“Robert, can’t you introduce us to your friends?” his mother had said, but before he could answer, his dad—surprisingly sensitive, in retrospect—had replied, “There, it isn’t necessary.”
“Well, now he’s all fancy Eton, you think he knew dukes and the like,” his mum said. “He talks like one.”
“Sir, maybe the three of us could go off and get a pint,” he’d said. “They’ve a nice pub in the town.”
“Robert, can’t say as I have a thirst,” his dad said. “But if you’d like. Just the three of us, to celebrate our Eton chap.”
Florry then led them on an awkward pilgrimage through the crowd with an excuse-me here and a beg-pardon there, his eyes down, his face hot and drawn. He was exceedingly worried that his hated nickname—“Stinky,” from a bad spell of bed wetting when first he’d arrived—would come up at him within his parents’ earshot.
But something far worse happened.
“Good heavens, Robert, can these be your parents?”
It was the first time that Julian had spoken to him in six months, and Florry looked up in weird, passionate misery. Julian stood before him, having appeared from God knows where, having suddenly, magically materialized—it was a gift for dramatic entrances, uniquely Julian’s—blocking the way. Julian’s skin was flushed pink and his fair hair hung lankly across his forehead, nonchalant in a way that many younger boys imitated, from under an Eton boater worn atilt on his head. He had on one of those absurd, smug little Eton jackets, too, with its white piping, and it looked dashing and perfect.
It had been most peculiar. Julian, the form’s swankiest boy, had taken up Florry abruptly, been his closest and most trusting friend for nearly three years, then six months earlier had just as abruptly dropped him. It still hurt; in fact, it absolutely crushed Florry and he’d watched helplessly as his studies disintegrated and his chances at a university scholarship, once so close, had simply vanished.
Thus Julian’s sudden appearance was at once wonderful and terrifying. Was this to be a sort of reconciliation, a readmission to favor? Florry’s knees began to shake and his breath came sharp as a knife.
“I say, Mr. and Mrs. Florry?” Julian bent forward, past Florry, and Florry was yet unable to identify the tone and did not know what course the next moment or so would take. “I’m Robert’s friend, Julian Raines.”
He paused, as if to tighten the suspense.
“I wanted to say hello to you. It’s an honor to meet you.”
Julian bowed, shook dad’s slack hand and kissed mum on hers. Florry could see the poor woman’s eyelashes flutter: a gent like Julian had never paid any attention to her.
“I must say,” said Julian, “it’s a shame Robert mussed his opportunity here. It’s not often that a chap from your class has the chance. We’d all so hoped Robert would prove out. But alas, he hasn’t. Off to India, Stink?” Julian smiled in the excruciating silence of the moment. “Well, it’s probably better that way. You won’t be dogged by it, old man. Well, best of luck.”
And with that little masterpiece of destruction, he was off. He had not looked at Florry after the first second, yet in less than a minute he had transformed Florry’s failure from a general one to a specific one, given it special shape and meaning and inserted it forever into his parents’ memories.
But Florry surprised himself by not crying. He simply swallowed and led his parents onward.
“You’re lucky to have such fancy friends,” his mum said. “Did you see how he kissed my hand? There, nobody’s ever done such a thing.”
“A bit cheeky, you ask me,” said his father. “Robert did graduate, did he not? First of our lot to get even half so far. Well, Robert, there’s still India. You’ll get your chance yet. What’s that he called you?”
“It’s nothing, Dad,” Florry said. “Just a schoolboy name.”
“Damned silly,” his father said.
Florry managed a dry heroic smile, but—and later he hated himself for this last weakness—looked past him back into the mob one last time: into Eton through the gates and the crowd of boys and their parents—and he’d seen Julian amid the form’s handsomest youths, laughing, sipping champagne … and then lost sight of him, and that was the end of it.
Thus when the truck halted and the driver came back and shouted, “Inglés. Sí, inglés. ¡Vámonos!” and he’d climbed down to find himself hard by a seedy, battered old country house, he discovered in himself a curious mixture of apprehension and loathing. He knew he was at La Granja, near the English section of the line around Huesca. Somewhere hereabouts he would find his friend and enemy, the man he was sent to stop.
Mobs of soldiers loafed about in the sun, most of them scruffier looking than hobos. In the yard, a dozen different languages filled the air. The largest crowd had formed up about a fire, where a cook was ladling out huge helpings of some sort of rice dish. Near the great house, a tent had been set up with a huge red cross painted on its roof, and Florry could make out wounded soldiers lying on cots. The house itself bore the marks of battle: one wing was smashed to rubble and most of the windows had been broken out. The ubiquitous POUM initials had been inscribed across its façade in garish red paint, in a spidery, gargantuan penmanship. Yet for all the noise and the numbers of men, the scene was strangely pastoral: it had no sense of particular urgency or design. It was as so much of the Spanish revolution, that is, primarily improvised and quite ragtag. No sentry questioned him or challenged him and there seemed to be no office for new arrivals. He simply asked the first several men he saw about the English, and after a time, someone pointed him in more or less the right direction.
He was directed beyond the house, through an orchard, and across a meadow, perhaps a mile’s walk in all. At last he came to a dour little redhead sitting on an appropriated dining-room chair in the middle of a field, sucking on a pipe, and hacking at what proved to be an ancient Colt machine gun.
“I say,” Florry called, “seen a chap about calling himself Julian Raines? Tall fellow, rather fine-boned. Blond.”
The man didn’t bother to look up.
After a time, Florry said, “Er, I was addressing you, sir.”
The man at last raised his face, fixing Florry with shrewd, dirty-gray eyes.
“Wouldn’t have a spare potato-digger bolt on you, mate? This one’s about to bleedin’ snap.”
“I assume ‘potato digger’ is slang for the weapon?”
“You got it, chum. They said they’d send one up.”
“No, they didn’t say anything about that.”
“Public-school man, eh?”
“Yes. My bloody accent, is it? Afraid I can’t much help it.”
“Your pal’s up top the hill, chum. Just go on up.”
“Oh. Thanks. Thanks awfully.”
“Think nothing of it, chum.”
Florry marched up the hill, dragging his rifle with him. At the crest, he saw before him a broad brown plain and beyond that a range of glorious white mountains and halfway between himself and the mountains there lay a doll’s city of brown structures crouching behind a wall from which there issued, lazily, a few columns of smoke. Huesca itself, the enemy city.
Florry looked down the hill where a group of men huddled around a cooking fire behind a rude trench, and cupped his hand to his mouth and—
The tackle sent him hurling down, rolling with bone-crunching racket, over rocks and bushes and branches. He came to a rest against a stunted tree, all tangled up in his equipment, hurting and scraped in a half dozen places. There seemed to be a flock of birds fluttering through the trees.
“You bloody idiot,” someone nearby was shouting at him.
Florry blinked in shock.
“What on earth—”
“Them’s bullets whippin’ about, you bloody fool,” screamed his assailant, no less than the redheaded runt of the other side of the hill. “Blimey, mate, don’t you know a bloody prank? Don’t they have bloody humor at that awful school of yours? Christ, ’e
goes and stands against the crestline!”
“Eh?”
“Come on, then.”
Florry, in his confusion and embarrassment, became aware of a circle of faces above him.
“Billy, you awful toad, playing games with some innocent swot,” came a voice of piercing familiarity. “Good heavens, fellow, don’t just lie there like the fallen Christ awaiting resurrection. Get your scrawny bones up and give us some account of yourself.”
A lovely apparition in mud and pale whiskers stood above him. He wore a small automatic pistol at his waist and some kind of many-buckled leather Burberry. He looked like a Great War aviator, all dash and style, more than any kind of infantryman, even to the scarf—silk, naturally—and the puttees and the hollow, noble sunburned face. His hair was almost white-blond from the outdoor living, the eyes still their fabled opaque blue.
“Hullo, Julian,” said Florry, in spite of himself excited. And a little nervous.
“Good God, it’s Stinky Florry of the old school. Stinky, can it really be you?”
“ ’E said ’e was a chum of yours, Julian,” said the runty redhead. “If I’d known it for a fact, I wouldn’t have knocked ’im down before Bob the Nailer invited him to tea.”
“Had Bob the Nailer known he was an Eton man, Billy, I’m sure he would have shown a degree more politeness,” said Julian with what Florry began to see was a kind of mock snootiness that must have been his style up here. “Robert, you’ve already met the disgusting Billy Mowry, who actually calls himself a commissar. He’s the only man I’ve ever known who’s actually read Das Kapital, which is less impressive than it seems because it’s the only book he’s read. He’s not read my book, for example. He’s not even heard of me, or so he claims.”
“Comrade,” said this Commissar Billy to Florry, “if you can work out a way to keep your fancy chum’s mouth glued tight, you’ll have served the revolution heroically. Anyhows, glad to have you here. We need all the fighters we can find, whatever the class. I reckon you’ll bleed just as red as any of us. I’m boss fellow, or so it says somewhere. Don’t ask me why; these foolish fellows elected me.” There was something like warmth—though not much of it—in his voice.
“Only to shut him up about Karl Bloody Marx, his patron saint. Come on, dear boy, to my quarters. You can meet these other fellows later; they’ll be the first to admit they’re not important enough to waste our time now.”
There was much laughter, and Florry saw that part of Julian’s job here in the trenches was to make the boys laugh.
“Now,” said Julian, drawing him off, “tell Julian why on earth you’ve come halfway across Europe to die in mud among louts and lice. I thought one fool in our form was enough. God, Stinky, you can’t have turned into a bloody Communist, can you? You don’t believe all their nonsense, do you?”
“Christ, Julian, it’s good to see you,” Florry surprised himself in suddenly blurting. He could feel Julian’s charm like a tide sweeping in to engulf him.
You hate him, he told himself. You’ll destroy him, he told himself.
“Look at me, Stink. Yes, by God, it is you. And what a present from God you are. Let me tell you, old man, this bloody giving oneself to the revolution is a good bit of trouble. It’s a picnic in the mud among Java men. Good fellows, but the blokes haven’t even read Housman, for God’s sake. And with your usual flair for the dramatic, you’ve managed to come upon something unique in history: it’s the only time a city has besieged an army. Why, it’s—”
“Julian, before we go any farther, I must tell you something.”
“Oh, God, I do hate it when someone says they must tell me something. From the look on your face, you’re about to tell me you’ve managed to get yourself listed ahead of me in Mother’s will. I can forgive you anything, Stinky, except that. Now keep low here. First rule: never stand against a crestline. Bang, Bob the Nailer has potted you. Now, what was it you were going to tell me. Can it wait at least until—”
“Please, no. I must get this out. You must know.”
“Lord, you’re not still ticked at me for the awful thing I said on Honors Day. Stink, I’d just had a rare turn-down from a bloody trollop—Jack Tantivy’s sister, as I recall, awful girl—and I was drunk and looking for somebody to hurt. Lord, Stink, how I’ve often regretted that. You’re not out here for revenge, lo these many years later? Here—”
He pulled out the little pistol, snapped it prime, and handed it to Florry.
“Go on then,” he said dramatically, closing his eyes. “Do the deed. I deserve it. I can be such a cad. I hurt people all the time, Stink. Pull the trigger and rid the world of the awful Julian.”
“You bloody idiot.”
“Ah, Stink, that’s the spirit. Give as good as you get.”
Florry saw that the pistol was the little Webley automatic, in .25 caliber.
“Here. Take the bloody toy. I’ve a Webley myself. The big revolver. When it comes to shooting, I could blast the moon out of the sky.”
“A four-five-five! Topping! Now that I envy you. A bloody big four-five-five! Christ, I’d love to turn it on a Moorish sergeant. Or pot a Jerry or an Eyetye captain. What fun! War’s great fun, Stink. Better than school … better even than poetry.”
Florry exploded. “Julian, I hate your poetry! I hate ‘Achilles, Fool.’ You’ve destroyed the talent you had at Eton with debauchery and sloth. You haven’t written a good verse in years.”
Julian’s blue eyes held his for the longest time. Then he smiled.
“Well spoken, Stink. Hate it myself. It’s no bloody game when it’s your own rump they’re shooting at. Yes, as a poet I’m finished, I agree. I’m halfway through an awful poem called ‘Pons,’ and I’ve no end at all for it. It’ll remain forever undone. Come on, we’ll have a tot and I’ll show it to you and we can have a good laugh over its utter dreadfulness. And some day we’ll go back to Barbastros to the whorehouse. Now that’s a pleasure you’ll have to experience. These revolutionary tarts, Stink, they’re utterly enchanting. They take your shooter in their bloody mouths! Extraordinary!”
“Julian.” Florry idiotically, wearily, repeated.
“Now, Stink, there is one thing I absolutely have to know.” He paused. “How is Mother?”
* * *
Some days, Bob the Nailer was more active than others; like so many things Spanish, it seemed to depend entirely upon the whim of the sniper himself. If he awoke in an indifferent mood, he might prang away indiscriminately, manufacturing only enough noise to keep his own sargento and priest off his back. If he awakened with the fire of zealotry moving in his bones, he might crawl close enough to do some real damage, and make things in the English section’s crude trench at least interesting.
Curiously Florry soon came to hope for interesting days. For Bob the Nailer was like a morale officer; he made the time in the trenches bearable, because when you are ducking bullets, you may be risking death but you are also blissfully unaware of rain, cold, mud, and all the other disgusting elements of the life of static warfare.
It was ’14–’18, again, the cold, wet living in mud hovels scooped from the earth, with only the occasional scurrying patrol into no-man’s-land to liven things up, the occasional calling card from Bob to keep you honest. It was as if the tank hadn’t yet been invented, and in a certain way it hadn’t. Jerry couldn’t get his PzKpfw IIs down here, Billy Mowry allowed, because the Spanish stone bridges were too old; the rumbling of a heavy vehicle upon them would bring them crashing down, dumping Jerry and his tin toy in the drink. And of course bloody Joe Stalin wouldn’t allow any T-26s up here where it was largely a POUMista show. But Florry almost wished for a tank or two; like Bob the Nailer, they’d make things more interesting—and boredom was almost as dangerous as the Fascists.
There was only one cure for boredom. It was Julian, who, whatever his horrors of the past, his history of cruelty, would not allow himself to be hated any more than he would allow anyone about him, particularly Florry, t
o appear put out.
His flamboyance and natural outrageousness seemed to cloak him in special grace and he was always happy, happier even than Billy Mowry, a true believer.
“I say, Billy, do you know why I joined this POUM thing of yours?” Julian baited on a day so like every other day it would have no place within a week or on a calendar.
Billy Mowry, sucking on a pipe while filling sandbags, delivered up the sour face of a man about to face an execution, paused, and finally sprang Julian for the pounce.
“No, comrade. Pray tell us.”
“Ah. You see, it happened like this. I saw the bloody great initials POUM on the banners outside this hotel on the Ramblas where I was rusticating one summer’s day, and I said to myself, why, these silly buggers cannot even properly spell the word POEM, and as our century’s fifth greatest living poet, I went in to correct them and the next thing I knew, here I was picking lice as big as hobnails off my balls.”
Everybody laughed. God, Julian.
Julian’s true enemy, however, wasn’t fascism or party politics or even war in general: it was time. Julian was the only one of them who could vanquish time. He could turn the months into weeks, the weeks to days, the days to hours. He could rip through the numbers on the clock and the pages of the calendar; he could make them forget where they were and how long they’d been there and how long they would be there. That was his special, most lovely gift. And as Florry settled into the troglodyte life it was Julian who freed him from his bondage to the calendar: and when Florry looked at such a document in what seemed to be his third or fourth week on the line he was stunned to discover that not only had January turned to February but February had turned to March and that March was soon to turn to April. It was, however, still 1937.
“Ain’t we low on wood?” Commissar Billy asked, part of the ritual of the sameness of days. “Whose bloody turn is it to scrounge some up?”
“I’ll go,” said Julian, shucking his blanket.
“Here, I’ll come along,” said Florry, grasping his first chance to confront Julian alone.
Tapestry of Spies Page 14
