In Love and War (4 page)

At a quarter to nine, Esmond walks through the courtyard of the Institute, past the portrait of the dead King, out onto via Tornabuoni. A light drizzle, little more than mist, pearls on the manes and tails of the horses. Bicyclists pass with umbrellas held high and the window of Doney’s is steamy with breakfast. An old woman steps from a cab into Pretini’s hair salon, tutting. Esmond turns up the collar of his mackintosh and makes his way onto the via degli Strozzi.

By the time he gets to the Piazza della Signoria, the shower has passed and a tentative sun emerges. People come out of shop doorways, furl their umbrellas and wait for their trams. He wafts his letter from
Il Duce
and is ushered through a silent inner courtyard where gargoyles spew from the capitals of columns, then to a wooden bench in a gilded hall, where the guard asks him to wait.

Small, well-dressed men hurry back and forth, heads down. Occasionally a Blackshirt, skull and crossbones on his chest, marches past. Esmond draws
A Room With a View
from his pocket and begins to read. After a few minutes, a peroxidial secretary shows him into the mayor’s office. The Podestà sits at a large desk between two windows, one of which is open to the morning. Over his right shoulder, against the brightening sky, stands a stocky figure with his back to the room, looking down to the banks of the Arno. The mayor gestures towards one of the armchairs facing him.

‘Please, Mr Lowndes, have a seat.’ He opens a silver cigarette case and holds it out.

Esmond takes one, tilts forward to accept a flame and sits. The Podestà lights his own cigarette and leans back.

‘My name’, he says, ‘is Count Alfonso Gaetano.’

Esmond smiles shyly. ‘Like the church,’ he says.

The mayor raises an eyebrow. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting Sir Oswald when he and his late wife came to visit some years ago. A most remarkable man. Now this project of a wireless broadcast to educate our citizens, to forge ties between the right-thinking men of your country and ours. Bravo! Mussolini himself has given his full support. If I, humbly, may be of any assistance at all, you must tell me.’ He reaches across and presents a creamy card with his full title in loping cursive.

‘Decent of you,’ Esmond says. At this moment, a butterfly, a cabbage white, flutters blithely into the room, borne up on a breeze from the river. It pauses for a moment on the windowpane, opening and closing its wings. The stocky figure at the window shoots out a plump hand and crushes the insect against the glass with his thumb, leaving a green smear. The mayor turns at the sound.

‘I must introduce you to our local communications expert, Mario Carità.’ The man, unhealthy-looking in black shirt and grey flannel shorts, inspects his thumb for a moment and turns to face them. He looks, Esmond thinks, like a pickled schoolboy, save for a streak of white in quiffed hair and his eyes, hard and black and glassy.

‘Carità will fix you up with your studio, with all the equipment you need. He’s one of the coming men in this town. Doing business in Italy, you’ll find, is all about whom you know, and Carità knows everybody.’

The little man steps forward. His palm is damp. ‘I happy to
meet you––’ He pauses, holding Esmond’s hand, smiling bloodlessly. ‘You and me, we make radio big success.’

The Podestà looks at his watch. ‘I have a committee meeting. Please do feel free to stay here and get acquainted.’ He gives a bow, collects some papers from the desk and leaves. After a pause, Carità pulls out the mayor’s chair and sits down, reaching for the floor with the balls of his feet.

‘We need make things straight,’ he says. ‘I no like English. We not need English here. For too long English treat Florence like a home. But’ – he gives a reluctant grin – ‘Podestà says you good Fascist. For me, nationality not so important, Fascism important.’ He stands, walks over to Esmond and leans down to embrace him. He smells of wet vegetation.

‘Hey,’ Carità stands back waggling his finger. ‘You tell Goad, he not pay enough for translation
and
radio work. I not a teacher. I a soldier first’ – he points to the death’s head on the breast of his shirt – ‘second electrician.’

‘Fine,’ says Esmond. ‘When do you think we can start?’

Carità lifts himself to sit on the desk, picks up the Podestà’s fountain pen and begins to play with it, tutting. ‘I’m not so sure. I very busy man. You wait to hear from me,
va bene
?’ he says finally. Esmond nods. ‘Good boy. We work very well together, I know this.
Arrivederci
.’

Esmond walks out into the morning. The rain has returned, settling in puddles. He pulls his mackintosh up over his head. At the entrance to Doney’s some girls laugh under an umbrella as a boy steps into the road to flag down a taxi. They tumble in, the boy holding the door and another taking the brolly. Esmond watches as the girls pat their hair and the boys call orders to the driver. The girl nearest turns her face and he sees it is Fiamma. She smiles and presses a hand to the glass, her breath misting it as she laughs. Esmond waves, feeling foolish, as one of the other
girls leans over to look at him, tented under his raincoat. Now both girls laugh and the taxi pulls away. He drops his hand and walks back towards the palazzo.

He starts another letter to Philip.
Perhaps this is all for the best,
he lies.
Perhaps I’ll find someone else who’ll make me feel as good, as loved as you did. You invented my heart, you know.
A postcard of
Primavera
to his father.
I am doing my best for the Party. Give my love to mother.
To Anna, the Gorgon shield by Caravaggio.
I miss you. Have decided to restart my novel. How are you?
He closes his eyes and thinks of Anna. She has weak lungs, her childhood one long, soft handshake with death. He remembers sitting beside her, pressing her burning skin, reading to her. In turn, she’d loved him, and her love was the thread that led him out of the labyrinth of spite and recrimination that was his family. He kisses the Gorgon’s head as he steps down to the postbox at Cook’s.

He eats dinner alone – Goad is at the German Consulate, Gesuina says – then goes to his room and lies on his bed. He opens a notebook on his knees and writes
Chapter One
. Music rises from the street, happy voices, the clatter of plates from Doney’s. He throws the notebook to the floor, strips off and crawls under the covers. He thinks of the look of mock absorption he and Philip would shoot discreetly at one another whenever someone nearby was being particularly dull. He pulls the pillow over his head. Later that night, he wakes as a door bangs. He wonders if it is Fiamma coming home. He listens for a moment to the night, to a disappointed silence. He turns over and falls into a deep, blank sleep.

On Sunday morning, Esmond pulls on a green jumper and tweed jacket. He and Goad meet at a quarter to ten in front of the late King and walk together through the mist, down the via Tornabuoni to the Ponte Santa Trinità. The bells ring across the city, people hurry to secure the best pew in the best church.

‘The ignominy of the side-aisle,’ Goad cautions, ‘and the Lady Chapel.’

Mist cushions the river, thick and white. When they reach the centre of the bridge, the bells of the town begin to muffle, and Goad peers nervously over the stone bulwarks. Sounds creep up through the mist towards them: the slop of the river, fishermen on the banks downstream, the distant bellow of the weir.

‘It’s as if we were underwater,’ Esmond says.

‘Or lost in time.’

They reach the south side of the river and walk down the via Maggio towards an old palazzo. There is no spire, only a small gold sign:
St Mark’s English Church
. The front is weather-beaten, the wash on the
pietra serena
chipped and flaking. Wire birdcages hang at eye height outside the shops and cafés on the street. None of the birds – canaries, zebra finches, parakeets, bullfinches – are singing. They stand in front of the church and Esmond looks down the line of silent cages. Goad makes his way through a wicket gate set in the large oak doors; Esmond ducks to follow.

In the entrance hall a flight of stone steps rises ahead of them, passing through an arch and curling out of sight. Green baize notice boards:
Italian Lessons Offered, Vieusseux’s Circulating Library
and
Christian Lady Lodger Seeks Room in Central Location
. The cards have yellowed and curled at the edges. They
remind Esmond of the boards on the walls of the common room at Winchester, scholarships to Oxford and rowing blues, messages of triumph from the world to come. A crackling organ begins, and Goad leads them through a small door to the left.

In near-darkness, they make their way down the aisle towards the altar, a block of white marble with lambs and palm trees in alabaster bas-relief. It looks ancient and sacrificial, scrubbed of blood each night, Esmond thinks, as they shuffle into a pew near the front. On the wall behind the altar is a triptych of the crucifixion. Christ’s crown of thorns draws blood at every needle, his ribs press closely against his skin. Blood seeps and clots at the wounds in his hands and feet, where the nails are thick and twisted. The left-hand panel of the triptych shows Mary Magdalene, mourning, just as withered and undone. On the right is John the Baptist clinging to a gold cross. All three have grey-green skin, faces gaunt and horrified, every tendon and muscle risen. Esmond thinks of Filippino’s painting of St Jerome in the Uffizi. The same leached skin, the hopeless terror.

‘Rather brutal, hum?’ says Goad.

‘It’s ghastly. Is it Filippino Lippi?’

‘Ha! Bernard Berenson thinks so. Art expert, lives at I Tatti, up towards Fiesole. The triptych was owned by Charles Tooth, queer fish, by all accounts. He was the first vicar here and the triptych just hung around, so to speak. It was only when Berenson came for a lunchtime recital that we realised it was, that it might be, something rather special.’

‘I must write to my father and tell him. He adores Filippino.’

‘Had quite a collection, didn’t he?’

Esmond thinks of the chapel at Aston Magna, the family home seized by the banks after the Crash. There was no altar, no pews or promises, just his father’s paintings, stained glass replaced by clear panes to better light the cheeks of a Bronzino goldfinch,
the pietà by Filippino Lippi, the Gentileschi
Judith
. His father had felt the loss of the paintings more than the house or the family firm. He’d blamed the unions in the factories, the Jews in the banks and the courts. Above all he blamed the Socialists, who’d pushed him from conservatism into full-blooded Fascism. Communism was a red rash on the mind of the family.

St Mark’s is like the chapel at Aston: secular, cluttered, flannelled with dust. A great-aunt’s attic. A grand piano sits at the back with a sheet over it. A sofa supports three peeling pictures of the Madonna. Chairs stacked down the side-aisles. A smell of damp and plaster, the sense of benign but terminal neglect. The darkness is partly due to the narrow clerestory windows at either end, and partly because everything is painted a light-eating crimson: the walls, the pillars, even some of the pews.

Goad bows his head to pray and Esmond looks around. He hadn’t realised how many worshippers had crowded into the darkness – all of them old, obviously British in their twill and tweed, floral hats and medals. Colonel Keppel is bolt upright in the front row beside a martial woman with a large nose. Behind them, on his own, is an old man in a double-breasted suit, a single comb of hair across his head. Goad looks up and the old man waggles thick eyebrows.

‘Reggie,’ whispers Goad.

‘Wotcha,’ the man says.

Another old man steps jauntily down the aisle. He wears a high-buttoned jacket, Edwardian-style, with turn-ups to the cuffs, a grey shirt and vermilion handkerchief. He stoops and crosses himself in the aisle, then edges into the pew behind Esmond and Goad. He leans his face between them.

‘Goad.’ His voice is a whispered quiver. Esmond can feel his breath – peppermint – on his cheek. ‘And I don’t believe we’ve met––’

‘Esmond Lowndes,’ Goad says. ‘Reggie Temple. One of our two Reggies. The other is Turner.’

‘How confusing,’ Esmond says.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ says the nearer Reggie. ‘Other Reggie looks like a Turner. All washed out. And I’ve still got hair at the temples.’ He gives a dry giggle. ‘Going to the Keppels’ later? Lunch?’ The organ grows louder and his head retreats. The congregation stands and heavy footsteps sound in the aisle.

‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.’

The priest is tall, in a black cassock with a white lace smock on his shoulders. He is handsome – narrow black moustache, sharp blue eyes, a heaviness around the jowls, the creeping solidness of age. His voice is deep with a faint Scottish burr.

‘Welcome, all of you. Jolly good to see so many here. Those that have gone, go with our blessing, of course, but while there’s a single one of you left in Florence, I’ll be here every morning, twice on Sundays.’ He gives a sad smile. ‘I’m afraid Walter Goodwin was among the latest exodus, so I shall need a new sacristan. A Reggie, perhaps?’

Turner looks at Temple. ‘You wouldn’t be able to reach,’ he whispers sharply, rising to walk down the aisle.

‘Thank you, Reggie. Now, we’ve had an approach from Holy Trinity to combine services. Father Hywell-Jones wishes to take his family back to Wales. Given that their congregation has held up rather worse than ours, we shall welcome all eight or nine of them next week. Remember that they are more sombre in their worship than we are, and be kind.

‘In better news, and against the general trend, we have a guest with us. I’d like to welcome Esmond Lowndes, who is staying with Harold Goad at the British Institute. He’s over here to set up, of all things, a radio station, with the aim of building bridges
between the British and Italians. All I can say is jolly good luck to you, Esmond, God bless, and if there’s anything any of us here at St Mark’s can do to help, then do let us know.’ Everyone turns to look at Esmond and he raises a shy hand towards the priest and nods. ‘Now let us pray––’

There is no service sheet and Esmond has trouble remembering the words. At school he’d spent his time in chapel looking at the backs of the younger boys, soft blond napes that shimmered in the stained light. Sometimes he’d humour baroque sexual fantasies of the barmaid at The Wykeham Arms, so that he’d have to struggle his erection into place before walking up to receive his blessing. Here, though, he can’t drag his eyes from the triptych. He feels the pressure of Mary Magdalene’s desert gaze, the heft of the russet hair that tumbles down over her back like a pelt. She holds her arms across her chest as if, were she to let go, she’d burst forth, ruptured by the weight of her sorrow. John’s eyes, deep in sallow cheeks, peer up to his crucified God in appalled disbelief. Their bodies are chicken-thin and painful to look at. When he goes up to the altar rail beside Goad and bows his head, he shudders at his nearness to the painting.

After the service, Goad prays for a long time. Colonel Keppel and his wife stride down the aisle, nodding sternly at Esmond as they pass. Other expatriates step away, pausing only to genuflect broadly. The women are artistic and nervous, hanging onto the last vestiges of girlhood, or rather finding them again, turning up in their late-life bodies something gamine, playful, fragile. Their husbands march stiffly behind them, hands behind their backs. Finally Goad shakes his head and stands. The priest, who has taken off his smock and cassock and stands in a grey suit, is extinguishing candles at the back of the church with a brass snuffer. When he sees Esmond and Goad coming towards him, he puts it down and rubs his hands together, smiling.

‘Now then, Esmond.’ His palm is smooth and cool. ‘Harold, good morning.’

‘I thought we might show Esmond the room, if you have a moment,’ Goad says.

‘Of course. Perhaps I could drive you up to Bellosguardo afterwards.’

They make their way back through the entrance and follow Father Bailey up the dark stairwell. The priest takes the steps two at a time and Goad is soon panting, reaching for the support of Esmond’s elbow. Bailey stops to wait for them.

‘Here we are.’ Bailey turns through a bunch of keys, selects one and opens the door onto a corridor, dimly lit by a window at the far end.

‘It was the Machiavelli family palazzo,’ Bailey says. ‘He was born in one of these rooms. Amazing, isn’t it?’ He throws open doors as he passes, showing empty rooms thick with dust. They come to the end of the corridor. ‘Now tell me what you think of this.’ He opens the last door on the left and they step into a large, white space. It reminds Esmond for a moment of the ballroom at Aston Magna. Four French windows open onto a narrow balcony overlooking the church of Santo Spirito. He can see young men playing football in the piazza, doves in a gossipy cluster on the tiled roof.

‘I spoke to Father Bailey,’ Goad puffs, ‘about a studio. He suggested you might use this. For a small contribution to the upkeep of the church, of course, but––’

‘You’d be welcome to have it for nothing, Esmond. Far too quiet around here recently and what you’re doing is more good than harm. If Harold’s behind you, that’s endorsement enough for me.’

Esmond can see fingers of damp creeping up the walls, patches of mould that fur the far corner. Parquet tiles are chipped,
missing in places. Dust covers the stone mantelpiece at the far end. He breathes the smell and lets out his breath in a low whistle.

‘This is smashing.’

‘Glad you approve. Now, oughtn’t we get going? I’m ruddy terrified of Alice Keppel.’

With a last look at the room, Esmond follows Goad and Bailey back along the corridor, down the steps and through a side door into the garage and Bailey’s old, rather dazzling, red Alfa Romeo. They drive out into the misty square, along streets so narrow that rugs touch as the women shake them from high windows. Finally, with a careless roar from the car, they wind up into the hills and out of the city.