The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  They walked the horses, climbing steadily through the pine on a sandy track through the forest. Wilshere retreated into himself, blended to the animal beneath him. Anne moved her body with the filly’s strides, trying to think of a way into Wilshere, looking at the man in his silent place – his hell, he’d said. After three-quarters of an hour they arrived at a stone fountain and a low, miserable grey rock building, with a cross on the apex of its roof, which was submerged in the surrounding vegetation with the green streaks of damp clinging to its walls. Wilshere seemed surprised and annoyed to find himself at this spot.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Anne.

  ‘Convento dos Capuchos,’ said Wilshere, turning his horse. ‘A monastery.’

  ‘Shall we take a look?’

  ‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘I took the wrong road.’

  ‘Why don’t we take a look now that we’re here?’

  ‘I said no.’

  Wilshere turned her horse and set her off back down the track. His own mare kept settling back on her hindquarters, raising her forelegs off the ground, apparently uncomfortable with the rider. They danced while Wilshere tried to wrestle her back down. Then he dug in his heels and let her have her head. They careered down the track, almost sideways, Wilshere bent over the horse’s neck. They closed rapidly on the filly and, as they reached her, Wilshere leaned over and gave the animal a whack across the rump with his crop. Anne felt her horse start beneath her, tip back on its hind legs. Then the filly lunged forward, tearing the reins from her fingers and throwing Anne on to its neck so that the mane, coarse and bitter, was stuffed into her mouth.

  The filly’s fast hooves rattled over the dry stones and the hard-baked track ripped past underneath. Anne hung on to the mane with her cheek pressed to the smooth skin, felt the thick beam of muscle in the horse’s neck, saw the animal’s eye wild and white-edged with panic.

  The track narrowed, the trees closed in. The filly’s tongue was hanging out of its head as foam crept up her jaws. Branches snapped at their flanks, cracking against Anne’s flattened back, whipping against the horse’s chest, spurring it on. Adrenalin had burst into her system and yet she found herself detached – both on the horse and yet looking on, too.

  They burst out of the trees and cloud into the brilliant sunshine, a rough brush underfoot. The wind crumpled in her ears. There was a clattering noise off to the right. A charging presence pursued by dust swirling in tight screws closed on her. The hot lathered flanks of the major’s black stallion pulled alongside and a thick wrist gripped the strap of the bridle and the fractions crunched into each other to make slow seconds until they stopped altogether.

  She pushed herself up straight against the major’s arm, legs quivering.

  ‘Where’s Senhor Wilshere?’ asked the major, in English.

  ‘I don’t know…I…’ she ducked at the memory of him, crop raised, bearing down on her.

  ‘Something frightened the horse?’

  Anne, gulping at the air, working at the events in her brain, searched for any possible reason for Wilshere’s bizarre action.

  ‘Whose clothes are these?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said the major, squinting at her.

  ‘Mr Wilshere…did he come riding here with someone…before? Before me. Another woman?’

  ‘You mean the American?’

  ‘Yes, the American. What was her name?’

  ‘Senhora Laverne,’ he said. ‘Senhora Judy Laverne.’

  ‘What happened to her? What happened to Judy Laverne?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been away some months. Perhaps she went back to America.’

  ‘Without her clothes?’

  ‘Her clothes?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘These clothes,’ she said, slapping her thigh.

  The major wiped sweat out of his eyebrow.

  ‘How long have you known Senhor Wilshere?’ he asked.

  ‘I arrived in Portugal yesterday.’

  ‘You didn’t know him before?’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before you arrived,’ he said, solid, calm.

  Anne filled her lungs with air, unbuttoned her jacket. The filly turned and put its head to the stallion’s flank. High up on a ridge Wilshere appeared, white shirt against the blue sky, and waved at them. He worked the mare down through the brush and rocks and on to the path.

  ‘I lost you,’ said Wilshere, approaching them on the now subdued mare. As if that was all it had been.

  ‘My horse bolted,’ said Anne, not ready for confrontation, not in front of the major. ‘The major rescued me.’

  Consternation crossed Wilshere’s face. It seemed so genuine that Anne almost accepted it, even though she’d seen he’d stripped off his jacket, which was strapped to the back of his saddle. Not the behaviour of an urgent man.

  ‘Well, thank you, Major,’ said Wilshere. ‘You must be rattled, my dear. Perhaps we should head back.’

  Anne eased the filly out from under the stallion’s haunch. Wilshere gave the major a casual half-salute. They headed back down the path towards the dense cloud on the north side of the serra. The major stayed behind, motionless on his horse, solid as an equestrian statue in a city square.

  They walked nose to tail back to the quinta, back into the gloom of the low cloud. Anne, mesmerized by the rhythm of the horses, replayed the incident; not Wilshere’s madness, but the exhilaration of the adrenalin rush on the back of the runaway horse – fear had not been as frightening as she’d imagined. It seemed to tell her something about the faces in the gaming room of the casino, about the thrill and fear of gain and loss. Perhaps there was more thrill in losing – the morbid draw of possible catastrophe. She shuddered, which turned Wilshere in his saddle. She gave him a smile torn from a magazine.

  They dismounted in the courtyard of the quinta and the groom led the horses away. Anne’s buttocks and thighs felt like a cooling bronze’s, the heat deep within, the surface set hard. The sweat in her hair was now cold, her muscles seizing as she followed Wilshere under the arches and into a rustic stone-flagged room with heavy wooden furniture, a dark family portrait and English hunting prints on the walls. Stags’ horns pricked the palpable, mildewed air in the room. A macabre chandelier of antlers hung from the ceiling, unlit, over a refectory table set with plates of cheeses, chouriços, presunto, olives and bread. Wilshere poured himself a large tumbler of white wine from a clay jug and handed a clay goblet to Anne.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it after that.’

  She was infuriated by his coolness and sank her wine. Questions backed up inside her. She wanted to find the join in his armour, prise it open, stick him with something sharp.

  ‘Care for anything to eat?’ he asked, diverting her, fluttering his hand over the food, not interested himself, gulping at the wine.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I didn’t eat breakfast.’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have dragged you out…’

  ‘No, no, I was glad of it,’ she said, facing off his mask of infallible politeness. ‘I wanted to ask…’

  ‘What?’ he teased, an interruption to undermine her. ‘What did you want to ask?’

  ‘I wanted to ask about the major,’ she said, not that interested in him, but he could be a lever, man against man. She took an olive from the table.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He seemed a very…ah…noble man,’ she said, walking around to the opposite side of the table, grinding her teeth on the olive pit.

  ‘Noble?’ Wilshere asked himself. ‘Noble. Yes, noble’s…very apposite. He is a noble fellow.’

  ‘Nobility sounds so old-fashioned these days,’ said Anne, keeping her eye on Wilshere, who had come round to her side of the table.

  ‘Something, perhaps, we associate with earlier conflicts,’ he said.

  ‘Except the major’s not at war and yet he has…’

  ‘Quite so, Anne, quite so. Perhaps because he was mounted on a horse, that made y
ou think of nobility and other aspects of the chivalric code.’

  ‘Other aspects?’

  ‘Rescuing damsels in distress,’ he said, blinking, almost batting his eyelids.

  She peeled a length of skin off a slice of chouriço, Wilshere’s presence close, unmistakably extortionate. He seemed like a small boy curious as to what would happen to a spider if he were to dismember it.

  ‘I suppose if he’d had a red satin-lined cloak and a plumed tricorn hat…’ she started, and Wilshere guffawed to the antler chandelier, reducing this little episode to some romantic nonsense. Anne gritted her teeth.

  ‘Is that Mafalda’s family up there?’ she asked, pointing with her cup to the portrait of a group whose white faces stared out of the dark oil of the painting.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wilshere, without shifting his gaze from her. ‘They used to come out here…’

  ‘Hunting?’

  ‘No, no, these trophies are from all over…Spain, France…I think there’s even some Scottish ones up there…Yes, look, Glamis Castle. No. The family came out here to keep cool in the summer. Lisbon, you know, can get awfully torrid and the family seat is in the Alentejo, which is even more so.’

  ‘And her family now?’

  ‘Most of that lot are dead now. In fact her father died only last year. She took it very badly…been rather unwell as a result. Not good…as Cardew said…’

  Anne paced the perimeter of the room. Below the antlers were photographs, hunting parties standing behind the day’s slaughter, which in some cases was so considerable that the hunters were reduced to stick figures at the apex of thousands of rabbits, birds and some fewer deer and boar.

  ‘Isn’t that Mafalda,’ asked Anne, surprised to see the woman young and smiling, gregarious amidst a group, ‘with a gun?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Wilshere, black against the grey light of the window, ‘she’s very handy with a twelve bore. Crack shot with a rifle too. I never saw it, mind, but her father told me she had quite an eye.’

  ‘Mafalda,’ said Anne, impressed.

  She moved round to the portrait.

  ‘Is she in this?’

  ‘It’s not that good, is it?’ said Wilshere. ‘She’s third from the left, next to her brother.’

  ‘And the brother?’ asked Anne, face up to the two figures.

  ‘Hunting accident…years ago, before I met Mafalda,’ he said, almost confirming that he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. ‘Tragic.’

  ‘Mafalda must feel quite lonely now.’

  Wilshere didn’t answer.

  Chapter 11

  Sunday, 16th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

  The heat steepened in the late afternoon, the Quinta da Águia slumped in silence. Anne’s room on the west side of the house was hot, even with the shutters closed, and she couldn’t sleep with the fan churning the stuffiness. She took her swimsuit, a robe and a towel and went down to the beach. Estoril was submerged in a haze, the sea blended into the sky.

  There was no breeze in the gardens of the square. The palms hung their shredded heads in the heat. The cafés were empty. She crossed the road, the silver railway tracks, continued past the empty station and on to the beach. She woke up an attendant, who lay in the shade of one of the huts, gave him a coin and changed.

  The beach looked empty at first, but as she walked down towards the sea a couple lying on the sand, arms linked, were given away by a dog digging at their feet. A woman in a white two-piece bathing costume stood up to reveal she’d been lying with someone in a dip in the sand. She wore white-framed sunglasses and was talking to a comatose man at her feet while smoking a cigarette in a short black holder. Anne sat on her towel twenty feet away from the woman, who whined loudly in an American accent.

  ‘Hal,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hal, drowsy, a straw hat over his eyes and a cigar burning out of the back of his hand which lay on his chest.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to be nice to Beecham Lazard.’

  No answer. She toed him in the leg.

  ‘Yeah, right. Beecham. Before you get going on Beecham, lemme ask you, what are we doin’ here, Mary? What are we doin’ in Lisbon?’

  ‘Making money,’ she said, bored to death.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Except we ain’t made none yet.’

  ‘Right, too. Know why?’

  ‘ ‘Cos you think Beecham Lazard’s the key to success. Me…?’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you think…but he happens to be my only contact.’

  She sat back on her heels and looked around. Anne studied the sand between her toes. Hal snored. Mary shook her head, stood and walked straight up to Anne.

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘I am English.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ she said, and introduced herself as Mary Couples. ‘I knew you had to be a foreigner…sitting on your own on the beach. Not a Portuguesey kinda thing to do.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not yet. The girls have shaken off their chaperones but they haven’t quite got the idea of going some place on their own. You ever seen a Portuguese woman in a bar without a man?’

  ‘I haven’t…’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, and removed the smoked cigarette from her holder.

  Hal snorted, growled and continued snoring louder.

  ‘That’s my husband, Hal…over there…making all the noise,’ she said, and looked at him, sadly, as if he was permanently crippled. ‘He got stewed lunchtime. He got stewed last night in the casino. He was playing roulette. He won. He always gets stewed when he wins. He always gets stewed, period.’

  ‘I was in the casino last night,’ said Anne. ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘I stay at home when he plays roulette.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ Anne asked, being polite.

  ‘A little place in Cascais. You?’

  ‘I’m staying with the Wilsheres here in Estoril.’

  ‘Oh yeah, nice place. Hal and I are going up there tonight for the cocktail party. You gonna be there?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Anne, digging a hole in the sand with her heel. ‘Do you know many of the Americans round here? I heard you talking about Beecham Lazard.’

  ‘Sure…he’s not my favourite out of all of them…’

  ‘Did you know a woman called Judy Laverne?’

  ‘I heard about her. She was before my time. Hal and I have only been here a couple of months.’

  ‘But you know what happened to her?’

  There was a fraction of silence, a half-beat, before Mary replied.

  ‘I think she was deported. Some confusion with her visa. She went to the PVDE, like you have to every three months, and they wouldn’t renew it. She had three days to leave. I think that was it. Judy Laverne…?’ She repeated the name to herself, shook her head.

  ‘You don’t know why?’

  ‘The PVDE don’t have to give explanations. They’re the secret police. They do what the hell they like and a lot of it’s not nice. I mean, it’s OK for foreigners, the worst that can happen is they deport you…no, that’s not true, the worst that can happen is they stick you in jail and then deport you…but they don’t do anything to you.’

  ‘Do anything to you?’

  ‘Torture is something they do to their own people,’ she said, putting a new cigarette into the holder. ‘Like Hal says, it’s all palm trees and the casino on the surface and…You haven’t been here very long, have you?’

  ‘Didn’t Judy Laverne work for somebody? Wasn’t there anybody who could help her?’

  Mary weighed that for a few moments.

  ‘You mentioned Beecham Lazard,’ she said.

  ‘I was introduced to him last night…in the casino,’ said Anne. ‘She used to work for him?’

  Mary turned down the corners of her heavily lipsticked mouth.

  ‘If he couldn’t keep her in the country, nobody could.’

  ‘And what does Beecham Lazard do?’r />
  ‘If you want to do business in this town – with anybody, with the government, with the Allies, with the Nazis, anybody – you gotta go through Beecham Lazard…that’s what Hal says, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t like him…I heard you earlier.’

  ‘Only because he likes to touch and I consider myself a bit of a museum piece these days…you can look and that’s it,’ she said, pushing the sunglasses up over her head and squeezing the bridge of her nose.

  Mary Couples was no longer stunning. She had been, but the green eyes under her dark hair didn’t shine any more. They had the matt finish of someone who saw things a little more clearly. She was in her thirties and, although intact on the outside, the mind had been working from the inside and the first signs of that weariness, from the long years of holding things together, had crept into her face and started making a bed.

  ‘So why couldn’t Beecham Lazard help her?’

  ‘What’s your interest in Judy Laverne?’ asked Mary, nailing Anne with a direct look.

  ‘I found myself wearing her riding clothes this morning,’ she said. ‘I was with Patrick Wilshere out on the serra. I was just wondering why.’

  ‘Welcome to Estoril,’ said Mary, and the sunglasses dropped over her eyes.

  ‘Does that mean Wilshere was having an affair with her?’

  Mary nodded.

  ‘And somebody arranged for her to be deported?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, irritated now. ‘Ask Beecham Lazard. One of his pals is the Director of the PVDE, Captain Lourenço.’

  ‘Are you saying that he got rid of her?’

  Mary froze and then in a nervous reaction started checking herself for a lighter which was still lying next to Hal’s heaving body.

  ‘Gotta get a light,’ she said, and staggered back to her husband, whose cigar was still trailing acrid smoke into the late afternoon.

  A figure ran and plunged into the sea and set off in an explosive burst of crawl.

  ‘The PVDE,’ said Mary, handing her a cigarette, lighting it, ‘is a state within a state. Nobody tells them what to do…Did you tell me your name?’