The Company of Strangers

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.

Chapter 10 (#ulink_686abfbd-c0ca-5c45-affc-b16717d76a5b)

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.