In Love and War

Part Three

Esmond Lowndes, Selected Correspondence, 1937–1939

(Italian translation by Ada Liuzzi)

Shrewsbury, Salop.

13/10/37

Dearest E –

It’s all just too horrifying for words. You must be undone. The poor girl; her poor mother. I wish I were out there to help you, darling. I had no idea the Blackshirts in Italy were such monsters. This Carità fellow sounds like a fiend — do watch out for him. Did you love her, this Fiamma? I imagine you did. At least Goad sounds like he’s been a brick. I do think you ought to write to daddy about it all. Goad is sure to let him know why you aren’t at the Institute any more.

Sorry this is rushed. I’m back in the cursed hospital. First cold snap of the autumn and I’m gurgling like a drain. Perhaps they should send me out to join you in the sunny South!

Much love to you and chin up,

Anna xx.

Welsh Frankton,

Shropshire.

October 21st ’37

Dear Esmond –

Your letter arrived in the same post as one from Harold Goad outlining the events of the end of September. The stories tally, more or less, for which you should be bloody thankful. I would have thought you might have written to me sooner — you need to face up to your misdeeds and take any punishment on the chin. I believe I’ve told you this before.

As it turns out, it sounds like you might get away with this one. The girl’s father is persona non grata, which helps. You’re lucky that the Blackshirts seem so keen to sweep the whole mess under the rug. You understand the kind of trouble you might have been in? Beyond our powers of help. I want you to be careful now. Concentrate on getting this station going and stop palling up with blasted sods and degenerates. I thought I made that clear to you before you left. This Douglas fellow sounds like the lowest of the low, one of these parasitical aesthetes happy to see the lives of others crumble to ruin as long as their own base interests are catered for. A bloody swine, and below you.

So you’re to live at the English Church? Goad explained the move in his letter. He can’t have someone under his roof who has betrayed his trust so completely. You see that, I’m sure. In exchange for him continuing to sponsor your undertakings in Florence, I’ve agreed to find his son a place at the Party headquarters. Is he a good chap, this Gerald? A solid Fascist like his father?

I understand that the studio is operational — well done for this. The stations in Heligoland and Sark are bringing in a not insubstantial amount of cash. It’s imperative that Florence begins to make its own contribution. Goad tells me he has plans for two hours of programming a day. Harder to fill than you might think, or so I’d imagine. Have you thought about contacting Ezra Pound? He’s been writing for The Blackshirt and Action, a new newspaper Mosley has set up. He’s in Rapallo, near Genoa. I think he’s probably insane, but his ideas about Social Credit are not so far from the Corporate State, and he can certainly string together a sentence. I enclose some recent discs of Mosley’s speeches that you might like to broadcast.

You will also find enclosed a list of Italian businessmen Rothermere has sounded out as potential advertisers for the wireless station. They will expect you to contact them over the next few weeks. Make sure that you do. Seize the hour, Esmond! Things are looking up for you now — all the nonsense is behind you. Get your head down and put your back into it. Good luck and be a bloody man!

Your mother sends her love,

Your Father.

P.S. You asked if you might draw upon the wireless funds to pay for repairs to the automobile you damaged during your hapless trip to Pisa. No.

P.P.S. The priest you’re staying with is Frederick Bailey, isn’t he? I met a God-botherer called Bailey in the First Battle of the Marne. Brave fellow if it’s the same chap (and you know what I think of priests as a species).

MINISTRY FOR POPULAR CULTURE

VIA VITTORIO VENETO, ROMA

2/11/1937

Dear Mr Lowndes,

It is my pleasure to announce that Il Duce himself has asked me to write to you regarding Radio Firenze. We view this radio enterprise as having two heads — to school the Italian shopkeeper, clerk and artisan in the English language, so that the temporary cooling-off in the relationship between our countries does not lead to a loss of that particular feel for the language of business that marks out the Italian from his Mediterranean cousin; and to link up the right-thinking men of each country, so that the Italian realises that not all Englishmen are like Mr Eden, and the Englishman knows of the success of our glorious revolution, the real changes that have been effected in the lives of the ordinary people here, and the powerful muscle with which Il Duce is leading us into the future.

As such, Il Duce suggests you might broadcast on the Radio Roma network, meaning that Radio Firenze will be audible not only throughout Italy and the Greater Italian Empire, but also across the whole of Europe, including Great Britain. I hope that you understand the faith we are putting in the British Union here. Had Harold Goad not always been such an intelligent and loyal friend of our work, this project could scarcely have been contemplated.

Do pass on my very warmest wishes to Mr Goad, whom I have always held in the greatest admiration. Perhaps — with your permission — I might come and visit the studio next time I am in Florence. I could even prepare a small speech of an informative nature.

Cordial salutes,

Alessandro Pavolini, Minister for Popular Culture.

He stands on the Ponte Santa Trinità thinking of Fiamma, a sob in his heart. Carità has taken to parading his squads of MVSN up and down the Lungarno degli Acciaiouli and their jackboots echo between the buildings either side of the river. The city grows darker with every passing day as the Blackshirts locate dissenters, arrest Communists, round up pacifists. Fasces are carved into walls that once housed tabernacles to the Virgin. Everywhere is the slogan Credere, Obbadire, Combattire. The MVSN swarm like flies over the streets of the town, wringing money from shopkeepers, threatening and swindling, and always the marching, marching. It’s easy to see Carità out front, he’s the only one wearing shorts. He has a horse-whip in one hand which he beats against his bare leg as he shouts — Sinister, dexter, sinister, dexter.

Esmond imagines a gun in his hand as he stands there, imagines pointing it at Carità and pulling the trigger. He pictures Carità stumbling forward, over the parapet and into the Arno, the yellow water filling his lungs. He shakes his head. Goad was right — men like Carità, like William Joyce, these are the men of the violent future. He’s a relic, like Douglas, like his father. He strolls back along the bridge towards the Oltrarno, away from the Institute, the via Tornabuoni, Doney’s and the bells of San Gaetano, and south towards St Mark’s, the studio, the small room in the church apartments where he spends his nights, where his days are filled with disc recorder switches, the knobs and dials of the transmitter, the quiet precision of Goad’s voice outlining the differences between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, the mysteries of the modal verb.

He pays melancholy visits to the triptych downstairs, and then upstairs to the lonely studio. — Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson, Ada tells him, and they both smile. He and Goad have broadcast on Shakespeare, Dante, Corporatism, Fascist art, and the programmes have been well received. He pictures his father, listening on his ancient Philco Easytune and hearing his, Esmond’s, voice, beamed across the Alps, across France, into the South Downs and breaking over the Midland towns into Shropshire. He imagines the smile on his father’s face and feels himself blush with pleasure.

Telegram: 26/10/37

Arrived in Ldn STOP 1st day at BUF HQ STOP Utterly mad all of them STOP Hope not 2 ghastly for you STOP Gerald

Rinaldo Piaggio, SpA

Genoa Sestri

1/11/1937

Dear Mr Lowndes,

Since my father is in ill health, I take the opportunity to reply to you in his stead. We would certainly be interested in purchasing three two-minute advertising slots on Radio Firenze. One of our employees will send you disc recordings directly, where we present the great aeronaut and Governor of Libya, Italo Balbo, praising the skills of Italian aircraft manufacturers and, particularly, the Piaggio P.16 heavy bomber, with which I’m sure you are familiar.

We agree your terms, namely five hundred lire per advertisement. Please find a cheque enclosed and we take this opportunity to wish you luck with your sensible venture.

Evviva Il Duce!

Sincerely,

Enrico Piaggio.

Isotta Fraschini Automobiles,

12845 Milano

7 November

MR LOWNDES

FIND ENCLOSED BANKER’S DRAFT FOR L2500 AND ONE DISC RECORDING OF PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL FOR THE ISOTTA FRASCHINI TIPO 8B. WE ARE DELIGHTED TO HEAR OF IL DUCE’S INTEREST IN YOUR UNDERTAKING AND PLEDGE OUR CONTINUED SUPPORT FOR RADIO FIRENZE. PLEASE GIVE OUR REGARDS TO LORD ROTHERMERE.

VIVA IL DUCE!

ORESTE FRASCHINI ON BEHALF OF ISOTTA FRASCHINI AUTOMOBILES.

Café Rapallo

Rapallo

27th November 1937

Mr Lowndes –

YES! in a word. In rather more, I might say to you how long I have been waiting for an opportunity of this sort. I first suggested that I broadcast my views regarding the SCOURGE of usury and the sole solution — that of C. H. Douglas’s SOCIAL CREDIT — some five years ago at a dinner I happened to attend with, amongst others, Signor Achille Starace. Unfortunately, the Italian administration has not seen fit to take me up on this offer. I am delighted, therefore, that you have made contact, and that I might continue my association with the laudable efforts of the British Union to repel the threat of Communism.

I will talk about the JEW. For centuries, since the brute Cromwell brought them back into England, the kikes have sucked the English marrow from its bones. And now even those last remnants of the WHITE RACE, the proper, intrepid Brits each of them the right blend of Saxon warrior and Norman noble, find themselves kowtowing to international financiers, the houses of Rothschild and Raphael and Samuel, usurers in London and New York. I will speak, and when I have finished speaking, it will be as when the storm passes, and the sky is crystalline.

I am afraid that I am not able to come to meet you in Florence as I am currently rather diminished of capital. If you should like to visit us in Rapallo (we could put you up at my good friend Olga Rudge’s place — we are far too cramped here) and bring your recording materials, I will be delighted, for a small fee, to deliver you several hours of DYNAMITE.

Give my best to Sir Oswald and your father.

Sincerely yours,

Ezra Pound.

Wooton Lodge, Staffs.

20/12/37

Dear Esmond –

All the best for a magnifico natale from Diana and me. I’m bloody proud of you, young man. I think you still smoke: here’s a couple of cartons from our doomed attempt to take on Philip Morris! Hope they aren’t too stale …

Warmest wishes,

Oswald.

[Card: Blake’s Newton]

Happy Christmas Darling E! Miss you masses. I’m in hospital again, worse luck. Any chance of you coming back for a visit? A xxx.

[Card: Winter scene, English landscape.]

Dec ’37

Dear Esmond –

Wishing you a very Happy Christmas. Sorry you’re not with us. Cheque inside as I’m sure you can buy much finer things out there than we’d be able to send you from Shropshire.

Your mother sends her love,

Your Father.

The mince pies have been crushed in transit from England. Alice Keppel looks down at them apologetically as she serves coffee at the end of Christmas lunch. Reggie Temple has drunk too much and is lolling back in his chair, snoring. Bailey and Goad are wearing paper crowns and discussing the Nanking Massacre. Colonel Keppel alone seems cheerful. — I’m dashed if I’m too old to fight, he says to anyone that will listen. — Just let me at the bounders. Russians, Germans, all the same to me.

Esmond had unwrapped his presents alone, in bed. Two Old Wykehamist ties from his father, the Dugdale abridgement of Mein Kampf from his mother. His sister has sent him a bundle of Everyman editions of the great Russian novels: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. He lays them on his dresser alongside the box of gaudy handkerchiefs from Gerald via Goad. Missing you, the card read.

He decides to walk back from L’Ombrellino alone. It’s cold and he’s wrapped in an overcoat. The wind brings tears to his eyes as he makes his way down into the city, lustrous under her lamps. Bells chime here and there, children play with spinning tops, yoyos, push-bikes in the street, their scarves tied in stiff knots at their throats. The church is dark and echoing when he lets himself inside. He has a recording to prepare, needs to check supplies of reel-to-reel tape and record needles. He’s in the studio until late and then goes to bed, reading three pages of Mein Kampf before tossing it aside with a snort.

Telegram: 2/1/38

Left yr mad politicians in the lurch STOP Wld rather sleep on street STOP Dad says he’s better is this true STOP Gerald

Via dei Forbici, 35c

Firenze

1.2.38

Dear Esmond –

It strikes me that we started out on the wrong note. Ada has enjoyed working with you enormously — she seems to have found her calling. Her mother and I listen to the programme with great pride, knowing the extent to which our daughter is involved in its production.

Perhaps you’d like to come for dinner one evening. If there’s one thing that the tribulations of my co-religionists north of the Alps have taught me, it’s that leaping to assumptions based upon such broad measures as race or nationality is almost always to err. I loathed your Mr Eden, I resented the sense of entitlement I found in the English who have colonised Florence, much as you have colonised the rest of the world. But these past few months have changed my views on many things. Ada’s aunt, my sister, lives in Hamburg. Life for her has become extraordinarily difficult. Her husband has been beaten, many of their friends have fled, some have disappeared.

It is to the credit of the British that you, like the Italians, are not temperamentally suited to racialist behaviour. The strength of your cultural life gives you access to a finer degree of sympathy — or that, at least, is how I’ve come to see it. Let’s discuss over dinner. I’ll leave it to Ada to agree the date with you.

With very best wishes,

Guido Liuzzi.

[Enclosed with following letter: article from Daily Mail entitled ‘Son of Sir Lionel Lowndes in Italian Broadcast Venture’.]

Welsh Frankton,

Shropshire.

February 2nd, 1938

Dearest E –

Thanks for yours. Can’t tell you how chuffed they all are with you. I’m sure others have sent you the piece from the Mail, but here it is just in case. It makes you sound like quite the hero. Mosley wrote a smashing letter to dad about the difference this has made to the Party’s standing in Italy. Is it true that Musso himself is going to broadcast for you? Now that would be a coup. In any case, he’s told Grandi that he’s thinking of re-starting his contributions to the Party.

I’ve been in the Royal Salop again, can’t seem to shake the cough. It’s a beastly pain but I’ve got through the boredom by thinking about you out there, and how fabulously you’re doing, and what a splendid time you must be having.

Oodles of love,

Anna xxx.

— You know the Treaty of Rapallo? Pound says as they make their way down from the train station. — 1922, it was. Marked the renewal of diplomatic relations between Germany and Russia. Now it looks like they’ll carve the world up between them. And it all started here! He has a halo of fiery hair turning white at the ends, a faun’s beard. Esmond had expected an American accent. — I found Hitler magnificent, when I met him, Pound says. — He’s the real thing, has a vision, a sense of history and destiny. They come to a small café on the seafront overlooking the gently curving bay, bobbing boats, terns and gulls following fishing trawlers out to sea. — In here, Pound says. — I’m upstairs.

He arranges the recording equipment on the balcony of Pound’s apartment. Inside it is too cramped, crowded with books, dark. Pound lounges back in a deckchair, occasionally stroking his beard. It’s cold, a jagged wind pouring down from the hills. He doesn’t seem to notice. — I’ve been introduced to the Boss — Il Duce — several times now, Pound says as Esmond checks levels and adjusts the microphone. — I’ve never met anyone who understood my poems so quickly. He seemed to feel them on an instinctive, primal level. He’s a soldier, of course, but he’s also an intellectual. People forget that here.

That evening they have dinner at the villa of the violinist Olga Rudge. Pound sits between their host and his wife, Dorothy. Esmond is exhausted, downcast, and the dining room is unheated and chilly. He’s not sure he can use any of his conversation with Pound. They’d sat and watched the sun sink over the hills and Pound had spooled out his theories on usury and Social Credit and the Jewish problem and Esmond had felt as if he were back listening to William Joyce address a rally in the East End. There was so little subtlety to his argument, so much anger. They talk about Hulme for a while. — He was a dear, dear friend, Pound says. — Thoroughly brutal. I miss him still. Throughout, Pound’s wife sits in silence, looking over sombrely at Esmond as if he might help her escape along his radio waves to Britain. He retreats to his room as early as he can.

He stands at his window and can see the castle on the bay, patches of darkness on the water where ships are moored, young people walking along the seafront arm-in-arm. He’d brought his novel with him, but he can’t write. Perhaps, he thinks, he’s not supposed to be a novelist. Perhaps novels won’t even be read in the years to come. Maybe his legacy, the thing to make his death less hollow, is the recordings. He imagines a shell whistling down on St Mark’s, he and Goad dragging archives down into the crypt. The best way to speak to the future, Goad is saying, is with brilliant ideas.

The next morning, as the train winds down the coast towards Pisa, he leans from the window of his carriage and sends the discs he’d cut with Pound the previous day spinning out to sparkle for a moment in the winter sunshine and then crash on the rocks below.

Telegram: 10/2/38

Wiring E Lowndes five thousand lire for purchase twelve advertising slots as per agreement at meeting in Milan 6 Feb STOP Viva Il Duce STOP Bianchi Automobiles and Bicycles 7 Via Nirone Milan

MINISTRY FOR POPULAR CULTURE

VIA VITTORIO VENETO, ROMA

10/3/1938

Dear Esmond,

I was delighted and honoured at the introduction Mr Goad gave to my short speech on Radio Firenze last week. I have already written to him directly and apologise that I haven’t been in touch with you earlier. I very much enjoyed meeting you in Rome and was delighted to discover so many points of shared interest. I am sure that Italy (and England) will thank the day that Esmond Lowndes took an interest in the rapprochement of our once-close nations.

You shouldn’t let the success of your radio enterprise distract you from what I feel certain is your true calling — as novelist. I was fascinated by our discussion about T. E. Hulme, whose work I did not know. You are right that it is hard to find literary figures of the correct type — perhaps harder in England than in Italy. Here we have Ungaretti and Pirandello and, of course, the late d’Annunzio, whose passing we mourn each day and whose legacy (notwithstanding his regrettable assessment of the Axis alliance) I am now working to assure.

I like the idea of using the novel, with its mutability, its openness and its place at the heart of middle-class life, to address historical figures, situating them in moments of great political unease. Of course this is not new — your George Eliot famously treated the life of our own Savonarola; Manzoni’s The Betrothed is one of the great historical novels (have you read it? I enclose a copy in any case). But what seems new to me in your idea is to claim a figure from the very recent past and to use him to illuminate the current political landscape. I look forward very much to reading In Love and War when it is published.

As you can imagine, with d’Annunzio’s death, I have been terribly busy. I will try, nonetheless, to make it to Florence before the heat of the summer strikes and, if you will humour me, I would be delighted to continue my musings on the state of contemporary Italian literature.

With warmest wishes,

Alessandro.

Telegram: 1/4/38

Received with thanks four hundred pounds STOP Impressive STOP Mosley

Early morning. Esmond is sitting at his desk in the studio. He can still smell Ada’s lavender perfume. Voices rise up from the stalls on the Piazza Santo Spirito. The sound of a street sweeper’s broom is like the whetting of long knives. He sits in thought for a few moments, scratches his fountain pen across his notebook. He leans back, looks carefully at the last page, and gives a thin smile. He has finished his novel. With a sigh, he gathers together the pile of notebooks, puts a sheet of paper in his Olivetti, extends two fingers, and begins to type.

There is no such thing as historical fact. It is likely, however, that our hero, Thomas Ernest Hulme, twelve days after his thirty-fourth birthday, was standing in front of the Royal Marine Artillery battery at Oostduinkerke Bad, two hundred yards from the slate flushness of the North Sea. Witnesses — Captain Henry Halahan RN, for instance — say that Hulme appeared lost in contemplation as the shells descended. He’d just begun a book on Epstein, so it may have been this that caused his wood-cut features to smudge over, his ears to close themselves against the whistle of the falling shells, fired from the 15-inch Leugenboom at Ostend. His comrades threw themselves into the trenches, into the gun pit of the Carnac battery. Hulme just stood there, gazing over towards the long barges on the Yser Canal.

We know what the explosion sounded like, at least to Hulme. He’d had enough near-misses during his time in Flanders to know that, as he wrote to Ursula Lowndes, ‘It’s not the idea of being killed that’s alarming, but the idea of being hit by a jagged piece of steel. You hear the whistle of the shell coming, you crouch down as low as you can, and just wait. It doesn’t burst merely with a bang, it has a kind of crack with a snap in it, like the crack of a very large whip.’ On the 28th September, 1917, though, Hulme didn’t crouch. He stood there, in a dreamy moment, and he was killed. When the smoke cleared, some of his comrades were bellowing, others emitting miserable groans. Hulme had simply disappeared. Not a scrap of clothing, nor a shred of that burly, lusty body was left.

Here we move further from the sham certainties of history, deeper into Hulme’s beloved speculations. For in that moment before death, between the whistle and the crack, we’d like to imagine his mind cycling back through his short, sharp life, falling now on the figure of Wyndham Lewis, hanging upside-down on the railings at Soho Square after a row over a girl, now on the crow-like visage of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, his dear friend, dead not yet two years, now on his lover Kate Lechmere’s cyanope smile. And as the shells plunge and shriek like buck-shot birds, we imagine his mind going back to the night when, aged nineteen, he was sent down from St John’s College, Cambridge.

It was late and the boathouse was on fire, the flames tonguing the black Cam. Two policemen wrung river water from their jackets, shaking their fists and whinnying while a college porter waved his feet in the air, his upper half wedged in a dustbin. A rower stood in the light of the flames, his singlet and shorts dark-spattered, one hand clasped to a bloody nose. Two girls sprawled on the bright grass, sobbing. Hulme was swimming in the dark water, pulling his long body through the velvet iciness of the river, because he knew he had gone too far, and he would not feel this water, this river, again. Under the moth-eaten blanket of the sky he swam, and he felt the vague grief of the night, and the ruddy face of the moon leant over the fence of trees that lined the river like a red-faced farmer, watching him. He swam on.

Esmond stops and sighs again. It is seven in the morning. He stands, stretches and looks out for a moment onto the piazza below. He turns out his desk light and shuts the door of the studio.

Suico Atlantico Hotel, Lisbon

15/4/38

Dearest Es –

I wonder if you’d given up on me? There is, I understand, a small mountain of unopened mail waiting for me in Praterstraße; whether some are yours or not I don’t know. The house is being looked after by our neighbours, although the downstairs windows have been broken and the statues in the garden smashed. The last letter I read was from early in your Florentine days. You sounded miserable. I do hope things have improved. I’m sorry I didn’t write back — I’ve always been a dreadful correspondent.

Mutti and papa left for Lisbon two weeks ago. They’d been in Switzerland waiting to see which way the wind would blow. It’s one thing you can say for papa — he’s careful. Moving out of Leopoldstadt was my own concession to caution. I bunked up with Charlie Campbell — do you remember him from Emmanuel? He’s over on some sort of exchange programme teaching papyrology at the university. Put me up in his drawing room. Jolly decent of him. I earned my keep by bowling leg-breaks at him in the corridors of the Faculty of Ancient History. At least I took something from my time in England. I think I loved cricket almost as much as I loved you. Helps keep off the Kummerspeck too!

We told everyone that I was a cousin of Charlie’s over from the UK. I wore his clothes, spoke bad German with an English accent, ordered my tea with milk. But when the worm von Schuschnigg rolled over, and the true extent of the whole Heim ins Reich thing came out, it began to get hot. I left Vienna at night, wrapped in Charlie’s ulster, three days after the Anschluß. I took the train to Innsbruck where I fell in with a gang of Jewish students with pretty much the same idea — escape, get away from that vile little man, his swarm of vile little men. I followed my parents to Lisbon. There were people on the border — not good people, no one I could see doing it for anything but money — and they ferried us across. A week in St Gallen, then Geneva, then a night train to Genoa.

Can’t tell you how much it bucked me up just to be in the same country as you. I even dreamed, for a moment, of hopping off in Milan, taking a train for Florence and turning up on your doorstep. If only to see your face. But that hereditary caution …

It feels like things are rushing towards a ghastly end, as if everything is coming apart like something from Yeats. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ That was it, wasn’t it? I watched those violent men on the streets of Vienna, ugly snarls on their faces, and I knew that no good would come of Europe, that we are entering the new Dark Age, and those who would live must flee.

Another quote kept coming to me on the train, and then on the boat from Genoa to Lisbon. It’s Shelley — I think from his Defence of Poetry, but I don’t have my books with me — ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.’ This is what we’ve lost, our empathy. The Germans used to have it — Hölderlin had it, and Goethe and Rilke. But they don’t any more. Poets still have it — Auden does, and Spender, I think. Whatever you lose out there in Florence, Es, keep that. And for God’s sake put it into your writing.

Now the last, rather embarrassing thing. My parents are nowhere to be seen here. Presume they’ve hot-footed it to New York already. But I was rather relying on them for funds. While I was waiting for the clipper to New York, I met a Portuguese sailor in the Barrio Alto. I know, I know, but Lisbon is a rather thrilling place. You’d adore it here. I woke to find my watch and wallet missing. He left me a handful of escudos on the chair but they won’t get me far. I wonder if you could wire me a few quid, just to see me through until the boat leaves. In my name to the Central Lisbon Post Office, if you don’t mind.

You’re a good man, Es. I’ll always think awfully well of the time we spent together.

Philip.

L’Ombrellino

Piazza di Bellosguardo

Firenze

28/4/38

Would you like to come for dinner on the 3rd? Just a few of the old-timers. You might come and bathe beforehand. Bring Bailey.

Alice Keppel.

Telegram: 2/5/38

Money received with thanks STOP Far too generous STOP Actually now not going to States at all STOP Will join Charlie in Valencia STOP Always fancied fighting the good fight STOP Come and join us STOP Viva las Brigadas Internacionales STOP Philip

[Selection of twenty-first birthday cards, postal orders, a copy of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a fountain pen.]

He hasn’t told Goad, or Bailey or Ada that it’s his birthday. It’s past eleven and he’s sitting in the bar of the Excelsior, drunk. He orders a gin fizz and goes to the lavatory where he urinates down the front of his trousers, singing ‘Domum’ to himself tunelessly. At the bar, he orders another drink and slumps on the stool. Despite the broadcasts, the money, the novel finally finished and typed up and sent off to Faber, he doesn’t feel he’s made a success of anything in Florence. And yet, he thinks, if he’d been offered this a year and a half ago in Shropshire — to be running the radio station, hosting vibrant cultural discussions with Ezra Pound and Bernard Berenson, invited to parties at Renaissance palaces in the hills of Fiesole — he’d have fainted. It’s partly that his expectations move several steps ahead of the events of his life — Goad smiles expectantly at him at the end of every broadcast and the face he returns grows ever more heedful and resigned, as if to say they could do so much better if only they had better equipment, more staff, more luminous interviewees — and partly that he’s different now: he walks a little slower, talks more carefully, drifts away during most of the Fascist broadcasts and looks towards the window.

Welsh Frankton,

Shropshire.

1st June.

Dear Esmond,

I was delighted with your letter, as was your mother. It seems extraordinary to us, marooned as we are out here in the wastes, that our son should be at the very centre of things, hobnobbing with world leaders. We listened to your programme on Manzoni’s The Betrothed with great interest in the library this evening. Difficult stuff! Pavolini sounds a good sort — well done for getting him on. I understand that he has Il Duce’s ear, quite the coming man of Italian politics.

Great sense of relief that the problems in Czechoslovakia appear to have been resolved. Hitler perhaps not as bellicose as we had feared. Glad also that Chamberlain was so swift to bat down any talk of cosying up to the Russians. They’re the real enemy: remember that.

Good work on the latest instalment of advertising money. Be assured that it’s being wisely invested in the future of this great country.

Your mother sends her love,

Your Father.

P.S. I saw Pound in London — he’s barking but seems to have enjoyed your meeting. When do we hear the recording you made with him?

[Selection of letters and telegrams from: Birra Moretti, Wilier Triestina, Snia-Viscosa, Beretta, Danieli, De Agostini, La Stampa, Martini & Rossi, Romeo Motron. All confirm advertising subscription to Radio Firenze at the new rate of 1,000 lire per three-minute window.]

Hotel Las Arenas,

Valencia

15th July, ’38

Dearest Es,

Of the many things I might have become, I scarcely thought I’d end up a soldier. But that seems to be how it’s all worked out. Simply thrilling out here. We travelled up the coast after getting a boat round the Straits. We could see the shelling of Alicante — whole place lit up like the sun had toppled down. Rather beautiful, actually. We came ashore at a kind of sandy isthmus called El Perellonet and then, under cover of night, made our way into the city. Italian warships like glimmering palaces out to sea. They fire the odd shell every so often but things seem to have quietened down since we arrived.

I’m driving an ambulance. The Nationalists are really quite on our doorstep here, so we’re always getting called to dash out and scrape up some poor chap who’s caught one in the head or arm. Charlie bought me a gun which I fire at pigeons on the roof. Not much of an aim yet, but I’ll need it soon enough, I would imagine, when the final confrontation comes. The Republicans are all thoroughly decent sorts. Lots of Brits, of course, but it’s the locals who up the pulse.

We’re staying in a hotel that’s been shelled. I can see the stars from my bed through a hole in the roof, but it’s mild enough and actually rather romantic. Charlie has insisted on teaching the chaps cricket. Rather a different game when it’s played between orange trees in the Plaça de la Reina after a few bottles of Rioja. I scored my first ever fifty as the light drew in last night, sound of gunfire and distant shells as I held my bat up to generally bemused spectators. Spaniards can’t play for toffee, of course. Charlie, who’s much better than me, hit a six that flew so far it ended up over enemy lines. I’m going to bowl a few grenades at him tomorrow. It’s all just too bloody exciting.

Anyway, I thought you’d want my address, and if you could spare some cash I’d appreciate it. Think of it as contributing to the forging of the heroic new me.

Philip.

One evening, light still trembling outside the windows of the studio. Ada signals the end of the transmission. They’ve recorded a programme on Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night, recently translated into Italian. It seems a very daring subject — the novel had, after all, been a choice of the Left Book Club — but it is, thinks Esmond, important that they engage with material like this. The novel imagines a future where the Nazis and Japanese have defeated the heroic Brits, and now squabble with each other over their Fascist empires. It is futuristic, bold, horrifying in the way it takes the unstable present and ramifies it into a vision of the totalitarian world to come. Esmond had enjoyed the book, Goad hadn’t.

— A most engaging debate, Goad says, standing and stretching, pulling on the blazer which he had hung on the back of his chair. — Perhaps the best yet. He smiles at Esmond. — It wasn’t too—? Goad thinks for a moment, scratching the skin of one hand. — No, it was fine. Our uncertainty tallies with the culture, I suppose, the uncertainty of the present moment in Europe. I think we did well. Now I must be off, good night, you two.

Esmond and Ada coil wires, dust the instrument panel, seal up the discs and store them in the rack on one side of the room. He has deliberately avoided speaking to her about the Manifesto of Racial Scientists, about the new laws in place regarding the Jews. Now she wraps her shawl around her neck and stands in the doorway. — Esmond, she says. He looks up. — I don’t want any special favours, I don’t want you to get in trouble on my behalf, but I want you to know that I enjoy working here. He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke towards the cornices of ceiling. — Of course, he says. — There’s no question. I’ll make sure of it.

When she has left, he sits at the open window, breathes the summer air, smiles peacefully. He thinks of Murray Constantine’s words, which he had quoted in the broadcast and which Goad had repeated two or three times in reply: They will make a world in which it is impossible for a man to love his own daughter.

Ministry of the Interior

Palazzo del Viminale

Rome

21/8/38

Sir or Madam –

As the listed employer of Ada Liuzzi, who is registered as Jewish/other non-Aryan on the Census dated August 1st, 1938, carried out by the Italian Office for the Study of Race (under the guidance of Dr Guido Landra), please advise by return of post if Ada Liuzzi is employed in a position whereupon her duties could be described as falling into one of the following areas:

a) Government, politics, local or regional council work, other general administrative role within the apparatus of the Italian State;

b) Banking, moneylending, other employment in which the worker has control over the exchange, transfer or deployment of sums of money larger than 5,000 lire per calendar month;

c) Teaching, lecturing, professorships, any work which brings the named person into regular contact with children or students;

d) Military (including carabinieri), air force, navy, local police, fire service, or any other position requiring access to weapons of any kind;

e) Other educated profession where the named person’s Jewish/other non-Aryan status could reasonably be assumed to represent a threat or potential threat to the economic, military, moral or educational health of the nation.

It is your responsibility as employer to ensure that the Jewish/non-Aryan person is correctly employed.

Please also confirm whether Ada Liuzzi has been charged with any crime in the past ten years, and if so the nature of this crime. Please also list any previous or outstanding arrest warrants.

Please inform if Ada Liuzzi became an Italian citizen on or after 31st December, 1919.

Viva Il Duce!

[Enclosed with following letter: article from The Times entitled ‘Nuremberg and Aussig’.]

Welsh Frankton

Shropshire

12th September

Dear Esmond,

It seems I spoke too soon. Situation in Sudetenland bloody bad. Mosley has put several calls in to the Führer urging him not to act hastily, letting him know that the eyes of the world are upon him, but I fear they don’t have the close relationship they once did. You’ll see I’ve clipped an article from The Times calling on the Czechs to cede the territory to the Germans. Eminently sensible and we can only hope that it is the view inside Whitehall.

Runciman’s attempts to mediate were shambolic, and Nevile Henderson made a buggery of things in Berlin. I remember a time when the Brits were known for their diplomacy. You can just see that bastard Stalin perched over all of this, rubbing his hands with glee. Chamberlain flies to Berchtesgaden tomorrow; he’s got a good head, and he’ll need it. You could picture this all unspooling rather quickly, with the Poles and the Russians and that madman Konrad Henlein all buttoning their coats. If Germany does decide to wade in, the Czech will be wiped out in a flash. It’s interesting, Esmond — difficult times, of course, but interesting.

I was glad to read in your letter that you have developed such affection for Filippino Lippi. I don’t remember seeing this particular triptych when I was in Florence. I never really told you about that tour back in ’06. I went with Arthur Fitzroy and Chummy Little straight from Cambridge. We arrived in Florence at night, driving into the narrowing throat of the valley, using the great dome to guide us. It’s strange, but I can only recall small details of the city from that time. I remember waking the next morning in our hotel — the Excelsior — and looking out over the rooftops of the town, but almost nothing else. The room of Botticellis and Lippis at the Uffizi, of course, the insides of certain churches, Cellini’s Perseus. But it’s as if it was too much for my mind to hold. Every time your mother and I returned to Florence, it was like drawing back a curtain to reveal bright treasures of memory.

Enough of my rambling. You have great things to do. Mosley is staying with us. He and Diana are always after news of you. We are both struck by how well you and Goad work together — a thoroughly engaging duo. Funny the way in which things work out, isn’t it? That all of this now feels fated — that you should leave Cambridge, go out to Florence, make a man of yourself. Then — who knows? — come back and do great things for the Party at home, or fight like a lion in the war when and if it comes.

Your mother sends her love,

Your Father.

Faber & Faber

24 Russell Square,

London, WC1

23rd September, 1938

Dear Mr Lowndes –

I greatly enjoyed the draft of In Love and War that you sent me. A rather good idea to take a well-known figure like Hulme and re-tell his life as fiction. I thought you got the essential clash between his bawdiness, his brutality and his brilliance absolutely spot-on. I also very much enjoyed the way you worked his poetry, his letters, his life, into your fiction.

I would like to ask you to take another run at the passages describing his life in battle. It seems to me that these are where the novel stumbles. Ask your father — he was there with him. Read Sassoon (if you haven’t already, and your prose rather suggests you haven’t). It is a fact that whilst so many of those who know what it was like to fight in the trenches are still with us, there is something of a moral duty for the writer to convey the truth of war as clearly and cleverly as possible. It doesn’t seem to me that your novel does this.

If you are able to fix this, I should think there’s a good chance that we’d be interested in publishing. It won’t hinder things that your father’s name, and your own work on the wireless confer upon you a certain celebrity. We won’t make you rich, but Faber & Faber is a fine publishing house and we’d be very glad to have you on board.

Sincerely,

Richard de la Mare.

Via dei Forbici, 35c

Firenze

1.10.38

Dear Esmond –

It was most kind of you and Father Bailey to treat us to such an exceptionally good dinner last week. I am only sorry it has taken me such a long time to write and thank you. As you can imagine, things are rather difficult for our family at the moment. I don’t like to go into things too deeply in front of Ada (or indeed her mother, who is, as you saw, suffering from a deep sadness at the turn events have taken), but you can imagine the sense of betrayal we are feeling just now. I — who have given everything for this government, for this country — my country — and for the Fascist cause — that I should no longer be thought of as an Italian, that my passport should be confiscated and returned defiled, that La Nostra Bandiera, which has supported Il Duce for more than a decade, should be closed down — All of this seems incredible to me.

I enclose a petition signed by several of my prominent friends — you will note the first name is that of Giovanni Gentile himself — supporting my exclusion from the punitive racial laws which have so hampered my ability to continue in the service of a cause in whose integrity I continue to believe with all my heart. I acknowledge the need for the Charter of Race, given that so many of those who insist on swimming against the tide of history — the members of Giustizia e Libertà, the leaders of the Communist unions — are Jewish. It seems sensible also to deny the great blessing of Italian citizenship to the recent miscegenated product of our African adventures. But to someone like me? It is a great travesty.

As a figure in the public eye, I’d be very grateful if you would sign this petition. I have been let down by many of those I counted amongst my dearest companions, but we are lucky to live at times such as these when the bonds of friendship are put to the test and we may winnow out the lickspittles and toadies. Perhaps you’d pass it on to Father Bailey once you sign it, and ask him to send it the way of anyone else he thinks might help my cause.

I’m aware that you have been put under some pressure over Ada’s continued employment at Radio Firenze. I wanted to offer you my sincere thanks, and that of my wife. We love our daughter and know she loves working with you. See you for dinner on Wednesday as usual, I hope.

With my most cordial salutations,

Guido Liuzzi.

[Collection of invitations; visiting cards; concert, cinema and opera tickets; train tickets to Rome, Milan, Genoa and Venice; receipts for meals, hotels, taxi journeys.]

He has been on so many train journeys these past months he feels the rhythm of the shuddering carriages in the patterns of his thoughts. He suffers a kind of seasickness for the first half-hour in a new city, until he finds his land legs again. He does not see enough of Italy on these trips. Often he is taken straight from the station to some out-of-town office to meet the scions of wealthy manufacturing families, ambitious executives keen to toady to Il Duce, place a flag in the ground on Radio Firenze. Advertising money is pouring into the station, eclipsing the contributions made by the operations in Heligoland and Sark, and he and Ada open the discs each afternoon and listen to stoic men in clipped voices talk about the smooth action of their Beretta, the speed of their Romeo, the refined taste of their Martini. The next day, he is a travelling businessman — he feels modern, useful, as if he has stepped from a dream into real life.

He spends a night in a hotel in Venice overlooking the Piazza San Marco. The city is more ornate, more oriental than Florence, the squares wider and suffused with grey light. It seems to him a more naturally Fascist environment. His taxi driver points out the balcony from which Mussolini and Hitler addressed the crowds when they met there in ’34. He is appalled by the stench of the canals. He meets a girl at the foot of the Torre dell’Orologio and takes her back to his hotel. He is surprised when, in the morning, she wants paying.

He finds an England in the landscape. Looking out of the window of the train as he crosses the Po Valley, he sees a coppice of oak and elder that might have been a hillside in Ellesmere. He is reading War and Peace, falling in love with Andrei and Natasha in equal measure, but he thinks of England. And the streets of Milan and Turin are as dull as those of London, the people of those busy northern cities as lost in their own affairs, in their own hurried footsteps and urban anxieties.

Whenever he returns to Florence, making his way by foot down the via Tornabuoni and over the Ponte Santa Trinità to the gate of St Mark’s, it feels like home.

Roma Reial Hotel, Barcelona

4/11/38

Dearest Es –

Everything’s buggered. I’m in Barcelona, looking down over the Plaça Reial. Bloody rain gushing onto the cobblestones, turning lanes into mud, splashing up and soaking the few miserable creatures out there pushing half-empty carts up to the Ramblas markets. Above the noise of the rain on the roof I can hear the shells to the south of the city, guns in the hills. Place I’m in used to be a hotel, but there’s no bed, nothing in the room but dust, my few books, my revolver, a blanket. I’m hungry and we’re all bloody buggered.

That sod Chamberlain’s to blame. We all had so much hope. We were cheering Hitler on during the Sudeten Crisis, applauding every act of violence, every ultimatum ignored. We thought, you see, that it’d lead to an alliance against Fascism: the Russians, the Brits and the French. Even the Americans, perhaps. That as Hitler pushed things further and further, the democratic powers (well, and Stalin) would see Fascism for the evil it is (sorry, Es, but there you have it). They’d turn not only on Hitler, but on Franco, Mussolini, Horthy — the whole dark stain wiped from the map. And before you brace yourself for a wiping, take a good look in the mirror. You’re no more a Fascist than I am. Anyone who’s had his cock in my mouth automatically unsubscribes himself from the Fascist Cause. It’s one of life’s little rules.

Now all we have is this welching appeasement — ‘Peace in our time’. There was a real chance for a better world and we blew it. I’m in such a rage, Es, I feel like running up into the hills with my gun and having a go. It’s funny, now that we’re really fighting, now that we can see the Falangists with our field glasses from the look-out on the roof, I don’t feel the least bit windy. Heroism ain’t the word for it either, it’s just a kind of placid acceptance. I’m going to see this out and bugger the consequences.

Charlie’s dead, by the way. We were caught in an ambush on the way out of Valencia. Italian CTV troops. Nothing to be done. He died holding his cricket bat, which I think would’ve made him happy. I lay underneath him and Gonzalo (the boy we’d been travelling with) for an hour, listening to the Italians picking around in our stuff, feeling Charlie’s breathing getting shallower all the time. Gonzalo died immediately. They’d mined the road and the car was flung up and off into a ditch, everything rolling and tumbling and then a volley of machine-gun fire that tore through the car and through Gonzalo, whose body, I think, protected me. Charlie only took one bullet, but it was in the eye. Straight through and out the back. He looked like he was winking, which I felt rotten about as I thought it. They dragged him and Gonzalo out from under the rolled car. I hid beneath a tartan rug. They’d found our stash of whisky in the boot and seemed more interested in that than in us, the bodies.

I waited until darkness and then crept out into the cool air, a waning moon on the water, bats flapping etc. Took me three nights, only travelling by dark, sipping the half-bottle of whisky the Italians left to keep me warm. Finally Barcelona, where the Republicans have made their new capital and everyone is doggedly optimistic, even under this bloody rain.

There are a good number of English here, enough that I’ve organised a few games of cricket in the Plaça in Charlie’s memory. Pathetic sight, me in the rain with a group of five or six scrawny, battered Englishmen crouched around the crease, and me crying so much to think of playing with Charlie in the corridors in Vienna, in the squares in Valencia. I was never much of a cricketer anyway, but I’ll keep playing for his sake, I think. We were in love, you see.

Send me some money, Es. Anything will do. I need to get boiled, stinko, lit up like a church and slopped to the gills, but haven’t a peseta to my name.

Philip.

Welsh Frankton,

Shropshire.

26th November

Darling E –

I haven’t slept a wink since I heard you were coming back for Christmas. Simply too thrilling. Daddy’s the happiest he’s been in years — I swear it. I should imagine the train ride will be splendid — take some good books and fall into some frightfully exotic affair with a White Russian countess. If it were anyone but you having this glamorous time, turning daddy into a nervous schoolgirl and generally being the top of everyone’s toast, I might feel a Small Dash of Envy. As it is, I’m just too, too thrilled for you darling.

Mick Clarke (who has taken over the nutty side of the Party since William Joyce left for Germany) is in a high frenzy over Kristallnacht. His grin is so wide he risks flipping open like a hatbox. He and Mosley are down here for a pow-wow with daddy. They’re arguing over whether the Party should cosy up to Hitler now he’s shown his true colours: daddy is anti, Clarke pro, Mosley increasingly addled and prone to letting Clarke take control. The Times got it right on Germany, for once. It seems as if all the talk of the British Union as the party of peace has been for nothing. Because we should be fighting against the Germans, shouldn’t we? Kristallnacht etc.

At least there’s Christmas. We’ll have masses to catch up on when you’re here. Mother and I went into Chester yesterday and I saw what I want to get you for your present. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s just perfect. Can’t wait to sing carols and roast chestnuts and go for walks in the cold and generally just bask in your company.

Excited oodles,

Anna xxx.

Villa dell’Ombrellino

Piazza di Bellosguardo

Firenze

2/12/38

Dear Harold, Frederick and Esmond,

It is with some sadness that I write to tell you that George and I have decided, when we visit Violet in Sussex this Christmas, to stay with her into the New Year. Whether it’s the position of L’Ombrellino, perched up here custodial of the city, or our own status within Anglo-Florentine society, it is impossible for us to remain. Windows broken at night, the crudest graffiti on the walls, two cooks in a row burgling us of food and plate and the police won’t do a thing about it.

We will, of course, be back eventually, whether after this ghastly looming war or before it. George is still certain we’ll be fighting the Russians. He has dusted off his uniform in anticipation and is wandering around looking fairly brutal.

We wanted, before we go, to wish you both a great deal of luck, and to thank you for all the entertainment, friendship and joy you have brought to us these past few years. We’ll be leaving many of our possessions here. I’ll send Massimo down with a key — perhaps you’d pop in and make sure the place isn’t overrun with rats or Italians in our absence.

With love and best wishes,

Alice and George Keppel.

La Palme,

Bast de l’Abbaye,

Le Colle-sur-Loup,

Alpes-Maritimes,

France.

17th December, ’38

Dear Esmond –

Tempus fugit! Know I should have written sooner to thank you for helping with the scrape I got myself into last year. Inexcusable, really, but I’ve been travelling rather a lot. In the hills above Nice now, but got here via Greece, Morocco, Malta and I don’t know where else. Pino has just joined me. His eyes are back working, but he’s grown horribly tubby. Can hardly bear to look at him. We’re working on a book of aphrodisiacal recipes together. Have you ever tried simmered crane? Lambs’ testes? Sow’s vulva? Thought not. All of them dee-lish.

A lot of blathering about the war. Nothing like an expat community to inspire a gaggle of silly women on the subject of catastrophe. Pino and I intend to stay gracefully here for a few more months before returning to Italy. It’s the only place I feel sane, you see. If there is a war, all the better. The prospect of a gruesome death gives young men a bit of spritz. Don’t go into battle yourself, though, Esmond. It’d be a crime to risk that exquisite phiz.

How’s the writing coming along? Are you keeping a diary? You’ll thank yourself when it comes to your autobiog. More than that, reading back over the early years of this century in my own tattered journals is one of the few unassailable pleasures left to me. Affreux being alive at this age, I tell you. Pity in the eyes of the sailors by the dock, with their rotten teeth and the reek of bouillabaisse. Better live in the corridors of your own memory. To do that: keep a diary.

Love to Gerald. Terribly sorry about Fiamma. Rotten luck.

Norman.

His father meets him at the train station at Gobowen. He is standing on the platform as the train pulls in, a silk scarf around his neck. He is obscured briefly by a cloud of steam and then reappears, waving his newspaper. He looks old, kind, eager. The Humber is parked in front of the station. Esmond lifts his bag into the back and climbs up beside his father. It is as if the steam from the train follows them onto the road: mist parts as they motor along the narrow lanes, through Whittington with its castle and ugly red church and up the hill to Welsh Frankton.

His family is waiting at the front door when he arrives: the silhouette of his mother, Rudyard to one side with a dog in his arms, scratching its ear. Anna pushes past her brother and comes running out to the car. Her breath is heavy and hot as she embraces him and he is surprised at his tears. She has lost weight and he lifts her from the ground with ease, pressing their damp cheeks together and spinning on the gravel of the courtyard.

He’s only here for four days — he and Goad will be broadcasting again on New Year’s Eve — but now, surrounded by his family, with Christmas to look forward to, the evidence of his success in the way his father steers him to the drinks cabinet, sits beside him on the sofa in the library, places his hand on Esmond’s as if to assure himself of his son’s physical presence, he feels weightless, joyous, grown.

On Christmas Eve, Mosley and Diana arrive, on their way to Wooton Lodge. Everyone seems to want to touch Esmond, to congratulate him, to hear from him some story of his time in Italy that can be theirs. Diana drinks too much at lunch and then sits very close to him on the sofa afterwards. — Kit is so frightfully chuffed, she whispers. This is what she calls Mosley. — Not just with the money, darling, but with the way you’ve made the British Union seem relevant and involved in the great matters of the Continent. She blows cigarette smoke towards him and laughs. She places a hand on his thigh, moving it in languorous strokes until it brushes the tip of his cock. He feels himself reddening, murmurs an excuse and goes to join Anna and Rudyard in the kitchen.

Mosley grips him by the hand as he leaves. They are all standing in the hallway and he speaks in loud bursts. — Bloody good stuff, Esmond. A man in his father’s image. Knows how to get things done. Make sure you keep it up. We’re all relying on you. Sir Lionel is looking at Esmond with a kind of evangelical glow. His mother comes up behind him and puts a gentle hand on his back. They go out into the courtyard, waving, as Mosley’s car disappears down the drive.

On Christmas morning they sit around the tree in front of the fire. The day seems to serve nostalgia, newly minted. As he watches his mother tousle Rudyard’s hair, his father unwrap his presents using his arm and his teeth, Anna open the purse he’d bought her on the via Calimala, he begins to miss and grieve for them, as if the picture were gently fading before his eyes. A Jack Russell and a Scottish terrier come bounding in, yapping and worrying the wrapping paper until Rudyard follows, chasing them out.

Esmond saves his present from Anna until last of all. It is large and square and carefully wrapped in brown paper. He opens a wooden frame around a collage of photographs of the family. He holds it in his lap, smiling, letting himself drift downwards into the scenes she has laid out for him: his mother and father by a piper at Loch Katrine, Anna and him in front of the beech tree at Aston Magna, Rudyard with blood-stained cheeks standing high in his stirrups. Anna comes to sit beside him — It’s simply ripping, old thing, he says. — Thank you.

He and Anna go for a walk that afternoon. The wind has picked up, shredding the clouds above, letting down barbs of winter sunshine. Three ducks bob on the canal’s glassy back. — How are you? he asks. A faltering of her eyes. — I’m marked for death, she says. Like a character in a motion picture. She laughs and he sees the red-ribbed roof of her mouth. They walk past glumly chewing horses, a pub with smoke drifting from its chimney, the slim elegance of a birch wood. — I live through you, she says. It’s not as sad as it sounds. Each of your letters, it’s like a clear breath. Keep writing them. They stop there and the wind leans into them. She shudders. — I love you, he says, and he realises it’s the truest thing he’s said, perhaps ever. They walk back in silence, arms linked.

In his room alone later, slightly drunk after an hour in the library with his father, he places the collage on his dresser and pulls up his chair to look at it again. His life appears, tessellated yet suddenly coherent. The three blond children crouched around the crease during a cricket match on the lawn at Aston Magna. Cook is at bat, a set expression on her face as she waits for Sir Lionel to bowl. Esmond and Anna on a carousel in Hyde Park. She must be four or five, her blonde hair spilling out from beneath the dome of a cloche hat. He is behind her on the horse, looking serious and responsible. A line-up of young Blackshirts, Esmond at one end, smaller and blonder than any of the others, his chest out, chin up. Esmond and Anna and Rudyard in the various arrangements of childhood, their father proudly with them, their mother more distant, always looking off as if keen to get on to some urgent appointment. Towards the bottom of the collage, more recent pictures: the pantechnicon van unloading in front of Welsh Frankton; Esmond in a straw boater by the river in Cambridge. In the very centre, the sun around which the other pictures orbit, is a large photograph of Esmond and his father in full British Union uniform, lightning flashes bright on their chests. They are on-stage at the Royal Albert Hall. It was 1934, Sir Lionel’s last great political speech. He’d chosen Esmond to stand with him on the platform beforehand in front of the thousands of faces. — This is my eldest son, he’d said, holding his good arm towards Esmond. — This is who I fought my war for. It’s why I’m here now. To build a future for young men like Esmond, a future in which there can never be another war like 14–18, a future where honest, decent folk who want to earn a living may do so. We are moving — he’d looked around at the massed ranks of Party members — towards a moment of reckoning. Choose the right side. He seized Esmond’s hand and lifted it into the air. Choose Esmond! The crowd let out a roar, Esmond had tried to force a smile, the camera flashed.

The next morning, his father comes into his room early. — We decided not to hunt, he says — Really? Esmond sits on the side of his bed. — I know you can’t bear it. You’re our guest of honour. Sir Lionel goes to look at the collage on the dresser. — We lost her for hours making this. Covered herself in glue. I’d forgotten that photograph, you and me at the rally. It’s rather good, isn’t it? He comes to sit beside Esmond on the bed. — Things aren’t as easy as they might seem back here, he says. I fear Mosley’s made some bad decisions. Circumstances are moving against us. Your mother and I— There have been rows. She’s been talking to Diana, to Mick Clarke, all of them helping to clarify my faults. I simply won’t have us allied with the Germans. Mosley’s still on my side, most days.

He’s looking down at his hand, frowning. — Your success, Esmond, it gives me the advantage in these negotiations for the future of the Party. That we can forge a future that is cultured, civilised, peaceful. I point to the fact that Radio Firenze is ten times more successful — in numbers and in contribution to Party funds — than these lunatic broadcasts coming out of Heligoland and Sark. He stands, ruffling Esmond’s hair. It also gives me hope, he says, to have you, my eldest son, out there, making a difference. It helps me believe there’s a future worth hanging around for.

They all come to see him off at the station. The collage, back in brown paper and string, is on the seat of his compartment. He presses his face to the upper window as the train moves off and he sees the four of them standing there, Anna with her arm around their mother, who is inexplicably crying, his father waving furiously, Rudyard kneeling down with a dog and looking on. It strikes him, as the train gathers speed and moves out of sight, that Rudyard’s eyes are the mirror of his own, identical in shape and shade. He sits down, pulls out The Brothers Karamazov, and begins to read.

[Postcard from Lyme Regis]

31st January

Dearest E –

Presume you’ve heard about Auden and Isherwood going off to America. Father is over the moon, as you can imagine. Proves that the younger gen of leftie writers has no spine. It is rather feeble of them, don’t you think? To flee when we need writers, poets, men and women who can make sense of the world. I was reading Auden after you left. I thought: a poet is a stranger who knows one’s secrets.

One of daddy’s friends suggested I take the seaside air for my asthma. It’s frightful here. The unanimous elderly, wandering along the front as if they might walk themselves away from death. Luscious to see you at Xmas. Do come back more often.

Brisk, deep-lunged oodles,

Anna xxx.

Faber & Faber

24 Russell Square,

London, WC1

4th February, 1939.

Dear Esmond,

I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. I’m very much aware that you’ve been waiting for a reply and it is inexcusable that it has taken us these months to come to a decision.

I’m afraid the war passages haven’t much improved as far as I can see. It’s as if, as soon as Hulme crosses the Channel, a veil comes up over him and your ability to feel your way into his experience evaporates. It’s really very sad. I showed this to Tom Eliot — to make sure I wasn’t being blind — and he agreed wholeheartedly. It’s difficult for a writer your age to capture something so raw, so violent, so far outside his own space. Has your father read it? What does he think?

There’s also the problem of a certain resistance within some parts of the company to publish an author so closely associated in many minds with the Fascists. Things have changed in the national atmosphere since I first read In Love and War. Since we became aware of the horrors executed by the National Socialists, the bloodiness of Mussolini’s regime (so wonderfully set out in Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara — have you read it?), it feels like a madness to publish a novel which — if we look behind the curtain of the fiction — is the elevation of a Fascist (or proto-Fascist) to a position of mythic heroism.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. You’re still very young and do please send me your work as it develops.

Sincerely,

Richard de la Mare.

Via dei Forbici, 35c

Firenze

17.2.39

Dear Esmond –

A thousand thanks for your visit. I know that Ada put you up to it, and I know what a miserable and pathetic creature I must seem, but to have had everything ripped away from me like this— My good friend Friedrich Kriegbaum, from the Kunsthistorisches Institut, visited the night before last and I could barely stand to have him in the house. ‘The annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ It is shameful. It is as if I was walking in darkness and suddenly a light of impossible brightness has been shone upon me. I am blinded again, but this time it is the force of the light that has taken away my sight.

I’m not sure what will happen to me, Esmond. I wrote some ill-advised letters in my madness. I wrote to Il Duce himself, I wrote to the German Consul, I think I even wrote to Herr Hitler. If the worst should occur, look after Ada for me. Her mother has travelled north to stay with relatives in Switzerland. I’m determined not to be chased out of this city I love, but I may have little choice in the matter. I couldn’t bear it if my idiocy should lead to something awful happening to Ada.

With my apologies for my weakness and stupidity,

Guido Liuzzi.

Telegram: 7/4/39

Anna condition serious STOP At John Radcliffe seeing specialist STOP Your mother with her STOP Will keep you posted STOP

[Various invitations to concerts associated with the Maggio Musicale: Beethoven at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Tosca at the Teatro Verdi (sponsored by Piaggio), Bach at the British Institute, a string quartet hosted by Bernard Berenson at I Tatti.]

He sits in the grand drawing room at Berenson’s house, I Tatti, and tries to concentrate on the music. It is Haydn and the string quartet is very good, but he is thinking only of Anna. It was clear she was fighting at Christmas, desperate not to let him see her discomfort, and by the end of his visit was snatching gulps of breath, slinking off for rests in the early afternoon, pausing in the middle of their conversations to collect herself. He wonders if perhaps she might come out to Florence to join him. But war feels so close, so inevitable.

Ada is beside him. She’s wearing a dark green dress, long earrings with jade stones. Her pale arms grip the chair beneath her as she sways to the music. She hums so softly that only he can hear. When the movement finishes, she turns to him, clasps her hands to her chest and begins to applaud.

Welsh Frankton

Shropshire

26th April

Dear Esmond –

Anna is back home. It seems as if it was a false alarm, or that the treatment at the John Radcliffe worked. Sorry if my telegram alarmed you. She’s rather frail, but she’s being a good brave girl. Rudyard has been wheeling her around the garden in her bath chair — it’s bloody sweet, really.

Looks like another war is inevitable. I read a historian in The Spectator who has identified only twenty-nine years since the Roman Empire when a war wasn’t being fought somewhere in the world. We lurch from crisis to crisis and we learn nothing from history.

You asked in your letter what I could tell you about the last war, the first war, as I suppose we should learn to call it. About Hulme. I’m glad you’ve stuck on with your novel, sorry that Faber turned it down. (Perhaps we could set up a Fascist Press — not a bad idea!) Hulme was a brute, a gent, a genuine conservative. He was a bloody good friend and I was undone when he died. As for my war, it was a nightmare, but the worst part is that nothing since — not politics, not sex, not hunting, nothing — has lived up to it. The real horror, Esmond, is that I’m not still there, that life will never have the same sheen, quite the purpose it had in those days.

If you ever find yourself fighting, remember this one thing: anger is stronger than fear. It was only years after the war ended, when I stopped being angry, that I began to feel afraid. Remember that and you’ll make a fine soldier.

Give my regards to Goad.

Your mother sends her love,

Your father.

Tombland,

Norwich.

23rd May ’39.

Dear Esmond –

Sit tight! I’ll be back at the end of the week when we can put our heads together and try to work out what this all means. In the interim you should be in loco presbyter, helping the lame dogs over stiles. Remember: we’re not at war yet. Mussolini is a strong, fine leader and we’ll have to trust that this Pact of Steel he’s signed with Hitler is a piece of political theatre.

The funeral was as funerals are: dispiriting to see the reduction of a fine life into so many platitudes. I read ‘This I know: that my avenger lives’ from the Book of Job. Stood a few hairs on end. Sad to say goodbye to mother, but all flesh, etc.

If anything comes up, ask Goad.

Best of British,

Bailey.

He is lying back in the pool at L’Ombrellino, looking up through the leaves of the camphor tree. He’d come up to check on the place for George and Alice Keppel, but the walk up the hill was so tiring, the abandoned rooms of the villa so stuffy and smothering, that he’d run past the box hedges of the upper terrace, down the steps and between the two dodos before he could think, shedding his clothes along the path as he went.

If he can just stretch his arm out a little further, he thinks, he’ll be able to grab hold of Gerald’s ankle, touch one of Fiamma’s slim limbs. He wonders if the water holds some trace of them: fragments of Fiamma’s skin, microscopic, etherised. He takes a mouthful of water and spits it out in a green arc. There is also the present: the water murky with weed, slightly malodorous but still deliciously cool. Cypress cones float about him like miniature wooden roses. They look like love. He is in love. Hopeless, unrequited love. He grins. There’s something unseemly in it, with the coming war, with Anna’s illness, it feels improper to be lying back here in the water smiling like a child, but he is in love.

She is not beautiful; she is older than him and in his company she is distant and professional. She has given him no sign that she views him as anything other than an employer, a Fascist; certainly not a friend, never a lover. She doesn’t know that he’s been lying to the increasingly officious Interior Ministry functionaries about her, using his friendship with Pavolini, his letter from Mussolini to make sure she remains unmolested. There are rumours that the Jews will be made to wear yellow stars, to live in a ghetto up above Rifredi. There are camps being built in the south, so the whispers say, trains heading north from stations in the Friuli, rounding up Jews who’ve fled from Germany, from Austria, sending them back where they came from. He will keep her from all of this.

During the broadcasts, he watches her when she’s not looking. — Ada, he whispers above the sound of the crickets — Ada. He’s spent his life turning over stones, looking in rockpools, for someone like her. She has been in front of him for more than a year. There is something upright and idealistic and whole to her that makes him want to lay his hands upon her, to build a shell around her with his arms. He lies back in the water of the swimming pool as the air begins to darken above him and the wind stirs the fingers of the pines. In the hesitant evening he basks in the gorgeous restlessness of his love for her. — Ada.

De Koning van Spanje,

Korte Nieuwstraat 12,

Antwerp.

19th June.

Dear Esmond,

We write with bad news. Philip was killed in Spain on the 23rd of December last year. We have been moving around a great deal and have only just had the information ourselves. Amongst his affairs there were several of your letters and instructions to let you know in the event of anything happening to him. I’m aware that you two were terribly close at Cambridge and I’m sorry to bear news that must come as a shock.

We had a letter from General Walter, the leader of the XIV International Brigade under which Philip served for much of his time in Spain. It appears the death was somewhat heroic. He held a machine-gun emplacement in Les Borges Blanques for six hours, single-handed, as the Falangists swarmed over the area. He was on a small hill in the centre of a grove of olives and, when he was finally overwhelmed, he turned his gun upon himself rather than be captured. A great soldier, General Walter told us, fearless and loyal.

We blame ourselves for Philip being in Spain. We had arranged to meet him in Lisbon, but I wanted to leave Europe as soon as possible. I got us a berth on a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro that struck rocks off the Azores. We spent several months attempting to get safe passage onwards from Ponta Delgada, but finally we were returned to Lisbon. With almost the last of the money we carried with us from Austria, we procured a cabin on the MS St Louis, a German ship, to Cuba. We were denied landing in Havana, then in Florida, where we might have swum ashore, so close were we to the beaches. Now we are back in Antwerp, penniless and without hope, to find that our only son is dead. Life can be cruel.

Thank you for the friendship you showed to Philip. We hope that, whatever dark days lie ahead, you continue to flourish.

Martin and Liesl Keller.

Berchtesgadener Hof Hotel

Berchtesgaden

Germany

29th June 1939

Dear Esmond –

I have left your father. I imagine you picked up on the coolness between us while you were there at Christmas, but since then things have deteriorated significantly and I felt I needed to make a Break for Freedom. I married your father for his courage and his conviction; in recent months he is short of both. I have been living too long in the shadow of a man I no longer respect. These must be hard things for you to hear, but I wanted to explain to you why I, too, have left England.

Ever since our first trip to National Socialist Germany, back in the bright days of the spring of ’35, I have felt strongly that the Führer had a vision of the future that would shape the Fate of the World. My visits with Mosley and Diana, and more recently on my own, have only confirmed this. We are moving into a Nazi Future and men like your father who try to resist this will be left behind.

I’m sure it must have seemed cruel to you, the burning of your books, your manuscript. I wanted to explain it to you at the time, but I knew your father would have thought it absurd. There is another Great War coming. Germany has been preparing since 1933, it will draw upon all the resources of Mitteleuropa, it has the kind of Deep Ideological Conviction its opponents lack. By the end of 1940, all Europe will be German, soon after, all of the globe will fly the Glorious Swastika. I burnt your degenerate books, your limp-wristed writing because I knew the risk they’d pose for you in the coming years. (I suggest you burn this letter, too.) We — the British Union, those of us who have remained faithful to the cause — will be at the forefront of Nazi Britain and we can’t have bad eggs amongst us. I hope you see that, Esmond.

Diana, Unity and I are in Berchtesgaden. I’m going to dinner at the Kelsteinhaus tonight. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. I feel like I’m breathing for the first time in my life, up here in the mountains. Don’t worry about your father — he has Anna to look after, his losing battle against the Tides of History to fight. I never really felt I knew my children, but I loved you. I hope you know that.

Heil Hitler!

Your Mother.

Telegram: 13/7/39

Many thanks for your generous wire STOP This has saved us from a most difficult time STOP We will repay you once these dark days are over STOP Martin and Liesl Keller

Royal Shrewsbury Infirmary,

Salop.

24/7/39

Darling E –

Everyone rather glum over mother leaving. Did she write to you? I can’t think she was terribly good to us, but I do miss her. Every evening now, daddy goes for mournful gallops across the countryside with the dogs. Not hunting, but still looking for something I think, in the copses, along the banks of the canal. He comes back covered in mud, looking provoked.

In the hospital, am on a new machine that does some of my breathing for me. Wonder when it’ll be that machines take over all our vital functions and we’re left sitting out infinity with only our various looks of unease to distinguish us. Sounds frightfully dull to me. Put myself in here by going for a long walk beside the canal two nights ago. It was damp and I wasn’t well-enough wrapped up but O the joy of it, striding along taking great lungfuls of air and watching clouds rush across the sky and feeling peppy for the first time in an age. Daddy doesn’t know how to talk to the nurses like mother did. He’s far too polite.

Sorry to hear Faber won’t take In Love and War. Bloody bastards. Don’t know a good thing when they see it. There are other publishers, you know — I do wish you’d send me a copy. I know you think it’s too filthy for my young eyes, but I promise I’d skip over the really grubby bits.

Daddy’s frightfully keen you should come home before the war starts. It would be super to have you, although I’ve no doubt he’d meet you off the train and march you straight down to the Knightsbridge barracks to enlist. Don’t go and get killed, darling. It would be too beastly of you.

Cough oodles cough,

Anna xxx.

Via dei Forbici, 35c

Firenze

12.8.39

Dear Esmond,

I am now going north — to Turin. It is said they are not implementing their vile laws with the same rigidity up there. Ettore Ovazza even claims he can find me work, perhaps. I will not flee to Switzerland just yet. Ada says she will stay here and I cannot persuade her otherwise. Look after her, perhaps bring some dinner over every now and again. She tends not to eat enough. I will write to her, and to you, often. I wish that she would come with me, but she says she belongs here, that she is a Florentine. It is with great sadness that I leave her, and this city.

With very best wishes and thanks,

Guido Liuzzi.

Welsh Frankton

Shropshire

26th August.

Dear Esmond,

I thought I’d sit down and write while our conversation was still fresh in my mind. It’s also an excuse to lock myself away in the library for an hour and not deal with the ghastly necessities of death — funeral invitations and readings and notes from well-wishers. The house is like a florist’s — bouquets on every table, pollen staining every carpet. Your mother has come back, of course, but she’s flying out again on the 30th. She’s frantic not to be trapped in England when the show starts. Odd to have her around the house again — we’d been rather getting used to life without her.

You were very brave on the telephone; I’m sorry I didn’t hold up my end quite so well. Anna loved you best of all, you know. You’re right that we should feel blessed to have had her in our lives as long as we did. I keep telling myself this in the hope it’ll comfort me. Not yet. So far it’s just a terrible sense that everything dear has reeled away from me. Your mother, Anna, the Party, the peaceful world I thought I was serving to build. Must be difficult to know that your father’s a failure, old chap, but the evidence is there for all to see.

Come home for the funeral, Esmond. Your brother needs you here. We all do. You don’t want to be scurrying over with every other Tom, Dick and Harriet when war’s declared — push off now, know that you’ve made a real contribution over the past few years and move on. I could get you into the Guards. Damned fine kit they have — you could do much worse. You’d be sure to see battle early on and that’s important with a war. Get out early and see a few bullets — you never know when it might all be over.

I’m afraid the Party’s more or less finished. Smashed on the rocks of history. I thought the Molotov — Ribbentrop Pact might turn a few within the Party my way, might make them see that the Nazis are the enemy every bit as much as the Reds. Joyce and Clarke and now, alas, Mosley and your mother have turned the British Union into Nazis, tout court. With the stories about what’s happening to the Jews in the work camps, the rounding up of innocent civilians, the stench of evil settling over Germany, they’ve simply hitched their cart to the wrong horse. Mosley is still making noises about peace, about the need to avoid another Ypres, another Somme, but our time is passing.

Wind things up and come back home, Esmond — it’s the right thing to do. It’s time for you to be the soldier you were meant to be. If not for me, do it for Anna.

I send you my love,

Your Father.

He stands with Ada on the Ponte Santa Trinità, his elbows on the parapet wall, crying into the water below. He feels himself unravelling with each breath, his spirit unstitching itself, dissolving into the yellow Arno. Ada has her hand on his shoulder. She is saying something, but he can’t understand her, can only see her lips move through the blur of his tears. He takes her in his arms and they stand there, and she feels bone-thin and so like Anna that he wonders for a moment if he will go mad. He wonders how much sorrow a mind can take — Anna, Philip, Fiamma — before it will no longer move through the world and sleeps in its own dark reaches.

Carità is marching on the north bank of the river. Fifty men in yellow fezzes, a squad of Fascist Youth, a band playing the Fascist anthem, ‘Giovinezza’. All goose-stepping loyally after him, this short-trousered messiah, whip in his hand, high voice reaching even over the music. — Me ne frego! Vincere e vinceremo! Viva Il Duce! Esmond sobs against Ada, watching the marching through his tears. Now that England and Germany are at war, the MVSN seem louder and more urgent, as do the Fascist politicians who stand on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio each afternoon speaking about the coming crisis, the need for a violent shock to Anglo-American hegemony. There’d been gunshots the night Britain declared war on Germany, fireworks over the Piazza della Signoria.

Esmond sees that Carità is leading the procession over the bridge towards them. Like a column of ants they stamp round the corner from the Lungarno and make their way up the curved cobbles. Esmond and Ada press themselves to the wall; he draws a sleeve across his face, swallows a sob. When Carità is level with them, he points his whip, leering. — Soon, he says in English. — Very soon. They march on, the bridge juddering under their footsteps. The teenage soldiers of the Fascist Youth look scornfully at them as they pass. They can still hear the music, the heartbeat thud of the bass drum, long after the parade has disappeared towards the Palazzo Pitti.

Ada takes him in her arms again and he hugs her back very hard, thinking it so fiercely he’s sure she can hear: I won’t lose you.