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.
Part Four
Recordings. St Mark’s English Church
FLORENCE, 1939–1941
(transcribed by Ada Liuzzi)
1. A-Side: Harold Goad and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss the building and authorship of the Ponte Santa Trinità (29′ 23″)
B-Side: ‘This is not a diary. Douglas always said I should keep a diary, record everything. Everything is interesting, he used to say. Get it down. I don’t believe him. I want to forget.
Nor is this an attempt at auto-psycho-analysis, to file my despair with Anna and Philip’s letters and Fiamma’s snood which, in the days after her death, found its way into my bedroom, I’ve no idea how.
The only thing to do with unwieldy objects is burn them, the only thing to do with a memory is tug it around like a fusty dog until you’re forgiven for tying a brick around its neck and drowning it.
I realised something last night: the discs we record onto, that make up our archive — and what a grandiose word that is for these programmes, which, as I listen to them, strike me as half-baked twaddle. People listen to this because they are charmed by the idea of an outpost of Englishness in Italy, because they visited Florence on some ghastly tour they saw advertised at the back of the Daily Mail and they think we’re guardians of Anglo-Italian culture.
Where was I? Oh yes, the discs. We’ve only been recording on one side. So I’ve begun this little memorandum on the other. It’s comforting to think they’ll stay here in Florence, in a box in the British Institute, or packed into Ada’s attic. And maybe she will, on a whim, very late one night and rather tragic, dig me out, hear my voice and be filled with me. Who would have believed the curved cornet of our direct-to-disc-recorder could be a time-travelling device?
I’ll be long gone, in a rum shack by a beach somewhere, or teaching at a frowsty colonial university — Wollongong, perhaps. I’m going to make old bones, you’ll see, crawl out of Europe, the dark continent.