In Love and War (15 page)
Authors: Alex Preston
[Collection of invitations; visiting cards; concert, cinema and opera tickets; train tickets to Rome, Milan, Genoa and Venice; receipts for meals, hotels, taxi journeys.]
He has been on so many train journeys these past months he feels the rhythm of the shuddering carriages in the patterns of his thoughts. He suffers a kind of seasickness for the first half-hour in a new city, until he finds his land legs again. He does not see enough of Italy on these trips. Often he is taken straight from the station to some out-of-town office to meet the scions of wealthy manufacturing families, ambitious executives keen to toady to
Il Duce
, place a flag in the ground on Radio Firenze. Advertising money is pouring into the station, eclipsing the contributions made by the operations in Heligoland and Sark, and he and Ada open the discs each afternoon and listen to stoic men in clipped voices talk about the smooth action of
their Beretta, the speed of their Romeo, the refined taste of their Martini. The next day, he is a travelling businessman – he feels modern, useful, as if he has stepped from a dream into real life.
He spends a night in a hotel in Venice overlooking the Piazza San Marco. The city is more ornate, more oriental than Florence, the squares wider and suffused with grey light. It seems to him a more naturally Fascist environment. His taxi driver points out the balcony from which Mussolini and Hitler addressed the crowds when they met there in ’34. He is appalled by the stench of the canals. He meets a girl at the foot of the Torre dell’Orologio and takes her back to his hotel. He is surprised when, in the morning, she wants paying.
He finds an England in the landscape. Looking out of the window of the train as he crosses the Po Valley, he sees a coppice of oak and elder that might have been a hillside in Ellesmere. He is reading
War and Peace,
falling in love with Andrei and Natasha in equal measure, but he thinks of England. And the streets of Milan and Turin are as dull as those of London, the people of those busy northern cities as lost in their own affairs, in their own hurried footsteps and urban anxieties.
Whenever he returns to Florence, making his way by foot down the via Tornabuoni and over the Ponte Santa Trinità to the gate of St Mark’s, it feels like home.
Roma Reial Hotel, Barcelona
4/11/38
Dearest Es –
Everything’s buggered. I’m in Barcelona, looking down over the Plaça Reial. Bloody rain gushing onto
the cobblestones, turning lanes into mud, splashing up and soaking the few miserable creatures out there pushing half-empty carts up to the Ramblas markets. Above the noise of the rain on the roof I can hear the shells to the south of the city, guns in the hills. Place I’m in used to be a hotel, but there’s no bed, nothing in the room but dust, my few books, my revolver, a blanket. I’m hungry and we’re all bloody buggered.
That sod Chamberlain’s to blame. We all had so much hope. We were cheering Hitler on during the Sudeten Crisis, applauding every act of violence, every ultimatum ignored. We thought, you see, that it’d lead to an alliance against Fascism: the Russians, the Brits and the French. Even the Americans, perhaps. That as Hitler pushed things further and further, the democratic powers (well, and Stalin) would see Fascism for the evil it is (sorry, Es, but there you have it). They’d turn not only on Hitler, but on Franco, Mussolini, Horthy – the whole dark stain wiped from the map. And before you brace yourself for a wiping, take a good look in the mirror. You’re no more a Fascist than I am. Anyone who’s had his cock in my mouth automatically unsubscribes himself from the Fascist Cause. It’s one of life’s little rules.
Now all we have is this welching appeasement – ‘Peace in our time’. There was a real chance for a better world and we blew it. I’m in such a rage, Es, I feel like running up into the hills with my gun and having a go. It’s funny, now that we’re really fighting, now that we can see the Falangists with
our field glasses from the look-out on the roof, I don’t feel the least bit windy. Heroism ain’t the word for it either, it’s just a kind of placid acceptance. I’m going to see this out and bugger the consequences.
Charlie’s dead, by the way. We were caught in an ambush on the way out of Valencia. Italian CTV troops. Nothing to be done. He died holding his cricket bat, which I think would’ve made him happy. I lay underneath him and Gonzalo (the boy we’d been travelling with) for an hour, listening to the Italians picking around in our stuff, feeling Charlie’s breathing getting shallower all the time. Gonzalo died immediately. They’d mined the road and the car was flung up and off into a ditch, everything rolling and tumbling and then a volley of machine-gun fire that tore through the car and through Gonzalo, whose body, I think, protected me. Charlie only took one bullet, but it was in the eye. Straight through and out the back. He looked like he was winking, which I felt rotten about as I thought it. They dragged him and Gonzalo out from under the rolled car. I hid beneath a tartan rug. They’d found our stash of whisky in the boot and seemed more interested in that than in us, the bodies.
I waited until darkness and then crept out into the cool air, a waning moon on the water, bats flapping etc. Took me three nights, only travelling by dark, sipping the half-bottle of whisky the Italians left to keep me warm. Finally Barcelona, where the Republicans have made their new capital
and everyone is doggedly optimistic, even under this bloody rain.
There are a good number of English here, enough that I’ve organised a few games of cricket in the Plaça in Charlie’s memory. Pathetic sight, me in the rain with a group of five or six scrawny, battered Englishmen crouched around the crease, and me crying so much to think of playing with Charlie in the corridors in Vienna, in the squares in Valencia. I was never much of a cricketer anyway, but I’ll keep playing for his sake, I think. We were in love, you see.
Send me some money, Es. Anything will do. I need to get boiled, stinko, lit up like a church and slopped to the gills, but haven’t a peseta to my name.
Philip.
Welsh Frankton,
Shropshire.
26th November
Darling E –
I haven’t slept a wink since I heard you were coming back for Christmas. Simply too thrilling. Daddy’s the happiest he’s been in years – I swear it. I should imagine the train ride will be splendid – take some good books and fall into some frightfully exotic affair with a White Russian countess. If it were anyone but you
having this glamorous time, turning daddy into a nervous schoolgirl and generally being the top of everyone’s toast, I might feel a Small Dash of Envy. As it is, I’m just too, too thrilled for you darling.
Mick Clarke (who has taken over the nutty side of the Party since William Joyce left for Germany) is in a high frenzy over Kristallnacht. His grin is so wide he risks flipping open like a hatbox. He and Mosley are down here for a pow-wow with daddy. They’re arguing over whether the Party should cosy up to Hitler now he’s shown his true colours: daddy is anti, Clarke pro, Mosley increasingly addled and prone to letting Clarke take control.
The Times
got it right on Germany, for once. It seems as if all the talk of the British Union as the party of peace has been for nothing. Because we should be fighting against the Germans, shouldn’t we? Kristallnacht etc.
At least there’s Christmas. We’ll have masses to catch up on when you’re here. Mother and I went into Chester yesterday and I saw what I want to get you for your present. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s just perfect. Can’t wait to sing carols and roast chestnuts and go for walks in the cold and generally just bask in your company.
Excited oodles,
Anna xxx.
Villa dell’Ombrellino
Piazza di Bellosguardo
Firenze
2/12/38
Dear Harold, Frederick and Esmond,
It is with some sadness that I write to tell you that George and I have decided, when we visit Violet in Sussex this Christmas, to stay with her into the New Year. Whether it’s the position of L’Ombrellino, perched up here custodial of the city, or our own status within Anglo-Florentine society, it is impossible for us to remain. Windows broken at night, the crudest graffiti on the walls, two cooks in a row burgling us of food and plate and the police won’t do a thing about it.
We will, of course, be back eventually, whether after this ghastly looming war or before it. George is still certain we’ll be fighting the Russians. He has dusted off his uniform in anticipation and is wandering around looking fairly brutal.
We wanted, before we go, to wish you both a great deal of luck, and to thank you for all the entertainment, friendship and joy you have brought to us these past few years. We’ll be leaving many of our possessions here. I’ll send Massimo down with a key – perhaps you’d pop in and make sure the place isn’t overrun with rats or Italians in our absence.
With love and best wishes,
Alice and George Keppel.
La Palme,
Bast de l’Abbaye,
Le Colle-sur-Loup,
Alpes-Maritimes,
France.
17th December, ’38
Dear Esmond –
Tempus fugit! Know I should have written sooner to thank you for helping with the scrape I got myself into last year. Inexcusable, really, but I’ve been travelling rather a lot. In the hills above Nice now, but got here via Greece, Morocco, Malta and I don’t know where else. Pino has just joined me. His eyes are back working, but he’s grown horribly tubby. Can hardly bear to look at him. We’re working on a book of aphrodisiacal recipes together. Have you ever tried simmered crane? Lambs’ testes? Sow’s vulva? Thought not. All of them dee-lish.
A lot of blathering about the war. Nothing like an expat community to inspire a gaggle of silly women on the subject of catastrophe. Pino and I intend to stay gracefully here for a few more months before returning to Italy. It’s the only place I feel sane, you see. If there is a war, all the better. The prospect of a gruesome death gives young men a bit of spritz. Don’t go into battle yourself, though, Esmond. It’d be a crime to risk that exquisite phiz.
How’s the writing coming along? Are you keeping a diary? You’ll thank yourself when it comes to your autobiog. More than that, reading back over
the early years of this century in my own tattered journals is one of the few unassailable pleasures left to me. Affreux being alive at this age, I tell you. Pity in the eyes of the sailors by the dock, with their rotten teeth and the reek of bouillabaisse. Better live in the corridors of your own memory. To do that: keep a diary.
Love to Gerald. Terribly sorry about Fiamma. Rotten luck.
Norman.
His father meets him at the train station at Gobowen. He is standing on the platform as the train pulls in, a silk scarf around his neck. He is obscured briefly by a cloud of steam and then reappears, waving his newspaper. He looks old, kind, eager. The Humber is parked in front of the station. Esmond lifts his bag into the back and climbs up beside his father. It is as if the steam from the train follows them onto the road: mist parts as they motor along the narrow lanes, through Whittington with its castle and ugly red church and up the hill to Welsh Frankton.
His family is waiting at the front door when he arrives: the silhouette of his mother, Rudyard to one side with a dog in his arms, scratching its ear. Anna pushes past her brother and comes running out to the car. Her breath is heavy and hot as she embraces him and he is surprised at his tears. She has lost weight and he lifts her from the ground with ease, pressing their damp cheeks together and spinning on the gravel of the courtyard.
He’s only here for four days – he and Goad will be broadcasting again on New Year’s Eve – but now, surrounded by his family, with Christmas to look forward to, the evidence of his
success in the way his father steers him to the drinks cabinet, sits beside him on the sofa in the library, places his hand on Esmond’s as if to assure himself of his son’s physical presence, he feels weightless, joyous, grown.
On Christmas Eve, Mosley and Diana arrive, on their way to Wooton Lodge. Everyone seems to want to touch Esmond, to congratulate him, to hear from him some story of his time in Italy that can be theirs. Diana drinks too much at lunch and then sits very close to him on the sofa afterwards. –
Kit is so frightfully chuffed,
she whispers. This is what she calls Mosley. –
Not just with the money, darling, but with the way you’ve made the British Union seem relevant and involved in the great matters of the Continent.
She blows cigarette smoke towards him and laughs. She places a hand on his thigh, moving it in languorous strokes until it brushes the tip of his cock. He feels himself reddening, murmurs an excuse and goes to join Anna and Rudyard in the kitchen.
Mosley grips him by the hand as he leaves. They are all standing in the hallway and he speaks in loud bursts. –
Bloody good stuff, Esmond. A man in his father’s image. Knows how to get things done. Make sure you keep it up. We’re all relying on you.
Sir Lionel is looking at Esmond with a kind of evangelical glow. His mother comes up behind him and puts a gentle hand on his back. They go out into the courtyard, waving, as Mosley’s car disappears down the drive.
On Christmas morning they sit around the tree in front of the fire. The day seems to serve nostalgia, newly minted. As he watches his mother tousle Rudyard’s hair, his father unwrap his presents using his arm and his teeth, Anna open the purse he’d bought her on the via Calimala, he begins to miss and grieve for them, as if the picture were gently fading before his eyes. A Jack Russell and a Scottish terrier come bounding in, yapping
and worrying the wrapping paper until Rudyard follows, chasing them out.
Esmond saves his present from Anna until last of all. It is large and square and carefully wrapped in brown paper. He opens a wooden frame around a collage of photographs of the family. He holds it in his lap, smiling, letting himself drift downwards into the scenes she has laid out for him: his mother and father by a piper at Loch Katrine, Anna and him in front of the beech tree at Aston Magna, Rudyard with blood-stained cheeks standing high in his stirrups. Anna comes to sit beside him –
It’s simply ripping, old thing,
he says. –
Thank you
.