16th August 1968, Luís and Anne Almeida’s rented house in Estoril, near Lisbon.
The night before her flight to London Anne had another running dream. Almost every night since coming back from the vicious fighting in the Mozambique war she’d had running dreams. Sometimes she would be running in daylight, but most of the time it was twilight. This time it was dark and enclosed. She was running down a tunnel, a rough tunnel like an old mine. She had a torch in her hand which was picking up the black shiny walls and the uneven floor, showing the imprint of some old tracks, narrow gauge. She was running away from something and she would occasionally look over her shoulder to see only the blackness she’d left behind her. But there was also the sense of running towards something. She didn’t know what it was and she could see nothing beyond the hole of light made by her torch.
She ran desperately. Her heart pounded and her lungs felt pierced. The torchlight began to waver. The beam flickered and yellowed. She shook the torch but it dimmed further and she found herself looking into the fading filament of the bulb, her breath suddenly visible as if it was cold. Finally it was totally black. No source of ambient light presented itself. Fear crawled up her throat and she tried to scream but nothing would come. She came awake with Luís holding her in his arms and she was crying as she hadn’t cried in over twenty years.
‘It’s all right, it’s only a dream,’ he said, the obvious surprisingly comforting. ‘She’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. We’ll all be all right.’
She nodded into his chest, unable to speak, knowing it was more than that but going along with him. It had been a turning point. That subterranean river, which snatched people’s lives and drove them harder and faster over the quick rocks, through the boiling water, down the chutes and cataracts, had just grabbed her again. The strong current was wrenching her away from her quiet past, slow at the moment, but the pace was gathering beneath her.
She didn’t go back to sleep but lay on her side looking at her husband’s broad back, blocking the sound of his violent snoring with thoughts that hadn’t occurred to her in more than two decades. The news of her mother’s illness had saved them from a formal separation after she’d refused to accompany him to yet another African war but, having arrived at the brink, she now found herself picking over her life, re-examining it in the new light of an uncertain future. One which was sending her back to London and her husband and son, colonel and lieutenant, fighting together in the same regiment in another independence war in Guiné in West Africa.
That other new beginning, twenty-four years ago, came back to her like biography, an objective fascination with another person’s more interestingly led life but, somehow, subjectively dull. She saw herself on her wedding day on a belting hot morning in Estremoz. How she was able to appear happy because she was glad that Luís had been so desperate to marry her, he’d rushed her into the ceremony giving her no time to think of the complications she was carrying inside her down that aisle. It had also meant that when her baby arrived three weeks late there was no suspicious discrepancy in the dates between her wedding night and the birth of their son on the 6th May 1945.
That had been unforgivable. She still felt the pang of guilt as fresh as on the day she’d announced her pregnancy to Luís. The happiness he radiated, the tenderness with which he held her, cut through to her terrible twin secrets, jabbed them awake so that as Luís’s joy grew sweeter, hers could only sour. It was then that she understood the true nature of the spy. The work she’d been doing for Rose and Sutherland hadn’t been anything like spying. What she’d done to Luís was spying. Watching him believe in her, admire her, love her, while she silently betrayed him every moment of every day. It was why, she supposed, the punishment meted out to spies throughout the ages had always been cruel and swift.
So much had happened after they were married that she couldn’t understand when looking back on it, especially that first year, why it all seemed so flat. All the decisions she’d made – those lonely nights spent in the confines of her mind – had determined the following decades and yet they came back to her with such rational clarity, devoid of excitement, mere measures for the continuation of her existence.
The long weekend of the wedding had seen the beginning of a seismic shift in her view of the world. Snapshots entered her head of Luís’s family, the Almeidas, and how they ran their estate in the depths of the rural Alentejo on principles she’d come across when studying the Middle Ages under the nuns. On the morning after the wedding, driving around the estate in a small cart with Luís, they’d come across workers of all ages, even small children, clothed from head to foot against the dry, unbearable heat, reaping corn by hand. She saw them again later sitting under a cork oak, eating the meagre rations provided by the estate and wincing with disgust at the barely edible food. She recognized some of the men who’d been brought in to sing at the wedding feast – slow, beautiful, melancholy songs, which had all the Almeidas, even the men, in tears.
She’d taken Luís to task about the treatment of these people and he hadn’t answered her. It had always been like this. She was about to importune Luís’s sister, hoping for a more sympathetic response, until the sister, showing her around the kitchens, described, almost with glee, how they pickled the olives with swathes of broom to make them more bitter so the farmworkers wouldn’t eat too many. As she’d travelled back to work in Lisbon on the train, an action regarded as treachery by the Almeidas, who thought she should remain with her new family, she found ideas forming in her head, new ideas about a fairer way of life. Ideas which would mean that she wouldn’t have to think too much about herself.
She rolled on to her back, turned away from Luís and his animal gruntings. She’d been lying in this same bed twenty-four years earlier with the baby growing inside her as rapidly as her guilt with all its Catholic foundations and she’d known then that there would have to be some payment for what she was doing. A heavy sum would be extracted and she’d hoped then, as she did now, that her unpredictable God would see fit to confine His punishment to her alone.
Her eyelids became impossibly heavy, even against her horror of re-entering the dark tunnels of her dreams, and she slept until Luís, at his morning toilet, woke her.
If her mother hadn’t been seriously ill she would have given up at the airport and gone to Guiné with them. She made a fool of herself outside the departures lounge. Luís had to prise her arms from around Julião. She wept in the toilet until her flight was called. As she flew she didn’t eat but drank gin and tonics and sat at the back, smoking on her own. She couldn’t seem to propel her thoughts forward. Like last night all they wanted to do was drift back listlessly over the past. This time it was her son, Julião, who occupied the foreground of her mind. How she’d failed him and he in turn had failed her.
She’d learned something about genetics on the day he was born. Looking into his face, screwed up against the harsh hospital light, she knew instantly that this child’s personality was neither hers nor Karl Voss’s and she hadn’t been so astonished when Luís, the proud father, had picked him up and said:
‘He’s me, isn’t he?’
In that moment the Voss family photograph came into her mind – the father and his eldest son, Julius, who’d died at Stalingrad – and she knew that this was who Luís was holding.
‘I think we should call him Julião,’ she said, and Luís had been jubilant that she’d chosen his grandfather’s name.
It had been so poignant when they left the hospital two days later on VE day. They drove down the hill from the Hospital São José into the Restauradores to find it full of people waving Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes and jabbing the air with victorious fingers and V-shaped placards. She noticed blank flags being waved, too, and asked Luís what they meant.
‘Ach!’ he said in disgust, pulling away from the crowd. ‘They’re the communists. The hammer and sickle is banned by the Estado Novo so they wave these rags…I see that and I’m sick, I’m…’
He hadn’t been able to continue and she couldn’t understand his vehemence. So they’d left it, the thin end of the wedge already jammed in between them.
The first black day had come twenty months later when, after trying every siesta and every night to conceive another baby and after three consultations with different gynaecologists, Luís went to see a doctor, a private one, not an army doctor, not for this. He took Julião with him for comfort and, she suspected, to show he’d already struck once.
He returned home, stunned and morose. The doctor had told him something he hadn’t been prepared to believe and, on taking the first blast of Luís’s outrage, let him look down the microscope himself. The doctor had said it could easily happen. A man, especially one in an active profession and a horseman, could go sterile.
Luís sat outside on the verandah in the January cold, staring at the slow, grey heave of the Atlantic. He was immovable and inconsolable. Anne, looking at the back of his bowed head, knew now that she’d never be able to tell him. After some hours she tried to coax him back in but he wouldn’t respond. He even lashed her hand away from his shoulder. She sent Julião out to bring him round. He eventually picked the boy up, sat him on his knee, held him tight and when the two came back in an hour later she knew that something had been resolved. He formally apologized to Anne and looked down on his son’s head in such a way that she knew, and it was almost with relief, that Julião would be the focus of Luís’s life.
As the plane began its slow descent the adrenalin trickle started. They touched down at Heathrow just after midday. The taxi drove into London past office blocks, endless rows of houses, through traffic, and she knew she was in a foreign country. It was not her own. This was a country which had moved, was moving. She realized how stultifying Salazar’s Estado Novo had become. In the first glimpses of London on a summer’s afternoon driving through Earl’s Court, seeing men with long hair, wearing red flared velvet trousers and vests, vests like the peasants wore except in bright colours and bleached with circles, she realized what Portugal was missing. This lot wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes on the streets before being picked up by the PIDE.
The cab driver charged her two weeks’ housekeeping to take her to her mother’s house on Orlando Road in Clapham.
‘It’s on the meter, love. I doesn’t make it up,’ he said.
She paid and waited for him to go, prepared herself. The last time she’d seen her mother was Easter 1947, Luíis had been on exercise and she’d flown back to London for a week. It had not gone well. London felt like a beaten city – grey, still rubble-strewn and ration-carded and peopled by dark-clothed shadows. Her mother had shown little interest in Julião and had made no alterations to her social or work arrangements, so that Anne had found herself alone with her son in the Clapham house for most of the week. She’d returned to Lisbon furious and since then she and her mother had phoned rarely, written letters which were strictly informative and exchanged presents neither of them wanted at Christmas and birthdays.
The only change in the street was a new block of flats where her piano teacher’s house had been bombed out on the corner of Lydon Road. She walked up the path to her mother’s house behind the privet hedge and had a momentary panic at the sight of the red-stained glass panels in the front door. She rang the door bell. Feet clattered down the stairs. A priest opened the door, saw the shock in her face.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘nothing to worry about. I was just dropping by. You must be the daughter. Audrey said you were arriving today. From Lisbon. Yes. Nice bit of weather we’re having here so…yes…well, come in, come on in.’
He took her case. They stood in the hall, inched around each other for a moment. Familiar furniture appeared over the priest’s shoulder like better company at a cocktail party.
‘She’s having a good day today,’ he said, trying to recapture her attention.
‘She still hasn’t told me what’s wrong with her,’ said Anne. ‘I tried to ask her last night on the telephone but she’s being evasive.’
‘Good days and bad days,’ said the priest, who although bald, looked as if he was her age.
‘Do you know, Father?’
‘It would be better coming from her, I think.’
‘She said it was serious.’
‘It is and she knows it. She even knows how long…’
‘How long?’ she said, shaken by it, not prepared for that level of finality. ‘You mean…?
‘Yes. She’s always playing it down, just says it’s serious, but she knows it’s only a matter of weeks. Weeks rather than months…so the doctors are saying.’
‘Shouldn’t she be…in hospital?’
‘Refuses to stay. Won’t have it. Can’t stand the smell of the food. Said she’d rather be on her own at home…with you.’
‘With me,’ she said, out loud but to herself. ‘Forgive me, Father, but you seem very cheerful, given…’
‘Yes, well, I always am around Audrey. Most extraordinary woman, your mother.’
‘I have to admit that I am quite surprised to see you here. I mean, she was never…’
‘Oh yes, I know. Somewhat lapsed.’
‘I mean, she’s always been religious and quite strictly Catholic…that’s how she brought me up. But as for…going to church, priests, confessions, Holy Communion, all that…no, Father…? You didn’t say…’
‘Father Harpur. That’s Harpur with a “u”,’ he said. ‘Look, I’d best get going. I’ve put the tonic in the fridge.’
‘Tonic?’
‘She likes a gin and tonic at about six.’
‘Is she in her room?’ she asked, suddenly desperate for him to stay, help her through this…any awkwardness.
‘No, no…she’s out in the garden sunning herself.’
‘In the garden?’ she said, looking up the stairs.
‘She just asked me to put something in your room…that’s why I came from upstairs.’
‘No, of course, but you said she was out in the garden in the sun.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you heard my mother’s confession?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I have,’ he said, startled by the change of tack.
‘Did she tell you when she last went to confession?’
‘Thirty-seven years ago. It did take several days.’
‘Well, that was probably the last time she sat out in the garden, too.’
‘No, that would have been when she was in India.’
‘Yes, I suppose it was.’
‘You must go to her,’ he said. ‘I must get back to the church.’
They shook hands and he slipped out the door, black and silent as a cat burglar, a soul saver. She took her bags up to her room, which had been painted and new curtains hung. There were flowers on the dressing table. All her old books were on their shelves, even her battered, balding teddy lay on her bed like a valued but stinking hound. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted up from the garden and she saw herself twenty-four years younger sitting in front of the mirror, pretending to light a cigarette from a suitor’s hand. She ducked to see herself in the glass, to inspect twenty-four years’ worth of damage, but there was little on the surface. She could still grow her hair long if she wanted to and it was still thick and black with only the odd white strand, which she plucked out. Her forehead was smooth, although there was a little creasing around the eyes, but the skin of her face rested on the bones, there was no sag in her cheeks. Well preserved, they called it. Pickled. Pickled in her own genetic recipe.
On the lower floor she pushed open her mother’s bedroom door. There was the strong scent of lilies masking another odour – not death, but the decay of live flesh. She shied away from it, went down to the hall, clicked across the black and white tiles to the kitchen and out into the garden. Her mother sat in the sun under a broad-brimmed straw hat with a tail of red ribbon. She had her neck back, her face up to the sun and the high trees which, in full leaf, screened the back of the houses behind. Smoke from a cigarette rippled out of her dangling hand. A tray sat on a stool and an empty chair next to it.
‘Hello, Mother,’ she said, nothing more momentous coming to mind.
Her mother’s eyes sprang open in shock – shock and, she saw, joy.
‘Andrea,’ she said, as if she was crying the name out of a dream.
She kissed her mother. There was a moment’s awkwardness as she crossed over to kiss the other cheek.
‘Oh yes, of course, both cheeks in Portugal.’
Bony fingers fumbled across Anne’s shoulders, thumbed her clavicle, seemed to be searching for something.
‘Sit, sit, have some tea. It’s a bit stewed but have some all the same. Did Father Harpur leave you a scone? He’s a bugger for those scones.’
Her mother was thin. Her body had lost its compactness, the sturdiness. If there was any creaking now it wasn’t from the bra or corsetry clasped to her but from old bones unoiled in their joints. She was wearing a flowery tea gown, and a loose light coat, cream and sky blue. Her pale face when kissed had lost its cool firmness. Now it was slack and soft, warm from the sun. Her features were still fine but faded and she’d lost that severity that had been so tiresome. For someone who was dying she looked good, or perhaps it was just what she was emanating.
‘He let me in. I was surprised, I must say.’
‘Really?’
‘But he was very cheerful.’
‘Yes, we do get on, James and I. We have such a giggle.’
‘Giggle’ wriggled like a worm in her mouth. Anne shifted in her seat.
‘He told me he was your confessor.’
‘He is, yes. And no, that wasn’t much of a laugh, I have to say. He’s a poet too, did he tell you?’
‘We only met on the doorstep.’
‘A good poet, as well. He wrote a very fine poem about his father. The death of his father.’
‘I didn’t think you liked poetry.’
‘I didn’t. I don’t. I mean, I don’t like that self-important stuff. People wandering lonely as clouds…you know. It’s not me.’
There was a long pause while a wind worked its way through the trees and Anne had the feeling that she was being prepared for something. Softened up.
‘Poetry’s different these days,’ said her mother. ‘Like music, clothes, the sexual revolution. Everything’s changing. You probably saw it on the way back from the airport. We even won the World Cup…was it last year, or the year before…anyway that was novel. How are Luís and Julião?’
Silence, while her mother smoked the cigarette to the end, her eyes closed, eyeballs fluttering against the thin lids.
‘Tell me about Luís and my grandson,’ she insisted gently.
‘Luís and I had a bad falling out.’
‘What about?’
‘About the wars in Africa,’ she said, immediately steeling up, not wanting to, but that was what politics did to her.
‘Well, at least it wasn’t about boiling his egg too hard.’
‘He knows that these wars are not…if there is such a thing…good wars. They’re not just.’
‘He’s an army officer, they’re not normally given the choice, are they?’
‘He should have kept Julião out of them, though…and now they’re both in Guiné, or at least they will be in a few days’ time.’
‘It’s what men do if they join the army. Combat is what they think they’ve always wanted from that life, until they get into it and come face to face with the horror.’
‘Luís has even seen the horror. That first time back in ‘61 when we went to Angola…terrible…the things he told me he’d seen up in the north. But he’s been hardened…inured to it. God knows, he might have even perpetrated some of the appalling atrocities they reported in Mozambique. No, there’s no doubt that Luís knows. He knows absolutely what it’s like. But the fact is, he’s a full colonel, it’s Julião who’ll be in the front line. Julião’s going to be the one who’s leading the patrols out into the bush. The guerrillas…sorry, I have to stop, I don’t really want to…I just can’t think about it.’
Her mother reached out her hand and Anne thought she wanted more tea at first but found it clawing a way up her leg towards her own. She gave it over and her mother stroked it with a papery palm.
‘There’s nothing to be done. You’ll just have to wait it out.’
‘Anyway, that’s why we had the falling out. I was supposed to go with them and I refused. Your call saved us from a formal separation.’
Some drops fell on the back of her hand and she thought it was raining and looked up to find the trees blurred as tears leaked down her cheeks. She was crying without knowing it, without understanding why. The start of some difficult unbuckling.
The sun dropped behind the trees. They went inside. Anne rattled ice cubes into glasses, poured the gin and tonics, sliced the lemon, thinking about the new openness of this undiscovered person she’d known all her life, working out the best way in.
‘You mustn’t spend any of your own money while you’re here,’ said her mother, shouting from the living room. ‘I know what life’s like in Portugal and I have plenty. It’s all going to be yours in a few weeks so you might as well use it now.’
‘Father Harpur said it’d be better if you told me what was wrong with you,’ said Anne, handing over the G&T, blurting it out, unable to keep up the light pretence.
Her mother took the drink, shrugged as if it was nothing much.
‘Well, it started as a stomach ache, one that went on all the time, no respite. Nothing would cure it – camomile tea, milk of magnesia – nothing would even ease it. I went to the doctor. They prodded and probed, said there was nothing to worry about. Ulcer, perhaps. The pain got worse and the men in white coats got their machines out and had a look inside. There was nothing wrong with the stomach but there was a large growth in the womb,’ she said, and sipped her drink, frowned.
Anne’s own insides quivered at the news, at the thought of something terrible and life-threatening growing inside of her.
‘Could I have a tad more gin in mine?’ asked her mother. ‘They always want to tell you how big it is – the tumour, I mean – as if it’s going to be something that you’re proud of, like those gardeners at country shows with spuds the size of their grandmother and tomatoes like boxers’ faces. I’ve also noticed that the smaller tumours are always fruit. It’s about the size of an orange, they say. I assume it’s to give you the impression that it can be easily picked. Once it’s bigger than a grapefruit they give up and thereafter it’s bladders. They told me mine was the size of a rugby ball, which is a game I’ve never even followed.’
They roared at that, the glib release, the gin slipping into their veins.
‘They took it out. I told them to send the damn thing to Twickenham. These chaps, though, they didn’t laugh. Deadly serious. Said they’d taken everything out, kit bag, tubes, the lot – but they didn’t think it had been enough. I told them I wasn’t sure I had anything else to hand over and they said it was too late anyway. The secondaries were already established. A black day that was. Mind you, I never thought I was going to go on and on, not with the Aspinall track record. Death,’ she said finally, ‘it runs in the family.’
Anne cooked a piece of lamb, slow-cooked it with garlic and potatoes in white wine.
‘I’m dying in here,’ her mother shouted, still in the living room. ‘I’m dying for another drink and from the wonderful smell of your cooking.’
‘It’s the way the Portuguese cook lamb,’ said Anne, appearing at the door.
‘Marvellous. We’ll have some wine too, and none of that Hirondelle rubbish I give to Father Harpur. No. In the cellar there’s a 1948 Chateau Battailley Grand Cru Classé which I think will suit the occasion of my daughter’s return.’
‘I didn’t know you were interested in wine.’
‘I’m not. Not enough to go out buying that sort of stuff. It’s all Rawly’s. You remember old peg-leg Rawlinson. He left it to me in his will.’
‘Good Lord, no.’
‘But you were, weren’t you? Back in ‘44.’
‘Is something burning?’
‘Nothing’s burning, Mother,’ said Anne. ‘That was why I was packed off to Lisbon, wasn’t it? You and Rawlinson.’
‘I’m sure there’s something…’
‘There’s no point in denying it, Mother, I saw the two of you in St James’s Park after my interview with Rawlinson.’
‘Did you now?’ she said. ‘I knew something had happened that day.’
‘I followed you from your office in Charity House in Ryder Street.’
‘Yes, well, I was working for Section V in those days. That’s where Section V was. Rawlinson was in recruitment. I recruited you…’
‘You recruited me?’ said Anne.
‘Yes, I recruited you, with Rawly’s help, and made sure you didn’t get sent anywhere dangerous. Thought you’d be safe in Lisbon.’
‘Was that all?’
‘Yes,’ she said, going a little sheepish.
‘But you wanted me out of the way as well, didn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t the sort of thing a young girl should know about her mother,’ she said, writhing in her chair. ‘It was embarrassing.’
‘But not now.’
‘God, no. Nothing embarrasses me now. Not even dying embarrasses me.’
They sat down to eat. Her mother drank the wine and ate tiny scraps of the food. She apologized for not having an appetite. After dinner her mother was sleepy and Anne took her up to bed, helped her get undressed. She saw that frail white body, the small breasts gone to flaps of skin, her belly still swathed in bandages.
‘We’ll have to change the dressing tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Anne said, pulling the nightie down over her mother’s head.
Her mother washed, cleaned her teeth, got into bed and asked for a goodnight kiss. Anne felt a pang at the roles reversed. Her mother’s eyes fluttered against sleep and the alcohol.
‘I’m sorry I was such a useless mother,’ she said, the words slurred and gargling in her throat.
Anne went to the door, turned out the light and found herself thinking about what she’d started on the plane – of her own inadequacy, how she’d loved Julião but always kept him at a distance.
‘I’ll explain everything,’ her mother said, into the dark. ‘I’ll explain everything tomorrow.’