While England Sleeps (22 page)

I stared into my beer.

“And no one has any idea where?”

“Oh, we’ve got leads. Nothing I can talk about, of course. In any case he hasn’t got his passport, so he won’t be able to leave the country. It may take a few days but we’ll track him down.”

“Well, really, what’s the point? Why not just let him go?”

Northrop’s eyes widened. “This is an army, my friend! Not some rugby club! Things like this can’t just be overlooked. Phelan is a soldier, and as such subject to military law.”

“So you’ll just hunt him down like an animal, is that what you’re saying?”

“Don’t confuse what’s happening here with one of your novels. We will not hunt him down like an animal. The police will simply search for him and when they find him turn him over.”

“And then?”

“There’ll be a hearing. A fair one. He’ll be judged by his comrades.”

“And what might they decide?”

“Well, he
could
be sent home, though that’s unlikely. Or they could assign him a few months’ duty in a prison camp, after which he’d probably be put back into the battalion. The firing squad is a possibility as well, though I tend to doubt—”

“The firing squad! The boy’s a volunteer! What kind of barbarians are you, to shoot a boy who’d volunteered?”

“If you’ll let me finish, I was saying the firing squad is a
possibility.
An extremely unlikely possibility.” He brushed his fingers through his hair.

“I hope for his sake he makes it to France.”

Northrop eyed me narrowly. “Look, what is it with you and this boy? Phelan knew what he was getting into when he signed up; I made it all very plain to him. He welcomed the opportunity. And a soldier can’t just leave a war because he’s changed his mind. If we allowed that, where would we be? Just where Franco wants us. Just where Hitler wants us.”

“But he’s twenty years old!”

“They’re all twenty years old.”

“Well, that’s my point! There’s no draft here, Northrop. These boys came by choice, out of a sense of idealism. Surely you can be easier on them than the Royal Marines.”

He slammed down his beer and leaned closer. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening here, Botsford. This is class
struggle.
Class
warfare
. Individual lives don’t matter. I would give up my life gladly for the cause. We’d all give up our lives, just as so many millions of our comrades gave up their lives so the rich could—”

“
You
are the rich!”

“Botsford—”

“Don’t give me this party line shit. I know you! Christ, you grew up in fucking Eaton Square! You went to Oxford! Your father’s an earl, for Christ’s sake!”

“Are you done?”

“Well—yes.”

“Good. And now that you’ve had this little opportunity to vent your frustrations, may I speak frankly as well?”

“Of course.”

Then he looked me in the eye and said, “You’re a buggerer. And for the last several months you’ve been buggering that boy, until finally he decided he’d had enough and he had to get away from you.”

“That’s ridiculous—”

“Maybe you thought I didn’t know what was happening. Maybe you think I’m stupid generally. Well, I’m not. Oh, I know we’ve never discussed what went on in school, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember. It was normal—back then. Now’s a different story. A lot of people wouldn’t stand for it, but my feeling is, what a fellow does in his bedroom is his business, so I kept my mouth shut. Now it’s wartime. I’m in charge of a battalion, and where the morale of my men is concerned I’ve got to put my foot down.”

I looked away. “You don’t understand, Edward and I—”

“Oh, I think I understand perfectly. You used him. You exploited him sexually the same way the bourgeoisie has been sexually exploiting the working class for generations. And Phelan went along with it, because he didn’t know any better. That’s the sad part. They’ve been trained to think it’s good for them too. Probably Phelan figured he’d make a quid or two that he could spend standing his mates a few pints at the pub, or getting Mum a new dress. Only soon he was in over his head. I guessed from the minute he rang what it was he wanted, and to be honest, my first reaction was, well, it’s the best thing for him. The chance to get out of England and prove he’s a man on the battlefield, with other, normal blokes. Now, if you want my advice, you’ll stay out of it. Don’t worry anymore about Phelan; you’ll only bring him trouble, and believe me, he’s got enough as it is.”

He smiled at me: a jaunty, old-school smile. I wanted to smash his teeth in. You idiot, I wanted to say. You fucking self-satisfied idiot. It wasn’t like that!

“If I were you,” Northrop went on, “I’d stop worrying about Phelan and start thinking about yourself. You’re right: you
do
know me. Your world is my world. For years people have been telling us it’s us that matters, us above all else, the privileged sons of the English privileged classes. Everything revolves around us. Servants have no existence beyond serving us. The world was created so that we could exploit it. And of course we came to believe them. How couldn’t we when it was all so convenient? You may say you’re a Communist now, Botsford, but it’s obvious you’re still in the thrall of the Capitalist reward system. Not that I blame you. It took me years to overcome my upbringing, but I did it. You can too. I’ll help you.”

His voice had grown honeyed, almost seductive.

“First off, you’ve got to recognize that your homosexuality is merely a corrupt bourgeois aberration—”

“Oh, piss off!” And I stood, upsetting a glass of beer. The stream of yellow liquid raced toward the table edge. Northrop leapt out of its path just in time.

He looked at me as if I were mad but I stared him down.

“I have only one thing to say to you, Northrop, and it’s this: if anything should happen to Edward—anything at all—I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

“I’m going to forget this conversation,” Northrop shouted. “I’m going to forget this conversation ever happened—”

But I was already turning, pushing my way through the crowd, hurrying out the door into the lamplight, the moonlight, the moist, deserted streets.

Chapter Fourteen

I spent the next several days waiting—hungering—for news that never came. When I wasn’t listening for gossip in Bar Bristol, I was wandering the city, hallucinating Edward’s face into the most outlandish and improbable circumstances. Not that I had any good reason to suspect he might be in Barcelona; it was as likely—and unlikely—as his being in France, or Upney, or dead. Still, I had to believe something. So I drew upon my creaky draftsman’s skills and worked up a likeness of Edward in black ink, which I showed to the patrons at Bar Bristol, to soldiers, to strangers in the street. An old woman on Calle del Carmen thought she’d seen him selling fruit at the
boquería
, the huge open-air market near the port—a purported sighting that sent me running frantically through that maze of stalls and peddlers where openmouthed fish gaped up from beds of ice, and the guillotined heads of boars and rabbits leered behind glass partitions, and pretty girls in dresses patterned with bluebells wiped their bloody knives with their aprons. The Spanish do not fear looking death in the face. There were chickens, half plucked like poodles, still wearing their crowns. But alas, no Edward, not even beheaded behind a counter, mouth and eyes open, bewildered, appalled. One young man looked like him from behind, but when he turned around he had cheeks scarred with acne, a missing front tooth.

Various other sightings were reported. A soldier at Bar Bristol said he thought he’d seen Edward the day before walking a dog on Plaza d’España. A woman was sure he’d been at a meeting she’d attended in December. Another woman said he had a shave twice a week at a barbershop on Calle Aribau.

In my madness I followed each of these leads to its inevitable fruitless conclusion. Don’t think, however, that I required the prompting of strangers to start a wild-goose chase. I could do it just as well on my own. Thus one afternoon I hailed a taxi and had it follow a fruit truck thirty blocks through the rain, because I was convinced I’d seen Edward’s face steal a glance out the back of it. During a parade I tried—without success—to break into an apartment on the balcony of which I was sure I’d seen Edward watering some plants. I even wandered “by accident” into the kitchen of a restaurant in the old quarter where I was having lunch one day. But the boy chopping potatoes in the back corner—the boy whom I had glimpsed stumbling sleepily toward the toilet—wasn’t Edward. He didn’t even look like Edward.

A telegram arrived from Chambers. As my first assignment, I was to travel to the town of —— and interview the mayor. He, in turn, would explain to me how the town had flourished under a Communist government. As I had no compelling reason to stay on in Barcelona, I decided that I would travel to —— as quickly as possible, then hurry back to see if there was any word as to Edward’s whereabouts. Besides, —— was just as likely a place for Edward to be hiding as Barcelona.

It was a long journey to ——, almost nineteen hours. Outside the window, scenes of unrelieved harshness unfolded. The land was knotty and windblown: all edge. Periodically the train slowed to a crawl as it passed through villages where old women leaned out windows and children stood immobile on cobbled streets, watching as the train crept along, segmented like a worm, huffing and huge, almost kingly. Then the town would be gone, the old women gone; we’d pick up speed through olive groves, thorny fields of rosemary, rice paddies in watery troughs. The Spanish landscape, so much more varied than films would have you believe; and yet the light was always the same—severe, unforgiving, as if the sun were a bare bulb screwed into a ceiling socket.

In ——, I announced myself, as requested, at the mayor’s office, only to be told that no appointment had been made for me. Moreover, the mayor was in Barcelona that week. So I went to have a beer at a
cervecería
, where I met a British officer, one Colonel Parker-Dawes, who recognized my accent and insisted we have a drink together. This jaunty and garrulous young idiot went on to tell me that he was an official with the government in Gibraltar. He had a lot of opinions about the residents of the colony—in particular a Lady Something who made herself available to him on a regular basis.

“By the way,” I said, “I have a friend whose uncle lives in Gibraltar. I was wondering if you knew him: Teddy Archibald?”

The mention of this gentleman’s name sent Parker-Dawes into gales of uproarious laughter. It turned out that Philippa’s uncle Teddy had a reputation around town for being a gambler and a rake, his parents, prominent members of the local polo-playing set, having died twenty years earlier and left him their entire fortune to squander. Most recently he had “gone red,” shuttering up his house and leaving town: rumor had it he intended to offer his services to Republicans on the front. “If you can beat that,” Parker-Dawes said. “Although those Spanish soldiers will screw anything from what I’ve heard, even their own grandmothers. Even their own grandfathers! The fellow is, as they say, ‘so.’ Care for a cigar?” I declined, and he put his rather large feet up on the table. “It
is
refreshing to have visitors from home,” he said, and I nodded, surprised and disturbed by the extent to which he saw me as one of his “kind.”

Forgoing Parker-Dawes’s invitation to join him for dinner, I went out to find a pension, where I spent a restless night. The next afternoon I was on my way back to Barcelona. The train was much more crowded than it had been going in the other direction, mostly with soldiers. Soldiers everywhere: smoking between the cars, lying on the floors of the corridors, their heads on each other’s laps. My own carriage I had to share with three infantrymen, one of whom snored; a nun; and an immensely fat old woman, whose valise gave off a distinct odor of sausage. No matter: I couldn’t have slept even if I’d wanted to. I was thinking about Edward. If he’d been captured, of course, Bar Bristol would be abuzz with the news. But what if he’d made it across the frontier? What if he was back in Upney? I needed desperately to know, yet I couldn’t very well contact Lil without alerting her to the fact of his desertion, knowledge that—assuming he
wasn’t
back in England—would cause her immense distress. Then there were the less palatable alternatives to consider: the possibility that Edward
had
been captured and was languishing in a prison somewhere; the possibility that he was dead.

So the train rolled on, through the interminable night, its rumble only partly muffling the snores and thrashings of the soldiers, the slow, regular wheeze of the old woman, who had fallen asleep with her head listing on my shoulder. I watched the window, partially curtained, for changes in the light. And then—it seemed eons later—dawn was breaking in blue streaks across the sky. The old woman lifted her lolling head. One of the soldiers raised the blinds of our sweaty carriage, filling it with a fevered radiance.

The nun got up, stumbled through the legs of the soldiers, came back awash with the sickly sweet odor of
eau de cologne
. I had to use the lavatory too, so I went out into the corridor. Everywhere soldiers were stretching, their hair rumpled, their cheeks dented with the imprint of whatever they had slept against. Looking out the window, I saw that we were passing through the distant outskirts of some city—I hoped it was Barcelona, then concluded from the talk in the corridor that it was Saragossa. Old neighborhoods of cobbled houses and stone streets passed us, going the other way. Opening the window a crack, I felt a rush of chill air and caught the distant odor of bread baking.