'What did you do in Spain during the Civil War, Peter?' I asked straight out. 'How long were you there? Not long, I imagine. Before, you told me that you were just passing through. Who were you working with? Where were you?'
Wheeler gave an amused smile as he had on that earlier night, when he had played with my newly aroused curiosity and said things like: 'If you'd ever asked me about it . . .But you've never shown the slightest interest in the subject. You've shown no curiosity at all about my peninsular adventures. You should have made the most of past opportunities, you see. You have to plan ahead, to anticipate.' He raised his hand to the back of his armchair and felt around without success. He wanted his walking stick and couldn't find it without turning round. I stood up, grabbed the stick and handed it to him, thinking he was going to use it to help him get to his feet. Instead, he placed it across his lap or, rather, rested the ends on the arms of his chair and gripped the stick with both hands, as if it were a pole or a javelin.
'Well, I went twice, but on both occasions I was there only briefly,' he said, very slowly at first, as if he did not entirely want to release the information or the words; as if he were forcing his tongue to anticipate his actual decision, the not entirely definite decision to tell me all: he might want to tell me, but, as he had explained with some embarrassment, he might not yet be authorized to do so. 'The first time was in March of 1937, in the company of Dr. Hewlett Johnson, whose name will mean nothing to you. However, you might be familiar with his nickname, "the Red Dean," by which he was known then and later.' We were speaking in English. Of course I knew the name, of course I had heard of it. In fact, I could scarcely believe it.
'El bandido Deán de Canterbury!' I exclaimed in Spanish. 'Don't tell me you knew him.'
'I beg your pardon!' he said, momentarily disconcerted by that sudden intrusion in Spanish and by that strange way of referring to the Dean as 'the bandit Dean of Canterbury'
'As you may well remember from what I've told you before, my father was arrested shortly after the end of the Civil War. And several false accusations were made against him, one of them, as I've often heard him say, was that he had been "the willing companion in Spain of the bandit Dean of Canterbury." Imagine! That strange cleric was very nearly responsible—albeit indirectly, unwittingly and involuntarily—for my not being born, nor any of my siblings either. I mean that in the normal course of events my father would have been summarily condemned and shot; they came for him in May, 1939, only a month and a half after the Francoists entered Madrid, and in those days if you denounced someone, even if you did so as a mere private individual, you didn't have to prove their guilt, they had to prove their innocence, and how could my father possibly have proved that he had never in his life seen that Canterburian Dean' (I was speaking in English again and so didn't need to resort to the strange Spanish equivalent 'cantuariense') 'or the falsity of the other charges, which were far graver. He was immensely lucky, and after a few months in prison was acquitted and released, although he suffered reprisals for many years afterwards. But imagine . . .'
'It's certainly a striking coincidence,' Wheeler said, interrupting me. 'Very striking. But let me continue my story, otherwise I'll lose the thread.' It was as if he thought the coincidence to be of no importance, as if he felt coincidences to be the most natural thing in the world, as did Pérez Nuix and I myself. Or perhaps, I thought, he had been planning his next encounter with me for a while, hoping that it would happen, and that I would deign to go and see him, and so knew exactly what he was going to tell me, what partial information he was going to give me, and did not want to be forced to depart from his script by impromptu remarks or distractions or interruptions (he never lost the thread). He may not have wanted any interruptions, but he would have to put up with at least one, when I told him what had happened to Dearlove and demanded, if not an explanation, at least some pronouncement on Tupra's behavior. And so he set my father aside and continued, still slowly, rather like someone reciting something they have previously memorized. 'We were the first to break the naval blockade set up by the Nationalists (I always thought it scandalous that they should call themselves that) in the Bay of Biscay. We set sail from Bermeo, near Bilbao, in a French torpedo boat, and reached Saint Jean de Luz without mishap, despite the widespread and widely believed rumors that the whole area had been mined. That was a Francoist lie, and a very effective one, because it kept boats away and stopped provisions reaching the Basque Country. The Dean described the crossing in The Manchester Guardian and a few days later, a merchant vessel, the Seven Seas Spray, tried its luck in the other direction, leaving Saint Jean de Luz after dark. And the following morning, when it sailed up the river to the dock in Bilbao, having encountered neither mines nor warships en route, the people of Bilbao massed on the quay and cheered the Captain, who was standing on the bridge with his daughter, and cried: "Long live the British sailors! Long live Liberty!" It was terribly moving apparently. And we paved the way. It's just a shame we were going in the other direction. The Captain was called Roberts.' Wheeler, eyes very wide, paused for a moment, deep in thought, as if he were reliving what he had not actually lived through, but of which he felt himself, in part, the artificer. Then he went on: 'Before that, we'd witnessed the bombing of Durango. We missed being caught in it ourselves by about ten minutes, it happened when we were approaching by road. We saw it from a hillside, in the distance. We saw the planes approaching, they were Junkers 52s, German. Then we heard a great roar and a vast black cloud rose up from the town. By the time we finally drove into the town after nightfall, the place had been almost completely destroyed. According to the first estimates, there had been some 200 civilian deaths and about 800 wounded, among them two priests and thirteen nuns. That same night, Franco's general headquarters announced to the world by radio that the Reds had blown up churches and killed nuns in Durango, in the devoutly Catholic Basque Country, as well as two priests while they were saying mass, one when he was giving communion to the faithful and the other while elevating the Host. All of this was true: the nuns had died in the chapel of Santa Susana, one priest in the Jesuit church and the other in the church of Santa Maria, but they had been bombed, as had the Convento de los Augustinos. I remember the names or those were the names I was given. It wasn't the Reds who had done it, though, it was those Junkers 52s. That was on March 31".'—He fell silent for a moment, a look of anger on his face, as if he were feeling the anger he had felt then, some seventy years before. 'That was what your War was like. One lie after another, every day and everywhere, like a great flood, something that devastates and drowns. You try to take one apart only to find there are ten new lies to deal with the next day. You can't cope. You let things go, give up. There are so many people devoted to creating those lies that they become a tremendous force impossible to stop. That was my first experience of war, I wasn't used to it, but all wars are full of lies, they're a fundamental part of them, if not their principal ingredient. And the worst thing is that none are ever completely refuted. However many years pass, there are always people prepared to keep an old lie alive, and any lie will do, even the most improbable and most insane. No lie is ever entirely extinguished.'
'That's why one shouldn't really ever tell anyone anything, isn't that right, Peter?' I said, quoting his words. It was what he had said to me just before lunch, on the Sunday of that now far-off weekend, while Mrs. Berry was waving to us from the window.
He didn't remember or didn't realize I was quoting him, or else he simply ignored it. He stroked the long deep scar on the left side of his chin, a gesture I had never seen him make before: he didn't usually touch or mention that scar, and so I had never asked him about it. If it did not exist as far as he was concerned, I had to respect that. I assumed it was from the war.
'Oh, I learned to lie as well, later on. Telling the truth isn't necessarily better, you know. The consequences are sometimes identical.' However, he didn't linger over that remark, but continued talking in this rather schema
tic manner, as if he had already drawn up a narrative plan for that day, that is, for the next time I went to see him. 'We were briefly in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, and then I came back to England. My second visit took place a year later, in the summer of 1938. On that occasion, my guide, or rather my driving force, was Alan Hillgarth, the head of our Naval Intelligence in Spain. Although he spent most of his time in Mallorca (in fact, his son Jocelyn, the historian, was born there, you've heard of him I expect), he gave me the task of watching and monitoring the movements of Francoist warships in the ports around the Bay of Biscay, on the assumption that I had acquired some knowledge of the area. Most, of course, were German and Italian ships, which had been harassing and attacking the British merchant fleet in 1936, both there in the Bay of Biscay and in the Mediterranean, and so the Admiralty was keen to gather as much information as possible about what kind of ships they were and their positions. I was traveling in the guise of a university researcher, on the pretext of delving into and rummaging around in Spain's old and highly disorganized archives, and I did exactly that—indeed some of the discoveries I made as a specialist in the history of Spain and Portugal date from that period: in fact it was in Portugal, when I was eventually deported there, that I started preparing my thesis on the sources used by Fernão Lopes, the great chronicler of the fourteenth century whom I'm sure you know' The truth is I'd never heard of him. 'But that's by the by. I was arrested by the Guardia Civil when I was on the Islas Cies, taking photographs of the cruiser Canarias, one of the few ships in the Spanish navy that had gone over to the rebels, as the Republicans called the Nationalists. They searched me, of course, and found compromising material, mainly photographs. Normally, as you can imagine, they would have executed me. We were, after all, in the middle of a war.' Wheeler paused. He may have been telling his story in that rather mechanical way, almost as if it had happened to someone else, but he nevertheless knew when to prolong the uncertainty.
'So how did you escape?' I asked, just to please him.
'I was lucky. Like your father. Like any survivor of any war. They took me in a launch to the Hotel Atlantico in the port of Vigo, and there I was interrogated by two SS officers.'—'It's always hotels they choose to convert into police stations or prisons,' I thought, 'like the one in Alcala de Henares where they tortured Nin and possibly flayed him alive.'—'In 1935, I had spent part of the summer in Bavaria, at a Hitler Youth camp, for, shall we say, biographical reasons that are irrelevant here. When they found out and checked that I was telling the truth, they invited me out to supper with them. That saved my life. They consulted the Nationalist headquarters in Burgos and, as I understand it, Franco himself gave the order not to have me killed but simply to expel me. After a few minor hitches getting hold of an exit permit, I was taken to the international bridge at Tui where I crossed into Portugal. That was the slowest stretch of my journey, I mean the longest walk of my life, on foot and carrying a suitcase full of books. Two German machine-gunners had their guns trained on my back so that I didn't deviate from the path and ahead of me stood some armed Portuguese guards. And beneath me lay the River Mino. It seemed very wide, and perhaps it was. So, as you see, however disastrous Franco proved to be for the history of your country and for many, many people, he played a crucial role in my personal history. A paradox, eh?
And rather an unfortunate one for me, I must admit. Owing one's life to the clemency of someone who showed clemency to almost no one else is oddly unflattering. Being an ignorant provincial, he was, I suppose, impressed by educated foreigners like me.' He laughed briefly at his own mildly malicious remark, and I laughed too out of politeness. Then he went on. 'As I told you before, I merely passed through your War: I still use words precisely. I didn't stay there long on either occasion, and there would be no reason for either of my names to appear in the index of any of the books written about the conflict. What I did there is hardly worth telling and seems almost ridiculous now. As would my subsequent activities during our War, although some of the things I did were more spectacular or more damaging and, objectively speaking, more important. Toby was quite right when he told you years ago that in times of relative peace, wartime events seem puerile and, inevitably, resemble lies, conceits and fabulations. As I think I've mentioned before, even things I've experienced myself seem fictitious or almost fanciful. I find it hard to believe, for example, that I acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1940. That was one of my first "special employments" to adapt the term used in my Who's Who entry, if you remember. It seems like a dream now. And the fact that it happened abroad doubtless contributes to that feeling.'
I remembered the expression clearly, as I did every word I had read, urged on by Wheeler, in his entry in Who's Who. And I understood that dream-like feeling too: 'But that was in another country . . .'
'The Duke and Duchess of Windsor?' I asked. 'Do you mean the former King, Edward VIII, and the divorced woman he abdicated the throne for, that ugly American, Wallis Simpson?' Like almost everyone else, I had read about the couple who were, supposedly, deeply in love, and seen photos of both of them in magazines and books. She, if I remember rightly, was extremely thin, had a hairstyle like that of the housekeeper in Hitchcock's Rebecca and very thin red lips, like a scar. The exact opposite of Jayne Mansfield. 'And what do you mean: sword of Damocles?'
'Oh, she wasn't that ugly' Wheeler said. 'Well, she was, but there was something troubling about her too.' He hesitated for an instant. 'I suppose I can tell you about it; it was a very harmless mission.' The word he used in English—'harmless'—means literally 'sin perjuicio' or 'sin daño' 'without harm or hurt.' 'Although it, too, sounds like a lie. I was charged with escorting them from Madrid to Lisbon, and, once there, to make sure that they embarked for the Bahamas. You may remember that he spent the War years there, as Governor of those islands—-it was a way of keeping them far from the conflict, as far away as decorum allowed. Both of them had been through an embarrassing, shall we say, Germanophile stage, and had, it was rumored, visited Hitler incognito, before 1939 of course. There was no basis to the rumor, but the government feared like the plague the possibility that they might fall into the hands of the Nazis, that the Gestapo might kidnap them and take them to Germany, of course, but also that they might desert. That they might, in a word, go over to the other side. Churchill didn't trust them at all, and didn't dismiss the idea that if, one day, the Germans invaded us as they had the rest of Europe, the Germans would reinstate the former Edward VIII as a puppet king. Anyway, I and a naval officer from the NID (a very small escort, when I think about it, unimaginable now)'—I knew those initials, the Naval Intelligence Division—'were given a pistol each and told, albeit not in so many words, that we should make use of them if there was the slightest risk of losing the Duke and Duchess in unfortunate circumstances, and regardless of the couple's own wishes.'
'Use them against the Duke and Duchess?' I asked, interrupting him. Against an ex-King? Or against the Gestapo?' The whole business really did sound like a lie, although it obviously wasn't.
'It went without saying that we should use them against the Gestapo, although I don't think we would have stood much of a chance. No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler's hands.'
'We understood? Not in so many words?' I was surprised by such expressions. 'Do you mean that they didn't give you clear orders?'
'MI6 was obsessed with never saying quite what it meant. But you soon learned to decode their orders, especially if you'd been at Oxford. I don't know if they still keep up the custom now. What they said to us, more or less, was: "Under no circumstances must they fall into enemy hands. It would be preferable to have to mourn them." The truth is that I would have interpreted this exactly as did he and the officer from the NID with whom he had shared responsibilities. And he went on to speak about the latter in an amused, almost jocular, gossipy tone: '
I bet you can't guess the name of the naval commander accompanying me.'
'No, I can't,' I said. 'How could I?'
'In fact, almost no one knows about this, not even his biographers.' Then he called out: 'Estelle!'And he automatically corrected himself: there was, after all, a witness present, even though I was a trusted friend and had occasionally heard him call her by her first name before. 'Mrs. Berry!' Mrs. Berry appeared at once, she was always close by, ready to be of service to him. 'Could you please bring me the Chocolate Sailor's passport? You know where I keep it. I want to show it to Jacobo.' That was what he said—'Chocolate Sailor.' 'Now you'll see, it will amuse you no end.' And when, after a few minutes, Mrs. Berry reappeared and handed him a document (I heard her go up the stairs to the top floor and then come back down again), he showed it to me with an almost childlike expression of shy pride on his face: 'Look.'
Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Page 49
