SANGAREE #2
I gaped at her. I’d confessed my secret and here she was, unmoved.
‘I don’t know anything about papers!’ She was turning towards the door again.
‘All right,’ I rushed, ‘I saw the papers, but I don’t know what they are.
I don’t read Italian. I only looked at them because—’ The words stuck on my tongue.
Because I want to know what I did for Cabrera.
I want to know what you and Langham are involved in.
‘Because I was curious,’ I finished, knowing it sounded pathetic.
Her lip curled. ‘You expect me to believe that?’
Anger rushed through me, adding its heat to my face, to my stinging eyes.
She had no idea, this woman with her fine clothes and her idle life.
She didn’t know what I’d seen, what I’d done just to be here, just to wait on her and cook her food.
Furiously, I shrugged out the jacket and threw it to the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.
I didn’t wait, but dragged the shirt from my waistband and hauled it up to my chin.
‘There,’ I spat. ‘Do you believe me now?’
Her eyes were fixed on the brassiere, her mouth open. Then, out of nowhere, she made a noise that was almost a laugh.
‘My god. So, in Gibraltar …’ She met my eyes. ‘Does he know?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Arthur? Does he know about you?’
I let the shirt drop, my anger receding. ‘No.’ I paused. ‘Will you tell him?’
‘I don’t know.’ She crossed the room and sank on to the bed. ‘God, I have no idea.’ When she looked up at me again, some of the hostility had left her face. ‘There’s a bottle on the bureau. Bring it here, would you? And the glass?’
It was gin, half empty. She poured out a measure, splashing her fingers as she did, and drank it down.
‘This still doesn’t explain why you followed us here,’ she said huskily, pouring another measure. ‘I need to know why you did that.’ She swallowed again, before grimacing and shoving the bottle in my direction. ‘Here, drink if you need it. But talk.’
In that cluttered bedroom, with the curtains billowing at the open windows, I told her a story.
It held some of the ingredients of my own, only measured and mixed differently.
In it, Elena and I became the same person.
The Senor became a rich man who had made promises of love to me, only to break them and grow violent; the murder became an attack, which I had fled, in fear of my life.
I became a terrified woman, alone on the streets, who had sought safety in men’s clothing.
‘I had nowhere to go, no friends, no money,’ I told her, the gin stinging my dry throat.
‘You and Monsieur Langham were so kind to me that day. I thought, perhaps, you would be kind to me again. And I couldn’t stay in Spain.
I was too afraid that he … that the man I mentioned would find me, and drag me back. I couldn’t let that happen.’
I risked a glance at her. She was staring at her hands, at the faint stripe where a wedding ring had once been.
‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘But you could have told us this. And there are ladies who wear men’s suits, you know – I wear trousers, quite often. If you did nothing wrong, why keep pretending to be someone you’re not?’
I couldn’t keep down a laugh at that. ‘They’re rich aren’t they, your ladies who wear men’s clothes?’
‘Well,’ Hilde said, ‘I suppose they are.’
‘Then they have a choice.’ I met her eyes.
‘Would Monsieur Langham have listened to me, that night of the party, if I had come here as a woman? Would he have given me a job, a room, safety? Would you? Or would you have seen me as trouble, as a foolish girl who had gotten herself into a mess, and turned me away, told me to go and find my work on the streets?’
Her face was red. ‘It is not that simple.’
I shook my head at her. ‘I thought you of all people would understand.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Her voice was sharp again, but unsteady.
I hesitated. I had to win her trust, if I was to stay in the house.
I pointed to her ring finger. ‘You’re running from something.
If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here, in Tangiers, with a man who isn’t your husband.
You wouldn’t be smoking as much as you do, and drinking, if you weren’t trying to forget. ’
On the floor near by was her tray, with its opium pipe and lamp, its little tweezers and pots. For a moment, her face was pinched and I thought she would be angry. Then, she sagged and reached for the bottle again.
‘Am I that obvious?’ she asked, and there were tears in her voice, like the air before it rains.
Over the next hour she told me about herself, between sips of gin.
I drank too, to seem companionable, and as the liquor disappeared she grew warmer with me, as if confiding to a friend.
I believe she forgot all about the papers in the drawer, about my revelation.
She was caught in the pattern of her own past, in the aching relief of confession.
Her story began with a marriage to a wealthy Italian businessman, followed by an idyllic honeymoon that went sour the moment they arrived back at his family home in Milan.
‘He turned overbearing, controlling, none of the things he had been when we were courting. He wouldn’t let me see my friends.
He said they were offensive, though before he had spent nearly every day in their company.
And his business –’ she laughed, tears wetting her eyelashes, loosened by the gin ‘– I had never asked much, you see, before the wedding. I knew he owned factories that made parts. I thought the details too dull to bother with.’ She drank.
‘But then the conferences began, the dinners, and I saw the sorts of people who attended, I heard them talk, discussing armaments and weaponry as if they were sweets.’
She looked at me. ‘A British wife with government connections is a useful thing in the arms trade. That’s how he saw me, a tool in his negotiations.
I couldn’t stand it. Finally, I told him I was leaving.
’ She drained the glass. ‘He disagreed. He tricked me into going to our country house, in the middle of nowhere, and locked me up there until he was sure I was with child.’
She held her hand out for the box of cigarettes on the dresser, and I handed them to her, helped her light one.
‘He thought that would stop me, you see,’ she said.
‘He was wrong. One night he left me alone, and I ran. I caught a train to the nearest town and I fixed the little problem he had given me. You can do that, you know, with enough money, even in places like Italy.’
Her hand was trembling as she took a drag on the cigarette.
‘Then I did exactly the same as you. I got out of the country. I knew he’d never agree to a divorce, and that I wouldn’t be safe, once he discovered what I’d done.’
‘Where did you go?’ I asked it quietly.
‘France,’ she said, ignoring the cigarette ash that fell on to the sheets.
‘Back to the Riviera. I had friends there. I thought about going home to England, but I was scared my family might intervene, send me back to Francesco. So I floated between Antibes and Nice, keeping as quiet as I could. That’s where I met Arthur, a year ago, at the Beau Rivage. ’
There was something in the way she said it, softly, quite different from the terrible matter-of-fact way she’d discussed her marriage.
‘Were you and he …?’ I felt my cheeks burn. Had he looked at her, the way he looked at me, in the shadows of the lounge? I shifted on the bed, trying to seem casual. It was no use. She knew.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, we were lovers.’ She smiled and took another drag of her cigarette.
‘For a little while anyway. But the thought of it all growing hateful and burning out, it was too much for me. Arthur felt the same. He has so many other concerns. We soon realized we were much better suited as companions.’
I looked down at the floor, more confused than ever. Beside the bed were the papers, spilled from their file. Had she drunk enough to talk about them?
She followed my gaze, and sighed. ‘Insurance, against my husband,’ she said, stirring the papers with a bare toe.
‘They’re blueprints. Original copies. I stole them when I left, and told Francesco that unless he leaves me alone, they will find their way into the hands of every foreign military attaché I can think of.
’ She smiled. ‘It is the only language he understands.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her.
‘So am I. But we’re here now, aren’t we?’
Sitting on that rumpled bed, we looked at each other.
‘I won’t tell Arthur,’ she said abruptly, stubbing her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray on the bedside table. ‘But you will have to.’
My stomach tightened with nerves. ‘What will he do?’
‘Honestly?’ Her eyes travelled over my suit, my tie, my reddened face. ‘I have no idea.’ After another moment she smiled, like the sun through cloud. She was looking at the napkins on the floor. ‘Do you really need those?’
When I grimaced and nodded, she let out a laugh.
‘Go and use my bathroom, then. You don’t want Bouzid walking in and surprising you.’
I found myself smiling at that, as I collected them up. ‘He’s suspicious enough already.’
‘Oh, he knows something’s up with you, just as I did.’ She laughed again. ‘Poor Bouzid, when he finds out.’
I made for the bathroom door, my head swimming from the gin and the smoke and the knowledge that someone at Dar Portuna could see beneath my mask.
‘Alejandro.’ Hilde’s voice stopped me. ‘Tell Arthur soon. He is not a man to keep things from.’