She interpreted this as cautious acquiescence to her approaches and we were both for the moment satisfied.
The launch rounded the point. Even though I had been prepared for something reflecting Fiorello’s demanding modernist taste, I had not expected to see a magnificent long-distance flying boat built on the very latest lines, large enough to accommodate a substantial number of passengers and crew. I was impressed. We drew alongside La Farfalla Nera. She was a breathing mass of dark glowing paint and red brass straining at her anchor like a captured bird. She represented the aggressive, arrogant, triumphant spirit of what even the provincial ras referred to as mussolinismo. Some of these ras grumbled that the cult of Il Duce conspired to diminish Fascism, but for most of us Mussolini was Fascism, was Italy, was the living embodiment of our faith in a glorious future. He was the voice, the strength, the will of all those millions of us who had been disinherited in the Great War.
For young people grubbing among the dresses and shawls I sell in Portobello Road, the twenties was a Golden Age of flappers and jazz, but for those of us who lived through them they were an Age of Assassination and Chaos in which year in and year out we heard of the death of this nationalist intellectual or that left-wing premier almost always by pistol, sometimes by bomb, by one rival political group or another. It is fashionable, these days, to blame the fascists for everything. But before them the German parliamentarians were murdering one another willy-nilly and the same was true in France, Greece, Italy and Spain. The Great War had familiarised them with the smell of death. Even in England Winston Churchill called out the troops to fire upon revolutionists. In mainland Europe, our future was non-existent until Mussolini and Hitler came along.
At dinner that evening, surrounded by the elegant appointments of the marvellous flying boat, all ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays and polished chrome, I was the centre of attention. Everyone wanted to know about my experiences in Egypt and North Africa and while I had to dress the facts in a less alarming and even less dramatic way in order to make them convincing, I regaled them with tales of the Dar-al-Habashiya, the Thieves’ Road across the Sahara, of the powerful Berber kingdoms no outsider had ever penetrated, of the lost oases and the bizarre mirages, the character and disposition of native chieftains, and so on. Their own interest, of course, was in Libya where Italy, some thought, was spending far too much money. ’Those natives live like pampered house pets while Italians at home are having to tighten their belts,’ declared Margherita Sarfatti suddenly and then laughed. ‘But Il Duce knows best. The investment will benefit us eventually. You said you met some rebel Senussi, Prince Max? They’re good-looking savages, I hear.’
That was her description of the great Saharan lawmakers. The Senussi were revered by Arab and Berber alike. While following the caravan to Khufra I had heard them spoken of with hatred, with admiration, but always with respect. I said as much to the other guests. The Senussi leader Omar was known as a scholar and a statesman of impeccable probity. One fellow, a bucolic ras from Tuscany with some pretensions as a folk poet, violently objected to my description, insisting the Senussi were ignorant zealots sworn to destroy all Christians and drive our Faith out of Africa, restoring the old Moorish Empire and extending it as far as the Baltic. He had a brother, he said, who was a personal friend of Cesare de Vecchi, Governor of Somalia. De Vecchi had earned the Moslems’ respect by riding his horse into their mosques and pissing on their shrines. It was only ‘What they would do to us if they could. Raw power is what they respect. The Senussi were a spent force the moment we hanged that monster Omar.’
With my usual social graces, I was able to turn the conversation to less controversial subjects, such as the success of the Nazi Party and its chances of bringing Germany under the fascist umbrella. Could fascism create the united Europe of which Mussolini would be both the chief architect and first premier? Ultimately it would take more than one member of a select company to shoulder the responsibilities of leadership. I told my fellow guests of my dream — to see a company of Carolingian knights — a court, attracting the paladins of the Christian nations — ruling Europe and perhaps America. A great wall of Western chivalry against the Eastern barbarian, ensuring that Constantinople would never fall again. But in those days it was unfashionable to speak positively of Christianity. Many of the best fascists felt the role of the Church to be over in modern life. Consequently, I clothed my remarks in the most general language.
‘I’d agree we need good men for the job.’ Margherita Sarfatti held a long cigarette holder of polished marble and smoked foul-smelling Turkish ovals. As she drank, she seemed to become a little more angry, a little more cutting, a little more bored. She found most of the company irritating and it was clear she did not much care for da Bazzanno’s diplomatic invitation to the gentleman from Tuscany who was now repeating some gossip he swore he had from the lips of Il Duce himself, to the effect that the German National Socialists were ‘a bunch of limp-wristed interior decorators and ballet-masters to a creature!’ which, presumably, was how he would also have dismissed the Spartan Hundred. This bumpkin asserted with hearty prurience that the would-be German Duce actually wore rouge in public. The only gentleman among them, the only heterosexual with any kind of war record, was the ex-flyer Hermann Göring, who was a great fan of Mussolini’s and who got on famously with him.
‘His are the kind who should lead the new Germany,’ said the ras’s cow-faced wife, continuing the speech for him while he took a breath, ‘people of the old stock but with new ideas. Hitler and the others are illiterate, mannerless dullards. Not one knows a fork from a dinner knife or a dinner knife from a dagger. They are typical lower-class Huns. They have no style. The Germans could never take such people seriously. They worship the Old Prussian order. They want the Kaiser back. They certainly don’t want to be represented by the worst examples of their own kind!’
‘Which is why Prince August, the Kaiser’s son, is now a Nazi, perhaps,’ I said. ‘Who better to lead them?’
Whereupon the folk poet, revived by wine and a puff on his cigar, ignored my pointed remark and continued his lecture on the fundamental discipline of the Germans and how they loved a leader, on the arrogant insouciance of the British and how they believed themselves and their nation unquestionably superior to all others, merely because of the voracious greed and cunning cupidity of those who had almost accidentally acquired their empire. This was, he supposed, the source of their strength and why they had no nationalist party and why they were so decadent. On almost every issue I found myself in irritable disagreement with that provincial bigwig. Most Italians were pro-British and dismissive of the Germans, who they feared would threaten Italy from Austria if they had the chance. They did not wish to fight another war.
The ras seemed utterly unworthy of his leader’s trust or of the honour bestowed upon him. His manners and opinions would have shocked a Chicago gangster. I began to make this comparison when da Bazzanno, perhaps conscious of his duties towards the rest of us, gracefully changed the subject and suggested that we all go to the observation deck on the roof of the aircraft. A full moon had risen over the bay and would be worth seeing. Miranda Butter took my arm as we went up. On three sides were steep wooded limestone terraces sharply defined by the light of a large yellow moon which made a silvery causeway across the lapping water to the dark, glinting metal of our little observation deck, bathing us all in its cold light.