LITMIR.BIZ

      FOUR

      It sounded like a fusillade of gunfire, distant rather than deadly. The sun was high and James’s shirt was sticking to his back. He squinted against the brightness of a Spanish noon but he could not see where the noise was coming from. He was in the bombed-out ruin of what, he guessed, had once been a farmworker’s cottage. The walls still stood, though they were pocked by bullet-holes. Whole chunks of plaster were missing, exposing the brick underneath, like snatched glimpses of flesh. The windows had no glass, the doorways were empty arches. And when he looked down at his feet, he saw that the ground itself seemed to be sinking slowly. He was in a house that was crumbling before his eyes. And now the gunfire started again …

      He woke with a start, his heart thumping. He looked around, confused. When he realized he was slumped in an armchair, he sat bolt upright, knocking over the bottle of whisky lodged at his side. Damn. It had soaked the top of his trousers, drenching his left thigh. And then came that rat-tat-tat again; not gunfire, but someone at the door.

      James remembered after a moment of delay what had happened, the recollection landing like a deadweight on his chest. Harry and Florence were gone.

      The knocking again. He stood up, aware of a chill draught in the house. Of course: the hole in the kitchen window, shattered by the candlestick.

      ‘Dr Zennor?’

      Oh no. The voice, unmistakable, belonged to Virginia Grey. James encountered her most often as one half of the couple that together ran his college: her husband was Master. But that accounted for only a small part of their influence. Bernard and Virginia Grey were luminaries of the British intellectual Left. You couldn’t open a copy of the New Statesman without coming across an article by or about them, the latter usually reviewing a pamphlet or book they had produced either singly or together. They were a dominant force in the Fabian Society and, through that, the Labour party, their ideas and proposals constantly debated in the national press or taken up as policy. They hosted a high table that was regularly graced by Westminster politicians and the country’s most eminent theorists.

      The Greys had taken Florence and James under their wing almost as soon as they had returned from Madrid, insisting that Florence transfer her doctoral work to the college, demanding they have their Spanish marriage blessed in the college chapel – where they had acted as if they were the parents of the bride. His own parents had sat polite, quiet and thoroughly overwhelmed through the whole event.

      Now in their late sixties, the Greys had their doubts about James’s field, regarding psychology as new-fangled and experimental. They urged him to switch to political science instead – though, to his irritation, they always appeared riveted by Florence’s work on evolutionary biology. James suspected they rather fancied the Zennors might become the future Greys of the 1970s, seeing themselves in this ‘handsome young couple’; seeing too, perhaps, an opportunity to extend their influence beyond the grave. They had no children of their own.

      Brushing crumbs of a half-eaten sandwich off himself and onto the wooden floor, he opened the door. ‘Good mor—’ He stopped, suddenly aware that he had no idea what time it was.

      ‘Thank heavens. I was beginning to wonder if you were dead! I’ve been knocking on your door for seven minutes.’

      ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Grey. I wonder if I could call on you later. Now is not—’

      ‘Are you unwell, James dear? You do sound a little off-colour.’ Her tone was bossily familiar, a mother talking to a recalcitrant child.

      ‘I am feeling a little under the weather, as it—’

      ‘I think I ought to come in.’

      ‘I really would rather—’

      ‘Chop, chop, James.’

      That was how the Greys were: they would not take no for an answer, so no one ever gave it to them. He opened the door.

      ‘Oh Lord. You look absolutely dreadful!’ Her eyes darted past him, no doubt taking in the devastation; then she wrinkled her nose in distaste: she had smelled the whisky.

      ‘What has been going on here?’ She marched into the room uninvited.

      ‘Would you like a drink, Mrs Grey?’ He took an almost malign pleasure in the appalled expression on her face.

      ‘I rather think you’ve had enough of that already, don’t you?’

      ‘I was actually offering one to you, Mrs Grey. But if you won’t, I will.’

      She ignored this remark, instead finding a chair and making herself comfortable. Then in a voice that was kindly, and nearly free of the usual imperiousness, she said, ‘Can I suggest you tell me what happened?’

      James sat down too, realizing that he was grateful for the chance to speak to another person. ‘It would appear that Florence has left me.’

      Grey stifled a gasp. ‘Good God, no. When?’

      ‘This morning. I came back from sculling and the house was empty.’

      ‘And Harry?’

      ‘She’s taken him with her.’

      James watched a thought flicker across Grey’s face, stern beneath its bun of silver hair. Her initial shock seemed now to give way to urgency, the practical desire to act and to act immediately. ‘Have you spoken to her? Has she telephoned?’

      ‘She left a note.’

      ‘A note? What did it say?’

      ‘Nothing.’ He paused, weighing up the temptation to tell her everything. But something held him back. Was it loyalty to Florence? Was it embarrassment? ‘Nothing that explains anything anyway.’

      ‘Had she ever talked about leaving before?’

      ‘No. Never.’

      ‘So why do you presume she left?’

      ‘She must have met someone else. She is the most beautiful woman in Oxford, after all. Your husband called her that, as I recall, at our wedding celebration.’

      A picture instantly sprang into his head. That Indian summer’s day, late September 1937, in the college garden: Florence, heavily pregnant and glowing with good health. Next to her, on crutches, James himself, his smile for the photographer more of a wince. Though the Greys had insisted on the location, the idea of the celebration had come from Florence’s parents: ‘Darling, you’ve denied us the delight of seeing our daughter married; you will not deprive us of our right to throw an enormous party.’ So nine months after they had exchanged their Spanish vows, they had listened as Sir George Walsingham made a toast extolling the qualities of his wonderful daughter while Bernard Grey made jokes at James’s expense and, like a man who could not help himself, offered repeated paeans to the beauty of the bride.

      ‘Her attractiveness has no bearing on her willingness or otherwise to pair with other men, nor to leave you.

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