Alex Preston - In Love and War

‘I design these,’ he says, holding the box up to Esmond. Painted inside the lid is the scene of a medieval torture chamber, a young boy stretched out on a rack, the masked torturer attacking his groin with pincers. ‘I sell them to tourists.’

‘Gosh,’ Esmond says, passing it carefully back.

‘Oscar Wilde was a dear, dear friend of mine, you know. I had a small but not inconsequential part in The Ideal Husband. ’ Reggie opens one of the buttons of his high-necked serge jacket and looks appealingly at Esmond.

The food arrives. Scampi in breadcrumbs; a bollito misto of tongue, beef, capon, sausage; saltimbocca; grey truffles in cheese sauce in sizzling pannikins; wild boar agrodolce . The tragic-looking maître d’ appears with a pepper pot that he grinds as if he were wringing a man’s neck. Douglas’s appetite is vast; half-standing and arcing genially across the table, he makes sure to snare the best cuts of meat, the juiciest prawns. He takes long swigs of his wine as he eats, his nose growing redder, and he begins to talk in close whispers to Gerald, who eats little and places his hand on Douglas’s every so often.

After a while, a pale man in his thirties comes to the restaurant, frayed and shiny as his suit. He looks around the room and then over at their table with a desperate beam.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Douglas mutters. ‘Eric, dear boy, come and join us, won’t you?’

The man takes a seat next to Gerald and nods doubtfully around the table.

‘Eric Wolton’s an old pal. Back when I had a wife.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Happiest day of my life, the day my wife died. Did I ever tell you I danced on her grave? A Scottish jig. Don’t tell my sons that, if you see them. Do you ever see them, in London?’

When they finish eating, Orioli turns to Esmond and puts his hand on his knee. His breath is sweet and heavy on Esmond’s cheek.

‘I think we will be very good friends,’ he says. ‘Norman likes you. I like you. It is so nice to have you and Gerald here. Tell me all about Esmond.’

Esmond stutters, looking across at the round spectacles, the tubby cheeks.

‘I went to school at Winchester, then Cambridge, though only for a year and a half—’

‘Winchester?’ Douglas shouts down the table, breaking off his conversation with Gerald. ‘I loathe the public school system. Creates kinds, not characters. Dr Arnold has a lot to answer for. That merciless pruner of the spirit prevented the upper classes, who were barmy, from feeling comfortable in their skins. We have ceased to be mad, the English. None but a flatterer would still call us eccentric.’

‘I thought Winchester was ghastly,’ Esmond replies, looking straight at Douglas. ‘Full of ugly, small-minded teachers, tuppeny tyrants, taking out their disappointments on the sons of equally catastrophic minor aristocrats and merchant bankers and retired colonels.’

‘Why d’you still wear a Wykehamist’s tie then?’

‘So when I hang myself, they’ll know why I did it.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Douglas shouts and the table laughs. ‘He’s all right!’ Douglas lifts his glass as Esmond turns back to Orioli.

‘I’m here to help Mr Goad set up a radio station. To finance my father’s political party. He’s the Chairman of the British Union.’

Orioli raises his eyebrows.

‘And you’re a Fascist, too?’

‘I’m not really sure, these days.’

Orioli removes his hand from Esmond’s knee and polishes his spectacles on his napkin. More wine is poured. The restaurant begins to fill with young couples staring at each other over candlelight; a family of grandparents, parents and a boy of six or seven in a sailor costume; an old man reading La Nazione with a plate of cannelloni.

‘Strindberg!’ Douglas shouts and bangs the table. ‘That’s what I call the maître d’. Because he looks so dashed mournful, worse than Eric over here. Strindberg, bring us the bill.’

When it comes, Douglas holds it under a candle and makes a few marks with his pencil. ‘Twelve lire each,’ he says. ‘I’d love to treat you all, of course, but money is very tight at the minute.’

Wolton, who has neither eaten nor drunk, passes a handful of notes towards them. On the way out, they stop at the table where the young boy in his sailor’s suit sits, looking pleased to be out with the adults, listening carefully to something his grandmother is saying. Douglas pulls over a chair to sit beside him and, quite naturally, lifts him onto his knee.

‘ Permesso? ’ he says, smiling at the boy’s father.

‘ Si, Professore, ’ the man replies.

The little boy looks up at Douglas with wide, delighted eyes.

‘Ma come ti chiami?’

‘ Dante ,’ the little boy replies, grinning bashfully.

‘Magnifico! Ma dov’è Beatrice?’ Douglas pretends to look under the table, and now in the little boy’s pockets. The boy giggles and simpers up at him.

Reggie Temple leans over and whispers to Esmond with a hiss.

‘It’s frightful. He’s like the Pied Piper. Wherever he goes, the boys just flock to him. One of the reasons he’s so short of money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The queue of parents wanting restitution. He holds competitions for the gypsy kids under the arches of the Ponte alle Grazie. Fifty centimes to whoever can gism first. It’s not dignified, a man of his age.’

Orioli, who has been listening, elbows Temple in the ribs. ‘You’re just jealous. It’s been a long time since anyone looked your way. And Norman is older than you, is he not?’

Douglas presents the father with his card and rests his hands on Dante’s shoulders. The man beams gratefully and insists on introducing his wife and her parents. Reggie tuts and shakes his head while Douglas bows and coos in a Florentine dialect. Finally, the group make their way out and hail taxis on the Piazza.

An hour later, Esmond is sitting on the little balcony of Douglas’s top-floor flat on the Lungarno delle Grazie, looking at the villas on the opposite bank of the Arno, the outline of cypress trees like feathers in the caps of the hills. He is smoking, tapping his ash onto the awning of the Davis & Orioli bookshop two floors below. Douglas comes out of the drawing room, where Schubert is playing on the gramophone.

‘ Ma la notte sperde le lontananze, ’ he says, sitting down beside Esmond and lighting a Toscano. ‘Night dispels distances. Ungaretti. Will you be with us in Florence for some time?’

‘It depends, I suppose, on how long it takes to set up the radio station. A year or two, perhaps more if it’s a success.’

‘How terribly dull for you. I can’t stay in one place for more than a few months. I am bored stiff with Florence. I should like to get further away, out of Europe, but money is very tight just now. You wouldn’t like to buy one of my books, by any chance?’

He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out a slim volume with a mottled gold-brown cover.

‘ Paneros ,’ he says. ‘Aphrodisiacs. The search for an elixir of youth and of sex. It’s about death, too. Because without death there would be no sex, d’you see?’

‘I think so.’ A gibbous moon is rising over the hills, reflected in the fast waters of the Arno.

‘Thirty-five lire usually, but twenty to you.’

Esmond opens his wallet and counts out the notes.

‘Jolly good,’ Douglas says, handing him the book. ‘Gerald tells me you’re a writer yourself.’

‘Actually, I’m trying to use this time to work out if I’m any good.’

‘I didn’t write a novel until I was forty-two. Would have been no point, I hadn’t lived enough. Before that I was all biology, geography, a paper on the pumice stone industry.’