‘Yes.’ Bernie paused. ‘Christians believe in forgiveness, don’t they?’

‘That is central to our faith.’

‘Then why can’t you forgive Vicente what his party may have done and leave him in peace?’

Father Eduardo raised a hand. ‘You don’t understand at all.’ His voice had that pleading note again. ‘Please try to understand. If a man dies having denied the Church he will go to Hell. But if he repents and asks forgiveness, even at the very end, after the worst life, God will forgive him. When a man is on his deathbed it is our last chance to save his soul. A man then is on the brink of eternity. Sometimes he can see his life and his sins truly for the first time, and reach out to God.’

‘A man then is at his weakest point, terrified. And you know how to use that. What if a man takes the sacrament then through sheer fear?’

‘Only God could know if he was truly contrite.’

Bernie realized he had lost. He had underestimated how deeply the priest was buried in his superstition. His natural compassion was just a flicker on the surface.

‘You’ve an answer for everything, haven’t you?’ he asked heavily. ‘Endless twisted logic?’

Father Eduardo smiled sadly. ‘I could say the same of your faith. The edifice Karl Marx built.’

‘My beliefs are scientific.’

‘Are they? I heard about the cave that was discovered in the hills, the prehistoric paintings. Figures of men chasing extinct animals, was it not?’

‘Yes. They’re probably priceless and you’re going to destroy them.’

‘That wasn’t my decision. But you believe these people lived as Communists, don’t you? Primitive communism, the first stage of the historical dialectic. You see, I know my Marx. But that is a belief, you cannot know how such people lived. You too live by faith; a false faith.’

It was like the psychiatrist again. Bernie wanted to hurt the priest, make him angry, as he had the doctor.

‘This is not some intellectual game. We’re in a place where sick men are denied doctors and worked to death by the government your church supports.’

The priest sighed. ‘You are not a Spaniard, Piper, how can you really understand the Civil War? I had friends, priests, who were caught in the Republican zone. They were shot, thrown from precipices, tortured.’

‘And so you take revenge on us. I thought Christians were supposed to be better than most men.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘What does the Bible say – by their fruits shall we know them.’

Father Eduardo didn’t get angry, his face was sad and burdened. ‘What do you think it is like for Father Jaime and me,’ he asked quietly, ‘working here among people who killed our friends? Why do you think we do it? For charity, to try and save those who hate us.’

‘You know if it is Father Jaime who comes to Vicente he will enjoy what he does. His revenge.’ He stood up. ‘May I go now, please?’

Father Eduardo raised a hand, then dropped it wearily to the desk. ‘Yes. Go.’

Bernie got up.

‘I shall pray for your friend,’ Father Eduardo said. ‘For his recovery.’

THAT EVENING Establo ordered a cell meeting. The ten Communists gathered around Pablo’s bed, at the farthest end of the hut.

‘We need to strengthen our Marxist faith,’ Establo said. Bernie looked into his face as he used that word. It was stern, severe. ‘The discovery of these paintings has made me think. We should have classes on the Marxist understanding of history, the development of the class struggle through the ages. Something to bond us closer together again; we need that with another winter upon us.’

One or two of the men nodded but others looked weary. Miguel, an old tramworker from Valencia, spoke up.

‘It’s too cold to sit around talking in the dark.’

‘And what if the guards find out?’ Pablo said. ‘Or someone tells?’

‘Who’s going to lead these classes?’ Bernie asked. ‘You?’ He could sense the meeting was going against Establo; he should have made this suggestion before the cold nights sent the men shrinking back into themselves.

The scaly head turned in Bernie’s direction, eyes bright with anger. ‘Yes. I am the cell leader.’

‘Comrade Establo is right,’ said Pepino, a hollow-faced young farmworker. ‘We need to remember what we are.’

‘Well, I for one haven’t the energy to listen to Comrade Establo lecturing us on historical materialism.’

‘I have decided, comrade,’ Establo said menacingly. ‘I’ve been elected, I make the decisions. That’s democratic centralism.’

‘No, it isn’t, I’ll take your orders against the feeling of this group when a properly constituted Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party tells me to. Not before.’

‘There is no Central Committee any more,’ Pepino said sadly. ‘Not in Spain.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You should watch your mouth, inglés,’ Establo said softly. ‘I know your history. A worker’s son who went to an aristocrat’s school, an arriviste.’

‘And you’re a petit bourgeois drunk on power,’ Bernie told him. ‘You think you’re still a factory foreman. I’m loyal to the party but you’re not the party.’

‘I can expel you from this cell.’

Bernie laughed softly. ‘Some cell.’ He knew at once it was the wrong thing to say, it would put them against him, but his head was spinning with exhaustion and anger. He got up and walked back to his bed. He lay down, listening to the mutterings from the other end of the room. Someone shouted to them to be quiet, people wanted to sleep. Shortly afterwards he heard the pallet creak as Establo lay down opposite him. He heard him scratch, felt his eyes on him.

‘We are going to consider your case, compadre,’ Establo said softly. Bernie didn’t reply. He listened to Vicente’s rasping gurgling breath and wanted to howl with sorrow and rage. He remembered Agustín’s words that he had puzzled over. Better times. No, he thought. Whatever you meant there, you were wrong.

HE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. He lay on his bunk in the cold, not tossing and turning but looking into the darkness. He remembered how, in London, the Communist Party’s theories of the laws of class struggle had seemed to him like a revelation, the world explained at last. When he left Cambridge he had helped out in his parents’ shop at first, but his father’s depression and his mother’s complaining disappointment that he had thrown Cambridge away stifled him and he left and took rooms nearby.

The contrast between the wealth of Cambridge and the bleak shabby poverty of the East End, where unemployed men lounged on street corners and there were stirrings of a home-grown fascism, angered him more than ever. Millions were unemployed and the Labour Party did nothing. He kept in touch with the Meras; the Republic was a disappointment, the government refusing to raise taxes to finance reforms for fear of angering the middle classes. A friend took him to a Communist meeting and at once he felt, this is the truth, this is exposing how it all really works.

He studied Marx and Lenin; their harsh prose was a struggle at first, different from anything he had read before, but when he understood their analyses he saw that here was the uncompromising reality of the class struggle: iron hard, as his party tutor said. Only Communists had the ruthlessness to destroy fascism, capitalism’s last attempt to stave off its own destruction. Bernie slogged for the party, selling the Daily Worker outside factory gates in the rain, stewarding meetings in half-empty halls. Many of the local party members were middle-class, bohemian intellectuals and artists. He knew that for many of them communism was a fad, an act of rebellion, at the same time as he realized he felt more at home with them than the workers. With his public-school accent they took him for one of their own; it was one of them, a sculptor, who got Bernie his job as a model. Yet there was still a part of him that felt rootless, lonely, neither proletarian nor bourgeois, a disconnected hybrid.