by Alex Preston
‘What do you think?’ Bailey asks, smiling broadly at him.
‘This is amazing, bloody brilliant. How did you manage––’
‘Not my doing at all. Ada’s the miracle worker. She rounded up some engineer friends at the university. They did this for next to nothing. It’s her you should thank.’
Esmond runs his hand along the desk, looks at the reels on the tape machine, lifts the needle on the recorder, blows dust from the disc.
‘How fabulous.’ And then, grinning as it dawns on him, ‘We never have to see Carità again.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I must–– Do you know where Ada lives?’
‘The Liuzzis are over in Le Cure. I’ll have the address downstairs.’
‘I’ll go and see her now. This is just–– It’s perfect.’
He leaves Gerald at the Institute and makes his way alone along the via dei Cerretani, past the Duomo and up towards Le Cure. As he strolls through the warm afternoon, he realises how much Carità had been casting his angry shadow over things. He feels a swell of gratitude for Ada.
The Liuzzi apartment is at the top of a glum, grey house overlooking the gardens of the Villa Ventaglio. A tall man stoops to the door. He carries a book in one hand and looks at Esmond over half-moon glasses.
‘Si, posso aiutarvi?’ he says.
‘Buongiorno,’ says Esmond. ‘I’m here to see Ada. I’m Esmond Lowndes.’
‘Come, please,’ the man says, opening the door. ‘I will call her. I have heard a great deal about you. About Radio Firenze. Ada! Vieni qui!’
There is the sound of hurried footsteps and Ada appears. She is wearing the same peasant’s linen tunic, her red hair reminds him again of Mary Magdalene in the triptych. She runs a hand through it, pulling strands behind her ears, and looks suddenly bashful, a flush flooding her cheeks. He notices the small, fragile mole below her left eye. Her father clears his throat.
‘I wanted to say––’ he says, ‘I am sorry about Mr Goad. But you British must understand. This is not your city. We will not be another pink-shaded nation. Excuse me, I must get back to work. Ring the bell for Lydia if you need anything.’ Ada leads Esmond into a gloomy, book-cluttered drawing room. Copies of La Nostra Bandiera, the newspaper her father publishes, are stacked by the French windows, cuttings spread out on the coffee table, on the floor. Ada sits down primly, hands on her knees. Esmond goes to the window and looks out over the trees of the park in front of the house.
‘Listen, what you did at St Mark’s––’
‘No,’ she interrupts him. ‘Let me speak first.’ She looks at him nervously again. ‘It was my fault,’ she says. ‘What happened to Signor Goad.’
Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘I told my father that I had been invited to the drinks party at the Institute. I was going to celebrate the coronation with you. He was very angry. He doesn’t approve of the British Institute. Hates the British. I’m so sorry, I should have thought—’
‘He wasn’t one of them, your father?’
‘No, he didn’t go, but I know he telephoned Niccolò Arcimboldi. He does everything he can to please. It isn’t as easy for him here as it was in Turin. There is more resistance, you know? To a Jewish Fascist. I should have seen this. Signor Goad, is he very bad?’
She turns, biting her thin upper lip. He thinks about putting his arms around her but sits beside her on the divan with a hand in the small of her back.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Goad will be fine. You couldn’t have known this would happen. And what you’ve done at the church, it’s amazing. We won’t need to see Carità again.’
She smiles. ‘I have some very capable friends. They saw it as a challenge. I was mostly standing around passing tools.’
‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’
‘It was really nothing. We salvaged most of it from the university. Parts no one was using. What I did spend, counts as penance for what happened to Mr Goad. We have another few days’ work before it’s ready––’
‘You’re too kind. We’ll be able to start as soon as Goad returns from hospital. I do hope you’ll be involved. I mean, not just translating, but in the whole project.’
‘I’d like to,’ she says. They sit quietly for a few moments, then he rises, kisses her cheeks and walks out into the hallway. As he makes his way to the front door, she stands looking after him. In the shadows of the corridor behind her he makes out her father, watching him over her shoulder.
That evening, after dinner on the loggia, Gerald and Fiamma and Esmond drink a bottle of wine, a few glasses of grappa. Without speaking much, they bathe together in the large, cool bathroom, splashing about like children and taking turns to soap each other. Esmond had been expecting awkwardness between them, a sense of shame. Instead they fall into bed again like they fall into the water. He feels, with them, rather like the triptych: an obscure work newly attributed to a master. When he finally sleeps, he sleeps with a hollow sound to his gentle snores, utterly quenched, content, dreaming of Gerald and Fiamma.
20
They arrange to meet Pino and Norman at Piccolo’s again and, as they make their way into the restaurant, Esmond wonders if their secret is visible on their faces. If Douglas or Orioli will be able to scent out the change in atmosphere that feels, to him, as if it is banked up in the room around them, a wave about to break. Certainly there had been a coldness in Mrs Keppel’s attitude that afternoon, although the Colonel was delighted when, rather than just Gerald, all three had decided to peel off their clothes and plunge naked into the pool at L’Ombrellino.
They stop going to the galleries in the mornings, choosing instead to lie in bed and recover from the drinking and carousing with Douglas and Orioli; further drinks and dancing with their younger friends at Doney’s or the Circolo Unione in the Palazzo Corsi; then the frantic grasping and thrusting and sucking and biting that, sustained perhaps by the triangulation of their urges, the seemingly limitless possibilities provided by three young bodies equally desired, equally possessed, keep them lost in the hot heaven of Fiamma’s room until the roosters crow over by the Cascine and the swallows start cheeping outside the window.
Gerald goes up to Bagni di Lucca to visit Goad and comes back grim-faced and quiet. Gesuina, he says, pushes his father up and down the streets of the town, from the sanatorium to the baths, from the baths to the sulphur springs, walking the steep streets tirelessly so that Goad might get the freshest, cleanest air. But the old man is still skeletal, eyes shadowed, breath quick and ragged. The doctors have found nothing more than ‘nerves’, a word they repeat in various tones of exasperation and wonder, in a range of evasive accents, shaking their heads.
Esmond continues his novel. Hulme at war. Heroism. Boredom. He has heard his father speak so many times about the deep-throated booming of the guns, the burst of star-shells, trench-foot, trench-mouth, sorties that might as well have been suicides. But he can’t make it come alive. The letters on the page are like bones in a vault, dusty and lifeless. He fills his notebooks, buys more, revises and rewrites, imagining all the time his father reading over his shoulder, tutting and shaking his head and muttering. ‘No. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.’
One evening towards the end of August, they are dining with Douglas and Orioli again at Piccolo’s. Both of the Reggies are there, and a new face, offered by Douglas with a sweep of his arm.
‘Prince Heinrich,’ he says of the tall, dashing young man in a suit of blue serge. Esmond shakes his hand. The Prince, fortyish, speaks perfect English, but seems reserved, otherworldly, sitting back and watching as they bellow at each other over the table. Douglas is on coruscating form, bristling when Esmond, who has been reading Paneros, suggests it reminds him of Wilde.
‘Can’t stand the man. Wrong type of sod. I know the Reggies here fight a posthumous battle over who has the misfortune of being the poor bugger’s widow, but he was nothing but words, words and old maid’s ways.’
Esm
ond learns that Prince Heinrich is the son of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, exiled by Hitler for not agreeing to support a south German military alliance between Bavaria and Austria.
After dinner, Douglas puts his arm around Esmond and guides him away from the others.
‘You’re enjoying Paneros, then?’
‘I’ve almost finished it. And yes, very much.’
‘Good. It’s really, if you like, a hymn to the sexual act. What ecstasy, of all of them, is more fervid than that of young lovers locked in lush embraces? I wanted to put that on the page, to make you feel it as you read it. I can’t read that book without a stiffy, all right!’
Orioli had looked a little jaded during dinner, eating and drinking less than usual. He’d asked Strindberg for a mineral water and drunk it, burping loudly and proffering swift, embarrassed apologies. He trots to catch up with them.
‘I’m not so much tonight. It’s my fegato, my bad liver. I need to go on a diet. Maybe I should go home.’
Douglas gives him a swipe on the buttocks with his walking cane.
‘No slacking. We’re going to join these young ones at their nightclubs. I want to see what they do after leaving us. They’ve been secretive recently. We ought to know what we’re missing.’
They make their way towards the orange dome of the cathedral. Beside the main steps of the Duomo, where indifferent hawkers hold out black-market cigarettes and saucy postcards, Douglas gives a little bark.
‘Let’s go in,’ he says. ‘I want to look at Sir John.’
The Prince and Colonel Keppel wait outside with the Reggies as the three friends follow Douglas and Orioli into the cathedral. It is very dark inside, barely any light through the stained glass from the streetlamps in the square.
‘Bugger,’ Gerald whispers, stubbing his toe on an unseen step. They walk down a side-aisle until they come to a small chapel. Douglas speaks, his voice terribly loud in the echoing church.
‘You see there?’ he says, lighting a match and holding it to one of the prayer candles. ‘Let’s fire up some of these, get a better look.’
As Douglas and Orioli light the candles to the side of the chapel, the fresco on the wall is illuminated. It is the painting in terra verde, the colour of the patina on bronze. A cruel-looking man on a horse atop a triumphant plinth.
‘Sir John Hawkwood,’ Douglas booms. ‘By Uccello. This is my favourite Florentine Englishman. Better than the soft-souls who live here now. A condottiero, a mercenary, in the twelfth century. They couldn’t pronounce his name, so they called him Giovanni Accuto. Fought mainly against Florence, actually, but chose to settle and die here. Bloody tough. Would have taught these Italians a thing or two about war. They could do with him in Spain, in Abyssinia. Bloody wet, the Italians.’
Esmond hears someone clear their throat, the sound of rustling papers. He looks around and, with a start, realises that the nave of the cathedral contains some dozen people, dressed in black. A priest comes hurrying towards them.
‘Signori,’ he says, ‘I really must insist––’
Esmond starts to apologise, but Douglas lifts his chin belligerently to the priest.
‘Lining your pockets with pelf from these sentimental fools. Irrational dunces praying for magic and redemption and hope. God, how I hate the clergy.’ He turns towards the congregation, mainly frightened-looking old women, and booms. ‘It’s all claptrap! Don’t you see it? Making you feel corrupt for the few real pleasures of your miserable lives. Go out and live, don’t waste your final days in here!’ By this time Gerald is hurrying him towards the door and Esmond, mumbled apology, places a five lire note in the collection plate.
In Doney’s, Douglas is loud and quarrelsome, ordering bottle after bottle of cheap Chianti and banging his fist on the table with every detail. He smokes incessantly, his large pale face moving behind the smoke like a moon behind clouds. Prince Heinrich, previously vaguely amused by Douglas, now looks on with a kind of fascinated horror.
‘I switched from girls to boys,’ Douglas says, a group of elderly English spinsters at the table next door nodding to one another, ‘in Naples in ’97. I was bartering with some street girl’s mother. A gypsy girl, up near Scampia.’ He inclines his head to Prince Heinrich. ‘Have you ever undressed a gypsy? They’re always perfectly clean.’ He turns back to the table, making sure the old ladies can hear him. ‘So, I was bargaining with this woman over her daughter when the girl’s brother turned up and gave me the most tremendous clout with a cosh. When I woke, he was covering my face with kisses and tears and I quite forgot about the girl. Disappeared with the boy for a fortnight.’
There is a bustle at the back of the room and Esmond can see Fiamma’s uncle Niccolò with a group of other Blackshirts at the bar, arguing with the bartender. With a lurch, he sees that Carità is amongst them. ‘We should go,’ he says quietly.
A younger Blackshirt, whom Esmond hasn’t seen before, walks slowly to their table. He leans over carefully and picks up Douglas’s glass.
‘You drink too much,’ he says, draining the wine himself and placing it back on the table. ‘Basta così.’
‘Damn fool!’ Douglas yells, his face softened and inflamed. The other Blackshirts gather behind their crony. Esmond sees a look of cold rage on Niccolò Arcimboldi’s face, a smirk on Carità’s, as Douglas begins to shout. ‘Look at you, stuffed up and delighted with yourselves, playing at soldiers. Italians make rotten soldiers, d’you know that? Halfway into an attack and they’re writing to their mothers.’
The young Blackshirt pauses for a moment, as if in thought, then swings a punch at Douglas. The old man topples back, knocking over the table, breaking glass and plates. The English women scream. Esmond thinks of Goad at the unveiling of the portrait, a reeling sense of déjà vu. He aims a swift kick at Niccolò Arcimboldi’s shin. Fiamma has picked up her butter knife and sweeps it wildly at Carità, who ducks. Gerald tries to get Douglas to the door while Pino beats frantically at a wide black back with his friend’s cane, his spectacles misting, a stream of curses in English and Italian. More punches reach Douglas as he staggers towards the door with Gerald. Esmond sees Carità draw a dagger from his belt and, before he has a chance to feel afraid, he picks up one of the empty wine bottles from the table and brings it down over the little man’s head. The bottle shatters, Carità stumbles forward, another Blackshirt takes out a pistol and holds it up. ‘A gun!’ More screaming; the Prince and the Reggies cower in the far corner.
Grabbing Fiamma’s hand, Esmond hustles them towards the door and into the night. Gerald and Douglas are disappearing into the Institute, twenty yards ahead. He looks back and sees the Blackshirts lifting their weapons in the air, shouting, Carità leading them. He drags Fiamma after him, stumbling through the doors of the Institute, which he slams and bolts. Panting, they lean against one another until their breathing slows.
‘We just can’t behave like that any more,’ Fiamma says, shaking her head. ‘Norman is out of control. I felt like hitting him myself.’
When they reach the library, Douglas is sitting in an armchair while Gerald pours him a scotch. The old man’s eyes are bloodshot, a bruise ripening on one cheek, his hands shaking.
‘They’re beasts,’ he says. ‘Brutes. See what they’ve done to my little boys, dressing them up as soldiers, marching and drilling when they should be lying in the sun.’
‘Where’s Pino?’ Fiamma asks.
‘The problem is that Musso’s foisted a political system designed for sober Northern temperaments onto a race of lovers. The Italians are all heart, too much compassion for Fascism––’
He lights a Toscano. Esmond crosses to the window. The Blackshirts aren’t waiting for them, only the old man in the pheasant feather cap sits on the steps of the church opposite, watching. A small crowd stands further up, in the pool of a streetlight outside Pretini’s salon, looking down at a pile of clothes on the ground. When it moves, Esmond wonders if a dog has been hit by a car. Then he sees the hands and arms, an
d runs for the door with Gerald and Fiamma following behind.
Orioli is lying buckled in the road. The Prince and the Reggies are there, Temple keening quietly. Pretini, a pair of scissors in his top pocket, has Pino’s head in his lap. Esmond kneels beside them and looks down at Pino, who attempts a smile. His spectacles are empty of glass, his eyes flooded with blood, shards sticking through in the soft red flesh.
‘Norman? Is that you? I can’t see you.’
Esmond takes his hand.
‘Norman?’
They ride with him in the ambulance, Douglas following with the Reggies in a taxi. Esmond feels he is somehow to blame, first Goad and now Orioli savaged in his presence. In the ambulance, bandages are wrapped around Orioli’s eyes. He begins to sob, calling out for his mother, and Esmond looks away into the night. He is lowered into a wheelchair at the hospital, still sobbing, and rushed into an operating room through double doors from which, two hours later, a white-coated doctor appears.
He speaks to Douglas in Italian for a while and then cups the old man’s arm with his hand, as if to show that he knows Orioli is more than a friend. With a shrug, Douglas turns to Esmond.
‘They’re taking him to Venice. There’s an expert there they think may be able to save his sight.’
He slumps down into a chair and lowers his great marble head into his hands. Fiamma crosses to put an arm around his shoulder. She whispers to him in Italian and he nods and mumbles in response. Esmond joins them.
‘You’d better stay with us,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to be alone, not after all this. He can have your father’s room can’t he, Gerald?’
‘Of course.’
Douglas is with them for three nights, a sad, sleepless figure in the house. He sits in the library, drinking all day, and out on the loggia in the evenings. They do their best to entertain him, invite him to L’Ombrellino to swim, offer to drive him over to Piccolo’s for dinner, but he declines. His face is a patchwork of bruises, and the only time they hear him speak more than a few words is when he calls the hospital in Venice to speak to Pino. One afternoon, they come home from swimming and he is gone, a polite note on the bed, two bottles of whisky missing from the cabinet in the library.