The Company of Strangers (33 page)

‘By whom?’

‘A man. A fabricated man. One who didn’t exist. It was easy to act it out. I mean, I was so damned upset anyway…almost mad at what I was having to go through.’

‘And Joaquim?’

‘He still wasn’t there. The Portuguese had sent another medical student for a couple of weeks. I was on my own. I was in a desperate state and I knew something had to be done. So I told my father I’d been raped, broke down and wept in front of him, fell at his feet. Literally, I was a heap on the floor. I cried until I retched. My father called the police. The local police was headed by a fellow called Longmartin. He was one of those fearsome, muscular types, quite small, wire-brush moustache and with a neck in a permanent state of rage. He came round and took my statement, the statement of my completely flawless story. He also spoke to my father. I don’t know what was discussed. I think perhaps they were asking my father
whether he wanted it kept quiet in the district that his daughter had been raped. How open the investigation should be. I don’t know. What I did know was that once those words of mine were uttered, they changed everything. I don’t know where I got this from, my own mind, Father Harpur, a book…I don’t know. The fact is that something started with a lie can only beget other lies, like a bad bloodline it will continue through to its terrible end.’

The wind thrashed through the trees, rattled the sash windows in their frames.

‘What did Joaquim say when you told him?’

‘There was nothing to be said. It was a
fait accompli.
He was racked with guilt that he’d brought this upon me…as if in some way I’d been unwilling in the whole affair. I’ve never seen anyone in such a torment of anguish. He was appalled that I’d had to take this stigma upon myself. The stigma of a defiled woman. He felt totally responsible. He wanted to go to my father. He wanted to take the blame.’

‘Oh, my God…and did he?’

‘You haven’t heard the half of it yet.’

The first drops of rain hit the window. The smell of it on the hot tarmac filled the air. Thunder cracked overhead and lightning blitzed through the room. The net curtains billowed in the bay window and the roof took the full force of the colossal downpour.

‘The way it happened,’ her mother said, raising her voice over the roar of the rain, ‘was that the police caught somebody. Yes, there’s a crash course in colonial justice in this, too. They came to the house, Longmartin and two of his constables. They wanted me to identify someone. This was ten days after my supposed attack. I had myself under control by then, but when my father came to my room and told me I had to go with Longmartin, I went straight back into the terror. Of course my father said he’d go with
me but Longmartin was a clever little bastard, that’s why he’d brought the two constables along with him. There was no room in the car. He wanted me on my own. I rode in the back with him and he told me what was going to happen. There would be a line-up of six men, all Indians. They would be standing under the light behind some mosquito netting and I would be in the dark, so I’d be able to see them but they couldn’t see me. I nodded through all this and then Longmartin started to say something else. He went from being the straightforward, almost brutally frank, police officer to somebody altogether quieter, more threatening, hopping backwards and forwards over the line of implication.

‘He said that he was glad that they’d been able to clear this matter up. They were just beginning to have second thoughts about what had happened because they hadn’t had the first glimmer of a clue. None of their informers had come back with anything except some rubbish about a Goan student at the mission. All the locals hate Goans, he said, because they’re Catholics. Little hints but with an accumulative weight. By the time we reached the police station I was convinced he knew my game, so when he whispered in my ear as I went in front of the line up: “Third from the end.” I didn’t hesitate. I walked the line and went straight back to the third man from the end, whom I’d never seen before in my life, and pointed him out.

‘Longmartin was very pleased. He took me straight home and handed me back to my father and said: “Very brave girl, your daughter, Mr Aspinall. Very courageous. Looked him in the eye and pointed him out. Very plucky, I must say.” I hung by his side, a broken, spineless creature, while he snapped me up into pieces with his savage little ironies. I even thought I heard derision in his voice. I went to bed and, when I wasn’t lying on my back staring sleepless into
the mosquito net seeing that man’s face behind it, I was writhing about as if…as I had been before they took this damned tumour out.’

‘So Joaquim wasn’t involved in the end.’

‘Things were already going wrong in India. I know it was another quarter of a century before the handover but colonial rule was already in trouble even then. It had only been four years since that terrible business in Amritsar when General Dyer machine-gunned all those unarmed demonstrators. There was unrest everywhere. The man I’d pointed out was a leader of one of the local Hindu resistance militias. Longmartin had wanted him for years. When the Indians heard the charge against their man, they rioted and marched on the mission, but Longmartin was well prepared. The troops stepped in and broke it all up.

‘Joaquim couldn’t stand it. Everything had gone to dust. Our physical desire for each other had vanished. We could hardly bear to be in the same room as each other because we were so tormented by the developments. He saw it all as his fault. He was six years older than me and should have known better etcetera, etcetera. Now a man was going to hang in all probability because of him. He was outraged at the injustice. He said it would never have happened in Goa. He demanded to know my lie…how I’d said the rape had occurred. And he was fierce about it, Andrea, totally frightening. I told him everything and he handed himself in to Longmartin, admitted to raping the English girl, gave him my story verbatim.’

‘And Longmartin accepted it?’

‘I imagine Longmartin was furious. It was probably the one thing he hadn’t anticipated. If you’re ignoble yourself you can’t foresee another’s nobility. I know he would have resisted it strongly. I don’t know what Joaquim said to persuade him but I think he must have scared him, given him a few ideas about how bad the rioting could get if the
Hindus had categoric proof of their man’s innocence. The end of it was that the Hindu leader was released and Joaquim was…Joaquim…’

Her mother was suddenly struggling against the unseen torment. She lay back, head thrown against the bedstead, her mouth wide, black and gaping, her shoulders convulsing with each chest-wrenching hack. She collapsed to her side. Anne sat next to her, put a hand to her shoulder, remembered that night when she was a child, her mother after the party sobbing to herself. Gradually the bird-like body underneath her calmed, the eyes opened and stared blankly into the room.

‘Joaquim died in police custody,’ she said. ‘The official line was that he “committed suicide”, hanged himself from the bars of his cell. Another version was that Longmartin was punishing him for ruining his little plan and he overdid it. As far as everybody was concerned, not just my parents and the people at the mission, but the whole town, Hindus and Muslims alike, justice had been done. Ten days later I was put on a ship to England. It was my peculiar fate that I, as the instigator of the whole rotten business, was to survive all of them. Thousands died in the cholera outbreak the following year including my parents, the Hindu resistance leader and Longmartin. As a nurse in the hospital my chances would not have been good. As it was I became a living monument to my own moral cowardice. And Joaquim, the most honourable of men, died…reviled by everyone…even his father wouldn’t collect the body and he was buried in an untouchables’ grave on the outskirts of town.’

The rain moved off. The air blown into the room was cool and clear and brought with it the freshness of wet earth and mown grass. Her mother strained to sit up. Anne propped her up on the pillows. In her hand was the other piece of paper from the box.

‘So that was my tale full of sound and fury. Shakespeare was right. It all comes to nought in the end. The slate is constantly wiped clean,’ she said, and handed Anne a letter. ‘This was the first, last and only letter he wrote to me…from jail. One of the Hindu leader’s men brought it to me. Read it. Read it out loud for me.’

Dear Audrey,

I feel clean for the first time in many days. My body is filthy, they don’t let me wash, but inside I am scrubbed clean, the walls newly white-washed and the sun bright against them so that I can hardly bear to look. I am happy in the same way that I was happy when I was a small boy.

You must believe me when I tell you that what I did was for the best. What would have become of our love with that man’s death between us? Better that we should hold it as something that was good and true although not to be. I know in these short lines that I might not be able to persuade you that none of what has happened is your fault. I am suffering the consequences of my own mistakes. You must sail away from here into the rest of your life with a clear mind and the knowledge that you have been my only true love.

Joaquim

‘It’s not an excuse,’ her mother said, ‘but an explanation.’

Autumn 1968, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.

The days shortened inch by inch towards the end of summer. The number of ‘bad days’ increased. If Audrey got out of bed it was only for a few hours in the afternoon. They spoke in the lucid moments before the pain took hold and the morphine smothered it.

Anne made a study in the room next to her mother’s, put a desk in front of the window with one of her many photographs of Julião at one corner and read Number Theory books during the day and Jane Austen at night. When she wasn’t reading she was thinking and smoking and watching the way the smoke was drawn up through the lampshade and into the dark.

One afternoon there were kids playing in the street, all gathered around one boy who was explaining the rules, and she saw herself years earlier looking out on to the lawn in Estoril at Julião and his friends. He’d only been eight years old and yet all the boys looked up to him, faces rapt with admiration, and she could only think of Julius and his last letter from the
Kessel
at Stalingrad. His men. It had started an ache in her chest. It was during the time they were launching
O Camponês
and she realized then that Julião was a passion she could have allowed herself, a cleaner, warmer passion than the politics she’d chosen, except it was a passion she didn’t feel she deserved and it was one she feared, too. She could never rid herself of that sense of a payment due. She photographed Julião all the
time, despite some dim memory telling her that primitive people thought that it was a theft of the soul. To her it had been a constant confirmation of his existence but now, fingering the frame on the corner of her desk, she wondered if it was her way of loving him at a distance.

She didn’t sleep much in this period. Her mother would call out at all times of night and Anne would sit with her until she drifted off again. They covered old ground, her mother added detail to incomplete pictures.

The great aunt who, on Audrey’s parents’ death, had inherited and lived in the Clapham house with her niece and the illegitimate child, had died and left it all to Audrey when Anne was barely seven years old. Audrey had been working in Whitehall as a secretary for five years. The job had been arranged for her by her aunt and when she died it meant there was no one to look after the child, which was why Anne was sent to the nuns early.

‘It was your Great Aunt, my Aunt G, G for Gladys, who started this régime of discipline. She was strict with both of us and I just carried it on. It wasn’t me at all but it was a useful persona to hide behind.’

‘What were you hiding from?’

‘Your curiosity,’ she said. ‘My own guilt. I was quite different at work. I think I was seen as a bit of a good-time girl, always on for a drink, always ready for a party. I learned how to laugh. A loud laugh is very useful in England.’

‘You must have had…offers.’

‘Of course, but I didn’t want anybody getting too close. Rawlinson was perfect. I have to say, there was something about his missing leg that attracted me. I couldn’t fathom it at the time, especially as the only man I’d ever known had been physically perfect. It occurred to me only the other day that this was what I thought I deserved. I didn’t
want the full commitment so I didn’t go after the whole man. I certainly wasn’t his only girlfriend, either.’

‘I followed him to Flood Street.’

‘That was his wife. They didn’t do much together. She never knew about the wine even. Terrible…the secrets, aren’t they? We were bloody masters, Rawly and I. It’s funny how they know, isn’t it?’

‘Who?’

‘The Company. Once the war got going I was transferred into the Ministry of Economic Warfare. I was good with numbers…only numbers, mind, not
your
hieroglyphics. Secretaries in those days did most of the work and it was all top-secret stuff. They liked me. And when they moved Section V up from St Albans to Ryder Street they sent me over there to keep an eye on the money.’

‘What was Section V?’

‘Counter Intelligence. And you know who was running it? Kim Philby. Yes, Philby was there from the beginning. I couldn’t believe it when he fled to Moscow. 1963. It was a cold day. January some time.’

‘You were talking about how they know.’

‘Yes. How they know the ones who can keep a secret.’

‘And?’

‘They find the ones who’ve already got a secret to keep. I’d be useless now. Thrown it all away. Tell anybody anything, me. They’d call me Blabbermouth Aspinall and give me my cards.’

‘And you were still working for the Company after you retired?’

‘Oh yes, still in banking. You’ll see them all at the funeral…except him.’

‘You liked Philby?’

‘Everybody did. Great charmer.’

Audrey suddenly directed her to the chest of drawers, left-hand side, under the bras and knickers, to a small
leather box. Inside was a medal on a length of ribbon.

‘That’s my gong,’ said Audrey. ‘My OBE.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘My great triumph!’ she said, punching the air weakly. ‘Not much of one after forty years’ service.’

‘I’d liked to have known.’

‘Now, yes. Now that we’re talking,’ she said. ‘You know, it wasn’t just because of Rawly that I sent you away. I
did
want you to be safe but…I wanted you out of my sight, too. You were a constant reminder of my weakness, my cowardice. You remember I couldn’t stand the heat either. It brought back India. Terrible headaches.’

That night Anne sat even longer at her desk, the Jane Austen open but unread in front of her, just her own still reflection in the dark glass of the window pane and the trail of smoke rippling from the ashtray. After the afternoon’s revelations she was thinking of her own secret life, which had continued after she graduated from Lisbon University with an offer from João Ribeiro to do a postgrad thesis on the new hot topic – Game Theory.

She’d snatched at the chance. Julião, under Luís’s constant supervision, was becoming more embroiled in his young male world and drifting further from her already weakening orbit. Two years later she was stunned and a little sickened when he announced that he’d joined the boy’s brigade, Mocidade, without asking her. To Anne, Mocidade was no better than the
Hitler Jugend
and it was only João Ribeiro who was able to mollify her, by saying it was a completely natural thing for a boy to want to do, to go off walking and camping in the hills with his friends.

It was then that the secret work had become even more important to her. She knew it was irrational but she saw Julião’s actions as defiance, even, God help us, betrayal.
The boy spent all his time with Luís, he was a brilliant sportsman and horseman, he was good at maths but not brilliant and he had a complete blindspot for physics. All that, and his pride in the Mocidade uniform, made her think that her son was all Almeida, that there wasn’t a drop of Voss left in him.

It had come to her one day, as she was taking the train into Lisbon and looking at the faces in the carriage, that it was her secret life that made her different. She knew it brought her excitement but it was at that moment that she began to think it was bringing meaning, too. She lived for her document encryption sessions with João Ribeiro, the long meandering walks to the safe houses and secret printing presses of
O Camponês
and
Avante,
the role-playing sessions, the whole mechanics of the clandestine struggle.

For her husband she felt occasional affection, for her son – unconditional, if distant, love, for her mathematics –an objective, intellectual interest, and for her secret work – a deep need, an addiction stronger than the cigarettes she smoked end to end with João Ribeiro and the caffeine in the coffee they drank. It was what defined her.

She even recalled lying in bed one night next to Luís’s snoring and feeling suddenly sufficient, enclosed, whole. She was thinking that guilt was being assuaged. Her secret work for social justice was an endless ‘Hail Mary’, penance for her self-confessed sins. It was part of the process of purification. And just as she arrived at this point she’d shaken the nonsense out of her head. She was a communist, an atheist – it had been muddled thinking.

She replenished her glass of brandy, found another packet of cigarettes and couldn’t help immersing herself in the real glory years. In 1959 João Ribeiro and Anne planned what became, a year later, the brilliant and successful escape of their leader Alvaro Cunhal from the Peniche prison in the north of Portugal. They followed this
with an even more outrageous scheme which would bring the attention of the world to the suffering of the Portuguese people. In January 1961 a group of Portuguese communists hijacked the cruise liner
Santa Maria
in the Caribbean. She referred to those two operations as the glory years but, looking back on it, they’d been short-lived. That was the high point of João Ribeiro’s fame within the PCP. It was downhill after that. Members of the central committee became uncomfortable with his success and, when there followed a number of inexplicable arrests of communist cadres, suspicion seemed to fall automatically on João Ribeiro and his foreign assistant. João was sidelined into dull Party work but heard there was a plot to have Anne deported. He split away from her, told her to stay at home and destroy anything that could compromise her with PIDE.

Anne spent a month pacing the drawing room of the house in Estoril, smoking severely, waiting for the knock. Luís was away on exercise almost constantly. The knock never came. Her exit from the resistance stage arrived when Angola blew up in February 1961 and Luís and his regiment were sent out to quell the rebellion. Six months later, when the initial crisis was over and the fighting contained in the north of the country, she’d arrived by boat in Luanda with a sixteen-year-old Julião.

She sat back from the desk, turning the tumbler of brandy in her hands. She’d expected more from her memories. She’d expected some kind of emotional intensity to come with them but, as when she’d woken up from the nightmare back in Lisbon, it had come back to her as newsreel. She looked in on her mother who was fast asleep, the air rushing into her gaping mouth, and realized that she’d been more replenished in a matter of weeks than she had been by two decades of living.

Before the end of August the weather changed. A chill wind blew in from the north-east and summer was over. Audrey remained in bed all day, sailing on morphine. She muttered to herself, babbled lines of poetry while kids screamed outside and a football boomed against a car. A man, cross, roared at them and after a pause a small voice piped up:

‘Can we have our ball back?’

‘No, you bloody can’t.’

Anne sat with her mother, holding her hand most of the day, squeezing it like a pulse, mulling over those endless days spent on the verandah in Angola while Luís fought the rebels and Julião played war in the garden. How it had all been leading to what she saw at the time as Julião’s next betrayal, which was his dramatic announcement in 1963 on his eighteenth birthday that he’d been accepted by the Military Academy for Officer’s Training. Why did she still think of it as betrayal? As if she’d spent years developing his political consciousness. A crack opened up in her mind and she’d just got her eye to it, her eye to a small chink of truth, when her mother suddenly said:

‘You never told me about Karl Voss.’

It jolted her, whipped her head round to her mother, whose eyes were closed, her breath baffling and ricocheting in her throat.

‘Mother?’ she asked, but there was no reply.

Now there was regret at a chance missed. Her mother, working in Section V, must have seen the progress reports, must have read about her indiscretion with their double agent, the military attaché of the German Legation. In all their time together Anne hadn’t spoken about Karl Voss and she’d had no intention of doing so. This was her mother’s time, her mother’s confessional. Earlier Audrey had urged her to go to Father Harpur several times. Anne
even liked Father Harpur but she wasn’t going to see him because she knew what he’d ask of her. He would compel her to tell Luís and Julião the truth and, whilst she could live with Luís’s contempt, she would not be able to bear Julião’s disdain. Now she thought that she should have told her mother, that it wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t have made any demands. She would have listened and taken the secret to the grave with her.

She wrote a letter to a friend of João Ribeiro’s, a mathematics professor at Cambridge called Louis Greig. His name and address had been given to her on her last afternoon in Lisbon while she’d put into action a half-measure, as she’d called it. She’d given João Ribeiro a wooden box from Angola containing the Voss family photograph and letters for safe-keeping. She didn’t want Luís to come across them if it ever came to him clearing her out of his life.

Louis Greig replied to her letter by return, urging her to visit. She responded, telling him about her mother but also jotting down some of her recent ideas and asking if there were any course possibilities, not in her doctoral thesis subject, Game Theory, which was a dead duck by now, but more in the line of pure maths. He wrote back saying that João Ribeiro had made contact and that there were definite possibilities for someone of her calibre. It was then that she began to see her half-measure as a full one and asked herself if she was ever going back to Portugal.

When she’d gone back to Lisbon in the past, from the various African wars, she’d gone back as the same person to find everything changed. Arriving back from Angola in 1964 she’d found the whole resistance movement stalled. Alvaro Cunhal had gone to the Soviet Union. João Ribeiro had spent two years in prison, his wife had died, he’d lost his job at the university and was now living in a single
room in the Bairro Alto on very little money. The PCP had shunned him and he’d told her it was all over.

As it happened, she hadn’t had much time to take it all in because the Mozambique rebellion started and Luís, with all his experience, was immediately posted to Lourenço Marques. It was in that tactically more brutal war that she and Luís began to fall apart. The Mozambique commander introduced techniques used by the British in Malaya and the Americans in Vietnam, giving the locals a stark choice – co-operate or face unrelenting suffering and death. News of the atrocities reached Anne in the army compound. She had pointless, violent rows with Luís. She threw things at him. She taunted him about the justice of the colonial wars, whether wars designed to maintain Salazar as an emperor were fit wars for his son. Luís spent more time in the mess. Anne drank cheap brandy and fulminated on the verandah.