LITMIR.BIZ

      TWO

       Barcelona, four years earlier

      James saw more of Florence’s bare flesh the first time he laid eyes on her than he did until the day they were married. Which was not strictly true, but became a line he liked to use – though rarely in mixed company.

      They met in Barcelona, in the heat of July 1936. He had never been to Spain before. In truth, he had never been anywhere before. He walked around the city, along its gorgeous wide avenues, round-eyed, his chest tight with excitement and pride. Hanging from the buildings with their strangely-shaped, weeping-eye windows were banners and bunting welcoming him and some six thousand other foreigners to the Olimpiada Popular: the People’s Olympiad. The event’s official flag depicted three heroic, muscular figures in red, yellow and black clutching a single standard. It took a while for James to realize that at least one of the notional athletes on the emblem was a woman; the second was a red-skinned man and a third figure was quite clearly negro.

      He should not have been surprised: this was the alternative Olympics, designed to steal the thunder of the official games taking place a week later and more than nine hundred miles eastward in Berlin. While those games would be a showcase of Aryan supremacy, the People’s Olympiad would be a festival of socialists, idealists and radicals who had refused as a matter of conscience to take part in Herr Hitler’s Nazi carnival.

      ‘Well, we’re not going to win, I can tell you that much,’ James had said the very moment he and his friend Harry had arrived, off the train after a journey that had begun nearly eighteen hours earlier at Victoria Station. ‘Not in this heat. We’re used to freezing dawns and Cherwell fog. This is the bloody tropics.’

      ‘Now, Zennor, you listen to me. If I’d wanted a gloom merchant, I’d have brought Simkins or that other twit, Lightfoot. I brought you for your rhetorical powers. You’re supposed to be here to lift our spirits, to exhort the team to victory!’

      ‘I thought I was here because I’m a bloody good oarsman.’

      ‘And so you are. So no more of that defeatist talk. We won’t lead the masses to revolution with soggy English pessimism now, will we?’

      Harry Knox, Winchester and Balliol, hereditary baronet and one-time lead organizer of … now what was it? James thought it was the ILP, but it might have been another socialist group with another set of initials: it was hard to keep up. Coming to Barcelona had been Knox’s idea, a way to make up for missing the real Olympics – as he insisted they not refer to them – and a chance to take a stand against Fascism. James had been tipped to row stroke in the Great Britain boat in Berlin; this was to be his consolation prize.

      Along with all the other foreign athletes they were put up at the Hotel Olímpico in the Plaza de España, where the lobby was already teeming with fresh arrivals from the United States, Holland, Belgium and French Algeria. Most were just like Harry and James, there with the backing of a workers’ association, a socialist party or a trade union, rather than their government. James rather doubted the selection process had been as athletically rigorous as it was for the official Games. But, as Harry had said, ‘That’s hardly the point, is it?’

      The atmosphere was raucous and did not let up for a week. The door of their room remained open, as Marxist Danish hurdlers or anarchist French sprinters came in and out as they pleased. The entire building seemed to host a single, unending party. James had barely put down his suitcase when a huge Italian shot putter, who later turned out to be a communist exile, thrust a bottle in his hand, urging him to knock it straight back, no sipping. James read the label – Sangre de Toro, ‘bull’s blood’ – and did as he was told. It tasted musky and heavy with fruit. He hadn’t much liked it at the time but thereafter he would forever associate the taste of that Catalan wine with freedom.

      At last they had spilled out onto the street, wandering from one tapas bar to another. James had no memory of paying for either his food or his drink, as if all the Barcelona bar-owners were grateful to the visiting Olympians for supporting their infant republic, for doing exactly what the International Olympic Committee had refused to do five years earlier – choosing Barcelona over Berlin.

      He was munching on a plate of calcots, charcoal-grilled spring onions that, had you offered them to him in England, he would have rejected as terrifyingly exotic, when Harry, already sunburnt, the sweat patches spreading under his arms, turned to him with a lascivious grin. ‘Rumour is the ladies’ swimming team are having a late night practice session.’

      ‘Harry, even you can’t be that desperate,’ James replied, doing his best to sound like a man of the world. He had some experience with women, more certainly than Harry. He had spent most of his second year at Oxford stepping out with Daisy, a blonde, long-necked Classicist from St Hugh’s, fumbling his way towards a familiarity with her body, albeit through her clothing, but he had lost his innocence with Eileen, studying at a secretarial college on the Woodstock Road. She lacked Daisy’s fine features, but her edges were softer and she was more like him: provincial, from Nottingham. He would see her every Wednesday evening with the occasional Saturday night trip to the pictures. He kept her entirely separate from his college friends, so that she was more like a mistress than a girlfriend. It slightly shamed him now to think of the secrecy he had maintained about their affair, but she had never questioned it. Instead, on Wednesdays at around 6.30pm, when her room-mate was at choir-practice, she would usher him into her digs – and into her bed.

      ‘Well, don’t come then, James,’ Harry said, feeling his friend’s scorn. ‘I’m sure there’s an exciting new academic monograph you could be reading.’

      ‘Since it’s clearly so important to you, old chum, I’ll come and keep you company.’

      For once, Knox’s gossip turned out to be accurate. By the time they arrived at the outdoor baths a crowd had already gathered. Mostly men, but also families out for an after-dinner stroll on this steaming night, young children, ice-creams in their hands, some on their fathers’ shoulders – all watching the moonlit swimmers.

      Knox elbowed his way through the three-deep throng in order to get closer. But James, at six foot four, had a clear line of sight to the start podiums at the right-hand end of the pool – and he saw her straight away.

      Her hair was hidden by a swim cap, but he could see that she was dark, or at least darker than the rest of the girls. There were two fine black lines above her eyes – eyes which even at this distance seemed to sparkle: later he would discover that they were a jewel-like green, as if illuminated from within. Her nose was perfect, not tiny, not a button like some of the other girls’, but somehow strong. She was the tallest among them, her legs long, lean and, thanks to the Catalan sun, bronzed. But it was the animation of her face, her laughter, the way the other women looked to her that marked her out as singular, the natural leader of the group. He was transfixed.

      He watched as she organized the team, assigning each of the six a lane. They were giggling, aware of their audience. The white of their swimsuits was almost fluorescent in the searchlight-bright moon, their figures defined in silhouette. As she turned side on, stepping onto the starting block readying for her dive, he marvelled at the shape

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