Alex Preston - In Love and War

‘Mr Ristori, we must be on the next train. May we have the documents?’

‘Let me get them. I’m sorry.’ He kneels down and begins to root beneath the bed. ‘It’s rare I have visitors now,’ he says. ‘I attend a literary gathering that is cover for a Marxist discussion group, but still — we are in Empoli, you understand? Revolutions were never made in Empoli. I am back where I began, the Tuscany of my birth. Defeated! Ah, here we go.’ He draws out some sheets of paper covered in dense typewritten text. Ada takes them from him and looks at them closely.

‘I think this is the sort of thing we were after. Thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ he says, smiling broadly again. ‘You’re sure you won’t stay for another drink?’

‘We must make our train.’

She stands above Esmond, helps him ease the cast off his wrist, rolls the papers around his arm, and closes it over them. They bid farewell to Ristori, and make their way down the narrow stairs of the hotel, through its silent courtyard. As they walk down the broad street towards the station, the sound of Ristori’s singing comes to them again, high and sweet, finally lost in the traffic and the wind.

On the train to Pisa, they sit together in an empty compartment. It has begun to rain and the drops are pulled along the window as they gather speed through the Tuscan hills.

‘I’ve no idea if these codes are any good,’ she says, looking out.

‘But he’s dependable. Bruno said so.’

‘He’s a lunatic.’ An inspector comes into the compartment, nods at them both as he checks their tickets and pulls the door shut behind him.

‘In some ways he’s amazing, obviously, a modern Bakunin. He fought for the rights of Italian immigrant labourers in South America. They think he’s a hero down there. No one knew how badly Italians were being exploited. He wrote long articles about the conditions for workers and kept being put on boats back to Italy, but he’d throw himself overboard and swim back to land.’

‘When did he meet—?’

‘Mercedes Gomez. She was another anarchist. They created the labour movement in Brazil, unions for plantation workers. When the police started rounding everyone up, Ristori was put on a prison boat back to Genoa. If he ever goes back he’ll be shot. He’s almost seventy, you know. This isn’t the first time he’s helped us.’

At Pisa there are gangs of Blackshirts on the platforms, police guarding the exits. He waits for Ada to get off the train and follows some distance behind. He makes his way down into the underpass and boards another train, this time for Genoa. Ada is sitting by herself in a crowded compartment. He stands, holding onto the luggage rack, aware suddenly that his cast is itching, that the papers are dampening against his skin.

They are only on the train for two stops, until Forte dei Marmi. He goes first and, without looking back, crosses the road and boards a bus to the seafront. He walks along the promenade, sheltering from the worst of the rain under the umbrella pines. Then an open stretch past shuttered restaurants and hotels until he comes to the Bagno Dalmazia bathing club; a single waiter stands outside on the sand, down towards the beach. Deckchairs sag under a tattered awning.

‘A drink, sir?’ he says, as Esmond walks down onto the damp sand.

‘I’m waiting for a friend. She’s always late,’ Esmond says, the carefully remembered code words sounding sham to his ears. He eases himself down into one of the deckchairs. The waiter disappears inside and Esmond can hear him speaking. He sits and watches the sea, a deep and melancholy grey, pocked with rain. Rocks prod up like fins twenty feet out. After fifteen minutes or so, he is aware of a buzzing noise from where the coast curves round for La Spezia. He thinks of Shelley floating in these choppy waters, his skin the grey-green deadness of the sea. Ada arrives and sinks down into the other deckchair.

‘You weren’t followed?’ Esmond asks in English.

‘No.’

‘I can’t think why I asked that. I suppose it sounded like the sort of thing I should say. Of course you weren’t.’

‘You’re a very convincing spy.’

The waiter brings them both a coffee. It is nearing three and they haven’t eaten yet.

‘They’re coming,’ Ada says, nodding at two boats moving steadily from the north.

‘You’re sure it’s them?’

‘I am.’

They sip their coffee.

‘I wonder,’ he begins, ‘the people who do this kind of thing all the time, the Richard Hannay types, how much they’re in it for the thrill? Waiting around for a secret assignations. Being terribly hush-hush. Generally feeling like a Buchan novel.’

She is silent, watching the boats as they approach.

‘Because it seems rather a flimsy thing to build your life upon, this kind of frisson, don’t you—’

‘Shut up, Esmond.’

‘Right-o.’

‘If you have to speak, speak in Italian. But better, don’t speak.’

He looks down the beach, up towards the road, where only the waiter stands, watching them, coolly complicit. A gust of wind showers them with a fine sting of sand.

‘Right-o,’ he says quietly.

The boats pull up on the shoreline a few hundred yards to the north and one man walks briskly along the beach towards them. He’s wearing a dark blue sou’wester and oilskin and puffing on a cigarette, a red glow each time he inhales. When he reaches them he squats down in front of Esmond. He has amused blue eyes, a square jaw peppered with stubble.

‘Shoot out your arm and let’s have a dekko,’ he says, looking swiftly up and down the beach and then peeling apart the plaster cast. He takes out the papers and gives them a brief, frowning glance before slipping them inside his oilskin. ‘Think they’re kosher?’ he asks.

‘They look real enough,’ Ada says, sitting up as straight as her deck chair will allow. ‘Ristori stole them from the Regia Marina headquarters in Livorno. Could be a plant, but I’d bet they were real.’

‘Good work,’ the man says. ‘You know Bailey, don’t you?’ He looks at Esmond again.

‘Yes. Very well.’

‘Bloody good egg. We sprung him from a camp in Sicily in August. He’s in Spain now, on a job, but he’ll be back in the UK before long. Deserves a rest after what he’s been through. More or less ran our game in Italy until they picked him up.’

‘Your game?’

‘Can’t stay, I’m afraid. Eyeties I’m with are awfully skittish. Cheerio.’

He pulls his hat down and sets off back up the beach. The rain has eased and there is sunlight on the sea as the two boats pull out and head northwards. They sit for a while longer and then Ada stands and stretches.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’

They follow the Englishman’s footsteps down to the tide-line. Ada shucks off her shoes and socks and walks barefoot, stepping over wormcasts and the bubbles of oily seaweed.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ Esmond asks.

‘I love it. I love winter. It’s worth a little pain to feel like this.’

Esmond takes his own shoes off and they walk together, looking up at the dark windows of holiday houses, hotels, restaurants. They herd wading birds ahead of them along the beach; Esmond spots oystercatchers, sanderlings, dunlin.

‘There’s nothing so depressing as a holiday resort in winter,’ he says.

‘But we have it to ourselves.’ She takes his hand and he feels the ridge of the ring on her wedding finger. He remembers slipping Bruno an envelope of cash to take to Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in exchange for the small and ancient gold band. Esmond had given it to Ada one evening, as they’d sat out on the terrace with one of the last bottles of wine from the Keppels’ cellar, and a rich dusk had fallen over the countryside. He’d told her he loved her, that as soon as the war was over, he’d marry her, that he’d never met anyone so admirable.