Winter in Madrid (23 page)

He squeezed her hand. ‘Why do you take their word for what you are? Why won’t you take mine instead?’

She burst out weeping. He came round the table and knelt beside her and held her tightly. She felt a sense of release.

‘I’ve only been with a man once,’ she said quietly.

‘You don’t have to now. I’d never want to do anything you didn’t. Ever.’

She looked into his eyes, deep dark olive. The past seemed to recede, washing away down a corridor in her mind. She knew it would return but for now it was far away. She took a deep breath.

‘I do want to. I have since the day I met you. Stay with me, don’t go back to Carabanchel tonight.’

‘Are you sure you don’t need to sleep now?’

‘No.’ She took off her glasses. He smiled and took them from her gently.

‘I like those,’ he said gently. ‘They make you look clever.’

She smiled. ‘So you didn’t just pick me out to convert to communism.’

He shook his head, his smile broadening.

S
HE WOKE
in the middle of the night to feel his fingers caressing her neck. It was dark, she could only make out the outline of his head but she felt his body against her.

‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she whispered. ‘Not with you.’

‘I loved you the first day I met you,’ Bernie said. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’

She laughed nervously. ‘Like me? What does that mean?’

‘Alive, compassionate, sensual though you pretend not to be.’

Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘I thought you were too beautiful for me. You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.’ She whispered, ‘I thought, if we were ever naked together I’d feel ashamed.’

‘You silly girl. Silly girl.’ He held her close again.

I
T FELT WRONG
to be so happy in the besieged city. The fighting to the north continued; Franco’s forces were still being held. The government had fled to Valencia, and Madrid was run by committees that people said the Communists controlled. The loudspeakers in the city centre called on citizens to be wary of traitors in their midst.

Barbara worked on, dealing with exchanges of prisoners and enquiries about missing persons, but side by side with her sense of helplessness in the face of murderous chaos was an inner warmth, a lightness. ‘I love him,’ she would tell herself, and then, wonderingly, ‘And he loves me.’

He waited for her every day outside the office and they would go
to her flat or the cinema or a cafe. The doctors said Bernie’s arm was healing well. In a month or so he would be fit for service again. He had asked again to help the party with new recruits to the International Brigades but they said they had enough people.

‘If only you didn’t have to go back,’ she said to him one evening. It was a few days before Christmas; they were sitting in a bar in the Centro after visiting the cinema. They had seen a Soviet film about the modernization of Central Asia, then a gangster movie with Jimmy Cagney. It was the topsy-turvy world they lived in now. Some nights the Nationalists in the Casa de Campo fired artillery down Gran Vía at the time the cinemas emptied, but not that night.

‘I’m an enlisted soldier in the Republican Army,’ Bernie said. ‘I have to go back when they tell me. Otherwise I could be shot.’

‘I wish we could just go home. Away from this. It’s what we’ve feared for years in the Red Cross. A war where there’s no difference between soldiers and civilians. A city full of people caught in the middle.’ She sighed. ‘I saw an old man in the street today, he looked like he’d been a professional of some sort, he had a thick coat on but it was old and dusty and he was looking in the bins for something to eat, peering in while pretending not to. He caught my eye and he looked so ashamed.’

‘I doubt he’s suffering any more than the poor. He’ll get the same rations. Why should it be worse for him, just because he’s middle class? This war’s got to be fought. It’s got to be.’

She took his hand across the table, looked him in the eye. ‘If you were allowed to go home now, with me, would you?’

He dropped his eyes. ‘I have to stay. It’s my duty.’

‘To the party?’

‘To mankind.’

‘I wish I had your faith sometimes. Then I mightn’t feel so bad.’

‘It’s not faith. I wish you’d try to understand Marxism, it exposes the bones of reality. Oh, Barbara, I wish you could see things clearly.’

She gave a tired laugh. ‘No, I’ve never been any good at that. Please don’t go back, Bernie. If you go now I’m not sure I could bear it. Not now. Please, please, let’s go back to England.’ She reached out and clasped his hand. ‘You’ve a British passport, you could get out. You could go into the embassy.’

He was silent for a moment. Then Barbara heard his name called out, in a voice with a strong Scottish accent. She turned and saw a fair-haired young man waving at him from the bar where he stood with a group of tired-looking men in uniform.

‘Piper!’ The Scotsman raised his glass. ‘How’s the arm?’

‘All right, McNeil. Getting better! I’ll be back soon.’

‘¡No pasarán!’
The soldier and Bernie exchanged the clenched-fist salute. Bernie turned back to Barbara, lowering his voice. ‘I can’t do it, Barbara. I love you but I can’t. And I don’t have a passport, I had to surrender it to the army. And …’ He sighed.

‘What?’

‘I’d be ashamed for the rest of my life.’ He nodded at the soldiers at the bar. ‘I can’t leave them. I know it’s hard for a woman to understand, but I can’t. I have to go back, though I don’t want to.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. But I’m a soldier. What I want doesn’t matter.’

T
HE FIGHTING
in the Casa de Campo ground into stalemate, trench warfare like the Western Front in the Great War. But everyone said Franco would renew his offensive in the spring, probably somewhere in the open country south of the city. There were still casualties enough; Barbara saw wounded men brought back from the front every day, lying pale-faced in carts or trucks. The mood among the populace was changing, the fiery combativeness of the autumn giving way to depression. There were shortages too; people were looking ill, getting boils and chilblains. Barbara felt guilty about the better Red Cross food she shared with Bernie. Her happiness alternated with the fear of losing him, and anger too that he could come into her life and transform it and then just march away. Sometimes the anger turned to a desperate fearful weariness.

Two days later they were walking from Barbara’s flat to her office. It was bright and cold, the sun just up, frost on the pavements. The queues for the daily ration began at seven; already a long line of black-clad women waited outside the government offices in Calle Mayor.

The women stopped talking suddenly and stared along the street. Barbara saw a couple of horse-drawn carts coming towards them.
As they passed she smelt the fresh tarry paint and saw that they contained little white coffins, for children whose souls had not yet been soiled, the Catholic practice living on. The women stared at them, bleakly and silently. One made the sign of the cross, then began to weep.

‘People are at the end of their tether,’ Barbara said. ‘They can’t take much more. All the death!’ She burst out crying too, there in the street. Bernie put his arm round her but she shrugged him off. ‘I see you in a coffin! You!’

He held her at arm’s length and looked into her eyes. ‘If Franco takes Madrid there’ll be a massacre. I won’t abandon them. I won’t!’

C
HRISTMAS
D
AY CAME
. They ate a greasy mutton stew in Barbara’s flat, then went upstairs to bed. They lay in each other’s arms and talked.

‘This isn’t the Christmas I expected,’ Barbara said. ‘I thought I’d be in Birmingham, going with Mum and Dad to visit my sister and her family. I always get restless after a couple of days, I want to get away.’

He held her tight. ‘How did they make you think so badly of yourself?’

‘I don’t know. It just happened.’

‘You should be angry.’

‘They could never understand why I went to work for the Red Cross.’ She ran a finger over his chest. ‘They’d have liked to see me married with children, like Carol.’

‘Would you like children?’

‘Only when there are no wars any more.’

Bernie lit cigarettes for them, fumbling in the dark. His face was serious in the red glow. ‘I’m a disappointment to my parents. They think I’ve thrown away everything Rookwood offered. I wish I’d never won that bloody scholarship.’

‘Didn’t you get anything out of school?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘Like Caliban said, they taught me language, so I know how to swear.’

She found his heart and laid her hand there, feeling the soft thump-thump.

‘Perhaps that’s what drew us together. Two disappointments.’ She paused. ‘You believe in fate, Bernie, don’t you?’

‘No. Historical destiny.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You can influence destiny, you can hamper it or hurry it forward. You can’t do anything to change fate.’

‘I wish my destiny could be with you.’

She felt his chest rise and fall sharply as he took a deep breath. ‘Barbara.’

‘What?’

‘You know I’m nearly fit again. In a couple of weeks they’re sending me to the new training camp at Albacete. They told me yesterday.’

‘Oh God.’ Her heart sank.

‘I’m sorry. I was waiting for the right moment but there isn’t one, is there?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t think I really cared if I lived before, but I do now. Now that I’m going back.’

F
OR TWO WEEKS
after he left she had no news. She went to work and stumbled through the day, but when she returned to the flat and he wasn’t there the silence seemed to echo as though he was dead already.

In the first week of February news came of a Fascist offensive to the south of Madrid. They were aiming to sweep round and cut the capital off completely, but they were held at the Jarama river. The radio and newspapers spoke of a heroic defence, Franco’s advance checked before it had really begun. The International Brigades were prominent in the fighting. They said there were heavy casualties.

Every morning before work Barbara went to army headquarters in the Puerta del Sol. At first the staff were suspicious, but when she came a second day and a third they were kind to her. She had let herself go, she was losing weight and there were dark rings under her eyes, her pain visible to all.

The headquarters was chaotic, uniformed clerks running around clutching papers, telephones ringing everywhere. Barbara wondered
whether some of those phone lines connected with the front, if there might be a connection between one of those buzzing rings and the place where Bernie was now. She did that all the time now, made connections in her head: the same sun shines down on us both, the same moon, I hold a book that he held, put a fork in my mouth that he put in his …

There was serious fighting in the second and third week of February, but still she had no news. She had had no letters, either, but they told her communications were difficult. Towards the end of February the fighting lessened, turned into another stalemate. Barbara hoped news might start coming through now.

She heard on the last day of February, a cold early spring day. She had come to HQ before work as usual and this time a uniformed clerk asked her to wait in a side room. She knew at once it was bad news. She sat in a shabby little office with a desk and typewriter and a portrait of Stalin on the wall. She thought, irrelevantly, how does he keep that big moustache in order?

The door opened and a man in captain’s uniform came in. There was a paper in his hand and his face was sombre. Barbara felt a chill run through her, as though she had fallen through ice into dark water. She didn’t get up to shake hands, just sat there.

‘Miss Clare. Good afternoon. I hear you have come here many times.’

‘Yes. For news.’ She gulped. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

The officer raised a hand. ‘We do not know for sure. Not for sure. But he is on the list of those missing believed killed. The British Battalion was in heavy fighting on the thirteenth.’

‘Missing believed killed,’ she said flatly. ‘I know what that means. You just haven’t found a body.’

He didn’t answer, just inclined his head.

‘They fought magnificently. They held back the Fascist advance on their own for two days.’ He paused. ‘Many could not be identified.’

Barbara felt herself fall from the chair. As she collapsed to the floor she started weeping uncontrollably, pushing herself into the floorboards because under them was the earth, the earth where Bernie was buried now.

T
HE
R
ITZ DINING ROOM
was lit by sparkling chandeliers. Harry took his seat at the long dining table reserved for the embassy staff. Tolhurst sat next to him; on his other side, Goach, the old man who had instructed him in protocol, settled carefully into his chair. He was bald, with a drooping white moustache and a soft voice, and wore a monocle on a long black thread. The collar of his dinner jacket was spotted with dandruff.

Harry’s wing collar chafed at his neck as he looked round the table; two dozen embassy staff had come to show the flag. At the head of the table Hoare sat with his wife, Lady Maud, a large plain woman. Hillgarth was on Hoare’s other side, his naval uniform bright with medals.

Harry had reported back to Hillgarth after his meeting with Sandy. Tolhurst had been there too. Hillgarth had been pleased with his progress, especially with the invitation to dinner, and intrigued to learn about Barbara.

‘See if you can get him to talk more about his business,’ Hillgarth had said. ‘You don’t know who the other guests are going to be?’

‘No. I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to press too closely.’

Hillgarth nodded. ‘Quite right. What about his girly, could she be in on his plans?’

‘I don’t know.’ Harry frowned.

‘You
were
just friends?’ Hillgarth interjected sharply.

‘Yes, sir. It’s just, I don’t want to involve her unless I have to. But I see it might be necessary,’ he added. ‘It’s odd, their getting together – Sandy didn’t get on with Bernie.’