by Alex Preston
Ada cut back the weeds on Alice Keppel’s vegetable garden. Soon they had tomatoes, zucchini, broad beans and radishes. She asked Bruno to bring her seeds and they planted carrots and celery, beetroot and cavolo nero. She worked with her hair in a gypsy bandana, an old shirt of Esmond’s hanging over her like a dress. Her hands became hard, the skin of her face dense with freckles. Before dinner they’d swim the dirt and heat of the day from their skinny bodies, lying naked, spreadeagled under the bruising sky.
Bruno and the Professor came more often in summer. Bruno would strip down to his undershorts – placing his matchstick atop his folded shirt – and swim slow lengths. The Professor removed his shoes and dangled his toes, leaning back against the pediment of one of the dodos and speaking with surprise about the destruction of Lübeck: the firestorm that had swept through the medieval city, sucking the oxygen from the air, unleashing tornadoes, turning people to ashes in seconds. He had become obsessed with the bombing raids. He’d started a scrapbook of press clippings, photographs, scholarly articles on the physical and psychological effects of the air war. Two hundred and fifty planes had dropped four hundred tonnes of explosives on the ancient Hanseatic port, he told them, the timbered buildings with their red-tiled roofs passing the flames from one house to the next with a roar. He looked down over Florence and was silent. Bruno’s path through the water, the birdsong in the trees below, wind in the pines and bamboo; he sighed and drew his long grey feet from the water.
Some evenings Esmond and Ada would raid the wardrobes of clothes the Keppels had left, opening bottles of spumante from the cellar and playing music – just softly – on the gramophone in the drawing room, pushing the divans and canapés and armchairs to the side. The discs were marching bands, Christmas carols, Vaughan Williams and Elgar, stolidly English. In one dusty record-case, Ada found three discs of Schubert waltzes. Esmond wore George’s white tie and tails, put a monocle in his eye and brilliantined his hair; Ada disappeared into Alice Keppel’s ball gowns, gathering up the trains and sweeping them around her à la flamenco. They’d jive and foxtrot to the faster numbers, working themselves into a sweaty muddle in the warm drawing room as daylight dwindled, then move in darkness to the slower music. Some evenings, birdsong in the hills was so loud that it drowned out the gramophone, and they’d find themselves dancing instead to a movement of larks and thrushes, finally falling onto the largest of the divans, panting and happy and lost.
She still has her moments of distance though, when she seems to leave him, to disappear into silence. She has the perfect cheekbones for such distance – high and horizontal, like Anna’s. Sometimes he despairs of ever knowing the rills and runnels of her heart. But love without torment, he reasons, is only friendship. They lie on their sky-high mattress, kiss, fuck; but it’s often as if there’s a film between them. One hot night, he’d stood with her in their bedroom and gripped her by the shoulders, shaking her gently. He was a little drunk and half-begged her, finally getting down on his knees.
‘Let me in. I want to know you. I can’t love you if I don’t know you.’
She’d smiled, faltering, then taken her wicker bag from the wardrobe and, looking directly at him, emptied it on the bed.
‘This is me,’ she said. ‘Look at it. This is me.’
Out fell a scallop purse, a diary, several pencils, a bottle of Yardley lavender water, a handkerchief, a blue-bound copy of Mayakovsky’s poems and a photograph of Esmond, taken by Goad last Christmas. She held the photograph out as if in triumph, as if to prove that he’d been fixed to the album of her life, and never again should he question her love.
They have talked, now and again, about the death camps. What started out as rumours were now facts: slatted railway carriages heading eastwards, humans herded like cattle, gas chambers. They listen to Radio Vaticana, which had first broken the news, and was now talking about German plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Professor has been in touch with Ada’s father, who is in Milan, protected by Ettore Ovazza, safe so far. They can see the eggshell dome of the Great Synagogue from the terrace. Ada stands there some evenings, looking down, a shawl around her, until the light fades and the soft blue dome disappears into darkness.
The leaves are falling in the garden. They will need to be more careful when they step outside, although since the army extended the draft to those aged fifty – sometimes, in the right wind, they can hear the drafted Florentines marching for the war in Russia – they often feel quite alone in the world. L’Ombrellino is like a cloud palace, a vast Zeppelin hanging above an unpeopled city. There are bloodbaths in Greece and Yugoslavia and North Africa, the balance tilts – only slightly – to the Allies, and Esmond and Ada lie on their bed and listen to the radio, looking at the triptych, allowing the tortured figures to stand for what they cannot see, for the suffering that says to them both: it is time to engage.
5
The third of November, 1942: the day after they burnt In Love and War. Esmond is standing in uncertain morning light listening to birdsong rising around the villa. Tatters is at his feet, sniffing the air: damp leaves and woodsmoke. After so long spent in old, familiar clothes, he moves with difficulty in the uniform, which is too small for him. He couldn’t believe, when Bruno showed him the complicated layers of his disguise, that Italian soldiers still wore puttees, and had spent almost half an hour that morning wrapping and re-wrapping them around his calves. On his head is the red fez of the Bersagliere. The right sleeve of his tunic has been pinned behind his back. He thinks of his father.
He hasn’t heard from home for over a year now, and he wonders how his parents are getting through the war, if his mother’s still locked up. He wonders about Rudyard, whether he’s alive, or dry bones in a desert, or heaving a pickaxe in some wind-lashed Silesian prison camp. Now Ada comes out to join him. She is wearing the green and white uniform of an ambulance driver. She hands him a cup of orzo which he blows on and sips, pulling a face.
‘It’s frightful, isn’t it?’
‘Parliamo italiano oggi, carino,’ she reminds him, smiling. They’ve been in the villa so long that Esmond feels panic in his chest at the thought of leaving. He pats the Beretta in the holster on his hip, remembers he isn’t meant to use his right arm, and takes another sip. It’s the first time since coming to the villa that he has really missed smoking.
‘You should put on your cast,’ she says, and he has to think for a moment about the word – ingessatura. She hands him the white plaster – fashioned by the ever-resourceful Maria Luigia – and a sling which he hooks over his head. His arm feels heavy and strange dangling on his chest. ‘We must go,’ she says.
They lock Tatters inside the house with a bone that he begins to gnaw, barely noticing them leave. They go down past the swimming pool into the copse, leaves thick and wet underfoot. Esmond helps Ada over the wall at the bottom of the garden – slipping his arm out from the sling and holding her hand with thickly bandaged fingers – and then they are in the via San Carlo where Bruno is leaning against the bonnet of the ancient Bianchi. He smiles at them, cocking his matchstick.
‘You’re ready?’
Ada nods.
He drives them down through the city and Esmond has to fight an urge not to press his nose to the window. Florence is deserted. A few stray dogs worry bags of rubbish outside the Pitti Palace. Cars sit on their haunches, their wheels removed for the rubber, their owners unable to find or afford petrol. When they come to the via Tornabuoni, Esmond reaches over with his good arm and takes Ada’s hand. He can feel his pulse against her cool flesh. She is made for this, he thinks.
‘Your British Institute, it’s now used for meetings of the Committee of Fascist Youth,’ Bruno says. ‘They’re training the next generation of cannon fodder, teaching range-finding and ordnance in that beautiful library.’ He shakes his head and then brings the car to a halt outside Pretini’s hair salon. ‘I must leave you here,’ he says. ‘I can’t risk anyone seeing me with you. Now, you know what you’re
required to do?’ Ada nods. ‘Don’t speak too much,’ he says, looking at Esmond. ‘If you’re caught, give them the information we agreed. Nothing about the Professor, nothing about supply lines. Good luck.’ They climb out into the cool morning. Esmond finds himself wondering what else he knows that the Fascists could possibly want. Some meaningless code names, a few fuzzily recalled locations in the hills that he’s transmitted over the W/T. The Professor is all he has.
He can see his breath in the air as they walk down the via degli Avelli towards the station. Ada is a few steps ahead, carrying a small case with a red cross on it, which she swings jauntily by her side. They wait for a tram to pass and walk out of the shadow of Santa Maria Novella. The railway station stretches in front of them; from under the brow of its porch beetles a line of commuters; travellers trying to keep up with their porters; soldiers embracing their wives and lovers in the gloomy ticket hall, greetings and farewells. Esmond spots another Bersagliera with a rifle across his back. The man salutes when he sees the caporal maggiore stripes on his shoulders. Esmond nods down at his arm, mutters ‘Va bene,’ at the soldier and follows Ada into the station.
Carabinieri stand in their kepis by the ticket gates, asking for documents only from the young girls as they board trains for the coast. Ada, whose hair is up beneath a peaked cap, passes the carabinieri and walks forward to the platform where the train to Livorno is beginning to puff. Esmond starts to follow her when one of the policemen holds out an arm.
‘Documenti, per favore,’ the policeman says, scowling at Esmond’s bandaged arm. Esmond reaches awkwardly inside his jacket and fumbles for his military identification card and notification of disability. He fights not to look towards Ada on the platform. The policeman stares at the documents and then at Esmond.
‘Dove andate?’
Esmond clears his throat and hesitates. Now he does see Ada, fumbling in her case, glancing at him. He stares back at the policeman and, in barely more than a whisper, says, ‘Vado a una clinica ortopedica a Livorno. Ho un appuntamento con un dottore Hartmann lì.’ He holds his breath as the policeman looks again at his papers, finally handing them back with a ‘Grazie’. Esmond walks through the gates and, without looking at Ada, boards the train for Livorno, his pulse visible in the corners of his eyes.
6
They get off at Empoli. The weather has turned for the worse, thunderclouds rolling across the sky from the west. Esmond makes sure Ada has seen him and crosses the road into the park opposite the station. He waits on a bench beneath a plane tree, where she joins him, at the far end, opening her case on her lap.
‘Was it close?’ she asks.
‘I don’t think so. He just wanted to get some sweat out of a soldier. If my Italian isn’t good enough by now––’
‘Your Italian is fine.’
They leave the park and walk past a group of cafés and down a road of blank-faced houses. After a few hundred yards, they stop in front of a building with a faded sign: ‘Hotel Superiore’. There is the sound of singing. Ada rings the bell. They wait for several minutes and finally the bolts are drawn back. A hunched old woman in black opens the door and leads them silently into a courtyard and up a staircase. On the piano nobile they make their way into a gloomy apartment. The old lady leaves them, shutting the door behind her. The singing gets louder. Esmond follows Ada into the bedroom where, against the open windows, an enormous man is performing ‘E Lucevan le Stelle’ from Tosca for the assorted pigeons and sparrows on the rooftops. His back to the room, he quivers at the highest notes, his voice breaking. Finally, after a sudden pause, he turns towards them.
‘Welcome,’ he says in an accent Esmond cannot place. He kisses Ada and shakes Esmond vigorously by his plaster cast, letting out a burbling laugh. He sits down on the bed, motions to two armchairs opposite and pours them out a glass of wine each from the bottle beside his bed.
‘Bene,’ he says, letting out another laugh and raising his glass. ‘I am Oreste Ristori. To your health, young ones – it’s never too early for a sip, heh?’ His face shines as if recently polished. He’s older than Esmond had thought, his vastness hiding wrinkles that only reveal themselves in repose. Above the fireplace on one side of the room are several photographs of a woman who, for a moment, reminds Esmond of Wallis Simpson. In some of the pictures she is in battle fatigues, in another she stands at a waterfall holding a rifle in one hand, her face streaked with mud or blood.
Ristori goes to stand beside the pictures, picking one from the mantel and passing it to Esmond. The silver frame is cold to the touch. She is beautiful. A string of black pearls hangs from her throat.
‘My Mercedes,’ the man says. ‘My star in the dark night. I write to her every day, not knowing even if she receives my letters. She was in gaol in São Paulo. Now she is fighting Vargas’s government in the jungle, with the anarchists, the guerrillas. In Brazil. You see how remarkable she is?’ He beams at Esmond. ‘You see how a man might spend his life for a woman like this?’ He knocks back his wine and sits down on the bed, pouring another. He hums a few more bars of Tosca as he sips. It is cold in the room and Ada gives a shiver.
‘Mr Ristori, we must be on the next train. May we have the documents?’
‘Let me get them. I’m sorry.’ He kneels down and begins to root beneath the bed. ‘It’s rare I have visitors now,’ he says. ‘I attend a literary gathering that is cover for a Marxist discussion group, but still – we are in Empoli, you understand? Revolutions were never made in Empoli. I am back where I began, the Tuscany of my birth. Defeated! Ah, here we go.’ He draws out some sheets of paper covered in dense typewritten text. Ada takes them from him and looks at them closely.
‘I think this is the sort of thing we were after. Thank you.’
‘My pleasure,’ he says, smiling broadly again. ‘You’re sure you won’t stay for another drink?’
‘We must make our train.’
She stands above Esmond, helps him ease the cast off his wrist, rolls the papers around his arm, and closes it over them. They bid farewell to Ristori, and make their way down the narrow stairs of the hotel, through its silent courtyard. As they walk down the broad street towards the station, the sound of Ristori’s singing comes to them again, high and sweet, finally lost in the traffic and the wind.
7
On the train to Pisa, they sit together in an empty compartment. It has begun to rain and the drops are pulled along the window as they gather speed through the Tuscan hills.
‘I’ve no idea if these codes are any good,’ she says, looking out.
‘But he’s dependable. Bruno said so.’
‘He’s a lunatic.’ An inspector comes into the compartment, nods at them both as he checks their tickets and pulls the door shut behind him.
‘In some ways he’s amazing, obviously, a modern Bakunin. He fought for the rights of Italian immigrant labourers in South America. They think he’s a hero down there. No one knew how badly Italians were being exploited. He wrote long articles about the conditions for workers and kept being put on boats back to Italy, but he’d throw himself overboard and swim back to land.’
‘When did he meet––?’
‘Mercedes Gomez. She was another anarchist. They created the labour movement in Brazil, unions for plantation workers. When the police started rounding everyone up, Ristori was put on a prison boat back to Genoa. If he ever goes back he’ll be shot. He’s almost seventy, you know. This isn’t the first time he’s helped us.’
At Pisa there are gangs of Blackshirts on the platforms, police guarding the exits. He waits for Ada to get off the train and follows some distance behind. He makes his way down into the underpass and boards another train, this time for Genoa. Ada is sitting by herself in a crowded compartment. He stands, holding onto the luggage rack, aware suddenly that his cast is itching, that the papers are dampening against his skin.
They are only on the train for two stops, until Forte dei Marmi. He goes first and, without looking back, crosses the
road and boards a bus to the seafront. He walks along the promenade, sheltering from the worst of the rain under the umbrella pines. Then an open stretch past shuttered restaurants and hotels until he comes to the Bagno Dalmazia bathing club; a single waiter stands outside on the sand, down towards the beach. Deckchairs sag under a tattered awning.
‘A drink, sir?’ he says, as Esmond walks down onto the damp sand.
‘I’m waiting for a friend. She’s always late,’ Esmond says, the carefully remembered code words sounding sham to his ears. He eases himself down into one of the deckchairs. The waiter disappears inside and Esmond can hear him speaking. He sits and watches the sea, a deep and melancholy grey, pocked with rain. Rocks prod up like fins twenty feet out. After fifteen minutes or so, he is aware of a buzzing noise from where the coast curves round for La Spezia. He thinks of Shelley floating in these choppy waters, his skin the grey-green deadness of the sea. Ada arrives and sinks down into the other deckchair.
‘You weren’t followed?’ Esmond asks in English.
‘No.’
‘I can’t think why I asked that. I suppose it sounded like the sort of thing I should say. Of course you weren’t.’
‘You’re a very convincing spy.’
The waiter brings them both a coffee. It is nearing three and they haven’t eaten yet.
‘They’re coming,’ Ada says, nodding at two boats moving steadily from the north.
‘You’re sure it’s them?’
‘I am.’