In Love and War (18 page)

6
. A-Side:
‘Dante Today – the Enduring Legacy of the
Divine Comedy’
, a lecture by Alessandro Pavolini (31′ 51″)

B-Side:
‘Bailey’s obsessed by the Finnish campaign. More by the pluck of the Finns than anything. The way they simply won’t give up, even with the aerial bombardments, the tanks, the Russians’ vastly superior numbers. We’re all cheering them on, but I can’t think they’ll be able to hold out much longer. I have an image of them: mostly blond, snow-dusted men with blue eyes and unpronounceable names skiing in white fatigues through the endless Arctic night. Rudyard is in France, digging in around the Maginot Line. He wrote me a card – thoroughly censored, of course. He sounds like a man, even in those few words. I wish I’d known him better when we were young. It made me think how alliances form in families, how Anna and I were so close we pushed the others away. I still miss her almost every day. It seems absurd that she should be dead and not there, in her room, waiting for me. That someone so abounding with kindness should act so pitilessly as to die.

Pavolini came to see Goad and me today, ostensibly to record his
thoughts on Dante’s legacy in contemporary European poetry – actually rather interesting – but in fact to issue instructions about our broadcasts. He’s seen the success William Joyce is having in Germany – Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen they call him there – and he wants us to mirror it. To become a propaganda mouthpiece for Musso. The way he put it to us was that
Il Duce
is certain to get into the war at some point; he’s like a hunter waiting for the optimum moment to shoot; and that we need to make up our minds now which side we’re on when Italy squares up to Britain. Goad and I sat on for a long time after he left. One of Pavolini’s requirements was that we give over a half-hour every day to PNF propaganda that he will script for us. Justifications of the war in Abyssinia, praise for the Italian military machine, hagiographies of
Il Duce
. I’ve heard the Joyce broadcasts and there’s not a chance we’d do something like that, but Pavolini is an intelligent man. Certainly no one who knows Dante like he does, who writes so delicately about poetry and music, can be all bad.

We’ve agreed we’ll see how it goes – there’s no gain in shutting things down before we see quite how invasive he’ll be. After Goad left, I stood in the studio looking out at the piazza getting rained on. My father wrote me one last letter, cutting me off. As far as he’s concerned I’m no longer his son. If I won’t be a warrior, I no longer deserve the name Lowndes. It draws a line under things, I suppose.

If only it wasn’t so very clear what’ll happen to me if I go back. A hair-raising voyage aboard some submarine-stalked ship, a few days at home with the ghost of Anna in every room, then to London with my pa, fitted out at Gieves’, on the train at Victoria and pow! a bullet in the brain a week or – worse – a year later. I went down to the church after dinner. I turned on the altar lights
and sat looking at the triptych for an hour or so. I feel crumpled, hollowed out, like those three figures in the painting. It’s as if Florence has seen me go from a boy who could feel sensuous about
Primavera
and
The Birth of Venus
to a man who can only relate to withered creatures. Don’t think I’m not ashamed of my fear: I am. I feel like a bloody hole. But shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling. Perhaps it will push me into action.

I saw crocuses growing in the Cascine today. Spring is on its way. Good night.’

7
. A-Side:
Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice
: a consideration by Harold Goad (28′ 28″)

B-Side:
‘The war is utterly confounding. Even Bailey seems to have given up moving his figures around the kitchen table. There’s mushroom sauce across Scandinavia, a blob of passata in the waters of the Indian Ocean. I’ve been learning how to cook – we’d grown bored with eggs on toast. All we had as far as cookbooks were concerned was Douglas’s collection of aphrodisiacal recipes, but I’m now able to fashion a passable
pastasciutta
, an encouraging
gnocchi al ragù,
a frankly hopeful
cinghiale salsa agrodolce
. I’ve converted Bailey to wine. He was teetotal when I turned up and now we get through a bottle of Chianti most evenings. I’ve started broadcasting Pavolini’s propaganda. Generally fairly tame stuff, but today there was something on the Manifesto of Racial Scientists. It wasn’t too evil, just the usual guff linking the Jews to the Reds who are disrupting the factories, how there will now be stricter curfews. They wanted us to get Guido Landra, their pet eugenicist on, but Goad drew the line.

All the time I was reading it, I was watching Ada’s face. That cold angularity, the way her eyes leave and she follows. I shiver to look at her when she gets like that. It became harder and harder to read the words. I realised how much power there is in those bureaucratic phrases, in the canted, abstract language of the State. I felt, with the suddenness of instinct, that the words I was reading meant something concrete, that translated into actions by Blackshirt thugs on the streets of Turin or Naples, into education or medication denied to Jewish children, into the concentration camp they’re building in Campagna. That speech carried a dreadful weight, a weight that would finally fall on Ada’s shoulders. I felt my throat closing up, choking off the words as I read them. I barely got through it. When I reached the end, silence like a fog came over us, and I felt as if I’d just carried out some atrocity, some appalling crime as I read. Ada got up from the sound desk and practically ran. I went after her, heard Goad following me. Her footsteps echoed down the stairwell, then the clatter of the wicket gate.

I finally caught up with her at the midpoint of the Ponte Santa Trinità. She was running very quickly. It must have been six – people were walking home from their jobs, standing around in the spring sunlight, watching the fishermen on the Arno. To stop her, I put my arms around her, and she was heaving with sobs, tears streaming down her freckled blue cheeks, onto the soft linen of her shirt where I could see her collarbones pushing through, see her small breasts, and then I was kissing her and I pulled her tightly to me, and the river flowing under us, the rumorous hum of the city, the milky sky overhead, all of them seemed to stop for a moment – we were the still point and the world was rising to a blister on our lips, at the intersection of our bodies as they pressed hopelessly together. I drew back for a moment and stared
at her, feeling as if another sun had risen. Then we started kissing again, urgently, both of us. When we pulled back for a second time, I saw Goad at the foot of the bridge, watching. I tore myself away from her, and that was what it felt like: as if our bodies had fused for a moment and now we tore flesh as we parted.

Goad gave me a talking to. About how ill-advised it was for a Brit to be consorting with a Jew. We are under significant scrutiny, and this is just the sort of performance that might tilt it all against us. He apparently assumes it’s been going on for some time. He gets terrible itching on his hands when he talks about this kind of thing; he sits there and I can feel the pressure to scratch building up inside him until it’s unbearable. Then he gives a rub, runs the back of one hand down the tweed of his thigh. Poor fellow. I can’t remember what I said to him. Mumbled apologies, told him it wasn’t anything serious, that it was in response to the moment, to her tears.

It’s time to turn in. I’ve found it hard to get Ada out of my head. I tried to telephone her earlier, but there was no answer. Something makes my chest suddenly too small for my heart when I think of her. She’s been the anchor tying me to Florence. It’s a better excuse than ennui, anyway. I’m reading Benedetto Croce. “Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.” Not easy.
Buonanotte
.’

8
. A-Side:
Esmond Lowndes: Milton in Italy, 1638–39 (30′ 21″)

B-Side:
‘Hell. Bugger, as Gerald would say. I’d meant to record these things more often, but so much has been happening, and
every night Bailey and I sit up planning and plotting, trying to sort our way through the mess that’s unfolding across Florence and Europe. So what has happened in the six weeks since my last direct-to-disc? I’ll start with the pathetically personal and broaden to the faintly historic. You’ll want to know, whoever-you-are, what is going on between me and the admirable-stroke-terrifying Ada Liuzzi.

I join you in your curiosity and only wish I could help. She came in the next day, the day after our kiss on the bridge, and every broadcasting day since, maintaining an air of chilly professionalism, resisting offers of after-work drinks and dinners and dances at the Maggio Musicale and, indeed, that far-off look has barely left her face. Only once, when we ran into each other on the via Porta Rossa, I coming back from dinner with Friedrich Kriegbaum, she from a concert in the Cascine, did I sense a crack in the
froideur
. A heavy rain squall came down over the city, as if the Arno were flowing upwards. Everyone was hurrying with their jackets tented over their heads, and I ran straight into Ada. Her eyes lit up for a moment when she saw me, and I could tell she was a little drunk, very wet. I took her hands and she didn’t snatch them away immediately. I kissed her cheek but close enough to the corner of her mouth that she could have turned it into something more had she wanted to. She almost did. I’m stricken, really. It
is
pathetic, to have fallen for someone like this, and to betray myself in so many trite, adolescent ways. I try to manoeuvre opportunities for us to work together, just the two of us; I’ve been waking from elaborate rescue dreams in the small hours, whisking her out of Europe on the back of a white charger.

I call her when I’m drunk, but she never answers.

My mother’s a gaolbird! Mosley was arrested first, then most of the rest of the active British Union. There was even talk of father doing clink, but sense seems to have prevailed there. At least mother’s back in Britain. Seems the realities of war broke up the hiking party in Berchtesgaden. It was decided that the squawking posse of English matrons surrounding the Führer were an unnecessary distraction. Hess drove mother and Diana Mosley to the aerodrome himself. They were picked up as soon as they set foot on British soil. They’re in Holloway Prison with Mosley, all three of them in a cosy little cabin of their own. Extraordinary that five years ago there was talk of these people running the country.

Mussolini, the hunter in the field, has finally pulled the trigger. Italy is at war with Britain and France. What does this mean? A final exodus of Brits from Florence. A host of women called Gladys have left, although my favourite of them, the indomitable Gladys Hutton, has said she’ll stay no matter what. Bailey and I have been frantic, sorting passports for ancient coves living in isolated splendour above Monte Oliveto, persuading Gladyses they can’t take their entire wardrobes with them on the train, then hauling suitcases around the station like porters, ordered about by women in pince-nez who colonise their railway carriages like their uncles colonised Poonah.

Goad has moved into the church apartments, a room on the ground floor. He’s not well – I suppose you’d call it nerves. He’s convinced that, if he’d had more support from his superiors, if he’d been allowed to continue at the Institute for a little longer, he’d have been able to prevent Musso from getting into the war. He writes thick letters to Lloyd George and Churchill and Duff Cooper, but you can’t think they’ll ever be opened, let alone
read. He comes up and joins us some evenings, sits ghostly at the table worrying his food while we plan the latest evacuation. He’s been hearing noises in the night, too. A baby crying, rustling footsteps, coughing. He thinks it’s part of his illness. Perhaps it is.

As for the Italians declaring war, that’s simple – pure opportunism. Mussolini saw which way the tide was turning and jumped. They’ll be eating strudel and raising steins on Piccadilly before the end of the year, unless the Americans help us out. Finland, Belgium, Norway have fallen; France has all but gone – there are Germans on the Champs-Elysées, the Brits ferried back from Calais in fishing sloops. If it’s all over this year, or early in ’41, the Italians will need to show they deserve a seat at the table alongside the Russians and the Germans. That’s why they’re fighting.

Pavolini called me up last night. With Goad ill, I’ve been making the broadcasts myself. Apart from the prescribed guff, I’ve been trying to stay away from matters political, rehashing my notes from F. R. Leavis’s lectures, speaking about Shelley and Yeats. Pavolini was awfully pally, described me as
a key asset
. But he pointed out that the
raison d’être
for Radio Firenze was now something of a nonsense. Rapprochement between the Brits and the Italians being, for the moment, off the table. He’s given me a plan for the next six weeks of programming. Italian poets, German composers, even more propaganda. Two days devoted to Balbo, the great Italian air hero shot down by his own troops in one of these absurdly antiquated Fiat biplanes that make up the Italian air force.

I imagine I’ll eventually find myself heading back to a Britain changed beyond recognition with – who knows – Mosley as
Commander of the British Reich or some such. In the meantime, I’ll keep my head down and concentrate on those few small things I can do to help push back that frightful prospect. Good night, whoever-you-are.’

9
. A-Side:
Esmond Lowndes and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
(33′ 33″)

B-Side:
The Battle of France is over; I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin
. That was my Churchill voice. He’s bloody good, actually. Much better than Chamberlain, hoisted by the petard of history. Churchill’s a bit more like it – feels as if he’s up for a fight. I’m no good at accents, really. Just listen to my Italian. I know the words all right, but can’t get myself to sound like a local. It’s partly why I’ve become something of a recluse, hiding from the Blackshirt gangs who’ve grown in number and aggression since war was declared. Mostly bitter older men, veterans from the last war looking for a reason to pull on a uniform and biff people up. Sound familiar?

Some good news, finally. I mean not only that, so far, the British pilots have managed to fight off the Hun. And wasn’t this how we always dreamed the wars of the future would be fought, high up in the clouds, sharks of the air ripping chunks off each other? But even better, Goad discovered that Carità has left Florence, joined up and gone to fight in Albania. The town can breathe.

Also, Ada loves me. I waited until we’d worked late recording a show on
The Decameron
. We were still in the studio at nine in the evening. I kept slipping up on the passages in Italian, clanking
mistakes in my translation, partly because it was reminding me of first being in Florence and reading the book in the loggia of the Palazzo Arcimboldi with Fiamma. Finally we were done and Ada pulled her scarf around her head, started buttoning her jacket. I asked her to join me for a drink and was surprised when she said yes. I found a three-quarters-full bottle of Chianti in the kitchen and led her up to the roof of the church.

We’ve been so busy, too busy even to come up and admire the sunsets, and the rooftop has grown over. Weeds spew out between tiles, the little garden where they must once have planted raspberries or tomatoes is now dense with wild fennel, yellow flowers shooting up through chicken-wire. We sat on the roof and drank our wine, and Ada said something about how Florence reflects her hills, how the undulations of the rooftops mirror the rise and fall of the land. It struck me as beautiful and true, and I thought back, again, to sitting on another rooftop with Fiamma and seeing the purple darkness reaching up to cold heights. I told Ada all about Fiamma, or almost all. She listened very carefully and was quiet afterwards. I leant over and kissed her, and she didn’t resist, though nor was she anything more than politely encouraging. We spoke for a while longer and then she invited me for dinner the next evening.

I’d imagined a lonely existence for Ada away from the studio. Whenever I telephoned her, after drinking too much and feeling maudlin, I pictured her with some serious book in her lap, reaching out a hand to the telephone and then drawing it back. In fact, her house is something of a salon. It wasn’t just me for dinner. I’d made an enormous effort with my clothes, I bathed and perfumed and pomaded. I’d selected a copy of
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse,
edited by Yeats, to give to her. It was a
present from Anna, Christmas before last, and it felt like a good sacrifice, to make it Ada’s.

I arrived at the via dei Forbici. I could hear conversation echoing in the stairwell as I made my way up. The door to the Liuzzi apartment was open and there were six or seven young people with Ada in the kitchen, more grouped around an older man with thick spectacles and thinning hair who sat on the divan in the drawing room. I’d brought a bouquet of flowers – lilies from the stall in front of the Villa Ventaglio. I stood, holding them stupidly, until Ada swept out of the kitchen and kissed me and took the flowers and cooed over the book, and seemed friendlier and more relaxed than she’d ever been with me before. It wasn’t the tête-à-tête I’d been hoping for, but, rather despite myself, I had a smashing time. The party was to celebrate the release of one of Ada’s friends – a thin-faced, quiet, good-looking man called Bruno Fanciullacci – from gaol. I saw Ada’s eyes slide to him repeatedly, monitoring his position in the room. He carried a matchstick in the corner of his mouth which bobbed gently as he spoke. He was the son of one of the leaders of the local Communist Party and had been arrested on a series of trumped-up charges, given seven years and released after two.

The older man was Piero Calamadrei, a Professor of Law at the university who’d led the legal challenge to Bruno’s imprisonment. Whenever he spoke, the rest of the room fell quiet, although his words came in jagged, impressionistic bursts that were hard to follow. We sat on the floor with our bowls in our laps – Ada had made lasagne – and the young people talked as they ate, shouting across each other and filling beakers with wine from unlabelled bottles, looking up reverently at the Professor whenever he held forth on politics, or literature, or law. Ada made sure that I was
included in conversations, translated words she thought might be difficult for me, trailed her fingers through my hair as she passed. She introduced me to her friends with a kind of protective warmth I found very touching. It made me realise how, after three and a half years in Florence, I know very few Italians. Shameful, really. This was a strange bunch, though.

The Professor seemed to take against me at first, referring to me as Ada’s “pet Fascist” and saying, with a little wrinkle of his nose, that he’d listened to my programme on d’Annunzio. No praise, or comment, just the nose.

In one corner sat a famous cyclist, Gino Bartali, who was a friend of Ada’s father and was cheerfully and palpably in love with his new wife, Adrianna. They spoke only to each other, smiling around the room every so often as if allowing us collusion in their bliss. A group of serious young men surrounded Bruno, huddled on one side of the room, watching him move the matchstick around his mouth. They all looked rather tired and ill-fed and trim-moustached. Three young women in Agnes Ayers turbans, smoking Sobranies, stood in the doorway, looking over at the men and letting out little flustered laughs. Finally, sitting with Ada and me, a lady called Maria Luigia Guaita, a plump, friendly sort from the Monte dei Paschi bank where my account is held. I hadn’t quite worked out at this point what should perhaps have been rather obvious – that this rag-tag bunch at Ada’s house were the Florentine chapter of
Giustizia e Libertà,
that the Professor was their leader, that Ada was testing me somehow by bringing me along.

After dinner, with the French doors open to the square below, the Professor began to talk about books. I lost a little of the subtlety,
even with Ada whispering occasional translations in my ear, but he was speaking about the role of literature in politics, the temptation for writers to retreat into symbol and allegory, rather than recording the stony facts of the world. He said it was the writer’s duty to speak for those who couldn’t speak, who were trapped or overlooked or oppressed. He said, in times like these, novels should be written with broken fingers, and all poets’ eyes should be black. He fixed me then and asked me if I wrote at all, and everyone was silent.

I didn’t see what else I could do; I told him about
In Love and War,
about Hulme and how writing about him was a way of writing about my father. Their friendship, I thought, had driven my father to Fascism. That staying true to Fascism, Mosley and violence, was all a fidelity to his dead friend. I’d always felt, I told them, that I was out of place, and that my attempt to make Hulme a hero was an attempt to forge someone from my father’s world, someone with fierce, Fascist ideas, into a laudable figure. I could show Hulme, a copy of Sorel from the London Library in one hand, a gun in the other, living the philosophy he preached: heroism, duty, standing up for those values that made life worth living. But I’d buggered it up. The novel didn’t work. I was writing it with an ugly hand over my eyes. By the end I was exhausted. You must remember I did all of this in Italian, which gave it a kind of clumsy honesty.

Ada raised her glass to me. The Professor swallowed the contents of his own, seemed satisfied, and began to ask me questions about Auden and Spender. He thought Pound a great poet, he said with a sorry smile. Yeats, too.
Now that my ladder’s gone,
he quoted in English,
I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Bloody good. Then everyone
began to talk and argue, and a group of university students turned up, and with them a young, pretty girl with white-blonde sparkle, Tosca. Everyone calls her La Toschina. Her boyfriend, a tough-looking fellow named Antonio Ignesti, seemed to take a shine to me – heavy Sicilian accent he had, barely caught a word. He kept urging me to drink from his bottle of grappa and soon it was two in the morning and people were walking out into the night. Finally I was left with Ada on the balcony, looking over the darkened square.

That was last night. No great passion. We kissed, slept in the same bed, but not much more than that. We talked a great deal. She’s part of the Resistance, which strikes me as frightfully brave. It’s why she stayed in Florence when her parents left, to keep up her work here. Radio Firenze provides her with just enough of a cover story. I was stroking her hair as she told me this, her head in my lap. She’s involved in counterfeiting documents. She and the plump cashier, Maria Luigia, create the passports at night with the bank’s franking machine, official paper stolen by someone at the Ministry in Rome. Then Gino Bartali, with the alibi of his gruelling training, cycles out to safe houses. Hiding there are deserters from the Italian Army, Communists threatened with internment, Jews looking to forge authentic Italian identities for themselves before
Il Duce
carries out his threat to round them all up and deliver them to Hitler.

Just before I left, a few hours ago, as the first light broke over the city, she spoke to me in her glowing voice. She said this was why she’d been hesitant about us, why she’d backed off instead of doing what everything in her heart told her to do – to take me in her arms and kiss me. Because I was the enemy. And she needed to know that I was with her, that the decency she sensed
in me wasn’t just a fabrication of love. I felt like Desdemona, you know:
She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.
Ada’s bravery undoes me a little.

It’s coming up for six. I need a few hours’ sleep. Rustling, movement, happy familial sounds from the empty rooms tonight. Not uncanny now – comforting. Good night.’