The Company of Strangers (9 page)

‘On 19th September 1939 Hitler made a speech in Danzig in which he threatened to employ a weapon against which there would be no defence,’ said Rose. ‘The Americans are convinced that he meant an atomic bomb.’

‘You shouldn’t worry about understanding any of this perfectly. There are probably only a handful of scientists in the world who do,’ said Sutherland. ‘The important thing is for you to understand the significance of this endgame that we’re all involved in.’

‘Why would the Germans tell you all this in a physics journal and published papers? Shouldn’t this be top secret?’

Sutherland ignored the question.

‘The fact is that the Allies have their own bomb programme. We have our own Ekarhenium, the 94th element, which for reasons of secrecy we refer to as “49”.’

Brilliant, thought Anne, to switch the numbers round like that.

‘In March 1941 Fritz Reiche, a German physicist on the run from the Nazis, passed through Lisbon on the way to the United States,’ Rose continued. ‘He was met by the Jewish Refugee Organization here and before they put him on a ship to New York we had a meeting in which he warned us that a bomb programme did exist in Germany. We now know that they’re building an atomic pile for
the creation of Ekarhenium somewhere in Berlin. We also know that Heisenberg went to see Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, and that they had an argument about whether atomic warfare was the right way for physics to be going. A rift developed between the two men over the Germans’ active bomb programme. Heisenberg also sketched out, in rough, the makings of an atomic pile. Since then Bohr has left Denmark and gone over to the Americans. You’ve been in London since June?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you know about the doodlebugs…the V1 rocket bombs?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We believe that these are the prototype rockets for launching an atomic bomb on London.’

It felt suddenly cold in the room despite the grinding heat outside. Anne rubbed her arms. Sutherland sucked on his pipe, which bubbled like a tubercular lung in the stem.

‘Your day job in Cardew’s office will be to microfilm the two German physics journals
Zeitschrift für Physik
and
Die Naturwissenschafen
and provide Sutherland and me with typed translations of any articles which pertain to atomic physics,’ said Rose. ‘More important than that is the accommodation we’ve managed to arrange for you in Estoril. Cardew has been working up a good social relationship with a fellow called Patrick Wilshere. He’s a wealthy businessman in his mid fifties, with contacts and companies in the Portuguese colonies, mainly Angola. He is also Irish, a Catholic and not a lover of Great Britain. We have intelligence that he was selling wolfram, from his Portuguese wife’s family’s mining concessions in the north, exclusively to the Germans, as well as cork and olive oil from family estates in the Alentejo. He has offered Cardew a room in his considerable house for a lodger. He specified a female lodger.’

Sutherland looked to see the effect of this on his new agent. Her blood now felt as thin and cold as ether.

‘What is expected of me?’ she asked, clipping each word off.

‘To listen.’

‘You just said that he specified a female lodger.’

‘He prefers female company,’ said Rose, as if it was something he himself couldn’t understand.

‘What about his wife? Doesn’t his wife live in the same house?’

‘I understand that the relationship with his wife has…broken down somewhat.’

Anne began to breathe deep, slow breaths. Her thighs were sticking together under the cotton of her dress. Sweat seemed to be pricking out all over. Sutherland shifted in his chair. His first bodily movement.

‘Cardew thinks she’s suffered some kind of breakdown,’ he said.

‘You mean she’s mad, too?’ asked Anne, the scenario burgeoning in her mind.

‘Not howling at the moon, exactly,’ said Rose. ‘More nerves, we think.’

‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

‘Mafalda. She’s very well connected. Excellent family. Hugely wealthy. The spread they’ve got in Estoril…magnificent. Small palace. Own grounds. Marvellous,’ said Sutherland, selling it hard.

‘Do you mind if I smoke, sir?’ she asked.

Sutherland broke out of his chair and offered her a cigarette from a silver box on the table. He lit it with a weighty Georgian silver lighter with a green baize bottom. Anne drew in heavily, saw Sutherland brightening in her vision.

‘Tell me more about Wilshere,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘please, sir.’

‘He’s a drinking man. Likes to…’

‘Does that mean he’s a drunk?’

‘He likes a drink,’ said Rose. ‘You do too, from the accounts of the Oxford do’s. Quite a strong head on you, they said.’

‘That’s different from being a drunk.’

‘Well, while we’re about it, he’s a gambler as well,’ said Sutherland. ‘The casino’s practically at the bottom of their garden. Do you…?’

‘I’ve never had that sort of liquidity.’

‘But you probably know something about probability, what with your maths…’

‘It’s not a particular interest of mine.’

‘What is?’ asked Rose.

‘Numbers.’

‘Ah, pure maths,’ he said, as if he might know something. ‘What drew you to that?’

‘A sense of completeness,’ she said, hoping that would do the trick.

‘A sense or the illusion?’ asked Rose.

‘We might be talking about a lot of abstractions but what links them, the logic, is very real, very strict and irrefutable.’

‘I’m a crossword man myself,’ said Rose. ‘I like to see into people’s minds. How they work.’

Anne smoked some more.

‘Crosswords have their own kind of completeness, too,’ she said, ‘if you’re any good at them.’

Things were digging into her. Her bra felt tight. Her waistband knotty. She wasn’t getting on with these two men and she didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe that first exchange and the last one really had been too cheeky. Perhaps they’d seen one thing, imagined and extended their idea of her and she’d revealed something completely different. Was she this difficult?

‘The thing about intelligence is that the picture is
always
incomplete. We deal in fragments. You, in the field, even more so. You might not always know what you’re doing, you might not always appreciate the importance of what you hear. There are no solutions and, even if there were, you wouldn’t have known the question in the first place. You listen and report,’ said Sutherland.

‘Something else for you to listen for in the Wilshere household, apart from people’s names, has some relevance to the endgame we were talking about earlier,’ said Rose. ‘To make the doodlebugs, or any rocket for that matter, the Germans need precision tools. To make those tools requires precision cutting instruments. They need diamonds. Industrial diamonds. Those diamonds are finding their way in here on ships from Central Africa. We have tried searching those ships when they put in at our ports, like Freetown in Sierra Leone, but a handful of diamonds is not so easy to find on a 7,000-ton ship. We think, but we have no proof, that Wilshere is bringing in diamonds from Angola and getting them into the German Legation, where they are sent by diplomatic bag to Berlin. We don’t know how he does it or how he gets paid for doing it. So anything you hear about diamonds and payment for them in the Wilshere household must be communicated, via Cardew, to us at once.’

‘How do you want me to do that?’

‘Wallis will look after that. You’ll see him and arrange things with him.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘Cardew had better take you up to the house now. It’s getting late. I’ve told him to brief you on Wilshere and his wife, but I’ve also instructed him to exclude certain details which, for the safety of your cover, it would be better for you to find out yourself. I don’t want you going in there knowing too much about the situation and not reacting correctly to…developments. You’re supposed to be a
secretary. First time abroad and all that. I want you to be curious about everything and everybody.’

‘That doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be too difficult, sir.’

Sutherland grimaced. The brown column of teeth appeared again and shut down just as fast. He went to the door and called for Cardew.

Saturday, 15th July 1944, Estoril, near Lisbon.

Meredith Cardew drove Anne west past empty beaches. The sun was still high and the air crammed with heat, the sea in a flat calm, the Atlantic Ocean just licking at the sand. She didn’t speak, still overwhelmed by that first meeting with Rose and Sutherland. Across the estuary Cardew pointed out the beaches of Caparica and further into the haze, discernible only as a smudge, the headland of Cabo Espichel. He was trying to loosen her up.

The saltine air that came through the windows brought back weekends by the sea before the war with her mother fully clothed and scarfed against the sun and wind, while her own young body went hazelnut brown in a day. It was easy to love this place, she thought, after London with its bombed-out, blackened houses, the drab grey streets piled with rubble. Here, by the sea, under the big sky, the palms and the bougainvillea flashing past, it should be easy to forget five years of destruction.

Cardew drove one-handed, clawing tobacco into his pipe with the other. He even managed to get the pipe going without sending them off down the rocks and into the sea. He was mid thirties, with thinning, reddish blond hair which had been razor cut up the back. He was tall, very long legs, and slim with a long nose and a facile smile working on the corners of his mouth. His baggy trousers flapped as his knees seemed to be conducting an unseen orchestra; the turn-ups were halfway up his shins, which
were covered by thick beige socks. He wore heavy brogues on his feet.

What were the winter clothes like?

He smoked the pipe blowing stage kisses. His right arm had suffered a severe burn up to the elbow. The skin was shiny and patterned like sea fossils in rock.

‘Boiling water,’ he said, catching her looking, ‘when I was a child.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, flustered at being caught out.

‘Did Sutherland and Rose fill you in?’

‘As much as they were prepared to. They said they’d purposely left some gaps.’

‘Ye-e-e-s,’ said Cardew, a frown of uncertainty rippling down his forehead. ‘Did Rose say anything about Mafalda?’

‘He said she was having a breakdown of some sort, not “howling at the moon”, as he put it, just nerves.’

‘I don’t know what it is. Something to do with her husband perhaps, but it might just be a genetic thing. A bit of inbreeding back down the line. These big Portuguese families are known for it. Marrying each other’s first cousins and the like and before you know it…I mean, look at the Portuguese royal family. A set of March hares if ever I saw one.’

‘Isn’t that all over now? The royal family?’

‘Thirty-six years ago. Terrible business. The king and his son came up to Lisbon from the country, from Vila Viçosa in fact, not far from where Mafalda’s family comes from, near the border. They arrived in Lisbon, trundling through the streets, both assassinated in their carriage. End of the monarchy. Well, it took a couple more years to fizzle out, but that was the effective end: 1908. Still, she might just be depressed or something. Whatever, she’s not right, which is probably why Wilshere’s looking for some company.’

‘Female company, so I understand.’

Cardew shifted in his seat and looked as wary as a grouse on the Glorious Twelfth.

‘Bit of a rum one, old Wilshere. He’s broken the mould. Not your average chap.’

‘Does he have children?’

‘Only sons, who are away. No daughters. Probably why he wants female company. And here I am with four, for God’s sake,’ he said, a little gloomy. ‘Sporting legacy gone…although the eldest one’s school long-jump champion.’

‘All is not lost, Mr Cardew.’

He brightened, bounced the end of his pipe by clenching his jaw.

‘I think you’ll like Wilshere,’ said Cardew. ‘And I know he’ll like you. You’ve got that determined look about you. He likes girls with a bit of spunk. He didn’t like Marjorie.’

‘Marjorie?’

‘My former secretary. The one who married a Portuguese and is now pregnant. The husband won’t let her work, says she’s got to lie down. Poor girl’s got six months to go. Still, that’s why you’re here. Wilshere didn’t take to her, anyway. She was a bit too English for his taste and he upset her. Yes, he can be a bit like that. If he takes to you, you’re all right. If not he’s…he’s a difficult bugger.’

‘He likes you.’

‘Yes…in his way.’

‘Aren’t you a bit too English as well?’

‘Sorry, old girl. I’m a Scot, both sides. Talk like a Sassenach but I’m a Scot through and through. Like Wilshere, in fact, he’s Irish down to his heels but talks with a silver spoon in his mouth.’

‘Or a hot potato…if he’s Irish,’ said Anne.

Cardew roared, not that he found it so funny. He was just the type who liked to laugh.

‘What else is there to know about Patrick Wilshere?’ she asked.

‘He can be a charmer…’

‘As well as a drinker and a gambler.’

‘He rides, too. Do you ride?’

‘No.’

‘It’s nice up there on the Serra de Sintra on horseback,’ said Cardew. ‘Sutherland told me you had a top-class brain. Maths. Languages. That sort of thing.’

‘It didn’t leave much time for anything else. I’m just not sporty, Mr Cardew. Sorry. I’m not much of a team person, I suppose. It’s probably something to do with being an only child and…’

She pulled up short of saying ‘and not having a father’. She had a father now, of course. Graham Ashworth. Accountant. She looked out of the window and ordered her mind. They passed large villas set in their own, almost tropical gardens.

‘There’re crowned heads of Europe sitting out the war in Estoril,’ said Cardew. ‘That’s the kind of place it is.’

He turned off the main road at the Estoril railway station and drove into a square lined with hotels and cafés surrounding some gardens with palm trees and beds of roses, which gradually sloped up to a modern building at the top.

They passed the Hotel Palácio which Cardew told her was ‘ours’ and next door the Hotel Parque which was ‘theirs’. They went round the back of the modern building at the top which proved to be the casino, and Cardew pointed out a narrow, overgrown passage and a gate in the hedgerow further up, which was the back way into the Wilsheres’ garden. They climbed higher, right to the top of the hill, past gardens enclosed by privilege, hugging the towering phoenix palms and spiked fans of the Washingtonians, while the brash purple lights of bougainvillea tried to escape over the wall. Anne straightened her sunglasses on her nose, rested an elbow on the car window ledge, wished she had a cigarette going, which she thought
would be the final detail of a leading actress’s style, coming into her Riviera home.

‘You didn’t say whether you liked Wilshere,’ said Anne, catching sight of herself in the wing mirror.

Cardew stared intently at the windscreen as if the entrails of squashed insects might lead him somewhere. They pulled up at an ornate gateway, walls curving up and scrolling against solid stone posts, each of which sported a giant carved pineapple on top. A tiled panel bore the words
Quinta da Águia
and the wrought-iron gates an elaborate
QA
design.

‘Here’s an insight into the man,’ said Cardew. ‘This place used to be called
Quinta do Cisne
, Swan House, if you like. He’s renamed it Eagle House. His little joke, I think.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘He does business with the Americans
and
the Germans. Both countries use the eagle as their national symbol.’

‘Maybe he’s just being a gentleman.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Making everybody feel comfortable…unless they’re Marjorie,’ she said.

The driveway was cobbled all the way up to the house, white with black geometric patterns, just as she’d seen on the Lisbon pavements. It was lined with pink oleanders, very mature, almost trees. They came out of the oleanders into a square in front of the house which had a fountain in the middle, water spouting from a dolphin’s mouth. Lawn sloped away to distant hedges, a stepped, cobbled path ran down one side towards the bottom of the garden and the back gateway to possible financial ruin. The view reached to the hotels and palms of Estoril’s main square, the railway station and the ocean beyond.

The house itself was vast and box-like, not an accumulation of extensions, not something organic that had grown with the owner’s mind or fortune, but a house that had
been planned, finished and never again added to. Its ugliness was disguised by the leafy frills of an ancient wisteria whose tributaries reached the eaves of the terracotta tiled roof. They walked to the pillared porch, Anne fretting about her case left in the car.

The door was opened by a grotesquely bent old man, his head at right angles to his body and turned sideways so that he could look Cardew in the eye. He wore a black tailed jacket and striped trousers. He was backed up by a small, wide woman also dressed in black with a white apron and cap. Cardew’s Portuguese came out like an order for buttered scones but it was intelligible enough for the old man, who produced a length of cane from the back of his jacket and set off towards the car with the woman in tow. Another maid appeared, doing up her apron. She was even smaller than the first, with a face that had been pinched and drawn out to the length of a fox’s. Tiny eyes, closed up by malnourishment in pregnancy, flickered in her head. There was an exchange and the maid set off across the black and white chequered floor of the dark hall which was surrounded by oak panelling, and stairs that joined a gallery above. A huge, tiered iron chandelier hung from the wooden roof.

On either side of the door through which the maid had disappeared were two glass cases full of brightly coloured, naïve clay figurines. Dark, uncleaned oil paintings in heavy gilt frames hung above them. In one, the stern face of a bearded ancestor appeared as if through battle smoke, the woman standing behind his chair was pale with dark rings around her eyes as if illness had been a way of life.

‘Mafalda’s parents,’ said Cardew. ‘The Conde and Condessa. Dead now. She inherited the lot.’

Behind them the old man and the maid staggered in with Anne’s case suspended between them on the piece of cane. They started up the staircase and paused on the
first landing. The old man held on to the shiny ball at the corner of the bannisters, panting. Anne felt the urge to get up there to help him and, sensing it, Cardew gripped her elbow. The other maid returned, taking tile-sized steps towards them, her foxy face nudging the air, suspicious, checking them for smells. Cardew steered Anne down the length of a wooden-floored corridor with a strip of carpet up the middle, tall mirrors on either side of mixed quality so that Anne appeared thin, chubby, wavy. A chandeliered dining room flashed past on the left. At the end of the corridor, just before the french windows out on to the back terrace, they turned right into a long, high room with six tall windows giving out on to the lawn. The shutters were open, the blue and gold designs on them faded from the fierce summer sun.

The quantity of furniture in the room gave the impression that there was a lot going on, that maps and compasses might have been helpful. This furniture was not in any way co-ordinated, colours clashed, brocade and velvet sat uncomfortably together, the muted carpets seemed embarrassed by the brashness and weight of it all. At the far end of the room was a carved marble fireplace which contained a frieze in bas-relief of an ancient people, Corinthians or Phoenicians, engaged in endless tussle with wild animals. Above the fireplace hung a painting, a hunting scene of wild and bloody savagery, with wild boar stuck and squealing and wounded dogs tossed in the air while mounted men with lances stared on.

Patrick Wilshere stood below this scene dressed in riding britches, boots and a loose, collarless white shirt undone at the neck. Cardew’s description of him as ‘rum’ and ‘not average’ was typical understatement. Wilshere had stepped out of a novel from a different, more romantic age. His grey hair, swept back behind his ears, was long, long enough so that it rested on the first vertebrae of his back. He had a
moustache whose waxed tips pointed upwards and his eyes were creased at the corners as if on permanent look-out for the source of all amusement. His hands had long elegant fingers and they cradled a cut-glass tumbler half-full of amber liquid. He nudged himself away from the fireplace where he’d been leaning.

‘Meredith!’ he called down the room, pleased to see him, hearty.

The maid stepped back and Anne followed Cardew through the watercourse between the furniture to the small backwater where Wilshere stood, still with the faint reek of horse about him.

‘Sorry, haven’t had time to change,’ said Wilshere. ‘Been out on the hills all day, just got back and needed a blast to put the wind back in my sails. You must be Anne. Pleased to meet you. Been travelling all day, I expect. Could do with freshening up. Get yourself out of that suit and into something more comfortable. Yes. MARIA! If you can’t remember the maids’ names just shout Maria and you’ll get two or three.’

The maid came back and stood at the door.

‘All tiny, these people,’ said Wilshere, ‘no bigger than fairies. Come from my wife’s part of the country.’

He spoke in perfect Portuguese. The maid dipped and ducked in an attempted curtsy. Anne navigated the furniture to the door and followed the maid up the stairs and down a corridor to a room which would have been above the end of the living room. It was a corner room, with views of the sea and Estoril. There was a private bathroom which overlooked the terrace and, beyond some hedges, a grass tennis court, brown from the sun. The cast-iron bath had clawed feet holding on to small worlds. A shower rose the size of a frying pan stuck out from the wall. The maid left, closing the door. Anne waited for the footsteps to retreat, ran at the four-poster bed, flung herself at it
wildly and writhed in luxury. She lay with her arms spread out, trying to encompass her new world.

She stripped, showered and changed into a pleated cotton skirt and a simple blouse which left her arms bare. She brushed out her hair, struck poses in the full-length mirror, pouting her mouth, flicking at her skirt, but still failed to match her surroundings.