Perhaps she’ll be with me, Ada. Although there doesn’t seem much chance of that now. After practically heaving me over her shoulder after Anna’s death, the barricades went straight back up. Every move I make towards her, she bats away. So I’m here, in a funk, mixing metaphors, leading a circumscribed, spinsterish life, writing postcards into the void.
Three, four, five — that’s the bell of Santo Spirito you hear. I’m going to open the shutters a bit. There’s the faintest glimmer of dawn out in the square. We’re having an Indian summer. It’s been like ’14 — peace before the nightmare. Although it’s beginning to look like it might never start here. We expected Musso to jump straight into bed with Hitler, to invade France, or Greece, or Britain. But it’s all gone rather quiet — Il Duce is busying himself with Albania, thumbing his nose to Adolf and his war games to the north. Perhaps Italy and Spain really won’t join in, perhaps Stalin will realise Hitler is a bigger monster than the one that greets him in the mirror each morning. Good night, whoever you are. I’m shattered.’
2. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes and Bernard Berenson discuss symbolism in Primavera by Botticelli (27′ 33″)
B-Side: ‘I’ve been trying to isolate the part of my mind where Anna, Philip and Fiamma dwell and close it down, like an aeroplane with an engine on fire. The pilot shuts it off, hoping to glide home safely on the one that remains. Still, my eyes are drawn to the flames on the wing.
I had another letter from my father. The folly of me staying on here, how I’ve shirked my duty, the essential uselessness of what I’m doing given that the British Union is all but wound up. Circumstances have overtaken them. Pa says he’s already spoken to his pal Major-General Fuller about getting me into the Guards. He’s tried to sign up himself, but there’s not much call for a one-armed fifty-four-year-old. Yet. I haven’t answered his letter.
It feels like when I was first in Florence. The warmth has given way to rain. There’s no one around. Bloody lonely. Having Ada here every day is too frightful. The way she looks at me as she stands at the door at the end of the evening, her brolly in one hand, already half in the rain. Every time, I dare myself to say Wait! but I never do. I think, secretly, I’m rather enjoying the part of tormented lover. It takes my mind off Philip, off Anna, off the more weathered scars left by Fiamma, and all that was lost in ’37. Love is a splendid distraction from despair.
I’m recording this on the other side of a discussion Bernard Berenson and I had today. Amazing that he’s still here — although he arrived in Florence before the 1919 cut-off, so he’s legit. Still, I’d be feeling a bit exposed if I were one of the most famous Jews in the country. I went up to I Tatti for dinner after we’d recorded the show. Strange set-up. I mean, with the wife and secretary and the very obvious tension, but the art makes up for it. Gloriousness on every wall — Pollaiolo, Lorenzetti, Sassetta. Ada came with me, she took my hand as we went through Poggio Gherardo, the city glowing below us. It was astonishing what the mere feel of her hand in mine did — little electrical explosions moving all the way up my arm, across my body. Douglas was right: Fascism is just a refuge from the powerlessness of love.
The talk at the Berensons’ was all of the war, of how Italy won’t be ready for combat for at least another three years. No automotive industry, an agricultural economy. They’ll have to sit it out with the tea and oranges, as pa would say, as the north falls apart. It looks to be a lengthy thing, none of that Panglossian “It’ll be over by Christmas” stuff this time.
There was a moment last night, as we came down from the hills into the first streets by lamplight, and a group of working men sat around a wireless on the viale Augusto Righi, when I was suddenly aware of the fact she was Jewish. It’s perhaps all this talk of what’s going on in Germany, in Poland, the camps holding people to whom — even though she says she doesn’t believe in God — she must feel some sort of link. Perhaps it was that we were arm-in-arm in public. I tried talking to her about it, but she’s got this way of turning a corner when the conversation is delicate. There’s a sad secret in her smile, but I’m buggered if I know what it is.
After I dropped Ada off at her apartment, I cooled my heels on the street and watched her lights go on. I imagined her sitting reading late, preparing material, stretched out on the divan in her father’s study. Her sadness reflects my own. I wish we could be sad together, but she doesn’t seem to have any need for contact, at least not mine. She’s the most island-like person I’ve ever met. I sat in the church and looked at the triptych tonight when I got back and I kept seeing her face in Mary Magdalene’s. Both of them hard, reedy, faraway. I’m so tired. Still a little drunk from dinner. I think I’ll go to bed. G’night, whoever-you-are. I may haunt you yet, so speak kindly of me.’
3. A-Side: Harold Goad and Alessandro Pavolini discuss the life and poetry of Gabriele d’Annunzio (27′ 54″)
B-Side: ‘Should I be dating these missives from the past? I rather think not. I like to picture you piecing the chronology together from my summation of the war elsewhere, a war which feels so daydreamish and unlikely when I climb up through the stairways, ladders, trap-doors and corridors and then out onto the palazzo’s flat roof. I look over the river, towards the dome of the cathedral, and the stories of submarine battles and massacred Poles and bombs dropped on Scottish harbours seem like the work of a very slender imagination indeed, somebody’s rejected novel.
It is the 23rd of October. It is a Monday night. A Tuesday morning. The 24th of October. I’ve grown rather sleepy. Not now, I don’t mean, even though it’s two and I’m unable to lie still let alone drop off. I’m in the studio in bare feet, recording this in my pyjamas. I’ve just fallen into a state of lethargy — the more everyone tells me to go, even Bailey now, and Goad, the more my father showers me with letters containing, some of them, ripe old nicknames — the more I feel happy here. I’ve begun to think a healthy and successful life depends on a kind of accomplished ignorance of good advice. I don’t want to be heroic; I want to stay in Florence, look after Ada, read books. I consider the balance between hope and memory that shifts and tilts over the course of a life, giving different reasons for carrying on. At the moment, it feels like I don’t have enough of either.
The palazzo is more complex than I’d imagined. I keep finding new passageways, hidden doors, empty rooms that feel just-left — perhaps the ghost of Machiavelli. Stairways cut through the building like rock strata; some end in brick walls, but usually they lead out onto the roof, where I like to sit and watch the tiles of the city crest and fall like a terracotta wave, collecting the last sun before winter. Occasionally, at night, I hear things: mumbling voices, a child crying. The voices of the Florentine dead? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous, or at least no more ridiculous than anything else. If God is an artist, we might accept that we are preliminary sketches. Good night.’
4. A-Side: Harold Goad and Esmond Lowndes discuss T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (25′ 41″)
B-Side: ‘Rudyard has signed up! I can hardly believe he’s old enough, but we’ve all been ageing recently. I’m twenty-two now, which means Rudyard’s eighteen. That seems impossible, but not unlikely. He took the bus into Shrewsbury on his birthday and signed up then and there. He’s a common foot soldier in the 7th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment. Father’s awfully proud. I imagine he’ll make rather a fine squaddie. He can handle a gun, has the kind of pluck that comes from never being wholly of this world. I always got the impression he lived without an internal narrative, or at least no more than What a jolly hunt! and I love shooting! and Dogs are faithful friends. I realised that all the images that come to my mind when I say the name Rudyard are outside, distant, bloody. He was always the one on horseback, wheeling a fox’s severed brush around his head, galloping off to mete out death to some small, innocent thing. Excluded from the love that Anna and I wrapped around each other, he was thrown together with my father, and into that world of hunting, heroism and intransitive rage. He’ll enjoy the war.