by Alex Preston
‘I bet you’re glad to have young Gerald out here now, eh?’ Douglas says, fixing Esmond in a stare. ‘Must have been hellish boring in that place with only old Goad for company.’
‘Fiamma was there,’ says Esmond, looking down the table at her again.
‘Ah yes, but not the same as having a man there. You know Pino and I have a walkie-talkie system between our rooms? Sort of speaking funnel at the head of each bed. Means if we wake in the night with some 4 a.m. satori, we can yell it out to the other before it’s lost.’
There are two bottles of cheap Soave on the table and Orioli fills all of their glasses to the brim. He never stops smiling, looking first at Douglas, then Gerald, then off into the distance, an expression of constant, wistful benevolence. Reggie has drawn out a little sandalwood box and is showing it to Fiamma, who peers in and pulls a face.
‘I design these,’ he says, holding the box up to Esmond. Painted inside the lid is the scene of a medieval torture chamber, a young boy stretched out on a rack, the masked torturer attacking his groin with pincers. ‘I sell them to tourists.’
‘Gosh,’ Esmond says, passing it carefully back.
‘Oscar Wilde was a dear, dear friend of mine, you know. I had a small but not inconsequential part in The Ideal Husband.’ Reggie opens one of the buttons of his high-necked serge jacket and looks appealingly at Esmond.
The food arrives. Scampi in breadcrumbs; a bollito misto of tongue, beef, capon, sausage; saltimbocca; grey truffles in cheese sauce in sizzling pannikins; wild boar agrodolce. The tragic-looking maître d’ appears with a pepper pot that he grinds as if he were wringing a man’s neck. Douglas’s appetite is vast; half-standing and arcing genially across the table, he makes sure to snare the best cuts of meat, the juiciest prawns. He takes long swigs of his wine as he eats, his nose growing redder, and he begins to talk in close whispers to Gerald, who eats little and places his hand on Douglas’s every so often.
After a while, a pale man in his thirties comes to the restaurant, frayed and shiny as his suit. He looks around the room and then over at their table with a desperate beam.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Douglas mutters. ‘Eric, dear boy, come and join us, won’t you?’
The man takes a seat next to Gerald and nods doubtfully around the table.
‘Eric Wolton’s an old pal. Back when I had a wife.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Happiest day of my life, the day my wife died. Did I ever tell you I danced on her grave? A Scottish jig. Don’t tell my sons that, if you see them. Do you ever see them, in London?’
When they finish eating, Orioli turns to Esmond and puts his hand on his knee. His breath is sweet and heavy on Esmond’s cheek.
‘I think we will be very good friends,’ he says. ‘Norman likes you. I like you. It is so nice to have you and Gerald here. Tell me all about Esmond.’
Esmond stutters, looking across at the round spectacles, the tubby cheeks.
‘I went to school at Winchester, then Cambridge, though only for a year and a half––’
‘Winchester?’ Douglas shouts down the table, breaking off his conversation with Gerald. ‘I loathe the public school system. Creates kinds, not characters. Dr Arnold has a lot to answer for. That merciless pruner of the spirit prevented the upper classes, who were barmy, from feeling comfortable in their skins. We have ceased to be mad, the English. None but a flatterer would still call us eccentric.’
‘I thought Winchester was ghastly,’ Esmond replies, looking straight at Douglas. ‘Full of ugly, small-minded teachers, tuppeny tyrants, taking out their disappointments on the sons of equally catastrophic minor aristocrats and merchant bankers and retired colonels.’
‘Why d’you still wear a Wykehamist’s tie then?’
‘So when I hang myself, they’ll know why I did it.’
‘Hear, hear!’ Douglas shouts and the table laughs. ‘He’s all right!’ Douglas lifts his glass as Esmond turns back to Orioli.
‘I’m here to help Mr Goad set up a radio station. To finance my father’s political party. He’s the Chairman of the British Union.’
Orioli raises his eyebrows.
‘And you’re a Fascist, too?’
‘I’m not really sure, these days.’
Orioli removes his hand from Esmond’s knee and polishes his spectacles on his napkin. More wine is poured. The restaurant begins to fill with young couples staring at each other over candlelight; a family of grandparents, parents and a boy of six or seven in a sailor costume; an old man reading La Nazione with a plate of cannelloni.
‘Strindberg!’ Douglas shouts and bangs the table. ‘That’s what I call the maître d’. Because he looks so dashed mournful, worse than Eric over here. Strindberg, bring us the bill.’
When it comes, Douglas holds it under a candle and makes a few marks with his pencil. ‘Twelve lire each,’ he says. ‘I’d love to treat you all, of course, but money is very tight at the minute.’
Wolton, who has neither eaten nor drunk, passes a handful of notes towards them. On the way out, they stop at the table where the young boy in his sailor’s suit sits, looking pleased to be out with the adults, listening carefully to something his grandmother is saying. Douglas pulls over a chair to sit beside him and, quite naturally, lifts him onto his knee.
‘Permesso?’ he says, smiling at the boy’s father.
‘Si, Professore,’ the man replies.
The little boy looks up at Douglas with wide, delighted eyes.
‘Ma come ti chiami?’
‘Dante,’ the little boy replies, grinning bashfully.
‘Magnifico! Ma dov’è Beatrice?’ Douglas pretends to look under the table, and now in the little boy’s pockets. The boy giggles and simpers up at him.
Reggie Temple leans over and whispers to Esmond with a hiss.
‘It’s frightful. He’s like the Pied Piper. Wherever he goes, the boys just flock to him. One of the reasons he’s so short of money.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The queue of parents wanting restitution. He holds competitions for the gypsy kids under the arches of the Ponte alle Grazie. Fifty centimes to whoever can gism first. It’s not dignified, a man of his age.’
Orioli, who has been listening, elbows Temple in the ribs. ‘You’re just jealous. It’s been a long time since anyone looked your way. And Norman is older than you, is he not?’
Douglas presents the father with his card and rests his hands on Dante’s shoulders. The man beams gratefully and insists on introducing his wife and her parents. Reggie tuts and shakes his head while Douglas bows and coos in a Florentine dialect. Finally, the group make their way out and hail taxis on the Piazza.
An hour later, Esmond is sitting on the little balcony of Douglas’s top-floor flat on the Lungarno delle Grazie, looking at the villas on the opposite bank of the Arno, the outline of cypress trees like feathers in the caps of the hills. He is smoking, tapping his ash onto the awning of the Davis & Orioli bookshop two floors below. Douglas comes out of the drawing room, where Schubert is playing on the gramophone.
‘Ma la notte sperde le lontananze,’ he says, sitting down beside Esmond and lighting a Toscano. ‘Night dispels distances. Ungaretti. Will you be with us in Florence for some time?’
‘It depends, I suppose, on how long it takes to set up the radio station. A year or two, perhaps more if it’s a success.’
‘How terribly dull for you. I can’t stay in one place for more than a few months. I am bored stiff with Florence. I should like to get further away, out of Europe, but money is very tight just now. You wouldn’t like to buy one of my books, by any chance?’
He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out a slim volume with a mottled gold-brown cover.
‘Paneros,’ he says. ‘Aphrodisiacs. The search for an elixir of youth and of sex. It’s about death, too. Because without death there would be no sex, d’you see?’
‘I think so.’ A gibbous moon is rising over the hills, reflected in the fast w
aters of the Arno.
‘Thirty-five lire usually, but twenty to you.’
Esmond opens his wallet and counts out the notes.
‘Jolly good,’ Douglas says, handing him the book. ‘Gerald tells me you’re a writer yourself.’
‘Actually, I’m trying to use this time to work out if I’m any good.’
‘I didn’t write a novel until I was forty-two. Would have been no point, I hadn’t lived enough. Before that I was all biology, geography, a paper on the pumice stone industry.’
Esmond smiles.
‘Oh, yes. Helped to gaol a gang of child labour racketeers, that one. It was read aloud at the trials in Messina. But fiction? No, you need money in the bank for fiction.’
He turns his head, which seems to Esmond like a statue in the moonlight: hewn and marmoreal.
‘Forsake books,’ he says. ‘Go out among people and nature and think it through for yourself. Keep a diary, if only dates and places. But more than anything, don’t scatter the gold of your youth. Don’t lose your life in books. Get out and live. Michael Arlen said of me – or was it Ronald Firbank? One of them said I was the least literary writer they’d ever met. That I might as well have been a lumberjack.’
Esmond smiles again. ‘I used to write with a friend of mine, the one in Austria. I find it very hard to know if anything I write’s any good without showing it to him. He gave me the necessary confidence.’
He pictures Philip in his digs in Park Terrace, chopping benzedrine tablets into the wine on the desk. The electric moment when he handed over the notebook, and Philip sprawled on the bed, whistling and smiling, his Cambridge-blue eyes galloping over the pages as he read.
‘I never show my work to anyone,’ Douglas says. ‘Writing’s like shitting. If someone’s cheering you on, it’s hard to get going, but give it time and space and it’ll come. And by the way, if you don’t eat well, you won’t shit well.’ He pauses. ‘Did you love this chap?’
Esmond turns to look out over the river. It is past eleven. A gentle breeze is blowing, stirring the hillside and making tight waves on the surface of the water.
‘I still do, I suppose,’ he says.
‘And where is he now?’ Douglas’s voice is suddenly very soft, very kind, like the breeze.
‘He went back to Austria. I think his parents were trying to emigrate to America. I haven’t heard from him for a little while.’
‘Ah, a Jew? Rotten business this. Shames a once-great nation. Hitlerism has its roots in the Old Testament, of course. All that pure race nonsense in Ezra and Nehemiah. Germans are dreadful Bible readers. Don’t give up on him, though. It’s good to be in love while you’re writing. Each of my books ripened under the rays of some attachment or other. Unless I am in love I have no impulse to write.’
They are silent for a while, smoking and watching the river. Then Douglas sits forward slowly and puts an arm around Esmond’s shoulders.
‘Are you sure you’re not throwing your lot in with the wrong side?’
‘The station? It’s for my father, for his Party.’
‘Must you?’
‘What’s the alternative? Communism? I’d rather Mussolini than Stalin.’
‘Break free from what you were born into, Esmond. This isn’t you, the politics. Embrace your freedom, embrace the flesh. You should go to Goa. Astonishing place. Why don’t you sail to Goa and write a life of St Francis Xavier? Dee-lish curries. Find yourself an ebony youngling and write in a little timber-framed hut under palm trees. Don’t let your family write the script of your life.’
They sit for a while longer, then go in to join the party. A bottle of Punt e Mes is passed around. Reggie Temple is asleep on the sofa, Pino talking in Italian to Fiamma and Gerald. Wolton sits on his own, hands on knees. Douglas looks down at him and lets out a snort.
‘Why do you insist on coming here, Eric? For God’s sake can’t you see you’re wasting space.’
Wolton’s grey skin colours momentarily but he stares at his hands.
‘Because I love you,’ he says, so softly that he has to repeat it. ‘I love you, Norman.’
‘So you come running after me as if I were a ballet girl? Not on your life! Clear out!’ Douglas picks up his stick and raps it hard against the floor. ‘You were worth talking to twenty years ago. But now? I simply don’t want to see you. Clear out!’
Wolton staggers to his feet. Reggie Temple has woken up and looks out blearily. Wolton moves for the door.
‘Norman, I––’
‘Clear out!’
Ten minutes later, Esmond and the others leave too, Reggie Temple walking with them as far as the Ponte Santa Trinità.‘Such a sad figure, the Wolton feller,’ he says, as they make their way along the deserted Lungarno. ‘Norman’s frightful to him, but I can’t blame him. Shows up here after so many years.’
‘What’s his story?’
‘He was one of Norman’s boys. Norman’s wife caught them buggering in the marital bed some twenty years ago. But he was old for Norman even then. He has a theory, you see, that boys after puberty suffer a loss of body heat. That he ought to sodomise only the very young in order to keep himself youthful.’ He lets out a low chuckle. ‘It’s all in that book of his, Paneros. Quite barmy.’
‘And now Eric’s back.’
‘Yes, after a failed marriage and some kind of collapse, he seemed to think Norman would find him irresistible. Really it is too sad.’
They leave him at the bridge and walk up to the Institute. It is dark and silent inside. They say good night, each of them a little drunk, a little sombre, and fall asleep, the bats riding the cool air outside their windows.
17
Esmond realises he has been putting off seeing Carità, disgusted and, he admits to himself, scared by what the little man did to Goad. He would rather face his father and Mosley at once than a brute like Carità. But there is no word from England, nothing from Goad, and so he keeps his head down, waiting, thumbing through The Wireless Operator’s Handbook whenever he feels particularly guilt-stricken.
One morning, a Saturday, Fiamma comes into Esmond’s room early. She sits at the end of the bed in the darkness. He sees that she’s crying as he pulls himself awake.
‘What is it?’
‘They’ve killed Carlo and Nello in Paris. Oh, Esmond––’ She reaches over to take him in her arms and begins to sob. After a while he regretfully disentangles himself, stands to open the window, and looks back to see her slumped on the bed with her fingers in her hair. It is another hot day; the room is close, the breeze warm and dusty from the street. He sits beside her in his nightshirt and places an arm around her, whispering softly.
‘Who were they? Died how?’
‘Friends of my father. They founded Giustizia e Libertà. Heroes––’ She unravels into tears. Esmond finds a handkerchief in a drawer and offers it to her, but she pushes it away, drawing her arm across her face. He picks up her hand and clasps it between his own.
‘Who killed them?’
‘Fascists,’ she spits at him. She begins to speak very swiftly. ‘They are taking everything from me,’ she says. ‘First my father, then the house I grew up in. My friends, who are either running off to join them, or in gaol because they won’t. They took dear, gentle Goad. Now Carlo and Nello.’ She bangs her hand down on the bed and turns to him. ‘I never understood what it meant, totalitarianism. You have this word in English, too?’ He nods uncertainly. ‘They are intruding into every aspect of my life, taking over all the things that are dear to me just as they took over Libya and Abyssinia. I hate them, Esmond.’
Gerald comes into the room. Fiamma looks up at him damply.
‘Where were you?’ she says. ‘I came looking for you this morning but you weren’t in bed.’
He kneels down beside her.
‘I’m so bloody sorry. I saw it on the front page of the Nazione. It was the Cagoule, of course, the French Fascists. On Musso’s orders. Bastards.’
She wipes her fac
e again with a slippery arm.
‘Listen,’ he says, with a doggish grin, ‘I’ve something to cheer you up. Get dressed and meet me in the courtyard. Come on, Fiamma. There you go.’
Esmond pulls on shorts and an Aertex shirt, brushes his teeth and knocks on Fiamma’s door. They make their way down the stone steps to the courtyard as darkness lifts off the city. Gerald is standing in the cloister opposite the entrance to Cook’s, a large canvas bag at his feet. Behind him, leaning on their stands, are three bicycles. One is a racer – a Romeo – the other two are Peugeot tourers. Gerald stands back with a flourish.
‘Thought we could use them to get out of town, find a cool spot along the river. I saw them in the barn at L’Ombrellino and knew George wouldn’t miss them. Couple of the gardeners helped me wheel them down this morning. D’you want the racer, Esmond?’
Esmond holds its lean, crouched frame, grey with red livery. He pats the leather seat.
‘It’s super,’ he says.
The three of them set off wobblingly towards the river. Fiamma is still crying quietly, hiccoughs escaping as she pedals. It is before nine, but already the sun is powerful overhead, searing as they gather pace along the Lungarno. At the Ponte Vecchio they pass tinkers with fly-bothered mules, beggars in the shadows, fishermen pushing ice-filled trolleys of their catch towards the Mercato Nuovo. The rich have left for their out-of-town villas or the Alps, the poor sit indoors with their fans, their windows open, their feet in tubs of ice-water. A group of Fascist Youth walk along the river in a bedraggled crocodile behind a little man in a heavy black shirt. He is sweating so much he barely sees the bicycles coming and has to leap, cursing. The boys behind him laugh.
‘My uncle,’ Fiamma shouts over her shoulder. ‘He is in charge of the Sabato Fascista today. Poor boys––’
On the towpath of the river the air is cooler, the wind fresh from the Apennine peaks, finding its way into the folds of their clothing, the nooks of their bodies. Esmond races ahead, pumping his legs, head down, lets out a joyful shout that’s muffled by the wind. Gerald rides with no hands, arms held up, cupping the breeze. They stop for a drink of water before crossing the river at the ford at San Jacopo al Girone, poppies in the wheat field behind them.