Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

by dint of sheer repetition and, ultimately, to feed both youthful and adult fantasies, more quickly if the war happens abroad, perhaps for many foreigners our war seems as literary and remote as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns or perhaps even the sieges of Numantia or Troy. And yet my father had nearly died in that war, wearing the uniform of the Republic in our besieged city, and, when it was over, had endured a mock trial and imprisonment under Franco, and an uncle of mine aged seventeen had been killed in Madrid and in cold blood by those on the other side – that side split into so many factions, and so full of calumnies and purges – by the militiamen who wore no uniform and were subject to no control and who would bump off anyone, they had killed him for no reason at an age when almost all one does is fantasise and when there are only imaginings, and his older sister, my mother, had searched that same besieged city for his body without finding it, only the tiny, bureaucratic photograph of his corpse, which I've seen and which is now in my possession. Perhaps in my country, too, without my realising it, this was all turning into fiction, everything moves ever faster, is less enduring, more quickly cancelled out and filed away, and our past grows ever denser and fuller and more crowded because it has been decreed – and even accepted as true – that yesterday is passe, the day before yesterday mere history, and what happened a year ago remote and immemorial. (Perhaps what happened three months ago too.) I thought that the time had come to find out at last what his 'line of work' was, I had earned enough brownie points, always assuming I needed them. In my thoughts I didn't believe this to be so, yet I had the distinct feeling that it was. 'Tell me, Mr Tupra, what is your field, if you don't mind my asking? It's not, by any chance, the history of my country, is it?' I realised that I was still awaiting permission to ask the easiest and most harmless of questions asked in our societies.

'No, no, of course not, you can be quite sure of that,' he replied, laughing loudly and with genuine mirth, his teeth were small but very bright, his long eyelashes danced. When you had got used to it, his was the sort of face to which you warmed more and more with each minute, objectivity would not last long with him, and suspicion would quickly dissolve. You noticed at once the generosity of the interest he took in you, as if at every moment he was concerned only with the person he was with and as if, behind you, the lights of the world had gone out and the world had been transformed into a mere backdrop designed to set you off. He also knew how to hold the attention of the person he was talking to, in my case that mention of Andres Nin had been enough to intrigue me, and not merely because of what he knew, for I was filled now with a desire to plunge into Orwell's Homage to Catalonia or into Hugh Thomas's summary and to brush up on the story of the slandered Andres Nin, of which I could barely remember a thing. One also noticed in Tupra that strange tension – a sort of postponed vehemence – but I took it at first as simply part of his natural alertness. He was well dressed, but not extravagantly so, discreet fabrics and colours (the cloth was always of extraordinarily high quality, his superb ties always pinned with a tie-pin), his vanity evident only – unless it was a remnant of past bad taste – in the perennial waistcoats he wore under his jacket, and one of which he was wearing at Wheeler's buffet supper. 'No, my activities have been as diverse as yours, but my real talent has always been for negotiating, in different fields and circumstances. Even serving my country, one should if one can, don't you think, even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself.'

He had evaded the question, this was all very vague, he hadn't even said what he had studied at Oxford, although Toby Rylands, one of his teachers, had been Professor of English Literature. Not that this meant anything. In that university it doesn't really matter what you study, what counts is to have been there and to have submitted to its method and its spirit, and no course of study, however eccentric or ornamental, prevents its postgraduates and graduates from going on to do whatever they choose to do afterwards, however different that may be: you can spend years analysing Cervantes and end up in the world of finance, or studying the traces left by the ancient Persians and convert that afterwards into the extravagant preamble to a career in politics or diplomacy, doubtless the latter for Tupra, I thought again, basing this now not only on my intuition or on his appearance, but on that verb 'negotiate' and that expression, 'serving my country'. He was lucky – in a way – that there is no one-word English equivalent for the unequivocal 'patria' of my own language (or only highly recondite, rhetorical ones): the word he had used, 'country', means different things depending on the context, but is less emotive and less pompous and should almost always be translated as 'pais'. Otherwise, I might perhaps have thought – that is, if he had used the Spanish word 'patria', which was impossible; and yet the shadow of that mad idea did cross my mind, though without taking proper shape – that he had a fascist mind, in the analogical sense, despite the evident solidarity and sympathy with which he had referred to the fate of Nin, Trotsky's former secretary, for in the colloquial or analogical sense the word is compatible with all ideologies, one's ideology isn't necessarily relevant, which is why it has become such a vague term, I've known official champions of the old Left, the apparently incontrovertible Left, who were intrinsically fascist by nature (and in their writing style too, if they were writers). In that idea of serving one's country I had noticed a hint of coquetry and a touch of arrogance. The coquetry of someone who enjoys appearing mysterious, the arrogance of someone who sees or conceives of himself as a granter of favours, even to his own country. A third foreign Briton, perhaps, a third bogus Englishman, I thought, like Toby, according to all the rumours, and like Peter, as he himself had confessed a few weeks ago. I had still not had a chance to ask him about that. Bogus at least to judge by the surname, that strange name Tupra, though perhaps not by birth in his case, the newly arrived and those with suspicious names are always and everywhere the most patriotic, the readiest to render a service, noble or base, clean or dirty, they feel grateful and volunteer, or perhaps it is their way of believing themselves to be indispensable to the country that one day allowed them to stay and continues to do so, as it would even if they had changed their name, like that poor Anatolian Hohanness who went on to be Joe Arness in America, or the fabulously wealthy Battenburg, who was transformed into Mountbatten for his English existence. It was strange that Tupra should have kept his name, perhaps it seemed excessive or too risky, 'strange to abandon even one's own name'.

'Hey, Deza,' I heard De la Garza's voice in Spanish beside me again, he never tired of his prowling, 'if you keep nattering on to this gypsy, we're going to miss all the totty. The rate we're going, Miss Longlegs here will end up going off with the fat guy, look at the way the great tub of lard is sweet-talking her. Bloody shameless.'

Not even Wheeler would have understood a word this time, for all his impeccable bookish Spanish. It was true that young Judge Hood was whispering in Beryl's ear and was being rewarded by peals of laughter, the neglectful girlfriend's upper lip had been hidden for some time now; they were inevitably sitting very close to each other on the sofa, the judge being extremely large and voluminous. I did not respond to the attache, not yet, as if he did not exist, he seemed to have forgotten who Longlegs had come with. But Tupra himself alluded to him, he had, like me, been observing him out of the corner of his eye, or else guessed what was going on despite not knowing our language, still less De la Garza's slang, which tended to the artificial or wilful, and sounded affected, put on. His sleek hair was becoming soft and unruly, no one in Oxford escapes unscathed from sharing a few drinks with The Flask.

'You'd better deal with your compatriot or friend,' Tupra said in a tone of fatherly amusement, 'he's getting in a real state about the ladies, and his English isn't helping him in the enterprise. You should lend him a hand. I don't think he'll get anywhere with Mrs Wadman, the dowager deaness,' he used the legal or ironic term 'dowager' rather than the more usual 'widow', 'I paid her a few compliments earlier on which have not only given her a glow that has lasted all evening, but have made her feel, how can I put it, inaccessible, I doubt that tonight she would feel herself worthy of any living being, look at her, so above all earthly passions, so lovely in the September of her life, so placid in the face of the encroaching autumn. He would be better off trying Beryl, although she's rather distracted at the moment and, besides, we'll have to leave soon, we've got to drive back to London. Or Harriet Buckley, she's a medical doctor and got divorced a few days ago, her new state might inspire her to start making some investigations.'

There was not only humour in these remarks, they breathed a kind of ingenuous, almost literary satisfaction; and the usual look of natural and unaffected mockery in his pale eyes was intensified by his own enjoyment, any mockery this time was quite intentional. It was then that I realised how aware he was of his power to persuade women and to make them feel either like goddesses – albeit minor ones – or mere cast-offs. Or, rather, I thought at that moment, he believed that he did or, if not, that it was all a joke, because he had still not realised the true extent of his powers. He had made the widowed deaness glow with his compliments, no less, and he must have been very confident about Beryl's devotion or the unconditional nature of her feelings to speak of her like that, like an old buddy or an old flame, in theory free to succumb to weaknesses brought on by a few last-minute drinks or by one last laugh.

'I didn't know the Dean of York's widow was called Mrs Wadman,' was all I managed to say.

Tupra smiled broadly again, his wide lips seemed less so when he did, they seemed less moist.