by Alex Preston
– A most engaging debate, Goad says, standing and stretching, pulling on the blazer which he had hung on the back of his chair. – Perhaps the best yet. He smiles at Esmond. – It wasn’t too––? Goad thinks for a moment, scratching the skin of one hand. – No, it was fine. Our uncertainty tallies with the culture, I suppose, the uncertainty of the present moment in Europe. I think we did well. Now I must be off, good night, you two.
Esmond and Ada coil wires, dust the instrument panel, seal up the discs and store them in the rack on one side of the room. He has deliberately avoided speaking to her about the Manifesto of Racial Scientists, about the new laws in place regarding the Jews. Now she wraps her shawl around her neck and stands in the doorway. – Esmond, she says. He looks up. – I don’t want any special favours, I don’t want you to get in trouble on my behalf, but I want you to know that I enjoy working here. He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke towards the cornices of ceiling. – Of course, he says. – There’s no question. I’ll make sure of it.
When she has left, he sits at the open window, breathes the summer air, smiles peacefully. He thinks of Murray Constantine’s words, which he had quoted in the broadcast and which Goad had repeated two or three times in reply: They will make a world in which it is impossible for a man to love his own daughter.
Ministry of the Interior
Palazzo del Viminale
Rome
21/8/38
Sir or Madam –
As the listed employer of Ada Liuzzi, who is registered as Jewish/other non-Aryan on the Census dated August 1st, 1938, carried out by the Italian Office for the Study of Race (under the guidance of Dr Guido Landra), please advise by return of post if Ada Liuzzi is employed in a position whereupon her duties could be described as falling into one of the following areas:
a) Government, politics, local or regional council work, other general administrative role within the apparatus of the Italian State;
b) Banking, moneylending, other employment in which the worker has control over the exchange, transfer or deployment of sums of money larger than 5,000 lire per calendar month;
c) Teaching, lecturing, professorships, any work which brings the named person into regular contact with children or students;
d) Military (including carabinieri), air force, navy, local police, fire service, or any other position requiring access to weapons of any kind;
e) Other educated profession where the named person’s Jewish/other non-Aryan status could reasonably be assumed to represent a threat or potential threat to the economic, military, moral or educational health of the nation.
It is your responsibility as employer to ensure that the Jewish/non-Aryan person is correctly employed.
Please also confirm whether Ada Liuzzi has been charged with any crime in the past ten years, and if so the nature of this crime. Please also list any previous or outstanding arrest warrants.
Please inform if Ada Liuzzi became an Italian citizen on or after 31st December, 1919.
Viva Il Duce!
[Enclosed with following letter: article from The Times entitled ‘Nuremberg and Aussig’.]
Welsh Frankton
Shropshire
12th September
Dear Esmond,
It seems I spoke too soon. Situation in Sudetenland bloody bad. Mosley has put several calls in to the Führer urging him not to act hastily, letting him know that the eyes of the world are upon him, but I fear they don’t have the close relationship they once did. You’ll see I’ve clipped an article from The Times calling on the Czechs to cede the territory to the Germans. Eminently sensible and we can only hope that it is the view inside Whitehall.
Runciman’s attempts to mediate were shambolic, and Nevile Henderson made a buggery of things in Berlin. I remember a time when the Brits were known for their diplomacy. You can just see that bastard Stalin perched over all of this, rubbing his hands with glee. Chamberlain flies to Berchtesgaden tomorrow; he’s got a good head, and he’ll need it. You could picture this all unspooling rather quickly, with the Poles and the Russians and that madman Konrad Henlein all buttoning their coats. If Germany does decide to wade in, the Czech will be wiped out in a flash. It’s interesting, Esmond – difficult times, of course, but interesting.
I was glad to read in your letter that you have developed such affection for Filippino Lippi. I don’t remember seeing this particular triptych when I was in Florence. I never really told you about that tour back in ’06. I went with Arthur Fitzroy and Chummy Little straight from Cambridge. We arrived in Florence at night, driving into the narrowing throat of the valley, using the great dome to guide us. It’s strange, but I can only recall small details of the city from that time. I remember waking the next morning in our hotel – the Excelsior – and looking out over the rooftops of the town, but almost nothing else. The room of Botticellis and Lippis at the Uffizi, of course, the insides of certain churches, Cellini’s Perseus. But it’s as if it was too much for my mind to hold. Every time your mother and I returned to Florence, it was like drawing back a curtain to reveal bright treasures of memory.
Enough of my rambling. You have great things to do. Mosley is staying with us. He and Diana are always after news of you. We are both struck by how well you and Goad work together – a thoroughly engaging duo. Funny the way in which things work out, isn’t it? That all of this now feels fated – that you should leave Cambridge, go out to Florence, make a man of yourself. Then – who knows? – come back and do great things for the Party at home, or fight like a lion in the war when and if it comes.
Your mother sends her love,
Your Father.
Faber & Faber
24 Russell Square,
London, WC1
23rd September, 1938
Dear Mr Lowndes –
I greatly enjoyed the draft of In Love and War that you sent me. A rather good idea to take a well-known figure like Hulme and re-tell his life as fiction. I thought you got the essential clash between his bawdiness, his brutality and his brilliance absolutely spot-on. I also very much enjoyed the way you worked his poetry, his letters, his life, into your fiction.
I would like to ask you to take another run at the passages describing his life in battle. It seems to me that these are where the novel stumbles. Ask your father – he was there with him. Read Sassoon (if you haven’t already, and your prose rather suggests you haven’t). It is a fact that whilst so many of those who know what it was like to fight in the trenches are still with us, there is something of a moral duty for the writer to convey the truth of war as clearly and cleverly as possible. It doesn’t seem to me that your novel does this.
If you are able to fix this, I should think there’s a good chance that we’d be interested in publishing. It won’t hinder things that your father’s name, and your own work on the wireless confer upon you a certain celebrity. We won’t make you rich, but Faber & Faber is a fine publishing house and we’d be very glad to have you on board.
Sincerely,
Richard de la Mare.
Via dei Forbici, 35c
Firenze
1.10.38
Dear Esmond –
It was most kind of you and Father Bailey to treat us to such an exceptionally good dinner last week. I am only sorry it has taken me such a long time to write and thank you. As you can imagine, things are rather difficult for our family at the moment. I don’t like to go into things too deeply in front of Ada (or indeed her mother, who is, as you saw, suffering from a deep sadness at the turn events have taken), but you can imagine the sense of betrayal we are feeling just now. I – who have given everything for this government, for this country – my country – and for the Fascist cause – that I should no longer be thought of as an Italian, that my passport should be confiscated and returned defiled, that La Nostra Bandiera, which has supported Il Duce for more than a decade, should be closed down – All of this seems incredible to me.
I enclose a petition signed by several of my promin
ent friends – you will note the first name is that of Giovanni Gentile himself – supporting my exclusion from the punitive racial laws which have so hampered my ability to continue in the service of a cause in whose integrity I continue to believe with all my heart. I acknowledge the need for the Charter of Race, given that so many of those who insist on swimming against the tide of history – the members of Giustizia e Libertà, the leaders of the Communist unions – are Jewish. It seems sensible also to deny the great blessing of Italian citizenship to the recent miscegenated product of our African adventures. But to someone like me? It is a great travesty.
As a figure in the public eye, I’d be very grateful if you would sign this petition. I have been let down by many of those I counted amongst my dearest companions, but we are lucky to live at times such as these when the bonds of friendship are put to the test and we may winnow out the lickspittles and toadies. Perhaps you’d pass it on to Father Bailey once you sign it, and ask him to send it the way of anyone else he thinks might help my cause.
I’m aware that you have been put under some pressure over Ada’s continued employment at Radio Firenze. I wanted to offer you my sincere thanks, and that of my wife. We love our daughter and know she loves working with you. See you for dinner on Wednesday as usual, I hope.
With my most cordial salutations,
Guido Liuzzi.
[Collection of invitations; visiting cards; concert, cinema and opera tickets; train tickets to Rome, Milan, Genoa and Venice; receipts for meals, hotels, taxi journeys.]
He has been on so many train journeys these past months he feels the rhythm of the shuddering carriages in the patterns of his thoughts. He suffers a kind of seasickness for the first half-hour in a new city, until he finds his land legs again. He does not see enough of Italy on these trips. Often he is taken straight from the station to some out-of-town office to meet the scions of wealthy manufacturing families, ambitious executives keen to toady to Il Duce, place a flag in the ground on Radio Firenze. Advertising money is pouring into the station, eclipsing the contributions made by the operations in Heligoland and Sark, and he and Ada open the discs each afternoon and listen to stoic men in clipped voices talk about the smooth action of their Beretta, the speed of their Romeo, the refined taste of their Martini. The next day, he is a travelling businessman – he feels modern, useful, as if he has stepped from a dream into real life.
He spends a night in a hotel in Venice overlooking the Piazza San Marco. The city is more ornate, more oriental than Florence, the squares wider and suffused with grey light. It seems to him a more naturally Fascist environment. His taxi driver points out the balcony from which Mussolini and Hitler addressed the crowds when they met there in ’34. He is appalled by the stench of the canals. He meets a girl at the foot of the Torre dell’Orologio and takes her back to his hotel. He is surprised when, in the morning, she wants paying.
He finds an England in the landscape. Looking out of the window of the train as he crosses the Po Valley, he sees a coppice of oak and elder that might have been a hillside in Ellesmere. He is reading War and Peace, falling in love with Andrei and Natasha in equal measure, but he thinks of England. And the streets of Milan and Turin are as dull as those of London, the people of those busy northern cities as lost in their own affairs, in their own hurried footsteps and urban anxieties.
Whenever he returns to Florence, making his way by foot down the via Tornabuoni and over the Ponte Santa Trinità to the gate of St Mark’s, it feels like home.
Roma Reial Hotel, Barcelona
4/11/38
Dearest Es –
Everything’s buggered. I’m in Barcelona, looking down over the Plaça Reial. Bloody rain gushing onto the cobblestones, turning lanes into mud, splashing up and soaking the few miserable creatures out there pushing half-empty carts up to the Ramblas markets. Above the noise of the rain on the roof I can hear the shells to the south of the city, guns in the hills. Place I’m in used to be a hotel, but there’s no bed, nothing in the room but dust, my few books, my revolver, a blanket. I’m hungry and we’re all bloody buggered.
That sod Chamberlain’s to blame. We all had so much hope. We were cheering Hitler on during the Sudeten Crisis, applauding every act of violence, every ultimatum ignored. We thought, you see, that it’d lead to an alliance against Fascism: the Russians, the Brits and the French. Even the Americans, perhaps. That as Hitler pushed things further and further, the democratic powers (well, and Stalin) would see Fascism for the evil it is (sorry, Es, but there you have it). They’d turn not only on Hitler, but on Franco, Mussolini, Horthy – the whole dark stain wiped from the map. And before you brace yourself for a wiping, take a good look in the mirror. You’re no more a Fascist than I am. Anyone who’s had his cock in my mouth automatically unsubscribes himself from the Fascist Cause. It’s one of life’s little rules.
Now all we have is this welching appeasement – ‘Peace in our time’. There was a real chance for a better world and we blew it. I’m in such a rage, Es, I feel like running up into the hills with my gun and having a go. It’s funny, now that we’re really fighting, now that we can see the Falangists with our field glasses from the look-out on the roof, I don’t feel the least bit windy. Heroism ain’t the word for it either, it’s just a kind of placid acceptance. I’m going to see this out and bugger the consequences.
Charlie’s dead, by the way. We were caught in an ambush on the way out of Valencia. Italian CTV troops. Nothing to be done. He died holding his cricket bat, which I think would’ve made him happy. I lay underneath him and Gonzalo (the boy we’d been travelling with) for an hour, listening to the Italians picking around in our stuff, feeling Charlie’s breathing getting shallower all the time. Gonzalo died immediately. They’d mined the road and the car was flung up and off into a ditch, everything rolling and tumbling and then a volley of machine-gun fire that tore through the car and through Gonzalo, whose body, I think, protected me. Charlie only took one bullet, but it was in the eye. Straight through and out the back. He looked like he was winking, which I felt rotten about as I thought it. They dragged him and Gonzalo out from under the rolled car. I hid beneath a tartan rug. They’d found our stash of whisky in the boot and seemed more interested in that than in us, the bodies.
I waited until darkness and then crept out into the cool air, a waning moon on the water, bats flapping etc. Took me three nights, only travelling by dark, sipping the half-bottle of whisky the Italians left to keep me warm. Finally Barcelona, where the Republicans have made their new capital and everyone is doggedly optimistic, even under this bloody rain.
There are a good number of English here, enough that I’ve organised a few games of cricket in the Plaça in Charlie’s memory. Pathetic sight, me in the rain with a group of five or six scrawny, battered Englishmen crouched around the crease, and me crying so much to think of playing with Charlie in the corridors in Vienna, in the squares in Valencia. I was never much of a cricketer anyway, but I’ll keep playing for his sake, I think. We were in love, you see.
Send me some money, Es. Anything will do. I need to get boiled, stinko, lit up like a church and slopped to the gills, but haven’t a peseta to my name.
Philip.
Welsh Frankton,
Shropshire.
26th November
Darling E –
I haven’t slept a wink since I heard you were coming back for Christmas. Simply too thrilling. Daddy’s the happiest he’s been in years – I swear it. I should imagine the train ride will be splendid – take some good books and fall into some frightfully exotic affair with a White Russian countess. If it were anyone but you having this glamorous time, turning daddy into a nervous schoolgirl and generally being the top of everyone’s toast, I might feel a Small Dash of Envy. As it is, I’m just too, too thrilled for you darling.
Mick Clarke (who has taken over the nutty side of the Party since William Joyce left for Germany) is in a high frenzy over Kristallnacht. His grin is so wide he risks flippi
ng open like a hatbox. He and Mosley are down here for a pow-wow with daddy. They’re arguing over whether the Party should cosy up to Hitler now he’s shown his true colours: daddy is anti, Clarke pro, Mosley increasingly addled and prone to letting Clarke take control. The Times got it right on Germany, for once. It seems as if all the talk of the British Union as the party of peace has been for nothing. Because we should be fighting against the Germans, shouldn’t we? Kristallnacht etc.
At least there’s Christmas. We’ll have masses to catch up on when you’re here. Mother and I went into Chester yesterday and I saw what I want to get you for your present. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s just perfect. Can’t wait to sing carols and roast chestnuts and go for walks in the cold and generally just bask in your company.
Excited oodles,
Anna xxx.
Villa dell’Ombrellino
Piazza di Bellosguardo
Firenze
2/12/38
Dear Harold, Frederick and Esmond,
It is with some sadness that I write to tell you that George and I have decided, when we visit Violet in Sussex this Christmas, to stay with her into the New Year. Whether it’s the position of L’Ombrellino, perched up here custodial of the city, or our own status within Anglo-Florentine society, it is impossible for us to remain. Windows broken at night, the crudest graffiti on the walls, two cooks in a row burgling us of food and plate and the police won’t do a thing about it.