Winter in Madrid (35 page)

‘Not that charmed, Luis, if he ended up in the camp.’

‘Agustín described him,’ Luis continued. ‘He is a tall man, broad in the shoulders, with fair hair. Probably a very handsome man, Agustín said, though now of course he has a scrubby beard and lice.’ Barbara winced. ‘He is known to be a difficult man, his spirit is unbowed. Agustín has told him to be careful, that better times may be coming, though no more than that for now.’ Luis smiled wryly. ‘He says your man has
duende
. Courage, class. He thinks he has the will to try and escape. Many in the camp have lost the will, or the energy.’

Barbara’s heart was thumping wildly. She knew now it was all true, she was certain. Luis put his head on one side. ‘Are you satisfied,
señora
? Satisfied that I have told you the truth?’

‘Yes. Yes, I am. Thank you, Luis.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t had the money through from my bank in England yet. It’s difficult getting money out of the country now.’

He looked at her seriously. ‘It is very important to get this done before the bad weather sets in. The winters are hard up there, and start early. It will be getting cold already.’

‘And the diplomatic situation may change. I know. I’ll chase them, I’ll write again today. What if I meet you here, a week today again. I’ll have the money by then, one way or another. If it comes sooner, is there any way I can get in touch with you?’

‘I have no telephone,
señora
. Could I telephone you?’

She hesitated. ‘Safer not. I don’t want my husband learning anything, he’s worried about me as it is.’

‘A week, then. But we must make some arrangements then, one way or another. We will be into November soon.’

‘Yes, I know.’ As she spoke she thought, this doesn’t leave time for me to write again. What if I asked Harry for a loan? She knew he had money. But he was a diplomat, it would be dangerous for him—

She forced her mind back to the present. ‘The plan,’ she asked Luis. ‘It is still the same? Agustín helps him escape and I pick him up in Cuenca?’

‘Yes. There may be some way that we can get him civilian clothes, so he will not be so conspicuous. Agustín is looking into that. Then it would be up to you,
señora
, to get him away and to the embassy.’

‘That might not be so easy. I’ve walked past there, there are
civiles
outside.’

‘You must resolve that one,
señora
,’ Luis said with a little smile. He seemed to have lost interest now, it wouldn’t be his problem once Barbara picked Bernie up.

‘I’ll pay you some when we have a firm plan in place, and the rest when it’s all done,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s in all our interests the whole thing goes through.’

He looked at her. ‘You will make sure of that, I know.’

Barbara thought of Harry again. If she could bring Bernie into Madrid, hide him somewhere. She sighed. She became aware of Luis looking at her curiously.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Forgive me asking,
señora
, but will this matter not have consequences for you and your husband? If Señor Piper reaches the embassy the matter is likely to become public knowledge, surely. At the least, representations will be made to our government. And your husband works with the government, does he not? You said so at our first meeting.’

‘Yes, Luis,’ she said quietly. ‘There may be consequences. I shall have to deal with them.’

He looked at her seriously. ‘You are a brave woman, to put your future at risk.’

She studied him. His face was tired and strained. He wasn’t much more than a boy really, made to deal with awful things too young, like half the men in the world today. ‘What will you and your brother do, Luis, when this is done and your brother gets out of the army?’

He smiled sadly. ‘I have a dream of us fetching my mother from Sevilla, getting somewhere to live in the country near Madrid, and perhaps growing vegetables. I have always liked growing things, and a big city needs vegetables, does it not? And we will all be together
again, as a family.’ His face darkened. ‘Family is important to Spaniards, the war split up so many – you who come from England cannot know the pain of it. It is because of that I must do whatever I have to do to bring us together again. Can you understand that,
señora
?’

‘Yes. I hope you are able to do that.’

‘So do I.’ He bowed his head a moment, closing his eyes, then looked up with a smile. ‘Until next week, señora.’

‘I’ll have the money. One way or another.’

T
HAT EVENING
over dinner Sandy told her he had booked a table at the Ritz for their anniversary the following night.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asked. He still hadn’t forgiven her for forgetting. ‘It’s the most expensive hotel in Madrid.’

‘I know, Sandy. Only, it’s always so full of the Germans and their Italian pals. You know I hate seeing them.’

He smiled. ‘Chance to show the flag.’ She wondered if he had chosen the Ritz deliberately to upset her. She looked at him, remembering his tenderness to her when they first met. Where had it gone? It was her discontent he didn’t like, she realized, her discontent with the life he had chosen for her that had been growing for a long time but had only really emerged since that dinner with Markby.

‘Do you remember that first Christmas after we met?’ he asked her, a hard mocking expression in his eyes.

‘Yes. When you went away on business, and couldn’t come back till after Christmas.’

‘That’s right.’

He smiled. ‘Only I could have. We finalized the deal before Christmas, I could have come back. But I knew that if I stayed away you’d realize how much you needed me. And I was right.’

She stared at him, she felt shocked and then furiously angry. ‘So you manipulated me,’ she said quietly. ‘Manipulated my feelings.’

He looked at her across the table, seriously now. ‘I know what people want, Barbara, I can sense it. It’s a gift, very useful in business. I see below the surface. Sometimes it’s easy. The Jews, for instance, they just want survival, they tremble and shake in their desperation to survive. The people I work with, what they want is usually money,
though occasionally it’s something else. Whatever it is I try to help oblige them. You wanted me and you wanted security, only you couldn’t quite bring yourself to see it. I just helped bring that to the surface.’ He inclined his head, raised his glass.

‘And what about you, Sandy? What do you want?’

He smiled. ‘Success, money. Knowing I can cut the mustard, make people give me what I want.’

‘You’re a shit sometimes, Sandy,’ she said. ‘You know that?’

She had never spoken to him like that before and he looked taken aback for a moment. Then his face set.

‘You’ve been letting your appearance go lately, you know. You look a mess. I hope working at that orphanage will help you pull yourself together.’

She felt the words like a blow even as she realized he had chosen them because they would hit her where she was weakest. Something cold and hard came into her mind and she thought, don’t react, the facade needs to be kept up for now. She got up, laying her napkin carefully on the table, and left the room. Her legs were shaking.

P
ART
T
WO
THE BEGINNING OF WINTER

T
HE PSYCHIATRIST
was a tall thin man with spectacles and silver hair. He wore a grey pinstripe suit. Bernie hadn’t seen anyone wearing a suit for three and a half years, only the prisoners’ boiler suits and the functional guards’ uniforms, both a drab olive-green.

The doctor had been installed in the room under the
comandante
’s hut, behind a scratched table brought from the offices above. Bernie guessed he hadn’t been told what the room was used for. It was just like Aranda’s macabre sense of humour to put him here.

Agustín, one of the guards, had been waiting for Bernie when his work detail returned from the quarry, with orders to take him to the
comandante
. ‘It is nothing to worry about, not trouble,’ he whispered as they crossed the square. Bernie had nodded his thanks. Agustín was one of the better ones, an untidy young man who liked a quiet life. The sun was low and a cold wind blew down from the mountains. Bernie kept track of the days and knew this was the first of November; winter was almost here. The shepherds were starting to bring their flocks down from the high pastures. Working on the quarry detail was hard but at least you got some sense of the rhythms of the outside world. He shivered, envying Agustín the heavy poncho he wore over his uniform.

Comandante Aranda sat behind his desk. He stared up at Bernie with his hard eyes, a humorous expression on his long handsome face with its luxuriant black moustache.

‘Ah, Piper,’ he said. ‘I have a visitor for you.’

‘
¿Señor.?
’ Bernie stood rigidly to attention, the way Aranda expected. A spasm of pain went through his arm; his old wound hurt after a day moving rocks.

‘Do you remember in San Pedro de Cardena, you were evaluated by a psychiatrist?’

‘
Si, señor
.’ It had been a bizarre interlude, a joke in hell. San Pedro was an abandoned medieval monastery outside Burgos. Thousands of Republican prisoners had been crammed in there after the Jarama battle. One day they had been given thick questionnaires to fill in. They were told it was for a project about the psychology of Marxist fanaticism. Two hundred questions, varying from his reaction to certain colours to his degree of patriotism.

The
comandante
lit a cigarette, studying him through a curling haze of smoke with his cold hazel eyes. Aranda had been in charge of the Tierra Muerte camp for nearly a year. He was a colonel, a veteran of the Civil War and before that the Foreign Legion. He enjoyed cruelty and even Bernie wouldn’t have dared be insolent with him. As always the
comandante
was immaculately dressed, his uniform ironed into knife-edge creases. The prisoners knew every line and curve of his handsome bronzed face with its waxed moustache. If he was frowning or wore his pouting childish look, someone could be in for a beating.

This evening, though, he looked amused. He blew smoke at Bernie; at once Bernie’s craving for tobacco returned and he found himself leaning forward slightly to catch another whiff.

‘They are doing a follow-up study, prisoners of special interest. Dr Lorenzo is waiting for you downstairs. And Piper, be sure to cooperate with him,
¿vale?
’

‘
Sí
,
señor comandante
.’

Bernie’s heart was thumping as Agustín led him down to the basement room, opening the heavy wooden door. He had never been there but had heard the room graphically described.

The psychiatrist’s face was cold. ‘You may leave us,’ he told Agustín.

‘I shall be outside,
señor
.’

The psychiatrist waved a hand at a steel chair in front of the desk. ‘Sit down.’ Bernie slumped into it; he was very tired. An oil stove had been put in a corner and the room was hot. The psychiatrist ran a silver pen down the columns of a questionnaire. Bernie recognized his own writing. The lice in his beard stirred, roused by the heat.

The psychiatrist looked up. ‘You are Piper, Bernard, English, age thirty-one?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am Dr Lorenzo. Three years ago, when you were in San Pedro, you answered a questionnaire. You recall?

‘Yes,
doctor
.’

‘The purpose of the study was to determine the psychological factors that cause people to embrace Marxism.’ His voice was even, monotonous. ‘Most Marxists are ignorant working people of low intelligence and culture. We wish to look again at the people who did not match those criteria. You, for example.’ He studied Bernie keenly.

‘What brings people to Marxism is simple,’ Bernie said quietly. ‘Poverty and oppression.’

The psychiatrist nodded. ‘Yes, that is what I would expect you to say. And yet you can have been subject to none of those things; I see you attended an English public school.’

‘My parents were poor. I got a place at Rookwood under a scholarship.’ Bernie found his eyes straying to the corner of the room, where a tall object was covered by a tarpaulin. Lorenzo tapped the desk sharply with the silver pen.

‘Pay attention, please. Tell me about your parents – what did they do?’

‘They worked in a shop someone else owned.’

‘And you felt sorry for them perhaps? You were close to them?’

A picture of his mother came into Bernie’s head, standing in the parlour wringing her hands. ‘Bernie, Bernie, why do you have to go to this awful war?’ He shrugged.

‘They may be dead now for all I know. I’ve never been allowed to write.’

‘You would write if you could?’

‘Yes.’

Lorenzo made another note. ‘This school, this Rookwood, that would have brought you into contact with boys of a higher culture. It interests me that you rejected those values.’

Bernie laughed bitterly. ‘There was no culture there. And their class was the enemy of mine.’