Книга - The Gate of the Sun

The Gate of the Sun
Derek Lambert


Spain, over a span of forty turbulent years, is the theatre for a drama of love, friendship, ideals, ambition and revenge in this powerful and passionate novel about the Spanish Civil War by Derek Lambert.

Gripping a cross between Harold Robbins and Hemingway’ Sunday Express



On the bitter battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, an unlikely friendship is forged. Tom Canfield and Adam Fleming are from different countries and on opposing sides, yet they have one thing in common a passionate love for Spain



With a fervour to match their own, a woman is battling in the same bloody struggle. She is Ana, the Black Widow; young, beautiful, bereaved and a dangerous freedom fighter.



The end of the armed conflict will not end the conflicting emotions that draw these people together. For over forty turbulent years, from the dark days of Franco’s victory to the birth of modern Spain, they will be bound together in an intricate web of love betrayal, ambition and revenge



Derek Lambert, who knew and loved Spain for many years, uses his unique understanding of Spanish history and character in this sweeping novel which encompasses some of the most crucial events of twentieth-century Europe, creates characters of extraordinary depth and humanity, and tells a story of compelling power and vitality.



Pure unadulterated story telling’ Daily Telegraph









The Gate of the Sun

Derek Lambert










Copyright (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)


Collins Crime Club

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain

by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1990

Copyright © Estate of Derek Lambert 1990

Cover Design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2018 © HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Cover images © Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com)

Derek Lambert asserts the moral right

to be identified at the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008287689

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008287696

Version: 2018-05-09




Dedication (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)


For Jonathan, mi hijo


Table of Contents

Cover (#u6b8d1bdb-0f15-514c-83d2-375d12e5e26f)

Title Page (#uddc5c125-553d-552b-9d21-2016e2c0d29f)

Copyright (#u35ffb0e8-10b2-5970-85fa-64d72da14cf4)

Dedication (#ue3ef8456-6adc-5bc5-b754-9aff078820fd)

Author’s Note (#u02803bc0-9751-519c-8229-e569a700cba3)

1975 (#ue1759523-ce34-5de5-83f5-62a6bf72c516)

Prologue (#u245fc779-4a6a-5551-914f-19d4c82dddab)

Part I: 1937–1939 (#u91981672-f193-515a-aa8b-99e60103d8d5)

Chapter 1 (#ud98bc92e-501a-57d7-9139-639e5de44f41)



Chapter 2 (#uaf9256a8-f9d2-5d63-beaf-128a90064bd8)



Chapter 3 (#ua6501dc8-0a20-59a5-a909-2475bf912519)



Chapter 4 (#u20193dc5-9662-57cd-9922-76b8abb2579f)



Chapter 5 (#u27db2c4d-d2a6-5f03-8576-714f06570d75)



Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part II: 1940–1945 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part III: 1946–1950 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part IV: 1950–1960 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part V: 1964–1975 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)



Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)



By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




AUTHOR’S NOTE (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)


There must be an element of masochism in my nature because it would be intimidating enough for a Spaniard to write a novel about the labyrinth (Gerald Brenan’s apposite choice of word) that is Spain, let alone a foreigner. It may also be interpreted by Spaniards as an impudence. What possible pretext can an Englishman proffer for chronicling in fiction 40 years of Spanish history beginning with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936? My only justification is that I wrote the book because I love Spain and its people, and I seek forgiveness for the mistakes and occasional liberties – the over-simplification in the Civil War of Fascist and Republican was perpetrated in the interests of clarity – that inevitably occur. I would like to believe, however, that I may have arranged the words in such a way that the vibrancy of Spain rises from the pages to obscure such infelicities.



1975 (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)




PROLOGUE (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)


Every morning the old woman in black packed a Bible in her worn bag, walked to church and prayed for forgiveness.

At first, newcomers drinking coffee and Cognac beneath the hams hanging in the Bar Paraiso questioned her fragile intensity but soon, like the old hands, they accepted her as part of the assembling day, as predictable as the arrival of Alberto, the one-legged vendor of lottery tickets and the screams of abuse from Angelica Perez as her husband scuttled from their apartment above the bakery.

None, unless they could cast their minds back 40 years, would have suspected that she had once set a torch to pews and vestments dragged from another church and spat upon a plump priest as he ran a gauntlet of hatred.

As for the woman she cared nothing for what they thought – scarcely heeded them, or the muted roar of traffic on the M30, or the squawk of the rag seller, as she made her way down a narrow street off the Marqués de Zafra in the east of Madrid.

She was 68 years old but she had spent her passions early and did not carry her years easily. Sometimes she mistook the boom and crackle of fireworks for gunfire, occasionally she confused the uniforms of the city police for the blue monos the militiamen once wore, but she did not dwell in the past. She lived rather in a suspended capsule in which the lengthening years and changing seasons were scarcely acknowledged.

Her hair was a lustrous white, combed tightly into a bun; her gaze, although the focus was remote, was steady; and her face had not yet assumed the fatalistic mask of the old and unwanted.

This bitter winter day she walked at her usual pace that never varied, whether the city was sweating in the heat of August or cowering before the snow-stinging winds of January. And such was the remote authority of her gait that the crowds parted before her as nimbly as pecking pigeons.

When she reached a corner lot, where children played basketball, the walls were daubed with fading graffiti and geraniums hung from pots crowding the balconies, she turned down an alley where, at the end, stood the church, its dome like a blue mushroom.

As she made her way down the street its occupants set their watches by her. A solicitor practising the scrolls of his signature, a purveyor of religious tracts scanning a mildly pornographic magazine, a greengrocer polishing fruit from the Canaries … At 9.18 she would enter the church, pray in the last-but-one pew and emerge at 9.23. What prayer she held in the chapel of her hands no one knew, only that it had been thus for 10 years or more.

But today she walked straight past the open door of the church without so much as a glance inside, causing consternation in this modest thoroughfare. What none of the inhabitants knew was that it was vengeance that had imparted that air of impartial arrogance for all those years and that today, instead of a Bible, she carried a gun in her worn bag.



PART I (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)




CHAPTER 1 (#u53534a36-00d4-5d2e-9bf7-efbfcd353a8e)


Difficult to believe on this February morning in 1937 that, as a new day was born in the sky, men on the earth below were dying.

Tom Canfield lowered his stubby little Polikarpov from the cloud to take a closer look, but all he could see were swamps of mist, broken here and there by crests of hills – like the backs of prehistoric monsters, he thought – and the occasional flash of exploding shells.

He nosed the monoplane with its camouflaged fuselage and purple, yellow and red tailplane even lower, as though he were landing on the mist over the Jarama river. Hilltops sped past, vapour slithered over the wings; he had no idea whether he was flying over Fascist or Republican lines, only that the Fascists were trying to cut the road to Valencia, the main supply route to Madrid, 20 miles north-west of the beleaguered capital and had to be stopped.

Three months ago he could not have told you where Valencia was.

Despairing of finding the enemy, he raised the snout of the Polikarpov, known to the Fascists as a rat, and flew freely in the acres between mist and cloud, a tall young man – length sharpened into angles by the confines of the cockpit – with careless fair hair that gave an impression of warmth, and the face of a seeker of truths. The mist was just beginning to thin when he spotted another aircraft sharing the space. He banked and flew towards it and as it grew larger and darker he identified it as an enemy Heinkel 51 biplane.

Enemy? I don’t know the pilot and he doesn’t know me. Why should we, strangers in a foreign land, try and shoot each other out of the wide sky? He adjusted his goggles which were in no need of adjustment and, with the ball of his thumb, touched the button controlling the little rat’s 7.62 mm machineguns.

Wings beat in the cage of his ribs.

He thought the German pilot of the Heinkel waved but he could not be sure. He waved back but he had no idea whether the German could see him.

His chest ached with the beat of the wings.

Tom learned to fly in the good days, in his father’s Cessna at Floyd Bennett Field, before his father was wiped out on Wall Street in the Crash of 1929.

Those were the days when, without pausing to spare good or bad fortune a thought, Tom had lived with his parents in a 32-roomed mansion at Southampton on Long Island, an apartment overlooking Central Park and a cabin at Jackman in Maine, near the Canadian border, where there was a lake stuffed with trout.

One day’s dealings on the Stock Exchange had erased these visible assets, and a lot more besides. Harry Canfield, self-made and bullishly proud of it, had suffered a stroke and his wife had mourned his convalescence with stoic martyrdom; the Cessna had been sold and Tom had quit Columbia Law School to earn a living.

Unprepared for routine labour, he had not prospered, succeeding only as a bouncer in a speakeasy until five Italians beat him senseless and concluding that period of his life share-cropping in Arkansas. By then he had lived in accommodation no bigger than a garden shed in a coal town in West Virginia and subsisted on soup made from potato peelings, and he had stood in a line in sub-zero temperatures in Minnesota waiting for a meal that had evaporated when he reached the head of the queue, and he had shared a brick-built shack in Central Park with commanding views of the blocks where the more fortunate citizens of New York still resided. And he had become rebelliously inclined.

When civil war broke out in Spain in July 1936, he and some 3,000 other Americans identified immediately and passionately with the Republicans – the workers, the peasants, the people – and crossed the Atlantic to help them fight their terrible, fratricidal battles. Some went through the Pyrenees, some reported to the recruiting centre of the International Brigades in Paris on the rue Lafayette.

Tom was interviewed in Paris by a chain-smoking Polish colonel with a shaven scalp and pointed ears who was reputed to have fought for the reds in the Russian civil war. He made notes in an exercise book with a squeaking pen in tiny mauve lettering.

What were Tom’s qualifications?

‘I can fly,’ Tom told him.

‘Aircraft?’ The colonel stared at him through the smoke rising from a yellow cigarette.

‘Boeings,’ Tom said.

‘Stearmans?’

‘P-26s,’ Tom lied because Stearmans were trainers and this shiny-scalped Pole with the exhausted eyes seemed to know his aircraft.

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘What’s the landing speed of a P-26?’

‘High, maybe 75 miles per hour.’

‘Politics?’

‘None.’

The colonel laid down his chewed pen. ‘Everyone has a political attitude whether they realize it or not.’

‘Okay, I’m for the people.’

‘An Anarchist?’

‘Sounds good,’ said Tom who had not thrown up on a cargo boat all the way from New York to Le Havre to be interrogated.

‘Communist?’

Tom shook his head and stared at the rain-wet street outside.

‘Socialist?’

‘If you say so.’

The colonel lit another cigarette, inhaling the smoke hungrily as though it were food. He scratched another entry in the exercise book. ‘Why do you want to fight in Spain?’

Tom pointed at a poster on the wall bearing the words SPAIN, THE GRAVE OF FASCISM.

‘Tell me, Comrade Canfield, are you anti-poverty or anti-riches?’

What sort of a question was that? He said: ‘I believe in justice.’

The colonel dipped his pen into the inkwell and wrote energetically. The rain made wandering rivulets on the window. Lenin smiled conspiratorially at Tom from a picture-frame on the wall.

‘You were born in New York?’

‘Boston,’ Tom said.

‘Why didn’t you go to Harvard?’

‘I went share-cropping instead.’

‘Please don’t play games with me. You see I, too, lived in New York. You’re no peasant, Mister Canfield, not with that accent.’

‘My father went bust.’

‘So why does the son of a capitalist want to fight for the Cause?’

‘Because bad luck is a two-edged sword, comrade. When we were rich I saw only the sea and the sky; when we went broke I saw the land and I saw people trying to make it work for them.’

‘And did it?’

‘I lived in a shack with a married couple with five kids in a coal town in West Virginia. Know what they paid them with?’

The colonel shook his head.

‘Coal,’ Tom said.

‘What were you paid in?’

‘Ideals,’ Tom said. ‘Do you have any objections to those, comrade?’ thinking: ‘Watch your tongue, or you’ll blow it.’

‘Why didn’t you join the Party?’

‘Which party?’

‘There is only one.’

‘You don’t reckon the Democrats or the Republicans?’

‘There’s not much to choose between them, is there? They’re all capitalists.’

‘What do you believe in, Colonel?’

‘In the class struggle. I believe that one day the slaves and not the slave-drivers will rule the world.’

‘Rule, Colonel?’

‘Co-exist. But please, I am supposed to be asking the questions. Do you believe in God?’

‘I guess so. Whether he’s Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Catholic. Or Communist,’ he said.

‘The Fascists believe they have God on their side. Maybe you should fight for the Fascists.’

‘Perhaps I should at that.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t allow that.’ The colonel almost smiled and his pointed ears moved a little. ‘You see, we need pilots.’ He leaned forward and made a small, untidy entry in the exercise book.

At first Paris was a disappointment. The inhabitants of the arrondissement where he was staying resented penniless mercenaries on their streets and the other foreigners taking part in the crusade, particularly the Communists, were hostile to an American who, although he had picked fruit in California and collected duck shit at the east end of Long Island for fertilizer, still possessed the sheen of privilege. He was either slumming or spying.

When one Russian on his way to Spain as an adviser – they were all ‘advisers’, the Russians – accused him in a café of being a spy he resorted to his fists, a not infrequent expedient when his tongue failed him. The Russian, a Georgian with beautiful eyes and a belly like a sack of potatoes, fought well but he was no match for the middle-weight champion of Columbia.

‘So,’ the Russian said from between fist-thickened lips, ‘if you’re not a spy what the hell are you?’ He picked himself up from the wreckage of a table.

‘An idealist, I guess.’

‘With a punch like that?’ The Russian shook his head tentatively and touched one slitted eye. ‘Are you reporting to Albacete?’ Tom said he was. ‘Maybe I will become your commissar,’ continued the Russian. ‘I would like that.’ Followed by other advisers, he walked into the rain-swept street.

When the Russians had gone the sturdy bespectacled man in the corner said, ‘So you pack your ideals in your fists?’

Tom, who was beginning to think that ideals could get him into a lot of trouble, said, ‘He asked for it.’

‘And got it. Where did you learn to fight like that?’ His accent was Brooklyn, as refreshing as water from a sponge.

‘Columbia,’ Tom said, sitting at the table. ‘Where did you learn to talk like that?’

‘A rhetorical question?’

‘Rhetorical, Jesus!’

‘I come from Brooklyn and I mustn’t use long words?’ He beckoned a waiter. ‘Beer?’

‘Fine,’ Tom said, examining a bruised knuckle.

‘You a flier?’

‘Am I that obvious?’

‘I can see it in your eyes. Searching the skies. My name’s Seidler,’ stretching a hand across the table. His grip was unnecessarily strong; when people gripped his hand firmly and looked him straight in the eye Tom Canfield looked for reasons – he had become wise in the coal fields and the orchards.

The waiter placed two beers on the table.

‘Are you going to Spain?’ Tom asked doubtfully because with his spectacles and the roll of flesh under his chin Seidler did not have the bearing of a crusader.

‘To Albacete. Wherever the hell that is.’

‘Why?’ Tom asked.

‘Because Spain seems like a good place to fly.’

‘You’re a pilot? Wearing spectacles?’

‘For reading only.’

‘So why are you wearing them now?’

‘And for drinking beer,’ Seidler said.

‘Okay, stop putting me on. Why are you going to Spain?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? Me, a German Jew, Hitler and Mussolini, Fascists in Spain … Or am I addressing a punch-drunk college dropout?’

‘I used to collect duck shit,’ Tom said.

‘Guano,’ Seidler said. ‘Best goddamn fertilizer in the world.’ He took a deep draught from his glass. ‘So your old man went bust?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Instinct,’ Seidler said tapping the side of his nose. ‘Who interviewed you? A Polak with pointed ears?’

‘He told you?’

‘Said you were a flier, too.’

‘A very stupid flier,’ Tom said. ‘Eyes searching the skies … Didn’t you have your eyes tested before you started flying?’

‘I’m short-sighted which means I can see long distances.’

‘So?’

‘I keep crashing,’ Seidler said.

After that Tom Canfield enjoyed Paris.

On 28 November Seidler and Canfield departed from the Gare d’Austerlitz on train number 77 on the first stage of their journey to the Spanish city of Albacete which lies on the edge of the plain, half-way between Madrid and the Mediterranean coast.

There were many volunteers on the train, French, British, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Russian advisers. Tom felt ill at ease with the leather-jacketed Russians: he had journeyed to Europe to fight injustice, not espouse Marx or Lenin or, God forbid, Stalin. But, as the train paused at small stations he was comforted by the crowds on the platforms waving banners, offering wine and, with clenched fists raised, chanting, ‘No pasarán!’ – they shall not pass. He was also cheered by the knowledge that he and Seidler were fliers, not foot soldiers; there is, as he was discovering, a pecking order in all things.

‘Tell me how you became a flier,’ he said to Seidler as the train nosed slowly past ploughed, wintry fields. Wine had spilled on his scuffed flying jacket, much shabbier than Seidler’s, and he felt a little drunk – happy to be here in Spain.

‘I wanted to join the Air Force,’ Seidler said, chewing grapes that a well-wisher had handed him and spitting the pips on the floor. ‘Actually volunteered, would you believe? I mean, do I look like Air Force material?’

‘It’s the spectacles,’ Tom said, but it was more.

‘They were polite. “Not quite what we’re looking for, Mr Seidler, but thank you for offering your services.” So I went back to selling books in a discount store on 42nd Street and learned to fly in New Jersey and waited for a war some place.’

Tom pointed at a miniature haystack on a church. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘A stork’s nest,’ Seidler said. ‘Did you leave a girl behind?’

‘Nothing serious,’ Tom said.

‘Parents?’

‘My father had a stroke after he was cleared out. They live in a small hotel in upstate New York. They didn’t want me to come out here’ – the understatement of the year.

‘And you’re obviously an only child.’

Obviously? He remembered the house on Long Island and he remembered avenues of molten light on the water with yachts making their way down it, and men dressed in shorts and matelot jerseys drinking with his father, fierce moustache trimmed for his 60th birthday, and his mother dutifully reading to him in bed. She had been beautiful then, an older Katherine Hepburn, with chestnut hair piled high. He had never told them that he hated boats and, when he was lying on his back on the deck of the yacht, he was imagining himself at the controls of a yellow biplane exploring the castles of cloud on the horizon.

‘But you’re not,’ he said to Seidler.

‘Two brothers, one sister, all gainfully employed in the Garment Centre.’

The train which they had joined at Valencia stopped at a station, little more than a platform, and a dozen militiamen climbed on board. They wore blue overalls and boots, or rope-soled shoes, and berets or caps – one wore a French-style steel helmet, and two of them sported blood-stained bandages. Although the war had been in progress for only four months they conducted themselves like veterans and one carried a long-barrelled pistol which he laid carefully on his knees, as though it were made of glass. They were all young but they were no longer youthful.

Seidler spoke to them in Spanish. They were, he told Tom, returning to Madrid which had miraculously held out against the Fascist onslaught.

As Seidler talked and handed out Lucky Strikes, which were taken shyly and examined like foreign coins, Tom spread a map on his knees and tried to understand the war.

He knew that the Fascists, or Nationalists, were drawn from the army, the Falange and the Church, the landowners and the industrialists; that the Republicans were Socialists, trade unionists, intellectuals and the working class.

He knew that, to protect their privileges, the Fascists had risen in July 1936 to overthrow the lawful government of the Republic, established in 1931, which was being far too indulgent towards the poor. He had read somewhere that before the advent of the Republic a peasant had earned two or three pesetas a day.

He knew that the Fascists, led by General Francisco Franco, had, with the help of German transport planes, invaded Spain from North Africa and that in the north, led by General Emilio Mola, they had swept all before them. But great swathes of Spain, including the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were still in the hands of the Republicans. No pasarán!

He knew that the Moors fighting for Franco took no prisoners and cut off their victims’ genitals; he knew that the heroine of the Republicans was a woman known as La Pasionaria.

He knew that on the sides of this carriage where, on the wooden seats, peasants sat with their live chickens and baskets of locust beans were scrawled the letters UGT and CNT and FAI, but he had no idea what they meant and was ashamed of his ignorance.

The plain rolled past; water and smuts from the labouring engine streaked the windows.

‘So what else have you found out?’ Tom asked Seidler.

‘That Albacete is the asshole of Spain but they make good killing knives there.’

The militiamen, Tom reflected later, had been right about Albacete. It was cold and commonplace, and the cafés were crammed with discontented members of the International Brigades from many nations drinking cheap red wine.

The garrison was worse. It was the colour of clay, the barrack-room walls were the graveyards of squashed bugs and the floors were laid with bone-chilling stone. Tom and Seidler were quartered with Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – seamen, students and Communists – but France was in the ascendancy: the Brigade commissar, André Marty, was a bulky Frenchman with a persecution complex; parade-ground orders were issued in French; many uniforms, particularly those worn resentfully by the British, were Gallic leftovers from other conflicts.

He and Seidler complained to Marty the day the commander of the Abraham Lincolns, good and drunk, fired his pistol through a barrack-room ceiling.

From behind his desk Marty, balding with a luxuriant moustache, regarded them suspiciously.

‘You are guests in a foreign country. You shouldn’t complain – just think of what the poor bastards in Madrid are going through.’

‘Sure, and we want to help them,’ Seidler said. ‘But the instructors here couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.’

Marty fiddled with a button on his crumpled brown uniform.

‘You Jewish?’ He sucked his moustache with his bottom lip. ‘And a flier?’ – as though that compounded the crime.

And it was then that Tom Canfield realized that Marty was jealous, that fliers were different and that this would always be an advantage in life.

‘We didn’t come here to march and clean guns: we came here to fly,’ Tom said. He loved the word ‘fly’ and he wanted to repeat it. ‘We came here to bomb the Fascists at the gates of Madrid and shoot their bombers out of the sky. We’re not helping the Cause sitting on our asses; flying is what we’re good at.’

Marty, who was said to have the ear of Stalin, listened impatiently and Tom got the impression that it was Communism rather than the Cause that interested him.

‘I want your passports,’ Marty said.

‘The hell you do.’

‘In case you get shot down. You’re not supposed to be in this war. Article Ten of the Covenant of the League of Nations.’

‘So what about the Russians?’ Tom asked.

‘Advisers,’ Marty said. ‘Give me your passport.’

‘No way,’ Tom said. Then he said, ‘You mean we’re leaving here?’

‘To Guadalajara, north-east of Madrid. You’ll be trained by Soviet advisers. There’s a train this afternoon. On your way,’ said Marty who could do without fliers in his brigade. He flung two sets of documents on the desk. Tom was José Espinosa, Seidler Luis Morales. ‘Only Spaniards are fighting this war,’ Marty said. ‘It’s called non-intervention.’

‘Congratulations, Pepe,’ Seidler said outside the office.

‘Huh?’

‘The familiar form of José.’

Tom scanned his new identification paper. It was in French. Of course. But he still had his passport.

At the last minute the Heinkel from the Condor Legion, silver with brown and green camouflage, ace of spades painted on the fuselage, veered away. Tom didn’t blame the pilot: the Russian-made rats were plundering the skies. Or maybe the pilot was no more a Fascist than he was a Communist and could see no sense in joining battle with a stranger over a battlefield where enough men had died already.

He banked and flew above the dispersing mist, landing at Guadalajara, which the Republicans had captured early in the fighting. Seidler was playing poker in a tent with three other pilots in the squadron’s American Patrol. He was winning but he displayed no emotion; Tom had never heard him laugh.

Tom made his reconnaissance report to the squadron commander – he was learning Spanish but his tongue grew thick with trying – debating whether to mention the Heinkel. If he did the commander would want to know why he hadn’t pursued it.

‘No enemy aircraft?’ asked the commander who had already shot down 11.

‘One Heinkel 51,’ Tom said.

‘You didn’t chase it?’

Tom shook his head.

‘Very wise: he was probably leading you into an ambush.’

Tom fetched a mug of coffee and met Seidler walking across the airfield where Polikarpovs, Chato 1-15 biplanes and bulbous-nosed Tupolev bombers stood at rest. It was cold and weeping clouds were following the Henares river on its run from the mountains.

The trouble with this war in which brothers killed brothers and sons killed fathers, he thought as they walked towards their billet, was that nothing was simple. How could a foreigner be expected to understand a war in which there were at least 13 factions? A war in which the Republicans were divided into Communists and Anarchists and God knows what else. A Communist had recently told him that POUM, Trotskyists he had thought, was in the pay of the Fascists. Work that one out.

They reached the billet and Seidler poured them each a measure of brandy. Tom shivered as it slid down his throat. Then he lay on his iron bedstead and stared at his feet clad in fleece-lined flying boots; at least fliers could keep warm. He had once believed that Spain was a land of perpetual sunshine … Sleet slid down the window of the hut and the wind from the mountains played a dirge in the telephone lines.

Seidler sat on the edge of his own bed, placing his leather helmet and goggles gently on the pillow; only Tom knew the secret of those goggles – the frames contained lenses to compensate for his bad sight.

He stared short-sightedly at Tom and said, ‘So how’d it go?’

‘Okay, I guess.’ He told Seidler, who had already recorded one kill, a Junkers 52 on a bombing mission, about the Heinkel. ‘I’m not sure I wanted to shoot it down.’

‘Know what I felt when I got that Junkers? I thought it was one of those passenger planes in a movie, you know, when Gary Cooper or Errol Flynn is trying to guide it through a storm. And as it caught fire and went into its death dive I thought I saw passengers at the windows. And then I thought that maybe it wasn’t a bomber because those Ju-52s are used as transport planes, too – 17 passengers, maybe more – and maybe I had killed them all. Kids younger than us, maybe.’

‘What you’ve got to do,’ Tom said, ‘is remember what we’re fighting for.’

‘I sometimes wonder.’

‘The atrocities …’

‘You mean our guys, the good guys, didn’t commit any?’

Tom was silent. He didn’t know.

‘In any case,’ Seidler said, ‘I’m supposed to be commiserating with you.’ He poured more brandy. ‘I hear that the Fascists have got a bunch of Fiat fighter planes with Italian crews. And that the Italians are going to launch an attack on Guadalajara.’

‘Where do you hear all these things?’

‘From the Russians,’ Seidler said.

‘You speak Russian?’

‘And Yiddish,’ Seidler said. The hut was suddenly suffused with pink light. ‘Here we go,’ Seidler said as the red alert flares burst over the field.

‘In this?’ Tom stared incredulously at the sleet.

They ran through the sleet which was, in fact, slackening – a luminous glow was now visible above the cloud – and climbed into the cockpits of their Polikarpovs. Tom knew that this time he really was going to war and he wished he understood why.

The Jarama is a mud-grey and thoughtful river that wanders south-east of Madrid in search of guidance. It had given its name to the battle being fought in the valley separating its guardian hills, their khaki flanks threaded in places with crystal, but in truth the fight was for the highway to Valencia which crosses the Jarama near Arganda. On this morose morning in February the Fascists dispatched an armada of Junkers 52s to bomb the bridge carrying this highway over the river.

Tom Canfield saw them spread in battle order, heavy with bombs, and above them he saw the Fiats, the Italians’ biplanes which Seidler had forecast would put in an appearance. He pointed and Seidler, flying beside him, peering through his prescription goggles, nodded and raised one thumb.

The Fiats were already peeling off to protect their pregnant charges and the wings were beating again in Tom Canfield’s chest. He gripped the control column tightly. ‘But what are you doing here?’ he asked himself. ‘Glory-seeking?’ Thank God he was scared. How could there be courage if there wasn’t fear? He waited for the signal from the squadron commander and, when it came, as the squadron scattered, he pulled gently and steadily on the column; soaring into the grey vault, he decided that the fear had left him. He was wrong.

The Fiat came at him from nowhere, hung on behind him. Bullets punctured the windshield. A Russian trainer had told him what to do if this happened. He had forgotten. He heard a chatter of gunfire. He looked behind. The Fiat was dropping away, butterflies of flame at the cowling. Seidler swept past, clenched fist raised. No pasarán! Seidler two, Canfield zero. He felt sick with failure. He kicked the rudder pedal and banked sharply, turning his attention to the bombers intent on starving Madrid to death.

Below lay the small town of San Martín de la Vega, set among the coils of the river and the ruler-straight line of a canal. He saw ragged formations of troops but he couldn’t distinguish friend from foe.

The anti-aircraft fire had stopped – the deadly German 88 mm guns could hit one of their own in this crowded sky – and the fighters dived and banked and darted like mosquitoes on a summer evening.

Tom saw a Fiat biplane with the Fascist yoke and arrows on its fuselage diving on a Polikarpov. As it crossed his sights he pressed the firing button of his machine-guns. His little rat shuddered. The Fiat’s dive steepened. Tom watched it. He bit the inside of his lip. The dive steepened. The Fiat buried its nose in a field of vines, its tail protruding from the dark soil. Then it exploded.

Tom was bewildered and exultant. And now, above a hill covered with umbrella pine, he was hunting, wanting to shoot, wasting bullets as the Fiats escaped from his sights. So close were they that it seemed that, if the moments had been frozen, he could have reached out and shaken the hands of the enemy pilots. But it had been a mistake to try and get under the bombers; instead he attacked them from the side. He picked out one, a straggler at the rear of his formation. A machine-gun opened up from the windows where Seidler had imagined passengers staring at him; he flew directly at the gun-snarling fuselage, fired two bursts and banked. The Junkers began to settle; a few moments later black smoke streamed from one of its engines; it settled lower as though landing, then, as it began to roll, two figures jumped from the door in the fuselage. The Junkers, relieved of their weight, turned, belly up, turned again, then fell flaming to the ground. Parachutes blossomed above the two figures.

Without looking down he saw again the white, naked faces of Spaniards killing each other, and reminded himself that among them were Americans and Italians and British and Russians, and wondered if the Spaniards really wanted the foreigners there, if they would not prefer to settle their grievances their own way, and then a Fiat came in from a pool of sunlight in the cloud and raked his rat from its gun-whiskered nose to its brilliant tail.

The Polikarpov was a limb with severed tendons. Tom pulled the control column. Nothing. He kicked the rudder pedal. Nothing. Not even the landing flaps responded. One of his arms was useless, too; it didn’t hurt but it floated numbly beside him and he knew that it had been hit. The propeller feathered and stopped and the rat began its descent. With his good hand Tom tried to work the undercarriage hand-crank, but that didn’t work either. Leafless treetops fled behind him; he saw faces and gun muzzles and the wet lines of ploughed soil.

He pulled again on the column and there might have been a slight response, he couldn’t be sure. He saw the glint of crystal in the hills above him; he saw the white wall of a farmhouse rushing at him.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_202bb53c-0494-5513-ae32-38a847a5c333)


Ana Gomez was young and strong and black-haired and, in her way, beautiful but there was a sorrow in her life and that sorrow was her husband.

The trouble with Jesús Gomez was that he did not want to go to war, and when she marched to the barricades carrying a banner and singing defiant songs she often wondered how she had come to marry a man with the spine of a jellyfish.

Yet when she returned home to their shanty in the Tetuan district of Madrid, and found that he had foraged for bread and olive oil and beans and made thick soup she felt tenderness melt within her. This irritated her, too.

But it was his gentleness that had attracted her in the first place. He had come to Madrid from Segovia because it had called him, as it calls so many, and he worked as a cleaner in a museum filled with ceramics and when he wasn’t sweeping or delicately dusting or courting her with smouldering but discreet application he wrote poetry which, shyly, he sometimes showed her. So different was he from the strutting young men in her barrio that she became at first curious and then intrigued, and then captivated.

She worked at that time as a chambermaid in a tall and melancholy hotel near the Puerta del Sol, the plaza shaped like a half moon that is the centre of Madrid and, arguably, Spain. The hotel was full of echoes and memories, potted ferns and brass fittings worn thin by lingering hands; the floor tiles were black and white and footsteps rang on them briefly before losing themselves in the pervading somnolence.

Ana, who was paid 10 pesetas a day, and frequently underpaid because times were hard, was arguing with the manager about a lightweight wage packet when Jesús Gomez arrived with a message from the curator of the museum who wanted accommodation for a party of ceramic experts in the hotel. Jesús listened to the altercation, and was waiting outside the hotel when Ana left half an hour later.

He gallantly walked beside her and sat with her at a table outside one of the covered arcades encompassing the cobblestones of the Plaza Mayor and bought two coffees served in crushed ice.

‘I admired the way you stood up to that old buzzard,’ he said. He smiled a sad smile and she noticed how thin he was and how the sunlight found gold flecks in his brown eyes. Despite the heat of the August day he wore a dark suit, a little baggy at the knees, and a thin, striped tie and a cream shirt with frayed cuffs.

‘I lost just the same,’ she said, beginning to warm to him. She admired his gentle persistence; there was hidden strength there which the boy to whom she was tacitly betrothed, the son of a friend of her father’s, did not possess. How could you admire someone who pretended to be drunk when he was still sober?

‘You should ask for more money, not complain that you have been paid less.’

‘Then I would be sacked.’

‘Then you should complain to the authorities and there would be a strike in all the hotels and a general strike in Madrid. We shall be a republic soon,’ said Jesús, giving the impression that he knew of a conspiracy or two.

Much later she remembered those words uttered in the Plaza Mayor that summer day when General Miguel Primo de Rivera still ruled and Alfonso XIII reigned; how much they had impressed her, too young even at the age of 22 to recognize them for what they were.

‘My father says we will not be any better off as a republic than we are now.’ She sucked iced coffee through a straw. How many centimos had it cost him in this grand place? she wondered.

‘Then your father is a pessimist. The monarchy and the dictatorship will fall and the people will rule.’

On 14 April 1931, a republic was proclaimed. But then the Republicans, who wanted to give land to the peasants and Catalonia to the Catalans and a living wage to the workers and education to everyone, fell out among themselves and, in November 1933, the Old Guard, rallied by a Catholic rabble-rouser, José Maria Gil Robles, returned to power. Two black years of repression followed and a revolt by miners in Asturias in the north was savagely crushed by a young general named Francisco Franco.

But at first, in the late 20s, before Primo de Rivera quit and the King fled, Ana and Jesús Gomez were so absorbed in each other that, despite the heady predictions of Jesús, they paid little heed to the fuses burning below the surface of Spain; in fact it wasn’t until 1936 that Ana discovered her hatred for Fascists, employers, priests, anyone who stood in her way.

When Jesús proposed marriage Ana accepted, ignoring the questions that occasionally nudged her when she lay awake beside her two sisters in the pinched house at the end of a rutted lane near the Rastro, the flea-market. Why after nearly a year was he still earning a pittance in the perpetual twilight of the museum whereas she, at his behest, had demanded a two-peseta-a-day pay rise and been granted one by an astounded hotel manager? Why did he not try to publish the poems he wrote in exercise books? Why did he not join a trade union, because surely there was a place for a museum cleaner somewhere in the ranks of the CNT or UGT?

They were married during the fiesta of San Isidro, Madrid’s own saint. The ceremony, attended by a multitude of Ana’s family, and a handful of her fiancé’s from Segovia, was performed in a frugal church and cost 20 pesetas; the reception was held in a café between a tobacco factory and a foundling hospital owned by the father of Ana’s former boyfriend, Emilio, who fooled everyone by getting genuinely drunk on rough wine from La Mancha.

Emilio, whose black hair was as thick as fur, and who had been much chided by his companions for allowing the vivacious and wilful Ana to escape, accosted the bridegroom as he made his way with his bride to the old Ford T-saloon provided by Ana’s boss. He stuck out his hand.

‘I want to congratulate you,’ he said to Jesús. ‘And you know what that means to me.’ He wore a celluloid collar which chafed his thick neck and he eased one finger inside it to relieve the soreness.

Jesús accepted the handshake. ‘I do know what it means to you,’ he said. ‘And I’m grateful.’

‘How would you know what it means to me?’ Emilio tightened his grip on the hand of Jesús, becoming red in the face, though whether this was from exertion or wine circulating in his veins was difficult to ascertain.

‘Obviously it must mean a lot,’ Jesús said, trying to withdraw his hand.

Ana, who had changed from her wedding gown into a lemon-yellow dress, waited, a dry excitement in her throat. The three of them were standing between the café where the guests were bunched and the Ford where the porter from the hotel stood holding the door open. No-man’s-land.

‘It means a lot to me,’ Emilio said thickly, ‘because Ana promised herself to me.’

‘Liar,’ Ana said.

‘Have you told him what we did together?’

‘We did nothing except hang around while you pretended to get drunk.’ What she had seen in Emilio she couldn’t imagine. Perhaps nothing: their union had been decided without any reference to her.

Emilio continued to grip the hand of Jesús, the colour in his cheeks spreading to his neck. Jesús had stopped trying to extricate his hand and their arms formed an incongruous union, but he showed no pain as Emilio squeezed harder.

The group outside the café stood frozen as though posing for a photographer who had lost himself inside his black drape.

‘We did a lot of things,’ Emilio grunted.

The porter from the hotel, who wore polished gaiters borrowed from a chauffeur and a grey cap with a shiny peak, moved the door of the Ford slowly back and forth. Fireworks crackled in the distance.

Jesús, thought Ana, will have to hit him with his left fist – a terrible thing to happen on this day of all days but what alternative did he have?

Jesús smiled. Smiled! This further aggrieved Emilio.

‘You would be surprised at the things we did,’ he said squeezing the hand of Jesús Gomez until the knuckles on his own fist shone white.

Finally Jesús, his smile broadening with the pleasure of one who recognizes a true friend, said, ‘Emilio, I accept your congratulations, you are a good man,’ and began to shake his imprisoned hand up and down.

‘Cabrón,’ Emilio said.

‘God go with you.’

‘Piss in your mother’s milk.’

‘Your day will come,’ Jesús said, a remark so enigmatic that it caused much debate among the other guests when they returned to their wine.

The two men stared at each other, hands rhythmically rising and falling, until finally Emilio released his grip and, massaging his knuckles, stared reproachfully at Jesús Gomez.

Jesús saluted, one finger to his forehead, turned, waved to the silent guests, proffered his arm to his bride and led her to the waiting Ford.

From the bathroom of the small hostal near the Caso de Campo, she said, ‘You handled that Emilio very well. He is a pig.’

She took the combs from her shining black hair and shed her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. In the street outside a bonfire blazed and couples danced in its light. Would he ask her about those things that Emilio claimed they had done together?

‘Emilio’s not such a bad fellow,’ Jesús said from the sighing double bed. ‘He was drunk, that was his trouble.’

Didn’t he care?

‘He is a great womanizer,’ Ana said.

‘I can believe that.’

‘And a brawler.’

‘That too.’

She ran her hands over her breasts and felt the nipples stiffen. What would it be like? She knew it wouldn’t be like the smut that some of the married women in the barrio talked while their husbands drank and played dominoes, not like the Hollywood movies in which couples never shared a bed but nevertheless managed to produce freckled children who inevitably appeared at the breakfast table. She wished he had hit Emilio and she knew it was wrong to wish this.

In novels, the bride always puts on a nightdress before joining her husband in the nuptial bed. To Señora Ana Gomez that seemed to be a waste of time. She walked naked into the white-washed bedroom and when he saw her he pulled back the clean-smelling sheet; she saw that he, too, was naked and, for the first time, noticed the whippy muscles on his thin body, and in wonderment, and then in abandonment, she joined him and it was like nothing she had heard about or read about or anticipated.

It is true that Ana Gomez only encountered her hatred during the Civil War, but it must have been growing sturdily in the dark recesses of her soul to show its hand so vigorously.

When, slyly, was it conceived? In the black years, when one of her three brothers was beaten up by police, losing the sight of one eye, for rallying the dynamite-throwing miners of Asturias? When, at the age of 62, her father, a gravedigger, bowed by years of accommodating the dead, was sacked by the same priest who had married her to Jesús for taking home the dying flowers from a few graves? Or because the same fat-cheeked incumbent had declined to baptize her first-born, Rosana, because she had not attended mass regularly, although for a donation of 20 pesetas he would reconsider his decision … Ah, those black crows who stuffed the rich with education and starved the poor. Ana believed in God but considered him to be a bad employer.

As the hatred, unrecognized, fed upon itself. Ana noticed changes in her appearance. Her hair, pinned back with tortoiseshell combs, still shone with brushing, the olive skin of her face was still unlined and her body was still young, but there was a fierce quality in her expression that was beyond her years. She attributed this to the inadequacies of her husband.

Not that he was indolent or drunken or wayward. He cooked and scavenged and cleaned and Rosana and Pablo, who was one year old, loved him. But he cared only to exist, not to advance. Why did he not write his sonnets in blood and tears instead of pale ink? wondered Ana who, since the heady days of courtship and consummation, had begun to ask many questions. It was she who had found the shanty in Tetuan, it was she who had found him a job paying five pesetas a week more than the National Archaeological Museum. But his bean soup was still the finest in Madrid.

When the left wing, the Popular Front, once again dispatched the Old Guard five months before the Civil War, Ana understood perfectly why strikes and blood-letting swept the country. The prisoners released from jail wanted revenge; the peasants wanted land; the people wanted schools; the great congregation of Spain wanted God but not his priests. What she did not understand were the divisions within the Cause and, although she reacted indignantly as blue-shirted youths of the Falange, the Fascists, terrorized the streets of the capital, she still didn’t acknowledge the hatred that was reaching maturity within herself.

On May Day, when a general strike had been called, she left the children with her grandmother and, with Jesús, who accompanied her dutifully but unenthusiastically, and her younger brother, Antonio, marched down the broad paseo that bisects Madrid, in a procession rippling with a confusion of banners. One caught her eye: ANTI-FASCIST MILITIA: WORKING WOMEN AND PEASANT WOMEN – red on white – and the procession was heady with the chant of the Popular Front: ‘Proletarian Brothers Unite’. In the side streets armed police waited with horses and armoured cars.

Musicians strummed the Internationale on mandolins. Street vendors sold prints of Marx and Lenin, red stars and copies of a new anti-Fascist magazine dedicated to women. And indeed women marched tall as the widows of the miners from Asturias advanced down the promenade. The colours of the banners and costumes were confusing – blue and red seemed to adapt to any policy – and occasionally, among the clenched fists, a brave arm rose in the Fascist salute.

After the parade the hordes swarmed across Madrid, through the West Park and over the capital’s modest river, the Manzanares, to the Casa de Campo, a rolling pasture of rough grass before the countryside proper begins. There they planted themselves on the ground, boundaries defined by ropes or withering glances, released the whooping children and foraging babies, tore the newspapers from baskets of bread and ham and chorizo, passed the wine and bared their souls to the freedom that was soon to be theirs.

Ana pitched camp between a pine and a clump of yellow broom where you could see the ramparts of the city, the palace and the river below, and, to the north, the crumpled, snow-capped peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama.

Her happiness as she relaxed among her people, her Madrileños, who were soon to have so much, was dispatched by her brother after his third draught of wine from the bota. As the jet, pink in the sunshine, died, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘I have something to tell you both. A secret,’ although she knew from the pitch of his voice that its unveiling would not be an occasion for rejoicing.

Antonio, one year her junior, had always been her favourite brother. And he had remained so, even when he married above himself, got a job, thanks to his French father-in-law in the Credit Lyonnais where, with the help of the bank’s telephones, he also traded in perfume, and mixed with a bourgeois crowd. He was tall, with tight-curled, black hair, a sensuous mouth and a nimble brain; his cheeks often smelled of the cologne in which he traded.

‘I have joined the Falange,’ he said.

It was a bad joke; Ana didn’t even bother to smile. Jesus took the bota and directed a jet of wine down his throat.

‘I mean it,’ Antonio said.

‘I knew this wine was too strong; it has lent wings to your brains,’ Ana said.

‘I mean it, I tell you.’ His voice was rough with pride and shame.

There was silence beneath the pine tree. A diamond-shaped kite flew high in the blue sky and a bird of prey from the Sierra glided, wings flattened, above it.

Ana said, ‘These are your wife’s words. And her father’s.’

‘It is I who am talking,’ said Antonio.

‘You, a Fascist?’ Ana laughed.

‘You think that is funny? In six months time you will be weeping.’

‘When you are taken out and shot. Yes, then I will weep.’ She turned to Jesús but he had settled comfortably with his head on a clump of grass and was staring at the kite which dived and soared in the warm currents of air.

Antonio leaned forward, hands clenched round his knees; he had taken off his stylish jacket and she could see a pulse throbbing in his neck. She remembered him playing marbles in the baked mud outside their home and throwing a tantrum when he lost.

He said, ‘Please listen to me. It is for your sake that I am telling you this.’

‘Tell it to your wife.’

‘Listen, woman! This is a farce, can’t you see that? The Popular Front came to power because enemies joined forces. But they are already at blows. How can an Anarchist who believes that “every man should be his own government” collaborate with a Communist who wants a bureaucratic government? As soon as the war comes the Russians, the Communists, will start to take over. Do you want that?’

‘Who said anything about a war?’

‘There is no doubt about it,’ Antonio said lighting a cigarette. ‘Within months we will be at war with each other.’

‘Who will I fight against? A few empty-headed Fascists in blue shirts?’

‘Listen, my sister. We cannot sit back and watch Spain bleed to death. The strikes, the burnings, the murders, the rule of the mob.’ He stared at the black tobacco smouldering in his cigarette. ‘We have the army, we have the Church, we have the money, we have the friends …’

‘Friends?’

‘I hear things,’ said Antonio who had always been a conspirator. ‘And I tell you this: the days of the Republic are numbered.’

Jesús, eyes half closed, said, ‘I am sure everything will sort itself out.’ He had taken a notebook from his pocket and was writing in it with an indelible pencil.

‘You were a Socialist once,’ Ana said to Antonio.

‘And I was poor. If I had stayed a Socialist or a Communist or an Anarchist I would have stayed poor. How many uprisings have there been in the past 50 years? What we need is stability through strength!’

‘And who will give that to us?’ She took the bota from her husband, poured inspiration down her throat. Her brother a Fascist? What about their brother, the sight knocked out of one eye by a police truncheon? What about their father, sacked by a priest with a trough of gold beneath his church? What about the miners, with their homemade bombs, gunned down by the military? What about the peasant paid with the chaff of the landowners’ corn?

‘There are many good men waiting to take command.’

‘Of what?’

‘I have said enough,’ Antonio said.

Jesús, licking the pencil point, said, ‘Good sense will prevail. Spain has seen too much violence.’

‘Spain was fashioned by violence,’ Antonio said. ‘But now a time for peace is upon us. After the battle ahead,’ he said. ‘Join us. The fighting will be brief but while it rages you can take the children into the country.’

She stared at him in astonishment. ‘Have you truly lost your senses?’

‘Life will be hard for those who oppose us.’

‘Threats already? A time for peace is upon us?’

Jesús said, ‘The milk of mother Spain is blood.’ He wrote rapidly in his notebook.

Antonio poured more wine down his throat and stood up, hands on hips. ‘I have tried,’ he said. ‘For the sake of you and your husband and your children. If you change your mind let me know.’

‘Why ask me? Why not ask my husband?’

Antonio didn’t reply. He began to walk down the slope towards the Manzanares dividing the parkland from the heights of the city.

When he was 50 metres away from her she called to him. The diamond-shaped kite dived and struck the ground; the bird of prey turned and flapped its leisurely way towards the mountains.

‘What is it?’

He stood there, suspended between distant childhood, and adulthood.

She raised her arm, bunched her fist and shouted, ‘No pasarán!’

The militiamen came for the priest at dawn, a dangerous time in the lawless streets of Madrid in the summer of 1936. Failing to find him, they turned on his church.

The studded doors gave before the fourth assault with a sawn-off telegraph pole. Christ on his altar went next, battered from the cross with the butt of an ancient rifle. They tore a saint and a madonna from two side chapels and trampled on them; they dragged curtains and pews into the street outside and made a pyre of them; they smashed the stained-glass window which had shed liquid colours on the altar as Ana and Jesus stood before the plump priest at their wedding. They were at war, these militiamen in blue overalls, some stripped to the waist, and a terrible exaltation was upon them.

Ana, who knew where the priest was, watched from the gaping doors and could not find it in herself to blame the wild men who were discharging the accumulated hatred of decades. Since the Fascist rising on July 17 the ‘Irresponsibles’ in the Republican ranks had butchered thousands and invariably it was the clergy who were dispatched first. Ana had heard terrible tales; of a priest who had been scourged and crowned with thorns, given vinegar to drink and then shot; of the exhumed bodies of nuns exhibited in Barcelona; of the severed ear of a cleric tossed to a crowd after he had been gored to death in a bullring.

But although she understood – the flowers that her father had taken from the graves of the privileged had been almost dead – such happenings sickened her and she could not allow them to happen to the priest hiding in the vault of the church with the gold and silver plate.

The leader of the gang, the Red Tigers, shouted, ‘If we cannot find the priest then we shall burn the house of his boss.’ He had the starved features of a fanatic; his eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of altar wine.

Ana, to whom blasphemy did not come easily, said, ‘What good will that do, burro, burning God’s house?’

‘He has many houses,’ the leader said. ‘Like all Fascists.’ He thrust a can of gasoline into the hand of a bare-chested militiaman who began to splash it on the walls. ‘What has God ever done for us?’

‘He did you no harm, Federico. You have not done so badly with your olive oil. How much was it per litre before the uprising?’

He advanced upon her angrily but spoke quietly so that no one else could hear him. ‘Shut your mouth, woman. Do you want that scribbling husband of yours shot for collaborating with the Fascists?’

‘As if he would collaborate with anyone. No one would believe you. They would think you were trying to take his place in my bed.’

‘The olive oil,’ the leader said more loudly, ‘is 30 centimos a litre. Who can say fairer than that?’

‘I asked what it was.’

‘So you know where the priest is?’ he shouted as though she had confessed and the militiamen paused in their pillaging and looked at her curiously.

She stared into the nave of the church where, with her parents and her brothers, she had prayed for a decent world and a reprieve for a stray alley cat and for her grandfather whose lungs played music when he breathed. She remembered the boredom of devotion and the giggles that sometimes squeezed past her lips and the decency of it all. She stepped back so that she could see the blue dome. A militiaman attacking a confessional with an axe shouted. ‘Do you know where the priest is, Ana Gomez?’

And it was then that Ana Gomez was visited by a vision of herself: one fist clenched, head held high, the fierceness that had been in gestation delivered. She told Federico to drag a pew from the pile in the street and when, grumbling, he obeyed, she stood on it.

She said, ‘Yes, I do know where the priest is,’ and before they could protest she held up one hand. ‘Hear me, then do what you will.’

As they fell silent she pointed at one young man with the tanned skin and hard muscles of a building labourer: ‘You, Nacho, were married in this church, were you not?’ And, when he nodded, ‘Then your children are the children of God and this is their house. Can you stand back and see it burned?’ He unclenched one big fist and stared at the palm in case it contained an answer.

‘And you,’ to a white-fleshed man whose belly sagged over his belt, ‘should be ashamed. Wasn’t your mother buried in the graveyard behind the church barely two weeks ago? Do you want her soul to go up in flames?’

‘And you,’ to a youth who had filled his pockets with candles, ‘put those back. Don’t you know they are prayers?’ She paused, waited while he took back the candles which cost ten centimos each.

When he returned she raised both hands. ‘Our fight is not against God: it is against those who have prostituted his love. If you take up arms against God you are destroying yourselves because you came into this world with his blessing.’

‘So the priest who grew fat while we starved should not be punished?’ Federico demanded.

They looked at her, these vandals, and there was a collective pleading in their gaze.

Again she waited. Raised one arm, clenched her fist.

‘Of course he must be punished. So must all the other black crows who betrayed the Church. Beat him, spit on him’ – they wouldn’t settle for less – ‘but don’t degrade yourselves. Why stain your hands with the blood of one fat hypocrite?’

They cheered and she watched the muscles move on their lean ribs, and she saw the light in their eyes.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Nacho.

Another pause. Then, ‘Beneath your feet.’ They stared at the baked mud. ‘In the vaults. With the gold and silver.’

‘Who has the key?’

‘The fat priest. Who else?’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get him.’

She went into the church. Long before the priest had started to squirrel the altar plate in the vaults he had given her father a key; she had it in her hand now as she made her way through the vestry to the door. The key turned easily; in the thin light filtering through a barred window she saw a kneeling figure.

The priest said, ‘So it has come to this,’ and she thought, ‘Please God don’t let him plead.’ ‘Here, take this.’ He handed her a gold chalice. ‘And help me.’

She distanced herself from him and said, ‘This is what you must do. When you emerge in the sunlight they’ll beat you and scream at you and spit on you. Run as if the wrath of God is behind you’ – which it must be, she thought – ‘and make your way to the old house where I used to live.’

‘They’ll kill me,’ the priest said. As her eyesight became accustomed to the gloom she saw that his plump cheeks had sagged into pouches. ‘And make me dig my own grave.’

She wanted to say, ‘My father could do it for you if you hadn’t sacked him,’ but instead she said, ‘Give them the gold and silver, that will speed you on your way.’

‘It’s a trap,’ the priest said. He bowed his head and gabbled prayers. ‘How can they hate me like this? I have been a good priest to them.’

‘That is for God to decide.’

‘You are a good woman,’ the priest said, standing up.

She handed him back the chalice. ‘Take this and the other ornaments and follow me.’

He said, ‘I wish I were brave,’ and she wished he hadn’t said that because it made her think of her husband.

‘If you believe,’ she said, ‘if you truly believe then you need not fear.’

‘Do you believe, Ana Gomez?’

‘In a fable? A black book full of stories? Angels with wings and a devil who lives in a dark and deep place? Yes, I believe,’ she said and led the way out of the vaults.

In the vestry she ripped up a surplice, wrapped it round the leg of a shattered chair, dipped it in gasoline and lit it with a match. She picked up a green and gold vestment, soaked that in gasoline and, torch carried high in one hand, vestment in the other, emerged into the sunlight.

The mob stared at her, confused. She threw the vestment on the pyre; the gold thread glittered in the sunlight. She applied the torch to it. Flames leaped across the cloth, swarmed over the gasoline-soaked fixtures of the church. Thick smoke rose and sparks danced in it.

She turned and signalled to the priest lurking in the church. He had removed his clerical collar and he was wearing a grey jacket and trousers and big black boots, and was more clown than cleric. His eyes narrowed in the sunlight, his dewlap quivered.

He threw the altar plate at the foot of the flames and began to run. She spat at him, threw the torch on the pyre and ran towards the gold and silver.

The crowd hesitated; then those at the front made a dash for the booty. Federico, the leader, held aloft a gold salver. ‘And we had to count our centimos,’ he shouted.

Then they were after the priest as, weaving and stumbling, he reached the edge of the poor square. Some made a gauntlet in front of him; rifle butts and axe handles smote him on the shoulders. He tried to protect his face with his plump hands but he uttered no sound. Ana reached him and spat again and hissed to him to run down an alley to his left.

She blocked the alley. ‘To think we obeyed such a donkey,’ she cried and indeed he looked too absurd to pursue.

She listened to the receding clatter of his boots on the cobblestones. The pursuers hesitated and, frowning, looked to each other for guidance.

Federico pushed his way through them. ‘Out of the way, woman,’ he said. ‘We must have the priest.’

‘You will have to move me first.’ She folded her arms across her breast and stared at him.

He advanced upon her but as he reached her a burning pew slipped from the pyre belching flames like cannon fire, and smoke heavy with ash billowed across the square.

Ana raised her arms above her head. ‘It is God’s word.’

As they dispersed she returned to the church, locked the door and made her way down rutted lanes to the house where the priest was waiting for her.

She had listened to La Pasionaria broadcasting on Radio Madrid. ‘The whole country throbs with rage in defiance … It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’

And on 20 July she had stood ready to die in the Plaza de España, where Don Quixote’s lance pointed towards the Montana Barracks in which Fascist troops were beleaguered – Fascists later pointed out that Quixote’s outstretched arm closely resembled a Fascist salute – and she had moved inexorably forward with the mob as they stormed the garrison.

She had watched the troops being butchered, although many, it was learned later, had been loyal to the Republicans, and she had watched a marksman drop officers from a gallery high in the red and grey barracks on to the ground.

She had heard about the Republican execution squads, the bodies piled up in execution pits at the university and behind the Prado – more than 10,000 in one month, it was rumoured – and she had wondered if her brother, Antonio, had been among them because although the bourgeoisie and the priests were fair game there was no more highly prized victim than a Falangist.

And she had heard about the inexorable progress of the Fascists in the south, under the command of General Francisco Franco with his Army of Africa – crack Spanish troops in the Foreign Legion whose battle cry was ‘Long live death’ and Moors who raped when they weren’t killing – and General Emilio Mola’s four columns in the north.

To Mola fell some of the responsibility for the killings in Madrid. Hadn’t he boasted, ‘In Madrid I have a Fifth Column: men now in hiding who will rise and support us the moment we march,’ thus inciting the gunmen, many of them criminals released from jail in an earlier amnesty, to further blood-letting? He had also boasted to a newspaper correspondent that he would drink coffee with him in the Puerta del Sol, so every day coffee was poured for him at the Molinero café.

She had doled out bread to refugees roaming the capital, in the sweating alleys of its old town, on the broad avenues of its heartland, and when the first aircraft, three Ju-52s, had bombed the city on 27 August she had organized air-raid precautions for the barrio – shatter-proofing windows with brown paper, painting street lamps blue, making cellars habitable.

So what am I doing drinking coffee in my old home with the enemy, a priest?

Her brother, a street cleaner whose eye had been knocked out long ago by the police, railed. ‘What is this fat crow doing here? He should have been crucified like all the other sons of whores.’

Salvador harboured a bitterness that was difficult for anyone with two eyes to understand, Ana thought. The patch over the socket stared at her blackly. Salvador hosed down streets at dawn but often his aim was bad.

She said quietly, ‘He baptized you and he married me and he listened to our sins.’

‘Did he ever listen to his own? Did he ever do penance?’

The priest, cheeks trembling as he spoke, said, ‘I did my best for all of you. For all of my flock.’

‘For my eye?’

‘That was none of my doing.’

‘Did you pray for the miners in Asturias?’

‘I pray for Mankind,’ the priest said.

‘Ah, the Kingdom of God. We have to pay high rents to occupy it, father.’

‘Jesus was the son of a carpenter. A poor man.’

‘But, unlike us, he could work miracles. Why did you only educate the rich, father?’

‘We have made mistakes,’ the priest admitted.

This took Salvador by surprise. He adjusted his black patch, good eye staring at Ana accusingly. The three of them, and her father who was dying on the other side of the thin wall, were the only people in the house. The house was a hovel but that had never occurred to her when they had been a family. The patterned tiles on the floor were worn; the whitewashed walls had been moulded with the palms of plasterers’ hands and, since her mother’s death, dust had collected in the hollows.

Salvador lit a cigarette and puffed fiercely. ‘I shall have to report his presence to the authorities,’ he said.

‘Which authorities?’

This bothered him too, as Ana had known it would. Before July he had supported the Socialist Trade Union. But now he suspected that Communists were infiltrating it – Russians who had forged tyranny instead of liberty from their Revolution. And they in their turn were at odds with the anti-Stalin Communists.

So Salvador was beginning to move towards the Anarchists, who believed in freedom through force, and didn’t give a damn about political power.

Already families were divided between the Fascists and the Republicans. Please God, Ana prayed while the priest shakily sipped his coffee, do not let the Cause divide us too.

‘The police,’ Salvador said lamely.

‘Which police? There are many of those, too.’

‘Stop trying to confuse me,’ Salvador said. ‘Get rid of him,’ he said pointing at the priest.

‘Kill him?’

‘Just get rid of him. I don’t want to see his face round here.’

‘Since when was it your home?’

‘You think our father would want a priest, that priest, here?’

‘I don’t know what our father would want,’ Ana said.

‘You realize,’ he said, touching his black patch, ‘that we are now the revolutionaries?’

‘Weren’t we always, in spirit?’

‘Now we are doing something about it and we have the Fascist insurgents to thank for it. We are taking over the country.’

‘Do you think the Fascists know about that?’ Ana asked, and the priest said, ‘We are all God’s people,’ and Salvador said, ‘So why are we fighting each other?’

Ana and Salvador looked deeply at each other but they did not speak about Antonio, their brother who had betrayed them. Had he managed to reach Fascist armies in the north or south? It was possible: certainly Republicans trapped behind Fascist lines were reaching Madrid. Salvador pushed back the top of his blue monos exposing his right shoulder. ‘Do you know what that is?’ pointing at bruised flesh.

‘Of course,’ said Ana who knew that he wanted a distraction from their brother. ‘The recoil of a rifle butt.’

‘The badge of death,’ Salvador said. ‘That’s what the Fascists look for when they capture a town. Anyone with these bruises has been fighting against them and they kill them. In Badajoz they herded hundreds with these bruises into the bullring and mowed them down with machine-guns.’

‘You have been firing a rifle?’ Ana looked at him with disbelief. ‘With one eye?’

‘Think about it,’ Salvador said. ‘When you fire a rifle do you not close one eye?’

‘Where have you been firing a rifle?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Not, who have I been shooting?’ He smiled, one eye mocking. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a murderer. Not yet. There’s a range on the Casa de Campo and I have been practising.’

From the other side of the wall they heard a moan.

Ana, followed by Salvador, went to their father who was dying from tuberculosis. He looked like an autumn leaf lying there, Ana thought. His grey hair grew in tufts, his deep-set eyes gazed placidly at death. On the table beside him stood a bottle of mineral water and a bowl in which to spit. His prized possession, a stick with an ivory handle shaped like a dog’s head, lay on the stiff clean sheet beside him. He was 67 years old and he looked 80; his mother-in-law, who walked in that moment, would outlive him.

He acknowledged his children with a slight nod of his head and stared beyond them.

‘Is there anything you want?’ Ana asked.

A slight shake of his head.

Salvador took one of his hands, a cluster of bones covered with loose skin, and pressed it gently. ‘We are winning the war,’ he said but the old man didn’t care about wars. He closed his eyes, kept them shut for a few moments, then opened them. Some of his lost expression returned and there was an angle to his mouth that might have been a smile. Ana turned. The priest stood behind them. Salvador rounded on him but Ana put her finger to her lips. He stretched out one hand and the priest who had taken away his living for stealing a few expiring blossoms held it.

‘May God be with you,’ the priest said.

Back in the living-room the priest said, ‘I think it would be a good thing if I stayed. I can administer the last rites.’

Salvador wet one finger, drew it across his own throat, and said, ‘But who will administer them to you?’

Ana’s sister-in-law, Antonio’s wife, came to her home one late September day. She had discarded the elegant clothes that Ana associated with girls in Estampa and her permanent waves had spent themselves; she was pregnant, her ankles were swollen. Ana regarded her with hostility.

‘Slumming, Martine Ruiz?’ she demanded at the door. Not that the shanty was a slum; it might not have electric light or running water but Jesús left no dust on the photographs of stern ancestors on the walls of the living-room, and the nursery, if that’s what you could call one half of a partitioned bedroom, still smelled of babies, and the marble slab of the sink was scoured clean. But it was very different from Antonio’s house to the south of the Retiro which was built on three floors with two balconies.

‘Please let me in,’ Martine said. Ana hesitated but there was a hunted look about the French woman and, noting the swell of her belly, she opened the door wider.

Jesús was stirring a bubbling stew with a wooden ladle. Food was becoming scarcer as the Fascists advanced on Madrid but he always managed to provide. He greeted Martine without animosity and continued to stir.

Martine sat on a chair, upholstered in red brocade, that Jesús had found on a rubbish dump, the expensive leather of her shoes biting the flesh above her ankles.

Ana said, ‘Take them off, if you wish.’ Martine eased the shoes off, sighing. ‘So what can we poor revolutionaries do for you?’ Ana asked.

Martine spoke in fluent Spanish. Jesús should leave, she said. Ana shrugged. Everyone suspected everyone these days. She said to Jesús, ‘I hear there are some potatoes in the market; see if you can get some.’

‘Very well, querida. Take care of the stew.’ He wiped his hands on a cloth and, smiling gently, walked into the lambent sunshine.

‘He is a kind man,’ Martine said. ‘A gentle man.’

Born in the wrong time, Ana thought. ‘You never thought much of him in the past.’

‘I don’t understand politics. They are not a woman’s business.’

‘Tell that to La Pasionaria. She is our leader, our inspiration.’

‘Really? I thought Manuel Azaña was the leader.’

‘He is president,’ Ana said. ‘That is different. He is a figurehead: Dolores is our lifeblood.’ Martine leaned back in the chair. Ana noticed muddy stains beneath her eyes. ‘So what is it you want?’ she asked her.

Martine arranged her hands across her belly. She stared at Ana. Whatever was coming needed courage. When she finally spoke the words were a blizzard.

‘The police came yesterday,’ she said. ‘SIM, the Secret Police. They asked many questions about Antonio. When had I last seen him? When was I going to see him? Trick questions … Did he give your daughter a present when you saw him? Why did my father help him to escape? Then they went to see my father. As you know, he has a weak heart.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Ana said. She poured Martine a glass of mineral water and handed it to her.

‘He was very distressed. Another interrogation could kill him.’ She sipped her mineral water and stared at the bubbles spiralling to the surface. ‘The police came to my house again this morning. They asked questions about Marisa.’ She blinked away tears. ‘Not threats exactly but hints … What a pretty little girl my daughter was, intelligent … They hoped that no harm would befall her.’

Ana said firmly, ‘The police would not harm Marisa.’

‘If they took me away it would harm her. And what of her brother or sister?’ pointing at her belly. ‘What if I were thrown into prison? I wouldn’t be the first. Then they wait, the SIM, until the husband hears that his wife is in gaol, that his child is starving. Then he gives himself up. Then he is questioned, tortured and shot in one of the execution pits.’

‘Has Antonio contacted you?’

Martine looked away furtively. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said, voice strumming with the lie.

‘That wasn’t what I asked you.’

‘I had a message,’ she said. ‘Through a friend.’

‘Is he well?’

‘He is full of spirit.’

‘He is a fool,’ Ana said. Martine said nothing. ‘So how can I help you?’

‘You can move about Madrid. Meet people, talk to them.’

‘And you can’t?’

‘None of us can.’

‘Us?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Ana said. ‘Fascists.’

‘Anyone with any property or position. Old scores are being settled.’

‘But not with pregnant women. When is the baby due?’

‘I am followed wherever I go,’ Martine said. ‘They want Antonio badly. He knew many things. The baby is due in February,’ she said.

‘You were followed here?’

‘Does it matter? We are sisters-in-law. But there are certain places I cannot visit …’ She hesitated. ‘Can I trust you to keep a secret?’

‘It depends. The names and addresses of Mola’s Fifth Column? No, you cannot trust me.’

Martine fanned herself with a black and silver fan; her hair, once so precise, was damp with sweat. She said, ‘Does the man in the check jacket mean anything to you?’

Ana frowned; it meant nothing.

‘He is an Englishman. And he wears a check jacket.’

‘Stop playing games,’ Ana said.

‘I want you to swear …’

‘I’ll swear nothing. Now, please, I am hungry and Jesús will be back from the market soon.’

Martine said abruptly, ‘I must escape from Spain. For Marisa’s sake. For the sake of your nephew,’ she said slyly, stroking her belly with one hand.

‘The man in the check jacket can help you?’

‘His name is Lance. He’s sometimes known as Dagger. He’s an attaché at the British Embassy in Calle Fernando el Santo. It’s full of refugees …’

‘From Mola’s army? From Franco’s army?’

‘Don’t joke,’ Martine said. ‘You know what I mean. Refugees from the militia, from the Assault Guards. Lance has been getting prisoners out of gaol. He may be able to get them out of Spain.’

‘And you want me to …’

‘I can’t,’ Martine said.

Ana was silent. She thought about Antonio and then she thought about Martine’s daughter, Marisa, and then she thought about the unborn child and then she thought about the priest.

She said, ‘Would you mind travelling with a man of God, a black crow?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Martine said.

Ana considered telling her sister-in-law about the priest. But no, you didn’t confide in women such as her brother’s wife: they used secrets as others use bullets. But maybe this man Lance could take the priest off her hands. And Martine.

She thought, Mi madre! What am I, a daughter of revolution, doing plotting the escape of a hypocritical priest and the daughter of a Falangist?

‘Where does this Englishman live?’ she asked.

‘Calle de Espalter. Number 11. You could go there pretending to offer your services as a cleaning woman.’

Ana laughed. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I almost admire you.’

At that moment Jesús returned carrying a basket half filled with sprouting potatoes.

Ana went to Calle de Espalter, a short, tree-lined street adjoining the Retiro, a few days later. It was the beginning of October and the air had cooled and the trees in the park were weary of summer. Militiamen, rifles slung over their shoulders, patrolled the street because it was in a wealthy and elegant part of Madrid; a banner fluttered in the breeze: LONG LIVE THE SOVIET. Broken glass crunched under Ana’s feet.

Two assault guards outside the thin block regarded her suspiciously. They wore blue uniforms and they were the Republic’s answer to the Guardia Civil who, with their shiny black tricorns and green-grey uniforms, were always suspected of Fascist sympathies.

‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked her. He was smoking a thin cigarette and smoke dribbled from his flattened nose.

‘Do I have to give reasons for walking in my own city?’ She folded her arms and stared at the guards whose reputation for killing was unequalled in Spain. Had they not assassinated José Calvo Sotelo and helped to spark off the war?

‘You have to give us reasons,’ the guard said but he regarded her warily because some of the women of Madrid were becoming more ferocious than their menfolk: La Pasionaria had led them from the kitchen and the bedroom on to the dangerous streets.

‘Then I will give you one: because I am alive.’

The guard rubbed his dented nose and looked at his colleague for help. His companion said: ‘Papers?’

‘Of course.’ She made no move to show them.

‘If you will forgive me,’ the first guard said, pointing at her cheap red skirt and white blouse, ‘you do not look as though you live here. Do you, perhaps, work for a capitalist?’

Ana spat. The assault guard took a step back.

‘I hope to find work. I have to feed my children and my husband who is the leader of a militia group. But not with a capitalist: with a foreigner. Now if you will excuse me.’ She stepped between them, continued up the street, turned into number 11 and mounted the stairs.

The man who let her into the small apartment was thin with a strong nose and a small moustache; he laughed a lot and he wore a check jacket.

She asked if it was safe to talk. This made him laugh and she began to wonder if this was truly the man who had supposedly whisked prisoners from gaols past the guns of waiting murder squads.

She said, ‘I have heard that you help people on the death lists.’

He stared at her and for a moment she glimpsed the wisdom which he was at pains to conceal.

‘But you, señora,’ he said in his accented Spanish, ‘are not on those lists. You, surely, are a woman of the revolution.’

She told him about Martine and the children, one unborn, and she told him about the priest. She added, ‘If anyone knows I came to you for help I will be killed.’

‘No one will know,’ he said and this time he didn’t laugh. ‘But what am I to do with your sister-in-law and her daughter and your priest?’

‘Hide them in your embassy?’

‘Most of them are in a private hospital and it’s stuffed full already.’

‘Please, Señor Lance.’

‘I will make inquiries.’

‘La palabra inglesa,’ she said. ‘The word of an Englishman. That is all I need to know.’

‘But …’

‘You have made me very happy,’ she said when, hands spread in submission, he laughed; she laughed too.

He made a note of the addresses where Martine and the priest were staying and led her to the door.

‘One last thing, Señor Lance. If anyone asks, I came for a job cleaning your apartment.’

She walked into the sunlit street where, behind shuttered windows, families lived in twilight.

Madrid was doomed.

How could it be otherwise? The Government had packed its bags and on 6 November fled to Valencia, leaving behind a sense of betrayal – and an ageing general, José Miaja, who looked more like a bespectacled monk than a soldier, in charge of its defence. Radio Lisbon had broadcast a vivid description of General Francisco Franco entering the city on a white horse. And the foreign correspondents viewing the Fascist build-up to the final assault from the ninth floor of the Telefónica on the Gran Via were predicting its capitulation.

By the first weekend in the month the Fascists – Moors and crack Foreign Legionnaires mostly – stormed down the woodland parkland of the Casa de Campo crossing the bridges of the Manzanares – what was left of it after the long hot summer – and scaling the heights beside the palace. Could an ill-equipped, ill-assorted ragbag of militia, sleepless and hungry, skulls echoing with explosions, some armed with canned fruit tins stuffed with dynamite, defend itself against 105 mm artillery and the German bombers of the Condor Legion?

Some thought it could.

Among them La Pasionaria who, dressed in black and fierce of face, preached courage to dazed fighters in blue overalls.

Among them a young sailor named Coll who tossed dynamite beneath Italian tanks rumbling towards the centre of the city, disabled them, proving that tanks weren’t invincible, and got himself killed.

Among them children digging trenches and old women boiling olive oil to pour on Fascist heads and younger women defending a bridge vulnerable to enemy attack and tram-drivers taking passengers to the battle front for five centimos.

And their belief given wings by the spectacle of Russian fighters, rats, shooting the bombers out of the cold skies and the soldiers, many wearing corduroys and blue berets, steel helmets on their belts, who materialized on the Sunday 8 November, singing the Internationale in a foreign tongue.

Russians, of course. Word spread through the bruised avenues and alleys: relief was at hand. Except that they weren’t Russians at all; they were 1,900 recruits of the 11th International Brigade, Germans, British, French, Belgians and Poles; Communists, crooks, intellectuals, poets and peasants.

But they armed the ragbag of defenders with hope.

The Ju-52 bomber looked innocent. It had split from its formation and, with the November-grey sky temporarily free of Russian fighters, it was looking for a target with grotesque nonchalance.

Ana noticed that it was heading in the general direction of her old home but only vaguely because at the time she was preoccupied with an argument with her husband.

Jesús was writing about the war for the Communist newspaper Mundo Obrero and providing captions for the fine, fierce posters the Republicans were producing.

She kicked off her rope-soled shoes and said, ‘So how was the housekeeping today?’ Rosana, who was eating sunflower seeds in the corner of the room, spitting the husks into a basket, turned her head; she was ten years old and sensitive to atmosphere.

‘I got some rice,’ he said. ‘A few weevils in it but we don’t get enough meat as it is.’

‘It’s a pity,’ she said, ‘that you have to write for a Communist newspaper.’

‘I write for the Cause. In any case, isn’t La Pasionaria a Communist?’

‘She is for the Cause,’ said Ana who knew she was a Communist too.

‘She is a great woman,’ Jesús agreed.

‘Fire in her belly,’ said Ana who had just taken food and brandy to the high positions overlooking the Casa de Campo where, on 1 May, her brother Antonio had announced his betrayal. She had also crossed the Manzanares to the suburb of Carabanchel, and taken rifles and ammunition from dead men in the trenches to give to the living and she had taken a dispatch through the centre of Madrid, through the Gran Via, Bomb Alley, where she had seen a small boy lying dead in a pool of his own blood, and the corpse of an old man with a pipe still stuck stiffly in his mouth.

‘But a Communist nonetheless,’ Jesús remarked.

‘So?’

‘It was you who were complaining that I write for a Communist newspaper. It would be a terrible thing, would it not, if we fell out within ourselves. Communists and Anarchists and Socialists …’

Ana said, ‘It is better to fight than to preach.’

Rosana spat the striped, black-and-white husk of a sunflower seed into the basket.

‘I am no fighter,’ Jesús said.

‘Are you proud of it?’

‘I am not proud of anything.’ He went to the charcoal stove to examine the black saucepan of rice from which steam was gently rising. The ancestors on the walls looked on.

‘Not even me?’

‘Of you I am proud. And Rosana.’ He smiled at their daughter.

Rosana said, ‘When is the war going to finish, papa?’ and Jesús told her, ‘Soon, when the bad men have been driven away from our town.’

‘By whom?’ Ana asked, feeling herself driven by a terrible perversity.

‘By our soldiers,’ Jesús said.

Rosana said, ‘Why don’t you fight, papa?’

‘Some people are born to be soldiers. Others …’

‘Housekeepers,’ Ana said.

‘Or poets,’ he said. ‘Or painters or mechanics. Mechanics have to repair the tanks and the guns; they cannot fight.’ He smiled but there was a sad curve to his lips.

Rosana cracked a husk between her front teeth and said, ‘The father of Marta Sanchez was wounded in the stomach. He can’t eat any more because there’s a big hole there.’

Her hair was curly like her father’s and her teeth were neat but already she is obstinate, like me, Ana thought. She wants many things and she uses guile to get them; she will be a handful, this one.

‘Why are Fascists different from us?’ Rosana asked and Jesús said, ‘I sometimes wonder if they are.’

The ground shook as bombs exploded. Yesterday Pablo had come back with a jagged sliver of shrapnel so hot that it had burned his hand.

Ana said, ‘Because they are greedy.’

‘And cruel?’ Rosana asked.

‘But they are Spaniards,’ Jesús said. ‘Born in different circumstances.’

‘You called them bad men just now,’ Rosana said.

‘Ah, you are truly your mother’s daughter.’ He stirred the rice adding fish broth.

And Ana thought: I should be doing that and he should be peering down the sights of a machine-gun, but since the war had begun the role of many women had changed, as though it had never been intended any other way, as though there had always been a resilience in those women that had never been recognized. And respect for women had been discovered to such an extent that, so it was said, men and women slept together at the front without sex.

She heard the sound of a plane strumming the sky; the Ju-52, perhaps, returning from its nonchalant mission. She hoped the Russian-built rats fell upon it before it landed. She wondered about the pilot and bomb-aimer, Germans presumably. She wondered about the pilots of the Capronis, Italians. Did any of them understand the war and had they even heard of the small towns they bombed? She thought the most ironic aspect of the war was the presence of the Moors: it had taken the Christians 700 years to get rid of them and here they were fighting for the Church.

Ana took the bota from beside the sink and poured resinous wine down her throat; it made a channel through her worries. Rosana picked up her skipping-rope and went into the yard.

Jesús settled his thin body in an upright chair beside Ana, took the bota, wetted his throat and said, ‘Why are brothers killing brothers, Ana. Can you tell me that?’

‘Because it has to be,’ she said. ‘Because they were bleeding us.’

‘Could we not have used words instead of bullets?’

‘Spaniards have always fought.’ Her voice lost some of its roughness and her words became smooth pebbles in her mouth. ‘But perhaps our time has come. Perhaps this war was born a long time ago and has to be settled. Perhaps we will not fight again,’ she said.

‘But we will always talk,’ he said, smiling at her as he had once smiled in the Plaza Mayor as she drank iced coffee through a straw and thought what a wise young man he was. ‘I like you when you’re thoughtful,’ he said.

‘Is that so rare?’ She drank more wine, one of those sour wines that get sweeter by the mouthful. She passed the bota to Jesus. ‘When will the rice be ready?’ she asked.

‘Afterwards,’ he said.

‘After what?’

He bolted the door and took the combs from her hair so that it fell dark and shining across her shoulders.

The bomb had been a small one. It had removed her old home from the row of hunched houses as neatly as a dentist extracts a tooth but had scarcely damaged its neighbours, although some balconies hung precariously from their walls. Light rain was falling and the meagre possessions of her father and her grandmother were scattered across the wet mud on the street: commode, sewing basket, cotton tangled in festive patterns, rocking chair moving in the breeze as though it were occupied, Bible opened in prayer, brass bedstead on which her father had waited for death.

The bodies were laid on stretchers. She lifted the sheets from each and gazed upon the faces. Her father and grandmother, ages merging in death, Salvador now blind in both eyes, all anger spent. She did not look at their wounds, only their faces. Neighbours watched her calmly: these days death was a companion, not an intruder.

Only one occupant of the house had been saved, the priest. Blast from bombs is as fickle as it is ferocious and it had bundled him on to the street, plumply alive beneath his shredded clothes. The priest who was due to report to Lance at the British Embassy that evening said to Ana, ‘It was a merciful release for your father.’ She walked over to the brass bedstead. ‘I prayed for their souls,’ he said. She covered the bed with a sheet because it was indecent to leave it exposed.

She said: ‘Why don’t you go out and fight like a man?’

Jesús, glancing up from an exercise book in which he was writing a poem, looked bewildered.

So did the children, Rosana crayoning planes laying bombs like eggs, Pablo who, at the age of eight, already looked like his father, arranging his shrapnel and his brass cartridge cases and his strip of camouflage said to have been ripped from a Ju-52 by the guns of a rat.

‘A little while ago …’

‘I don’t care about a little while ago. A little while ago was a long time ago. The priest was saved,’ she said. ‘Why the priest?’

‘I don’t understand.’

She told him.

‘Ana, the children.’

‘They have to know.’

Pablo stared hard at the piece of shrapnel lying in the palm of his hand.

‘Why the priest?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, pointing at the children and shaking his head.

‘I don’t expect you to. What would you know about living and dying? It’s written in blood, not ink.’

Jesús said to the children, ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’

They began to gather up their possessions.

In the distance Ana could hear gunfire, the firework splutter of rifles, the chatter of machine-guns and the bark of heavy artillery.

‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I saw a peasant, a refugee, lie like Coll in front of a tank. The treads rolled over him, crushing him, but the tank blew up.’

‘You want me to get killed. Is that it?’

‘I want your children to be proud of you.’

The children remained absorbed with clearing up but Pablo’s bottom lip trembled.

Jesús stood up, knocking the bottle of ink over the scrubbed table. He fetched a newspaper and soaked it up. His fingers were stained blue. The children were silent, following him with their eyes. He walked to the door.

‘I hope the bottle of anis is full in the bar,’ Ana said.

He stood silhouetted against the fading, rain-swept afternoon light. He looked very thin – he didn’t eat as much as the children and, although he was only 32, he stooped a little, but still she let him go.

When she went to bed he had not returned.

In the morning she left the children with a neighbour and marched to the front with a platoon of women militia. They were dressed in blue, and they carried rifles on their shoulders and food for the men. They went first to University City, the model campus and suburb to the north-west of Madrid, near Tetuan, where Fascists who had crossed the Manzanares were fighting hand-to-hand with the militia and the International Brigades. They fought for faculties, libraries, laboratories, rooms. The walls of half-finished buildings swayed; the air smelled of cordite, brick-dust and distemper, and rang with foreign tongues. The Moors bayoneted the wounded; the Germans placed bombs in elevators and sent them up to explode among the Moors.

Ana shot a Moor wearing a kerchief as he raised his bayonet above a German from the Thaelmann Battalion of the 11th International Brigade who was bleeding from a chest wound. It was the first time she had killed. She took provisions to the British defending the Hall of Philosophy and Letters against the Fascists who had already taken the Institute of Hygiene and Cancer and the Santa Cristina and Clinical hospitals. Someone told her there was an English poet named Cornford among the machine-gunners. A poet!

She went about her duties coldly. She no longer thought about young men who knew nothing about each other killing each other. She thought instead about her grandmother and her father and her one-eyed brother who were dead, and she thought about the priest who was alive.

With the other women she descended the heights to a bridge across the Manzanares which the Fascists hadn’t crossed. The Moors were grouped at the other side, Foreign Legionnaires with red tassels on their grey-green gorillo caps behind them. Assault guards and militiamen held the east neck of the bridge, another inlet to the city. The guards were armed with grenades and rifles and one of them was firing a Lewis machine-gun. When Ana and her platoon arrived the dark-skinned Moors in ragged uniforms were advancing across the bridge while the militiamen fitted another magazine on to the Lewis gun. Ana knelt behind them, aimed her rifle, a Swiss antique made in 1886, and squeezed the trigger; the rifle bucked, a Moor fell but she couldn’t tell whether it was her bullet that had hit him because the other militiamen were firing, although without precision and she was dubious about the resolution of these exhausted defenders who had never wanted to be soldiers. There was no doubt about the resolution of the Moors trained by the Spaniards to fight bandits in Morocco: they ignored the bullets and stepped over the dead and wounded.

For some reason the magazine wouldn’t fit on the Lewis gun; it was probably a magazine for another gun; such things were not unknown. The assault guards and militiamen shuffled backwards. The Moors moved forward firing their rifles. A militiaman in front of Ana threw up his arms and fell backwards.

Ana shouted to the women, ‘Keep firing!’ But the militiamen were turning, running towards the women, blocking their view of the Moors. Ana stood up, aimed the ancient Swiss rifle at the militiamen and fired it above their heads. ‘Sons of whores!’ she shouted at these men who had been bakers and housepainters and garbage collectors. ‘Turn back!’

They hesitated.

‘Mierda!’ shouted Ana who never swore. ‘Have you no cojones?’

She reloaded quickly and fired between them. A Moroccan fell. And the militiamen turned away from these women who were more frightening than the Moors and the machine-gunners, fitted the magazine to the Lewis gun, and, planting it firmly on the road surface, aimed it at the Moors who were almost upon them.

Chop-chop went the gun, piling up bodies that were soon too high and disorderly for the back-up Moors to navigate. Instead they retreated. The militiamen sent them on their way with a hail of bullets. Then they looked shamefacedly at Ana.

She looked across the modest river and thought: they knocked out one of Salvador’s eyes with a club then they removed the sight of the other with a bomb dropped as casually as boys drop stones over bridges. Couldn’t they have left my father to die in his own time?

She said, ‘Fix the next magazine.’ They nodded. Then she led her women back to their barrio in Tetuan. Jesús was standing in the yard.

He had acquired a gorillo cap and a bandolier which he wore over a blue shirt she had never seen before. Slung over his shoulder was a rifle. The children, hands tight fisted, observed him wonderingly.

She smiled at him. She felt as happy to see him there as she had in the days when her whole day had been taken up with waiting to meet him.

‘What game is this?’ she asked.

He looked a little ridiculous. He hadn’t found a jaunty angle for his cap; his ears were bigger than she remembered beneath it; the ink was still blue on his fingertips.

‘The game you told me to play,’ he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that if we were all cowards there would be no wars?’

He straightened the stoop in his back and, so thin that she wanted to stretch out a hand and feel the muscles moving over his ribs, walked past her towards the killing.




CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_69e584a2-c2a3-508b-8fa8-1f6964543eb3)


February 1937.

Chimo, philosopher, legionnaire and murderer, said, ‘What are you thinking about, Amado?’

Adam Fleming, sheltering in a slit trench from rain and bullets, said, ‘England.’

‘More than that, Amado – you sighed.’ Chimo was an authority on untruths and half-truths because they came readily to his own lips.

‘Why do you call me Amado? My name is Adam. Why not Adamo?’

‘You are Amado. That is you. Were you perhaps thinking about a woman?’ Chimo was an authority on women, too.

‘I was thinking about my sister.’

This troubled Chimo. He massaged his jagged teeth with one finger and the red tassel on his gorillo cap trembled with his anxiety. Finally, he said, ‘But you sighed.’

‘My sister is in Madrid …’

‘She isn’t a red?’ Chimo, brushing raindrops from his abundant moustache, looked apprehensively at Adam through monkey-brown eyes.

‘No, Chimo, she is not a red.’

‘Then to be in Madrid is bad. Very bad. They are starving there. And if we cut the road to Valencia on the other side of the Jarama river then hunger will make them surrender and there will be a great killing.’

‘Were you there when we attacked Madrid?’ Adam asked. He had arrived in Spain last November but he had been too late to take part in the attack which Franco had called off on the 23rd, laying siege to the city instead.

‘I was there,’ Chimo said. ‘They fought like devils, the reds. Particularly the women. Ah, those women, fiercer than the Moors. Those Madrileños, those cats … You have to admire them. Abandoned by their Government who ran off to Valencia, fighting with 50-year-old Swiss rifles, antique weapons taken from the museums … But they were good in the streets, those cats, not like our Moors who are good in open spaces, in deserts …’

‘I heard there was a lot of killing in the city before we attacked.’

‘I heard that, too. Mola and his Fifth Column! Obvious, wasn’t it, that the reds would seek them out and kill them. I hear they took a thousand from the Model Prison and shot them a few miles from Barajas airport. Killing has become a pastime in Spain,’ Chimo said.

‘I hear that Franco could have taken Madrid if he hadn’t decided to relieve Moscardó, at Toledo. I hear,’ Adam said carefully, ‘that Franco doesn’t want to win the war too quickly. He doesn’t want to rule a people who are still full of spirit.’

‘You will hear many things,’ Chimo told him. ‘Every Spaniard is a politician.’

A shell fired from the Republican lines on the far bank of the Jarama, south of Madrid, slurred through the rain digging a crater 50 metres in front of the trench and showering their grey-green campaign tunics with mud.

‘Sons of whores,’ Chimo said. ‘Red pigs. That was the first. The second lands behind us. The third …’

‘I know about range-finding,’ Adam said. He had acquitted himself reasonably well in the cadet corps at Epsom College at everything except rolling puttees round his calves.

‘… lands here. With our name on it.’

Rain bounced on the lip of the trench and fell soggily onto the brown blankets covering their guns; Adam wondered if it would drown the lice; he doubted it – they were survivors.

Chimo said, ‘Tell me, Amado, what are you, an Englishman, doing in this trench waiting for the third shell?’

‘What are you doing, Chimo?’

‘I am a legionario.’

‘What are you fighting for, peace?’

‘Peace?’ The tassel on his cap quivered. ‘Peace is the enemy of the soldier.’

‘How old are you, Chimo?’

‘Nearly 27.’

‘A veteran!’

‘And you, inglés?’

‘Twenty-one,’ Adam said. A confession.

‘And what are you fighting for?’

‘Ideals,’ Adam said, silencing Chimo who was an authority on many things but a stranger to ideals.

Ideals, too, were self-effacing at Epsom College unless, that is, they were represented by the gods of sport, although there were outposts in that mellow-bricked academy where learning ran a close second to rugby and cricket.

Adam was sent to Epsom, close to the race-track, the home of the Derby, because his mother wished him to be a doctor and the college was renowned for its contributions to medicine.

It was at Epsom that Adam first became aware that his character was seamed with perversity. What he objected to, he subsequently decided, was the attempt to inscribe privilege on pubescent souls. To achieve this many enlightened disciplines were invoked. Games were compulsory unless a medical certificate was produced; such a document was viewed as evidence of weakness and its possessor was consigned to the company of other failures. Crimes were punished by headmaster or housemaster with a cane; misdemeanours by prefects with a slipper and they never shirked their responsibilities. Meals were passed from seniors to juniors along tables the length of the hall, any remotely digestible morsels being removed en route so that the smallest diners were given incentive to rise through the ranks to the heights where the food, although still largely indigestible, was at least warm. A chaplain boomed prayers at 8.40 every morning; modest homosexual practices were not severely discouraged because they were a natural adjunct of puberty and a necessary preparation for the rigours of heterosexual intercourse that lay ahead.

Adam invoked the wrath of both masters and boys not because he was one of the runts of the herd but because he seemed constructed to become one of its leaders. He wasn’t tall but his muscles were long and sinuously sheathed, his expression was secretive, and his hair was black and careless and widow-peaked.

So what did he do? He refused to shove in the scrum; he played tennis, a highly suspect sport; he smoked State Express 555 in a hollow on Epsom Downs while the rest of the house made panting cross-country runs around the frost-sparkling racecourse; and, unforgivably, he read. Inevitably such transgressions brought about retribution. But again he broke the character-moulding rules that decreed that you endured cane or slipper with stoicism: he howled and yelled until the punishment was curtailed; then he rose, dry-eyed, and grinned at his tormentor.

At the end of his first year he told his mother that he had no intention of becoming a doctor. And God help the ailing population of Great Britain, he added, if any of his fellow inmates ever got a scalpel in their hands. His father, home from the City that evening and smelling slightly of whisky, was summoned but, as always, he kept his distance from family crises, regarding children as a necessary by-product of marriage. His mother accused Adam of being ungrateful but soon became accustomed to the prospect of having a barrister in the family and was heard to confide at a garden party, ‘Who knows, he may become Attorney General one day.’

Towards the end of his last year, before going to Cambridge, Adam, who had no intention of becoming a lawyer, seriously endangered his reputation: he accidentally revealed that, despite his consumption of State Express, he could run and so swift was he that he was entered for the mile in the public school championships. Canings and slipperings ceased; he was extracted from the scrum and encouraged to play tennis; he was served lean meat and fresh vegetables; a maths master who reported seeing him leave the Capitol cinema in Epsom with a shopgirl was taken on one side and rebuked for voyeurism.

For Adam the mile was a triumph: he came last.

‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’ Chimo asked.

‘At Cambridge,’ Adam replied.

A rat peered over the lip of the trench. One of their own machine-guns opened up behind them. A Gatling replied; he wished the trenches were deeper but the legionnaires and Moors were used to scooping the sand of North Africa.

‘Cambridge, where is that?’

‘In England,’ Adam told him. ‘In East Anglia. It has a bridge over a river called the Cam. There are many colleges there. One of them, Trinity, was founded, refounded rather, by Henry VIII. Have you heard of him?’

‘He had many wives,’ Chimo said. ‘He must have been a stupid king.’

‘He chopped some of their heads off.’

‘Not so stupid,’ Chimo said. ‘At Cambridge they taught you to speak with a city voice.’

‘The purest in Spain. Castilian.’

‘Tell that to a Basque; tell that to a Catalan,’ said Chimo who spoke with a broad Andaluz accent.

The rain seeped through the blanket on to Adam’s rifle, a 7 mm Spanish Mauser. He turned his head and noticed minerals, quartz probably, shining wetly in the hills.

‘Catalan,’ Adam said. ‘Basque. Communist, Anarchist, Trotskyist … That’s our strength, their confusion.’

‘Did you know I can’t read or write, Amado?’

‘Does it matter? You talk enough for ten men.’

‘All Spaniards talk a lot. Ask a Spaniard a question and he delivers a speech.’

A spent bullet skittered across the mud throwing up wings of spray. Chimo said, ‘Tell me something, Amado, are you scared?’

‘I would be a fool not to be.’

‘You are a fool to be here at all: it is not your war.’

‘I sometimes wonder whose war it is.’

‘Clever words from one of your books?’ Adam had with him behind the lines Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, the French edition of Ulysses, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and an anti-war book, Cry Havoc! by a newspaper columnist, Beverly Nichols.

‘Nothing clever. But if it had been left to the Spanish it might have been over by now.’

‘Who would have won?’ Chimo asked.

‘Without German and Italian planes our side wouldn’t have been able to land troops in Spain. Without Russian “advisers”, without their tanks and planes, the Republicans would have been driven into the sea. Perhaps it is their war, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s.’

‘And Britain’s? You are here, inglés.’

‘Most of my countrymen are on the other side.’ Adam jerked his head towards the enemy lines across the small, thickly curved river. ‘With the Americans and French and Poles …’

‘And Germans and Italians. It isn’t just Spaniards who are fighting each other.’ Chimo combed his extravagant moustache with muddy fingers. ‘Why are you fighting on our side, Amado? And don’t confuse me with ideals.’

‘Because I was looking for something to believe in,’ Adam said.

A second shell exploded behind them throwing up gouts of sparkling rock.

‘The third one,’ Chimo said, ‘is ours.’

Four of them at the dinner table to celebrate the 60th birthday of William Stoppard, Professor of Economics at Oxford. Kate, his daughter, 18 and already bored; Richard Hibbert, at Trinity, Cambridge, who would have joined the International Brigade if he hadn’t been a pacifist; and Adam. Subject: non-intervention.

‘It is, of course, quite disgraceful,’ said Stoppard, his pointed pepper-and-salt beard agreeing with him.

‘Why?’ Adam asked in the pause before dessert. Two of the leaded windows in the rambling house near Lambourn were open and evening smells, chestnut and horses, reached him making him restless.

‘Why?’ The beard seemed suspended in disbelief. Kate, blonde with neat features, hair arranged in frozen waves, stared at him. She took a De Reszke from a slim gold case and lit it.

‘I hope no one minds,’ she said.

‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Adam said.

‘Too bad.’ She blew a jet of smoke across the table at him.

‘Perhaps,’ Stoppard said, ‘you could explain yourself, young man.’

‘I’m questioning your assumption, sir,’ said Adam who had drunk three whiskies before dinner. ‘Am I to assume that you are referring to the possibility of intervention on the side of the Republicans?’

Was there any other kind? the silence asked.

Hibbert, who was in love with Kate Stoppard, said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Fascists at Badajoz.’ He turned his heavy and wrathful face to Stoppard for approval; Stoppard’s beard nodded.

Adam poured himself wine and said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Republicans at Madrid.’

Kate squashed her half-smoked cigarette – she didn’t look as though she had enjoyed it anyway – and considered him, neat head to one side. The flames of the candles on the table wavered in a breeze summoned from the darkness outside.

Stoppard began to lecture.

‘The Fascists are the insurgents. Their ostensible object: to overthrow by force the Government of the Republic elected by popular franchise. Their ulterior motive: to re-establish the privileges they enjoyed under the monarchy – in effect the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera – which were the exploitation of the poor.’

Adam said, ‘With respect, sir, if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ As the second silence of the evening lengthened he said to Kate, ‘That’s what Wellington said when some idiot said to him, “Mr Jones, I believe?” I’m a great admirer of Arthur Wellesley.’

Stoppard said, ‘Perhaps, Adam, you would be good enough to elaborate on that last statement and enlighten us.’

A timorous girl in a black and white uniform served dessert, lemon soufflé.

‘Certainly,’ said Adam. ‘Do you believe in God, sir?’

‘Get on with it, man,’ Hibbert said excavating fiercely with his spoon in the soufflé.

‘I ask because I cannot understand how you can support a regime that condones the destruction of churches and the murder of priests.’

‘Ah, the Irresponsibles; I thought we’d come to them,’ Stoppard remarked indulgently. He tasted his soufflé; his beard approved.

‘From February to June this year,’ Adam said, concentrating, ‘160 churches were burned. There were also 269 assassinations, 113 general strikes and 228 half-cocked ones. Spain was in a state of anarchy, so is it small wonder that generals such as Mola, Queipo de Llano and Franco and the rest decided to bring back stability?’

‘Did you do your homework on the way?’ Stoppard asked. He winked at Hibbert.

‘As a matter of fact I did. It was inevitable that you would talk about non-intervention. But there’s nothing to stop anyone intervening. Not even you, sir.’

Hibbert said irrelevantly, ‘John Cornford’s fighting with the International Brigades. And Sommerfield. And Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew.’

‘A pity they’re fighting on the wrong side.’

‘Are you a Fascist, Adam? A blackshirt?’ Hibbert asked.

‘What I am,’ Adam said, watching Kate lick lemon soufflé from her upper lip and wondering about her breasts beneath her silk dress, ‘is anti-Communist. We all know what’s happened in Russia – a worse tyranny than before. Do we want that in Spain?’

Stoppard laid down his spoon and addressed his class. What we were witnessing in Spain, he told them, was an exercise in European Fascism. Hitler wanted to assist Spain so that he could establish bases there for the next war and help himself to the country’s iron ore. Mussolini was helping because he wanted to control the Mediterranean. And both wanted to test their planes, their guns and their tanks. If they, the enemies of the future, were championing the Fascists, why should not Britain aid the Republicans?

Adam, who had learned at Cambridge never to answer a question directly, said, ‘What is so different between Fascism and Communism?’

The third silence of the evening. Kate took a cigarette from her case and tapped it on one painted fingernail.

Adam said, ‘Is Hitler a dictator?’

Of course.

‘And Stalin?’

So it appeared.

‘Are they not both anti-Semitic?’

Perhaps.

‘Enemies, imagined or otherwise, purged?’

There were similarities.

‘Both presiding over elitist societies in which the masses are subservient?’

‘That’s certainly true in Germany,’ Hibbert said.

‘And Russia. Ask any peasant.’

‘I haven’t met any recently,’ Stoppard said but no one in the class smiled.

The maid served coffee; Stoppard lit a cigar. ‘Adam,’ he said, almost fondly, ‘suggested just now that there was nothing to stop anyone intervening. On either side, you implied. Is that correct?’

‘Quite correct, sir.’

‘Then why, Adam, don’t you volunteer to fight for the Fascists?’

‘I might just do that,’ Adam said.

Chimo said, ‘Have you had many women, Amado?’

‘Not many,’ said Adam, who had made love to three girls.

‘I have had many, many girls.’

‘I’m sure they all remember you.’

‘Oh sure, they remember Chimo. And I remember one of them. You know, she gave me a present.’ He pointed to his crotch.

‘You don’t have to go with whores: you’re too much of a man.’

‘You don’t know girls. How can you fuck them with a chaperone sitting on your knee?’

‘Fuck the chaperone,’ said Adam, old soldier with three months service behind him.

Kate took Adam to her father’s cottage in the Cotswolds for a long weekend – without her father’s consent – five days after the dinner party at Lambourn.

They walked through countryside where stems of smoke rose steadily from hollows in the hills and horse chestnuts lay shiny in their split, hedgehog shells and boys with concertina socks kicked flocks of fallen leaves; they drank beer that tasted of nuts in small pubs; they danced to Lew Stone records; they made love on a bed that smelled of lavender.

But throughout the interlude Adam was aware of disquiet. It visited him as he watched the sun rise mistily through the branches of a moulting apple tree, or while he felt pastoral loneliness settle in the evenings; it materialized in the wasting happiness after they had made love.

At first he blamed it on the challenge he had accepted at Lambourn: it wasn’t every young man who was going to fight for the Fascists. That, surely, was enough to disturb the most swashbuckling of crusaders.

But it wasn’t until the afternoon of the Sunday, when she lay in bed with her back curved into his chest and his hands were cupped round her small breasts and he was examining the freckles on her back just below the nape of her neck, where her short, golden hair was still damp from exertion, that he realized the other cause for his disquiet.

‘Don’t think,’ she said, turning towards him, ‘that you have to go and fight because of me.’ Well, he didn’t; but suddenly he understood that she was only there beside him because he was prepared to risk death – a refreshing change from conventional young men with normal life expectations.

And, as he considered this premise, it came to him that maybe his motives were suspect. Did he really believe in the Fascist cause or was it wilfulness asserting itself? Surely ideals were the essence of purity. How was it, then, that both he and the other Englishmen fighting on opposite sides could both possess them? Can I be wrong? he asked himself.

She said, ‘What are you thinking about, Adam?’ and he said, ‘This and that.’

‘You were in another place.’ She reached for his hand and placed it on the soft hair between her thighs, and he forgot his disquiet.

Later, walking through silent woods, she held his hand. How long would the war last? she asked him. Not long, he told her: Franco was at the gates of Madrid.

‘Months?’

‘Weeks.’

‘Everything has been so quick,’ she said. ‘We only met a few days ago …’

‘What would your father say if he knew what we’d done in his cottage?’

‘Cut us off without a penny,’ Kate said promptly.

Us?

They sat on a log and she took a cigarette from her case, lit it and blew puffs of smoke through narrowed lips as though she found them distasteful. Ruffled pigeons settled above them.

‘I’ll always remember how you stood up for yourself at dinner that evening,’ she said.

‘They were debating in formulas. Mathematics aren’t always right.’

‘I hope you don’t think that just because …’

‘You’re cheap?’

‘Do they all say that?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Adam said.

‘How many?’

‘None of your bloody business,’ Adam said.

‘You don’t think I’m trying to trap you?’

‘By having a baby?’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

‘Did you bring me to the cottage because I’m going to war?’

‘Because you’re coming back from it.’

He put his arm round her waist under her coat. He could feel the fragile sharpness of her bones, the flatness of her stomach. He felt that he was expected to utter words of deep moment but they were elusive.

He stood up. She tossed aside her cigarette and he stamped on it, pulverizing it with the heel of his shoe. He turned her and pointed her towards the cottage. When they got back he lit a fire with pine cones and they watched the sparks chase each other up the chimney. He knew that she was waiting for the words that lay trapped in his throat so he switched off the lights and they lay down beside each other and he stared into the caverns of the fires in search of answers and justifications.

The justification was brought to Adam on a silver salver on 6 October, two days before the Michaelmas term was due to begin. He was sitting in the garden of his parents’ house in East Grinstead reading a newspaper summary of recent developments in Spain. Summer hadn’t quite abdicated, sunlight shining through smoke lit chrysanthemums and persistent roses, and a biplane traversed the pale sky towing a banner advertising the News Chronicle.

Adam read that General Francisco Franco had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist army and Head of State and that the Republicans had created a Popular Army. The Fascists seemed to be on the rampage – in September they had captured Irún, San Sebastian and Toledo – and if he didn’t act soon it would be too late.

But was wilfulness enough? Do I want to be a soldier of fortune, champion of my own ego? He flung down the newspaper and paced the lawns. He was near the pond where frogs plopped in the summer when the maid found him and handed him the letter on the salver as though it were something to eat.

The envelope, which bore a new Edward VIII stamp, had been posted in London the previous day but the writing was his sister’s and she was in Madrid. Fear stirred and he held the envelope for a few moments without opening it.

The letter was dated 16 August, so it must have been smuggled out of Spain – via Marseille, perhaps, on one of the British warships evacuating refugees – and posted in London.

Dear Adam,

Paco is dead. He was taken from our apartment two nights ago and driven to a village called Paracuellos del Jarama where, with two dozen other suspects, he was executed. They were forced to dig a mass grave, then machine-gunned and finished off with bullets in the backs of their necks.

I say suspects. Suspected of what I have no idea. Certainly Paco had no interests in politics, just his job and his home and his children – and me. But he was a good Catholic and an architect and relatively well off, so I suppose that was sufficient reason. Or maybe a private quarrel across the drawing board was settled in the name of the Republic; many old scores are being settled that way. All I know is that I am lost. I hear the children and I hear the maid (she is more scared than any of us) and I hear the shooting and I suppose I eat and sleep. It is supposed to be dangerous to walk in the streets but so far the Irresponsibles, as they call them, have not killed a foreign woman. Not that I care, although I should because of the children.

A part of me also knows that I must not leave Spain. For Paco’s sake, for the children’s sake because they are Spanish. I am writing to you because we always shared and father never much cared for Paco, did he? Well, tell him the dago is dead. He was a good man, Adam …

The back-sloping letters lengthened, died. The letter was signed Eve. Her name was Julia but with Adam it had always been Eve.

Adam, letter in hand, heard the plop of stones thrown by her two boys into the pond; saw the ripple of the water beneath the duckweed. They had been happy that day, Adam and Eve, sharing Eve’s family, sharing a day that smelled of daffodils and hope, even sharing the hostility of their father which, now that there were children, was more a family joke than a threat.

Ah, Paco of the healthy skin and glossy hair and provident disposition who believed that Spain would be a land of opportunity as soon as the Republic had settled … poor, naïve Paco who was forced to dig his own grave out of the land in which he believed.

Adam threw a pebble into the pond and watched the green ripples until they lapped the bank, then strode rapidly away.

Five days later he was in the solemn city of Burgos in the north of Spain.

The third shell duly arrived in the slit trench. It came with the sound of a wave unfurling and, with an impact that shook the trench, buried itself in the mud and soft rock, resting lethally five yards from Adam.

‘Shit,’ said Chimo, ‘we’d better get out of here.’

‘It’s a dud,’ Adam said. It was not unknown for Spanish munition workers who didn’t want to kill other Spaniards to immobilize ammunition.

‘There are duds and duds. Maybe this has got a delayed fuse.’

‘Why would it have that?’

‘So that we all think it’s a nice shiny shell. We even go up and pat it. Then, whoosh, it blows us over the countryside. That’s the reds for you, those sons of whores …’

The legionnaire next to Chimo said, ‘Those bastards … We came here to fight, not wait until we’re blown into little pieces by one sleeping shell.’

He climbed out of the trench and made a crouching run for the concrete bunker at the base of the flat-topped hills. The others followed. Adam, taking a last look at the shell half-buried in the mud, went last. It was his misfortune that he was a good runner.

Keeping low, he passed empty trenches, a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest on the roof, a shrike perched on a telegraph wire, shell-holes, sage and brush and leafless fig trees … To his left he saw the curves of the river and the rulered line of Jarama canal.

Bullets fired from across the river sang past him. But what he feared was heavy artillery or a strafing run by one of the German fighters now occupying luminous pools in the clouds.

He reached the bunker first. And found that the colonel in charge of the bandera, the battalion, was waiting for him. His name was Delgado, a native of Seville, and, modelling himself on General Queipo de Llano, who broadcast bloodthirsty threats to the Republicans on the radio, bore himself with exaggerated stiffness and wore his small moustache as though it were a medal; he disliked all foreigners, whether they were fighting for the Republicans or the Fascists.

He said to Adam, ‘I must be losing my hearing – I didn’t hear any order to retreat.’

Adam drew himself to attention. ‘We’re not retreating …’

‘We?’

Adam looked behind him, spotted the last of the legionnaires who had followed him disappearing into a trench.

‘I am not retreating. I’ve come to report an unexploded shell.’

‘It’s my experience that unexploded shells report themselves.’

‘In our trench. If it had gone off it would have killed the lot of us.’

‘Who gave the orders to abandon the trench?’

‘No one, sir.’

‘But you got out first?’ Delgado slapped his cane against a polished boot. He looked as though he had just shaved and showered.

‘I run faster,’ Adam said.

‘Are you implying that the rest of the men ran away too?’

‘I did not run away.’

‘You could hardly say you were attacking. What if other members of the company had followed your example?’

Adam didn’t reply: they hadn’t.

‘Name?’

‘Fleming, sir.’

‘Ah, Fleming,’ tapping his boot with his cane. ‘Why do you want to fight for us, Fleming? Most of your countrymen are fighting for the reds.’

‘Because I’m anti-Communist.’

‘Not pro-Nationalist?’

‘If I am one then surely I am the other.’

‘You’re beginning to talk like a diplomat.’ Delgado took a step forward. ‘What makes you think you can help us?’

‘I can fire a rifle.’

‘Where? At a fiesta, a fairground?’

Adam told him that in the cadet corps he had been a crack shot; no mention of the puttees.

‘Did they teach you to run away in this cadet corps of yours?’

‘I learned how to run at college.’

‘In the wrong direction?’

A young captain loomed behind Delgado. Adam shrugged.

Delgado said, ‘I believe this to be a Spaniard’s war. I don’t believe foreigners should interfere.’

Adam thought: ‘What about the Moors?’ but he said nothing.

‘Odd that you should have chosen this time to retreat. We were going to attack in one hour from now. I should have you shot.’

‘I came to warn you about the shell.’

‘I don’t believe in that shell. How old are you, Fleming?’

Adam told him he was 21.

‘I had a son of 20. He’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said.

‘He was shot in the lungs and in the stomach. He died in great pain.’

Adam remained silent.

‘Do you know who shot him?’

‘The reds … Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyists …’

‘He was shot at Badajoz by the Legion. He was fighting for the reds.’

The rain had stopped and there were patches of blue in the sky and despite the sporadic gunfire, a bird was singing on the telegraph wire. Inside the bunker a radio crackled.

Delgado turned to the captain. ‘Escort this man to his trench,’ he said. ‘I want to hear more about this non-exploding shell.’

The captain put on his cap and drew his pistol.

‘That’s not necessary,’ Adam said but the captain who was young and glossy, like Paco had been, prodded the barrel of the pistol, a Luger, in the direction of the trench.

‘How old are you sir?’ Adam asked the captain.

‘May God be with you if there isn’t any shell,’ the captain said.

A sparrow-hawk hovered above them.

They were ten yards from the trench when the shell blew.

The attack was delayed until dawn the following day. Then, supported by a barrage from their batteries of 155 mm artillery and a baptismal blast from the Condor Legion’s 88 mm guns, they moved, legionnaires and Moors, across the wet, blasted earth where, in the summer, corn had rippled, towards the river separating them from the enemy.

Some time during the fighting, when the barrel of his rifle was hot and there was blood on the bayonet and his ears ached with gunfire and his skull was full of battle, he vaguely noticed a plane drop from the sky, gently like a broken bird; he thought it levelled out but he couldn’t be sure because by then he was busy killing again.




CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_794dda16-6919-58a5-b195-96749eb0136b)


The smell was pungent, sickly and familiar. Tom Canfield’s nostrils twitched; he opened his eyes. After a few moments he had it: locust beans. One of the maid’s sons had brought some to the house on Long Island one day and they had chewed them together. His eyes focused on a dark corner of wherever he was and saw a mound of them, pods sweetly putrefying.

In front of the beans lay the broken propeller of an aeroplane. He tried to touch it but his arm was cold and heavy. He flexed his fingers; they moved well enough but there was blood between them. He lay still concentrating, then blinked slowly and deliberately. Part of the fuselage was above him, radial engine bared. So he had been flung out of the cockpit. He tested his other arm. It moved freely. So did his legs, but his chest hurt and the pain was worse when he breathed deeply.

He sat up. Easy. Except that his right arm didn’t belong to him. He could pick it up with his left hand as though it were a piece of baggage. Blood dripped from his fingers. He looked for the wound and found it near the elbow. His thumb felt bone.

He stood up and, supporting himself against the walls, made an inspection of the farmhouse. It was a poor place with thin dividing walls painted with blue wash. Sagging beds were covered with straw palliasses, a jug of sour-smelling wine stood on a cane table.

The strength left his legs and he sat on a crippled chair. Where was he? Behind Fascist lines, behind the Republicans, in no-man’s-land? He heard gunfire and the venomous explosions of fragmentation hand-grenades; but he couldn’t tell how far away they were.

What he needed was a drink and a bandage to stop the blood seeping from the hole in his arm. He went to the kitchen and opened a cupboard painted with crusted varnish and found a half-full bottle of Magno brandy. He poured some down his throat. It burned like acid but the power returned to his legs. He ripped down a chequered curtain and tore off a strip; he eased his wounded arm from his flying jacket and bound the wound, knotting the cloth with his teeth and the fingers of his good hand.

He looked out of the window. The ground mist had returned, so it was late afternoon. Gunfire flashed in the mist.

Despite his wound he was hungry. He returned to the store-room and chewed a couple of locust pods; they made him feel sick.

He patted the fuselage of the Polikarpov. It was still warm.

He sat down and tried to visualize the battlefield as he had seen it from the air. The hills that glittered in the sun to the west, empty cornfields, vineyards, then the canal and the river and the Pindoque bridge which carried trains loaded with sugar from La Poupa factory to the railway to Andalucia. On the opposite side of the river the heights of Pingarrón where the Republicans were entrenched. But he still could not envisage where he was.

When evening had pinned the first star in the sky he opened the door and made his way towards the voice of the river.

The rabbit, one ear folded, stared at them from its hutch in the yard. It was a big problem, this rabbit. It was a pet and it was dinner. No, more – dinner, lunch and soup for supper the next day.

The rabbit, grey and soft, twitched its whiskers at Ana and the children.

‘I think he’s hungry,’ said Pablo, thereby encapsulating the rabbit’s two main faults – it was masculine and it was always hungry. What was the point in keeping a buck rabbit which could not give birth to other rabbits? What was the point of wasting food on an animal which was itself sustenance? Was there really any sense, Ana asked herself, in wasting cabbage stalks and potato peelings on a rabbit when her children were threatened by scabies and rickets?

But despite its appetite, despite its masculinity, this rabbit possessed two trump cards: it was part of the family, thumping its hind legs when the air-raid siren wailed and flattening its ears when bombs exploded, and it was available for stud to the owners of doe rabbits who would exchange a sliver of soap or a cupful of split peas for his services.

Ana regarded the rabbit with exasperation. Jesús would have known what to do.

But Jesús was at Jarama fighting the Fascists. Fighting and writing poetry – two of his front-line poems had been published in Mundo Obrero and one of them, a soldier’s thoughts about his family, hung framed on the wall among the formidable ancestors.

What would Jesús have done about the rabbit? Killed it? Ana doubted that: he would have departed, and returned, a curved smile of triumph on his face, with provisions mysteriously acquired. Like a magician, he never disclosed the secrets of his bartering but Ana suspected that he exchanged poems for provender – there were still wells of compassion beneath the brutalized streets of Madrid.

He had returned once, at Three Kings, with a doll for Rosana that he had carved with his pocket-knife in the trenches, and shining cartridge cases and studded fragments of a Mills bomb for Pablo’s war museum. But he had changed since Ana had sent him to war: he was still good with the children but with her, although gentle, he was wary and when they lay together in their sighing bed he seemed to be searching for the girl he had met and not the woman she now was. They hadn’t made love until they were married and they didn’t make love now; instead she held him until he slept and stroked his forehead when he whimpered in dreams of battle.

He was in the Popular Army, formed to bring order to the militias and Irresponsibles, but as he walked away from the chabola, stooping under the weight of the carnage he had witnessed, he didn’t look the least bit like a soldier. I am the warrior, Ana thought, regarding the rabbit speculatively, and he should be the provider.

Food! She turned away from the rabbit, allowing it one more reprieve, and went into the bedroom to fetch her shawl and her shabby coat and her shoes laced with string darkened with blacking. She hated the hunger that was always with her, because it was a weakness that distracted her from the Cause.

She left Pablo fashioning a whistle out of a cartridge case and Rosana painting a water colour of a harlequin in black, red and yellow, arm raised in a clench-fist salute.

As she crossed the yard the rabbit thumped its legs.

She went first to an old woman who lived on her own in a hovel that stood alone, like an ancient’s tooth, in a street of rubble. Here she made wreaths with paper flowers tied with black and red ribbon; the flowers were always red and she was always busy. Sometimes she possessed extra food with which the bereaved had paid for their wreaths, but there was none on view today.

‘Just a little bread,’ Ana pleaded, hating herself. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s stale; I can toast it.’ At least they had fires in the chabola, kindled with slats from the ceilings of collapsed houses and fuelled with furniture – a walnut writing-desk had burned for two days.

‘What have you got to offer?’ the crone asked. In her youth she had married a member of the CNT; when he had died she had become the mistress of a doyen of the UGT; now she believed that age was an amnesty for the past. Her face was blotched and hooked; in her youth it must have been sharp enough to cut down trees, Ana thought.

‘A poem?’

‘Ah, a poem. What a beautiful thought, Ana Gomez.’ Beneath her arthritic fingers scarlet crêpe blossomed. ‘Except that I cannot read.’

‘If I read it you will remember it.’

‘I would prefer jewellery,’ the crone said.

‘I have no jewellery, only my wedding ring.’

‘I have a little bread,’ the crone said. ‘A little rice. Admittedly with weevils but beggars can’t be choosers, can they, Ana Gomez?’

Ana twisted the gold band on her finger; she remembered Jesus placing it there.

‘I have money,’ she said.

‘Who wants money? There is nothing to buy with it.’

‘I will come back,’ Ana said. With a gun! ‘Tell me, do you make wreaths for Fascists?’

The crone gazed at her suspiciously. ‘I make wreaths for the dead,’ she said.

Perhaps one day she will make a wreath for Antonio, Ana thought as she stepped over a fallen acacia on a street scattered with broken glass. He had returned to the capital once, as furtive as a pervert, wearing a beret and filthy corduroy trousers and a pistol in his belt. He had crossed the front line, relatively quiet on the western limits of the city since the fury of November, leaving his blue Falange shirt behind him.

He had come to the chabola after dark while she was boiling water on the walnut desk blazing in the hearth. He brought with him cigarettes – the new currency of Republican Spain. He gave her six packs, then, sitting in Jesús’s rocking chair, said, ‘I went to the house; the neighbours told me that Martine and my daughter left several weeks ago …’ Even now he smelled faintly of Cologne.

‘She’s with the British,’ Ana said. ‘Waiting to be evacuated.’ She told him about Christopher Lance and his ambulance service to British warships waiting on the Mediterranean coast. ‘She’s well,’ Ana said. ‘The baby’s due at the beginning of March.’

Antonio lit a cigarette, an Imperial. His curls were tight with dirt and the skin across his cheekbones was taut; he was growing old with the war.

‘When will she go?’

‘Soon. There were many waiting before her.’

‘Is it still dangerous in Madrid for anyone who made the mistake of being successful?’

‘For the Fascists who exploited the workers? Not as bad as it was; the real pigs are all dead. As for the rest …’ Ana tested the water with her wrist as she had done when the children were babies. ‘They can’t even buy your perfume any more. Isn’t that sad?’

‘What happened to the perfume?’

‘The Irresponsibles drank it.’

She lifted the pan of water from the fire and took it to the bathroom and told the children to wash themselves, Rosana first, then Pablo.

‘I hope it poisoned them,’ Antonio said. ‘And how have you been keeping, elder sister?’

‘Surviving,’ Ana said.

‘Jesús?’

‘Fighting.’

‘Mother of God! He’ll shoot his own foot.’ Antonio inhaled deeply and blew smoke towards the fire and watched it wander into the chimney.

‘And Salvador?’

Ana straightened her back in front of the fire. ‘He’s dead.’

Antonio stared at the cigarette cupped in his hand. ‘Papa?’

‘Dead.’

‘How?’

‘Killed by one of your bombs.’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘But the priest lived.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

And then he had gone and she had imagined him flitting through the blacked-out campus, and sidling through the front lines where friend and foe called to each other, and making his way south to the Jarama valley to resume the fight against his own people.

In the Puerta del Sol she spoke to a lottery ticket vendor. The lottery headquarters had moved with the faint-hearted Government to Valencia but tickets which could make purchasers rich beyond the dreams of working men were still on sale in Madrid. But as the crone had said, ‘Who wants money?’ If the first prize had been a kilo of sausages Ana might have joined a syndicate and bought a fraction of a decimo, a tenth part of a ticket.

The vendor was young and broad-shouldered with a strong waist and muscular arms but his legs were shrivelled, tucked under him like a cushion on his wheelchair.

She asked him if he knew any food resources. She had known him for three years, this robust cripple, and they admired each other.

‘I know where there are candles.’

‘You can’t eat candles, idiot.’

‘You can barter with them, guapa.’

‘And what do I barter for the candles?’

‘That rabbit of yours. He is very lucky. I wish I was that rabbit.’

‘If I can’t get any food today I shall eat that rabbit tonight,’ Ana said.

‘I wish even more that I was that rabbit.’

She frowned but she was not displeased; she liked his glow and enjoyed his vulgarity. It was rumoured that, during the frenzied days of July, he had produced a pistol from beneath the blanket covering his thighs and shot a Fascist between the eyes.

‘How is business?’ she asked.

‘Today everyone gambles with death, not figures.’

‘You get enough to eat?’

‘People are good to me,’ he said. ‘I am, after all, at the centre of Spain.’

‘Some people say the Hill of the Angels is the centre of Spain.’

‘I hope not; the Fascists hold it.’

‘We held it for one great day,’ Ana said. ‘Enrique Lister took it in January. And took 400 prisoners. We showed them what to expect.’

‘Just the same, this plaza is the centre of Spain because it is in Republican hands. Kilometre 0.’ He pointed across the plaza, shouldered by the red and white façade of the Ministry of the Interior, with its kiosks selling merchandise that no one wanted these days – dolls and combs and fans – and the umbrella shop with sawdust on the floor. ‘Have you ever been here, guapa, on New Year’s Eve when you must swallow twelve grapes before the clock has finished striking twelve?’

‘I have been here,’ she said. ‘And I have been to the Retiro on a Sunday and seen the jugglers and the mummers and listened to the guitars and eaten water ices and taken a rowing boat on the lake.’

‘It was beautiful to be in Madrid then,’ the vendor said. ‘Here, I will give you a ticket.’ He tore a pink ticket from one of the strips hanging from his neck.

‘But you will have to pay for it.’

‘You can repay me one day when we have won this bloody war. Now perhaps you can use it to trade for a candle which you can trade for a can of beans.’

‘If not, you share the rabbit with us.’

‘Have you noticed that all the cats have disappeared?’

‘Then there will be plenty of rats to eat. Where are these candles?’

He named a street near the Plaza Mayor where, from a height, the roofs looked like a scattered pack of mouldering playing cards.

At the stall, where a man with sunken cheeks was trading candles, Ana became inspired. Glancing at the ticket she noticed that the last three figures were 736. The seventh month of the year of ’36 – the month in which the war had broken out.

‘What have you to offer?’ asked the trader, who was not doing good business because, after dark, Madrileños went to bed and watched the searchlights switching the sky and listening to the gunfire to the west of the city and had no need for illumination.

‘I want six candles, comrade,’ Ana said.

He appraised her. Ana was flattered that men still looked at her in that way; she was also aware that she carried with her a fierceness that discouraged all but the most intrepid.

‘I asked you what you had to offer.’ A cigarette in the corner of his mouth beat time with his words.

‘This.’ She held up the lottery ticket.

‘You expect six candles for that?’

But Ana knew her Madrileños: they would bet on two flies crawling up the wall.

‘This is a very special ticket,’ Ana said. ‘With this you will be able to buy a Hispano-Suiza. And an apartment on the Castellana. And a castle in the country.’

‘Let me have a look at this passport to paradise.’

She handed him the ticket. He held it up to the light like a banker looking for a forgery. Cold rain began to fall from a pewter sky.

‘What is so special about this ticket?’ the vendor asked.

‘Imbecile. Look at the last three numbers. The month of the year the war started.’

The trader hesitated. Then he said, ‘Three candles.’

‘Burro! They were looted from a church anyway.’

‘Four.’

‘No, it is I who am the imbecile. I have always wanted a castle in the campo … Give me back the ticket.’

He handed her six candles.

She took these to a bakery off the Calle del Arenal where they baked bread for the troops; twice a week Ana and ten other women from the barrio took this bread by tram to the front. Its warm smell made the saliva run painfully in her mouth but she never touched any of the loaves nestling in the tin trays on her lap.

The baker, plump with a monk’s fringe, hands gloved with flour, stood at the doorway.

‘You have made a mistake, Ana Gomez. Tomorrow is the day for the front.’

‘No mistake, comrade. How was the electricity last night?’

‘Twice the lights failed. How can a man make bread in the dark?’

‘By candle-light,’ Ana said handing him the six candles. ‘Now give me three of those loaves.’ And when he hesitated, ‘You are fat with your own bread; my children are starving.’

She placed the three loaves in the bottom of her basket and covered them with a cloth. As she walked home through the rain she thought, ‘Today is Friday and we will be able to eat – the bread and some of the vegetable pap that was supposed to be a substitute for meat. And on Monday there will be more rations. But what of Saturday and Sunday? We shall eat the rabbit,’ she decided.

As she neared Tetuan the air-raid siren wailed. No one took much notice: they had become used to Junkers and Heinkels laying their eggs on the city. The city, she thought, was a fine target for bombers, a fortress on a plateau.

She walked down a street of small shops guarded by two tanks. The crews wore black leather jackets, Russians probably. A bomb fell at the far end of the street; a thin block of offices collapsed taking its balconies with it and crushing the empty butcher’s shop below. The air smelled of explosives and distemper.

The crews disappeared into their tanks.

Ana took shelter in a doorway beside a small church. A poster had been stuck on a shop window on the opposite side of the street, beside a bank still displaying the stock market prices for last summer. It showed a negro, an Asian and a Caucasian wearing steel helmets; beneath their crusading faces ran the caption, ‘ALL THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD ARE IN THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES ALONGSIDE THE SPANISH NATION’.

The bombers flew lazily back to their bases at Avila or Guadalajara and the leather-jacketed crews emerged from their tanks and stood stretching in the powdery rain blowing down the street with the dust from the explosions.

Ana emerged from the doorway. She thought about the bread, still warm and soft in her bag, and thought how good it would taste tonight and then, anticipating tomorrow’s hunger, she thought, ‘I will kill that rabbit while the children are playing. Break its neck with a single blow with the blade of my hand. Who are you, Ana Gomez, to worry about killing a pet when you have shot Moors and Spaniards and would have shot your own kind if they had turned and run?’

She wished the rabbit wasn’t so trusting.

When she got home she noticed that the faces of the children were dirty with dried tears.

‘So, what have you done?’

Pablo, lips trembling, pointed into the yard, ‘The rabbit escaped,’ he said.

Anger leaped inside her. She went to the bedroom and shut the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed.

When she came out the children were sitting in one corner watching her warily.

‘Who let it escape?’

‘I did,’ they both said.

She nodded and said, ‘Your hunger will be your punishment.’

Then she fetched one of the loaves from her bag and cut it in three pieces. She sliced them, then smeared them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt.

They sat down and ate like a family.

The slaughter was cosmopolitan.

Chimo brought the details to Adam Fleming who was resting with other legionnaires in an olive grove at the foot of Pingarrón, the heights which the Fascists had just captured after crossing the Jarama.

Moors had slit the throats of Spaniards; Irish had fought Irish; Italians had checked the Fascists’ advance; the French fighting for the Republicans had really shown that they had cojones; Balkans, many of them Greeks, had defended ferociously; the British were still fighting suicidally to hold a hill below Pingarrón; the Americans were waiting to do battle.

‘Ah, those Yanks,’ Chimo said. ‘Soon we shall see if they shoot like Sergeant York.’

‘I’m lucky to be fighting at all,’ Adam said. ‘Lucky to be alive. Where were you when Delgado appeared at the entrance to the bunker?’

‘I was being diplomatic,’ Chimo said. He tested the cutting edge of his yellow teeth on the ball of his thumb.

‘And brave?’

‘I know nothing of bravery: I am a soldier. They are the brave ones.’ He pointed at the hills where, alongside the Popular Army, the International Brigades were fighting to stop the Fascists reaching the Madrid–Valencia road. ‘They know nothing about fighting. Have you seen the British?’

‘I don’t want to see the British,’ Adam said.

He wondered if there was anyone he knew from Cambridge fighting under Tom Wintringham, Communist military correspondent of the Daily Worker, and commanding officer of the 600-strong British Battalion engaged in its first battle.

Already the poet John Cornford was dead, wounded in the Battle for Madrid, killed in Andalucia the day after his 21st birthday. In that engagement half of the 145 members of the British Number 1 company had been killed or wounded.

‘You should see them,’ Chimo said. ‘They haven’t got a map between them …’

‘How do you know?’

‘You should see them wandering about … Their rifles haven’t been greased and they blow up in their hands. And their uniforms! Berets, peaked caps, ponchos, a steel helmet or two, breeches, baggy slacks, alpargatas …’

‘What are alpargatas?’ Adam asked without interest. His body ached with exhaustion, his mind with questions.

‘Canvas shoes with rope soles. Imagine wearing those in the mud. Our guns pick them off while they’re still stuck in it.’

Poor, sad, would-be soldiers, Adam thought. That was true courage: even Chimo understood that. But what are you dying for? Ideals? I have those too. Haven’t I? He touched his sister’s letter in the pocket of his tunic.

What he feared most was coming face to face with an Englishman. Could he kill him? And in any case should it be so different from killing a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard? Patriotism, surely, is only an accident of birth.

No, he decided, I should not be able to kill him.

An orderly served cold rice, which they ate with their hands, and cold coffee. Rain dripped from the silver-green leaves of the olive trees. The rain in Cambridge had smelled of grass; this rain smelled of cordite.

Adam leaned against the trunk of an olive tree, shielding his Mauser rifle with his blanket. He closed his eyes and dozed on his feet, limbs jerking as he ducked bayonets. Chimo’s voice reached him in snatches.

‘Not saying they aren’t good fighters, they are … but shit, how can they fight in peasants’ shoes with guns that kill them instead of us?’

Delgado said, ‘No unexploded shells here?’ There was mud on his boots and his eyes were pouched with fatigue but his grey-green legion uniform was freshly pressed and he looked as though he had just left the barbers.

Adam pushed himself away from the olive tree. ‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Good. We attack in five minutes.’

Adam looked at his wrist-watch. They had been resting for 35 minutes.

Delgado said, ‘A lot of your countrymen up there,’ pointing at the pock-marked hill. ‘You’ll have to kill some.’

‘If they don’t kill me, sir.’

‘Spaniards are fighting Spaniards … Now you’ll find out what that feels like.’

‘I know what it feels like, sir.’

‘How can you?’

‘Is it any different from killing a Pole or a Belgian or a Greek?’

‘I didn’t want foreigners in my unit,’ Delgado said. ‘I’ve been lucky: you’re the only one. This is our war.’ He bent his cane between his two hands.

‘And the Germans’ war. And Italians’. Perhaps it isn’t your war any more, sir.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you, inglés, that you’re fighting on the wrong side?’

Delgado strode away, his young captain in tow.

Adam fought his fatigue. Close your eyelids for a moment and you are in the armchair of the past.

Sometimes on Epsom Downs he had played at war, storming the racecourse grandstand on one occasion while thunder flashes exploded and masters in khaki stood in the line of fire barking contradictory orders. Adam had taken the opportunity to smoke a Passing Cloud in a nest of hawthorn bushes.

A red Very light blossomed in the sky. The legionnaires moved from their oasis and advanced towards the hill which the British Battalion, intellectuals, poets, adventurers, Jews from Manchester, Leeds and London, even a few members of the IRA, was defending.

Adam, rifle bayoneting the mist gathering in the rain, advanced into battle.

Chimo said, ‘Don’t worry, Amado, there are Spaniards fighting with the brigade as well as British.’

How could you tell one from the other? Phantom figures in front of them. Shouts and curses in Spanish and English.

‘Stay close to me.’ Chimo said. ‘I will kill your Englishmen for you.’

‘And I will kill your Spaniards.’

And then the mist lifts and there is great confusion and it’s apparent that, in their job-lot uniforms, reds are shooting reds as well as Fascists. Adam sees the scene as an old, frantically-speeded movie; when the reel spends itself the killing will stop.

He aims his Mauser and fires at nothing in particular. Finds himself on the edge of the movie screen beside a half-dug trench, cartridge cases and jagged slivers of shell-casing shining in the mud.

The Englishman stands in front of him, rifle, armed with a bayonet, clenched in white-knuckled hands. He wears a woollen Balaclava and rope-soled shoes. And spectacles, rimless and spotted with rain. An Englishman all right.

The Englishman prods his bayonet forward. The blade shines wetly but there is no blood on it. He blinks rapidly behind his spectacles, the sort you can buy in Woolworths without a prescription.

Adam holds his rifle, speared with a ten-inch blade, loosely. He does not want to kill this short-sighted Englishman. Nor does he wish to be killed. As they face each other fear pours into this pause in time, twists Adam’s bowels and roughens his throat.

Before coming to Spain he has not considered death; now it is as close as life. He understands that one thrust from that wet bayonet and the half-dug trench and the shining fragments of war and Kate with her damp hair curling at the nape of her neck will be no more. What does the Englishman see through his rimless, Woolworth’s spectacles?

‘Come on, you Fascist bastard,’ the Englishman says. ‘Fight.’

But Adam can’t move. He opens his mouth but his lips and tongue are frozen as they are in a nightmare that sometimes visits him.

The Englishman’s bayonet stabs, nearer this time.

‘Ah can’t kill you just like that,’ he continues, northern vowels as flat as slate. ‘Not if you don’t move.’

‘And I can’t kill you with an accent like that.’

A lozenge of silence inside the noise of battle. Then the Englishman speaks.

‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ he says. His bayonet dips.

Unanswerable knowledge expands inside Adam. Who is the enemy?

He says, ‘What are we going to do?’

The Englishman says reproachfully: ‘You shouldn’t be on’t other side.’

‘Why not? I believe in what I’m fighting for.’

‘You can’t.’ The Englishman knows this to be true and there is nothing more to be said about it.

‘I should kill you,’ Adam says.

‘If you don’t some other bugger will.’

‘And you should try and kill me.’

‘An Englishman? Nay, lad.’

‘Why are you fighting for the reds?’

‘Because I’m Jewish.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘A lot more but you wouldn’t understand, lad.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t understand,’ Adam says as he notices the Englishman looking beyond him, as he hears the click of a rifle bolt, as he turns deflecting the barrel of Chimo’s rifle, as Chimo pulls the trigger firing a bullet into the greyness above the rain.

And now the mist embraces them again and the Englishman disappears in it, an illusionist’s apparition. Adam calls out but his voice is swallowed by the mist and there is no reply.

Chimo hits him on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. ‘Son of the great whore!’

‘He was English.’

‘So? I am killing Spaniards.’

‘It’s your war.’

‘Then go home, cabrón.’

Adam tells him about his sister and what the Republicans did to Paco.

‘So it’s everyone’s war. So try killing the enemy: if you don’t they will surely kill you.’

And now they are trying to do just that. Emerging from the mist, surprising Adam and Chimo who thought they were behind the Englishman; but all the senses tell untruths in the gunsmoke and the noise that never ceases.

Adam fires his rifle. Once, twice. Men fall. British or Spanish? The rifle jams. He lunges with the bayonet and the blade is as red as the poppies in the field.

Chimo pulls his sleeve. ‘Let’s get out of here, Amado.’

And they are running along the hillside between shallow trenches, over bodies, taking cover behind a crop of boulders.

But these boulders are no one’s exclusive property. These boulders are an objective within the objective of the hill which is an objective within the campaign. And suddenly the fighting is thick around them; so thick that Adam cannot always distinguish Fascists from reds.

He grabs a rifle from the tight grip of a dead soldier. Fires it. The calico-rip of machine-pistol. Men fall forward which means they have been shot in the back but no one can be blamed because the reel of the ancient movie is out of control.

A punch on the head, just below the ear; he can no longer hear. He makes his way carefully through the silent carnage. He is alone now in the mist walking with a drunkard’s gait.

His head is heavy on his shoulders, his body bends with its weight; he wants to lie down and sleep. He stumbles, slides into a shell-hole, stays there, feet in a puddle, back propped against torn soil. He feels the earth shift as shells fall but he hears nothing.

The convoy skirting the Battle of Jarama at 3.30 am consisted of a black Chevrolet, an ambulance and three lorries.

At the wheel of the Chevrolet sat Christopher Lance wearing his check jacket and the pink, grey and brown tie of Lancing Old Boys. With him was a small, shy woman named Margaret Hill, matron of the British-American Hospital in Madrid and Fernanda Jacobson, head of the Scottish Ambulance Unit who often wore kilt and tartan hose and was not shy at all.

With them were 72 charges, British evacuees whom the Government allowed to leave Spain and Spanish refugees from the reds whom the Government didn’t. They had gathered furtively that evening at the British Embassy at 8 pm; now they were on their way through 32 check points to Alicante to be taken by a British destroyer, HMS Esk, north through the Mediterranean and across the Gulf of Lions to Marseilles and freedom.

As the convoy turned on to the Madrid–Valencia road shells exploded behind them and to their right machine-guns and rifles barked and coughed.

Martine Ruiz listened to them as the baby moved impatiently within her. In the makeshift British-American Hospital in Madrid on the corner of Velazquez at Ayala before reporting to the embassy she had insisted that it had no intention of entering the hostile world for at least another week or so; but even as she had been smiling comfortably at the British women the pains had been coming regularly.

The ambulance leaped over a shell-hole; Martine moaned and placed her hands across her drum-tight belly. The priest comforted her.

‘It will be soon,’ an old Spanish woman beside her said. ‘There is a hospital in Alicante.’

‘It won’t be for a long time yet,’ Martine said.

‘I can tell.’

‘It’s my baby,’ Martine Ruiz said.

The convoy stopped. Martine heard voices. But she trusted this Englishman who had a pass stamped by the Ministry of Works, the War Office, the British Embassy, the syndicates and Azaña himself.

The door of the ambulance opened. A sentry looked in. He was unshaven and wore a shiny-peaked cap on his unkempt hair. He saw the hump of Martine’s stomach and smiled. He would deliver a baby with one hand and shoot a Fascist with the other, this one.

‘A boy or a girl?’ he asked.

‘A girl,’ Martine said, smiling at him.

‘A boy,’ the old woman said.

‘Twins,’ the sentry said and, still smiling, shut the doors.

The convoy moved off. The gunfire grew fainter.

The baby pushed again. Not in Alicante, Martine said to the baby. There they will find out who I am and, although they may let you live, you will not have a mother. Tranquilo, she said. Please baby, boy or girl, tranquilo.

‘It will be soon,’ the old woman said.

The priest said nothing.

Tom Canfield, crouching, made his way along the dirt path beside the Jarama. The water idled past islands of black mud on which dark weed-like watercress grew. A stork stood alone among the bodies in a field, and its arrogance and the abandoned desolation of the field made Tom decide that the battle had passed by here, that the Fascists had crossed the river so he must be in Nationalist territory. All he could do was hold out till dusk, then try and cross the river as the Fascists had done, work his way through their lines to the Republicans and hitch a lift to the air-base at Guadalajara. Which sounded easy enough, except that the countryside with its vineyards and fallow cornfields was flat, and Fascist reconnaissance planes were flying low over the river.

Dusk began to gather with its own brand of loneliness. His wounded arm belonged to someone else; his chest hurt. A squad of Polikarpovs flew through the valley, scattering and climbing as they reached the outskirts of Madrid. One lingered. Seidler looking for him. You could bet good money on it.

Tom remembered an evening like this, a little cruel with a saline breeze coming in from the Atlantic, when he and a girl had escaped from a party at his father’s mansion at Southampton and ended up of all places in the potato fields at the south fork of the island. He had taken his open Mercer with the wire wheels and white-wall tyres. She was a happy girl with golden limbs and easy ways and they had lingered in the Mercer until the spray from the ocean had cooled their ardour. When they got back to the house the party was over, his father was bust and life would never be the same again. But he would always remember the girl.

Tom smiled. A bullet hit a tree hanging over the river gouging a finger of sappy wood from it. He dropped to the ground, took cover behind another farmhouse with a patio scattered with olive stones. There was some bread on a scrubbed table and a leather wineskin. The bread was stale but not too hard; he ate it and drank sweet dark wine from the wineskin. The wine intoxicated him immediately.

He heard a dog barking. He opened a studded door with a rusty key in the lock. The dog was half pointer, half hunter, with a whiplash tail, brown and white fur, a brown nose and yellowish eyes. It was young, starving and excited; as Tom stroked its lean ribs it pissed with excitement. Tom gave it the last of the bread.

A heavy machine-gun opened up; bullets thudded into the walls of the patio. The lingering Polikarpov returned, firing a burst in the direction of the machine-gun. Seidler without a doubt. The machine-gun stopped firing but Tom decided to leave the farmhouse which was a natural target. He let himself out of the patio. The dog followed.

The river led him through the rain into mist. He came to a broken bridge that had been blown up, coming to rest where it had originally been built. He ran across it, the dog at his heels.

The gunfire was louder now. No chance yet of getting through the Fascist lines. He noticed a shell-hole partly covered by a length of shattered fencing. He slithered down the side, coming to rest opposite a young, dark-haired soldier dazed with battle.

Sometimes a meeting between two people is a conceiving. A dual life is propagated and it possesses a special lustre even when its partners are divided by time or location. These partners, although they may fight, are blessed because together they may glimpse a vindication of life. All of this passes unnoticed at the time; all, that is, except an easiness between them.

Tom Canfield became aware of this easiness when, coming face to face with Adam Fleming in a shell-hole in the middle of Spain, he said, ‘Hi, soldier,’ and Adam replied incredulously, ‘I can hear you.’

And because a sense of absurdity is companion of these relationships, Tom laughed idiotically and said, ‘You can what?’

‘Hear you. I was deaf until you dropped in.’ And then he, too, began to laugh.

Tom watched him until the laughter was stilled. He had an argumentative face and, despite the laughter, his eyes were wide with shock. Tom was glad he was a flier: these young men from the debating forums of Europe hadn’t been prepared for the brutality of a battlefield.

‘Where did you learn to shoot?’ he asked pointing at the Russian rifle in the young man’s hands.

‘At college.’

‘In England? I thought you only learned cricket.’

‘And tennis. I played a lot of tennis.’

‘Because you were supposed to play cricket?’

‘You’re very perceptive. My name’s Adam Fleming.’ He saluted across the muddy water at the bottom of the crater.

‘Tom Canfield. How’s it going up there?’ he asked, nodding his head at the lowering sky.

Adam shrugged.

‘Fifty-fifty. I got disorientated,’ he said as though an explanation was necessary. ‘I didn’t know who I was fighting. Maybe someone fired a rifle too close to my ear. I felt as though I had been punched.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Tom said.

‘You’re a boxer?’

‘A mauler.’ Tom hesitated. ‘What made you come out here?’ He cradled his wounded arm inside his flying jacket; the dog settled itself at his feet and closed its eyes.

‘The same as you probably. It’s difficult to put in words.’

‘I would have guessed you were pretty neat with words.’

‘I knew a great injustice was being perpetrated. I knew words weren’t enough; they never are. And you have to make your stand while you’re young … I’m not very good with words tonight,’ he said.

‘I guess you’ve been fighting too long,’ Tom said.

A shell burst overhead. Hot metal hissed in the water.

Adam said, ‘My father had a cartoon in his study. It was by an artist from the Great War called Bruce Bairnsfather. It showed two old soldiers sitting in a shell-hole just like this and one soldier is saying to the other, “If you knows of a better ’ole go to it.”’

‘This is the best hole I know of,’ Tom said.

‘You’re lucky, being a flier.’

‘A privileged background,’ Tom said. ‘My old man owned a Cessna.’

Fleming, he decided, came from London; a left-wing intellectual rather than an enlightened slogger like himself.

Adam said, ‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’

‘It’s a weird thing to say but there was no other choice.’

‘I understand that. Did you ever doubt?’

‘My motives? Sure I did. I figure there’s a bit of the adventurer or the martyr in any foreigner fighting here.’

‘But our motives, surely, are stronger than self glory or self pity?’ His voice sounded anxious.

‘Oh sure. In my case anyway. I can’t speak for everyone. There are a few phonies here, you know.’

‘You think I’m one?’

‘I think you go looking for arguments.’

‘I can’t stand dogma. But you’re right, I’m too argumentative. It had me worried for a while. I wondered whether I was championing a cause out of perversity.’

‘Not you,’ Tom said. He had known this man for a long time – the frown as he interrogated himself, the dawning smile as he called his own bluff.

‘Then I had a letter from my sister.’

Tom waited; there is a time for waiting and when you knew someone as well as he knew Adam Fleming you knew that this was just such a time.

‘They killed her husband.’

‘Bastards.’

‘Then I knew I had to come here. I wish I’d come before I needed proof.’

‘You would have come anyway,’ Tom said.

‘But you didn’t need a push.’

‘Try living in a company shack in a coal town,’ Tom said. ‘Try busting your ass in the dust bowl of Oklahoma.’

He sensed that what he had said was grotesquely wrong but he couldn’t fathom why. Surely it was feasible to compare injustices in the United States with those of Spain. I knew a great injustice was being perpetrated. Those were Adam Fleming’s very words.

But such is the spontaneity of relationships such as this that anticipation is everything. No need to tell a joke: just point the way. No need to say goodbye: there is farewell in your greeting.

And now Tom Canfield knew.

He said, ‘Your sister, where was her husband killed?’

‘In Madrid,’ said Adam who, of course, knew by now.

‘But you’re holding a Russian rifle.’

‘And you’re wearing a German flying jacket.’

‘I took my rifle from the body of a dead Republican.’

‘I bought my flying jacket in a discount store in New York.’

Delgado said from the lip of the shell-hole, ‘I am delighted to see, Fleming, that you have taken a prisoner.’




CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_2781bd98-ff26-5347-a074-7a03dac05067)


Able Seaman Thomas Emlyn Jones, RN, was a man of many talents. He could sing like a chorister, pluck pennies from the ears of children visiting his ship, arm-wrestle a dockside bruiser into submission, summon delicate fevers when threatened with onerous duties and tune the Welsh lilt in his voice on to a wavelength that could cajole girls from Portsmouth to Perth into committing perilous indiscretions.

But midwifery was not one of his accomplishments. When Martine Ruiz emerged from a cabin on HMS Esk, swathed in a sheet, hand supporting her considerable belly, and said, ‘Please help me, I’m having a baby,’ he was unnerved.

He had watched her board the destroyer with the other refugees at the palm-fringed port of Alicante at dusk and she had reminded him of a galleon in full sail, so stately in her bearing that nothing untoward could possibly happen in the immediate future. Now here she was, alarm bells sounding.

His first instinct was to run on his bandy miner’s legs to the sickbay to get help but the Esk had paused north of Alicante to pick up wounded refugees from a moonlit beach, and the ship’s surgeon and his assistants were busily and bloodily engaged. In any case the woman wouldn’t let go of him.

Pulling him into the cabin, she lay on the bunk and said, ‘It is happening,’ as indeed it seemed to be, belly convulsing, body heaving, hands white-knuckled.

Hot water and towels: those, Taffy Jones remembered, were the essentials. He had observed them being taken into the bedroom in the dark and crouching cottage in the Rhondda Valley when his exhausted mother was giving birth to one of his sisters; he had heard the doctor calling for them in the sort of movie where the heroine collapses in a snowstorm and gives birth to twins.

The woman on the bunk screamed.

He turned on the hot water in the wash-basin and grabbed the towels from the rack.

‘There, there, lovey,’ he said, ‘everything will be all right, just you see.’ He held her hand and she gripped it with a fearful strength.

What now? ‘Push,’ he said as the midwife, who smelled of gin, had said to his mother. ‘Push, that’s it, lovey, you just help her on her way,’ because he had no doubt in his mind that a lady was about to be added to the passenger list.

He bathed her sweating face with a towel, not too hot, and laid another across her labouring belly. Observing her agony, hearing her cry, he determined that in future he would be more considerate towards women. No more buns in the oven for Taffy Jones.

The sheet slipped away and a head emerged from between her wide-flung thighs. ‘Push,’ he said gently, ‘push,’ although whether he was addressing mother or child he couldn’t say. What did you do when the baby finally made it? All you heard in the movies was a plaintive squawk from behind closed doors.

‘There, there, lovey, she’s on her way.’

The fingers of Martine Ruiz gripped his hand like talons. She said, ‘You will have to help.’

He stared at the baby; it seemed to have given up the struggle. Perhaps it didn’t like what it saw. He placed two paws round the tiny shoulders and pulled very gently; when he got back to Cardiff he would marry the girl who worked in the newsagents and they would take out a mortgage on a £600 semi and have two kids.

The baby, creased and slippery with mucus and blood, swam forward. Taffy Jones, aware of unplumbed emotions stirring within him, sighed. ‘She’s almost there,’ he said softly. ‘Almost there.’

‘In my bag,’ Martine Ruiz whispered in her accented English that he found difficult to understand. ‘A pair of … scissors.’

He opened her expensive-looking handbag and took them out. The cord had to be cut and knotted; that was it. The prospect didn’t alarm him: authority had settled comfortably upon him.

He dipped the blades of the scissors into the hot water, snipped the cord with one deft cut and tied it. Then he examined the baby.

‘It’s a girl,’ he told Martine Ruiz.

But it was making no sound. Was it breathing? He picked it up in his big hands and anxiously held it aloft. A smack followed by a squawk, he remembered.

‘Come on, you little bugger,’ Taffy Jones pleaded.

Still holding the baby in one paw, he ran the fingers of the other down its flimsy ribs.

And the baby laughed. Taffy Jones swore to it then and many times later in dockside bars where normally midwifery doesn’t rate high in conversational priorities. Some might have mistaken that first utterance for a whimper but Taffy knew better. He was there, wasn’t he? ‘Made a contribution to medical science, perhaps. To mankind, maybe,’ and, if it was his round, his drinking friends would nod sagely.

At the time Taffy Jones merely smiled at the baby who was now making noise that could, perhaps, be mistaken for crying and cooed, ‘Oh, you little bugger you.’

He gently washed the baby and handed it to its mother.

Ana Gomez worried. Not at this moment about her husband who was fighting at Jarama but about the future he was fighting for.

In the Plaza de España in Madrid, close to the front line, she watched Pablo kicking a scuffed football near the waterless fountains and Rosana making a sketch of the statue of Don Quixote.

Pablo intended one day to play for Real Madrid; Rosana to have her pictures hung in the Prado. Or would he, perhaps, play for Moscow Dynamo while Rosana exhibited in the Pushkin Museum?

This was what worried Ana as she paused in the hesitant sunshine on her way to hear her cousin Diego, an orator if ever there was one, speak in a bombed-out church off the Gran Via.

At first the different factions within the crusade hadn’t bothered her. They were all fighting for the same cause, weren’t they, so what did it matter if you were FAI or CNT or UGT or a regional separatist? She herself had favoured Anarchism because the belief that ‘Every man should be his own government, his own law, his own church’ seemed to be the purest form of revolution.

But what she believed in even more passionately was Spain – a wide, free country where equality settled evenly with the dust in the plains and the snow in the mountains – and she now believed that this vision was endangered. By the Russians. True, they were providing planes and tanks and guns but do we have to pay with our pride? Everywhere the Communists seemed to be taking over – there was Stalin smiling at her benignly from a banner on the other side of the square. And in Barcelona, so she had heard, the Communists who took their orders from the Kremlin were poised to crush the Communists in POUM who were independent of the Kremlin.

What has it come to, Ana Gomez asked herself, when not only are we divided but the divisions themselves are split? Where was the single blade of revolution that had flashed so brightly at the beginning?

A breeze rippled the banner of Stalin making a deceit of his smile.

Ana called the children. Outside the Gran Via cinema she met Carmen Torres who was taking the children to see the Marx Brothers. She gave them five pesetas and, skirting a bomb crater, made her way through the debris and broken glass to the church.

It was open to the sky and naked and, when she arrived, Diego was about to speak from the stone pulpit. Watching him from the back of the nave, Ana felt uneasy. Although she despised the priests who had defiled religion she still believed in the God they had betrayed and she didn’t like to hear politics instead of prayers in his house. But there was more to her unease than that: there was slyness abroad in the roofless church, a sulking defiance, and at the sides of the congregation stood several men with zealots’ faces.

Diego offered his congregation the clenched fist salute. ‘No pasarán!’ he shouted and they hurled it back at him. He spread his arms. We are one, his arms said. Then, with a plea and sally, he beckoned them into his embrace and when they were there he told them what they had to do.

Diego, with his myopic eyes peering from smoked glasses and his small, button-bursting stomach, did not have a prepossessing appearance, and this was perhaps the secret of his oratory: no one could believe that such fire could issue from such a nondescript body.

But on this disturbing day even Diego sounded suspect to Ana. First came the impassioned affirmation that they would stand together to fight the Fascist oppressors who had ‘plundered their souls’ – lively enough, but predictable, as were the warnings of sacrifices to be endured and the promises of the individual freedoms to be celebrated after the bourgeoisie were sent packing.

After that Diego, man of the people, faltered. And whereas normally his voice soared, hoisting collective passions with it, before diving as abruptly as an eagle on its prey, it was flat and cautious.

Ana listened. State controls, centralism … workers to have their say, of course … but while the war lasted the country must be protected against lawlessness … What was this?

On the sidelines the men with the zealots’ faces clapped. The rest of the audience followed suit but the customary cheers remained stuck in their throats. Diego moved on to ‘our good friends the Russians’.

Planes glinted silver in the sky above the nave. The earth shook with the impact of their bombs. Anti-aircraft guns started up.

‘We must never forget that the Soviet Union fought a civil war against capitalist exploitation …’

And look where it got them. Diego, why are you reciting to us?

‘No pasarán!’ she shouted and strode down the aisle towards the altar, arm raised, fist clenched. ‘No pasarán!’ Ana Gomez, is this you?

Two of the men from the sidelines stood in her way. They smiled indulgently but they were snake-eyed and muscle-jawed, these men.

‘Please return to your place, Ana Gomez.’

How did they know her name?

She half-turned to the audience.

‘This is a woman’s war as well, comrades, in case you hadn’t heard. Ask La Pasionaria.’

From the body of the crowd came a man’s voice: ‘Let her speak. Where would we be without our women?’

‘Thank you, comrade,’ Ana shouted. Two years ago he would have told her to get back to the kitchen!

One of the sidesmen said, ‘The meeting is over. I order you all to disperse in an orderly fashion.’

Order! That was his mistake.

‘Let her speak … Go back to Moscow … This is our war …’ The audience began to stamp and slow-handclap.

The sidesman’s hand went to the long-barrelled pistol in his belt.

‘Go ahead, shoot me,’ Ana said.

The shouts seemed to unify into an ugly sound that reminded her of the first warning growl of a dog with bared teeth.

The sidesmen looked at each other, and shrugged.

Diego came down from the pulpit and took her arm. ‘What are you trying to do to me?’ He had taken off his spectacles; he was naked without them. ‘Didn’t you get my message?’

‘Message? I received no message.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Speak to them,’ Ana said pointing at the audience which was quiet now. ‘The way you used to.’

She pushed past him and mounted the steps of the pulpit. She saw beneath her, as priests before her had seen, faces waiting for hope. What are you doing here, Ana Gomez, mother of two, wife of a museum guard, resident of one of the poorest barrios in Madrid? Who are you to talk about hope?

She laid both hands on the cold knuckle of the pulpit. She had no idea what she was going to say, no idea if any words would emerge from her lips. She noticed the scowling faces of the two men who had tried to stop her. She heard herself speaking.

‘My husband is fighting at Jarama.’

A hush as silent as night settled on the people below her. She saw their poor clothes and their hungry faces and she felt their need for comfort.

‘He did not want to fight.’ She paused. ‘None of us wanted to fight.’

Gunfire sounded distantly.

‘All we wanted was enough money to live decently – decently, comrades, not grandly. All we wanted was a decent education for our children.’

A child whimpered in the congregation.

The two sidesmen seemed to relax; one leaned against a pillar.

‘All we wanted was a share of this country. Not a grand estate, just a decent plot that belonged to us and not to those who paid us a duro for the honour of tilling their land.’

Sunlight shining through the remnants of a stained-glass window cast trembling pools of colour on the upturned faces.

‘All we wanted in this city was a decent wage so that we could feed our families and give them homes and live almost as grandly as the priests.’

She stared at the sky which the bombers had vacated and whispered, ‘Forgive me God.’ But although she knew not where the words came from, they could not be stemmed.

‘No, we did not want to fight: they made us, the enemy who sought to deny us our birthright. But now, at their behest, we shall win and Spain will be shared among us.’

They clapped, and then they cheered, and hope illumined their faces. The two sidesmen clapped and exchanged glances that said they need not have worried. Ana paused professionally, then held up her hands, palms flattened against her audience.

‘I repeat, Spain will be shared among us. Not among foreigners.’ A shuffling silence. The two men snapped upright and stared at her. ‘We shall always be grateful for the help that has been given to us – without that we might have perished – but let us never forget that the capital of Spain is Madrid, not Moscow.’

The audience applauded but now they were more restrained. The sidesmen walked briskly out of the church.

In a bar near the church, where brandy was still available to distinguished revolutionaries, Diego said, ‘Why did you do that to me?’

‘Do what?’

‘Attack the Communists.’

‘Because I am an Anarchist like you.’

‘But I’m not: I’m a Communist.’

Diego leaned forward on his stool and stared despairingly into his coffee laced with Cognac.

Ana folded her arms. ‘You are what?’

‘A Communist. They have even promised me a party card. That was a Communist meeting; I sent Ramón to tell you.’

‘Ramón? Who is this Ramón?’

‘My assistant. But he probably got drunk on his way.’ He stroked his damp moustache with one nail-bitten finger. ‘You were making an anti-Communist speech at a Communist meeting. Mi madre!’ He smiled grimly.

‘I was making a pro-Spanish speech.’

‘The capital of Spain is Madrid, not Moscow … Yes, very patriotic, cousin. I congratulate you on condemning us to the firing squad.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Ana gulped her coffee. ‘How could any true Spaniard disagree?’

‘It wasn’t exactly diplomatic. Not when Moscow is supplying us with our arms.’

‘We are paying for them in gold.’

‘They have our gold: we still need their arms.’

‘And so now we should give them our souls? Do you want Spain to become a colony of the Soviet Union?’

‘Keep your voice down; you aren’t in the pulpit now.’ Diego took off his glasses and glanced around as though he could see better without them. ‘We need them,’ he said. ‘Without them we are doomed.’

Ana said softly, ‘Why did you sell your soul, Diego?’

‘Because I believe that salvation lies with the Communists.’

‘What about those dreams of Anarchism you once cherished? “There is only one authority and that is in the individual.” Who said that, Diego?’

‘Me?’

‘You. What did they buy you with, Diego?’

‘We are all fighting for the same cause.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

‘I have been promised a high office in the administration when the war is over.’

‘And a grand house and a decent salary?’

‘Commensurate with my office,’ Diego said.

‘Perhaps,’ Ana said, ‘they will pay you in roubles.’

‘I tell you, we are all fighting for the same cause.’

It was then that Ana realized that one contestant had been missing from the conversation – the enemy, the Fascists.

Has it come to this? she asked herself. She strode out of the bar and down the street to the cinema where her children were watching the Marx Brothers.

On the Jarama front the fighting had stopped for the night. The combatants had retired to debate how best to kill each other in the morning and, except for the intermittent explosions of shells fired to keep the enemy awake, the battlefield was quiet.

In a concrete bunker captured from the Republicans Colonel Carlos Delgado considered the two foreigners interfering in his war. A picture of Franco hung from the wall recently vacated by Stalin; a map of the Jarama valley and its environs, crayoned with blue and red arrows, was spread across the desk.

Delgado’s fingers searched his freshly-shaven cheeks for any errant bristles, tidied the greying hair above his ears where his cap had rested. His khaki-green tunic was freshly pressed and his belt shone warmly like dark amber. His voice, like Franco’s, was high-pitched.

‘So why,’ he asked in English, ‘were two mercenaries fighting on opposite sides sharing a shell-hole?’

‘I guess you could call it force of circumstances,’ Tom Canfield said.

‘It does neither of you any credit. What is your name?’ he asked Canfield.

‘You’ve got it there in front of you. José Espinosa.’

‘Your real name: non-intervention is a stale joke.’

‘Okay, what the hell – Thomas Canfield.’

‘Why are you fighting for the rabble, Señor Canfield?’

‘Name, rank and number. Nothing more. Isn’t that right, Colonel?’

The glossy captain pulled his long-barrelled pistol from its holster. ‘Answer the colonel,’ he said.

‘You don’t have a rank or number,’ Delgado said.

‘José Espinosa does.’

‘Are you Jewish?’

‘Espinosa, José, pilot, 3805.’

‘This isn’t a movie, Señor Canfield. Please enlighten me: I cannot understand – really I can’t – why any reasonable man should want to fight for a ragged army of peasants and city hooligans whose sport is burning churches and murdering anyone industrious enough to have earned more money than them.’

‘Then you don’t understand very much, Colonel.’

‘Anti-Hitler? Anti-Mussolini? Anti-Fascist?’

‘Anti-gangster,’ Tom said.

‘So we have one anti-Fascist.’ Delgado turned to Adam Fleming who was standing, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, beside Canfield. ‘And one anti-Communist. Do you both find Spain an agreeable location to indulge your politics?’

‘Your politics, sir,’ Adam said.

‘Nice climate,’ Tom said.

Delgado lit an English cigarette, a Senior Service. ‘You, I presume,’ he said to Canfield, ‘were trying to find your way back to the Republican lines.’

‘Wherever those are,’ Tom said.

‘And you,’ to Fleming, ‘were hiding from an unexploded shell?’

‘I got lost,’ Adam said.

‘Perhaps we should provide foreign mercenaries with compasses as well as rifles.’

‘Good idea,’ Tom said. ‘They might find the right side to fight for.’

The captain prodded him in the back with the barrel of his pistol.

Delgado blew a jet of smoke across the bunker. It billowed in the light of the hurricane lamps.

‘So what shall I do with the two of you? One American fighting for the enemy, one Englishman displaying cowardice in the face of the enemy …’

‘That’s a lie,’ Adam said.

‘He was concussed,’ Tom said.

‘Your loyalty is touching. But loyalty to what, an anti-Communist?’

‘I’m not a Communist,’ Tom said.

‘Then it is you who is serving on the wrong side.’ Delgado smoked ruminatively and precisely. ‘There are a lot of misguided men fighting for the Republicans. Good officers in the Fifth Regiment, like Lister and Modesto and El Campesino, of course. When he was only 16 he blew up four Civil Guards. Then he fought in Morocco – on both sides! Would you consider flying for us, Señor Canfield?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ Tom said.

‘I rarely joke,’ Delgado said. ‘I see no point to it. But I’m glad you’re staying loyal to the side you mistakenly chose to fight for.’ He dropped his cigarette on the floor, squashing it with the heel of one elegant boot. ‘Now all that remains is to decide the method of execution.’

Spray broke over the prow of HMS Esk as it knifed its way through the swell on its approach to Marseilles but Martine Ruiz, standing on the deck with her five-year-old daughter, Marisa, didn’t seem to notice it as it brushed her face and trickled in tears down her cheeks.

What concerned her was the future that lay ahead through the spume and the greyness for herself, Marisa and her three-day-old baby. How could she settle in England?

What would she do without Antonio? Why did he have to fight when all that had been necessary was to slip away to some Fascist-held city such as Seville or Granada in the south or Salamanca or Burgos in the north and lie low until Madrid was captured? She wished dearly that Antonio was here beside her so that she could scold him.

She stumbled across the lurching deck and went below. Her breasts hurt and her womb ached with emptiness.

The baby was as she had left it in a makeshift cot, a drawer padded with pillows; Able Seaman Thomas Emlyn Jones was also as she had left him, sitting beside the drawer on the bunk reading a copy of a magazine called Razzle.

He hastily folded the magazine and placed it on the bunk beneath his cap.

‘Not a sound,’ he said. ‘Not a dicky bird.’ He stared at his big, furry hands. ‘I was wondering … How are you going to get to England?’

‘Train,’ she said. ‘Then ferry.’

‘Lumbering cattle trucks, those ferries. You mind she isn’t sick,’ pointing to the sleeping baby.

Martine glanced at herself in the mirror. There were shadows under her eyes and her face was drained.

‘It is me who will be sick.’ She spoke English slowly and with care.

‘And me,’ Marisa said. She lay on the bunk and closed her eyes.

‘You’d be surprised how many sailors are sea-sick,’ Taffy Jones said.

Martine, who was becoming queazy, stared curiously at his chapel-dark features. ‘What part of England do you come from?’ she asked.

‘England is it?’ His reaction was unexpected and, she suspected, ungrammatical.

She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Aren’t you English?’

‘Is the Pope a Protestant? I come from Wales, girl, and don’t you ever forget it.’

Now she understood. He was just like a Basque, she thought. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s me that should be sorry, bloody fool that I am.’ He looked at his hands, clenching them and unclenching them, and then he looked at the baby. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘when you get to England … Do you have anywhere to go?’

‘A relative,’ thinking of her brother Pierre who worked in the Credit Lyonnais in London.

‘Ah, not too bad then.’ He adjusted the pillow behind the baby’s head. ‘But just in case this relative of yours is too distant, if you’re ever stuck … You know, if you don’t have anywhere to go you could always come and see us in Wales.’ He handed her a lined sheet of paper. ‘There’s the address, just in case.’ He stood up awkwardly.

Martine took the scrap of paper. ‘Thank you Monsieur Jones.’

‘Taffy.’

‘Monsieur Taffy. And now,’ she said, as the baby stirred and prepared its face to cry, ‘I must feed her.’

Taffy Jones picked up his cap and his copy of Razzle. ‘What are you going to call her?’ he said. ‘I meant to ask you.’

‘Isabel.’

‘Can she have another name?’

‘As many as she wants,’ Martine said.

‘My name’s Thomas. I thought maybe Thomasina might be a good name. How does it sound in Spanish?’

‘It sounds like Tomasina,’ Martine said. ‘And now if you’ll excuse me.’

Isabel Tomasina began to whimper and at first the sounds were so small that to Taffy Jones they sounded like the lonely cries of the seagulls wheeling overhead.

It was dawn – the classic time for executions. Tom Canfield and Adam Fleming walked under armed guard. Behind them were Delgado and the young captain.

Mist lay in the valley but here in a field of vines the air was clean and still night-smelling. A squadron of Capronis flew high above Pingarrón.

Adam glanced at Canfield. He looked thoughtful, that was all, thoughtful and, with his fair hair and lazily dangerous face, very American, convinced that he would be welcome anywhere in the world and if not he would want to know the reason why.

Not any more, Tom Canfield, we are going to die, you and I. For what? For bringing our contradictory ideals to a foreign land?

He stumbled over a fiercely pruned vine. He looked back. The vines squatted in the wet earth like a graveyard of crosses.

There is no future. Life is an entity, not a sequence. It is mine and when it is severed there will be no life for anyone because it is I who see and hear. No life for you, Colonel Delgado, slicing the enemy bristles from your cheeks with a cut-throat razor; no promotion for you, Captain, so handy with your long-barrelled pistol, certainly no life for you, Tom Canfield, who dropped into my life just 12 hours ago.

They approached a ruined farmhouse. A whitewashed wall was still standing and there were blood stains and the pock marks of bullets on it.

Adam Fleming opened his mouth and screamed but no sound issued from his lips.

Canfield said, ‘Excuse me, Colonel, may I ask you a question?’

Delgado switched irritably with his cane at a clump of nettles. ‘What is it?’

‘Will you grant a last request?’

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t shoot me.’

‘You have a sense of humour,’ Delgado said. ‘Why else would you be fighting for Republicans?’

Adam noticed that Canfield’s lips were tight and a muscle was moving in the line of his jaw. They stopped in front of the wall beneath a flap of bamboo roof. Where was the firing squad?

Delgado, holding his cane between two hands, turned and faced them. ‘You,’ to Canfield, ‘will be executed because you were found wearing civilian clothes and carrying false papers. You,’ – to Adam – ‘should be executed for desertion.’

Should?

‘But I am willing to concede you were shell-shocked. However, you know my views on foreign mercenaries meddling in Spain’s war. It seems logical, therefore, that you should carry out the execution.’ The captain handed Adam the pistol. ‘After all, he is the enemy.’

Adam took the gun. It had been tended with love, and he knew the mechanism would work snugly.

Delgado pointed at the blood-stained wall with his cane. ‘Over there.’ The blood stains were the colour of rust. ‘Do you want to be blindfolded?’ he asked Canfield.

‘I like to look the enemy in the eye. One of the lessons you learn in boxing.’ There was a catch in his voice and his body was shaking and because they had known each other a long time, 12 hours at least, Adam knew that he was thinking, ‘Please, God, don’t let me be a coward.’

Cowardice? Who cared about cowardice? Why did they teach children that it mattered? If I live I will teach children that cowardice is natural, the most natural thing in the world; but I shan’t live because I can’t shoot Tom Canfield.

‘If you refuse,’ Delgado was saying, ‘you, too, will be executed for desertion, for refusing to obey an order, for cowardice.’

There it was again, cowardice. I wish I could pin medals on the breasts of all those who have exhibited cowardice in the face of the enemy. I wish I could tell my children that they should never be ashamed of crying.

‘There.’ Delgado indicated a line whitewashed on the mud. ‘Get it over with quickly: we are due to attack again.’

The sound of aircraft filled the sky. Adam looked up. Russian-built Katiuska twin-engined bombers.

‘Get on with it,’ Delgado snapped.

Adam raised the pistol.

‘I will raise my cane,’ Delgado said. ‘When I drop it you will fire. Empty the barrel, just in case.’

Adam stared down the barrel of the pistol, lined up Canfield’s chest with the inverted V blade foresight and the V notch rearsight. Why shouldn’t I shoot him? He is the enemy, a red, and I have killed many of those already.

Canfield said, ‘How about that …’ He lost his sentence, recaptured it. ‘… last request? A cigarette?’

You don’t smoke, Adam thought. He stroked the trigger. Two pressures? Why do you hesitate, Adam Fleming? Canfield chose to fight on that side, you on this. You came to Spain to kill reds, didn’t you? Priest-killers, murderers of your sister’s husband.

Who is the enemy?

‘Permission refused.’ Delgado’s cane fell.

The last thing Adam Fleming remembered was the roar of a Katiuska bomber.

Tom Canfield assumed he was dead.

The crash and the pointed ache in his skull and the crepitus of fractured wall … Now all he could see was a khaki-coloured dustiness. Perhaps he was in the process of dying. He tested his limbs. They moved painlessly, all except the arm that had been wounded in the plane crash. His hand went to his chest searching for bullet holes. Nothing. The dust began to clear. He heard a groan. He sat up.

The flap of bamboo lay across his knees. Then he heard the drone of the Katiuska bombers.

He stood up and blundered through the settling dust. The first body he encountered was Delgado’s. He was still alive but for once he did not look freshly barbered. Then the two soldiers and the captain. One of the soldiers was dead. Lastly Adam Fleming, pistol still clenched in his fist. There was a wound on the side of his head and his face was grey.

He knelt beside him. He was alive but only just. His breathing was shallow and blood flowed freely from the scalp wound. Tom took a torn cushion from a cane chair, placed it under his head and tried to staunch the bleeding with his handkerchief.

‘Were you going to shoot me?’ he asked the unconscious man. ‘Would I have shot you?’

He heard voices. He knelt behind a heap of rubble beside a legless rubber doll. Fascist soldiers were approaching. They would look after Fleming.

He took the pistol from his hand and edged round the remnants of the farmhouse. As he ran towards an olive grove he heard a noise behind him. He flung himself to the ground and the brown and white dog with the foraging nose licked his face, then whipped his chest with its long tail.

‘Another survivor,’ Tom said. He patted the dog’s lean ribs. ‘Come on, let’s find some breakfast.’

The hill where Adam Fleming had been fighting lay ahead. He began to climb towards the Republican lines on the other side.

Machine-gun fire chattered in the distance but yesterday’s battlefield was deserted except for corpses. The sky was pure and pale, and the mist in the valley was rising. It was going to be a fine, spring-beckoning day.

He was near the brow of the hill now. There he would be a silhouette, a perfect target. He flattened himself on the shell-torn ground and, with the dog beside him, inched upwards.

Bodies lay stiffly around him, many of them British by the look of them, wearing berets and Balaclavas and job-lot uniforms, staring at the sky as though in search of reasons.

At the crest of the mole-shaped hill he rolled towards the Republican lines. Hit a rock and lay still. When he tried to stand up there was no strength in him. He noticed blood from his wounded arm splashing on to a slab of stone. How long had it been bleeding like that? Pain knifed his chest.

The dog whined, whip-lash tail lowered.

He continued down the hill, cannoning into ilex trees, slithering in the water draining from the top of the hill. There was a dirt road at the bottom and he had to reach it. He collapsed into a fragrant patch of sage 50 metres short of it. He stretched out one hand and felt the dog. Or is this all an illusion? Did Adam Fleming pull the trigger?

The smell of the sage and the warmth of the dog faded.

It was replaced by the smell of ether.

He opened his eyes. A middle-aged man with pugnacious features, Slavonic angles to his eyes and sparse grey hair, stood beside his bed.

The man said, ‘Please, don’t say Where am I.’

‘Okay, I won’t.’ He heard his own voice; it was thin and far away.

‘You’re in a field hospital. A monastery, in fact. And you’re extremely lucky to be alive for two reasons.’

‘Which are?’

‘A peasant found you bleeding to death near a dirt road. He stopped the bleeding by tying a strip of your shirt round your arm, pushing a stick underneath it and twisting it. A primitive tourniquet.’

‘Secondly?’

‘Then I drove by and saved your life.’

Tom closed his eyes. He was vaguely aware of something intrusive in his good arm. He tried to find it but he couldn’t move his other arm. He retreated into a star-filled sky.

‘Why did you come to Spain?’ Tom asked Dr Norman Bethune from Montreal when he next stood at his bedside.

‘I needed a war,’ Bethune said. ‘To see if I can save lives in the next one.’

‘Which next one would that be?’

‘The one we’re rehearsing for,’ said Bethune who was taking refrigerated blood to the front line instead of waiting for haemorrhaging casualties to reach hospitals. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I wouldn’t want to go three rounds with Braddock but I’m okay, I guess. Whose blood have I got inside me?’ He jerked his head at the pipe protruding from his arm.

‘God knows. Good blood by the look of you. Maybe you owe your life to a priest.’

‘Don’t tell the commissar that,’ Tom said. ‘Are these all your patients?’ He pointed at the broken and bandaged patients lying on an assortment of beds in the stone-floored dining hall of the monastery.

‘A few, those with colour in their cheeks. I gave the first transfusion at the front on 23 December last year. Remember that date: maybe it will be more important than the date the war broke out.’

Tom raised himself on his pillow, then said abruptly, ‘When can I fly again?’

‘When your arm’s mended. You broke it a few days ago. Right?’

‘I got shot down.’

‘And later you must have fallen. And when you fell you turned a simple fracture into a compound fracture and a splinter of bone penetrated an artery and the haemorrhage became a deluge.’

‘I can fly with my left hand.’

‘When your ribs are mended.’

‘Ribs?’

Bethune pointed at his chest. ‘They weren’t practising first-aid when they strapped you up.’

‘Shit,’ said Tom Canfield. ‘No pain though.’

‘Breathe in deeply.’

‘Shit,’ said Tom Canfield.

During the next five days Tom fell in love and learned how to acquire a fortune.

The girl’s name was Josefina. She was 18 and stern in the fashion of nurses, although sometimes the touch of her fingers was shy. She was a student nurse, qualified by war, and she came from a small coastal town astride the provinces of Valencia and Alicante.





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