A Funeral in Fiesole

by Rosanne Dingli

  ‘So what’s down there?’

  ‘If it weren’t raining so hard I’d take you down those steps – they’re cut into the bank, see? – and descend to the next terrace. It’s a bit of lawn surrounded by large pots, flower borders, you know the sort of thing. It’s the ideal place for a pool, you’ll see that for yourself – but we never had one.’

  I had sat on the steps down there with Mama summer after summer, and talked about how glorious it might be to have a pool right on that grassed terrace. She would get me to pace it out; seven metres one way, four metres the other way. Perfect, we would say together, knowing it was a dream. Since Papa died she had to be careful. Her own mortality must always have been on her mind, not knowing she would live into her eighties. Knowing her caution was simply that. We feasibly could have had the pool. I didn’t think it ever was money that stopped her.

  I wondered about her last days at the hospital. Nigel and Harriet wouldn’t say much. It would have had to be harrowing for Nigel. Harriet too. Mama loved her in a way, and one could not know someone for years on end and not be saddened by their death.

  One expected to find Donato and Matilde here too. They were part of the furniture and we grew up with them in the background. Donato fixed things, even bandaged knees with the same patience he would lag a hot-water pipe. He could do a lot with his funny cloth bag of tools and wooden folding ladder, which seemed part of him. Donato wasn’t Donato without his paint-stained ladder.

  Matilde fixed everything else with pasta, pieces of cheese, her pickled olives, and those magical cantuccini baked from a recipe from her home town of Prato. ‘Make no mistake, Broderick. These are Prato biscuits, and they have conquered the world.’ Oh, that accent. Her clear Florentine dialect, which we all got to patter in by the time we grew to teenage.

  Matilde was right. I remember dunking her biscuits into milky coffee in a bowl. I remember the big red round table and how she would wring out a dishcloth and vigorously rub it all clean while I sat there eating. The squeak of the cloth, the smell of yellow soap, the presence of someone silent there, active but silent, doing things around me; it all still made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I thought I learned about pleasure, and from where it can come, and the unexpected things that give pleasure, in that kitchen.

  I could tell Grant fell in love with the house. Not only its size. ‘It’s massive, Brod. It’s more than big – it’s absolutely lovely. Where does the passage behind us lead?’

  I took him up and back down the vaulted corridor and we ascended the back stairs to the wing, where some of the rooms were renovated. Papa’s B & B plans, schemes, and dreams never came true, but a lot of work and expense had gone into the house. Mama admired some of the improvements. The rooms down this way were smaller than the bedchambers upstairs in the main block of the mansion, but they were pretty.

  ‘It’s because this part of the house was built much later, I think. Successive owners added, took away, renovated … you know.’

  Grant walked on. ‘It’s what’s so lovely about it. I like organic houses where the changes happen through the years, where you can see the pauses and the re-takes. There’s nothing more maddening than a house all built and decorated to one instant plan.’ He opened double doors and peeked into a bedroom whose walls were butter yellow. Even on a dull rainy day it was a bright sunny room. Even with an English ticking mattress rolled up on a metal bed base, curtains hanging to an expedient knot in their ends, and crates of things piled in corners; even with a door standing ajar showing a dated bathroom, it was attractive. I saw it too.

  ‘What’s happening to the house, Brod? It’s not being sold, is it? It would be such a shame.’

  I could see what he was thinking. ‘I could never afford to buy Suzanna, Paola, and Nigel out, Grant – it can’t happen.’

  ‘Would a mortgage …? Would …? No, I guess not, but it would be wonderful if it stayed in the family so we could visit. Can you see us in this yellow room, eh, can you?’ He smiled, charming, his beautiful face twisted into a playful grimace.

  ‘I can. What we should do is talk Paola into buying us out – our share at least. Paola is most likely the only one who can afford it … she’s an author. I told you.’

  ‘I thought Suzanna and Lewis …’

  ‘They’re buying an enormous yacht. Their heart is set on it. It can only be Paola, my sister the author.’

  ‘Not a household name author, though.’

  ‘No – but she’s written something like … what? Thirty mystery novels? Paola Larkin, and her special detective, Emanuele Bondin. It should mean something – she does sell books. How do we get her to buy us out? I’d rather she had it than either of the others. Oh – look, it’ll never happen.’ I walked to the next double doors and opened them to reveal a small bedroom whose walls were a shade of rust. The ceiling cornice was decorative, and there were French windows to a small balcony, drenched with rain. The balustrade out there was not safe. ‘It would take a fortune to fix the place, Grant. Even you can see it.’

  ‘Especially me. I have to stop myself doing sums in my head. Take me away. Take me away! I’m thinking of how we could have this place.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘I know – we can’t.’

  ‘You still want it, though.’

  ‘Of course I do. I’d give my right arm.’

  I wondered how Mama felt when she was still here, what she put in her will, and whether it would present problems for us. Would she have left this crumbling Tuscan mansion to us all, to quarrel over? And what about the cottage in Cornwall?

  Grant read my mind. ‘There’s a house in England too, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes – but it’s small, with only four bedrooms, only two bathrooms. Nothing like this.’

  He laughed. ‘Only four bedrooms.’ He thought we were all privileged spoilt kids, even though we were all now in our fifties. ‘What’s it like, the one in Cornwall?’

  ‘It overlooks the estuary, in Newquay, a funny place with extra bedrooms built into the roof space. Nigel and I had to share. We all crammed into it at Christmas, and Mama decorated everything with silver. Silver tree, silver ornaments, silver tinsel … you know.’

  ‘You loved it.’

  ‘Yes. Paola didn’t. She thought Christmas was a waste of time and she hated the cold. She hated the church thing.’

  ‘Church!’

  I laughed. ‘Mama liked the traditional, the festive … I don’t know … the ceremonial thing about Christmas. She didn’t go to church otherwise, we were never religious or anything, but we’d all jump into our best gear and go to a Christmas service and sing.’

  Grant’s eyes showed something like pleasure, or like envy. ‘My childhood was nothing like yours.’

  ‘We didn’t all want it. We didn’t all enjoy it every year. We had nuts and oranges and this huge pudding Papa would set aflame when we were quite little. Nigel wanted to do it when he died, but the job fell to me because I was older.’

  Grant dug his chin into my shoulder. ‘You set a pudding aflame.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Such a jolly family. Didn’t you ever fight or anything?’

  I had to laugh again. ‘Continually. I always wanted what Paola had. She was secretive and cagey. Selfish. I stole comics and books from her room, and she would chase me down the stairs flicking a wet towel at my legs.’

  ‘Girls’ comics. How very Brod.’

  ‘Yes. Well, the stories made more sense than Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan.’

  Paola

  A mistake to look backward

  The funeral was on the coming Saturday, which meant many more unsettling nights in my old room. I always had the same dreams in this house, identical to the ones I had as a teenager. Brod and Grant did the right thing by staying in town. Who wanted to lie awake waiting for drops from the ceiling to ding and splash into a zinc bucket on the rug?

  I didn’t want to gaze at Neptune on the wall, on the way up. He wo
uld squint at me, to say, ‘You’ll never have it your way. You’ll never persuade anyone about anything.’

  And yet, and yet, I wanted the house more than I wanted anything. No – there was one more thing, which might be impossible to find – lost forever. Everything was lost.

  Last night, I sat up, startled by the sound of rain against my window panes, and wished for the thick insulating curtains and shutters on my wonderful Melbourne house. My dream-come-true house. I made sure everything in it was perfect before John and I moved there from our first home, and we undertook two thorough renovations through the years. I promised myself the perfect office, to write in. When the contract and advance for my third series came in, I was fortunate enough to get it. More time has been spent in my office than in any other room.

  Living close to the sea in Melbourne was not unlike Cornwall used to be, John would insist. We had spent enough time in the Newquay cottage for him to make a good comparison. It was different for me of course. He did not have a childhood like mine, with Mama insisting on a traditional Christmas dinner, and a traditional this and a traditional that. I would resent it as a thirteen year-old. Now, I saw how it had shaped and formed me. Could it be I was starting to take on Mama’s conventional ways?

  John grew up in Australia, where everything was pleasantly back-to-front, with scorching Christmases and large platters of prawns, and bodysurfing on white beaches until his skin was pink and wrinkly. The surfing was why he liked Newquay. The fact it had a nice square tower, like the one in Fiesole, meant little to him. He didn’t have three siblings. He could not know how competitive the oldest sibling can get. How sullen, envious, introverted, how desirous of peace and solitude. I was glad he didn’t meet me as a teenager. He would have hated me.

  I remembered Mama marching us all to get new winter outfits, and I would never know what to choose. Indecisive about colours and styles until someone else chose something, and then I would envy it. Suzanna was an easier child to please. She liked boots and scarves and shoulder bags resembling something out of a catalogue. Such flair. The problem was that unlike Suzanna – who was an embarrassing few years younger – I could not plump on a style. I had no notion of what suited me. I had a blue twinset chosen for me one winter, dark blue, to wear over a pleated tartan skirt. Mama insisted I wore her pearls. I was sixteen, and felt an ancient twenty-six.

  Perhaps it was a mistake to reminisce and recall everything through my present anger. I could not shift the indignation, and could not talk to anyone about my present state of mind. Not even John. Especially not John, because he was the cause, root, and reason for it. Soaking, drenched in misery, I tried to sort everything out and make decisions about my entire life – what was left of it, at fifty-eight – trying to deal with the most enormous surprise that had ever shaken me out of myself.

  And then Mama died.

  Nigel’s phone call came at a very bad moment. John in Queensland, all my siblings on the other side of the globe, my only old friend and confidante in hospital having a hysterectomy, and all in a heatwave so bad, so humid, so appalling I felt like rolling into a foetal ball and dying too.

  When was the last time I felt happy? Impossible to remember. Now, here, in my old childhood bedroom, where everything rang dismal bells of memory, it was all coloured by a foul internal ferocity I could not shake off. If it weren’t for the rage, I might have enjoyed being back. I squinted at the damp ceiling and thought about money.

  Anyone else, in any sort of circumstances, would have been overjoyed to win so much money in such a flukish way. A single ticket, so serendipitously discovered, so stealthily redeemed, had the potential to change everything. But I had changed it all already. Or rather, John had. He would have said he changed things because I had changed. Did all marriages not go through phases like ours?

  Not Mama’s marriage – not hers, because Papa died too early to cause her rage. Outrage. Naked indignation, like John caused me.

  He was so numb and fed up he packed and left for his Brisbane conference with infuriating slowness. The last thing he said, in the front garden with the taxi already there, was that he was not coming back. ‘After the conference, Paola, I’m going onward … look, I’m not coming back, okay? I’m not. I don’t know a good way to say this, but … I’ll be staying in Queensland for a while.’

  Astonished – was I astonished? – I could only repeat his words. ‘For a while?’

  ‘A long while. I’ve … met someone.’

  ‘Met someone!’

  A straight silent mouth and wide eyes, surprised at his own words. Surprised to hear them repeated.

  I was beside myself, but tried to hang on to dignity. It was not elegant or mature to get too ruffled, not with a taxi waiting, out in the front garden; but I could not help the words. ‘You met someone. Teenagers say I met someone. Kids say I met someone. Adult men say, I had an affair and wrecked my marriage. That’s what they should say, John.’

  He got into the taxi, and waved, as if he waved to some acquaintance, some vague associate, and not his wife of twenty-eight years. He waved.

  Bewilderment grew later when I discovered most of his things were packed in preparation, neatly, purposefully, into cartons in his study, a less sumptuous office than mine at the back of the house. Labelled carefully, all taped up, waiting to be collected, the cartons were more insulting than his last words. More puzzling than the last flutter of his hand, waving.

  John was leaving me, and without much ado, without many words. There were no heated, defensive explanations.

  Of course I understood why.

  Crushed, insulted, I walked through the house. What I needed was a coffee. What I needed was a drink. Or a kilo of chocolate. With numb fingers I mixed myself one of my infrequent gin and tonics, with over-fizzy tonic water from a half-frozen bottle at the back of the fridge, lying on its side behind a forgotten bunch of celery.

  It froze my throat, and bubbles went up my nose, but the gin warmed my empty stomach and I could breathe again. Slants of dreaded sun blazed through the garden windows onto the living room rug and I almost went to sit at my desk as I always did, but writing would not be possible. Not then. Not after being summarily left by my husband.

  Off to seek his fortune, like Dick Whittington? Fury bubbled inside me, and did not calm, even after Nigel’s sad phone call, even after thirty minutes gazing blindly out at the hot white garden where I dared not go, with the phone still in my limp fist. We were all meeting in Fiesole for the funeral. How on earth was I to explain what had happened to me; to Nigel, Suzanna and Brod?

  Two hours – which would ordinarily have been spent drafting a new novel, or rewriting another, or researching some important forensic or procedural detail for a future project – were passed in sore doldrums, pacing through rooms empty but for the accumulations of years spent together. There was one consolation: Mama would never know of my humiliation. My emptiness in this empty house. Full, but empty. Books; books everywhere. Souvenirs from many trips to Europe, several lavish presents and collections in which we could indulge, being childless.

  It was one of the facets of our marriage that could have pushed John the way he went, the fact we had no children, and the fact it was because of me. How could I have said it was my fault if what did not conform to what he wanted was my physiology? How could I dredge up the sorrow of what happened to my first and only pregnancy? No one knew. No one but John.

  He must have been angry too, and his emptiness and resentment spilled over his ability to stay loyal and committed. But now? After all those years? It was crazy.

  I could have, must have, misread his contented resignation to a life full of travel, writing, cultural pursuits unhampered by years of nappies and bottles or the matters that burden other couples. What? School choices, inappropriate friends, expensive clothing? It was what Nigel and Harriet talked about when they were raising Lori and Tad. Blazers, musical instruments, dentists’ bills.

  It was obvious I misread his resignation, a
nd how long it would last, because there he went – off to Brisbane, and never coming back. Whether or not there was anyone there waiting, to fulfil his family dreams, or smother him in sexual warmth for which I had no desire lately, was by the bye. I sought my eyes in the hall mirror and admitted, acknowledged, it was years since we had felt truly happy together.

  John had hit the wall, and went off toward something better. My anger would subside with time. It was for me to make a more comfortable life for myself now. Perhaps it was time to take satisfaction in a future made up of solo decisions. Did I have a choice? I took a deep breath, more like a sigh, when I thought of not having to consult anyone when I wanted to do something or go somewhere.

  Still, with shaking angry fingers, I texted John a brief message about Mama’s funeral and my intention to fly immediately to Fiesole.

  His response was equally terse. Very sorry – condolences to everyone. Terse. Terse.

  There was a surprising brief spattering, though quite typical of Melbourne weather, of raindrops on the bedroom window when I dragged my suitcases out to pack for Fiesole. I watched the drops evaporate, from my perch at the end of the bed, still unmade from the morning, when we had risen and got out of bed, one on either side, together. Like we always did.

  Always. Always. Always was over.

  Bright as though the shower never happened, the sun swept and slanted in from over treetops beyond, and revealed the empty side, John’s side, of the wardrobe.

  All that was left were gently swinging naked wooden coat hangers, empty shoeboxes, three ties, and a brand new shirt with swing tickets still on it. A present from me he had never worn. Also, among the boxes and mothballs at the bottom, an unfamiliar piece of paper I had to inspect.

  A lottery ticket – lotto. Something we never – or very rarely – bought. ‘Lotteries are for people who are bad at maths,’ John would say. So what was a lotto ticket doing at the bottom of his wardrobe? I stooped and picked it up, flattened it out from the way it had clearly been scrunched up, and scanned the lines of numbers.