Alex Preston - In Love and War

‘She’ll be super,’ he says. ‘Her English is excellent.’

‘Yes. She’s a terribly nice girl. Fascinating family. Her father’s a Jew, would you believe? He and Ettore Ovazza, the banker, founded La Nostra Bandiera in Turin. Hugely pro-Fascist, all of them.’

‘But Jews?’

‘Indeed. It’s folly to think the Jews are all Communists and agitators. One which leads some of the British Union chaps in entirely the wrong direction. Il Duce understands that, whatever the racial origins, whatever the dress, the gods, human beings are all about connection, and if you throw people together for long enough, they’ll rub along. Mussolini refuses to implement racial laws because Jews have been here since the days of Ancient Rome. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s doctor was a Jew.’

‘Didn’t Mussolini have a Jewish mistress?’

‘Margherita Sarfatti. Jews here are firstly Italians. What they choose to do in their temples is no concern of ours.’ He looks worried. ‘I hope that isn’t a problem for you? Ada being Jewish. I presumed, like your father, you had no truck with this racialist nonsense.’

‘None at all,’ Esmond replies. ‘I’m just surprised. With everything that’s going on in Germany, and the Italians cosying up to Hitler, the Rome — Berlin Axis and all that.’

‘I can’t help but think’, Goad says, ‘that there’s a degree of exaggeration in what we hear of Germany. The Germans I know are the most civilised people on earth. Simply couldn’t imagine them putting up with that kind of — hum — savagery. I should like, perhaps, to go and see for myself. But now, I must prepare for my lessons.’

Later that evening, from the window of his room, Esmond watches a stream of earnest, dark-suited young men enter the palazzo. He sits down to write Anna a postcard of St Jerome , recalling the two of them sitting in their father’s chapel at Aston Magna, staring up at the paintings, swooning themselves into the future. In art, in books, they’d built a bubble around themselves, impervious to their family, to Fascism. Her illness gave them an excuse for this, for long hours in her room with Middlemarch or The Eustace Diamonds or Tristram Shandy. Whenever I read, he writes, part of me is always reading to you, out loud . He finishes the letter and then sits with his legs on the windowsill, The Decameron in his lap. Bats begin to flutter past like thoughts, sweeping and circling over the streetlights. Just after nine-thirty, he hears voices below and watches as the young men come out, laughing, carrying books, shouting as they scatter into the lamp-lit streets of the city.

Before going to bed, feeling indulgent, nostalgic, he opens his cupboard. Already, his British Union uniform has taken on a historical air, and he’s surprised at the familiar scratch of the twill as he runs a thumb over the collar of the shirt. A sudden keen memory of coming back to Cambridge, important in his uniform after a march in the East End. He’d found Philip in his room and the older boy, silent and ritualistic, had unbuttoned Esmond’s tunic, opened his belt, slipped off the jackboots. He knew that in the silence was a question, and in the hot press of their bare bodies in the frantic hours that followed, a response. Now, concussed by memory, he sleeps.

On Thursday night, the entrance hall of the Institute is lit by two standard lamps from the library. The front door is open to the evening. Gesuina, in a sober black smock, is next to a table with the wine. Esmond stands smoking, watching Fiamma balancing her tray of fizzing glasses carefully, proudly, like a completed jigsaw. He is already a little drunk. Goad places a hand in the small of his back and moves him towards a white-bearded man in a smoking jacket.

‘Esmond, let me introduce you to our most celebrated resident, an honorary Brit, Bernard Berenson. Esmond was rather taken by the triptych in the English church. That’s a Filippino, he said, without a blink.’

‘It’s a sin they didn’t sell the thing,’ Berenson says, a faint American twang in his voice. ‘I had the Italian government baying for it, three pages of authentication, and this new priest good as tore it up. Maddening.’ He shakes his head. He reminds Esmond of the photograph of Freud that Philip had pinned to the wall of his study.

‘They are astonishing paintings.’

‘Yes? One refers to a triptych in the singular. But it is special, there’s no doubt.’

‘The colour of the skin. It’s almost alien.’

‘It wouldn’t have been like that at the time, of course. It’s verdaccio , the green undercoat coming through. But it is striking, isn’t it? Filippino was always in the shadow of his mentor, Botticelli, but with the triptych, and his St Jerome in the Uffizi—’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘They’re a whole new mode, as if he were trying to unpaint all the flippant beauty of his earlier work. He’s not studied widely enough, I’m afraid.’

There is a stir at the door, a few shouts of welcome. Esmond sees Gesuina turn and whisper something in her daughter’s ear.

‘Here’s trouble,’ says Berenson. ‘Don’t block the path to the wine. Like getting between a hippo and her young.’ He stands back to let a red-faced man tap through on a silver-topped cane. Behind him comes a smaller fellow, fortyish and chubby, with round spectacles and cheeks.

‘ La Signora e la Signorina Ricci, che belle regazze, ’ the first man says, bowing to Gesuina and Fiamma behind the table. ‘ Come mi fa contento di vedervi. ’ He takes two glasses, passes one to his friend and tastes his own. ‘Asti spumante,’ he says, letting out a sigh, ‘il champagne italiano, il nettare degli dei. And who might you be, my angel?’ Sea-grey eyes fix upon Esmond, widening with slow delight. He holds out his hand.

‘Esmond Lowndes. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Norman Douglas,’ the man says with another bow. ‘This is my dear friend Pino Orioli. Is there any particular book of mine you’d like?’

Esmond feels himself blushing. ‘I believe I’ve read most of them, sir.’

‘Oh really? And which is your favourite?’

‘ South Wind, ’ Esmond says, then, seeing Douglas’s face fall, ‘but, of course, Alone was magnificent, and Old Calabria . Some of the best travel writing I’ve read.’

‘Some of it, eh?’ Douglas frowns at him. ‘I’m not a travel writer. I’m a writer who happens to rush about. Have you read Together ?’

‘Yes. I had a great friend at Cambridge from Austria. He said … that you described the country in a way that made it feel more real than his clearest memories.’

‘And you?’ Douglas asks, jabbing a finger towards him. ‘What about you?’

Esmond hesitates. Then, in a small voice, ‘It made me feel like I knew my friend much better than before. That I could understand where he’d come from.’

Douglas twitches his nose. ‘I think we shall be seeing young Mr Lowndes again, don’t you, Pino?’

Orioli grins, waggling his eyebrows and reaching for another glass of wine. Douglas places a hand on Esmond’s shoulder and squeezes. ‘He’s all right, this one.’ With a nod, he drops his hand and speaks again in Italian.

Esmond looks around and realises that Ada isn’t there. He wonders what it will be like to work with her, what closeness might grow between them. He glances sideways at Fiamma. It is a shame, he thinks, that Ada looks so un-Italian, has none of Fiamma’s fine grace. It’s not her Jewishness, rather the squareness of her jaw, the gas-blue skin that make him shiver when he pictures her.

The ting-ting of a fork on glass. Goad stands on the first step of the staircase, pulling at his hands. Esmond sees Berenson and a Reggie, George and Alice Keppel turn and straighten, Father Bailey towering over another Reggie in the corner. Others he doesn’t recognise. He counts eighteen people in the entrance hall.