The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson
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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.
She headed back down the corridor towards the stairs. A figure appeared at the far end of the gallery. A woman with a face whiter than her mother’s and long grey hair down to the middle of her back. She wore a white nightdress. The woman faded into the darkness of a room, shut the door.
Mafalda the Mad, very Jane Eyre, she thought, and fled down the stairs.
Anne returned to the living room, which was empty. Wilshere was sitting on his own on the back terrace in front of a wrought-iron table with a cigarette box and the cut-glass tumbler, emptier. He had his boots up on an unoccupied chair opposite. She joined him.
‘Ye-e-es,’ he said, ‘that’s better.’
‘What happened to Mr Cardew?’
‘Sit down, sit down, won’t you,’ he said, pulling her down into a chair next to him, his palm rough on her bare arm. His green eyes stroked her all over and the hand held on to the soft part below her shoulder. His look was neither prurient nor penetrative, two other looks she’d had that day, but attentive, oddly intimate, as if they were old friends, or even stronger – lovers, maybe, who’d had a life together, parted and come back for another visit.
‘Drink?’
How to play this? She’d been hoping to observe while Cardew talked but now she was in it. He likes a girl with spunk.
‘Gin,’ she said, ‘and tonic.’
‘Excellent,’ he said, releasing her arm, calling a boy over, who Anne hadn’t seen in the shade of the terrace.
Wilshere punched some words into him and drained his own glass which he handed over.
‘Smoke?’
She took a cigarette which he lit for her. She blew the smoke out into the still, very hot evening. It smelled like burnt dung. The boy returned and laid out two tumblers and a small dish of black, shiny olives. They chinked glasses. The cold drink and the fizz of the tonic smacked into her system and she had to restrain herself from jutting her breasts.
‘You’ll probably want to go to the beach tomorrow,’ said Wilshere, ‘although I should warn you that our friendly dictator, Dr Salazar, does not agree with men and women disporting themselves semi-naked on the strand. There are police. An intimidating squad of fearless men whose job it is to maintain the moral rectitude of the country by sniffing out depravity at source. All those refugees, you see, brought their immoral ideas and fashions with them and the good Doctor’s determined that it won’t get out of hand. The three F’s. Football, Fado and Fátima. The great man’s solution to the evils of modern society.’
‘Fado?’
‘Singing. Very sad singing…wailing, in fact,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some of my Irishness has worn off in this sunshine. All that rain and terrible history, I should have a natural inclination for drink and melancholy thought, but I don’t.’
‘Drink?’ asked Anne, archly, which earned a flash of white teeth.
‘I’ve never felt the need to brood over things. They happen. They pass. I move on. Construct. I’ve never been one for sitting about, longing for previous states. States of what? Lost innocence? Simpler times? And