The Company of Strangers (35 page)

In her head she saw herself with her face out of the train window. These were the events that were rushing towards her, but blinded by the wind, they were just a blur, a sense of impending incident. Looking back she’d seen the silver rails but only through the incoherence of her own streaming hair. Now she was seeing a pattern, a terrible tragic pattern – her mother’s story, her father’s death, Julius Voss perishing at Stalingrad, his father’s suicide, Karl’s capture and execution, their son’s death, the suicide of the surrogate father. ‘Lies beget lies,’ her mother had said, you have to tell another to keep the first one going. But tragedy is the same. It follows bloodlines. The one thing she’d never expected to be was tragic – some jittery middle-aged woman, living alone in a large cold house, never going out because she could anticipate the
next lightning strike. And here she was, a tragic figure. Pitied by Senhor Martims because she was a mother who’d lost everything and had no family. It made her angry and she tore open Luís’s letter to see what he had to say for himself.

Dear Anne,

It is late and I’ve been drinking. The drink is not doing what it is supposed to do. I’m sweating and words, which were never my strength, float past me, but the pain, which should be dull by now, is still there, diamond hard, piercing, not one edge of it blunted.

The night and the noise of the insects are crowding me. My friends, fellow officers, have gone to bed. They see that I have taken it well. But I have not.

You and I left each other on bad terms because you thought that these wars were wrong. I saw it before – that first time in Angola – and I see it clearly now, but it is too late and I have lost everything – my son, and because you can never forgive me, you as well. The two of you were all that mattered to me and without you the future has no value.

I was never a man to do this sort of thing. I always savoured life. Perhaps if I wait I could persuade myself out of it and live the unendurable existence. But now, with the heat pressing against the walls, the vagueness of the world beyond the mosquito netting, the great distance between us and the colossal absence – I have no strength for it, no courage. Forgive me this, if not the other.

Your husband. Luís

She folded the letter up in its envelope and stuffed it down the side of the chair. Senhor Martims had stopped pacing and was now thinking about the English as a race. The words pity and admiration came to him. Why can’t they explode? Why can’t they squeeze out a tear? If she’d been Portuguese she’d have…she’d have fainted or fallen to her knees, wailing, but this…this bottled silence, this strapped-down stoicism. How do they do it?
Sang froid,
that was it, cold blood. The English were emotional reptiles. And as soon as he’d thought it he felt guilty. This was not the time for such thoughts. This woman…the suffering…it was unimaginable. Her mother as well.

But Senhor Martims was wrong. He didn’t know it, but he was walking at the foot of a volcano. Plates had moved inside Anne, chasms had opened up and this boiling rage of molten rock was seething to the surface. Her hands, which were clasping her knees, trembled against her body’s geology.

‘Thank you, Senhor Martims, for coming to see me,’ she said, her voice quaking. ‘Thank you for your sympathy. I’ll be all right now. You can go back to the consulate.’

‘No, no, I insist on staying until Mr Wallis arrives.’

‘I would like some moments to myself beforehand, that’s all. If you would be so kind as to…’

She engineered him out of the door. He went to his car and waited. Anne didn’t go back into the sitting room but found the darkness of the dining room a comfort. She fell towards the table, retching with something too big to vomit out and barked her shins on a chair. The sharp physical pain was blinding and she stumbled over the chair, crashing with it to the floor. She lashed out at it with savage kicks, ripped the heel off her shoe.

‘You fucking…you fucking…you little fucker,’ she spat from between gritted teeth and, amazed at finding the available vocabulary, hauled herself to her feet.

She grabbed the back of the chair and dashed it against the wall. The back and rear legs split away from the seat and she brought this down with all her strength on another chair and broke off the two legs. She smashed the back into the wall and saw it splinter into matchwood. She took the front legs and seat and reduced that, too. She stood back, panting. The china quivered in the dresser. She threw open the doors, took out a plate and hurled it against the wall, another plate and another, the destructive satisfaction of it thrilling up her ribs. She swung each one harder and, as she got tired, she dredged up a screech of agony to launch the next plate with increasing venom. Just as her arm began to hang limp from her shoulder and her chest felt too full of organs, jostling for room, she found herself engulfed by a damp raincoat and Wallis whispering into her ear. More incomprehensible words.

She was taken up to a bedroom, her mother’s room, and put into bed. A doctor was called, who came and sedated her. He left valium for later. She lay like a figurine in a cotton wool-filled box. The outside did not penetrate and inside was curiously muted, no thought or feeling could reach its pin-sharp conclusion.

She floated for what seemed like days and came into daylight with a strange woman in the room. She had to claw her way back into reality, a physical effort. The woman explained herself. Jim Wallis’s wife. Anne tried to edge back towards what had happened but found herself removed from it. There was a padded bulwark between this new point and her past. She knew what had happened, the steel-fastened lock of muscles around her shoulder reminded her of that. She even saw the drift of shattered china up the wall but she could not recapture any of the intensity of the moment. She felt curiously bereft. The thought of her dead son and husband elicited sadness, which produced bleak, but quiet, weeping but there was
no madness. She missed that madness. It had been right for the moment. Now she felt split, completely disconnected, not just from the incident but from the whole of her old life. The memories of it were as intact as they had been in the weeks while her mother lay dying, only now it wasn’t even biography but more like history. It frightened her, this change of perception, until she realized that it was a modus vivendi, a truce after a mortifying exchange of artillery.

Wallis came by in the evening to relieve his wife. They talked on the landing outside the room. The day’s report. Calm. Wallis sat on the bed, took Anne’s hand. The front door slammed below.

‘I’m back,’ she said.

‘It looks like it.’

‘How long have I been…out?’

‘Three days. Doctor’s orders. He thought it best, in view of your mother as well.’

‘Am I still on drugs?’

‘Less than before, which is why you’re back with us but probably a little fuzzy.’

‘Yes, a little…fuzzy.’

She dressed as if she was watching herself do it and they ate something downstairs, the cutlery loud on the plates. Her surroundings, although sharp and recognizable, appeared unusual, as if oddly lit. Wallis asked her what she was going to do with herself, but carefully as if she might be considering…what did they call it? Something stupid. The strangest thing was that the thought hadn’t occurred to her – to kill herself. She assumed that she’d instinctively locked on to that stubbornness that her mother had possessed as well.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My life seemed to picking up some kind of momentum before this, I should try and recapture that, I suppose.’

‘I could get you a job if you want.’

‘Who with?’

‘The Company, of course,’ he said. ‘They still haven’t filled Audrey’s position to Dickie’s satisfaction. Every time someone new starts in the job Dickie just shakes his head and says, “Irreplaceable”, and that’s it.’

‘Thanks, but Richard Rose and I, you know…I think I’m going to do this research project at Cambridge.’

‘Any time you need help, Anne, we’re here.’

Then something did come back to her and in focus. The reason why she’d hesitated to fill in her university application forms.

‘There is something you could do for me now,’ she said. ‘You could get me my name back, my identity. I wouldn’t mind being Andrea Aspinall again.’

1968–70, Cambridge and London.

Her last act as Anne Ashworth was to go to Lisbon for the burial of Julião and Luís. Because of the African heat the bodies had already been cremated in Guiné but there was to be a Mass in the Basílica da Estrela and a burial service at the family mausoleum in Estremoz.

Anne stayed in the York House in Rua das Janelas Verdes in Lapa. The evening before the funeral she walked the familiar streets past the British Embassy on Rua de São Domingos, turned right into Rua de Buenos Aires, left into Rua dos Navegantes and down the railed slope of Rua de João de Deus. She hadn’t been back in this neighbourhood for twenty-four years and, when she first saw the swaying jacarandas below the white dome of the basilica, she’d expected the memories to rush at her like excited children, but they held back, sidled off.

She stood in front of the old apartment building, its façade still the same with the green and blue tiles, black diamonds, the plaque, commemorating the death of the poet João de Deus, was still above the door.

She joined the Almeida family group on the steps in front of the basilica and, even though they’d never liked her, the foreigner, they took her in, accepted her in their mutual grief. They walked into the basilica together, Anne on Luís’s mother’s arm, and it confirmed to her what she knew about the Portuguese – they understood tragedy, it was their territory and they were united with anybody
who was in it with them. They sat all night through the vigil – keeping watch over the urns.

Mass was held in the morning. Few people other than family came. The friends of Luís and Julião were all in Africa, fighting the wars. The Almeidas took the urns to Estremoz where they were laid in the family mausoleum, alongside other coffins, bunked on top of each other like soldiers in the barracks. The wrought-iron door was closed on the dead and their photographs placed in frames on the outside: Luís, as he’d always been in front of the camera, solemn, almost as if he was attending his own funeral, and Julião, still ready for life, his smile unbroken.

She stayed a night with the Almeidas and headed back to Lisbon on the train the next day. In the evening she went to see João Ribeiro, the last loose end to be tied before she flew out the next morning. João was living in a different room, but still in the heart of the Bairro Alto. He greeted her, kissing her hard on both cheeks and holding her tight to his thin body. She pulled away and he was weeping, pushing his handkerchief up under his specs until he realized it was easier to take them off.

‘So, this is what has happened to me. This is what you do to an old man. How can you leave for such a short time and still make me so happy to see you? And sad. I am sorry for all your losses. More than anyone should have to bear in a lifetime, let alone a month. Life can be a brutal beast at times, Anne.’

‘You should know, João,’ she said, looking around the spartan room, his worn circumstances.

‘This…’ he said, sweeping his arm around, ‘this is nothing to what you have had to endure.’

‘You lost your wife, your job, the work that you loved.’

‘My wife was always sick. It was a blessed release for her. The university? Under this régime it can’t teach anybody anything. How can you learn with the newspapers printing
their daily lies. And my work? I
have
work. This room is better than the last one, isn’t it?’

‘What work?’

‘I teach arithmetic to children and their mothers how to read and write. I am a true communist, a better one now that I live among the people. They feed me, clothe me, look after me. But you…you must tell me what you are going to do after these terrible events.’

‘There’s only one thing I can do,’ she said. ‘I seem to have reached some sort of finality and yet I’m still here. I have to continue. I have to start again.’

She told him about Louis Greig and the research project and they talked mathematics until a woman brought a tray of plates and grilled sardines and they sat down to dinner.

‘It’s not a bad life for an old man,’ said João. ‘My meals cooked, my washing done, my room cleaned and
fado
in the evenings. Perhaps this is how we should all live. I find it harmonious.’

The woman came back, cleared the table and left coffee and brandy.

‘They know you are important to me,’ said João, ‘so they’re making a fuss. They wanted to cook you something special but I told them sardines was what you liked, that you were one of us…as indeed is Louis Greig, for all his wealth.’

‘One of us?’

‘A mathematician and a communist.’

‘I’m surprised. He told me he worked at RAND after Princeton.’

‘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 Ages,’ 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.’