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‘I was thinking about my sister.’
This troubled Chimo. He massaged his jagged teeth with one finger and the red tassel on his gorillo cap trembled with his anxiety. Finally, he said, ‘But you sighed.’
‘My sister is in Madrid …’
‘She isn’t a red?’ Chimo, brushing raindrops from his abundant moustache, looked apprehensively at Adam through monkey-brown eyes.
‘No, Chimo, she is not a red.’
‘Then to be in Madrid is bad. Very bad. They are starving there. And if we cut the road to Valencia on the other side of the Jarama river then hunger will make them surrender and there will be a great killing.’
‘Were you there when we attacked Madrid?’ Adam asked. He had arrived in Spain last November but he had been too late to take part in the attack which Franco had called off on the 23rd, laying siege to the city instead.
‘I was there,’ Chimo said. ‘They fought like devils, the reds. Particularly the women. Ah, those women, fiercer than the Moors. Those Madrileños, those cats … You have to admire them. Abandoned by their Government who ran off to Valencia, fighting with 50-year-old Swiss rifles, antique weapons taken from the museums … But they were good in the streets, those cats, not like our Moors who are good in open spaces, in deserts …’
‘I heard there was a lot of killing in the city before we attacked.’
‘I heard that, too. Mola and his Fifth Column! Obvious, wasn’t it, that the reds would seek them out and kill them. I hear they took a thousand from the Model Prison and shot them a few miles from Barajas airport. Killing has become a pastime in Spain,’ Chimo said.
‘I hear that Franco could have taken Madrid if he hadn’t decided to relieve Moscardó, at Toledo. I hear,’ Adam said carefully, ‘that Franco doesn’t want to win the war too quickly. He doesn’t want to rule a people who are still full of spirit.’
‘You will hear many things,’ Chimo told him. ‘Every Spaniard is a politician.’
A shell fired from the Republican lines on the far bank of the Jarama, south of Madrid, slurred through the rain digging a crater 50 metres in front of the trench and showering their grey-green campaign tunics with mud.
‘Sons of whores,’ Chimo said. ‘Red pigs. That was the first. The second lands behind us. The third …’
‘I know about range-finding,’ Adam said. He had acquitted himself reasonably well in the cadet corps at Epsom College at everything except rolling puttees round his calves.
‘… lands here. With our name on it.’
Rain bounced on the lip of the trench and fell soggily onto the brown blankets covering their guns; Adam wondered if it would drown the lice; he doubted it – they were survivors.
Chimo said, ‘Tell me, Amado, what are you, an Englishman, doing in this trench waiting for the third shell?’
‘What are you doing, Chimo?’
‘I am a legionario.’
‘What are you fighting for, peace?’
‘Peace?’ The tassel on his cap quivered. ‘Peace is the enemy of the soldier.’
‘How old are you, Chimo?’
‘Nearly 27.’
‘A veteran!’
‘And you, inglés?’
‘Twenty-one,’ Adam said. A confession.
‘And what are you fighting for?’
‘Ideals,’ Adam said, silencing Chimo who was an authority on many things but a stranger to ideals.
Ideals, too, were self-effacing at Epsom College unless, that is, they were represented by the gods of sport, although there were outposts in that mellow-bricked academy where learning ran a close second to rugby and cricket.
Adam was sent to Epsom, close to the race-track, the home of the Derby, because his mother wished him to be a doctor and the college was renowned for its contributions to medicine.
It was at Epsom that Adam first became aware that his character was seamed with perversity. What he objected to, he subsequently decided, was the attempt to inscribe privilege on pubescent souls. To achieve this many enlightened disciplines were invoked. Games were compulsory unless a medical certificate was produced; such a document was viewed as evidence of weakness and its possessor was consigned to the company of other failures. Crimes were punished by headmaster or housemaster with a cane; misdemeanours by prefects with a slipper and they never shirked their responsibilities. Meals were passed from seniors to juniors along tables the length of the hall, any remotely digestible morsels being removed en route so that the smallest diners were given incentive to rise through the ranks to the heights where the food, although still largely indigestible, was at least warm. A chaplain boomed prayers at 8.40 every morning; modest homosexual practices were not severely discouraged because they were a natural adjunct of puberty and a necessary preparation for the rigours of heterosexual intercourse that lay ahead.
Adam invoked the wrath of both masters and boys not because he was one of the runts of the herd but because he seemed constructed to become one of its leaders. He wasn’t tall but his muscles were long and sinuously sheathed, his expression was secretive, and his hair was black and careless and widow-peaked.
So what did he do? He refused to shove in the scrum; he played tennis, a highly suspect sport; he smoked State Express 555 in a hollow on Epsom Downs while the rest of the house made panting cross-country runs around the frost-sparkling racecourse; and, unforgivably, he read. Inevitably such transgressions brought about retribution. But again he broke the character-moulding rules that decreed that you endured cane or slipper with stoicism: he howled and yelled until the punishment was curtailed; then he rose, dry-eyed, and grinned at his tormentor.
At the end of his first year he told his mother that he had no intention of becoming a doctor. And God help the ailing population of Great Britain, he added, if any of his fellow inmates ever got a scalpel in their hands. His father, home from the City that evening and smelling slightly of whisky, was summoned but, as always, he kept his distance from family crises, regarding children as a necessary by-product of marriage. His mother accused Adam of being ungrateful but soon became accustomed to the prospect of having a barrister in the family and was heard to confide at a garden party, ‘Who knows, he may become Attorney General one day.’
Towards the end of his last year, before going to Cambridge, Adam, who had no intention of becoming a lawyer, seriously endangered his reputation: he accidentally revealed that, despite his consumption of State Express, he could run and so swift was he that he was entered for the mile in the public school championships. Canings and slipperings ceased; he was extracted from the scrum and encouraged to play tennis; he was served lean meat and fresh vegetables; a maths master who reported seeing him leave the Capitol cinema in Epsom with a shopgirl was taken on one side and rebuked for voyeurism.
For Adam the mile was a triumph: he came last.
‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’ Chimo asked.
‘At Cambridge,’ Adam replied.
A rat peered over the lip of the trench. One of their own machine-guns opened up behind them. A Gatling replied; he wished the trenches were deeper but the legionnaires and Moors were used to scooping the sand of North Africa.
‘Cambridge, where is that?’
‘In England,’ Adam told him. ‘In East Anglia. It has a bridge over a river called the Cam. There are many colleges there. One of them, Trinity, was founded, refounded rather, by Henry VIII. Have you heard of him?’
‘He had many wives,’ Chimo said. ‘He must have been a stupid king.’
‘He chopped some of their heads off.’
‘Not so stupid,’ Chimo said. ‘At Cambridge they taught you to speak with a city voice.’
‘The purest in Spain. Castilian.’
‘Tell that to a Basque; tell that to a Catalan,’ said Chimo who spoke with a broad Andaluz accent.
The rain seeped through the blanket on to Adam’s rifle, a 7 mm Spanish Mauser. He turned his head and noticed minerals, quartz probably, shining wetly in the hills.
‘Catalan,’ Adam said. ‘Basque. Communist, Anarchist, Trotskyist … That’s our strength, their confusion.’
‘Did you know I can’t read or write, Amado?’
‘Does it matter? You talk enough for ten men.’
‘All Spaniards talk a lot. Ask a Spaniard a question and he delivers a speech.’
A spent bullet skittered across the mud throwing up wings of spray. Chimo said, ‘Tell me something, Amado, are you scared?’
‘I would be a fool not to be.’
‘You are a fool to be here at all: it is not your war.’
‘I sometimes wonder whose war it is.’
‘Clever words from one of your books?’ Adam had with him behind the lines Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, the French edition of Ulysses, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and an anti-war book, Cry Havoc! by a newspaper columnist, Beverly Nichols.
‘Nothing clever. But if it had been left to the Spanish it might have been over by now.’
‘Who would have won?’ Chimo asked.
‘Without German and Italian planes our side wouldn’t have been able to land troops in Spain. Without Russian “advisers”, without their tanks and planes, the Republicans would have been driven into the sea. Perhaps it is their war, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s.’
‘And Britain’s? You are here, inglés.’
‘Most of my countrymen are on the other side.’ Adam jerked his head towards the enemy lines across the small, thickly curved river. ‘With the Americans and French and Poles …’
‘And Germans and Italians. It isn’t just Spaniards who are fighting each other.’ Chimo combed his extravagant moustache with muddy fingers. ‘Why are you fighting on our side, Amado? And don’t confuse me with ideals.’
‘Because I was looking for something to believe in,’ Adam said.
A second shell exploded behind them throwing up gouts of sparkling rock.
‘The third one,’ Chimo said, ‘is ours.’
Four of them at the dinner table to celebrate the 60th birthday of William Stoppard, Professor of Economics at Oxford. Kate, his daughter, 18 and already bored; Richard Hibbert, at Trinity, Cambridge, who would have joined the International Brigade if he hadn’t been a pacifist; and Adam. Subject: non-intervention.
‘It is, of course, quite disgraceful,’ said Stoppard, his pointed pepper-and-salt beard agreeing with him.
‘Why?’ Adam asked in the pause before dessert. Two of the leaded windows in the rambling house near Lambourn were open and evening smells, chestnut and horses, reached him making him restless.
‘Why?’ The beard seemed suspended in disbelief. Kate, blonde with neat features, hair arranged in frozen waves, stared at him. She took a De Reszke from a slim gold case and lit it.
‘I hope no one minds,’ she said.
‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Adam said.
‘Too bad.’ She blew a jet of smoke across the table at him.
‘Perhaps,’ Stoppard said, ‘you could explain yourself, young man.’
‘I’m questioning your assumption, sir,’ said Adam who had drunk three whiskies before dinner. ‘Am I to assume that you are referring to the possibility of intervention on the side of the Republicans?’
Was there any other kind? the silence asked.
Hibbert, who was in love with Kate Stoppard, said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Fascists at Badajoz.’ He turned his heavy and wrathful face to Stoppard for approval; Stoppard’s beard nodded.
Adam poured himself wine and said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Republicans at Madrid.’
Kate squashed her half-smoked cigarette – she didn’t look as though she had enjoyed it anyway – and considered him, neat head to one side. The flames of the candles on the table wavered in a breeze summoned from the darkness outside.
Stoppard began to lecture.
‘The Fascists are the insurgents. Their ostensible object: to overthrow by force the Government of the Republic elected by popular franchise. Their ulterior motive: to re-establish the privileges they enjoyed under the monarchy – in effect the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera – which were the exploitation of the poor.’
Adam said, ‘With respect, sir, if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ As the second silence of the evening lengthened he said to Kate, ‘That’s what Wellington said when some idiot said to him, “Mr Jones, I believe?” I’m a great admirer of Arthur Wellesley.’
Stoppard said, ‘Perhaps, Adam, you would be good enough to elaborate on that last statement and enlighten us.’
A timorous girl in a black and white uniform served dessert, lemon soufflé.
‘Certainly,’ said Adam. ‘Do you believe in God, sir?’
‘Get on with it, man,’ Hibbert said excavating fiercely with his spoon in the soufflé.
‘I ask because I cannot understand how you can support a regime that condones the destruction of churches and the murder of priests.’
‘Ah, the Irresponsibles; I thought we’d come to them,’ Stoppard remarked indulgently. He tasted his soufflé; his beard approved.
‘From February to June this year,’ Adam said, concentrating, ‘160 churches were burned. There were also 269 assassinations, 113 general strikes and 228 half-cocked ones. Spain was in a state of anarchy, so is it small wonder that generals such as Mola, Queipo de Llano and Franco and the rest decided to bring back stability?’
‘Did you do your homework on the way?’ Stoppard asked. He winked at Hibbert.
‘As a matter of fact I did. It was inevitable that you would talk about non-intervention. But there’s nothing to stop anyone intervening. Not even you, sir.’
Hibbert said irrelevantly, ‘John Cornford’s fighting with the International Brigades. And Sommerfield. And Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew.’
‘A pity they’re fighting on the wrong side.’
‘Are you a Fascist, Adam? A blackshirt?’ Hibbert asked.
‘What I am,’ Adam said, watching Kate lick lemon soufflé from her upper lip and wondering about her breasts beneath her silk dress, ‘is anti-Communist. We all know what’s happened in Russia – a worse tyranny than before. Do we want that in Spain?’
Stoppard laid down his spoon and addressed his class. What we were witnessing in Spain, he told them, was an exercise in European Fascism. Hitler wanted to assist Spain so that he could establish bases there for the next war and help himself to the country’s iron ore. Mussolini was helping because he wanted to control the Mediterranean. And both wanted to test their planes, their guns and their tanks. If they, the enemies of the future, were championing the Fascists, why should not Britain aid the Republicans?
Adam, who had learned at Cambridge never to answer a question directly, said, ‘What is so different between Fascism and Communism?’
The third silence of the evening. Kate took a cigarette from her case and tapped it on one painted fingernail.
Adam said, ‘Is Hitler a dictator?’
Of course.
