Robert Wilson - The Company of Strangers

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 board. 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.’