The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert

stability?’

      ‘Did you do your homework on the way?’ Stoppard asked. He winked at Hibbert.

      ‘As a matter of fact I did. It was inevitable that you would talk about non-intervention. But there’s nothing to stop anyone intervening. Not even you, sir.’

      Hibbert said irrelevantly, ‘John Cornford’s fighting with the International Brigades. And Sommerfield. And Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew.’

      ‘A pity they’re fighting on the wrong side.’

      ‘Are you a Fascist, Adam? A blackshirt?’ Hibbert asked.

      ‘What I am,’ Adam said, watching Kate lick lemon soufflé from her upper lip and wondering about her breasts beneath her silk dress, ‘is anti-Communist. We all know what’s happened in Russia – a worse tyranny than before. Do we want that in Spain?’

      Stoppard laid down his spoon and addressed his class. What we were witnessing in Spain, he told them, was an exercise in European Fascism. Hitler wanted to assist Spain so that he could establish bases there for the next war and help himself to the country’s iron ore. Mussolini was helping because he wanted to control the Mediterranean. And both wanted to test their planes, their guns and their tanks. If they, the enemies of the future, were championing the Fascists, why should not Britain aid the Republicans?

      Adam, who had learned at Cambridge never to answer a question directly, said, ‘What is so different between Fascism and Communism?’

      The third silence of the evening. Kate took a cigarette from her case and tapped it on one painted fingernail.

      Adam said, ‘Is Hitler a dictator?’

      Of course.

      ‘And Stalin?’

      So it appeared.

      ‘Are they not both anti-Semitic?’

      Perhaps.

      ‘Enemies, imagined or otherwise, purged?’

      There were similarities.

      ‘Both presiding over elitist societies in which the masses are subservient?’

      ‘That’s certainly true in Germany,’ Hibbert said.

      ‘And Russia. Ask any peasant.’

      ‘I haven’t met any recently,’ Stoppard said but no one in the class smiled.

      The maid served coffee; Stoppard lit a cigar. ‘Adam,’ he said, almost fondly, ‘suggested just now that there was nothing to stop anyone intervening. On either side, you implied. Is that correct?’

      ‘Quite correct, sir.’

      ‘Then why, Adam, don’t you volunteer to fight for the Fascists?’

      ‘I might just do that,’ Adam said.

      Chimo said, ‘Have you had many women, Amado?’

      ‘Not many,’ said Adam, who had made love to three girls.

      ‘I have had many, many girls.’

      ‘I’m sure they all remember you.’

      ‘Oh sure, they remember Chimo. And I remember one of them. You know, she gave me a present.’ He pointed to his crotch.

      ‘You don’t have to go with whores: you’re too much of a man.’

      ‘You don’t know girls. How can you fuck them with a chaperone sitting on your knee?’

      ‘Fuck the chaperone,’ said Adam, old soldier with three months service behind him.

      Kate took Adam to her father’s cottage in the Cotswolds for a long weekend – without her father’s consent – five days after the dinner party at Lambourn.

      They walked through countryside where stems of smoke rose steadily from hollows in the hills and horse chestnuts lay shiny in their split, hedgehog shells and boys with concertina socks kicked flocks of fallen leaves; they drank beer that tasted of nuts in small pubs; they danced to Lew Stone records; they made love on a bed that smelled of lavender.

      But throughout the interlude Adam was aware of disquiet. It visited him as he watched the sun rise mistily through the branches of a moulting apple tree, or while he felt pastoral loneliness settle in the evenings; it materialized in the wasting happiness after they had made love.

      At first he blamed it on the challenge he had accepted at Lambourn: it wasn’t every young man who was going to fight for the Fascists. That, surely, was enough to disturb the most swashbuckling of crusaders.

      But it wasn’t until the afternoon of the Sunday, when she lay in bed with her back curved into his chest and his hands were cupped round her small breasts and he was examining the freckles on her back just below the nape of her neck, where her short, golden hair was still damp from exertion, that he realized the other cause for his disquiet.

      ‘Don’t think,’ she said, turning towards him, ‘that you have to go and fight because of me.’ Well, he didn’t; but suddenly he understood that she was only there beside him because he was prepared to risk death – a refreshing change from conventional young men with normal life expectations.

      And, as he considered this premise, it came to him that maybe his motives were suspect. Did he really believe in the Fascist cause or was it wilfulness asserting itself? Surely ideals were the essence of purity. How was it, then, that both he and the other Englishmen fighting on opposite sides could both possess them? Can I be wrong? he asked himself.

      She said, ‘What are you thinking about, Adam?’ and he said, ‘This and that.’

      ‘You were in another place.’ She reached for his hand and placed it on the soft hair between her thighs, and he forgot his disquiet.

      Later, walking through silent woods, she held his hand. How long would the war last? she asked him. Not long, he told her: Franco was at the gates of Madrid.

      ‘Months?’

      ‘Weeks.’

      ‘Everything has been so quick,’ she said. ‘We only met a few days ago …’

      ‘What would your father say if he knew what we’d done in his cottage?’

      ‘Cut us off without a penny,’ Kate said promptly.

       Us?

      They sat on a log and she took a cigarette from her case, lit it and blew puffs of smoke through narrowed lips as though she found them distasteful. Ruffled pigeons settled above them.

      ‘I’ll always remember how you stood up for yourself at dinner that evening,’ she said.

      ‘They were debating in formulas. Mathematics aren’t always right.’

      ‘I hope you don’t think that just because …’

      ‘You’re cheap?’

      ‘Do they all say that?’

      ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Adam said.

      ‘How many?’

      ‘None of your bloody business,’ Adam said.

      ‘You don’t think I’m trying to trap you?’

      ‘By having a baby?’

      ‘I won’t,’ she said.

      ‘Did you bring me to the cottage because I’m going to war?’

      ‘Because you’re coming back from it.’

      He put his arm round her waist under her coat. He could feel the fragile sharpness of her bones, the flatness of her stomach. He felt that he was expected to utter words of deep moment but they were elusive.

      He stood up. She tossed aside her cigarette and he stamped on it, pulverizing it with the heel of his shoe. He turned her