The Company of Strangers

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.

‘Americans,’ said Wilshere, back at her side. ‘No idea of the time or the place.’

He took her over to a table and introduced her to four women and two men. The foreign names rushed past like a hunt in full cry, all titles and ancestry, fanfare and heraldry. They spoke to Wilshere in French and ignored her. All they needed to know of Anne was apparent in her dress – some skivvy that Wilshere was tupping. He detached himself from their imploring jewelled and knotted fingers, and bowed.

‘Has to be done, I’m afraid,’ he said to Anne’s cheek. ‘Ignore the Romanians at your peril. Frightful gossips.’

They headed for the caixa where Wilshere wrote a cheque for some chips and they wheeled through the swing doors into the gaming room. He gave Anne an inch of his chips and went straight to the baccarat table, took a seat next to another slumped player and lapsed into dense concentration. Anne hung at his back, suspended in layers of smoke. Cards were drawn from the slab. The players turned up the corners. Sometimes they asked to stand, other times to draw and rarely they declared a natural. It was tedious unless you were one of the rivet-eyed players, who clenched the air in fists, hissing at their losses and uncurling, but only for a second, at their wins.

Wilshere’s transformation was instant. All vestiges of amusement and ennui had left him. His interest now was only calculable in percentages, his intelligence reduced to a wavering telepathy with numbered suits. Anne diverted herself by computing the bank’s advantage in the game and started to yawn. The gambling had sucked out the oxygen in the air. She wandered the room, keen to get away from the joyless backs of the baccarat players. No straying eyes connected with hers, money more compelling than lust in here. The room was quiet, but prickling with anticipation and torment. The yards of green baize and acres of carpet added stealth to wealth and hushed any sudden collapse of funds.

She was drawn to roulette. There was noise in roulette, especially when an American was playing, and the clicking of the ivory ball, playing its own fado, was almost a sweet distraction after the murderous cards. She joined the crowd, found herself embraced by it, welcomed, offered a cigarette, crushed and, in this familiar, slaughter-yard jostle, confirmed what she had known from the moment those swing doors had batted shut behind her. She was being watched.

It would have been easy enough to turn, to look over the heads bowed in supplication to the green baize god. It would have been easy to find the only other face in the room uncomplicated by numbers, unconcerned by the concentration of avidity. But she couldn’t do it. The tension set in her neck, her head began to tremble. An arm snaked around her shoulder and dragged her into a damp shirt.

‘Ladies for luck,’ roared the American. ‘Come on. Let’s hear it for number twenty-eight.’

The American gripped her tighter. The croupier terminated the betting, span the wheel and set the ball in motion. Girls squealed. The ball began its chatter. Anne was clenched to the American’s chest, harder. His smell as strong as roast meat. The ball played the flibbertigibbet – coy, tantalizing, coquettish – jumping in and out of bed, over the numbers’ brass divides. Anne’s head was almost on the man’s chest now, such was his determination, and into the corner of her eye, back from the crowd, just inside the spread of light, came the strap of neck muscle, the prominent jawline, the hollow cheek of the one she knew was watching her.

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.