The Company of Strangers (11 page)

He dipped his head. The cheekbones high against the blue eyes, the vulnerable mouth, the dented chin, the throat like a small fist framed by the straining neck. Seeing the eyes complicated matters. It was impossible to understand the motive, to accurately translate the look. Her throat closed up, heat prickled up her neck. She wrestled her eyes back down to the table but not to the squares and numbers, not to the black and red diamonds but to the soft, green felt that was easy on the mind. Her head clicked back up, jerked on a nervous string. Still there. His intent as close as thunder. A roar went up.

‘
Vingt-huit
,’ said the croupier.

The American’s fist punched the underbelly of the smoke above, cigar in the corner of his mouth. Anne, released from his grip, fell forward and saw another girl on his other side still in the man’s hug, tiny, thrush-sized with pointy breasts and a sharp beak. He kissed the little bird’s head. The croupier raked in the dead chips, leaving the American’s bet. He made his calculation and pushed a New York skyline back. Anne backed out of the crowd, sucked on her cigarette and headed for the baccarat tables. She had to concentrate on her walking, as if she had someone else’s legs and feet, ones that might run off on their own.

Wilshere’s back was still buttressed against the baccarat table, but now Beecham Lazard was sitting next to him. She held back from their orbit. The dealer had his back to the two men, preparing new slabs of cards. The American
looked left and swept a stack of high-denomination chips across to Wilshere, whose shoulders widened for a moment and collapsed back.

Anne had to get out of the room, get away from the suffocating quiet of money, the fierce addiction of the gamblers, and away from those blue eyes. She headed for the padded swing doors. The way out of the asylum. She heard music from the Wonderbar and headed for it. She hid in the darkness, away from the lighted dance floor and smoked the cigarette down to her nails.

‘Surprised to see you out on your own on your first night,’ said a voice from below her.

The band’s drummer enjoyed a roll and thrashed his cymbals. Jim Wallis was sitting at a table a few feet to her left, with a spare chair next to him. Across the dance floor, the face from the gaming room appeared at the edge of the light, swept round and fell back into the dark. She took Wallis’s offer of a cigarette and drank some of his whisky and soda, which clawed at her throat. Blood smacked into her cheeks.

‘I seem to be being followed already,’ she said through the music.

‘Not surprised,’ said Wallis, almost miserable.

‘I thought nobody was supposed to know who I am.’

‘They want to, though,’ he said and leaned into her with his lighter.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, the flame wavering in her face. ‘Simple as that.’

‘Jim,’ she said, warning him.

‘You asked a question.’

‘What are
you
doing here?’

‘Waiting and watching,’ he said. ‘Do you want to dance…pass the time?’

‘Aren’t you with someone?’

‘She likes roulette,’ said Wallis, holding open his hands to reveal a man with shallow means.

He led Anne to the dance floor. The music started slow. They danced close but formally. She told him about the summerhouse and the covered bower which would make a good place for a dead-letter drop. She’d check it out the next day. The band leader announced a dance number and the couples multiplied on the floor.

She danced for half an hour and went into the powder room when the band took a break. By the time she arrived back at the bar, Wilshere stood on his own with his back to her, foot up on the brass rail, his elbow turned out so that she knew he was still drinking. She told him she wanted to get back to bed. He finished his drink with small ceremony and held out his arm, which she took and they went out into a night that was no cooler.

‘These nights…’ said Wilshere, panting, but without offering anything more, weary of them she could tell.

Wilshere’s pace slowed as they reached the edge of the stone pines near the entrance to the garden. She thought at first that he couldn’t face going back to the house, that smell on him again, which wasn’t fear but like it. He disengaged his arm and put it around her shoulder. They moved on, she supporting him.

The moonlight coaxed the darkness of the garden to blue and Wilshere was staggering and snatching at the fat leaves of the hedge. He was sobbing from such a depth that it came out as a retch, as if he was trying to sick up this thing inside him, some horror tormenting his innards. He hugged her tighter to him. The sharp edges of the jacket stuffed with casino chips cut into her ribs. Anne’s heels ripped over the uneven edges of the cobbled steps. They careened off the path and crashed through the hedge and landed, humped on top of each other, in the soft earth on the other side. Wilshere lay on his back. His face was slack,
his breathing regular. She pushed away from his limp embrace and started at the sound of wildlife, large and loud, coming through the foliage. A white shirt front flitted, cuffs reached down to the comatose Wilshere.

‘You’re going to have to help me,’ said the voice in quiet, accented English.

She helped Wilshere over the stranger’s shoulder, chips cascading down his legs. He backed out of the hedge and set off at a steady lope up the lawn. The lights were off inside and outside the house. They went in through the french windows by the terrace.

‘Where does he sleep?’

‘I don’t…I think…just put him in there,’ she said.

The stranger sidestepped into the sitting room, threw Wilshere down on the first sofa and pulled off his shoes. Wilshere struggled with himself and fell silent. She went to the window and opened the shutter which the servants had closed against the morning sunshine. By the time she’d turned back the stranger had gone. Back at the window she saw him cross the moonlit lawn at a calm night-watchman’s pace. He turned at the top of the path to look back, his face obscure. He trotted down the steps, his leather soles pattering the cobbles to silence.

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

In the heat of the morning Anne lay in bed, a crack of light across the foot of the bed warming her ankles. The night’s events crawled through her mind and she understood how quickly adults’ lives could complicate themselves – a compression of thought and action in time, of too much happening in a confined space, of daily need and greed, triumph and disappointment – and how interminably slow a child’s life was, how long the summers used to be with nothing in them. Her mind worked cyclically, coming round to fix on the same single image which had disturbed her even more than Wilshere’s behaviour; the man’s face, his look, intense and intent – inscrutable, too – threatening or benevolent?

She replayed the night to a final tableau in the casino. As she collected Wilshere from the bar Jim Wallis was sitting at his table with a girl. The girl was the song thrush from under the American roulette-player’s arm. She was pretty, in the way of a porcelain doll, if a face that gave out so little could be attractive. It was a hard face that promised but never rewarded. Wallis’s good nature might break itself against that face.

Her dress on the back of the chair was filthy. She recalled the catastrophe in the bushes. Wilshere fighting his way into unconsciousness, desperate to stop living with whatever he had in his mind. She threw on some clothes and ran downstairs barefoot. There was no Wilshere in the
silent drawing room where dust motes rolled in the single shaft of light from the one half-opened shutter.

She ran out of the house, across the lawn, hot and rough underfoot, to the cobbled path and down to the bushes which she crashed through to find the soil raked over. The neat furrows twitched with ants. She felt around with her feet and fingers and found a casino chip of the highest denomination: five thousand escudos – fifty pounds. She crossed the path to the summerhouse and the pillared bower whose wooden crossbeams were overgrown with passionflower, its exotic purple and white tropical discs hanging above the stone seat. She placed the casino chip on the top of the left pillar to test her dead-letter drop.

The sun was already grilling her shoulders as she went back up to the house. She broke into a run across the lawn, thudded over the empty terrace and up to the french windows where Wilshere caught her by the arms so suddenly that her feet dangled for a moment. He brushed his thumbs over her hot shoulders, ran his fingers down her arms and off at her elbows so that she shivered.

‘Mafalda doesn’t like running in the house,’ he said, as if this was a rule he’d just made up.

He was dressed as she’d first seen him, in riding gear, and if she expected to see a man dishevelled by his hangover, she was disappointed. He was fresh, perhaps in a way that had taken some work – washing, boiling, starching and ironing – but he was not the man who’d tried to throw himself into hibernation the night before.

‘D’you fancy a ride?’ he asked.

‘You don’t look as if you mean a donkey on the beach.’

‘No-o-o.’

‘Well, that’s just about the upper limit of my riding experience.’

‘I see,’ he said, teasing his moustache up to points with
his fingers. ‘It’s a start, I suppose. At least you’ve been aboard an animal before.’

‘I don’t have any clothes…or boots.’

‘The maid’s laid some things out for you on your bed. Try them on. They should fit.’

Back in her room the dirty evening dress had been removed and on the bed were britches, socks, a shirt, a jacket, and boots on the floor. Everything fitted, only the britches were a little short in the leg. She dressed, buttoning the shirt, looking out of the window, thinking that these were not Mafalda’s clothes. They belonged to a young woman. Wilshere came striding back up the cobbled path, whacking his boot with his crop.

She turned, knowing she wasn’t alone in the room. Mafalda stood in the doorway of the bathroom, hair down, wearing the nightdress again, her face shocked and taking in every inch of Anne as if she knew her and couldn’t believe that she’d had the nerve to reappear in her house.

‘I’m Anne, the English girl, Dona Mafalda,’ she said. ‘We met last night…’

The words didn’t break the spell. Mafalda’s head reared back, incredulous, and then she was away, the cotton nightdress wrapping itself around her thighs, her slippered feet striding the hem to full stretch. The floor in the corridor creaked as Mafalda disappeared in a sound of unfurling sailcloth. Anne pulled on the boots, a dark weight settled in her. If Sutherland thought that Cardew had successfully positioned her in this house without Wilshere’s premeditation, he was wrong.

Wilshere was standing in the hall, nodding his approval as she came down the stairs and smoking.

‘Perfect fit,’ he said on the way to the car, a soft-top Bentley polished to new.

‘Whose are they?

‘A friend of Mafalda’s,’ he said.

‘She seemed surprised to see me wearing them.’

‘She saw you?’

‘She was in my bathroom.’

‘Mafalda?’ he said, unconcerned. ‘She’s such a stickler for cleanliness. Always checking up on the maids. I tell you…you wouldn’t want to be in service here.’

‘She seemed to think I was someone else,’ she said, pressing him.

‘I can’t think who that would be,’ he said, smiling out of the corner of his face. ‘You don’t look like anybody else…that we know.’

They drove down to the seafront, turned right and along the new Marginal road to Cascais. Anne stared ahead, thinking of opening gambits to break through Wilshere’s shiny, deflecting carapace. None came to her. They rounded the harbour, drove up past the block of the old fort and out to the west. The sea, with more swell in it than yesterday, pounded against the low cliffs and sent up towers of saltine spray through holes in the rock, which the light breeze carried across the road, prickling the skin.

‘Boca do Inferno,’ said Wilshere, almost to himself. ‘Mouth of Hell. Don’t see it like that myself, do you?’

‘I only see hell how the nuns taught me to see hell.’

‘Well, you’re still young, Anne.’

‘How do you see it?’

‘Hell’s a silent place, not…’ he stopped, shifted again. ‘I know it’s Sunday but let’s talk about something else, can we? Hell isn’t my…’

He trailed off, put his foot down on the accelerator. The road broke through a clump of stone pines and continued along the coast to Guincho. The wind was stronger out here, blowing sand across the road, which corrugated to washboard, hammering at the suspension.

The hump of the Serra de Sintra appeared with the lighthouse at its point. The road climbed, twisted and turned
back on itself – a grim chapel and fortification high above on a wind-blasted peak, naked of vegetation, looked out over the surf-fringed coast, now far below, tapering off into the Atlantic.

At the highest point the road turned north and into a thick bank of cloud. The vapour condensed on their faces and hair. The light sunk to an autumnal grey. Homesickness and gloom descended with it.

At the hamlet of Pé da Serra Wilshere turned right up a steep climb and on the first bend stopped outside some wooden gates flanked by two large terracotta urns. A servant opened the gates and they rolled into a cobbled yard in which vines had been trained to form a green canopy over a right-angled arcade. Piles of dung littered the stones and a Citroën was parked with its nose under one of the arches.

As the Bentley pulled up alongside, a man mounted on a black stallion came from behind the building. The horse stepped daintily around the piles of ordure, its hooves ringing on the damp satin cobbles. The rider, seeing Wilshere, turned his animal, the musculature in the horse’s hindquarters straining to be out on the gallop. The horse snorted and tongued the bit. Wilshere shrugged into his jacket, introduced Anne to Major Luís da Cunha Almeida and tried to stroke the stallion’s head, but the horse shook him off. The major was powerfully built, his shoulders as restless as the animal underneath him. His hands and wrists toiled with the reins while his thick knees and thighs gripped the horse’s impatience. They exchanged a few words and the major turned his horse and trotted out of the yard.

The groom brought a large grey mare and a chestnut filly into the yard. Wilshere mounted the mare, took the reins of the filly and led it to some steps. The groom held the stirrup while Anne mounted. Wilshere arranged her
reins for her, gave brief instructions, and they followed the major out on to the hills.

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.