The Company of Strangers (30 page)

His staidness vanished. His manner, which was normally governed by a stronger gravitational pull than that on most humans, giving him his granite-like dependability and solidity, broke its moorings and he became all ardour and expression. She was stunned by the transformation. He held her face in his hands and told her over and over how much he loved her, so that the words lost their meaning and she didn’t listen to them, but began to think whether this was perhaps a Portuguese trait – to be hermetically sealed receptacles for mad passion.

He was breathing the words into her mouth, as if trying to make her say them back to him, and she was remembering his profound enjoyment of food, how eating one meal would remind him of the wonder of another. Wine to him was like a favourite piece of music. He drank it with his eyes closed, let it flow through him as if it was Grand Premier Cru Mozart. The flowers he bought for her he seemed to enjoy more himself – plucking a bloom, he wouldn’t just sniff it, he would inhale it. It struck her that he was a sensualist and she’d hardly been aware of it because he had no talent for conversation but only physical pleasure.

He snapped her back into reality. He was holding her by the shoulders and willing her to respond, his forearms trembling as if he was restraining himself from crushing her. He was demanding that she marry him, but she couldn’t find any words to begin to explain the complexity of her situation.

‘Will you? Will you?’ he asked, again and again, his English heavily accented so that each demand came from deeper and deeper down his throat like a man drowning in a well.

‘You’re hurting me, Luís,’ she said.

He let her go, running his hands down her arms, hanging his head, suddenly ashamed.

‘It’s not so easy,’ she said.

‘It
is
easy,’ he replied. ‘It is
very
easy. You only have to say one word. Yes. That’s it. It is the easiest “yes” you will ever say.’

‘There are complications.’

‘Then I am happy.’

‘How can you be happy?’

‘Complications are surmountable. I will talk to anybody. I will talk to the British Ambassador. I will talk to the Chairman of Shell. I will talk to your parents. I will…’

‘My mother. I only have a mother.’

‘I will talk to your mother.’

‘Stop, Luís. You must stop and let me think for a moment.’

‘I will only let you think if it is to overcome these complications, if it is to see that complications…’ he said, running out of words for a second until he announced, ‘Complications mean nothing to me. There is no complication that I cannot…that I cannot…
Raios
!…what is the word?’

‘I don’t know what you want to say…overleap?’

‘Overleap!’ he roared in agreement. ‘No, no, not overleap. Overleap means that it is still there…behind you maybe, but still there. Vanquish. There is no complication that I cannot vanquish.’

She laughed at a vision of Luís with sword and shield flashing in the sun, blinding the complications.

‘I can’t answer you,’ she said.

‘I am
still
happy.’

‘You can’t still be happy, Luís. I haven’t said anything.’

‘I am happy,’ he repeated, and he knew why, but he didn’t want to say that it was because she hadn’t given him the alternative, perhaps even easier, reply.

She crawled into bed at two in the morning. Luís wouldn’t let her go home. His earlier boldness had given him new fuel to burn and he couldn’t stop. He took her into Lisbon and they danced at the Dancing Bar Cristal. Luís had never been so animated and she realized that he could only speak when he was doing something else. As soon as they went back to the table for a rest he would fall back into silent contemplation of unknown complications until he could bear it no longer and he’d drag her back on to the floor. There he talked as if he knew something she didn’t. His family, their estate outside Estremoz in the rural Alentejo, 150 miles east of Lisbon, his work, the barracks he was posted to, which luckily was in Estremoz, and all was related to how their life would be together, how she would fit into his world.

Anne slept and dreamt her dream and woke in a panic with the certainty that she would not be able to survive this pace. Like a fallen rider with a foot still trapped in the stirrup, dragged along at the whim of the horse, she needed a release, she needed control, but she could not bring her intelligence to bear down on the complications. The different strands knotted too quickly.

She asked herself a question. Why shouldn’t she marry Luís? She didn’t love him was not an answer, it was the reason she wanted to be with him. That she was still in love with Voss did not make any sense. Richard Rose had been brutal in his prognosis. The whole point of her involvement with Luís was to survive her guilt. That she
was carrying Voss’s embryo was the impediment, which, as soon as the thought occurred, was dispatched. It scared her, not in shivers of panic, they were surface qualms. This was core fear, a deep moral fear. Only religion did this to you, she thought. All that stuff the nuns had crammed into her head about guilt and evil, it shook her up, disorientated her. She paced the room to confirm the ground under her feet, to calm herself, to tether herself to what she now understood, which was that she
had
to marry Luís
because
she was carrying Voss’s child.

She sat on the bed inspecting her hands. She had been young. She had been green and whippy, but now she could feel the brittleness of age creeping in and the breakability that came with it. Alone on her single bed, in the high August heat, with the cells multiplying inside her, she shivered in the cold shadows of society, the Church, her mother. She made her decision and even while making it the Catholic inside her knew that there would be some cost, some bloody awful price to pay later on. She would marry Luís da Cunha Almeida and her secret would sit with her other one, they would be joined like Siamese twins, individual but dependent on each other.

The morning light had a new clarity. The thick heat of the last few days and nights had been cut by a fresh, saltine zest from the Atlantic. The sun still shone in a clear sky but bodies felt less like carcasses. The Serra de Sintra was no longer vague in the haze and the palm trees applauded in the square. Out from under the close doom of night, Anne saw things differently. There was hope of a solution. She would talk to Dorothy Cardew. The women, between them, would get things out on the table where they could be examined.

The maid took the Cardew girls to the beach midmorning and Anne found Dorothy on her own, sitting with
her sewing box in the living room. She was working on a sampler, tackling the ‘e’ of ‘Home’. Meredith was outside reading in the garden, his pipe signalling his enjoyment. Anne moved around the room, circling before landing, waiting for a way in. The needlepoint was badly at odds with what she had trampling through her mind. Dorothy Cardew eyed her, made mistakes in the sampler, gave up on it.

‘Luís has asked me to marry him,’ said Anne, which knocked Dorothy back into the cushions.

Anne registered the total relief in Dorothy’s face. Good news after all.

‘That’s marvellous,’ she said. ‘Wonderful news…such a good man, Luís.’

And that was the end of it. This was not a day for trouble. The clear air, the breeze in the pines, the birds talking up the day so that anything other than good news would seem ill-mannered.

‘Yes,’ said Anne, the word dropping out of her like a drunk from a bar.

‘You must let me tell Meredith.’

The scene developed, transformed from the one Anne had inside her head. Dorothy skipped to the french windows and called for her husband, hopping up on to one leg as she did so.

‘Good news, darling,’ she called.

Meredith slammed his book shut and scrambled like a fighter pilot. He joined his wife at the french windows, breathless, eager.

‘Luís has asked Anne to marry him.’

A flicker of disappointment. Hitler hadn’t surrendered after all.

‘Congratulations!’ he roared. ‘Terrific chap, Luís.’

‘Yes,’ said Anne, another brawler ejected into the street.

A quizzical look from Cardew. Had he seen something?
Had he sensed something other than spoken words in the room?

‘Have you said anything to anyone?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Best talk to Richard first…could be complicated.’

‘Yes.’

‘Marvellous news, though…couldn’t hope for a better chap than Luís. Terrific horseman, too,’ he finished, as if that could be an enormous help in a marriage.

Anne’s smile creaked into position. This was the future – words taken from her and put into a common language, the language of the receiver, never her own. It pricked her eyeballs because that was one of Voss’s talents – an understanding of many languages but more especially the silent ones.

The following Tuesday Anne sat in the Estrela Gardens watching children, waiting for time to pass before heading into Lapa for her meeting with Rose. The children ran over the thousand changing shapes on the ground as the breeze rippled the sunlight through the trees. The pace was slowing at last. The relentlessness was still there but that breathless speed had gone. Now there was the sense of large forces manoeuvring, something perhaps to do with what was happening in Europe as the Russian, American and British armies bore down on the rubble of the Reich.

She walked to the gates opposite the basilica and looked up to the room where she’d been waiting only a few weeks ago. A maid was cleaning the window, a disembodied hand appeared and flicked a cigarette out. At her feet the silver tramlines embedded in the cobbles headed off down the hill of the Calçada da Estrela towards São Bento and the Bairro Alto where they would cross and connect with other rails but would never deviate from their dedicated path. What on one night had seemed like an exquisite thread
tugging her to a hopeful future, now appeared as a terrible certainty from which the only way out was derailment and disaster.

She sat in front of Richard Rose again, who was not ignoring her but, because it was after lunch, was lounging back in his chair with a cigarette in his hand and either smoke in his eye or contempt tempered only by shrewdness.

‘Cardew told me your news,’ he said.

My
news, thought Anne, dissociated from it already, a messenger for someone else.

Rose waved his match at her, tossed it into the ashtray. It enraged her, God knows why.

‘When we trained you as an…’

‘With all due respect, sir, you did not train me as a translator. I arrived with that ability on board.’

‘When we trained you as an
agent
and the subsequent assessment of your training arrived here in Lisbon, I…
we
didn’t perceive you as an emotional character. Everything pointed towards you being logical, rational, even clinical. That was why we liked you.’

‘
Liked
me?’

‘On paper you were perfect for the assignment,’ he said, sitting back, flourishing his cigarette, stabbing the smoking end in her direction, goading her. ‘You were female, very intelligent, excellent at role-play, of…beguiling looks, but also determined, clear-headed, detached…in short, perfect for the work.’

Silence while Rose inspected his cigarette box, seeing if that had been enough to elicit more reaction.

‘You arrived,’ he continued, ‘and we were immediately impressed by the way you entered into your role. Good information. Strong social involvement. Excellent handling of some difficult personalities. Everything going swimmingly until…’

Rose blew out smoke in an exasperated jet.

‘Even logical, rational, clinical people can fall in love,’ said Anne.

‘
Twice
?’ asked Rose.

The cold, cutting edge of the word sliced into her. Its unjustness pushed her on to the defensive.

‘It was you who told me to forget about Voss,’ she said, ‘that there was no hope for him.’

‘I did, but…’ he said, and let that hang with the smoke, accusatory, before dismissing it with a flick of his fingers. ‘So, now you’d like to marry Major Luís da Cunha Almeida?’

‘He has asked me. I want to know if it’s possible,’ said Anne. ‘I don’t intend to allow it to affect my work…the work which you indicated that I would be doing in the…until further notice.’

‘There is the small question of identity,’ said Rose. ‘If you want to get married I don’t see why you shouldn’t, it’s just that you will have to marry under your cover name and you won’t be able to have any member of your family present. As far as the Portuguese are concerned you are Anne Ashworth and will have to remain so.’

‘My name changes anyway.’

‘Quite.’

‘You should know that I broke my cover story.’

‘How?’

‘I was emotionally…’

‘Just tell me how.’

‘I told Dona Mafalda and the contessa that my father was dead.’

‘I doubt that will be a problem. If it is we’ll say that you were emotionally distraught, that your father died very recently in an air raid and you’ve been unable to accept it. On application forms you always put him down as alive but he is in fact dead. We’ll arrange a death certificate. Finish.’

And that was the end of the matter. The end of Andrea Aspinall too. She stood and shook hands, headed for the door.

‘We’ve had news of Voss, by the way. Not good,’ he said to the back of her head. ‘Our sources tell us that he was shot at dawn in Plötzensee prison last Friday with seven others.’

She slipped through the door without looking back. The corridor rocked like a ship’s in a heavy sea. She concentrated on each stair going down to the street, nothing automatic, nothing certain. She breathed in the clear air, hoping it would somehow dislodge the obstruction in her chest, this fishbone, this piece of shrapnel, this sharp chunk of crystalline ice. She screwed up her face, doubled over and ran up the hill towards Estrela. It felt like a heart attack and, when she reached the gardens, she found that she could think of nothing else but crossing the road to the basilica and hiding herself in the darkest corner.

Inside, she crossed herself and collapsed on to her knees, face in the crook of her elbow and the word ‘never’ repeating itself in her mind. She was never going to see Voss again, never going to be herself again, never going to be the same again. The pain loosened itself from the wall of her chest and moved up to her throat. She started crying, but not crying as she’d ever cried before, not bawling like a child, because this pain was pain that could not be articulated. It had no human sound. Her mouth was wide open, her eyes were creased shut. She wanted her agony to find some superhuman screech so that she could get it out of herself but there was nothing, it wasn’t on her scale. Scalding tears coursed down her cheeks, acid streaks to the corner of her mouth. Snot and saliva poured out of her, hung in quivering skeins from her mouth and chin. She seemed to be crying for everything, not just herself but Karl Voss, her dead father, her distant mother, Patrick
Wilshere, Judy Laverne, Dona Mafalda. She didn’t think she would be able to recover from such crying, until a nun put a hand on her shoulder and that jerked her upright. She wasn’t ready for nuns, nor the dark sweat box of the confessional.