The Invitation(25)

Still, sleep does not come. He hasn’t slept properly for years – not counting that night in Rome, with her beside him. The last place he remembers sleeping well was a hammock slung in a crowded mess deck, with the swell of the Atlantic beneath. Then, after the death of Morris, lying a few metres away from the place where his friend would have slept himself, it had become a hell. He noticed the other men glancing there, and then quickly away, as though the place were a bad omen.

How many men were sent to their fate by Lionheart? Somewhere in the thousands. Too great a number to comprehend, though he, like all the men on board, had been an author of all those deaths. But only one death clings to him. Has threatened, at times, to destroy him. Because it was his fault. Only he knows this, of course. Perhaps that is what gives it such power. If others knew, the weight of the secret might be lifted a little. But it is too shameful to share.

He will try and do something useful with this wakefulness, he thinks. He has brought the Underwood with him – he could type up the events of the first day. Except that his thoughts keep being drawn back toward things that won’t be of any interest to the readership, who will come to it hungry for the taste of celebrity. A man in a pale linen suit whose elegance seems to bely a kind of concentrated violence somewhere just beneath the surface. A woman who, for all her composure, and for all the winking gems at wrist and throat, seems a little lost. Seems profoundly sad.





8


Her


I can’t sleep. My mind is too full. The evening was such a strange ordeal. Him in particular, sitting so near to me with his questions, and his judgement. Oh, I know that he judges me, beneath his nice, British manners. I see how he looks at me, now that he knows who I am. What I am. I find myself wishing that I had the chance to explain my actions to him – though I don’t know exactly what excuse I would give. And then I remind myself that he is nobody: that I don’t care what he makes of me. After this, I need never see or think of him again.

And the film. I wish that I could have been prepared for what it made me feel. All I could think, as they sailed towards the new world at the end, was of her, of what she might have left behind in the way of family, of history. But perhaps there was nothing to leave.





November 1936


The radio has been on all night in my father’s study: I kept waking and hearing the murmur of it through the wall. And he has been in there all night, too – I can hear him now, moving restlessly about. Eventually, I go in, to see what it all means.

He is very pale.

‘What is it?’ I ask, because it is clear to me that something is happening, that some change has occurred in him.

He touches the back of his head, which he always does when he is agitated. There is a thinning patch there, which reminds me of a bear that passed from me to Tino, the fur rubbed away by our embraces.

‘Madrid. I have had news from Salvador. They’re attacking through the Casa del Campo.’

It is a park, at the outskirts of the city. Aunt Aída took us there once when we were staying with them. I remember pine trees, undulating green, a stream near which we had almost stumbled over a courting couple. A place of peace. The idea of war – or death – occurring there is an impossible one.

‘If Madrid falls,’ Papa says, ‘everything will be lost. All the progress the government has made. These men, they want to plunge us back into the Dark Ages. They want to turn good men and women, people who have begun to hope for something more, back into starving peasants. Do you understand?’

‘I—’

‘Estrella,’ he says. ‘I have to go and help.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘no, Papa – we need you here.’

‘They’re using my words on the radio,’ he says, with an unmistakable note of pride. They are, I’ve heard them, too. “A time will come when ordinary Spanish men and women will have to fight to protect their freedom. Because the oppressor will fight to destroy it. At this time, there can be no distinction between the ordinary man and the soldier. We must all be soldiers.”

‘They’re using words that I meant when I wrote them, that I should stand by. And yet I sit here, doing nothing.’ He looks at me. He is waiting for me, I think, to give him my permission. But I can’t. This isn’t like his other trips, the ones made in peacetime.

‘What about us?’ I ask. ‘We could come with you, to Madrid. We could stay with Tío Salvador and Tía Aída.’

‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘It wouldn’t be safe.’

‘If it isn’t safe,’ I realize that I am close to tears, ‘if it isn’t safe, then you mustn’t go.’ My father is many things, but he is no soldier. At one time, as many children do of their fathers, I believed him invincible. But now, as I think of those soldiers they have spoken of on the radio – men trained from my own age in war, men out for blood – he appears diminished to me, vulnerable.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘We need you here, Papa. Tino needs you.’

‘You’re seventeen now, Estrella. I trust you to take care of him while I’m gone.’

I am sixteen, in fact, but there seems little point in mentioning this: it won’t change anything in his mind.

‘I am doing this for you, Estrella. For you and Tino. Do you understand?’