The Company of Strangers (29 page)

30th July 1944, Cardew’s House, Carcavelos, near Lisbon.

Anne burnt the crumpled pages in the grate, including the blank pages underneath, all the way down to the first undented sheet. She lit a cigarette with the same match and drew on it, knowing that these would be her friends for life. The writing of her disease, her assessment of it, her diagnosis of it was consumed in a green flame until only the blackened negative remained, the copper of the ink still legible. She beat it with her shoe until it had all broken up and showered in flakes and specks on to the swept stone below the grate.

There had been only fractions of seconds when her thoughts had not been full of Voss. Even the lighting of a cigarette brought thoughts of his unwavering hand in the darkness of the garden. Nothing else came to her. Numbers didn’t matter any more. Her work was automatic. Every thought, however disconnected, found its way back to Voss or a reference to him.

Now there was a difference. The written confession had brought about some containment. Her mind no longer galloped away from her, which it had done when she’d heard that Voss had been smuggled out of Portugal and back to Germany for interrogation. During those days she’d found herself amongst terrible imaginings of dark, sobbing cells punctuated by bright, searing light and questions, endless questions. Questions to which there were no answers, and questions to which all possible answers would be inadequate.
She’d been told about torture, and the detail, which had been at a manageable distance in a rainy springtime lecture theatre in Oxford, could now make her writhe in the morning sunshine.

She crushed out the cigarette and for the first time in a week lay down on her bed and slept six straight hours, no dreams. She woke up without the normal electrical jolt as her mind hit the thousand-volt reality. She was on top of the bed. The room warm and glowing pink from the setting sun. Her body felt languorous, as if she’d been walking all day. An exquisite lassitude seeped through her muscles. She stretched to full length like a cat with all day on its mind and had a memory flash so vivid she rolled over to check that the room was empty.

She was six years old, her mother was sitting by her on the bed, cigarettes and cocktails mingled with her perfume, which was different for parties – spiky, exotic. She had her hand on Anne’s shoulder, who had been sleeping. The material of her dress wasn’t making the usual quiet rustlings but was racked with creaks and convulsive friction. Anne had seen through the slits of her eyes that her mother was crying and not quiet tears. She had been too sleepy, too overwhelmed by the weight of slumber to even put a finger to her mother’s knee. In the morning her mother had returned to her usual cool strictness and Anne had forgotten the moment.

A thought unravelled itself. Rawlinson and his missing leg. An odd notion about the integrity of integers, the missing fraction ruining the completeness. What about the invisible missing fraction or the unseen additional one? The structure altered, the equation would never work out. Mad thoughts manipulating maths to emotions, and yet there was such a thing as a nuance.

The Cardew children were already in bed. Anne went down for dinner which was eaten late in high summer
and, this evening, out in the garden under the liquid yellow light from Cardew’s hurricane lamps. There was a crowd. A chair was pulled out for her and, when the face of the man who had helped her re-entered the light, she saw that it was Major Luís da Cunha Almeida, the man who’d stopped her horse from bolting.

They ate cheese,
presunto
and olives with fresh bread. Cardew poured wine brought by the major from his family estate in the Alentejo. Mrs Cardew served the fresh seafood while the servants went to the village bread oven to collect the lamb, which the cook believed tasted better having been slow-roasted since the middle of the afternoon.

They all ate the lamb, even the servants in the dimly lit kitchen. The potatoes, which were glued to the bottom and sides of the clay roasting tray, were sticky with meat juice and pungent from the garlic and rosemary. The meal returned Anne to her tribe like a rider, horseless on the open plain, who’d made it back to civilization.

At the end of the evening the major asked her if she would like to go out for a drive with him one evening the following week. She didn’t say no. He settled on Wednesday.

As she went up to bed, Cardew intercepted her at the bottom of the stairs. He patted her shoulder, gripped it.

‘Glad to see you’ve pulled through, Anne,’ he said. ‘Terrible shock, I imagine…but good show.’

In bed she thought that this was what it was like to be English. This is how we handle things. We’re natural spies. We never wear anything on the outside. Napoleon was wrong, we were not
une nation de boutiquiers
but a nation of secretkeepers. We all know you can’t say a word with a stiff upper lip.

Richard Rose agreed to see her on Monday afternoon. A positive psychological report must have made its way to
him because until now he’d refused to see her. They’d said he was busy, but Wallis had told her that, unlike Sutherland, Rose preferred to keep his distance. He wasn’t going to risk discomfort in front of an emotional woman. Rose into women didn’t go. They were indivisible.

It was the last day of July and there’d been no relenting of the heat. Rose sat behind Sutherland’s desk in the room shuttered against the sun which hammered that side of the embassy building in the afternoons. She sat in the hot gloom, an indistinct, ignorable figure, while Rose read through papers, signed them off. He rubbed his bare elbows as if they were sore from desk work. He muttered excuses. She didn’t respond. She knew she wasn’t a welcome presence. Sutherland’s secretary had been replaced by someone called Douggie who didn’t look up when he was spoken to but pointed with his pen. Rose spoke while stacking his papers.

‘How d’you fancy staying with Cardew?’

‘As his secretary?’

‘Thinks a lot of you, he does,’ said Rose. ‘You’d still be doing the translation work, of course. Very important work, that.’

‘I thought that was just my cover.’

‘It was, yes. But you can’t work as an agent any more, can you? Not here in Lisbon. And given the flap on at the moment we’re going to have a job to replace you immediately. London don’t want to move you yet. Cautious buggers. They’ll have a file on you by now…in Berlin.’

That word ‘Berlin’ shot past her like a bird in the room.

‘If you think that’s the best use of my abilities…’

‘We do,’ he said, too quickly, ‘…for the moment.’

‘You know that I do want to continue with the Company, sir.’

‘Of course.’

‘If my involvement in the last operation is going to have any bearing on my future…’

‘Your
involvement
?’ he said, pinching his lips, looking her in the eye for the first time.

‘That my actions resulted in the loss of a valuable double agent.’

‘You shouldn’t blame yourself for that, you know,’ he said, his face bearing an approximation of pity. ‘You were inexperienced. Voss…yes…he should have known better. A terrible risk he took. Madness, really, for such an old hand.’

‘Has there been any news?’ she asked, matter of fact, wringing the pathos out of her voice.

‘What do you know?’

‘Only that he was taken back to Germany.’

‘There were two others on the same plane. Men who’d been kidnapped off the streets of Lisbon just like Voss. One of them, Count von Treuberg, has since been released. He told us that Voss had been packed in a trunk for the flight. They were all taken from Tempelhof to the Gestapo HQ in Prinz Albrechtstrasse in the back of a van. Von Treuberg spoke to Voss, who was not in good shape. He saw him once more on the day he was released.’

Rose fell silent. Anne stared into the floor. Her head weighed heavily on the cords of muscle in her neck.

‘Voss had undergone three days of intensive interrogation. Von Treuberg was shocked.’

Anne’s insides froze and her breathing shallowed.

‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

‘I want to know
everything,
’ she said with vehemence.

Rose fetched a thick file from the grey metal cabinets that now lined the room.

‘The operation you were involved in with Voss took place at a very sensitive moment for the Third Reich.’

‘The coup attempt, you mean?’

‘SS General Wolters was running an intelligence operation which he hoped was going to be one of the great successes of the war. It’s in the nature of the losing team to believe that they can suddenly turn things around with a miracle. His operation was a disaster. He’s lost a lot of money and one of the main pipelines for diamonds to the Reich. Voss is his scapegoat. Taken by itself, the botched operation might earn Voss a reprimand and a nasty transfer, but in the light of the 20th July assassination attempt it becomes more serious, which is better for Wolters. Wolters will want to implicate him in the coup attempt, which, at this distance, you might think is improbable except that
we
know that Voss knew what was going to happen. He gave us notice, so it was clear he was involved. Given that he’s an old Abwehr man, the only one left out here, we’re of the opinion that his part was to take control of the legation in Lisbon. If that is the case and there’s a single strand of evidence pointing to that sort of level of involvement…’

Rose let his sentence drift, lit himself a cigarette.

‘Then what, sir?’

He opened the file, picked the pages apart with his nail and turned them as if they were ancient scriptures.

‘The investigation of senior Wehrmacht officers is being carried out by the head of the Reich Main Security Office, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He’s a lawyer, which you might think is a good sign until you’ve seen a photograph of him. Sinister-looking brute. Total fanatic…intensely loyal. He will…he hasn’t shirked his duties. Thousands of people have been rounded up. Men, women, children…anybody with a family connection or otherwise to any of the known conspirators has been brought in for questioning. All other suspects are being interrogated by an SS Colonel Bruno Weiss. He used to be head of security at the
Wolfsschanze,
Hitler’s Rastenburg HQ in East Prussia. If
he were younger he could be taken for Kaltenbrunner’s son. I don’t know where they breed them.

‘I have no doubt that these men will find something amongst the thousands of depositions because it is in the nature of ordinary people to write things down when they shouldn’t, say things that should never be said and babble uncontrollably when they’re scared. Voss’s chances are not good. If he is charged he will appear in the so-called People’s Court presided over by the most disgraceful judge ever to find his way into the law, Roland Freisler, where, if the evidence is even vaguely positive, he will be sentenced to be executed, and if it’s not, he will certainly end up in a concentration camp where he’s very unlikely to survive.’

Rose flicked through the file. Anne sat rigid in the chair.

‘Apart from what we’ve heard from von Treuberg there is no other news,’ said Rose, more concerned with his file. ‘If I were you, Miss Ashworth, I’d forget about him. Live your life. It’s the nature of war.’

Anne stood on shaking legs, on knees that unless she locked them straight would buckle. She turned to the door.

‘You’ll continue with Cardew, then?’ he said to the back of her head.

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, and staggered out of the room into the corridor.

Anne worked with an intensity that unnerved Cardew. She rarely looked up and took no more than a quarter of an hour for lunch. On Wednesday evening she went out with Major Luís Almeida. They drove to Cascais and ate a fish meal. She didn’t recall what fish. She remembered the way the major didn’t take his eyes off her throughout the meal and even when he was driving, so that she had to brace herself occasionally to get him to look ahead. She knew then that she would be all right because she didn’t
want to die. She feared death, which she hadn’t a week ago. She began to orbit nearer to the outer edges of normality as each day passed and another onion skin of insulation wrapped itself around her disease, her growth, which had been rendered benign now by the absence of any trace of menstrual blood.

The major, on holiday for the whole of August, intensified his campaign and took her out nearly every night. She never turned him down. She only refused to ride horses. His presence was a comfort, his attention close to avuncular. Their talk was formal, inquisitive without being intimate. She preferred that. She could retreat into herself while she was with him and he wouldn’t pressure her. She knew that she was changing and that it was for her own protection. It was making her different and she couldn’t help that difference materializing into distance. She would find herself in a crowd at a lunch, never aloof but always alone. Society took her in and she let herself become a part of its edifice, not as a brick in its wall but more of a gargoyle spouting out of a corner.

On a mid August Saturday night Anne sat with the major outside a café in the main square in Estoril. He’d tried to persuade her into the casino but she wasn’t ready for that yet, if ever. It was eleven o’clock and still hot. She had no appetite for food or drink. She proposed a walk along the front, away from the holiday bustle, the family scenes, the fractious palm trees. The major was glad to stretch his legs.

They walked the promenade above the beach. There was a little light from a crescent moon, no wind and the air was soft. Waves came in as phosphorescent ripples, collapsing on to the beach and running up to merge into the sand. She took his arm. Her heels made the only sound above the muted ocean.

She stopped to breathe it in and the major put his arm around her and she realized that he’d misinterpreted her
motives. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected it. It was just that she’d never managed to think any further than it happening. She turned to him and put her hands up on his chest to keep him at bay but he wasn’t tentative like Voss. He crushed her to him and kissed her on the mouth for the first time, long and hard, so that she was struggling for breath and completely unmoved.