The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

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      ‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.

      

      After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent, but they gave her some additional training instead. Dead-letter drops, invisible ink, using miniature cameras, following people, talking to people while pretending to be someone else to find out what they knew – role-playing, they called it. The minuscule arts of deception. They also taught her how to fire a gun, ride a motorbike and drive a car.

      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?’ СКАЧАТЬ