Pantheon Read online

  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 naive. 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 viva s, 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 Ma
ncha 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 naivete. 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 f
rom 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.