The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

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       Chapter 9

       Saturday, 15th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

      The servant came out on to the lawn to get her, made her jump as she was lounging about in her own thoughts. She’d lost herself in the graininess where the town’s light met the darkening air. She turned to the boy and found that the façade of the house was now lit by footlights as if it was a monument. It only came to her then. The freedom of artificial light. She hadn’t thought about it looking down on the town. No blackout. This alarming country – free and yet forbidding.

      She followed the boy. His thighs thumped out of the side of his trousers, massive as a weightlifter’s. He walked her across the terrace, already cleared of her half-drunk gin and tonic, and on to the dining room halfway down the corridor. Three glass chandeliers hung over a table which had been shortened to fifteen feet for this, more intimate, occasion. Wilshere stood, almost at attention. He was dressed in a dinner jacket with a board-hard shirt front and black bow tie. He presented his wife, who was in a floor-length evening gown, breasts encased, waist pinched, skirts full of animal rustlings. Her hair was up and she wore a necklace of three large, set rubies. Her face still had the terrible pallor but it was not the alabaster whiteness of her mother’s, more the ghastliness of unsuccessful junket.

      Anne shook her hand which had been held out like a bishop’s, waiting to be kissed. It was puffy, swollen by fluid retention, so that the knuckles were dimples. They sat. Anne, midway between their two ends, awkward in her informal dress. The light from the three chandeliers was surgically bright and harsh – operative.

      A soup was served, greyish-green with a slice of sausage floating in the middle. White wine trickled into glasses. Mafalda refused the wine, placed her spoon in her soup and looked about. The wine tasted of cold metal with a fizz like the end of a battery. The soup was replaced by a plate of three fish each, their eyes cataracted by frying. Anne’s intestines screamed for a break to the shattering silence but Wilshere, unmoved, holding his knife like a scalpel, dismantled his fish expertly, while Anne reduced hers to a pile of bony hash. Mafalda’s knife and fork tinkered around the sea bass and subsided. The fish were taken away. Large chunks of indeterminate meat flecked with red were served, clamshells rattled on the plates.

      Anne, desperate to communicate, found her thoughts crashing about her head like a late-night drunk looking for food in a hotel kitchen. Mafalda corralled her meat on one side of her plate, the clams on the other, and laid down her irons. Red wine jugged into different glasses. It smelled of damp socks but tasted as complex as a kiss. Wilshere swilled it in his mouth, his lips pursed to a smooch beneath his joyous moustache.

      ‘Your husband was telling me about fado this evening,’ gasped Anne, having two goes at it, finding not just a frog in her throat but a whole fat toad.

      ‘I can’t think why,’ said Mafalda. ‘He doesn’t know anything about it. Loathes it. Runs – no, sprints – to turn it off when it comes 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 СКАЧАТЬ