The summer was almost at an end, and Nat was sent for more training. It turned out he was ‘officer material’.
On the gunnery course, Nat encountered his first Russian in Spain, a hero of the Revolution. Not that ‘Pablo’ discussed his origins. Discussion wasn’t his style. Nor was Pablo his real name. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and when he yelled at them to reload their machine guns more quickly he barked something that sounded like: ‘Beestro-eye! Beestro-eye!’ They got faster, fast.
Trench technique was taught by an American. Mark the earth before digging. Make sure a trench on a ridge can’t be seen against the skyline. Throw the earth towards the enemy, not behind you. Clear every single rock because a bullet that hits rock is never just one bullet’s worth of danger. A proper trench is built in zigzags, irregular, not more than eight feet long: a hand grenade or mortar shell in a straight trench can kill dozens of men, instead of only four or five.
Yes, that all made sense.
Two Sundays into training, there was a concert party. Nat was leaning against a tree, rereading his third letter from Felix, when the sound truck’s speakers whistled and howled into life. (The last time he heard them they were blaring propaganda across the enemy trenches during a stalemate.) After a few crackling false starts, a rumba began to blare across the dusty square. Black-shawled villagers and freshly washed military men gathered around its edge, toes tapping.
Nat looked up. These evenings were always fun. You could end up dancing with anyone, and they’d rarely be female. He began to smile now as a leather-clad dispatch rider sidled up to issue an invitation to a giant of a sergeant major. Very bold. He’d join in himself in a little while, but Nat couldn’t resist lingering a few minutes longer over his letter.
It was just like Felix, he realised, with the pleasure of recognition. Grave and serious for great stretches – and then it was a job to take in the technical details: something about median nerves and tying off an ulnar artery in a recent operation? Anyway, it had been a triumph! – and then suddenly, unexpectedly (just like that time in the bar in Madrid when her hand gently stilled his trembling knee and a painful joy had stopped him in his tracks), her tone would change. A few lines sent the blood rushing to Nat’s head:
At the end of surgery, each time we finish, I look at my patient’s face. And I think how very glad I am it isn’t you lying there. And I picture you with your limbs whole and hale and hearty. If I imagine you whole hard enough, I hope I can keep you that way.
And then she was straight back to more medical stuff, debridement or something, whatever that was.
How should he respond? He found it so hard to put his own feelings into words. Reading the letter let him hear her voice in his head, and it made him feel quite desperate for her. He’d just have to send more pictures. She said nothing about meeting again, and neither could he. It was too uncertain. But he’d use his pencil to show her how he felt.
On the back of the last page, Felix’s writing became a scrawl.
It’s taken days to write this. Ridiculously long. Always in little snatches of time. I thought it was finished. Now something terrible’s happened. I’m so sorry to burden you. But writing gets it off my chest, and I’m afraid to tell Kitty, though I know I should.
Nat read faster, stumbling over her words.
We lost another patient today – well, that’s nothing new. But this man was in with a chance. I’m sure he was. There was something odd about the way he went downhill so suddenly. I don’t quite understand it. But I’m terrified it was my fault. I believe it was haemolytic shock, although it’s awfully hard to tell. I don’t know why Dolores didn’t tell me his temperature had gone up almost as soon as the transfusion started – I’d left her to finish the procedure while I dealt with something else. I’m always telling her to watch out for that. Too many things going on at once. That’s the trouble. You know how it is. I mustn’t blame her, I really mustn’t. My responsibility.
Oh Felix.
The man suddenly had a raging fever and started to vomit like mad. That was yesterday. And now he’s dead.
We can’t find out why. No autopsy facilities here. And there’s talk of moving on again soon. Sorry. Sorry. Sometimes I can’t bear it. Another poor widow, and four more orphans for Spain. They were all girls. He told me. Enough now. Stay safe, until I see you again.
The letter made Nat want to throw his arms around Felix, tell her not to worry, and hold her so close that their bodies merged. He wanted to stroke her shorn hair, and reassure her that she’d done the best she could, and of course it wasn’t her fault, and she was a wonderful nurse and one day in the better and fairer world they were fighting for she could be a wonderful surgeon too, if that’s what she still wanted.
He remembered the day they first met, when he swung her in the air after Cable Street, and how they’d lost and found each other again. Their parting at the café. The first time his lips had brushed hers, outside the hospital, with trams rattling by, and everyone going home for their tea. Before the Sister interrupted. He longed to take up where they’d left off in Madrid, in the air raid, when he couldn’t even kiss her goodbye with that hag of a receptionist just kept staring and staring. And he could see Felix had wanted him to.
Nat gave himself over to thinking about kissing Felix properly. With no bandages in the way, no intrusions. Kissing for as long as they wanted, with nothing and nobody to rush them. He thought about exploring every inch of her, skin against skin, and time and space and warmth to take as long as they both needed. If she noticed his inexperience, she would forgive it, because it would be another thing they shared. He shut his eyes for a moment. He could almost see her now, almost feel her.
The low voice of Seneca Digges broke in: ‘Brother, might I have the pleasure of the next dance?’ Seneca made a deep bow, and winked at Nat. ‘You was a long way away just then and no mistake.’
‘Not any more, damn you.’ They both laughed. ‘Well, if you’re the best thing on offer, I don’t mind if I do.’
They set off round the square in a stately waltz.
‘So you got a sweetheart waiting for you,’ said Seneca, a black American from Chicago, now a lieutenant.
‘Not exactly waiting,’ said Nat proudly. ‘She’s hard at work, here, in Spain. She’s a nurse.’
Seneca let out a low whistle.
‘Oh, boy,’ he said. ‘You got it bad.’
The next record on the gramophone was a conga. Everyone got sweaty, snaking round the square. It was followed by some Bach choral music. At any rate, so Nat and Seneca were informed by an old Etonian called Rupert who joined them for a cigarette in the pause between dances. He wrote poetry and edited the wall newspaper at the training camp. By the time the Bach was over, he’d persuaded Nat to do some sketches for the display.
‘Are you a cartoonist too?’ Rupert asked.
‘Not really. Why?’
‘Just wondered. Cartoons are always good for morale. Have to be the right sort of course. Had some trouble a few months ago with some bad elements in that respect. Trotskyists no doubt. Thought they could make a joke about Stalin and get away with it.’
‘And they couldn’t?’ Nat looked to Seneca for support. Had he not heard? He was examining his boots with great intensity. Defiantly, Nat repeated his question. ‘So you can’t make a joke about Stalin round here?’
‘Certainly not.’ Rupert gave Nat a very odd look, and wandered off.
He probably shouldn’t have pushed it. You had to be so careful these days. There was so much whispering. Talk of spies even, and certain kinds of letters never reaching home. And then you heard stuff about denunciations, and court martials, and prison, and probably worse. God forbid those rumours were true.
Nat didn’t know what to believe. A lot of stories were probably put about by ‘bad elements’, deliberately. Trying to stir up trouble. Anything was possible. What about the fifth column the Fascists boasted they had in Madrid – all those unidentifiable traitors secretly working for the enemy? There was just no way of telling. Nat felt his skin tighten round his skull.
‘Do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched, by someone you can’t see?’ he asked Seneca, who had continued to stare firmly at the ground throughout the conversation with Rupert. He let out a non-committal grunt, and wandered away.
The speakers clicked off. Two very old men moved into the silence in the centre of the square. One had a guitar; the other began to clap his hands. Their rhythms were strange and compelling. When the singer opened his mouth, the hairs on the back of Nat’s neck stood to attention. The words meant little, but the music’s unexpected breaks and sudden turns pulled and twisted him until he was ready to weep.
Then Seneca spoke to him again, tugging him away from the crowd.
‘Nat, listen to this. There’s a guy in town with a pair of Belgian Brownings for sale. Nine millimetre. What do you reckon? Don’t an officer need a pistol? That’s what everyone says round here.’
Blood pools inside the body on the rocks, blood forced downwards now by gravity alone. With no heartbeat left to pump it through the veins, no oxygen left to circulate, the colour of the skin begins to change in patches. The flesh stays soft. Down at the bottom of the ravine, close to the stream, it is too cold for limbs to stiffen into rigor mortis, though they will freeze eventually. A light snowfall covers the surface of this corpse with no discrimination . . . hair, coat, face, mouth, legs, boots. Eyes that still stare. Snow is not fastidious. Nor does it last.