‘A thousand, I know. Stalin doing Franco’s work for him.’
‘Hush, man. There’s eyes and ears everywhere, the Ruskies have the best secret service organization in the world.’
‘You know, Jock, when I left home I was filled with ambition to live in a Republic. It seemed that it had to be every working bloke’s dream, equality, liberty and friendship. Isn’t that what the Frenchies say?’
‘Aye, man. That’s our Sermon on the Mount. It’s what makes us march to the same drum.’ Smiling, he started to hum the Internationale, the anthem of leftists the world over. He had scarcely finished the first four or five bars, when it was taken up by everybody within earshot. It was extraordinary how a simple tune that any child could have picked out on a penny whistle could arouse such emotion in battle-hardened soldiers.
‘It all seemed so simple when we came, didn’t it?’
‘Aye. Simple it was and simple it is. Them over there’s the fascists, and us over here’s going to shoot the shite out of them.’
All that Ken Wilmott could do was hope that Mariella and her family had survived. Like Jock, he found the ever-growing power-struggle within the Republic hard to come to terms with. For one thing, he didn’t understand it. There was a revolution and a war going on at the same time. The origins of internal clashes were often ancient and complicated, only the Spanish themselves could understand.
As Jock Duncan and Ken Wilmott agreed, the thing to keep in mind was that they were there to blast the shite out of the fascists.
* * *
The headquarters of the Brigade was established amid the scars and ruins of Belchite. Bodies from the last battle still lay beneath the ruins, and the smell of decay was everywhere as Ken and his companies, together with thousands of other soldiers, marched to the front. The closer they got, the more remnants they saw of units who had gone before, until suddenly they were aware that there were no troops of the Republican army between them and the full force of the enemy. Attack came from air and ground. The terrain offered no defensive positions and there were no fortifications.
They fell back to Belchite.
Then further back.
Military discipline held. There was no headlong flight. There was no rout. At every stage of the withdrawal they covered their line against the enemy. They transported casualties to safety and tried to save as much materiel as could be saved.
If Ken and Jock realized this might be the start of a retreat through Aragon, they never suggested or even implied it. For one thing, Ken Wilmott was preoccupied with the state of his socks and boots. The long march to the front, followed at once by the withdrawal, was not the best treatment for damaged toes.
Thirteen
With every week that passed, the invading armies pushed the front further and further until, by the time the snows had gone, it seemed to Eve that the invaders were reapers slowly closing in on the eye of the cornfield. This fanciful idea came about because of the number of familiar faces she saw in and around Madrid. Ozz particularly, then Sweet Moffat who had come to help with refugee orphans. Then, one day, Helan Alexander, whom she hadn’t seen since the episode of the enquiry into the death of Sophie Wineapple.
Eve’s old truck had gone into the depot to be cannibalized by the mechanics who did wonders with ever-decreasing spare parts. But that was life in Madrid. Food was scarce, not to the point of starvation, but supplies were sporadic and unplanned. One day there would be only black-eyed peas, another only flour. Meat was more scarce than ever. Ration cards were prepared. A statement made by a government official warning that if there was no self-restraint in hoarding, then there would be food shortages and thus rationing, caused shops to be stripped almost bare. Wine was still plentiful. Oil was obtainable. Eve stopped smoking for the simple reason that it became too time-consuming to look for tobacco.
Eve had become a seasoned driver of anything and everything. Occasionally she looked back to last year when she had made such a fuss about driving a Mercedes. Now that she had seen the difficulties under which some visitors made their flying visits from front to front, she thought that there was a case for fast cars. Not that she would change what she was now doing, for she loved her big, thundering lorries. Her Spanish was now comprehensible in places as far afield as Murcia and Catalonia, not that she always understood their language, but there was always the language of the hands and nods. She liked the runs to the small villages where, in spite of the worsening conditions, people were amazingly cheerful.
Many of the more remote places relied on passing traffic for news of what was going on. The peasants would listen and nod. Eve had heard that many of them had always been against the Republic and were waiting for the day when they would be liberated by General Franco. The only indication that this might be so was when news of a Republican advance was greeted by a gob-spit, but, as many peasants were given to expectoration anyway, it was difficult to draw conclusions from this.
Because of artillery bombardment and air-raids, most of her supplies runs now were made as part of a convoy. On one occasion, when she had been driving in a line of close formation, they had all had to run off the road and into a grove when strafing planes were spotted. Suddenly she realized that the truck ahead was loaded with ammunition while Ozz, who was travelling in the rear, was delivering cans of kerosene. Having panicked for a few minutes, she calmed down and decided that wherever you were in Spain now, you stood a chance of sudden death. It did no good thinking about it.
With the onset of spring, the air-raids on Madrid become fiercer and more frequent. Despite this, whenever she had an hour off she would go out into the city and simply look. She always had something in writing ready to send to London. She now had an editor who handled all her work. Because her style was simply to record what she saw, a surprising variety of publications were willing to take her reports.
She was one of the team of drivers working the Madrid front. Like everyone else she turned her hand to anything that came along, from holding plasma bottles in a first-aid station to hauling potatoes to one location and returning with tomatoes from another.
It was when she was on her way back from wandering around the Gran Via and Calle de Alcala in the city that she came upon Helan Alexander, for the first time in ages it seemed. An air-raid warning sounded so she joined the crowd racing for shelter in the Metro where she squatted down among the Madrileños and rested her back against the wall. ‘Alex?’
Helan Alexander was painfully thin and drawn, and looked as though all the stuffing had been knocked out of her.
‘Anders?’ She clasped Eve as though she was a long-lost friend. ‘Thank God, a friendly face.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I don’t know… actually what I’m doing is running around like a blue-arsed fly making a balls of everything.’ From her top pocket she took two cigarettes.
‘I haven’t smoked for weeks.’
‘So have one.’
The strong, Spanish tobacco was extremely satisfying, and numbed the hunger pangs that had been with Eve since the day before. ‘Thanks, it tastes good.’
Alexander blew out a long stream of smoke, oblivious to the woman suckling her baby close by, and said casually, ‘Carl’s dead. Executed.’
‘Oh, Alex, that’s dreadful! I’m so sorry. When?’
‘God knows. Probably as soon as he was captured, I should think. Not exactly the blood of the new master race – half-breed Negro Jew, married to white English woman from the decadent class.’
She was probably right, there was nothing Eve could say that wouldn’t sound trite and crass. ‘You’re not giving up here? You’re not going home?’
‘I’m not much good here, can’t think straight. I packed it in at the depot.’ For a long pause she withdrew into herself. ‘It’s devastating, Eve. I didn’t know how much I loved the bloody man until… I could keep my head above water when I could believe that he was in a concentration camp, my work had purpose. Now my reason for being he
re has gone. Pouf… bullet in the head. Gone.’
‘Were you doing it only for your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not because you believed it was the right thing?’
‘No. I believed what he believed because he was such a good man. A man like that knows what is right. But it went against the grain, contrary to everything I’d ever been or known.’
‘Why have you come to Madrid?’
‘To hand over and go home, I think. I don’t really know.’
‘I think you will miss him more in England than you would if you stayed.’
‘I miss him because he’s stopped living in the same world I do. If I go home… God! If I go home – what? Back to Mummy and Daddy – their naughty daughter who had a fling with a nigger? Back to the pretty horses? You see, Anders, I’m quite nutty.’
‘I went nuts after my mother died. Grief knocks you off course.’
‘I’m floundering. I think that I may be sinking. Just now, when the warning sounded, I thought, Stay where you are, Alexander, what in hell’s name is the use of trying to save yourself. But then I got caught up in the rush for shelter. The instinct to survive, I suppose. What for I can’t imagine.’
The air-raid over, they left the Metro. ‘Where are you staying, Alex?’
She named a pensione that Eve didn’t know. ‘I know one of the secretaries, she bunked up a bit last night to make room for me. I came to see you.’
‘Me? What’s that about?’
They went into a small eating place and sat at a table away from the window, part of which was boarded up and part was stuck over with paper strips. Eve couldn’t decide whether Alexander was pondering on what to say, or whether she had retreated into her own misery.
‘David Gore-Hatton.’
Eve started and felt her cheeks flush. ‘Who?’
‘Gore-Hatton. Has he been in touch yet?’
Eve sensed that whatever answer she gave would be the wrong one, so she tried to keep a blank expression upon her face. Ozz had said that Madrid was the cross-roads of the world and if you hung around long enough everyone would come by. How could Alex possibly know that the name Gore-Hatton meant anything to her? David had no part in her life here, except in her dreams, and even there he was fading.
Dimitri, who probably had headquarters in Madrid, had come by the cross-roads since she had been in the city. He had sought her out when he knew that she was stationed there and they had met several times. As they had before, they made love with an explosion of repressed desire for a night or for an afternoon and then parted on good terms. Gratification? Pleasure? Lust, perhaps? Not love, no deep emotions, no strings attached to their hours of give and take. There might well be another side to Dimitri, of course there was; he was a commissar spreading the Stalinist line, or a member of the Soviet secret service – the GPU – reputed to be the power behind the government and paymasters of the Republic. It was no secret that for every shipload of weapons brought in from the USSR, shiploads of iron ore went back. But, if he was either of these, then she did not see it. He came, they enjoyed one another, and parted. Making love with Dimitri was a delight. She enjoyed watching him as he became transformed from the square-jawed, belted Soviet army officer, to the tousled and aroused, vulnerable white-skinned man. Afterwards she watched Dimitri the lover as he strapped on the accoutrements of Major Dimitri Vladim.
David Gore-Hatton. Suddenly hearing his name spoken aloud, it was as though he had been conjured up, vivid and real.
Alexander had now recovered her composure and was sipping coffee as though idling in a street-cafe with never a ruined building in sight, waiting for Eve to reply. She had probably learned the art of the stiff upper-lip in her nursery, from nannies who trained little English girls and boys who were expected to rule the Empire. The display of feeling that Eve had seen in the Metro shelter was under control by the time they were on their second cup of coffee.
Seeing that she would get no help from Eve, Alex took command of the situation. ‘You may not like this, Eve. I would not like it, in fact I didn’t like it when the same thing was done to me. Look. I know about Eve Vera Anders, and I have to talk to you about that.’
‘You mean the newspaper reports?’
‘Oh, no. Well, yes, I know about them, of course – and I have to say that it was disappointing to say the least that you did not consult me. After all – oh, what the hell! That’s too petty for words. What I should have said is that I know about Louise Vera Wilmott.’
Eve didn’t give herself time to consider Alexander’s tone, which was not at all critical. Her chagrin detonated a burst of quiet fury. ‘Oh, you do! Well, it’s no damned affair of yours! People like you Poveys think they have a divine right to interfere in other people’s lives. Well, you haven’t got a right to enquire into mine!’
‘For God’s sake, calm down and give over on the people like me bit. I don’t like the Poveys any more than you, but I’m stuck with them. Have a fucking cigarette and cool off.’
Eve took one, lit it and drew deeply, saving herself from wading further into a quagmire of pettiness.
‘Why do you ask about David, Alex?’
Helan Alexander looked directly at her from beneath her straight brows. ‘Sure you won’t denounce me as one of the Lliga Catalana?’
‘You are neither bourgeois nor even remotely Catalan.’
Alexander gave a wry little smile. ‘Well, thank you for that.’
‘Go on. What about David? I might explode sometimes, but I hardly ever do damage except to myself.’
‘You called him David as though you know him well. I hadn’t realized that.’
‘Why should you?’
‘Because the Gore-Hattons and the Poveys – my people – are out of the same stable, but generations back, and when… oh, sod this for a lark! Look, don’t fly off the handle again.’
Eve let out a slow stream of smoke, watching it on its way to the ceiling before she engaged Alexander’s gaze again. ‘I apologize. You have enough to deal with as it is. It was the last thing I expected.’ Eve had never seen Alexander non-plussed. ‘It was David who, who, um, gave the information. I mean, told me that you used to be… that Eve Anders hasn’t always been your name.’
Eve kept her self-control admirably. ‘Actually, that was the last thing I expected.’
‘I’m sorry. This whole thing is coming apart.’
‘No it isn’t. Just start again from Louise Vera Wilmott. I’ll listen. I won’t interrupt. But let’s get out of here and walk.’
In the aftermath of the air-raid, the streets of the city were once more thronging with people getting on with their daily lives before the next raid forced them to pause. It was not a warm day, but the sun was shining, and spring was close.
‘Does LOLO mean anything to you?’
‘Not much. I remember Ozz once saying that there was some sort of equivalent to Franco’s fifth column playing them at their own game, some kind of secret organization to look out for spies and fifth columnists within the Republic? I thought it sounded pretty far-fetched.’
‘LOLO… ears and eyes. There are people like myself who are in a position to be able to keep our ears and eyes open.’
Eve felt anger begin to rise again. ‘Was that what all the Sophie Wineapple questions were about? Did you think that I was…’
‘No! Nobody thought that. But Wineapple was suspected of working for the other side, and it was later confirmed. You happened to come into the line of fire, so to speak, quite coincidentally. No one had any idea of the connection between the two of you.’
‘But having found one, you checked on me.’
‘Not because of that. I had hoped that you, well, I thought you were a good candidate.’
‘For what?’
‘For the Ears and Eyes.’
Eve was dumbstruck, again causing her thoughts to veer away from the David Hatton connection.
‘You thought I would make a good spy?’
&nbs
p; ‘Don’t be so dramatic. It is merely a question of being aware of what is going on around you, being sensitive to things people say when they aren’t on their guard.’ She gave a brief, wry smile. ‘Your explosions about having to drive the Mercedes were patently not smokescreens, and your antipathy to privilege like mine is only too honest – you are against us, no mistaking that. What I cannot understand is why you would want to do what you are doing by this… why this false front? David wouldn’t say any more than that you changed your name.’
‘Don’t call this a false front. It isn’t. There is nothing false about me, I am what you see, which is all I ever intended.’
‘Please, Eve, don’t be so defensive. I don’t condemn what you are doing, I only wish that I had been as successful in suppressing my early years. How many times have you said that I was patronizing or elitist when I argued for smoothing the path for visiting Vipps? If I had become the convinced egalitarian I am trying to be, you wouldn’t have been able to talk about divine rights of my class as you just did.’
‘David Hatton, where does he fit in to this?’
‘It is he who obtained the details of Louise Wilmott.’
Eve felt as though she had been betrayed. She had taken David Hatton at face value and had fallen for him. She had run away from him, as she had run away from everything else connected with her first twenty years, but she had not suspected for a moment that he had seen through her – a factory girl pretending to be someone she was not. She felt mortified. ‘Go on.’
‘I had no idea that you and David knew one another. He doesn’t make any reference to it. There’s no reason why he should, of course.’
‘We had a very brief romance… hardly even that.’ Eve knew that this bit of information must make Alex curious – did David Hatton know her before her life as Eve Anders?
‘That has nothing to do with the question of whether or not you agree to join up as a listening ear or an observant eye, if you like.’
Not Just a Soldier’s War Page 23