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of all industries so that workers could help construct fortifications, organisation seemed to have fallen apart and most people seemed merely to be enjoying the time off while the army squabbled among itself, first the Santanderinos refusing to fight, then the Bilbainos who had arrived to help them.
    At the British Club, Miss Jenner-Neate was worried. She’d been unable to contact several of the British residents who’d gone into hiding in safer parts of the city.
    ‘They’re all a bit stupid,’ she said. ‘They think because they’re British they’re untouchable.’
    ‘Tell them the destroyer, Hunter, was mined only a fortnight ago,’ Kelly suggested. ‘That might convince them that the might of the British Empire doesn’t necessarily reach out to them here.’
    He took several addresses and set off to unearth them. The day was exhausting in the heat, because the British residents were not anxious to move and many of them were elderly people who’d spent their savings buying what they thought could be a safe retreat from English winters. Bullying, cajoling and extracting promises, in the end he had them all agreeing not to let him down, and he returned to the Hotel Jauregui hoping against hope he’d hear something from Teresa.
    The tap water was still not running so he found a large bucket and went to the ornamental lake to get enough to wash, carrying it back with the spatulate leaves from the trees floating on the surface to stop it slopping over. When he poured it into the wash basin, fifty per cent of it had solidified as mud on the bottom.
    There was a constant drone of aeroplanes overhead and scarlet flashes in the sky at the other side of the city. It looked as if everyone was out in the streets but the heart seemed to have gone out of them. Christ, he thought uneasily, he’d been in more dying towns and cities in his life than he cared to remember.
    The planes came again after dark, German Junkers and Heinkels and Italian Savoias and Fiats, and as the bombs dropped he could hear the wails of terror outside. The hotel seemed to have emptied of staff but the ground floor was full of terrified people. He took one look at it, pushed his way to the bar, bought a bottle of brandy and headed back to his room. If he were going to die, he thought, he might as well die with a bit of elbowroom to do it in, not trampled to death by a panic-stricken mob.
    The artillery fire sounded closer now and he heard there had been a last infantry attack, which had left a mountain of corpses on the rocky slopes outside the city. Going downstairs again, he questioned a group of Basques.
    There was something about the Basques that appealed to him. They were a religious, deep drinking lot who all seemed to be good sailors and detested regimentation. To the Spanish they were ‘brutos’ and ‘bestias’, but to them the Spanish were intriguers and political parasites who lived off other people’s industry, and their whole history had been one of trying to obtain autonomy for themselves. By this time, they’d lost every foot of their country and were simply hoping now to reach the wild Asturias to fight a hopeless rearguard action.
    They were all well-armed with rifles, while revolvers, those most dramatic and useless of weapons, dangled from all ranks, to say nothing of grenades which swung in bunches from their waists like the bananas that Josephine Baker had used in her nude shows. They were exhausted but far from dispirited.
    ‘Hay una vida mas barata,’ one of them said to Kelly, ‘que no vale La pena de vivir. There’s a cheaper life but it’s not worth living.’
    It seemed a better attitude than that of the British government as it crawled at the feet of the dictators.
    During the night the bombing seemed to stop. Expecting Teresa’s professor at any moment, Kelly decided to leave the bed for him and merely lay on top of it, a glass of brandy by his elbow. He had just dropped off when the door rattled and he was