The Company of Strangers Read online

  They sent her home at the beginning of July to wait for an assignment. A week later she was contacted by Rawlinson, who told her he was going to come to tea to meet her mother. It was important to establish normality at home, her mother had to be given something official about what her daughter would be doing but not, of course, the reality.

  ‘Andrea!’

  Her mother shouted up the stairs from the hall. She dabbed the coal of the cigarette out on the wall, put the butt back in the packet.

  ‘Andrea!’

  ‘Coming, Mother,’ she said, ripping open the door.

  She looked down the stairs to her mother’s moon-white, but not so luminous, face at the curve of the bannisters.

  ‘Mr Rawlinson’s here,’ she said in a stage whisper.

  ‘I didn’t hear him arrive.’

  ‘Well, he’s here,’ she said. ‘Shoes.’

  She went barefoot back to the bedroom, put on her mother’s horrible shoes, laced them up. She sniffed the air, still smoky, still behaving like Mother’s little girl. Definitely not a spy.

  ‘She’s very young, you know…’ She overheard her mother in the drawing room. ‘I mean, she’s nineteen, no twenty, but she doesn’t act it. She went to a convent…’

  ‘The Sacred Heart in Devizes,’ said Rawlinson. ‘Good school.’

  ‘And out of London.’

  ‘Away from the bombing.’

  ‘It wasn’t the bombing, Mr Rawlinson,’ her mother said, without saying what it had been.

  Andrea braced herself for the tedium of her mother behaving properly in front of strangers.

  ‘Not the bombing…?’ said Rawlinson, feigning mild surprise.

  ‘The influences,’ said Mrs Aspinall.

  Andrea rattled her heels on the tiles to announce herself, to stop her mother talking about ‘goings on’ in the air-raid shelters. She shook hands with Rawlinson.

  Her mother’s bra creaked as she poured the tea. What rigging for such a tight little ship, thought Andrea, feeling Rawlinson’s bright, nearly saucy eyes on her neck, which heated up. Teacups rattled, raised and refitted on to saucers.

  ‘You speak German,’ he said to Andrea.

  ‘Frisch weht der Wind / Der heimat zu, / Mein Irisch kind / Wo weilest du?’ said Andrea.

  ‘Don’t show off, dear,’ said her mother.

  ‘And Portuguese,’ said Andrea.

  ‘She taught herself, you know,’ said Audrey Aspinall, interrupting. ‘Pass Mr Rawlinson some cake, dear.’

  Andrea had been sitting on her hands and now found that the ribbing of her dress was printed on the back of them as she passed the cake. Why did her mother always do this to her?

  ‘You have secretarial skills,’ said Rawlinson, lifting the cake.

  ‘She just did a course, didn’t you, dear?’

  Andrea didn’t contribute. Her mother’s porcelain face, still beautiful at thirty-eight years old but unyielding, turned hard on her. Andrea hadn’t told her mother anything about what had gone on at Oxford other than what they’d told her to say.

  ‘It’s my job to find suitable staff for our embassies and high commissions. My department is very small and when we find someone with a foreign language we tend to snap them up. I have a position for your daughter, Mrs Aspinall…abroad.’

  ‘I’d like to go abroad,’ said Andrea.

  ‘How would you know?’ said her mother. ‘That’s the thing about young people today, Mr Rawlinson, they think they know everything without having done anything but, of course, they don’t think. They don’t think and they don’t listen.’

  ‘We’re relying on youth in this war, Mrs Aspinall,’ said Rawlinson, ‘because they don’t know fear. Eighteen-year-olds can do a hundred bombing missions, get shot down, make their way through enemy territory and be up in the air again within a week. The reason they can do that is precisely that they don’t think, you see. The danger’s in the thinking.’

  ‘I’m not sure about abroad…’ said Mrs Aspinall.

  ‘Why don’t you come to my office tomorrow,’ said Rawlinson to Andrea. ‘We’ll test your skills. Eleven o’clock suit you?’

  ‘I don’t know where you’d send her. Not south. She can’t stand the heat.’

  This was a lie, worse than a lie because the opposite was the case. Andrea, inside her dark skin, under her starling glossy hair, glared at her mother’s translucency, at the blue blood inching its way under the alabaster skin. Mrs Aspinall had a Victorian’s attitude to sun. It never touched her skin. In summer she wore marble, in winter the snow would pile on her head as on a statue’s in the square.

  ‘Lisbon, Mrs Aspinall, we have an opening in Lisbon which would suit your daughter’s skills and intelligence.’

  ‘Lisbon? But there must be something she can do in London.’

  Rawlinson got to his feet, hauling his stiff leg up after him, shooting Andrea a conspiratorial look.

  They followed him into the hall. Mrs Aspinall fitted him into his light coat, gave him his hat, smoothed the shoulders of his coat. Andrea blinked at that small, intimate action. It shocked her, confused her.

  ‘You’re going to be hot out there, Mr Rawlinson.’

  ‘Thank you so much for tea, Mrs Aspinall,’ he said, and tipped his hat before going down to the gate and out into the sun-baked street.

  ‘Well, you won’t want to go to Lisbon, will you?’ said Mrs Aspinall, closing the door.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s as good as Africa down there…Arabs,’ she added as an afterthought, making it exotic.

  ‘I suppose it’s because I speak Portuguese,’ said Andrea. ‘Why do you never let me say…’

  ‘Don’t start on that. I’m not doing battle with you on that score,’ she said, heading back into the living room.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I talk about my father?’

  ‘He’s dead, you never knew him,’ she said, throwing her tea dregs into the pot plant, pouring herself another cup. ‘I hardly did, either.’

  ‘That’s no reason.’

  ‘It’s just not done, Andrea. That’s all.’

  Something wriggled in Andrea’s mind, something irrational like the first half of an equation, some algebra with too many unknowns. She was thinking about her mother smoothing Rawlinson’s shoulders. Intimacy and what brought that intimacy. Rawlinson’s leg. And why dead Portuguese fathers can’t be mentioned.

  Talking to her mother was just like algebra. Maths without the numbers. Words which meant something else. A question arrived in Andrea’s head. One prompted by an image. It was a question which couldn’t be asked. She could think it and if she looked at her mother and thought it, she’d shudder, which she did.

  ‘I don’t know how you can be cold in this heat.’

  ‘Not cold, Mother. Just a thought.’

  In the morning her mother produced one of her suits for Andrea to wear. A dark blue pencil skirt, short jacket, cream blouse, and a hat that perched rather than sat. Her nails were inspected and passed. After breakfast her mother told her to clean her teeth and left for work firing a volley of instructions up the stairs about what to do and, more important, what not to do.

  Andrea took a bus to St James’s Park and spent a few minutes on a bench before walking down Queen Anne’s Gate to number 54 Broadway. She went to the second floor, her feet already hurting in the borrowed shoes, and the suit, built for her mother’s slightly smaller frame, was pinching her under the armpits, which were damp in the heat. A woman told her to wait on a hard, leather-seated wooden chair. Sun streamed through the lazy dust motes.

  She was shown into Rawlinson’s office. He sat with his leg coming through the footwell to her side of his desk. Tea appeared and two biscuits. The secretary retired.

  ‘Biscuit?’ he asked.

  She took the offered biscuit. The dry half detached itself from the sodden half.

  ‘So,’ said Rawlinson, pulling himself up straight in his chair, the air clear as after a storm. ‘Nice to have you on bo
ard. There’s just one question I have outstanding here. Your father.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘You never include your father’s details on any of your forms.’

  ‘My mother says it’s not relevant. He died before I was born. He had no influence and nor did his family. I…’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘They were in India. There was a cholera outbreak. He died, as did my mother’s parents. She came back to England and lived with her aunt. I was born here at St George’s.’

  ‘In 1924,’ he said. ‘You see, I was interested in the Portuguese business. Why does Miss Aspinall speak Portuguese? And I found out that your father was Portuguese.’

  ‘My grandparents were missionaries in the south of India. There were a lot of Portuguese down there from their colony, Goa. She met…’

  ‘Your mother never took his name…’ said Rawlinson, and steadied himself to pronounce Joaquim Reis Leitão.

  ‘Leitão means “suckling pig”,’ she explained.

  ‘Does it?’ he said. ‘I see why she never took his name. Not something you’d want to have to explain every day of the week…suckling pig.’

  He sipped his tea. Andrea chased a piece of dry biscuit around her mouth.

  ‘You’ve led a cloistered life,’ said Rawlinson.

  ‘That’s what my mother says.’

  ‘The Sacred Heart. Then Oxford. Very sheltered.’

  ‘I spent time here during the Blitz as well,’ said Andrea. ‘That was a sheltered life, too.’

  Rawlinson took some moments to find the joke and grunted, reluctant to be amused.

  ‘So you’ll be all right in Lisbon,’ said Rawlinson, launching himself out of the chair, cracking his leg a stunning blow on the desk.

  ‘You’ll be working as a secretary for a Shell Oil executive called Meredith Cardew,’ said Rawlinson, speaking to the sky. ‘Rather a fortuitous vacancy. Last girl married a local. The husband doesn’t like her working. She’s pregnant. There’s been some accommodation arranged for you, which I will not attempt to explain but it is the crucial element of your assignment. How’s your physics?’

  ‘School Certificate standard.’

  ‘That’ll have to do. You’ll be doing some translating work. German scientific journals into English for the Americans, so you’ll have your work cut out, what with being Cardew’s secretary and all. Sutherland and Rose are running the Lisbon station. They’ll make contact with you via Cardew. A car will pick you up on Saturday morning and take you to RAF Northolt where you’ll be given your documents for travelling to Lisbon. You’ll be met at the airport by an agent called James – Jim – Wallis who works for an import/export company down at the docks. He will take you to Cardew’s house in Carcavelos, just outside Lisbon. Everything you need to know at this stage is in a file which Miss Bridges will give you and which you will read here and remember.’

  He turned his back to the sun. His face, backlit by the window, blackened. He held out his hand.

  ‘Welcome to the Company,’ he said.

  ‘The Company?’

  ‘What we call ourselves to each other.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You’ll do very well,’ he said.

  Miss Bridges sat her in a small room off her office with the file. It wasn’t a long file. The changes that had been wrought in her life were small but significant. She would now be known as Anne Ashworth. Her parents lived on Clapham Northside. Her father, Graham Ashworth, was an accountant, and her mother, Margaret Ashworth, was a housewife. Their lives to date had nearly been too boring to read. She digested the material, closed the file and left.

  She crossed St James’s Park and The Mall and walked up St James’s Street to Ryder Street where she knew her mother worked in a government office. She stood on the other side of St James’s to the entrance to Ryder Street and waited. At lunchtime the streets began to fill with people looking for something to eat. Men dived into pubs, women into teahouses. Her mother’s white face appeared in the entrance to 7 Ryder Street and walked down to St James’s. Andrea tracked her from across the street, into the park. Before the lake she took a right and chose a bench with a view of Duck Island and Horse Guards Road.

  Rawlinson’s distinctive gait was impossible to miss. He came from the other end of the park and joined her mother on the bench. They sat and looked at the ducks. Rawlinson’s hand rested on the duckhead-topped cane. After some minutes he held her hand; Andrea saw the join just below the two slats of wood at the back of the bench. A roaming dog paused to sniff at their feet and moved on. Her mother turned to look at the side of Rawlinson’s face and spoke something into his ear, only inches away. They stayed there for half an hour and then walked together, but unconnected, towards the bridge across the middle of the lake where they parted.

  Andrea killed time in a reference library just off Leicester Square until the late afternoon. Rawlinson was punctual about leaving work. Andrea watched him swing his boom down towards Petty France and into St James’s Park tube station. She followed him to a terraced house in Flood Street in Chelsea. A woman met him at the door, kissed him and took his hat. The door closed and through the lead-glass panes Andrea saw the coat coming off his back. The same coat that her mother had smoothed on to his shoulders the previous afternoon. Rawlinson’s blurred outline appeared in the frame of the sittingroom window and collapsed out of sight into a chair. The woman arrived in the window, looked out through the net curtains directly into Andrea’s stunned face and then up and down the street as if she was expecting someone.

  Andrea walked back down to Sloane Square and caught a bus to Clapham Common, her feet in an uproar from the hard leather of her mother’s shoes. She was furious at the years spent watching her mother laying the bricks to the austere edifice of her own hypocrisy. She limped home, dragged her tortured feet up the wooden stairs and collapsed face-down on the bed.

  The next morning at breakfast her mother appeared in the doorway tightly bound in a burgundy silk dressing gown. Andrea felt her contemplating six or seven lines of attack before putting the kettle on – the English solution to personal confrontation.

  ‘I got the job,’ said Andrea.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Mr Rawlinson’s secretary called me at the office,’ she said, ‘which was very considerate, I thought.’

  Andrea searched her mother’s back for clues. The scapulae shifted under the silk.

  ‘Do you like Mr Rawlinson?’ asked Andrea.

  ‘He seems very pleasant.’

  ‘Do you think you could like him…more?’

  ‘More?’ she said, rounding on her daughter. ‘What do you mean by “more”?’

  ‘You know,’ she said, shrugging.

  ‘Goodness me, I’ve only met him once. He’s probably married.’

  ‘That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?’ said Andrea. ‘Anyway, I’ll be out of here by the weekend.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’ll clear my room out. You could take a lodger.’

  ‘A lodger,’ said Mrs Aspinall, aghast.

  ‘Why not? They pay money. You could use a few pounds extra, couldn’t you?’

  Mrs Aspinall sat down opposite her daughter, who had a forearm either side of her plate, hands poised on the table top like spiders.

  ‘What happened to you yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘Nothing. After Rawlinson, I went to the library.’

  ‘You’re going away. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I’m staying here. I’ll be on my own. Don’t you think I’ll be lonely? Have you thought about that?’

  ‘That depends if you’re alone.’

  Her mother blinked. Andrea decided that the line was her parting shot. She looked back from the bottom of the stairs, her mother was still in the same position, the kettle whistling madly in her ear.

  Andrea got straight down to packing her few clothes and books. Her mother thundered up the stairs
. Half a minute of antagonistic silence opened up as she hovered outside the bedroom door. She moved off. Water ran in the bathroom.

  Fifteen minutes later Mrs Aspinall came into Andrea’s empty room with only the case in the middle of the floor. All vestiges of her daughter already gone.

  ‘You’ve packed,’ she said. ‘I thought you weren’t leaving until Saturday.’

  ‘I wanted to be organized.’

  Her mother’s face was indecipherable, too much going on at once for any emotion to make itself plain.

  The complicated world of adults.

  Chapter 7

  Saturday, 15th July 1944, Lisbon Airport.

  Andrea landed in Lisbon at three in the afternoon, the adrenalin from her first flight still live in her veins. The heat slammed into her at the door of the aircraft along with the smell of hot metal, tar and vaporized aviation fuel. She took out the white-rimmed sunglasses her mother had given her to protect her eyes and took her first steps on foreign soil as Anne Ashworth.

  The sun slapped down on the wide-open spaces of the airfield. The landscape beyond wavered in the rising heat. The trunks of palm trees snaked up to their frayed heads. The flat ground at their feet shone mirror bright. Nobody was moving out there, not even a bird, in the torrid afternoon.

  The new airport, barely eighteen months old, had straight, hard, fascistic lines, its main building dominated by the control tower affright with antennae. Armed police moved around the halls inside looking at everyone, who in turn looked at no one, sank into themselves, tried to disappear. Andrea’s dark face in the white sunglasses stood out and the customs officer selected her with two beckoning fingers and a cigarette trailing smoke.