‘Oh, I’m so sorry. That was me, I’m sorry.’

The man looked annoyed; it might be the only pair of trousers he had. He began dabbing at them.

‘I’m so sorry. Listen, I’ll pay for them to be cleaned, I—’ Barbara stumbled over her words, forgetting her Spanish. Then she heard that drawling voice at her elbow.

‘Excuse me, are you English? May I help?’

‘Oh no – no, it’s all right.’

The waiter recovered himself. She offered to pay for the spilt bottle as well as his trousers and he went off, mollified, to fetch another glass. Barbara smiled nervously at the Englishman.

‘How stupid of me. I’ve always been so clumsy.’

‘These things happen.’ He held out a hand. He had brown slender fingers, the wrist covered in a fair down that caught the light and shone like gold. She saw his other arm was encased in plaster from above the elbow to the wrist. His large eyes were dark olive, like a Spaniard’s. ‘Bernie Piper,’ he said, studying her curiously. ‘You’re a long way from home.’

‘Barbara Clare. Yes, afraid so. I’m here with the Red Cross.’

‘Mind if I join you? Only I haven’t spoken English to anyone for weeks.’

‘Well, I – no, please do.’

And so it began.

SOMEONE FROM the Madrid office of the Daily Express had telephoned Barbara three days previously and told her there was a man who might be able to help her. His name was Luis and he could meet her in a bar in the old town on Monday afternoon. She had asked to speak to Markby but he was away. As Barbara put the phone down she wondered if it was tapped; Sandy said it wasn’t but she had heard they tapped all the foreigners’ telephones.

After breakfast she went back to her room. Her mirrored bureau was an eighteenth-century antique she and Sandy had picked up in the Rastro market in the spring. It had probably been looted from some wealthy house in Madrid at the start of the Civil War. You saw families there on Sundays, hunting for their stolen heirlooms. They went cheap, it was food and petrol that were valuable now.

The bureau had come with a key and Barbara used it to store personal, precious things. Bernie’s photograph was in there. It had been taken just before he went to the front, in a photographer’s studio with chaises longues and potted palms. He stood in his uniform, arms folded, smiling at the camera.

He had been so beautiful. It was a word people used about women but Bernie had been the beautiful one. She hadn’t looked at the photograph for a long time; seeing it still hurt her, she mourned Bernie as deeply as ever. Guiltily, because Sandy had rescued her and set her on her feet, but what she had with Bernie had been different. She sighed. She mustn’t hope too much, she mustn’t.

It still amazed her that Bernie had been interested in her, she must have looked a fright in that bar, her hair all frizzy and wearing that tatty old jumper. She took off her glasses. She told herself that without them, yes, she could be called quite attractive. She put the glasses on again. As so often, even amid her preoccupation with Bernie, just thinking she was attractive triggered a memory, one of the bad ones. Usually she tried to push them away but she let this one come, even though it left her feeling she was standing on the edge of a precipice. Millie Howard and her gang of eleven-year-olds, forming a circle round her in the quadrangle of the grammar school, chanting. ‘Speccy frizzy-hair, speccy frizzy-hair.’ If she hadn’t had the glasses to mark her out as different, if she hadn’t responded with blushing and tears, would it ever have happened, the tormenting that had gone on for so long? She closed her eyes. Now she saw her older sister, radiant Carol who had inherited their mother’s blonde hair and heart-shaped face, walking through the lounge of the little house in Erdington, off to meet another boy. She swirled past, leaving a rich smell of perfume. ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ her mother had asked her father, while Barbara’s heart burned with jealousy and sadness. A little while before she had broken down and told her mother how the girls taunted her at school. ‘Looks aren’t everything, darling,’ her mother had said. ‘You’re much cleverer than Carol.’

She lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Mum and Dad, Carol and her good-looking accountant husband were under the air-raids now. The Blitz had moved beyond London; in the week-old, censored edition of the Daily Mail she bought at the station, she had read of the first raids on Birmingham. And here she was, sitting in a fine house, still picking at those old wounds while her family were running for the air-raid shelters. It was so petty, she felt ashamed. Sometimes she wondered if there was something wrong with her mind, whether she was a little crazy. She got up and put on her jacket and hat. She would kill some time in the Prado. Then she would see what this man knew. The thought gave her a welcome sense of purpose.

The Prado art gallery was full of blank walls; most of the pictures had been taken down for safe keeping during the Civil War and so far only a few had been returned. It was cold and damp. She had a bad lunch in the little café, then sat smoking till it was time to leave.

Sandy had noticed something was up with her; yesterday he had asked her if she was all right. She replied she was bored; it was true, now they were established in the house there were long hours when she had nothing to do. He had asked if she would like to do some voluntary work, he might be able to fix something up. She had agreed, to put him off the scent. He had nodded, apparently satisfied, and gone off to his study to do some more work.

Sandy had been working on what he called his ‘Min of Mines project’ for six months now. He was often out late, and often worked at home, worked harder than Barbara had ever seen. Sometimes his eyes gleamed with excitement and he smiled as though he had some wonderful secret. Barbara didn’t like that little secret smile. At other times he seemed preoccupied, worried. He said the project was confidential, he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Sometimes he made mysterious trips out to the countryside. There was a geologist involved, a man called Otero who had visited the house a couple of times. Barbara didn’t like him either; he gave her the creeps. She worried that they might be involved in something illegal; half of Spain seemed to be working the estraperlo, the black market. Sandy was scarcely more open about the committee to aid Jewish refugees from France he worked for. Barbara wondered if Sandy felt his voluntary work detracted from the picture he liked to paint of himself as a hard, successful businessman, though it was that better side of him, the side that liked to help those in trouble, that had drawn her to him.

At four she left the Prado and headed into the centre. Shops were opening again after the siesta as she walked through the narrow streets, hot and dusty and smelling of dung. Her sensible shoes rang on the cobbles. Turning a corner, she saw an old man in a tattered shirt trying to manoeuvre a cart filled with cans of olive oil up onto the pavement. He held the cart by its shafts, trying to haul it on to the high kerb. Behind him was a newly painted building, a big banner with the yoke and arrows over the door. As Barbara watched, a pair of blue-shirted young men appeared in the doorway. They bowed, apologizing for blocking her way, and asked the old man if they could help. He relinquished the shafts gratefully and they pulled the cart up onto the pavement for him. ‘My donkey is dead,’ he told them. ‘I have no money for another.’

‘Soon everyone in Spain will have a horse. Just give us time, señor.’

‘I had him twenty years. I ate him when he died. Poor Hector, his meat was stringy. Thank you, compadres.’

‘De nada.’ The Falangists clapped the old man on the back and went back inside. Barbara stepped off the pavement to let him pass. She wondered if things really would get better now. She didn’t know; after four years in Spain she still felt like an alien, there was so much she didn’t understand.