His service at the front and hers at the hospital meant they could not see each other much, but that only made their encounters through the autumn of 1936 the more exquisite. Instead of sleeping in a shallow trench — little more than a ditch, bolstered by a few sandbags — surrounded by unwashed men, James would find himself in a room in the Hotel Gran Via where, before anything, he and Florence would soak in a hot bath together, then make love and then make love again. They would eat a long dinner, trading tales of what they had seen, before climbing the staircase and returning to bed. No matter how exhausted they were, they would stay awake much of the night — believing that to sleep was to squander the strictly-rationed supply of time they had together.
During the day, they might walk out, surveying the latticework of tramlines and improvised barricades Madrid had become. ‘It looks like London during street-mending,’ Florence said, pointing to braziers just like those English labourers might use to warm their hands.
Once they were out walking together during an air raid. The city was all but defenceless in the face of attack from the air: there were no anti-aircraft weapons and the Republicans were reduced to mounting cinema projectors on the rooftops to do the work of searchlights. But this raid came in the middle of the day. Florence and James were at a street market when suddenly they heard the overhead whine of German planes and, seconds later, the thudding crash, the cloud of dust and the screams caused by a falling bomb.
They ran together to a scene of appalling destruction, lumps of blood and flesh barely recognizable as bodies. James was quickly drafted into helping move a slab of concrete under which a man, conscious and still wearing his hat, had his legs trapped. Only later did he notice Florence kneeling by a little girl, who lay as still as a doll.
Perhaps it was because the people of Madrid themselves returned to normal so quickly — the shops lifting their shutters within a few hours, the elderly couples strolling once more in the late afternoon — that somehow these events did not obliterate all other memories of their time together. Despite everything, James thought of those final months of 1936 as among the happiest times of his life. ‘It’s not despite the war, it’s because of it,’ Florence had said once as she gazed out of the window of their hotel room, watching the blue beams thrown into the sky by machines that a few months earlier had lit up the local cinema screen with Fred and Ginger, dancing together cheek-to-cheek.
‘Because of it?’ he had asked from the bed.
‘Yes, because. Fear of death makes love more intense: isn’t that what it says in your psychology books?’
‘“Make love”? Did someone say “make love”?’ And he dragged her back under the covers so that he could touch her skin and taste her mouth all over again.
On Christmas Eve, after less than two months together, they went to the ayuntamiento, the town hall on the Plaza de la Villa, to be married by a grandly-moustached socialist councillor, who hailed theirs as a ‘revolutionary wedding’, a civil ceremony conducted in defiance of the Catholic church, now fatally identified with Franco. The ceremony was brief and chaotic, punctuated by rowdy cheers from the crowd of well-wishers that had gathered all but spontaneously. Harry was best man and held the ring, bought from a jeweller whose shop window had been blown out in that afternoon bombing raid but who had reopened for business the very next day. Sister Marjorie was there as Florence’s witness. They had had to utter their vows in Spanish, so that James would forever cherish the words, Si, quiero, the Spanish equivalent of ‘I do’, seeing them as somehow belonging to him and Florence alone — their private language.
Now, he considered pouring himself another glass of Scotch, but thought better of it: he drank straight from the bottle instead. That had all been less than four years ago, but it might as well have happened in another age. To another man. Florence had left him because she had grown to despise him. He had been a good, loving husband and father, but it had not been enough. She would now shower that exceptional vigour, energy and beauty on another man. He felt the anger rise in him once more, his old sparring partner back for another round.
He got up, not wanting to be in the same room as that framed newspaper clipping, and walked into the kitchen, stumbling in the hallway on a chair he couldn’t remember knocking over, and saw it straight away, wondering instantly how he could have missed it.
On the table, resting against the conical flask Florence had brought home from the lab and converted into a vase, was a small envelope — quarter-sized, the kind that would usually contain a florist’s card accompanying a bouquet. No name on it.
He tore it open and recognized her handwriting instantly.
She had written just three words: I love you.
James felt a pricking sensation behind his eyes. He blinked and then read it again. Was this some kind of trick?
She had left him, taking Harry with her, and yet she still loved him? What sense did that make? It was insincere, a fake greeting card, ‘I love you’, scribbled to offset the cruelty of her actions. That must be it.
And yet he did not believe that either. Florence was only ever sincere about love. She did not use the word lightly; they had been together a long time before she told him that she loved him. He knew, too, that he was the first man ever to hear those words from her lips. If she had written it, she meant it. That there was no other message made it truer still. That she loved him was her entire meaning.
He held the card and read it a dozen more times, turning it over, then reading it again. The words were balm to the bruise she had left on his heart, but after the relief came another sensation: a bafflement that grew deeper by the moment.
Chapter Four
It sounded like a fusillade of gunfire, distant rather than deadly. The sun was high and James’s shirt was sticking to his back. He squinted against the brightness of a Spanish noon but he could not see where the noise was coming from. He was in the bombed-out ruin of what, he guessed, had once been a farmworker’s cottage. The walls still stood, though they were pocked by bullet-holes. Whole chunks of plaster were missing, exposing the brick underneath, like snatched glimpses of flesh. The windows had no glass, the doorways were empty arches. And when he looked down at his feet, he saw that the ground itself seemed to be sinking slowly. He was in a house that was crumbling before his eyes. And now the gunfire started again…
He woke with a start, his heart thumping. He looked around, confused. When he realized he was slumped in an armchair, he sat bolt upright, knocking over the bottle of whisky lodged at his side. Damn. It had soaked the top of his trousers, drenching his left thigh. And then came that rat-tat-tat again; not gunfire, but someone at the door.
James remembered after a moment of delay what had happened, the recollection landing like a deadweight on his chest. Harry and Florence were gone.
The knocking again. He stood up, aware of a chill draught in the house. Of course: the hole in the kitchen window, shattered by the candlestick.
‘Dr Zennor?’
Oh no. The voice, unmistakable, belonged to Virginia Grey. James encountered her most often as one half of the couple that together ran his college: her husband was Master. But that accounted for only a small part of their influence. Bernard and Virginia Grey were luminaries of the British intellectual Left. You couldn’t open a copy of the New Statesman without coming across an article by or about them, the latter usually reviewing a pamphlet or book they had produced either singly or together. They were a dominant force in the Fabian Society and, through that, the Labour party, their ideas and proposals constantly debated in the national press or taken up as policy. They hosted a high table that was regularly graced by Westminster politicians and the country’s most eminent theorists.