Pantheon

‘And so you are. So no more of that defeatist talk. We won’t lead the masses to revolution with soggy English pessimism now, will we?’

Harry Knox, Winchester and Balliol, hereditary baronet and one-time lead organizer of … now what was it? James thought it was the ILP, but it might have been another socialist group with another set of initials: it was hard to keep up. Coming to Barcelona had been Knox’s idea, a way to make up for missing the real Olympics – as he insisted they not refer to them – and a chance to take a stand against Fascism. James had been tipped to row stroke in the Great Britain boat in Berlin; this was to be his consolation prize.

Along with all the other foreign athletes they were put up at the Hotel Olímpico in the Plaza de España, where the lobby was already teeming with fresh arrivals from the United States, Holland, Belgium and French Algeria. Most were just like Harry and James, there with the backing of a workers’ association, a socialist party or a trade union, rather than their government. James rather doubted the selection process had been as athletically rigorous as it was for the official Games. But, as Harry had said, ‘That’s hardly the point, is it?’

The atmosphere was raucous and did not let up for a week. The door of their room remained open, as Marxist Danish hurdlers or anarchist French sprinters came in and out as they pleased. The entire building seemed to host a single, unending party. James had barely put down his suitcase when a huge Italian shot putter, who later turned out to be a communist exile, thrust a bottle in his hand, urging him to knock it straight back, no sipping. James read the label – Sangre de Toro, ‘bull’s blood’ – and did as he was told. It tasted musky and heavy with fruit. He hadn’t much liked it at the time but thereafter he would forever associate the taste of that Catalan wine with freedom.

At last they had spilled out onto the street, wandering from one tapas bar to another. James had no memory of paying for either his food or his drink, as if all the Barcelona bar-owners were grateful to the visiting Olympians for supporting their infant republic, for doing exactly what the International Olympic Committee had refused to do five years earlier – choosing Barcelona over Berlin.

He was munching on a plate of calcots, charcoal-grilled spring onions that, had you offered them to him in England, he would have rejected as terrifyingly exotic, when Harry, already sunburnt, the sweat patches spreading under his arms, turned to him with a lascivious grin. ‘Rumour is the ladies’ swimming team are having a late night practice session.’

‘Harry, even you can’t be that desperate,’ James replied, doing his best to sound like a man of the world. He had some experience with women, more certainly than Harry. He had spent most of his second year at Oxford stepping out with Daisy, a blonde, long-necked Classicist from St Hugh’s, fumbling his way towards a familiarity with her body, albeit through her clothing, but he had lost his innocence with Eileen, studying at a secretarial college on the Woodstock Road. She lacked Daisy’s fine features, but her edges were softer and she was more like him: provincial, from Nottingham. He would see her every Wednesday evening with the occasional Saturday night trip to the pictures. He kept her entirely separate from his college friends, so that she was more like a mistress than a girlfriend. It slightly shamed him now to think of the secrecy he had maintained about their affair, but she had never questioned it. Instead, on Wednesdays at around 6.30pm, when her room-mate was at choir-practice, she would usher him into her digs – and into her bed.

‘Well, don’t come then, James,’ Harry said, feeling his friend’s scorn. ‘I’m sure there’s an exciting new academic monograph you could be reading.’

‘Since it’s clearly so important to you, old chum, I’ll come and keep you company.’

For once, Knox’s gossip turned out to be accurate. By the time they arrived at the outdoor baths a crowd had already gathered. Mostly men, but also families out for an after-dinner stroll on this steaming night, young children, ice-creams in their hands, some on their fathers’ shoulders – all watching the moonlit swimmers.

Knox elbowed his way through the three-deep throng in order to get closer. But James, at six foot four, had a clear line of sight to the start podiums at the right-hand end of the pool – and he saw her straight away.

Her hair was hidden by a swim cap, but he could see that she was dark, or at least darker than the rest of the girls. There were two fine black lines above her eyes – eyes which even at this distance seemed to sparkle: later he would discover that they were a jewel-like green, as if illuminated from within. Her nose was perfect, not tiny, not a button like some of the other girls’, but somehow strong. She was the tallest among them, her legs long, lean and, thanks to the Catalan sun, bronzed. But it was the animation of her face, her laughter, the way the other women looked to her that marked her out as singular, the natural leader of the group. He was transfixed.

He watched as she organized the team, assigning each of the six a lane. They were giggling, aware of their audience. The white of their swimsuits was almost fluorescent in the searchlight-bright moon, their figures defined in silhouette. As she turned side on, stepping onto the starting block readying for her dive, he marvelled at the shape of her, and when she bent her knees, her arms forming into an arrowhead, it struck him that this was probably how the ancients imagined Diana the huntress, a goddess of perfect strength and beauty. With the moonlight on her and her hair swept up into the white swim cap, she could have been made entirely of marble.

The races went on for a while, the crowd eventually dwindling. But Harry didn’t want to leave and James was only too happy to let him think that staying on was his idea. Once the women were out of the pool and had pulled on their robes, the two of them headed over, trying terribly hard to saunter.

‘I say, you all did terribly well,’ Knox offered as his opening gambit, his voice plummier than usual – a nervous tic which, James recognized, surfaced whenever Harry came face to face with what he called ‘the fairer sex’. James could feel his own heart rate had increased: rather than risk a joke that fell flat or some other gaucheness, he said nothing.

Two of the ladies laughed behind their hands, a third stared intermittently at her feet, stealing shy glances upward. James noticed that five of the six girls were looking at him rather than Harry, a pattern that, he had to admit, he had seen before. All that spoiled the moment was that the goddess was paying him no attention, instead rounding up the equipment and collecting a stopwatch left hanging on the back of an observation chair. Finally she walked over and, assessing the scene, extended her hand immediately towards Harry, bestowing on him a thousand-watt smile.

‘Miss Florence Walsingham,’ she said. Her voice was confident and melodic but with a gentleness that surprised. As Harry stammered a reply, she nodded intently, her eyes only for him. James might as well have not existed. But, curiously, he did not mind. It meant he could stare at her, savour her smile, listen to that voice which instantly suggested the West End at night, dinner on the Strand, cocktails in Pall Mall and a thousand other delights he could only guess at.

As she turned to him, she reached up and removed her swimming cap, allowing long, glossy curls of dark brown hair to fall to her shoulders. Not all of it was dry: the damp ends clung to her cheekbones. Involuntarily, he found himself imagining how this woman would look when she was sweating, while she was making love. His outstretched hand had to remain suspended in mid-air for a second or two before she took it. But when she did, fixing him with that high-wattage gaze, he was over-run. By desire, of course, but also by an urge he had never known before: he wanted to lose himself in her, to dive inside and let the waters close over him.

James and Florence spent every moment of the next four days together. She watched him row, he watched her swim. Both tall, dark and striking, they became one of the more recognizable couples around the Plaza de España. They accompanied one another to the permanent parties in the hotel, on his floor and on hers, but mainly they just wanted to be with each other.

After Florence’s morning swimming practice, they would walk and walk. The swimming baths were in Montjüic, a raised area that had once been a fort and a jail but which had been revamped in time for the International Exhibition seven years earlier. They would start at the newly-landscaped gardens, soaking up the view, then stroll down the hill past the pavilions built for the 1929 exhibition, stopping at the Poble Espanyol, the model Spanish village, and eventually gazing in awe at the fabulously elaborate Magic Fountain. In the warm sunshine, he in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, she in cotton dresses that seemed to float around her, they told each other how they had come to be fraternal team-mates at the People’s Olympiad.

‘Blame Harry and his pals in the ILP,’ he had said, during their first proper conversation.

‘The Independent Labour Party?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Independent Labour Party.’

‘Are you a member?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m what Harry calls a fellow traveller. You?’

‘Well, I’m certainly a socialist if that’s what you mean.’ Hers was an accent he had never heard before he went up to Oxford, certainly not in his home town. It wasn’t the received pronunciation you’d hear on the National Programme. It was the voice Harry lapsed into towards the bottom of a bottle of wine or when he spoke to his mother or, of course, when he was around young ladies: James supposed it was the accent of the upper class, or something close to it. ‘Inevitable, really, given my field.’

‘Your field.’ He marvelled at the arrogance of a twenty-one-year-old girl, four years younger than him, speaking of herself as if she were some kind of expert. ‘And what is your “field”, Miss Walsingham?’

She turned her face up to catch the sun. ‘I’m a scientist, Mr Zennor.’

‘A scientist indeed.’

She ignored his condescension. ‘I’ve just completed my degree in natural sciences at Somerville. I’ll be returning there next year.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘To get my doctorate, of course. I am specializing in biology.’

He considered making a joke – something about undertaking practical research – but wisely changed his mind. ‘What’s that got to do with being a socialist?’

‘You’re a scientist, aren’t you?’

‘Well, some would dispute that, as it happens. Some call psychology “mental philosophy”. Others say it’s the newest branch of medicine.’

‘I don’t care what “some” say.’ She clutched his arm. ‘I want to know what you say.’

He wanted to kiss her there and then, in front of all these people. She only had to look at him like that, with that electric-light smile, and he fell several hundred leagues deeper. ‘All right then,’ he conceded. ‘I say that it’s science too. The science of the mind.’

‘Good. So we’re both scientists.’ She squeezed his hand and he felt her energy flow into him.

He forced himself to concentrate. ‘You still haven’t explained what any of this has to do with socialism.’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Science is reason. It’s about seeing what’s rational and eliminating everything else. Socialism aims to do the same thing: to organize society rationally.’

‘But human beings are not rational, are they?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Just look at us. Here.’ He glanced down at his forearm, on which lightly rested Florence’s slender fingers. ‘What’s rational about this?’

A worried look fleetingly crossed her face, like a wisp of cloud passing the sun. It was gone almost as soon as it had appeared. He could not tell whether she had been concerned at the blow to her argument or at the thought of what she was doing, walking arm in arm in a foreign land with a man she barely knew.

‘Oh, I would say this is perfectly rational,’ she chirped, her enthusiasm recovered. ‘But to persuade you I would have to blind you with science.’

Their love affair continued for the rest of that hot July week, preparing for the start of the Games on the nineteenth. They stayed up late at the street corner bar, listening to Harry play his ukulele along with his impromptu band – two Americans on trumpet and bass, one of whom turned out to be Edward Harrison, eminent foreign correspondent, with a gymnast from Antwerp as the singer – but they remained inside their own cocoon. James wanted to know everything about Florence, and was prepared to tell her more about himself than he had ever told anyone before.

‘So what’s Zennor then? Is that foreign?’

He laughed. ‘Cornwall originally.’

‘Not now?’ she asked, as if disappointed.

‘My ancestors headed east,’ he said. ‘To Bournemouth.’

‘Bournemouth. I see. I thought from “Zennor” you’d have at least, oh, I don’t know, some pirate blood. From Zanzibar—’

‘Or Xanadu.’

‘Cheat,’ she said, giving him a mock slap on the back of his hand, which was in truth another excuse to touch.

He said, ‘Bournemouth is not very exotic, is it?’

‘Not really, I’m afraid, my darling. No foreign blood at all?’

‘My parents are Quakers, if that counts. Both schoolteachers and both Quakers. Maths for him, piano for her. Two more solid, provincial people you could not hope to meet. They’re not quite sure what to make of me.’

‘Aren’t Quakers pacifists?’

‘That’s right.’ He watched as Florence did some rapid mental arithmetic.

‘Does that mean, your father was, you know—’

‘A conshie? Right again.’

‘Heavens. Did he go to jail?’

‘Nearly, but not quite. Sent to do “work of national importance”. In his case, farming.’

‘I see,’ she said, biting her lower lip in a gesture he was already coming to love. ‘So that’s why they moved away from Cornwall. They couldn’t return home after the war: too shaming.’

He stared at her, wondering if he had been the victim of some kind of confidence trick. He had never told anyone that story, not even Harry. But she had intuited the truth.

This is how it was for that short, heady week, the two of them peeling off layers from each other. Sometimes it took the presence of another person, like the night they stayed at the tapas bar long after the rest of the rolling Olympics party had moved on elsewhere.

‘I do hope we’re not keeping you,’ Florence had asked the manager, a rotund man probably twice their age, as he began wiping the tables around them, sometime around two am. He insisted they were not and thanked them for being in Barcelona. In a fractured, bartered conversation – a bit of pidgin English in exchange for a phrase of broken Spanish – they began talking, he explaining that Spain would soon be a model for the world, a communist utopia.

‘Well, if that’s what the people vote for, then that’s what it should be,’ Florence said.

‘Quite right,’ James added. ‘That’s what the army and the church need to get into their heads: the government was elected by the people of Spain. If you don’t like it, vote it out at the next election.’

‘No, no, no,’ the man said, rag still in hand. ‘No voting out. Once we have communism here, it stay that way. Forever.’

‘Even if the people vote against it?’ Florence had asked, her brow furrowed.

‘They won’t vote against it.’

‘Yes, but if they do.’

‘They won’t. They shouldn’t be allowed. Once the revolution is secure, then they can vote.’

‘And how long will that take?’ James asked, picking up where Florence had left off. ‘How long till the revolution is “secure”? That could take decades. Just look at Russia.’

‘The Soviet Union is the greatest democracy in the world!’

Florence and James looked at each other, before Florence said, ‘I don’t think Mr Stalin has to face the voters too often, do you?’

The man looked puzzled.

‘Communism is all very well but only if it’s democratic. Otherwise it’s just as bad as all the other rotten systems, if you ask me,’ James said.

The man resumed his clearing up, then rebuffed James’s repeated attempts to pay the bill: ‘You are guests in my country and you support the republic!’ When James produced a bank note, he shooed them out.

‘It’s like boycotting Berlin,’ James said as they walked slowly back towards her digs. ‘You don’t have to be a communist to detest Hitler and the Nazis. You just have to be a half-decent human being. The man’s a vile brute.’

They were speaking of politics and the world, but really they were exploring each other, discovering with every conversation, every new encounter, how well the curves and contours of their minds fitted together. Then, at stolen moments in the mid-afternoon or late at night, they would do the same with their bodies – cautiously at first, with Florence teasing more than he could bear, then surprising him with sudden passion. His strongest memory was of her face close to his in the dark, their mouths sometimes speaking to each other in a lovers’ hush, sometimes kissing.

The result was a fever for the taste, touch and smell of the other that shocked them both. Merely walking beside Florence, close enough for her scent to reach him, was enough to make him ravenous for her. What was more, and this he had never experienced before – even with sweet, giving Eileen – Florence seemed to feel the same: her desire was equal to his.

And so, while the political skies over Barcelona began to darken, and as the welcoming faces of their Barcelona hosts turned to distracted anxiety, James and Florence focused on the deadly serious business of falling in love.

Only when they heard about the broadcast of a coded message – ‘Over all of Spain, the sky is clear,’ was the plotters’ signal to each other over the radio – did they understand that a coup d’état was underway, fascists and nationalists bent on overthrowing the republican government that had invited the flower of international radical youth to Barcelona, to thumb its nose at the Nazis on parade in Berlin.

Suddenly the notion of sprints, heats and semi-finals seemed horribly irrelevant. Even those who thought the coup would be rapidly put down, who did not imagine the country was about to plunge into a vicious civil war, could see that this was no time for a pretend Olympics. When the rumour spread through the Hotel Olímpico that the games had been cancelled, few waited for confirmation.

James was packing his bag when Harry, his skin fire-engine red, found him. He had, James saw instantly, sobered up fast.

‘Where are you going, Zennor?’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. The Games have been—’

‘Cancelled, I know. But where are you off to?’

‘Well, I thought … if there are no Games. That is, I was going to ask Fl—’

‘You’re not proposing to leave, are you? In the republic’s hour of need?’

James scanned Harry’s face. He seemed entirely in earnest. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘A few of us are staying on. To defend the republic.’

‘But … but, you’re not a soldier.’

‘I can train. The point is, Zennor, we’ve been enlisted, whether we like it or not.’

‘Enlisted?’

‘History is enlisting us.’

James stopped stock-still, holding the lid of his suitcase. It was quite true that, since the day he had arrived, he had understood that something much larger than a sports tournament was at stake. He knew it was easy to romanticize a gathering of fit and handsome young people coming together in the sunshine in a noble cause – but it was not just romance. Barcelona with its People’s Olympiad had become the focus of international opposition to Adolf Hitler and his nasty so-called Third Reich. It was here that the world had said no, taking a stand not only against the Berlin games but against the entire Nazi project. And so an attack on the republic led by ultra-nationalist army officers and backed by fascist thugs was not solely a domestic matter for Spain. It was an attack by fascism itself. There would be a new fault-line now, running through Spain, yes, but dividing all of Europe. Hitler and Mussolini would doubtless be on one side of that line and those who believed in democracy and free speech and all the promise that the twentieth century held in store would be on the other. James Zennor found that he was asking himself a question: whose side are you on?

He snapped his suitcase shut and went to find Florence.

James had to fight a throng of athletes flooding out of the Hotel Olímpico lobby, stampeding for the railway station, to reach her. He was bewildered to find her standing outside, bags already in hand.

‘I was just coming to see you,’ she said. She bit her lip in a way that instantly resolved him not to say what he had planned to say.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to Berlin.’

‘Berlin?’

‘If I leave now, I can make it.’

‘Berlin? Why the hell would you be going there?’

‘It’s not how it looks, James. You have to trust me.’

‘But, what about—’ he gestured at the crowd shoving and pushing around them, at the banners and the bunting.

‘I know, but I have—’

‘All that talk about the “wicked Nazis” and how the Olympics will be just a “glorified Nuremberg rally”. That was all rubbish, wasn’t it? You meant none of it!’

‘That’s not fair.’

That cloud that he had once seen pass across her face so briefly was lodged directly above her now, darkening her eyes. The light within seemed to be faltering. But he could not stop. ‘“I refuse to play any part in it”. That’s what you said. Just talk, wasn’t it? Cheap talk.’

‘How dare you talk to me like that?’ She was glaring. ‘This is beneath you, James. And it’s certainly beneath me.’

‘Listen—’

‘No, you listen. I don’t know what kind of women you’ve been with before me but this one’ – her index finger tapped her breastbone – ‘makes up her own mind, OK? I will not be told what to do by any man. Not by my father and certainly not by you. You can decide to do whatever you like. But this is my decision. I’ve realized I need to make my point in my own way.’ She paused. ‘Besides, I haven’t done all this training for nothing.’

‘Oh, so that’s it, is it? You don’t want your precious training to be in vain? You want the glory of a bloody medal!’

‘No, that’s not it,’ she said in a low voice, her eyes not meeting his. She was briefly knocked off balance by a group of women hurrying to cross the road and board a bus. ‘I have to leave. I’m sorry.’

He reached out and grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to turn back to face him. ‘And what about this? Us.’ The word tasted awkward in his mouth; he instantly regretted it. ‘You and me. Has this meant nothing to you?’

She tilted her head to one side in an expression he didn’t quite know how to read. Was it pity? Regret? He wondered if he could see tears in her eyes.

‘You don’t understand at all, do you? All that “experimental psychology” and you don’t understand a thing.’

And with that, she broke free of him and disappeared into the swell of people clamouring to get out.

James stood for a while, letting the crowd shift around him, like a stream around a pebble. He could not quite believe what had happened, how quickly he had let her go. How quickly he had pushed her away, more like. What a fool, sounding off like that to a woman he had known for, what, a week? And this was not any woman. You might be able to tell an Eileen, or even a Daisy, what to do – some women positively seemed to like being bossed around. But not Florence. That much should have been obvious. She was independent, strong-willed, with a mind of her own: it partly explained why he was falling in love with her. To have attempted to control such a woman – a brilliant, beautiful woman, who could have any man she wanted – was the mark of a prize idiot.