Alex Preston: In Love and War

The Alps rear up from the plain like thunderclouds. It is four o’clock and, as they come into the huddle of the mountains, he sees night clustered in the ravines and crevasses below. They wheel like a cliff-bird over pines and crags, above icy cataracts falling into blackness. ‘Monte Blanc,’ the pilot says, confusingly, pointing at the great brooding fortress of ice and rock that lowers over them to the east, high as they are.

‘The everlasting universe of things flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,’ Esmond whispers. He’s brought his Shelley with him, one of the few books to survive his mother’s libricidal purge. He glances back at the box, tied with string, and thinks ahead to dusty bookshops, libraries, reading the Inferno in the city of Dante’s birth.

The engines change pitch and he looks up to see a ridge of rock, a great grey wave coming towards them. The plane lifts, and he feels a little stab of panic. A sublime way to die, he thinks, but still. They crest the ridge, clearing the jagged rocks by a few hundred feet, and the pilot turns, beaming. ‘Italia.’

The mountains fall as they’d risen, and soon give onto rolling farmland, lakes like spilt mercury, red-roofed towns. ‘Your new home,’ the pilot shouts. Esmond sees the aeroplane’s shadow, which really is like a dragon, harrying the path of a river. He lights a cigarette and presses his cheek against the glass.

‘Could I have one?’ the pilot calls back, not turning this time. ‘Please?’

Esmond looks at the pack in his hand and thinks about throwing it, then pulls himself up, off-kilter until he’s in the seat behind the cockpit. He leans over and places a cigarette between the pilot’s lips.

‘Why do you come to Italy? You are a politician, yes?’

‘Not precisely,’ Esmond says, lighting a fag for himself. ‘My father’s Lionel Lowndes, of the British Union.’

‘With Mosley. I read the English Mail . For your language, you understand.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So you’re a Fascist, like your new hosts.’

‘I suppose so. I’m setting up a wireless station for the British Union, a commercial enterprise.’ The last direct from the mouth of Mosley, who’d kneaded Esmond’s shoulder each time he’d said it.

‘Bravo,’ the pilot says.

‘It’s the first time for me. Away like this.’

‘In Florence, you are lucky. A city of artists, politicians and Englishmen. You are all three, I think.’

‘Perhaps.’

Esmond picks up The Wireless Operator’s Handbook and begins to read about sine waves and resonators, capacitors and inductors. He is half-nodding in the warm cabin when the pilot’s voice comes, as if through the doors of a dream. ‘Storm over Florence,’ he says, showing Esmond his frown. ‘Hard landing.’

Esmond shrugs, having given himself up to fate. The dark clouds paint the whole depth of the sky ahead. Forks of lightning jag downwards, burning themselves out on his eyes. They steer into the clouds and it is as if night has fallen. Rain thrashes the windows, obscuring even the wings, and the aeroplane bobs and yaws, plywood shuddering in the wind, engines muffled. The pilot sends them first one way, then another, trying to cut a path through the storm. Esmond puts his hands behind his head, leans back in his seat and, surprising himself even as it happens, he falls asleep.

He dreams of a Juliet balcony, looking over terracotta roofs towards a dome. His enemy is beside him, torturer’s hands folded over the rail. Esmond takes a handful of the coarse black twill of his enemy’s shirt, pulls him over the balcony and into the air. In a slow moment, he lets go of the shirt and sees his father and Mosley swinging him between them as a child, his father’s good arm full of strength, Mosley’s fingers dry and certain. Here we go, bend a bow, shoot a pigeon and off we go! They lift him squealing, stomachless into the sunshine. Again he feels he is rising, still rising, into the pale evening. Then he begins to fall, and he hears his enemy’s screams, and sees the ground rushing up to meet them. He scents death, impossible in dreams, and opens his eyes, very wide.

‘Difficult!’ The pilot shouts, stubbing his cigarette on the inside of the window.

They are coming in fast over the runway, yawing horribly, and the screaming is the baying of the wind. A distant green light through the swirling rain, then they drop, bounce once on the ground, are airborne again and careening through the night. The wheels hit the tarmac once more, a blast of rubber, and Esmond’s box of books launches into the air and bursts against the cabin roof. He is beaned by a copy of Hamsun’s Hunger . The back wheel falls to earth with a clunk and Esmond lands hard in his seat, Kipling and Henry James in theirs. The plane comes to a skidding halt, the pilot’s shoulders heaving. Esmond sits there for a while, breathing the fusty air of the cabin, the sharp tang of fuel.

‘Florence?’ he says.

The pilot nods. ‘ Firenze .’

Esmond wakes to the sound of a bell. He pokes one leg out of bed, then another, hops across tiles to find his dressing-gown and opens the shutters. Watery sunlight falls down on the via Tornabuoni below. There is a church opposite. Old ladies move nimbly up the steps and lean through heavy doors. Cars weave between pony traps, mules, bicycles on the cobbles. A black cat laces along the pavement, licks a patch of fur clean, rubs herself against the wall.

Esmond puts on his watch. It is almost eight. Dear Philip, he’d written on a sheet of letter paper before bed. He pulls out the chair, sits at his desk, writes I miss you and hears a light knock at the door.

Harold Goad, the Director of the British Institute, stands in the hallway in brisk tweed, the sound of crockery and the smell of coffee behind him. ‘I thought you might need these.’ He lifts an armful of books to his chest. ‘Something to read when you’re woken by the bells of San Gaetano. Ugliest church in Florence, I’m afraid.’ They exchange their first smile. ‘I’m an early riser,’ Goad adds. ‘I like to walk in the city while it’s still quiet. But I’ve waited for breakfast.’

Esmond takes the books. There is a Baedeker, a thick Italianto-English dictionary, a thicker Decameron , a Modern Library copy of A Room With a View and one of Goad’s own, The Making of the Corporate State . ‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ he says. ‘I love Forster. And I’ll look forward to reading this.’ He holds up Goad’s book. ‘My father says you’re the one true Fascist intellectual.’

‘Decent of him.’ Goad’s cheeks flush a little. ‘Splendid fellow, Sir Lionel. Now — hum — we eat breakfast in the kitchen. Nothing too grand, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ll be along shortly.’

At his desk, Esmond thinks how the Forster, particularly, would bother his parents. The day of his ignominious return from university he’d found gaps like missing teeth in his bookshelves. Nightwood was gone and Ulysses and all his Forster, and he’d looked down to see his mother feeding book after book into the flames of a bonfire in the field below. She liked her novels like her evenings — light and mannered and smelling faintly of horses; his were fishy and, like Cambridge, to be struck from record.

He dresses, reaching past the stiff twill of the uniform he’d slipped out of the night before, arriving at the Institute late, in the rain, and following Goad up the stairs to the apartment on the third floor. Now he steps out into the corridor, breathing the rich, gloomy air. He closes the door, straightens his tie, and makes for the kitchen.