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
