by Helen Pryke
“She’d be turning in her grave at the sight of her garden looking like this,” I muttered. “I’ll have to sort it out.” I quite liked the idea of taming this wild area and tending the plants. I started to feel excited. Finally I had something worthwhile to fill my time. My gaze fell to the pile of ivy in the middle of the garden, thrown haphazardly over the grave in my panic to get away the previous evening.
I dragged myself over to it and stared at the headstone, set like a giant full stop in front of me. I brushed the dirt and growing moss away and crouched down to read the inscription.
Sei nata per essere amata da me, ma non ero all’altezza. Mi dispiace.
Malva, settembre 25 1960 – settembre 28 1960
Three days old. The baby had been three days old when it died. I ran my hand over the writing, trying to understand. “You were born to be loved by me, but I wasn’t good enough. I’m sorry.” A tear rolled down my cheek. “You poor baby,” I murmured. Glancing down, I saw that the grave was covered in weeds. I started clearing them away with my hands, ripping them out of the ground, faster and faster, until the marble base was completely free. I sat down on the ground and cried, for the unknown child here before me, and for my own children, so cruelly taken from me before I had the chance to hold them in my arms. My chest hurt from the pain I had inside me and my whole body ached with the love I could have given them and would never have the chance to experience ever again.
It was too much for me. The gardening could wait, I would come back tomorrow and start putting everything in order. Not today. Not with all this pain. No, today I would finish off the bottle of wine I’d started yesterday, just to forget everything for a while.
“Jennifer!” I jumped as someone called my name. “Jennifer, are you here?”
“Coming,” I yelled back. I tried to wipe the tears away, then realised that my face would be all red anyway and gave up. Walking back to the house, I saw Agnese standing by the back door, waiting for me.
“There you are,” she said, relieved. “I just popped round to see if I can bring Bea tomorrow afternoon. I thought you’d gone out, and I’d have to go back home to…” She paused and stared at me. “Are you OK? Your face is a bit red, like you’ve been cry… oh.”
I gestured, embarrassed. “It’s nothing, I’m OK, really. Do you fancy a coffee?”
“It looks like you need something stronger,” she said.
I thought of Grandma Luisa’s wine in the cupboard in the corridor. “Maybe later. Let’s start with a coffee.”
We went into the kitchen and I busied myself with the percolator, adding an extra heaped spoonful of coffee. I needed something to pick me up.
“So why were you crying?” Agnese asked, curious.
“You Italians are pretty direct, aren’t you?” I remarked, but I wasn’t annoyed. I was starting to get used to the Italian way.
“And you English are very good at changing the subject,” she retorted.
“I guess we are.”
“So?”
I hesitated, unsure whether to tell her or not. “I-I found a gate at the bottom of the garden.”
“You found Luisa’s sanctuary. We call it the Grove.”
“The Grove,” I repeated. “What a lovely name.”
“Yes, and very apt, don’t you think? She loved going down there, tending all the plants and trees, picking the parts she needed for her remedies. I’m sure you’ll find a few balms and lotions in the pantry, some of them may still be good to use. She showed me how to make some, it was very interesting watching her at work.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was. But I found something else down there, it was quite a shock.”
“What?”
“Erm, a grave,” I blurted out, unsure how to say it gently.
“Oh, the grave.” She didn’t seem at all shocked by my revelation.
“You knew about it?”
“Of course. It’s the baby’s grave, we all know about it.”
“What? Why is it there, in the garden? Why isn’t it in the cemetery?”
“She died before they could baptise her, and Bruna didn’t want her buried in the cemetery. She wanted her here, close to the family, where Luisa could look after her.”
“Bruna? It was Bruna’s daughter?”
“Yes. It was all very hush hush. She had the baby before she met George but wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was. The poor thing died a few days later, and she was distraught. Then she married George and escaped to England, to get away from everything.”
“Now I understand why Uncle Dante didn’t want to talk about her,” I said, fascinated. “How do you know all this?”
“Luisa told me. She and I were very close, I was always coming around here to see her, I loved talking to her. Though towards the end, a lot of what she said didn’t make sense.”
“How did the baby die?”
“Luisa said they found her dead in her bed. Bruna was hysterical.”
I felt like crying myself. I could only imagine Bruna’s pain, together with the stigma of giving birth to an illegitimate child, and then finding it dead. “Poor Bruna,” I murmured, and then I did start crying again, much to my embarrassment.
Agnese looked alarmed. “Jennifer? It happened years ago, why are you so upset?”
I blew my nose, avoiding looking at her. “I-I can’t have children, I keep miscarrying, my husband left me because I started drinking, nobody will ever talk to me about it, not even my mum, and when I saw the headstone today it just set me off crying and now I can’t stop,” I blurted out miserably.
Agnese came over to me and hugged me tightly. “Oh Jennifer, I’m so sorry. You can talk to me, maybe it will help.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start, I’ve kept it inside me for so long.”
“Start at the beginning,” she suggested.
I didn’t realise I had so much pain inside me, so many tears, so much heartache. It helped that Agnese was a good listener; she let me talk without interrupting and encouraged me to go on when I faltered. We sat in the kitchen for ages, talking, crying, hugging, until finally I had nothing else to say. I felt strangely empty, as if I’d got rid of a heavy burden I’d been carrying for so long without realising it. We were silent for a while, each lost in her own thoughts.
“You know, you could talk to Uncle Mario about the baby,” Agnese suddenly suggested.
“Uncle Mario?”
“He’s Bruna’s brother, he was still living at home at the time, and I know that he and Bruna were close. He can probably tell you more, although he’s a bit funny about who he talks to. If he doesn’t like you, he’ll chase you away.”
“As long as he doesn’t have a gun,” I quipped. The look on Agnese’s face wasn’t too reassuring. “Well, maybe I’ll go and pay him a visit.” If I was desperate enough.
“Look, I have to go now,” Agnese said. “Will you be OK?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine.” I felt a bit embarrassed after all the crying I’d done. “I’m not always like this, you know. But thank you for listening, it’s been a big help.”
She hugged me goodbye, and I watched as she walked out of the front gate, giving her a little wave as she closed it behind her. I dragged myself back indoors, the house suddenly empty. I was hardly aware that I was heading towards the wine cupboard until I found myself standing before it, the key magically in my hand. I took out the bottle I’d started the day before, got a glass from the kitchen, and, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, went upstairs to bed.
I’d never considered myself a weak person; after everything I’d been through I’d always been proud of my ability to face things head on and deal with them on my own. At that moment, though, forcing myself to take small, polite sips of wine, I felt that I was losing control of my destiny. I lay back on the bed and watched the clouds scurry across the incredibly blue sky, pushed and moulded by invisible hands to become those fantastic shapes everyone likes to look at, imagining they can see faces, animals…
but all I could see was my life floating away from me, out of reach, the umbilical cord that tethered me to the earth trailing behind it, frayed, swinging uselessly in the air. I finished the wine and put the glass on my bedside table, then closed my eyes and let the drink transport me to that dark, dreamless place I called salvation.
Chapter Five
I woke up, terrified, from another nightmare. The wine glass on the bedside table fell to the floor with a crash as I flung my arms about. I fumbled for the light switch, sighing with relief as the room lit up. Glancing at my phone, I saw it was three in the morning. I knew I would never get back to sleep. I went downstairs and turned on my laptop. The internet was slow but usable, so I decided to do some research on Bruna and her baby.
Two hours later I admitted defeat and closed the laptop. The Italians were obviously not as efficient as the English; trying to find a newspaper article from the 1960s in a small village in Tuscany was about as easy as finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe the baby’s death hadn’t been reported? Would that be possible? Surely a doctor would have had to sign the death certificate; maybe Luisa had managed to find a way to keep it out of the papers.
Whatever had happened, I knew that I’d have to find the courage to speak with Uncle Mario. The thought of facing him and his gun wasn’t something I was looking forward to at all. I cursed out loud. I knew that this wasn’t about Mario and his possibly psychopathic personality. This was about me, about all those soul-destroying circumstances that had slowly worn me down over the years and moulded me into the bitter, messed-up person I was now. The bitter, messed-up alcoholic, I berated myself sharply. How the hell had I let myself get into this state? I lay down on the sofa, closed my eyes, and let the memories flood in.
I’d got back from yet another night out at the pub, giggling as I tripped up the stairs, shushing myself like a drunk from a comedy sketch and stumbling along the landing, which I hardly recognised in my state. When I found my husband in our bed with another woman, my whole world fell apart in those few seconds. I quietly closed the bedroom door, praying they hadn’t seen me and, instead of confronting them, I sneaked out of the house as if I was the guilty party. I somehow made my way to my mum’s house, where I knew I would be in for endless cups of coffee and long, tearful conversations.
“We’ve gone over this a thousand times, Jennifer. You know why this happened, don’t you?” Mum asked once again, after she’d listened to me cry my heart out for a whole week. We were sitting at the kitchen table, a box of tissues in front of me and a bottle of wine next to it.
“Because he’s a lying, cheating bastard?” I muttered, pouring myself yet another, rather full, glass of white wine.
“Not only,” she said quietly.
“What do you mean, ‘not only’? What other reason could there be?” I took a long swig, almost gagging on the slightly chemical taste at the back of my throat.
Mum pointed at my wine glass. “That.”
“What, this glass?” I giggled, confused.
“No, the fact that you’ve emptied it in ten seconds flat, and it’s your third, and it’s only nine in the morning.” She folded her arms and leant back in her chair.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I yelled, jumping to my feet. “So a girl can’t have a drink now, not even when her husband cheats on her?”
“Sit down, Jennifer,” Mum said sternly.
I sat.
“He phoned me yesterday,” she said.
I glared at her. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Just like you didn’t tell me he’d moved out. When did that happen?”
I decided to ignore the question, mainly because I couldn’t remember. “So you’re taking his side now?” I’d make her feel guilty, for once.
Mum sighed. “I’m not taking anyone’s side. He told me your drinking is out of hand, that you were getting through at least two bottles every evening, from the moment you got in from work to when you went to bed. He even found you passed out sometimes on the sofa the morning after. That’s why he left you.”
“So.” I hesitated. “I like to drink.”
“Jennifer, liking a drink is having a glass during dinner and maybe another later on just to wind down. Not two bottles a day. Have you looked at yourself lately?”
I scowled mutinously at her.
“Your skin is blotchy and your face is all puffy. And your hands shake if you don’t have a glass of wine as soon as you get indoors. I don’t know how you manage all day long at work.”
I blushed.
“Jennifer!”
“It’s nothing, Mum, just a glass or two at lunchtime. Everyone does it, we all go to the pub for lunch.”
She gave me ‘the look’, the one that needed no words.
“Don’t, Mum,” I mumbled. I plucked a tissue from the box and started pulling nervously at it, tearing small pieces off and rolling them between my fingers before letting them fall to the table. My hands shook as I swept all the tissue balls into a pile, shaping them into a square.
She came around to my side of the table and gave me a big hug. “Ever since your dad died,” she said, her eyes tearing up, “you’re all I’ve got left. I need you as much as you need me. It’s time you stop drinking and start living, sweetie.” She wiped away the tears with the crumpled tissue she’d been clenching in her fist the whole time.
For the next week, I tried my best to stay away from alcohol. I really did. Mum insisted I stay with her, I was in no fit state to go back home by myself. She hunted out all her bottles of wine and Christmas brandy, tucked away in various cupboards for when visitors arrived as she didn’t drink much. We held a ritual cleansing, and my hands shook as I poured the precious liquid down the sink.
For a few days after we purged the house of every drop of wine, Mum and I spent the evenings together, cooking dinner, chatting about our day and watching TV until it was time for bed. It was a somewhat peaceful coexistence. But on the fourth day, I bought myself a bottle of wine. Every day, on my way home from work, I had to pass the shop at the top of the road. I’d been a regular customer when I was younger, popping in for a bar of chocolate or a packet of sweets. I knew they had a small selection of alcohol, and that knowledge kept niggling at the back of my mind, until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I crossed the threshold of the shop, trying not to think of Mum, or my husband Paul and our failed marriage, which had mainly been due to my drinking. I hid the bottle of wine at the bottom of my handbag, and when I arrived home I immediately put it at the back of my wardrobe for later. Oh, I was so looking forward to that first sip!
Every evening after that day, I said goodnight to Mum like a dutiful daughter, went to bed at ten, sober, and by half past I was a drunken wreck. I didn’t even taste the sweetness of the grapes, I didn’t care. All I knew was that I became a guzzler, once again. One bottle became two, two became three. Then I decided to try vodka, as it was getting too difficult to hide all the bottles. I quickly found out that one bottle of vodka was the equivalent of three or four bottles of wine, and much easier to carry home in my handbag. I just had to get through the evening and hide my shaking hands as my thoughts kept going to the hidden bottle upstairs, as if it were a lover. My eyes followed the endless, ticking movement of the clock.
The television was just noise and flickering images at the edge of my vision that had no meaning. I laughed when I heard the canned laughter, gasped when I heard Mum gasp, even managed to make comments on some of the storylines, but all the time I was listening to the call of that bottle upstairs. The last half hour before bedtime was the worst; time slowed down almost to a stop, the clock hand taking an hour to mark off every minute.
Mum had her suspicions. She kept begging me to admit I had a problem, until I lost my patience.
“Remember we poured all the alcohol down the sink two weeks ago, Mum?” I barely waited for her to reply. “So everything’s sorted, isn’t it?”
She reminded me const
antly that I’d lost my husband and my home, and that she was so worried about me. She complained about all the weight she was losing. But still I carried on with my secret drinking. It seemed that nothing could stop me from self-destructing, I felt that I could handle anything. However, there was one issue Mum couldn’t nag me about since she didn’t know; my work was suffering too.
One day I was called into the HR office.
“Hi, Jennifer,” bright, cheery Rebecca chirped as I sat down. Her painted fingernails flew over the keyboard as she brought up my employee data on the computer.
“Morning, Rebecca,” I replied, not half as bright and cheerily. My head was thumping and I felt like I was going to be sick at any moment. I had finished off the last few swigs of vodka this morning rather than have breakfast, and was regretting it. Note to self: no more vodka on an empty stomach. No. Not a good idea.
Rebecca was chattering away about something, but I couldn’t focus. She looked like some kind of canary, all bright colours and non-stop cheeping.
“Wh-what?” I said, as she stopped and looked at me expectantly.
“Oh dear, Jennifer, you don’t look very well, you know.” She peered at me over the top of her glasses. “I hope you haven’t got that stomach bug that’s going around.”
“I don’t feel too good, to be honest,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t really catch what you were saying.”
“Well, I’ll try not to take too long.” She tapped her fingers on the desktop, reading the file on her computer screen. “I’ve got a report here from Mr Pennington.”
Mr Pennington was head of my department and a right pain in the backside. He’d had it in for me ever since I started working at the company two years before, and now it seemed that he’d found the perfect excuse to get me into trouble.
“He says that on three occasions in the last month you’ve come back from lunch drunk, and tiddly on numerous other occasions. He also says that the quality of your work is much lower than it used to be, that he has to proofread any letters you type as they’re often full of mistakes.”
