IT WAS BECAUSE OF Bernie’s parents that Harry had met Barbara. He had spent Easter 1937 with his aunt and uncle. He was in the first year of his fellowship then. Since going up to Cambridge four years before he had seen little of them; strangely, that seemed to make them miss him and on his rare visits they greeted him with affection, eager to hear his news.

One afternoon at the end of April the telephone rang in the hall of the big old house. Uncle James came into the lounge where Harry was reading the Telegraph He looked worried.

‘That was your friend Bernie Piper’s mother on the phone,’ he said. ‘The boy you went to Spain with.’

Harry hadn’t heard from Bernie in five years. ‘Has something happened?’

‘It was hard to follow her, she was gabbling so, I don’t think she’s used to the telephone. Apparently he went out to fight in the war in Spain. For the Reds,’ Uncle James added with distaste. ‘They’ve had a letter saying he’s missing in action. She wants to know if you can help. Sounds like a can of worms to me. I told her you weren’t in, actually.’

Harry felt a chill settle on his stomach. He remembered Bernie’s mother, a nervous, birdlike woman. Bernie had taken him to see her in London just before they went to Spain in 1931; he wanted Harry to convince her they would be safe. She had believed his reassurances, if not her son’s; perhaps he represented the respectable solidity of Rookwood that Bernie had rejected.

‘I ought to talk to her. I’ll phone back.’

‘They don’t have a phone. She asked if you could go and see her. Bit of a cheek.’ He paused. ‘Still, poor woman must be desperate.’

Harry took the train to London the next day. He remembered the way to the little grocer’s shop on the Isle of Dogs, among the little streets where shabby unemployed men walked. The shop was the same, vegetables in open boxes on the floor, cheap canned goods on the shelves. Bernie’s father sat behind the counter. He was as tall and strongly built as Bernie and must once have been as good-looking, but now he was faded, stooped, with sad dead eyes.

‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘Hello. Mother’s in there.’ He jerked his head to a glassed door behind the counter. He didn’t follow Harry in.

Edna Piper was sitting at the table in the little parlour. Her narrow face under its untidy hair lit up when Harry appeared. She stood and took his hand in a bony grip.

‘ ’Arry, ’Arry. How are you?’

‘I’m all right thanks, Mrs Piper.’

‘I was so sorry Bernie lost touch with you, wasting his time with those people in Chelsea—’ she broke off. ‘Did you know he’d gone to fight in Spain?’

‘No. I’m afraid I haven’t heard from Bernie for years. We lost touch.’

She sighed. ‘It’s as though he’d never been to the school, apart from the way he speaks. Sit down, I’m sorry, would you like some tea?’

‘No. No, thanks. What – what’s happened? My uncle wasn’t very clear, I’m afraid.’

‘We had a letter a month ago from the British Embassy. It said there was some battle in February and that Bernie was missing in action. It was so short and curt.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘His pa says that means he’s dead, they just never found a body.’

Harry sat opposite her. There was an envelope on the table with a bright Spanish stamp. Mrs Piper picked it up, turning it over and over.

‘Bernie just breezed in here one day last October and said he was going out to fight the Fascists. Looked at me all defiant because he knew I’d argue. But it was his father it affected most. Bernie didn’t think of that, but I saw how he slumped like all the air was sucked out of him when he told us. This’ll finish him.’ She looked bleakly at Harry. ‘Sometimes children crucify their parents, you know.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You lost both yours, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pete won’t come in, he’s certain Bernie’s dead.’ She held up the letter. ‘Would you look at this? It’s from an English girl Bernie knew out there.’

Harry pulled out the letter and read it. It was dated three weeks before:

‘Dear Mr and Mrs Piper,

You don’t know me but Bernie and I were very close and I wanted to write to you. I know the embassy has written saying Bernie is missing believed killed. I work for the Red Cross out here and I wanted you to know I am working hard to try and find out more, whether he could possibly still be alive. It is difficult to get information here but I will go on trying. Bernie was always such a wonderful person.

Yours truly,

Barbara Clare’

‘I don’t know what she means,’ Mrs Piper said. ‘She says he may still be alive, then that he was a wonderful person, like he was dead.’

‘It sounds like she’s hoping against hope,’ Harry said. His heart seemed to fall; for the first time it sunk in that Bernie was gone. He put the letter down.

‘He wrote to us about her, you know, back at Christmas. Said he’d met an English girl out there. She must be in a dreadful state. I don’t like to think of her there alone.’

‘Have you written back?’

‘Straight away, but there’s been no reply.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think letters always get through. I wondered – you speak Spanish, don’t you, you know the country?’

‘I’ve not been to Spain since 1931,’ Harry said hesitantly.

‘Which side do you support?’ she asked suddenly.

He shook his head. ‘Neither. I just think the whole thing’s a tragedy.’

‘I’ve had the Spanish Dependants’ Aid round, but I don’t want money, I just want Bernie.’ Mrs Piper looked him in the eye. ‘Would you go there? Try to find this girl, find what happened?’ She leaned forward and grasped his hand in both of hers. ‘It’s a lot to ask but you were such good friends. If you could find out for sure, find out if there’s any hope.’

TWO DAYS AFTER his visit to Mrs Piper, Harry took the train for Madrid. He had managed to book a hotel room. The travel agent said it would be full of journalists; they were the only people travelling to Spain now.

From the train window Harry saw slogans everywhere proclaiming the workers’ war. It was a warm, fresh Castilian spring but people looked grim, embattled. When he arrived in Madrid he was astonished how different everything looked from the time of his first visit: the huge posters, the soldiers and militia everywhere, the people with the strained worried faces despite the propaganda booming from the loudspeakers around the Centro. The newspapers were full of an attempted coup in Barcelona by ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ traitors.

He checked into the hotel, it was near the Castellana. He had Barbara’s address but wanted to orient himself first. That afternoon he went for a walk through La Latina to Carabanchel. He remembered walking down here with Bernie in 1931 to visit the Meras, the heat of that summer, how carefree they had been.

The further south he walked the fewer people there were. Soldiers eyed him suspiciously. There were barricades across many of the streets, crude structures built with cobblestones, a small gap for pedestrians; the streets without their cobbles were seas of mud. The sound of artillery became audible, occasional whistles and crumps in the distance. Harry turned back. He wondered, feeling sick to his stomach, whether the Meras were still down in Carabanchel.

In his hotel that evening he met a journalist, a cynical scholarly looking man called Phillips. He asked him what had happened in Barcelona.

‘The Russians asserting control.’ He laughed. ‘Trotskyists my arse. There aren’t any.’

‘So it’s true? The Russians have taken over the Republic?’

‘Oh it’s true all right. They run everything now; they’ve got their own torture chambers in a basement in the Puerta del Sol. They’ve got the trump card, you see. If the government challenges them, Stalin can say all right, we’ll stop the arms shipments. He’s even got them to ship the Bank of Spain’s gold to Moscow. They won’t see that again in a hurry.’