In Love and War

by Alex Preston

  One other revelation. I was in my room the other night. Ada won’t sleep at the church apartments, even though I’m certain Bailey wouldn’t mind, and is away so much anyway, and Goad is so absent-minded and frail he’d barely notice. But she won’t and so, two or three nights a week, I’m here alone. I was sitting up writing, going over passages of In Love and War, trying to dust some truth off the words. I scratched out whole pages in my notebook, wrote and rewrote, and it was as though I was unbricking a wall behind which bodies had been buried. Fascist blood was burning, burning in the veins of the novel and I would have no truck with it.

  A sound brought me from the contemplative fug into which I’d fallen. It was past midnight – the bell of Santo Spirito had stopped and wouldn’t be back until five. I crept out into the corridor. It was cold and I had a thick woollen dressing gown wrapped around me, heavy slippers on my feet. Dim light coming up from the stairwell at the end. I felt my way along the passage, down the steps and round towards the entrance of the church. There, a flicker of light. I made my way into the church. Faint incense from Sunday’s service. In a pew at the front, looking up at the triptych, sat a young boy. He was humming quietly to himself. A candle in his hand. I walked down the aisle, looking at the soft black hair of his head. A creak of the floorboard and he turned round and there was horror on his face, and his eyes darted first one way, then another, searching for a way out. I got down on my knees, held up my hands, said something minor. He looked at me out of large, dark eyes. I asked him whether he liked the painting. We stared at it together. He didn’t answer, but his mouth dropped open a little.

  I went to sit beside him. He must have been six, a scrawny scrap of a thing. He was wearing a jumper but his feet were bare. Sono Dino, he said, his eyes still fixed on the triptych. I asked him if he wasn’t cold. Un poco, he said, but he couldn’t find his socks in the darkness. I asked him where he lived and now he looked at me. Are you a Fascist? he asked. I shook my head. We’re upstairs, he said. I took his feet in my hands and rubbed them warm. We sat, his feet in my lap, for a while longer, staring up at the painting. It is bewitching, that triptych, something in it that shuts out the world. I felt suddenly sleepy, found myself nodding. When I woke, the boy was gone, the candles on the altar burnt down, the air around me still and grave.

  Bailey was away on one of his trips and didn’t come back until late Saturday night, yesterday. He has lost weight: everyone is leaning on him at the moment – the Gladyses, Goad, certain other eccentric Brits who’ve decided to stay. He’s been enlisted by Cardinal Elia della Costa, the Archbishop of Florence, to advise a group of priests charged with interceding with the regime on behalf of political prisoners. The islands in the south, the blighted villages of exile, now busy with dissidents.

  I always half-thought George Keppel’s description of Bailey as a spy was far-fetched, but the trips to Milan, to Switzerland, shuttling back and forth to Britain – it makes no sense for a priest. When he walked in that Saturday evening, I poured him a glass of wine and waited for him to sit at the table, where the map of the world has become a record of long dinners and twilit debate. The tanks and miniature soldiers with which he marked out the course of the war are all piled around North Africa, where he’d finally given up, overcome by military complexities, contradictory news. Military fronts, he said, sitting down heavily and unlacing his boots, were as wild and arbitrary as the weather from which they drew their name. I’d kept some pasta al ragù on the stove which I heated up and served to him. He ate in silence and I could tell he was waiting for me to speak. I told him about the boy.

  He put his fork down, swirled the wine in his glass and sipped at it, not taking his eyes from me. He asked me which side I was on. I thought I could see where this was heading, but feigned innocence. He began a long and rather worn speech about the course of world history, consequentialism, the necessary conditions for evil, et cetera.

  I let the silence settle after he’d finished and then told him I was on board. That whatever he was up to, I was with him. It turns out Goad is in, too. Bailey went to call for him and we sat up till late. Goad even drank a glass of Chianti, or half, looking rather sparkier than I’d seen for a while. He’s out of love with Fascism, he says. The Corporate State was still the ideal, but not the violence. The Fascists weren’t poets – look at Pavolini. Once a thoroughly decent writer, now just another of Il Duce’s thugs. Now he smiled, and I realised it was the first smile I’d seen on that pinched, grey face since Fiamma, since Gerald, since everything turned to dust.

  After dinner, Bailey led me back into his bedroom, Goad following with his glass of wine – a sight I found oddly funny. It was all so bizarre it was hard not to laugh. This vicar and his pale accomplice standing up to the might of Fascism. On the desk in Bailey’s room there was a shortwave W/T set. On the floor reams of paper fanned out from manila files; on the wall a map of Tuscany with numerous pins in and around Florence, some as far as Pisa and Lucca.

  Bailey says he’s working with the Professor – Piero Calamandrei – to mould the rag-tag Resistance into a credible whole. Bailey and Goad are in charge of helping dissidents, refugees and deserters evade the tentacles of the State. The Resistance have a man in Rome, Filippo Caracciolo, who lets them know when new names are added to the list of official enemies. More information comes from local Blackshirts, who are bribed with a few jugs of wine at the Paszkowski Bar, a grappa or two. As soon as they know that a member of Giustizia e Libertà is in trouble, they ferry him or, just as often, her, to a safe-house. Bartali, the cyclist, pulls a wooden box behind him in which a man can crouch. When stopped, he claims the box is essential to his fitness for the Giro d’Italia. It is full of stones, he says, and opens the lid. The Blackshirts or carabinieri stand back and nod, the fugitive tucked snugly beneath a false bottom.

  Recently they’ve been taking in Jews threatened with internment at the concentration camps in Campagna and Trieste, others who ducked out of sight during the eviction of July ’39. Florence’s bureaucrats and their henchmen have been more enthusiastic than most in circumscribing the lives of their Jewish residents, but their roll-calls and round-ups are nothing compared to those in the east. Over the past few weeks, Jews have been arriving from Fiume, Friuli, Trieste and all across the Julian March. Some are refugees from Austria and Germany; most fleeing the anti-Semitic officials of Balkan and Adriatic Italy. The boy I’d seen in the church a few nights earlier, Dino, was from a family of fishermen on the Isonzo River.

  It was Ada who introduced Bailey to the Professor and his group of liberalsocialiste. He is now co-ordinating with Giustizia e Libertà cells in Milan and Turin to ferry the refugees under false papers to America, Palestine, Brazil. Sixty have been sent so far; fifty more housed in convents, abbeys, derelict church buildings in the city and Val di Pesa, Cardinal della Costa providing the keys and his blessings. Bailey and Goad told me all this as one bottle of wine, then another, was emptied, me sitting cross-legged on Bailey’s bed, Goad perched on the dressing table stool. Goad kept beaming at me, rubbing his hands and saying Just so and Very good. It grew late.

  Bailey told me other things. The presence of the station provides cover for his shortwave communications with Turin and Milan, with the deserters who’d fled the city and were hiding in the wooded hills of Forlì-Cesena. The telephones were tapped – he knew this – and the security police had devices for monitoring radio signals, but the noise generated by the waves of Radio Firenze masked his messages. Was I, he asked, ready to take a more active role in his plans? Could I be relied upon not to give them all up?

  I’m recording this early in the morning. I haven’t slept, haven’t been able to find my way back into In Love and War. I remember something my housemaster at Winchester said to me. I’d let down the house in some way – I think it was the time I was out in front in the school run, had stumbled and fallen and had to crawl to the finish. Twenty-fifth place, I recall. That evening, in his study, he’d steepled his fingers. We
only know ourselves, he’d said, in crisis. Character is theoretical until we act. I think today, Esmond, you beheld yourself. Not quite the hero your father was, eh? He’d given me a narrow, nasty smile and dismissed me with a flick of his hand, gone back to pleasanter thoughts. Now I have a chance to do something Ada will admire, something for England, something that, if he ever knew about it, my father would be proud of, I think.

  I still feel bloody windy, though. I keep thinking of that brave young man who broke a bottle over Carità’s head, grabbed his pudgy wrist in the entrance hall of the British Institute. Perhaps, in the end, those were my crises, my assessments. I didn’t do so badly.

  Hitler’s arriving in Florence today. Musso is already here, encamped in the Palazzo Vecchio, banners fluttering over the ramparts, posters of his granite head on every wall. Blackshirts glower under the carved tabernacles on the street corners, polishing their revolvers. I’ve not been invited to meet the great men but Pavolini is in town and wants a chat. I intend to be sly, I think. Evasive. Play the part, spy-like. Now dawn is coming up like thunder, and I must go. Good morning, whoever-you-are, good morning.’

  11. A-Side: Alessandro Pavolini on the March on Rome and the Glorious Patria (35′ 21″)

  B-Side: ‘It’s February, and bitterly cold in the church apartments. There’s central heating at the via dei Forbici, and Ada and I have made a nest for ourselves there, piling rugs on the bed and looking out over the branches of the Villa Ventaglio, silhouetted with snow. The Professor comes to see us weekly, bringing other members of the Resistance with him. The persecution of the English, the crackdown on Communists and deserters, even the racial laws appear to have been forgotten as the Italians are buffeted with bad news from all sides: disaster in Greece; ignominy in North Africa; now British warships shell Genoa, RAF bombers hit Livorno. There are sandbags around the foot of Giotto’s Campanile, around Ammannati’s Neptune, which I, for one, wouldn’t mourn were it hit. They’ve constructed a wooden shelter under which David seems smaller, rather ashamed of his city’s nerves. The Brancacci Chapel, where Filippino learnt his craft, is cocooned in an asbestos bunker, closed up until peace breaks out.

  Ada and I spend our time doing paperwork: small tasks which, when combined with the work of others who take far greater risks than we, will mean a family safely on an Aliyah Bet ship bound for Haifa, or a group of young men hidden with friends in the hills. We celebrated Hanukkah with Dino and his family. I gave him a catapult and a book of prints, Lippi’s St Jerome and Botticelli’s Venus among them. It’s not possible now to see the paintings in person: most of the galleries’ important works have been removed to storage. Underground vaults, or in villas in Fiesole, Pontassieve, Impruneta. Dino’s father is a quiet, intelligent man; he looks at the book carefully, nodding all the time, then passes it back to his son. His mother is chubby, sweetly smiling, and used her son’s catapult briefly to fire peanuts at Bailey and Goad. They have another son with the rebels in the Apennines.

  Every day the Resistance grows. We hear of sabotage attacks on railway convoys, bombs planted at factories, ammunition dumps ransacked or destroyed. With so many Italian troops abroad, the security forces are making do with veterans, cripples, recently released prisoners. Carità and his squadristi are away in Greece, so the deserters and Communists, the assorted anti-Fascists have the run of the city, putting to use the bomb-making and sabotage skills they learnt during the war in Spain. The Professor is optimistic: he sends Antonio Ignesti, Giuseppe Martini, Giuliano Gattai – names already taking on a lustre of heroism – on daring missions to collect refugees heading over the mountains, to procure boats in Ligurian harbours. They confab with their northern friends, the union leaders in the Fiat and Piaggio factories in the Piedmont. And all the time Bartali pedals that cycle of his, covering hundreds of kilometres each week, passing where others may not pass, returning to the doe-eyed Adrianna with his cheeks flushed, his brow stiff with ice.

  I had a letter from my mother, mainly asking what had happened to the advertising revenue. She’s beginning to sound like Mosley’s puppet. Rudyard, she wrote, has been sent to North Africa, now they’re talking about Greece. He’s already been promoted, leads a band of sharpshooters, a hero in the making. I haven’t answered her. The truth is I’ve allowed Maria Luigia to use her place at the bank to siphon funds from the broadcasts. It’s not much, not enough, but it’s a start. I’ve been on a new round of visits to the major advertisers. I’ve been trying to persuade them to keep up their contributions despite the pressure of the war. How important it is for them to let the world know it’s business as usual in Italy. No luck so far.

  Bailey’s got a dog – Tatters. Energetic Jack Russell-y little thing with a snowy beard. Turned up at the church one morning in January, half-starved, tail chewed by rats. I chose the name – from Ulysses, the whole dog-God thing. I believe in one dog.

  The noises in the building have lost their spook since I found out about Dino and the rest. I like wandering through the warren of small rooms and passageways and staircases in the palazzo now. Often I run into Dino chasing mice with his catapult, or come upon his father reading in an empty room, armchair to the window, winter light on a serious-looking novel. There are others, passing through on their way to safe-houses in the hills, stopping for nights between Rome and Turin, or between the coast and the mountains. Young men with devil-may-care moustaches, sallow skin. They sit in close huddles looking at water-stained papers and smoking. I rather want to join in, but they barely seem to notice me. It’s almost time to start recording today’s programme. I must cut this disc and bury it. Cheerio.’

  12. A-Side: ‘An Address to the People of England’ by Benito Mussolini (35′ 42″)

  B-Side: ‘As you can see, as you may have heard, we broadcast a message from Il Duce himself this morning. I’ll save you the trouble of listening. The Italians, he says, with their German allies, will drive the Brits out of Africa, batter us for daring to intervene in Greece, and altogether warm our heels to Battersea Bridge. His English isn’t terribly good, so it was actually Pavolini reading, doing his best Mussolini-speaking-quite-good-English impression. It’s funny, madness in any other job is weeded out and treated. In politics it’s classed as fortitude.

  Something dreadful happened last week. I was out at a concert of the Maggio Musicale. It was hosted by Gerhard Wolf, the new German Consul. Bailey appeared at the door of Orsanmichele asking someone to come and fish me out. Gently, holding the newspapers but not allowing me to read them, he told me about articles in the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald linking me to William Joyce, calling me a traitor and accusing me of waging “a one-man propaganda war on behalf of Fascism”. You can imagine – I was undone. Denounced at home. Furtive abroad. I felt like P. G. Wodehouse. Bailey saw the positive side immediately – how this strengthened my cover, how it would be well received in Rome. He tried to cheer me up. Tatters in my lap all evening – he could tell I was sad, good fellow.

  The war follows its coarse, careless path. It feels as if, slowly, the Germans are gaining the upper hand. Rudyard, according to my gaolbird mother, has been evacuated from Greece, pushing out from Piraeus in a fishing boat with a bunch of his wounded comrades. They made it to Crete and there’s talk of him getting a King’s Commendation at the very least.

  Dino and his family have gone to America. I was sad to see it. They made me promise to look out for their son and write when the war’s over. Ada and I are now experts at forging passports, visas, emigration forms. Maria Luigia brings photos, paper and card, and for a chilling tale of extradition or escape we can have you a thick wad of documents within the hour, no questions asked. Bailey has been visiting a man named Moses Ricci, Mayor of Casoli, site of the largest concentration camp in the country. He thinks that, with the correct emoluments, Ricci will agree to transfer a number of the foreign Jews in his care to a ship at Pescara. Ada and I may travel down to help arrange it. Life is full and dangerous. I am continuing to make my broa
dcasts, to act the good Fascist. Just now, I am preparing to have the German Consul speak about Beethoven. He’s a kind, clever man, but his delivery is a little dry. I am sipping a glass of Chianti in preparation. Bis bald, Zukunft.’

  13. A-Side: ‘Italy in 1950 – A Speculation’ by Niccolò Arcimboldi (37′ 50″)

  B-Side: ‘I must be quick. I think this’ll be the last of these. In fact I’ve no idea what’s going to happen. There was a raid on the church this morning. I have an appointment with the Quaestor – the chief of police – at eleven. He’ll grill me about how much I knew of Bailey’s clandestine operations. I’d been at Ada’s the night before; when I turned up at the church, the security police were already there, Carità with them. He’s back from Greece with a new ugliness about him. He’s gained weight, his bare knees are now invisible beneath folds of skin. His hair is longer, the white tuft curling into a question mark above his head. He’s a centurione now, still in shorts, but with medals on his chest, polished silver eagles on his epaulettes. Tatters wouldn’t stop barking – Carità landed a kick at him, but still he yipped and snapped until I shut him in the studio. Bailey was very cool about the whole thing. The police had arrived during the morning mass – only Gladys Hutton in the congregation. Goad was serving, holding a chasuble in the shadows, and managed to sneak out, up and into the apartments. He warned the four young Sicilians living on the fourth floor: they escaped over the rooftops.