30th July 1944, Cardew’s House, Carcavelos, near Lisbon.
Anne burnt the crumpled pages in the grate, including the blank pages underneath, all the way down to the first undented sheet. She lit a cigarette with the same match and drew on it, knowing that these would be her friends for life. The writing of her disease, her assessment of it, her diagnosis of it was consumed in a green flame until only the blackened negative remained, the copper of the ink still legible. She beat it with her shoe until it had all broken up and showered in flakes and specks on to the swept stone below the grate.
There had been only fractions of seconds when her thoughts had not been full of Voss. Even the lighting of a cigarette brought thoughts of his unwavering hand in the darkness of the garden. Nothing else came to her. Numbers didn’t matter any more. Her work was automatic. Every thought, however disconnected, found its way back to Voss or a reference to him.
Now there was a difference. The written confession had brought about some containment. Her mind no longer galloped away from her, which it had done when she’d heard that Voss had been smuggled out of Portugal and back to Germany for interrogation. During those days she’d found herself amongst terrible imaginings of dark, sobbing cells punctuated by bright, searing light and questions, endless questions. Questions to which there were no answers, and questions to which all possible answers would be inadequate. She’d been told about torture, and the detail, which had been at a manageable distance in a rainy springtime lecture theatre in Oxford, could now make her writhe in the morning sunshine.
She crushed out the cigarette and for the first time in a week lay down on her bed and slept six straight hours, no dreams. She woke up without the normal electrical jolt as her mind hit the thousand-volt reality. She was on top of the bed. The room warm and glowing pink from the setting sun. Her body felt languorous, as if she’d been walking all day. An exquisite lassitude seeped through her muscles. She stretched to full length like a cat with all day on its mind and had a memory flash so vivid she rolled over to check that the room was empty.
She was six years old, her mother was sitting by her on the bed, cigarettes and cocktails mingled with her perfume, which was different for parties – spiky, exotic. She had her hand on Anne’s shoulder, who had been sleeping. The material of her dress wasn’t making the usual quiet rustlings but was racked with creaks and convulsive friction. Anne had seen through the slits of her eyes that her mother was crying and not quiet tears. She had been too sleepy, too overwhelmed by the weight of slumber to even put a finger to her mother’s knee. In the morning her mother had returned to her usual cool strictness and Anne had forgotten the moment.
A thought unravelled itself. Rawlinson and his missing leg. An odd notion about the integrity of integers, the missing fraction ruining the completeness. What about the invisible missing fraction or the unseen additional one? The structure altered, the equation would never work out. Mad thoughts manipulating maths to emotions, and yet there was such a thing as a nuance.
The Cardew children were already in bed. Anne went down for dinner which was eaten late in high summer and, this evening, out in the garden under the liquid yellow light from Cardew’s hurricane lamps. There was a crowd. A chair was pulled out for her and, when the face of the man who had helped her re-entered the light, she saw that it was Major Luís da Cunha Almeida, the man who’d stopped her horse from bolting.
They ate cheese, presunto and olives with fresh bread. Cardew poured wine brought by the major from his family estate in the Alentejo. Mrs Cardew served the fresh seafood while the servants went to the village bread oven to collect the lamb, which the cook believed tasted better having been slow-roasted since the middle of the afternoon.
They all ate the lamb, even the servants in the dimly lit kitchen. The potatoes, which were glued to the bottom and sides of the clay roasting tray, were sticky with meat juice and pungent from the garlic and rosemary. The meal returned Anne to her tribe like a rider, horseless on the open plain, who’d made it back to civilization.
At the end of the evening the major asked her if she would like to go out for a drive with him one evening the following week. She didn’t say no. He settled on Wednesday.
As she went up to bed, Cardew intercepted her at the bottom of the stairs. He patted her shoulder, gripped it.
‘Glad to see you’ve pulled through, Anne,’ he said. ‘Terrible shock, I imagine…but good show.’
In bed she thought that this was what it was like to be English. This is how we handle things. We’re natural spies. We never wear anything on the outside. Napoleon was wrong, we were not une nation de boutiquiers but a nation of secretkeepers. We all know you can’t say a word with a stiff upper lip.
Richard Rose agreed to see her on Monday afternoon. A positive psychological report must have made its way to him because until now he’d refused to see her. They’d said he was busy, but Wallis had told her that, unlike Sutherland, Rose preferred to keep his distance. He wasn’t going to risk discomfort in front of an emotional woman. Rose into women didn’t go. They were indivisible.
It was the last day of July and there’d been no relenting of the heat. Rose sat behind Sutherland’s desk in the room shuttered against the sun which hammered that side of the embassy building in the afternoons. She sat in the hot gloom, an indistinct, ignorable figure, while Rose read through papers, signed them off. He rubbed his bare elbows as if they were sore from desk work. He muttered excuses. She didn’t respond. She knew she wasn’t a welcome presence. Sutherland’s secretary had been replaced by someone called Douggie who didn’t look up when he was spoken to but pointed with his pen. Rose spoke while stacking his papers.
‘How d’you fancy staying with Cardew?’
‘As his secretary?’
‘Thinks a lot of you, he does,’ said Rose. ‘You’d still be doing the translation work, of course. Very important work, that.’
‘I thought that was just my cover.’
‘It was, yes. But you can’t work as an agent any more, can you? Not here in Lisbon. And given the flap on at the moment we’re going to have a job to replace you immediately. London don’t want to move you yet. Cautious buggers. They’ll have a file on you by now…in Berlin.’
That word ‘Berlin’ shot past her like a bird in the room.
‘If you think that’s the best use of my abilities…’
‘We do,’ he said, too quickly, ‘…for the moment.’
‘You know that I do want to continue with the Company, sir.’
‘Of course.’
‘If my involvement in the last operation is going to have any bearing on my future…’
‘Your involvement?’ he said, pinching his lips, looking her in the eye for the first time.
‘That my actions resulted in the loss of a valuable double agent.’
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself for that, you know,’ he said, his face bearing an approximation of pity. ‘You were inexperienced. Voss…yes…he should have known better. A terrible risk he took. Madness, really, for such an old hand.’
‘Has there been any news?’ she asked, matter of fact, wringing the pathos out of her voice.
‘What do you know?’
‘Only that he was taken back to Germany.’
‘There were two others on the same plane. Men who’d been kidnapped off the streets of Lisbon just like Voss. One of them, Count von Treuberg, has since been released. He told us that Voss had been packed in a trunk for the flight. They were all taken from Tempelhof to the Gestapo HQ in Prinz Albrechtstrasse in the back of a van. Von Treuberg spoke to Voss, who was not in good shape. He saw him once more on the day he was released.’
Rose fell silent. Anne stared into the floor. Her head weighed heavily on the cords of muscle in her neck.
‘Voss had undergone three days of intensive interrogation. Von Treuberg was shocked.’
Anne’s insides froze and her breathing shallowed.
‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’
‘I want to know everything,’ she said with vehemence.
Rose fetched a thick file from the grey metal cabinets that now lined the room.
‘The operation you were involved in with Voss took place at a very sensitive moment for the Third Reich.’
‘The coup attempt, you mean?’
‘SS General Wolters was running an intelligence operation which he hoped was going to be one of the great successes of the war. It’s in the nature of the losing team to believe that they can suddenly turn things around with a miracle. His operation was a disaster. He’s lost a lot of money and one of the main pipelines for diamonds to the Reich. Voss is his scapegoat. Taken by itself, the botched operation might earn Voss a reprimand and a nasty transfer, but in the light of the 20th July assassination attempt it becomes more serious, which is better for Wolters. Wolters will want to implicate him in the coup attempt, which, at this distance, you might think is improbable except that we know that Voss knew what was going to happen. He gave us notice, so it was clear he was involved. Given that he’s an old Abwehr man, the only one left out here, we’re of the opinion that his part was to take control of the legation in Lisbon. If that is the case and there’s a single strand of evidence pointing to that sort of level of involvement…’
Rose let his sentence drift, lit himself a cigarette.
‘Then what, sir?’
He opened the file, picked the pages apart with his nail and turned them as if they were ancient scriptures.
‘The investigation of senior Wehrmacht officers is being carried out by the head of the Reich Main Security Office, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He’s a lawyer, which you might think is a good sign until you’ve seen a photograph of him. Sinister-looking brute. Total fanatic…intensely loyal. He will…he hasn’t shirked his duties. Thousands of people have been rounded up. Men, women, children…anybody with a family connection or otherwise to any of the known conspirators has been brought in for questioning. All other suspects are being interrogated by an SS Colonel Bruno Weiss. He used to be head of security at the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s Rastenburg HQ in East Prussia. If he were younger he could be taken for Kaltenbrunner’s son. I don’t know where they breed them.
‘I have no doubt that these men will find something amongst the thousands of depositions because it is in the nature of ordinary people to write things down when they shouldn’t, say things that should never be said and babble uncontrollably when they’re scared. Voss’s chances are not good. If he is charged he will appear in the so-called People’s Court presided over by the most disgraceful judge ever to find his way into the law, Roland Freisler, where, if the evidence is even vaguely positive, he will be sentenced to be executed, and if it’s not, he will certainly end up in a concentration camp where he’s very unlikely to survive.’
Rose flicked through the file. Anne sat rigid in the chair.
‘Apart from what we’ve heard from von Treuberg there is no other news,’ said Rose, more concerned with his file. ‘If I were you, Miss Ashworth, I’d forget about him. Live your life. It’s the nature of war.’
Anne stood on shaking legs, on knees that unless she locked them straight would buckle. She turned to the door.
‘You’ll continue with Cardew, then?’ he said to the back of her head.
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, and staggered out of the room into the corridor.
Anne worked with an intensity that unnerved Cardew. She rarely looked up and took no more than a quarter of an hour for lunch. On Wednesday evening she went out with Major Luís Almeida. They drove to Cascais and ate a fish meal. She didn’t recall what fish. She remembered the way the major didn’t take his eyes off her throughout the meal and even when he was driving, so that she had to brace herself occasionally to get him to look ahead. She knew then that she would be all right because she didn’t want to die. She feared death, which she hadn’t a week ago. She began to orbit nearer to the outer edges of normality as each day passed and another onion skin of insulation wrapped itself around her disease, her growth, which had been rendered benign now by the absence of any trace of menstrual blood.
The major, on holiday for the whole of August, intensified his campaign and took her out nearly every night. She never turned him down. She only refused to ride horses. His presence was a comfort, his attention close to avuncular. Their talk was formal, inquisitive without being intimate. She preferred that. She could retreat into herself while she was with him and he wouldn’t pressure her. She knew that she was changing and that it was for her own protection. It was making her different and she couldn’t help that difference materializing into distance. She would find herself in a crowd at a lunch, never aloof but always alone. Society took her in and she let herself become a part of its edifice, not as a brick in its wall but more of a gargoyle spouting out of a corner.
On a mid August Saturday night Anne sat with the major outside a café in the main square in Estoril. He’d tried to persuade her into the casino but she wasn’t ready for that yet, if ever. It was eleven o’clock and still hot. She had no appetite for food or drink. She proposed a walk along the front, away from the holiday bustle, the family scenes, the fractious palm trees. The major was glad to stretch his legs.
They walked the promenade above the beach. There was a little light from a crescent moon, no wind and the air was soft. Waves came in as phosphorescent ripples, collapsing on to the beach and running up to merge into the sand. She took his arm. Her heels made the only sound above the muted ocean.
She stopped to breathe it in and the major put his arm around her and she realized that he’d misinterpreted her motives. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected it. It was just that she’d never managed to think any further than it happening. She turned to him and put her hands up on his chest to keep him at bay but he wasn’t tentative like Voss. He crushed her to him and kissed her on the mouth for the first time, long and hard, so that she was struggling for breath and completely unmoved.
His staidness vanished. His manner, which was normally governed by a stronger gravitational pull than that on most humans, giving him his granite-like dependability and solidity, broke its moorings and he became all ardour and expression. She was stunned by the transformation. He held her face in his hands and told her over and over how much he loved her, so that the words lost their meaning and she didn’t listen to them, but began to think whether this was perhaps a Portuguese trait – to be hermetically sealed receptacles for mad passion.
He was breathing the words into her mouth, as if trying to make her say them back to him, and she was remembering his profound enjoyment of food, how eating one meal would remind him of the wonder of another. Wine to him was like a favourite piece of music. He drank it with his eyes closed, let it flow through him as if it was Grand Premier Cru Mozart. The flowers he bought for her he seemed to enjoy more himself – plucking a bloom, he wouldn’t just sniff it, he would inhale it. It struck her that he was a sensualist and she’d hardly been aware of it because he had no talent for conversation but only physical pleasure.
He snapped her back into reality. He was holding her by the shoulders and willing her to respond, his forearms trembling as if he was restraining himself from crushing her. He was demanding that she marry him, but she couldn’t find any words to begin to explain the complexity of her situation.
‘Will you? Will you?’ he asked, again and again, his English heavily accented so that each demand came from deeper and deeper down his throat like a man drowning in a well.
‘You’re hurting me, Luís,’ she said.
He let her go, running his hands down her arms, hanging his head, suddenly ashamed.
‘It’s not so easy,’ she said.
‘It is easy,’ he replied. ‘It is very easy. You only have to say one word. Yes. That’s it. It is the easiest “yes” you will ever say.’
‘There are complications.’
‘Then I am happy.’
‘How can you be happy?’
‘Complications are surmountable. I will talk to anybody. I will talk to the British Ambassador. I will talk to the Chairman of Shell. I will talk to your parents. I will…’
‘My mother. I only have a mother.’
‘I will talk to your mother.’
‘Stop, Luís. You must stop and let me think for a moment.’
‘I will only let you think if it is to overcome these complications, if it is to see that complications…’ he said, running out of words for a second until he announced, ‘Complications mean nothing to me. There is no complication that I cannot…that I cannot…Raios!…what is the word?’
‘I don’t know what you want to say…overleap?’
‘Overleap!’ he roared in agreement. ‘No, no, not overleap. Overleap means that it is still there…behind you maybe, but still there. Vanquish. There is no complication that I cannot vanquish.’
She laughed at a vision of Luís with sword and shield flashing in the sun, blinding the complications.
‘I can’t answer you,’ she said.
‘You can’t still be happy, Luís. I haven’t said anything.’
‘I am happy,’ he repeated, and he knew why, but he didn’t want to say that it was because she hadn’t given him the alternative, perhaps even easier, reply.
She crawled into bed at two in the morning. Luís wouldn’t let her go home. His earlier boldness had given him new fuel to burn and he couldn’t stop. He took her into Lisbon and they danced at the Dancing Bar Cristal. Luís had never been so animated and she realized that he could only speak when he was doing something else. As soon as they went back to the table for a rest he would fall back into silent contemplation of unknown complications until he could bear it no longer and he’d drag her back on to the floor. There he talked as if he knew something she didn’t. His family, their estate outside Estremoz in the rural Alentejo, 150 miles east of Lisbon, his work, the barracks he was posted to, which luckily was in Estremoz, and all was related to how their life would be together, how she would fit into his world.
Anne slept and dreamt her dream and woke in a panic with the certainty that she would not be able to survive this pace. Like a fallen rider with a foot still trapped in the stirrup, dragged along at the whim of the horse, she needed a release, she needed control, but she could not bring her intelligence to bear down on the complications. The different strands knotted too quickly.
She asked herself a question. Why shouldn’t she marry Luís? She didn’t love him was not an answer, it was the reason she wanted to be with him. That she was still in love with Voss did not make any sense. Richard Rose had been brutal in his prognosis. The whole point of her involvement with Luís was to survive her guilt. That she was carrying Voss’s embryo was the impediment, which, as soon as the thought occurred, was dispatched. It scared her, not in shivers of panic, they were surface qualms. This was core fear, a deep moral fear. Only religion did this to you, she thought. All that stuff the nuns had crammed into her head about guilt and evil, it shook her up, disorientated her. She paced the room to confirm the ground under her feet, to calm herself, to tether herself to what she now understood, which was that she had to marry Luís because she was carrying Voss’s child.
She sat on the bed inspecting her hands. She had been young. She had been green and whippy, but now she could feel the brittleness of age creeping in and the breakability that came with it. Alone on her single bed, in the high August heat, with the cells multiplying inside her, she shivered in the cold shadows of society, the Church, her mother. She made her decision and even while making it the Catholic inside her knew that there would be some cost, some bloody awful price to pay later on. She would marry Luís da Cunha Almeida and her secret would sit with her other one, they would be joined like Siamese twins, individual but dependent on each other.
The morning light had a new clarity. The thick heat of the last few days and nights had been cut by a fresh, saltine zest from the Atlantic. The sun still shone in a clear sky but bodies felt less like carcasses. The Serra de Sintra was no longer vague in the haze and the palm trees applauded in the square. Out from under the close doom of night, Anne saw things differently. There was hope of a solution. She would talk to Dorothy Cardew. The women, between them, would get things out on the table where they could be examined.
The maid took the Cardew girls to the beach midmorning and Anne found Dorothy on her own, sitting with her sewing box in the living room. She was working on a sampler, tackling the ‘e’ of ‘Home’. Meredith was outside reading in the garden, his pipe signalling his enjoyment. Anne moved around the room, circling before landing, waiting for a way in. The needlepoint was badly at odds with what she had trampling through her mind. Dorothy Cardew eyed her, made mistakes in the sampler, gave up on it.
‘Luís has asked me to marry him,’ said Anne, which knocked Dorothy back into the cushions.
Anne registered the total relief in Dorothy’s face. Good news after all.
‘That’s marvellous,’ she said. ‘Wonderful news…such a good man, Luís.’
And that was the end of it. This was not a day for trouble. The clear air, the breeze in the pines, the birds talking up the day so that anything other than good news would seem ill-mannered.
‘Yes,’ said Anne, the word dropping out of her like a drunk from a bar.
‘You must let me tell Meredith.’
The scene developed, transformed from the one Anne had inside her head. Dorothy skipped to the french windows and called for her husband, hopping up on to one leg as she did so.
‘Good news, darling,’ she called.
Meredith slammed his book shut and scrambled like a fighter pilot. He joined his wife at the french windows, breathless, eager.
‘Luís has asked Anne to marry him.’
A flicker of disappointment. Hitler hadn’t surrendered after all.
‘Congratulations!’ he roared. ‘Terrific chap, Luís.’
‘Yes,’ said Anne, another brawler ejected into the street.
A quizzical look from Cardew. Had he seen something? Had he sensed something other than spoken words in the room?
‘Have you said anything to anyone?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Best talk to Richard first…could be complicated.’
‘Yes.’
‘Marvellous news, though…couldn’t hope for a better chap than Luís. Terrific horseman, too,’ he finished, as if that could be an enormous help in a marriage.
Anne’s smile creaked into position. This was the future – words taken from her and put into a common language, the language of the receiver, never her own. It pricked her eyeballs because that was one of Voss’s talents – an understanding of many languages but more especially the silent ones.
The following Tuesday Anne sat in the Estrela Gardens watching children, waiting for time to pass before heading into Lapa for her meeting with Rose. The children ran over the thousand changing shapes on the ground as the breeze rippled the sunlight through the trees. The pace was slowing at last. The relentlessness was still there but that breathless speed had gone. Now there was the sense of large forces manoeuvring, something perhaps to do with what was happening in Europe as the Russian, American and British armies bore down on the rubble of the Reich.
She walked to the gates opposite the basilica and looked up to the room where she’d been waiting only a few weeks ago. A maid was cleaning the window, a disembodied hand appeared and flicked a cigarette out. At her feet the silver tramlines embedded in the cobbles headed off down the hill of the Calçada da Estrela towards São Bento and the Bairro Alto where they would cross and connect with other rails but would never deviate from their dedicated path. What on one night had seemed like an exquisite thread tugging her to a hopeful future, now appeared as a terrible certainty from which the only way out was derailment and disaster.
She sat in front of Richard Rose again, who was not ignoring her but, because it was after lunch, was lounging back in his chair with a cigarette in his hand and either smoke in his eye or contempt tempered only by shrewdness.
‘Cardew told me your news,’ he said.
My news, thought Anne, dissociated from it already, a messenger for someone else.
Rose waved his match at her, tossed it into the ashtray. It enraged her, God knows why.
‘When we trained you as an…’
‘With all due respect, sir, you did not train me as a translator. I arrived with that ability on board.’
‘When we trained you as an agent and the subsequent assessment of your training arrived here in Lisbon, I…we didn’t perceive you as an emotional character. Everything pointed towards you being logical, rational, even clinical. That was why we liked you.’
‘Liked me?’
‘On paper you were perfect for the assignment,’ he said, sitting back, flourishing his cigarette, stabbing the smoking end in her direction, goading her. ‘You were female, very intelligent, excellent at role-play, of…beguiling looks, but also determined, clear-headed, detached…in short, perfect for the work.’
Silence while Rose inspected his cigarette box, seeing if that had been enough to elicit more reaction.
‘You arrived,’ he continued, ‘and we were immediately impressed by the way you entered into your role. Good information. Strong social involvement. Excellent handling of some difficult personalities. Everything going swimmingly until…’
Rose blew out smoke in an exasperated jet.
‘Even logical, rational, clinical people can fall in love,’ said Anne.
‘Twice?’ asked Rose.
The cold, cutting edge of the word sliced into her. Its unjustness pushed her on to the defensive.
‘It was you who told me to forget about Voss,’ she said, ‘that there was no hope for him.’
‘I did, but…’ he said, and let that hang with the smoke, accusatory, before dismissing it with a flick of his fingers. ‘So, now you’d like to marry Major Luís da Cunha Almeida?’
‘He has asked me. I want to know if it’s possible,’ said Anne. ‘I don’t intend to allow it to affect my work…the work which you indicated that I would be doing in the…until further notice.’
‘There is the small question of identity,’ said Rose. ‘If you want to get married I don’t see why you shouldn’t, it’s just that you will have to marry under your cover name and you won’t be able to have any member of your family present. As far as the Portuguese are concerned you are Anne Ashworth and will have to remain so.’
‘My name changes anyway.’
‘Quite.’
‘You should know that I broke my cover story.’
‘How?’
‘I was emotionally…’
‘Just tell me how.’
‘I told Dona Mafalda and the contessa that my father was dead.’
‘I doubt that will be a problem. If it is we’ll say that you were emotionally distraught, that your father died very recently in an air raid and you’ve been unable to accept it. On application forms you always put him down as alive but he is in fact dead. We’ll arrange a death certificate. Finish.’
And that was the end of the matter. The end of Andrea Aspinall too. She stood and shook hands, headed for the door.
‘We’ve had news of Voss, by the way. Not good,’ he said to the back of her head. ‘Our sources tell us that he was shot at dawn in Plötzensee prison last Friday with seven others.’
She slipped through the door without looking back. The corridor rocked like a ship’s in a heavy sea. She concentrated on each stair going down to the street, nothing automatic, nothing certain. She breathed in the clear air, hoping it would somehow dislodge the obstruction in her chest, this fishbone, this piece of shrapnel, this sharp chunk of crystalline ice. She screwed up her face, doubled over and ran up the hill towards Estrela. It felt like a heart attack and, when she reached the gardens, she found that she could think of nothing else but crossing the road to the basilica and hiding herself in the darkest corner.
Inside, she crossed herself and collapsed on to her knees, face in the crook of her elbow and the word ‘never’ repeating itself in her mind. She was never going to see Voss again, never going to be herself again, never going to be the same again. The pain loosened itself from the wall of her chest and moved up to her throat. She started crying, but not crying as she’d ever cried before, not bawling like a child, because this pain was pain that could not be articulated. It had no human sound. Her mouth was wide open, her eyes were creased shut. She wanted her agony to find some superhuman screech so that she could get it out of herself but there was nothing, it wasn’t on her scale. Scalding tears coursed down her cheeks, acid streaks to the corner of her mouth. Snot and saliva poured out of her, hung in quivering skeins from her mouth and chin. She seemed to be crying for everything, not just herself but Karl Voss, her dead father, her distant mother, Patrick Wilshere, Judy Laverne, Dona Mafalda. She didn’t think she would be able to recover from such crying, until a nun put a hand on her shoulder and that jerked her upright. She wasn’t ready for nuns, nor the dark sweat box of the confessional.
‘Não falo Português,’ she said, smearing her face around with a ball of sodden handkerchief. She crashed through the pew into the aisle and ran for the door. Out in the sun, the breeze was still blowing. It went clean through her louvred ribs.