The Invitation(46)

I am convinced that if we stay we will wake one morning and find it here, on our own doorstep. I have explained as much to Tino as is necessary.

‘But I thought you said that they wouldn’t harm us, because we’re children?’

‘No.’ There is talk on the radio of the bombing of schoolhouses. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to be sure. And Aunt Aída and Uncle Salvador are waiting for us, in Madrid.’

This isn’t quite true. I have sent them a telegram. No reply – and no time to wait for one. No way of telling if it has even reached them. In his telegram, the one in which he told me that Papa had been killed, my uncle told me to stay put. Madrid no es seguro. But it is not safe here any more, either. And the truth is, I’m not sure that I can protect Tino properly. Not on my own. I’m not sure that I want to try.

In our cases: clothes, a little food, and supplies for Se?or Bombón, put together at great pains by Tino. Also several colouring books for Tino, and a collection of various books about pirates: his latest obsession, perhaps because we have never seen the sea. When all of this is over, I think I will take him there.

It is very cold when we leave the house, and a freezing mist hangs low over the ground. We walk for an hour, as far as the main road to Madrid. As we reach it, a fine rain begins to fall and then, gradually, worsens, sweeping over us in curtains. Through the hush of its falling comes the occasional staccato of gunfire, somewhere in the west, somewhere near. Every so often, there is a yowl from Se?or Bombón’s cage, and Tino crouches down to whisper words of encouragement to him.

‘Be brave,’ he says, ‘be brave.’

We wait for an hour, trying to shelter beneath the branches of an old olive, which seems to have wandered out of the marching lines of its compatriots to stand here beside the road. I am beginning to wonder if I have made the right decision. There is nothing going towards the capital – though we have seen several trucks pass in the opposite direction, carrying soldiers.

We are waiting on the main route from Valencia to Madrid – I had thought it would be easy. But this is the first time I have left the town and its surrounds since the beginning of the war. The scope of my own ignorance frightens me.

Finally, just as I am starting to calculate the journey home, and whether Tino will make it – or if I will have to carry him and Se?or Bombón – there is the sound of an engine. Several engines, in fact. In the distance a black mass grows larger. They are going in the right direction. We crouch behind the olive, and watch, until I see the flag. Only then do I step out into the road, raising my arm. The first truck graunches to a halt: there are three others behind.

The driver leans from his cabin and shouts: ‘What are you doing? I could have hit you!’

‘Please,’ I walk towards him. ‘We need to get to Madrid.’

He frowns, wipes sweat from his brow. ‘Why, child? Others are leaving fast as they can.’

‘I know. We have nowhere else to go. We have family there.’

He looks from me to Tino, shakes his head. ‘Vale. Fine, OK. You can climb in.’

I lift Tino into the driver’s cabin next to him, our small bag, Se?or Bombón – protesting furiously – in his cage. I scramble up beside them.

We have joined a convoy of supplies to Madrid. In our truck, foodstuffs. In the two behind, weapons.

‘Better stuff now,’ the man – Luis – tells us. ‘From the Russians. Up until recently, our lot have been fighting with guns twenty years old.’

‘Why?’

‘England and France sold us down the river. So the government will buy anything: second-rate planes with the faults plastered over, rifles that backfire, or don’t fire at all – that haven’t been used since the eighteen hundreds. All sold to them at the highest possible price, by charlatans, because they know that we’re desperate. Straight into the pockets of criminals.’

I think of my father, who had to my knowledge never fired a gun, trying to use one of these useless weapons against a trained soldier. Was that how he went?

In the thick air inside the truck the smell of the supplies form a powerful, not entirely pleasant fug: a petroleum tang combined with the distinctive sweetish hum of meat that has spent too long in the warm. I pull Tino close to me, and press my nose to the top of his head. Normally, he might wriggle away from me: he feels he is getting too old for such embraces, I know. But since Papa’s death he has been different. He remains where he is, in my arms. Gradually, lulled by the heat and the sway of the truck, I let my eyes close.

I come groggily awake. Then I hear the thing that has woken me. I know this sound: I have heard them pass over, high above. I don’t understand the other sound, though. A high-pitched scream. Not human: the shriek of a machine.

As an idea surfaces – the possibility of what it might be – I am being hurled through space, and all behind me is white heat.

I am lying on my back. A hot bubble of silence surrounds me. I feel detached from myself, thrown loose. For a moment I wonder if this is dying. No, I realize, it is merely that I have come within touching distance of that veil that separates life from death.

‘Oh,’ Stella says, stopping on the track.

‘What?’

‘I think we’re nearly there.’

There, in front of them, San Fruttuoso has appeared through a brief gap in the trees. There is the pale expanse of beach far below, the fa?ade of the abbey gleaming like bone. The yacht is visible too, moored a hundred feet or so from the shore. The change that comes over her now is marked. The words are stopped up, the sadness and the energy … all seem to dissipate. She is combing her hair with her fingers and smoothing it behind her ears, drying the film of sweat from her brow. Before his eyes she is diminishing to a negative of the woman she was a moment before. His opportunity to comfort, to empathize, has passed.