The Company of Strangers (7 page)

They arrived in Santa Apolónia station in Lisbon late the following afternoon. It was raining and Mesnel in his oversized coat and hat walked at funereal pace from the
station to the massive square of the Terreiro do Paço, which Voss was surprised to see sandbagged and guarded in a neutral country. He followed the Frenchman through the Baixa and up the Avenida da Liberdade to the Praça Marquês de Pombal where Mesnel, dragging his feet, seemingly weak with hunger, entered a small
pensão
on the Rua Braancamp. Voss was relieved to take a taxi to the German Legation on the Rua do Pau de Bandeira in Lapa, a smart quarter on the outskirts of the city. SS Colonel Reinhardt Wolters had been expecting him two days earlier but welcomed him all the same.

On 13th February the Chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was escorted out of the Maibach II complex by officers sent from the Reich’s Main Security Office by Kaltenbrunner. He was taken to the house within the grounds where he packed and was then driven to his own home in Schlachtensee. On 18th February the Abwehr was dissolved and brought under Kaltenbrunner’s direct control. The rain was clattering against the windows of the German Legation in Lapa when Wolters came into Voss’s office to deliver the good news. As the SS man left the room, Voss was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, a man out on a limb at the westernmost tip of Europe with only the enemy to talk to.

10th July 1944, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.

Andrea Aspinall collapsed on her bed in her room with the windows open, just back from another trip to the air-raid shelter – the doodlebugs a menace, flying over at all times of day, not like the good old predictable nights of endless bombing raids in the Blitz. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of not going to the shelter – listen for the low drone of the diesel-powered rocket, wait for its engine to cut out, take pot luck under its silent falling, test her boredom threshold.

She went to sit on the window ledge, her room at the top, old servants’ quarters. She looked over the back garden through the lime trees to Macaulay Road, four houses along, direct hit from a doodlebug, not much left, blackened beams, piled rubble but nobody home at the time. She caught sight of herself, only her head in the bottom corner of the mirror on the dressing table across the room. Long black hair, dark, nearly olive skin, twenty-year-old brown eyes wanting to be older.

She opened a packet of Woodbines, rested the filterless cigarette on her lower lip, let it stick. She struck a match on the outside wall, warm brick. Her hand came into the frame, she turned her face and accepted the light. She flicked her head back, unstuck the cigarette, let out a long stream of smoke and came back to herself in the mirror with her tongue on her top lip – being sophisticated. She shook her head at herself, looked out of the window – still
a silly girl playing romantic games in the mirror. Not a spy.

She’d spent most of her life at the Sacred Heart Convent in Devizes where she’d been sent at seven years old when her great aunt had died and there’d been no one to look after her while her mother worked. That was why the piano teacher and his wife, who’d been bombed in their home during the Blitz, had been so important to her, they’d become family, looking after her through school holidays. The piano teacher was her father. She’d never known her own, the one who’d died of cholera before she was born.

They knew about discipline and religion at the Sacred Heart and not much else, but it hadn’t prevented her from getting a place at St Anne’s, Oxford to read maths. She’d done nearly two years of her degree when her tutor invited her to a party at St John’s. At the party a large quantity of drink was served and consumed by dons, undergraduates and other people not directly associated with the university. These people floated around the room and occasionally moored themselves to some young person or other and engaged them in short intense conversations about politics and history. She went to more parties like this and met a man who took a particular interest in her, who was called simply – Rawlinson.

Rawlinson was very tall. He wore a three-piece suit, charcoal grey, a starched collar attached with studs to his shirt and a school tie which, if she’d known more, would have said Wellington and the military. He was in his fifties with all his hair, which was black on top, grey at the sides and combed through with tonic. He had only one leg and his prosthesis was stiff so that when he walked that leg swung in a semi-circle and he had to support himself with a duckhead-topped cane. She felt lucky because, while his conversation was the usual penetrative stuff, he
participated with the charm of an uncle who shouldn’t really take a fancy to his niece but couldn’t help it.

‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Mathematics. Has anybody ever asked you why mathematics? Interesting.’

Andrea, a little drunk, shrugged. Unprepared for the question, her brain ticked. She spoke with her mind elsewhere.

‘You can get things to work out, I suppose,’ she said, feeling instantly stupid, embarrassed.

‘Not always, I shouldn’t think,’ said Rawlinson, surprising her, taking it seriously, taking her seriously even.

‘No, not always, but when you do it’s…well…there’s a beauty to it, an inconceivable simplicity. As Godfrey Hardy said, “Beauty is the test. There’s no place in this world for ugly mathematics.’”

‘Beauty?’ said Rawlinson, baffled. ‘Not something I remember from maths class. Fiendish is more the word. Show me beauty…beauty that I can understand.’

‘The number six,’ she said, ‘has three divisors – one, two and three – which if added together come to…six. Isn’t that perfect? And, seen in that same light, isn’t Pythagoras’s theorem beautiful too? So simple. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides squared. True for all right-angled triangles ever created. What seems terribly complicated can be resolved into equations…formulae which go towards completing the…well, at least part of the puzzle.’

He tapped his cheek with a long finger.

‘The puzzle?’

‘How things work,’ she said, hysteria mounting as the banality took root.

‘And people,’ he said; question or agreement, she wasn’t sure.

‘People?’

‘How do
people
fit into the equation?’

‘There are infinite possibilities in maths. Every number is a complex number. It can be real or imaginary, and real numbers can be rational or irrational. Rational like integers or fractions, irrational like algebra or transcendental numbers.’

‘Transcendental?’

‘Real, but non-algebraic.’

‘I see.’

‘Like π.’

‘What are you saying, Miss Aspinall?’

‘I’m talking to you in the simplest way possible, at the most basic end of mathematics, and already there are things you don’t fully understand. It’s a secret language. Only very few people know it and can speak it.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how people fit into your world.’

‘I was just showing you that numbers can be complicated in the same way that people can be. And something else…I’m a person, too, with all the normal human needs. I don’t always speak in algorithms.’

‘Numbers are more stable than people, I’d have thought. More predictable.’

‘I haven’t come across an emotional number…yet,’ she said, her hands feeling huge at her sides, flapping like albatross’s wings, ‘which is why, I suppose, it’s possible to get things to work out…every so often.’

‘Are solutions important to you?’

Andrea studied him for a moment, the question carrying interview weight. His eyes didn’t flinch from hers. She lost the match.

‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.

After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent, but they gave her some additional training instead. Dead-letter drops, invisible ink, using miniature cameras, following people, talking to people while pretending to be someone else to find out what they knew – role-playing, they called it. The minuscule arts of deception. They also taught her how to fire a gun, ride a motorbike and drive a car.

They sent her home at the beginning of July to wait for an assignment. A week later she was contacted by Rawlinson, who told her he was going to come to tea to meet her mother. It was important to establish normality at home, her mother had to be given something official about what her daughter would be doing but not, of course, the reality.

‘Andrea!’

Her mother shouted up the stairs from the hall. She dabbed the coal of the cigarette out on the wall, put the butt back in the packet.

‘Andrea!’

‘Coming, Mother,’ she said, ripping open the door.

She looked down the stairs to her mother’s moon-white, but not so luminous, face at the curve of the bannisters.

‘Mr Rawlinson’s here,’ she said in a stage whisper.

‘I didn’t hear him arrive.’

‘Well, he’s here,’ she said. ‘Shoes.’

She went barefoot back to the bedroom, put on her mother’s horrible shoes, laced them up. She sniffed the
air, still smoky, still behaving like Mother’s little girl. Definitely not a spy.

‘She’s very young, you know…’ She overheard her mother in the drawing room. ‘I mean, she’s nineteen, no twenty, but she doesn’t act it. She went to a convent…’

‘The Sacred Heart in Devizes,’ said Rawlinson. ‘Good school.’

‘And out of London.’

‘Away from the bombing.’

‘It wasn’t the bombing, Mr Rawlinson,’ her mother said, without saying what it had been.

Andrea braced herself for the tedium of her mother behaving properly in front of strangers.

‘Not the bombing…?’ said Rawlinson, feigning mild surprise.

‘The influences,’ said Mrs Aspinall.

Andrea rattled her heels on the tiles to announce herself, to stop her mother talking about ‘goings on’ in the air-raid shelters. She shook hands with Rawlinson.

Her mother’s bra creaked as she poured the tea. What rigging for such a tight little ship, thought Andrea, feeling Rawlinson’s bright, nearly saucy eyes on her neck, which heated up. Teacups rattled, raised and refitted on to saucers.

‘You speak German,’ he said to Andrea.

‘
Frisch weht der Wind / Der heimat zu, / Mein Irisch kind / Wo weilest du
?’ said Andrea.

‘Don’t show off, dear,’ said her mother.

‘And Portuguese,’ said Andrea.

‘She taught herself, you know,’ said Audrey Aspinall, interrupting. ‘Pass Mr Rawlinson some cake, dear.’

Andrea had been sitting on her hands and now found that the ribbing of her dress was printed on the back of them as she passed the cake. Why did her mother always do this to her?

‘You have secretarial skills,’ said Rawlinson, lifting the cake.

‘She just did a course, didn’t you, dear?’

Andrea didn’t contribute. Her mother’s porcelain face, still beautiful at thirty-eight years old but unyielding, turned hard on her. Andrea hadn’t told her mother anything about what had gone on at Oxford other than what they’d told her to say.

‘It’s my job to find suitable staff for our embassies and high commissions. My department is very small and when we find someone with a foreign language we tend to snap them up. I have a position for your daughter, Mrs Aspinall…abroad.’

‘I’d like to go abroad,’ said Andrea.

‘How would you know?’ said her mother. ‘That’s the thing about young people today, Mr Rawlinson, they think they know everything without having done anything but, of course, they don’t think. They don’t think and they don’t listen.’

‘We’re
relying
on youth in this war, Mrs Aspinall,’ said Rawlinson, ‘because they don’t know fear. Eighteen-year-olds can do a hundred bombing missions, get shot down, make their way through enemy territory and be up in the air again within a week. The reason they can do that is precisely that they don’t think, you see. The
danger’s
in the thinking.’

‘I’m not sure about abroad…’ said Mrs Aspinall.

‘Why don’t you come to my office tomorrow,’ said Rawlinson to Andrea. ‘We’ll test your skills. Eleven o’clock suit you?’

‘I don’t know where you’d send her. Not south. She can’t stand the heat.’

This was a lie, worse than a lie because the opposite was the case. Andrea, inside her dark skin, under her starling glossy hair, glared at her mother’s translucency, at the
blue blood inching its way under the alabaster skin. Mrs Aspinall had a Victorian’s attitude to sun. It never touched her skin. In summer she wore marble, in winter the snow would pile on her head as on a statue’s in the square.

‘Lisbon, Mrs Aspinall, we have an opening in Lisbon which would suit your daughter’s skills and intelligence.’

‘Lisbon? But there must be something she can do in London.’

Rawlinson got to his feet, hauling his stiff leg up after him, shooting Andrea a conspiratorial look.

They followed him into the hall. Mrs Aspinall fitted him into his light coat, gave him his hat, smoothed the shoulders of his coat. Andrea blinked at that small, intimate action. It shocked her, confused her.

‘You’re going to be hot out there, Mr Rawlinson.’

‘Thank you so much for tea, Mrs Aspinall,’ he said, and tipped his hat before going down to the gate and out into the sun-baked street.

‘Well, you won’t want to go to Lisbon, will you?’ said Mrs Aspinall, closing the door.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s as good as Africa down there…Arabs,’ she added as an afterthought, making it exotic.

‘I suppose it’s because I speak Portuguese,’ said Andrea. ‘Why do you never let me say…’

‘Don’t start on that. I’m not doing battle with you on that score,’ she said, heading back into the living room.

‘Why shouldn’t I talk about my father?’

‘He’s dead, you never knew him,’ she said, throwing her tea dregs into the pot plant, pouring herself another cup. ‘I hardly did, either.’

‘That’s no reason.’

‘It’s just not done, Andrea. That’s all.’

Something wriggled in Andrea’s mind, something irrational like the first half of an equation, some algebra
with too many unknowns. She was thinking about her mother smoothing Rawlinson’s shoulders. Intimacy and what brought that intimacy. Rawlinson’s leg. And why dead Portuguese fathers can’t be mentioned.

Talking to her mother was just like algebra. Maths without the numbers. Words which meant something else. A question arrived in Andrea’s head. One prompted by an image. It was a question which couldn’t be asked. She could think it and if she looked at her mother and thought it, she’d shudder, which she did.

‘I don’t know how you can be cold in this heat.’

‘Not cold, Mother. Just a thought.’

In the morning her mother produced one of her suits for Andrea to wear. A dark blue pencil skirt, short jacket, cream blouse, and a hat that perched rather than sat. Her nails were inspected and passed. After breakfast her mother told her to clean her teeth and left for work firing a volley of instructions up the stairs about what to do and, more important, what not to do.