‘Can’t you hear it?’
Felix strains her ears. Far away, across the Ebro, the shelling has begun.
‘The breakfast bombs?’
‘No. Listen.’
Closer to hand, very quietly at first, but getting slowly louder, comes the sound of singing, low singing. It has a kind of throbbing pulse, the tune familiar. Felix knows the words.
Si me quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero . . . if you want to write to me, you know where I am . . .
But this is a new version.
En el frente de Gandesa primera linea de fuego . . . On the Gandesa front, in the first line of fire.
They are going to Gandesa, on the other side of the Ebro.
‘Shall we go up and see them off?’ she says to Kitty. Lacking latrines, they’re both squatting in a ditch at the edge of a field.
‘Let’s.’
They make their way to the road. The day before, the villagers of La Bisbal de Falset were mending the potholes with branches. Others bent with picks, widening hairpin bends without a word. Just the sound of steel on stone.
As they reach the verge, a huge open truck with a Russian number plate comes rumbling by. Kitty and Felix raise their hands, two solitary clenched fists. A sea of fists and smiles return their greeting.
‘They look so young, don’t they?’ says Kitty.
‘Fifteen? Sixteen?’
‘La quinta del biberón.’
‘The baby bottle brigade.’
The singing drifts away. Another truck is approaching.
‘They don’t know yet though. What it’s going to be like, I mean,’ says Felix.
‘No, they don’t know.’
All at once Felix feels terribly ancient as well as sad. She is also very itchy. She scratches at her wrist. ‘These damned things. How I hate them.’
‘At least you can see a louse to catch it.’
‘And have the satisfaction of squeezing it to death. Every time I pop one between my fingernails I imagine it’s one of Franco’s generals. Or, even better, someone on the bloody Non-Intervention Committee in London.’
Kitty laughs. ‘Who’d have thought anything could be worse than lice? But scabies! It’s the utter limit!’
‘Come on . . . let’s get out the Lysol while there’s still time.’
This hospital is in a cave. When Felix heard, she imagined a storybook kind of cave, where dragons lurk on piles of gold at the end of winding tunnels. Theirs is a great horizontal gash in the rock face of a hillside, an unhappy open mouth. But its roof is solid stone. And it won’t be far from the fighting.
On uneven rocky floors the orderlies have done their best to recreate a ward, with staggered lines of camp beds on several levels. At one end is the food store, and the kitchen – a scrubbed wooden table and a vast cauldron bubbling on a fire, big enough to feed a coven of witches. A few stone walls, built like the terraces that step down to the valley below, offer more protection.
Kitty and Felix climb back up the stony path to the cave. In the olive grove, they pass the triage tent – the equip – and the transfusion lorry. A group of men in vests and dungarees are busy getting stretchers ready. Piles of wooden poles lie waiting to be fed through canvas. Trucks and ambulances nearby have bonnets up, and legs stick out from under chassis, as drivers carry out last-minute checks and repairs. The vehicles have a dead, hollow feel to them without their windscreens. Some have been smashed out by bombs, the others removed on purpose. The flash of sun on glass is an instant giveaway to the enemy air force. Even moonlight shows up a windscreen.
‘Shall we just keep quiet about our engagement?’ Felix suggested, during a snatched conversation with George when they first arrived. ‘It makes things awkward for the others, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable around us. And I have to wash my hands so often. I’d worry about losing the ring. I could wear it on a string around my neck, if you like.’
‘It might be safer that way,’ said George. ‘If that’s really what you want to do . . .’
Felix knew he wanted to show her off. Make her promise more real by making it public.
‘Everything’s in limbo now. But it can’t be much longer, can it? And then we can really celebrate.’ She hated the sight of his disappointment, but she wasn’t quite ready for celebrations.
They were unloading a new consignment of medical supplies, timing their journeys to meet back at the truck for another armful. Hidden by the big metal doors, she gave him a quick hug, only to pull away when they heard voices. Kitty and Doug were coming back for a second load, followed by some new volunteers from the nearest village. Spanish girls were rather shockable. Felix didn’t want to get a reputation, she told herself. It made a good excuse.
But she is careful to offer George some small sign each day, something to make sure he doesn’t feel neglected. Nothing that will attract attention. A quick squeeze on the arm is often all that can be managed. Once he grabbed a kiss in passing – but she turned her head, so her cheek took it, just by her ear. ‘I can’t wait for all this to be over,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t wait.’
Last night she looked at him across a tin plate of beans and saw he really couldn’t wait. At the end of the meal she whispered for him to meet her on the hillside above the cave. It was the least she could do, with the battle coming. No one need know. She waited in darkness, wondering, with her back against a tree, while, like a film score, the sound of cicadas built to a deafening crescendo. George loped towards her, unmistakeable, and Felix felt a rush of affection as she stepped forward to meet him. There was nothing to say. She kissed him with hard, fierce lips. She pushed herself against him. She waited for the hot, liquid feeling to flood through her. But the deadness wouldn’t leave her body.
Felix finds George back at the cave, crouched over the generator with the maintenance engineer – a bespectacled American borrowed from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
She grins at both men, but looks longer at George. ‘Getting close?’
‘Definitely,’ says George.
‘Do you know what the plan is, later?’
‘I’m to cross over with one of the field ambulances. It’s light enough to go over the nearest pontoon. We’re setting up a clearing post on the other side.’
Kitty has gone off to find the Lysol. Even so, with the American right at his side, there isn’t much Felix can say to George.
‘Good luck. You know I’ll be thinking of you. Try and get some sleep today.’
‘Will do. You too. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. I’ll see you later.’
The American is looking at them with interest. Felix is still in earshot when the ribbing begins.
‘My, you’ve made a hit there! She’ll be thinking of you. Crafty guy, aren’t you? Who’d have thought?’
‘Oh, Felix is an old friend. I used to work with her brother. In London.’
‘Oh yeah?’
Felix hurries away. I’ll be thinking of you. I’ll be thinking of you. She hammers out the rhythm of the words with her teeth as she walks, jaw stiff with tension. It’s clamped tight shut whenever she sleeps. She feels the ache in her molars and her face all day.
She will be thinking of George. She does love him, she’s sure of it. He is very lovable. It’s easy to imagine having breakfast with George every day. Going for walks, that kind of thing. Maybe they’d even have a car one day, when they got settled, and he’d spend Sundays fixing it up and they’d go for drives in Kent, with her mother, or to the races. She finds herself longing for all the things she once found so dull. As for the other stuff, it’s probably just a question of time. This deadness inside her is because of her illness. It must be. After all, she’s still not a hundred per cent. Once she’s completely over it, everything’s sure to feel better.
She’ll try harder, for George’s sake. Felix makes an effort to summon back the devoted blue eyes she’s just been looking into. She stands with her own tight shut and thinks about last night, and his face moving closer, his lips meeting hers. She waits, testing herself. But all she can see is Nat, looking at her just as longingly.
‘Oh, go away!’ she says out loud, without meaning to.
‘Who are you talking to?’ calls Kitty from behind a sheet slung over a rope. She’s making a great deal of noise as she slaps on disinfectant to keep the parasites at bay. ‘Ye Gods, this stings even more than it stinks. Ah! Ow!’
‘Just the flies. Hurry up!’
‘Two minutes.’
Felix waits to purify herself.