Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'That's why one shouldn't really ever tell anyone anything, isn't that right, Peter?' I said, quoting his words. It was what he had said to me just before lunch, on the Sunday of that now far-off weekend, while Mrs. Berry was waving to us from the window.

He didn't remember or didn't realize I was quoting him, or else he simply ignored it. He stroked the long deep scar on the left side of his chin, a gesture I had never seen him make before: he didn't usually touch or mention that scar, and so I had never asked him about it. If it did not exist as far as he was concerned, I had to respect that. I assumed it was from the war.

'Oh, I learned to lie as well, later on. Telling the truth isn't necessarily better, you know. The consequences are sometimes identical.' However, he didn't linger over that remark, but continued talking in this rather schematic manner, as if he had already drawn up a narrative plan for that day, that is, for the next time I went to see him. 'We were briefly in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, and then I came back to England. My second visit took place a year later, in the summer of 1938. On that occasion, my guide, or rather my driving force, was Alan Hillgarth, the head of our Naval Intelligence in Spain. Although he spent most of his time in Mallorca (in fact, his son Jocelyn, the historian, was born there, you've heard of him I expect), he gave me the task of watching and monitoring the movements of Francoist warships in the ports around the Bay of Biscay, on the assumption that I had acquired some knowledge of the area. Most, of course, were German and Italian ships, which had been harassing and attacking the British merchant fleet in 1936, both there in the Bay of Biscay and in the Mediterranean, and so the Admiralty was keen to gather as much information as possible about what kind of ships they were and their positions. I was traveling in the guise of a university researcher, on the pretext of delving into and rummaging around in Spain's old and highly disorganized archives, and I did exactly that-indeed some of the discoveries I made as a specialist in the history of Spain and Portugal date from that period: in fact it was in Portugal, when I was eventually deported there, that I started preparing my thesis on the sources used by Fernão Lopes, the great chronicler of the fourteenth century whom I'm sure you know' The truth is I'd never heard of him. 'But that's by the by. I was arrested by the Guardia Civil when I was on the Islas Cies, taking photographs of the cruiser Canarias, one of the few ships in the Spanish navy that had gone over to the rebels, as the Republicans called the Nationalists. They searched me, of course, and found compromising material, mainly photographs. Normally, as you can imagine, they would have executed me. We were, after all, in the middle of a war.' Wheeler paused. He may have been telling his story in that rather mechanical way, almost as if it had happened to someone else, but he nevertheless knew when to prolong the uncertainty.

'So how did you escape?' I asked, just to please him.

'I was lucky. Like your father. Like any survivor of any war. They took me in a launch to the Hotel Atlantico in the port of Vigo, and there I was interrogated by two SS officers.'-'It's always hotels they choose to convert into police stations or prisons,' I thought, 'like the one in Alcala de Henares where they tortured Nin and possibly flayed him alive.'-'In 1935, I had spent part of the summer in Bavaria, at a Hitler Youth camp, for, shall we say, biographical reasons that are irrelevant here. When they found out and checked that I was telling the truth, they invited me out to supper with them. That saved my life. They consulted the Nationalist headquarters in Burgos and, as I understand it, Franco himself gave the order not to have me killed but simply to expel me. After a few minor hitches getting hold of an exit permit, I was taken to the international bridge at Tui where I crossed into Portugal. That was the slowest stretch of my journey, I mean the longest walk of my life, on foot and carrying a suitcase full of books. Two German machine-gunners had their guns trained on my back so that I didn't deviate from the path and ahead of me stood some armed Portuguese guards. And beneath me lay the River Mino. It seemed very wide, and perhaps it was. So, as you see, however disastrous Franco proved to be for the history of your country and for many, many people, he played a crucial role in my personal history. A paradox, eh?

And rather an unfortunate one for me, I must admit. Owing one's life to the clemency of someone who showed clemency to almost no one else is oddly unflattering. Being an ignorant provincial, he was, I suppose, impressed by educated foreigners like me.' He laughed briefly at his own mildly malicious remark, and I laughed too out of politeness. Then he went on. 'As I told you before, I merely passed through your War: I still use words precisely. I didn't stay there long on either occasion, and there would be no reason for either of my names to appear in the index of any of the books written about the conflict. What I did there is hardly worth telling and seems almost ridiculous now. As would my subsequent activities during our War, although some of the things I did were more spectacular or more damaging and, objectively speaking, more important. Toby was quite right when he told you years ago that in times of relative peace, wartime events seem puerile and, inevitably, resemble lies, conceits and fabulations. As I think I've mentioned before, even things I've experienced myself seem fictitious or almost fanciful. I find it hard to believe, for example, that I acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1940. That was one of my first "special employments" to adapt the term used in my Who's Who entry, if you remember. It seems like a dream now. And the fact that it happened abroad doubtless contributes to that feeling.'

I remembered the expression clearly, as I did every word I had read, urged on by Wheeler, in his entry in Who's Who. And I understood that dream-like feeling too: 'But that was in another country…'

'The Duke and Duchess of Windsor?' I asked. 'Do you mean the former King, Edward VIII, and the divorced woman he abdicated the throne for, that ugly American, Wallis Simpson?' Like almost everyone else, I had read about the couple who were, supposedly, deeply in love, and seen photos of both of them in magazines and books. She, if I remember rightly, was extremely thin, had a hairstyle like that of the housekeeper in Hitchcock's Rebecca and very thin red lips, like a scar. The exact opposite of Jayne Mansfield. 'And what do you mean: sword of Damocles?'

'Oh, she wasn't that ugly' Wheeler said. 'Well, she was, but there was something troubling about her too.' He hesitated for an instant. 'I suppose I can tell you about it; it was a very harmless mission.' The word he used in English-'harmless'-means literally ' sin perjuicio' or 'sin daño' 'without harm or hurt.' 'Although it, too, sounds like a lie. I was charged with escorting them from Madrid to Lisbon, and, once there, to make sure that they embarked for the Bahamas. You may remember that he spent the War years there, as Governor of those islands-it was a way of keeping them far from the conflict, as far away as decorum allowed. Both of them had been through an embarrassing, shall we say, Germanophile stage, and had, it was rumored, visited Hitler incognito, before 1939 of course. There was no basis to the rumor, but the government feared like the plague the possibility that they might fall into the hands of the Nazis, that the Gestapo might kidnap them and take them to Germany, of course, but also that they might desert. That they might, in a word, go over to the other side. Churchill didn't trust them at all, and didn't dismiss the idea that if, one day, the Germans invaded us as they had the rest of Europe, the Germans would reinstate the former Edward VIII as a puppet king. Anyway, I and a naval officer from the NID (a very small escort, when I think about it, unimaginable now)'-I knew those initials, the Naval Intelligence Division-'were given a pistol each and told, albeit not in so many words, that we should make use of them if there was the slightest risk of losing the Duke and Duchess in unfortunate circumstances, and regardless of the couple's own wishes.'