‘Trying to find out about these concentration camps for Republican prisoners. Beaverbrook wouldn’t have taken stories like that during the Civil War, but it’s different now.’
‘I’ve heard rumours,’ she replied guardedly. ‘But if anything like that was going on I’m sure the Red Cross would have sniffed it out. I used to work for them, you see. In the Civil War.’
‘Did you?’ Markby looked at her with surprise. Barbara knew she had been even more gauche and clumsy than usual that evening, had heard the mistakes in her Spanish. When she went to the kitchen to check on Pilar her glasses had misted up and on coming out she had unthinkingly wiped them on her hem, catching a cross look from Sandy.
‘Yes, I did,’ she replied a little sharply. ‘And if a lot of people were missing they’d know.’
‘Which side of the lines were you on?’
‘Both, at different times.’
‘It was a bloody business.’
‘It was a civil war, Spaniard against Spaniard. You have to understand that to understand the things that happened here.’
The journalist spoke quietly. On his other side Inés Vilar Cuesta was leading a loud demand from the ladies for nylon stockings.
‘A lot of people have been arrested since Franco won. Their families assumed they’d been shot, but a lot were taken to the camps. And there were a lot of prisoners taken in the war, people posted missing believed killed. Franco’s using them as forced labour.’
Barbara frowned. She had tried for so long to tell herself that now Franco had won he should be supported in the task of rebuilding Spain. But she found it increasingly hard to shut her eyes to the things that went on; she knew that what the journalist said could have some truth in it.
‘Have you evidence?’ she asked. ‘Who told you?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say. Can’t reveal my sources.’ He cast a weary eye round the company. ‘Especially not here.’
She hesitated, then lowered her voice to a whisper.
‘I knew someone who was listed missing believed killed. Nineteen thirty-seven, at the Jarama. A British International Brigader.’
‘Republican side?’ Markby raised thin pale eyebrows.
‘I never shared his politics. I’m not political. But he’s dead,’ she added flatly. ‘They just never found his body. The Jarama was terrible, thousands dead. Thousands.’ Even now, after three years, she felt a sinking in her stomach at the thought of it.
Markby put his head on one side, considering. ‘Most foreign prisoners were sent home, I know. But I hear some slipped through the net. If you could give me his name and rank I might be able to find something out. The prisoners of war are kept in a separate camp, out near Cuenca.’
Barbara looked over her guests. The women had rounded on a senior official in the Supply Ministry, insisting he get them nylons. Tonight she was seeing the New Spain at its worst, greedy and corrupt. Sandy, at the head of the table, was smiling at them all, indulgently and sarcastically. That was the confidence public school gave you. It struck her that though he was only thirty-one, in his wing-collared shirt, with his oiled swept-back hair and his moustache, Sandy could have been ten years older. It was a look he cultivated. She turned back to Markby, taking a deep breath.
‘There’s no point. Bernie’s dead.’
‘Yes, if he was at the Jarama it’s very unlikely he’d have survived. Still, you never know. Do no harm to try.’ He smiled at her. He was right, Barbara thought, even the faintest chance.
‘His name was Bernard Piper,’ she said quickly. ‘He was a private. But don’t—’
‘What?’
‘Raise false hopes.’
He studied her, a journalist’s searching look. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that, Mrs Forsyth. It’s only the slimmest chance. But worth a look.’
She nodded. Markby surveyed the company, the dinner jackets and couturier dresses interspersed with military uniforms, then turned that keen evaluating gaze back to Barbara. ‘You’re moving in different circles now.’
‘I was sent to work in the Nationalist zone after Bernie – after he disappeared. I met Sandy there.’
Markby nodded at the company. ‘Your husband’s friends might not like you sniffing after a prisoner of war.’
She hesitated. ‘No.’
Markby smiled reassuringly. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll see if I can find anything out. Entre nous.’
She held his eyes. ‘I doubt you’ll get a story out of this.’
He shrugged. ‘Any chance to help a fellow Englishman.’ He smiled, a sweet, strangely innocent smile, although of course he wasn’t innocent at all. If he did find Bernie, Barbara thought, and the story came out, it would be the end of everything here for her. She was shocked to realize that if only Bernie was alive, she wouldn’t care about the rest.
SHE GOT UP and put on the silk dressing gown Sandy had got her last Christmas. She opened the window; it was another hot day, the garden bright with flowers. Strange to think that in six weeks winter would be here with its mist and frosts.
She stumbled against a chair, swore and took her glasses from the dressing-table drawer. She looked in the mirror. Sandy urged her to do without them whenever she could, memorize the layout of the house properly so she didn’t bump into things. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun, darling,’ he had said. ‘Walking around confidently greeting people and no one knowing you’re a bit short-sighted.’ He had developed a thing about those glasses, he hated her wearing them, but although she had always hated them too she still wore them when she was on her own. She needed them. ‘Bloody idiotic nonsense,’ she muttered as she took out her curlers and ran the comb through her thick auburn hair. It flowed in waves. That stylist was good, her hair never looked unkempt now. She applied her make-up carefully, eyeshadow that highlighted her clear green eyes, powder to emphasize her cheekbones. Sandy had taught her all this. ‘You can decide how you look, you know,’ he had said. ‘Make people see you as you want to be seen. If you want to.’ She had been reluctant to believe him but he had persisted and he was right: for the first time in her life she had begun, very nervously, to question her belief that she was an ugly woman. Even with Bernie she had found it hard to think what he could see in her, despite his endless loving reassurance. Tears came to her eyes. She blinked them quickly away. She needed to be strong today, clear-headed.
She wasn’t meeting Markby’s contact till late afternoon. She would go to the Prado first; she couldn’t bear being cooped up all day in the house, waiting. She put on her best outdoor dress, the white one with the rose pattern. There was a knock at the door and Pilar appeared. The girl had a round surly face and curly black hair struggling to escape from beneath her maid’s cap. Barbara addressed her in Spanish.
‘Pilar, please prepare breakfast. A good one today, toast and orange juice and eggs, please.’
‘There is no juice, señora, there was none in the shops yesterday.’
‘Never mind. Ask the daily to go out later and try to find some, would you?’
The girl left. Barbara wished she would smile occasionally. But perhaps she had lost people in the Civil War; nearly everyone had. Barbara thought she caught a faint note of contempt sometimes when Pilar called her ‘señora’, as though she knew she and Sandy weren’t really married. She told herself it was imagination. She had no experience of servants and when she first came to the house had been uneasy around Pilar, nervous and eager to please. Sandy had told her she must be clear and precise in her orders, keep a distance. ‘It’s what they prefer, lovey.’ She remembered Maria Herreira telling her never to trust servants, they were all peasants and half of them had been Reds. Yet Maria was a kind woman who did voluntary work with old people for the church. She lit another cigarette and made her way downstairs to breakfast, to the cornflakes that Sandy was able to get in rationed, half-starved Madrid as though by magic.
WHEN THE Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Barbara had been working at the Red Cross headquarte
rs in Geneva for three years. She worked in the Displaced Persons section, tracing missing members of families in Eastern Europe torn apart by the Great War and still missing. She matched names and records, wrote letters to Interior Ministries from Riga to Budapest. She managed to put enough people in touch with their families to make it worthwhile. Even where their relatives were all dead, at least the families knew for certain.
She had been excited by the job at first, it was a change from nursing in Birmingham. She had got it partly because of her years of work for the British Red Cross. After four years, though, she was bored. She was twenty-six; soon she would be thirty and she began to fear she was fossilizing among the order of her files, the stolid dullness of the Swiss. She went for an interview with a Swiss official in a neat office overlooking the still blue lake.
‘It’s bad in Spain,’ he told her. ‘There’re thousands who’ve found themselves on one side of the lines and their relatives on the other. We’re sending medical supplies and trying to arrange exchanges. But it’s a savage war. The Russians and Germans are getting involved.’ He looked at her over his half-moon glasses with tired eyes. All the hopes of 1919, that the Great War had truly been the war to end war, were disintegrating. First Mussolini in Abyssinia, now this.
‘I’d like to get out in the field, sir,’ Barbara said firmly.
SHE ARRIVED in an unbearably hot Madrid in September 1936. Franco was advancing from the south; the Moroccan colonial army, airlifted across the Straits of Gibraltar by Hitler, was now only seventy miles away. The city was full of refugees, ragged lost-looking families from the pueblos dragging enormous bundles through the streets or crowded together on donkey carts. Now she saw the chaos of war at first hand. She never forgot the old man with shocked eyes who passed her that first day, carrying all he had left: a dirty mattress slung over his shoulder and a canary in a wooden cage. He symbolized all the refugees, the displaced persons, all those caught in the middle of war.
Red militiamen hurtled by in lorries and buses on their way to the front line – ordinary Madrileños, their only uniform the dark blue boiler suits all workers wore and red neckerchiefs. They would wave their ancient-looking weapons as they passed, calling out the Republic’s shout of defiance. ‘¡No pasarán!’ Barbara, who believed in peace more than anything, wanted to weep for them all. She wanted to weep for herself too at first, because she was frightened: by the chaos, by the stories of nightmare atrocities on both sides, by the Fascist aeroplanes that had begun to appear in the skies, making people pause, look up, sometimes run for the safety of the metro. Once she saw a stick of bombs fall, a pall of smoke rising from the west of the city. The bombing of cities was what Europe had feared for years; now it was happening.
The Red Cross mission was based in a little office in the city centre, an oasis of sanity where half a dozen men and women, mostly Swiss, laboured to distribute medical supplies and arrange exchanges of refugee children. Although she spoke no Spanish, Barbara’s French was good and it was a relief to be able to make herself understood.
‘We need help with the refugee exchanges,’ Director Doumergue told her on her second day. ‘There are hundreds of children separated from their families. There’s a whole group from Burgos who were at a summer camp in the Guadarramas – we want to exchange them for some Madrid children caught in Sevilla.’ The director was another calm, serious Swiss, a young man with a plump, tired face. Barbara knew she’d been flapping, panicking, and that wasn’t like her. Babs we all depend on, they used to call her in Birmingham. She’d have to pull herself together. She brushed a stray tangle of red hair from her brow. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What do you need me to do?
That afternoon she went to visit the children in the convent where they had been lodged, to take their details. Monique, the office interpreter, came with her. She was a small, pretty woman, wearing a neat dress and freshly ironed blouse. They walked through the Puerta del Sol, past huge posters of President Azaña, Lenin and Stalin. Monique nodded at Stalin’s poster. ‘That’s the way things are going now,’ she said. ‘Only Russia will aid the Republic. God help them.’
The square was full of loudspeakers, a woman’s voice rising and falling, punctuated by tinny squeaks from the speaker. Barbara asked what they were saying.
‘That’s Dolores Ibárruri. La Pasionaria. She’s telling housewives that if the Fascists come they must boil their olive oil and pour it from the balconies onto their heads.’
Barbara shuddered. ‘If only both sides could see everything will be destroyed.’
‘Too late for that,’ Monique answered heavily.
They entered the convent through a stout wooden gate in a high wall designed to shield the sisters from the outside world. It had been thrown open and across the little yard a militiaman kept guard by the door, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The building had been burned out; there was no glass at the windows and black trails of soot rose up the walls. There was a sickly smell of smoke.
Barbara stood in the yard. ‘What’s happened? I thought the children were with the nuns …’
‘The nuns have all fled. And the priests. Those that got away. Most of the convents and churches were burned by the mob in July.’ Monique gave her a searching look. ‘Are you a Catholic?’
‘No, no, I’m nothing really. It’s just a bit of a shock.’
‘It’s not so bad at the back. The nuns ran a hospital, there are beds.’
The entrance hall had been burned and vandalized, sheets of paper torn from breviaries lay about among the broken statues.
‘What must it have been like for those nuns?’ Barbara asked. ‘Shut away in here, then a mob runs in and burns the place down.’
Monique shrugged. ‘The Church supports the Nationalists. And they’ve lived off the backs of the people for centuries. Once it was the same in France.’
Monique led the way down a narrow echoing corridor and opened a door. On the other side was a hospital ward with about twenty beds. The walls were bare, lighter patches in the shape of crosses showing where religious symbols had been removed. About thirty ten-year-olds sat on the beds, dirty and frightened-looking. A tall Frenchwoman in a nurse’s uniform hurried over to them.
‘Ah, Monique, you have come. Is there any news of getting the children home?’
‘Not yet, Anna. We’ll take their details, then go to the ministry. Has the doctor been?’
‘Yes.’ The nurse sighed. ‘They are all well enough. Just frightened. They come from religious homes – they were scared when they saw the convent had been burned.’
Barbara looked over the sad little faces, most of them smeared with the tracks of tears. ‘If any are ill, I’m a nurse—’
‘No,’ said Monique. ‘Anna is here. Getting them transferred back, that’s the best thing we can do for them.’
They spent the next hour taking details; some of the children were terrified, the nurse had to persuade them to talk. At last they were done. Barbara coughed from the smell of smoke.
‘Could they not be taken somewhere else?’ she asked Monique. ‘This smoke, it’s bad for them.’
Monique shook her head. ‘There are thousands of refugees in this city, more every day. We’re lucky some official took time to find anywhere for these children.’
It was a relief to be back outside, even in the boiling sunlight. Monique waved at the militiaman. ‘Salud,’ he called. Monique offered Barbara a cigarette and looked at her keenly.
‘This is what it’s like everywhere,’ she said.
‘I can take it. I was a nurse before I went to Geneva.’ Barbara blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘It’s just – those children, will they ever be the same again, if they get home?’
‘Nobody in Spain will ever be the same again,’ Monique answered, in sudden angry despair.
BY NOVEMBER 1936 Franco had reached the outskirts of Madrid. But his forces were held in the Casa de Campo, the old royal park just west of the city. There were Russian aircraft in the skies now, protect
ing the city, and fewer bombs fell. Hoardings had been erected to cover the bombed houses, displaying more portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Banners spanned the streets. ‘¡NO PASARAN!’ The determination to resist was even greater than in the summer and Barbara admired it even as she wondered how it could survive the cold of winter. With only one road to the city still open, supplies were already becoming short. She half hoped Franco would take Madrid so the war could end, though there were terrible stories of Nationalist atrocities. There had been plenty on the Republican side too, but Franco’s sounded even worse, coldly systematic.
After two months she had adjusted, so far as anyone could. She had had successes, had helped get dozens of refugees exchanged; now the Red Cross was trying to negotiate prisoner exchanges between the Republican and Nationalist zones. She was proud of how quickly she was picking up Spanish. But the children were still in the convent – their case had fallen into some bureaucratic abyss. Sister Anna had not been paid for weeks, though she stayed on. At least the children would not run away; they were terrified of the Red hordes beyond the convent walls.
One day Barbara and Monique had spent an afternoon at the Interior Ministry, trying again to get the children exchanged. Each time they saw a different official, and today’s man was even less helpful than the others. He wore the black leather jacket that marked him out as a Communist. It looked odd on him; he was plump and middle-aged and looked like a bank clerk. He smoked cigarettes constantly without offering them any.
‘There is no heating at the convent, Comrade,’ Barbara said. ‘With the cold weather coming the children will become ill.’
The man grunted. He reached forward and took a tattered file from a pile on his desk. He read it, puffing at his cigarette, then looked at the women.