SOFIA AND HARRY walked slowly through the Rastro crowds. It was Sunday, a cool cloudy day, and Madrid’s main street market was packed. The rickety wooden stalls with their awnings spilled into the narrow streets around Plaza de Cascorro. They were covered with junk of every imaginable variety – cheap ornaments, pieces of broken down machinery, canaries in wooden cages. Harry would have liked to take Sofia’s hand but that was now forbidden as immoral unless the couple were married. Pairs of guardias stood in doorways here and there, looking at the crowd with cold hard eyes.

It was exactly a week since they had made love in Harry’s flat. Since then they had managed to see each other most days. Harry had time on his hands; he had had no further instructions from the spies. Sofia would come round to his flat in the evenings, leaving early because of her early shifts at the dairy.

He was happy to be in love for the first time, happy that his orderly world had been turned upside down. When the latest letter from Will arrived he read of their problems with getting a cleaner for their house in the country, the children’s schooling, and felt unimaginably distant from his cousin’s world at the same time as he felt a warm rush of love for him.

There were secrets, though. Harry wanted nothing more than to tell Sofia about his work as a spy and how he hated it, how his only friend at the embassy had turned out to be his watcher: but he couldn’t and mustn’t. Sofia, meanwhile, had not told her family of their relationship. She said it wasn’t the right time. When she left Enrique to look after their mother and Paco in the early evenings she told him she went visiting one of the girls from the dairy. She didn’t seem to mind lying to her brother; Harry wondered whether perhaps families as close as theirs could only cope with that closeness by having secrets.

Today was Sofia’s weekly day off from the dairy. She had arranged for Enrique to stay at home to look after their mother and Paco.

They had made love at Harry’s flat and then Sofia suggested the Rastro. As they threaded their way through the crowds, Harry whispered to her. ‘You never smell of milk. Why don’t you smell of milk?’

She laughed. ‘What do I smell of?’

‘Just you. A clean smell.’

‘When I went to work there I promised myself I wouldn’t end up smelling like the others. There is a shower there; it is freezing cold and has a concrete floor with a broken metal drain you must be careful not to fall into, but I shower every day.’

‘No one will ever keep you down, will they?’

‘No.’ She smiled at him. ‘I hope not.’

They walked deeper into the crowds, laughing at some of the bizarre things up for sale, and passed into the part of the market that sold food. Most of the stalls were nearly empty, only a few dried-up vegetables here and there. A meat stall sold offal that Harry could smell six feet away but there was a queue waiting to buy it. Sofia saw his disgusted look.

‘People will buy anything now,’ she said. ‘The ration wouldn’t feed a dog.’

‘I know.’

‘Everyone is desperate. That’s why Enrique took that job, you know. He is a good man at heart, he didn’t want to be a spy.’

‘I wonder whether not being good at spying makes you a better man?’

‘Perhaps it does. People who are good at deceiving cannot be good people, can they? He is happier as a street cleaner.’

‘How is his leg?’

‘All right. He is still tired in the evenings, but that will get better. Señora Avila is disappointed. Now there is more income coming into the family she has lost one excuse to run to the priest with, that we cannot afford to care for Paco.’

He looked at her. ‘What was your uncle the priest like?’ he asked.

Sofia smiled sadly. ‘Mama and Papa moved from Tarancón to Madrid to find work when I was small and Uncle Ernesto went to a parish in Cuenca. Although my parents were Republicans they kept in touch, family is everything in Spain. We used to go and stay with Uncle Ernesto for a few days every summer when I was small. I remember being amazed by his sotana.’ She laughed. ‘I remember I asked my mother why Uncle wore a dress. But he was kind. He let me clean the candlesticks in the church. I would leave great finger-marks all over them, but he said it didn’t matter. He must have got one of his beatas to polish them again afterwards.’ She looked at Harry. ‘Since the war ended Mama has said one of us should go to Cuenca and see if he is still alive. But even if we could afford it I do not think it is a good idea. I heard bad stories of what happened to the priests and nuns there.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She grasped his hand for a moment, hidden by the press of the crowd. ‘At least I had a family to look after me. I wasn’t sent away to some school like you.’

Ahead of them the street broadened out. It was particularly busy here and Harry saw an unusual number of well-dressed customers crowded round a stall, their faces intent, frowning. A pair of civiles stood in a doorway, watching.

‘What’s going on?’ Harry asked.

‘This is where all the things that were taken from the houses of the rich in 1936 end up,’ Sofia said. ‘The people who took them need the money for food so they sell them to the stallholders. Rich Madrileños come here to try to find their family heirlooms.’

They walked past the stalls. There were expensive-looking vases and dinner services, porcelain figures and even an old record-player with a silver horn. Harry read the inscription on it. ‘To Don Juan Ramirez Dávila from his colleagues at the Banco de Santander, 12.7.19.’ An elderly woman picked through a heap of brooches and mother-of-pearl necklaces. ‘We’ll never find it, Dolores,’ her husband murmured wearily. ‘You have to forget about it.’

Harry picked up a porcelain figure of a woman in eighteenth-century dress, her nose chipped. ‘Some of these probably meant a lot to someone once.’

‘They were bought with money stolen from the people,’ Sofia replied, a harshness in her voice.

They passed on to a table with a huge pile of photographs. People were crowded around sorting through them, and here the faces were sad, stricken, some looking frantic as they delved through the piles.

‘Where did all these come from?’ Harry asked.

‘Photographs would be taken from the frames when they were sold. People come here looking for photographs of their families.’

Some of the photos were recent, some half a century old. Wedding photographs, family portraits, black and white and sepia. A young man in a military uniform, smiling into the camera; a young couple sitting outside a taverna hand in hand. Harry realized many of them must be dead now. No wonder these people were looking so intently; here they might find the only image left of a lost son or brother.

‘So many gone,’ he muttered. ‘So many.’

Sofia leaned in to him. ‘Harry, do you know that man over there? He is looking at us.’

Harry turned and drew in his breath sharply. General Maestre was standing by the porcelain stall with his wife and Milagros. He wore civilian clothes, a heavy coat and a trilby. Out of uniform his weatherbeaten features looked harsher, older. Señora Maestre was examining a silver candleholder but the general was frowning in Harry’s direction. Milagros was looking at him too, her eyes sad in her plump face. He met her eye and she blushed and lowered her head. Harry nodded at the general. He raised his eyebrows slightly before nodding briefly in return, a jerk of the head.

‘It’s a government minister, General Maestre,’ Harry whispered.

‘How do you know him?’ Sofia’s voice was suddenly sharp, her eyes wide.

‘I had to translate for him. It’s embarrassing, I went out with his daughter once, I was pushed into it. Come on, let’s go.’