by David Black
‘And they’d rather stay here,’ said Harry, before realising he’d just interrupted the equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel, and then remembering it didn’t matter.
‘Have you looked around?’ said Eurico, gesturing beyond his office window. ‘It’s getting a bit cold for the beach now. But when they are not all getting drunk at their governments’ expense, they’re stuffing their faces on the finest foods, playing games: tennis . . . football . . . cricket! And you haven’t been here for one of our mess “at-homes” yet. Have you? All the young señoritas of genteel family, and needless to say their chaperones, are invited. It is an event. Their hosts, after all, are officers. And on the night? You cannot imagine. The camellia terrace surrounded by candlelight, the warm evening, the Mediterranean air, and all those young English and Italian fighter pilots, and their guests – young Spanish ladies in the full bloom of their beauty. It is the most romantic, the most intoxicating . . .’ and here, even Eurico was lost for words, before collecting himself. ‘They are young men enjoying themselves, whose countries might be at war, but who have discovered they are not that much different from each other, and would rather be carousing than killing. It is most reassuring, and amusing, to watch. Your English comrades really do give poor George the runaround when he’s trying to organise their repatriation. But he’s very patient.’
‘Ah,’ said Harry, remembering George was Mr Wingate’s first name, ‘even Group Captain Mahaddie? I can’t imagine him giving George the runaround.’
‘You’ve met Jock?’ and at that Eurico sighed. ‘Of course you have.’
‘Another unamiable character,’ offered Harry, ‘like the Arse Clencher.’
‘No,’ said Eurico firmly. ‘Our Jock might be keen to get back into his war, but it doesn’t stop him from enjoying himself. No, Jock is just an oaf. A role he is far too old for. Just time for another little Soberano before they all start getting up.’ And Eurico poured him another tiny nip of brandy, Harry thinking if this was the continental way, he could get used to it.
‘Thank you for talking with Fabrizio, by the way,’ said Eurico. ‘I was worried about him.’
Harry looked confused for a moment, but then cottoned on: Fabrizio and his big, glorious gesture against the British battlecruiser. Except all he’d ended up achieving had been to bend his aeroplane. ‘It was a very brave thing he did,’ said Harry.
‘It was a very brave thing you did, too,’ said Eurico, who then paused while Harry squinted at him. ‘I spoke to the men in the lifeboat.’
Harry smiled his lop-sided smile and shrugged.
‘You sawing through that little rope while your submarine is diving under your feet. I shut my eyes and what I see is a scene from a Feydeau farce. But you’re not depressed by it,’ added Eurico.
‘I might be,’ said Harry, smirking.
‘Let me put it this way,’ continued Eurico, ‘you have more of a sense of the ridiculous than Fabrizio. It is good for a serious boy like him to see that not everyone or everything has to be so . . . do you understand . . . machismo?’
‘Yes, Eurico, I understand. And how very wise, Sir,’ said Harry deliberately, ignoring Eurico’s mock scowl at the word ‘Sir’. Harry let a long silence hang as he looked around Eurico’s office, with his big tooled-leather desk, and high-backed leather chairs; the glass-fronted bookcase like the façade of a cathedral, and almost as big; the corniced ceiling with space for two chandeliers, and how the gold-and-green striped wallpaper made the room seem darker and cooler than the growing warmth of the morning outside might suggest. ‘You’re really enjoying all this too, aren’t you?’ he said, giving an expansive sweep of his arms, as if to include the office, the hotel, all its occupants, the whole island even, and its peace and quiet. ‘This is no dead-end posting for you – you’re having the time of your life.’
‘How very wise of you, Harry,’ said Eurico, who allowed his own pause for reflection. ‘Indeed, I too have had my war . . .’
Of course you have, thought Harry, the Spanish Civil War. And you were one of the baddies too.
‘. . . and discovered that it’s much more fun to drink and carouse and dally with beautiful women than be involved in the business of killing people.’ Another pause, and then a smile. ‘Now, your new uniform. I will write you a pass into town for tomorrow. And Fabrizio will accompany you. He knows the way, and as I think he is probably a snappier dresser than you, he will supervise the cut.’
Only after he’d left the office did it dawn on Harry that their entire conversation had been conducted in English. Eurico really was a most accomplished man, thought Harry.
Chapter Five
Her name was Sybilla Cruz Soriano, and Harry first met her on his day out in town with Fabrizio, on his way to be measured for his new uniforms. It was in the old town, in one of the Calle that ran down to the harbour, where all Palma’s fashionable shops were. She was promenading with her lady’s servant, for women of Sybilla’s caste did not go a-promenading alone.
It was late morning and the perfect cool for a stroll around the shops. There were a lot of people about, yet she still stood out. She was wearing a dove-grey, two-piece silk suit, with pencil skirt and tailored jacket with high, flamboyant lapels that revealed a shot-silk dark-blue blouse. A cashmere shawl draped her shoulders, and her calves were sheathed in sheer stockings and her feet shod in high-heeled, open-toed shoes cut from the finest chamois. If Harry hadn’t been with Fabrizio he would have walked into a lamp post. To have called Sybilla a beauty would have been like saying Michelangelo was quite good at painting ceilings. Her face, her figure, the way she carried herself – where did you begin?
Her skin was translucently pale and peach-soft, taut over high cheekbones, but with a prominent nose that not only did not detract from her looks, but added the dimension of character. Then there were the eyes: feline, and the colour of warm chocolate fondant. And her mouth . . . Oh, but what a mouth! Harry would later hear one of the RAF boys describe it as ‘. . . lips that could suck-start an Indian . . .’ The pilot had, of course, been referring not to any citizen of the subcontinent, but to the 1200cc motorcycle much beloved of dispatch riders. Not a gallant observation by any means, but Harry had instantly known what he was driving at. And then there was the bosom. We have to discuss the bosom, because every other interned belligerent in Eurico’s Hotel El Real did. Frequently. When Harry saw it first, taut against the grey silk of her suit, a phrase had shot into his head, completely unbidden, from the rubbish bin of his memory. It had come from a lecture he’d once sat through, from deep in its droning tedium. Some segue into Renaissance ecclesiastical architecture. ‘Pseudo-sexpartite vaulting’ had been the phrase. Harry hadn’t a clue what it meant back then, but the instant he’d clapped eyes on Sybilla’s bosom, he knew he was looking at it. As to what was holding that waist, Harry shuddered to think what architectural connivance was going on in there. Finally, but not least, there was her hair. Raven hair, what else, contained by the tiny confection of a hat – hair that radiated all the resting languor of high explosives.
Fabrizio, it quickly transpired, was already acquainted with her, for Sybilla, as he explained, was one of the young ladies of Palma always invited to the Officers’ Mess Nights at the Hotel El Real. Harry could see Fabrizio was completely fascinated. And from the moment Fabrizio introduced her, it was apparent to Harry that Sybilla was more than acquainted with the effect she had on Fabrizio. Greetings were exchanged with a certain formality, allowing just enough time for one of those timeless little gavottes to ensue: the one where the lady shamelessly flirts with the ardent admirer’s best friend – and for all the flashing eyes she directs at the friend, the last flash is always in the direction of the ardent admirer, just to make sure she’s having the desired effect.
Yet Harry came away from their first meeting with the sense that for all her conceits and hauteur, Sybilla was probably a nice person. Why? Because of the way she’d behaved towards her lady’s servant. For a start, Sybilla h
ad included her lady in the introductions, by name. It was a small thing, but one Harry had seldom seen before – not from the likes of Sybilla and certainly not from her caste, in any nationality.
Fabrizio’s huffiness lasted only until afternoon tea, then it got washed away by a vast vat of Catalunya rosado.
Idle days followed. As the days wore on, and the cool of autumn deepened, the sport tended to move inside, card schools being the favourite, and a running chess tournament. The Italians even embraced the joys of dominoes, despite the ever-present threat of crowd trouble. As a result, the only time they ever really saw the Germans was at sundowners, when they were all gathered on the balcony, each man wrestling with his daily quandary: when to escalate from wine to spirits. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe would be holding their evening parade on the patio below. For the Anglo-Italian contingent, it was always an occasion for the singing of dirty songs, name-calling and ritual bottom-baring – activities that were always met with unflinching Teutonic indifference. Old Arse Clencher himself would march his men up and down. There’d be a lot of stamping and Heil Hitler!s, and then a tedious address by the Oberst on how the master race were doing in the war. The whole time Harry was there, no one ever managed to hit old Arse Clencher with a bread roll, though God knows they tried. Then Jerry would march off to an evening of God knows what. And all the time the consuls would come and go, bearing tidings of each man’s progress towards repatriation – a process that appeared to advance in geological time. Harry had only ever seen three men actually leave since he’d arrived on the island.
There were two Germans, seen off with parade pomp and Nazi salutes, while the RAF lad was taken in hand the night before the car arrived to take him away, and was fed drink until he was insensible, loaded into a crude coffin with a wilted wreath on his chest and carried off to his bed amid much false, and some not so false wailing and beating of breasts.
‘We are a Fascist state, Harry,’ said Eurico one afternoon when the card schools were deep in study, others were sleeping off the booze and the Germans were doing callisthenics. Harry and Eurico were speaking French and discussing politics over a pot of exquisite Arabian coffee and Eurico’s Havana cigarillos. He was explaining how Spanish bureaucracy worked, or rather, how it was impossible to explain how it worked. ‘So we have a Fascist bureaucracy. There’s no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. In that, we tend to follow the Roman taste in the exercise of power, rather than the Greco, which I feel is the more preferred among your democracies. You cannot reason with paperwork.’
Harry so enjoyed their talks on politics, books and Hollywood movies, not to mention their games of chess. Fabrizio played chess too, and was far superior at the game than either of them. ‘He lets us win sometimes, you know,’ observed Harry one day. ‘You noticed,’ said Eurico. But they both enjoyed Fabrizio’s piano-playing, and that he had put together a trio with two other Italian pilots of a musical bent, who could turn their hands to a variety of strings: viola, violin and the cello. Little afternoon soirées would be convened when the rough boys were off playing cricket and the more refined of their small band stayed back to listen, more of them Italian than English – like the day when Eurico produced a guitar, and they were a quartet. Or the afternoon, with the sun low over the port, with half a dozen of them lying around, rapt with the sound of Boccherini’s La Musica Notturna delle Strade di Madrid, and then the boys coming back, sweating and charged, shouting up at Harry leaning back against the balustrade, ‘Gilmour, you Scotch slacker! You’re giving the Group Captain a showing up! And you a Jock like him too!’ Followed swiftly by someone pretending to Jock-ness: ‘Ah’ll jist conduct a wee movement from How tae pirouette in a French poof’s boudoir, while Ahm still in the mood!’ Laughter, interrupted by a more refined tone: ‘If we can teach the Tallymen how to play cricket, we can surely teach a haggis-muncher!’ Encouraging the less refined, ‘Maybe he likes munching more than just haggis!’ All just in time for afternoon tea.
They had all signed paroles, swearing never to offend against a lengthy list of prohibited activities including escape, acts of sabotage or subversion, or conduct likely to offend public sensitivities. On the strength of this they would be allowed passes, signed by Eurico and countersigned by the civilian governor, that everyone from the local policia to the Guardia Civil, and even the Army, had to recognise. Especially the Army. Not that all of the Spanish Army personnel on the island were so ghastly.
‘There is an Engineer Officer called Jaime you must meet,’ Eurico had confided in Harry one day, ‘and there are a number of Artillery Officers who are quite agreeable. But as for the rest of the Army people,’ he said, dismissing his own Army colleagues, ‘they all want to go to Russia with Hitler. And like to practise here how they will behave there, while they’re waiting.’
Harry’s favourite trip was to take the Ferrocarril, a narrow-gauge electric train that ran all the way from the upper part of Palma, through the Serra de Tramuntana to the town of Sóller on the north-west of the island, and then on into its small port. This was where Harry had been unceremoniously dumped by the tuna boat, not that he remembered much about it, being tired and already drunk from all the fundador the fishermen had fed him after his rescue.
It was on one of those trips, loaded down with picnic, and looking forward to an assignation with Sybilla – and her lady’s servant, and a gaggle of Sybilla’s friends, who would be driving up with all their attendant chaperones – that Harry listened to Fabrizio on the subject of the war, and his family.
‘My family is very old. We were Roman nobility,’ he told Harry as the train rattled along and they both gazed out of the strap window of the little wooden-slatted carriage down into deep, wooded ravines. ‘There are condottieri and cardinals in my blood line: we are one of the Black families. I hold dual citizenship of Italy and the Vatican City. And now I am expected, nay commanded, to kneel before the son of a blacksmith from the Romagna.’
If you looked up you could see the sunlight dapple the trees and ragged rocks along the mountain’s skyline as the little train hugged the opposite ravine wall, and then they plunged into another tunnel, and their faces shone in the pale yellow of the carriage’s electric lights. Harry made no reply, but thought, Ah, so it’s all about class.
‘Most politicians make mistakes because they do not know history,’ continued Fabrizio. ‘Mussolini takes his country to war because he knows too much. Education should be a good thing, no? But this man, he reads a book about socialism and he is a socialist; he reads another about fascism and he is a fascist, and he reads another about Nietzsche and now he is an Übermensch. And we are all to follow him down this path of hubris to a new Roman empire, with Il Duce as Caesar. We are good at fighting black tribesmen and Arab rabbles, but now we are fighting you and the Soviets, and soon, as everybody knows, we’ll be fighting the Americans and all their industrial might. Does he really think he can win? By throwing in his lot with that failed dauber of canvases? I know he is betting my life on it. Madre di Dio! We couldn’t even beat the Greeks on our own. “War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.” He said that. He actually said that.’
‘You sound like my father,’ said Harry, thinking, Ah, so it’s not about class, it’s about . . . reason. Then adding quickly, ‘Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Not at all.’
‘And my father,’ said Fabrizio, looking now at Harry with a steady stare, ‘and his brothers. And their father too. And they’re not alone.’
When they met the ladies in their convoy of open-top cars, they motored out to a small promontory beyond the port and spread their picnic. The attention Sybilla directed at Harry meant that he forgot all about his conversation with Fabrizio, and for one glorious afternoon he entertained the fantasy that maybe she just might really hold a genuine interest in a young, bright, articulate, and dare he say it, handsome Highlan
d gentleman of absolutely no estate, wealth or noble line. Poor Harry. He was still not much more than a boy, and God bless him, his head was all too turnable by a pretty face. Certainly turnable far enough for him to completely fail to see the effect all this was having on his friend. The effect was not lost however on Eurico, who spotted Fabrizio’s lowering face right away when both young men returned to the Hotel El Real. He filed the insight away as part of his ongoing psychological study.
The days passed.
On one unseasonably warm afternoon, the quartet had set up on the big terrace after lunch’s digestifs, and they were listening to some baroque little ditty, joined by several off-duty Spanish airmen and the Spanish Army Engineer, Jaime, who did indeed turn out to be a pleasant fellow and was proving himself quite able to converse with Harry in French. The rough boys had gone off somewhere to be rough, and the Germans to be Teutonic. Harry’s mind was wandering with the music when a shadow, the briefest of flits, caught his eye. It came from within one of the little stone-turreted artifices that overlooked the terrace – like toy watchtowers, not very high and not very stout, with vertical windows, decorative rather than genuine arrow slits, through which, at this time of day and this angle of the sun, light should have been spilling through, but for a moment hadn’t been.
‘Someone’s watching us,’ Harry said to Jaime, who, along with Armando, another of the Italian pilots, had for the past ten minutes been taunting him on and off about how Britain was a land without music. Jaime, who was an older man than the rest of the Hotel El Real’s inmates, tall and square of jaw, and with receding jet-black crinkly hair, had just been telling Harry, ‘Writers, you have: Shakespeare, Dickens, Keats. But where are your Mozarts, your Bachs? Albéniz, Vivaldi, Beethoven! How can you have a land without music? How can you live?’