Orioli is lying buckled in the road. The Prince and the Reggies are there, Temple keening quietly. Pretini, a pair of scissors in his top pocket, has Pino’s head in his lap. Esmond kneels beside them and looks down at Pino, who attempts a smile. His spectacles are empty of glass, his eyes flooded with blood, shards sticking through in the soft red flesh.
‘Norman? Is that you? I can’t see you.’
Esmond takes his hand.
‘Norman?’
They ride with him in the ambulance, Douglas following with the Reggies in a taxi. Esmond feels he is somehow to blame, first Goad and now Orioli savaged in his presence. In the ambulance, bandages are wrapped around Orioli’s eyes. He begins to sob, calling out for his mother, and Esmond looks away into the night. He is lowered into a wheelchair at the hospital, still sobbing, and rushed into an operating room through double doors from which, two hours later, a white-coated doctor appears.
He speaks to Douglas in Italian for a while and then cups the old man’s arm with his hand, as if to show that he knows Orioli is more than a friend. With a shrug, Douglas turns to Esmond.
‘They’re taking him to Venice. There’s an expert there they think may be able to save his sight.’
He slumps down into a chair and lowers his great marble head into his hands. Fiamma crosses to put an arm around his shoulder. She whispers to him in Italian and he nods and mumbles in response. Esmond joins them.
‘You’d better stay with us,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to be alone, not after all this. He can have your father’s room can’t he, Gerald?’
‘Of course.’
Douglas is with them for three nights, a sad, sleepless figure in the house. He sits in the library, drinking all day, and out on the loggia in the evenings. They do their best to entertain him, invite him to L’Ombrellino to swim, offer to drive him over to Piccolo’s for dinner, but he declines. His face is a patchwork of bruises, and the only time they hear him speak more than a few words is when he calls the hospital in Venice to speak to Pino. One afternoon, they come home from swimming and he is gone, a polite note on the bed, two bottles of whisky missing from the cabinet in the library.
21
They haven’t seen Douglas for a week. Strindberg has gone back to Austria for a fortnight’s walking tour and Piccolo’s is boarded up. When they cycle past Davis & Orioli on the way to the woods at Lungarno Colombo, they look up at the shuttered windows on the second floor, peer through the blinds of the bookshop, hoping to catch a flash of white hair. Gerald has rung the doorbell several times without answer. They ask at Betti’s and Vieusseux’s Library, but nobody has seen him. Esmond talks of him often, of his stern eyes, the catty dazzle of his smile; ‘He’s all right!’ they mimic and laugh.
One afternoon Esmond visits the English Cemetery while Gerald and Fiamma climb the hill to swim at L’Ombrellino. He knows that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried there, and Clough, and Landor, and feels it’s a pilgrimage he should make, a way of touching the England he’s left behind. He reads in Forster that the English had once spent their Sunday afternoons strolling through the bosky graveyard, admiring the tombs by Holman Hunt and Stanhope.
It is crushingly hot in the graveyard. Weeds have grown up over the paths, some of the stones have shifted and fallen and lean on each other like ancient, lichen-covered drunks. He walks aimless diagonals across the cemetery, from the shadow of one tree to the next, trying to find Clough’s grave and remembering lines from Amours de Voyage. ‘St Peter’s disappoints me,’ he half-sings to himself, ‘Rome in general might be called a rubbishy place—’ The cemetery is stuffy with an English melancholy, prim and out of sorts with the swooning, histrionic tombs of the Italians that stretch up the hillside behind San Miniato. He leaves feeling embarrassed, parched and damp with sweat.
On the way back from the cemetery, walking down the via Laura, is Douglas. One hand taps his silver cane on the cobbles, the other holds the arm of a young girl. Esmond hurries to catch them.
‘Norman!’
Douglas turns around with an irritated sheen. His eyes soften when he sees Esmond and he attempts a smile. He looks shaky, unsteady on his feet. Little deltas of red and blue snake out from his nose and cheeks. He reaches into his pocket for a Toscano, lights it, inhales slowly.
‘Morning, Esmond. Well met. Let me present a young friend of mine, Roberta Drago. She’s all right, this one.’
The girl is perhaps eleven years old, smartly dressed with long, dark, serious hair. He gives her a little pat on the backside. She holds out a thin, gloved hand to Esmond, who shakes it.
‘We were just heading up to the gelato place by the station, care to join us?’
The girl runs ahead as Douglas takes Esmond’s arm. He can feel the occasional shudder passing through him. The old man speaks in a low, confidential voice, his breath sour with smoke.
‘It’s a miracle. Never thought I’d look at a girl again, but this one? Heavenly little thing.’ He winks at Esmond. ‘She’s run away from home, you know. This is our first trip out for a week.’
Esmond looks ahead to the girl, who now breaks into a skip across the drain covers. Douglas stumbles and clutches at his chest, breathing heavily.
‘Do you want to sit down?’
Douglas shakes his head and allows his lips to open into a damp smile.
‘One gets a little groggy at my age. If it isn’t heart, it’s liver, it’s kidneys. These doctors, I don’t know whether they’re discussing me or their breakfast.’
They eat their ices on a bench in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. A group of Fascist Youth is carrying out exercises in the square, weapons to their shoulders, black boots stamping on the paving stones. The girl runs with her ice-cream to look in the window of the perfumery on the other side of the square. Douglas watches her as his short, fleshy tongue darts out to lap at his ice.
Esmond feels suddenly nauseous and leans forward. He thinks of Fiamma and Gerald in the cool air above the city, the water on their skin. He stands. ‘Any word of Pino?’
‘He’s being operated on tomorrow in Venice. They’re hopeful.’ A pause. ‘Come and see me some time,’ Douglas says, shrugging his shoulders. ‘If you like. Bring some of your writing, perhaps. Can’t write a word myself these days. It’s no good.’
Esmond leaves him on the bench, staring towards the girl pressed against the window of the shop. He looks back at Douglas, his careful white hair, his once-handsome face now untying into papery jowls. Lawrence had described him as a fallen angel in Aaron’s Rod, Esmond remembers. Thinking himself unobserved, Douglas allows a tremor to seize hold of him. His ice-cream drops to the ground, cone-up. The girl turns back, skips across the square and sits beside him, taking his hand in hers. The two of them sit there, in the monstrous sunlight, like a long-married couple until Esmond tires of watching and heads back to the via Tornabuoni.
22
He is aware of a sound creeping into his dreams. It is the darkest heart of the night, so hot he’d left the windows and shutters open. He drags himself slowly from sleep and opens his eyes, searching the darkness until he recognises the trilling of the telephone in the library, echoing up the stone steps and into the apartment. He slips from bed, sticky and fuzzy-headed, and pads down the corridor. Gerald is standing in the doorway of his room.