The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ he said, ‘that’s better.’

  ‘What happened to Mr Cardew?’

  ‘Sit down, sit down, won’t you,’ he said, pulling her down into a chair next to him, his palm rough on her bare arm. His green eyes stroked her all over and the hand held on to the soft part below her shoulder. His look was neither prurient nor penetrative, two other looks she’d had that day, but attentive, oddly intimate, as if they were old friends, or even stronger – lovers, maybe, who’d had a life together, parted and come back for another visit.

  ‘Drink?’

  How to play this? She’d been hoping to observe while Cardew talked but now she was in it. He likes a girl with spunk.

  ‘Gin,’ she said, ‘and tonic.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, releasing her arm, calling a boy over, who Anne hadn’t seen in the shade of the terrace.

  Wilshere punched some words into him and drained his own glass which he handed over.

  ‘Smoke?’

  She took a cigarette which he lit for her. She blew the smoke out into the still, very hot evening. It smelled like burnt dung. The boy returned and laid out two tumblers and a small dish of black, shiny olives. They chinked glasses. The cold drink and the fizz of the tonic smacked into her system and she had to restrain herself from jutting her breasts.

  ‘You’ll probably want to go to the beach tomorrow,’ said Wilshere, ‘although I should warn you that our friendly dictator, Dr Salazar, does not agree with men and women disporting themselves semi-naked on the strand. There are police. An intimidating squad of fearless men whose job it is to maintain the moral rectitude of the country by sniffing out depravity at source. All those refugees, you see, brought their immoral ideas and fashions with them and the good Doctor’s determined that it won’t get out of hand. The three F’s. Football, Fado and Fátima. The great man’s solution to the evils of modern society.’

  ‘Fado?’

  ‘Singing. Very sad singing…wailing, in fact,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some of my Irishness has worn off in this sunshine. All that rain and terrible history, I should have a natural inclination for drink and melancholy thought, but I don’t.’

  ‘Drink?’ asked Anne, archly, which earned a flash of white teeth.

  ‘I’ve never felt the need to brood over things. They happen. They pass. I move on. Construct. I’ve never been one for sitting about, longing for previous states. States of what? Lost innocence? Simpler times? And I don’t have much time for destiny or fate, which is what fado means. People who believe in destiny are invariably justifying their own failure. Don’t you think? Or am I a godless fellow?’

  ‘I thought belief in fate was just a way of accepting life’s inexplicability,’ said Anne, ‘and you still haven’t told me how fado is supposed to stiffen moral fibre. How can fate or destiny be a social policy?’

  Wilshere smiled. Cardew had been right about spunk.

  ‘It’s what they sing about in the fado. Saudades – which is longings. I’ve no time for it. You know where it comes from? This is a country with a magnificent past, a tremendously powerful empire with the world’s wealth in their hands. Take the spice trade. The Portuguese controlled the trade that made food taste good…and then they lost it all and not only that…their capital was destroyed by a cataclysmic event.’

  ‘The earthquake.’

  ‘On All Souls’ Day too,’ he said. ‘Most of the population were in church. Crushed by falling roofs. Then flood and fire. The perils of Egypt, minus the plague and locusts, were visited on them in a few hours. So that’s where fado comes from. Dwelling in and on the past. There are other things too. Men putting out to sea in boats and not always coming back. The women left behind to fend for themselves and to sing them back into existence. Yes, it’s a sad place, Lisbon, and fado provides the anthems. That’s why I don’t live there. Go there as little as possible. You have to have the right spirit for the city and it’s not one that sits well with me. Pay no attention to fado. It’s just Salazar’s way of subduing the population. That and the miraculous sighting of the Virgin at Fátima…ye-e-e-s, Catholicism.’

  ‘That must be hard work if they all died in church back in 1755.’

  ‘Ah, well, you see, the good Doctor’s trained to be a priest, he’s a monk manqué…he knows better than anybody how to control a population. You might have heard of the PVDE.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she lied.

  ‘His secret police. His Inquisitors. They root out all non-believers, the heretics and the blasphemers, and break them on the wheel.’

  She looked sceptical.

  ‘I promise you, Anne, there’s no difference except it’s politics now and not religion.’

  He beckoned the boy, who approached, whisky bottle in hand, and filled Wilshere’s glass to within a quarter-inch of the brim. He took an olive, bit out the pit, and threw it unconsciously into the garden. He sucked the top off his drink, lit another cigarette and was surprised to find his old one still going in the ashtray. He crushed it out, flung a boot up on to the chair and missed. He looked at his watch as if someone had burnt his wrist.

  ‘Better change for dinner. Didn’t realize it was so late.’

  Anne stood with him.

  ‘No, no, you stay here,’ he said, patting her arm. ‘You’ll do fine like that. Perfect. I still smell of horse.’

  He did. And whisky. And something sour, which smelled the same as fear but wasn’t.

  ‘Will your wife be joining us?’ Anne asked his retiring back.

  ‘My wife?’ he asked, turning on his boot heel, the whisky from his glass slopping on to his wrist.

  ‘I thought I saw her…’

  ‘What did you see?’ he asked rapidly, drawing on his cigarette, which he then flicked away across the terrace.

  ‘On the way down from my room. A woman in a nightdress…that was all. In the corridor upstairs.’

  ‘What did Cardew say about my wife?’ asked Wilshere, the savage edge to his voice even sharper.

  ‘Only that he thought she was unwell, which was why I asked you…’

  ‘Unwell?’

  ‘…which was why I asked you whether she would be joining us for dinner, that’s all,’ finished Anne, holding her ground against Wilshere’s sudden blast.

  His top lip extended over the glass rim and sucked up an inch of whisky, the sweat from the alcohol in this heat standing out on his forehead in beads.

  ‘Dinner’s in fifteen minutes,’ he said and turned through the french windows, clipping the door, which juddered in its frame.

  Anne sat back down, a small tremble in the tip of her cigarette as she put it to her mouth. She sipped more gin, finished smoking and walked out on to the crepuscular lawn. Lights were on down in the town – rooms here and there in buildings, streets brought up in monochrome, the crowns of the gathered stone pines billowing like thick black smoke, the railway station with people waiting, mesmerized by the track or staring off down the rails of past and future. Normality, and next to this, the vast and threatening blackness of the unlit ocean.

  Two squares of light came on in the house behind her. A figure came to one of the lit windows and looked down on her although, in the twilight, she wasn’t sure if she was visible. She felt the drag, almost heard the sinister rattle of the pebbles as with the inevitability of tide she was being drawn into the complicated currents of other people’s lives.

  Chapter 9

  Saturday, 15th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

  The servant came out on to the lawn to get her, made her jump as she was lounging about in her own thoughts. She’d lost herself in the graininess where the town’s light met the darkening air. She turned to the boy and found that the façade of the house was now lit by footlights as if it was a monument. It only came to her then. The freedom of artificial light. She hadn’t thought about it looking down on the town. No blackout. This alarming country – free and yet forbidding.

  She followed the boy. His thighs thumped out
of the side of his trousers, massive as a weightlifter’s. He walked her across the terrace, already cleared of her half-drunk gin and tonic, and on to the dining room halfway down the corridor. Three glass chandeliers hung over a table which had been shortened to fifteen feet for this, more intimate, occasion. Wilshere stood, almost at attention. He was dressed in a dinner jacket with a board-hard shirt front and black bow tie. He presented his wife, who was in a floor-length evening gown, breasts encased, waist pinched, skirts full of animal rustlings. Her hair was up and she wore a necklace of three large, set rubies. Her face still had the terrible pallor but it was not the alabaster whiteness of her mother’s, more the ghastliness of unsuccessful junket.

  Anne shook her hand which had been held out like a bishop’s, waiting to be kissed. It was puffy, swollen by fluid retention, so that the knuckles were dimples. They sat. Anne, midway between their two ends, awkward in her informal dress. The light from the three chandeliers was surgically bright and harsh – operative.

  A soup was served, greyish-green with a slice of sausage floating in the middle. White wine trickled into glasses. Mafalda refused the wine, placed her spoon in her soup and looked about. The wine tasted of cold metal with a fizz like the end of a battery. The soup was replaced by a plate of three fish each, their eyes cataracted by frying. Anne’s intestines screamed for a break to the shattering silence but Wilshere, unmoved, holding his knife like a scalpel, dismantled his fish expertly, while Anne reduced hers to a pile of bony hash. Mafalda’s knife and fork tinkered around the sea bass and subsided. The fish were taken away. Large chunks of indeterminate meat flecked with red were served, clamshells rattled on the plates.

  Anne, desperate to communicate, found her thoughts crashing about her head like a late-night drunk looking for food in a hotel kitchen. Mafalda corralled her meat on one side of her plate, the clams on the other, and laid down her irons. Red wine jugged into different glasses. It smelled of damp socks but tasted as complex as a kiss. Wilshere swilled it in his mouth, his lips pursed to a smooch beneath his joyous moustache.

  ‘Your husband was telling me about fado this evening,’ gasped Anne, having two goes at it, finding not just a frog in her throat but a whole fat toad.

  ‘I can’t think why,’ said Mafalda. ‘He doesn’t know anything about it. Loathes it. Runs – no, sprints – to turn it off when it comes on the radio.’

  Wilshere’s jaws chewed over the meat in his mouth, interminable as cud.

  ‘He was saying,’ Anne pressed on, ‘he was saying that they’re songs about longing, about dwelling…’

  Mafalda just rattled the cutlery on the side of her monogrammed plate and Anne shut up.

  ‘I like that new girl. Amália,’ said Wilshere. ‘Amália Rodrigues. Yes, she’s rather good.’

  ‘Her voice?’ asked Mafalda on the end of a coal-black look.

  ‘I didn’t know there was anything else to fado,’ said Wilshere, ‘or were you asking me whether I thought she had the spirit, the soul, the alma of fado?’

  A twitch had started up around Mafalda’s left eye. She stroked it down with her little finger. Anne looked from one end of the table to the other – the idiot spectator.

  ‘Of course, she has marvellous…’ said Wilshere, and his search for a word set the air quivering, ‘…marvellous deportment.’

  ‘Deportment?’ scoffed Mafalda. ‘He means…’

  She reined herself in. Her small puffy fist banging the edge of the linen tablecloth a light thump.

  ‘Perhaps I should have chosen something less contentious,’ said Wilshere. ‘We were merely conversing about our good friend the great Doctor and, of course, the three “F”s came up. Perhaps we should have talked about history, but even that’s a minefield. You’ll be glad to know that I didn’t make any mention of O Encoberto, the Hidden One, my dear.’

  ‘The Hidden One?’ asked Anne.

  ‘Dom Sebastião,’ said Wilshere. ‘No, I didn’t make any mention of him, my dear, I knew you’d rather tell Anne all about that yourself. My wife, you see, Anne, is a monarchist. A state that hasn’t existed in this country for more than thirty years. She believes that the Hidden One, who was killed – ooooh, four hundred years ago, wasn’t it? – on the battlefield of El Kebir in Morocco, will somehow return…’

  Mafalda stood with some difficulty. Wilshere broke off. A servant was pulling back her chair and offering his shoulder for her to lean on.

  ‘I’m not feeling so well,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I will have to withdraw.’

  She left the room without appearing to shift any of her weight on to the servant’s shoulder, which she gripped in a fistful of material. She hadn’t been that unsteady upstairs in her nightclothes. Mafalda gave Anne the shadow of a nod. The door closed with a brass click. Anne dropped back into the dent of her upholstered chair, traumatized. Her half-eaten meat was removed. Fruit salad appeared. Steps receded to the kitchen. They were left alone in the chandeliered glare, the red wine on a small silver tray in front of Wilshere.

  ‘Words, words, words,’ said Wilshere under his breath, ‘it’s only words.’

  Earlier, out on the terrace Wilshere had been on his way up to drunkenness. The flash of anger at the mention of his wife had been a hiatus in the usual, uninterrupted progression. In the short fifteen minutes he’d taken to get changed he’d shot through drunkenness and regained sobriety, but with a difference. He was now capable of seamless transformations from belligerent to maudlin, from vindictive to self-pitying. Perhaps Cardew’s estimation of the mental state of the occupants was the reverse. Mafalda was just unwell and the man drumming his stiff bib at the end of the table, contemplating the level of wine in his glass, was, if not mad, then close to it.

  ‘Don’t eat dessert myself,’ he said. ‘No sweet tooth.’

  He chinked the edge of his plate with the spoon, drank the wine and poured the remains into his glass. The servants arrived with coffee. He told them to serve it out on the terrace. He finished the wine in a single draught as if compelled to drink it – condemned to death by poisoning.

  On the terrace Wilshere forced a glass of port from another century on to Anne. This was no longer pleasurable drinking.

  ‘Let’s take a walk down to the casino,’ said Wilshere after a prolonged silence in which his body became an impregnable fortification, behind which the man’s mind had retreated to fight some internal battle. ‘Run along and put your best party frock on.’

  She put her only party frock on, one of her mother’s from before the war. She looked down out of the bathroom window on to the terrace where Wilshere sat immobile. Refocusing on her own image in the glass she felt a crack of fear opening up. She remembered her training – the talk about mental stamina for the work – and breathed the panic back down.

  She walked downstairs with her shoes in her hand, not wanting another confrontation with the spectral Mafalda. On the terrace she rejoined Wilshere, who was staring through the footlights into the wall of darkness. He jerked himself out of his chair, held her by the shoulders but not with the soft touch of her old piano teacher. His breath, an ammoniacal reek that could have blistered paintwork, made her blink. Sweat had appeared in the parted channel of his perky moustache. His mouth was no more than inches from her own. Everything in her body recoiled and a squeal moved up from her stomach. He let her go. Goose flesh flourished where his hands had been.

  They walked through the curtain of light on to the lawn and round to the cobbled pathway that led down the garden. A half-moon lit the way. Not far from the bottom a path forked off to a summerhouse and a bower which had formed around some stone pillars providing a shelter of hanging fronds for a bench with a view out to the sea. It looked unused, as if the house’s occupants had no need of such tranquillity but preferred the relentlessness of the dark halls and the corridors of their natural habitat.

  They crossed the road under the dense darkness of the stone pines at the rear of the casino, a modern featureless building which knew that
its attraction was not architectural. They joined the current of expensive-looking people going in – the rustle of taffeta, the sizzle of nylons and the crack of wads of freshly minted folding money.

  Wilshere headed straight for the bar and ordered a whisky. Anne opted for a brandy and soda. As Wilshere lit her cigarette a meaty arm came around his shoulders. His slim body flinched.

  ‘Wilshere!’ said an expansive American voice, not looking at him but putting his head close as if about to touch cheeks. A hand stretched out towards Anne. ‘Beecham Lazard.’

  ‘The third,’ said Wilshere, shrugging the American’s arm off. ‘This is Miss Anne Ashworth.’

  Lazard was taller and wider than Wilshere. He was dressed in a dinner jacket too, but his was crammed full and bulging. He was younger than Wilshere by twenty years and had black hair with a precision-tooled side parting. His smile was faultless and his skin tone utterly consistent. There was something of waxwork perfection about him, both fascinating and repellent.

  ‘We gotta talk,’ said Lazard to the side of Wilshere’s face.

  Wilshere looked down his shirt front like a man on a high ledge.

  ‘Anne is my new house guest,’ he said. ‘Flew in from London today. I was just showing her the wonderful place in which we live.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Lazard, releasing Anne’s hand, which he’d been rubbing with a smoothing thumb. ‘It’s just about dates…a few seconds, that’s all.’

  Wilshere, annoyed, excused himself and backed off to the entrance of the bar where they talked, jostled by others streaming past them. Anne fiddled with her cigarette and felt juvenile in her outfit. Haute couture Paris had shifted to Lisbon and the clothes on the people around her made her feel as if she was waiting for the jellies to come out at a tea party. She smoked as a diversionary tactic and cast about to compensate. Even that proved difficult. Her idle, confident gaze was easily met by others’ with stronger, more demanding eyes. Her head snapped back to the mirrors and glassware of the bar, which reflected a multiplication of eyes, some drunk, some sad, some hungry, some hard – but all wanting.