‘Yes. Ruined now though. The village, the church, our small manor. It’s still secret, out of bounds. We’ve never been back. And Daddy’s never even been back to England. He hates the place, the way they treated him over his house.’
The Warrens said nothing. It seemed a painful enough subject. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, getting up, awkward in the silence. Tommy was over by the far side of the terrace now, looking through the telescope at something in the bay. The light was dying fast. He couldn’t have seen much, I thought.
‘How’s the ship?’ Laura asked brightly, changing the subject.
‘Ready and willing,’ her father answered promptly, still looking down the tube.
‘A ship?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Go and look, if you can.’
I went over and Tommy offered me the lens. It was getting quite dark now. Bats were flipping about. I was doubtful if I’d see anything. So it seemed a miracle, in the great magnification, like a fairy tale coming up on a nursery wall from an old magic lantern, when the lovely blue and white ketch suddenly appeared at the end of the glass, moored to a buoy in Cascais harbour, bobbing gently in the violet light.
Laura stood behind me, putting an arm on my shoulder as I crouched down. ‘His toy, his dream,’ she said. Tommy had gone away to recharge the drinks. There were lights on along the hull, I saw, a row of portholes glittering in the blue haze.
‘That’s Jorge, first mate, deckhand, general factotum. He looks after it. Cleaning up I should think. We’ll go out on it. Tomorrow perhaps.’
I took another look at it. The long white boat, since one couldn’t see it at all with the naked eye, was certainly a dream, with its necklace of lights dancing on the water in the gathering dusk.
‘What’s it called?’
‘She’s called Clare — now,’ Laura said.
The graceful bow cut the Atlantic swell, flowing through it at a steady ten knots so that the spray jumped in the air over us, spitting in our faces as we dipped in and out of the big waves a mile out from Cascais.
Clare, in a lifejacket, was next me on the prow, her hair pasted back against the side of her head by the wind. She seemed totally absorbed by something, her eyes fixed on some point on the horizon dead ahead of her. But there was nothing there.
Then, above the wind, I heard a sort of keening noise, a low-pitched whistle almost, as if some strange bird was hovering immediately above the boat. But again there was nothing there. But, bending down, I realised it was Clare beside me who was whistling into the wind, half whistle, half hum, her face alight, an unbroken, unconscious sound of pleasure, elemental itself among the other elements.
Tommy was behind us at the big brass-tipped wheel, with Jorge, master-minding things. They were some way back, their heads bobbing about behind the sails, for it was a large enough ketch — a fifty-footer, with a Croxley marine auxiliary diesel, which Tommy, angrily abandoning his country, had sailed out from Southampton forty years before. His wife, never a sailor, wasn’t with us. But Laura was there, joining us on the bow a minute later.
‘Have you ever done this before?’ she shouted against the wind. I shook my head. A turreted castle rose up on a promontory ahead of us, a kind of Martello tower suggesting old adventure. The sea lost its sheer blue further into shore, where bands of moving aquamarine, like green oil slicks, shimmered in the great light beneath the Atlantic cliffs. None of this sort of life had been mine before.
Laura kissed me briefly then, on the lips, putting an arm round my shoulder for a moment to steady herself. Salt ran down my throat as I swallowed afterwards, breathless suddenly. Her father must have seen us, I thought. And I felt a childish guilt, as though discovered in some shared mischief with a companion behind the laurels thirty-five years before. But I’d had no juvenile companions at my home in north Wales then. All this, even the guilt, was quite new.
Laura had younger friends in Lisbon outside her parents’ circle: one or two families from the Embassy, other British expatriates, but mostly a number of Portuguese acquaintances. She got on very well with the natives. She met them sometimes for mid-morning coffee on the Chiado, the Bond Street of the city which ran up the hill behind my hoteclass="underline" at the Brasileira café or the Pastelaria Marquês, the last of the city’s old baroque tearooms. I began going with her on these occasions, carrying her parcels as she did her errands about the city. I had little else to do, after all. We were slipping into marriage, I suppose, before either of us was ever aware of it.
One of her friends — a suitor, indeed — was a prominent young Portuguese general back from Angola, a Socialist officer prematurely elevated in the army coup six years before, an olive-skinned, volatile bachelor, a member of the Revolutionary Council, who strode about town eccentrically in combat boots and green battledress, followed by a monkey-faced chauffeur batman in a small broken down army car, which, against all regulations, he would park right outside the Brasileira while his master went about his business in the crowded interior.
He burst in there one morning like a knight errant, moving easily among acquaintances, before seeing us at the back where I was surrounded by parcels, for all the world the hen-pecked husband. He joined us, a small, decisive, humorous figure, the gossips in the café hanging unsuccessfully on our every word.
‘How is the President?’ Laura asked him straight away. They had met originally at a reception in the Palace for the British community and press corps given by President Eanes.
‘Fine. Excellent. He is proposing a bill shortly requiring all unmarried foreign women to take Portuguese husbands. May I present myself?’
‘No. You may not. But have a coffee though.’ They started to chat. The man didn’t take the slightest notice of me. Perhaps, with all my parcels, he thought me an Embassy clerk or servant. I was tempted to disabuse him.
Yet afterwards, when he left, I was determined not to appear possessive.
‘He’s rude. He’s pushy,’ Laura said, mildly excited. ‘But I do like him.’
‘Yes.’ But my silence then was an admission of my hurt and Laura noticed it.
‘Apart from your first wife — and the other serious girls — how many women have you had?’ she asked abruptly.
‘I never bothered to count.’
‘So many? Or so few?’
‘Why? Have you slept with him? Is that it?’
She looked at me quizzically then, distancing herself, seeming to leave me, merging into the busy anonymity of the crowded café behind her.
‘You have a thing about fidelity,’ she said at last. I didn’t reply. ‘So do I,’ she added, standing up, smiling. We had lunch afterwards in the Avenida Palace — mountain trout and vinho verde. That was the day we first made love.
Clare had started to fidget badly. Then she said in her fractured, incomplete English, ‘Why do you be with us all the time?’
I hadn’t answered at once, the question taking me by surprise, so that she looked at me now, doubtfully, out of the corner of one eye.
I’d been pushing her quietly to and fro on the cork tree swing out in the Cascais garden one afternoon, pushing her back and forth like a metronome for nearly half an hour. It was one of the few balms in Clare’s life then, this calm, endlessly repeated movement.
But now, since I’d been trying to read to her, we were sitting at the table beneath the bougainvillaea tree and Clare was twisting about, embarking on a quite different sort of restlessness, common to autistic children, Laura told me afterwards, where they become violently, inexplicably possessed.
Clare had much improved, I gathered, from the time a year before when her father had been killed in Nairobi. But she could still be a vastly difficult child, prone to deep silences or just the opposite, to bouts of frenzied, ever-increasing movement, which struck her now, as she tried to twist a screw out from the side of the table with her thumb nail, bloodying herself in the process, so that I moved to stop her. But then she started to kick the table legs, viciously, repeatedly, bruising her shins and toes.