Winter in Madrid (6 page)

It was strange to be in a night-time London without streetlamps. There was no one outside now, but the dark shape of the shelter was visible in the moonlight across the road. There was a distant sound of ack-ack fire and something else, a low heavy drone from the south.

‘Hell,’ Will said. ‘They’re coming this way!’ He looked suddenly confused. ‘But it’s the docks they go for, the docks.’

‘Maybe they’re lost.’ Or want to hit civilian morale, Harry thought. His legs had stopped shaking. He had to take charge. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get over the road.’

They began running but Muriel was slowed by the little girl. In the middle of the road Will turned to help her and slipped. He went down with a crash and a yell. Ronnie, ahead, paused and looked back.

‘Will, get up!’ Muriel’s cry was hysterical. Will tried to lift himself but fell back. Prue, the teddy bear still dangling from her arm, began screaming. Harry knelt by Will’s side.

‘I’ve twisted my ankle.’ Will’s face was full of pain and fear. ‘Leave me, get the others into the shelter.’ Behind him Muriel held the keening Prue tightly. Muriel was swearing, over and over again, language Harry wouldn’t have thought she knew.

‘Bloody fucking bastard Hitler oh God Christ!’

Still the siren wailed. The planes were almost overhead. Harry heard the whine of bombs falling, growing louder and ending in a sudden loud crump. There was a flash of light from a few streets away, a momentary tug of hot air at his dressing gown. It was so like Dunkirk. His legs were shaking again and there was a dry acid taste at the back of his mouth but his mind was very clear. He had to get Will up.

There was another whine and crump, closer, and the ground shook with the impacts. Muriel stopped swearing and stood stock still, eyes and mouth wide open. She bent her thin dressing-gowned body over to protect her still weeping daughter. Harry took her arm and looked into her terrified eyes. He spoke to her slowly and clearly.

‘You have to take Prue into the shelter, Muriel. Now. See, there’s
Ronnie; he doesn’t know what to do. You have to get them in. I’ll bring Will.’

Life came back into her eyes. She turned wordlessly and began walking rapidly towards the shelter, stretching out her other hand for Ronnie to take. Harry bent and took Will’s hand. ‘Come on, old chap, get up. Put your good leg down, take the weight.’

He hauled his cousin to his feet as another great crash sounded, no more than a street away. There was a brief yellow flash and a wave of blast almost toppled them over but Harry had his arm round Will and managed to keep him steady. There was a feeling of pressure and a whining noise in Harry’s bad ear. Will leaned into him and hopped on his good leg, smiling through gritted teeth.

‘Don’t get blown up,’ he said. ‘The sneaky beakies will be furious!’ So he
had
guessed who wanted me, Harry thought. More bombs fell, yellow flashes lighting the road, but they seemed more distant now.

Someone had been watching from the shelter, holding the door open a crack. Arms reached out, taking hold of Will, and they fell together into the crowded darkness. Harry was guided to a seat. He found himself next to Muriel. He could just make out her thin form, still bent over Prue. The little girl was still sobbing. Ronnie was huddled against her as well.

‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ Muriel said quietly. ‘I just couldn’t bear any more. My children, every day I think about what could happen to them. All the time, all the time.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’

‘I’m sorry I went to pieces. You got us through.’ She raised an arm to touch Harry’s, but let it fall, as though the effort were too much.

Harry leaned his throbbing head against the gritty concrete wall. He had helped them, taken control, he hadn’t fallen apart. He would have a few months ago.

He remembered his first sight of the beach at Dunkirk, walking over a sand dune then seeing the endless black columns of men snaking into a sea dotted with boats. They were all sizes – he saw a pleasure steamer next to a minesweeper. There were smoking wrecks too, and German dive-bombers buzzing overhead, shrieking down and
dropping their bombs on the boats and the men. The retreat had been so fast, so chaotic, the horror and shame of it had been almost too much to take in. Harry was ordered to help line the men up on the beach for evacuation. Sitting in the shelter, he felt again the numb shame that came then, the realization of total defeat.

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.’

T
HE PLANE LEFT
C
ROYDON
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 brutal. ‘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.’