The Company of Strangers (49 page)

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

‘I have my uses.’

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 At meals he was distracted and withdrawn.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 through 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.

She was sitting on the ruined side of his face but she could see his eye, staring out from its gnarled and webbed nest, taking it all in, remembering. His head ducked down as they passed the Basílica da Estrela to catch sight of the façade of his old apartment building on Rua de João de Deus still intact – in fact, untouched, just a little more cracked and crumbled. Only then did she realize the brilliance of her gift. These parts of Lisbon hadn’t changed at all in fifty years and some not since the 1755 earthquake.

They turned off into Avenida Infante Santo and into Lapa. The cab threaded through the streets to Rua das Janelas Verdes and the York House. They walked up the same stone steps as the monks had done in the seventeenth century, when it had been the Convento dos Marianos. Voss stood in the old courtyard, beneath the huge spread of the palm tree and remembered all those characters in all those other
pensões
in Lisbon reading their newspapers, waiting for the day’s real information which was never in print in front of them.

They rested and in the evening walked back up to the Jardim da Estrela. They touched the tiles of the old apartment building’s façade. Voss ran his hands up the iron swans’ necks supporting the roof of the now disused kiosk, where he used to buy his cigarettes and newspapers. They sat and had a beer in the café in the gardens. They stood on the spot where he’d given himself up and he raised his eyes to the window of the old apartment, now open to the cool of the evening.

They walked the walk that they believed had been their undoing – down the Calçada da Estrela to São Bento and the National Assembly, into the edge of the Bairro Alto, around the church, along Rua Academia Ciências, up the Rua do Seculo and right into the grid of the Bairro Alto. Andrea ate a meal of
rojões,
cubed pork with cumin, in a Minhote restaurant. Voss watched and drank the best part of a bottle of
Vinho Verde
red from Ponte da Lima. In the lamp-lit darkness they strolled past bars, restaurants and dodgy-looking characters offering a night of
fado,
as if it was a porno movie. They reached the Rua de São Pedro de Alcântara and walked up between the silver rails of the tramlines as they crossed the street to the
miradouro.
They stood at the railings, looking out across the city to the Castelo São Jorge, just as they had stood forty-seven years before, but not touching.

Voss still hadn’t spoken much since they’d arrived, but it wasn’t the hard, grim, obsessive silence of the month in Langfield. He seemed to be filling up, like a dry clay jug, darkening with moisture as it takes in water from a spring. She leaned with her back to the railings and pulled him to her by his lapels, looked into the good half of his face.

‘Is this completely normal?’ she asked.

He struggled. His eyes shifted over her face.

‘I don’t…I don’t remember the words,’ he said.

‘You remember them,’ she said. ‘You told me them.’

‘They’ve slipped my mind.’

‘Is this completely normal?’ she repeated, shaking him by the lapels.

‘I don’t…I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been in love once.’

‘Who with?’

‘You…crazy.’

He’d said it but it didn’t carry the same conviction as forty-seven years ago.

‘In that case,’ she said, relenting, ‘you’re allowed into my hotel room.’

He joined her in bed that night and she slept with her back to him, their heads on the same pillow, hands joined over her stomach.

In the morning she went off on her own and found the lawyer’s office in the Chiado. He gave her the wooden box, which she signed for. She bought some paper and wrapped it and went on to the bus station and booked two tickets to Estremoz for the next day.

They took the train from Lisbon out to Estoril along the glinting, panel-beaten Tagus, the silver carriages of the train visible ahead as they turned on the bright and shining rails. The surf broke against the Búgio lighthouse in the middle of the estuary and the hump of the sandbank lurked behind like a surfacing whale.

They were horrified by how tacky the casino had become – all naked girls and ostrich feathers. The passage up to the garden of the Quinta da Águia no longer existed. Houses had been built across it and up the hill behind. They had lunch on the promenade. He poked at his sardines. She showed him where she’d lived when she’d been married to Luís and they took the train back into the city in the late afternoon.

When they arrived in Estremoz the next day it was already brutally hot. They took a cab up to the
pousada
within the castle walls and flaked out for an hour. They went back down into the town for lunch and found a dark, cool
tasca
whose walls were lined with terracotta wine jars, each tall as a man. The place was packed with Portuguese, workers and tourists, all sitting on wooden benches and eating vast portions of food.

‘Do you see these people?’ asked Andrea.

‘Yes, I see them,’ said Voss, wary.

‘What do you think about them?’

‘That they might become very fat,’ he said, the thin smug man.

‘I think they don’t give a damn about anything, except the food on their plates, the good wine in their glasses and the people around them. It’s not such a bad way to be.’

He nodded and ate a quarter of his grilled fish and a leaf of lettuce.

They took a cab out to the small chapel and graveyard amongst the marble quarries on the outskirts of town. They walked the lanes of the graves and tombs until they reached the Almeida family mausoleum. Voss lagged behind, looking at the photographs of the dead, which were very formal, no better than mug shots, some of them. He fingered the flowers, some of which were plastic and
others made out of material. He came alongside her, not knowing what they were doing in this place. She tapped Julião’s photograph, faded in the years of draining sunshine. Voss took a closer look, peering at the outline of the face.

‘You haven’t asked me anything about him,’ she said. ‘So I thought I’d start at the end. In his end is your beginning…something like that.’

Voss clung on to the wrought-iron bars of the gate to the mausoleum and took in the coffins, more coffins now, and the two urns of Julião and Luís on the same shelf. Andrea took out the old photograph and put in a new one. She handed the old one to Voss. They left the graveyard, Voss’s head bowed over the bleached picture, and found a cab to take them back up to the
pousada.

Outside the hotel she took his arm and walked him past the church and the statue of Rainha Santa Isabel and sat on the ramparts. She gave him the present, which he opened. He admired the African box and thanked her with an awkward kiss.

‘Look inside,’ she said. ‘The present’s inside.’

On top was the Voss family photograph. His hand shook as he took it out. His emaciated body shuddered as he looked from face to face, each one with its own sense of triumph at being someone in the family group, in front of a photographer. He took out his father’s letters, leafed through them to the one asking him to get Julius out of Stalingrad. He read it, and then his own to Julius and finally the letter from one of Julius’s men. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.

‘I took them from your room before I escaped on to the roof back in ‘44. I thought it might be the only thing I’d ever have of you so I kept them. They’re yours,’ she said. ‘You probably don’t have anything left yourself.’

He shook his head, chin resting on his chest.

‘I lost you, Karl,’ she said, standing up, looking down on his bowed head. ‘This last time, you’ve turned up in my life but you’re not here. You’ve been consumed by something else and I want you back. I hope this reminds you of the man you were, because you’re still the only one who has meant anything and everything to me.’

They went up to the hotel room. Karl, exhausted, slept on his back with the box on his chest, its contents seeping into him like a new drug. In the evening they returned to the same
tasca
where they’d had lunch. This time he ordered beer and wine. He ate the cheese and olives. He ordered roasted pig’s cheeks and ate it all, right down to the crackling skin. He had a pudding – cake with sugar plums – and coffee and he drank a
bagaço
, because he wanted to remember that harsh liquor, his demand for it when he’d been in Lisbon during the war. He still didn’t say very much but he looked at her throughout, taking her in as if he’d noticed her for the first time. His eyes were still sunk in his head but they’d lost the haunted look, the tortured, pleading look.

Slightly drunk, they held on to each other and found a small café near some gardens by the barracks and ordered
aguardente velho
, less harsh, more refined, more suitable for pensioners. He toasted her:

‘For what you’ve returned to me,’ he said. ‘And for reminding me what’s important.’

‘And?’ she asked, severe, but eyes smiling with the booze.

He paused, smacked his lips.

‘For being the most beautiful creature on earth that I’ve never stopped loving.’

‘More,’ she said, ‘I think I deserve more of that stuff. Tell me how much you love me. Go on, Karl Voss, physicist from Heidelberg University. How much? Quantify it. I need measures.’

‘I love you…’ he said, and thought about it for thirty seconds.

‘I’m glad this is taking so long to compute.’

‘I love you more than there are water molecules in the oceans of the world.’

‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘That
is
quite a lot. You may kiss me now.’

‘This work,’ he said, as they recklessly asked the waiter to leave the bottle of
aguardente velho
on the table, ‘this book I’ve been working on, that I thought, until this afternoon, was so important, is called…I’ve named it
The Gospel of Lies.
It was to be a personal account of what it has been like to spend my whole life as a spy, always working against the states which have employed me. I thought that this would be the way to make sense of it all. But it wasn’t just going to be that. I was also going to make an astounding revelation…that for the entire post-war period, until it became unimportant, the Russians had somebody installed at the very highest level of British Intelligence.