Tapestry of Spies

“I must say,” said Julian, “it’s a shame Robert mussed his opportunity here. It’s not often that a chap from your class has the chance. We’d all so hoped Robert would prove out. But alas, he hasn’t. Off to India, Stink?” Julian smiled in the excruciating silence of the moment. “Well, it’s probably better that way. You won’t be dogged by it, old man. Well, best of luck.”

And with that little masterpiece of destruction, he was off. He had not looked at Florry after the first second, yet in less than a minute he had transformed Florry’s failure from a general one to a specific one, given it special shape and meaning and inserted it forever into his parents’ memories.

But Florry surprised himself by not crying. He simply swallowed and led his parents onward.

“You’re lucky to have such fancy friends,” his mum said. “Did you see how he kissed my hand? There, nobody’s ever done such a thing.”

“A bit cheeky, you ask me,” said his father. “Robert did graduate, did he not? First of our lot to get even half so far. Well, Robert, there’s still India. You’ll get your chance yet. What’s that he called you?”

“It’s nothing, Dad,” Florry said. “Just a schoolboy name.”

“Damned silly,” his father said.

Florry managed a dry heroic smile, but ? and later he hated himself for this last weakness ? looked past him back into the mob one last time: into Eton through the gates and the crowd of boys and their parents ? and he’d seen Julian amid the form’s handsomest youths, laughing, sipping champagne … and then lost sight of him, and that was the end of it.

Thus when the truck halted and the driver came back and shouted, “Ingles. Si, ingles. ?Vamonos!” and he’d climbed down to find himself hard by a seedy, battered old country house, he discovered in himself a curious mixture of apprehension and loathing. He knew he was at La Granja, near the English section of the line around Huesca. Somewhere hereabouts he would find his friend and enemy, the man he was sent to stop.

Mobs of soldiers loafed about in the sun, most of them scruffier looking than hobos. In the yard, a dozen different languages filled the air. The largest crowd had formed up about a fire, where a cook was ladling out huge helpings of some sort of rice dish. Near the great house, a tent had been set up with a huge red cross painted on its roof, and Florry could make out wounded soldiers lying on cots. The house itself bore the marks of battle: one wing was smashed to rubble and most of the windows had been broken out. The ubiquitous POUM initials had been inscribed across its facade in garish red paint, in a spidery, gargantuan penmanship. Yet for all the noise and the numbers of men, the scene was strangely pastoral: it had no sense of particular urgency or design. It was as so much of the Spanish revolution, that is, primarily improvised and quite ragtag. No sentry questioned him or challenged him and there seemed to be no office for new arrivals. He simply asked the first several men he saw about the English, and after a time, someone pointed him in more or less the right direction.

He was directed beyond the house, through an orchard, and across a meadow, perhaps a mile’s walk in all. At last he came to a dour little redhead sitting on an appropriated dining-room chair in the middle of a field, sucking on a pipe, and hacking at what proved to be an ancient Colt machine gun.

“I say,” Florry called, “seen a chap about calling himself Julian Raines? Tall fellow, rather fine-boned. Blond.”

The man didn’t bother to look up.

After a time, Florry said, “Er, I was addressing you, sir.”

The man at last raised his face, fixing Florry with shrewd, dirty-gray eyes.

“Wouldn’t have a spare potato-digger bolt on you, mate? This one’s about to bleedin’ snap.”

“I assume ‘potato digger’ is slang for the weapon?”

“You got it, chum. They said they’d send one up.”

“No, they didn’t say anything about that.”

“Public-school man, eh?”

“Yes. My bloody accent, is it? Afraid I can’t much help it.”

“Your pal’s up top the hill, chum. Just go on up.”

“Oh. Thanks. Thanks awfully.”

“Think nothing of it, chum.”

Florry marched up the hill, dragging his rifle with him. At the crest, he saw before him a broad brown plain and beyond that a range of glorious white mountains and halfway between himself and the mountains there lay a doll’s city of brown structures crouching behind a wall from which there issued, lazily, a few columns of smoke. Huesca itself, the enemy city.

Florry looked down the hill where a group of men huddled around a cooking fire behind a rude trench, and cupped his hand to his mouth and ?

The tackle sent him hurling down, rolling with bone-crunching racket, over rocks and bushes and branches. He came to a rest against a stunted tree, all tangled up in his equipment, hurting and scraped in a half dozen places. There seemed to be a flock of birds fluttering through the trees.

“You bloody idiot,” someone nearby was shouting at him.

Florry blinked in shock.

“What on earth?”

“Them’s bullets whippin’ about, you bloody fool,” screamed his assailant, no less than the redheaded runt of the other side of the hill. “Blimey, mate, don’t you know a bloody prank? Don’t they have bloody humor at that awful school of yours? Christ, ’e goes and stands against the crestline!”

“Eh?”

“Come on, then.”

Florry, in his confusion and embarrassment, became aware of a circle of faces above him.

“Billy, you awful toad, playing games with some innocent swot,” came a voice of piercing familiarity. “Good heavens, fellow, don’t just lie there like the fallen Christ awaiting resurrection. Get your scrawny bones up and give us some account of yourself.”

A lovely apparition in mud and pale whiskers stood above him. He wore a small automatic pistol at his waist and some kind of many-buckled leather Burberry. He looked like a Great War aviator, all dash and style, more than any kind of infantryman, even to the scarf ? silk, naturally ? and the puttees and the hollow, noble sunburned face. His hair was almost white-blond from the outdoor living, the eyes still their fabled opaque blue.

“Hullo, Julian,” said Florry, in spite of himself excited. And a little nervous.

“Good God, it’s Stinky Florry of the old school. Stinky, can it really be you?”

“ ’E said ’e was a chum of yours, Julian,” said the runty redhead. “If I’d known it for a fact, I wouldn’t have knocked ’im down before Bob the Nailer invited him to tea.”

“Had Bob the Nailer known he was an Eton man, Billy, I’m sure he would have shown a degree more politeness,” said Julian with what Florry began to see was a kind of mock snootiness that must have been his style up here. “Robert, you’ve already met the disgusting Billy Mowry, who actually calls himself a commissar. He’s the only man I’ve ever known who’s actually read Das Kapital, which is less impressive than it seems because it’s the only book he’s read. He’s not read my book, for example. He’s not even heard of me, or so he claims.”

“Comrade,” said this Commissar Billy to Florry, “if you can work out a way to keep your fancy chum’s mouth glued tight, you’ll have served the revolution heroically. Anyhows, glad to have you here. We need all the fighters we can find, whatever the class. I reckon you’ll bleed just as red as any of us. I’m boss fellow, or so it says somewhere. Don’t ask me why; these foolish fellows elected me.” There was something like warmth ? though not much of it ? in his voice.

“Only to shut him up about Karl Bloody Marx, his patron saint. Come on, dear boy, to my quarters. You can meet these other fellows later; they’ll be the first to admit they’re not important enough to waste our time now.”

There was much laughter, and Florry saw that part of Julian’s job here in the trenches was to make the boys laugh.

“Now,” said Julian, drawing him off, “tell Julian why on earth you’ve come halfway across Europe to die in mud among louts and lice. I thought one fool in our form was enough. God, Stinky, you can’t have turned into a bloody Communist, can you? You don’t believe all their nonsense, do you?”