In Love and War (17 page)

De Koning van Spanje,

Korte Nieuwstraat 12,

Antwerp.

19th June.

Dear Esmond,

We write with bad news. Philip was killed in Spain on the 23rd of December last year. We have been moving around a great deal and have only just had the information ourselves. Amongst his affairs there were several of your letters and instructions to let you know in the event of anything happening to him. I’m aware that you two were terribly close at Cambridge and I’m sorry to bear news that must come as a shock.

We had a letter from General Walter, the leader of the XIV International Brigade under which Philip served for much of his time in Spain. It appears the death was somewhat heroic. He held a machine-gun emplacement in Les Borges Blanques for six hours, single-handed, as the Falangists swarmed over the area. He was on a small hill in the centre of a grove of olives and, when he was finally overwhelmed, he turned his gun upon himself rather than be captured. A great soldier, General Walter told us, fearless and loyal.

We blame ourselves for Philip being in Spain. We had arranged to meet him in Lisbon, but I wanted to leave Europe as soon as possible. I got us a berth on a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro that struck rocks off the Azores. We spent several months attempting to get safe passage onwards from Ponta Delgada, but finally we were returned to Lisbon. With almost the
last of the money we carried with us from Austria, we procured a cabin on the MS St Louis, a German ship, to Cuba. We were denied landing in Havana, then in Florida, where we might have swum ashore, so close were we to the beaches. Now we are back in Antwerp, penniless and without hope, to find that our only son is dead. Life can be cruel.

Thank you for the friendship you showed to Philip. We hope that, whatever dark days lie ahead, you continue to flourish.

Martin and Liesl Keller.

Berchtesgadener Hof Hotel

Berchtesgaden

Germany

29th June 1939

Dear Esmond –

I have left your father. I imagine you picked up on the coolness between us while you were there at Christmas, but since then things have deteriorated significantly and I felt I needed to make a Break for Freedom. I married your father for his courage and his conviction; in recent months he is short of both. I have been living too long in the shadow of a man I no longer respect. These must be hard things for you to hear, but I wanted to explain to you why I, too, have left England.

Ever since our first trip to National Socialist Germany, back in the bright days of the spring of
’35, I have felt strongly that the Führer had a vision of the future that would shape the Fate of the World. My visits with Mosley and Diana, and more recently on my own, have only confirmed this. We are moving into a Nazi Future and men like your father who try to resist this will be left behind.

I’m sure it must have seemed cruel to you, the burning of your books, your manuscript. I wanted to explain it to you at the time, but I knew your father would have thought it absurd. There is another Great War coming. Germany has been preparing since 1933, it will draw upon all the resources of Mitteleuropa, it has the kind of Deep Ideological Conviction its opponents lack. By the end of 1940, all Europe will be German, soon after, all of the globe will fly the Glorious Swastika. I burnt your degenerate books, your limp-wristed writing because I knew the risk they’d pose for you in the coming years. (I suggest you burn this letter, too.) We – the British Union, those of us who have remained faithful to the cause – will be at the forefront of Nazi Britain and we can’t have bad eggs amongst us. I hope you see that, Esmond.

Diana, Unity and I are in Berchtesgaden. I’m going to dinner at the Kelsteinhaus tonight. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. I feel like I’m breathing for the first time in my life, up here in the mountains. Don’t worry about your father – he has Anna to look after, his losing battle against the Tides of History to fight. I never really felt I knew my children, but I loved you. I hope you know that.

Heil Hitler!

Your Mother.

Telegram: 13/7/39

Many thanks for your generous wire STOP This has saved us from a most difficult time STOP We will repay you once these dark days are over STOP Martin and Liesl Keller

Royal Shrewsbury Infirmary,

Salop.

24/7/39

Darling E –

Everyone rather glum over mother leaving. Did she write to you? I can’t think she was terribly good to us, but I do miss her. Every evening now, daddy goes for mournful gallops across the countryside with the dogs. Not hunting, but still looking for something I think, in the copses, along the banks of the canal. He comes back covered in mud, looking provoked.

In the hospital, am on a new machine that does some of my breathing for me. Wonder when it’ll be that machines take over all our vital functions and we’re left sitting out infinity with only our various looks of unease to distinguish us. Sounds frightfully dull to me. Put myself in here by going for a long walk beside the canal two nights ago. It was damp and I wasn’t well-enough wrapped up but O the joy of it, striding along taking great lungfuls of air and watching clouds rush across the sky and
feeling peppy for the first time in an age. Daddy doesn’t know how to talk to the nurses like mother did. He’s far too polite.

Sorry to hear Faber won’t take
In Love and War
. Bloody bastards. Don’t know a good thing when they see it. There are other publishers, you know – I do wish you’d send me a copy. I know you think it’s too filthy for my young eyes, but I promise I’d skip over the really grubby bits.

Daddy’s frightfully keen you should come home before the war starts. It would be super to have you, although I’ve no doubt he’d meet you off the train and march you straight down to the Knightsbridge barracks to enlist. Don’t go and get killed, darling. It would be too beastly of you.

Cough oodles cough,

Anna xxx.

Via dei Forbici, 35c

Firenze

12.8.39

Dear Esmond,

I am now going north – to Turin. It is said they are not implementing their vile laws with the same rigidity up there. Ettore Ovazza even claims he can find me work, perhaps. I will not flee to Switzerland just yet. Ada says she will stay here and I cannot persuade her otherwise. Look after her, perhaps bring some dinner over every now and again.
She tends not to eat enough. I will write to her, and to you, often. I wish that she would come with me, but she says she belongs here, that she is a Florentine. It is with great sadness that I leave her, and this city.

With very best wishes and thanks,

Guido Liuzzi.

Welsh Frankton

Shropshire

26th August.

Dear Esmond,

I thought I’d sit down and write while our conversation was still fresh in my mind. It’s also an excuse to lock myself away in the library for an hour and not deal with the ghastly necessities of death – funeral invitations and readings and notes from well-wishers. The house is like a florist’s – bouquets on every table, pollen staining every carpet. Your mother has come back, of course, but she’s flying out again on the 30th. She’s frantic not to be trapped in England when the show starts. Odd to have her around the house again – we’d been rather getting used to life without her.

You were very brave on the telephone; I’m sorry I didn’t hold up my end quite so well. Anna loved you best of all, you know. You’re right that we should feel blessed to have had her in our lives as long as we did. I keep telling myself this in the hope it’ll
comfort me. Not yet. So far it’s just a terrible sense that everything dear has reeled away from me. Your mother, Anna, the Party, the peaceful world I thought I was serving to build. Must be difficult to know that your father’s a failure, old chap, but the evidence is there for all to see.

Come home for the funeral, Esmond. Your brother needs you here. We all do. You don’t want to be scurrying over with every other Tom, Dick and Harriet when war’s declared – push off now, know that you’ve made a real contribution over the past few years and move on. I could get you into the Guards. Damned fine kit they have – you could do much worse. You’d be sure to see battle early on and that’s important with a war. Get out early and see a few bullets – you never know when it might all be over.

I’m afraid the Party’s more or less finished. Smashed on the rocks of history. I thought the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact might turn a few within the Party my way, might make them see that the Nazis are the enemy every bit as much as the Reds. Joyce and Clarke and now, alas, Mosley and your mother have turned the British Union into Nazis, tout court. With the stories about what’s happening to the Jews in the work camps, the rounding up of innocent civilians, the stench of
evil
settling over Germany, they’ve simply hitched their cart to the wrong horse. Mosley is still making noises about peace, about the need to avoid another Ypres, another Somme, but our time is passing.

Wind things up and come back home, Esmond – it’s
the right thing to do. It’s time for you to be the soldier you were meant to be. If not for me, do it for Anna.

I send you my love,

Your Father.

Part Four

FLORENCE, 1939–1941

(
transcribed by Ada Liuzzi
)

1
. A-Side:
Harold Goad and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss the building and authorship of the Ponte Santa Trinità (29′ 23″)

B-Side:
‘This is not a diary. Douglas always said I should keep a diary, record everything.
Everything is interesting,
he used to say.
Get it down
. I don’t believe him. I want to forget.

Nor is this an attempt at auto-psycho-analysis, to file my despair with Anna and Philip’s letters and Fiamma’s snood which, in the days after her death, found its way into my bedroom, I’ve no idea how.

The only thing to do with unwieldy objects is burn them, the only thing to do with a memory is tug it around like a fusty dog until you’re forgiven for tying a brick around its neck and drowning it.

I realised something last night: the discs we record onto, that make up our archive – and what a grandiose word that is for these programmes, which, as I listen to them, strike me as half-baked twaddle. People listen to this because they are charmed by the idea of an outpost of Englishness in Italy, because they visited Florence on some ghastly tour they saw advertised at the back of the
Daily Mail
and they think we’re guardians of Anglo-Italian culture.

Where was I? Oh yes, the discs. We’ve only been recording on one side. So I’ve begun this little memorandum on the other. It’s comforting to think they’ll stay here in Florence, in a box
in the British Institute, or packed into Ada’s attic. And maybe she will, on a whim, very late one night and rather tragic, dig me out, hear my voice and be filled with me. Who would have believed the curved cornet of our direct-to-disc-recorder could be a time-travelling device?

I’ll be long gone, in a rum shack by a beach somewhere, or teaching at a frowsty colonial university – Wollongong, perhaps. I’m going to make old bones, you’ll see, crawl out of Europe, the dark continent.

Perhaps she’ll be with me, Ada. Although there doesn’t seem much chance of that now. After practically heaving me over her shoulder after Anna’s death, the barricades went straight back up. Every move I make towards her, she bats away. So I’m here, in a funk, mixing metaphors, leading a circumscribed, spinsterish life, writing postcards into the void.

Three, four, five – that’s the bell of Santo Spirito you hear. I’m going to open the shutters a bit. There’s the faintest glimmer of dawn out in the square. We’re having an Indian summer. It’s been like ’14 – peace before the nightmare. Although it’s beginning to look like it might never start here. We expected Musso to jump straight into bed with Hitler, to invade France, or Greece, or Britain. But it’s all gone rather quiet –
Il Duce
is busying himself with Albania, thumbing his nose to Adolf and his war games to the north. Perhaps Italy and Spain really won’t join in, perhaps Stalin will realise Hitler is a bigger monster than the one that greets him in the mirror each morning. Good night, whoever you are. I’m shattered.’

2
. A-Side:
Esmond Lowndes and Bernard Berenson discuss symbolism in
Primavera
by Botticelli (27′ 33″)

B-Side:
‘I’ve been trying to isolate the part of my mind where Anna, Philip and Fiamma dwell and close it down, like an aeroplane with an engine on fire. The pilot shuts it off, hoping to glide home safely on the one that remains. Still, my eyes are drawn to the flames on the wing.

I had another letter from my father. The folly of me staying on here, how I’ve shirked my duty, the essential uselessness of what I’m doing given that the British Union is all but wound up. Circumstances have overtaken them. Pa says he’s already spoken to his pal Major-General Fuller about getting me into the Guards. He’s tried to sign up himself, but there’s not much call for a one-armed fifty-four-year-old. Yet. I haven’t answered his letter.

It feels like when I was first in Florence. The warmth has given way to rain. There’s no one around. Bloody lonely. Having Ada here every day is too frightful. The way she looks at me as she stands at the door at the end of the evening, her brolly in one hand, already half in the rain. Every time, I dare myself to say
Wait!
but I never do. I think, secretly, I’m rather enjoying the part of tormented lover. It takes my mind off Philip, off Anna, off the more weathered scars left by Fiamma, and all that was lost in ’37. Love is a splendid distraction from despair.

I’m recording this on the other side of a discussion Bernard Berenson and I had today. Amazing that he’s still here – although he arrived in Florence before the 1919 cut-off, so he’s legit. Still, I’d be feeling a bit exposed if I were one of the most famous Jews in the country. I went up to I Tatti for dinner after we’d recorded
the show. Strange set-up. I mean, with the wife and secretary and the very obvious tension, but the art makes up for it. Gloriousness on every wall – Pollaiolo, Lorenzetti, Sassetta. Ada came with me, she took my hand as we went through Poggio Gherardo, the city glowing below us. It was astonishing what the mere feel of her hand in mine did – little electrical explosions moving all the way up my arm, across my body. Douglas was right: Fascism is just a refuge from the powerlessness of love.

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.’