The Company of Strangers (31 page)

‘Não falo Português,
’ she said, smearing her face around with a ball of sodden handkerchief. She crashed through the pew into the aisle and ran for the door. Out in the sun, the breeze was still blowing. It went clean through her louvred ribs.

16th August 1968, Luís and Anne Almeida’s rented house in Estoril, near Lisbon.

The night before her flight to London Anne had another running dream. Almost every night since coming back from the vicious fighting in the Mozambique war she’d had running dreams. Sometimes she would be running in daylight, but most of the time it was twilight. This time it was dark and enclosed. She was running down a tunnel, a rough tunnel like an old mine. She had a torch in her hand which was picking up the black shiny walls and the uneven floor, showing the imprint of some old tracks, narrow gauge. She was running away from something and she would occasionally look over her shoulder to see only the blackness she’d left behind her. But there was also the sense of running towards something. She didn’t know what it was and she could see nothing beyond the hole of light made by her torch.

She ran desperately. Her heart pounded and her lungs felt pierced. The torchlight began to waver. The beam flickered and yellowed. She shook the torch but it dimmed further and she found herself looking into the fading filament of the bulb, her breath suddenly visible as if it was cold. Finally it was totally black. No source of ambient light presented itself. Fear crawled up her throat and she tried to scream but nothing would come. She came awake with Luís holding her in his arms and she was crying as she hadn’t cried in over twenty years.

‘It’s all right, it’s only a dream,’ he said, the obvious surprisingly comforting. ‘She’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. We’ll all be all right.’

She nodded into his chest, unable to speak, knowing it was more than that but going along with him. It had been a turning point. That subterranean river, which snatched people’s lives and drove them harder and faster over the quick rocks, through the boiling water, down the chutes and cataracts, had just grabbed her again. The strong current was wrenching her away from her quiet past, slow at the moment, but the pace was gathering beneath her.

She didn’t go back to sleep but lay on her side looking at her husband’s broad back, blocking the sound of his violent snoring with thoughts that hadn’t occurred to her in more than two decades. The news of her mother’s illness had saved them from a formal separation after she’d refused to accompany him to yet another African war but, having arrived at the brink, she now found herself picking over her life, re-examining it in the new light of an uncertain future. One which was sending her back to London and her husband and son, colonel and lieutenant, fighting together in the same regiment in another independence war in Guiné in West Africa.

That other new beginning, twenty-four years ago, came back to her like biography, an objective fascination with another person’s more interestingly led life but, somehow, subjectively dull. She saw herself on her wedding day on a belting hot morning in Estremoz. How she was able to appear happy because she was glad that Luís had been so desperate to marry her, he’d rushed her into the ceremony giving her no time to think of the complications she was carrying inside her down that aisle. It had also meant that when her baby arrived three weeks late there was no suspicious discrepancy in the dates between her wedding night and the birth of
their
son on the 6th May 1945.

That had been unforgivable. She still felt the pang of guilt as fresh as on the day she’d announced her pregnancy to Luís. The happiness he radiated, the tenderness with which he held her, cut through to her terrible twin secrets, jabbed them awake so that as Luís’s joy grew sweeter, hers could only sour. It was then that she understood the true nature of the spy. The work she’d been doing for Rose and Sutherland hadn’t been anything like spying. What she’d done to Luís was spying. Watching him believe in her, admire her, love her, while she silently betrayed him every moment of every day. It was why, she supposed, the punishment meted out to spies throughout the ages had always been cruel and swift.

So much had happened after they were married that she couldn’t understand when looking back on it, especially that first year, why it all seemed so flat. All the decisions she’d made – those lonely nights spent in the confines of her mind – had determined the following decades and yet they came back to her with such rational clarity, devoid of excitement, mere measures for the continuation of her existence.

The long weekend of the wedding had seen the beginning of a seismic shift in her view of the world. Snapshots entered her head of Luís’s family, the Almeidas, and how they ran their estate in the depths of the rural Alentejo on principles she’d come across when studying the Middle Ages under the nuns. On the morning after the wedding, driving around the estate in a small cart with Luís, they’d come across workers of all ages, even small children, clothed from head to foot against the dry, unbearable heat, reaping corn by hand. She saw them again later sitting under a cork oak, eating the meagre rations provided by the estate and wincing with disgust at the barely edible food. She recognized some of the men who’d been brought in to sing at the wedding feast – slow, beautiful, melancholy songs,
which had all the Almeidas, even the men, in tears.

She’d taken Luís to task about the treatment of these people and he hadn’t answered her. It had always been like this. She was about to importune Luís’s sister, hoping for a more sympathetic response, until the sister, showing her around the kitchens, described, almost with glee, how they pickled the olives with swathes of broom to make them more bitter so the farmworkers wouldn’t eat too many. As she’d travelled back to work in Lisbon on the train, an action regarded as treachery by the Almeidas, who thought she should remain with her new family, she found ideas forming in her head, new ideas about a fairer way of life. Ideas which would mean that she wouldn’t have to think too much about herself.

She rolled on to her back, turned away from Luís and his animal gruntings. She’d been lying in this same bed twenty-four years earlier with the baby growing inside her as rapidly as her guilt with all its Catholic foundations and she’d known then that there would have to be some payment for what she was doing. A heavy sum would be extracted and she’d hoped then, as she did now, that her unpredictable God would see fit to confine His punishment to her alone.

Her eyelids became impossibly heavy, even against her horror of re-entering the dark tunnels of her dreams, and she slept until Luís, at his morning toilet, woke her.

If her mother hadn’t been seriously ill she would have given up at the airport and gone to Guiné with them. She made a fool of herself outside the departures lounge. Luís had to prise her arms from around Julião. She wept in the toilet until her flight was called. As she flew she didn’t eat but drank gin and tonics and sat at the back, smoking on her own. She couldn’t seem to propel her thoughts forward. Like last night all they wanted to do was drift back
listlessly over the past. This time it was her son, Julião, who occupied the foreground of her mind. How she’d failed him and he in turn had failed her.

She’d learned something about genetics on the day he was born. Looking into his face, screwed up against the harsh hospital light, she knew instantly that this child’s personality was neither hers nor Karl Voss’s and she hadn’t been so astonished when Luís, the proud father, had picked him up and said:

‘He’s me, isn’t he?’

In that moment the Voss family photograph came into her mind – the father and his eldest son, Julius, who’d died at Stalingrad – and she knew that this was who Luís was holding.

‘I think we should call him Julião,’ she said, and Luís had been jubilant that she’d chosen his grandfather’s name.

It had been so poignant when they left the hospital two days later on VE day. They drove down the hill from the Hospital São José into the Restauradores to find it full of people waving Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes and jabbing the air with victorious fingers and V-shaped placards. She noticed blank flags being waved, too, and asked Luís what they meant.

‘Ach!’ he said in disgust, pulling away from the crowd. ‘They’re the communists. The hammer and sickle is banned by the Estado Novo so they wave these rags…I see that and I’m sick, I’m…’

He hadn’t been able to continue and she couldn’t understand his vehemence. So they’d left it, the thin end of the wedge already jammed in between them.

The first black day had come twenty months later when, after trying every siesta and every night to conceive another baby and after three consultations with different gynaecologists, Luís went to see a doctor, a private one, not an army doctor, not for this. He took Julião with him
for comfort and, she suspected, to show he’d already struck once.

He returned home, stunned and morose. The doctor had told him something he hadn’t been prepared to believe and, on taking the first blast of Luís’s outrage, let him look down the microscope himself. The doctor had said it could easily happen. A man, especially one in an active profession and a horseman, could go sterile.

Luís sat outside on the verandah in the January cold, staring at the slow, grey heave of the Atlantic. He was immovable and inconsolable. Anne, looking at the back of his bowed head, knew now that she’d never be able to tell him. After some hours she tried to coax him back in but he wouldn’t respond. He even lashed her hand away from his shoulder. She sent Julião out to bring him round. He eventually picked the boy up, sat him on his knee, held him tight and when the two came back in an hour later she knew that something had been resolved. He formally apologized to Anne and looked down on his son’s head in such a way that she knew, and it was almost with relief, that Julião would be the focus of Luís’s life.

As the plane began its slow descent the adrenalin trickle started. They touched down at Heathrow just after midday. The taxi drove into London past office blocks, endless rows of houses, through traffic, and she knew she was in a foreign country. It was not her own. This was a country which had moved, was moving. She realized how stultifying Salazar’s Estado Novo had become. In the first glimpses of London on a summer’s afternoon driving through Earl’s Court, seeing men with long hair, wearing red flared velvet trousers and vests, vests like the peasants wore except in bright colours and bleached with circles, she realized what Portugal was missing. This lot wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes on the streets before being picked up by the PIDE.

The cab driver charged her two weeks’ housekeeping to take her to her mother’s house on Orlando Road in Clapham.

‘It’s on the meter, love. I doesn’t make it up,’ he said.

She paid and waited for him to go, prepared herself. The last time she’d seen her mother was Easter 1947, Luíis had been on exercise and she’d flown back to London for a week. It had not gone well. London felt like a beaten city – grey, still rubble-strewn and ration-carded and peopled by dark-clothed shadows. Her mother had shown little interest in Julião and had made no alterations to her social or work arrangements, so that Anne had found herself alone with her son in the Clapham house for most of the week. She’d returned to Lisbon furious and since then she and her mother had phoned rarely, written letters which were strictly informative and exchanged presents neither of them wanted at Christmas and birthdays.

The only change in the street was a new block of flats where her piano teacher’s house had been bombed out on the corner of Lydon Road. She walked up the path to her mother’s house behind the privet hedge and had a momentary panic at the sight of the red-stained glass panels in the front door. She rang the door bell. Feet clattered down the stairs. A priest opened the door, saw the shock in her face.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘nothing to worry about. I was just dropping by. You must be the daughter. Audrey said you were arriving today. From Lisbon. Yes. Nice bit of weather we’re having here so…yes…well, come in, come on in.’

He took her case. They stood in the hall, inched around each other for a moment. Familiar furniture appeared over the priest’s shoulder like better company at a cocktail party.

‘She’s having a good day today,’ he said, trying to recapture her attention.

‘She still hasn’t told me what’s wrong with her,’ said Anne. ‘I tried to ask her last night on the telephone but she’s being evasive.’

‘Good days and bad days,’ said the priest, who although bald, looked as if he was her age.

‘Do
you
know, Father?’

‘It would be better coming from her, I think.’

‘She said it was serious.’

‘It is and she knows it. She even knows how long…’

‘How
long
?’ she said, shaken by it, not prepared for that level of finality. ‘You mean…?

‘Yes. She’s always playing it down, just says it’s serious, but she knows it’s only a matter of weeks. Weeks rather than months…so the doctors are saying.’

‘Shouldn’t she be…in hospital?’

‘Refuses to stay. Won’t have it. Can’t stand the smell of the food. Said she’d rather be on her own at home…with you.’

‘With me,’ she said, out loud but to herself. ‘Forgive me, Father, but you seem very cheerful, given…’

‘Yes, well, I always am around Audrey. Most extraordinary woman, your mother.’

‘I have to admit that I am quite surprised to see you here. I mean, she was never…’

‘Oh yes, I know. Somewhat lapsed.’

‘I mean, she’s always been religious and quite strictly Catholic…that’s how she brought me up. But as for…going to church, priests, confessions, Holy Communion, all that…no, Father…? You didn’t say…’

‘Father Harpur. That’s Harpur with a “u”,’ he said. ‘Look, I’d best get going. I’ve put the tonic in the fridge.’

‘Tonic?’

‘She likes a gin and tonic at about six.’

‘Is she in her room?’ she asked, suddenly desperate for him to stay, help her through this…any awkwardness.

‘No, no…she’s out in the garden sunning herself.’

‘In the
garden
?’ she said, looking up the stairs.

‘She just asked me to put something in your room…that’s why I came from upstairs.’

‘No, of course, but you said she was out in the garden in the sun.’