The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson
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on the radio.’
Wilshere’s jaws chewed over the meat in his mouth, interminable as cud.
‘He was saying,’ Anne pressed on, ‘he was saying that they’re songs about longing, about dwelling…’
Mafalda just rattled the cutlery on the side of her monogrammed plate and Anne shut up.
‘I like that new girl. Amália,’ said Wilshere. ‘Amália Rodrigues. Yes, she’s rather good.’
‘Her voice?’ asked Mafalda on the end of a coal-black look.
‘I didn’t know there was anything else to fado,’ said Wilshere, ‘or were you asking me whether I thought she had the spirit, the soul, the alma of fado?’
A twitch had started up around Mafalda’s left eye. She stroked it down with her little finger. Anne looked from one end of the table to the other – the idiot spectator.
‘Of course, she has marvellous…’ said Wilshere, and his search for a word set the air quivering, ‘…marvellous deportment.’
‘Deportment?’ scoffed Mafalda. ‘He means…’
She reined herself in. Her small puffy fist banging the edge of the linen tablecloth a light thump.
‘Perhaps I should have chosen something less contentious,’ said Wilshere. ‘We were merely conversing about our good friend the great Doctor and, of course, the three “F”s came up. Perhaps we should have talked about history, but even that’s a minefield. You’ll be glad to know that I didn’t make any mention of O Encoberto, the Hidden One, my dear.’
‘The Hidden One?’ asked Anne.
‘Dom Sebastião,’ said Wilshere. ‘No, I didn’t make any mention of him, my dear, I knew you’d rather tell Anne all about that yourself. My wife, you see, Anne, is a monarchist. A state that hasn’t existed in this country for more than thirty years. She believes that the Hidden One, who was killed – ooooh, four hundred years ago, wasn’t it? – on the battlefield of El Kebir in Morocco, will somehow return…’
Mafalda stood with some difficulty. Wilshere broke off. A servant was pulling back her chair and offering his shoulder for her to lean on.
‘I’m not feeling so well,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I will have to withdraw.’
She left the room without appearing to shift any of her weight on to the servant’s shoulder, which she gripped in a fistful of material. She hadn’t been that unsteady upstairs in her nightclothes. Mafalda gave Anne the shadow of a nod. The door closed with a brass click. Anne dropped back into the dent of her upholstered chair, traumatized. Her half-eaten meat was removed. Fruit salad appeared. Steps receded to the kitchen. They were left alone in the chandeliered glare, the red wine on a small silver tray in front of Wilshere.
‘Words, words, words,’ said Wilshere under his breath, ‘it’s only words.’
Earlier, out on the terrace Wilshere had been on his way up to drunkenness. The flash of anger at the mention of his wife had been a hiatus in the usual, uninterrupted progression. In the short fifteen minutes he’d taken to get changed he’d shot through drunkenness and regained sobriety, but with a difference. He was now capable of seamless transformations from belligerent to maudlin, from vindictive to self-pitying. Perhaps Cardew’s estimation of the mental state of the occupants was the reverse. Mafalda was just unwell and the man drumming his stiff bib at the end of the table, contemplating the level of wine in his glass, was, if not mad, then close to it.
‘Don’t eat dessert myself,’ he said. ‘No sweet tooth.’
He chinked the edge of his plate with the spoon, drank the wine and poured the remains into his glass. The servants arrived with coffee. He told them to serve it out on the terrace. He finished the wine in a single draught as if compelled to drink it – condemned to death by poisoning.
On the terrace Wilshere forced a glass of port from another century on to Anne. This was no longer pleasurable drinking.
‘Let’s take a walk down to the casino,’ said Wilshere after a prolonged silence in which his body became an impregnable fortification, behind which the man’s mind had retreated to fight some internal battle. ‘Run along and put your best party frock on.’
She put her only party frock on, one of her mother’s from before the war. She looked down out of the bathroom window on to the terrace where Wilshere sat immobile. Refocusing on her own image in the glass she felt a crack of fear opening up. She remembered her training – the talk about mental stamina for the work – and breathed the panic back down.
She walked downstairs with her shoes in her hand, not wanting another confrontation with the spectral Mafalda. On the terrace she rejoined Wilshere, who was staring through the footlights into the wall of darkness. He jerked himself out of his chair, held her by the shoulders but not with the soft touch of her old piano teacher. His breath, an ammoniacal reek that could have blistered paintwork, made her blink. Sweat had appeared in the parted channel of his perky moustache. His mouth was no more than inches from her own. Everything in her body recoiled and a squeal moved up from her stomach. He let her go. Goose flesh flourished where his hands had been.
They walked through the curtain of light on to the lawn and round to the cobbled pathway that led down the garden. A half-moon lit the way. Not far from the bottom a path forked off to a summerhouse and a bower which had formed around some stone pillars providing a shelter of hanging fronds for a bench with a view out to the sea. It looked unused, as if the house’s occupants had no need of such tranquillity but preferred the relentlessness of the dark halls and the corridors of their natural habitat.
They crossed the road under the dense darkness of the stone pines at the rear of the casino, a modern featureless building which knew that its attraction was not architectural. They joined the current of expensive-looking people going in – the rustle of taffeta, the sizzle of nylons and the crack of wads of freshly minted folding money.
Wilshere headed straight for the bar and ordered a whisky. Anne opted for a brandy and soda. As Wilshere lit her cigarette a meaty arm came around his shoulders. His slim body flinched.
‘Wilshere!’ said an expansive American voice, not looking at him but putting his head close as if about to touch cheeks. A hand stretched out towards Anne. ‘Beecham Lazard.’
‘The third,’ said Wilshere, shrugging the American’s arm off. ‘This is Miss Anne Ashworth.’
Lazard was taller and wider than Wilshere. He was dressed in a dinner jacket too, but his was crammed full and bulging. He was younger than Wilshere by twenty years and had black hair with a precision-tooled side parting. His smile was faultless and his skin tone utterly consistent. There was something of waxwork perfection about him, both fascinating and repellent.
‘We gotta talk,’ said Lazard to the side of Wilshere’s face.
Wilshere looked down his shirt front like a man on a high ledge.
‘Anne is my new house guest,’ he said. ‘Flew in from London today. I was just showing her the wonderful place in which we live.’
‘Sure thing,’ said Lazard, releasing Anne’s hand, which he’d been rubbing with a smoothing thumb. ‘It’s just about dates…a few seconds, that’s all.’
Wilshere, annoyed, excused himself and backed off to the entrance of the bar where they talked, jostled by others streaming past them. Anne fiddled with her cigarette and felt juvenile in her outfit. Haute couture Paris had shifted to Lisbon and the clothes on the people around her made her feel as if she was waiting for the jellies to come out at a tea party. She smoked as a diversionary tactic and cast about to compensate. Even that proved difficult. Her idle, confident gaze was easily met by others’ with stronger, more demanding eyes. Her head snapped back to the mirrors and glassware of the bar, which reflected a multiplication of eyes, some drunk, some sad, some hungry, some hard – but all wanting.
‘Americans,’