Alex Preston: In Love and War

Carità lifts himself to sit on the desk, picks up the Podestà’s fountain pen and begins to play with it, tutting. ‘I’m not so sure. I very busy man. You wait to hear from me, va bene ?’ he says finally. Esmond nods. ‘Good boy. We work very well together, I know this. Arrivederci .’

Esmond walks out into the morning. The rain has returned, settling in puddles. He pulls his mackintosh up over his head. At the entrance to Doney’s some girls laugh under an umbrella as a boy steps into the road to flag down a taxi. They tumble in, the boy holding the door and another taking the brolly. Esmond watches as the girls pat their hair and the boys call orders to the driver. The girl nearest turns her face and he sees it is Fiamma. She smiles and presses a hand to the glass, her breath misting it as she laughs. Esmond waves, feeling foolish, as one of the other girls leans over to look at him, tented under his raincoat. Now both girls laugh and the taxi pulls away. He drops his hand and walks back towards the palazzo.

He starts another letter to Philip. Perhaps this is all for the best, he lies. Perhaps I’ll find someone else who’ll make me feel as good, as loved as you did. You invented my heart, you know. A postcard of Primavera to his father. I am doing my best for the Party. Give my love to mother. To Anna, the Gorgon shield by Caravaggio. I miss you. Have decided to restart my novel. How are you? He closes his eyes and thinks of Anna. She has weak lungs, her childhood one long, soft handshake with death. He remembers sitting beside her, pressing her burning skin, reading to her. In turn, she’d loved him, and her love was the thread that led him out of the labyrinth of spite and recrimination that was his family. He kisses the Gorgon’s head as he steps down to the postbox at Cook’s.

He eats dinner alone — Goad is at the German Consulate, Gesuina says — then goes to his room and lies on his bed. He opens a notebook on his knees and writes Chapter One . Music rises from the street, happy voices, the clatter of plates from Doney’s. He throws the notebook to the floor, strips off and crawls under the covers. He thinks of the look of mock absorption he and Philip would shoot discreetly at one another whenever someone nearby was being particularly dull. He pulls the pillow over his head. Later that night, he wakes as a door bangs. He wonders if it is Fiamma coming home. He listens for a moment to the night, to a disappointed silence. He turns over and falls into a deep, blank sleep.

On Sunday morning, Esmond pulls on a green jumper and tweed jacket. He and Goad meet at a quarter to ten in front of the late King and walk together through the mist, down the via Tornabuoni to the Ponte Santa Trinità. The bells ring across the city, people hurry to secure the best pew in the best church.

‘The ignominy of the side-aisle,’ Goad cautions, ‘and the Lady Chapel.’

Mist cushions the river, thick and white. When they reach the centre of the bridge, the bells of the town begin to muffle, and Goad peers nervously over the stone bulwarks. Sounds creep up through the mist towards them: the slop of the river, fishermen on the banks downstream, the distant bellow of the weir.

‘It’s as if we were underwater,’ Esmond says.

‘Or lost in time.’

They reach the south side of the river and walk down the via Maggio towards an old palazzo. There is no spire, only a small gold sign: St Mark’s English Church . The front is weather-beaten, the wash on the pietra serena chipped and flaking. Wire birdcages hang at eye height outside the shops and cafés on the street. None of the birds — canaries, zebra finches, parakeets, bullfinches — are singing. They stand in front of the church and Esmond looks down the line of silent cages. Goad makes his way through a wicket gate set in the large oak doors; Esmond ducks to follow.

In the entrance hall a flight of stone steps rises ahead of them, passing through an arch and curling out of sight. Green baize notice boards: Italian Lessons Offered, Vieusseux’s Circulating Library and Christian Lady Lodger Seeks Room in Central Location . The cards have yellowed and curled at the edges. They remind Esmond of the boards on the walls of the common room at Winchester, scholarships to Oxford and rowing blues, messages of triumph from the world to come. A crackling organ begins, and Goad leads them through a small door to the left.

In near-darkness, they make their way down the aisle towards the altar, a block of white marble with lambs and palm trees in alabaster bas-relief. It looks ancient and sacrificial, scrubbed of blood each night, Esmond thinks, as they shuffle into a pew near the front. On the wall behind the altar is a triptych of the crucifixion. Christ’s crown of thorns draws blood at every needle, his ribs press closely against his skin. Blood seeps and clots at the wounds in his hands and feet, where the nails are thick and twisted. The left-hand panel of the triptych shows Mary Magdalene, mourning, just as withered and undone. On the right is John the Baptist clinging to a gold cross. All three have grey-green skin, faces gaunt and horrified, every tendon and muscle risen. Esmond thinks of Filippino’s painting of St Jerome in the Uffizi. The same leached skin, the hopeless terror.

‘Rather brutal, hum?’ says Goad.

‘It’s ghastly. Is it Filippino Lippi?’

‘Ha! Bernard Berenson thinks so. Art expert, lives at I Tatti, up towards Fiesole. The triptych was owned by Charles Tooth, queer fish, by all accounts. He was the first vicar here and the triptych just hung around, so to speak. It was only when Berenson came for a lunchtime recital that we realised it was, that it might be, something rather special.’

‘I must write to my father and tell him. He adores Filippino.’

‘Had quite a collection, didn’t he?’

Esmond thinks of the chapel at Aston Magna, the family home seized by the banks after the Crash. There was no altar, no pews or promises, just his father’s paintings, stained glass replaced by clear panes to better light the cheeks of a Bronzino goldfinch, the pietà by Filippino Lippi, the Gentileschi Judith . His father had felt the loss of the paintings more than the house or the family firm. He’d blamed the unions in the factories, the Jews in the banks and the courts. Above all he blamed the Socialists, who’d pushed him from conservatism into full-blooded Fascism. Communism was a red rash on the mind of the family.

St Mark’s is like the chapel at Aston: secular, cluttered, flannelled with dust. A great-aunt’s attic. A grand piano sits at the back with a sheet over it. A sofa supports three peeling pictures of the Madonna. Chairs stacked down the side-aisles. A smell of damp and plaster, the sense of benign but terminal neglect. The darkness is partly due to the narrow clerestory windows at either end, and partly because everything is painted a light-eating crimson: the walls, the pillars, even some of the pews.

Goad bows his head to pray and Esmond looks around. He hadn’t realised how many worshippers had crowded into the darkness — all of them old, obviously British in their twill and tweed, floral hats and medals. Colonel Keppel is bolt upright in the front row beside a martial woman with a large nose. Behind them, on his own, is an old man in a double-breasted suit, a single comb of hair across his head. Goad looks up and the old man waggles thick eyebrows.

‘Reggie,’ whispers Goad.

‘Wotcha,’ the man says.

Another old man steps jauntily down the aisle. He wears a high-buttoned jacket, Edwardian-style, with turn-ups to the cuffs, a grey shirt and vermilion handkerchief. He stoops and crosses himself in the aisle, then edges into the pew behind Esmond and Goad. He leans his face between them.