They make their way down a narrow alley and into a courtyard where a sign sways gently above an oleander hedge. A sad-faced maître d’ greets them at the door, bowing deeply to Fiamma. Despite the heat, he leads them into the stuffy, candlelit room where Douglas and Orioli sit at one end of a long table. Reggie Temple is with them. A waiter hovers over Douglas with a dish in his hand whose contents the old man inspects carefully. He looks up as they enter.
‘Ah. All right! Come on, sit down. I’m bartering with this crook over the scampi. Fresh today from Forte dei Marmi. Look like a little boy’s tom tiddler, don’t they?’ He bangs the table and gives a nod of his head. ‘Va bene!’ He lights a Toscano cigarillo and grins.
Esmond sits down between Orioli and Reggie. Douglas is embracing Gerald with a cry of ‘He’s all right, this man!’ Fiamma sits at the end of the table and lifts the shawl from her shoulders, bare skin above a green and white polka-dot dress. She looks a little nervous, and very beautiful. Esmond smiles at her, feels a blush.
‘I bet you’re glad to have young Gerald out here now, eh?’ Douglas says, fixing Esmond in a stare. ‘Must have been hellish boring in that place with only old Goad for company.’
‘Fiamma was there,’ says Esmond, looking down the table at her again.
‘Ah yes, but not the same as having a man there. You know Pino and I have a walkie-talkie system between our rooms? Sort of speaking funnel at the head of each bed. Means if we wake in the night with some 4 a.m. satori, we can yell it out to the other before it’s lost.’
There are two bottles of cheap Soave on the table and Orioli fills all of their glasses to the brim. He never stops smiling, looking first at Douglas, then Gerald, then off into the distance, an expression of constant, wistful benevolence. Reggie has drawn out a little sandalwood box and is showing it to Fiamma, who peers in and pulls a face.
‘I design these,’ he says, holding the box up to Esmond. Painted inside the lid is the scene of a medieval torture chamber, a young boy stretched out on a rack, the masked torturer attacking his groin with pincers. ‘I sell them to tourists.’
‘Gosh,’ Esmond says, passing it carefully back.
‘Oscar Wilde was a dear, dear friend of mine, you know. I had a small but not inconsequential part in The Ideal Husband.’ Reggie opens one of the buttons of his high-necked serge jacket and looks appealingly at Esmond.
The food arrives. Scampi in breadcrumbs; a bollito misto of tongue, beef, capon, sausage; saltimbocca; grey truffles in cheese sauce in sizzling pannikins; wild boar agrodolce. The tragic-looking maître d’ appears with a pepper pot that he grinds as if he were wringing a man’s neck. Douglas’s appetite is vast; half-standing and arcing genially across the table, he makes sure to snare the best cuts of meat, the juiciest prawns. He takes long swigs of his wine as he eats, his nose growing redder, and he begins to talk in close whispers to Gerald, who eats little and places his hand on Douglas’s every so often.
After a while, a pale man in his thirties comes to the restaurant, frayed and shiny as his suit. He looks around the room and then over at their table with a desperate beam.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Douglas mutters. ‘Eric, dear boy, come and join us, won’t you?’
The man takes a seat next to Gerald and nods doubtfully around the table.
‘Eric Wolton’s an old pal. Back when I had a wife.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Happiest day of my life, the day my wife died. Did I ever tell you I danced on her grave? A Scottish jig. Don’t tell my sons that, if you see them. Do you ever see them, in London?’
When they finish eating, Orioli turns to Esmond and puts his hand on his knee. His breath is sweet and heavy on Esmond’s cheek.
‘I think we will be very good friends,’ he says. ‘Norman likes you. I like you. It is so nice to have you and Gerald here. Tell me all about Esmond.’
Esmond stutters, looking across at the round spectacles, the tubby cheeks.
‘I went to school at Winchester, then Cambridge, though only for a year and a half—’
‘Winchester?’ Douglas shouts down the table, breaking off his conversation with Gerald. ‘I loathe the public school system. Creates kinds, not characters. Dr Arnold has a lot to answer for. That merciless pruner of the spirit prevented the upper classes, who were barmy, from feeling comfortable in their skins. We have ceased to be mad, the English. None but a flatterer would still call us eccentric.’
‘I thought Winchester was ghastly,’ Esmond replies, looking straight at Douglas. ‘Full of ugly, small-minded teachers, tuppeny tyrants, taking out their disappointments on the sons of equally catastrophic minor aristocrats and merchant bankers and retired colonels.’
‘Why d’you still wear a Wykehamist’s tie then?’
‘So when I hang myself, they’ll know why I did it.’
‘Hear, hear!’ Douglas shouts and the table laughs. ‘He’s all right!’ Douglas lifts his glass as Esmond turns back to Orioli.
‘I’m here to help Mr Goad set up a radio station. To finance my father’s political party. He’s the Chairman of the British Union.’
Orioli raises his eyebrows.
‘And you’re a Fascist, too?’
‘I’m not really sure, these days.’
Orioli removes his hand from Esmond’s knee and polishes his spectacles on his napkin. More wine is poured. The restaurant begins to fill with young couples staring at each other over candlelight; a family of grandparents, parents and a boy of six or seven in a sailor costume; an old man reading La Nazione with a plate of cannelloni.
‘Strindberg!’ Douglas shouts and bangs the table. ‘That’s what I call the maître d’. Because he looks so dashed mournful, worse than Eric over here. Strindberg, bring us the bill.’
When it comes, Douglas holds it under a candle and makes a few marks with his pencil. ‘Twelve lire each,’ he says. ‘I’d love to treat you all, of course, but money is very tight at the minute.’
Wolton, who has neither eaten nor drunk, passes a handful of notes towards them. On the way out, they stop at the table where the young boy in his sailor’s suit sits, looking pleased to be out with the adults, listening carefully to something his grandmother is saying. Douglas pulls over a chair to sit beside him and, quite naturally, lifts him onto his knee.
‘Permesso?’ he says, smiling at the boy’s father.
‘Si, Professore,’ the man replies.
The little boy looks up at Douglas with wide, delighted eyes.
‘Ma come ti chiami?’
‘Dante,’ the little boy replies, grinning bashfully.
‘Magnifico! Ma dov’è Beatrice?’ Douglas pretends to look under the table, and now in the little boy’s pockets. The boy giggles and simpers up at him.
Reggie Temple leans over and whispers to Esmond with a hiss.
‘It’s frightful. He’s like the Pied Piper. Wherever he goes, the boys just flock to him. One of the reasons he’s so short of money.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The queue of parents wanting restitution. He holds competitions for the gypsy kids under the arches of the Ponte alle Grazie. Fifty centimes to whoever can gism first. It’s not dignified, a man of his age.’
Orioli, who has been listening, elbows Temple in the ribs. ‘You’re just jealous. It’s been a long time since anyone looked your way. And Norman is older than you, is he not?’
Douglas presents the father with his card and rests his hands on Dante’s shoulders. The man beams gratefully and insists on introducing his wife and her parents. Reggie tuts and shakes his head while Douglas bows and coos in a Florentine dialect. Finally, the group make their way out and hail taxis on the Piazza.