‘Well, whoever it was, it doesn’t matter,’ I went on. ‘One thing is certain, though, none of those prime ministers would have known what you know, you and your friends, the troops, although you may already have been made a sergeant or a lieutenant. And they certainly won’t have issued any orders. And as for what you call the Crown, well, the Queen will have no idea and won’t want to, poor woman – very wise. And nothing will have changed in that respect since the Second World War, Tomás, not in England or anywhere else. The people who worked for the PWE believed they were working for Churchill, for the nation that he embodied at the time, but they would only have been doing so very obliquely, if at all. They were working for Lockhart or Crossman or Delmer.’ I continued to throw names at him, as well as acronyms, to impress him with my pseudo-knowledge. ‘Or for someone beneath them. And the MI6 people would be working for Menzies or Vivian and for their close or distant subordinates; whether Menzies met with Churchill every day, I’ve no idea – he may have done – but it would make no difference: the troops were leagues away from Churchill, as far as you are from Thatcher and from whoever’s in charge of you at the moment, and that’s how everything is everywhere. The people ultimately responsible for any decision-making always delegate and wash their hands of things, and cover themselves with a veil. The veil has the advantage of letting you see and not see, or to see only vaguely if that’s what you want; you just have to fold the veil in two to make it thicker, or into four and then you can’t see a thing. So almost no one knows who they’re working for, nor who actually gave the orders they’re carrying out. It’s absurd, everyone thinks they know who or what they’re serving when really they’re just groping in the dark, flying blind. But then even if they did know …’
I paused just to test his mood, to find out if he was still furious or was at least listening to some of what I said. It seemed to me that his fit of rage had abated and he was more or less paying attention.
‘Dick Franks, I believe.’ I assumed he meant that this was the man in charge of them now. ‘Go on. What do you mean by “even if they did know”?’ He was still speaking in English and in that vaguely American drawl, which I found discomfiting and unsettling. However, he said so little that I didn’t pause for long and went on:
‘Do you remember that scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V?’ My English literature classes at the university had required me to do a very close reading of the play, in case I was asked to teach it.
‘Which scene?’
‘The one where, on the eve of battle, the King wraps himself in a cloak and joins three soldiers who, unable to sleep, their weapons at the ready, are anxiously waiting for what the next day will bring. He presents himself to them as a friend, he passes himself off as one of them, sits down by their fire and they talk. The soldiers speak very freely, as among equals, and two even get a bit stroppy with him at one point, because, for them, he isn’t the King or anything, just as they are not, at that moment, his subjects, they can argue with him and say whatever they like, for the King is in disguise, has hidden his face.’
‘Yes, that’s a very famous scene, very famous indeed. And it’s followed by the speech about ceremony, I think. Anyway, what about it?’
Tomás appeared to have calmed down, but I found that decrepit voice and that entirely inappropriate accent far more frightening than his angry shouts or him thumping the table. I didn’t know what he was playing at or why, it was nothing like the playful mimicry he had always indulged in, nor was this the right moment for such things. It was suddenly as if I were speaking to a stranger, someone remote, another person. I could see him and he was him, despite his changed appearance, for he always returned from one of his prolonged absences looking quite different: with long or short hair or almost shaven-headed, with his hair fairer or darker, with a beard or a moustache or mutton-chop side whiskers, a few pounds heavier or lighter, his face and body thinner or fatter, almost puffy, his nose broader and with shadows under his eyes; a new scar on his back, the product of a car accident, nothing serious, he told me. But it was his accent I found troubling; more than that, it filled me with the beginnings of panic, as if he were possessed by the spirit of an old actor in Westerns: Walter Brennan, for example, who had appeared in a hundred films and won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor; Brennan always spoke as if he were chewing tobacco or had forgotten his false teeth, and I often found him incomprehensible, I’d seen him play that role in classics like My Darling Clementine, Red River and Rio Bravo, which both of us loved. The disconnect between Tomás and his voice and his accent made me feel insecure, or, for some reason, in danger, as if I were treading on unstable ground: if he could transform himself like that, then he would be capable of anything, I thought, of not being himself even in his actions. But he urged me on with an energetic, impatient gesture, like the young man he was, and I hastened to answer:
‘Those soldiers know that they serve the King, even though they’ve never seen him in person and are happy to serve him, as you have been now that you’re serving your unexpectedly beloved England. But even those simple men wonder about the battle they will fight the next day and in which they might lose their lives. And one of them says: “But if the cause is not good, the King himself has a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together on the last day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place.’ ” And the truth is that no one can ever know if other people’s causes are good or bad, even those of your own country when that country isn’t a source of shame, as, until only recently, was ours; or should I say, my country. Causes belong only to their representatives, remember, and they are always temporary and lose authority as one succeeds another. Think of the current fashion for apologising for what was done by compatriots who have been pushing up the daisies for centuries now. It’s ridiculous. So, tell me, how can you say that your causes are just causes, if they’re given to you by intermediaries and lieutenants and sergeants, causes that are doubtless disfigured, distorted or fake, perhaps not even explained; I doubt very much that they take the trouble to justify to you what they’re ordering you to do. They’ll send you off here or there, saying “Do this” or “Get rid of him”, nothing more, I bet. If we find it hard to know whether our own causes are good and can blithely deceive ourselves about them, imagine how hard it is to know about other people’s causes. We don’t even know what they are.’
I was about to go on, because that wasn’t my main point, only a preamble, but he took advantage of my pause to interrupt me and this time he spoke for longer, still – infuriatingly – in that Walter Brennan voice, which grew more sinister with each second that passed. It was really unnerving to hear it issuing from his throat and his lips.
‘If memory serves me right, someone else says in that famous scene: “If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime from us.” We study Shakespeare in our work too, you know. Of course, what Shakespeare says isn’t the current doctrine, which even accuses and lays the blame on the poor cabin boy of some ship whose captain committed a felony. Perhaps that modest soldier in Henry V had more sense than our world, which, with its pretensions to virtue, is more hypocritical than any other. But I don’t know where you’re going with all this or what you’re trying to say, girlie.’ He called me ‘girlie’ as if he really were an old cowboy and I was a little kid, or, who knows, a horse. ‘That’s how it’s been for as long as there have been bosses and hierarchies: there’s a chain of command and each person receives instructions from the person immediately above and passes them on to the person beneath. If each link in that chain questioned those instructions and made deep moral speeches about them, nothing would work and nothing would be possible, chaos would ensue. That’s how it is in armies and in businesses, even in grocery shops. And no one could operate efficiently, no wars would be won, not even the odd skirmish. I know there’s a long tradition of that in Spain: undisciplined troops full of harebrained schemes, ideas de bombero’ – he s
hifted back into Spanish at that point, for every language has a yearning for other languages – ‘who argue about everything, hoping to impose their ideas, and if they don’t, then they go it alone. Obviously, we haven’t been helped by the string of incompetent, disastrous leaders we’ve had since time immemorial. England does things differently, and it’s not so very strange that I should have chosen it. Historically, it, too, has had its fair share of fools in charge …’
Our little girl had been crying and calling out for some time, when Tomás was only about halfway through his spiel, but he hadn’t stopped speaking, pretending that he hadn’t heard her, or perhaps thinking it wasn’t urgent enough to keep him from finishing his speech. And he clearly hadn’t finished, just as I hadn’t finished mine, but, at that point, I could bear it no longer and I got up and went to fetch her, but before I did, I said:
‘Will you stop doing that? Why are you talking to me like some old cowpoke from the Wild West? What are you playing at? You’re making me nervous, you’re frightening me. You sound as if you were someone else, I don’t know, Walter Brennan or someone. I can’t even understand you properly and I just don’t recognise you. So stop it now, stop arsing around.’
I went into the bedroom and picked my daughter up in my arms. She was thirsty, and so I gave her something to drink, then took her into the living room to be with us, cradling her head against my shoulder and rocking her back and forth, to calm her, and hoping she would fall asleep to the murmur of our voices and my gentle pacing. This wouldn’t be easy unless Tomás reverted to his normal self. His relationship with Guillermo and Elisa was a contradictory one. I’m sure he loved them and was deeply fond of them, and he just adored Elisa, but he always tried to maintain a certain distance from them when he was in Madrid. He reined in his affection and reined in their instinctive affection for him, as if he didn’t want to become overly accustomed to such fond displays, so that he wouldn’t miss them too painfully during his inevitable future absences. Even though he was often at home for several months at a time, he knew he would be summoned to London again and would again have to leave, that he was only at home with us temporarily, and he could never discount the possibility that he might not come back. This thought so saddened me that my feelings of disapproval diminished somewhat. Thomas knew that, one day, he might become an outcast from our universe, and, as a consequence, he tried hard not to become too attached to it, to be, up to a point, a visitor, insofar as that was possible. He held out his arms to take the child, and I handed her to him and he laid her on his chest, patting her gently on the back and rather inexpertly rocking her back and forth. She stopped crying, and her tears were replaced by little groans, heralding a return to sleep, and he took advantage of that moment to answer me, still in English, but in a completely different voice and accent this time: now he sounded like a rather uneducated Englishman, the kind who pronounces nearly all his vowels as ‘o’s, and instead of ‘like’ or ‘mind’ says ‘loik’ or ‘moind’, just to give a couple of examples. To be honest, I couldn’t always tell the difference. It was a harsh voice, that of a coarse young man, not a decrepit old fellow.
‘More like Charley Grapewin,’ he said. I had no idea who that was, although I presumed it was some other supporting actor. During their training sessions, they were probably shown films, new and old, to help them learn to imitate all kinds of voices, ways of speaking and accents. As well as listening to tapes of different languages and dialects, I suppose. ‘If you find that so upsetting, see what you think of this one.’
I found this other voice equally disturbing, because what was so unnerving and frightening was seeing him and yet hearing not his voice, but that of some complete stranger who had slipped into my house and taken possession of Tomás or supplanted him: if he’d done that kind of thing in a different age, someone would have called for an exorcist. His mimicry was now of such a disquieting, not to say terrifying, perfection that he could pretend to be whomever he wanted. They had certainly taught him well, and, during those years, had really honed his skills, transforming him into a chameleon-like actor or a professional mimic of the sort who appears on the radio and makes listeners believe that it really is the prime minister or the King or the Pope speaking. Once, those verbal incarnations had been intended to divert or amuse, but now they were deadly serious, and their very seriousness made them horribly sinister; they were a brilliant forgery, like a fake painting that is presented and sold as authentic, or like a seducer in one of those classical comedies, who slips into the bed of a woman under cover of a moonless night, pretending to be her beloved, and has his way with her: that was the stuff of deceit. Someone capable of such shams could fool anyone and was, therefore, highly dangerous, and I found this idea utterly repugnant, that my husband, my old love, should be so gifted at pretence, and deployed that gift and used those skills when he was far away in that part of his life to which I had no access. All the more reason, despite my unease, to return to what I was saying, to what I most wanted to tell him and which I had left half-said. Elisa didn’t seem bothered by her father’s phoney, albeit sonorous, voice, and was slowly falling asleep in his arms, doubtless breathing in the smell of his skin; perhaps children find any voice soothing and only need to know they’re not alone and that someone is watching over them.
‘Listen, Tomás, tell me what you think of this. One of the soldiers in that scene, called Bates if I remember rightly – no, Williams – gets embroiled in an argument with the King, who is partly muffled up or entirely covered by his cloak, I’m not sure, but his face is certainly obscured, plus they’re in the dark. Williams says something disrespectful about his monarch, and the King defends him (that is, he defends himself as if he were someone else), the two quarrel and promise to settle accounts after the battle, if they survive. And they exchange gloves, by way of what they call a ‘gage’ or ‘guarantee’, so that they’ll recognise each other when they meet again, if they meet again: one will wear it pinned to his helmet and the other to his cap. And a few scenes later, they do meet. Henry V has survived, of course, and as he’s waiting to receive a full count of the numbers of deaths on the French and English sides, he sees Williams pass by. The King is now clearly the King, surrounded by aides-de-camp, and he’s the one who addresses the soldier when he spots him with the glove pinned to his cap. He asks why he’s wearing it, and Williams describes what happened the previous night with an unknown Englishman or Welshman. Henry comments mischievously that perhaps his enemy was “a gentleman of great sort”, to which Williams replies, with the agreement of a captain who is also present that, however great the gentleman with whom he quarrelled, he is honour-bound to keep his oath and strike him if he sees him alive and in one piece. There are various other bits of business that I won’t go into now, but, at last, the King shows him the other glove, the fellow of the one he gave to Williams in the dark when he was in disguise. And then the King dares to censure him for abusing his King: “It was indeed I you vowed to strike, and you spoke in most bitter terms,” he says. The last time I read it for my classes, I noticed that he even resorts to using the royal “we” to intimidate him: “It was ourself thou didst abuse.” And the captain, who is also there as witness to this dialogue, quickly changes his mind and urges Henry to punish Williams, declaring “let his neck answer for it”.’
‘Yes, I remember the first really famous scene, but have no recollection of that part, none at all,’ said Tomás, and he said this in Spanish and in his normal or true voice, as if he’d suddenly returned to his old self, perhaps because he was interested or intrigued by what I was telling him. ‘And what does the King do? Does he order his execution? That would be most unfair, an abuse of power. How could the soldier know who he was actually talking to that night? For him, he was just another soldier, an equal, someone with whom he was perfectly at liberty to get into an argument.’
‘This is what Williams says in response: “Your Majesty came not as yourself: you came to me as a common man, and what you
r Highness suffered in that guise was your fault, not mine; for had you been what I took you for, then I caused no offence; I ask your Highness, therefore, pardon me.” I’m quoting from memory, of course,’ I added, ‘but that’s essentially what he said.’
‘I don’t even know why that man Williams should ask to be forgiven,’ Tomás said rather vehemently (the vehemence felt by more innocent readers and spectators, by children and the very young). ‘He had clearly done nothing wrong. If the King doesn’t behave like the King, if he supplants himself and appears in disguise, then he isn’t the King for as long as he keeps up that pretence. What anyone says to him while he’s in that disguise doesn’t count, even if it’s offensive, subversive, even treasonous; it’s as if anything said hadn’t been said, and should be ignored or wiped from the record. So what does Henry do then? Does he have him executed or pardoned?’ Tomás was anxious to know what happened next, whether Henry V took advantage of his deceitful mode of inquiry, of having learned that one of his soldiers despised him (which was the cause of the quarrel, the argument, the summons), or if he absolved Williams of all blame, whatever his opinions and regardless of who he had challenged, because, at the time, he didn’t know who he was taking on or who he was talking to.
I stood looking at Tomás for a moment, with a mixture of perplexity, tenderness, pity, even unwitting mockery, I’m not sure which, and the latter might have been unavoidable. He was still somewhat ineptly jiggling Elisa about, even though she was already sound asleep, her light breathing regular and peaceful. I was tempted to take her from him and return her to her cot, but I waited, I held back.
‘You’re quite right, I think, and so was the soldier, as we will see. On the eve of battle, the King has infiltrated his own troops, those who serve him and are prepared to die for him and for their country, which, in those days were two indistinguishable entities, and, for the troops, were one and the same. There are even politicians today who try to make out that there’s no difference between the country and them, and, despite the way the world has changed, quite a lot of people are persuaded by their arrogance, so just imagine what it would have been like in 1415. The soldiers may have questioned whether the cause of the war was good or bad, but they had no intention of running away or disobeying their leader. For that very reason, because he was an infiltrator, the King would have no right to make use of what he heard, of what the soldiers had told him, frankly and in good faith. If he took advantage of that, if he punished that particular soldier, he would be abusing the trust placed in him by one of his subjects, who was unaware that, by speaking so freely, he risked losing his head at the hands of his friendly interlocutor, when they were not on equal terms and he could not defend himself. That’s how we would see it now, isn’t it, and presumably that’s how it was seen in Shakespeare’s day, two centuries after that battle. Henry’s behaviour would seem sly and aberrant. The King, though, was all-powerful and his will always prevailed, which is probably why the fickle captain urges him to punish the soldier immediately, and take the life that had not been taken by the enemy in the recent victorious struggle. According to him, what did it matter how the King learned of Williams’s disrespectful remarks, what did it matter who Williams thought he was threatening with a slap across the face and a subsequent duel? He was still threatening the King, and the King is always the King even if he dresses as a beggar, as happens in fairy tales. That, at least, was the captain’s reasoning, or, rather, his belief. His name was Fluellen …’
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