Pantheon. Sam Bourne

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.’

      ‘And how long will that take?’ James asked, picking up where Florence had left off. ‘How long till the revolution is “secure”? That could take decades. Just look at Russia.’

      ‘The Soviet Union is the greatest democracy in the world!’

      Florence and James looked at each other, before Florence said, ‘I don’t think Mr Stalin has to face the voters too often, do you?’

      The man looked puzzled.

      ‘Communism is all very well but only if it’s democratic. Otherwise it’s just as bad as all the other rotten systems, if you ask me,’ James said.

      The man resumed his clearing up, then rebuffed James’s repeated attempts to pay the bill: ‘You are guests in my country and you support the republic!’ When James produced a bank note, he shooed them out.

      ‘It’s like boycotting Berlin,’ James said as they walked slowly back towards her digs. ‘You don’t have to be a communist to detest Hitler and the Nazis. You just have to be a half-decent human being. The man’s a vile brute.’

      They were speaking of politics and the world, but really they were exploring each other, discovering with every conversation, every new encounter, how well the curves and contours of their minds fitted together. Then, at stolen moments in the mid-afternoon or late at night, they would do the same with their bodies – cautiously at first, with Florence teasing more than he could bear, then surprising him with sudden passion. His strongest memory was of her face close to his in the dark, their mouths sometimes speaking to each other in a lovers’ hush, sometimes kissing.

      The result was a fever for the taste, touch and smell of the other that shocked them both. Merely walking beside Florence, close enough for her scent to reach him, was enough to make him ravenous for her. What was more, and this he had never experienced before – even with sweet, giving Eileen – Florence seemed to feel the same: her desire was equal to his.

      And so, while the political skies over Barcelona began to darken, and as the welcoming faces of their Barcelona hosts turned to distracted anxiety, James and Florence focused on the deadly serious business of falling in love.

      Only when they heard about the broadcast of a coded message – ‘Over all of Spain, the sky is clear,’ was the plotters’ signal to each other over the radio – did they understand that a coup d’état was underway, fascists and nationalists bent on overthrowing the republican government that had invited the flower of international radical youth to Barcelona, to thumb its nose at the Nazis on parade in Berlin.

      Suddenly the notion of sprints, heats and semi-finals seemed horribly irrelevant. Even those who thought the coup would be rapidly put down, who did not imagine the country was about to plunge into a vicious civil war, could see that this was no time for a pretend Olympics. When the rumour spread through the Hotel Olímpico that the games had been cancelled, few waited for confirmation.

      James was packing his bag when Harry, his skin fire-engine red, found him. He had, James saw instantly, sobered up fast.

      ‘Where are you going, Zennor?’

      ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. The Games have been—’

      ‘Cancelled, I know. But where are you off to?’

      ‘Well, I thought … if there are no Games. That is, I was going to ask Fl—’

      ‘You’re not proposing to leave, are you? In the republic’s hour of need?’

      James scanned Harry’s face. He seemed entirely in earnest. ‘What are you suggesting?’

      ‘A few of us are staying on. To defend the republic.’

      ‘But … but, you’re not a soldier.’

      ‘I can train. The point is, Zennor, we’ve been enlisted, whether we like it or not.’

      ‘Enlisted?’

      ‘History is enlisting us.’

      James stopped stock-still, holding the lid of his suitcase. It was quite true that, since the day he had arrived, he had understood that something much larger than a sports tournament was at stake. He knew it was easy to romanticize a gathering of fit and handsome young people coming together in the sunshine in a noble cause – but it was not just romance. Barcelona with its People’s Olympiad had become the focus of international opposition to Adolf Hitler and his nasty so-called Third Reich. It was here that the world had said no, taking a stand not only against the Berlin games but against the entire Nazi project. And so an attack on the republic led by ultra-nationalist army officers and backed by fascist thugs was not solely a domestic matter for Spain. It was an attack by fascism itself. There would be a new fault-line now, running through Spain, yes, but dividing all of Europe. Hitler and Mussolini would doubtless be on one side of that line and those who believed in democracy and free speech and all the promise that the twentieth century held in store would be on the other. James Zennor found that he was asking himself a question: whose side are you on?

      He snapped his suitcase shut and went to find Florence.

      James had to fight a throng of athletes flooding out of the Hotel Olímpico lobby, stampeding for the railway station, to reach her. He was bewildered to find her standing outside, bags already in hand.

      ‘I was just coming to see you,’ she said. She bit her lip in a way that instantly resolved him not to say what he had planned to say.

      ‘Where