‘My father… I would like some breathing space. I want to get away.’
He frowned. ‘Oh, well, then,’ he said.
A family group, pushing two trolleys with suitcases wrapped in plastic sheeting, shot past us. Will stepped back. I watched as he detached himself mentally from me and what I might be feeling. That was the way he survived. The mobile phone shrilled in his pocket and, with obvious relief, he dived for it. ‘Sorry, darling.’
I picked up my hand luggage. Inside, wrapped in bubblewrap, Sellotape and one of my father’s jumpers was the casket containing his ashes. ‘’Bye,’ I mouthed, and moved towards Departures.
‘Fanny,’ he called sharply. ‘Fanny’ He clicked off his phone and caught my arm. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go without me. Wait until I can come.’
‘No,’ I said, panic-stricken that I might be persuaded to stay, and guilty that I did not wish to. ‘Please… let me go.’
And I shook him off and fled in a manner that – clearly – shocked him.
*
I was too tired to read on the plane and for the first slice of the journey I dozed and woke with a start from a dream where dank grass and grey mud clotted my shoes. I waded into a river of dead leaves, fighting for breath as the level went over my head. A little later, I found myself wreathed in a white river mist and its cold slid deep into my bones. In that dream, I cried out for the sun.
I woke and the Mediterranean coastline, vividly coloured and fringed by a bright blue sea, came into view and I breathed in deeply with relief. The stewardess dumped a tray of food in front of me. ‘Enjoy,’ she said.
I inspected a plastic lump, a roll attached to some dubious cold meat, drank the orange juice and found myself thinking of Caro. Her final words to me – her wedding present, which had been so crude and hurtful at the time – made better sense with experience. Nails screeching against the surface, wincing at the sound, Caro had attempted to wipe the blackboard clean of my father to begin again.
I could have explained how I felt to Will. I could have said: ‘When I married you and I was swept up by the tempestuous emotions of early passion, of coming together in love, it was irrelevant (apart from the obvious physical mechanics) who belonged to which sex. It was a meeting of souls and minds. But once the marriage was made, the duties allocated, it mattered very much to which sex I belonged.’
What was more, when he had taken Liz into our bed Will taught me that to be a wife was separate and distinct from being a woman.
I looked down from the plane window at the green and brown of the Italian peninsula. I wanted a rest from that part of my life.
As the plane began its descent, I uttered a silent thank-you to my father.
‘Fanny… Fanny!’ To make up for not getting to the funeral, Benedetta had insisted on travelling from Fiertino on the train to meet me. She carved a swathe through the clumps of spectators gathered around Arrivals and folded me into an embrace. It combined the sensations of plump arms, sweat, heat, and a base note of garlic – and I was transported back to the child with plaits, wadded in a Chilprufe vest against the cold.
We queued for a long time at the car-hire desk. ‘Let me look at you,’ she demanded, and looked long and hard, laid a hand on my arm, touched my shoulder, caressed my cheek. The gestures were careful, loving and, like the best cough medicine, soothing and sweet.
Her English had deteriorated. So had my Italian, but some important facts were soon established. Her arthritis was bad, her son never wrote from Milan, where he now lived, much of the hillside surrounding Fiertino – which had been open and free – had been carved up by city-dwellers for summer residences, and you never knew who you would stumble across in the valley. But I was not to worry – she grabbed my hand: the house where I was staying was old, a strange preference she knew my father and I shared. For herself, she was happy in her modern bungalow.
On the drive out of Rome, past dusty oleanders and fields of mass-produced tomatoes and courgettes, Benedetta chattered. Casa Rosa had been bought by an inglese couple who, failing to secure the money to repair it properly, had retreated back to England. Now it was empty, except for an odd letting or two during the summer. Not that the agent knew her job – ‘Santa Patata, she was born with no brain.’ Anxious in the unfamiliar traffic, I listened with only half an ear.
Two hours later, Benedetta instructed me to turn right into a valley running from north to south and we drove between fields of corn and of vines. They were small and immaculate, cherished pockets of maize and grapes. Even so, it was noticeable that the machinery being used in them was elaborate and expensive.
Olive trees shimmered silver-white in the heat. The road wound through the valley and, on the slopes above it, the crete sensesi, the ridges on top of the hills, were dusty brown -‘old leather that has done good service,’ said my father – and the river, which dropped into the valley, was a twisted ribbon of smoothed, burning rock.
The gearstick was slippery under my hand. I coughed a little and Benedetta clucked. ‘You are low from Alfredo’s death. It is to be expected.’
I turned and smiled at her. ‘Probably. It was a great shock.’
‘It is best for him,’ she said, and tapped my thigh. ‘Slow down, Fanny. We are coming to Fiertino.’
Stomach contracting a little with nerves, and frightened that Fiertino would not match up to all those years of thinking about it, I obeyed.
And… yes, there was the church, and the piazza, hemmed by dusty-looking plane trees, and the jumble of narrow streets that radiated out from the centre.
And… no. The Fiertino of my father’s childhood almost certainly had no traffic, no garish adverts, or the sprawl of squat, modern housing that pressed for space up against the elegant architecture and stone of the old centre.
No matter.
We drove past the church and skirted the piazza, and Benedetta did not let up with her stream of information. The builders had cheated the inglese - anyone could have told them: the new wall they built developed cracks and fell down, and most of the plants in the garden died during an exceptionally hot summer. Her worst scorn was reserved for their sin of failing to ask the locals for help. ‘They ran back home and, now, the house is in trouble.’
Casa Rosa was set back from the road about quarter of a mile out of Fiertino to the north. A dusty track sloped steeply upward and I was concentrating so hard on negotiating the rough surface that I missed the first sight of the house. This I regretted, for I would have known five seconds earlier what I knew the minute I got out of the car and walked up to the front door.
Painted a pink-orange, which had weathered in soft, subtle streaks, Casa Rosa was a flat-fronted two-storey house. Nothing magnificent, nothing special – except that it spoke to me in a manner that made me catch my breath. It said, I should be yours.
OK, I thought. At least that’s clear. It’s a little inconvenient since I live somewhere else, but at least it’s quite clear.
It had long, shuttered windows on the ground floor and smaller echoes upstairs. The tiled roof had weathered as subtly as the stucco, and they matched each other for disrepair. There were ugly holes in the stonework, telltale scars from damp and missing tiles, and a plant grew out of the masonry by the chimney. Even the kindest eye could not ignore the raw, unfinished look, its air of desperation and need.
Benedetta shrugged. ‘You need la passione to make it good.’
I shaded my eyes and counted the windows. It seemed a good thing to do, a good first thing to have under my belt.
The front door needed persuasion to yield. ‘Alloral,’ said Benedetta, ‘it is the pig.’
As we went in, there was a rustling of insects and our feet kicked up dust. Benedetta clicked her tongue. ‘Very bad. But no worry. I shall come and clean.’
‘No, you won’t.’ I slipped my arm round her shoulders. I sounded proprietorial. ‘I will.’
‘No good,’ said Benedetta flatly, when we inspected the kitchen.
‘There
is hope,’ I contradicted her. If the cooker was both ancient and well used, it was clean; and if the taps were fur-encrusted, the sink was usable. A selection of crockery had been stacked on a shelf, and a box of matches with a saucer full of spent ones had been placed beside the cooker. A candle had been wedged into a Chianti bottle and the wax had splashed over the wooden kitchen table.
Upstairs, there were three bedrooms and a bathroom, which was little more than a basin and a drain in the floor. The main bedroom was in a reasonable condition and the bed was positioned so that the occupant could derive full advantage of the view that swept beyond Fiertino to the other side of the valley.
My vision filled with the vividness of a blazing blue sky, the bosomy line of hills dipping into purple and brown, the sylvan grey-green of olive leaves and, to the west, the vines, which travelled in matching lines up the slope, and I caught my breath.
Benedetta took the state of the house as a personal affront and apologized with tears in her eyes.
I hefted my suitcase up to the bedroom and lifted my hand luggage carefully on to the bed. ‘Benedetta…’ I extracted the casket and unwrapped it. ‘You will have to help me find the right place for my father.’
‘Ah…’ She touched the lid. ‘Alfredo. Yes, we must think. That is important.’ Her fingers rested on the casket. ‘Perhaps the priest… I think Alfredo would prefer to be out on the hillside.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but I shall have to look carefully. I must get it right.’
Benedetta laughed a deep belly laugh. ‘Your father was a wonderful man.’
16
‘Poor you,’ said Meg.
I had rung to report my arrival and thrown in a few details about the state of the house. There was no point in explaining to Meg that the state of the house was the point. Its quasi-dereliction and the suggestion of redemption suited my mood. No point telling Meg that Casa Rosa was the perfect outward setting for the curious inner landscape in which I found myself.
Anyway, there is nothing quite like running away. No points out of ten for this Girl Guide. Not a trouper. But I did not care. I tossed and turned in a strange bed, and yet I was perfectly, gloriously happy. Later, a hard, unEnglish light from the unshuttered window nudged me awake just after dawn and I uttered aloud into the cool air: ‘Yes.’
‘Chloë rang,’ Meg informed me, finally. ‘She’d forgotten you’d done a runner. We talked and she’s fine. Sacha had a long talk with her, too. Actually, Sacha’s thinking of joining her for a while.’ When I failed to rise to the bait, Meg plunged in the needle, as only she knew how. ‘You know, Fanny, there was no need to hide the left-over bottles of wine from your lunch with Elaine. It just shows you don’t trust me an inch.’
Weeping Eros might have goaded me into building a city, but when it came to the question of Meg, I suspected I had never got past digging out the foundations. I glanced up. Through the doorway into the sitting room, light and sun pooled across the floor, and I thought, I am here and she is there.
‘Enjoy yourself, Fanny,’ she said, an admonition designed to make me feel worse.
I kept my eyes fixed on the sun and the light.
The phone was tucked into a niche by the front door, surrounded by an audience of dead insects. I brushed them on to the floor and rang Will. Our initial conversation was strained and difficult. Will was hurt by the manner in which I had shaken him off, and I was sorry – but not sorry enough to lie. ‘I love it here,’ I told him, but failed to add, ‘I wish you were here.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of.’ He sounded distracted and uncharacteristically low. ‘Fanny, I’ve been asked on to Newsnight to talk about future plans. I’m in two minds. What do you think?’
‘Any news on progress?’
‘The wheels grind on. The car lobby is raging out of control. So, it’s a case of I’m damned if I do appear and damned if I don’t.’
We reflected on this for a second or two.
‘The balance has shifted, as it does. I have an awful feeling that this one is going… pear shaped.’
My body was irradiated with warmth, right down to the tips of my varnished toes, and Will’s distress was powerless to touch me. I felt almost insane with the novelty of stepping back. Should I tell the truth and say, ‘Will, I’m off the case’, and confess a great, burdensome distaste for the ins and outs, the double-dealing and the stratagems, the straitjacket of politics into which Will and I had been laced?
‘Be honest,’ Will begged. ‘Tell me what you think I should do.’
I wheeled out the old tactics. ‘What’s happened to the man who said that a project should be fought over because it meant it had been tried and tested?’
‘Perhaps I’m tired. Perhaps I’ve had enough.’
I wasn’t fooled. Will’s doubts and fear might be black, but he hadn’t given up. He was still in there, sharp on the scent. ‘Don’t go on the programme,’ I said. ‘You’ll be a hostage to fortune.’
‘You think that’s best?’
‘I do,’ I said – guiltily, for I did not care what he did.
Because I had neglected to close the shutters, the sun drove past the defences of the house and invaded, throwing a nimbus of light into the corner, a pretty crescent on the bottom stair, a diffuse, painterly wash at the top of the flight. Light-headed and dazzled by its splendour and novelty, I hurried round to close them and the interior was instantly shrouded.
The outer walls of Casa Rosa were built of thick stone. A beautifully cool passage, with doors opening off it, ran from front to back. I kicked off my sandals and, leaving damp imprints on the cotto, padded into the long sitting room, which I was convinced held faint traces of herbs and sandalwood. The windows gave on to a view that swept across the valley to the ridge of hills in the far distance.
The sunlight fractured into different colours and depths on the walls and spilled on to the floor. A couple of faded and disgusting armchairs stood at either side of the fireplace. No doubt the impoverished English couple had sat here and mulled over their plans – Let’s take the wall down here, replaster there, can we afford central heating? I felt pity for them too – in fact, I felt pity for anyone who had not had the luck to be in this house, in this country.
The fireplace was splattered with ash and cigarette ends, and on the shelf above there was an arrangement of dried flowers in a jam jar. I touched one, and brittle petals fell to the floor. I picked the jar up, padded out to the rubbish bin and dumped it. Then I found a dustpan and brush roosting in the back of the cupboard and swept up the ash and butts.
In the kitchen, the whitewash on the walls was stained and, in places, rubbed down to the original limewash. Grease rimed the ceiling beams, which had turned black. Bunches of dried herbs had been hooked on to them – a small offering to the kitchen god.
I dragged up a chair and took them down, which made the kitchen look naked. Arms folded, I stood back and took stock. How was it possible that, having escaped from all I resented, I desired nothing so much here as to assemble paints and an army of astringent cleaning tools? Byron wrote, ‘I regained my freedom with a sigh,’ and I thought he had been talking rubbish. Yet if this were my kitchen, I would love it so tenderly. I would make it glow with white and yellow, and the table would shimmer, bleached and virgin, under fresh herbs hanging from the beams, while blue and white plates sat on clean shelves.
On cold evenings, it would certainly be the place to make Benedetta’s mushroom risotto, and lash it into perfection with Parmesan and butter. On hot ones, when the sun had slithered down the horizon and the air panted with aromas of herbs and plants, it would be clever and cooling to rustle up grilled chicken and lemon, garnished with fresh basil, and take it out to the loggia to eat. I knew the place, too, where Mrs Scott’s beaded cover would do its job: on a jug of fresh lemonade.
Upstairs, I would make up the beds with old, thick linen sheets, polish the floorboards with beeswax and tuck sachets of lavender into the cupboard – as the women who
lived here must have done when Casa Rosa’s fortunes were high and it sheltered a family.
In spring, no doubt, the shutters had been thrown open and the vegetable plot behind the outhouse planted with chard, spinach and potatoes. On cold days, a fire warmed the room with huge windows, but I dare say the family would have longed unsentimentally for central heating.
I would burnish and polish each room in Casa Rosa. Each would hold a special trove of things – books, a table, a picture. Each would have its smell, its different function. Each had its window that looked down on the landscape, whose intimacies would only be gradually revealed.
The loggia ran along the back of the house, and a wooden colonnade created a shaded area where it would be possible to sit for the whole day. I dragged a chair into it and sat down. The aspect faced away from the village and, apart from a large concrete building, the olive store, at the crook of the valley, and the road, which dropped over the furthest hill, it looked over an unimpeded sweep.
Sweat pooled at the base of my spine and soaked the back of my thighs. An ant ran over my big toe. The heat shimmered above the road, above the vines, above the hill. I felt warmth flow into my bones, fill my veins, irradiate me. I raised a finger and flicked it against the arm of the chair and told myself that that was all the movement I needed to make.
Forget that I was sensible and organized, forget that my life was arranged on practical lines. Forget the brown leather diary, the lists, the precooked meals stockpiled in the freezer, the clutch of sanitized topics I deployed at official dinners. Who was I now, this girl… no, woman, who smelt faintly of sweat? Fresh-sloughed of dull skin that had grown over me, still grieving – my father should be here – but filled, too, with a new and greedy curiosity and impatience.
Benedetta’s bungalow was squeezed alongside ten others on the slope above the bridge at the southern quarter of Fiertino. There was no garden, just a rectangular plot that contained a row of tomatoes, which had been trained up bamboo stakes, a couple of olive trees and a plastic oil-storage tank. The houses, Benedetta said, had been built on the site of the old school, which, like so much in the valley, had been destroyed by the bombardment during the Second World War when the Allies chased the Germans north.
The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back Page 17