by Alex Preston
If he can just stretch his arm out a little further, he thinks, he’ll be able to grab hold of Gerald’s ankle, touch one of Fiamma’s slim limbs. He wonders if the water holds some trace of them: fragments of Fiamma’s skin, microscopic, etherised. He takes a mouthful of water and spits it out in a green arc. There is also the present: the water murky with weed, slightly malodorous but still deliciously cool. Cypress cones float about him like miniature wooden roses. They look like love. He is in love. Hopeless, unrequited love. He grins. There’s something unseemly in it, with the coming war, with Anna’s illness, it feels improper to be lying back here in the water smiling like a child, but he is in love.
She is not beautiful; she is older than him and in his company she is distant and professional. She has given him no sign that she views him as anything other than an employer, a Fascist; certainly not a friend, never a lover. She doesn’t know that he’s been lying to the increasingly officious Interior Ministry functionaries about her, using his friendship with Pavolini, his letter from Mussolini to make sure she remains unmolested. There are rumours that the Jews will be made to wear yellow stars, to live in a ghetto up above Rifredi. There are camps being built in the south, so the whispers say, trains heading north from stations in the Friuli, rounding up Jews who’ve fled from Germany, from Austria, sending them back where they came from. He will keep her from all of this.
During the broadcasts, he watches her when she’s not looking. – Ada, he whispers above the sound of the crickets – Ada. He’s spent his life turning over stones, looking in rockpools, for someone like her. She has been in front of him for more than a year. There is something upright and idealistic and whole to her that makes him want to lay his hands upon her, to build a shell around her with his arms. He lies back in the water of the swimming pool as the air begins to darken above him and the wind stirs the fingers of the pines. In the hesitant evening he basks in the gorgeous restlessness of his love for her. – Ada.
De Koning van Spanje,
Korte Nieuwstraat 12,
Antwerp.
19th June.
Dear Esmond,
We write with bad news. Philip was killed in Spain on the 23rd of December last year. We have been moving around a great deal and have only just had the information ourselves. Amongst his affairs there were several of your letters and instructions to let you know in the event of anything happening to him. I’m aware that you two were terribly close at Cambridge and I’m sorry to bear news that must come as a shock.
We had a letter from General Walter, the leader of the XIV International Brigade under which Philip served for much of his time in Spain. It appears the death was somewhat heroic. He held a machine-gun emplacement in Les Borges Blanques for six hours, single-handed, as the Falangists swarmed over the area. He was on a small hill in the centre of a grove of olives and, when he was finally overwhelmed, he turned his gun upon himself rather than be captured. A great soldier, General Walter told us, fearless and loyal.
We blame ourselves for Philip being in Spain. We had arranged to meet him in Lisbon, but I wanted to leave Europe as soon as possible. I got us a berth on a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro that struck rocks off the Azores. We spent several months attempting to get safe passage onwards from Ponta Delgada, but finally we were returned to Lisbon. With almost the last of the money we carried with us from Austria, we procured a cabin on the MS St Louis, a German ship, to Cuba. We were denied landing in Havana, then in Florida, where we might have swum ashore, so close were we to the beaches. Now we are back in Antwerp, penniless and without hope, to find that our only son is dead. Life can be cruel.
Thank you for the friendship you showed to Philip. We hope that, whatever dark days lie ahead, you continue to flourish.
Martin and Liesl Keller.
Berchtesgadener Hof Hotel
Berchtesgaden
Germany
29th June 1939
Dear Esmond –
I have left your father. I imagine you picked up on the coolness between us while you were there at Christmas, but since then things have deteriorated significantly and I felt I needed to make a Break for Freedom. I married your father for his courage and his conviction; in recent months he is short of both. I have been living too long in the shadow of a man I no longer respect. These must be hard things for you to hear, but I wanted to explain to you why I, too, have left England.
Ever since our first trip to National Socialist Germany, back in the bright days of the spring of ’35, I have felt strongly that the Führer had a vision of the future that would shape the Fate of the World. My visits with Mosley and Diana, and more recently on my own, have only confirmed this. We are moving into a Nazi Future and men like your father who try to resist this will be left behind.
I’m sure it must have seemed cruel to you, the burning of your books, your manuscript. I wanted to explain it to you at the time, but I knew your father would have thought it absurd. There is another Great War coming. Germany has been preparing since 1933, it will draw upon all the resources of Mitteleuropa, it has the kind of Deep Ideological Conviction its opponents lack. By the end of 1940, all Europe will be German, soon after, all of the globe will fly the Glorious Swastika. I burnt your degenerate books, your limp-wristed writing because I knew the risk they’d pose for you in the coming years. (I suggest you burn this letter, too.) We – the British Union, those of us who have remained faithful to the cause – will be at the forefront of Nazi Britain and we can’t have bad eggs amongst us. I hope you see that, Esmond.
Diana, Unity and I are in Berchtesgaden. I’m going to dinner at the Kelsteinhaus tonight. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. I feel like I’m breathing for the first time in my life, up here in the mountains. Don’t worry about your father – he has Anna to look after, his losing battle against the Tides of History to fight. I never really felt I knew my children, but I loved you. I hope you know that.
Heil Hitler!
Your Mother.
Telegram: 13/7/39
Many thanks for your generous wire STOP This has saved us from a most difficult time STOP We will repay you once these dark days are over STOP Martin and Liesl Keller
Royal Shrewsbury Infirmary,
Salop.
24/7/39
Darling E –
Everyone rather glum over mother leaving. Did she write to you? I can’t think she was terribly good to us, but I do miss her. Every evening now, daddy goes for mournful gallops across the countryside with the dogs. Not hunting, but still looking for something I think, in the copses, along the banks of the canal. He comes back covered in mud, looking provoked.
In the hospital, am on a new machine that does some of my breathing for me. Wonder when it’ll be that machines take over all our vital functions and we’re left sitting out infinity with only our various looks of unease to distinguish us. Sounds frightfully dull to me. Put myself in here by going for a long walk beside the canal two nights ago. It was damp and I wasn’t well-enough wrapped up but O the joy of it, striding along taking great lungfuls of air and watching clouds rush across the sky and feeling peppy for the first time in an age. Daddy doesn’t know how to talk to the nurses like mother did. He’s far too polite.
Sorry to hear Faber won’t take In Love and War. Bloody bastards. Don’t know a good thing when they see it. There are other publishers, you know – I do wish you’d send me a copy. I know you think it’s too filthy for my young eyes, but I promise I’d skip over the really grubby bits.
Daddy’s frightfully keen you should come home before the war starts. It would be super to have you, although I’ve no doubt he’d meet you off the train and march you straight down to the Knightsbridge barracks to enlist. Don’t go and get killed, darling. It would be too beastly of you.
Cough oodles cough,
Anna xxx.
Via dei Forbici, 35c
Firenze
12.8.39
Dear Esmond,
I am now going north – to Turin.
It is said they are not implementing their vile laws with the same rigidity up there. Ettore Ovazza even claims he can find me work, perhaps. I will not flee to Switzerland just yet. Ada says she will stay here and I cannot persuade her otherwise. Look after her, perhaps bring some dinner over every now and again. She tends not to eat enough. I will write to her, and to you, often. I wish that she would come with me, but she says she belongs here, that she is a Florentine. It is with great sadness that I leave her, and this city.
With very best wishes and thanks,
Guido Liuzzi.
Welsh Frankton
Shropshire
26th August.
Dear Esmond,
I thought I’d sit down and write while our conversation was still fresh in my mind. It’s also an excuse to lock myself away in the library for an hour and not deal with the ghastly necessities of death – funeral invitations and readings and notes from well-wishers. The house is like a florist’s – bouquets on every table, pollen staining every carpet. Your mother has come back, of course, but she’s flying out again on the 30th. She’s frantic not to be trapped in England when the show starts. Odd to have her around the house again – we’d been rather getting used to life without her.
You were very brave on the telephone; I’m sorry I didn’t hold up my end quite so well. Anna loved you best of all, you know. You’re right that we should feel blessed to have had her in our lives as long as we did. I keep telling myself this in the hope it’ll comfort me. Not yet. So far it’s just a terrible sense that everything dear has reeled away from me. Your mother, Anna, the Party, the peaceful world I thought I was serving to build. Must be difficult to know that your father’s a failure, old chap, but the evidence is there for all to see.
Come home for the funeral, Esmond. Your brother needs you here. We all do. You don’t want to be scurrying over with every other Tom, Dick and Harriet when war’s declared – push off now, know that you’ve made a real contribution over the past few years and move on. I could get you into the Guards. Damned fine kit they have – you could do much worse. You’d be sure to see battle early on and that’s important with a war. Get out early and see a few bullets – you never know when it might all be over.
I’m afraid the Party’s more or less finished. Smashed on the rocks of history. I thought the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact might turn a few within the Party my way, might make them see that the Nazis are the enemy every bit as much as the Reds. Joyce and Clarke and now, alas, Mosley and your mother have turned the British Union into Nazis, tout court. With the stories about what’s happening to the Jews in the work camps, the rounding up of innocent civilians, the stench of evil settling over Germany, they’ve simply hitched their cart to the wrong horse. Mosley is still making noises about peace, about the need to avoid another Ypres, another Somme, but our time is passing.
Wind things up and come back home, Esmond – it’s the right thing to do. It’s time for you to be the soldier you were meant to be. If not for me, do it for Anna.
I send you my love,
Your Father.
He stands with Ada on the Ponte Santa Trinità, his elbows on the parapet wall, crying into the water below. He feels himself unravelling with each breath, his spirit unstitching itself, dissolving into the yellow Arno. Ada has her hand on his shoulder. She is saying something, but he can’t understand her, can only see her lips move through the blur of his tears. He takes her in his arms and they stand there, and she feels bone-thin and so like Anna that he wonders for a moment if he will go mad. He wonders how much sorrow a mind can take – Anna, Philip, Fiamma – before it will no longer move through the world and sleeps in its own dark reaches.
Carità is marching on the north bank of the river. Fifty men in yellow fezzes, a squad of Fascist Youth, a band playing the Fascist anthem, ‘Giovinezza’. All goose-stepping loyally after him, this short-trousered messiah, whip in his hand, high voice reaching even over the music. – Me ne frego! Vincere e vinceremo! Viva Il Duce! Esmond sobs against Ada, watching the marching through his tears. Now that England and Germany are at war, the MVSN seem louder and more urgent, as do the Fascist politicians who stand on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio each afternoon speaking about the coming crisis, the need for a violent shock to Anglo-American hegemony. There’d been gunshots the night Britain declared war on Germany, fireworks over the Piazza della Signoria.
Esmond sees that Carità is leading the procession over the bridge towards them. Like a column of ants they stamp round the corner from the Lungarno and make their way up the curved cobbles. Esmond and Ada press themselves to the wall; he draws a sleeve across his face, swallows a sob. When Carità is level with them, he points his whip, leering. – Soon, he says in English. – Very soon. They march on, the bridge juddering under their footsteps. The teenage soldiers of the Fascist Youth look scornfully at them as they pass. They can still hear the music, the heartbeat thud of the bass drum, long after the parade has disappeared towards the Palazzo Pitti.
Ada takes him in her arms again and he hugs her back very hard, thinking it so fiercely he’s sure she can hear: I won’t lose you.
Recordings. St Mark’s English Church
FLORENCE, 1939–1941
(transcribed by Ada Liuzzi)
1. A-Side: Harold Goad and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss the building and authorship of the Ponte Santa Trinità (29′ 23″)
B-Side: ‘This is not a diary. Douglas always said I should keep a diary, record everything. Everything is interesting, he used to say. Get it down. I don’t believe him. I want to forget.
Nor is this an attempt at auto-psycho-analysis, to file my despair with Anna and Philip’s letters and Fiamma’s snood which, in the days after her death, found its way into my bedroom, I’ve no idea how.
The only thing to do with unwieldy objects is burn them, the only thing to do with a memory is tug it around like a fusty dog until you’re forgiven for tying a brick around its neck and drowning it.
I realised something last night: the discs we record onto, that make up our archive – and what a grandiose word that is for these programmes, which, as I listen to them, strike me as half-baked twaddle. People listen to this because they are charmed by the idea of an outpost of Englishness in Italy, because they visited Florence on some ghastly tour they saw advertised at the back of the Daily Mail and they think we’re guardians of Anglo-Italian culture.
Where was I? Oh yes, the discs. We’ve only been recording on one side. So I’ve begun this little memorandum on the other. It’s comforting to think they’ll stay here in Florence, in a box in the British Institute, or packed into Ada’s attic. And maybe she will, on a whim, very late one night and rather tragic, dig me out, hear my voice and be filled with me. Who would have believed the curved cornet of our direct-to-disc-recorder could be a time-travelling device?
I’ll be long gone, in a rum shack by a beach somewhere, or teaching at a frowsty colonial university – Wollongong, perhaps. I’m going to make old bones, you’ll see, crawl out of Europe, the dark continent.
Perhaps she’ll be with me, Ada. Although there doesn’t seem much chance of that now. After practically heaving me over her shoulder after Anna’s death, the barricades went straight back up. Every move I make towards her, she bats away. So I’m here, in a funk, mixing metaphors, leading a circumscribed, spinsterish life, writing postcards into the void.
Three, four, five – that’s the bell of Santo Spirito you hear. I’m going to open the shutters a bit. There’s the faintest glimmer of dawn out in the square. We’re having an Indian summer. It’s been like ’14 – peace before the nightmare. Although it’s beginning to look like it might never start here. We expected Musso to jump straight into bed with Hitler, to invade France, or Greece, or Britain. But it’s all gone rather quiet – Il Duce is busying himself with Albania, thumbing his nose to Adolf and his war games to the north. Perhaps Italy and Spain really won’t join in, perhaps Stalin will realise Hitler is a bigger monster than the one that g
reets him in the mirror each morning. Good night, whoever you are. I’m shattered.’
2. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes and Bernard Berenson discuss symbolism in Primavera by Botticelli (27′ 33″)
B-Side: ‘I’ve been trying to isolate the part of my mind where Anna, Philip and Fiamma dwell and close it down, like an aeroplane with an engine on fire. The pilot shuts it off, hoping to glide home safely on the one that remains. Still, my eyes are drawn to the flames on the wing.
I had another letter from my father. The folly of me staying on here, how I’ve shirked my duty, the essential uselessness of what I’m doing given that the British Union is all but wound up. Circumstances have overtaken them. Pa says he’s already spoken to his pal Major-General Fuller about getting me into the Guards. He’s tried to sign up himself, but there’s not much call for a one-armed fifty-four-year-old. Yet. I haven’t answered his letter.
It feels like when I was first in Florence. The warmth has given way to rain. There’s no one around. Bloody lonely. Having Ada here every day is too frightful. The way she looks at me as she stands at the door at the end of the evening, her brolly in one hand, already half in the rain. Every time, I dare myself to say Wait! but I never do. I think, secretly, I’m rather enjoying the part of tormented lover. It takes my mind off Philip, off Anna, off the more weathered scars left by Fiamma, and all that was lost in ’37. Love is a splendid distraction from despair.
I’m recording this on the other side of a discussion Bernard Berenson and I had today. Amazing that he’s still here – although he arrived in Florence before the 1919 cut-off, so he’s legit. Still, I’d be feeling a bit exposed if I were one of the most famous Jews in the country. I went up to I Tatti for dinner after we’d recorded the show. Strange set-up. I mean, with the wife and secretary and the very obvious tension, but the art makes up for it. Gloriousness on every wall – Pollaiolo, Lorenzetti, Sassetta. Ada came with me, she took my hand as we went through Poggio Gherardo, the city glowing below us. It was astonishing what the mere feel of her hand in mine did – little electrical explosions moving all the way up my arm, across my body. Douglas was right: Fascism is just a refuge from the powerlessness of love.