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.
13
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.
14
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.’