London

London is the novel’s recurring center of republican diplomacy and frustrated international solidarity. It offers Manuel Arroyo Benítez work, purpose, and connections, but also becomes the setting for a political performance in which evidence and sympathy repeatedly fail to produce action. Across the years, the city marks both his separation from the life he wanted and his persistence in serving a Republic whose cause foreign governments increasingly set aside.

The diplomatic posting

Manuel returned to London in December 1936 after nearly six years in Switzerland. He had gone back to Spain briefly, then left again from London; by this stage Pablo de Azcárate, who had given up his post at the League of Nations to become the Spanish Republic’s ambassador in the United Kingdom, had brought his assistant with him. The London posting restored the intensity Manuel had missed in Geneva, but its daily work exposed the limits of diplomacy rather than its power.

In September 1936, Azcárate’s role in London was not simply that of an ambassador. He represented the Republic before the Non-Intervention Committee, which had been operating in the British capital since the previous month. Manuel’s task was to identify and substantiate violations of the agreement: evidence concerning Johannes Bernhardt and HISMA, Ciano and Italian volunteers, and shipments of aircraft, troops, and ammunition to the rebel side. Lord Windsor-Clive, the committee’s director, repeatedly judged this evidence unreliable or insufficient. London thus gave Manuel a formal platform from which to make the case, while demonstrating that the machinery receiving it would not act.

The contrast between public concern and practical inaction governed his diplomatic routine. Labour, socialist, and social-democratic figures listened with emotion, sometimes promising solidarity, but did nothing to advance the Republic’s cause. At receptions, Manuel had to conceal his indignation and keep returning smiles while speaking with people he inwardly despised. He described the work to himself as trying to empty the sea with a small bucket while an audience watched for amusement: the image gives a physical form to an assignment that demanded repeated labor without any prospect of proportionate effect.

His isolation extended to the American embassy. The Republic could count on verbal sympathy there, but, as elsewhere, that sympathy had no practical consequence. Manuel missed Meg Williams not only as a person but as a source of intimacy and unconditional support amid the exhausting work. Their long letters were full of trivialities because he could not tell her anything important about his duties. One of the few pointed observations she could make was that she had no English friend to keep him company, so he would have to get drunk alone. Her letter offered a private counterpoint to the public ceremonies in which fellow diplomats and politicians expressed concern without changing policy.

A covert channel through London

In December, Azcárate summoned Manuel to dinner and proposed a mission he characterized as delicate and potentially dangerous. Once a month, Manuel would travel to Valencia as an intermediary between Azcárate and Juan Negrín, then finance minister in Largo Caballero’s government. The arrangement was deliberately separate from the official channel: Azcárate and Negrín trusted one another but did not trust their shared superior, Largo Caballero, whom they considered incapable both as head of government and as minister of war.

That private trust made Manuel’s position especially precarious. If Largo learned that the London ambassador’s envoy was exchanging information with a member of the government outside the formal chain, Manuel would be the expendable link. Azcárate warned him that he would deny having commissioned the work and would claim that Manuel had acted independently, leaving him to bear the consequences. The threat was part of the assignment’s conditions, not an accidental risk: Manuel was asked to carry messages between two powerful men while accepting that neither could publicly protect him if the channel were exposed. For all that, the monthly journey was the closest thing to a holiday he experienced while serving at the London embassy.

London also remained a personal address and a point of contact after Manuel’s work changed. In December 1937, before the promised edition of Bailén had reached him, he sent a telegram from the central post office to a private Kensington address that he had once made available to the embassy secretary. The message concealed a Madrid episode beneath its compressed wording. When a reply telegram arrived, Amparo opened it, and Manuel passed off its contents as business concerning Dr. Quintanilla’s fundraising for transfusion units. The exchange shows how the London connection persisted within a life of coded communication: an address associated with the diplomatic service could receive a message that could not safely be explained at home.

Exile, reporting, and disillusion

The London years did not end with Manuel’s departure from the city. In the summer of 1939 he returned to Geneva, now in circumstances sharply different from those that had made him popular as Monsieur Agoyo before the war. He worked alone for an unofficial operation arranged by Azcárate, using a small office rented in the name of a nonexistent commercial agency. His actual office was the benches of squares and parks and the tables of cafés, where he met representatives of neutral and Allied countries. He presented himself as Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez and sent reports to Taplow whenever he could find space on a British military aircraft.

The assignment meant enduring the same political evasions he had encountered in London. Manuel had heard too many emotional promises from people who had helped destroy the Spanish Republic, and had once asked Azcárate to replace him. Azcárate refused: keeping pressure on and learning what was not said at diplomatic receptions remained essential. Manuel continued the work. In June 1945, at the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations, Francoist Spain was excluded while Republican politicians were invited as observers. The decision might have seemed a diplomatic triumph to someone who had not spent years confronting Lord Windsor-Clive; Manuel, who trusted no one, did not experience it as a decisive victory.

After the United Nations was established, the shape of his work in Geneva seemed to confirm rather than relieve his disappointment. He saw the diplomatic center moving from Europe to New York and feared that Azcárate’s summons would mean losing his post. A call from London invited him to spend a weekend at Taplow, and he accepted despite his bitter memories of the British capital. The invitation led instead to another mission: on 10 September 1946, he entered Spain through Gibraltar under the cover of an American citizen, born in New Jersey and visiting his parents’ homeland for the first time. The London connection had become part of a longer chain of exile, intelligence work, and return under a false identity.

London as a continuing network

Even after Manuel was back in Madrid, London remained reachable through people rather than through an official posting. On 6 January, he called a number in London that in fact corresponded to an address in Taplow. Meg Williams had served as an intermediary between Manuel and Azcárate, keeping him informed as Azcárate’s United Nations duties took him increasingly to the Middle East. The two men spoke without using names. Manuel carefully described his position and asked Azcárate to find a trustworthy European woman with whom he could correspond, presenting the request as a response to loneliness and leaving the personal complication of Meg implicit rather than explicit.

This contact mattered because Manuel’s work in Spain required reliable channels beyond the people physically around him. As he gathered information about the network assisting Nazi fugitives and the movement of Nazi loot, he reported to Burnham while maintaining a separate correspondence with Helen Murray. He deliberately separated the timing of his letters from the timing of shipments so that Gabino would be less likely to connect the gifts he sent to his English correspondent with his work for Clarita. The cargoes carried by La Meridiana trucks were never intercepted; the plan was to record their number, frequency, and nature so that the Allies could later trace the operations and recover the stolen property. London was therefore not just a remembered diplomatic setting: it remained the distant endpoint of a reporting and communications network.

The city’s recurring function is defined by a disparity between contact and consequence. It gives Manuel access to officials, allies, and information, but the committee’s inaction during the war and the later disappointments of international diplomacy teach him not to confuse a hearing with help. The repeated London connections—his embassy service, Meg’s letters, the concealed telegrams, and the telephone link to Azcárate—preserve practical and emotional ties across his successive departures. They make London less a secure home than a relay point: a place from which Manuel can continue working, even when the political world to which he appeals declines to answer.