The Company of Strangers (32 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Have you heard my mother’s confession?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I have,’ he said, startled by the change of tack.

‘Did she tell you when she last went to confession?’

‘Thirty-seven years ago. It
did
take several days.’

‘Well, that was probably the last time she sat out in the garden, too.’

‘No, that would have been when she was in India.’

‘Yes, I suppose it was.’

‘You must go to her,’ he said. ‘I must get back to the church.’

They shook hands and he slipped out the door, black and silent as a cat burglar, a soul saver. She took her bags up to her room, which had been painted and new curtains hung. There were flowers on the dressing table. All her old books were on their shelves, even her battered, balding teddy lay on her bed like a valued but stinking hound. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted up from the garden and she saw herself twenty-four years younger sitting in front of the mirror, pretending to light a cigarette from a suitor’s hand. She ducked to see herself in the glass, to inspect twenty-four years’ worth of damage, but there was little on the surface. She could still grow her hair long if she wanted to and it was still thick and black with only the odd white strand, which she plucked out. Her forehead was smooth, although there was a little creasing around the eyes, but the skin of her face rested on the bones, there was no sag in her cheeks. Well preserved, they called it. Pickled. Pickled in her own genetic recipe.

On the lower floor she pushed open her mother’s bedroom door. There was the strong scent of lilies masking another odour – not death, but the decay of live flesh. She shied away from it, went down to the hall, clicked across the black and white tiles to the kitchen and out into the garden. Her mother sat in the sun under a broad-brimmed straw hat with a tail of red ribbon. She had her neck back, her face up to the sun and the high trees which, in full leaf, screened the back of the houses behind. Smoke from a cigarette rippled out of her dangling hand. A tray sat on a stool and an empty chair next to it.

‘Hello, Mother,’ she said, nothing more momentous coming to mind.

Her mother’s eyes sprang open in shock – shock and, she saw, joy.

‘Andrea,’ she said, as if she was crying the name out of a dream.

She kissed her mother. There was a moment’s awkwardness as she crossed over to kiss the other cheek.

‘Oh yes, of course, both cheeks in Portugal.’

Bony fingers fumbled across Anne’s shoulders, thumbed her clavicle, seemed to be searching for something.

‘Sit, sit, have some tea. It’s a bit stewed but have some all the same. Did Father Harpur leave you a scone? He’s a bugger for those scones.’

Her mother was thin. Her body had lost its compactness, the sturdiness. If there was any creaking now it wasn’t from the bra or corsetry clasped to her but from old bones unoiled in their joints. She was wearing a flowery tea gown, and a loose light coat, cream and sky blue. Her pale face when kissed had lost its cool firmness. Now it was slack and soft, warm from the sun. Her features were still fine but faded and she’d lost that severity that had been so tiresome. For someone who was dying she looked good, or perhaps it was just what she was emanating.

‘You met Father Harpur.’

‘He let me in. I was surprised, I must say.’

‘Really?’

‘But he was very cheerful.’

‘Yes, we do get on, James and I. We have such a giggle.’

‘Giggle’ wriggled like a worm in her mouth. Anne shifted in her seat.

‘He told me he was your confessor.’

‘He is, yes. And no, that wasn’t much of a laugh, I have to say. He’s a poet too, did he tell you?’

‘We only met on the doorstep.’

‘A good poet, as well. He wrote a very fine poem about his father. The death of his father.’

‘I didn’t think you liked poetry.’

‘I didn’t. I don’t. I mean, I don’t like that self-important stuff. People wandering lonely as clouds…you know. It’s not me.’

There was a long pause while a wind worked its way through the trees and Anne had the feeling that she was being prepared for something. Softened up.

‘Poetry’s different these days,’ said her mother. ‘Like music, clothes, the sexual revolution. Everything’s changing. You probably saw it on the way back from the airport. We even won the World Cup…was it last year, or the year before…anyway that was novel. How are Luís and Julião?’

Silence, while her mother smoked the cigarette to the end, her eyes closed, eyeballs fluttering against the thin lids.

‘Tell me about Luís and my grandson,’ she insisted gently.

‘Luís and I had a bad falling out.’

‘What about?’

‘About the wars in Africa,’ she said, immediately steeling up, not wanting to, but that was what politics did to her.

‘Well, at least it wasn’t about boiling his egg too hard.’

‘He knows that these wars are not…if there is such a thing…good wars. They’re not just.’

‘He’s an army officer, they’re not normally given the choice, are they?’

‘He should have kept Julião out of them, though…and now they’re both in Guiné, or at least they will be in a few days’ time.’

‘It’s what men do if they join the army. Combat is what they think they’ve always wanted from that life, until they get into it and come face to face with the horror.’

‘Luís has even seen the horror. That first time back in ‘61 when we went to Angola…terrible…the things he told me he’d seen up in the north. But he’s been hardened…inured to it. God knows, he might have even perpetrated some of the appalling atrocities they reported in Mozambique. No, there’s no doubt that Luís knows. He knows absolutely what it’s like. But the fact is,
he’s
a full colonel, it’s Julião who’ll be in the front line. Julião’s going to be the one who’s leading the patrols out into the bush. The guerrillas…sorry, I have to stop, I don’t really want to…I just can’t think about it.’

Her mother reached out her hand and Anne thought she wanted more tea at first but found it clawing a way up her leg towards her own. She gave it over and her mother stroked it with a papery palm.

‘There’s nothing to be done. You’ll just have to wait it out.’

‘Anyway, that’s why we had the falling out. I was supposed to go with them and I refused. Your call saved us from a formal separation.’

Some drops fell on the back of her hand and she thought it was raining and looked up to find the trees blurred as tears leaked down her cheeks. She was crying without
knowing it, without understanding why. The start of some difficult unbuckling.

The sun dropped behind the trees. They went inside. Anne rattled ice cubes into glasses, poured the gin and tonics, sliced the lemon, thinking about the new openness of this undiscovered person she’d known all her life, working out the best way in.

‘You mustn’t spend any of your own money while you’re here,’ said her mother, shouting from the living room. ‘I know what life’s like in Portugal and I have plenty. It’s all going to be yours in a few weeks so you might as well use it now.’

‘Father Harpur said it’d be better if
you
told me what was wrong with you,’ said Anne, handing over the G&T, blurting it out, unable to keep up the light pretence.

Her mother took the drink, shrugged as if it was nothing much.

‘Well, it started as a stomach ache, one that went on all the time, no respite. Nothing would cure it – camomile tea, milk of magnesia – nothing would even ease it. I went to the doctor. They prodded and probed, said there was nothing to worry about. Ulcer, perhaps. The pain got worse and the men in white coats got their machines out and had a look inside. There was nothing wrong with the stomach but there was a large growth in the womb,’ she said, and sipped her drink, frowned.

Anne’s own insides quivered at the news, at the thought of something terrible and life-threatening growing inside of her.

‘Could I have a tad more gin in mine?’ asked her mother. ‘They always want to tell you how big it is – the tumour, I mean – as if it’s going to be something that you’re proud of, like those gardeners at country shows with spuds the size of their grandmother and tomatoes like boxers’ faces.
I’ve also noticed that the smaller tumours are always fruit. It’s about the size of an orange, they say. I assume it’s to give you the impression that it can be easily picked. Once it’s bigger than a grapefruit they give up and thereafter it’s bladders. They told me mine was the size of a rugby ball, which is a game I’ve never even followed.’

They roared at that, the glib release, the gin slipping into their veins.

‘They took it out. I told them to send the damn thing to Twickenham. These chaps, though, they didn’t laugh. Deadly serious. Said they’d taken everything out, kit bag, tubes, the lot – but they didn’t think it had been enough. I told them I wasn’t sure I had anything else to hand over and they said it was too late anyway. The secondaries were already established. A black day that was. Mind you, I never thought I was going to go on and on, not with the Aspinall track record. Death,’ she said finally, ‘it runs in the family.’

Anne cooked a piece of lamb, slow-cooked it with garlic and potatoes in white wine.

‘I’m dying in here,’ her mother shouted, still in the living room. ‘I’m dying for another drink and from the wonderful smell of your cooking.’

‘It’s the way the Portuguese cook lamb,’ said Anne, appearing at the door.

‘Marvellous. We’ll have some wine too, and none of that Hirondelle rubbish I give to Father Harpur. No. In the cellar there’s a 1948 Chateau Battailley Grand Cru Classé which I think will suit the occasion of my daughter’s return.’

‘I didn’t know you were interested in wine.’

‘I’m not. Not enough to go out buying that sort of stuff. It’s all Rawly’s. You remember old peg-leg Rawlinson. He left it to me in his will.’

‘You were still seeing him?’

‘Good Lord, no.’

‘But you were, weren’t you? Back in ‘44.’

‘Is something burning?’

‘Nothing’s burning, Mother,’ said Anne. ‘That was why I was packed off to Lisbon, wasn’t it? You and Rawlinson.’

‘I’m sure there’s something…’

‘There’s no point in denying it, Mother, I saw the two of you in St James’s Park after my interview with Rawlinson.’

‘Did you now?’ she said. ‘I knew
something
had happened that day.’

‘I followed you from your office in Charity House in Ryder Street.’

‘Yes, well, I was working for Section V in those days. That’s where Section V was. Rawlinson was in recruitment. I recruited you…’

‘You
recruited
me?’ said Anne.

‘Yes, I recruited you, with Rawly’s help, and made sure you didn’t get sent anywhere dangerous. Thought you’d be safe in Lisbon.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Yes,’ she said, going a little sheepish.

‘But you wanted me out of the way as well, didn’t you?’

‘It wasn’t the sort of thing a young girl should know about her mother,’ she said, writhing in her chair. ‘It was embarrassing.’

‘But not now.’

‘God, no. Nothing embarrasses me now. Not even dying embarrasses me.’

They sat down to eat. Her mother drank the wine and ate tiny scraps of the food. She apologized for not having an appetite. After dinner her mother was sleepy and Anne took her up to bed, helped her get undressed. She saw
that frail white body, the small breasts gone to flaps of skin, her belly still swathed in bandages.

‘We’ll have to change the dressing tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Anne said, pulling the nightie down over her mother’s head.

Her mother washed, cleaned her teeth, got into bed and asked for a goodnight kiss. Anne felt a pang at the roles reversed. Her mother’s eyes fluttered against sleep and the alcohol.

‘I’m sorry I was such a useless mother,’ she said, the words slurred and gargling in her throat.

Anne went to the door, turned out the light and found herself thinking about what she’d started on the plane – of her own inadequacy, how she’d loved Julião but always kept him at a distance.

‘I’ll explain everything,’ her mother said, into the dark. ‘I’ll explain everything tomorrow.’

17th August 1968, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.

Anne sat on her window ledge in the dark, the soft breeze blew through the cotton of her nightdress, rustled the trees at the bottom of the garden, drowned out the slow thunder of the city. A half-moon lit the lawn blue and there was the occasional faint few bars of music coming from a record player a few houses down. If she could have disembodied the sharp chunk of anxiety over Julião’s safety she could have called herself happy. She was home and, after all the bitterness between her and Luís, now found herself near someone who had suddenly become reliable and all because of words, a few hours of words. A few hours to break the deadlock of forty-four years. Her mother not the person she’d ever known, behaving as if nothing was any different, as if she’d always been like this. Had the prospect of death done that? Given her a sense of freedom, of nothing to lose. She shivered. Old Rawly had been the tip of the iceberg, something that had broken the surface at the time. There was more. ‘I’ll explain everything.’ That was the problem with becoming a different person, or returning to the original, everybody around you is changed as well. A little sickness crept into her stomach, a flutter in the gut. The nausea of truth taking off.

She was trying not to remember things but it was impossible, under these circumstances, not to look back. She tried to concentrate on the easy details – how she’d carried on working even after the war to the disgust of the
Almeidas, Cardew leaving Shell at the end of ‘45 to go back to a different career in London and how that prompted her to start studying for her seventh-year exams to get a place to read maths at Lisbon University, none of her own qualifications being acceptable. But cutting into these bland facts were the other sharp, undeniable truths. Luís had drawn Julião to him, made him
his
son, not hers, and she hadn’t resisted it and, at the time, she couldn’t think why.

She’d busied herself with her maths and political observations. The harsh treatment meted out to the
ganhões,
the day labourers, employed at subsistence wages by the Almeidas’ foremen was little different from what the city workers suffered in the factories and on construction sites. Under Salazar’s fascist régime the conditions were terrible and any treacherous talk of union representation was rooted out by the
bufos
and the troublemakers handed over to the renamed, but equally brutal, PIDE. Her perception of these injustices hardened her and not just to the perpetrators. Luís became less of a husband, a more distant figure because he was away a lot, but also she thought of him as the father of her child – a job description whose irony never failed to make her uncomfortable.

She veered away from the start of that kind of thinking, lit a cigarette and paced the room, saw her first day at the university back in the autumn of 1950. The meeting with her tutor and mentor, João Ribeiro, a stick man built from pipe cleaners, a deathly pale individual who ate nothing, drank endless coffee in the form of small strong
bicas
and smoked packets and packets of Três Vintes. He was in constant pain from his teeth, of which only two were a yellowish white, the rest being brown, black or not there. From their first meeting, since he’d interviewed her for the place, he’d known that he had a brilliant student in front of him and they became close. When, a few months later, looking out of his window, they saw the arrest of several students
and a professor by the PIDE, they exchanged a look and then risked some views on the matter. He felt safe because she was a foreigner but he was taking a risk, especially knowing that her husband was an army officer. After that groundbreaking moment their tutorials became maths and political symposiums and after some weeks João Ribeiro received permission to introduce her to some officials of the Portuguese Communist Party.

They were interested in her curriculum vitae although the written version didn’t include her war service, but because there’d been Portuguese communist collaboration with the British Secret Intelligence Services at that time, they were aware of her role and were interested in her training. The communists had been decimated by a series of successful PIDE infiltrations and the subsequent arrests had included one of the main resistance leaders, Alvaro Cunhal. They wanted to make use of her SIS training to implement some safety measures within the cadres.

It became routine that after their tutorials João Ribeiro and Anne would throw themselves into Party work. She introduced a protection system whereby cell members would never know the identity of their controller, and all new members were given passwords, which were regularly changed. With João Ribeiro she developed new encryption codes for documents which, even when the PIDE raided a safe house in April 1951, proved to be uncrackable as there were no further arrests. Over the spring she introduced the whole idea of cover and initiated training programmes in role-play.

After the arrest of Alvaro Cunhal, the central committee had begun to suspect that they had a highly placed traitor in their ranks. Anne and João Ribeiro concocted a series of dummy operations in which each member of the central committee’s discretion was tested with specific pieces of information leaked to them. Manuel Domingues, one of
the most senior party members, failed the test. If Anne still thought she was engaged in intellectual games it changed that night. Domingues was interrogated and revealed to be a government spy and provocateur.
A Voz,
the Salazarist newspaper, reported the discovery of the body the next day, 4th May 1951, in the Belas pine forest north of Lisbon. He’d been shot, or rather executed, as she’d forced herself to accept.

In 1953 they launched the rural Communist Party newspaper,
O Camponês,
whose avowed aim was so close to Anne’s heart – to campaign for a daily minimum wage of fifty escudos. The workers won their demands after a series of punishing strikes and brutal pitched battles between peasants and police, but not before a young and pregnant woman from Beja, Catarina Eufémia, was shot by a GNR lieutenant to become a martyr and symbol of the brutality of the régime. Her image emblazoned the front of
O Camponês
countrywide.

Anne stopped in her tracks across the room and looked up out of herself and realized that steely obsessiveness had returned. In falling back on those memories, she’d forgotten or rather been able to put aside, the moments of…what had she called it? Domestic pain. That made it sound like knife cuts and toe stubs, which is possibly what it had been, but they added up, maybe that was it, they added up.

In the morning her mother didn’t tell her anything. She was sick and in pain. Anne changed the dressing on the livid, black-stitched scar across her mother’s stomach. Her mother took pills and drifted, floated on a cloud of morphine through the slow, hot day. The next day was the same. Anne called the doctor. He inspected the wound, looked into the old woman’s dull eyes, tried and failed to get any sense out of her. He left saying she’d have to
go into hospital if she didn’t come round. It must have penetrated her mother’s unconscious state because it rallied some of her old stubbornness. She didn’t take morphine the next day and slept through the morning.

The brilliant sunshine of the first days had been taken over by a growing oppression. The clear heat had become thunderous and the pressure leaned against the windows. Her mother ate a little lunch and read the newspaper. Anne took tea with her in the bedroom, sat facing the window with her feet up on the ledge. Her mother was sweating and held a damp flannel in her hand.

‘It used to get like this in India before the monsoons came. The later the rains, the worse the heat. Everybody else went up to the north. Houseboats in Kashmir…that sort of thing. We…the missionaries, stayed. Terrible heat,’ she finished savagely.

‘It was the same in Angola.’

‘What places for women like us to have been. They died in the streets in Bombay…just dropped to the floor like old carpets.’

‘The smell,’ said Anne.

‘I don’t think I could have lived with all that endless decay.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘If I’d stayed in India.’

‘Would you have done?’

‘No,’ she said, after some time, ‘no, I wouldn’t…I couldn’t have stayed.’

‘Why not?’ asked Anne, pushing now, sensing that they were coming to the nub of it.

Her mother stared at the lump of her feet at the end of the bed.

‘You’d better bring me that box from the dressing table,’ she said.

It was a reddish box and on the lid were carved two
stylized figures, a man and a woman. Indian. Her mother opened it and tipped the contents of her jewellery on to the bedcover.

‘This is beautiful,’ she said and pushed her thumbs into the corners of the box below the hinges. The bottom of the box dropped like a jaw and two pieces of paper fell on to the sheet. ‘You see, on the lid are the lovers and underneath are their secrets.’

The light outside had turned yellow. The sunlight strained against some dark centre like an old bruise. It screwed the pressure down in the room and the perspiration came up on their skins.

‘You’d better sit down,’ said her mother, and reached for her spectacles, which she held in front of her eyes without unfolding.

‘Is this going to be a shock?’ Anne asked.

‘Yes, it will be. I’m going to show you who your father was.’

‘You told me you didn’t have any photographs of him.’

‘I lied,’ she said, and handed over one of the pieces of paper from the box.

On the back was written
Joaquim Reis Leitão 1923.
She turned it over. There was a photograph of a man in a light suit.

‘Is there something wrong with this photograph?’ asked Anne. ‘Or the light? Perhaps it’s just old.’

‘No, that’s what he looked like.’

‘But…he seems to be very dark-skinned.’

‘That’s right. He’s Indian.’

‘You said he was Portuguese.’

‘He was…partly. His father was a member of the Portuguese garrison, his mother was a Goan. Joaquim was a Catholic and a Portuguese national. His mother,’ she said, and shook her head, ‘his mother was stunning. You take after her, thank heaven. The father…well, he was a
good man, so I understand, but beautiful?…Perhaps the Portuguese are different on their own turf.’

‘My father was an
Indian.
’

‘Half Indian.’

Anne took the photograph to the window but the light was so bad she knelt by the bedside lamp trying to discern the features.

‘You look like the mother…lighter-skinned but…’

Anne squeezed the picture as if it was flesh and she was trying to extract something, not a splinter, but a tincture of life.

‘So why couldn’t you stay? Was it the cholera?’

‘This was before the cholera.’

‘What was before the cholera?’

Her mother dabbed her face and neck with the flannel.

‘It’s going to break soon,’ she said. ‘The weather.’

‘They did all die in the cholera outbreak, didn’t they?’

‘Both my parents died in the cholera outbreak but that wasn’t until 1924. This was in 1923.’

‘When you got married? I was born in 1924 so…’

‘We were never married. It didn’t happen like that.’

The thunder rumbled way off in Tooting or Balham. The room was lit only by the bedside lamp which suddenly flickered and went off. The two women sat still in the ghastly light of the approaching storm.

‘Was this your confession?’

‘Yes. Father Harpur showed me his poem about his father afterwards. It was a great help for me. For the first time I managed to make sense of things…understand my stupid self.

‘I fell in love with Joaquim. Madly in love. I was completely crazy for him. I was seventeen. I didn’t know anything. I’d had this strict Catholic upbringing. The convent and then the mission. I knew nothing about boys…men. Joaquim was being trained by the Portuguese in medicine.
My father got on well with the Portuguese. All Catholics together, I suppose. The Portuguese used to send the mission medicine and staff. One day they sent Joaquim. I was working as a nurse in the hospital at the time so I met him on his first day and everything I’d ever been taught, all my religious education, all my fear…it all went out of the window when I saw Joaquim.

‘It was physical. He was the most beautiful human I’d ever seen. Dark brown eyes with great long lashes and skin like sanded wood. I just wanted to touch him and feel the texture of him on the palm of my hand. He had beautiful hands, too. Hands that you could watch doing anything and they’d lull you. I’m banging on, I know, but it was an incredible thing for me at the time. To have this feeling inside of me of, of…I never know how to say this because it was too many things at once – certainty, beauty, joy. You know what Father Harpur said? “Like faith, you mean?” And that would have been it…if sex was allowed to come into faith.’

‘Sex,’ said Anne, the word falling out of her mouth, prickly, like a horse chestnut, which grew to the size of a sea mine in the room.

‘Yes. Sex,’ said her mother bluntly. ‘And before marriage, too. You’d have thought they’d only just invented that, the way they go on about it these days. Joaquim and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We had the opportunity in the mission hospital at night. We even had a bed. We were young and reckless. I tried to keep count of the days…tried to be careful, but we were both incapable. I got pregnant.’

The thunder rolled nearer. The sound of the wooden tumbrel on a cobbled street was south of the Common now, the smell of rain already coming in through the windows. The pressure cracking. The electricity in the air fizzing.

‘That was a terrible day. Joaquim was away, back in Goa. I’d been praying to come on. My father couldn’t believe my sudden devotion. And one day it hit me. Two weeks after I should have had my period it came to me that this was it and I panicked. I lay in bed at night, my brain in a flat spin, trying to imagine myself standing in front of my father…you didn’t know my father. It was inconceivable to have to tell him that I was pregnant and, not only that, I was pregnant by an Indian. I mean, they liked Joaquim very much. They loved the Indians but…mixed marriages. No. The Portuguese were different in that respect, they’ve always mixed with the locals in their colonies, but the British…a white British Catholic girl and a Goan. It wasn’t possible. It was against the laws of nature. No different to homosexuality in those days. So, I panicked. I made up a story. I invented this very detailed account of how I’d been raped and become pregnant.’