Winter in Madrid (2 page)

Bernie had thought Spain would be hot; the memories of his visit with Harry six years ago were all of dry heat, hard as a hammer. But in February, although the days were warm enough, it grew cold at dusk, and he wasn’t sure he could get through a night out here. He could feel the lice crawling in the thick down on his stomach. They had infested the base camp and Bernie hated their crawling itch. Pain was a strange thing: his leg was bearable but the urge to scratch his stomach was desperate. For all he knew, though, he could be surrounded by Fascist soldiers who had taken his still form for a corpse, and would open fire at any sign of movement.

He raised his head a little, gritting his teeth, dreading the impact of a bullet. Nothing. Above him only the bare hillside. Stiffly, he turned over. Pain shot through his leg like a knife and he had to clench his jaw shut against a scream. He pulled himself up on his elbows and looked down. Half his trouser leg was torn away and
his thigh was covered with dark, clotted blood. It wasn’t bleeding now, the bullet must have missed the artery, but if he moved too much it might start again.

To the left he saw two bodies in Brigade uniforms. Both had fallen on their faces and one was too far off to see but the other was McKie, the young Scots miner. Fearfully, trying not to move his leg, he swivelled on his elbows again and looked upwards, to the top of the knoll.

Forty feet above him, projecting over the lip of the hill, was a tank. One of the German ones Hitler had given Franco. An arm protruded limply from the gun turret. The Fascists must have brought up tanks and this one had been stopped just before it lurched down the knoll. It was precariously balanced, the front protruding almost halfway over; from where he lay Bernie could see the pipes and bolts of the underside, the heavy plated tracks. It could topple over on him at any moment; he had to move.

He began crawling slowly away. Pain stabbed through his leg and after a couple of yards he had to stop, sweating and gasping. He could see McKie now. One arm had been shot off and lay a few yards away. Untidy brown hair was ruffled slightly by the breeze, in death as it had been in life, though the face beneath was already white. McKie’s eyes were closed, the pleasantly ugly face looked peaceful. Poor devil, Bernie thought, and felt tears pricking the corners of his eyes.

When he had first seen dead bodies, the men brought back from the fighting in Madrid and laid out in rows in the street, Bernie had felt sick with horror. Yet when they had gone into battle yesterday his squeamishness had vanished. It had to when you were under fire, Pa had told him on one of the rare occasions he spoke about the Somme, every sense had to be tuned to survival. You didn’t see, you
watched
, as an animal watches. You didn’t hear, you
listened
, as an animal listens. You became as focused and heartless as an animal. But Pa had long spells of depression, evenings spent sitting in his little office behind the shop, head bowed under the weak yellow light as he fought to forget the trenches.

Bernie remembered McKie’s jokes about how Scotland would be independent under socialism, laughing as he looked forward to its
being free of the useless Sassenachs. He licked his dry lips. Would this moment, McKie’s hair ruffling in the breeze, come to him in dreams if he got out of it alive, even if they succeeded and created a new, free world?

He heard a creak, a small, metallic sound. He looked up; the tank was swaying slightly, the long gun barrel outlined against the darkening sky moving slowly up and down. Surely his movements at the bottom of the knoll couldn’t have been enough to shift it, but it was moving.

Bernie tried to rise but pain stabbed through his injured leg. He began crawling again, past McKie’s body. His leg hurt more now and he could feel blood oozing down it. His head was swimming; he had a horror of fainting and of the tank falling down the hill and crashing down onto his prone body. He must stay conscious.

Directly ahead of him was a puddle of dirty water. Despite the danger, his thirst was so great that he buried his head in it and took a deep drink. It tasted of earth and made him want to retch. He lifted his head and jerked back in surprise as he caught the reflection of his face: every line was filled with dirt above a straggly beard and his eyes looked mad. He suddenly heard Barbara’s voice in his head, remembered soft hands on his neck. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ she had said once. ‘Too beautiful for me.’ What would she say now?

There was another creak, louder this time, and he looked up to see the tank inching slowly forwards. A little stream of earth and stones pattered down the side of the knoll. ‘Oh Christ,’ he breathed. ‘Oh Christ.’ He heaved himself forward.

There was a creaking noise and the tank went over. It rolled slowly down the hill with a clanking grinding noise, missing Bernie’s feet by inches. At the bottom the long gun buried itself in the earth and the tank came to a halt, shuddering like a huge felled beast. The observer was thrown from his turret and landed face down, spreadeagled in the trench. His hair was whitish-blond: a German. Bernie closed his eyes, gasping with relief.

Another noise made him turn and look upwards. Five men stood in a row at the top of the knoll, drawn by the noise. Their faces were as dirty and weary as Bernie’s. They were Fascists; they wore the olive-green battledress of Franco’s troops. They raised their rifles,
covering him. One of the soldiers pulled a pistol from his holster. There was a click as he slipped the safety catch. He stepped forward and descended the knoll.

Bernie leaned on one hand and raised the other in weary supplication.

The Fascist came to a halt three feet away. He was a tall, thin man with a little moustache like the Generalísimo’s. His face was hard and angry.

‘
Me entrego
,’ Bernie said. ‘I surrender.’ It was all there was left to do.

‘¡Comunista cabrón!’
The man had a heavy southern accent. Bernie was still trying to make out the words as the Fascist brought up his pistol and aimed at his head.

P
ART
O
NE
AUTUMN

A
BOMB HAD FALLEN
in Victoria Street. It had gouged a wide crater in the road and taken down the fronts of several shops. The street was roped off; ARP men and volunteers had formed a chain and were carefully moving rubble from one of the ruined buildings. Harry realized there must be someone under there. The efforts of the rescuers, old men and boys caked with the dust that hung round them in a pall, seemed pitiful against the huge piles of brick and plaster. He put down his suitcase.

Coming into Victoria on the train, he had seen other craters and shattered buildings. He had felt oddly distanced from the destruction, as he had since the big raids began ten days before. Down in Surrey, Uncle James had almost given himself a stroke looking at the photographs in the
Telegraph
. Harry had scarcely responded as his uncle snarled red-faced over this new example of German frightfulness. His mind had retreated from the fury.

It could not retreat, though, from the crater in Westminster suddenly and immediately before him. At once he was back at Dunkirk: German dive-bombers overhead, the sandy shoreline exploding. He clenched his hands, digging the nails into his palms as he took deep breaths. His heart began pounding but he didn’t start shaking; he could control his reactions now.

An ARP warden strode across to him, a hard-faced man in his fifties with a grey pencil moustache and ramrod back, his black uniform streaked with dust.

‘You can’t come up ‘ere,’ he snapped briskly. ‘Road’s closed. Can’t you see we’ve ‘ad a bomb?’ He looked suspicious, disapproving,
wondering no doubt why an apparently fit man in his early thirties was not in uniform.

‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘I’m just up from the country. I hadn’t realized it was so bad.’

Most Cockneys confronted with Harry’s public school accent would have adopted a servile tone, but not this man. ‘There’s no escape anywhere,’ he rasped. ‘Not this time. Not in the tahn, not in the country either for long, if yer ask me.’ The warden looked Harry over coldly. ‘You on leave?’

‘Invalided out,’ Harry said abruptly. ‘Look, I have to get to Queen Anne’s Gate. Official business.’

The warden’s manner changed at once. He took Harry’s arm and steered him round. ‘Go up through Petty France. There was only the one bomb round here.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s all right, sir.’ The warden leaned in close. ‘Were you at Dunkirk?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s blood and ruin down the Isle of Dogs. I was in the trenches last time, I knew it’d come again and this time everyone’d be in it, not just soldiering men. You’ll get the chance to fight again, you wait and see. Bayonet into Jerry’s guts, twist and then out again, eh?’ He gave a strange smile, then stepped back and saluted, pale eyes glittering.

‘Thank you.’ Harry saluted and turned away, crossing into Gillingham Street. He frowned; the man’s words had filled him with disgust.

A
T
V
ICTORIA
it had been as busy as a normal Monday; it seemed the reports that London was carrying on as usual were true. As he walked on through the broad Georgian streets everything was quiet in the autumn sunlight. But for the white crosses of tape over the windows to protect against blast, you could have been back before the war. An occasional businessman in a bowler hat walked by, there were still nannies wheeling prams. People’s expressions were normal, even cheerful. Many had left their gas masks at home, though Harry had his slung over his shoulder in its square box. He knew the defiant good humour most people had adopted hid the fear of invasion, but
he preferred the pretence that things were normal to reminders that they now lived in a world where the wreck of the British army milled in chaos on a French beach, and deranged trench veterans stood in the streets happily forecasting Armageddon.

His mind went back to Rookwood, as it often did these days. The old quadrangle on a summer’s day, masters in gowns and mortarboards walking under the great elms, boys strolling by in dark blue blazers or cricket whites. It was an escape to the other side of the looking glass, away from the madness. But sooner or later the heavy painful thought would always intrude: how the hell had it all changed from that to this?

S
T
E
RMIN
’
S
hotel had once been grand but the elegance was faded now; the chandelier in the entrance hall was dusty and there was a smell of cabbage and polish. Watercolours of stags and Highland lochs covered the oak-panelled walls. Somewhere a grandfather clock ticked somnolently.

There was nobody at the reception desk. Harry rang the bell and a bald, heavily built man in a commissionaire’s uniform appeared. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said in the relaxed, unctuous voice of a lifetime in service. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.’

‘I’ve an appointment at two thirty with a Miss Maxse. Lieutenant Brett.’ Harry pronounced the woman’s name ‘Macksie’ as the caller from the Foreign Office had instructed.

The man nodded. ‘If you would follow me, sir.’ His footsteps soundless on the thick dusty carpet, he led Harry to a lounge full of easy chairs and coffee tables. It was empty apart from a man and woman sitting in a bay window.

‘Lieutenant Brett, madam.’ The receptionist bowed and left.

The two rose to their feet. The woman extended a hand. She was in her fifties, small and fine-boned, smartly dressed in a blue two-piece suit. She had tightly curled grey hair and a sharp, intelligent face. Keen grey eyes met Harry’s.

‘How do you do, so nice to meet you.’ Her confident contralto made Harry think of a girls’ school headmistress. ‘Marjorie Maxse. I’ve been hearing all about you.’

‘Nothing too bad, I hope.’

‘Oh, quite the contrary. Let me introduce Roger Jebb.’ The man took Harry’s hand in a hard grip. He was about Miss Maxse’s age, with a long tanned face and thinning black hair.

‘What about some tea?’ Miss Maxse asked.

‘Thank you.’

A silver teapot and china cups had been laid out on a table. There was a plate of scones too, pots of jam and what looked like real cream. Miss Maxse began pouring tea. ‘Any trouble getting here? I gather one or two came down round here last night.’

‘Victoria Street’s closed off.’

‘It
is
a nuisance. And it’s going to go on for some time.’ She spoke as though it were a spell of rain. She smiled. ‘We prefer to meet new people here, for the first interview. The manager’s an old friend of ours, so we won’t be disturbed. Sugar?’ she continued in the same conversational tone. ‘Do have a scone, they’re awfully good.’

‘Thanks.’ Harry scooped up jam and cream. He looked up to see Miss Maxse studying him closely; she gave him a sympathetic smile, unembarrassed.

‘How are you getting on now? You were invalided out, weren’t you? After Dunkirk?’

‘Yes. A bomb landed twenty feet away. Threw up a lot of sand. I was lucky; it shielded me from the worst of the blast.’ He saw Jebb studying him too, from flinty grey eyes.