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
