In Love and War (6 page)

He and Fiamma are in the kitchen drinking tea. She has changed into green silk pyjamas and looks, Esmond thinks, like a princess from the
Arabian Nights
. They’d cleared up the entrance hall together, sweeping glass and mopping the sticky floor. It had grown dark and they worked in the light between standard lamps, under the dull gaze of Victor Emmanuel. Now San Gaetano chimes ten o’clock. The pain in his groin has finally lifted. Fiamma fishes a slice of lemon out of her tea with a spoon, sucks it, drops it back into her cup.

‘Where have they taken him, do you think?’

‘Santa Maria Nuova. It’s not far.’ She blows on her tea. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Rum,’ says Esmond. ‘Worried about Harold.’

‘Me too. He looked so unwell on the floor.
Bastardi
.’ She places her cup in the sink with a crash. ‘You were a good man tonight,’ she says, stepping towards him and walking her fingers across his head. ‘You were brave. Now I must go to bed.’ Esmond’s scalp tingles as he finishes his tea and makes his way along the corridor to his room.

The next morning he breakfasts alone and then wires Gerald from Cook’s. He pictures Gerald as a younger version of his father: thinning, hesitant, hands a patchwork of scabs and raw skin. Afterwards he climbs the stairs and knocks on the door to Fiamma’s room.

‘
Sì, entra!
’ she says. A gramophone plays ‘Summertime’.
The Decameron
is face down on the dressing table, dresses and jackets on the bed and the doors of her wardrobe. ‘It’s such a mess,’ she says, smiling, picking up her handbag and placing a navy shawl around her shoulders. ‘Let’s go.’

Goad is in a ward with elderly people, all of whom appear to be more or less dead. There is an occasional groan from one of the beds, otherwise silence. Goad’s head is heavily bandaged, his face grey and drawn under the white turban. Bailey sits in a chair beside him, Gesuina in another.

‘How is he?’ Esmond asks. Fiamma takes Goad’s hand, running her thumbs over the skin. Goad opens his eyes narrowly and attempts a smile.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he says.

‘He’ll be fine if he gets some rest,’ says Bailey, firmly. ‘The head seems to be in reasonable condition, nothing broken. But the blood pressure’s terribly high, his heart is not in good shape at all. The doctors have insisted on at least a month of rest.’

‘The shock?’

‘They don’t know, I’m afraid. One suggested––’

‘I’ve told you, Frederick, I simply can’t take the time off. My students rely upon me. And Radio Firenze––’

‘You don’t have the option.’ The priest’s voice is tired and Esmond realises he has been here all night. Gesuina has a basket of food by her feet, a steaming flask of coffee in her hands. Her eyes are red.

‘What about the people who did this, what about Carità?’ Esmond asks.

Goad sighs and shakes his head. ‘Anything we do will just drive a deeper wedge between us. It’s my fault. I should have known, brandishing the picture of the King through the open door. Idiotic. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.’

‘But Mussolini should know about this. We should write to him.’

‘We need to work with Carità, not against him. This is something you must understand, Esmond. We live according to different rules here. Violence is the blood of this new Fascism. I don’t hold it against Carità for a moment, what he did. We were in the wrong and were punished. It’s him I ought to write to – a note of apology.’

A nurse comes in, gently removes Goad’s hand from Fiamma’s and takes his pulse.

‘
Signor Goad dovrette dormire,’
she says.

Fiamma kisses Goad on the cheek and squeezes his hand again.

‘Will you let my students know when they arrive this evening? Tell them in person. I don’t think a sign––’

‘Of course,’ Esmond says. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

‘As for the station, it’s down to you now. Prepare, Esmond. Go and see Carità. Square things up with him. Make sure the studio’s ready for when I’m back on my feet.’

Bailey walks with them to the corridor. ‘He’s really very sick,’ the priest says. ‘They were talking about operating, but he’s not well enough for that. He’ll be here for at least another week. I’d like him to take the waters at Bagni di Lucca. I think I’ll be able to persuade Gesuina to go with him, but he’s in no state to travel yet. You’ll hold the fort at the palazzo, you two?’

‘Of course,’ Esmond nods.

‘We’ll manage,’ Fiamma says.

At the Institute, Esmond stands at the door and meets the clerks and university students, shop workers and salesmen arriving for Goad’s English lesson. ‘I’m afraid the lessons will have to be postponed. Signor Goad has had an accident. He’s in hospital.
I’m terribly sorry.’ He repeats it to each of them. They ask after Goad, if they might visit him, offer their condolences, pressing Esmond’s hands with theirs. When the last has left, Esmond walks into the courtyard, looks up and feels the old building breathing around him. He sees a light flickering against the pale roof of the loggia. He climbs the stairs to the top floor and, instead of turning left towards the bedrooms and the kitchen, he turns right.

He tries the door at the end of the passage. It opens with a creak. There on the loggia, again in green pyjamas, this time with a woollen shawl around her shoulders, sits Fiamma, reading by candlelight, making notes in a pad on her knee. She has found a rusty garden chair to sit on. Esmond steps out onto the pathway between railings and she looks up at him.

‘It’s better to read outside,’ she says. ‘You can hear the city, see the sky, the mountains.’

‘
The Decameron
?’ he asks.

She holds up the cover and then goes back to her reading.

He looks around. The hills that circle Florence are purpled by the night. Thin feathers of noctilucent cloud sit in the air to the west. To the east, the hills are dark, marked here and there by the lights of villages, the solitary glow of villas.

‘Could I join you?’ he asks.

‘Of course. Do you have any food? My mother’s still at the hospital.’

He crosses to the apartment, finds a loaf of bread and some salami in the pantry, a bottle of red wine and two glasses from the kitchen cupboard. He pulls on a jumper, puts his own copy of
The Decameron
under his arm and heads back out onto the loggia. Fiamma has unfolded another green chair. They sit, each reading the same book in different languages, each sipping, munching, smiling, sighing as they follow the stories of ten young people,
six hundred years earlier, in the very hills which tend them now. When San Gaetano has tolled twelve and the wine is finished, the candle almost down to its holder, Fiamma draws in a sharp breath, shivers and reaches out for Esmond’s hand.

‘My uncle was one of them,’ Fiamma says.

‘One of what?’

‘The men, last night. He passed Carità the portrait of Vittorio Emanuele.’

He can feel her pulse in her palm. Her hands are cold and he seizes them both between his. She looks at him with wide, frank eyes.

‘I can’t believe he could do this to Mr Goad. They have lunch, they are friends even. Something has happened to the people in this city. They are turning against themselves.’ She takes her hands from his and stands up. ‘I must go to bed. I have classes tomorrow.’ He can barely see her eyes in the candlelight. ‘It is good to have you here.’

She bends over and places a kiss on his cheek. He watches her cross the loggia to the door and out of sight. He stays for a while on the rooftop, turning with the drifting stars. Later, in bed, he imagines he can feel the moist press of her lips with his fingertip.

They live the next week like a holiday. They get up later, dine longer, fall asleep or into books in the afternoons. Gesuina is in and out of the apartment, leaving meals under muslin cloths on the sideboard in the kitchen, salads in deep glazed bowls in the icebox, loaves of bread on the table. She seems unwilling to quit Goad’s side, particularly at night, when she says he grinds his teeth and calls out, his heart a skipping trot in his chest. She’s
usually there at breakfast, looking rinsed but satisfied, her hair in a fretful bun. After Fiamma has left for lectures at the university, Gesuina puts together a basket of food and she and Esmond walk up to Santa Maria Nuova to visit Goad.

Bailey is often at the hospital, his cool assurance a comfort in the wheezing closeness of the ward. His Italian indulges no accent and is garnished with English words and suspect Italianate endings:
stethoscopio
, for instance. He and Gesuina together, though, are a formidable pairing, and the doctors and nurses soon scurry at their command. Goad is moved into a private room overlooking a flagstoned courtyard, the bluff back of the church and the railway station visible through a gap between hospital buildings.

‘They call it a
scorcio
,’ Goad says. ‘A view you glimpse, all of a sudden, that leaps inside you. Florence is the city of
scorci
.’ Pale blue curtains belly in the breeze as they stare out into the bright day. Esmond has brought Goad’s Tennyson, his Foscolo, his Browning, but feels useless now, gently gripping the old man’s hand. He has done nothing about the wireless station, about Carità, and the thought presses upon him. There has also been no word from Gerald.

In the evenings, he and Fiamma have dinner on the loggia. They drink and read, closeness creeping between them as the night inks the hills, bells tolling in the darkness around them. They bring cushions and rugs onto the loggia like tender colonisers, giving it back the purpose of its design. He plans his novel, with Fiamma a new Philip, listening to his ideas, laughing encouragement.
Hulme at Cambridge – sent down – then in London
, he writes.
After a row over a girl, he hangs Wyndham Lewis upside-down on the railings of Soho Square. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the artist, forges him a pair of brass knuckle-dusters which he uses to drive home philosophical arguments
.

One evening they go down to Doney’s for a
digestivo
. Fiamma drinks three glasses of Frangelico as the white-coated waiters dip and bend around them. The room glitters with marble tables and chandeliers, coruscating brightness. Everyone seems to know Fiamma, who is wearing the same yellow dress she wore the first time Esmond saw her. Late on, just as the waiters are beginning to stack chairs, one of them performing a
pas de deux
with his broom, Fiamma reaches across to take Esmond’s hand on the silver-topped table.

‘When I was young,’ she says, ‘I was hungry. My father couldn’t get work – it was the first years of Mussolini’s reign and the papers suddenly refused to take articles from a Communist, even one who’d fought in the war, and who wrote so beautifully.’ She reaches up to draw her fingers down the sleek curve of her hair. ‘My early memories are of being cold and hungry, and of there never being any money, of having to go to our neighbours to beg food.’ They both lift their feet as the dancing waiter sweeps beneath their table. Fiamma lets out a little sigh. ‘We’d come to Florence for holidays, my mother and I, and there’d be food and soft sheets and my Fascist uncle, and I hated myself for loving it, for not staying in the apartment in Milan with my father. I still feel that, here, a little.’ She shrugs, swirls her glass and drinks it down.

When they get back to the apartment there is a moment of awkwardness at the door to her room. He leans to kiss her cheek, they move their heads the same way, then again, and their lips brush together. They draw apart, eyes wide. Fiamma smiles, and moves to place another swift kiss on his mouth. He is wordless, all lips, staring at the blank face of her door.

He wakes at dawn, the air in his bedroom close and stale. The rumble of a taxi below. A muttered conversation, banging doors, footsteps on the stairs, then silence. He dozes again and wakes with a start as his door bursts open. In the dim light he makes out a tall figure with thick chestnut hair. Fiamma stands behind him, her arm on the doorframe.

‘Well, turn the light on then. Let’s get a look at you.’ The voice is warmly amused.

Esmond sticks out a hand for the light and looks blinkingly towards the doorway. The young man is
sportif
in a white boating jacket and slacks, a loose tie. He smiles, and it is like a growl. Fiamma’s nightdress shows the darkness of her skin as she steals happily behind the stranger. Beautiful, Esmond thinks, sitting up.

‘May we come in?’ The young man crosses to the window and throws open the shutters. The world stirs shyly outside. He pulls out the chair, turns it towards the bed and sits. Fiamma perches on the desk behind him, looking first at Esmond, then at him. Esmond is aware that an incipient morning erection is prodding his sheets. He feels childish and Victorian in his nightshirt, his father’s, too large and threadbare at the armpits.

‘Listen,’ the boy says in a loud voice. ‘I want you to know how bloody good you’ve been. Standing to attention at the old man’s bedside, keeping the pip from his tooth and all that. I’ve spoken to Bailey and he says you’ve been a sainted hero. So thanks a million, pal.’

‘You’re Gerald.’ Esmond says, looking for a trace of Goad in the elegant, almost oriental eyes.

‘S’right,’ Gerald says. ‘Bloody good to be back here. And to see
this little one.’ He slaps a hand on Fiamma’s thigh and she smiles out a squeal. ‘Too early for breakfast? Procacci’ll open in twenty minutes. Milk rolls and jam. My treat.’

Gerald and Fiamma leave and Esmond sits muddled and sleepy, listening to their voices and laughter echoing through the corridor. He gets up and picks his clothes more carefully than he has all week – a pale lawn shirt and sponge-bag trousers.

He finds them in the courtyard. It is light now, a lemony brightness in the air. As they stroll out into the street, Gerald throws his arm around Esmond’s shoulders.

‘We’re going to have a high old time this summer. No idea what I’ll do when I get back to London, but I intend to be thoroughly debased before I go.’

They walk through the doors to Procacci, whose stooped, trembling owner is letting up the blinds. He nods them in, tucks a dishcloth into his belt and stands behind the counter.

‘Tre panini con confettura, tre caffè, per favore,’
Gerald says. He pulls out a chair from the round marble table for Fiamma and sits down himself, rocking backwards as he draws out his cigarette case. ‘Smoke?’ he asks, holding it towards Esmond. Esmond takes one and leans forward to light it as the owner brings their breakfasts.

‘You’re studying for the bar, aren’t you?’ Esmond says.

‘Rather flunked, I’m afraid. Have you seen inside a law court, Esmond? There’s always one bird looks as if he’s about to split the atom when all he’s thought about for twenty years is roast beef and gravy. A cemetery for the mind, law.’

Later that morning they visit Goad. Gesuina sits knitting as the old man sleeps. She stands up when she sees Gerald, letting out a whimper of pleasure as they embrace. He tilts backwards and lifts her from the floor. Goad wakes, looks over at them and breaks into a smile.

‘You came,’ he says.

Gerald sits by his father and they talk for some minutes in low voices. Then he turns towards them. ‘I think I’ll sit and read to the old man for a while. Listen, it’s going to be a scorcher. Why don’t we head up to L’Ombrellino for a swim later? I’ll meet you chaps up there, say, three?’

Outside, Fiamma reaches into her clutch and draws out a pair of round, wire-framed sunglasses. Esmond takes her arm. As they walk down past the train station, past Santa Maria Novella, he can feel the heat rising from the paving stones. There are speakers mounted around the piazza and Mussolini’s voice cries out as they pass. Fiamma stops, and he watches a group of boatered schoolgirls giggle past in the mirrors of her lenses. Mussolini ends with a shout that is almost a scream. Fiamma walks on, shaking her head.

‘
Che
palle,
’ she says.