Robert Wilson - The Company of Strangers

‘Mr Wilshere…did he come riding here with someone…before? Before me. Another woman?’

‘You mean the American?’

‘Yes, the American. What was her name?’

‘Senhora Laverne,’ he said. ‘Senhora Judy Laverne.’

‘What happened to her? What happened to Judy Laverne?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been away some months. Perhaps she went back to America.’

‘Without her clothes?’

‘Her clothes?’ he asked, confused.

‘These clothes,’ she said, slapping her thigh.

The major wiped sweat out of his eyebrow.

‘How long have you known Senhor Wilshere?’ he asked.

‘I arrived in Portugal yesterday.’

‘You didn’t know him before?’

‘Before what?’

‘Before you arrived,’ he said, solid, calm.

Anne filled her lungs with air, unbuttoned her jacket. The filly turned and put its head to the stallion’s flank. High up on a ridge Wilshere appeared, white shirt against the blue sky, and waved at them. He worked the mare down through the brush and rocks and on to the path.

‘I lost you,’ said Wilshere, approaching them on the now subdued mare. As if that was all it had been.

‘My horse bolted,’ said Anne, not ready for confrontation, not in front of the major. ‘The major rescued me.’

Consternation crossed Wilshere’s face. It seemed so genuine that Anne almost accepted it, even though she’d seen he’d stripped off his jacket, which was strapped to the back of his saddle. Not the behaviour of an urgent man.

‘Well, thank you, Major,’ said Wilshere. ‘You must be rattled, my dear. Perhaps we should head back.’

Anne eased the filly out from under the stallion’s haunch. Wilshere gave the major a casual half-salute. They headed back down the path towards the dense cloud on the north side of the serra. The major stayed behind, motionless on his horse, solid as an equestrian statue in a city square.

They walked nose to tail back to the quinta , back into the gloom of the low cloud. Anne, mesmerized by the rhythm of the horses, replayed the incident; not Wilshere’s madness, but the exhilaration of the adrenalin rush on the back of the runaway horse – fear had not been as frightening as she’d imagined. It seemed to tell her something about the faces in the gaming room of the casino, about the thrill and fear of gain and loss. Perhaps there was more thrill in losing – the morbid draw of possible catastrophe. She shuddered, which turned Wilshere in his saddle. She gave him a smile torn from a magazine.

They dismounted in the courtyard of the quinta and the groom led the horses away. Anne’s buttocks and thighs felt like a cooling bronze’s, the heat deep within, the surface set hard. The sweat in her hair was now cold, her muscles seizing as she followed Wilshere under the arches and into a rustic stone-flagged room with heavy wooden furniture, a dark family portrait and English hunting prints on the walls. Stags’ horns pricked the palpable, mildewed air in the room. A macabre chandelier of antlers hung from the ceiling, unlit, over a refectory table set with plates of cheeses, chouriços, presunto , olives and bread. Wilshere poured himself a large tumbler of white wine from a clay jug and handed a clay goblet to Anne.

‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it after that.’

She was infuriated by his coolness and sank her wine. Questions backed up inside her. She wanted to find the join in his armour, prise it open, stick him with something sharp.

‘Care for anything to eat?’ he asked, diverting her, fluttering his hand over the food, not interested himself, gulping at the wine.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I didn’t eat breakfast.’

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have dragged you out…’

‘No, no, I was glad of it,’ she said, facing off his mask of infallible politeness. ‘I wanted to ask…’

‘What?’ he teased, an interruption to undermine her. ‘What did you want to ask?’

‘I wanted to ask about the major,’ she said, not that interested in him, but he could be a lever, man against man. She took an olive from the table.

‘What about him?’

‘He seemed a very…ah…noble man,’ she said, walking around to the opposite side of the table, grinding her teeth on the olive pit.

‘Noble?’ Wilshere asked himself. ‘Noble. Yes, noble’s…very apposite. He is a noble fellow.’

‘Nobility sounds so old-fashioned these days,’ said Anne, keeping her eye on Wilshere, who had come round to her side of the table.

‘Something, perhaps, we associate with earlier conflicts,’ he said.

‘Except the major’s not at war and yet he has…’

‘Quite so, Anne, quite so. Perhaps because he was mounted on a horse, that made you think of nobility and other aspects of the chivalric code.’

‘Other aspects?’

‘Rescuing damsels in distress,’ he said, blinking, almost batting his eyelids.

She peeled a length of skin off a slice of chouriço , Wilshere’s presence close, unmistakably extortionate. He seemed like a small boy curious as to what would happen to a spider if he were to dismember it.

‘I suppose if he’d had a red satin-lined cloak and a plumed tricorn hat…’ she started, and Wilshere guffawed to the antler chandelier, reducing this little episode to some romantic nonsense. Anne gritted her teeth.

‘Is that Mafalda’s family up there?’ she asked, pointing with her cup to the portrait of a group whose white faces stared out of the dark oil of the painting.

‘Yes,’ said Wilshere, without shifting his gaze from her. ‘They used to come out here…’

‘Hunting?’

‘No, no, these trophies are from all over…Spain, France…I think there’s even some Scottish ones up there…Yes, look, Glamis Castle. No. The family came out here to keep cool in the summer. Lisbon, you know, can get awfully torrid and the family seat is in the Alentejo, which is even more so.’

‘And her family now?’

‘Most of that lot are dead now. In fact her father died only last year. She took it very badly…been rather unwell as a result. Not good…as Cardew said…’

Anne paced the perimeter of the room. Below the antlers were photographs, hunting parties standing behind the day’s slaughter, which in some cases was so considerable that the hunters were reduced to stick figures at the apex of thousands of rabbits, birds and some fewer deer and boar.

‘Isn’t that Mafalda,’ asked Anne, surprised to see the woman young and smiling, gregarious amidst a group, ‘with a gun?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Wilshere, black against the grey light of the window, ‘she’s very handy with a twelve bore. Crack shot with a rifle too. I never saw it, mind, but her father told me she had quite an eye.’

‘Mafalda,’ said Anne, impressed.

She moved round to the portrait.

‘Is she in this?’

‘It’s not that good, is it?’ said Wilshere. ‘She’s third from the left, next to her brother.’

‘And the brother?’ asked Anne, face up to the two figures.

‘Hunting accident…years ago, before I met Mafalda,’ he said, almost confirming that he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. ‘Tragic.’

‘Mafalda must feel quite lonely now.’

Wilshere didn’t answer.

Sunday, 16th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

The heat steepened in the late afternoon, the Quinta da Águia slumped in silence. Anne’s room on the west side of the house was hot, even with the shutters closed, and she couldn’t sleep with the fan churning the stuffiness. She took her swimsuit, a robe and a towel and went down to the beach. Estoril was submerged in a haze, the sea blended into the sky.