Alex Preston - In Love and War

He shrugs and grins, still basking in her words. People begin to leave the hall, moving off into various meeting rooms — as they walk with them, and pass open doors, Esmond hears snatches of welcome to Badoglio’s government, admonitions to reform, refuse, tighten with the Church, distance from the State. Bruno sticks his head out of one of the doors and sees them.

‘You two should come in here. We’re discussing whether to send a delegation to Stalin, declare Florence an independent Soviet republic. Come on.’ He disappears back inside. Ada whistles.

‘You go,’ Esmond says. ‘You should be involved in this — you deserve to be.’ She smiles and, with a kiss, heads off to join her comrades.

At something of a loss that afternoon, Esmond sits in the condensation-misted window of the Giubbe Rosse, sipping tea. His bicycle is leaning against the window. He has been to the bank, where he was delighted to see Maria Luigia and withdrew a thousand lire from the radio account. He strolled along to the Libreria Gonnelli just off the Piazza del Duomo and bought a copy of Turgenev’s Rudin in Italian which he now reads, frowning, rubbing a window in the misted glass and looking out over his bicycle into the empty square. He finds himself increasingly drawn to Russian novels, particularly those peopled by what Leavis had referred to in a lecture as the ‘superfluous man’. He wonders if fate has marked him as one of these, destined for the footnotes of a great moment, a passenger, an Oblomov.

As evening falls, he sits in the café. His book is finished, the teapot cool, several beer glasses emptied. He is gently drunk and the book lies face-down on his lap. He is beginning to nod as the door opens and Antonio strides in.

‘He’s here,’ he shouts out into the square. ‘Esmond!’ He’s beaming, slaps Esmond on the back and sits down at the table opposite him. Soon Tosca enters, followed by Ada and Bruno, Alessandro and Elio. Oreste Ristori comes in singing the ‘Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso,’ from The Marriage of Figaro . He smiles as Ristori, still singing, gives a little jig. A waiter brings them over glasses and a bottle of spumante , and they sit drinking into the night.

They walk out into the square at around one o’clock and, as they are saying their farewells, there is the sound of aeroplane engines above, a distant rattle of gunfire.

‘It’s not over yet,’ Bruno reminds them. ‘We’re still with the Germans as far as the Brits are concerned. It’s right to celebrate but we should be careful.’ Esmond pushes the bike up the hill with Ada walking on one side, Alessandro on the other. When they get to L’Ombrellino, they shake dust from the sheets of the Keppels’ bed, where Alessandro is to sleep, and open the windows to the night.

Ada has gone upstairs. Esmond and Alessandro are back in the drawing room having a final brandy. A nightjar creaks somewhere in the garden below them.

‘I appreciate you putting me up,’ Alessandro says. ‘Just until things are clearer in the city and I can find a job, a place to rent. It was fucking mad down there, don’t you think?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe it’s because I’ve been in gaol. It just seems like they’re walking around in a dream. All this shit about declaring a Soviet republic in Florence, or becoming a Papal dependency. This city was the beating heart of Tuscan Fascism. The guys who tortured me are sitting at home right now, picking their toenails, but eventually they’ll have to come out, get jobs. What do we do with them?’

‘I was wondering—’

‘Some fool was walking down the via Guelfa with a Party badge on earlier. A bunch of workers from the Ginori factory almost killed him. But we can’t do that, we have to bring them in somehow.’

They sip their drinks a while longer and then go up to bed. On the stairs, just before parting, Alessandro lays a hand on Esmond’s arm.

‘Ada told me about the baby,’ he says. ‘Congratulations. She’s an astonishing girl, the girl who’s meant the most to me. I thought about her a lot when I was in prison and I’m pleased to find her so well. So happy with you.’ A throb of sadness in his voice. Esmond can hardly see him in the darkness of the stairwell, but he smiles.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘It’s good to have you here.’

The days are taken up with meetings in the Palazzo Vecchio, speeches in the Piazza della Signoria where the various leaders make — with varying degrees of eloquence — their plays for power. Ada even gives a speech, standing in at the last moment for Bruno, who is caught at a rally in the Fiat factory. She is very straight, very still on the stage in front of the Palazzo, Michelangelo’s David looking peaceably over her. She speaks — not for long, but with honesty and intelligence — and Esmond feels extraordinarily proud that his child is growing in this fiery, political woman.

Alessandro is rarely at home. When he is, he’s an excellent guest, making delicious meals from a mixture of packets and tins and Ada’s garden. He goes out with Tatters and Esmond’s Webley early in the morning and comes back with woodpigeons, pheasants and partridges which he plucks in the kitchen until the air is thick with feathers and rich fat. The dog loves him. The evenings he’s not at a rally or meeting workers at the factories in Rifredi or Sesto Fiorentino, he stands for hours in the garden throwing a ball for Tatters, rolling with him in the long grass, the dog covering his dark skin with bright pink licks.

Ada’s thin body doesn’t help her hide her expanding belly. Bruno writes a card that he delivers by hand. Dear Esmond, it reads, I surprised myself at the delight with which I greeted Ada’s news. There are friendships that are obvious, easily observed. There are others that creep up and surprise you. Ours is the latter kind, but you should know how much I value the contribution you made during the days of Fascism and how much I value now your support to Ada, who will be one of the stars of Italian politics in years to come. I look forward to welcoming your child into the world, and to your help in building a better Italy for that child to live in. I wish you all the best, Bruno.

They tell Tosca and Antonio together, over dinner at Antonio’s apartment on the Lungarno del Pignone. It is a tiny, one-bedroom flat on the top floor of an ancient building, some of whose rooms have been left to fall into ruin, their floors collapsed, plaster caving inwards. Antonio’s salotto looks out on the river and is deliciously cool even during the muggy August evenings. They sit at the table by the window and eat soup that Antonio has made, dipping into it a precious white ciabatta — far better than the dusty loaves to which they’ve grown accustomed. When Ada tells them her news, Tosca almost leaps across the table to hold her friend. Antonio rushes off to find a bottle of spumante and they sit long into the night, keen and happy.

‘It’s nothing,’ Ada says, shrugging and struggling not to smile. ‘It’s only biology.’

News of the war comes to them over the W/T, through newspapers and the continually well-informed Professor. The Russians enjoy success after success, driving the Hun back towards the Polish border. Pictures of General Zhukov, looking grim and purposeful, splash across the covers of La Stampa and La Repubblica. The tone of these reports is resolutely neutral, not wishing to alienate the Germans, who remain in Italy in their tens of thousands and are still the ostensible ally. Whenever Esmond sees a German soldier, or the Consul in his black Foreign Office uniform, he is taken by his own astonishment. He would rather forget that the city is still host to these crafty beasts. On the wireless, he hears that Goebbels had announced the departure of the final Jew from Berlin earlier that summer, declaring the city Judenfrei . He hears of chambers being built at Auschwitz, the annihilation of ghettoes at Vilna and Minsk, the uprising at the death camp in Bialystok that was brutally crushed, its leaders committing suicide before they could be caught. He looks the Germans in the eye, and thinks of Philip.