SHE GOT UP and put on the silk dressing gown Sandy had got her last Christmas. She opened the window; it was another hot day, the garden bright with flowers. Strange to think that in six weeks winter would be here with its mist and frosts.

She stumbled against a chair, swore and took her glasses from the dressing-table drawer. She looked in the mirror. Sandy urged her to do without them whenever she could, memorize the layout of the house properly so she didn’t bump into things. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun, darling,’ he had said. ‘Walking around confidently greeting people and no one knowing you’re a bit short-sighted.’ He had developed a thing about those glasses, he hated her wearing them, but although she had always hated them too she still wore them when she was on her own. She needed them. ‘Bloody idiotic nonsense,’ she muttered as she took out her curlers and ran the comb through her thick auburn hair. It flowed in waves. That stylist was good, her hair never looked unkempt now. She applied her make-up carefully, eyeshadow that highlighted her clear green eyes, powder to emphasize her cheekbones. Sandy had taught her all this. ‘You can decide how you look, you know,’ he had said. ‘Make people see you as you want to be seen. If you want to.’ She had been reluctant to believe him but he had persisted and he was right: for the first time in her life she had begun, very nervously, to question her belief that she was an ugly woman. Even with Bernie she had found it hard to think what he could see in her, despite his endless loving reassurance. Tears came to her eyes. She blinked them quickly away. She needed to be strong today, clear-headed.

She wasn’t meeting Markby’s contact till late afternoon. She would go to the Prado first; she couldn’t bear being cooped up all day in the house, waiting. She put on her best outdoor dress, the white one with the rose pattern. There was a knock at the door and Pilar appeared. The girl had a round surly face and curly black hair struggling to escape from beneath her maid’s cap. Barbara addressed her in Spanish.

‘Pilar, please prepare breakfast. A good one today, toast and orange juice and eggs, please.’

‘There is no juice, señora, there was none in the shops yesterday.’

‘Never mind. Ask the daily to go out later and try to find some, would you?’

The girl left. Barbara wished she would smile occasionally. But perhaps she had lost people in the Civil War; nearly everyone had. Barbara thought she caught a faint note of contempt sometimes when Pilar called her ‘señora’, as though she knew she and Sandy weren’t really married. She told herself it was imagination. She had no experience of servants and when she first came to the house had been uneasy around Pilar, nervous and eager to please. Sandy had told her she must be clear and precise in her orders, keep a distance. ‘It’s what they prefer, lovey.’ She remembered Maria Herreira telling her never to trust servants, they were all peasants and half of them had been Reds. Yet Maria was a kind woman who did voluntary work with old people for the church. She lit another cigarette and made her way downstairs to breakfast, to the cornflakes that Sandy was able to get in rationed, half-starved Madrid as though by magic.

WHEN THE Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Barbara had been working at the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva for three years. She worked in the Displaced Persons section, tracing missing members of families in Eastern Europe torn apart by the Great War and still missing. She matched names and records, wrote letters to Interior Ministries from Riga to Budapest. She managed to put enough people in touch with their families to make it worthwhile. Even where their relatives were all dead, at least the families knew for certain.

She had been excited by the job at first, it was a change from nursing in Birmingham. She had got it partly because of her years of work for the British Red Cross. After four years, though, she was bored. She was twenty-six; soon she would be thirty and she began to fear she was fossilizing among the order of her files, the stolid dullness of the Swiss. She went for an interview with a Swiss official in a neat office overlooking the still blue lake.

‘It’s bad in Spain,’ he told her. ‘There’re thousands who’ve found themselves on one side of the lines and their relatives on the other. We’re sending medical supplies and trying to arrange exchanges. But it’s a savage war. The Russians and Germans are getting involved.’ He looked at her over his half-moon glasses with tired eyes. All the hopes of 1919, that the Great War had truly been the war to end war, were disintegrating. First Mussolini in Abyssinia, now this.

‘I’d like to get out in the field, sir,’ Barbara said firmly.

SHE ARRIVED in an unbearably hot Madrid in September 1936. Franco was advancing from the south; the Moroccan colonial army, airlifted across the Straits of Gibraltar by Hitler, was now only seventy miles away. The city was full of refugees, ragged lost-looking families from the pueblos dragging enormous bundles through the streets or crowded together on donkey carts. Now she saw the chaos of war at first hand. She never forgot the old man with shocked eyes who passed her that first day, carrying all he had left: a dirty mattress slung over his shoulder and a canary in a wooden cage. He symbolized all the refugees, the displaced persons, all those caught in the middle of war.

Red militiamen hurtled by in lorries and buses on their way to the front line – ordinary Madrileños, their only uniform the dark blue boiler suits all workers wore and red neckerchiefs. They would wave their ancient-looking weapons as they passed, calling out the Republic’s shout of defiance. ‘¡No pasarán!’ Barbara, who believed in peace more than anything, wanted to weep for them all. She wanted to weep for herself too at first, because she was frightened: by the chaos, by the stories of nightmare atrocities on both sides, by the Fascist aeroplanes that had begun to appear in the skies, making people pause, look up, sometimes run for the safety of the metro. Once she saw a stick of bombs fall, a pall of smoke rising from the west of the city. The bombing of cities was what Europe had feared for years; now it was happening.

The Red Cross mission was based in a little office in the city centre, an oasis of sanity where half a dozen men and women, mostly Swiss, laboured to distribute medical supplies and arrange exchanges of refugee children. Although she spoke no Spanish, Barbara’s French was good and it was a relief to be able to make herself understood.

‘We need help with the refugee exchanges,’ Director Doumergue told her on her second day. ‘There are hundreds of children separated from their families. There’s a whole group from Burgos who were at a summer camp in the Guadarramas – we want to exchange them for some Madrid children caught in Sevilla.’ The director was another calm, serious Swiss, a young man with a plump, tired face. Barbara knew she’d been flapping, panicking, and that wasn’t like her. Babs we all depend on, they used to call her in Birmingham. She’d have to pull herself together. She brushed a stray tangle of red hair from her brow. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What do you need me to do?

That afternoon she went to visit the children in the convent where they had been lodged, to take their details. Monique, the office interpreter, came with her. She was a small, pretty woman, wearing a neat dress and freshly ironed blouse. They walked through the Puerta del Sol, past huge posters of President Azaña, Lenin and Stalin. Monique nodded at Stalin’s poster. ‘That’s the way things are going now,’ she said. ‘Only Russia will aid the Republic. God help them.’

The square was full of loudspeakers, a woman’s voice rising and falling, punctuated by tinny squeaks from the speaker. Barbara asked what they were saying.