‘I will never give you a divorce,’ he said quickly.
‘A divorce?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I will not dignify your treachery with a divorce. Besides, unlike you, I believe in the sanctity of marriage.’
‘What are you talking about, then?’
‘A legal separation. I will go my way and you will go yours. I want nothing more to do with you.’
‘What about the children?’
‘You old fool, do you think they don’t know by now what you are? Worry about your public, rather. When they find out that the great Toscanini is a fraud, a lying, deceitful wretch who cannot keep his hands off women half his age, then you will have something to worry about.’
‘Carla, I cannot live without you.’
‘You should have thought of that before.’ She heaved herself to her feet with difficulty. She had once been a ballerina, her body alive with grace. In the past forty years her body, like her face, had grown heavy. What had once been a grave beauty had become lumpishness. ‘I’m going to my cabin. You may stay here and freeze to death, for all I care.’
Toscanini watched her make her way down the deck, tottering as the ship surged. She had been allocated a stateroom to herself, a great honour on such a crowded voyage, but the door was clearly locked to him.
When she had vanished, he lowered his chin on to his chest. How was he going to face an existence without Carla? His art had been his life, and she had taken care of all the rest for four decades. She had been the roof under which he had sheltered.
Of course he had been unfaithful to her. But the daemon that possessed him demanded the regular sacrifice of a young woman’s body. Sometimes two or three at a time. The daemon insisted that he obey its commands to sin, to lose himself in passion without considering the consequences. To be as wild as those ancients who rutted with every woman they met, with goats and birds and trees and stones. Without that wildness, the daemon would withdraw its gift, and he would be nothing.
His gift was everything to him – this ability to bring out the best in a performer, an orchestra, a lover.
He allowed the thought of Ada Mainardi to come into his mind. The gulf of separation was sickening. He missed her with a pain that was like death. And mingled with the pain, that rush of desire to the heart.
Those last weeks in Kastanienbaum had been dreadful. The agonising difficulties of seeing Ada for more than a fleeting moment had driven him half-mad. And then, out of a clear sky, the thunderclap of Gretel Neppach’s death. The daughter of his dear friend, Bruno Walter; that lovely girl, who for years had been begging her husband for a divorce. Instead, he had shot her as she slept, and then turned the revolver upon himself.
The tragedy had burst on them all like the judgment of a wrathful God. The days after it had been a slow nightmare: the wretched funeral, at which the only other mourners had been the Walters and Ezio, Gretel’s lover. The pitiful spectacle of Bruno, shattered by grief, begging him to take his place at the Lucerne Festival. Of course, he’d had to agree. But how had he managed to conduct Mozart in Bruno’s place? Mozart 40! The G minor symphony! With the tears streaming down his face on the podium!
And of course, Carla was right, in her blunt way. It could have ended like that with him and Ada. If Mainardi had lost his reason as Neppach did, who knew how it could have ended?
As much as the eruption of war into their lives, it had been those two revolver shots that had sobered them. That what if.
There had been moments over the course of the affair when he would have welcomed a bullet in the heart, either to end the wretchedness, or because Ada had given him a joy he would not experience again in his life.
Yes, he had been mad. A madness that Carla would never understand. He clutched the blanket in his hands as he remembered Ada, in that hotel room, crouched between his thighs, his manhood quivering in her mouth. Those terrible kisses that had sucked his soul from his body.
And then he, in turn, returning that cannibal kiss, intoxicated by her, addicted to her, while she cried out Artú, Artú, you are my god.
Yes, he had begged Ada for those flowers from her garden, for the handkerchiefs stained with her blood, the downy curls from her sex. He had been unable to think of a life without her. And now it was here, that life without her. She in Fascist Italy, he on his way to America. It was not likely they would ever meet again, in this world or the next.
How would he survive, without Ada, without Carla?
Southampton
The SS Manhattan steamed up the silver Solent with black clouds trailing from her stacks and spreading into the leaden morning sky. The overnight crossing had been rough, but not unbearably so, and scores of passengers had turned out of their bunks early to be on deck for the arrival at Southampton. They were visible from shore, crowding the rails in groups, muffled against the cold.
The sky over the docks was filled with hundreds of elephantine barrage balloons. The docks themselves bristled with anti-aircraft batteries. Anxious Tommies with Lewis guns peered from little molehills of sandbags. Along the wharf, dozens of troop transports were moored, steady tides of khaki cannon fodder trudging on to each one. A quarter of a million men were bound for France.
In her hotel smoking room, poised against a view of the harbour, Fanny Ward, the Eternal Beauty, was entertaining the Press.
‘Miss Ward, are you afraid of bombing?’
Miss Ward bridled. ‘I’m not running away, if that’s what you mean. I’m returning to New York to fill several stage and radio engagements.’
Nobody was so ungentlemanly as to ask what those engagements might be, or to point out that she was leaving behind her beautiful Berkeley Square apartment, with its antiques gathered over a long career in silent films and vaudeville.
‘As a friend of England, what do you think of America’s Neutrality Act?’
‘Oh, I can’t say anything about that.’ At her age, Fanny Ward had to be careful with lighting. She had put herself with her back to the window. A lace veil bobbed over her eyes, where time had wreaked most havoc. Once a sexually alluring beauty with a bee-stung mouth, she knew that the best that could be said about her now was that she was a pretty old woman. As for her once-voluptuous figure, although she still affected flapperish clothes, it was a flapper in winter that she presented now, wrapped to the throat, trimmed in furs, with kid gloves on her hands and a cloche hat pulled down over her dancing curls.
‘Do you think this war will last as long as the Great War?’
‘My goodness, I’m far too young to remember that,’ she replied indignantly. This drew laughter. They all knew that Miss Ward’s agelessness had by now become an act in itself, carried out with the conspiratorial wink of a pleated eyelid.
‘Are you worried about your salon in Paris, Miss Ward?’
She had opened a beauty shop in Paris in the 1920s, called The Fountain of Youth, which had added considerably to her mystique. ‘Not at all,’ she cried gaily. She forbore to mention that she had already sold it.
‘Are you going to miss your friends in London, Fanny?’
The question was a pointed one. Miss Ward counted among her friendships a warm attachment to Elizabeth, the former Duchess of York, catapulted on to the throne of England by the abdication of the King, her brother-in-law, three years earlier. To be the confidante of the Queen of England was no small thing.
‘Oh, I’m not going for more than a month or two,’ she said gaily. ‘My friends will survive without me for that long, I am sure.’ She wagged a gloved finger at the cameras. ‘Didn’t I say no flashbulbs?’