In Love and War

by Alex Preston

  31

  Esmond wakes to the sound of music. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. He’s in a long hall, balconied French windows open to the courtyard several floors below. A man in a monk’s habit, dark hair swept over a balding crown, is playing a grand piano. The bass notes throb in time with the pain in Esmond’s shoulders. He realises his arms have been tied behind his back. He is standing on a high stool beneath a wooden frame. Carità sits at a table beside the frame, eating slices of beef which he spears and presses between fleshy lips. There is a bottle of wine on the table and he pours himself a glass, stands, and kicks the stool from under Esmond’s feet. Esmond’s arms, tied at the wrists, swing up behind him as he drops. His muscles spasm, fight for a moment, then a splintering sound as his shoulder-balls leave their sockets. The dreadful parting of bone and with it a pain that brings darkness.

  *

  He is in a small, windowless room, blue-lit. He is naked, tied to a chair that is raised on a platform, almost a stage. Carità stands beside a car battery, holding two wires in gloved hands. The ends of these wires are taped to the end of Esmond’s cock, to his lips, to his earlobes. They are pressed into the weeping bullet wounds in his thigh and his collarbone. He is astonished at the noises that come from him, not language, not human. He is losing his words, forgetting books, people, names, giving himself entirely to the endless moment of pain. He feels as if he is drowning in black milk. He lives strung up between the brief respites, a kind of torture in themselves, when Carità goes out for a piss, or when he lights a cigarette and blows the smoke in Esmond’s face, mouthing again, ‘Tell us where your friends are hiding. Don’t be an idiot. This can stop, just tell us where they are.’ He feels the secret inside him, wrapped like a gift, and sees how natural is Carità’s belief that he can burn, hack, bleed it out of him.

  An early morning, when Carità has gone out for breakfast, and he is there, alone on the blue-lit stage, he remembers how in The Magic Mountain Settembrini has to give up his attempt to record the literature of suffering because all literature is suffering. Esmond understands, there in the eye of his pain, how wrong Mann was. Heartache, loss, loneliness: these are literature; but suffering like this, of the body, it is beyond the reach of language. Every so often, he hears, very close, a mechanical wail that gradually opens out into the screaming of a human voice.

  *

  Esmond, bound to the chair, wakes to find Carità standing under the swaying blue bulb. He is staggering drunk, his face flushed and glistening, his lips moistly fleering. Resting against his schoolboy’s legs is Anna’s collage. He reaches down and begins to peel the photographs from the backing board to which, a lifetime ago, his sister had glued them.

  ‘Tell me where your friends are, Esmond.’ The picture of Anna on the carousel is peeled off. ‘Where are they hiding?’ Carità flicks open a silver cigarette lighter and the photograph curls and then burns. Carità drops it to the ground and Esmond remembers his mother, burning letters in a Shropshire field. Esmond and Rudyard, cricket and Cambridge, Anna and Aston Magna. Carità, with long, grubby grey nails, picks at the edges, tears them up from their moorings, holds them to the greedy tongue of flame. Esmond realises that he has no photograph of Ada, and it feels like a victory, for to see her burnt would be too much, would take away the one thing holding him together.

  ‘Tell me where your friends are hiding, Esmond. We’ll find them anyway. Do it for your father, for Goad. Imagine what they’d say if they knew you were protecting a gang of Communists. Tell us and we can walk out of here together.’ Now the picture of Esmond and his father at the Albert Hall rally. The old man’s hopeful smile, one strong arm and an empty sleeve. Esmond feels a rush of love for his father that meets a wave of certainty that he’ll never see him again. The picture flickers and burns.

  Finally, the collage is scraps of charred paper, a glue-marked board. Carità leaves and Esmond, husked out, slumps in his chair and weeps.

  *

  Carità. Pliers.

  ‘Tell me where they are.’ The little finger of his left hand breaks. A brief moment between the snap and the detonation of pain.

  ‘Tell me where.’ Now the nail is pulled out of the broken finger, and it is as if his hand is on fire.

  ‘We know they’re in the mountains. Where?’ His ring finger. The sound is like biting on a stick of grissini.

  ‘Are they in the east? With the Serbians?’ Both of his thumbs, now. They take more work and Carità grunts as he breaks them.

  ‘In Monte Morello? Monte Oliveto? Where are they, you pig, where?’

  Esmond remembers his father’s words – anger is stronger than fear. He lifts his head and spits, first on his own chin, then in Carità’s face.

  *

  He and Elio in the blue-lit room. Elio is owlish and astonished without his glasses, his nose flattened to his face.

  ‘You know, whatever happens to us––’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘History––’ Elio’s voice is cracked and fading.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Brecht. You know? Burn me. Do not fear death––’

  ‘But rather the inadequate life.’

  ‘Good.’

  Silence. Esmond looks down at Elio who is silent, sleeping, and smiles.

  *

  He is standing next to Bruno in the hall with the wooden frame which had dislocated his shoulders. It is hot and the French windows, with their birdcage-like Juliet balconies, are wide open. A fan turns in the corner where Father Idelfonso is still playing Schubert. Esmond cannot move his arms and presumes they are bound, but looking down he realises that it is just that they are broken, hanging at his sides. When Carità comes to punch him, to cut obscure symbols on the skin of his chest with a stiletto knife, he can do nothing. Milly enters the room wearing only stockings and suspenders, her breasts threatening to overbalance her. Bruno starts to laugh. Esmond looks across at his friend, who is covered in bruises, one of his eyes closed, his mouth empty of teeth, then back at the overweight, absurd figure of Carità’s mistress. He begins to laugh as well. Milly has crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth open in a scandalised O. Carità is irate, storming back and forth in front of them.

  ‘Why are you laughing? Don’t you realise that you’re going to die?’

  They stop laughing when Elio’s body is dragged into the room. Father Idelfonso interrupts Schubert to play Chopin’s Funeral March. Carità goes over to the body and lifts the head back to show, beneath a face, toothless and eyeless, the opened neck darkly smiling. A whisper of breeze through the French windows. Esmond can hear Bruno’s breath coming fast and ragged. Carità lets Elio’s head drop back down and comes towards them.

  ‘It’s time to end this, don’t you think?’ he says, drawing out his long, ivory-handled knife. He presses the blade against Esmond’s Adam’s apple. Esmond winces and feels blood running warmly down his chest. Carità draws the blade away.

  ‘I’ll give you one last chance. For form’s sake.’ He smiles and walks to the end of the room, unlocking the door and opening it. ‘You may be a little unsteady on your feet, but no one will stop you. Just tell me where the camp is and you can go. Think of the taste of the air, the freedom.’

  Esmond is holding his throat, blood rising between his fingers. Carità crosses to stand by the window, his hands, black with gore, twining over the balcony. ‘This is your last chance, boys.’ He looks down into the shadowy courtyard, his pudgy face caught in the evening’s dying light and nods with a sudden, serious goodwill. A glance between Esmond and Bruno – a swift decision. On legs that can hardly bear his weight, Esmond plunges forward. He stumbles, then seizes upon an image of Ada in the high room at L’Ombrellino, her arms crossed over her bare chest, the triptych behind her. From her, he draws a final burst of energy, as if love alone might staunch blood, knit bones. Now beside him, Bruno, staggering and certain. They grab Carità by his black shirt with their broken fingers, lift him up with their broken arms, and with the very last
of their strength they pull him out into the void, shrieking.

  32

  As he falls, Esmond doesn’t think of Bruno, or Carità, falling with him. He doesn’t think of Elio, or what remains of him. He doesn’t think of Alessandro in the graveyard beside the Great Synagogue or Maria Luigia buried in the cemetery at San Miniato. He doesn’t think of Tatters running at his heels along the cypress-lined mule-tracks of Bellosguardo, or the doggy cairn by the swimming pool. He doesn’t think of Philip lying in a grave in the blushing heights above Barcelona. He doesn’t think about Anna. He doesn’t think about Rudyard, who is not more than a hundred miles away, marching towards Florence. He doesn’t think of Gerald or Fiamma. He doesn’t even think of Ada, who is, however, thinking of him. Under a sky of fast-moving sulphurous clouds, she sits and pictures him, and it makes her smile, the shape of his face in her mind.

  Instead, as he falls, he remembers, aged seven or eight, when a dog had died at Aston Magna. It was a stable dog, not one of the hounds, and his father had refused to call the vet. She didn’t even have a name. She’d given birth to three healthy pups who were now with Cook in the kitchen, sucking milk from plump fingers. One of the pups was still inside her, though, and after dragging herself around the yard on her hunkers for an hour, straining every so often, groaning after the stable lads had tired of their attempts to fish the dead, sack-wrapped pup out of her, she’d crawled up to Esmond’s room to die.

  He’d sat with her all night, the shuddering weight of her in his arms, her head on his shoulder, sour breath in his ear until finally she’d stopped breathing. He sat with her a while longer and then carried her out into the pale morning and buried her in his mother’s rose garden, beneath a Crown Princess Margareta. He was astonished by the lightness of her body, as if life were substantial. Back in the warmth of the house, he went into the kitchen where Cook was still sitting in a deep armchair, the silky knot of puppies in her lap, cooing a gentle song to them. He’d said nothing, but sat on the arm of the chair and watched, wonderstruck, as the new lives writhed and shivered.

  He even has time, on his journey to the hard earth, to marvel at the workings of the mind, where this forgotten image from his youth has arrived, unbidden, and filled his heart with sorrow and joy. And now, as if the dog, whose mottled fur and wet nose he can see with extraordinary clarity, there beside him, has unblocked some obstruction, a flood of love comes. Anna speaking gentle words in his ear; Philip in the foliage at Cambridge, the sound of rain on leaves; Fiamma and Gerald in the island-studded river. He pictures Douglas and Orioli, Mosley and his father swinging him between them as a child, his mother burning books in a field, and he loves them all. Now the parade of figures wisps across the cyclorama of his mind, the Unfinished Symphony loud around them, the city’s angels peeling themselves from the bridges and loggias. St John and Mary Magdalene dance, wild-eyed, sweeping their tattered robes about them, Mary’s hair like a russet river. And Ada – and he swells at the thought of her, and the last thing he does, before the ground rushes up, is to send arrowing towards her everything that is left of his strength.

  As he dies, he realises that the last few months of his life have been spent chasing after the wrong thing. His father’s idea of pluck. But he knows he has done enough, and that it doesn’t matter. Carità hits the ground first, a wet thud. Esmond feels himself turn inside himself and can now see the largeness of the palpitating earth, the depth of human love, the stars in the firmament, Ada singing gently into the sulphurous sky. As he draws his last breath, he realises that this is the thing: this is joy and courage and hope. Ada. A feeling of extraordinary peace washes over him, a feeling of bliss. Ada. Blackness.

  EPILOGUE

  Excerpt from In Love and War, the Autobiography of Rudyard Lowndes (Faber & Faber, London, 1956)

  The morning after we arrived in Florence, I was up early, keen to be out in the city. It had been a wheeze the night before – the bells of the great church ringing, gunshots echoing in the hills, German stragglers to be mopped up, toasts drunk with jubilant partisans. From midnight to 2 a.m. I oversaw a team of sappers clearing mines from the road leading up from the Ponte Vecchio towards the Piazza della Signoria. I recognised the names from Esmond’s letters, from the broadcasts we used to listen to, all of us clustered around the wireless in the library at Welsh Frankton.

  It was a very luminous morning as I walked out of the villa where we’d stationed ourselves, a good-looking place called L’Ombrellino that sits on the hillside overlooking the town. There were already younger coves splashing in the murky pool in the garden, others smoking on the terrace. I enjoyed the walk down towards the river, swinging my arms with a tra-la-la. In the city proper I slowed down, picking carefully through the rubble of the via de Guicciardini. British squaddies are the best there are, but I’d seen too many chaps with misplaced limbs in military hospitals, with the hangdog expression of blighters who’d made a frightful hash of something quite simple. I’d got this far by being a trifle slower and a trifle more careful than other fellows. I wasn’t going to stop now.

  I sat down halfway along the Ponte Vecchio, where there’s a break between the jewellers and leather shops, all boarded up, empty and windowless, of course. I eased myself onto the little stone bench there and pulled out a cigarette. There’s nothing quite like the first fag of the day. Soldiers thrive on routine, and one of mine was to clear a moment of peace for a smoke, even if it meant getting up earlier than other chaps. Taking a dekko downriver, I could see the blasted ruins of the next bridge – the Ponte Santa Trinità – lying just below the surface. Here and there a jagged piece of stone would break through, causing a flurry of white water. Further away, past the remains of another blown-up bridge, lay the pontoon we’d constructed to get our men and their tanks onto the north side of the river.

  When I’d finished my cigarette, giving a nod of thanks to Herr Hitler for ordering that this bridge, at least, be preserved by his retreating troops, I set out into the city proper. It was astonishingly intact given that I was standing where, less than twenty-four hours earlier, the enemy had been. Walls riddled with bullet holes, a burnt-out Kübelwagen in front of that famous statue of David, a dead paratrooper – one of the Green Devils – lying quite serene in the middle of the great, empty square in front of the town hall. But it seemed as if the Germans had more or less respected the unofficial Open City. Apart from the bridges, of course. I wandered haphazardly until I found the rebel headquarters in the Piazza San Marco, where members of the Resistance had taken over rooms in a convent formerly used by the SD. A filly, blonde hair, was brought to me in the cloisters of the church. Name was Tosca Buccarelli. She offered to escort me back over the river to the Allori Cemetery, to Esmond’s grave.

  As we walked through the city, she told me about my brother’s war, or as much as she knew of it. About the assassination of a Fascist colonel, attacks on train lines, scores of refugees saved from the hands of first the Blackshirts, and the Nazis. She told me about a girl, Ada Liuzzi, a Jew who’d been taken north to a camp by the Germans, with whom my brother had lived, to whom he’d been engaged. She told me about the two other members of the Resistance who’d been, with my brother, a trio of unlikely heroes – two Communist students and a foppish Englishman. She told me about a capture, a rescue attempt that went wrong, a tragic ending.

  I must say I didn’t recognise the fellow she was talking about, but then I dare say he wouldn’t recognise me if he was looking down as I made my way between the cluttered rows of the cemetery, where the graves jostle and slant amid the cypresses. His body, it seems, was badly broken by the fall and the chopping and slicing he’d suffered at the hands of this Carità and so he’d been cremated, his ashes scattered on the Arno. There is a modest gravestone.

  ESMOND LIONEL LOWNDES

  21ST MAY 1917–25TH JULY 1944

  I stood, thinking of all the life, all the love, contained in that single engraved hyphen, and I placed down a nosegay of flowers I’d picked as
we strolled through the cemetery. Tosca was crying beside me, this brassy, voluptuous girl, crying over dear old Esmond. I hardly knew him, or at least the person he’d become – Tosca knew him better – but I, too, loved him. And I thought of all the lives he’d touched, the web of affection he’d weaved that stretched from Shropshire to Cambridge to Italy to who knows elsewhere, and deep under the earth to all those who’d died before. I thought of the girl, Ada, in Auschwitz, perhaps not yet aware that my brother, her lover, was dead. I said a prayer for her there on the consecrated ground, that she might make it through alive.

  Then I walked out of the gatehouse and up towards the river, Tosca at my side, and we spoke of Esmond, and of the days of freedom ahead, and the great bells of the Duomo began to chime, and then the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio, which they call La Vacca, and I could see the bevelled red roofs in the bright August light, the churches clamouring skywards, the sculptures and tabernacles and all the ravishing splendour of the place and I carried my love for my brother in my heart like a flame into the streets of the city he called home. Florence.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the following, without whom this book would have been longer, less accurate or never written at all: my editors, Walter Donohue and Matt Shoard, and my agent, Anna Power. To all at Faber & Faber, particularly Hannah Griffiths, Lee Brackstone and Kate McQuaid. To Silvia Crompton, who held it all together (in exchange for wine). To all at Johnson & Alcock, particularly Ed Wilson. To Glenn Haybittle and Penny Mittler, two inglesi italianati, who were there at the beginning and at the end. To Enrico Giachetti, for priceless first-hand recollections of Firenze Fascistissima. To Michael Brod and the Palazzo Tornabuoni, for their hospitality. To all at St Mark’s Anglican Church, where all of this started. To James Holland, for making sure that my errors in military history were chosen rather than accidental. To Mark Miller and de Havilland Support Ltd for a wonderful day with the Dragon Rapide. To Gerald Wells and the British Vintage Wireless and Television Museum, for their endless patience. To Neil Gower, for the stunning illustrations. To Emma Smith, for strong women. To Damian Barr, Emer Gillespie, Tom Edmunds, Helen Benckendorff, Florence Ballard and Ele Simpson, for their early, insightful and encouraging readings. To my grandfather and my parents, for inspiration past and present. Finally, as ever, to Al, Ray and Ary, with endless love.