In Love and War (21 page)

Esmond had suggested they move to the villa. There was already talk of the MVSN requisitioning Jewish property, and the apartment was simply too small to hide him for long. Carità’s smile at the railway station came to mind. He knew that, if word of his escape reached the Blackshirts, they’d be after his blood. One evening in October, over dinner with the Professor, he mentioned the unoccupied villa that sat on a hilltop to the south, the key to the front door given to Bailey before the Keppels left, now in a drawer in the sacristy. The Professor had nodded.

‘It may be the answer to a few other problems we’ve been having,’ he said. ‘We need a base out of the city, where people might–– disappear.’

Later that night, Bruno Fanciullacci pulled up outside the apartment in a battered and spluttering Bianchi. He’d secured himself a job on the Fiat factory floor in Novoli by day; by night he organised hushed meetings, arranged messages to and from the numerous Communist Party leaders in gaol in Florence. He had shaved and showered since Esmond had seen him in Ada’s apartment. His moustache was a slick black line beneath which, ever twirling, the matchstick. He was wearing a new beige suit, a thin navy tie. He looked dashing and capable and Esmond felt a twist of jealousy. Ada sat in front beside Bruno with Tatters on her lap, Esmond in the back. They drove through the deserted
town, lights off. The car jerked and squealed around corners, struggled up the smallest incline.

Every plume of mist from the river was a Fascist spy, every shadow hid a Blackshirt with a Beretta. They parked in one of the side streets in front of the Pitti Palace. Ada kept watch outside while Esmond and Bruno went into the church. It was dark inside, cool despite the warm night. Esmond picked up the key to the villa and, under a pile of surplices, Bailey’s Army standard W/T radio. Then, just as they were about to leave, he stopped.

‘
Aspetta
,’ he said, and Bruno shone his torch down the aisle. It found the triptych, which brought Esmond up short. ‘D’you think we’ll be bombed?’ he asked Bruno. ‘In Florence, I mean.’

‘Maybe. Depends how bad things get. How long it all goes on. They talk about an Open City, but––’

‘I want to take the paintings. Keep them with me up at the villa. If they’re evacuating art from the Uffizi, the Bargello, all the other churches, we should take care of these.’

Bruno looked at the triptych with a little shake of his head. ‘They won’t fit in the car.’

‘You go ahead, I’ll carry them up.’

Bruno shrugged, then smiled, moving the matchstick from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘We’ll see you up there – if the car makes it. Don’t get caught.’

With the paintings balanced on his head – not heavy, but catching every breeze – he set out up the via Romana. The moonlight was broken by clouds, but he kept to the shadows, relieved when he left the main road and began the long climb towards the villa. He heard the sputtering of the Bianchi’s engine somewhere ahead.

Bruno and Ada were waiting when he arrived at L’Ombrellino. He carried the paintings up into the house and arranged them by the table in the hall. Bruno had found a bottle of
champagne, some glasses in the kitchen. Ada lit the candelabra in the entrance. They stood beside the paintings in the candlelight and toasted the new home. Tatters was already exploring, his footsteps clicking, halting as he caught a new scent, then darting into the upper parts of the house. They were silent in the hallway, listening to the dog’s progress. As he left, Bruno embraced them both, the matchstick prodding Esmond’s cheek.

‘Be careful, you two,’ Bruno said. ‘It’s a risk to love someone these days. They’ll use it against you, if they get you.’ Esmond drew himself up when Bruno left, the quicker to fill his space. They stood there, in the hall, watching the flames on the gilt of the paintings. Tatters clacked back in with a mouse clamped softly between his jaws. It was still alive, squirming gently. Esmond reached down and eased open the dog’s mouth. The mouse dropped, paused for a moment, overcome briefly by this unexpected redemption, then scurried off into the skirting-board.

They have been here at the villa for a year now. They have grown used to the strictures of their new life as eyes grow accustomed to darkness, though Esmond is dreading winter. He can scarcely believe they survived January ’42, when snow packed so thickly on the roof they’d heard it groaning like a whale in the night. Ice had patterned the windows, the pool had frozen over and the Arno, flowing heavy with snow-water, was just a black slash across the city below them. He’d had to drop rocks down the well in the garden before he could lower the bucket for water. During the day they’d huddled under eiderdowns bundled in clothes, Tatters a furry, breathy hot-water bottle between them. Later they lit fires in the kitchen, hoping no one would see the smoke.
They barely slept, tucked into the hot fug, feeding vine-wood into the stove, gradually removing clothes and then bathing in a copper tub. They’d pour jugs of near-scalding water over each other, letting out animal bellows and gurgles of pleasure, then sit wrapped in their towels while potatoes baked in the oven, a bowl of carrots boiled on the stove. They read to each other: Ada
Gerusalemme Liberata,
Leopardi’s
Zibaldone
, Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno;
Esmond
Eugene Onegin, Mrs Dalloway, The Way We Live Now.
They began to speak Italian as much as English, Ada correcting him on his grammar and pronunciation; now he dreams in both languages.

Once a week – Wednesday afternoons – Bruno would arrive at the wall at the end of the garden with a chicken or a stick of salami or a haunch of ham. He had Communist contacts in the north who could bypass both the government rationing teams and the black marketers, while relatives of Maria Luigia on a pig farm out towards Pistoia happily provided Bruno with supplies. He spoke breathlessly to Esmond of his efforts to unite the various
liberalsocialista
factions and their obdurate Communist cohorts. He was always fizzing with news, the matchstick dancing under his moustache as he talked, his hands sweeping across Florence as he described how they’d hound the Fascists into the Arno, throw them bodily from the Ponte Santa Trinità, and then build a country on the teachings of Gramsci, how Esmond and Ada’s children would grow up in a socialist paradise. At this last, Ada would blush and shove him in the chest. As he left, he’d hand them scribbled messages to transmit over the W/T set. They were always in code and made no sense to Esmond, although he began to recognise certain names – Penna, Rossino, Babbo.

Sometimes the Professor came in Bruno’s stead, climbing over the wall at the bottom of the garden and rapping on the window
of the drawing room until they let him in. He’d brush the snow from his jacket and peer at them: avuncular, anxious. They’d serve him tea, extinguishing the fire as soon as the water boiled. He’d bring news that wasn’t on the radio: about the partisans high in the hills waiting for their moment to pounce, strikes at the factories in Milan, about the growing strength of the unions in the big cities and discontent among
contadini
in the south.

Esmond had made several late-night trips to the church that last winter, a hat pushed down over his head, his breath misting in the sharp wild brace of the air. He’d pressed himself into ice-stiff bushes at the slightest sound, leapt garden walls, disappeared into the shadows of buildings where he watched Blackshirts garrulous and greasy after a night in a brothel on the via delle Terme. The curfew was loose, often ignored, but he couldn’t afford to be caught by the
carabinieri
and so he waited until the small hours before setting out. He came back loaded with books, jumpers, candles. He found Bailey’s service Webley in the priest’s bedside drawer, a Sam Browne belt of ammunition under the bed. He sleeps with the gun on the floor beside their mattress.

Finally, April – the trees shrugged of snow, the box-hedge parterre cutting shaggy lines through the whiteness. Only on distant peaks did snow still vein down. The town below woke with difficulty from winter. Petrol was increasingly scarce, food heavily rationed, the young men all away at war. Most of those who stepped out into the serene light of spring wished the snow and cold and darkness would come back. But the sun continued to shine and the city resumed life haltingly, stretching its stiff limbs.

That summer, they lived in the garden. The precise Italianate order at L’Ombrellino unravelled into wild profusion, geometric lines smudged and finally erased by fiercely sprouting fennel, fig,
oleander, morning glory. The pool was dark with algae and frogspawn, knots of weed. Swallows threw themselves down over it to drink from the reflections of their beaks. Esmond imagined them flying up in a great dark wing over the desert where brave sunburnt soldiers stared across a landscape of dunes and mirages of the enemy. When summer ended, they’d swoop – on sudden instinct – southwards to the desert and the dying. The sand would be crossed with bones, dark blood, husks of tanks and troop-carriers. If the swallows knew anything at all, he thought, they’d weep as they passed over, or fly north, back into frozen whiteness.

Ada cut back the weeds on Alice Keppel’s vegetable garden. Soon they had tomatoes, zucchini, broad beans and radishes. She asked Bruno to bring her seeds and they planted carrots and celery, beetroot and
cavolo nero
. She worked with her hair in a gypsy bandana, an old shirt of Esmond’s hanging over her like a dress. Her hands became hard, the skin of her face dense with freckles. Before dinner they’d swim the dirt and heat of the day from their skinny bodies, lying naked, spreadeagled under the bruising sky.

Bruno and the Professor came more often in summer. Bruno would strip down to his undershorts – placing his matchstick atop his folded shirt – and swim slow lengths. The Professor removed his shoes and dangled his toes, leaning back against the pediment of one of the dodos and speaking with surprise about the destruction of Lübeck: the firestorm that had swept through the medieval city, sucking the oxygen from the air, unleashing tornadoes, turning people to ashes in seconds. He had become obsessed with the bombing raids. He’d started a scrapbook of press clippings, photographs, scholarly articles on the physical and psychological effects of the air war. Two hundred and fifty planes had dropped four hundred tonnes of explosives on the
ancient Hanseatic port, he told them, the timbered buildings with their red-tiled roofs passing the flames from one house to the next with a roar. He looked down over Florence and was silent. Bruno’s path through the water, the birdsong in the trees below, wind in the pines and bamboo; he sighed and drew his long grey feet from the water.

Some evenings Esmond and Ada would raid the wardrobes of clothes the Keppels had left, opening bottles of
spumante
from the cellar and playing music – just softly – on the gramophone in the drawing room, pushing the divans and canapés and armchairs to the side. The discs were marching bands, Christmas carols, Vaughan Williams and Elgar, stolidly English. In one dusty record-case, Ada found three discs of Schubert waltzes. Esmond wore George’s white tie and tails, put a monocle in his eye and brilliantined his hair; Ada disappeared into Alice Keppel’s ball gowns, gathering up the trains and sweeping them around her
à la
flamenco. They’d jive and foxtrot to the faster numbers, working themselves into a sweaty muddle in the warm drawing room as daylight dwindled, then move in darkness to the slower music. Some evenings, birdsong in the hills was so loud that it drowned out the gramophone, and they’d find themselves dancing instead to a movement of larks and thrushes, finally falling onto the largest of the divans, panting and happy and lost.

She still has her moments of distance though, when she seems to leave him, to disappear into silence. She has the perfect cheekbones for such distance – high and horizontal, like Anna’s. Sometimes he despairs of ever knowing the rills and runnels of her heart. But love without torment, he reasons, is only friendship. They lie on their sky-high mattress, kiss, fuck; but it’s often as if there’s a film between them. One hot night, he’d stood with her in their bedroom and gripped her by the shoulders, shaking
her gently. He was a little drunk and half-begged her, finally getting down on his knees.

‘Let me in. I want to know you. I can’t love you if I don’t know you.’

She’d smiled, faltering, then taken her wicker bag from the wardrobe and, looking directly at him, emptied it on the bed.

‘This is me,’ she said. ‘Look at it. This is me.’

Out fell a scallop purse, a diary, several pencils, a bottle of Yardley lavender water, a handkerchief, a blue-bound copy of Mayakovsky’s poems and a photograph of Esmond, taken by Goad last Christmas. She held the photograph out as if in triumph, as if to prove that he’d been fixed to the album of her life, and never again should he question her love.

They have talked, now and again, about the death camps. What started out as rumours were now facts: slatted railway carriages heading eastwards, humans herded like cattle, gas chambers. They listen to Radio Vaticana, which had first broken the news, and was now talking about German plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Professor has been in touch with Ada’s father, who is in Milan, protected by Ettore Ovazza, safe so far. They can see the eggshell dome of the Great Synagogue from the terrace. Ada stands there some evenings, looking down, a shawl around her, until the light fades and the soft blue dome disappears into darkness.

The leaves are falling in the garden. They will need to be more careful when they step outside, although since the army extended the draft to those aged fifty – sometimes, in the right wind, they can hear the drafted Florentines marching for the war in Russia – they often feel quite alone in the world. L’Ombrellino is like a cloud palace, a vast Zeppelin hanging above an unpeopled city. There are bloodbaths in Greece and Yugoslavia and North Africa, the balance tilts – only slightly – to the Allies, and Esmond and
Ada lie on their bed and listen to the radio, looking at the triptych, allowing the tortured figures to stand for what they cannot see, for the suffering that says to them both: it is time to engage.