In Love and War (16 page)

He and Anna go for a walk that afternoon. The wind has picked up, shredding the clouds above, letting down barbs of winter sunshine. Three ducks bob on the canal’s glassy back. –
How are you?
he asks. A faltering of her eyes. –
I’m marked for death,
she says.
Like a character in a motion picture
. She laughs and he sees the red-ribbed roof of her mouth. They walk past glumly chewing horses, a pub with smoke drifting from its chimney, the slim elegance of a birch wood. –
I live through you,
she says.
It’s not as sad as it sounds. Each of your letters, it’s like a clear breath. Keep writing them
. They stop there and the wind leans into them. She shudders. –
I love you
, he says, and he realises it’s the truest thing he’s said, perhaps ever. They walk back in silence, arms linked.

In his room alone later, slightly drunk after an hour in the library with his father, he places the collage on his dresser and pulls up his chair to look at it again. His life appears, tessellated yet suddenly coherent. The three blond children crouched around the crease during a cricket match on the lawn at Aston Magna. Cook is at bat, a set expression on her face as she waits for Sir Lionel to bowl. Esmond and Anna on a carousel in Hyde Park. She must be four or five, her blonde hair spilling out from beneath the dome of a cloche hat. He is behind her on the horse,
looking serious and responsible. A line-up of young Blackshirts, Esmond at one end, smaller and blonder than any of the others, his chest out, chin up. Esmond and Anna and Rudyard in the various arrangements of childhood, their father proudly with them, their mother more distant, always looking off as if keen to get on to some urgent appointment. Towards the bottom of the collage, more recent pictures: the pantechnicon van unloading in front of Welsh Frankton; Esmond in a straw boater by the river in Cambridge. In the very centre, the sun around which the other pictures orbit, is a large photograph of Esmond and his father in full British Union uniform, lightning flashes bright on their chests. They are on-stage at the Royal Albert Hall. It was 1934, Sir Lionel’s last great political speech. He’d chosen Esmond to stand with him on the platform beforehand in front of the thousands of faces. –
This is my eldest son,
he’d said, holding his good arm towards Esmond. –
This is who I fought my war for. It’s why I’m here now. To build a future for young men like Esmond, a future in which there can never be another war like 14–18, a future where honest, decent folk who want to earn a living may do so. We are moving
– he’d looked around at the massed ranks of Party members –
towards a moment of reckoning. Choose the right side
. He seized Esmond’s hand and lifted it into the air.
Choose Esmond!
The crowd let out a roar, Esmond had tried to force a smile, the camera flashed.

The next morning, his father comes into his room early. –
We decided not to hunt,
he says –
Really?
Esmond sits on the side of his bed. –
I know you can’t bear it. You’re our guest of honour.
Sir Lionel goes to look at the collage on the dresser. –
We lost her for hours making this. Covered herself in glue. I’d forgotten that photograph, you and me at the rally. It’s rather good, isn’t it?
He comes to sit beside Esmond on the bed. –
Things aren’t as easy as they might seem back here,
he says.
I fear Mosley’s made some
bad
decisions. Circumstances are moving against us. Your mother and I–– There have been rows. She’s been talking to Diana, to Mick Clarke, all of them helping to clarify my faults. I simply won’t have us allied with the Germans. Mosley’s still on my side, most days.

He’s looking down at his hand, frowning. –
Your success, Esmond, it gives me the advantage in these negotiations for the future of the Party. That we can forge a future that is cultured, civilised, peaceful. I point to the fact that Radio Firenze is ten times more successful – in numbers and in contribution to Party funds – than these lunatic broadcasts coming out of Heligoland and Sark
. He stands, ruffling Esmond’s hair.
It also gives me hope,
he says,
to have you, my eldest son, out there, making a difference. It helps me believe there’s a future worth hanging around for.

They all come to see him off at the station. The collage, back in brown paper and string, is on the seat of his compartment. He presses his face to the upper window as the train moves off and he sees the four of them standing there, Anna with her arm around their mother, who is inexplicably crying, his father waving furiously, Rudyard kneeling down with a dog and looking on. It strikes him, as the train gathers speed and moves out of sight, that Rudyard’s eyes are the mirror of his own, identical in shape and shade. He sits down, pulls out
The Brothers Karamazov,
and begins to read.

[Postcard from Lyme Regis]

[Various invitations to concerts associated with the Maggio Musicale: Beethoven at the Kunsthistorisches Institut,
Tosca
at the Teatro Verdi (sponsored by Piaggio), Bach at the British Institute, a string quartet hosted by Bernard Berenson at I Tatti.]

He sits in the grand drawing room at Berenson’s house, I Tatti, and tries to concentrate on the music. It is Haydn and the string quartet is very good, but he is thinking only of Anna. It was clear she was fighting at Christmas, desperate not to let him see her discomfort, and by the end of his visit was snatching gulps of breath, slinking off for rests in the early afternoon, pausing in the middle of their conversations to collect herself. He wonders if perhaps she might come out to Florence to join him. But war feels so close, so inevitable.

Ada is beside him. She’s wearing a dark green dress, long earrings with jade stones. Her pale arms grip the chair beneath her as she sways to the music. She hums so softly that only he can hear. When the movement finishes, she turns to him, clasps her hands to her chest and begins to applaud.

He is lying back in the pool at L’Ombrellino, looking up through the leaves of the camphor tree. He’d come up to check on the place for George and Alice Keppel, but the walk up the hill was so tiring, the abandoned rooms of the villa so stuffy and smothering, that he’d run past the box hedges of the upper terrace, down the steps and between the two dodos before he could think, shedding his clothes along the path as he went.

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.