Free While England Sleeps by David Leavitt Page A

your drinks parties. So I have arranged to have this assemblage of delicious cheeses delivered to you in the hopes that it will drastically improve the quality of your soirées. Bon appétit!
    By the way, Philippa Archibald has had to take leave of London for several months; it seems her elderly grandmother is quite ill. (She is that sort of young lady— responsible .) Sadly, we shall have to postpone our evening.
     
    A reprieve, it seemed; and yet how little Aunt Constance knew of my life! (Drinks parties?) Now I only feared lest the cheeses were intended as substitute for—rather than complement to—next month’s check.
     
    News of Continental disaster was raining down on us daily, like chunks of plaster from a ceiling of questionable integrity. In Andalusia, the Falangists continued their programmatic terror, herding prisoners from their cells by night and shooting them between the eyes. In Madrid, Largo Caballero formed an uneasy alliance with the Anarchists, who had decided to abolish marriage as well as money. In Burgos, Franco was declared generalissimo. Meanwhile the European countries, under the shameful leadership of Anthony Eden, continued to stick by the nonaggression pact, which Germany and Russia were blatantly defying. For me, the saddest figure of all was poor old Unamuno, the rector at the University of Salamanca and a nationalist sympathizer, who found himself sharing a platform one day with the one-eyed chief of the Spanish foreign legion. When the legionnaire’s supporters started shouting “Long live death!” the scholarly old humanist found he could stand it no more. Grabbing the microphone from the nonplussed general, he condemned the slogan, pleading that in order to win, the Fascists would have to convince as well as conquer. “Death to intelligence!” was the crowd’s answer. That was the end of Unamuno; he had lost his privileged position within the new order. A few months later, broken and obscure, he died.
    Poor Unamuno. Was it coincidence that from within the labyrinth of his peculiar name the word “human” struggled to free itself?
    Tuesday came. I met Edward at the station at dusk, and together we boarded an Upminster train. He wore a shirt with a stiff collar and a tie, had had his hair cut and neck shaved. (It was furiously nicked.) At first we barely spoke. Edward was eyeing the Harrods bag with some suspicion. (Understandably—Aunt Constance’s cheeses gave off exactly the same odor as a baby with unchanged nappies, with the result that the other passengers, rather than making faces at me, made them at an infant in a pram whose mother was seated next to us; the young woman was as perplexed by the stares as she was by the smell, and on several occasions turned the baby over just to make sure it had not soiled itself; it had not, and she could only shrug in embarrassed bewilderment, while the offended passengers held their noses and looked on.) To put Edward at his ease, I asked him whether further expansion of the underground was planned for the near future, and he visibly brightened as he described to me his own idea for such expansion: a new branch of the Piccadilly into Hackney and then Walthamstow, where previously Nellie had lived with her children.
    The train had emerged aboveground; outside the windows, yardfuls of untrimmed grasses quivered slightly in the chill dusk light. Warehouses passed us, then the stodgy upright brick backs of stodgy upright brick East London houses, then more warehouses. A wounded blue dark was descending. Lights flickered on in windows like fireflies; wilted trees and dingy backyards separated the suburban stations that were now bleeding into each other with trancelike regularity. Soon Edward tapped me; we stood; it seemed we were arriving somewhere.
    We disembarked at Upney Station. For about twenty minutes Edward led me along a circuitous sequence of nearly identical streets, all of them dreary. Both the landscape and the architecture in