In Love and War

by Alex Preston

  The talk at the Berensons’ was all of the war, of how Italy won’t be ready for combat for at least another three years. No automotive industry, an agricultural economy. They’ll have to sit it out with the tea and oranges, as pa would say, as the north falls apart. It looks to be a lengthy thing, none of that Panglossian “It’ll be over by Christmas” stuff this time.

  There was a moment last night, as we came down from the hills into the first streets by lamplight, and a group of working men sat around a wireless on the viale Augusto Righi, when I was suddenly aware of the fact she was Jewish. It’s perhaps all this talk of what’s going on in Germany, in Poland, the camps holding people to whom – even though she says she doesn’t believe in God – she must feel some sort of link. Perhaps it was that we were arm-in-arm in public. I tried talking to her about it, but she’s got this way of turning a corner when the conversation is delicate. There’s a sad secret in her smile, but I’m buggered if I know what it is.

  After I dropped Ada off at her apartment, I cooled my heels on the street and watched her lights go on. I imagined her sitting reading late, preparing material, stretched out on the divan in her father’s study. Her sadness reflects my own. I wish we could be sad together, but she doesn’t seem to have any need for contact, at least not mine. She’s the most island-like person I’ve ever met. I sat in the church and looked at the triptych tonight when I got back and I kept seeing her face in Mary Magdalene’s. Both of them hard, reedy, faraway. I’m so tired. Still a little drunk from dinner. I think I’ll go to bed. G’night, whoever-you-are. I may haunt you yet, so speak kindly of me.’

  3. A-Side: Harold Goad and Alessandro Pavolini discuss the life and poetry of Gabriele d’Annunzio (27′ 54″)

  B-Side: ‘Should I be dating these missives from the past? I rather think not. I like to picture you piecing the chronology together from my summation of the war elsewhere, a war which feels so daydreamish and unlikely when I climb up through the stairways, ladders, trap-doors and corridors and then out onto the palazzo’s flat roof. I look over the river, towards the dome of the cathedral, and the stories of submarine battles and massacred Poles and bombs dropped on Scottish harbours seem like the work of a very slender imagination indeed, somebody’s rejected novel.

  It is the 23rd of October. It is a Monday night. A Tuesday morning. The 24th of October. I’ve grown rather sleepy. Not now, I don’t mean, even though it’s two and I’m unable to lie still let alone drop off. I’m in the studio in bare feet, recording this in my pyjamas. I’ve just fallen into a state of lethargy – the more everyone tells me to go, even Bailey now, and Goad, the more my father showers me with letters containing, some of them, ripe old nicknames – the more I feel happy here. I’ve begun to think a healthy and successful life depends on a kind of accomplished ignorance of good advice. I don’t want to be heroic; I want to stay in Florence, look after Ada, read books. I consider the balance between hope and memory that shifts and tilts over the course of a life, giving different reasons for carrying on. At the moment, it feels like I don’t have enough of either.

  The palazzo is more complex than I’d imagined. I keep finding new passageways, hidden doors, empty rooms that feel just-left – perhaps the ghost of Machiavelli. Stairways cut through the building like rock strata; some end in brick walls, but usually they lead out onto the roof, where I like to sit and watch the tiles of the city crest and fall like a terracotta wave, collecting the last sun before winter. Occasionally, at night, I hear things: mumbling voices, a child crying. The voices of the Florentine dead? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous, or at least no more ridiculous than anything else. If God is an artist, we might accept that we are preliminary sketches. Good night.’

  4. A-Side: Harold Goad and Esmond Lowndes discuss T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (25′ 41″)

  B-Side: ‘Rudyard has signed up! I can hardly believe he’s old enough, but we’ve all been ageing recently. I’m twenty-two now, which means Rudyard’s eighteen. That seems impossible, but not unlikely. He took the bus into Shrewsbury on his birthday and signed up then and there. He’s a common foot soldier in the 7th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment. Father’s awfully proud. I imagine he’ll make rather a fine squaddie. He can handle a gun, has the kind of pluck that comes from never being wholly of this world. I always got the impression he lived without an internal narrative, or at least no more than What a jolly hunt! and I love shooting! and Dogs are faithful friends. I realised that all the images that come to my mind when I say the name Rudyard are outside, distant, bloody. He was always the one on horseback, wheeling a fox’s severed brush around his head, galloping off to mete out death to some small, innocent thing. Excluded from the love that Anna and I wrapped around each other, he was thrown together with my father, and into that world of hunting, heroism and intransitive rage. He’ll enjoy the war.

  Father’s letters have gone from angry to ominous. Of course it doesn’t help that he’s alone now in that mournful house, only Cook for company. His last one said he was thinking of commandeering a Wellington from RAF Shawbury and flying over himself to collect me. He still seems to think it’s practicalities that are holding me up. Or he thinks I feel some misplaced loyalty to the Party that I need to keep up Radio Firenze for the sake of the cause. Alas it’s just that I’m in love, and a coward. I’ve stopped answering his letters, although I keep collecting cash from the advertisers, wiring it over when I remember.

  Ada’s father has been attempting to persuade her to come and join him in Turin, up there where he’s near enough to the Swiss border to get out if need be. When I try to talk more generally with her about what was happening to the Jews, how she feels about it, she just casts off again. That distance she has, nothing can get behind it. It’s an emotional Maginot Line. She’d make a virtuoso torturer – I wake up exhausted and ashamed, empty of my secrets, and happy. I don’t know what I’d do if she left. Throw myself from the Ponte Santa Trinità, I expect.

  Bailey has been back to the UK again. Spying, no doubt. In his kitchen, he has a map of the world spread out on the table with different-coloured toy soldiers for the Germans and French and Brits. It has become an evening’s fun for us to read the newspapers together and arrange the troops. My Italian’s fairly decent now – still a frightful accent, but posso farmi comprendere, posso leggere i giornale. I miss Bailey when he’s away. Hey! There – did you hear that? More noises in the roof. If it’s not ghosts, then it’s rats. I should set out traps, or poison. There’s certainly something peculiar about this place.

  I found a glove on one of the stairs, a lady’s glove. It’s not Ada’s – hers are red, scuffed. This is small and black and exquisite. I can’t imagine Bailey had invited in a lady-friend. Uncanny. G’night.’

  5. A-Side: ‘Filippo and Filippino Lippi – A Son in His Father’s Shadow’, a talk by Esmond Lowndes (27′ 30″)

  B-Side: ‘Happy Christmas. It’s snowing outside the window. There’s no heating in the palazzo, but I’ve lit a fire and I’m wrapped up like a Sherpa: scarf, hat, tweed jacket, two pairs of socks. I’m actually quite warm. It’s been a bugger of a Christmas Day.

  We lunched at Goad’s. We all squeezed into the sad little flat they’ve let him keep on the ground floor of the Palazzo Arcimboldi, now the Institute is no more. He greeted us at the door of his burrow, and he seemed so genuinely happy to see us, and so small and tired it was all I could do not to drown him with tears. Gerald is over for a week. He’s losing his hair. A bald patch the size of a quail’s egg in the centre of his scalp. He looks terribly serious and business-like. He’s working at Lloyds Bank. Just like Eliot. After a few drinks, though, he shrugged off the mien of the busy capitalist and was something like his old self. There was still just a shadowiness around him, though. He seems disappointed, shifty somehow.

  Ada and Bailey and Reggie Temple joined us for lunch. It was almost merry, to start off with. A rag-tag family pulling Smith’s crackers that Gerald brought over. Goose roasted in Goad’s little kitchen
. A pudding that wouldn’t light no matter what we poured on it. I think I drank too much grappa. Became a tad maudlin at the end, raising my glass to the dead ones, singing “Auld Lang Syne”, sending Ada long, doleful glances.

  We played charades all afternoon until Reggie fell asleep in a chair and Goad and Bailey started arguing about the war. So Gerald and Ada and I went out to walk about the city in our galoshes, looking at the ice floes in the Arno, the bright windows of the shops on the via de’ Corsi, snow settling on the cathedral: heavily around the lantern and then thinning out to a dusting as the roof slopes. I have a picture in my mind of the three of us, standing in the empty square looking up at the spiralling snow, the scab-coloured roof glowing beneath it. It felt like being with Fiamma, but now we look older and wounded.

  Ada went home and Gerald and I found the bar of the Excelsior open, and we sat on the high stools and drank. The longer we sat there, the easier it was to see Gerald as he had been a year and a half earlier: dashing, rather dangerous. Sexful, as they used to say. We came out of the hotel drunk and it was dark, our footsteps squeaking on the snow. An icy corridor of wind swept down the Lungarno and we burrowed into our overcoats. It reminded me of Philip and the rain storm in Grantchester, and I suppose for that reason I kissed Gerald below the statue of Justice at the end of the via delle Terme. His breath was sour, and there was something too ardent and grateful in the way he kissed me back. I broke off quickly and said goodbye. I stood on the Ponte Santa Trinità until I was frozen sober, thoroughly depressed.

  I came back to the church and tried to work on the novel, but it all seemed predictable and tiresome. So now I’m here, earlier than usual, speaking to you. Happy Christmas, whoever-you-are. I’m off to sleep with my hangover.’

  6. A-Side: ‘Dante Today – the Enduring Legacy of the Divine Comedy’, a lecture by Alessandro Pavolini (31′ 51″)

  B-Side: ‘Bailey’s obsessed by the Finnish campaign. More by the pluck of the Finns than anything. The way they simply won’t give up, even with the aerial bombardments, the tanks, the Russians’ vastly superior numbers. We’re all cheering them on, but I can’t think they’ll be able to hold out much longer. I have an image of them: mostly blond, snow-dusted men with blue eyes and unpronounceable names skiing in white fatigues through the endless Arctic night. Rudyard is in France, digging in around the Maginot Line. He wrote me a card – thoroughly censored, of course. He sounds like a man, even in those few words. I wish I’d known him better when we were young. It made me think how alliances form in families, how Anna and I were so close we pushed the others away. I still miss her almost every day. It seems absurd that she should be dead and not there, in her room, waiting for me. That someone so abounding with kindness should act so pitilessly as to die.

  Pavolini came to see Goad and me today, ostensibly to record his thoughts on Dante’s legacy in contemporary European poetry – actually rather interesting – but in fact to issue instructions about our broadcasts. He’s seen the success William Joyce is having in Germany – Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen they call him there – and he wants us to mirror it. To become a propaganda mouthpiece for Musso. The way he put it to us was that Il Duce is certain to get into the war at some point; he’s like a hunter waiting for the optimum moment to shoot; and that we need to make up our minds now which side we’re on when Italy squares up to Britain. Goad and I sat on for a long time after he left. One of Pavolini’s requirements was that we give over a half-hour every day to PNF propaganda that he will script for us. Justifications of the war in Abyssinia, praise for the Italian military machine, hagiographies of Il Duce. I’ve heard the Joyce broadcasts and there’s not a chance we’d do something like that, but Pavolini is an intelligent man. Certainly no one who knows Dante like he does, who writes so delicately about poetry and music, can be all bad.

  We’ve agreed we’ll see how it goes – there’s no gain in shutting things down before we see quite how invasive he’ll be. After Goad left, I stood in the studio looking out at the piazza getting rained on. My father wrote me one last letter, cutting me off. As far as he’s concerned I’m no longer his son. If I won’t be a warrior, I no longer deserve the name Lowndes. It draws a line under things, I suppose.

  If only it wasn’t so very clear what’ll happen to me if I go back. A hair-raising voyage aboard some submarine-stalked ship, a few days at home with the ghost of Anna in every room, then to London with my pa, fitted out at Gieves’, on the train at Victoria and pow! a bullet in the brain a week or – worse – a year later. I went down to the church after dinner. I turned on the altar lights and sat looking at the triptych for an hour or so. I feel crumpled, hollowed out, like those three figures in the painting. It’s as if Florence has seen me go from a boy who could feel sensuous about Primavera and The Birth of Venus to a man who can only relate to withered creatures. Don’t think I’m not ashamed of my fear: I am. I feel like a bloody hole. But shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling. Perhaps it will push me into action.

  I saw crocuses growing in the Cascine today. Spring is on its way. Good night.’

  7. A-Side: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: a consideration by Harold Goad (28′ 28″)

  B-Side: ‘The war is utterly confounding. Even Bailey seems to have given up moving his figures around the kitchen table. There’s mushroom sauce across Scandinavia, a blob of passata in the waters of the Indian Ocean. I’ve been learning how to cook – we’d grown bored with eggs on toast. All we had as far as cookbooks were concerned was Douglas’s collection of aphrodisiacal recipes, but I’m now able to fashion a passable pastasciutta, an encouraging gnocchi al ragù, a frankly hopeful cinghiale salsa agrodolce. I’ve converted Bailey to wine. He was teetotal when I turned up and now we get through a bottle of Chianti most evenings. I’ve started broadcasting Pavolini’s propaganda. Generally fairly tame stuff, but today there was something on the Manifesto of Racial Scientists. It wasn’t too evil, just the usual guff linking the Jews to the Reds who are disrupting the factories, how there will now be stricter curfews. They wanted us to get Guido Landra, their pet eugenicist on, but Goad drew the line.

  All the time I was reading it, I was watching Ada’s face. That cold angularity, the way her eyes leave and she follows. I shiver to look at her when she gets like that. It became harder and harder to read the words. I realised how much power there is in those bureaucratic phrases, in the canted, abstract language of the State. I felt, with the suddenness of instinct, that the words I was reading meant something concrete, that translated into actions by Blackshirt thugs on the streets of Turin or Naples, into education or medication denied to Jewish children, into the concentration camp they’re building in Campagna. That speech carried a dreadful weight, a weight that would finally fall on Ada’s shoulders. I felt my throat closing up, choking off the words as I read them. I barely got through it. When I reached the end, silence like a fog came over us, and I felt as if I’d just carried out some atrocity, some appalling crime as I read. Ada got up from the sound desk and practically ran. I went after her, heard Goad following me. Her footsteps echoed down the stairwell, then the clatter of the wicket gate.

  I finally caught up with her at the midpoint of the Ponte Santa Trinità. She was running very quickly. It must have been six – people were walking home from their jobs, standing around in the spring sunlight, watching the fishermen on the Arno. To stop her, I put my arms around her, and she was heaving with sobs, tears streaming down her freckled blue cheeks, onto the soft linen of her shirt where I could see her collarbones pushing through, see her small breasts, and then I was kissing her and I pulled her tightly to me, and the river flowing under us, the rumorous hum of the city, the milky sky overhead, all of them seemed to stop for a moment – we were the still point and the world was rising to a blister on our lips, at the intersection of our bodies as they pressed hopelessly together. I drew back for a moment and stared at her, feeling as if another sun had risen. Then we started kissing again, urgently, both of us. When
we pulled back for a second time, I saw Goad at the foot of the bridge, watching. I tore myself away from her, and that was what it felt like: as if our bodies had fused for a moment and now we tore flesh as we parted.

  Goad gave me a talking to. About how ill-advised it was for a Brit to be consorting with a Jew. We are under significant scrutiny, and this is just the sort of performance that might tilt it all against us. He apparently assumes it’s been going on for some time. He gets terrible itching on his hands when he talks about this kind of thing; he sits there and I can feel the pressure to scratch building up inside him until it’s unbearable. Then he gives a rub, runs the back of one hand down the tweed of his thigh. Poor fellow. I can’t remember what I said to him. Mumbled apologies, told him it wasn’t anything serious, that it was in response to the moment, to her tears.

  It’s time to turn in. I’ve found it hard to get Ada out of my head. I tried to telephone her earlier, but there was no answer. Something makes my chest suddenly too small for my heart when I think of her. She’s been the anchor tying me to Florence. It’s a better excuse than ennui, anyway. I’m reading Benedetto Croce. “Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.” Not easy. Buonanotte.’