Alex Preston - In Love and War

Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘I told my father that I had been invited to the drinks party at the Institute. I was going to celebrate the coronation with you. He was very angry. He doesn’t approve of the British Institute. Hates the British. I’m so sorry, I should have thought—’

‘He wasn’t one of them, your father?’

‘No, he didn’t go, but I know he telephoned Niccolò Arcimboldi. He does everything he can to please. It isn’t as easy for him here as it was in Turin. There is more resistance, you know? To a Jewish Fascist. I should have seen this. Signor Goad, is he very bad?’

She turns, biting her thin upper lip. He thinks about putting his arms around her but sits beside her on the divan with a hand in the small of her back.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Goad will be fine. You couldn’t have known this would happen. And what you’ve done at the church, it’s amazing. We won’t need to see Carità again.’

She smiles. ‘I have some very capable friends. They saw it as a challenge. I was mostly standing around passing tools.’

‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’

‘It was really nothing. We salvaged most of it from the university. Parts no one was using. What I did spend, counts as penance for what happened to Mr Goad. We have another few days’ work before it’s ready—’

‘You’re too kind. We’ll be able to start as soon as Goad returns from hospital. I do hope you’ll be involved. I mean, not just translating, but in the whole project.’

‘I’d like to,’ she says. They sit quietly for a few moments, then he rises, kisses her cheeks and walks out into the hallway. As he makes his way to the front door, she stands looking after him. In the shadows of the corridor behind her he makes out her father, watching him over her shoulder.

That evening, after dinner on the loggia, Gerald and Fiamma and Esmond drink a bottle of wine, a few glasses of grappa. Without speaking much, they bathe together in the large, cool bathroom, splashing about like children and taking turns to soap each other. Esmond had been expecting awkwardness between them, a sense of shame. Instead they fall into bed again like they fall into the water. He feels, with them, rather like the triptych: an obscure work newly attributed to a master. When he finally sleeps, he sleeps with a hollow sound to his gentle snores, utterly quenched, content, dreaming of Gerald and Fiamma.

They arrange to meet Pino and Norman at Piccolo’s again and, as they make their way into the restaurant, Esmond wonders if their secret is visible on their faces. If Douglas or Orioli will be able to scent out the change in atmosphere that feels, to him, as if it is banked up in the room around them, a wave about to break. Certainly there had been a coldness in Mrs Keppel’s attitude that afternoon, although the Colonel was delighted when, rather than just Gerald, all three had decided to peel off their clothes and plunge naked into the pool at L’Ombrellino.

They stop going to the galleries in the mornings, choosing instead to lie in bed and recover from the drinking and carousing with Douglas and Orioli; further drinks and dancing with their younger friends at Doney’s or the Circolo Unione in the Palazzo Corsi; then the frantic grasping and thrusting and sucking and biting that, sustained perhaps by the triangulation of their urges, the seemingly limitless possibilities provided by three young bodies equally desired, equally possessed, keep them lost in the hot heaven of Fiamma’s room until the roosters crow over by the Cascine and the swallows start cheeping outside the window.

Gerald goes up to Bagni di Lucca to visit Goad and comes back grim-faced and quiet. Gesuina, he says, pushes his father up and down the streets of the town, from the sanatorium to the baths, from the baths to the sulphur springs, walking the steep streets tirelessly so that Goad might get the freshest, cleanest air. But the old man is still skeletal, eyes shadowed, breath quick and ragged. The doctors have found nothing more than ‘nerves’, a word they repeat in various tones of exasperation and wonder, in a range of evasive accents, shaking their heads.

Esmond continues his novel. Hulme at war. Heroism. Boredom . He has heard his father speak so many times about the deep-throated booming of the guns, the burst of star-shells, trench-foot, trench-mouth, sorties that might as well have been suicides. But he can’t make it come alive. The letters on the page are like bones in a vault, dusty and lifeless. He fills his notebooks, buys more, revises and rewrites, imagining all the time his father reading over his shoulder, tutting and shaking his head and muttering. ‘No. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.’

One evening towards the end of August, they are dining with Douglas and Orioli again at Piccolo’s. Both of the Reggies are there, and a new face, offered by Douglas with a sweep of his arm.

‘Prince Heinrich,’ he says of the tall, dashing young man in a suit of blue serge. Esmond shakes his hand. The Prince, fortyish, speaks perfect English, but seems reserved, otherworldly, sitting back and watching as they bellow at each other over the table. Douglas is on coruscating form, bristling when Esmond, who has been reading Paneros , suggests it reminds him of Wilde.

‘Can’t stand the man. Wrong type of sod. I know the Reggies here fight a posthumous battle over who has the misfortune of being the poor bugger’s widow, but he was nothing but words, words and old maid’s ways.’

Esmond learns that Prince Heinrich is the son of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, exiled by Hitler for not agreeing to support a south German military alliance between Bavaria and Austria.

After dinner, Douglas puts his arm around Esmond and guides him away from the others.

‘You’re enjoying Paneros , then?’

‘I’ve almost finished it. And yes, very much.’

‘Good. It’s really, if you like, a hymn to the sexual act. What ecstasy, of all of them, is more fervid than that of young lovers locked in lush embraces? I wanted to put that on the page, to make you feel it as you read it. I can’t read that book without a stiffy, all right!’

Orioli had looked a little jaded during dinner, eating and drinking less than usual. He’d asked Strindberg for a mineral water and drunk it, burping loudly and proffering swift, embarrassed apologies. He trots to catch up with them.

‘I’m not so much tonight. It’s my fegato , my bad liver. I need to go on a diet. Maybe I should go home.’

Douglas gives him a swipe on the buttocks with his walking cane.

‘No slacking. We’re going to join these young ones at their nightclubs. I want to see what they do after leaving us. They’ve been secretive recently. We ought to know what we’re missing.’

They make their way towards the orange dome of the cathedral. Beside the main steps of the Duomo, where indifferent hawkers hold out black-market cigarettes and saucy postcards, Douglas gives a little bark.

‘Let’s go in,’ he says. ‘I want to look at Sir John.’

The Prince and Colonel Keppel wait outside with the Reggies as the three friends follow Douglas and Orioli into the cathedral. It is very dark inside, barely any light through the stained glass from the streetlamps in the square.

‘Bugger,’ Gerald whispers, stubbing his toe on an unseen step. They walk down a side-aisle until they come to a small chapel. Douglas speaks, his voice terribly loud in the echoing church.

‘You see there?’ he says, lighting a match and holding it to one of the prayer candles. ‘Let’s fire up some of these, get a better look.’

As Douglas and Orioli light the candles to the side of the chapel, the fresco on the wall is illuminated. It is the painting in terra verde, the colour of the patina on bronze. A cruel-looking man on a horse atop a triumphant plinth.