by C. J. Sansom
Muriel muttered something. She was on his deaf side and he turned to her. ‘What?’
‘Are you all right? You’re shaking all over.’ There was a tremble in her voice. He opened his eyes. The gloom was spotted with the red pinpoints of cigarette ends. The shelterers were quiet, trying to hear what was happening outside.
‘Yes. It just – brought everything back. The evacuation.’
‘I know,’ she muttered.
‘I think they’ve gone now,’ someone said. The door opened a crack and someone peered out. A draught of fresh air cut through the odour of sweat and urine.
‘It’s dreadful, the smell in here,’ Muriel said. ‘That’s why I don’t like to come over, I can’t stand it.’
‘Sometimes people can’t help it – they lose control when they’re frightened.’
‘I suppose so.’ Her voice softened. Harry wished he could make out her face.
‘Is everyone all right?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ Will answered from Muriel’s other side. ‘Good work there, Harry. Thanks, old man.’
‘Did the soldiers – lose control?’ Muriel asked. ‘In France? It must all have been so frightening.’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’ Harry remembered the smell as he approached the line of men on the beach. They hadn’t washed for days. Sergeant Tomlinson’s voice came back to him.
‘We’re lucky – things are going faster now the little boats are coming over. Some poor sods have been standing here three days.’ He was a big, fair-haired man, his face grey with exhaustion. He nodded towards the sea, shaking his head. ‘Look at those stupid buggers, they’ll capsize that boat.’
Harry followed his gaze to the head of the queue. Men stood shoulder deep in the cold Channel. At the head of the line men were piling into a fishing smack, their weight already tipping it over at an angle.
‘We’d better go down,’ Harry said. Tomlinson had nodded, and they began marching to the shore. Harry could see the fishermen remonstrating with the men still piling in.
‘I suppose it’s lucky discipline hasn’t broken down completely,’ Harry had said. Tomlinson turned to him, but his reply was lost in the scream of a dive-bomber, right above them, drowning the fainter whine of the falling bombs. Then there was a roar that felt as though it would burst Harry’s head as he was lifted off his feet in a cloud of red-stained sand.
‘Then he wasn’t there,’ Harry said aloud. ‘Just bits. Pieces.’
‘Sorry?’ Muriel asked, puzzled.
Harry squeezed his eyes closed, trying to shut out the images. ‘Nothing, Muriel. It’s OK, sorry.’
He felt her hand find his and clutch it. It felt work-roughened, hard, dry. He blinked back tears.
‘We made it tonight, eh?’ he said.
‘Yes, thanks to you.’
The warble of the all-clear was audible. The entire shelter seemed to exhale and relax. The door opened fully and the leader stood silhouetted against a starry sky lit with the glow of fires.
‘They’ve gone, folks,’ he said. ‘We can go home again.’
Chapter Three
THE PLANE LEFT CROYDON at dawn. Harry had been driven there straight from the SIS training centre. He had never flown before. It was an ordinary civil flight and the other passengers were English and Spanish businessmen. They chatted easily among themselves, mostly about the difficulties the war had made for trade, as they flew out over the Atlantic before turning south, avoiding German-occupied France. Harry felt a moment’s fear as the plane took off and he realized the railway lines he could see far below, smaller than Ronnie’s train set, were real. That passed quickly, though, as they flew into a bank of cloud, grey like thick fog against the windowpane. The cloud and the steady drone of the engines grew monotonous and Harry leaned back in his seat. He thought of his training, the three weeks’ coaching and preparation they had given him before, this morning, they put him in a car to the airport.
The morning after the bombing Harry had been driven from London to a mansion in the Surrey countryside, where he had spent the entire three weeks. He never knew its name or even where it was exactly. It was a Victorian redbrick pile; something about the layout of the rooms, the uncarpeted floors and a faint, indefinable smell, made him think it had once been a school.
The people who trained him were mostly young. There was something eager and adventurous about them, a quickness of reaction and an energy that made them seize your attention, hold your eye, take charge of the conversation. Sometimes they reminded Harry oddly of eager salesmen. They taught him the general business of spying: letterdrops, how to tell if you were being watched, how to get a message out if you were on the run. Not that that would happen to Harry, they reassured him – he had diplomatic protection, a useful by-product of his cover.
From the general they moved to the specific: how to deal with Sandy Forsyth. They made him do what they called role-plays, a former policeman from Kenya playing Sandy. A suspicious Sandy, doubting his story; a drunk and hostile Sandy asking what the fuck Brett was doing here, he had always hated him; a Sandy who was himself a spy, a secret Fascist.
‘You don’t know how he’ll react to you, you have to be prepared for every possible eventuality,’ the policeman said. ‘You have to adapt yourself to his moods, reflect what he’s thinking and feeling.’
Harry had to be absolutely consistent in his own story, they said, it had to be watertight. That was easy enough. He could be absolutely truthful about his life up to the day Will had received the telephone call from the Foreign Office. In the cover story they had rung looking for a translator to replace a man in Madrid who had to leave suddenly. Harry soon had it pat, but they told him there was still a problem. Not with his face, but with his voice; there was an uncertainty, almost a reluctance, when he told his story. A sharp operator, as Forsyth appeared to be, might pick up that he was lying. Harry worked at it and satisfied them after a while. ‘Of course,’ the policeman said, ‘any oddness in tone could be put down to your little bit of deafness, that can affect the voice. Play that up, and tell him about the panics you had after Dunkirk as well.’
Harry was surprised. ‘But those have gone, I don’t get them any more.’
‘You feel them coming still, don’t you? You manage to suppress them but you feel them coming?’ He glanced at the file on his knees; Harry had his own buff file with a red cross and ‘secret’ on it now. ‘Well, play up to that – a moment’s confusion, like pausing to ask him to repeat something, can play to your advantage. Gives you time to think and fixes you in his mind as an invalid, not someone to be afraid of.’
The information about his panics had come, Harry knew, from the odd woman who had interviewed him one day. She never said who she was but Harry guessed she was some sort of psychiatrist. She had something of the busy eagerness of the spies about her. The gaze from her blue eyes was so penetrating that Harry recoiled for a second. She shook his hand and cheerfully asked him to sit down at the little table.
‘Need to ask a few personal questions, Harry. I may call you Harry?’
‘Yes – er …’
‘Miss Crane, call me Miss Crane. You seem to have led a pretty straightforward life, Harry. Not like some of the rum ’uns we get here, I can tell you.’ She laughed.
‘I suppose I have. An ordinary life.’
‘Losing both parents when you were so young, though, that can’t have been easy. Passed around between uncles and aunts and your boarding school.’
That made him suddenly angry. ‘My aunt and uncle have always been kind. And I was happy at school. And Rookwood’s a public school, not a boarding school.’
Miss Crane eyed him quizzically. ‘Is there a difference?’
‘Yes, there is.’ The heat that came into his voice surprised Harry. ‘A boarding school makes it sound like a place where you’re just left, to mark time. Rookwood – a public school, you’re part of a community, it becomes part of you, shapes you.’
She still smiled but her reply was br
utal. ‘Not the same as having parents who love you, is it?’
Harry felt his anger being replaced by heavy weariness. He lowered his gaze. ‘You have to deal with things as they are, make the best of things. Soldier on.’
‘On your own? There isn’t a girlfriend, is there? Anyone?’
He frowned, wondering if she was going to start making suggestions about his sex life, like Miss Maxse had. ‘There isn’t now. There was someone at Cambridge, but it didn’t work out.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Laura and I got bored with each other, Miss Crane. Nothing dramatic.’
She changed the subject. ‘And after Dunkirk? The shell shock, when you found you were having panic attacks, were frightened of loud noises. Did you decide to soldier on then, too?’
‘Yes, not that I was a soldier any more. I won’t be again.’
‘Does that make you angry?’
He looked at her. ‘Wouldn’t you be?’
She inclined her head reprovingly. ‘It’s you we’re here to talk about, Harry.’
He sighed. ‘Yes, I decided to soldier on.’
‘Were you tempted not to? To retreat into – being an invalid?’
He looked at her again. God, she was sharp. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose I was. But I didn’t. I started by going into the hospital grounds, then crossing the road, then walking into town. It got easier. I wasn’t as badly affected as some poor sods.’
‘Must have taken courage, guts. Like helping your cousin’s family in the bombing the night before you came here.’
‘You go on or go under. That’s life these days, isn’t it?’ he replied sharply. ‘Even when you’ve seen everything you took for granted, believed in, smashed to pieces.’ He gave a long sigh. ‘I think the sight of everyone retreating on that beach, the chaos, all that affected me as much as the shell that nearly hit me.’
‘But soldiering on, it must be very lonely.’
Her voice was suddenly gentle. Harry found his eyes filling with tears. He said, without intending to, ‘That night in the shelter, it was so strange. Muriel, Will’s wife, she took my hand. We’ve never got on, I always felt she resented me, but she took my hand. Yet …’
‘Yes?’
‘It felt so dry. So cold. I felt – sad.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t Muriel’s hand you wanted.’
He looked at her. ‘No, you’re right,’ he said in surprise. But I don’t know whose I did want.’
‘We all need someone’s hand.’
‘Do we?’ Harry laughed uneasily. ‘This is a long way from my mission.’
She nodded. ‘Just getting to know you, Harry, just getting to know you.’
HARRY WAS JERKED out of his reverie as the plane tilted. He clutched at the arms of his seat and looked out of the window, then leaned forward and stared out. They had come out into sunshine again, they were over land. Spain. Harry looked down at the Castilian landscape, a sea of yellow and brown dotted with patchwork fields. As the plane circled lower he made out white empty roads, red-tiled houses, here and there a jumble of ruins from the Civil War. Then the pilot said they were about to land at Barajas airport and a few minutes later they were down on the runway, the engines stopped and he was here, in Spain. He felt a mixture of excitement and fear; he could still hardly believe he was actually back in Madrid.
Looking out of the window he saw half a dozen civil guards standing outside the terminal building, staring over the runway. Harry recognized their dark green uniforms, the yellow holsters clipped to their belts. They still wore their sinister, archaic leather hats, round with two little wings at the back, black and shiny like a beetle’s carapace. When he first came to Spain in 1931 the civiles, old supporters of the right, had been under threat from the Republic and you could see the fear and anger in their hard faces. When he returned in 1937, during the Civil War, they were gone. Now they had returned and Harry felt a dryness in his mouth as he looked at their faces, their cold, still expressions.
He joined the passengers heading for the exit. Dry heat enveloped him as he descended the steps and joined the crocodile crossing the tarmac. The airport building was no more than a low concrete warehouse, the paint flaking away. One of the civiles came across and stood by them. ‘Por allí, por allí,’ he snapped officiously, pointing to a door marked ‘Inmigración’.
Harry had a diplomatic passport and was waved quickly through, his bags chalked without a glance. He looked round the empty entrance hall. There was a whiff of disinfectant, the sickly smelling stuff they had always used in Spain.
A solitary figure leaning against a pillar reading a newspaper waved and came across.
‘Harry Brett? Simon Tolhurst, from the embassy. How was the flight?’
He was about Harry’s age, tall and fair, with an eager friendly manner. He was built like Harry, solidity turning to fat, although with the embassy man the process had gone further.
‘Fine. Cloudy most of the way, but not too bumpy.’ Harry noticed Tolhurst wore an Eton tie, the bright colours clashing with his white linen jacket.
‘I’ll drive you to the embassy, take about an hour. We don’t use Spanish drivers; they’re all government spies.’ He laughed and lowered his voice, though there was no one around. ‘The way they bend their ears back to listen, you’d think they’re going to meet in the middle. Very obvious.’
Tolhurst led him out into the sun and helped put his case in the back of a highly polished old Ford. The airport was out in the country, fields all around. Harry stood looking over the harsh brown landscape. In a field across the road he saw a peasant leading a couple of skinny oxen, ploughing the stubble in with a wooden plough as his ancestors had in Roman times. In the distance the jumbled peaks of the Guadarrama mountains stood out against the harsh blue sky, shimmering in heat haze. Harry felt sweat prickling at his brow.
‘Hot for October,’ he said.
‘Been a bloody hot summer. They’ve had a dreadful harvest; they’re very worried about the food situation. That may help us, though – makes them less likely to enter the war. We’d better get on. You’ve got an appointment with the ambassador.’
Tolhurst eased out onto a long deserted road flanked by dusty poplars, the leaves yellowing at the tips like giant torches.
‘How long have you been in Spain?’ Harry asked.
‘Four months. Came when they expanded the embassy, sent Sir Sam over. Did a spell in Cuba before. Lot more relaxed. Fun.’ He shook his head. ‘This is one awful country, I’m afraid. You’ve been before, haven’t you?’
‘Before the Civil War, then briefly during it. To Madrid both times.’
Tolhurst shook his head again. ‘It’s a pretty grim place now.’
As they drove over the stony, potholed road they talked about the Blitz, agreeing Hitler had abandoned his invasion plans for now. Tolhurst asked Harry where he had gone to school.
‘Rookwood, eh? Good place, I believe. Those were the days, eh?’ he added wistfully.
Harry smiled sadly. ‘Yes.’
He looked out at the countryside. There was a new emptiness to the landscape. Only the occasional peasant driving a donkey and cart passed them, and once an army truck going north, a group of tiredlooking young soldiers staring vacantly from the back. The villages were empty too. It was siesta time, but in the old days there would have been a few people about. Now even the once ubiquitous skinny dogs had gone and only a few chickens were left foraging round closed doorways. One village square had huge posters of Franco all over the cracked, unpainted walls, his arms folded confidently as his jowly face smiled into the distance. ¡HASTA EL FUTURO! Towards the future. Harry took a deep breath. The posters, Harry saw, covered older ones whose tattered edges were visible beneath. He recognized the bottom half of the old slogan, ¡NO PASARAN! They shall not pass. But they had.
Then they were in the rich northern suburbs. From the look of the elegant houses the Civil War might never have happened. ‘Does the ambassador live out here?’ Harry aske
d.
‘No, Sir Sam lives in the Castellana.’ Tolhurst laughed. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, actually. He’s next door to the German ambassador.’
Harry turned, open-mouthed. ‘But we’re at war!’
‘Spain’s “non-belligerent”. But it’s crawling with Germans, the scum are all over the place. The German embassy here’s the largest in the world. We don’t speak to them, of course.’
‘How did the ambassador end up next door to the Germans?’
‘Only big house available. He makes a joke of glaring at von Stohrer over the garden wall.’
They drove on into the town centre. Most of the buildings were unpainted and even more dilapidated than Harry remembered, though once many must have been grand. There were posters everywhere, Franco and the yoke-and-arrows symbol of the Falange. Most people were shabbily dressed, even more than he remembered, many looking thin and tired. Men in overalls with scrawny weather-beaten faces walked by, and women in black shawls, patched and mended. Even the barefoot skinny children playing in the dusty gutters had pinched watchful faces. Harry had half expected to see military parades and Falangist rallies like in the newsreels, but the city was quieter than he had known it, as well as dingier. He saw priests and nuns among the passers-by; they were back, too, like the civiles. The few wealthier-looking men wore jackets and hats despite the heat.
Harry turned to Tolhurst. ‘When I was here in ’37 wearing a jacket and hat on a hot day was illegal. Bourgeois affectation.’
‘You’re not allowed to go out without a jacket now, not if you’re wearing a shirt. Point to remember.’
The trams were running but there were few cars and they weaved their way among donkey carts and bicycles. Harry jerked round in amazement as a familiar shape caught his eye, a hooked black cross.