He should not have been surprised: this was the alternative Olympics, designed to steal the thunder of the official games taking place a week later and more than nine hundred miles eastward in Berlin. While those games would be a showcase of Aryan supremacy, the Peoples Olympiad would be a festival of socialists, idealists and radicals who had refused as a matter of conscience to take part in Herr Hitlers Nazi carnival.
Well, were not going to win, I can tell you that much, James had said the very moment he and his friend Harry had arrived, off the train after a journey that had begun nearly eighteen hours earlier at Victoria Station. Not in this heat. Were used to freezing dawns and Cherwell fog. This is the bloody tropics.
Now, Zennor, you listen to me. If Id wanted a gloom merchant, Id have brought Simkins or that other twit, Lightfoot. I brought you for your rhetorical powers. Youre supposed to be here to lift our spirits, to exhort the team to victory!
I thought I was here because Im a bloody good oarsman.
And so you are. So no more of that defeatist talk. We wont lead the masses to revolution with soggy English pessimism now, will we?
Harry Knox, Winchester and Balliol, hereditary baronet and one-time lead organizer of now what was it? James thought it was the ILP, but it might have been another socialist group with another set of initials: it was hard to keep up. Coming to Barcelona had been Knoxs idea, a way to make up for missing the real Olympics as he insisted they not refer to them and a chance to take a stand against Fascism. James had been tipped to row stroke in the Great Britain boat in Berlin; this was to be his consolation prize.
Along with all the other foreign athletes they were put up at the Hotel Olimpico in the Plaza de Espana, where the lobby was already teeming with fresh arrivals from the United States, Holland, Belgium and French Algeria. Most were just like Harry and James, there with the backing of a workers association, a socialist party or a trade union, rather than their government. James rather doubted the selection process had been as athletically rigorous as it was for the official Games. But, as Harry had said, Thats hardly the point, is it?
The atmosphere was raucous and did not let up for a week. The door of their room remained open, as Marxist Danish hurdlers or anarchist French sprinters came in and out as they pleased. The entire building seemed to host a single, unending party. James had barely put down his suitcase when a huge Italian shot putter, who later turned out to be a communist exile, thrust a bottle in his hand, urging him to knock it straight back, no sipping. James read the label Sangre de Toro, bulls blood and did as he was told. It tasted musky and heavy with fruit. He hadnt much liked it at the time but thereafter he would forever associate the taste of that Catalan wine with freedom.
At last they had spilled out onto the street, wandering from one tapas bar to another. James had no memory of paying for either his food or his drink, as if all the Barcelona bar-owners were grateful to the visiting Olympians for supporting their infant republic, for doing exactly what the International Olympic Committee had refused to do five years earlier choosing Barcelona over Berlin.
He was munching on a plate of calcots, charcoal-grilled spring onions that, had you offered them to him in England, he would have rejected as terrifyingly exotic, when Harry, already sunburnt, the sweat patches spreading under his arms, turned to him with a lascivious grin. Rumour is the ladies swimming team are having a late night practice session.
Harry, even you cant be that desperate, James replied, doing his best to sound like a man of the world. He had some experience with women, more certainly than Harry. He had spent most of his second year at Oxford stepping out with Daisy, a blonde, long-necked Classicist from St Hughs, fumbling his way towards a familiarity with her body, albeit through her clothing, but he had lost his innocence with Eileen, studying at a secretarial college on the Woodstock Road. She lacked Daisys fine features, but her edges were softer and she was more like him: provincial, from Nottingham. He would see her every Wednesday evening with the occasional Saturday night trip to the pictures. He kept her entirely separate from his college friends, so that she was more like a mistress than a girlfriend. It slightly shamed him now to think of the secrecy he had maintained about their affair, but she had never questioned it. Instead, on Wednesdays at around 6.30pm, when her room-mate was at choir-practice, she would usher him into her digs and into her bed.
Well, dont come then, James, Harry said, feeling his friends scorn. Im sure theres an exciting new academic monograph you could be reading.
Since its clearly so important to you, old chum, Ill come and keep you company.
For once, Knoxs gossip turned out to be accurate. By the time they arrived at the outdoor baths a crowd had already gathered. Mostly men, but also families out for an after-dinner stroll on this steaming night, young children, ice-creams in their hands, some on their fathers shoulders all watching the moonlit swimmers.
Knox elbowed his way through the three-deep throng in order to get closer. But James, at six foot four, had a clear line of sight to the start podiums at the right-hand end of the pool and he saw her straight away.
Her hair was hidden by a swim cap, but he could see that she was dark, or at least darker than the rest of the girls. There were two fine black lines above her eyes eyes which even at this distance seemed to sparkle: later he would discover that they were a jewel-like green, as if illuminated from within. Her nose was perfect, not tiny, not a button like some of the other girls, but somehow strong. She was the tallest among them, her legs long, lean and, thanks to the Catalan sun, bronzed. But it was the animation of her face, her laughter, the way the other women looked to her that marked her out as singular, the natural leader of the group. He was transfixed.
He watched as she organized the team, assigning each of the six a lane. They were giggling, aware of their audience. The white of their swimsuits was almost florescent in the searchlight-bright moon, their figures defined in silhouette. As she turned side on, stepping onto the starting block readying for her dive, he marvelled at the shape of her, and when she bent her knees, her arms forming into an arrowhead, it struck him that this was probably how the ancients imagined Diana the huntress, a goddess of perfect strength and beauty. With the moonlight on her and her hair swept up into the white swim-cap, she could have been made entirely of marble.
The races went on for a while, the crowd eventually dwindling. But Harry didnt want to leave and James was only too happy to let him think that staying on was his idea. Once the women were out of the pool and had pulled on their robes, the two of them headed over, trying terribly hard to saunter.
I say, you all did terribly well, Knox offered as his opening gambit, his voice plummier than usual a nervous tic which, James recognized, surfaced whenever Harry came face to face with what he called the fairer sex. James could feel his own heart rate had increased: rather than risk a joke that fell flat or some other gaucheness, he said nothing.
Two of the ladies laughed behind their hands, a third stared intermittently at her feet, stealing shy glances upward. James noticed that five of the six girls were looking at him rather than Harry, a pattern that, he had to admit, he had seen before. All that spoiled the moment was that the goddess was paying him no attention, instead rounding up the equipment and collecting a stopwatch left hanging on the back of an observation chair. Finally she walked over and, assessing the scene, extended her hand immediately towards Harry, bestowing on him a thousand-watt smile.
Miss Florence Walsingham, she said. Her voice was confident and melodic but with a gentleness that surprised. As Harry stammered a reply, she nodded intently, her eyes only for him. James might as well have not existed. But, curiously, he did not mind. It meant he could stare at her, savour her smile, listen to that voice which instantly suggested the West End at night, dinner on the Strand, cocktails in Pall Mall and a thousand other delights he could only guess at.
As she turned to him, she reached up and removed her swimming cap, allowing long, glossy curls of dark brown hair to fall to her shoulders. Not all of it was dry: the damp ends clung to her cheekbones. Involuntarily, he found himself imagining how this woman would look when she was sweating, while she was making love. His outstretched hand had to remain suspended in mid-air for a second or two before she took it. But when she did, fixing him with that high-wattage gaze, he was over-run. By desire, of course, but also by an urge he had never known before: he wanted to lose himself in her, to dive inside and let the waters close over him.
James and Florence spent every moment of the next four days together. She watched him row, he watched her swim. Both tall, dark and striking, they became one of the more recognizable couples around the Plaza de Espana. They accompanied one another to the permanent parties in the hotel, on his floor and on hers, but mainly they just wanted to be with each other.
After Florences morning swimming practice, they would walk and walk. The swimming baths were in Montjuic, a raised area that had once been a fort and a jail but which had been revamped in time for the International Exhibition seven years earlier. They would start at the newly-landscaped gardens, soaking up the view, then stroll down the hill past the pavilions built for the 1929 exhibition, stopping at the Poble Espanyol, the model Spanish village, and eventually gazing in awe at the fabulously elaborate Magic Fountain. In the warm sunshine, he in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, she in cotton dresses that seemed to float around her, they told each other how they had come to be fraternal team-mates at the Peoples Olympiad.