In Love and War (3 page)

Esmond sits on the window-ledge in his room, smoking. He has three cartons of British Union cigarettes in his trunk and feels a sudden surge of fondness for the Party, turning over a black packet and running his thumb over the lightning bolt and golden hoop. Three Blackshirts strut past on the street below, their heels ringing on the cobbles, their yellow fezzes at loose tilts. He watches the crowd outside Caffè Casoni part for them. Grinding out his fag in the ashtray at his bedside,
he picks up his panama, forces a pocketbook of wide Italian banknotes into his jacket, steps into the corridor and runs for the stone stairway.

The courtyard is empty now. It is almost eleven when he walks through the entrance-hall of the palazzo, past a large portrait of the late King George and onto the street. The traffic has died down, the rainwater drained from the road. A tramp with a pheasant feather in his cap sits on the steps of San Gaetano, scattering crumbs for the pigeons. Moustachioed men walk arm-in-arm with girls in lace chiffon. Older couples step down from taxis outside Doney’s café, its name in gold on frosted windows. Roberts’ British Pharmacy, apparently not yet drawing Anglophobic ire, advertises quinine pills and Fleischmann’s Yeast. Next door, Pretini the hairdresser waves a white-gloved hand at Esmond through the window. He comes to the intersection where the via Tornabuoni meets the vias Strozzi and Spada.

At a table on the pavement, sipping a spumey cappuccino, is the man Esmond had seen queuing for Cook’s. Esmond raises his hat and the old man lets out a whinny. ‘Good morning,’ he says.

‘Is it so obvious I’m English?’

‘Bloody right. It’s the panama. An Italian fellow your age wouldn’t be seen dead in one. It’s the Fascist fez or a fedora here. And that’s a Wykehamist’s tie, if I’m not mistaken. Esmond, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Goad told us about you. You’re coming to lunch on Sunday after church. I’m Colonel Keppel – George. Pleased to meet you. Off to the galleries?’

‘I think so. I was going to wander—’

‘Don’t wander. Too much to see. The Uffizi closes for lunch at one. You should eat at the Nuova Toscana in the Piazza della
Signoria. Say I sent you. Then back to the Uffizi for a couple of hours and then the Bargello. See you Sunday.’

‘Thanks!’ Esmond is chased across the street by a bicycle. He passes in front of stone and stucco palazzos, their faces coloured cream or ochre, saffron, apricot, or white with terracotta crenellation. He strides through a piazza where restaurateurs set out their tables in spots of sun, then down the via Calimala. The Blackshirts he’d seen from his window pass him and he returns their straight-arm salute, conscious of his foreigner’s hat. He resolves to buy a fedora at the first opportunity. He hears the Blackshirts’ laughter echoing down the street behind him.

Esmond turns the corner into the Piazza della Signoria and his breath catches in his throat. Bare brick, parapets, the clock tower, Michelangelo’s
David
. The palazzo looks like a castle; beside it sculptures cluster on the terrace of the loggia, guarded by stone lions. His eye falls immediately on Perseus holding the Gorgon’s head, tendons and gore streaming from the neck.

A tram clatters past, swaying on its rails, heading down into the narrow streets beside the palace. Electronic speakers mounted on the corners of buildings squawk out military anthems. Esmond makes his way past David, whose comely half-turn and tight pubic hair remind him of Philip, and down towards the river and into the arcade of the Uffizi.
And he felt
– he remembers D. H. Lawrence –
that here he was in one of the world’s living centres, in the Piazza della Signoria. The sense of having arrived – of having reached the perfect centre of the human world
. He grins foolishly.

He had read of Stendhal’s collapse on leaving the church of Santa Croce, a fit of panic brought on by the presence of too
much beauty, too much history. It is not exactly panic he feels now, coming out of the gallery, but an anguished and somnolent wonder. He cannot remember having lunch, whether he took Colonel Keppel’s advice or not. He didn’t make it to the Bargello. He walks past a group of Blackshirts who stand on a street corner, eyeing passers-by, the death’s heads on their shirts polished to a shine, but he barely sees them. They call after him when he fails to return their salute but he carries on, oblivious.

He pauses for a moment in the centre of a piazza and closes his eyes. Filippo Lippi’s
Madonna with Child and Two Angels,
his son Filippino’s
Adoration of the Magi.
Then the Botticellis –
Primavera
and the
Birth of Venus,
of course, but also
Pallas and the Centaur,
the
Madonna of the Pomegranate.
He tries to summon every detail to mind. The purity and humanity of the Madonna. Venus’s toes, he remembers, long and prehensile, the way her head cocks to one side, the tress of golden hair she presses to her groin.

He’d spent an hour in front of Filippino’s
St Jerome
. It had seemed an antidote to the easy pleasure he drew from Botticelli. This was a painting his father could love: the saint’s skin was grey-green, his eyes hollow. This, Esmond thought, was what came after. When one has lived with Venus and Flora for long enough, there is only the hillside, the penitence, the twisted branches and dank grottoes. He walks on as the sun dips behind buildings and a breeze sweeps up from the river and he imagines a lifetime of this, being breathed by Florence.

Back at the Institute, the courtyard is dark. A square of light from the window of Goad’s study falls onto the flagstones, otherwise all is shadow. He climbs the steps to the apartment and opens the door. He looks for a light switch, can’t find one, and edges carefully along until he comes to his door. He pushes and gasps. A young girl, long tanned back to the door, sits naked at
a dressing table, combing her hair. There are books on the floor, drowsy jazz on the gramophone, dresses laid out on the bed. In the instant before he shuts the door, he sees the pale undersides of raised arms, the reflection of smiling, startled eyes.

He hurries along the corridor, realising he has confused the three sides of the apartment. He turns a corner to the kitchen, the smell of roast meat, the spitting of a pan and Gesuina’s low humming. He finds his door in the half-light, walks in and fumbles for a cigarette. Gesuina has made up his bed, the windows are closed and the ashtray empty. He slips off his shoes, pulls off his tie, tries to force his mind back to the Uffizi, but sees only that long back and dark-freckled shoulders, a coral bangle fallen halfway down a bare arm.

He opens the windows to the street. The tramp with the pheasant feather cap is still sitting on the steps of the church, in the edges of a pool of light that falls from the streetlamp. A military truck, its bonnet painted with the fasces, roars down the road. Esmond watches the tramp’s eyes following it. There is a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ he says.

In a plain, yellow cotton dress, no shoes or stockings, she is as astonishing dressed as she was naked. Her black hair is pinned in a high pony-tail. She smiles but her eyes remain cool. ‘I am Fiamma Ricci. The daughter of Gesuina.’ The accent is heavy, her English hesitant but precise. ‘I live here with Mr Goad while I study at Florence University.’

‘Pleased to meet you. Listen, I’m awfully sorry––’ Esmond gets up, lifts a pile of shirts from the chair at his desk and scrapes it towards her. She folds one foot beneath her as she sits.

‘Please, don’t worry. It is easy to be lost here.’

Esmond grinds out his cigarette in the ashtray and offers her the packet. She shakes her head.

‘So how long do you stay with Mr Goad, Esmond?’

‘I’m not sure. As long as it takes. I’m here to set up a radio station. For the British Union.’

She looks up at him with a sly smile. ‘This is Fascist, right? You do not look like a Fascist. A Nazi, maybe, all that blond hair. But not a Fascist.’

He swallows and sits, straight-backed, on the edge of the bed.

‘You are a Fascist like Mr Goad is a Fascist, perhaps?’ she says. ‘He is an intellectual gentleman. Not like the brutes we have here.’

‘Oh, we have our share of brutes,’ he says, thinking of William Joyce, Mosley’s right-hand man, breaking windows in the Jewish East End. ‘And you have noble Fascists, too. What about Ungaretti, d’Annunzio?’

‘You like poetry? I am glad. Then you will be a friend for Mr Goad. He is lonely, I think, since his wife died. Too much work.’

There is silence between them. They hear footsteps pass in the corridor.

‘Listen, mightn’t you show me some of the city? It would be super to have a local guide.’

Her smile fades as she stands.

‘I am not a local. We are from Milan, my mother and I.’

‘Oh. Right then.’

She walks to the door and opens it, turning back to address him from the hallway. ‘My father is in the gaol there. He is a Socialist, a political man. He wrote for
L’Ordine Nuovo
. He has been in exile, on an island. Now he is back in Milan, like a common prisoner. I haven’t seen him since I was ten.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It is not your fault. If you have to be a Fascist, just make sure you are the right kind, not like that fat frog who calls himself our leader. Now I go out. Good night.’

She closes the door behind her. Esmond lights another cigarette and sits on the windowsill, looking down at the young people gathering outside Casoni and Doney’s. A motorcycle engine revs and the bell of San Gaetano tolls eight. He sees Fiamma come out into the street. She is wearing a dark blue jacket over her dress, a pair of high-heeled sandals, her hair wrapped inside a crocheted yellow snood. As she walks south towards the Arno, he sees her, bright and bobbing in the pale streetlamps, in the light from the doorways of cafés. She turns the corner, glances back up the via Tornabuoni, and is gone.

Dinner is cold meat, a bowl of salad, some bread. A single glass sits at Esmond’s place. When he enters the dining room he sees Goad struggling to pull a cork from a bottle of wine.

‘Ah, I thought you might – huh –’ He stifles a shout and frees the cork, sending a short crescent of dark wine into the air. ‘Blast. I thought you might like some wine. This is Arcimboldi Chianti, made by the family from whom we rent the palazzo. Beautiful vineyards at their villa in Val di Pesa.’

‘I’d love some, thanks.’

Goad half-fills the glass and then painstakingly reintroduces the cork.

‘I can’t stomach alcohol, myself. Brings on my black dog.’

He watches as Goad slices and chews carefully, eyes closing. Esmond finishes his wine in a couple of gulps and glances meaningfully at the bottle on the table. When Goad has eaten the last of his ham he pours himself some water and, finally seeing Esmond’s empty glass, passes the wine.

‘Do help yourself, dear boy. We don’t stand on ceremony here.
I’m afraid these evening meals will seem rather drab to you. I don’t like to ask Gesuina to work too late, particularly when it’s only the two of us dining.’

Goad peels and cores an apple with his pocket-knife. Esmond sips wine and clears his throat. ‘I met Fiamma earlier.’

‘Ah, did you. And how did you find her?’

‘Very charming. It’s good of you to provide for her.’

‘Hum – Did she tell you her story?’

‘That her father is in prison.’

‘It’s rather more complicated. You see, Gesuina, her mother, is the half-sister of Niccolò Arcimboldi, from whom we rent this palazzo. She married a Milanese.’

‘A journalist, she said.’

‘Although he’s not published a word, at least in any newspaper worth the name, for some time. In and out of gaol, exiled to Ustica and Lipari for sedition. He’s a member of
Giustizia e Libertà,
the anti-Fascist movement. A thoroughly bad egg. He was arrested for helping Socialists escape from prison. Not a thought for his wife and daughter. After a year in squalor in Milan, Gesuina came home and threw herself on her brother’s mercy.’

‘And he asked you to take them in?’

‘Niccolò Arcimboldi is one of the hardliners. Believes Mussolini isn’t going far enough, that Italy should round up the Jews, purge the factories, shoot the Communists. He’s chums with Carità at the MVSN, marches around looking for Reds to set about. Gesuina marrying a Socialist riled him terribly. So when she and her daughter came back to Florence, Niccolò reluctantly agreed to put them up. Asked me if I could use her as a housemaid. And since the apartment isn’t full, even when Gerald is here, and it reduces our overheads––’

‘Doesn’t she resent it, Gesuina?’

Goad scratches his hands.

‘She is here as a guest, she knows that. Over the past few years we have grown – hum – comfortable. Since my wife died she runs the household. I believe it suits her very well. Fiamma is different. She was horribly impertinent at first. Rather trite, adolescent talk. Now she’s a closed book. Not unruly any more so much as – hum – inaccessible.’

‘It must be hard for her, not knowing how her father is. And she’s studying?’

‘Literature, or so she says. Dante and Boccaccio this year, but you wouldn’t know it to speak to her. She’s out at dances most of the time, home late, connecting with heaven knows whom.’

He looks more closely at Esmond, a slice of apple paused on the approach to thin lips.

‘You might befriend her, Esmond. I feared you wouldn’t encounter enough young people, cooped up here with – hum – the aged adviser. And she would surely benefit from the company of someone as sensible and purposeful as you. Yes, this really is very good.’ He smiles and pops the apple into his mouth.

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Capital.’ Goad rises. ‘I must prepare my lessons. Our students return from their Easter vacation on Monday. You’ll find the place quite different when they’re around. Serious young fellows, most of them, but I do enjoy the peace of the holidays. Good night.’

Esmond waits for a few minutes and then, careful to ensure that no one sees him, makes his way up, the three-quarters full bottle of wine in one hand, glass in the other. He closes his door, fastens the shutters and windows and switches on his desk lamp. Pouring out a glass, he sits at the desk and picks up his pen.

Florence is beautiful,
he writes, imagining Philip in a Viennese tearoom, white marble tables and clever laughter.
I’m staying at
the
British Institute. It’s in the heart of the city, a fifteenth-century palace. Lots of dark passageways and tapestries. You imagine turning a corner and finding Michelangelo arguing with Ficino.
He takes a sip of his wine and lights a cigarette.
I can’t tell you how glorious the Uffizi is
. He wonders where Fiamma is now. On the dancefloor of some half-lit nightclub, a pack of wolfish boys around her.
I worry about you. I always look out for Vienna in the newspaper. If you get a chance to leave, you should.
Tanti auguri
(as the locals say!), Esmond.

He folds the letter into an envelope. Pouring another glass of wine and picking up his towel, he makes for the bathroom. Filling the bath so hot that a bank of steam hovers above it, he lowers himself into the water, cups his glass and reclines. He feels Philip’s absence in the groan of his stomach. He remembers a day in May when they’d cycled to Grantchester, the sun on Philip’s tanned shoulders, the sudden shower that sent them into the cover of bushes, the damp grasping for each other as the rain pounded around them and their lips became two wet, living things. He remembers sitting with Philip in F. R. Leavis’s lectures, the older boy with his hand on Esmond’s thigh, and then in the saloon bar of the Pickerel, where they drank with Leavis and talked until closing about Russian novels and the book-buttressed adventure their lives would be.

With Philip, something had loosened within him, his childhood lifting under the beam of the older boy’s careful love. Until then he’d felt himself, before anything else, his father’s son. At Cambridge he was pointed out as Sir Lionel Lowndes’s boy, scion of the second family of the British Union. People were surprised he wasn’t in black. On Philip’s arm, he felt himself different, decent.

He lets the bath run out with a gurgle and goes back to his room. He puts on his nightshirt, reads for an hour and then
sleeps. In his dream, Fiamma and Philip are together, dancing with the clever, cautious footsteps of the cat on the pavement outside San Gaetano.