by Alex Preston
‘You like poetry? I am glad. Then you will be a friend for Mr Goad. He is lonely, I think, since his wife died. Too much work.’
There is silence between them. They hear footsteps pass in the corridor.
‘Listen, mightn’t you show me some of the city? It would be super to have a local guide.’
Her smile fades as she stands.
‘I am not a local. We are from Milan, my mother and I.’
‘Oh. Right then.’
She walks to the door and opens it, turning back to address him from the hallway. ‘My father is in the gaol there. He is a Socialist, a political man. He wrote for L’Ordine Nuovo. He has been in exile, on an island. Now he is back in Milan, like a common prisoner. I haven’t seen him since I was ten.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It is not your fault. If you have to be a Fascist, just make sure you are the right kind, not like that fat frog who calls himself our leader. Now I go out. Good night.’
She closes the door behind her. Esmond lights another cigarette and sits on the windowsill, looking down at the young people gathering outside Casoni and Doney’s. A motorcycle engine revs and the bell of San Gaetano tolls eight. He sees Fiamma come out into the street. She is wearing a dark blue jacket over her dress, a pair of high-heeled sandals, her hair wrapped inside a crocheted yellow snood. As she walks south towards the Arno, he sees her, bright and bobbing in the pale streetlamps, in the light from the doorways of cafés. She turns the corner, glances back up the via Tornabuoni, and is gone.
6
Dinner is cold meat, a bowl of salad, some bread. A single glass sits at Esmond’s place. When he enters the dining room he sees Goad struggling to pull a cork from a bottle of wine.
‘Ah, I thought you might – huh –’ He stifles a shout and frees the cork, sending a short crescent of dark wine into the air. ‘Blast. I thought you might like some wine. This is Arcimboldi Chianti, made by the family from whom we rent the palazzo. Beautiful vineyards at their villa in Val di Pesa.’
‘I’d love some, thanks.’
Goad half-fills the glass and then painstakingly reintroduces the cork.
‘I can’t stomach alcohol, myself. Brings on my black dog.’
He watches as Goad slices and chews carefully, eyes closing. Esmond finishes his wine in a couple of gulps and glances meaningfully at the bottle on the table. When Goad has eaten the last of his ham he pours himself some water and, finally seeing Esmond’s empty glass, passes the wine.
‘Do help yourself, dear boy. We don’t stand on ceremony here. I’m afraid these evening meals will seem rather drab to you. I don’t like to ask Gesuina to work too late, particularly when it’s only the two of us dining.’
Goad peels and cores an apple with his pocket-knife. Esmond sips wine and clears his throat. ‘I met Fiamma earlier.’
‘Ah, did you. And how did you find her?’
‘Very charming. It’s good of you to provide for her.’
‘Hum – Did she tell you her story?’
‘That her father is in prison.’
‘It’s rather more complicated. You see, Gesuina, her mother, is the half-sister of Niccolò Arcimboldi, from whom we rent this palazzo. She married a Milanese.’
‘A journalist, she said.’
‘Although he’s not published a word, at least in any newspaper worth the name, for some time. In and out of gaol, exiled to Ustica and Lipari for sedition. He’s a member of Giustizia e Libertà, the anti-Fascist movement. A thoroughly bad egg. He was arrested for helping Socialists escape from prison. Not a thought for his wife and daughter. After a year in squalor in Milan, Gesuina came home and threw herself on her brother’s mercy.’
‘And he asked you to take them in?’
‘Niccolò Arcimboldi is one of the hardliners. Believes Mussolini isn’t going far enough, that Italy should round up the Jews, purge the factories, shoot the Communists. He’s chums with Carità at the MVSN, marches around looking for Reds to set about. Gesuina marrying a Socialist riled him terribly. So when she and her daughter came back to Florence, Niccolò reluctantly agreed to put them up. Asked me if I could use her as a housemaid. And since the apartment isn’t full, even when Gerald is here, and it reduces our overheads––’
‘Doesn’t she resent it, Gesuina?’
Goad scratches his hands.
‘She is here as a guest, she knows that. Over the past few years we have grown – hum – comfortable. Since my wife died she runs the household. I believe it suits her very well. Fiamma is different. She was horribly impertinent at first. Rather trite, adolescent talk. Now she’s a closed book. Not unruly any more so much as – hum – inaccessible.’
‘It must be hard for her, not knowing how her father is. And she’s studying?’
‘Literature, or so she says. Dante and Boccaccio this year, but you wouldn’t know it to speak to her. She’s out at dances most of the time, home late, connecting with heaven knows whom.’
He looks more closely at Esmond, a slice of apple paused on the approach to thin lips.
‘You might befriend her, Esmond. I feared you wouldn’t encounter enough young people, cooped up here with – hum – the aged adviser. And she would surely benefit from the company of someone as sensible and purposeful as you. Yes, this really is very good.’ He smiles and pops the apple into his mouth.
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Capital.’ Goad rises. ‘I must prepare my lessons. Our students return from their Easter vacation on Monday. You’ll find the place quite different when they’re around. Serious young fellows, most of them, but I do enjoy the peace of the holidays. Good night.’
Esmond waits for a few minutes and then, careful to ensure that no one sees him, makes his way up, the three-quarters full bottle of wine in one hand, glass in the other. He closes his door, fastens the shutters and windows and switches on his desk lamp. Pouring out a glass, he sits at the desk and picks up his pen.
Florence is beautiful, he writes, imagining Philip in a Viennese tearoom, white marble tables and clever laughter. I’m staying at the British Institute. It’s in the heart of the city, a fifteenth-century palace. Lots of dark passageways and tapestries. You imagine turning a corner and finding Michelangelo arguing with Ficino. He takes a sip of his wine and lights a cigarette. I can’t tell you how glorious the Uffizi is. He wonders where Fiamma is now. On the dancefloor of some half-lit nightclub, a pack of wolfish boys around her. I worry about you. I always look out for Vienna in the newspaper. If you get a chance to leave, you should. Tanti auguri (as the locals say!), Esmond.
He folds the letter into an envelope. Pouring another glass of wine and picking up his towel, he makes for the bathroom. Filling the bath so hot that a bank of steam hovers above it, he lowers himself into the water, cups his glass and reclines. He feels Philip’s absence in the groan of his stomach. He remembers a day in May when they’d cycled to Grantchester, the sun on Philip’s tanned shoulders, the sudden shower that sent them into the cover of bushes, the damp grasping for each other as the rain pounded around them and their lips became two wet, living things. He remembers sitting with Philip in F. R. Leavis’s lectures, the older boy with his hand on Esmond’s thigh, and then in the saloon bar of the Pickerel, where they drank with Leavis and talked until closing about Russian novels and the book-buttressed adventure their lives would be.
With Philip, something had loosened within him, his childhood lifting under the beam of the older boy’s careful love. Until then he’d felt himself, before anything else, his father’s son. At Cambridge he was pointed out as Sir Lionel Lowndes’s boy, scion of the second family of the British Union. People were surprised he wasn’t in black. On Philip’s arm, he felt himself different, decent.
He lets the bath run out with a gurgle and goes back to his room. He puts on his nightshirt, reads for an hour and then sleeps. In his dream, Fiamma and Philip are together, dancing with the clever, cautious footsteps of the cat on the pavement outside San Gaetano.<
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7
At a quarter to nine, Esmond walks through the courtyard of the Institute, past the portrait of the dead King, out onto via Tornabuoni. A light drizzle, little more than mist, pearls on the manes and tails of the horses. Bicyclists pass with umbrellas held high and the window of Doney’s is steamy with breakfast. An old woman steps from a cab into Pretini’s hair salon, tutting. Esmond turns up the collar of his mackintosh and makes his way onto the via degli Strozzi.
By the time he gets to the Piazza della Signoria, the shower has passed and a tentative sun emerges. People come out of shop doorways, furl their umbrellas and wait for their trams. He wafts his letter from Il Duce and is ushered through a silent inner courtyard where gargoyles spew from the capitals of columns, then to a wooden bench in a gilded hall, where the guard asks him to wait.
Small, well-dressed men hurry back and forth, heads down. Occasionally a Blackshirt, skull and crossbones on his chest, marches past. Esmond draws A Room With a View from his pocket and begins to read. After a few minutes, a peroxidial secretary shows him into the mayor’s office. The Podestà sits at a large desk between two windows, one of which is open to the morning. Over his right shoulder, against the brightening sky, stands a stocky figure with his back to the room, looking down to the banks of the Arno. The mayor gestures towards one of the armchairs facing him.
‘Please, Mr Lowndes, have a seat.’ He opens a silver cigarette case and holds it out.
Esmond takes one, tilts forward to accept a flame and sits. The Podestà lights his own cigarette and leans back.
‘My name’, he says, ‘is Count Alfonso Gaetano.’
Esmond smiles shyly. ‘Like the church,’ he says.
The mayor raises an eyebrow. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting Sir Oswald when he and his late wife came to visit some years ago. A most remarkable man. Now this project of a wireless broadcast to educate our citizens, to forge ties between the right-thinking men of your country and ours. Bravo! Mussolini himself has given his full support. If I, humbly, may be of any assistance at all, you must tell me.’ He reaches across and presents a creamy card with his full title in loping cursive.
‘Decent of you,’ Esmond says. At this moment, a butterfly, a cabbage white, flutters blithely into the room, borne up on a breeze from the river. It pauses for a moment on the windowpane, opening and closing its wings. The stocky figure at the window shoots out a plump hand and crushes the insect against the glass with his thumb, leaving a green smear. The mayor turns at the sound.
‘I must introduce you to our local communications expert, Mario Carità.’ The man, unhealthy-looking in black shirt and grey flannel shorts, inspects his thumb for a moment and turns to face them. He looks, Esmond thinks, like a pickled schoolboy, save for a streak of white in quiffed hair and his eyes, hard and black and glassy.
‘Carità will fix you up with your studio, with all the equipment you need. He’s one of the coming men in this town. Doing business in Italy, you’ll find, is all about whom you know, and Carità knows everybody.’
The little man steps forward. His palm is damp. ‘I happy to meet you––’ He pauses, holding Esmond’s hand, smiling bloodlessly. ‘You and me, we make radio big success.’
The Podestà looks at his watch. ‘I have a committee meeting. Please do feel free to stay here and get acquainted.’ He gives a bow, collects some papers from the desk and leaves. After a pause, Carità pulls out the mayor’s chair and sits down, reaching for the floor with the balls of his feet.
‘We need make things straight,’ he says. ‘I no like English. We not need English here. For too long English treat Florence like a home. But’ – he gives a reluctant grin – ‘Podestà says you good Fascist. For me, nationality not so important, Fascism important.’ He stands, walks over to Esmond and leans down to embrace him. He smells of wet vegetation.
‘Hey,’ Carità stands back waggling his finger. ‘You tell Goad, he not pay enough for translation and radio work. I not a teacher. I a soldier first’ – he points to the death’s head on the breast of his shirt – ‘second electrician.’
‘Fine,’ says Esmond. ‘When do you think we can start?’
Carità lifts himself to sit on the desk, picks up the Podestà’s fountain pen and begins to play with it, tutting. ‘I’m not so sure. I very busy man. You wait to hear from me, va bene?’ he says finally. Esmond nods. ‘Good boy. We work very well together, I know this. Arrivederci.’
Esmond walks out into the morning. The rain has returned, settling in puddles. He pulls his mackintosh up over his head. At the entrance to Doney’s some girls laugh under an umbrella as a boy steps into the road to flag down a taxi. They tumble in, the boy holding the door and another taking the brolly. Esmond watches as the girls pat their hair and the boys call orders to the driver. The girl nearest turns her face and he sees it is Fiamma. She smiles and presses a hand to the glass, her breath misting it as she laughs. Esmond waves, feeling foolish, as one of the other girls leans over to look at him, tented under his raincoat. Now both girls laugh and the taxi pulls away. He drops his hand and walks back towards the palazzo.
He starts another letter to Philip. Perhaps this is all for the best, he lies. Perhaps I’ll find someone else who’ll make me feel as good, as loved as you did. You invented my heart, you know. A postcard of Primavera to his father. I am doing my best for the Party. Give my love to mother. To Anna, the Gorgon shield by Caravaggio. I miss you. Have decided to restart my novel. How are you? He closes his eyes and thinks of Anna. She has weak lungs, her childhood one long, soft handshake with death. He remembers sitting beside her, pressing her burning skin, reading to her. In turn, she’d loved him, and her love was the thread that led him out of the labyrinth of spite and recrimination that was his family. He kisses the Gorgon’s head as he steps down to the postbox at Cook’s.
He eats dinner alone – Goad is at the German Consulate, Gesuina says – then goes to his room and lies on his bed. He opens a notebook on his knees and writes Chapter One. Music rises from the street, happy voices, the clatter of plates from Doney’s. He throws the notebook to the floor, strips off and crawls under the covers. He thinks of the look of mock absorption he and Philip would shoot discreetly at one another whenever someone nearby was being particularly dull. He pulls the pillow over his head. Later that night, he wakes as a door bangs. He wonders if it is Fiamma coming home. He listens for a moment to the night, to a disappointed silence. He turns over and falls into a deep, blank sleep.
8
On Sunday morning, Esmond pulls on a green jumper and tweed jacket. He and Goad meet at a quarter to ten in front of the late King and walk together through the mist, down the via Tornabuoni to the Ponte Santa Trinità. The bells ring across the city, people hurry to secure the best pew in the best church.
‘The ignominy of the side-aisle,’ Goad cautions, ‘and the Lady Chapel.’
Mist cushions the river, thick and white. When they reach the centre of the bridge, the bells of the town begin to muffle, and Goad peers nervously over the stone bulwarks. Sounds creep up through the mist towards them: the slop of the river, fishermen on the banks downstream, the distant bellow of the weir.
‘It’s as if we were underwater,’ Esmond says.
‘Or lost in time.’
They reach the south side of the river and walk down the via Maggio towards an old palazzo. There is no spire, only a small gold sign: St Mark’s English Church. The front is weather-beaten, the wash on the pietra serena chipped and flaking. Wire birdcages hang at eye height outside the shops and cafés on the street. None of the birds – canaries, zebra finches, parakeets, bullfinches – are singing. They stand in front of the church and Esmond looks down the line of silent cages. Goad makes his way through a wicket gate set in the large oak doors; Esmond ducks to follow.
In the entrance hall a flight of stone steps rises ahead of them, passing through an arch and curling out of sight. Green baize notice boards: Italian Lessons Offered, Vieusseux’s Ci
rculating Library and Christian Lady Lodger Seeks Room in Central Location. The cards have yellowed and curled at the edges. They remind Esmond of the boards on the walls of the common room at Winchester, scholarships to Oxford and rowing blues, messages of triumph from the world to come. A crackling organ begins, and Goad leads them through a small door to the left.
In near-darkness, they make their way down the aisle towards the altar, a block of white marble with lambs and palm trees in alabaster bas-relief. It looks ancient and sacrificial, scrubbed of blood each night, Esmond thinks, as they shuffle into a pew near the front. On the wall behind the altar is a triptych of the crucifixion. Christ’s crown of thorns draws blood at every needle, his ribs press closely against his skin. Blood seeps and clots at the wounds in his hands and feet, where the nails are thick and twisted. The left-hand panel of the triptych shows Mary Magdalene, mourning, just as withered and undone. On the right is John the Baptist clinging to a gold cross. All three have grey-green skin, faces gaunt and horrified, every tendon and muscle risen. Esmond thinks of Filippino’s painting of St Jerome in the Uffizi. The same leached skin, the hopeless terror.
‘Rather brutal, hum?’ says Goad.
‘It’s ghastly. Is it Filippino Lippi?’
‘Ha! Bernard Berenson thinks so. Art expert, lives at I Tatti, up towards Fiesole. The triptych was owned by Charles Tooth, queer fish, by all accounts. He was the first vicar here and the triptych just hung around, so to speak. It was only when Berenson came for a lunchtime recital that we realised it was, that it might be, something rather special.’
‘I must write to my father and tell him. He adores Filippino.’
‘Had quite a collection, didn’t he?’
Esmond thinks of the chapel at Aston Magna, the family home seized by the banks after the Crash. There was no altar, no pews or promises, just his father’s paintings, stained glass replaced by clear panes to better light the cheeks of a Bronzino goldfinch, the pietà by Filippino Lippi, the Gentileschi Judith. His father had felt the loss of the paintings more than the house or the family firm. He’d blamed the unions in the factories, the Jews in the banks and the courts. Above all he blamed the Socialists, who’d pushed him from conservatism into full-blooded Fascism. Communism was a red rash on the mind of the family.