For his part, Tomás Nevinson made his debut in the usual way these things happened in England in 1969, casually and without a second thought – almost like someone going through a formality whose importance he prefers not to exaggerate by postponing it – first, with a fellow undergraduate about whom he had no qualms and who was swiftly followed by a girl who worked locally, and both he and they were determined not to lend these effusions any importance and not to be affected by them either for good or for ill; those were the days of so-called sexual liberation, which was permeated by the idea that there was barely any difference between having sex with someone and having a cup of coffee with them, as if they were equivalent activities, and as if neither should leave behind any trace or sense of unease. (Even if no memory remains of the one, and of the other it eternally does – however vague and pale that memory may become – the event does at least leave a trace, or perhaps only in our knowledge and awareness that it did occur.) Nor did he see these between-the-sheets encounters and his immovable love for Berta as contradictory or conflicting. They simply led him to think that on one of his next stays in Madrid, it would be high time that he and she finally had such an encounter, for Spain always lagged a little behind in fashion and in boldness, although less so then: those in the know prided themselves on being up to the minute, and Tom and Berta included themselves in that number. The second of those brief encounters did have some influence on his future, because, while the local girl was never a real presence in his life, she didn’t disappear entirely during the years he spent at Oxford, not even when she died: he would see her now and again at the antiquarian bookshop where she worked as an assistant, and whenever he went to the shop, they would end up arranging to meet that night or the next, which is why he preferred to space out his searches for old books, at least in that particular establishment. Tom rarely asked himself what her feelings might be, or what her expectations were of him, if indeed she had any. He tended to think that she didn’t, just as he had no expectations of her, of Janet, for that was her name. He knew she had a boyfriend or something in London and that she got together with him at weekends. He took it for granted that, for her, he was as much of a pastime, comfort and compensation for other absences as she was for him; in those places where you’re obliged to spend most of your days, even if only temporarily, you have to find some consolation. While he was sure that, sooner or later, he would return to Madrid, at no point during his time there did he see any sign of Janet leaving her job and moving to London to live with her boyfriend or get married. There appeared to be nothing temporary about her stay in Oxford, where she had, after all, been born and brought up and grown into an attractive, sensual woman.

Equally influential for his future were his studies and his relationships with certain professors or dons, especially with the man who was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies – in an American university, he would have been called the head of the Spanish department – appointed to Exeter College after having been a fellow at Queen’s, the Hispanist and Lusitanist, Peter Edward Lionel Wheeler, a keen-witted man of growing prestige, by turns affectionate and sardonic, of whom it was rumoured that he had worked for the Secret Service during the war, like many others recruited during those extreme times, and that, afterwards, he had continued to collaborate at a distance – with MI5 or MI6 or with both – in the days of apparent peace, unlike the many people who, once the war was over, had merely returned to their civilian jobs and maintained an enforced silence under oath about any occasional, or perhaps seasonal, crimes they may have committed, crimes made legal and justifiable by the war situation, with wars treated as parentheses, as prolonged, mortally serious carnivals, cruel and almost devoid of farce, during which citizens are given carte blanche, and the most brilliant, the most intelligent, the most able and capable are even taken up and trained – a character-building exercise – to sabotage, betray, deceive, trick, to abolish all feelings, all scruples, and to murder.

It was said that Peter Wheeler had been subjected to a harsh training regime in 1941 at the centre for commandos and special operations at Lochailort, on the west coast of Scotland, and that he suffered a serious car accident there, which partially damaged the bone structure of his face. He underwent reconstructive surgery at Basingstoke Hospital, where he remained for four months, and, as a result of those various operations, he was left with permanent scars (these faded only slowly, pining palely away), one on his chin, the other on his forehead, but these did not in the least diminish his decidedly gallant appearance. It was also said that, even while he was still convalescing, he received a terrible beating, as part of a mock interrogation, at the hands of some ex-policemen from Shanghai at Inverailort House, which had been requisitioned at the time by the Navy and by the SOE, or Special Operations Executive, in order to harden him up were he ever captured by the enemy. The following year, he had been appointed director of security in Jamaica, and later assigned to postings in West Africa – where he took advantage of the RAF’s secret surveillance flights to get a bird’s-eye view of geographical details that would prove useful in his books The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II, published in 1955, and Prince Henry the Navigator: A Life, first published in 1960 – as well as in Rangoon (Burma), Colombo (Ceylon), where he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and Indonesia, after the Japanese surrender in 1945. A lot of stories were told about him, but he himself never told any, doubtless still bound by the oath of confidentiality taken by anyone involved in espionage and undercover work, that is, work whose existence will never be revealed or will always be denied. He knew that various tales and anecdotes about him regularly did the rounds of his colleagues and students, but he let them pass as if they didn’t concern him. And if anyone dared to ask him directly, he would immediately make a joke or shoot them a stern look, depending on who it was, and then divert the conversation onto the Cantar de Mío Cid, La Celestina, Iberian translators of the fifteenth century, or Edward, the Black Prince. All these rumours made him a singularly attractive figure to the few students who heard them, and Tom Nevinson, whose excellent linguistic skills soon aroused the interest of his teachers – even their admiration, to the limited extent that teachers will allow themselves to admire a student – was one of those who most benefitted from the whispers and gossip normally reserved for the clerically named ‘members of the Congregation’, that is, the faculty. Tom was one of those people to whom others tend to tell things without being asked – he came across as likeable and sympathetic without even trying, and he was a wonderful listener, whose intense attentiveness always flattered and encouraged his interlocutors, unless, that is, he chose not to listen, in which case he would cut the conversation short – making him the repository of their trust without even wondering why they were talking so much about themselves or why the hell they were blithely divulging secrets without having them wheedled or coaxed out of them.

His outstanding linguistic gifts were immediately noticed by his tutors, and, of course, by the former Lieutenant Colonel Peter Wheeler, who, at the time, was not yet sixty and who combined his exceptionally acute antennae – his alert, curious mind – with long years of experience. When he went up to Oxford, Tomás had already mastered to perfection most of the registers, intonations, varieties, dictions and accents of his two family languages; he also spoke almost impeccable French and very respectable Italian. At Oxford, he not only made huge advances in those last two languages, but by the end of his third year, in 1971, when he was almost twenty, after having been persuaded to enrol in Slavonic languages too, he could speak Russian almost flawlessly, with barely any mistakes, and could get by in Polish, Czech and Serbo-Croat. He was clearly extraordinarily gifted in that field, a prodigy, as if he had retained the linguistic malleability of a small child, who can learn however many languages are spoken around him, can master and allow them to become part of his being, because, in his eyes, they are all his language, as any language could be, depending on where the wind took him and where he ended up living; who can retain them all and keep them separate, and only rarely confuse or mix them up. His imitative skills also developed and grew as he immersed himself in his studies, and one Easter vacation, when he decided not to go back to Spain, he devoted himself to travelling around Ireland instead, and at the end of that time (the vacation lasted almost five weeks), he had mastered all the island’s main dialects. He was already familiar with the accents of Scotland and Wales, of Liverpool, Newcastle, York, Manchester and other places, having heard them here and there, on the radio and television, during his summer holidays as a child. Anything he heard he could learn instantly, could memorise and later reproduce with precision and skill.