She thought he was all right but Kathleen told her he was a glue sniffer and a threat to society. Morgan Trent agreed with her, but he was bedding her by now so he was bound to.

  In the late summer Andrea came back from a treacherous shopping trip to Waitrose and found the lawn mower had gone. She mentioned it to Kathleen, who said that she’d seen Gary Brock walking it out of the village earlier that afternoon. Andrea announced she was going
down to the council houses to speak to him.

  ‘Watch those dogs,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘What dogs?’

  ‘His father breeds pit bull terriers.’

  ‘Sells them to drug dealers in Brixton,’ shouted Morgan, from the living room.

  ‘Shut up, Morgan,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘He bloody does.’

  ‘Anyway, you’ve got the idea,’ said Kathleen. ‘Mr Brock senior isn’t what you’d call genteel.’

  ‘Not the type you fought the war for, Andrea,’ shouted Morgan.

  ‘How do you know I did anything in the war, Morgan?’

  ‘Everybody did in your generation.’

  On Marvin Brock’s gate was a hand-painted plywood sign that said ‘BE WEAR THE DOGS’. She rang the door bell, which set off savage barking from all over the house. She took two steps back as if that would give her a half-chance of escape. Through the frosted glass she could make out a large person struggling down the corridor.

  ‘Come on now, matey,’ said the voice.

  Marvin Brock opened the door. Daytime TV blared from a room behind him. His head was shaved and he wore jeans and a Swindon Town football shirt; wrapped around his wrist was a thick leather lead, which was attached to a dog of such alarming power and potential ferocity that it didn’t have a collar but a full leather harness. Andrea flinched at its name written in metal studs on the thick strap across its chest. Can you call a dog that nowadays? Isn’t there a law? The dog was straining against the lead, pushing a twitching black nose in her direction.

  ‘Come on, Clint,’ said Marvin, ‘back down, back down, there’s a good lad.’

  ‘Oh, Clint,’ said Andrea, relieved.

  ‘Yairs, after the actor. Greatest living actor. Clint Eastwood.’

  ‘You’re Gary’s father, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yairs,’ he said slowly, used to this opening question.

  ‘I’m Andrea Aspinall. Your son Gary mows my lawn. He appears to have walked off with my mower.’

  ‘Walked off?’ said Marvin. ‘Well, he’s prob’ly gone to mow someone else’s lawn.’

  ‘I didn’t give him permission.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Can you get him to bring it back please, Mr Brock.’

  ‘No probs, Andy. No probs. Sorry about the mix-up.’

  A week later there was still no mower and Andrea reported its theft to the police. Gary had stolen the mower and sold it, but it was just one in a long line of minor offences ending with a drugs charge. Andrea was called as a witness. She spent a full three minutes in front of the magistrates. Gary Brock was sent down for eighteen months.

  In late May of 1991 she was mowing her own lawn and wondering why she’d ever bothered to pay Gary Brock to do it. It was so satisfying, even mathematical, especially that last square in the middle of all the other concentric squares.

  As she put the lawn mower away she was aware of a presence leaning against her car in the garage.

  ‘You remember me, Mrs A, don’t you?’ said a voice, with threat and lots of Oxfordshire threaded into it.

  He was thickset, wearing tight jeans and mahogany Doc Martens. His T-shirt was stretched over slabs and ridges of muscle and clasped his biceps, which had a thick worm of a vein over them.

  ‘Gary Brock, Mrs A.’

  ‘You’ve been let out early, Gary.’

  ‘Been on my best behaviour, ‘aven’ I, Mrs A?’

  ‘You’ve been weight training too, haven’t you, Gary?’

  ‘Yair, I ‘ave. You know why, Mrs A?’

  ‘I expect being locked up’s a bit boring, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not to start with, it isn’t, no.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because everyone wants to fuck a new arse, Mrs A.’

  Silence.

  ‘What are you doing here, Gary?’

  ‘Just telling you what it’s like inside, Mrs A.’

  ‘You didn’t got to jail because you stole my lawn mower, Gary.’

  ‘You were quick to get up in that box against me though, weren’ ya?’

  She made for the door. Gary blocked her way. She was scared now. Rubio and Venetia were away and Gary would know that. The garage was hidden from the road at the back of the house. This was what happened, she thought, you survive the worst possible scenarios without a scratch only to be assaulted by a teenage lout in your garage at home on a summer’s afternoon.

  ‘What do you want, Gary?’ she asked, angry now.

  Gary’s head suddenly twitched. Footsteps on the gravel drive. He stepped back to look. A tall male figure stood in the garage door, silhouetted against the bright light outside.

  ‘Well…what do you want?’ the man asked Gary in accented English.

  She knew that voice. Gary lumbered over. Andrea moved into the light, made a negative sign with her hand.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Voss asked, in a voice that had known men a lot worse than Gary. Voss put the terrible side of his face up to him. Gary pulled back from the power of such damage. A man, even in his seventies, who looked like that, who could walk around like that, had his own strength.

  ‘I came to say hello to Mrs A, that’s all,’ he said, edging around Voss. ‘Been away, I ‘ave.’

  Gary moved off, trying to look light and unselfconscious. Voss put an arm around her shoulders, gripped her tight.

  ‘You have a talent, Karl Voss…’ she said.

  ‘I have my uses.’

  Chapter 40

  May 1991, Andrea’s cottage, Langfield, Oxfordshire.

  As soon as she sat him down in the kitchen and made him coffee she knew that he was different. They didn’t just walk into each other’s lives and take up residence as they had done before. Her instinctive understanding of him had disappeared. He’d made himself unreachable.

  He told her he hadn’t contacted her before because Elena had been ill. She’d died only last month. He’d just left his youngest daughter in Moscow after she’d got married to a research chemist two weeks ago. His eldest was in Kiev, married to a naval officer and pregnant with her second child. That was all he had to say about his two little girls. He mentioned, too, that he’d been ill himself and that he’d been working on a book but wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. He was thin, and the good side of his face appeared haggard. He smoked constantly, roll-ups which he made with the economy of a prisoner. He didn’t eat much of her celebration supper of loin of pork roasted with truffles and he drank heavily but with no change in his mood. He asked if he could stay – he needed a safe place to work. She felt ashamed at having to think about it for a fraction of a second. She showed him up to the attic room. That night she lay in her bed listening to him moving around, pacing, while she thought that he should have been with her, but she didn’t want him in her bed. The stranger.

  He’d arrived with very little clothing but two large suitcases filled with documents and files. A week later a trunk arrived with more paper. She felt invaded but still bought him a computer. He worked all the time. She heard him clacking on the keyboard at four in the morning. At meals he was distracted and withdrawn. In the afternoons she sat in her own study, looking up in his vague direction and feeling the terrible pressure coming down from the top of the house. The unbearable weight of silent hate. It was overrunning her house, moving between the floors and walls like vermin, infecting the stairs and landings with its sharp stench.

  She had to get out. She spent time at Kathleen’s shop, confided in her, told her about Voss and how he’d seen off Gary Brock but now she couldn’t bear to have him in the house. Kathleen told her to put him out, like a dog at night but never to return.

  After a few weeks Voss started to take his meals at different times. He thought that by being absent it would relieve her of his oppressive presence, but it was equally intolerable because then he was being absent. He was still there even when he wasn’t. This was not how it was meant to be.

  She took refuge in the past, leafing thro
ugh old papers, photographs, trying to recapture a sense of how she used to feel about him because, of course, there was no record, he was anonymous in her life. There were no old letters, no photographs, no mementoes even. Then she came across the letter from João Ribeiro’s lawyer informing her of his death, which had happened two years after the revolution, in 1976. She had missed the funeral because, by law, burials have to take place within twenty-four hours in Portugal. João Ribeiro, who’d never taken up the offer of reinstatement to the central committee, had been carried out of the Bairro Alto in his coffin followed by hundreds of people. The lawyer’s letter also said that he was holding something for her which had been left in João Ribeiro’s possession.

  She called the lawyer and booked two flights to Lisbon for 26th June. Voss had become so expert at avoiding her that she had to lie in wait like a hunter in a hide.

  ‘I’ve bought you a present,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Your birthday.’

  ‘My birthday’s not for three more days.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘The present is in Lisbon. We’re flying tomorrow.’

  ‘Unmöglich,’ he said. Impossible. ‘My work. I have to do my work.’

  ‘Not unmöglich,’ she said. ‘We’re going somewhere very important.’

  ‘Nothing is more important that my work. Once that is finished…only then am I free,’ he said, and his voice faltered over that last word as if he didn’t believe it himself.

  ‘Are you refusing to accept my gift?’

  He looked tortured.

  They flew into Lisbon on the afternoon of 26th June. The flight was pure torment for Voss, who had to endure two and a half hours without tobacco. He passed his time rolling cigarettes so that he had a hundred ready-made. They took a cab into the city through Saldanha, the Praça Marquês de Pombal, Largo do Rato and down Avenida Álvares Cabral to the Jardim da Estrela.