Father’s letters have gone from angry to ominous. Of course it doesn’t help that he’s alone now in that mournful house, only Cook for company. His last one said he was thinking of commandeering a Wellington from RAF Shawbury and flying over himself to collect me. He still seems to think it’s practicalities that are holding me up. Or he thinks I feel some misplaced loyalty to the Party that I need to keep up Radio Firenze for the sake of the cause. Alas it’s just that I’m in love, and a coward. I’ve stopped answering his letters, although I keep collecting cash from the advertisers, wiring it over when I remember.
Ada’s father has been attempting to persuade her to come and join him in Turin, up there where he’s near enough to the Swiss border to get out if need be. When I try to talk more generally with her about what was happening to the Jews, how she feels about it, she just casts off again. That distance she has, nothing can get behind it. It’s an emotional Maginot Line. She’d make a virtuoso torturer — I wake up exhausted and ashamed, empty of my secrets, and happy. I don’t know what I’d do if she left. Throw myself from the Ponte Santa Trinità, I expect.
Bailey has been back to the UK again. Spying, no doubt. In his kitchen, he has a map of the world spread out on the table with different-coloured toy soldiers for the Germans and French and Brits. It has become an evening’s fun for us to read the newspapers together and arrange the troops. My Italian’s fairly decent now — still a frightful accent, but posso farmi comprendere, posso leggere i giornale. I miss Bailey when he’s away. Hey! There — did you hear that? More noises in the roof. If it’s not ghosts, then it’s rats. I should set out traps, or poison. There’s certainly something peculiar about this place.
I found a glove on one of the stairs, a lady’s glove. It’s not Ada’s — hers are red, scuffed. This is small and black and exquisite. I can’t imagine Bailey had invited in a lady-friend. Uncanny. G’night.’
5. A-Side: ‘Filippo and Filippino Lippi — A Son in His Father’s Shadow’, a talk by Esmond Lowndes (27′ 30″)
B-Side: ‘Happy Christmas. It’s snowing outside the window. There’s no heating in the palazzo, but I’ve lit a fire and I’m wrapped up like a Sherpa: scarf, hat, tweed jacket, two pairs of socks. I’m actually quite warm. It’s been a bugger of a Christmas Day.
We lunched at Goad’s. We all squeezed into the sad little flat they’ve let him keep on the ground floor of the Palazzo Arcimboldi, now the Institute is no more. He greeted us at the door of his burrow, and he seemed so genuinely happy to see us, and so small and tired it was all I could do not to drown him with tears. Gerald is over for a week. He’s losing his hair. A bald patch the size of a quail’s egg in the centre of his scalp. He looks terribly serious and business-like. He’s working at Lloyds Bank. Just like Eliot. After a few drinks, though, he shrugged off the mien of the busy capitalist and was something like his old self. There was still just a shadowiness around him, though. He seems disappointed, shifty somehow.
Ada and Bailey and Reggie Temple joined us for lunch. It was almost merry, to start off with. A rag-tag family pulling Smith’s crackers that Gerald brought over. Goose roasted in Goad’s little kitchen. A pudding that wouldn’t light no matter what we poured on it. I think I drank too much grappa. Became a tad maudlin at the end, raising my glass to the dead ones, singing “Auld Lang Syne”, sending Ada long, doleful glances.
We played charades all afternoon until Reggie fell asleep in a chair and Goad and Bailey started arguing about the war. So Gerald and Ada and I went out to walk about the city in our galoshes, looking at the ice floes in the Arno, the bright windows of the shops on the via de’ Corsi, snow settling on the cathedraclass="underline" heavily around the lantern and then thinning out to a dusting as the roof slopes. I have a picture in my mind of the three of us, standing in the empty square looking up at the spiralling snow, the scab-coloured roof glowing beneath it. It felt like being with Fiamma, but now we look older and wounded.
Ada went home and Gerald and I found the bar of the Excelsior open, and we sat on the high stools and drank. The longer we sat there, the easier it was to see Gerald as he had been a year and a half earlier: dashing, rather dangerous. Sexful, as they used to say. We came out of the hotel drunk and it was dark, our footsteps squeaking on the snow. An icy corridor of wind swept down the Lungarno and we burrowed into our overcoats. It reminded me of Philip and the rain storm in Grantchester, and I suppose for that reason I kissed Gerald below the statue of Justice at the end of the via delle Terme. His breath was sour, and there was something too ardent and grateful in the way he kissed me back. I broke off quickly and said goodbye. I stood on the Ponte Santa Trinità until I was frozen sober, thoroughly depressed.
I came back to the church and tried to work on the novel, but it all seemed predictable and tiresome. So now I’m here, earlier than usual, speaking to you. Happy Christmas, whoever-you-are. I’m off to sleep with my hangover.’
6. A-Side: ‘Dante Today — the Enduring Legacy of the Divine Comedy’, a lecture by Alessandro Pavolini (31′ 51″)
B-Side: ‘Bailey’s obsessed by the Finnish campaign. More by the pluck of the Finns than anything. The way they simply won’t give up, even with the aerial bombardments, the tanks, the Russians’ vastly superior numbers. We’re all cheering them on, but I can’t think they’ll be able to hold out much longer. I have an image of them: mostly blond, snow-dusted men with blue eyes and unpronounceable names skiing in white fatigues through the endless Arctic night. Rudyard is in France, digging in around the Maginot Line. He wrote me a card — thoroughly censored, of course. He sounds like a man, even in those few words. I wish I’d known him better when we were young. It made me think how alliances form in families, how Anna and I were so close we pushed the others away. I still miss her almost every day. It seems absurd that she should be dead and not there, in her room, waiting for me. That someone so abounding with kindness should act so pitilessly as to die.
Pavolini came to see Goad and me today, ostensibly to record his thoughts on Dante’s legacy in contemporary European poetry — actually rather interesting — but in fact to issue instructions about our broadcasts. He’s seen the success William Joyce is having in Germany — Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen they call him there — and he wants us to mirror it. To become a propaganda mouthpiece for Musso. The way he put it to us was that Il Duce is certain to get into the war at some point; he’s like a hunter waiting for the optimum moment to shoot; and that we need to make up our minds now which side we’re on when Italy squares up to Britain. Goad and I sat on for a long time after he left. One of Pavolini’s requirements was that we give over a half-hour every day to PNF propaganda that he will script for us. Justifications of the war in Abyssinia, praise for the Italian military machine, hagiographies of Il Duce. I’ve heard the Joyce broadcasts and there’s not a chance we’d do something like that, but Pavolini is an intelligent man. Certainly no one who knows Dante like he does, who writes so delicately about poetry and music, can be all bad.