With every week that passed, the invading armies pushed the front further and further until, by the time the snows had gone, it seemed to Eve that the invaders were reapers slowly closing in on the eye of the cornfield. This fanciful idea came about because of the number of familiar faces she saw in and around Madrid. Ozz particularly, then Sweet Moffat who had come to help with refugee orphans. Then, one day, Helan Alexander, whom she hadn’t seen since the episode of the enquiry into the death of Sophie Wineapple.
Eve’s old truck had gone into the depot to be cannibalized by the mechanics who did wonders with ever-decreasing spare parts. But that was life in Madrid. Food was scarce, not to the point of starvation, but supplies were sporadic and unplanned. One day there would be only black-eyed peas, another only flour. Meat was more scarce than ever. Ration cards were prepared. A statement made by a government official warning that if there was no self-restraint in hoarding, then there would be food shortages and thus rationing, caused shops to be stripped almost bare. Wine was still plentiful. Oil was obtainable. Eve stopped smoking for the simple reason that it became too time-consuming to look for tobacco.
Eve had become a seasoned driver of anything and everything. Occasionally she looked back to last year when she had made such a fuss about driving a Mercedes. Now that she had seen the difficulties under which some visitors made their flying visits from front to front, she thought that there was a case for fast cars. Not that she would change what she was now doing, for she loved her big, thundering lorries. Her Spanish was now comprehensible in places as far afield as Murcia and Catalonia, not that she always understood their language, but there was always the language of the hands and nods. She liked the runs to the small villages where, in spite of the worsening conditions, people were amazingly cheerful.
Many of the more remote places relied on passing traffic for news of what was going on. The peasants would listen and nod. Eve had heard that many of them had always been against the Republic and were waiting for the day when they would be liberated by General Franco. The only indication that this might be so was when news of a Republican advance was greeted by a gob-spit, but, as many peasants were given to expectoration anyway, it was difficult to draw conclusions from this.
Because of artillery bombardment and air-raids, most of her supplies runs now were made as part of a convoy. On one occasion, when she had been driving in a line of close formation, they had all had to run off the road and into a grove when strafing planes were spotted. Suddenly she realized that the truck ahead was loaded with ammunition while Ozz, who was travelling in the rear, was delivering cans of kerosene. Having panicked for a few minutes, she calmed down and decided that wherever you were in Spain now, you stood a chance of sudden death. It did no good thinking about it.
With the onset of spring, the air-raids on Madrid become fiercer and more frequent. Despite this, whenever she had an hour off she would go out into the city and simply look. She always had something in writing ready to send to London. She now had an editor who handled all her work. Because her style was simply to record what she saw, a surprising variety of publications were willing to take her reports.
She was one of the team of drivers working the Madrid front. Like everyone else she turned her hand to anything that came along, from holding plasma bottles in a first-aid station to hauling potatoes to one location and returning with tomatoes from another.
It was when she was on her way back from wandering around the Gran Via and Calle de Alcala in the city that she came upon Helan Alexander, for the first time in ages it seemed. An air-raid warning sounded so she joined the crowd racing for shelter in the Metro where she squatted down among the Madrileños and rested her back against the wall. ‘Alex?’
Helan Alexander was painfully thin and drawn, and looked as though all the stuffing had been knocked out of her.
‘Anders?’ She clasped Eve as though she was a long-lost friend. ‘Thank God, a friendly face.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I don’t know… actually what I’m doing is running around like a blue-arsed fly making a balls of everything.’ From her top pocket she took two cigarettes.
‘I haven’t smoked for weeks.’
‘So have one.’
The strong, Spanish tobacco was extremely satisfying, and numbed the hunger pangs that had been with Eve since the day before. ‘Thanks, it tastes good.’
Alexander blew out a long stream of smoke, oblivious to the woman suckling her baby close by, and said casually, ‘Carl’s dead. Executed.’
‘Oh, Alex, that’s dreadful! I’m so sorry. When?’
‘God knows. Probably as soon as he was captured, I should think. Not exactly the blood of the new master race – half-breed Negro Jew, married to white English woman from the decadent class.’
She was probably right, there was nothing Eve could say that wouldn’t sound trite and crass. ‘You’re not giving up here? You’re not going home?’
‘I’m not much good here, can’t think straight. I packed it in at the depot.’ For a long pause she withdrew into herself. ‘It’s devastating, Eve. I didn’t know how much I loved the bloody man until… I could keep my head above water when I could believe that he was in a concentration camp, my work had purpose. Now my reason for being here has gone. Pouf… bullet in the head. Gone.’
‘Were you doing it only for your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not because you believed it was the right thing?’
‘No. I believed what he believed because he was such a good man. A man like that knows what is right. But it went against the grain, contrary to everything I’d ever been or known.’
‘Why have you come to Madrid?’
‘To hand over and go home, I think. I don’t really know.’
‘I think you will miss him more in England than you would if you stayed.’
‘I miss him because he’s stopped living in the same world I do. If I go home… God! If I go home – what? Back to Mummy and Daddy – their naughty daughter who had a fling with a nigger? Back to the pretty horses? You see, Anders, I’m quite nutty.’
‘I went nuts after my mother died. Grief knocks you off course.’
‘I’m floundering. I think that I may be sinking. Just now, when the warning sounded, I thought, Stay where you are, Alexander, what in hell’s name is the use of trying to save yourself. But then I got caught up in the rush for shelter. The instinct to survive, I suppose. What for I can’t imagine.’
The air-raid over, they left the Metro. ‘Where are you staying, Alex?’
She named a pensione that Eve didn’t know. ‘I know one of the secretaries, she bunked up a bit last night to make room for me. I came to see you.’
‘Me? What’s that about?’
They went into a small eating place and sat at a table away from the window, part of which was boarded up and part was stuck over with paper strips. Eve couldn’t decide whether Alexander was pondering on what to say, or whether she had retreated into her own misery.
‘David Gore-Hatton.’
Eve started and felt her cheeks flush. ‘Who?’
‘Gore-Hatton. Has he been in touch yet?’
Eve sensed that whatever answer she gave would be the wrong one, so she tried to keep a blank expression upon her face. Ozz had said that Madrid was the cross-roads of the world and if you hung around long enough everyone would come by. How could Alex possibly know that the name Gore-Hatton meant anything to her? David had no part in her life here, except in her dreams, and even there he was fading.
Dimitri, who probably had headquarters in Madrid, had come by the cross-roads since she had been in the city. He had sought her out when he knew that she was stationed there and they had met several times. As they had before, they made love with an explosion of repressed desire for a night or for an afternoon and then parted on good terms. Gratification? Pleasure? Lust, perhaps? Not love, no deep emotions, no strings attached to their hours of give and take. There might well be another side to Dimitri, of course there was; he was a commissar spreading the Stalinist line, or a member of the Soviet secret service – the GPU – reputed to be the power behind the government and paymasters of the Republic. It was no secret that for every shipload of weapons brought in from the USSR, shiploads of iron ore went back. But, if he was either of these, then she did not see it. He came, they enjoyed one another, and parted. Making love with Dimitri was a delight. She enjoyed watching him as he became transformed from the square-jawed, belted Soviet army officer, to the tousled and aroused, vulnerable white-skinned man. Afterwards she watched Dimitri the lover as he strapped on the accoutrements of Major Dimitri Vladim.
David Gore-Hatton. Suddenly hearing his name spoken aloud, it was as though he had been conjured up, vivid and real.
Alexander had now recovered her composure and was sipping coffee as though idling in a street-cafe with never a ruined building in sight, waiting for Eve to reply. She had probably learned the art of the stiff upper-lip in her nursery, from nannies who trained little English girls and boys who were expected to rule the Empire. The display of feeling that Eve had seen in the Metro shelter was under control by the time they were on their second cup of coffee.
Seeing that she would get no help from Eve, Alex took command of the situation. ‘You may not like this, Eve. I would not like it, in fact I didn’t like it when the same thing was done to me. Look. I know about Eve Vera Anders, and I have to talk to you about that.’
‘You mean the newspaper reports?’
‘Oh, no. Well, yes, I know about them, of course – and I have to say that it was disappointing to say the least that you did not consult me. After all – oh, what the hell! That’s too petty for words. What I should have said is that I know about Louise Vera Wilmott.’
Eve didn’t give herself time to consider Alexander’s tone, which was not at all critical. Her chagrin detonated a burst of quiet fury. ‘Oh, you do! Well, it’s no damned affair of yours! People like you Poveys think they have a divine right to interfere in other people’s lives. Well, you haven’t got a right to enquire into mine!’
‘For God’s sake, calm down and give over on the people like me bit. I don’t like the Poveys any more than you, but I’m stuck with them. Have a fucking cigarette and cool off.’
Eve took one, lit it and drew deeply, saving herself from wading further into a quagmire of pettiness.
‘Why do you ask about David, Alex?’
Helan Alexander looked directly at her from beneath her straight brows. ‘Sure you won’t denounce me as one of the Lliga Catalana?’
‘You are neither bourgeois nor even remotely Catalan.’
Alexander gave a wry little smile. ‘Well, thank you for that.’
‘Go on. What about David? I might explode sometimes, but I hardly ever do damage except to myself.’
‘You called him David as though you know him well. I hadn’t realized that.’
‘Why should you?’
‘Because the Gore-Hattons and the Poveys – my people – are out of the same stable, but generations back, and when… oh, sod this for a lark! Look, don’t fly off the handle again.’
Eve let out a slow stream of smoke, watching it on its way to the ceiling before she engaged Alexander’s gaze again. ‘I apologize. You have enough to deal with as it is. It was the last thing I expected.’ Eve had never seen Alexander non-plussed. ‘It was David who, who, um, gave the information. I mean, told me that you used to be… that Eve Anders hasn’t always been your name.’
Eve kept her self-control admirably. ‘Actually, that was the last thing I expected.’
‘I’m sorry. This whole thing is coming apart.’
‘No it isn’t. Just start again from Louise Vera Wilmott. I’ll listen. I won’t interrupt. But let’s get out of here and walk.’
In the aftermath of the air-raid, the streets of the city were once more thronging with people getting on with their daily lives before the next raid forced them to pause. It was not a warm day, but the sun was shining, and spring was close.
‘Does LOLO mean anything to you?’
‘Not much. I remember Ozz once saying that there was some sort of equivalent to Franco’s fifth column playing them at their own game, some kind of secret organization to look out for spies and fifth columnists within the Republic? I thought it sounded pretty far-fetched.’
‘LOLO… ears and eyes. There are people like myself who are in a position to be able to keep our ears and eyes open.’
Eve felt anger begin to rise again. ‘Was that what all the Sophie Wineapple questions were about? Did you think that I was…’
‘No! Nobody thought that. But Wineapple was suspected of working for the other side, and it was later confirmed. You happened to come into the line of fire, so to speak, quite coincidentally. No one had any idea of the connection between the two of you.’
‘But having found one, you checked on me.’
‘Not because of that. I had hoped that you, well, I thought you were a good candidate.’
‘For what?’
‘For the Ears and Eyes.’
Eve was dumbstruck, again causing her thoughts to veer away from the David Hatton connection.
‘You thought I would make a good spy?’
‘Don’t be so dramatic. It is merely a question of being aware of what is going on around you, being sensitive to things people say when they aren’t on their guard.’ She gave a brief, wry smile. ‘Your explosions about having to drive the Mercedes were patently not smokescreens, and your antipathy to privilege like mine is only too honest – you are against us, no mistaking that. What I cannot understand is why you would want to do what you are doing by this… why this false front? David wouldn’t say any more than that you changed your name.’
‘Don’t call this a false front. It isn’t. There is nothing false about me, I am what you see, which is all I ever intended.’
‘Please, Eve, don’t be so defensive. I don’t condemn what you are doing, I only wish that I had been as successful in suppressing my early years. How many times have you said that I was patronizing or elitist when I argued for smoothing the path for visiting Vipps? If I had become the convinced egalitarian I am trying to be, you wouldn’t have been able to talk about divine rights of my class as you just did.’
‘David Hatton, where does he fit in to this?’
‘It is he who obtained the details of Louise Wilmott.’
Eve felt as though she had been betrayed. She had taken David Hatton at face value and had fallen for him. She had run away from him, as she had run away from everything else connected with her first twenty years, but she had not suspected for a moment that he had seen through her – a factory girl pretending to be someone she was not. She felt mortified. ‘Go on.’
‘I had no idea that you and David knew one another. He doesn’t make any reference to it. There’s no reason why he should, of course.’
‘We had a very brief romance… hardly even that.’ Eve knew that this bit of information must make Alex curious – did David Hatton know her before her life as Eve Anders?
‘That has nothing to do with the question of whether or not you agree to join up as a listening ear or an observant eye, if you like.’
‘As I said, a spy. Call it a spade, Alex. It’s not something I would want to do. If I had known that Sophie Wineapple was a suspect when I spent that week with her, my loyalties would have been pretty stretched, because no matter what else she was, to me she was a woman having a pretty bad time.’
‘You think her work for the enemy didn’t give other women a pretty…?’ She stopped abruptly, her attention caught. Eve followed the direction of her interest. Her mouth dried and even if her cheeks did not show it, she was blushing. Some men, one or two of whom were in the uniform of the Republican army, had jumped down from the back of a truck and were helping offload some luggage.
The man whose belongings were dumped on the pavement was David Hatton.
‘Did you know, Alex?’
‘That he was coming to Madrid, of course. I asked you if he had been in touch.’
Eve backed away into the comparative shelter of an entrance, but to no avail. It was as though, in the midst of waving to the truck-driver, David became aware of eyes on the back of his neck. He turned, slowly dropped a canvas tote on the pavement and raised his hand.
‘Hasta la vista. This one’s yours.’ Without looking at its destination, Alexander leaped on to a tram that was just drawing away.
Eve did not move, mesmerized by the strangeness of the situation. David recovered more quickly. He abandoned his bags and dodged through the traffic. ‘I can’t believe it’s really you!’
‘Hello, David.’
The short silence was awkward. They were in a minefield of possibilities, neither knowing which way to step. Even mention of her name could blow them apart.
‘I say, do you mind? I left my equipment over there. I don’t want to…’
‘Of course.’
He floundered. ‘Will you come… or shall I…’
‘Oh, I have to cross to that side of the road.’
He moved as though he might be going to embrace her; instead, he took her elbow gently and they dodged the traffic together. ‘Um. I was just going in to deposit my gear in…’
‘It’s OK. I have to get back to the…’ She waved vaguely in the direction of the hospital to which she was now attached. ‘To my vehicle.’
‘You are an ambulance-driver?’
‘I drive anything, really.’
‘Will you come up while I stow my stuff?’
‘I’ll wait here.’
If real affairs were to follow the rules of a romantic novel, then this meeting would be the one where they resolved the problems that had kept them apart. Life isn’t like that.
He picked up his bags. ‘You won’t go.’
‘No, but I do have to report in.’
‘This won’t take long.’
As she waited she was forced to face up to the reality of the situation. The years between eighteen and twenty had changed her. The David of sparkling and arousing memories, the sophisticated David in a tuxedo and driving a low sports car, the David who had thrilled her when she was eighteen, was not this David. Or, if he was, then he aroused and thrilled her no longer. She was too old for him now.
He laid a tentative hand on her shoulder. ‘You waited.’
‘I said I would.’
His reply could have been: You once said that you would speak to me. Hers: I tried, but I allowed myself to be intimidated by your grandmother.
‘Yes. Um, do you know somewhere we could eat? I’m starving.’ Her reply to that could have been: So is everybody in Spain. (Although that was not the exact truth, shipping blockades had cut off the Republic from essential industries and supplies, resulting in terrible shortages. Eve, who had grown up in an area of great poverty and deprivation had, nevertheless, been one of the lucky children who had never gone barefoot or hungry. Destitution was becoming almost commonplace in the beleaguered Republic.)
‘If you like chilli beans and pimentos.’
‘I love chilli beans.’ He smiled, as Ozz might have smiled when he suggested that they find a canteen, friendly and not caring about anything much except the moment.
As in Barcelona, the people’s canteen had once been the banqueting hall of one of the city’s most prestigious hotels. Extravagant light fittings were still suspended, but where there had once been long dining tables all a-glitter with crystal and silver, there were now dozens of small cafe tables at which were seated people who, in the glittering hey-day, might have worked in the kitchens. The aroma of garlic and tomatoes pervaded the air.
They collected their food and easily found a table. Eve ate a little of her rice and hot sauce, but she had no appetite. She had to tell him that the past was over, and it made her awkward and uneasy. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was a nice man. They’d had fun together, they had kissed and danced, she had driven his motor car and he had briefly taken her into a more glamorous world than she had ever known.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ he asked.
‘I’ve just eaten. Alex and I…’
‘Ah, right.’ He smiled. ‘And Alex skedaddled and left you to it.’
They had talked about food in the officers’ mess at the RN dockyards, when she had worn her green silk gown, and she had realized that she could never let him know that at the stroke of midnight Cinderella must return to her industrial sewing-machine. She could not meet his eyes in case hers revealed what she remembered. She said, ‘I met your brother, you know.’
‘I know. And I yours.’
They were treading on dangerous ground again. She gave him a puzzled look. ‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Rich died.’
‘Richard? But he was going to be all right. He was being treated by a friend of mine, everybody said he would be all right.’
‘He didn’t wait to find out. He killed himself.’
‘Oh, David, how absolutely awful. I’m so sorry.’
‘Thank you.’ Absently he wiped a crust of bread around his plate.
Eve watched him, wondering what his grandmother would think of that. Or his mother. She knew hardly anything about his parents, only that she stood in for them in their absence in South America or somewhere.
This attempt at formality increased the tension between them. Their well-behaved enquiries were at odds with their emotions.
‘Please, could we go somewhere less public?’
She really did not want to prolong the inevitable end of the affair, but she owed him more than a blunt ‘Sorry, David, but it’s over’.
‘There’s a… it’s just a kind of room where chauffeurs and ambulance drivers… no guarantee that there won’t be people hanging around.’
‘Can we go there?’
‘If you like. It’s only about five minutes from here.’
There were three male drivers there, including two who were English. Eve had seen them several times before, and today they were engaged in what appeared to be a critical discussion about poetry. They wore the short leather jackets and jodhpurs that had become the practical standard dress for those drivers who could bargain for the jackets.
‘You recognized Rich was my brother?’
‘I thought at first that it was you. Even though he looked dreadfully haggard and sick, I…’ She trailed off.
He gave her a brief smile. ‘I hope that you were going to say, that you would have known me anywhere.’
‘I don’t really know what I was going to say. To be perfectly frank, ever since I happened to meet Alex this morning, I’ve been in a state of confusion. I’ve swung from bewilderment to fury to chagrin and back again. When I said that I had met Richard, you said, I know. How did you?’
‘I was at Benicasim, in that first-floor balcony place. I saw you get into a truck and drive away. I started to race out after you, but it was no use, of course.’
‘And you said that you had met my brother. Were you at Benicasim when Kenny was there?’
‘I’d met him before that. Of course, I had no idea that you and he were related. I’ve met Captain Wilmott on more than one occasion… sold his picture to…’ That was the first step that he had taken towards the subject of her old name.
‘The picture with the Madrileño women’s militia?’
He nodded. ‘Ken showed me. It was a very good photo.’
‘People thought so. It helped to buy some penicillin.’ He leaned forward a little and said, in the same tone that he might have used to tell her he liked the hairband she wore, ‘This may not be the moment, but I am very much in love with you.’
She sat back and clasped her hands tightly in her lap, not knowing what she thought, let alone what to say.
‘I’m not expecting you to fall into my arms, but I do want you to know. Since that evening, the shindig in the officers’ mess, remember? Well, I haven’t wanted to look at another woman.’ Eve gave him a doubtful look. ‘You don’t believe me? Rich knew, he’d heard all about it. Used to call you my magical mystery girl. That last time I was with him down at Benicasim, we talked about the way all our lives are governed by chance. Rich believed it was Fate, part of a plan, a kind of play in which we have a part and we have to act it out.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I shouldn’t like to think that all of this was preordained and that we have no choices.’
‘That is one of those philosophical subjects that takes you round in circles; maybe the choices too are preordained, and so are not choices. I don’t like that kind of discussion.’
He reached out and laid his hand briefly upon hers. ‘What do you like? I know that you like gardenias, dancing and driving.’
There could be no more skirting round the subject that was right there between them.
It was hard to keep her voice even. ‘From what Alex said to me earlier, I imagine that you must know everything about me.’
‘No. I know only what I see now, what I saw those other times, and a few unimportant facts that Alex needed to know before she showed her hand.’
‘How could you agree to do it? How could you make enquiries into the background of this woman you’ve just said that you love? I can’t understand…’
‘I had no idea that Alex’s protegee and you were one and the same woman.’ He longed to tell her all the facts, how he had watched the girls come out of the factory and felt elated by the thought that she had once been one of them; to tell her that he had seen the house where she had lived, and the mean school she had attended; to tell her that his admiration for her knew no bounds. He longed to tell her that she was a woman in a million. But he knew that anyone who had worked so hard to obliterate what she been born to would find his curiosity unforgivable. He couldn’t blame her.
He knew only too well that he wouldn’t have had the guts to do what she had done. He called himself a socialist, yet he still used his own class to further his career. He knew the right people, knew whom to lobby, how the old public school network operated, how to call in a favour. To an extent, both he and Rich had rejected their own class, but not totally.
Her voice when she said, ‘Well, now you do know,’ was toneless.
‘Yes. What do you want me to say? That I don’t love you? That it is a matter of the greatest importance that you have chosen to be yourself? That it matters in the slightest that you’ve said goodbye to the kind of life that was imposed upon you? That it matters a damn to me whether your name is Louise or Eve, or Daffodil for that matter?’
‘Oh that! A rose is a rose is a rose.’
‘Yes, that! A rose by any other name does smell as sweet.’ He laughed in a way that brought back memories.
‘I am absolutely willing to believe that you are right.’
Before she could move away, he had grasped her hands and was holding on to them. ‘Damn it, what have I got to say to you to convince you that the love of my life is this woman here,’ he kissed her fingers, ‘this woman with chapped hands, who dresses like a pilot in the Condor Legion.’
Not long ago she would have had a very different reaction to such a declaration of love. Now she was less certain. ‘I… David, I don’t know what to say.’ She tried to lighten her tone. ‘As they say, this is so unexpected.’
‘I suppose it is. Because I have been thinking of you for months on end, I suppose I must have imagined that you had been thinking of me too. Pretty stupid. Just the kind of thing Hatton Junior would do.’
‘I have thought about you, many, many times. I did keep my promise and phone you but…’
‘But my grandmother answered. I know. She knew that I was expecting a call. I was on crutches, couldn’t get to the telephone. She thought that you were… that you were someone else and that… Christ! Louise, it simply all went wrong. I’ve been every place I could think of to try to trace you, but you covered your tracks so well. I went to all the dance-halls in Southampton and in Portsmouth, because the only clue that I had was that you probably lived in Portsmouth and were a brilliant dancer.’
She began to feel guilty that, because his grandmother’s authoritarian voice had startled her, she had cut herself off without leaving a message. ‘I was only eighteen then, David. I’ve changed a lot since that time.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I have, not only my name and so forth, I am… I’m quite different.’
‘You are more a woman than then, which is why I can tell you how I feel about you, but all that… that enigma. I don’t even know how to describe it, that sense of still waters running deep in you. I wish I could find a more apt simile but in the respect that nine-tenths of you is hidden, you are like an iceberg. Except that I know that you are the opposite of icy. You intrigue me, and I dreamed of spending a lifetime discovering what it is that enchants me.’
‘Look, David, I’m sorry I was so silly as to have drawn you into my girlish fantasy. You were nice to me and, to be honest, I did have romantic notions. But the whole thing was a bit of a fantasy, you should have known that.’
‘No. If I hadn’t felt something more than that, then I would have gone ahead and… and made love to you that night out on the downs.’
‘You didn’t call it making love at the time.’
‘I know. I hardly knew what I was saying. It…’
She watched as he floundered. She wanted it to be over, to be able to return to the life that had been hers before she happened to meet Alex that morning. But her past had caught her like a bramble, and unless she unhooked all the barbs, then she would have to keep dragging Louise Wilmott about with her.
‘I’d been used to a different kind of girl. My own set, the set I’ve grown up with, the fast set, as people say. It’s the clever sort of way we say things to prove that we are unconventional, not bourgeois.’
‘Literary like D. H. Lawrence or earthy like Mellors?’ She heard an unpleasant edge creeping into her tone, and she encouraged it. ‘Do you play Mellors when you are with your fast girls? In my set, as I’m sure you know, that sort of language is only spoken in the dockyard area – and I don’t mean the officers’ mess.’
He looked as though she had slapped him in the face. ‘This is not to do with all that, is it?’
‘No, it is not to do with that.’
‘It is because I happened to discover Eve Anders’ past life. If only you’ll believe me, all that makes no difference to me. When I realized that I had found Louise, I went to see your street, where you went to school, where you worked…’
‘You what! You went to see?’
‘Yes, I couldn’t not go once I had made the discovery. You must believe me, it makes no difference to my feelings for you.’
She felt her anger rise. ‘Did you suppose that it might? When you discovered that a girl who could pass as one of your set had been brought up in a slum and worked in a factory, you had to go and look. Did you find the idea of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins exciting?’
‘That’s not fair.’
It probably wasn’t, but in her imagination she saw him standing outside the house, driving past the factory gates, looking at the poverty-stricken kids in the school yard, and she saw herself in those same locations. She should have been sad for their pinched lives; instead she was furious that he had inspected them. ‘I’ll tell you what’s not fair. What’s not fair is life at the bottom of the pile. You long for beautiful things, to be with beautiful people, to go places where nobody gives a second thought to where the next meal is coming from. What’s not fair is for an intelligent girl with ambition to have to play-act to get a little bit of what people like you take for granted.’
‘Stop it. Stop it. Why are you so angry? I’m way out of my depth, I just don’t understand. I wish Alex had never asked about Eve Anders. I wish I hadn’t been the one she asked. But it happened.’
‘When you said that what you found out about my origins has made no difference, what did you mean?’
‘That I can accept all that. We rise above the stuffy social differences between us. I don’t care. I’m a socialist, for God’s sake. I committed myself to the working-class cause long before we met.’
‘You aren’t a socialist, David. Perhaps you hold a party card, but if you really had committed yourself to the working class, as you call us, then you wouldn’t have to insist that my origin is something to be risen above.’
Now he sounded angry. ‘But isn’t that what all this Eve Anders business is about – you getting away from that?’
‘No. This Eve Anders business is nothing like that. It is getting away from the prejudice of people of your set, your class. I’m not trying to rise above anything, I simply want to be accepted for what I am. D’you know, that first time when I met you, I had travelled down on the train with a really fashion-plate woman – a journalist so she said – who complimented me on my style and then went on to make fun of the lack of fashion in women who were involved in trades unions. I let her go on until I could stand it no longer, then I told her that I was one of those figures of fun and swept out with as much dignity as I could muster.’
‘Malou French. I know her. She told the story, she tried to make a joke of it, but it was obvious that she had been humiliated by…’
‘One of the lower orders?’
‘Don’t, don’t go on with that, please!’
‘I saw her speak to you at that conference. I was in the visitors’ gallery, opposite where the reporters were seated.’
‘Doesn’t that mean anything at all?’
‘You surely don’t mean Fate, David.’
‘Maybe not, but we have constantly been lost and found. Don’t let us lose one another this time. Believe what you like about me, the one true thing is that I do love you.’
‘All that I was saying is that I wish that I could be part of it.’
Anything else they might have said was stopped when a couple of women Eve knew came into the room and sank gratefully into low chairs. ‘Hi, Eve. Have you seen Ozz? He wants you to go to that Marx Brothers film, I think.’
‘Oh, right. I’ll try to catch him before he goes out again.’ She could see from David’s expression that he expected her to say something about Ozz. Why should she?
David stood up, his face as rigid as his back. ‘I’d better leave, then.’
It was all so easy with Ozz. Their relationship uncomplicated by sex, they were free to get close to one another and be honest. She told him the whole story.
‘He would never be able to understand that even though I hated the surroundings in which I was born and bred, I’m not trying to rise above them.’
Ozz said, ‘You are touchy about it, though.’
‘Of course I’m touchy about it. I’m touchy because I had to leave home to be me.’
‘Same reason I had to, sweetheart. The world’s not ready for us yet.’ He passed her his cigarette. ‘I see you’ve got the old yellow finger again.’
She drew on the cigarette and didn’t hand it back. ‘Blame Alex. I’ve decided it has to be cigs or vino, and vino sends me to sleep.’
‘Are you going to see him again?’
‘No. One thing I’ve always been able to decide – and that’s when something is over, it’s over.’
‘But you wouldn’t mind him for the odd roll in the hay?’
‘He’s not the sort, Ozz.’
‘Sweetheart, there’s times when I wonder if you should be let out alone. Everybody’s the sort.’
‘Good old Ozz. What will I do if you ever take a hair-pin bend too fast?’
‘I ain’t one of them slick bastards in black leather and riding britches – saving your presence, ma’am – I come from the boots and corduroy bags school of driving.’
‘Good. I thought, if I have to leave this place, I might like to try Australia.’
He paused before responding. ‘And we are going to have to leave this place, Andy. You know that as well as I do.’
‘That’s defeatist talk.’
‘That’s realism, sweetheart, and you know it as well as I do. Don’t mean we shouldn’t keep on keeping on.’
She did know. It wasn’t hard to see that, with all of northern Spain in Nationalist hands, a shipping blockade and no aid from any government except Russia, it would be hard for the Republic to survive.
Ozz Lavender thought about Andy as he negotiated the hair-pin bend with a full load of ammunition.
She was fantastic. If he hadn’t been given this letch for athletic bodies that were like his own, she’d be just the sort of a girl Mam would have taken to her heart. He missed his mam, really missed her. Life’d be OK if he could take Andy home and say, Hey, look, no sex attached, but she’s the big potato in my life. He hadn’t heard from the Old Man lately. What had he made of the bull’s ear? Would he believe that his school-teacher boy took it off himself, or would he think it had been a fix?
Another heart-stopping bend in the road took all his concentration. It was all right joking about these bastards, but a drop like that wasn’t a joke. He kept as far over as he dared without actually scuffing sparks off the wheel-hubs. These narrow passes scared him shitless. The road widened a bit. He made a thumbs-up sign to the driver of the following lorry – he’d be scared shitless too. Awesome country, spectacular views if only you dared to look down at the plains far below. Back home he’d done a bit of driving into the outback, but back home you weren’t carrying a bloody great load of ammo.
If his Old Man didn’t believe his story, at least none of his brothers had ever given him a bull’s ear as a keepsake. But they gave him grandchildren. Perhaps he should marry a widow out here and take her back to the Lavender place. It was a great life for kids and, Christ knew, there were enough of the poor little bastards here. That was quite an idea. An older woman with three or four kids, one who wouldn’t much care if they didn’t share a bed so long as he took care of them. It could be nice. He’d go back to teaching, have his own kids in the schoolhouse. He’d take up coaching. He’d bring some promising kid along and get him ready for the 1940 Olympics, no, there wouldn’t be enough time. Train up a kid about fourteen now, he’d be in the Aussie Juniors at sixteen, international hurdler by twenty, and ready for the ’44 Olympics.
He had never before let himself speculate about his future. It wasn’t worth it. You might disappear in a cloud of smoke tomorrow.
Neither Ozz nor any of the other five drivers in that convoy heard the sound of the bombers of the Trechuelo squadron above the noise of their own labouring engines. The detonations were heard ten kilometres across the valley as the trucks exploded their way down the sheer drop, taking a huge section of the road with them.