He went over what Agustín had said. He didn’t understand. Better times? Was there some political change in Spain? The comandante had told them Franco had met Hitler and that soon Spain would be in the war, but they knew nothing of what was actually going on outside.

Aranda stepped out of his hut. He carried his riding crop, tapping it against his leg. This evening he was smiling and all the prisoners relaxed slightly. He vaulted on to the platform and began calling out names in his clear sharp voice.

The roll-call took half an hour, the men standing rigidly to attention. Towards the end someone a few rows away fell down. The man’s neighbours bent to help him.

‘Leave him!’ Aranda called out. ‘Eyes to the front.’

At the end the comandante raised his arm in the Fascist salute. ‘¡Arriba España!’ In the early days of Bernie’s captivity, at San Pedro, many prisoners had refused to respond, but when a few were shot they had complied, and now there was a dull ragged response. Bernie had told the other prisoners about an English word that sounded almost the same as ‘arriba’ and now it was ‘Grieve España’ that many called back.

The prisoners were dismissed. The man who had fallen was lifted by his neighbours and they carried him back to his hut. It was one of the Poles. He stirred faintly. On the other side of the barbed-wire fence a figure, shadowy in the dusk in his long black robe, stood watching.

‘Father Eduardo,’ Vicente muttered. ‘Come for his prey.’

They watched as the young priest came through the gate and walked towards the Pole’s hut, his long sotana stirring up little eddies of dust from the yard. The last of the light glinted on his spectacles. ‘Bastard,’ Vicente muttered. ‘Coming to see if he can terrify another good atheist into taking the last rites by threatening him with Hell.’

VICENTE WAS an old Left Republican, a member of Azaña’s party. He had been a lawyer in Madrid, providing cheap services to the city’s poor, until he joined the militia in 1936. It was a romantic gesture, he had told Bernie. ‘I was too old. But even rationalist Spaniards like me are romantics at heart.’ Like all his party Vicente had a visceral hatred for the Church. It was almost an obsession with the Left Republicans; a liberal-bourgeois distraction, the Communists said. Vicente despised the Communists and said they had destroyed the Republic. Establo, leader of the Communists in Bernie’s hut, disapproved of Vicente and Bernie’s friendship.

‘In this camp you have only your convictions to keep you going,’ Establo had warned Bernie once. ‘If they are eaten away your strength will go too, you will give up and die.’ Establo himself looked as though it was only his beliefs that kept him alive. He was in his forties but looked sixty; his skin yellow and sagging, scarred with the marks of scabies. His eyes, though, were still full of fire.

Bernie had shrugged and told Establo he would end by converting Vicente, that the lawyer had the seeds of a class perspective. He had no respect for Establo; he hadn’t voted for him when the twenty Communists in the hut elected their leader. Establo was obsessed with control and couldn’t bear disagreement. During the war it had been necessary to have such people but it was different here. By the end of the Civil War the parties that made up the Republic had all hated each other, but in the camp the prisoners needed to cooperate to survive. Establo, though, tried to maintain the Communists’ separate identity. He told them they were still the vanguard of the working class, that one day their time would come again.

A couple of days before, Pablo, one of the other Communists, had whispered in Bernie’s ear. ‘Beware of mixing with the lawyer, compadre. Establo is making an issue of it.’

‘He can go fuck himself. What’s his authority, anyway?’

‘Why court trouble, Bernardo? The lawyer will die soon, anyone can see that.’

THIRTY PRISONERS shuffled into their bare wooden hut and threw themselves down on the straw mattresses covering their plank beds, each with one brown army blanket. Bernie had taken the bunk next to Vicente when the last occupant died. It was partly an act of defiance against Establo, who lay on his bunk in the opposite row, staring across at him.

Vicente coughed again. His face reddened and he lay back, gasping.

‘I am bad. I will have to plead sickness tomorrow.’

‘You can’t. Ramirez is on duty, you’ll just get a beating.’

‘I don’t know if I can work another day.’

‘Come on, if you can stick it out until Molina is back, he’ll put you on easy duty.’

‘I will try.’

They were silent a moment, then Bernie leaned over on his elbow, speaking quietly. ‘Listen, the guard Agustín said an odd thing earlier.’

‘The quiet one from Sevilla?’

‘Yes.’ Bernie repeated the guard’s words. Vicente frowned.

‘What can it mean?’

‘I don’t know. What if the Monarchists have toppled the Falange? We wouldn’t know.’

‘We’d be no better off under the Monarchists.’ Vicente thought a moment. ‘Better times may be ahead? For who? He might have meant just for you, not all the camp.’

‘Why should they do me any favours?’

‘I don’t know.’ Vicente lay back with a sigh that turned into a cough. He looked ill, miserable.

‘Listen,’ Bernie said, to distract him. ‘I stood up to that bastard quack. He told me I was a degenerate because I couldn’t be converted to Catholicism. I remember that scene last Navidad. Remember, the doll?’

Vicente gave a sound between a laugh and a groan. ‘Who could forget it?’

IT HAD BEEN a cold day, snow on the ground. The prisoners were marched out into the yard where Father Jaime, the older of the two priests who served the camp, stood dressed in a green and yellow cope. In his regalia in the bare snowy yard he looked like a visitor from another world. Beside him young Father Eduardo, in his usual black, looked uncomfortable, his round face red with cold. Father Jaime was holding a child’s doll, a baby made of wood, wrapped in a shawl. There was a silver circle painted round its brow that puzzled Bernie for a moment until he realized it was meant to be a halo.

As always Father Jaime’s face was supercilious, angry, his hawklike nose with the stiff little hairs on top lifted as though offended by more than the men’s rank smell. Aranda called the prisoners into shivering lines then stood on the platform, tapping his crop against his leg.

‘Today is Epiphany,’ he called out, his breath making grey clouds in the freezing air. ‘Today we honour the baby Jesus, who came to Earth to save us. You will offer up homage and perhaps the Lord will take pity on you and shine a light into your souls. You will each kiss the image of the Christ child Father Jaime holds. Do not worry if the person before you has tuberculosis, the Lord will not allow you to be contaminated.’

Father Jaime frowned at the levity in the comandante’s tone. Father Eduardo looked at his feet. Father Jaime held the doll up, threateningly, like a weapon.

One by one the men shuffled past and kissed it. A few failed to bring their lips quite to the wood and the priest called them back sharply. ‘Again! Kiss the baby Jesus properly!’

It was one of the Anarchists who refused, Tomás the shipbuilder from Barcelona. He stood in front of the priest, looking him in the eyes. He was a big man and Father Jaime shrank back a little.

‘I will not kiss your symbol of superstition,’ he said. ‘I spit on it!’ And he did, leaving a trail of white spittle on the baby’s wooden brow. Father Jaime cried out as though the baby were real. One of the guards landed a blow on Tomás’s head that felled him to the ground. Father Eduardo looked about to step forward but a glare from Father Jaime stopped him. The older priest wiped the doll’s brow with a white handkerchief.