Tapestry of Spies

lovely grouping.”

“We were just awfully lucky,” said Florry. “Halfway through the second day, a foraging party was less than fifty paces off. We were cooked.”

“And then some wonderfully ingenious fifth columnist touches off the POUM magazine at La Granja, and all the Johnny Fascist types totter off to watch the smoke rise and cheer for their team.” Julian greedily drank more champagne. “Here’s to luck, Julian’s wonderful luck,” he toasted again, this time removing his father’s wedding ring from under his shirt and holding it, on its chain, out for them to see. “This little beauty didn’t do him much good, but it’s come in handy for us, eh, Stink?”

Florry smiled wanly. “Indeed,” he said.

“Well put, old sport.”

“Do they treat you decently in that awful hospital?” Sylvia asked politely.

“The Spanish, it seems, can do nothing well except cook,” said Florry, somewhat relieved to turn to a neutral subject. “Three times a day, they wheel in huge steaming, wonderful meals. Meanwhile men die because nobody thinks to change their bandages.”

“The future is definitely behind schedule in Spain,” said Julian. “I don’t believe the present has even arrived.”

Florry sat back in the wheelchair. Sylvia and Julian had contrived to spring him from his great bay of bleeding boys for this outing, and they wheeled him down the two blocks of Tarragona’s own Ramblas here to the Esplanade high above the sea. Before him stretched a mile of white sand, a rumpled mess of a Roman arena, and the sleepy, tepid Mediterranean. A few bathers dabbled in it, a few more lay in the sun. The breeze was fresh and salty; gulls flipped and fluted on it. A statue of Christopher Columbus stood proudly atop its pedestal, as at the foot of Barcelona’s Ramblas.

“It’s lovely here,” said Florry.

“An odd town, Tarragona,” Julian said. “It seems the revolution hasn’t quite reached it. Or if it has, it got rather bored and left early, like Noel Coward at a dreary party.”

Florry looked past Julian, in a splendid white linen suit, to Sylvia. Damn you, he thought. Her gray green eyes were sleepy yet lively; she’d done something to her hair, giving it a kind of frilly, lacy delicacy, and she’d put away her blue overalls and found a pretty dress. How had she met Julian? What was she doing with him while Florry lay in his bed? Was she with him?

He looked back to Julian, slugging down the champagne.

Damn you, Julian. You just go on, don’t you?

“Barcelona is no longer a party Noel Coward would enjoy,” she said. “The city’s ugly. There’s a vileness to it. Someone shot Carlos Brea right outside the Cafe Oriente. It was horrible. Someone shot him from a car. The bullet hit him in the head. They don’t know who did it, but everybody says it was the Russian secret police. Poor Carlos.”

“Carlos Brea?” said Julian. “The POUM intellectual? Poor sot. Spoke to him at length. Wanted to use it in a piece.”

“Julian, you’re such an awful cynic,” she said, and Florry thought he could hear the love in her voice and see a radiance in her eyes.

They seemed such a wonderful English couple, the tall, blond, elegant poet-soldier who just as easily could have been a banker or a diplomat, and his beautiful, fair woman, as cool and poised as an impeccable statue. They looked so good together that Florry envied them their perfection.

“Have some more of the bubbly, old boy,” urged Julian. “Do you think it was easy to find this stuff? Good God, I had to pay a fortune.”

“Bottoms up,” said Florry, finishing the glass, feeling the buzz in his nostrils.

“Look, you two,” said Julian, “eat up and enjoy. I’ve got to be off.”

“Where are you going?” Sylvia asked.

“To see about a car. I’ll be back. I told the chap I’d see him at two. Besides, you two must have scads to talk about.”

He rose from the bench with a smile and darted off down the Ramblas. Florry watched him slide along, graceful and fair. Then he turned back to the sea. Now, just the two of them, he felt all ridiculous.

“Is it so hard to be alone with me?” she said. “We were alone together for quite a while, as I recall. You were never so tongue-tied.”

“You must think me an awful fool.”

“Why ever do you say that?”

“The note I sent you. You received it?”

“Yes. It was lovely. I still have it.”

“The soldier lad’s last declaration before battle. God, you must think me the idiot.”

“I think nothing of the kind. Do you want me to push you along the promenade?”

“No.”

“Do you want some more champagne?”

“No.”

“What about some of this food?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you want, Robert? Tell me straight out.”

“You, of course.”

She said nothing.

“Or have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t forgotten. It was quite lovely, wasn’t it?”

“It was the best.”

“Should you tax yourself, thinking about these things? Shouldn’t you concentrate on?”

“Stop it. Don’t say that. It’s all I think about. You’re with him now, is that right?”

“Oh, Robert, you’re such an idiot. He’s a charming man. He’s no more interested in me than in the man in the moon. Julian’s quality. I’m just a daughter of the bourgeoisie with a bit of inherited money for a year’s adventuring. He likes you better than he likes me. He loves you, in fact.”

“But you’d be with him instead of me if that’s what he wanted?”

“Please, Robert. Don’t put yourself through this. There’s no point to it.”

“Thinks have become complicated.”

“Not if you don’t permit them to, Robert.”

Florry could no longer look at her. Her beauty was hurting him more than his throbbing neck would. He could feel her very close and very still. He could smell her. He could not get the night at the Falcon out of his mind: he remembered how good it felt, how it seemed to straighten the world all out for him.

“I suppose you’d best wheel me back now, Sylvia,” he said. “I find I’m quite weary.”

“Of course, darling. May we visit you tomorrow?”

We!

Florry wished he could say simply no, damn you, and be done with it. But he heard himself saying yes, yes, of course, it would be great fun, and as she wheeled him around, he saw Sampson across the street, watching.

* * *

It took a day or so, but at last Sampson managed it. He applied for permission with the Republican Propaganda Department to do a profile of wounded Englishmen fighting valiantly on the side of Justice, and the office itself suggested a series of possibilities. Florry was the third of them, and he lay in the bay and watched as Sampson came in with his official escort and plopped down beside one of the other boys and proceeded to interview him at grindingly boring length. Even the lad himself, an ex-miner from Wales who’d been hurt fighting with the International Brigade near Brunete, soon grew uninterested in his own answers. By halfway through the second interview, the Republican press officer had given up in disgust, muttering darkly about English pedantry, and thus when, late in the afternoon, Sampson finally approached Florry it was alone and in privacy; most of the other patients in the bay had been wheeled out to watch the sunset, their one pleasure, and those that remained were