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.