Pantheon

‘Are you a member?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m what Harry calls a fellow traveller. You?’

‘Well, I’m certainly a socialist if that’s what you mean.’ Hers was an accent he had never heard before he went up to Oxford, certainly not in his home town. It wasn’t the received pronunciation you’d hear on the National Programme. It was the voice Harry lapsed into towards the bottom of a bottle of wine or when he spoke to his mother or, of course, when he was around young ladies: James supposed it was the accent of the upper class, or something close to it. ‘Inevitable, really, given my field.’

‘Your field.’ He marvelled at the arrogance of a twenty-one-year-old girl, four years younger than him, speaking of herself as if she were some kind of expert. ‘And what is your “field”, Miss Walsingham?’

She turned her face up to catch the sun. ‘I’m a scientist, Mr Zennor.’

‘A scientist indeed.’

She ignored his condescension. ‘I’ve just completed my degree in natural sciences at Somerville. I’ll be returning there next year.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘To get my doctorate, of course. I am specializing in biology.’

He considered making a joke – something about undertaking practical research – but wisely changed his mind. ‘What’s that got to do with being a socialist?’

‘You’re a scientist, aren’t you?’

‘Well, some would dispute that, as it happens. Some call psychology “mental philosophy”. Others say it’s the newest branch of medicine.’

‘I don’t care what “some” say.’ She clutched his arm. ‘I want to know what you say.’

He wanted to kiss her there and then, in front of all these people. She only had to look at him like that, with that electric-light smile, and he fell several hundred leagues deeper. ‘All right then,’ he conceded. ‘I say that it’s science too. The science of the mind.’

‘Good. So we’re both scientists.’ She squeezed his hand and he felt her energy flow into him.

He forced himself to concentrate. ‘You still haven’t explained what any of this has to do with socialism.’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Science is reason. It’s about seeing what’s rational and eliminating everything else. Socialism aims to do the same thing: to organize society rationally.’

‘But human beings are not rational, are they?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Just look at us. Here.’ He glanced down at his forearm, on which lightly rested Florence’s slender fingers. ‘What’s rational about this?’

A worried look fleetingly crossed her face, like a wisp of cloud passing the sun. It was gone almost as soon as it had appeared. He could not tell whether she had been concerned at the blow to her argument or at the thought of what she was doing, walking arm in arm in a foreign land with a man she barely knew.

‘Oh, I would say this is perfectly rational,’ she chirped, her enthusiasm recovered. ‘But to persuade you I would have to blind you with science.’

Their love affair continued for the rest of that hot July week, preparing for the start of the Games on the nineteenth. They stayed up late at the street corner bar, listening to Harry play his ukulele along with his impromptu band – two Americans on trumpet and bass, one of whom turned out to be Edward Harrison, eminent foreign correspondent, with a gymnast from Antwerp as the singer – but they remained inside their own cocoon. James wanted to know everything about Florence, and was prepared to tell her more about himself than he had ever told anyone before.

‘So what’s Zennor then? Is that foreign?’

He laughed. ‘Cornwall originally.’

‘Not now?’ she asked, as if disappointed.

‘My ancestors headed east,’ he said. ‘To Bournemouth.’

‘Bournemouth. I see. I thought from “Zennor” you’d have at least, oh, I don’t know, some pirate blood. From Zanzibar—’

‘Or Xanadu.’

‘Cheat,’ she said, giving him a mock slap on the back of his hand, which was in truth another excuse to touch.

He said, ‘Bournemouth is not very exotic, is it?’

‘Not really, I’m afraid, my darling. No foreign blood at all?’

‘My parents are Quakers, if that counts. Both schoolteachers and both Quakers. Maths for him, piano for her. Two more solid, provincial people you could not hope to meet. They’re not quite sure what to make of me.’

‘Aren’t Quakers pacifists?’

‘That’s right.’ He watched as Florence did some rapid mental arithmetic.

‘Does that mean, your father was, you know—’

‘A conshie? Right again.’

‘Heavens. Did he go to jail?’

‘Nearly, but not quite. Sent to do “work of national importance”. In his case, farming.’

‘I see,’ she said, biting her lower lip in a gesture he was already coming to love. ‘So that’s why they moved away from Cornwall. They couldn’t return home after the war: too shaming.’

He stared at her, wondering if he had been the victim of some kind of confidence trick. He had never told anyone that story, not even Harry. But she had intuited the truth.

This is how it was for that short, heady week, the two of them peeling off layers from each other. Sometimes it took the presence of another person, like the night they stayed at the tapas bar long after the rest of the rolling Olympics party had moved on elsewhere.

‘I do hope we’re not keeping you,’ Florence had asked the manager, a rotund man probably twice their age, as he began wiping the tables around them, sometime around two am. He insisted they were not and thanked them for being in Barcelona. In a fractured, bartered conversation – a bit of pidgin English in exchange for a phrase of broken Spanish – they began talking, he explaining that Spain would soon be a model for the world, a communist utopia.

‘Well, if that’s what the people vote for, then that’s what it should be,’ Florence said.

‘Quite right,’ James added. ‘That’s what the army and the church need to get into their heads: the government was elected by the people of Spain. If you don’t like it, vote it out at the next election.’

‘No, no, no,’ the man said, rag still in hand. ‘No voting out. Once we have communism here, it stay that way. Forever.’

‘Even if the people vote against it?’ Florence had asked, her brow furrowed.

‘They won’t vote against it.’

‘Yes, but if they do.’

‘They won’t. They shouldn’t be allowed. Once the revolution is secure, then they can vote.’