In Love and War

by Alex Preston

  We will, of course, be back eventually, whether after this ghastly looming war or before it. George is still certain we’ll be fighting the Russians. He has dusted off his uniform in anticipation and is wandering around looking fairly brutal.

  We wanted, before we go, to wish you both a great deal of luck, and to thank you for all the entertainment, friendship and joy you have brought to us these past few years. We’ll be leaving many of our possessions here. I’ll send Massimo down with a key – perhaps you’d pop in and make sure the place isn’t overrun with rats or Italians in our absence.

  With love and best wishes,

  Alice and George Keppel.

  La Palme,

  Bast de l’Abbaye,

  Le Colle-sur-Loup,

  Alpes-Maritimes,

  France.

  17th December, ’38

  Dear Esmond –

  Tempus fugit! Know I should have written sooner to thank you for helping with the scrape I got myself into last year. Inexcusable, really, but I’ve been travelling rather a lot. In the hills above Nice now, but got here via Greece, Morocco, Malta and I don’t know where else. Pino has just joined me. His eyes are back working, but he’s grown horribly tubby. Can hardly bear to look at him. We’re working on a book of aphrodisiacal recipes together. Have you ever tried simmered crane? Lambs’ testes? Sow’s vulva? Thought not. All of them dee-lish.

  A lot of blathering about the war. Nothing like an expat community to inspire a gaggle of silly women on the subject of catastrophe. Pino and I intend to stay gracefully here for a few more months before returning to Italy. It’s the only place I feel sane, you see. If there is a war, all the better. The prospect of a gruesome death gives young men a bit of spritz. Don’t go into battle yourself, though, Esmond. It’d be a crime to risk that exquisite phiz.

  How’s the writing coming along? Are you keeping a diary? You’ll thank yourself when it comes to your autobiog. More than that, reading back over the early years of this century in my own tattered journals is one of the few unassailable pleasures left to me. Affreux being alive at this age, I tell you. Pity in the eyes of the sailors by the dock, with their rotten teeth and the reek of bouillabaisse. Better live in the corridors of your own memory. To do that: keep a diary.

  Love to Gerald. Terribly sorry about Fiamma. Rotten luck.

  Norman.

  His father meets him at the train station at Gobowen. He is standing on the platform as the train pulls in, a silk scarf around his neck. He is obscured briefly by a cloud of steam and then reappears, waving his newspaper. He looks old, kind, eager. The Humber is parked in front of the station. Esmond lifts his bag into the back and climbs up beside his father. It is as if the steam from the train follows them onto the road: mist parts as they motor along the narrow lanes, through Whittington with its castle and ugly red church and up the hill to Welsh Frankton.

  His family is waiting at the front door when he arrives: the silhouette of his mother, Rudyard to one side with a dog in his arms, scratching its ear. Anna pushes past her brother and comes running out to the car. Her breath is heavy and hot as she embraces him and he is surprised at his tears. She has lost weight and he lifts her from the ground with ease, pressing their damp cheeks together and spinning on the gravel of the courtyard.

  He’s only here for four days – he and Goad will be broadcasting again on New Year’s Eve – but now, surrounded by his family, with Christmas to look forward to, the evidence of his success in the way his father steers him to the drinks cabinet, sits beside him on the sofa in the library, places his hand on Esmond’s as if to assure himself of his son’s physical presence, he feels weightless, joyous, grown.

  On Christmas Eve, Mosley and Diana arrive, on their way to Wooton Lodge. Everyone seems to want to touch Esmond, to congratulate him, to hear from him some story of his time in Italy that can be theirs. Diana drinks too much at lunch and then sits very close to him on the sofa afterwards. – Kit is so frightfully chuffed, she whispers. This is what she calls Mosley. – Not just with the money, darling, but with the way you’ve made the British Union seem relevant and involved in the great matters of the Continent. She blows cigarette smoke towards him and laughs. She places a hand on his thigh, moving it in languorous strokes until it brushes the tip of his cock. He feels himself reddening, murmurs an excuse and goes to join Anna and Rudyard in the kitchen.

  Mosley grips him by the hand as he leaves. They are all standing in the hallway and he speaks in loud bursts. – Bloody good stuff, Esmond. A man in his father’s image. Knows how to get things done. Make sure you keep it up. We’re all relying on you. Sir Lionel is looking at Esmond with a kind of evangelical glow. His mother comes up behind him and puts a gentle hand on his back. They go out into the courtyard, waving, as Mosley’s car disappears down the drive.

  On Christmas morning they sit around the tree in front of the fire. The day seems to serve nostalgia, newly minted. As he watches his mother tousle Rudyard’s hair, his father unwrap his presents using his arm and his teeth, Anna open the purse he’d bought her on the via Calimala, he begins to miss and grieve for them, as if the picture were gently fading before his eyes. A Jack Russell and a Scottish terrier come bounding in, yapping and worrying the wrapping paper until Rudyard follows, chasing them out.

  Esmond saves his present from Anna until last of all. It is large and square and carefully wrapped in brown paper. He opens a wooden frame around a collage of photographs of the family. He holds it in his lap, smiling, letting himself drift downwards into the scenes she has laid out for him: his mother and father by a piper at Loch Katrine, Anna and him in front of the beech tree at Aston Magna, Rudyard with blood-stained cheeks standing high in his stirrups. Anna comes to sit beside him – It’s simply ripping, old thing, he says. – Thank you.

  He and Anna go for a walk that afternoon. The wind has picked up, shredding the clouds above, letting down barbs of winter sunshine. Three ducks bob on the canal’s glassy back. – How are you? he asks. A faltering of her eyes. – I’m marked for death, she says. Like a character in a motion picture. She laughs and he sees the red-ribbed roof of her mouth. They walk past glumly chewing horses, a pub with smoke drifting from its chimney, the slim elegance of a birch wood. – I live through you, she says. It’s not as sad as it sounds. Each of your letters, it’s like a clear breath. Keep writing them. They stop there and the wind leans into them. She shudders. – I love you, he says, and he realises it’s the truest thing he’s said, perhaps ever. They walk back in silence, arms linked.

  In his room alone later, slightly drunk after an hour in the library with his father, he places the collage on his dresser and pulls up his chair to look at it again. His life appears, tessellated yet suddenly coherent. The three blond children crouched around the crease during a cricket match on the lawn at Aston Magna. Cook is at bat, a set expression on her face as she waits for Sir Lionel to bowl. Esmond and Anna on a carousel in Hyde Park. She must be four or five, her blonde hair spilling out from beneath the dome of a cloche hat. He is behind her on the horse, looking serious and responsible. A line-up of young Blackshirts, Esmond at one end, smaller and blonder than any of the others, his chest out, chin up. Esmond and Anna and Rudyard in the various arrangements of childhood, their father proudly with them, their mother more distant, always looking off as if keen to get on to some urgent appointment. Towards the bottom of the collage, more recent pictures: the pantechnicon van unloading in front of Welsh Frankton; Esmond in a straw boater by the river in Cambridge. In the very centre, the sun around which the other pictures orbit, is a large photograph of Esmond and his father in full British Union uniform, lightning flashes bright on their chests. They are on-stage at the Royal Albert Hall. It was 1934, Sir Lionel’s last great political speech. He’d chosen Esmond to stand with him on the platform beforehand in front of the thousands of faces. – This is my eldest son, he’d said, holding his good arm towards Esmond. – This is who I fought my war for. It’s why I’m here now. To build
a future for young men like Esmond, a future in which there can never be another war like 14–18, a future where honest, decent folk who want to earn a living may do so. We are moving – he’d looked around at the massed ranks of Party members – towards a moment of reckoning. Choose the right side. He seized Esmond’s hand and lifted it into the air. Choose Esmond! The crowd let out a roar, Esmond had tried to force a smile, the camera flashed.

  The next morning, his father comes into his room early. – We decided not to hunt, he says – Really? Esmond sits on the side of his bed. – I know you can’t bear it. You’re our guest of honour. Sir Lionel goes to look at the collage on the dresser. – We lost her for hours making this. Covered herself in glue. I’d forgotten that photograph, you and me at the rally. It’s rather good, isn’t it? He comes to sit beside Esmond on the bed. – Things aren’t as easy as they might seem back here, he says. I fear Mosley’s made some bad decisions. Circumstances are moving against us. Your mother and I–– There have been rows. She’s been talking to Diana, to Mick Clarke, all of them helping to clarify my faults. I simply won’t have us allied with the Germans. Mosley’s still on my side, most days.

  He’s looking down at his hand, frowning. – Your success, Esmond, it gives me the advantage in these negotiations for the future of the Party. That we can forge a future that is cultured, civilised, peaceful. I point to the fact that Radio Firenze is ten times more successful – in numbers and in contribution to Party funds – than these lunatic broadcasts coming out of Heligoland and Sark. He stands, ruffling Esmond’s hair. It also gives me hope, he says, to have you, my eldest son, out there, making a difference. It helps me believe there’s a future worth hanging around for.

  They all come to see him off at the station. The collage, back in brown paper and string, is on the seat of his compartment. He presses his face to the upper window as the train moves off and he sees the four of them standing there, Anna with her arm around their mother, who is inexplicably crying, his father waving furiously, Rudyard kneeling down with a dog and looking on. It strikes him, as the train gathers speed and moves out of sight, that Rudyard’s eyes are the mirror of his own, identical in shape and shade. He sits down, pulls out The Brothers Karamazov, and begins to read.

  [Postcard from Lyme Regis]

  31st January

  Dearest E –

  Presume you’ve heard about Auden and Isherwood going off to America. Father is over the moon, as you can imagine. Proves that the younger gen of leftie writers has no spine. It is rather feeble of them, don’t you think? To flee when we need writers, poets, men and women who can make sense of the world. I was reading Auden after you left. I thought: a poet is a stranger who knows one’s secrets.

  One of daddy’s friends suggested I take the seaside air for my asthma. It’s frightful here. The unanimous elderly, wandering along the front as if they might walk themselves away from death. Luscious to see you at Xmas. Do come back more often.

  Brisk, deep-lunged oodles,

  Anna xxx.

  Faber & Faber

  24 Russell Square,

  London, WC1

  4th February, 1939.

  Dear Esmond,

  I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. I’m very much aware that you’ve been waiting for a reply and it is inexcusable that it has taken us these months to come to a decision.

  I’m afraid the war passages haven’t much improved as far as I can see. It’s as if, as soon as Hulme crosses the Channel, a veil comes up over him and your ability to feel your way into his experience evaporates. It’s really very sad. I showed this to Tom Eliot – to make sure I wasn’t being blind – and he agreed wholeheartedly. It’s difficult for a writer your age to capture something so raw, so violent, so far outside his own space. Has your father read it? What does he think?

  There’s also the problem of a certain resistance within some parts of the company to publish an author so closely associated in many minds with the Fascists. Things have changed in the national atmosphere since I first read In Love and War. Since we became aware of the horrors executed by the National Socialists, the bloodiness of Mussolini’s regime (so wonderfully set out in Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara – have you read it?), it feels like a madness to publish a novel which – if we look behind the curtain of the fiction – is the elevation of a Fascist (or proto-Fascist) to a position of mythic heroism.

  I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. You’re still very young and do please send me your work as it develops.

  Sincerely,

  Richard de la Mare.

  Via dei Forbici, 35c

  Firenze

  17.2.39

  Dear Esmond –

  A thousand thanks for your visit. I know that Ada put you up to it, and I know what a miserable and pathetic creature I must seem, but to have had everything ripped away from me like this–– My good friend Friedrich Kriegbaum, from the Kunsthistorisches Institut, visited the night before last and I could barely stand to have him in the house. ‘The annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ It is shameful. It is as if I was walking in darkness and suddenly a light of impossible brightness has been shone upon me. I am blinded again, but this time it is the force of the light that has taken away my sight.

  I’m not sure what will happen to me, Esmond. I wrote some ill-advised letters in my madness. I wrote to Il Duce himself, I wrote to the German Consul, I think I even wrote to Herr Hitler. If the worst should occur, look after Ada for me. Her mother has travelled north to stay with relatives in Switzerland. I’m determined not to be chased out of this city I love, but I may have little choice in the matter. I couldn’t bear it if my idiocy should lead to something awful happening to Ada.

  With my apologies for my weakness and stupidity,

  Guido Liuzzi.

  Telegram: 7/4/39

  Anna condition serious STOP At John Radcliffe seeing specialist STOP Your mother with her STOP Will keep you posted STOP

  [Various invitations to concerts associated with the Maggio Musicale: Beethoven at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Tosca at the Teatro Verdi (sponsored by Piaggio), Bach at the British Institute, a string quartet hosted by Bernard Berenson at I Tatti.]

  He sits in the grand drawing room at Berenson’s house, I Tatti, and tries to concentrate on the music. It is Haydn and the string quartet is very good, but he is thinking only of Anna. It was clear she was fighting at Christmas, desperate not to let him see her discomfort, and by the end of his visit was snatching gulps of breath, slinking off for rests in the early afternoon, pausing in the middle of their conversations to collect herself. He wonders if perhaps she might come out to Florence to join him. But war feels so close, so inevitable.

  Ada is beside him. She’s wearing a dark green dress, long earrings with jade stones. Her pale arms grip the chair beneath her as she sways to the music. She hums so softly that only he can hear. When the movement finishes, she turns to him, clasps her hands to her chest and begins to applaud.

  Welsh Frankton

  Shropshire

  26th April

  Dear Esmond –

  Anna is back home. It seems as if it was a false alarm, or that the treatment at the John Radcliffe worked. Sorry if my telegram alarmed you. She’s rather frail, but she’s being a good brave girl. Rudyard has been wheeling her around the garden in her bath chair – it’s bloody sweet, really.

  Looks like another war is inevitable. I read a historian in The Spectator who has identified only twenty-nine years since the Roman Empire when a war wasn’t being fought somewhere in the world. We lurch from crisis to crisis and we learn nothing from history.

  You asked in your letter what I could tell you about the last war, the first war, as I suppose we should learn to call it. About Hulme. I’m glad you’ve stuck on with your novel, sorry that Faber turned it down. (Perhaps we could set up a Fascist Press – not a bad idea!) Hulme was a brute, a gent, a genuine conservative. He was a bloody good friend and I was undone when he died. As
for my war, it was a nightmare, but the worst part is that nothing since – not politics, not sex, not hunting, nothing – has lived up to it. The real horror, Esmond, is that I’m not still there, that life will never have the same sheen, quite the purpose it had in those days.

  If you ever find yourself fighting, remember this one thing: anger is stronger than fear. It was only years after the war ended, when I stopped being angry, that I began to feel afraid. Remember that and you’ll make a fine soldier.

  Give my regards to Goad.

  Your mother sends her love,

  Your father.

  Tombland,

  Norwich.

  23rd May ’39.

  Dear Esmond –

  Sit tight! I’ll be back at the end of the week when we can put our heads together and try to work out what this all means. In the interim you should be in loco presbyter, helping the lame dogs over stiles. Remember: we’re not at war yet. Mussolini is a strong, fine leader and we’ll have to trust that this Pact of Steel he’s signed with Hitler is a piece of political theatre.

  The funeral was as funerals are: dispiriting to see the reduction of a fine life into so many platitudes. I read ‘This I know: that my avenger lives’ from the Book of Job. Stood a few hairs on end. Sad to say goodbye to mother, but all flesh, etc.

  If anything comes up, ask Goad.

  Best of British,

  Bailey.

  He is lying back in the pool at L’Ombrellino, looking up through the leaves of the camphor tree. He’d come up to check on the place for George and Alice Keppel, but the walk up the hill was so tiring, the abandoned rooms of the villa so stuffy and smothering, that he’d run past the box hedges of the upper terrace, down the steps and between the two dodos before he could think, shedding his clothes along the path as he went.