Alex Preston - In Love and War

After I dropped Ada off at her apartment, I cooled my heels on the street and watched her lights go on. I imagined her sitting reading late, preparing material, stretched out on the divan in her father’s study. Her sadness reflects my own. I wish we could be sad together, but she doesn’t seem to have any need for contact, at least not mine. She’s the most island-like person I’ve ever met. I sat in the church and looked at the triptych tonight when I got back and I kept seeing her face in Mary Magdalene’s. Both of them hard, reedy, faraway. I’m so tired. Still a little drunk from dinner. I think I’ll go to bed. G’night, whoever-you-are. I may haunt you yet, so speak kindly of me.’

3 . A-Side:Harold Goad and Alessandro Pavolini discuss the life and poetry of Gabriele d’Annunzio (27′ 54″)

B-Side:‘Should I be dating these missives from the past? I rather think not. I like to picture you piecing the chronology together from my summation of the war elsewhere, a war which feels so daydreamish and unlikely when I climb up through the stairways, ladders, trap-doors and corridors and then out onto the palazzo’s flat roof. I look over the river, towards the dome of the cathedral, and the stories of submarine battles and massacred Poles and bombs dropped on Scottish harbours seem like the work of a very slender imagination indeed, somebody’s rejected novel.

It is the 23rd of October. It is a Monday night. A Tuesday morning. The 24th of October. I’ve grown rather sleepy. Not now, I don’t mean, even though it’s two and I’m unable to lie still let alone drop off. I’m in the studio in bare feet, recording this in my pyjamas. I’ve just fallen into a state of lethargy — the more everyone tells me to go, even Bailey now, and Goad, the more my father showers me with letters containing, some of them, ripe old nicknames — the more I feel happy here. I’ve begun to think a healthy and successful life depends on a kind of accomplished ignorance of good advice. I don’t want to be heroic; I want to stay in Florence, look after Ada, read books. I consider the balance between hope and memory that shifts and tilts over the course of a life, giving different reasons for carrying on. At the moment, it feels like I don’t have enough of either.

The palazzo is more complex than I’d imagined. I keep finding new passageways, hidden doors, empty rooms that feel just-left — perhaps the ghost of Machiavelli. Stairways cut through the building like rock strata; some end in brick walls, but usually they lead out onto the roof, where I like to sit and watch the tiles of the city crest and fall like a terracotta wave, collecting the last sun before winter. Occasionally, at night, I hear things: mumbling voices, a child crying. The voices of the Florentine dead? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous, or at least no more ridiculous than anything else. If God is an artist, we might accept that we are preliminary sketches. Good night.’

4 . A-Side:Harold Goad and Esmond Lowndes discuss T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (25′ 41″)

B-Side:‘Rudyard has signed up! I can hardly believe he’s old enough, but we’ve all been ageing recently. I’m twenty-two now, which means Rudyard’s eighteen. That seems impossible, but not unlikely. He took the bus into Shrewsbury on his birthday and signed up then and there. He’s a common foot soldier in the 7th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment. Father’s awfully proud. I imagine he’ll make rather a fine squaddie. He can handle a gun, has the kind of pluck that comes from never being wholly of this world. I always got the impression he lived without an internal narrative, or at least no more than What a jolly hunt! and I love shooting! and Dogs are faithful friends. I realised that all the images that come to my mind when I say the name Rudyard are outside, distant, bloody. He was always the one on horseback, wheeling a fox’s severed brush around his head, galloping off to mete out death to some small, innocent thing. Excluded from the love that Anna and I wrapped around each other, he was thrown together with my father, and into that world of hunting, heroism and intransitive rage. He’ll enjoy the war.

Father’s letters have gone from angry to ominous. Of course it doesn’t help that he’s alone now in that mournful house, only Cook for company. His last one said he was thinking of commandeering a Wellington from RAF Shawbury and flying over himself to collect me. He still seems to think it’s practicalities that are holding me up. Or he thinks I feel some misplaced loyalty to the Party that I need to keep up Radio Firenze for the sake of the cause. Alas it’s just that I’m in love, and a coward. I’ve stopped answering his letters, although I keep collecting cash from the advertisers, wiring it over when I remember.

Ada’s father has been attempting to persuade her to come and join him in Turin, up there where he’s near enough to the Swiss border to get out if need be. When I try to talk more generally with her about what was happening to the Jews, how she feels about it, she just casts off again. That distance she has, nothing can get behind it. It’s an emotional Maginot Line. She’d make a virtuoso torturer — I wake up exhausted and ashamed, empty of my secrets, and happy. I don’t know what I’d do if she left. Throw myself from the Ponte Santa Trinità, I expect.

Bailey has been back to the UK again. Spying, no doubt. In his kitchen, he has a map of the world spread out on the table with different-coloured toy soldiers for the Germans and French and Brits. It has become an evening’s fun for us to read the newspapers together and arrange the troops. My Italian’s fairly decent now — still a frightful accent, but posso farmi comprendere, posso leggere i giornale . I miss Bailey when he’s away. Hey! There — did you hear that? More noises in the roof. If it’s not ghosts, then it’s rats. I should set out traps, or poison. There’s certainly something peculiar about this place.

I found a glove on one of the stairs, a lady’s glove. It’s not Ada’s — hers are red, scuffed. This is small and black and exquisite. I can’t imagine Bailey had invited in a lady-friend. Uncanny. G’night.’

5 . A-Side:‘Filippo and Filippino Lippi — A Son in His Father’s Shadow’, a talk by Esmond Lowndes (27′ 30″)

B-Side:‘Happy Christmas. It’s snowing outside the window. There’s no heating in the palazzo, but I’ve lit a fire and I’m wrapped up like a Sherpa: scarf, hat, tweed jacket, two pairs of socks. I’m actually quite warm. It’s been a bugger of a Christmas Day.

We lunched at Goad’s. We all squeezed into the sad little flat they’ve let him keep on the ground floor of the Palazzo Arcimboldi, now the Institute is no more. He greeted us at the door of his burrow, and he seemed so genuinely happy to see us, and so small and tired it was all I could do not to drown him with tears. Gerald is over for a week. He’s losing his hair. A bald patch the size of a quail’s egg in the centre of his scalp. He looks terribly serious and business-like. He’s working at Lloyds Bank. Just like Eliot. After a few drinks, though, he shrugged off the mien of the busy capitalist and was something like his old self. There was still just a shadowiness around him, though. He seems disappointed, shifty somehow.

Ada and Bailey and Reggie Temple joined us for lunch. It was almost merry, to start off with. A rag-tag family pulling Smith’s crackers that Gerald brought over. Goose roasted in Goad’s little kitchen. A pudding that wouldn’t light no matter what we poured on it. I think I drank too much grappa. Became a tad maudlin at the end, raising my glass to the dead ones, singing “Auld Lang Syne”, sending Ada long, doleful glances.