‘Do you know, I’ve never met an ordinary Spanish family.’ She sighed. ‘The way people look at me in the street sometimes, I think there’s something disapproving. I don’t know what. Maybe I’m getting paranoid.’

‘You’re too well dressed.’

She looked down at her old coat in disbelief. ‘Me?’

‘Yes. That’s a good heavy coat, with a brooch.’

‘This old thing. It’s just coloured glass. I picked it up in Geneva.’

‘Even so, anything like that’s seen as ostentation. The people here are going through hell. Solidarity’s everything now, it has to be.’

Barbara took off her brooch. ‘There, is that better?’

He smiled. ‘That’s fine. One of the people.’

‘Of course you’ll always get the best, being in uniform.’

‘I’m a soldier.’ He looked offended. ‘I wear the uniform to show solidarity.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She cursed herself for putting her foot in it again. Why on earth did he bother with her? ‘Tell me about your public school.’

Bernie shrugged. ‘Rookwood’s what made me a communist. I fell for it all at first. Sons of the empire, cricket a game for gentlemen, the dear old school song. But I soon saw through it.’

‘Were you unhappy there?’

‘I learned to hide what I felt about it. That’s one thing they teach you. When I left and came back to London it was like a – a liberation.’

‘You haven’t any London accent left.’

‘No, that’s one thing Rookwood took away for good. If I try to speak cockney now, it just sounds stupid.’

‘You must have had friends, though?’ She couldn’t imagine him not having friends.

‘There was Harry, who came here with me five years ago. He was all right. His heart’s in the right place. We’ve lost touch now,’ he added sadly. ‘Moved into different worlds.’ He stopped and leaned against a tree. ‘So many good people like Harry fall for bourgeois ideology.’

‘I suppose I’m bourgeois, in your eyes.’

‘You’re something different.’ He winked.

NOVEMBER TURNED to December and sharp cold rains drove down from the Guadarramas. The Fascists were held in the Casa de Campo. They tried to break through from the north but were held there as well. The shelling went on but the desperate crisis was over. There were Russian fighters in the sky now, fast snub-nosed monoplanes, and if German raiders came over they were chased away. Sometimes there were dogfights over the city. People said the Russians had taken over everything and were running the Republic from behind the scenes. The government officials were even unfriendlier now and sometimes they had a frightened air. The children in the orphanage were moved overnight to a state camp somewhere outside Madrid; the Red Cross weren’t consulted.

Bernie kept seeking Barbara out. She spent half her evenings with him in the Gijón or one of the bars in the Centro. At weekends they would walk through the safe eastern part of the city and sometimes out to the countryside beyond. They shared an ironic sense of humour and laughed as they talked about books and politics and their childhoods, lonely in their different ways.

‘My dad’s shop’s one of five the owner has,’ Bernie told her one day. They were sitting on a field wall just outside town, enjoying the sun on a rare warm day. Clouds chased each other, their shadows skimming over the brown fields. It was hard to believe the front line was only a few miles away. ‘Mr Willis lives in a big house in Richmond, pays my dad a pittance. He knows Dad would never get another job, the war affected him; my mum does most of the work with a girl assistant.’

‘I suppose I was well off in comparison. My dad has a bike repair shop in Erdington. It’s always done well.’ She felt the sadness that always came on her when she spoke of her childhood; she almost never talked of it but found herself telling Bernie. ‘After my sister was born he hoped for a boy to take over the shop one day, but he got me. Then my mother couldn’t have any more.’ She lit a cigarette.

‘Are you close to your sister? I often wished I had one.’

‘No.’ Barbara turned her face away. ‘Carol’s very beautiful. She’s always loved showing herself off. Especially to me.’ She glanced at Bernie; he smiled encouragingly. ‘I had the brains though, I was the bright one, the one who got into the grammar school.’ She bit her lip at the memories those words brought back. She glanced at him again. Oh hell, she thought, in for a penny. Though it wrenched her heart she told him how she had been bullied from the day she went to the grammar school until she left at fourteen.

‘They called me speccy and frizzy-hair on my first day and I burst into tears. That’s where it all started, I can see that now. I suppose it marked me down as someone who could be tormented, made to cry. Then everywhere I went I had girls calling out about my hair, my glasses.’ She gave a long shuddering sigh. ‘Girls can be very cruel.’

She felt dreadful now, she wished she hadn’t blurted all this out, it had been a stupid thing to do. Bernie lifted his hand as though to take hers, then let it fall again. ‘It was the same at Rookwood. If you had something a bit different about you and wouldn’t fight back, you got picked on. They started on me when I came because of my accent, called me a pleb. I thumped a few of them and that put paid to that. Funny, I thought it was just public schools where those things happened.’ He shook his head. ‘Girls too, eh?’

‘Yes. I wish I’d hit them, but I was too well brought up.’ She threw away her cigarette. ‘All that bloody misery, just because I’ve got glasses and look a bit odd.’ She stood up abruptly and walked a few paces away, gazing at the town, a distant smudge. On the far side of it she could see tiny flashes, like pinpoints, where the Fascists were shelling.

Bernie came over and stood beside her. He gave her another cigarette.

‘You don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Look odd. Don’t be silly. And I like those glasses.’

She felt angry as she always did when people paid her compliments. Just trying to make her feel better about how she was. She shrugged. ‘Well, I got away,’ she said. ‘They wanted me to stay in that hell hole, go on to university, but I wouldn’t. I left when I was fourteen. Worked as a typist till I was old enough to start nursing.’

He was silent a moment. Barbara wished he would stop looking at her. ‘How did you get involved with the Red Cross?’ he asked.

‘The school used to have people to give talks on Wednesday afternoons. This woman came and told us about the work the Red Cross did, trying to help refugees in Europe. Miss Forbes.’ She smiled. ‘She was stout and middle-aged and had grey hair spilling out from under this silly flowery hat but she seemed so kind, she tried so hard to get across how important the work was. I joined them as a junior volunteer at first. I’d just about lost faith in the human race by then; they gave it back to me. Some.’ She felt tears pricking at her eyes and moved back towards the wall.

‘And you ended up in Geneva?’

‘Yes. I needed to get away from home too.’ She blew out a long cloud of smoke and looked at him. ‘What did your parents think about you volunteering for the International Brigades?’

‘Just another disappointment. Like my leaving university.’ He shrugged. ‘I feel guilty sometimes, about leaving them.’

To work for the party, Barbara thought. And be a sculptor’s model. She imagined him without clothes for a second, and dropped her eyes.

‘They didn’t want me to come here of course,’ he said, ‘they didn’t understand.’ Bernie gave her that hard direct look again. ‘But I had to come out here. When I saw the newsreels, the refugee columns. We have to destroy fascism, we have to.’

HE TOOK HER to see the Mera family, but the visit was not a success: Barbara didn’t understand the family’s accents, and though they were kind to her she felt uneasy in the crowded muddle of their flat. They greeted Bernie as a hero and she gathered he had done something brave in the Casa de Campo. He shared a room in the tenement flat with one of the sons, a thin boy of fifteen with the pale hollow face of a consumptive. On the way home Barbara said it could be dangerous for Bernie to share a room with him. He replied with one of his occasional bursts of anger.