Felix opens her eyes to rough grey concrete a few feet from her face. She scrapes her eyelids back down over eyeballs so dry and dusty they seem to grind in their sockets. One minute more. One minute more, she tells herself, and then I will go back.
She’s taken to sleeping in an underground pipe, just off the road. In the heat of the day, an hour or two on a cork mattress helps get her through the nights. She lies there, drowsing, one hand rubbing at her cheek.
Waking a second time, Felix recognises the hollow in her stomach as despair as much as hunger. I’ll just stay here and wait. It must be very near the end. Really, there can be no hope left. Then she thinks of all her Spanish friends.
‘While there’s life there’s hope.’ Felix’s sing-song taunt echoes back at her. Maybe tonight there’d be more news. Maybe this would be the breakthrough they were all hoping for. They would regain the ground they had lost. And George had got a message across with a stretcher-bearer a few days earlier. He’d be back soon himself perhaps. Then they could talk about things.
The realisation has been creeping up on her for days, like flu, making her skin crawl and her temperature soar. She gives into it finally with the relief that comes with giving in to illness. There’s no other choice left. No use fighting the truth. Felix is glad she said nothing before the battle: it would have been too cruel. Dangerous, even. But she can’t put it off much longer. To go on saying nothing is as bad as lying, Felix tells herself, with sudden clarity. It simply isn’t honest to pretend to feel things she can’t make herself feel. Oh, maybe it would be different if she had never known Nat. If George was all she’d ever had. But even when she doesn’t want to think about him, even while her mind is pushing Nat away, her body can’t stop remembering him.
No, it’s hopeless. George will be better off without her. Anyone would make him a truer wife than she could. She’ll work out what to say that will hurt him least, and give him back his ring, and then they’ll both be free. And he, at least, will have a chance of happiness.
She rolls herself onto her front and wriggles out. The sun hits her face instantly. As she walks, Felix looks at the sky. It’s automatic. Five squadrons are curving in from the north, a great flock in V formations. Trimotors, she registers. Bombers, flanked by biplanes, four more Vs of three. Silver birds of prey. If we had what they have, this war would be over by now. And I wouldn’t be having to decide these things.
The cave fills with patients as the skies fill with planes. The space is divided: one level for Republican soldiers, one for the rebels. The civilians from round about are taking it hard too. ‘¡Curandera!’ they cry out, not knowing the word for doctor. ‘Curandera, por favor, aquí, aquí . . . Please, healer, over here.’ Except for the mother who lies completely silent. Is she still a mother, with both her children dead and buried under rubble?
Winding round the beds, Felix assesses each patient for change. Kitty sits with a beautiful young man with golden skin and white-blond hair. From where Felix stands, he looks perfect, like a Norse god, not a scratch on him. But she knows he doesn’t have much longer. Kitty strokes him, bending to catch his words. The man is a Finn, they think, though they can’t be sure. He doesn’t seem to understand Spanish or English, or French or German or Czech or Yiddish. But now he’s trying to speak. And Felix sees from the way Kitty moves her head that still she can’t understand him, and that he will die before they find someone who can.
An orderly tugs at her sleeve.
‘Comrade Smilie wants you in theatre.’
It’s for one of the prisoners of war, an Italian. Felix scrubs up quickly. Impossible to hate these men, however much you loathe their masters.
‘Ah, there you are. We’ve got to amputate.’ In English, with a patient who doesn’t understand, Doug can be brutal. ‘Gas gangrene. Out there too long. Like everyone else. Could be too far gone already. You distract him while I take his leg off.’
As soon as she comes close, the man grabs Felix’s hand.
‘Per favore, signorina, per favore, me cantare una canzone della culla?’
Felix doesn’t understand. But the Spanish anaesthetist guesses the man’s meaning.
‘¿Una canción de cuna?’ he asks.
‘Sí, sí,’ comes the response. His grip relaxes a fraction.
‘He wants you to sing him a cradle song. Can you do that?’
Felix’s mind empties. A cradle song? Then her mother’s voice comes into her head, and her face becomes clearer too, and the nursery in Sydenham takes shape.
‘Golden slumbers, kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise,
Sleep pretty darling, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby.
Rock you,
Rock you,
Lullaby.’
Were there more verses? Felix can’t remember. So she just sings that one, over and over again, close to the man’s ear.