Pantheon
Sam Bourne
The darkest secrets of World War II… finally revealed. The Number One bestseller returns with his most explosive book to date.Europe is ablaze. America is undecided about joining the fight against Nazism. And James Zennor, a brilliant, troubled, young Oxford don is horrified. He returns one morning from rowing to discover that his wife has disappeared with their young son, leaving only a note declaring her continuing love.A frantic search through wartime England leads James across the Atlantic and to one of America’s greatest universities, its elite clubs and secret societies – right to the heart of the American establishment. And in his hunt for his family, James unearths one of the darkest and deadliest secrets of a world at war…
SAM BOURNE
PANTHEON
For my mother, both the gentlest and strongest person I know
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ud3510fc0-0398-54fb-833e-9116127de5d4)
Dedication (#u0b1f1f5d-d931-50d0-aec1-59c227a25760)
Chapter One (#u30d39632-f581-5924-bf56-1ab97d88cad1)
Chapter Two (#u9818d55d-370d-52c1-ba12-64dac04dd317)
Chapter Three (#uf0c0cadf-3fc2-5da7-a334-592b2f436c16)
Chapter Four (#u519636c1-9084-5530-94a3-421198794727)
Chapter Five (#ub96e73ac-4cb2-5b5a-8dbc-31207223649a)
Chapter Six (#ue9f253b1-adae-55b3-8597-561b5a1eb8ba)
Chapter Seven (#u8e7e4a83-d6ab-5f46-b7ba-9103120fb111)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE
Oxford, July 8 1940
It hurt him, this journey, it pained him, yet day after day he came back for more punishment. Every morning, whether the skies were dark with rain or, like today, lit by searing sunshine, James Zennor would be here on the water shortly after dawn, sculling alone on the Isis stretch of the Thames.
James loved these early mornings. The air smelled fresh, the sky was empty, everything was quiet. A family of moor-hens puttered by the water’s edge, but even they made no sound as if, like him, they preferred to keep their counsel.
The boat was gliding now, James’s wrists flat and straight, the feathering motion – twisting the oars so that they entered the water vertically before slicing horizontally through the air – all but automatic. He gazed at the river ahead, sparkling as if jewelled by the sunlight. At moments like this, when the true exertion had only just begun, when the sky was blue and the breeze was as cool as a caress, he could almost forget what had happened to his ruined body. He could almost feel like the man he used to be.
Barring that one, fateful, year abroad, he had come to this same spot for a decade, ever since he had been an undergraduate, grateful for a place in his college team. He had even become the stroke for Oxford against Cambridge in a famously close boat race. But that was a long time ago. These days he was fighting only against himself.
He checked left and right but there was still no one else around. In term-time he might see some of the more ambitious crews on the water at this hour, readying for Torpids or Eights – younger men who reminded him of his younger self. James Zennor was not yet thirty. But he had been through enough that he felt twice that age.
He squinted upwards, enjoying the sensation of being dazzled, then returned his gaze to the job in hand. As his eyes adjusted, he could see the trees on the right-hand bank, shielding the path where he and Florence had so often walked, both before Harry was born and since. James liked bringing his son down here, fondly imagining he would fall in love with the river the way he had as a boy, just by being near to it. But in recent months Harry had become nervous, anxiously clinging to his mother’s hand if they inched too close to the water’s edge. But that would pass. James was sure of it. On a day like this, he felt that anything was possible.
He imagined how his son would look at this very moment. Still two months short of his third birthday, Harry would be fast asleep, one hand clutching Snowy, the little white polar bear who accompanied him to bed every night. Just the way James had seen him this morning before creeping out for his rowing practice. Whatever else he and Florence had been through, they had made a beautiful child together.
Now, as James reached Iffley Lock again and turned around, the inevitable happened. His left shoulder began to scream for attention. The pain was no less sharp for being familiar, both burning and piercing, as if he were being stabbed by several thick, white-hot needles. Each day would begin with the hope that this time it would be different, that the pain would come later, that it might not come at all. Today, with the weather so perfect, that hope had shone brighter than usual. But as he rowed towards Folly Bridge he knew nothing had changed.
James tried to focus on those brief, blissful half-seconds of relief, when the blades were up and out of the heavy water: the recovery before the drive. He tried to imagine the river’s coolness, the balmy, soothing effect it would have on his burning skin.
Each pull squeezed his lungs, his breaths coming as if they were the gasps of someone faraway; but his heart was as loud as the engine of a motor car revving too fast.
The boat scythed through the water, parting it silently, its bow lean and narrow. He knew that, viewed from the bank, the motion would look effortless. Team rowing, done well, always looked like that; human beings turned into a single, mighty machine, all their energies harnessed towards a single objective. If you had selected the right men, the strongest and best, the water seemed powerless to resist.
Single-sculls rarely looked so pleasing; a man on his own could not generate the same momentum or sense of order. James was certain his own rowing looked especially inelegant. His ruined left shoulder made sure of that. Fated now to be forever weaker than his right, his left arm could not keep up; perfect symmetry was out of reach. He pictured his boat zigzagging its way down the river, even though he had been told a dozen times that it did no such thing.
He gulped for oxygen, looking up as he did so. Folly Bridge was just visible in the distance. Once there, he would have rowed himself along the Isis stretch, to Iffley Lock and back, three times, a distance of four and a half miles. His body was demanding to stop; he had already done his usual morning circuit. But he could not help thinking about the men – his own age or younger – in combat on the continent, or the pilots preparing to defend the skies over England, giving their all for what the new prime minister had warned would be a ‘Battle of Britain’. With each stroke, he contemplated how feeble were his exertions compared to theirs, how if they could carry on doing their part, the least he could do …
But now the perennial shoulder pain suddenly sharpened as if something had splintered. He wondered if perhaps a shard of bone had cracked out of place. The agony was unspeakable.
James firmed his jaw against the pain. In a bid to distract himself, he forced his mind to recall what he had heard on the wireless last night. The main news remained Britain’s sinking of the French fleet in Algeria. Typical Churchill, that. Bold and brazen with it. Unlike that damned fool Chamberlain, Churchill understood there was no room for messing around, no time for niceties. Now that Paris had been conquered, France’s ships would fall into German hands. Better they were destroyed altogether. Not that the French saw it that way: they were furious, the recriminations still rumbling on.
His shoulder was sending shockwaves of hurt through him now. He refused to listen. What had come next? The BBC generally tried to begin the broadcast with something positive to offset the bad news that was to follow. What pill was the discussion of the sinking of the French fleet meant to sweeten last night? The agony tugged at his nerves, but he refused to succumb. That was it. The Channel Islands. Sark had surrendered to the Nazis, two days after Alderney: the Channel Islands were now entirely under German rule. The idea was shocking. He had never been there, but he had grown up on the English south coast knowing that Jersey was just a ferry ride away. The people there spoke English. In just the last few weeks the swastika had been raised over Norway, France, Belgium, Holland; and now a little corner of Britain. Hitler was getting closer.
James shipped the oars to let the boat drift on the unruffled water and let out what he thought was a gasp of relief. It was only when a flock of coots scattered wildly that he realized the sound he had made was a scream. A man on the towpath opposite turned suddenly and then, alarmed, walked briskly away.
James took himself to the bank, as close to the boathouse as he could manage, then hauled himself out onto dry land and braced for the most demanding moment in his morning routine. Bending low, he tugged at the loop of cord on the bow of the boat, to bring the scull out of the water and onto his good shoulder. One, two, three and, with a strain that made him want to howl, it was out and up. He staggered the few yards to the boathouse and dropped the scull into its rack.
Then he stood for a few seconds, catching his breath, gazing up at the sky. The glorious cornflower blue of it struck him as a kind of lie. The skies over Britain were becoming a battlefield, the air-raid sirens sounding in cities night after night. German planes had bombed Cardiff just a few nights ago. What right did they have now to look so peaceful?
James walked quickly past the college boathouses, one each for St John’s, Balliol, New and the others, all now locked up and empty. And though that owed more to the Long Vacation than to the war, he silently cursed his fate once again.
Reaching the post where he had left his bicycle, he threw one long leg over the saddle and began to pedal hard, savouring the kinetic change for his body after the relentless back-and-forth of the river. He pushed himself over the little bridge, as steeply arched as a rainbow, then across Christ Church meadow, noting both the grazing cows – who, since the onset of rationing, looked useful rather than merely decorative – and the patches that had been ploughed up for growing potatoes. That was happening all over Oxford now, even the smallest private garden or square of lawn turned into a vegetable patch to boost the nation’s food supply.
He pedalled between Merton and Corpus, up past Oriel and onto the High Street. The colleges were deserted at this hour, though many of them would soon fill up for another day of requisitioned wartime service. Turning right towards St Giles, he did his best to avoid a glimpse of the Martyrs’ Memorial, and headed north for home.
It was not yet seven, so there were not many cars on the road. But even when rush hour came there would be fewer today than there had been a year ago: petrol rationing had seen to that. James knew of one adventurous fellow who had found a solution, filling up his tank with a brew of whisky and paraffin – he complained his car now smelled like a ‘lamplighter on the piss’ – but by the looks of things most of Oxford’s motorists preferred not to take the risk. Those that did would now encounter checkpoints guarding the exits north, south, east and west of the city – roadblocks designed to ensure the authorities knew exactly who was coming in and out, as if Oxford were a military base rather than an ancient university town. There was even a roadblock between Pembroke and Christ Church. But they tended to be rather less bothered by a chap on a bike.
Not that you could ever forget it was wartime, no matter how you got around. There were the traffic lights cloaked in their monk-like hoods, one of the countless little transformations demanded by the blackout. But stranger still was the complete absence of street signs and signposts, removed in order to give a headache to any future occupying army. Let Jerry find his own damned way around Oxford.
The pain in his shoulder had returned. He glanced at his watch and began to make the calculations that might distract him from the agony. If he cycled at full strength, he should be back at the house in four and a half minutes.
As he powered along Banbury Road, the wind rushing past his ears, he became conscious of a roaring appetite. A meagre four ounces: that was his entire bacon ration for the week. He could wolf all of that down this instant, in a single breakfast! And what good to anybody was one egg every three and a half days?
At last the turning for Parks Road was just ahead of him, a large black car parked on the corner, its engine humming.
Florence looked over at her son, sitting at the kitchen table, his chair piled high with cushions so that he could reach his plate, though his toast and margarine were barely touched. Harry was instead hunched over his drawing pad, a stubby red crayon in his hand.
‘Not long now, Harry, I promise.’ Yet again she opened, rummaged through and closed every drawer in the kitchen. Where the hell had it gone?
Everything else was ready: the suitcase, methodically packed, coats for the journey, sturdy shoes. She had been careful with the passport, deliberately placing it at the back of the second drawer in her dresser, tucked in among her underwear, a private realm James was unlikely to probe. And yet when she had checked for it nearly an hour ago it had not been there. It had been the first thing she had done, after a long time spent in bed, her eyes closed feigning sleep, as she heard James wash, dress and head out to the river. Unmoving, she had lain there listening to his routine, waiting for the sound of the front door closing behind him. She had waited another two minutes after that, timing it by the bedside clock, just in case he had forgotten something and turned back. Then, when the coast was clear, she had got out of bed, her mental checklist clear and straight. But when she opened the second drawer, there had been no sign of her passport. Had James somehow twigged, and hidden it from her? Had somebody revealed her secret? If her husband did know, why had he said nothing? What trap was he setting for her?
She glanced over at Harry again. His head was down, intent on his drawing. She moved to stand behind him, peering over his head, and abruptly felt a hardness in her throat. ‘What’s that, darling?’
Harry looked up, his eyes two round blue pools. Florence saw in them a terrible melancholy, before realizing it was a reflection of herself she had glimpsed in her son’s eyes.
‘It’s our house,’ Harry said, his voice low and husky, so different from other children his age and yet so like James. ‘Inside, there’s me,’ he said, pointing at a shape that vaguely resembled a window. His chubby finger pointed at another shape: ‘And there’s you and Daddy.’
Florence felt her eyes smarting. ‘It’s lovely, Harry,’ she said, trying to sound jolly. ‘It’s lovely.’ It was the third house he had drawn in the last twenty minutes.
She resumed her search, trying not to think about Harry or his picture. She didn’t want to dwell on anything that might corrode her resolve. Where in heaven’s name had she put the passport?
Perhaps in her panic she had missed it. Determined to be more methodical, she returned to the kitchen drawers for the third time, now removing the cutlery tray from the top one and then proceeding to the next. Tea cosies, napkins, a wooden spoon, a spare torch and a fresh set of batteries. Finally the bottom drawer, full of James’s man things: screwdrivers, pliers, a spanner, a can of bicycle oil and more batteries for the torch. Since the war began, there seemed to be torches and batteries in every corner of the house. But it wasn’t there.
Florence glanced at her watch. Six forty-five am. They had to be out of here by seven at the very latest. James was never back before seven fifteen. She just needed to keep her head.
She ran into his study. Such an awful mess, tottering piles of papers, books and what appeared to be a complete set of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Lifting the biggest tower, she moved it gingerly onto the chair. Then she removed the February issue of the New Statesman, its cover marked by the ringed stains of multiple cups of coffee, a copy of Tribune underneath. More letters, a heavily dog-eared copy of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell – though her husband always referred to him as Eric, after meeting him in Spain – a thick copy of Wisden, but no sign of the passport. A weeks-old clipping from the Daily Sketch: ‘Conscription extended to age 36’, read the headline. It was five minutes to seven.
‘Mummy!’ A shout from the kitchen.
‘Not now, Harry.’
‘Mummy.’ More insistent.
‘Mummy’s busy.’ She worked her way through a desk drawer full of typewriter ribbons, paperclips and a spare blotter. ‘Why don’t you make sure Snowy is comfortable in your satchel?’
‘There’s a man at the door.’
She froze. Could James be back already, so much earlier than usual? It made no sense; if he were here, he would let himself in. Why would he be standing outside? Unless he had left his keys behind. And he was refusing to ring the bell, lest he wake up Harry. Good God, what should she do?
She crept into the hall. Instantly, through the coloured glass at the top of the door, she could see that it was Leonard, the outline of him tall and taut. Her shoulders dropped with relief. She opened the door.
His brilliantined hair was still in place but his face was flushed with exertion. ‘He finished early. I saw him just now.’
‘What?’
‘I came as fast as I could. James has stopped rowing: I think he must have been quicker than usual today. Or I timed it wrong. But he’s finished. He’ll be back here in ten minutes, fifteen at the most.’
She grimaced and, as if he had misinterpreted her expression, he added sharply, ‘Remember, there are too many people depending on this, Florence. There’s too much at stake.’
‘Just wait there a minute.’
Desperate, she tore at the rest of the desk drawers, foraging through the cigarette papers, used up matchboxes and foreign coins, most of them Spanish. She turned to the bookshelves, pulling out volume after volume, then whole blocks at a time, including the entire Left Book Club stretch in orange, throwing them to the floor. Still no passport.
Harry had begun to cry, maybe at the sight of Leonard, a stranger, at the front door. Or perhaps because of her barely-contained frustration. But she would have to ignore him. She ran back into the bedroom. Breaking one of the tacit taboos of their marriage, she had already peered inside James’s wardrobe, but now she would do a thorough search. She swept past the two or three suits and dark cloth jackets hanging on the rail then sank to her knees, padding the hard wood at the base of the cupboard. She felt something and snatched at it.
A shoebox. She tore at it hopefully. But inside were just two black leather brogues, still wrapped in tissue paper, the ones, she realized with a stab of guilt, he had worn for their wedding or, rather, the wedding party they had had nearly six months later in England.
A shadow fell over her and she turned to find Harry, escaped from his chair, standing in the doorway trembling. ‘Mummy?’ Tears streaked his cheeks.
She felt her own eyes pricking. Despite all her preparation, weeks of it, she was about to fail. ‘Don’t cry, darling. Everything will be all right.’
One last chance. She grabbed the stool by the bathroom door, stood on it to look into the top shelf of her husband’s clothes cupboard. Two thick sweaters sat, unworn, on the shelf. She pushed them apart. Nothing there. She was about to give up when a faint outline caught her eye. It was barely visible, brown against brown. She reached out and felt the touch of leather. Her heart sank: another damned book, with musty-smelling pages and no words on the cover. When she opened it a picture slipped out. Harry snatched it up, gazing at the handsome young man in uniform surrounded by pals, a rifle in every hand, before crying out with happy recognition: ‘Daddy!’
Florence felt defeat settle in her bones. James must have found the passport and taken it to the river with him. What a cruel trick.
Only desperation sent her back to the place where she had started her search: her underwear drawer. She emptied it of the remaining items one by one, as if in a final show of thoroughness. As she lifted up a pair of black stockings, her heart jumped. She pulled at the material and there, somehow caught inside, was the small, stiff, dark blue booklet. How on earth had she missed it? Her passport was there, exactly where she had left it, all along.
‘What did Mummy tell you, Harry? You see, everything’s going to be all right.’ She could hear the crack in her own voice as she lifted her son in a single move, settling him onto her right hip. With her left hand she picked up the suitcase she had placed in the hallway, in readiness for this moment, nearly an hour ago. She walked out of the front door to join Leonard. There was no time to look back. In his small hand, Harry was still clutching the picture of his father.
TWO
Barcelona, four years earlier
James saw more of Florence’s bare flesh the first time he laid eyes on her than he did until the day they were married. Which was not strictly true, but became a line he liked to use – though rarely in mixed company.
They met in Barcelona, in the heat of July 1936. He had never been to Spain before. In truth, he had never been anywhere before. He walked around the city, along its gorgeous wide avenues, round-eyed, his chest tight with excitement and pride. Hanging from the buildings with their strangely-shaped, weeping-eye windows were banners and bunting welcoming him and some six thousand other foreigners to the Olimpiada Popular: the People’s Olympiad. The event’s official flag depicted three heroic, muscular figures in red, yellow and black clutching a single standard. It took a while for James to realize that at least one of the notional athletes on the emblem was a woman; the second was a red-skinned man and a third figure was quite clearly negro.
He should not have been surprised: this was the alternative Olympics, designed to steal the thunder of the official games taking place a week later and more than nine hundred miles eastward in Berlin. While those games would be a showcase of Aryan supremacy, the People’s Olympiad would be a festival of socialists, idealists and radicals who had refused as a matter of conscience to take part in Herr Hitler’s Nazi carnival.
‘Well, we’re not going to win, I can tell you that much,’ James had said the very moment he and his friend Harry had arrived, off the train after a journey that had begun nearly eighteen hours earlier at Victoria Station. ‘Not in this heat. We’re used to freezing dawns and Cherwell fog. This is the bloody tropics.’
‘Now, Zennor, you listen to me. If I’d wanted a gloom merchant, I’d have brought Simkins or that other twit, Lightfoot. I brought you for your rhetorical powers. You’re supposed to be here to lift our spirits, to exhort the team to victory!’
‘I thought I was here because I’m a bloody good oarsman.’
‘And so you are. So no more of that defeatist talk. We won’t lead the masses to revolution with soggy English pessimism now, will we?’
Harry Knox, Winchester and Balliol, hereditary baronet and one-time lead organizer of … now what was it? James thought it was the ILP, but it might have been another socialist group with another set of initials: it was hard to keep up. Coming to Barcelona had been Knox’s idea, a way to make up for missing the real Olympics – as he insisted they not refer to them – and a chance to take a stand against Fascism. James had been tipped to row stroke in the Great Britain boat in Berlin; this was to be his consolation prize.
Along with all the other foreign athletes they were put up at the Hotel Olímpico in the Plaza de España, where the lobby was already teeming with fresh arrivals from the United States, Holland, Belgium and French Algeria. Most were just like Harry and James, there with the backing of a workers’ association, a socialist party or a trade union, rather than their government. James rather doubted the selection process had been as athletically rigorous as it was for the official Games. But, as Harry had said, ‘That’s hardly the point, is it?’
The atmosphere was raucous and did not let up for a week. The door of their room remained open, as Marxist Danish hurdlers or anarchist French sprinters came in and out as they pleased. The entire building seemed to host a single, unending party. James had barely put down his suitcase when a huge Italian shot putter, who later turned out to be a communist exile, thrust a bottle in his hand, urging him to knock it straight back, no sipping. James read the label – Sangre de Toro, ‘bull’s blood’ – and did as he was told. It tasted musky and heavy with fruit. He hadn’t much liked it at the time but thereafter he would forever associate the taste of that Catalan wine with freedom.
At last they had spilled out onto the street, wandering from one tapas bar to another. James had no memory of paying for either his food or his drink, as if all the Barcelona bar-owners were grateful to the visiting Olympians for supporting their infant republic, for doing exactly what the International Olympic Committee had refused to do five years earlier – choosing Barcelona over Berlin.
He was munching on a plate of calcots, charcoal-grilled spring onions that, had you offered them to him in England, he would have rejected as terrifyingly exotic, when Harry, already sunburnt, the sweat patches spreading under his arms, turned to him with a lascivious grin. ‘Rumour is the ladies’ swimming team are having a late night practice session.’
‘Harry, even you can’t be that desperate,’ James replied, doing his best to sound like a man of the world. He had some experience with women, more certainly than Harry. He had spent most of his second year at Oxford stepping out with Daisy, a blonde, long-necked Classicist from St Hugh’s, fumbling his way towards a familiarity with her body, albeit through her clothing, but he had lost his innocence with Eileen, studying at a secretarial college on the Woodstock Road. She lacked Daisy’s fine features, but her edges were softer and she was more like him: provincial, from Nottingham. He would see her every Wednesday evening with the occasional Saturday night trip to the pictures. He kept her entirely separate from his college friends, so that she was more like a mistress than a girlfriend. It slightly shamed him now to think of the secrecy he had maintained about their affair, but she had never questioned it. Instead, on Wednesdays at around 6.30pm, when her room-mate was at choir-practice, she would usher him into her digs – and into her bed.
‘Well, don’t come then, James,’ Harry said, feeling his friend’s scorn. ‘I’m sure there’s an exciting new academic monograph you could be reading.’
‘Since it’s clearly so important to you, old chum, I’ll come and keep you company.’
For once, Knox’s gossip turned out to be accurate. By the time they arrived at the outdoor baths a crowd had already gathered. Mostly men, but also families out for an after-dinner stroll on this steaming night, young children, ice-creams in their hands, some on their fathers’ shoulders – all watching the moonlit swimmers.
Knox elbowed his way through the three-deep throng in order to get closer. But James, at six foot four, had a clear line of sight to the start podiums at the right-hand end of the pool – and he saw her straight away.
Her hair was hidden by a swim cap, but he could see that she was dark, or at least darker than the rest of the girls. There were two fine black lines above her eyes – eyes which even at this distance seemed to sparkle: later he would discover that they were a jewel-like green, as if illuminated from within. Her nose was perfect, not tiny, not a button like some of the other girls’, but somehow strong. She was the tallest among them, her legs long, lean and, thanks to the Catalan sun, bronzed. But it was the animation of her face, her laughter, the way the other women looked to her that marked her out as singular, the natural leader of the group. He was transfixed.
He watched as she organized the team, assigning each of the six a lane. They were giggling, aware of their audience. The white of their swimsuits was almost fluorescent in the searchlight-bright moon, their figures defined in silhouette. As she turned side on, stepping onto the starting block readying for her dive, he marvelled at the shape of her, and when she bent her knees, her arms forming into an arrowhead, it struck him that this was probably how the ancients imagined Diana the huntress, a goddess of perfect strength and beauty. With the moonlight on her and her hair swept up into the white swim cap, she could have been made entirely of marble.
The races went on for a while, the crowd eventually dwindling. But Harry didn’t want to leave and James was only too happy to let him think that staying on was his idea. Once the women were out of the pool and had pulled on their robes, the two of them headed over, trying terribly hard to saunter.
‘I say, you all did terribly well,’ Knox offered as his opening gambit, his voice plummier than usual – a nervous tic which, James recognized, surfaced whenever Harry came face to face with what he called ‘the fairer sex’. James could feel his own heart rate had increased: rather than risk a joke that fell flat or some other gaucheness, he said nothing.
Two of the ladies laughed behind their hands, a third stared intermittently at her feet, stealing shy glances upward. James noticed that five of the six girls were looking at him rather than Harry, a pattern that, he had to admit, he had seen before. All that spoiled the moment was that the goddess was paying him no attention, instead rounding up the equipment and collecting a stopwatch left hanging on the back of an observation chair. Finally she walked over and, assessing the scene, extended her hand immediately towards Harry, bestowing on him a thousand-watt smile.
‘Miss Florence Walsingham,’ she said. Her voice was confident and melodic but with a gentleness that surprised. As Harry stammered a reply, she nodded intently, her eyes only for him. James might as well have not existed. But, curiously, he did not mind. It meant he could stare at her, savour her smile, listen to that voice which instantly suggested the West End at night, dinner on the Strand, cocktails in Pall Mall and a thousand other delights he could only guess at.
As she turned to him, she reached up and removed her swimming cap, allowing long, glossy curls of dark brown hair to fall to her shoulders. Not all of it was dry: the damp ends clung to her cheekbones. Involuntarily, he found himself imagining how this woman would look when she was sweating, while she was making love. His outstretched hand had to remain suspended in mid-air for a second or two before she took it. But when she did, fixing him with that high-wattage gaze, he was over-run. By desire, of course, but also by an urge he had never known before: he wanted to lose himself in her, to dive inside and let the waters close over him.
James and Florence spent every moment of the next four days together. She watched him row, he watched her swim. Both tall, dark and striking, they became one of the more recognizable couples around the Plaza de España. They accompanied one another to the permanent parties in the hotel, on his floor and on hers, but mainly they just wanted to be with each other.
After Florence’s morning swimming practice, they would walk and walk. The swimming baths were in Montjüic, a raised area that had once been a fort and a jail but which had been revamped in time for the International Exhibition seven years earlier. They would start at the newly-landscaped gardens, soaking up the view, then stroll down the hill past the pavilions built for the 1929 exhibition, stopping at the Poble Espanyol, the model Spanish village, and eventually gazing in awe at the fabulously elaborate Magic Fountain. In the warm sunshine, he in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, she in cotton dresses that seemed to float around her, they told each other how they had come to be fraternal team-mates at the People’s Olympiad.
‘Blame Harry and his pals in the ILP,’ he had said, during their first proper conversation.
‘The Independent Labour Party?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Independent Labour Party.’
‘Are you a member?’ she asked.
‘No. I’m what Harry calls a fellow traveller. You?’
‘Well, I’m certainly a socialist if that’s what you mean.’ Hers was an accent he had never heard before he went up to Oxford, certainly not in his home town. It wasn’t the received pronunciation you’d hear on the National Programme. It was the voice Harry lapsed into towards the bottom of a bottle of wine or when he spoke to his mother or, of course, when he was around young ladies: James supposed it was the accent of the upper class, or something close to it. ‘Inevitable, really, given my field.’
‘Your field.’ He marvelled at the arrogance of a twenty-one-year-old girl, four years younger than him, speaking of herself as if she were some kind of expert. ‘And what is your “field”, Miss Walsingham?’
She turned her face up to catch the sun. ‘I’m a scientist, Mr Zennor.’
‘A scientist indeed.’
She ignored his condescension. ‘I’ve just completed my degree in natural sciences at Somerville. I’ll be returning there next year.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘To get my doctorate, of course. I am specializing in biology.’
He considered making a joke – something about undertaking practical research – but wisely changed his mind. ‘What’s that got to do with being a socialist?’
‘You’re a scientist, aren’t you?’
‘Well, some would dispute that, as it happens. Some call psychology “mental philosophy”. Others say it’s the newest branch of medicine.’
‘I don’t care what “some” say.’ She clutched his arm. ‘I want to know what you say.’
He wanted to kiss her there and then, in front of all these people. She only had to look at him like that, with that electric-light smile, and he fell several hundred leagues deeper. ‘All right then,’ he conceded. ‘I say that it’s science too. The science of the mind.’
‘Good. So we’re both scientists.’ She squeezed his hand and he felt her energy flow into him.
He forced himself to concentrate. ‘You still haven’t explained what any of this has to do with socialism.’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Science is reason. It’s about seeing what’s rational and eliminating everything else. Socialism aims to do the same thing: to organize society rationally.’
‘But human beings are not rational, are they?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Just look at us. Here.’ He glanced down at his forearm, on which lightly rested Florence’s slender fingers. ‘What’s rational about this?’
A worried look fleetingly crossed her face, like a wisp of cloud passing the sun. It was gone almost as soon as it had appeared. He could not tell whether she had been concerned at the blow to her argument or at the thought of what she was doing, walking arm in arm in a foreign land with a man she barely knew.
‘Oh, I would say this is perfectly rational,’ she chirped, her enthusiasm recovered. ‘But to persuade you I would have to blind you with science.’
Their love affair continued for the rest of that hot July week, preparing for the start of the Games on the nineteenth. They stayed up late at the street corner bar, listening to Harry play his ukulele along with his impromptu band – two Americans on trumpet and bass, one of whom turned out to be Edward Harrison, eminent foreign correspondent, with a gymnast from Antwerp as the singer – but they remained inside their own cocoon. James wanted to know everything about Florence, and was prepared to tell her more about himself than he had ever told anyone before.
‘So what’s Zennor then? Is that foreign?’
He laughed. ‘Cornwall originally.’
‘Not now?’ she asked, as if disappointed.
‘My ancestors headed east,’ he said. ‘To Bournemouth.’
‘Bournemouth. I see. I thought from “Zennor” you’d have at least, oh, I don’t know, some pirate blood. From Zanzibar—’
‘Or Xanadu.’
‘Cheat,’ she said, giving him a mock slap on the back of his hand, which was in truth another excuse to touch.
He said, ‘Bournemouth is not very exotic, is it?’
‘Not really, I’m afraid, my darling. No foreign blood at all?’
‘My parents are Quakers, if that counts. Both schoolteachers and both Quakers. Maths for him, piano for her. Two more solid, provincial people you could not hope to meet. They’re not quite sure what to make of me.’
‘Aren’t Quakers pacifists?’
‘That’s right.’ He watched as Florence did some rapid mental arithmetic.
‘Does that mean, your father was, you know—’
‘A conshie? Right again.’
‘Heavens. Did he go to jail?’
‘Nearly, but not quite. Sent to do “work of national importance”. In his case, farming.’
‘I see,’ she said, biting her lower lip in a gesture he was already coming to love. ‘So that’s why they moved away from Cornwall. They couldn’t return home after the war: too shaming.’
He stared at her, wondering if he had been the victim of some kind of confidence trick. He had never told anyone that story, not even Harry. But she had intuited the truth.
This is how it was for that short, heady week, the two of them peeling off layers from each other. Sometimes it took the presence of another person, like the night they stayed at the tapas bar long after the rest of the rolling Olympics party had moved on elsewhere.
‘I do hope we’re not keeping you,’ Florence had asked the manager, a rotund man probably twice their age, as he began wiping the tables around them, sometime around two am. He insisted they were not and thanked them for being in Barcelona. In a fractured, bartered conversation – a bit of pidgin English in exchange for a phrase of broken Spanish – they began talking, he explaining that Spain would soon be a model for the world, a communist utopia.
‘Well, if that’s what the people vote for, then that’s what it should be,’ Florence said.
‘Quite right,’ James added. ‘That’s what the army and the church need to get into their heads: the government was elected by the people of Spain. If you don’t like it, vote it out at the next election.’
‘No, no, no,’ the man said, rag still in hand. ‘No voting out. Once we have communism here, it stay that way. Forever.’
‘Even if the people vote against it?’ Florence had asked, her brow furrowed.
‘They won’t vote against it.’
‘Yes, but if they do.’
‘They won’t. They shouldn’t be allowed. Once the revolution is secure, then they can vote.’
‘And how long will that take?’ James asked, picking up where Florence had left off. ‘How long till the revolution is “secure”? That could take decades. Just look at Russia.’
‘The Soviet Union is the greatest democracy in the world!’
Florence and James looked at each other, before Florence said, ‘I don’t think Mr Stalin has to face the voters too often, do you?’
The man looked puzzled.
‘Communism is all very well but only if it’s democratic. Otherwise it’s just as bad as all the other rotten systems, if you ask me,’ James said.
The man resumed his clearing up, then rebuffed James’s repeated attempts to pay the bill: ‘You are guests in my country and you support the republic!’ When James produced a bank note, he shooed them out.
‘It’s like boycotting Berlin,’ James said as they walked slowly back towards her digs. ‘You don’t have to be a communist to detest Hitler and the Nazis. You just have to be a half-decent human being. The man’s a vile brute.’
They were speaking of politics and the world, but really they were exploring each other, discovering with every conversation, every new encounter, how well the curves and contours of their minds fitted together. Then, at stolen moments in the mid-afternoon or late at night, they would do the same with their bodies – cautiously at first, with Florence teasing more than he could bear, then surprising him with sudden passion. His strongest memory was of her face close to his in the dark, their mouths sometimes speaking to each other in a lovers’ hush, sometimes kissing.
The result was a fever for the taste, touch and smell of the other that shocked them both. Merely walking beside Florence, close enough for her scent to reach him, was enough to make him ravenous for her. What was more, and this he had never experienced before – even with sweet, giving Eileen – Florence seemed to feel the same: her desire was equal to his.
And so, while the political skies over Barcelona began to darken, and as the welcoming faces of their Barcelona hosts turned to distracted anxiety, James and Florence focused on the deadly serious business of falling in love.
Only when they heard about the broadcast of a coded message – ‘Over all of Spain, the sky is clear,’ was the plotters’ signal to each other over the radio – did they understand that a coup d’état was underway, fascists and nationalists bent on overthrowing the republican government that had invited the flower of international radical youth to Barcelona, to thumb its nose at the Nazis on parade in Berlin.
Suddenly the notion of sprints, heats and semi-finals seemed horribly irrelevant. Even those who thought the coup would be rapidly put down, who did not imagine the country was about to plunge into a vicious civil war, could see that this was no time for a pretend Olympics. When the rumour spread through the Hotel Olímpico that the games had been cancelled, few waited for confirmation.
James was packing his bag when Harry, his skin fire-engine red, found him. He had, James saw instantly, sobered up fast.
‘Where are you going, Zennor?’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. The Games have been—’
‘Cancelled, I know. But where are you off to?’
‘Well, I thought … if there are no Games. That is, I was going to ask Fl—’
‘You’re not proposing to leave, are you? In the republic’s hour of need?’
James scanned Harry’s face. He seemed entirely in earnest. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘A few of us are staying on. To defend the republic.’
‘But … but, you’re not a soldier.’
‘I can train. The point is, Zennor, we’ve been enlisted, whether we like it or not.’
‘Enlisted?’
‘History is enlisting us.’
James stopped stock-still, holding the lid of his suitcase. It was quite true that, since the day he had arrived, he had understood that something much larger than a sports tournament was at stake. He knew it was easy to romanticize a gathering of fit and handsome young people coming together in the sunshine in a noble cause – but it was not just romance. Barcelona with its People’s Olympiad had become the focus of international opposition to Adolf Hitler and his nasty so-called Third Reich. It was here that the world had said no, taking a stand not only against the Berlin games but against the entire Nazi project. And so an attack on the republic led by ultra-nationalist army officers and backed by fascist thugs was not solely a domestic matter for Spain. It was an attack by fascism itself. There would be a new fault-line now, running through Spain, yes, but dividing all of Europe. Hitler and Mussolini would doubtless be on one side of that line and those who believed in democracy and free speech and all the promise that the twentieth century held in store would be on the other. James Zennor found that he was asking himself a question: whose side are you on?
He snapped his suitcase shut and went to find Florence.
James had to fight a throng of athletes flooding out of the Hotel Olímpico lobby, stampeding for the railway station, to reach her. He was bewildered to find her standing outside, bags already in hand.
‘I was just coming to see you,’ she said. She bit her lip in a way that instantly resolved him not to say what he had planned to say.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to Berlin.’
‘Berlin?’
‘If I leave now, I can make it.’
‘Berlin? Why the hell would you be going there?’
‘It’s not how it looks, James. You have to trust me.’
‘But, what about—’ he gestured at the crowd shoving and pushing around them, at the banners and the bunting.
‘I know, but I have—’
‘All that talk about the “wicked Nazis” and how the Olympics will be just a “glorified Nuremberg rally”. That was all rubbish, wasn’t it? You meant none of it!’
‘That’s not fair.’
That cloud that he had once seen pass across her face so briefly was lodged directly above her now, darkening her eyes. The light within seemed to be faltering. But he could not stop. ‘“I refuse to play any part in it”. That’s what you said. Just talk, wasn’t it? Cheap talk.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’ She was glaring. ‘This is beneath you, James. And it’s certainly beneath me.’
‘Listen—’
‘No, you listen. I don’t know what kind of women you’ve been with before me but this one’ – her index finger tapped her breastbone – ‘makes up her own mind, OK? I will not be told what to do by any man. Not by my father and certainly not by you. You can decide to do whatever you like. But this is my decision. I’ve realized I need to make my point in my own way.’ She paused. ‘Besides, I haven’t done all this training for nothing.’
‘Oh, so that’s it, is it? You don’t want your precious training to be in vain? You want the glory of a bloody medal!’
‘No, that’s not it,’ she said in a low voice, her eyes not meeting his. She was briefly knocked off balance by a group of women hurrying to cross the road and board a bus. ‘I have to leave. I’m sorry.’
He reached out and grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to turn back to face him. ‘And what about this? Us.’ The word tasted awkward in his mouth; he instantly regretted it. ‘You and me. Has this meant nothing to you?’
She tilted her head to one side in an expression he didn’t quite know how to read. Was it pity? Regret? He wondered if he could see tears in her eyes.
‘You don’t understand at all, do you? All that “experimental psychology” and you don’t understand a thing.’
And with that, she broke free of him and disappeared into the swell of people clamouring to get out.
James stood for a while, letting the crowd shift around him, like a stream around a pebble. He could not quite believe what had happened, how quickly he had let her go. How quickly he had pushed her away, more like. What a fool, sounding off like that to a woman he had known for, what, a week? And this was not any woman. You might be able to tell an Eileen, or even a Daisy, what to do – some women positively seemed to like being bossed around. But not Florence. That much should have been obvious. She was independent, strong-willed, with a mind of her own: it partly explained why he was falling in love with her. To have attempted to control such a woman – a brilliant, beautiful woman, who could have any man she wanted – was the mark of a prize idiot.
He had embarrassed himself, there was no other word for it. He had sounded desperate, like some lovesick drip. All that talk of ‘you and me’, of ‘us’ – why, he had got it all wrong. To her, this was a holiday romance, nothing more – a casual fling. How naïve of him to have presumed it was anything more. He was like a girl in a port, stupid enough to believe the sailor who says he loves her. She was young and gorgeous and for her this probably meant no more than a furtive kiss in the chapel during an Oxford ball.
He had a strong urge to turn around that very instant and make the long journey back to Victoria Station. But the thought filled him with cold. The very idea of England without Florence felt barren. Returning to his routine of seminars, papers and long, silent sessions entombed in the dust of the Bodleian … No, he couldn’t do it, not after a week like this.
Perhaps he should chase after her. He could apologize, tell her he had got it all wrong. He could tell her that whatever she had decided, he was sure it was right. Maybe he should follow her to Berlin. It would be worth it, even for just one more night with her, touching her skin, smelling her hair, hearing her laugh.
But that would sound more desperate still. He would be clinging to her, like a limpet. She would soon want to shake him off. And what respect would she have for a man so ready to abandon his principles, decrying Hitler and the ‘fascist circus’ of the Berlin Olympics one minute, only to come scurrying to the Games the next? It was one thing for her to do it; she had her own, mysterious reasons. She had her point to make, ‘in her own way’. He would have no such excuse.
Anyway, she had not asked him. If she had wanted him at her side, she would have asked, and she had done no such thing. It would be humiliating to follow her to Berlin, trotting after her like a devoted little spaniel.
He looked upward, watching the red and yellow of the People’s Olympiad banner come down, replaced by a flag of deepest red, and let himself fill up with the sensations he had felt earlier: the call of liberty, the demand of justice, the imperative that all those who were fit and able fight the good fight, saving the republic from those who would destroy it and much of civilization along with it. The void love had left in his heart would be filled by history.
THREE
Oxford, July 8 1940
James slid his key into the lock noiselessly. He always tried to be quiet on these early mornings, so as not to wake the baby. But there was the smell of human warmth in the hallway, suggesting Florence and Harry were already up. He called out, ‘Good morning!’ There was silence.
He wandered into the kitchen, noting that two of the three drawers were still open. Had they had to rush out for something? Had his son been ill while he was on the river? He called out again. ‘Harry? Daddy’s home.’
Once in the bedroom, his concern rose. Clothes were strewn over the floor, a chair from the bathroom dragged in front of his cupboard, whose door was flung wide open. His scrapbook was on the bed, several pictures shaken loose. Now James ran into his study, only to have his worst fears confirmed. The drawers were pulled from the desk, the floor covered with their contents along with dozens of books. There had been a robbery, just now, while he was out.
And yet the most valuable objects in the house, a pair of solid silver candlesticks, worth several years of his fellow’s salary – a wedding gift from her parents – were still sitting, untouched, on the mantelpiece. If they had been robbed, and if Florence had rushed from here to the police station to report it, a screaming Harry in tow, then the culprits must be the stupidest men in Oxford.
As he went back to the bedroom, a new thought began to form. He opened his wife’s cupboard and, while he could not have said exactly which items were missing, he could see that the shelves were unusually bare. A look under the bed confirmed that the suitcase was gone.
Now his head began to throb. He ran into Harry’s bedroom, looking for one thing. He went straight to the bed, pulled away the pillow and then tore off the blankets. No sign of Snowy, the boy’s toy polar bear. His place was always here, in Harry’s bed. If they went anywhere overnight, whether staying at the Walsinghams’ London home in Chelsea, as they had done a couple of times, or at the country house in Norfolk, Snowy always came with them. Harry couldn’t sleep without him. The fact that the bear was missing, even more than the absent suitcase, could mean only one thing.
Instantly and without conscious thought, James ran back into the hall and out of the front door, down the garden path and onto the wide, tree-lined road that was Norham Gardens. He looked left and then right, then left again: nothing, save for a large, heavy black car pulling away at the Banbury Road end of the street. All else was tranquil at this hour, the larger buildings opposite – once among the grandest houses in Oxford, but which were now often satellite buildings for assorted academic departments – were still locked up and empty, their gravel driveways undisturbed.
With no more reflection than before, he ran in the opposite direction, stopping just before Norham Gardens came to a dead-end at Lady Margaret Hall. The college porter, sweeping outside the front gate, lifted an arm in acknowledgement but James ignored him, instead turning hard right down a narrow pathway. This would lead to the University Parks. Would Florence have taken Harry here so early? Perhaps the boy had had a tantrum, perhaps he had developed that child’s version of cabin fever for which the only remedy was fresh air. But then why had the house been turned upside down and why was the suitcase missing?
James vaulted over the gate – officially this entrance was for members of Lady Margaret Hall only – into the wide, flat stretches normally green but now a dry, sun-scorched brown: ahead and to his right was a strip of turf the colour of a digestive biscuit. This was the Oxford University Cricket Club, still and dormant.
A flicker of movement to his left: a matronly woman with a headscarf, walking her dog. He scoped the horizon one more time, left to right and back again. There seemed to be no one else around. And certainly no sign of Florence and Harry.
He walked the short distance back but now it felt like a long trudge. It was becoming impossible to avoid the conclusion that Florence had not left the house for some early-morning exercise, nor because there had been a break-in, but because she had left him.
Back at the house he felt instantly mocked by the outward serenity of the scene: the creeping white roses around the front door, the low wall containing a small, pretty garden with its trim lawn and single chair. He could picture Florence and Harry sitting there, the boy on his mother’s knee, turning the pages of his illustrated edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. With one shove of his right arm, James sent the chair crashing to the ground.
Once inside, he went straight back to his wife’s wardrobe, standing closer this time, so that the scent of her rose from the few remaining clothes. He pulled out a drawer, now empty but for a few forlorn items: an old comb, a broken brooch. Her jewellery box was there. He opened it and saw that all the pieces he had given her – including the bracelet that was a gift to celebrate their reunion – were gone. He picked up the Japanese lacquerware box and, without thinking, hurled it against the far wall. The shattering sound provided a momentary shock of relief.
She had left him. She had left him, just as he had always feared she would. Who was it, he wondered? It could only be a much older man. All those his age or younger were at war. McGregor at the lab, working with her on ‘research’? Or that Fabian smoothie, what was his name? Leonard something.
He started running through all the possibilities, each time inflicting on himself the image of his wife in the arms of another, her mouth on his, her hair touching his shoulders …
Now he began pacing the house. How long had it been going on? How long had she been planning for this moment, never letting on a thing? Smiling at him, chatting away as if there was nothing out of the ordinary, when all the time she was scheming, preparing …
And to take little Harry with her, treating their son as if he were her personal property …
He could feel it returning, the sensation which these past three years had become as familiar to him as an old friend. He could almost hear it, like the first intimation of distant thunder or the tremor of an approaching underground train. It was building inside him, getting stronger with each beat, until it was rushing through his veins, a rage that could not be stopped. He could picture it too, hot and viscous as lava, a physical substance that, once stirred, would swell inside his body, surging forward, searching for escape. The rage controlled him now; it would brook no restraint until it had erupted. He was merely its vessel.
The terrible truth, that he had admitted only once and never to Florence, was that he did not loathe or despise this feeling. Instead, he greeted this molten fury when it came with something close to relief. For weeks on end he had to hold it all in, to speak calmly, to smile at acquaintances, to feign interest in students, to discuss cricket or Herodotus with some fossilized nonagenarian at high table. But when the fury came, it came with elemental force, a force that cared for nothing but his appetites, his fears and his rage. When James was in the grip of this anger, he did not care about the consequences of his actions or what the neighbours would think. He did not think at all. It made him free.
He reached for one of those damnable candlesticks and, satisfied by the weight of it in his hand, threw it squarely at the window looking out on the back garden: it sailed through, smashing the glass but clipping the window-frame on its exit, splitting the white wood. He heard it land hard on the flagstones beyond. To hell with the bloody Walsinghams and their bloody adulterous daughter!
Next he turned to the dresser, containing their best china. He opened the glass-fronted door and removed the largest plate, and hurled it, discus-style, in the same direction as the candlestick. It went askew, smashing on the wall to the right of the window. The noise was too feeble to sate him, so he took another plate and threw that one to the floor. Softened by the rug, it broke in two with a single crack. Reaching for a third, he smashed it on the table before him; it cut his wrist on impact, producing a jagged wound. The sight of the welling blood brought the eruption to a halt and suddenly he felt tired, spent.
And now came the reckoning, the feeling of disgust that followed release. He surveyed his surroundings, strewn with rubble of his own making. So much destruction. Again.
He stumbled towards Harry’s room and slumped onto his son’s infant bed, imagining he could still feel the boy’s warmth. At this moment, Harry was probably walking between Florence and the man who had stolen her from him. They were each holding one of the boy’s hands, calling out ‘one-two-three’ then lifting and swinging him through the air. The man was smiling at Florence who was looking more beautiful than ever. How long before Harry called him Daddy?
As if trying to escape the thought, James headed to his study, now as cavernously empty as the rest of the house, suddenly desperate for a cigarette. The first hit of nicotine flooded through him, swamping his neural circuitry, just as he wanted it to. As he exhaled, a fresh thought occurred to him, one sparked by the ache in his shoulder, now pulsing with increased voltage. Florence had tired of him, and who could blame her?
She had tired of living with an invalid. Not yet thirty, James was already a veteran with a war wound. A cripple. Yes, he could row, though at nothing like his former strength and at such enormous effort. He was still a cripple, rejected three times for military service, despite his repeated appeals and best endeavours at string-pulling in Whitehall. So what did that make him? A cripple who tried hard. A Victorian oddity, on display in a travelling show. Good old James: shoulder smashed to pieces, but still he does make a jolly good effort, I’ll say that for him.
Florence, on the other hand, was twenty-four and in her impeccable prime. Why would such a perfect creature want to be paired with a physically damaged specimen, why would she tolerate it? She needed more than he could give her.
He thought of the first time, not long after it happened, when he had realized this. They were back in England, married for less than a year. He had woken with a terrible thirst and croaked out, ‘Florence! Florence?’
And then he had seen that her side of the bed was empty. He had hauled himself up and staggered to the kitchen. He had been about to go inside when he had stopped short, halted by the sound of sobbing. He had watched her for what seemed like an hour, though it was probably no more than seconds. Her back had been to him, her shoulders rising and falling in rapid, short jerks. She was pregnant and he had decided that she must be in pain, that there must be some kind of complication and that she needed his help. He had stepped forward, drawing level with the doorway, before realizing that she was, in fact, crying for him – for what he had once been and for what he would never be again. He had opened his mouth, his lips forming his wife’s name, but they emitted no sound, just a dry, papery rasp. She did not turn around.
He had returned to their bed without her ever noticing that he had left it. And that was hardly the last time he had seen her cry.
The memory left a bitter taste: he decided he needed a drink. He poured himself a full glass of Scotch, downed it, then poured another. Florence had left him before, he now thought. After their very first week together, she had left him. Or that was how he had understood it at the time.
She had told him she was going to Berlin, to take up the place she had never formally surrendered in the British Olympic team. He had accused her of vanity, of betraying the principles that surely they both shared. He had embarrassed himself, speaking of ‘us’, as if they had sworn solemn vows, when they had known each other for little more than a week. He had sensed in Florence Walsingham a kindred spirit. She was not like Harry, with his ideological tracts and his alphabet soup of political parties. She seemed to see things the way he did: that what was happening around them was not really about politics, but about right and wrong. You didn’t have to carry a party card to know the difference, to know on which side of the line a decent person had to stand. By heading to Berlin, she had announced she was crossing over to the other side.
He was the older of the two of them, and yet he had been so bloody juvenile. So naïve. She had told him to trust her, that she was going to make her point in her own way, but he had not listened.
Instead he and Harry Knox had stayed in Spain, to do what they could to defend the now-endangered republic. They had watched as a flood of French communists who had made the same decision poured into both the Basque country and Catalonia. As those volunteers and others from all over Europe and beyond gradually formed into the International Brigades, he and Harry gladly signed up.
There had been quite a few people in their position, two hundred by one estimate: athletes who had been expecting to take part in the People’s Olympiad but who would soon find themselves learning how to dig a trench or use a rifle. (It was a Czech, tipped for gold in the twenty-five metre rapid-fire pistol event, who had first taught James his safety catch from his trigger.)
Most there were like Harry, serious men driven by political conviction – and that conviction was usually Marxism. Some saw the Spanish republic as a laboratory experiment, a test bed for socialism that had to be protected. But plenty saw it the way James did. He had been adamant that he would not be used as an extra in Hitler’s pageant of the master-race in Berlin, and he was equally clear that Francisco Franco and his fascist allies in the Falange could not be allowed to overturn the will of the Spanish people by toppling a government the people had chosen. It was a clash of democracy versus brute force: pretty straightforward really.
And what James could not deny, though he would not have admitted it out loud or even quietly to himself, was that this epic struggle between good and evil had come along at the right time – just when he needed a cause in which he could lose himself.
So he was happy to join the internationals as they journeyed first to Valencia, where they paraded through the streets, greeted by flags, placards and ragged banners, their slogans chalked in white, and by endlessly-repeated chants. James heard lots of vivas, quickly echoed by the French communists leading the column, who began to shout Vive le Front Populaire! or Vive la Republique! But the most constant refrain was No Pasaran!, the slogan James would see daubed on walls and hear at rallies for most of the next year. As he and Harry walked with others from the International Brigades, diffident and surprised to be feted in such fashion, the townspeople would sometimes join in, walking among them for a block or two, before joining the crowds stretched along the pavements. They were being hailed as heroes, like the warriors of ancient myth. And they had not yet fired a shot. When they came to leave Valencia, and their train was delayed for a long while before moving off, the local women compensated them by offering free kisses to anyone who stuck his head out of the window.
James remembered the mood of almost reckless idealism that had gripped him and his new comrades in that late summer of 1936: young men, from all over the world, united in a cause that was just and noble. And in his mind it was intertwined inseparably with the love that he carried for Florence, the spark lit during that brief, exhilarating week in Barcelona and which burned in the months afterwards. It burned even as that train took him to Albacete, the nowhere city in La Mancha where the International Brigades would have their headquarters and training camp. Though that term flattered it: there was no formal training, just a period set aside early each morning for exercise. Perhaps in a nod to the anarchists then so influential in the republic, each unit was to devise its own exercise programme with no order from any commanding officer telling them what to do. James and his group had prepared for war by playing leapfrog.
Now slumped in his chair in Norham Gardens, the whisky doing its work, he gazed up at the mantelpiece, at the picture frame that contained no photograph but only a small, singed newspaper clipping. He had preserved it because that little piece of paper had brought Florence back to him.
He had been on guard duty at the Albacete camp, his group having been saddled with the two am shift. The war was in its eighth week, it was late September and the nights were getting cold. A Yugoslavian comrade had passed him a shred of newspaper, urging James to use it to relight a dwindling fire. He had just put a match to it when he noticed it was in English; indeed it was a page from The Times. Hungry for news, he had blown out the flame so that he could scan the items: a ship lost in the Atlantic, troubles for Mr Baldwin’s government. Then a name leapt out at him.
Miss Walsingham’s withdrawal from the Games disappointed British organizers, who had believed she was a racing certainty for a gold medal, having secured her place in the final with the fastest qualifying time. But the champion swimmer said that she had never intended to compete in the last stage of the Olympic swimming competition. ‘I wanted to show Herr Hitler that his nasty little Nazis are not the best in the world, whatever they might say. Whoever comes first on Sunday will be second best – and they will know it.’
James reached for it now, reading it again, nearly four years later, as he let a third glass of whisky warm his throat. For months that clipping had stayed in his wallet, second best to having a photograph of her. He had kept it with him until they had made contact again, kept it with him, in fact, until they had set up this house as their marital home (thanks to some help from Papa Walsingham).
Once in its frame, it became quite a conversation piece: Florence used to like telling the story. But for James it was more than just a memento of their romance. It was also a reminder to him of his own naïveté. He kept it lest he forget that sometimes – often – she was right and he was wrong.
He had written to Florence immediately, addressing his letters to her Oxford college. He had little confidence in the wartime postal service of a country divided against itself, but whenever he passed a mailbox, even in the remotest Spanish village, he would send another letter. When he ran into Ed Harrison, covering the war for Time magazine, the American journalist had let slip that he was returning to the States via London: James promptly pushed a letter into his hand.
In each version he wrote the same thing, apologizing for his pig-headedness, applauding her bravery for what she had done in Berlin – and then congratulating both of them for taking a stand for what was right. He described the action he was seeing, at first doctoring the actuality just a touch to ensure he gave a good impression of himself. But eventually he simply recorded the unvarnished truth, flattering or otherwise. He faithfully recorded, for example, the midday attempt he and a contingent of mainly British volunteers had made to storm a hilltop monastery deep in the Castilian countryside, now converted into a Nationalist fort. He had been inching forward on his stomach, the earth scratching his face as he advanced. Within moments, he had heard bullets swish through the grass above his ears. Only the sound of gunfire coming from his comrades behind made him realize that he was meant to fire back. He pointed his rifle in the direction of the enemy and squeezed the trigger – only to hear a single, dull click. He suddenly felt utterly exposed, vulnerable to instant death (though, he wrote to Florence, ‘I soon learned that the ability to shoot back is no guarantee of safety’). Still lying prone, the air around him whizzing with gunfire, he had emptied out the failed ammunition and loaded a fresh clip of cartridges. Still nothing. So it wasn’t his fault; his weapon was a dud. Only the presence of Harry Knox, scrabbling up the hillside just behind him with a functioning gun had saved him.
In his letters, he would offer his half of the conversation he imagined they would be having – about the course of the war, the intervention on the Nationalists’ side of the Germans and the Italians, the republic’s desperate need for Britain to get involved. He wrote often, once a week at least, and kept writing even when he had reached Madrid for what he and his fellow volunteers believed would be the decisive battle of the war.
Madrid. By rights his memories of Madrid should have been sources of horror – and plenty of them were. He had spent twelve long days with the XII International Brigade in an event that would be named, in the heroic language of such things, the defence of Madrid. On the ground and in the moment, it felt much less epic. For a man raised on English schoolboy notions of battles – at Agincourt or Hastings – it was a shock to realize quite how messy, confused and appalling was the reality.
The battle was fought in the northwest of the city, where Franco’s forces were attempting to break into the capital, with the action focused on the university district. The result was a crazed, shifting series of skirmishes in and around the academic buildings. It might have been funny if there had not been so much death around – the notion of an armed advance to capture the geography block, followed by a retreat back to the literature department. James was involved in a series of particularly furious counter-attacks to recapture the Hall of Philosophy.
In one operation, James and a dozen others had had to run across an open space of some forty yards. They did it in threes, a frantic dash in which the men at James’s side had simply fallen away as they ran, shot noiselessly it seemed to him. By the time he reached the other side, he came across perhaps a hundred dead bodies, Moroccans mostly, men of the Army of Africa, veterans of Spain’s colonial wars enlisted into Franco’s forces. James had been transfixed by the sight of the corpses. Most had not been killed cleanly, by gunfire. Instead shells had shredded their bodies; Mills bombs had blown off their arms and legs. He could smell burning and turned to see a small fire, no larger than the ones he remembered from the scouting weekends of his boyhood. Except this time, in place of logs, were two dead men burning steadily. He had not vomited, nor wept, as he might have expected of himself. Instead he had simply stared, feeling as if he had failed these men by arriving too late. But perhaps by looking at them, really looking at them, as if they were men rather than corpses, he could give them a small measure of dignity.
He had, to his surprise, become an effective soldier, his willingness to take risks winning the admiration of his superiors. A few called him El Corajudo, the brave one. Eventually, he had been given intelligence duties, including surveillance of those the Republican brass suspected as infiltrators or spies. Until the day whose details he could not remember, the day whose consequences he was never allowed to forget.
And yet, despite everything, the word ‘Madrid’ did not fill him with dread. For he associated Madrid with Florence.
Eventually, after perhaps his dozenth letter, he had got a reply. She explained that, not long after the fuss about her performance in Berlin had faded, she had decided that she too ought to be in Spain, to give what she could to the cause of freedom. Like him, she was reluctant to write down the complete truth: that she wanted to be with him. And he, no less ardently, wanted to be with her.
Florence became a nurse, treating the wounded at the Red Cross Hospital in Avenida Reina Victoria, in northwest Madrid. She had no training to speak of, but that was hardly unusual. She relied instead on the instruction of Marjorie, a stout and seasoned volunteer from Baltimore, who had abandoned her job as a sister on the wards of the city hospital there to treat the besieged people of the republic; she taught Florence and the other women under her the basics. And, Florence being Florence, she had read several books on medicine and anatomy en route to embattled Spain, mugging up on the ship from Marseille to Valencia, leaving James in no doubt that she had rapidly become as expert as any of the doctors.
His service at the front and hers at the hospital meant they could not see each other much, but that only made their encounters through the autumn of 1936 the more exquisite. Instead of sleeping in a shallow trench – little more than a ditch, bolstered by a few sandbags – surrounded by unwashed men, James would find himself in a room in the Hotel Gran Via where, before anything, he and Florence would soak in a hot bath together, then make love and then make love again. They would eat a long dinner, trading tales of what they had seen, before climbing the staircase and returning to bed. No matter how exhausted they were, they would stay awake much of the night – believing that to sleep was to squander the strictly-rationed supply of time they had together.
During the day, they might walk out, surveying the latticework of tramlines and improvised barricades Madrid had become. ‘It looks like London during street-mending,’ Florence said, pointing to braziers just like those English labourers might use to warm their hands.
Once they were out walking together during an air raid. The city was all but defenceless in the face of attack from the air: there were no anti-aircraft weapons and the Republicans were reduced to mounting cinema projectors on the rooftops to do the work of searchlights. But this raid came in the middle of the day. Florence and James were at a street market when suddenly they heard the overhead whine of German planes and, seconds later, the thudding crash, the cloud of dust and the screams caused by a falling bomb.
They ran together to a scene of appalling destruction, lumps of blood and flesh barely recognizable as bodies. James was quickly drafted into helping move a slab of concrete under which a man, conscious and still wearing his hat, had his legs trapped. Only later did he notice Florence kneeling by a little girl, who lay as still as a doll.
Perhaps it was because the people of Madrid themselves returned to normal so quickly – the shops lifting their shutters within a few hours, the elderly couples strolling once more in the late afternoon – that somehow these events did not obliterate all other memories of their time together. Despite everything, James thought of those final months of 1936 as among the happiest times of his life. ‘It’s not despite the war, it’s because of it,’ Florence had said once as she gazed out of the window of their hotel room, watching the blue beams thrown into the sky by machines that a few months earlier had lit up the local cinema screen with Fred and Ginger, dancing together cheek-to-cheek.
‘Because of it?’ he had asked from the bed.
‘Yes, because. Fear of death makes love more intense: isn’t that what it says in your psychology books?’
‘“Make love”? Did someone say “make love”?’ And he dragged her back under the covers so that he could touch her skin and taste her mouth all over again.
On Christmas Eve, after less than two months together, they went to the ayuntamiento, the town hall on the Plaza de la Villa, to be married by a grandly-moustached socialist councillor, who hailed theirs as a ‘revolutionary wedding’, a civil ceremony conducted in defiance of the Catholic church, now fatally identified with Franco. The ceremony was brief and chaotic, punctuated by rowdy cheers from the crowd of well-wishers that had gathered all but spontaneously. Harry was best man and held the ring, bought from a jeweller whose shop window had been blown out in that afternoon bombing raid but who had reopened for business the very next day. Sister Marjorie was there as Florence’s witness. They had had to utter their vows in Spanish, so that James would forever cherish the words, Sí, quiero, the Spanish equivalent of ‘I do’, seeing them as somehow belonging to him and Florence alone – their private language.
Now, he considered pouring himself another glass of Scotch, but thought better of it: he drank straight from the bottle instead. That had all been less than four years ago, but it might as well have happened in another age. To another man. Florence had left him because she had grown to despise him. He had been a good, loving husband and father, but it had not been enough. She would now shower that exceptional vigour, energy and beauty on another man. He felt the anger rise in him once more, his old sparring partner back for another round.
He got up, not wanting to be in the same room as that framed newspaper clipping, and walked into the kitchen, stumbling in the hallway on a chair he couldn’t remember knocking over, and saw it straight away, wondering instantly how he could have missed it.
On the table, resting against the conical flask Florence had brought home from the lab and converted into a vase, was a small envelope – quarter-sized, the kind that would usually contain a florist’s card accompanying a bouquet. No name on it.
He tore it open and recognized her handwriting instantly.
She had written just three words: I love you.
James felt a pricking sensation behind his eyes. He blinked and then read it again. Was this some kind of trick?
She had left him, taking Harry with her, and yet she still loved him? What sense did that make? It was insincere, a fake greeting card, ‘I love you’, scribbled to offset the cruelty of her actions. That must be it.
And yet he did not believe that either. Florence was only ever sincere about love. She did not use the word lightly; they had been together a long time before she told him that she loved him. He knew, too, that he was the first man ever to hear those words from her lips. If she had written it, she meant it. That there was no other message made it truer still. That she loved him was her entire meaning.
He held the card and read it a dozen more times, turning it over, then reading it again. The words were balm to the bruise she had left on his heart, but after the relief came another sensation: a bafflement that grew deeper by the moment.
FOUR
It sounded like a fusillade of gunfire, distant rather than deadly. The sun was high and James’s shirt was sticking to his back. He squinted against the brightness of a Spanish noon but he could not see where the noise was coming from. He was in the bombed-out ruin of what, he guessed, had once been a farmworker’s cottage. The walls still stood, though they were pocked by bullet-holes. Whole chunks of plaster were missing, exposing the brick underneath, like snatched glimpses of flesh. The windows had no glass, the doorways were empty arches. And when he looked down at his feet, he saw that the ground itself seemed to be sinking slowly. He was in a house that was crumbling before his eyes. And now the gunfire started again …
He woke with a start, his heart thumping. He looked around, confused. When he realized he was slumped in an armchair, he sat bolt upright, knocking over the bottle of whisky lodged at his side. Damn. It had soaked the top of his trousers, drenching his left thigh. And then came that rat-tat-tat again; not gunfire, but someone at the door.
James remembered after a moment of delay what had happened, the recollection landing like a deadweight on his chest. Harry and Florence were gone.
The knocking again. He stood up, aware of a chill draught in the house. Of course: the hole in the kitchen window, shattered by the candlestick.
‘Dr Zennor?’
Oh no. The voice, unmistakable, belonged to Virginia Grey. James encountered her most often as one half of the couple that together ran his college: her husband was Master. But that accounted for only a small part of their influence. Bernard and Virginia Grey were luminaries of the British intellectual Left. You couldn’t open a copy of the New Statesman without coming across an article by or about them, the latter usually reviewing a pamphlet or book they had produced either singly or together. They were a dominant force in the Fabian Society and, through that, the Labour party, their ideas and proposals constantly debated in the national press or taken up as policy. They hosted a high table that was regularly graced by Westminster politicians and the country’s most eminent theorists.
The Greys had taken Florence and James under their wing almost as soon as they had returned from Madrid, insisting that Florence transfer her doctoral work to the college, demanding they have their Spanish marriage blessed in the college chapel – where they had acted as if they were the parents of the bride. His own parents had sat polite, quiet and thoroughly overwhelmed through the whole event.
Now in their late sixties, the Greys had their doubts about James’s field, regarding psychology as new-fangled and experimental. They urged him to switch to political science instead – though, to his irritation, they always appeared riveted by Florence’s work on evolutionary biology. James suspected they rather fancied the Zennors might become the future Greys of the 1970s, seeing themselves in this ‘handsome young couple’; seeing too, perhaps, an opportunity to extend their influence beyond the grave. They had no children of their own.
Brushing crumbs of a half-eaten sandwich off himself and onto the wooden floor, he opened the door. ‘Good mor—’ He stopped, suddenly aware that he had no idea what time it was.
‘Thank heavens. I was beginning to wonder if you were dead! I’ve been knocking on your door for seven minutes.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Grey. I wonder if I could call on you later. Now is not—’
‘Are you unwell, James dear? You do sound a little off-colour.’ Her tone was bossily familiar, a mother talking to a recalcitrant child.
‘I am feeling a little under the weather, as it—’
‘I think I ought to come in.’
‘I really would rather—’
‘Chop, chop, James.’
That was how the Greys were: they would not take no for an answer, so no one ever gave it to them. He opened the door.
‘Oh Lord. You look absolutely dreadful!’ Her eyes darted past him, no doubt taking in the devastation; then she wrinkled her nose in distaste: she had smelled the whisky.
‘What has been going on here?’ She marched into the room uninvited.
‘Would you like a drink, Mrs Grey?’ He took an almost malign pleasure in the appalled expression on her face.
‘I rather think you’ve had enough of that already, don’t you?’
‘I was actually offering one to you, Mrs Grey. But if you won’t, I will.’
She ignored this remark, instead finding a chair and making herself comfortable. Then in a voice that was kindly, and nearly free of the usual imperiousness, she said, ‘Can I suggest you tell me what happened?’
James sat down too, realizing that he was grateful for the chance to speak to another person. ‘It would appear that Florence has left me.’
Grey stifled a gasp. ‘Good God, no. When?’
‘This morning. I came back from sculling and the house was empty.’
‘And Harry?’
‘She’s taken him with her.’
James watched a thought flicker across Grey’s face, stern beneath its bun of silver hair. Her initial shock seemed now to give way to urgency, the practical desire to act and to act immediately. ‘Have you spoken to her? Has she telephoned?’
‘She left a note.’
‘A note? What did it say?’
‘Nothing.’ He paused, weighing up the temptation to tell her everything. But something held him back. Was it loyalty to Florence? Was it embarrassment? ‘Nothing that explains anything anyway.’
‘Had she ever talked about leaving before?’
‘No. Never.’
‘So why do you presume she left?’
‘She must have met someone else. She is the most beautiful woman in Oxford, after all. Your husband called her that, as I recall, at our wedding celebration.’
A picture instantly sprang into his head. That Indian summer’s day, late September 1937, in the college garden: Florence, heavily pregnant and glowing with good health. Next to her, on crutches, James himself, his smile for the photographer more of a wince. Though the Greys had insisted on the location, the idea of the celebration had come from Florence’s parents: ‘Darling, you’ve denied us the delight of seeing our daughter married; you will not deprive us of our right to throw an enormous party.’ So nine months after they had exchanged their Spanish vows, they had listened as Sir George Walsingham made a toast extolling the qualities of his wonderful daughter while Bernard Grey made jokes at James’s expense and, like a man who could not help himself, offered repeated paeans to the beauty of the bride.
‘Her attractiveness has no bearing on her willingness or otherwise to pair with other men, nor to leave you. Unless you have any evidence to the contrary, James?’ Virginia Grey asked tartly.
James closed his eyes. ‘No, I don’t suppose I do.’
‘You have made a telephone call to Florence’s parents of course.’
He sighed. ‘No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.’
‘Well, why ever not? She’s probably on her way there now. It’s the first place any young girl goes when there’s trouble at home.’
‘She’s not gone there. Believe me.’
‘Well, it’s the obvious place to start and I insist that you check. Now where’s the number? I’ll—’
‘Please! Mrs Grey. Florence hasn’t spoken to her mother in … for a while.’
Virginia Grey frowned.
James looked away, guilty to be breaking one of his wife’s secrets. ‘They’re not speaking to each other at present.’
Silence hung in the air until eventually Mrs Grey spoke again. ‘I imagine it will be awkward, but I fear you will have to do it all the same. She has almost certainly gone there and no proper search can begin until you have at least eliminated that possibility.’
James could hardly fault her logic; but the thought of making such a call filled him with dread. What would he say? If he announced that Florence had gone missing, he would be admitting that she had left him. If Mrs Grey was right, that would make no odds: the Walsinghams would know already. But if she was wrong, well, then he would be making an entirely needless confession. And before he knew it, Sir George Bloody Walsingham would be taking charge, alerting his contacts in the Oxford constabulary until they had tracked down his daughter and grandson, while Lady Walsingham would be giving him that withering look of hers, a woman’s look that said ‘No wonder she’s left you: you’re not a proper man any more.’
They already blamed him anyway. He was the reason why Florence had stormed out of that dinner in London with her parents, back in April (or was it February?). He could scarcely remember what the row had been about, probably something trivial about the menu or the taxi home. But the underlying cause was obvious. The Walsinghams believed their daughter had married beneath herself: she, whose pedigree breeding would have secured the richest, most desirable man in the kingdom, married to this son of provincial schoolteachers who was crippled to boot. To announce that he could not find Florence or Harry, that he had been discarded, would be to confirm their verdict on him: he was not good enough.
A voice called out from the hallway. ‘They live in Norfolk, don’t they?’ As good as her word, Virginia Grey was standing by the telephone table, about to make the call.
James ran out and grabbed the phone from her. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said quietly. This was how the Greys operated, bending everyone to their will.
Virginia hovered as he heard his own breathing through the heavy, Bakelite receiver and then a click as the operator came on the line. ‘The name is Walsingham, please,’ he said. ‘In Langham in Norfolk. Thank you.’ He waited, listening to the clicks and switching sounds, picturing the exchanges as they plugged in the series of cables that would send his voice eastward across England.
Eventually there was the ringing sound, followed after four rings by a female voice: middle-aged and aristocratic. ‘Wells 452.’
‘Lady Walsingham? It’s James. Florence’s husband.’
‘Good afternoon, James. I’m afraid Sir George is out.’ Ite. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘No, there’s nothing wrong.’ The echo on the line was confusing him, making him trip over his words as they bounced back to him two seconds later. ‘I just wondered if I might speak to Florence.’
‘Florence? I don’t understand.’
‘Florence and Harry. They’re not with you?’
‘No. Why ever would they be with us? You always come in August.’
He listened closely to the voice, trying to detect a lie. They were polished, people of her class, he had learned that much after more than a decade in Oxford, whether as undergraduate or fellow. She and Sir George – a powerful figure in the City and a decorated officer in the Great War – were as elegant in their manner as in their looks. They were a handsome couple: Florence’s mother, once a society beauty, had her daughter’s piercing eyes and perfect bone structure. Was Florence standing nearby, mouthing answers to her? If she were, he would never know it. And yet, he had to confess it did not sound like that at all.
‘James? Are you still there? Has something happened?’
‘No, no. Not at all.’ Hearing his own voice played back to him, even he did not believe it. ‘Just some confusion on my part.’
‘Is Florence unwell? Is Harry all right?’ The concern was genuine, he was certain of it.
‘Yes, yes. Everyone’s well. I just thought they might have … perhaps …’ He mumbled a farewell and hung up.
Virginia Grey did not say anything. She bit her lip and headed towards the kitchen. ‘Time for a pot of tea, I think.’
While she was fussing over cups and spoons, she asked, her tone as casual as if she were inquiring where she might find the sugar, ‘How have things been between you? Recently I mean.’
He hesitated, reluctant to confide in her. But it was clear she was keen to help and it was somehow comforting not to be conducting this search entirely alone. ‘We’re not newlyweds any more, Mrs Grey. But I believe our marriage is strong.’
She stopped her tea preparations and gazed at him.
‘You’re not convinced,’ he said.
‘It does not matter a jot whether I am convinced, my dear. That is not at issue here.’
‘Did she say something to you?’
Grey stared out into the garden and her hair caught the sunlight, turning the silver to bright white.
‘I don’t think it was anything specif—’
‘So she did say something! What the hell was it?’ Now he stood up, looming over her. He could feel his veins engorging, the rage stirred and beginning to surge.
Grey’s expression looked more pitying than alarmed, which only fuelled James’s ire. ‘Come on,’ he said loudly, ‘answer me!’
In a voice that was studiedly calmer and quieter than before, she said, ‘This.’ She gestured towards him. ‘She told me about this. Your aggression. She told me about your fights, James.’
‘We have had disagreements. Every couple has dis—’
‘She was not referring to disagreements, James. She was referring to violent displays of temper. I can see for myself the broken crockery here today.’
‘Today is hardly typical.’
‘She told me that there was a constant tension in the house.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Her exact words were, “I feel as if the ground is covered with eggshells. And I’m tiptoeing my way through them.”’
‘Eggshells? I know what that’s about. That’s my punishment for demanding quiet when I work. Any scholar would be the same. It’s impossible to do serious reading with an infernal racket going on.’
‘What infernal racket?’
‘Harry shouting and shrieking when he’s playing. I lost my temper a few times.’ He could picture the tears trickling down his son’s cheeks, the little boy standing in the garden crying after James had exploded again, Florence holding Harry tight, explaining that it was not his fault, not his fault at all, James standing apart from them, too ashamed to step forward and hug Harry himself – a shame whose sting he felt again now. But what he said stiffly was, ‘I’m sure the Master would have been the same in my position.’
The silver-haired author of half a dozen books and a couple of hundred learned articles eyed him coolly. ‘Yes. Even I might struggle to do my needlepoint with that distraction.’
James realized his mistake. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Grey. I didn’t mean—’
‘Don’t worry, Dr Zennor. I’ve been condescended to by far greater men than yourself.’ She now placed the teapot at the centre of the table and took a seat. ‘Florence was worried about you. She said you were drinking heavily.’
‘For heaven’s sake, can a man not drink a glass of Scotch in his own home?’
‘At high table the other night, you had Perkins return to the cellar at least twice.’
‘So you think my wife left me because I’m some kind of dipsomaniac?’
‘No one is saying your wife has left you.’
‘She’s not here, is she?’
‘No, she is not. But there is no evidence that she has left you, in the rather melodramatic sense of that word. You don’t know where she is. And you don’t know why she’s gone.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Well, I think you need to begin by putting yourself in her shoes.’
James straightened his back, as if to signal that the discussion was over. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Grey. I appreciate your efforts. But nothing you have told me will help me get my wife back.’
‘Is that what you want? To get her back?’
‘Of course, that’s what I bloody want!’ His voice cracked at that and, ashamed by the show of weakness, he dipped his head.
‘Well, perhaps I can help you.’
He looked up, the rims of his eyes a bloodshot red.
‘Florence came to see me yesterday.’
James gave a small nod, determined to do nothing that might stop Grey from going on.
‘She seemed agitated. She told me something of the … strains at home.’
‘Yes.’ His mind was whirring, processing what he was hearing at top speed, already working through the possible implications.
‘She said nothing concrete, she made no mention of any plans.’
‘But …’
‘She was clearly in a hurry. She broke off our conversation, saying there was something she had to look up urgently at the Bodleian.’ Grey focused on her fingers, as if she needed to concentrate and choose her words carefully. ‘I thought nothing of it at the time. After all, your wife is a dedicated scholar. But given her departure first thing this morning, I wonder if the two are connected. If there was something she had to check, something she had to find out, before she could leave. It might perhaps give you a—’
But Virginia Grey did not get the chance to complete her sentence. She looked up to see James had simply turned around, grabbed a jacket from the hall and marched out of the front door.
FIVE
It was only when he passed the clock outside the Post Office that he discovered the time. It was quarter to six: he had, he realized, spent most of the day in a stupor fuelled by anger and alcohol. But now, at last, he had some action to take. It was not much – after all, his wife was in the Bodleian fairly regularly – but Grey was a shrewd judge of character: if she believed Florence’s visit yesterday might be significant, that his wife had somehow seemed agitated, then that had to be taken seriously.
He had peddled furiously past Keble when a blur from his left suddenly slammed into view. He swerved to avoid it, but it was too late: a fellow cyclist had sprung from South Parks Road without looking, clipping the back of James’s rear wheel.
He landed hard, thankfully on his backside rather than his shoulder. His right hand, which had taken some of the impact, was scratched, the graze revealing itself as a grid of blood spots.
‘So sorry, Zennor. I am so frightfully sorry.’
James looked upward, shading his eyes to see Magnus Hook, research fellow at New College and wearer of the roundest, thickest glasses in Oxford, standing over him. Poor eyesight had kept Hook out of the army, but he was doing his bit for the war effort: he had been seconded by the Ministry of Food, which had taken over large chunks of St John’s to control the national supply of fish and potatoes. ‘I now work at the largest fish and chip shop in the world,’ was his pet conversational gambit; James had heard it at least three times.
Just the glimpse of Hook sapped his energy. For one thing, he embodied the category in which he, Zennor, now belonged. Thanks to his damned shoulder, he too was a D-band reject, just like Hook and the rest of the other half-blind cripples. But combined with this contempt was envy: for Hook had taken his place alongside the hundreds of dons of non-military age who had been drafted as civil servants. That was why Oxford in July, usually empty thanks to the Long Vacation, was teeming: the city had become a displaced Whitehall. Merton housed parts of the Department of Transport, Queen’s had the Ministry of Home Security and Balliol, characteristically for a college which regarded itself as primus inter pares, was host to a good part of the most prestigious of all departments, namely the Foreign Office. Word was that the section in question was intelligence. A further rumour insisted that one unnamed college was being kept empty, ready to house the royal family should the King flee London.
James had watched as this gradual transformation of the university had happened – Brasenose College becoming a hospital, the Ashmolean Museum opening its doors to the Slade School of Art – and wondered when the call would come for him. He had a first-class mind, at least that was what it said on his degree certificate, and he had military experience – experience that had not come cheap. He had even picked up a grounding in intelligence, before … well, before. When James heard that Oriel was taking in the War Office Intelligence Corps, he had stood by, waiting for the call. But it never came.
Instead he was supposed to spend the war in the Department of Experimental Psychology, reading Viennese scholars and drafting learned monographs. A mere five-year-old department in a university that measured its life in centuries, it lacked all status. Located far up the Banbury Road in a converted house, it would have had to be sited in Slough to be any more peripheral. All that had been true before the outbreak of war. Afterwards, its irrelevance increased tenfold.
It was obvious to James that his work there was pointless. Once the requisitioning of college buildings and senior faculty was underway, he had put himself forward, either by means of a discreet chat with colleagues or twice writing formal letters of application. He had heard nothing back. He told himself it was the chaos of war. So he had gone to see Bernard Grey, who knew everyone in Whitehall, and asked him to put in a word. He assumed it would be a formality. But Grey had eventually had to apologize over sherry in the Master’s Lodgings. ‘I’m afraid, Dr Zennor, it seems this is one war you’re going to have to sit out.’
And now here was Hook in his grey flannels, smiling smugly even under his cringing apologies and clumsy, myopic attempts to help James to his feet.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? I feel awful. I thought you could see me, but you were haring along at such a speed, I—’
‘You should have been looking, you damn fool.’
‘That’s just it you see, Zennor. I have the most appalling eyes. Hence these binoculars.’ He gestured at his spectacles which, Zennor guessed, would have enabled a normal man to gaze at the surface of the moon.
James pulled himself up to full height, so that he was now looking down at Hook with the advantage of at least a foot. Maybe it was the imploring, not to say intimidated, look on the poor man’s face; or the recollection that Hook was a staunch anti-fascist – as intolerant as James himself of the appeasers who had had quite a presence in Oxford not so long ago – but James felt a dose of sympathy for Hook, standing there in his bottle glasses. And with the sympathy came shame for his rudeness, and the attendant need to make amends.
‘Apology accepted.’ He extended his hand, which Hook took gratefully. ‘So what you working on then, Hook?’
‘Well, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t say.’
‘Good man. “Careless talk” and all that. I’d better be—’
‘Put it this way, though. All this focus on fish and potatoes complements my research very well.’ He looked expectantly at James but, getting no response, went on. ‘Nutrition.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ James said, lifting up his bike.
‘You see, consumption patterns map very precisely onto income and education levels. I’d intuited that before, but now – thanks to the ministry – I have very precise data. They show that in those social categories we would define as weak, potato consumption outstrips fish by a ratio of up to three to one. Among those we might classify as defective, the ratio rises to five to one. In superior groups, the data—’
‘You’re saying the poor eat more chips?’
‘Well, that’s obviously a great simplification. I’d prefer to put—’
‘Yes, of course. Well, I really do have to—’
‘Oh. But I hadn’t explained the link between oily fish in the diet and mental performance. And the benefits of school milk on national strength indices for teeth and bones!’
‘Another time, Magnus.’ James got back on his bicycle, relieved to see that the rear wheel was bent but still functional. He had pedalled a couple of yards when he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Florence recently, have you?’
Hook looked down at his feet, his face flushing. James had seen this reaction before: Florence only had to walk into a room to reduce men to stammering wrecks. He had not appreciated that the mere mention of her name could have the same effect. The realization of it brought that deadweight of melancholy back onto his chest.
‘The last time I saw her was on Tuesday. I was on my way into college and she was coming out with her friend, what’s her name?’
‘Rosemary?’ James had only met her a couple of times, but he had found her irritating. And she clung to Florence like a growth.
‘That’s right. Rosemary.’ Hook squinted at James once more. ‘I say, Zennor: is that a rowing shirt under your jacket?’
The last leg of the ride down Parks Road took no time at all, but as he leaned his bike against the low wall outside Wadham College, James had a dread thought. Opening hours at the libraries were shorter now, the New Bodleian included. And it was nearly six o’clock.
He dashed across, heading into a building that still stood out for its novelty. Where almost every other structure in the town was covered in grime, stained with the soot generated by coal fires in every room, the brick of the New Bod was still a pristine beige. Not only was it clean but it was made of straight lines, free of the gargoyles, gnarled brickwork and battlements that made university Oxford resemble a walled city from the Middle Ages. That gloom had only deepened thanks to the strictures of the blackout, demanding that every college cover its windows in blinds or curtains or, when supplies of those had run out, brown paper or even black paint. At first, pride ensured that the curtains were drawn back or the paper removed each morning. But staff were short and so was patience, and so, with the war now in its eleventh month, many of Oxford’s medieval or Tudor windows remained cloaked in darkness all day long.
And to think it had only opened a year ago: James and Florence had gone together, invited as the Greys’ guests. The speeches had looked forward to a bright future, full of dreams for the scholars of the next generation. Even at the time, James remembered, those seemed to owe more to hope than expectation. Only the hopelessly deluded, or those fanatical for appeasement, believed war could be avoided. For some, like James, the war had begun long ago.
Sure enough, the New Bodleian was closing its doors. ‘Have to wait till tomorrow now, sir,’ said the commissionaire, producing a key from his belt in the manner of a gaoler.
‘Of course,’ James replied. ‘I just need to retrieve some notes I’d left in one of the reading rooms.’
‘Opening hours are nine am till—’
‘Yes, yes, I know the opening hours. But—’ He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘This is for the, er, war effort. If you get my meaning.’
The doorman pulled back as if to assess James’s honesty from a distance. All he had to do was feign confidence. That, his instructor back in Spain had told him, was the key. So he held the commissionaire’s gaze, convinced in his own mind that he was engaged in intelligence duties at Balliol or Oriel, until the man eventually stepped out of his way, gesturing him towards the stairs.
He noticed that the landings were full of what he guessed were paintings wrapped in brown paper and string, stacked together against the wall: those must be the artworks he had heard about, brought here for safekeeping. All the colleges were doing it, emptying out their collections, even removing stained glass windows and statuary, using the newly-built Bodleian building as their refuge. And not just the colleges. The House of Lords library had sent some of the nation’s most precious documents here, packed into four tins – among them the death warrant of Charles I. Quite why they thought such treasures would be safer here than anywhere else in Oxford, James was not sure: perhaps they simply put their faith in the modern.
On the first floor, he could see a last remaining librarian, a woman around his age. She had a wireless set on her desk and it was switched on, a sign not only that she was off-duty and packing up for the day but also of how different life had become: you would never have seen a wireless in a library before, but everyone was glued to the device these days, awaiting word of the war. As he approached the desk, he heard the BBC announcer conclude that afternoon’s play, Adolf in Blunderland. Some satirical effort aimed at lifting the nation’s spirits, James guessed.
The woman turned around. She looked nothing like Florence but something in the brightness of her eyes reminded James of his wife and, for a split-second, it seemed to suck the wind out of him. In that instant he was somewhere else entirely, in a pokey little café not far from here – The Racket – where, thanks to rationing, he and his wife had had to make do with a supper of baked beans on toast. They had been arguing, he had gone too far and she had calmly got up and walked out, leaving him to face the embarrassed stares of the staff and the other diners. He had run out after her, searching street after street, eventually finding her just a few hundred yards away from their home. They had patched it up, he couldn’t remember how. But for nearly an hour he had feared that he had lost her. And something in this woman’s face brought back that fear now, made him realize he had been fending it off all day.
‘I’m sorry, sir, the library is now closed for the day. We will be open again tomorrow morning.’
James stared back at her, suddenly unsure what to say, where even to begin.
‘Sir?’
She had dipped the volume on the wireless, but he could hear the start of the six o’clock bulletin: something about Vichy France formally breaking off diplomatic relations with Britain. Unplanned, he began to speak. ‘I’m afraid something serious has happened. My wife has gone missing. One of the last places she was seen was here. I’d like to know what she was here for. It may enable us to find her.’
The woman blinked a few times, then glanced over James’s shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone else was around. ‘The rules are quite strict on—’
James looked directly into her eyes. ‘I quite understand that. And that’s how it should be. But this is quite an exceptional situation.’ She said nothing, which he took as a good sign. ‘I’m desperately worried for her, you see.’
‘I’d like to help, but the request forms are not kept here. I’d have to—’ She looked away again, towards a door just behind her. He couldn’t tell if she was worried that someone might come – or hoping that they would. She was a woman alone in a large, empty building with a man who had just described himself as desperate.
‘Would you? I really would be extremely grateful.’
Speaking hurriedly, conscious that she was breaking the rules, she handed him a yellow slip and asked him to write on it the name of the lender concerned. ‘And the date please, Mr …’
‘Zennor. Dr James Zennor.’
She took the piece of paper, turned and went through the door behind her. James looked upward then around, taking in the vast room. He had barely visited here since the opening: he preferred to do his reading in the Radcliffe Camera, where he came across fewer of his colleagues. But Florence had embraced it right away. ‘Just think: I will be one of the very first scholars to have worked in a building that will probably stand for a thousand years.’ She paused, then gave him that smile he could not resist. ‘I like being first.’
He began to pace, looking at the rows of desks, new and barely scratched – lacking the dents, cracks, blemishes and the gluey, human resin accreted through centuries that coated the wood at the ‘Radder’. He looked at the clock. The librarian had been gone more than five minutes, closer to ten. He wondered what could possibly be keeping her.
Where on earth would Florence have gone? Mrs Grey was right: the obvious answer was her parents’ house, but he had ruled that out. He could feel a swell of anger rising inside him. He needed to see what the hell Florence had been looking at here. It could be her regular studies, Darwin and the like, but it could be something else, something more urgent. What was it Grey had said? Something she had to check, something she had to find out, before she could leave.
So what the hell was it? What had Florence had to find out? And where was that damned librarian?
He marched at full speed past the administrative desk, breaking through the invisible barrier that separated clerks from readers, and through the door the librarian had taken nearly quarter of an hour earlier.
Behind it, he found himself on a landing for a service stairwell. Dimly lit by a single sickly bulb, it was painted a functional grey, the floors covered in a thin linoleum. Instinctively he headed downstairs.
Two flights down he came to a pair of double doors. He pushed them open to see what struck him at first as a long corridor. He called out. ‘Hello?’
The echo on his voice surprised him. This was no corridor. He stepped into the almost-dark, calling out again. No answer.
He walked further, slowly becoming conscious that the path he was taking was narrow. He put out his hand, expecting the touch of cold concrete. Instead he felt rough metal, the texture of a bicycle chain. Slowly he began to make out the shape of a conveyor belt.
He had read about this innovation. He was inside the tunnel, the one that connected the New Bodleian to the Old, stretching under Broad Street. It had been lauded as a feat of engineering and great British ingenuity. Instead of librarians scurrying back and forth between the two buildings, a mechanical conveyor would do the work for them, dumbly transporting whatever had been requested, whether it were Principia Mathematica or Das Kapital.
James squinted upward to see a stretch of pipework attached to the ceiling. That must be the pneumatic tube system introduced with equal fanfare last year: put the request slip in the capsule and off it whizzed, powered by nothing more than compressed air. Aeroplanes, the wireless, the cinema – the world was changing so fast. It was already unrecognizable from the Victorian age his parents still inhabited.
‘Miss? Are you there?’ Where had the librarian gone and why was she not answering?
There was a sharp turn right; he wondered how far he had gone. Could he already be under Radcliffe Square? He didn’t think he had walked that far, but perhaps the absence of light had confused his senses. He suddenly became aware that he was cold; he shivered, feeling the film of sweat that still coated him.
What was that? Was that a flicker of light far ahead? There had been some kind of change, perhaps a torch coming on and off. He quickened his pace.
He broke into a jog. ‘Miss, is that you?’
There was a delay and then an answer, one that made his blood freeze.
The answer was ‘No.’ And it was spoken by a man.
SIX
‘Who’s there?’ He could hear the alarm in his own voice.
‘Is that Dr Zennor?’
An accent. What was it? Dutch? German? He couldn’t even see where the voice was coming from. What exactly had he walked into here? ‘Where has the librarian gone?’
‘I am the librarian.’
As that moment, James was dazzled by a bright-yellow beam aimed directly in his face. He turned away, lifting his hand to his eyes.
‘My apologies, sir. For the light, also I am sorry.’
The torch was now angled away from his face, but still James remained blinded. He blinked and blinked again to regain his vision. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Please.’ Pliz. ‘Do not swear at me.’
James could feel his rage building again. In a low voice, the calmness of a man repressing fury, he repeated, ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Epstein. I am now the night librarian here.’
So that would explain the accent: an émigré German. ‘And what happened to the woman?’
‘I saw her down here after six of clock and told her to go home already. Such long days they work, these girls. Working for seven days she has been, without a break. On a trot.’
‘On the trot.’
‘Yes. On the trot. That is what I mean.’
‘But she was helping me. I had a request.’
‘Yes, yes. I know this. I am helping you myself. I was trying to find the books.’
‘The books Mrs Zennor was borrowing?’
‘That’s right. But why you come down in the tunnel? This is prohibited, yes?’
James exhaled. His heart was pounding, at a pace that refused to slow. The light shining in his face had rattled him. He was still dazed, but it was not just the light. Something else.
The man spoke again. ‘Please. I have them now. You are to follow me.’
They walked in silence, James embarrassed by his pursuit of this man underground. And also fearful – that he would, by saying the wrong thing, induce a change of heart in the émigré librarian, that he would come across as too sweatily anxious. So he curbed his impatience to see the books in the man’s hands and waited till they emerged into the relative light of the stairwell, moving from there back inside the reading room.
‘We have to save the power, you see. At night. That is why there is no lights down there. Only this.’ Epstein waved his torch. ‘And no conveyor of course. So this I do by hand. It takes a long time, for which I apologies.’
‘No need to apologize,’ James replied.
‘Apologize, yes, of course. Sorry for my English. I can read it perfectly, but I never had to speak it before so much.’
‘No. It’s excellent.’ James momentarily considered speaking to him in German, then imagined the delay that would entail – explaining how he knew the language, his reading of the great Viennese analysts and all the rest of it.
‘In Heidelberg, I did not need so much English. But now I am here.’
‘I see.’ James was trying to identify the three books the German had placed on the desk, their spines facing – maddeningly – away from him.
‘I did not choose to leave, Dr Zennor. You see, I am of a type considered, how to say, undesirable by the new governors of my country. I came here two years ago.’
‘You are a Jew?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, welcome to England. And thanks for finding these books so quickly.’ James nodded towards them, hoping he would get the hint. ‘You’re obviously a good librarian.’
‘Thank you. I am learning. In Heidelberg, I was not librarian.’
‘No?’ James glanced again at the books, but the man was still laboriously engaged in signing them out, taking what seemed an age over each word.
‘No.’ Epstein smiled a wistful smile. ‘My last job at the university was as a cleaner. I had to mop the floors.’
‘Oh.’
‘Before that, I was Professor of Greek and Chairman of the Department of Classical Studies.’
‘I see.’ James looked into the old eyes, seeing a terrible sadness and longing. He had read about the ghastly things the Nazis were doing to the Jews; he knew of the laws banning them from the professions, burning down their synagogues and God knows what else. But it was different to meet one in person, to see the human consequences of such barbarism standing in front of you.
The librarian must have grown used to this reaction. ‘Oh, do not feel sorry for me, Dr Zennor. I am very grateful. For my job and for this country. The only country in the world fighting this evil.’
James glanced once more at the pile on the desk between them.
The professor pulled himself upright. ‘I am forgetting myself. Please.’
James picked up the books and shifted over to one of the desks. He turned the first one over. To his surprise, it was a bound volume of journals: The Proceedings of the British Psychological Society for 1920–1. He flicked through it, trying to work out what might possibly have drawn the interest of his wife. This was not her subject after all.
As he turned the pages, he caught a slip of white paper, the tiniest bookmark that had been left inside. Instinctively, he held it close to his face, hoping that he might catch a scent of her. But it carried no trace. Instead it marked an article entitled: ‘A survey of British veterans of the Great War’.
Odd. Florence had no particular interest in the last war. If she was not a psychologist, she was certainly not a historian.
He turned to the next book, written by an American scholar affiliated with Harvard Medical School: Studies in Pediatric Trauma. He flicked through the pages again, looking for one of those tiny white slips. He found it and began reading:
‘… sustained exposure of a non-traumatized child to a traumatized adult can result in secondary or passive trauma. Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting …’
Instantly, he thought of Harry: how he had been slower than the other children to control himself at night, how he had still not mastered it. Florence had been anxious, refusing to be placated by James’s insistence that their son would ‘soon get the hang of it’. Until now James had thought nothing more of it.
He picked up the third book. A Compendium of Advice for Mothers. So very unlike Florence, who usually cursed such things. He didn’t need to thumb through the pages. The book opened automatically, the spine already cracked. The chapter heading: Preparing a child for a long journey or separation.
He read the title again and then once more, the dread rising in him. Any hope he had harboured that this might be a stunt, an attempt by Florence to make a point, was fading fast. There it was in black and white. What his wife had planned for was a long journey. Or, worse, a separation.
He went back to the first volume, to the article on former combatants in the last war, reading a paragraph at random:
‘… subjects in the trial revealed a set of behaviors which recurred. Among them were acute insomnia, including difficulty both falling and staying asleep; excess anger and temper; poor concentration. Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger.’
He skimmed a few paragraphs ahead:
‘… several of those interviewed displayed an extreme reluctance to speak of their wartime experiences, flinching from even indirect reminders. Perhaps paradoxically, many of these same people complained of unwanted memories of the event, “flashbacks”, as it were. The most common complaint, experienced by some sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed, was of distressing dreams, often violent …’
James slammed the book shut, his heart hammering. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He was hungry. He had barely eaten since last night and he had exerted himself strenuously on the river early this morning. The alcohol would not have helped either. The room was beginning to spin.
He stood up and saw Epstein at the desk, the old man’s bespectacled face appearing to shrink and swell, waxing and waning like the moon. He had to get out, into the fresh air. He mumbled an apology, left the books where they were and stumbled towards the exit.
Outside, he gulped down large draughts of oxygen, clutching the handrail by the entrance. Across the street, the Kings Arms was filling up now with the after-work crowd: not students but academics-turned-civil servants.
He needed to think but his head was throbbing. What had he been expecting? He had assumed something more direct: an atlas, perhaps a road map, maybe a train timetable. But this, what he had just seen … he felt nauseous.
Where the hell was his wife? Where had she gone? It unnerved him to imagine that she was living and breathing somewhere – perhaps arriving at a distant railway station or walking down a street or sipping a cup of tea – that she existed somewhere now, at this very moment, and he had no idea where. He told himself he could survive being apart from her, so long as he knew where she was. But he knew that was not true. Ever since those nights and days in Madrid, holding each other as the bombs fell, he felt that nature itself demanded they be together. As a scientist, he was not meant to believe in fate or destiny, so he could not say what he truly felt. Nor did his education have much tolerance for a word like ‘souls’, but that too was what he felt: that their souls had been joined.
Harry’s arrival had only confirmed it. He loved his son with an intensity that had surprised him. He pictured him now, rarely saying a word to anyone, clinging to his little polar bear. The thought of life apart from his son struck sudden terror into his heart.
The words appeared before him, floating in front of his eyes: a long journey or separation. A black thought raced through his mind, like a virus carried on his bloodstream. Could it be, was it possible …
Suddenly and without any warning even to himself, as if his mouth, chest and lungs had a will of their own, he heard himself screaming at the top of his voice. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’
The sound of it shocked him. A group of young men drinking on the pavement outside the Kings Arms looked towards him, their faces flushed, their necks taut with aggression. James wondered if these were the veterans of the Dunkirk retreat – or evacuation, as the BBC delicately phrased it – brought here for treatment at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Florence had mentioned them only yesterday, reporting the scandalized reaction of some superannuated don or other who had been outraged by the soldiers’ constant state of drunkenness. James had shrugged, refusing to condemn servicemen for seeking comfort wherever they could find it.
Ignoring them, he crossed the road, retrieved his bike from outside Wadham and cycled away.
He pedalled maniacally, trying to keep his thoughts at bay. And yet they refused to be halted. He could almost feel them in his head, speeding around his cerebral cortex; as soon as he had blocked off one neural pathway, they re-routed and hurtled down another, shouting at him inside his head, forming into words.
He smothered them with another idea. It was Thursday, nearly seven o’clock in the evening and it was summer. Ordinarily, this was when Florence would be out with her friend Rosemary for the weekly walk of their rambling club. As far as James could tell, most were communists, all but ideological in their zeal for strenuous exercise in the British countryside.
The group would probably be walking back by now and, if they were sticking with their usual routine, he knew just where to find them.
And so, for the second time that day – though it felt like another era – he was back by the river, cycling along the towpath towards Iffley Lock. And, sure enough, there they were: Rosemary at the front, in sensible shoes, her sensible brown hair in a sensible bob, carrying one handle of a picnic hamper, the other taken by a strapping young female undergraduate. James let his bike slow, then swung one leg off it, so that he was perching on just one pedal, before hopping off, trying to look calm and composed. No red mists now, he told himself.
‘Hello there,’ he called out, giving a wave.
‘Is that you, James?’ she asked, peering through spectacles which, while no match for Magnus Hook’s, consisted of two substantial slabs of glass.
‘Yes, yes it is. I was just—’
‘Don’t worry, I can guess.’ She nodded at the young woman on the other side of the picnic basket who immediately and deferentially yielded her handle to James, falling back to join the chattering group of women a few paces behind. How Florence fitted into this group, James could not imagine, except that it was a pretty safe bet that several would have had a strong ‘pash’ for her. Perhaps Rosemary too. He took the basket in one hand, wheeling his bike in the other, and waited for her to speak first.
‘So, you’re looking for Florence?’
‘I am, as it happens. I don’t suppose you know where she—’
She cut him off, her gaze fixed straight ahead: ‘How long has she been gone?’
‘Since,’ he made a gesture of looking at his watch, ‘this morning, as a matter of fact.’ He was carrying the hamper in his left arm, which was already buckling under the strain. But he was reluctant to say anything, lest he distract Rosemary whose brow was fixed in concentration. But it was she who stopped.
‘Audrey!’ she shouted, turning to address one of the walkers behind. ‘Could you and Violet take the hamper? There’s a love.’
Two of the girls rushed forward to do as they had been told. Rosemary supervised the handover, then waited while the rest of the group overtook them, ensuring that she and James were well out of earshot. ‘Gone since this morning, you say,’ she said at last.
‘Yes.’
‘And you thought she might be with us.’
‘Well, it’s Thursday evening. She never misses her weekly walk, rain or shine.’
‘Ramble, Dr Zennor. We call it a ramble. And, you’re right, Florence is a stalwart. She hated missing the last couple of weeks.’
‘Missing them? She didn’t miss them.’
‘Well, she wasn’t here.’
‘I think you must have that confused. I remember it distinctly, Florence left at five o’clock, walking boots on. Same as always. I can picture her coming home, telling me about it.’
‘Well, I run this rambling club, Dr Zennor, and I’ve never missed a week. Not one. And I can tell you that Florence was absent last Thursday, as she was the week before. She’s not the kind of woman whose presence goes unnoticed.’
James was baffled. ‘Did she give any explanation?’
‘Only that something had come up. Something important. She was very apologetic.’
James was working through the different logical possibilities, trying to rank them in order of probability: that Rosemary was lying; that Florence had joined some other group and lied to her friend in order to spare her feelings; that on both Thursdays Florence had indeed been somewhere else, somewhere important, and had lied to him about it.
Rosemary spoke again. ‘This is very awkward, Dr Zennor. When speaking about the affairs of others, one never knows how much one is meant to know. Or how much the other parties themselves know.’
‘Affairs? What do you mean, “affairs”?’
‘Sorry. That was a very poor choice of word. Sorry about that. When one is speaking about the lives of others, let’s put it that way, one is never quite sure where the boundaries lie.’
‘Look, Miss—’ he ran dry, immediately regretting the attempt at a name.
‘Hyde, it’s Rosemary Hyde. And that rather makes my point, Dr Zennor. I have been your wife’s friend for at least ten years, since we were at school together. I suspect I am her closest confidante. And yet you are not entirely sure of my name.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said, without much conviction. ‘It’s just that I always thought your friendship was … well, I just left you two to get on with it.’ He was still preoccupied by the notion of his wife pretending to have gone out walking the last two Thursdays, putting her boots on, arranging for Mrs Brunson to look after Harry. Why would she have done that? Where would she have gone?
‘It’s not a criticism,’ Rosemary was saying. ‘Rather it might illustrate your problem.’
He could feel the red mist descending. ‘Yes? And what exactly is my “problem”, Miss Hyde? Because as far as I can see my only “problem” is that my wife and child are missing. I have been sent on a wild goose chase to the Bodleian library that proved no use at all and now you want to play games with me – suggesting that my wife has been lying about her recent movements – rather than just spitting out where the hell she is. That’s all I want to know, Miss Hyde. Where is she?’
It came out as more of a plea than he had intended, his voice desperate and imploring. That much was apparent from the change in Rosemary’s expression. Her features had softened into a look unnervingly close to pity.
‘I don’t know where Florence is,’ she said quietly. ‘That is the truth.’ She resumed walking. ‘But I am not surprised she’s gone. I expected it.’
‘You expected it?’
‘Didn’t you? If you’re honest. Given everything that’s been going on?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I really don’t, Miss Hyde. And I’m getting pretty damned irritated with people speaking to me about events I know nothing about.’
‘These are not “events”, Dr Zennor. This is about day-to-day life. At home. You and Florence and Harry.’
‘Our day-to-day life is fine, thank you very much. We’re a very good family. I love my wife and I love my son.’ His eyes widened in sudden understanding. ‘Oh, so that’s why you spoke about “affairs”. Well, let me tell you, I have always been faithful to Florence, from the very first moment—’
‘Nothing like that,’ she said, looking at her feet. She lifted her eyes and met his gaze directly. ‘Tell me, how well do you sleep?’
‘I don’t see this is any business of—’
‘It’s no business of mine at all. But your wife needed someone to talk to and that turned out to be me. So: how well do you sleep?’
‘And if I answer you, is that going to help me find my wife?’
‘It might.’
‘I go to bed late and I get up early, and I sometimes wake in the night. There, I’ve told you. Now, what can you tell me?’
‘Florence told me that you often wake up in the dead of night, shouting and screaming.’
‘I know the incident you’re referring to. It was—’
‘Incident? Florence said it happens all the time. You’re in a sweat, sitting bolt upright, bellowing out—’
‘I really don’t see …’
Rosemary ignored the interruption. ‘Night after night. And that would set Harry off. He’d be crying so hard, he couldn’t be settled. And if he did fall asleep, he’d only wet the bed an hour later. Then there was the time she found you sleepwalking.’
‘I don’t remember any—’
‘She found you in the kitchen, holding a knife. She said you just stood there, your eyes staring, frozen still with a knife in your hand. She was scared half to death.’
‘You’re making this up!’ he roared suddenly.
Rosemary turned and faced him, her teeth clenched tight. ‘And this is what she said was making life utterly impossible. Your constant pretence that nothing had happened. And your aggression. “Is he lying, Rosemary – or does he just not remember?” That’s what she would say to me. And she didn’t know what was worse: the thought that you would deny what she had seen with her own eyes or that you were so ill you couldn’t remember your own actions.’
‘Ill? I’m not ill.’
‘I know about this too. Your refusal to see a doctor. She’s been begging you to see—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s—’ He struggled to get to the end of the sentence; the bright light in his head was becoming unbearable … but he couldn’t stop her. Not if she knew something he needed to know. He tried to speak calmly. ‘I did see someone. About the insomnia.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t tell him the truth, did you? You just said you had “the odd bad night”. You said—’
‘How the hell do you know all this?’
‘Because your wife had no one else to turn to. She didn’t dare speak to her parents. She knew how much you resented them for—’
‘Resented them?’
‘—for the help they had given you.’ His puzzled expression prompted her to be more explicit. ‘Resented the money they had given you.’
‘Look,’ he said, his voice firm and steady. ‘All I want is to know what information you have. You need to tell me that. Now.’
She paused, looking out over the river unwinding ahead, gazing at the top of Christ Church Cathedral in the middle distance. ‘All right,’ she began. ‘The important thing is Harry. Florence wanted to protect him.’
‘From what?’
‘From you, of course. Initially.’
He was about to object, but the throbbing in his head was getting too insistent. It was easier to be quiet, to walk and to listen.
‘She said she had almost got used to you being angry all the time. After the—’ she glanced at his shoulder. ‘After the, um, accident. But once Harry was born, it began to worry her. The truth is, she was frightened.’
‘Of me,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, James. Of you. Of what you might do. She was worried that you might hurt Harry.’
At this, his heart seemed to cave in, a physical sensation, felt in the muscle and blood. He could say nothing.
‘You once left him by a boiling kettle. Do you remember that, James?’
He shook his head, unsure.
‘Well, you did. You’d left the boy on his own, in the kitchen. You’d put the kettle—’
‘That’s enough,’ he said softly.
‘That’s what I said,’ Rosemary said, sardonically. ‘I told her it was enough. That she should leave you. Several times. Especially after you hit her.’
‘After I did what?’
‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t remember that. You’d had an almighty row. And you slapped her, clean across the face. Her cheek was stinging. I had to soothe it with cool flannels all evening.’
‘That’s a damned lie!’
‘Don’t shout at me. All I am—’
‘It’s a damned lie and you know it.’ He felt giddy, as if he were about to topple over. It could not be true. It could not. Could it?
Everything else she had said had sounded some distant bell in his head, a distant but undeniable ring of truth. But not this. Yes, he had a temper, that was a fact. But the target of his rages was always himself. It was his own wrist that had been slashed when he punched his fist clean through the French windows onto the garden, his own head that had been bruised when he had rammed it into a bookcase in an eruption of fury. But he had never harmed his wife. No real man would ever do such a thing. His voice quieter now, he said once again, ‘It’s a lie.’
‘So you keep saying. But how can you be sure? Your memory seems a touch unreliable in my book.’
‘And you say she came to you?’
‘Straight away.’ The pride with which this was declared sent the rage surging through him once more, rising like mercury in a thermometer.
‘But she’d never do it. Leave you, I mean. Absurdly loyal, Florence. I hope you appreciate that.’
‘But she’s left me now.’
‘For Harry’s sake. She feared for his safety with you in the house. That was at first. Florence no longer sees you as the biggest threat to her son. Not directly anyway.’
James spoke quietly, more to himself than to her: ‘It’s the war.’
‘Yes. She’s been getting gradually more terrified since the day the war started. The sirens, the air-raid shelters, the gas-masks, that thing you’ve just built in the garden—’
‘The Anderson shelter.’
‘All of it scares her. She feels like it’s getting closer.’
‘They bombed Cardiff last week.’
‘Exactly. She was convinced Oxford would be next.’
A dozen times Florence had expounded her belief that Oxford was a natural target, not only because of the car plant at Cowley now converted into a munitions factory but also because of the university. ‘London is the nerve centre, but Oxford is the brain,’ she had said.
Rosemary was still talking. ‘I explained to her the statistical probabilities. As you know, mathematics is my subject: my specialism is statistics. Actually, you almost certainly don’t know: typical man, you probably think I’m a secretary. Anyway, I explained the probabilities, but it was no use. She kept torturing herself with the thought. “What if, Rosemary? What if?”’
The haze was beginning to clear in James’s mind. It was so obvious he couldn’t fathom how he had been unable to see it, why he had not thought of it till now. Still, if even half of what this woman was telling him were true, there was so much he was not seeing, so much he was forgetting, so much he had – what was the phrase in that book Florence had requested at the library? – blacked out.
Rosemary had not stopped: ‘It made no sense, of course. If I told her once I told her a hundred times, Oxford is not an evacuation area. Children are being sent to Oxford, aren’t they? We were entertaining some of them just yesterday, lively little things from London. A few of the girls from Somerville went out to cheer them up …’
But James was not listening. He was remembering the conversation – the row – he and Florence had had … when was it? A month ago? They had just come home from an evening at the Playhouse, watching a top-drawer play: the West End theatre, like so much else of London, had sought sanctuary in Oxford.
‘I won’t hear of it,’ he had said.
‘What do you mean, you won’t hear of it. You do not have sole authority over our child. We are both Harry’s parents.’
He had tried to get out of the kitchen, walking past her as if to signal the discussion was over. But Florence had stuck her arm out across the doorway, barring his way. ‘You need to listen to me,’ she had said in a low voice, her teeth gritted. ‘I will do whatever it takes to protect him.’
‘It’s a surrender, Florence. You’re asking me to surrender to the fascists.’
‘“Surrender”? We’re not talking about a bridge or a railway line, James. This is not some strategically important piece of land. This is a child.’
‘If people like us run away, Hitler will have won, won’t he?’
‘Don’t ask a two-year-old boy to do your fighting for you, James.’
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard what I said. You want us to be heroes because you can’t be. And it’s not fair.’
He had stepped back from her, not wanting to look her in the face. She had extended her hand, but he had brushed her away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he had said, spitting out the words.
She tried again, her voice gentler. ‘When are you going to understand that you already did your bit? You made your sacrifice, James. And you were one of the first to do it. You took your stand against fascism when everyone else here was fast asleep. You don’t need to do any more.’
He had looked up at her, his face red with anger. ‘That’s easy for you to say. You’re a woman: no one expects you to fight. But I should be there, killing as many of those bastards as I can. I’m not though, am I?’ She had said nothing, prompting him to repeat his question, this time bellowing it: ‘Am I?’ Once she had sighed and nodded, he went on. ‘This is my frontline – here, this house. And I’ll be damned if anyone will make me retreat from my own bloody home.’
He stared ahead now, all but forgetting that Rosemary was there, and still talking. He now knew why his wife had left – and, much more important, he had an inkling of where she had gone.
SEVEN
James cycled home, the energy coursing through his veins and into his legs. He was full of determination, a plan forming in his mind. Back at the house, he rushed into his study to find his atlas of the British Isles.
Rosemary had forced him to remember what he had forgotten, that Florence had indeed been in a state of high anxiety about the war and what she felt was its creeping proximity to their own lives. It was natural that Florence would want to get out into the countryside, with her parents’ estate in Norfolk the obvious destination. But she was not there.
Now that it had proved a dead end, he could see it was always going to be an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it could not account for the mystery of the last two Thursday evenings – the elaborate lengths his wife had taken to deceive him, apparently withholding the truth even from her best friend. No, she must have made an alternative arrangement, joining the rest of the hundreds of thousands of British people who had left their homes in cities for rural safety. It made no sense to him: Oxford was hardly an urban metropolis; a quick cycle ride and you were in the countryside. But Florence, unlike almost every other mother in England, had seen the aftermath of a bombing with her own eyes. He remembered his wife crouching by that little girl in Madrid, still and lifeless. Florence had been so calm; she had not sobbed or become hysterical. But clearly it had left its mark.
He found the page for Oxfordshire. This was what he would do. He would get on his bicycle and keep going until he had found them, cycling to every village if he had to. Start at Botley, then Wytham, then Wolvercote, Old Marston, Marston – ringing the city in concentric circles until he had covered the whole county. And after that the next county and the next and the next.
He looked out of the window. The summer light had at last faded. There was no chance of going now, whatever fantasy he had spun as he had raced back here from the river. It would mean cycling in the dark, no lights allowed in the blackout. He was confident he could navigate sufficiently well, even without road signs, but what would he do once he arrived in, say, Botley? He could hardly start walking the country lanes, calling out their names – though he imagined himself now doing exactly that, hearing the echo of it in his head: ‘Florence! Harry!’ He would have to wait till morning.
He reached for the whisky bottle beside the chair. Despite the spillage caused by Virginia Grey’s arrival, there was still some left. He raised it to his lips and, without opening his eyes, knocked it back.
As the liquid ran down his throat and he felt the alcohol travel through his veins, he thought of what the insufferable Rosemary had told him. That he had been sleepwalking, shouting in the night, waking Florence and Harry with his screaming. He wanted to deny it, but it sounded true. And the boiling kettle? If he forced himself, he could picture it: Harry on his high-chair, the steam rising inches from his face. How he, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had put the kettle down on the child’s table … But slapping Florence? Hitting his own wife? He had no memory of that whatsoever.
He saw her as she had been in Madrid, during their first weeks together as husband and wife: her floodlit smile, her body bursting with energy, vitality, sex. And then he imagined her in the Bodleian, her brow furrowed, poring over dry journal articles, detailing the symptoms of a kind of delayed shellshock in veterans of the Great War. Was that what she believed was wrong with him? Was she right?
He saw again the page as he had read it. Whatever else had gone wrong with him, his memory for printed words had retained its near-photographic ability. He could read the lines as if they were still there, recalling their precise position on the page: acute insomnia, including difficulty both falling and staying asleep; excess anger and temper; poor concentration. Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger.
With his mind clarified by the whisky and the serial shocks of this day, he could recognize himself in that list.
And then he thought of the second book in that pile the old Jewish librarian had handed him: Studies in Pediatric Trauma. That was what she feared most, he could see. She worried that he was passing on some of his own troubles to his son. Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting …
It was true that Harry had not yet mastered staying dry at night, but James had put that down to his age: he did not know when boys were meant to learn that particular trick. But impaired development? Everyone had always joked that, with his parents’ combined IQ, Harry would be on course for a double first before his tenth birthday. He had started speaking early and could deliver neatly composed, relatively complex sentences. But in recent months he had become shy. Did that amount to selective dumbness? Surely not. Though, try as he might, James could not recall the last time he had heard his son speak at length.
His headache was returning. He could see the bright lights again, miniature explosions inside his brain. Now he could hear Florence’s voice, pleading with him: ‘James, you’re supposed to be the expert in how the mind works. You’re so clever about “the human brain”. But why can’t you understand yourself?’
Eyes closed, he attempted to formulate an answer. But the words would not come. Instead, he heard a voice repeating the sentence in the book Florence had been studying. The voice, he realized as it became more distant, belonged to Epstein, the refugee professor. He was lecturing, in that calm, patient German accent, as if he were Sigmund Freud himself: ‘… several of those interviewed displayed an extreme reluctance to speak of their wartime experiences, flinching from even indirect reminders. Perhaps paradoxically, many of these same people complained of unwanted memories of the event, “flashbacks”, as it were. The most common complaint, experienced by some sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed, was of distressing dreams, often violent …’
It is dusk, not yet six o’clock. A cloudless day has ensured a severe drop in temperature, so that now he longs for his overcoat. Or perhaps that tremble he feels is a last rush of nerves. Or, as he likes to think of it, stage fright.
He has done a few of these missions and he is becoming rather adroit, if he says so himself. He is quick on his feet, but quick of eye too: if there is something to see, he will see it. That’s what matters most, Jorge is very clear on that. ‘This is not a job you do with your hands or your legs.’ He would point. ‘Your eyes do all the work.’
It is the starting rung in the intelligence corps of the republican army, that’s how he explains it. James’s job is to be a courier of messages, those too secret, sensitive or elaborate to be trusted to radio signals. The enemy is outside Madrid, but also inside: it is known that there is a ‘fifth column’ of Franco sympathizers lurking in the city. That he is a foreigner has its drawbacks: he is more visible, no matter how hard he attempts to dress, walk, smoke like a Spaniard. On the other hand, he has an excuse if a fascist gang pounce. He will say he is a journalist, writing for … it doesn’t matter who.
This journey has been more elaborate than most, but that has not dimmed his confidence. Besides, he has his pal with him, his ‘comrade’ as Harry Knox would put it. They will be one hundred yards apart at all times, with Harry in front – but the important thing is that James will not be alone. James is the message-bearer, Harry the scout who will spot trouble, then either walk around it or walk away, thereby protecting them both.
But on this evening, it is James who has been unsettled by something he has seen. An older man in a creased grey suit walked past him twenty minutes earlier and walked past him again just now, heading in the opposite direction. There is nothing unusual about his manner or his appearance. But Jorge’s words, repeated a dozen times, are too firmly etched on James’s mind: ‘Nothing is a coincidence. If you see the same thing twice, run!’
He thinks of doing that but hesitates, anxious that, if they are being followed, the sight of him sprinting up the street will immediately confirm their pursuers’ suspicions. And what if only he, James, has been spotted? A dash to warn Harry will simply serve to expose his friend as an accomplice.
So he chooses to walk instead, to increase his pace only subtly, to make the gear change from steady to brisk. He has closed the gap to just a few yards when it happens. He feels it before he hears it, the rush of air behind his ear as the bullet races over his shoulder and into Harry’s back. His partner jerks upward, arcing his back, an oddly balletic movement, slow and graceful. As Harry begins to fall, there is a second shot directly into his head, exploding his face into a thousand pieces of flesh and gristle; the glass of his spectacles, lit red with blood, sprays into the air like sparks from a bonfire. A third shot and a fourth and James darts into a side alley, propelled there by instinct alone.
He stands there, panting heavily, his brain juddering over the image he has just seen: the head blown off, the head blown off, the head blown off. Harry there one moment, gone the next. The rain-shower of skin and bone.
He is digesting this when he realizes that his shirt is wet. Some of Harry’s blood must have landed on him. But under his jacket is a red patch, covering the left side of his chest. It takes him a while to realize that the stain is spreading. Oh, he thinks. That’s my blood. I’ve been shot.
Harry’s looking at him, tut-tutting over James’s wound and shaking his head, as if to say, ‘Who’s a silly boy, then?’ Until once again, his brain explodes. And again. And again …
James woke to his own scream. Immediately his hand reached for his left shoulder and, as always, it was wet. Not with blood, but with sweat. That dream, again.
It was light, which only added to his confusion. He was home, in the armchair, the whisky bottle close by. Was it still the afternoon? Had Florence left that morning? The clock on the mantelpiece said seven. But was it morning or evening? Had he dreamed his visit to the Bodleian, his underground encounter with a strange old German Jew and Rosemary Something by the river, shouting at him?
There was a rattling sound outside, muffled and indistinct. He leapt up, to see a shadow of movement shift across the doorway, visible through the stained glass. His heart leapt. Was that Florence, putting her key in the door? Had she come back to him? But there was no smaller, second shadow, no Harry …
He rushed to the door and snatched it open. No one there. He called out. ‘Hello?’ He heard a rustle, but whether that was a person slipping past the trees on this wide, quiet avenue or merely a breeze, he could not tell. He called out once more, stepping forward this time. But no one replied.
The smell of the air, the height of the sun, told him it was a new day. He had slept all night in that chair and they were still gone. It had been twenty-four hours now, twenty-four hours without them. Their absence was not some temporary aberration, a lost afternoon. It was, he felt now, solid and real. The thought of facing another day alone and then another and then another filled him with gloom.
But as he came back inside he caught a glimpse of one of Harry’s favourite toys, left abandoned on the living room floor: a wooden Noah’s Ark, complete with its own pairs of animals. Perhaps it had been too big to take, perhaps Harry had cried as Florence had prised it from his hands, explaining that there was no room for Noah on their long journey. Whatever had happened, the mere sight of it restored James’s determination. He would not be engulfed by despair; he would not give up. No matter what it cost, he would find his wife and child.
He decided to wash, eat and ready himself for the full-scale search. Sleep had given him the clarity to realize that his effort needed to be organized, that it should not begin with the random searching of nearby villages. He girded himself for the task ahead, taking care as he towelled himself dry not to shake his morale by looking too closely at the wreck of his shoulder in the bathroom mirror: collapsed and thinner than the rest of him, as if his chest simply petered out on that side, it was repulsive for him to contemplate. The wound had been treated in a hurry, in the crowded, overworked military hospital in Carabanchel, in the south-west of Madrid, near to where he had fallen. In time the city’s doctors would get used to such operations, as sniper fire became a favoured tactic of Franco’s Fifth Columnists. But on that night they had stitched him up fast, stretching the skin too tight and with little regard to appearances. The result was that the top half of his chest looked like a wall covered with paper from two separate and clashing rolls.
And all the while, as he foamed up the shaving brush and splashed on the hot water, he could not shake the odd feeling he had had since the moment he awoke, one akin to the sensation of being watched. The only reason for it was that faraway rattling sound the instant he had been pulled from sleep, that fleeting glimpse through the glass of the front door – and yet the feeling lingered, like a shiver.
His plan was to see Bernard Grey in college. He would ask him to deploy all his contacts in the Health Ministry running the national evacuation effort, so that they could rifle through their voluminous card index and discover which generous soul had taken in Florence and Harry Zennor. It could not be that difficult, not for a man like Grey, for whom Whitehall might as well have been just another Oxford college.
James parked his bike and guiltily received the greeting of the aged porter in the lodge, a nod he always translated as, ‘What the hell are you doing here, a man your age? Why aren’t you in the war like everyone else?’
To his surprise, the quad was covered with people, around a hundred and fifty men at least, standing in neat lines. The shock was that Oxford had no more strictly imposed rule than the prohibition on walking on the grass. You could steal another man’s essay and pass it off as your own; you could, in the immortal phrase, bugger the Bursar. But you could not, under any circumstances, tread on the trim green of the college lawn. Yet here that hallowed turf had been transformed into a parade ground and there, standing at the head of it, was none other than Grey himself.
He had heard about this but scarcely believed it could be true: that the Oxford South Company of the newly-created Local Defence Volunteers, made up chiefly of Royal Mail employees, had been put under Grey’s command. But here they were, row after row of middle-aged postmen taking orders issued not by a bullying sergeant major but by a white-haired philosopher, one whose voice was known to millions through his regular talks on the BBC Home Service. Heaven preserve them all if, come the invasion, these men represented the first line of defence.
Invasion. The word triggered a memory of yesterday’s ill-tempered exchange with Rosemary. She had been talking about invasion just before he climbed back on his bicycle and returned home, once he had switched off and stopped listening properly to what she was saying. Something about the countries that had fallen in just the last few weeks – France, Holland and Belgium in just a single day last month. Saying that Florence was convinced Britain would be next. Mr Churchill was doing a manful job of stiffening the nation’s resolve, but that was how most people felt: that there was a very good chance that, before long, there would be German boats landing on England’s beaches and German troops walking on England’s streets. Was that why she had not gone to her parents’ house, because she feared Hitler’s men might come across the North Sea and march right into Norfolk? He began to wish he had listened to what the damned Rosemary woman had been saying.
James turned on his heel, avoiding the embarrassment of explaining why he was not among those on parade, and walked back to the porter’s lodge, this time going inside.
Another raised eyebrow semi-smile to the man on duty and straight to the pigeon-holes. Much less for him these days, now that term had finished. There was a letter inviting him to a lecture on birth control by Marie Stopes: Population Science and the Path to Radiant Motherhood. No, thank you. He wouldn’t go within a hundred yards of that woman, not since hearing that she had attended some conference in Berlin a couple of years after Hitler had become Chancellor. Completely unacceptable to lend aid and succour to the Nazis like that. The only exception: if you were going in order to poke a finger in the Germans’ eye, as Florence had done. But there were not many like Florence, not many at all.
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