The Portuguese Escape (23 page)

‘A measure of economy! It costs me less to instal eight instruments than to pay the wages of someone to operate— almost certainly extremely inefficiently—a switch-board.' He leaned forward, and tapped the machines one by one. ‘This is to the bailiff's office, and this to his house; that to the oil-mill, that to the stables; this one is to the farm, and this to the
lagare
, where the wine is made—of course it is
only used during the vintage; this is to the garage, and finally, here is the one which connects me with the outside world.'

‘This same system used to operate in the big country houses in Hungary,' Father Antal put in, ‘and for the same reason. Rustic people find these complicated mechanical contrivances difficult to manage.'

There was a tap on the door, and Nanny's neat head, veiled in black lace, appeared round it.

‘I'm sorry to interrupt, Your Grace, but Dona Maria Francisca wants to know if the Monsignor is ready to come to the chapel for the Rosary?'

‘Oh yes,' the Duke said rising, with a rather resigned expression. ‘They will come immediately.' He kissed Luzia—‘Good night, my child'—and turned to the two priests. ‘I must ask you to excuse me—I have things to attend to. I wish you a very good night. Make my excuses to the Senhora Condessa, Nanny,' he said urbanely. When they had all gone off to say the Rosary he settled down in an armchair and began to read
The Farmer and Stock-breeder
.

‘You aren't by any chance poaching just a little on my preserves, are you?' the Military Attaché said to the First Secretary on the morning of that same Saturday, when after Julia and Major Torrens had driven off Richard Atherley went and asked Colonel Campbell to get Colonel Marques to come round to the Chancery.

‘If I am it's most unwillingly, I assure you, my dear Campbell,' Richard said heartily. ‘Your miserable clients are pestering the life out of me—even the Monsignor! However, thank you for organising police protection for me at No. 35.'

‘What on earth were you doing at Torrens' diggings?'

‘Packing his clothes for his visit, under Miss Probyn's wing, to the Duke of Ericeira's country-seat.'

‘Oh, he's gone up there, has he? I think he might have told me.'

‘Between ourselves, I think he was a little distraught.'

‘Hardly too distraught to pack his own bags before he came away, I should have thought.'

‘He didn't know he was going, and anyhow he wasn't at home last night.'

‘Where was he, then?'

‘In the British Hospital,' Atherley said blandly, with enjoyment.

‘Why? Is he ill?'

‘No. He just thought it would be a good place to sleep in.'

‘Well, perhaps you'll explain all this,' the Colonel said, leaning back and looking resigned.

Atherley explained at some length what had taken place the night before, and how he had dispatched Torrens and Miss Probyn in his own car, not twenty minutes ago.

‘Good God, do you mean to say you're letting that girl use your Bentley?' Colonel Campbell asked—this fact
seemed to impress him more than all the rest of his colleague's recital.

‘Yes—in
your
interest, Campbell, I may say! But you realise, don't you, that her car is already compromised, though she's only had it two days; the car-hire firm she got it from must have sold the number, and her Lisbon address, to the opposition. That's what I want you to see Marques about.'

‘Well he'll be along in a few minutes. Yes, he ought to get after those car people. Where's Miss Probyn's car now?'

‘Under your window. Here's the key'—he threw it on the table. ‘Over to you, Campbell—you can be your own game-keeper for a bit,' Richard said, with an amicable grin. ‘By the way, what are you doing this afternoon?'

‘Playing golf. Why?'

‘I wondered if you would lend me your car? I want to take someone for a drive, and I don't particularly want to use Julia Probyn's, and be mobbed by Spanish Communists in raincoats.'

‘Yes, of course take it—that's the least I can do, though as you know it isn't a Bentley! I can use one of the Chancery cars. Why, has the Countess turned up?'

Richard stared in incomprehension. His mind was on Hetta: she had said that she was free for the whole weekend, and he had conceived the idea of taking her out for a drive that afternoon; her self-abnegation over the luncheon with the Armorican Pretender on Sunday had moved him a good deal. ‘She hasn't left Estoril since she got out, so far as I know,' he said, taken by surprise by Campbell's question.

‘Oh, sorry—you're talking about little Countess Páloczy. I meant the Countess de Vermeil,' Colonel Campbell said, looking slightly embarrassed.

Richard looked embarrassed too, and rather annoyed. Naturally he had not reached the age of thirty-five or thereabouts without having been ‘subjected to other influences' as the French so elegantly call it, and one of the foremost among these influences was a certain Countess de Vermeil; she had been very much in the ascendant during
his time in Washington, and Colonel Campbell, there on some war-time mission or other, had met them both; when Atherley was at the Embassy in Paris before coming to Lisbon, he had in fact seemed quite dominated by her, and Colonel Campbell, then assistant Military Attaché there, had again registered the fact. She was a widow, older than Atherley; ultra-
mondaine
, skilful, witty, and well-dressed to a French degree of perfection which was like a sort of lacquer over her whole person—she was also tall, blonde, and sufficiently beautiful
just
to be visible herself through her wonderful clothes. (There are women who dress so well as to render their actual selves practically invisible, but Fanny Vermeil contrived to avoid that.) Lately Richard, absorbed by Hetta, had given very little thought to this enchantress, and the young man in his present mood felt his colleague's well-meant question peculiarly ill-timed.

‘As far as I know, Madame de Vermeil is not expected here,' he said coldly.

At that moment Tomlinson ushered in Colonel Marques. Both men, their minds fully occupied in giving the latest facts to the head of the Portuguese Security Service, forgot about any Countesses, young or less young. Colonel Marques was, as always, practical, brief, and shrewd: he noted down the address of the firm from which Julia had hired both her machines, and on learning that she had driven up to Gralheira in Richard's CD. car nodded approval, and asked where the young lady's car was at that moment?

‘Under this window,' Richard said for the second time.

Colonel Marques asked who had the key. Campbell showed it to him.

‘It would be convenient if I might borrow the key, and the car, for a day or two,' Colonel Marques said—' If it is not required?'

‘You can do anything you like with it, provided you take it away from under my window,' Colonel Campbell replied. ‘We don't in the least want it standing about in this street!'

‘Very well. Thank you. Leave it in my hands, Monsieur le Colonel.'

‘I'll leave you now,' Richard said, rising, and went back to his room to ring up Hetta Páloczy.

After some thought as to what would please her most, he took her to Obidos, the little walled city lying between the main Lisbon-Alcobaça road and the sea, one of the most beautiful walled towns in Europe. In its smallness and completeness it compares with Gruyère, and like Gruyère a mediaeval castle dominates it from one end, but in some ways it is even more beautiful; the golden tone of its castle and walls is warmer and richer than the slate-grey of the Swiss town.

Hetta was delighted by it. They left Colonel Campbell's car outside the big fortified entrance, incongruously lined with blue-and-white
azulejos
, and inside climbed a flight of stone steps up onto the top of the western wall; a narrow path, originally a firing-parapet for bowmen, runs along the whole length of this to the massive block of the Castelo at the farther end. Neither the steps nor the firing-walk have any form of hand-rail, and people with a bad head for heights find them alarming, but to Richard's relief Hetta tripped up the steps and along the walk with complete unconcern—he had once had the disconcerting experience of taking a V.I.P. to Obidos, and finding that he could only negotiate the path along the wall on his hands and knees. The girl looked out through the loop-holes at the bright multi-coloured countryside, pink and green with plough-land and springing wheat; the dim blue of the Atlantic bounded the horizon, and nearer at hand was the brilliant blue of the great sand-enclosed lagoon, the Lagoa de Obidos, in which enterprising bathers can catch grey mullet in their hands. On the other side they looked down, very intimately, into the back gardens of the inhabitants, where shapely grey-green medlar-trees stand up among hen-houses, rabbit-hutches, and beds of vegetables. Hetta, inveterately practical, commented on the fact that these back-yards contained almost no lines of washing.

‘No, they spread it out on those slabs of rock with the agaves on them, below the Castelo. Look.' He took her elbow, and pointed to the open slope, gay with white and parti-coloured linen drying in the sun.

‘Oh I see—how nice.'

They were both very happy. In fact many people do experience an unexpected happiness in Obidos; it is a quality of the place. Moreover, this was Hetta's first expedition into the Portuguese countryside, and she was loving every moment. The Castelo has been turned into a
pousada
, a government-run hostelry, but when they descended from the battlements by another of those dizzy flights of steps just below it he did not take her there, but led her instead a few yards along one of the two streets, which are all that Obidos boasts, and into a tiny room barely ten feet square, with narrow benches along the walls and a broad wooden counter with wine-barrels below it. Richard knocked on this, and a bright-faced young woman with a flowered kerchief on her head came running in from the next room, and greeted him with cries of pleasure—these brought in a much older man, wearing the regular Portuguese country-townsman's rig of an open waistcoat, shirt-sleeves with floral stripes, and a black felt hat crammed down on his round head. He, too, showed the utmost satisfaction at the sight of Richard, and wrung him by the hand; he spoke to the young woman, who went out and reappeared after a moment with a big earthenware jug brimming with wine, which she poured into two thick tumblers and handed to the guests.

‘This is their better wine,' Richard said to Hetta—she sniffed, sipped, and then nodded her head.

‘It is good,' she pronounced. ‘This is such a nice place, Richard; it is like a Kis-Kocsma in Hungary.'

‘And what does Kis-Kocsma mean, pray?'

‘A small wine-room. They are a little bigger, as a rule, but like this.' She drank again. ‘Do you know, this is excellent.'

‘The Menina approves of your wine,' Richard told the man—‘And she knows of what she speaks; her father had his own vineyards.'

‘In what part of Portugal?'

‘Not in Portugal at all—the Menina is Hungara.'

This statement produced some rather surprisingly on-the-spot remarks.

‘From Hungary, eh? Where they have put a Cardinal in
prison? I thought the Hungaros were all Communists. Is the Menina a Communist?'

‘No, she is a Condessa,' Richard said, laughing.' She has come to Portugal to escape from the Communists.' But as he spoke he was seized with a sudden pang of the anxiety that had tormented him before on Hetta's behalf. ‘You don't go swimming alone in the mornings any more, do you?' he asked.

‘Not since you told me I should not. Why?'

‘I just wanted to be sure. Have some more wine.'

‘Yes please. But would he mind if we took it outside and sat in that square? It is so beautiful, this town—I cannot see it enough.'

‘There's nowhere to sit in the
largo
'

‘Richard, do not be English, and diplomatic! We can sit on the steps.'

On the steps they sat, their refilled glasses in their hands, looking up at the great bulk of the Castelo high above them.

‘I'm glad you like Obidos; it's a place I love,' Richard said. He felt warmed towards her, towards the whole world, as he sat drinking his wine, watching her face tilted up to gaze at the castle's golden crenellations profiled against the blue sky overhead. ‘Tell me why you like it?'

‘Because it is happy, and simple. Much nicer than Estoril!' she said, with one of her sudden flashes of contempt. ‘I should like to live here—perhaps in one of those houses.'

Below the
largo
stood a short row of houses considerably more elaborate than most of the town, with green shutters folded back from their windows, creepers on the walls, and in front of them neat little gardens with paved paths leading up to the doors; they had a sort of homely elegance.

‘That one with the notice on it is to let,' he said. ‘Would you like to live there with me, Hetti?'

He spoke on an impulse, born of his immediate happiness, his romantic love for Obidos, and his half-recognised love for the girl beside him. She turned her face towards him at his words, and studied him for some time before she spoke.

‘Richard, I should like to live with you anywhere where
you would be happy,' she said at length. ‘But I am not sure that you would really be happy living in Obidos. Or indeed living with me,' she added.

‘Hetti, I really believe I should be happy with you anywhere,' he said, taking her hand. This was really all he could do in the way of demonstration, since the square immediately in front of them had suddenly become filled with small boys, kicking a rather dessicated football about. The Portuguese have of late years developed an obsession for Association Football, which they call
futebol;
as professionals they play it extremely well, but the entire male population of the country, from the age of seven upwards, spends most of its spare time kicking some sort of ball about any available open space.