Alex Preston - In Love and War

*

Esmond, bound to the chair, wakes to find Carità standing under the swaying blue bulb. He is staggering drunk, his face flushed and glistening, his lips moistly fleering. Resting against his schoolboy’s legs is Anna’s collage. He reaches down and begins to peel the photographs from the backing board to which, a lifetime ago, his sister had glued them.

‘Tell me where your friends are, Esmond.’ The picture of Anna on the carousel is peeled off. ‘Where are they hiding?’ Carità flicks open a silver cigarette lighter and the photograph curls and then burns. Carità drops it to the ground and Esmond remembers his mother, burning letters in a Shropshire field. Esmond and Rudyard, cricket and Cambridge, Anna and Aston Magna. Carità, with long, grubby grey nails, picks at the edges, tears them up from their moorings, holds them to the greedy tongue of flame. Esmond realises that he has no photograph of Ada, and it feels like a victory, for to see her burnt would be too much, would take away the one thing holding him together.

‘Tell me where your friends are hiding, Esmond. We’ll find them anyway. Do it for your father, for Goad. Imagine what they’d say if they knew you were protecting a gang of Communists. Tell us and we can walk out of here together.’ Now the picture of Esmond and his father at the Albert Hall rally. The old man’s hopeful smile, one strong arm and an empty sleeve. Esmond feels a rush of love for his father that meets a wave of certainty that he’ll never see him again. The picture flickers and burns.

Finally, the collage is scraps of charred paper, a glue-marked board. Carità leaves and Esmond, husked out, slumps in his chair and weeps.

*

Carità. Pliers.

‘Tell me where they are.’ The little finger of his left hand breaks. A brief moment between the snap and the detonation of pain.

‘Tell me where.’ Now the nail is pulled out of the broken finger, and it is as if his hand is on fire.

‘We know they’re in the mountains. Where?’ His ring finger. The sound is like biting on a stick of grissini.

‘Are they in the east? With the Serbians?’ Both of his thumbs, now. They take more work and Carità grunts as he breaks them.

‘In Monte Morello? Monte Oliveto? Where are they, you pig, where?’

Esmond remembers his father’s words — anger is stronger than fear. He lifts his head and spits, first on his own chin, then in Carità’s face.

*

He and Elio in the blue-lit room. Elio is owlish and astonished without his glasses, his nose flattened to his face.

‘You know, whatever happens to us—’

‘Yes?’

‘History—’ Elio’s voice is cracked and fading.

‘Yes?’

‘Brecht. You know? Burn me. Do not fear death—’

‘But rather the inadequate life.’

‘Good.’

Silence. Esmond looks down at Elio who is silent, sleeping, and smiles.

*

He is standing next to Bruno in the hall with the wooden frame which had dislocated his shoulders. It is hot and the French windows, with their birdcage-like Juliet balconies, are wide open. A fan turns in the corner where Father Idelfonso is still playing Schubert. Esmond cannot move his arms and presumes they are bound, but looking down he realises that it is just that they are broken, hanging at his sides. When Carità comes to punch him, to cut obscure symbols on the skin of his chest with a stiletto knife, he can do nothing. Milly enters the room wearing only stockings and suspenders, her breasts threatening to overbalance her. Bruno starts to laugh. Esmond looks across at his friend, who is covered in bruises, one of his eyes closed, his mouth empty of teeth, then back at the overweight, absurd figure of Carità’s mistress. He begins to laugh as well. Milly has crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth open in a scandalised O. Carità is irate, storming back and forth in front of them.

‘Why are you laughing? Don’t you realise that you’re going to die?’

They stop laughing when Elio’s body is dragged into the room. Father Idelfonso interrupts Schubert to play Chopin’s Funeral March. Carità goes over to the body and lifts the head back to show, beneath a face, toothless and eyeless, the opened neck darkly smiling. A whisper of breeze through the French windows. Esmond can hear Bruno’s breath coming fast and ragged. Carità lets Elio’s head drop back down and comes towards them.

‘It’s time to end this, don’t you think?’ he says, drawing out his long, ivory-handled knife. He presses the blade against Esmond’s Adam’s apple. Esmond winces and feels blood running warmly down his chest. Carità draws the blade away.

‘I’ll give you one last chance. For form’s sake.’ He smiles and walks to the end of the room, unlocking the door and opening it. ‘You may be a little unsteady on your feet, but no one will stop you. Just tell me where the camp is and you can go. Think of the taste of the air, the freedom.’

Esmond is holding his throat, blood rising between his fingers. Carità crosses to stand by the window, his hands, black with gore, twining over the balcony. ‘This is your last chance, boys.’ He looks down into the shadowy courtyard, his pudgy face caught in the evening’s dying light and nods with a sudden, serious goodwill. A glance between Esmond and Bruno — a swift decision. On legs that can hardly bear his weight, Esmond plunges forward. He stumbles, then seizes upon an image of Ada in the high room at L’Ombrellino, her arms crossed over her bare chest, the triptych behind her. From her, he draws a final burst of energy, as if love alone might staunch blood, knit bones. Now beside him, Bruno, staggering and certain. They grab Carità by his black shirt with their broken fingers, lift him up with their broken arms, and with the very last of their strength they pull him out into the void, shrieking.

As he falls, Esmond doesn’t think of Bruno, or Carità, falling with him. He doesn’t think of Elio, or what remains of him. He doesn’t think of Alessandro in the graveyard beside the Great Synagogue or Maria Luigia buried in the cemetery at San Miniato. He doesn’t think of Tatters running at his heels along the cypress-lined mule-tracks of Bellosguardo, or the doggy cairn by the swimming pool. He doesn’t think of Philip lying in a grave in the blushing heights above Barcelona. He doesn’t think about Anna. He doesn’t think about Rudyard, who is not more than a hundred miles away, marching towards Florence. He doesn’t think of Gerald or Fiamma. He doesn’t even think of Ada, who is, however, thinking of him. Under a sky of fast-moving sulphurous clouds, she sits and pictures him, and it makes her smile, the shape of his face in her mind.

Instead, as he falls, he remembers, aged seven or eight, when a dog had died at Aston Magna. It was a stable dog, not one of the hounds, and his father had refused to call the vet. She didn’t even have a name. She’d given birth to three healthy pups who were now with Cook in the kitchen, sucking milk from plump fingers. One of the pups was still inside her, though, and after dragging herself around the yard on her hunkers for an hour, straining every so often, groaning after the stable lads had tired of their attempts to fish the dead, sack-wrapped pup out of her, she’d crawled up to Esmond’s room to die.

He’d sat with her all night, the shuddering weight of her in his arms, her head on his shoulder, sour breath in his ear until finally she’d stopped breathing. He sat with her a while longer and then carried her out into the pale morning and buried her in his mother’s rose garden, beneath a Crown Princess Margareta. He was astonished by the lightness of her body, as if life were substantial. Back in the warmth of the house, he went into the kitchen where Cook was still sitting in a deep armchair, the silky knot of puppies in her lap, cooing a gentle song to them. He’d said nothing, but sat on the arm of the chair and watched, wonderstruck, as the new lives writhed and shivered.