She held his eyes. 'I doubt you'll get a story out of this.'

He shrugged. 'Any chance to help a fellow Englishman.' He smiled, a sweet, strangely innocent smile, although of course he wasn't innocent at all. If he did find Bernie, Barbara thought, and the story came out, it would be the end of everything here for her. She was shocked to realize that if only Bernie was alive, she wouldn't care about the rest.

SHE GOT UP and put on the silk dressing gown Sandy had got her last Christmas. She opened the window; it was another hot day, the garden bright with flowers. Strange to think that in six weeks winter would be here with its mist and frosts.

She stumbled against a chair, swore and took her glasses from the dressing-table drawer. She looked in the mirror. Sandy urged her to do without them whenever she could, memorize the layout of the house properly so she didn't bump into things. 'Wouldn't it be fun, darling,' he had said. 'Walking around confidently greeting people and no one knowing you're a bit short-sighted.' He had developed a thing about those glasses, he hated her wearing them, but although she had always hated them too she still wore them when she was on her own. She needed them. 'Bloody idiotic nonsense,' she muttered as she took out her curlers and ran the comb through her thick auburn hair. It flowed in waves. That stylist was good, her hair never looked unkempt now. She applied her make-up carefully, eyeshadow that highlighted her clear green eyes, powder to emphasize her cheekbones. Sandy had taught her all this. 'You can decide how you look, you know,' he had said. 'Make people see you as you want to be seen. If you want to.' She had been reluctant to believe him but he had persisted and he was right: for the first time in her life she had begun, very nervously, to question her belief that she was an ugly woman. Even with Bernie she had found it hard to think what he could see in her, despite his endless loving reassurance. Tears came to her eyes. She blinked them quickly away. She needed to be strong today, clear-headed.

She wasn't meeting Markby's contact till late afternoon. She would go to the Prado first; she couldn't bear being cooped up all day in the house, waiting. She put on her best outdoor dress, the white one with the rose pattern. There was a knock at the door and Pilar appeared. The girl had a round surly face and curly black hair struggling to escape from beneath her maid's cap. Barbara addressed her in Spanish.

'Pilar, please prepare breakfast. A good one today, toast and orange juice and eggs, please.'

'There is no juice, senora, there was none in the shops yesterday.'

'Never mind. Ask the daily to go out later and try to find some, would you?'

The girl left. Barbara wished she would smile occasionally. But perhaps she had lost people in the Civil War; nearly everyone had. Barbara thought she caught a faint note of contempt sometimes when Pilar called her 'senora', as though she knew she and Sandy weren't really married. She told herself it was imagination. She had no experience of servants and when she first came to the house had been uneasy around Pilar, nervous and eager to please. Sandy had told her she must be clear and precise in her orders, keep a distance. 'It's what they prefer, lovey.' She remembered Maria Herreira telling her never to trust servants, they were all peasants and half of them had been Reds. Yet Maria was a kind woman who did voluntary work with old people for the church. She lit another cigarette and made her way downstairs to breakfast, to the cornflakes that Sandy was able to get in rationed, half-starved Madrid as though by magic.

WHEN THE Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Barbara had been working at the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva for three years. She worked in the Displaced Persons section, tracing missing members of families in Eastern Europe torn apart by the Great War and still missing. She matched names and records, wrote letters to Interior Ministries from Riga to Budapest. She managed to put enough people in touch with their families to make it worthwhile. Even where their relatives were all dead, at least the families knew for certain.

She had been excited by the job at first, it was a change from nursing in Birmingham. She had got it partly because of her years of work for the British Red Cross. After four years, though, she was bored. She was twenty-six; soon she would be thirty and she began to fear she was fossilizing among the order of her files, the stolid dullness of the Swiss. She went for an interview with a Swiss official in a neat office overlooking the still blue lake.

'It's bad in Spain,' he told her. 'There're thousands who've found themselves on one side of the lines and their relatives on the other. We're sending medical supplies and trying to arrange exchanges. But it's a savage war. The Russians and Germans are getting involved.' He looked at her over his half-moon glasses with tired eyes. All the hopes of 1919, that the Great War had truly been the war to end war, were disintegrating. First Mussolini in Abyssinia, now this.

'I'd like to get out in the field, sir,' Barbara said firmly.

SHE ARRIVED in an unbearably hot Madrid in September 1936. Franco was advancing from the south; the Moroccan colonial army, airlifted across the Straits of Gibraltar by Hitler, was now only seventy miles away. The city was full of refugees, ragged lost-looking families from the pueblos dragging enormous bundles through the streets or crowded together on donkey carts. Now she saw the chaos of war at first hand. She never forgot the old man with shocked eyes who passed her that first day, carrying all he had left: a dirty mattress slung over his shoulder and a canary in a wooden cage. He symbolized all the refugees, the displaced persons, all those caught in the middle of war.

Red militiamen hurtled by in lorries and buses on their way to the front line ordinary Madrilenos, their only uniform the dark blue boiler suits all workers wore and red neckerchiefs. They would wave their ancient-looking weapons as they passed, calling out the Republic's shout of defiance. 'No pasaran!' Barbara, who believed in peace more than anything, wanted to weep for them all. She wanted to weep for herself too at first, because she was frightened: by the chaos, by the stories of nightmare atrocities on both sides, by the Fascist aeroplanes that had begun to appear in the skies, making people pause, look up, sometimes run for the safety of the metro. Once she saw a stick of bombs fall, a pall of smoke rising from the west of the city. The bombing of cities was what Europe had feared for years; now it was happening.

The Red Cross mission was based in a little office in the city centre, an oasis of sanity where half a dozen men and women, mostly Swiss, laboured to distribute medical supplies and arrange exchanges of refugee children. Although she spoke no Spanish, Barbara's French was good and it was a relief to be able to make herself understood.

'We need help with the refugee exchanges,' Director Doumergue told her on her second day. 'There are hundreds of children separated from their families. There's a whole group from Burgos who were at a summer camp in the Guadarramas we want to exchange them for some Madrid children caught in Sevilla.' The director was another calm, serious Swiss, a young man with a plump, tired face. Barbara knew she'd been flapping, panicking, and that wasn't like her. Babs we all depend on, they used to call her in Birmingham. She'd have to pull herself together. She brushed a stray tangle of red hair from her brow. 'Of course,' she said. 'What do you need me to do?

That afternoon she went to visit the children in the convent where they had been lodged, to take their details. Monique, the office interpreter, came with her. She was a small, pretty woman, wearing a neat dress and freshly ironed blouse. They walked through the Puerta del Sol, past huge posters of President Azana, Lenin and Stalin. Monique nodded at Stalin's poster. 'That's the way things are going now,' she said. 'Only Russia will aid the Republic. God help them.'

The square was full of loudspeakers, a woman's voice rising and falling, punctuated by tinny squeaks from the speaker. Barbara asked what they were saying.

'That's Dolores Ibarruri. La Pasionaria. She's telling housewives that if the Fascists come they must boil their olive oil and pour it from the balconies onto their heads.'

Barbara shuddered. 'If only both sides could see everything will be destroyed.'

'Too late for that,' Monique answered heavily.

They entered the convent through a stout wooden gate in a high wall designed to shield the sisters from the outside world. It had been thrown open and across the little yard a militiaman kept guard by the door, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The building had been burned out; there was no glass at the windows and black trails of soot rose up the walls. There was a sickly smell of smoke.

Barbara stood in the yard. 'What's happened? I thought the children were with the nuns ...'

'The nuns have all fled. And the priests. Those that got away. Most of the convents and churches were burned by the mob in July.' Monique gave her a searching look. 'Are you a Catholic?'

'No, no, I'm nothing really. It's just a bit of a shock.'

'It's not so bad at the back. The nuns ran a hospital, there are beds.'

The entrance hall had been burned and vandalized, sheets of paper torn from breviaries lay about among the broken statues.

'What must it have been like for those nuns?' Barbara asked. 'Shut away in here, then a mob runs in and burns the place down.'

Monique shrugged. 'The Church supports the Nationalists. And they've lived off the backs of the people for centuries. Once it was the same in France.'

Monique led the way down a narrow echoing corridor and opened a door. On the other side was a hospital ward with about twenty beds. The walls were bare, lighter patches in the shape of crosses showing where religious symbols had been removed. About thirty ten-year-olds sat on the beds, dirty and frightened-looking. A tall Frenchwoman in a nurse's uniform hurried over to them.

'Ah, Monique, you have come. Is there any news of getting the children home?'

'Not yet, Anna. We'll take their details, then go to the ministry. Has the doctor been?'

'Yes.' The nurse sighed. 'They are all well enough. Just frightened. They come from religious homes they were scared when they saw the convent had been burned.'

Barbara looked over the sad little faces, most of them smeared with the tracks of tears. 'If any are ill, I'm a nurse-'

'No,' said Monique. 'Anna is here. Getting them transferred back, that's the best thing we can do for them.'

They spent the next hour taking details; some of the children were terrified, the nurse had to persuade them to talk. At last they were done. Barbara coughed from the smell of smoke.

'Could they not be taken somewhere else?' she asked Monique. 'This smoke, it's bad for them.'

Monique shook her head. 'There are thousands of refugees in this city, more every day. We're lucky some official took time to find anywhere for these children.'

It was a relief to be back outside, even in the boiling sunlight. Monique waved at the militiaman. 'Salud,' he called. Monique offered Barbara a cigarette and looked at her keenly.

'This is what it's like everywhere,' she said.

'I can take it. I was a nurse before I went to Geneva.' Barbara blew out a cloud of smoke. 'It's just those children, will they ever be the same again, if they get home?'

'Nobody in Spain will ever be the same again,' Monique answered, in sudden angry despair.

BY NOVEMBER 1936 Franco had reached the outskirts of Madrid. But his forces were held in the Casa de Campo, the old royal park just west of the city. There were Russian aircraft in the skies now, protecting the city, and fewer bombs fell. Hoardings had been erected to cover the bombed houses, displaying more portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Banners spanned the streets. 'NO PASARAN!' The determination to resist was even greater than in the summer and Barbara admired it even as she wondered how it could survive the cold of winter. With only one road to the city still open, supplies were already becoming short. She half hoped Franco would take Madrid so the war could end, though there were terrible stories of Nationalist atrocities. There had been plenty on the Republican side too, but Franco's sounded even worse, coldly systematic.

After two months she had adjusted, so far as anyone could. She had had successes, had helped get dozens of refugees exchanged; now the Red Cross was trying to negotiate prisoner exchanges between the Republican and Nationalist zones. She was proud of how quickly she was picking up Spanish. But the children were still in the convent their case had fallen into some bureaucratic abyss. Sister Anna had not been paid for weeks, though she stayed on. At least the children would not run away; they were terrified of the Red hordes beyond the convent walls.

One day Barbara and Monique had spent an afternoon at the Interior Ministry, trying again to get the children exchanged. Each time they saw a different official, and today's man was even less helpful than the others. He wore the black leather jacket that marked him out as a Communist. It looked odd on him; he was plump and middle-aged and looked like a bank clerk. He smoked cigarettes constantly without offering them any.

'There is no heating at the convent, Comrade,' Barbara said. 'With the cold weather coming the children will become ill.'

The man grunted. He reached forward and took a tattered file from a pile on his desk. He read it, puffing at his cigarette, then looked at the women.

'These are children of rich Catholic families. If they go back they will be asked about military dispositions here.'

'They've hardly been out of the building. They're afraid to.' Barbara was surprised how easily her Spanish came now when she was roused. The official smiled grimly.

'Yes, because they are frightened of us Reds. I am not happy with sending them back. Security is everything.' He put the file back on the pile. 'Everything.'

As they left the ministry, Monique shook her head in despair. 'Security. Always the excuse for the worst things.'

'We'll have to try another tack. Perhaps if Geneva could get on to the minister?'

'I doubt it.'

Barbara sighed. 'We have to try. I'll have to organize some more supplies for them. Oh God, I'm tired. Do you want to come for a drink?'

'No, I have some washing to do. I'll see you tomorrow.'

Barbara watched Monique walk away. A tide of loneliness washed over her. She was conscious of how separate she was from the closeness, the solidarity of the city's inhabitants. She decided to go to a bar off the Puerta del Sol where English people sometimes gathered, Red Cross staff and journalists and diplomats.

The bar was almost empty, no one there that she knew. She ordered a glass of wine and went to sit at a corner table. She didn't like sitting in bars on her own but perhaps someone she knew would come in.

After a while she heard a man's voice speaking English, with the long lazy vowels of a public-school education. She looked up; she could see his face in the mirror behind the bar. She thought he was the most attractive man she had ever seen.

She watched him covertly. The stranger was standing alone at the bar, talking to the barman in halting Spanish. He wore a cheap shirt and a boiler suit; one arm was in a white sling. He was in his twenties and had broad shoulders and dark blond hair. His face was long and oval, with large eyes and a full, strong mouth. He seemed ill at ease standing there alone. His eyes met Barbara's in the mirror and she looked away, then jumped as the white-aproned waiter appeared at her elbow, asking if she wanted another vino. He was carrying the bottle and her elbow jogged his, making him drop it. It landed on the table with a crash, wine pumping out over the waiter's trousers.

'Oh, I'm so sorry. That was me, I'm sorry.'

The man looked annoyed; it might be the only pair of trousers he had. He began dabbing at them.

'I'm so sorry. Listen, I'll pay for them to be cleaned, I-' Barbara stumbled over her words, forgetting her Spanish. Then she heard that drawling voice at her elbow.

'Excuse me, are you English? May I help?'

'Oh no no, it's all right.'

The waiter recovered himself. She offered to pay for the spilt bottle as well as his trousers and he went off, mollified, to fetch another glass. Barbara smiled nervously at the Englishman.

'How stupid of me. I've always been so clumsy.'

'These things happen.' He held out a hand. He had brown slender fingers, the wrist covered in a fair down that caught the light and shone like gold. She saw his other arm was encased in plaster from above the elbow to the wrist. His large eyes were dark olive, like a Spaniard's. 'Bernie Piper,' he said, studying her curiously. 'You're a long way from home.'

'Barbara Clare. Yes, afraid so. I'm here with the Red Cross.'

'Mind if I join you? Only I haven't spoken English to anyone for weeks.'

'Well, I no, please do.'

And so it began.

SOMEONE FROM the Madrid office of the Daily Express had telephoned Barbara three days previously and told her there was a man who might be able to help her. His name was Luis and he could meet her in a bar in the old town on Monday afternoon. She had asked to speak to Markby but he was away. As Barbara put the phone down she wondered if it was tapped; Sandy said it wasn't but she had heard they tapped all the foreigners' telephones.

After breakfast she went back to her room. Her mirrored bureau was an eighteenth-century antique she and Sandy had picked up in the Rastro market in the spring. It had probably been looted from some wealthy house in Madrid at the start of the Civil War. You saw families there on Sundays, hunting for their stolen heirlooms. They went cheap, it was food and petrol that were valuable now.

The bureau had come with a key and Barbara used it to store personal, precious things. Bernie's photograph was in there. It had been taken just before he went to the front, in a photographer's studio with chaises longues and potted palms. He stood in his uniform, arms folded, smiling at the camera.

He had been so beautiful. It was a word people used about women but Bernie had been the beautiful one. She hadn't looked at the photograph for a long time; seeing it still hurt her, she mourned Bernie as deeply as ever. Guiltily, because Sandy had rescued her and set her on her feet, but what she had with Bernie had been different. She sighed. She mustn't hope too much, she mustn't.

It still amazed her that Bernie had been interested in her, she must have looked a fright in that bar, her hair all frizzy and wearing that tatty old jumper. She took off her glasses. She told herself that without them, yes, she could be called quite attractive. She put the glasses on again. As so often, even amid her preoccupation with Bernie, just thinking she was attractive triggered a memory, one of the bad ones. Usually she tried to push them away but she let this one come, even though it left her feeling she was standing on the edge of a precipice. Millie Howard and her gang of eleven-year-olds, forming a circle round her in the quadrangle of the grammar school, chanting. 'Speccy frizzy-hair, speccy frizzy-hair.' If she hadn't had the glasses to mark her out as different, if she hadn't responded with blushing and tears, would it ever have happened, the tormenting that had gone on for so long? She closed her eyes. Now she saw her older sister, radiant Carol who had inherited their mother's blonde hair and heart-shaped face, walking through the lounge of the little house in Erdington, off to meet another boy. She swirled past, leaving a rich smell of perfume. 'Doesn't she look lovely?' her mother had asked her father, while Barbara's heart burned with jealousy and sadness. A little while before she had broken down and told her mother how the girls taunted her at school. 'Looks aren't everything, darling,' her mother had said. 'You're much cleverer than Carol.'

She lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Mum and Dad, Carol and her good-looking accountant husband were under the air-raids now. The Blitz had moved beyond London; in the week-old, censored edition of the Daily Mail she bought at the station, she had read of the first raids on Birmingham. And here she was, sitting in a fine house, still picking at those old wounds while her family were running for the air-raid shelters. It was so petty, she felt ashamed. Sometimes she wondered if there was something wrong with her mind, whether she was a little crazy. She got up and put on her jacket and hat. She would kill some time in the Prado. Then she would see what this man knew. The thought gave her a welcome sense of purpose.

The Prado art gallery was full of blank walls; most of the pictures had been taken down for safe keeping during the Civil War and so far only a few had been returned. It was cold and damp. She had a bad lunch in the little cafe, then sat smoking till it was time to leave.

Sandy had noticed something was up with her; yesterday he had asked her if she was all right. She replied she was bored; it was true, now they were established in the house there were long hours when she had nothing to do. He had asked if she would like to do some voluntary work, he might be able to fix something up. She had agreed, to put him off the scent. He had nodded, apparently satisfied, and gone off to his study to do some more work.

Sandy had been working on what he called his 'Min of Mines project' for six months now. He was often out late, and often worked at home, worked harder than Barbara had ever seen. Sometimes his eyes gleamed with excitement and he smiled as though he had some wonderful secret. Barbara didn't like that little secret smile. At other times he seemed preoccupied, worried. He said the project was confidential, he wasn't allowed to talk about it. Sometimes he made mysterious trips out to the countryside. There was a geologist involved, a man called Otero who had visited the house a couple of times. Barbara didn't like him either; he gave her the creeps. She worried that they might be involved in something illegal; half of Spain seemed to be working the estraperlo, the black market. Sandy was scarcely more open about the committee to aid Jewish refugees from France he worked for. Barbara wondered if Sandy felt his voluntary work detracted from the picture he liked to paint of himself as a hard, successful businessman, though it was that better side of him, the side that liked to help those in trouble, that had drawn her to him.

At four she left the Prado and headed into the centre. Shops were opening again after the siesta as she walked through the narrow streets, hot and dusty and smelling of dung. Her sensible shoes rang on the cobbles. Turning a corner, she saw an old man in a tattered shirt trying to manoeuvre a cart filled with cans of olive oil up onto the pavement. He held the cart by its shafts, trying to haul it on to the high kerb. Behind him was a newly painted building, a big banner with the yoke and arrows over the door. As Barbara watched, a pair of blue-shirted young men appeared in the doorway. They bowed, apologizing for blocking her way, and asked the old man if they could help. He relinquished the shafts gratefully and they pulled the cart up onto the pavement for him. 'My donkey is dead,' he told them. 'I have no money for another.'

'Soon everyone in Spain will have a horse. Just give us time, senor.'

'I had him twenty years. I ate him when he died. Poor Hector, his meat was stringy. Thank you, compadres.'

'De nada.' The Falangists clapped the old man on the back and went back inside. Barbara stepped off the pavement to let him pass. She wondered if things really would get better now. She didn't know; after four years in Spain she still felt like an alien, there was so much she didn't understand.

She knew there were idealists in the Falange, people who genuinely wanted to improve Spaniards' lives, but she knew there were many more who had joined to take advantage of the chance of a corrupt profit. She looked again at the yoke and arrows. Like the blue shirts they reminded her the Falange were fascists, blood-brothers to the Nazis. She saw one of the Falangists looking at her from the window and hurried on.

THE BAR WAS a dark, run-down place. The mandatory portrait of Franco, spotted with grease, hung behind the bar, where a couple of young men lounged. A big grey-haired woman in black was washing glasses at the sink. One of the men carried a crutch; he had lost half a leg, the trouser end crudely sewn up. They all looked at Barbara curiously. Usually only whores came into bars alone, not foreign women wearing expensive dresses and little round hats.

A young man sitting at a table at the back raised his hand. As she walked across he rose and bowed, taking her hand in a strong, dry grip.

'Senora Forsyth?'

'Yes.' She replied in Spanish, trying to keep her voice confident. 'Are you Luis?'

'Yes. Please sit. Allow me to get you a coffee.'

She studied him as he went to the bar. He was tall and thin, in his early thirties with black hair and a long sad face. He wore threadbare trousers and an old, stained jacket. His cheeks were stubbly, like those of the other men in the cafe; there was a shortage of razor blades in the city. He walked like a soldier. He came back with two coffees and a plate of tapas. She took a sip and grimaced. He smiled wryly.

'It is not very good, I am afraid.'

'It's all right.' She looked at the tapas, little brown meatballs with tiny delicate bones sticking out. 'What are they?'

'They call it pigeon but I think it is something else. I am not sure what. I would not recommend it.'

She watched as Luis ate, picking the minute bones from his mouth. She had decided not to say anything; leave him to begin. He shifted nervously in his seat, studied her face with large dark eyes.

'I understand from Mr Markby that you are trying to trace a man who went missing at the Jarama. An Englishman.' He spoke very quietly.

'Yes I am, that's right.'

He nodded. 'A Communist.' His eyes still scanned her face. Barbara wondered with a flicker of fear if he was police, if Markby had betrayed her or been betrayed himself. She forced herself to stay calm.

'My interest is personal, not political. He was he was my my boyfriend, before I met my husband. I believed he was dead.'