‘I was only a girl,’ I said, trying to put this part of the past into its proper place. ‘I didn’t understand. I was curious and, when it came to it, I was offended, because I did not understand. I hope you have forgiven me.’
‘I know. Of course, I know.’
I traced the blue and white pattern with my finger. ‘Raoul, what do you consider to be most vital when judging…’ I raised my eyes and smiled, ‘a wine?’
‘You tell me.’
I mulled it over. ‘You need independence. You need the courage, of course, to assess the bottle rather than the provenance or the pedigree. Maybe that’s it; you just need courage.’
‘Experience helps, I promise you.’
I swallowed the last piece of almond cake and raised my eyes again to his.
We explored the town and drove back to Fiertino as it was growing dark, a sumptuous, cicada-serenaded dusk. Raoul was staying in a hotel in Pienza and he dropped me at Casa Rosa, promising to return the following day.
I lit the candle in the Chianti bottle, made a cup of tea and took them out on to the loggia.
That night, the mosquitoes were deadly. I slapped frantically at my exposed flesh but, in the end, I was forced to draw up my knees and wrap my skirt around my legs.
Will was a long way away. It was unfair that he did not know quite how far away.
*
I saw Liz only once, at a children’s party held at the House. I looked up from dabbing Chloë’s chocolate-engraved face with a useless paper napkin and there she was. I knew it was her because, at that moment, someone called her name and she responded.
She was unaware of my presence, which gave me the advantage and allowed me to recover my equilibrium – and from my surprise. For Liz had nothing special in the way of beauty. She was dressed in a green corduroy skirt and black jumper, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her figure was excellent, though, with a round curving haunch that must have been attractive to men. She was talking to a couple of the other wives and hugged a sheaf of notes to her chest.
‘You’re hurting me, Mummy.’ Chloë wriggled out of my grasp and promptly fell over.
I bent down to soothe her smarting knees. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ I said. ‘Nothing terrible.’
Chloë snuggled into me and I lifted her up. As I did so, Liz turned and caught sight of me. She went white and, within a few seconds, left the room.
Chloë raised her face for a kiss and I gave one, passionately and with more love than I could possibly describe.
I have no idea what Liz made of that encounter, but I could imagine a little of her feelings. She would never guess my reaction. I did not hate her, nor did I despise her for taking Will (after all, I had taken him, just like that). Those emotions were redundant. No, what intrigued me was the realization that Liz had been instrumental in pushing Will and me further on. She had shown me that, for good or ill, I had left the fellowship of the single girls to which she belonged. My curved haunch was no longer an invitation to other men, for now a child sat snugly on it. A new set of templates had replaced the old ones. Unlike Liz, if I left a room, it was no longer an isolated gesture. Anything, anything, I did was connected to Will and Chloë.
Years and years of jumble sales, Rotarian dinners, evergreen outings. Four elections… and now I had arrived here.
I checked my notebook and, in the light thrown by the inadequate candle, reread my assessment of the Brunello. ‘A clone of the Sangiovese grape, capable of great richness. Concentrated and brilliantly tannic.’
If I had not pushed Raoul away all those years ago. If I had not been confused, embarrassed, aghast at the business of sex, and at the desperate way in which he had helped himself to me, and my anguished, ignorant response, my life might have been different.
Something rustled in the clump of marjoram at the edge of the loggia. A mouse with dampened fur from the heat? A mosquito bit in the crease of my elbow where sweat gathered. I knew exactly what Will would say if he could see me writing up my notes: ‘Wine is only wine. People’s lives are much more important.’ He truly believed it. Of course; and he had no reason to admire alcohol.
The phone rang.
Are we not talking to each other?’ asked Will. ‘Why haven’t you been in contact? What’s happening?’
I scratched the mosquito bite. ‘Plenty of winged biting things.’ My voice sounded overbright. Are you OK?’
‘OK-ish.’
‘Will?’ This was the moment to say: ‘Guess who turned up? Raoul. He happened to be in the area.’
‘You know politics, Fanny.’ Yes, I did know politics. ‘I can’t persuade you to come home?’
I squeezed my eyes shut. ‘No.’
His voice quickened with the anger that he had, no doubt, been nurturing. ‘I don’t know what’s happening and it’s probably my fault, but should the Stanwinton Glee Club’s salmon supper, or whatever, suffer because you feel like playing truant?’
‘You’re the one they want, not me.’
‘It seems so sudden,’ he countered. ‘You gave no warning. It was as if I had woken up and found I’d been living with someone I didn’t know.’
This confession pleased me. It suggested that our lives were not quite so predictable and tame as I had thought. I slapped at yet another mosquito. ‘Should keep you on your toes, then.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Will, the other day I worked out that I have spent approximately five thousand seven hundred and forty-five days of my life working for you. This was predicated on the assumption of one commitment per day of our marriage, minus two hundred and sixty-six days for childbirth and holidays.’
‘As much as that?’ he shot back. ‘Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?’
Before I could help myself, I snorted with laughter.
‘That’s better,’ he said.
*
Benedetta seemed tired and low at breakfast the next morning. I protested that I was giving her extra work, but she would have none of it. ‘It’s my son in Milan,’ she said. ‘I think he has bad habits. I worry that he spends too much money. Never saves. I tell him to come home. I tell him he needs his mama.’ She spread her hands out in a gesture of appeal. ‘He says he should come home to his mama. But how to do it?’
Che fare? A question we all ask of ourselves.
I sat at the table, drank her coffee and ate a hunk of bread and apricot jam. The sun speared through the kitchen window and illuminated the framed picture of the Madonna, the array of well-used saucepans on the single shelf. ‘Benedetta,’ I asked, ‘how was the fattoria destroyed?’
Benedetta folded her hands on the table. ‘It was bad. You don’t want to know. There is no point.’
‘Please tell me.’
She heaved herself to her feet. ‘I must see to the tomatoes.’
I followed her outside. It was nine o’clock, but the sun was already like a power drill on the skin. Benedetta fussed away over the trusses and nipped out the leaders. ‘Lucilla was your grandmother’s sister,’ she admitted at last.
‘I didn’t know she had one.’
Benedetta shrugged. ‘When she was nineteen, she married a Fascist and went to live in Rome. I was still small, but the gossip… The Fascists made people volunteer to fight and they sent out people from Rome who beat you or put you in prison if you refused.’
By the law of averages, there’s an awful similarity in war stories and I had a good idea of what might come next.
‘This man arrived with Lucilla in a big car and demanded that all the men in Fiertino join up. None of the family would speak to Lucilla and we, the children, were forbidden to go anywhere near her. I remember coming down the road with my brother and she was standing outside the fattoria, crying and wailing. Eventually her husband put her back into the car and drove away.’
Benedetta harvested two ripe tomatoes from a plant and held one out to me. ‘Eat, Fanny.’
The lush red was almost the colour of blood. ‘D
id they come back?’
‘They did. Towards the end, after your grandmother and your father had gone away over the hills. The Germans had blown up some of the houses over there,’ Benedetta pointed in the direction of the fattoria, ‘to make it difficult for the Allies to get through on the roads, and they ambushed them when they took the route over the hills. Every house in the village had been damaged. It was bad. They came back because I don’t think Lucilla knew what else to do. This time it was she who was driving the car. He sat in the back, very pale, very fat, hugging a bottle of brandy. She helped him out and took him into the fattoria to beg help from her sister, your grandmother. She didn’t know she had left.’ Benedetta flapped the material at the neck of her print dress to cool herself. ‘Yes.’ Sweat glistened in the folds of her neck. ‘But it was the night when nobody was there, and nobody knows what happened. In the evenings, you see, we used to take shelter in one house or another, never in the same place.’
I had heard some of these stories from my father; they had been told to him by my grandmother. Stories are usually improved in the telling, but these had the directness and simplicity that came from having to face the worst. At night, the women piled the prams high with the hoarded provisions, and the children carried what they could to the safe house. It was a lottery. Often they picked the wrong house, and the shelling did its worst. ‘By then,’ my father had told me, ‘we were used to secrets. Where to hide the oil, a ham, half a cheese, where the chickens had been taken.’
Having nipped the final truss, Benedetta levered herself upright. ‘No one was willing to tell Lucilla and her husband where that night’s safe house was. The Partisans sent word down from the hills that the Germans were planning to use the road running north of the valley so everyone made for the church. But in the end it wasn’t the Germans. It was… A Partisan came down from the hills and demanded to know where Lucilla’s husband was. No one said anything, for whatever her politics Lucilla was still one of us.’
‘And?’
‘It was me.’ Benedetta spoke so softly that I almost didn’t catch her confession. ‘I heard the Partisan ask, “Where is this man?” and I ran up to him. “I know, I know,” I shrieked, in my little-girl voice. “In the fattoria.”’
Back in the kitchen, Benedetta stood in front of her picture of the Madonna and crossed herself. ‘I had been taught always to tell the truth. The next time we looked, the fattoria was ablaze. We could see it from the church… but they must have been already dead.’
I sat down. ‘We must think so,’ I said.
What seemed like an hour later, but was only a minute or two, Benedetta added, ‘Lucilla was a good wife, faithful unto death.’
Later, I walked up to the cemetery outside the village. The graves were a garish mix of coloured marble, white stone, plastic-embossed photographs and soiled plastic flowers. It took me a while to locate Lucilla’s for she had not been buried with the other Battistas, her family. She had been laid to rest in the extreme edge of the north corner. Her stone was meagre, and badly carved, its inscription terse: ‘Lucilla Battista. Born 1919. Died 1944’. Behind it a Cupressus sempervirens grew straight up into the brazen blue sky. There was no mention of her married name, or her husband, and no sign of his grave.
Raoul picked me up from Casa Rosa at ten o’clock. He was dressed in well-cut linen trousers and shirt, but there were dark circles under his eyes. ‘We will eat in Cortona. Afterwards we will drive to Tarquinia and look at Etruscan objects.’ He peered over his sunglasses. ‘I know your father was always interested. Then I will bring you back to Fiertino and you can change. I will attend to some business in the next village. Then we will head up to La Foce where my friend Roberto will give us dinner.’
‘Me?’
‘He’s expecting you.’
I could not help smiling at Raoul’s presumption. ‘You assumed?’
‘I assumed.’
There was a trace of cumulus cloud as we drew into Cortona but it was hot. In a dim, shaded restaurant, we ordered antipasti and light, tangy pinot grigio. I ate and drank with a faint air of unreality, a sense that I had trespassed into a story where I recognized neither the characters nor the setting. But I was intrigued to know what would happen.
‘Thank you for lunch, Raoul.’ I tipped my glass at him. ‘Do you know the best thing? Not having to think about a timetable.’
He looked at me with a question. ‘Let me be honest, Fanny. I was hoping you might thank me for something else.’
The suggestion of sharp, sexual pleasure made my stomach lurch.
‘I shouldn’t be saying this, but it is unavoidable and I, at least, had better say it and you can think about it.’
At Tarquinia, we bought tickets to the fifteenth-century palazzo where the Etruscan artefacts were kept. Inside, we admired a pair of winged terracotta horses, a bronze mirror held up by a statue of Aphrodite, and a bronze of Heracles subduing the horses of Diomedes.
As I moved away, I happened to glance over my left shoulder and caught the image. I recognized it instantly. Behind the glass showcase, and beautifully lit, was the stone funerary carving. It was composed of a couch over which a tasselled cloth had been arranged. Stretched out on it were two figures, a man and a woman. She was young, with huge painted eyes and a trace of a smile on her lips. One of her arms was stretched across her breast so it almost touched her companion. His arm was round her shoulders and he was smiling too. The inscription read, ‘Married couple, fifth century BC’.
But I knew that already.
I read out from my guidebook: ‘“They were the inhabitants of opulenta arva Etruriae, the opulent fields in which had grown wheat and vines. In the end, the plenty made them decadent.”
‘They look so normal,’ I commented to Raoul. ‘So understandable.’
Raoul captured the guidebook. ‘“Etruscan women enjoyed the freedom to go out, to share feasts and to drink wine. The Etruscans honoured their wives and sought out their company.”’
‘Ah,’ I said.
Raoul pressed on: ‘“Nor did they share them.’”
18
Will had shocked me once by remarking that he reckoned MPs often had no idea as to what they were voting for: they just headed for where their whips were standing guard. He let this drop as we drove to Chloë’s school for a parent-teacher evening. Chloë was fifteen and at a tricky stage: i.e. life was a production in which she took the starring role.
We were late. This was because Will had missed the agreed train to Stanwinton. A deal in the tea-room. He climbed into the car at the station and said, ‘Don’t say anything Fanny. Sorry, sorry.’
I let out the clutch. ‘Last time, if you remember, we were so late we had to sit behind the headmistress on the staff chairs.’
‘You should give thanks. It meant we only had to look at her back view, not the front.’
Will could always make me laugh. I reached over and laid my hand on his thigh. ‘What was it this time?’
‘That’s it,’ he said, sobering up. ‘I must talk to you about it.’
If Will thought he could sneak unnoticed into the audience, he was wrong. As we entered the school hall, the headmistress bore down on him and whisked him into captivity with a posse of senior staff. I sought out an anxious-looking Chloë. ‘Your father wants to know if there are any terrible surprises.’
Chloë looked rather pale. ‘Only the sodding maths,’ she said.
‘Don’t swear, darling.’
She looked even more pained. ‘You don’t understand, Mum. Our generation doesn’t think of it as swearing. It’s just words we use.’
‘Could you not use them, then?’
She shot me one of her looks. ‘It’s as bad as when you try to lecture me about sex. We are the informed generation, you know.’
Not, as it transpired, that well informed. Chloë’s maths was dire, so were physics and chemistry; and the geography teacher was not convinced that Chloë had grasped the nettle.
‘At lea
st,’ I said to Will, back at the Stanwinton house, ‘her Italian is forging ahead.’
‘Good.’ Will dumped a pile of washing on the kitchen floor.
I groaned. ‘There’s a laundry basket over there.’
Will achieved a look of utter surprise. ‘Oh, of course.’
I watched him stuff the clothes into the basket. ‘Fanny, can we talk?’ He draped his jacket over the back of a chair. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a drink anywhere? You haven’t hidden a shifty bottle?’
‘I wish.’
‘No. No. Of course not.’
Will and I had stuck to our decision not to keep drink in the house as it was unfair on Meg. The place to enjoy wine was London. It was no great deprivation, we agreed. But there were times…
‘It’s the vote on fishing and shooting.’
‘I thought that had all been sorted, that our side were to vote for banning them.’
‘That’s it,’ said Will. ‘I would never fish or shoot, but to forbid them makes me uneasy. It is to ban a fundamental freedom, and I am not sure I should agree.’
I tied on my plastic apron, a present from Chloë, with its picture of a cat spatchcocked over the seat of an armchair while its owner looked on crossly, with the words ‘Never give up’ written underneath, took out of the fridge a cheese and mushroom quiche I had made that afternoon, and put it into the oven to warm. ‘But you have to. You’re a whip.’
‘No, I don’t have to. I could vote against. After all, it is what I believe in. It’s a question of conscience.’
I handed him a couple of tomatoes – the cold, round English type. ‘Could you slice these for me, Will?’ I fetched a lettuce from the pantry, to give myself a few seconds to consider. ‘You’d lose the whip.’
Will sliced away, if not with skill, with diligence. ‘Chuck in the wrath of the animal-rights people, too,’ he said.
I froze in the act of shredding the lettuce into the salad bowl. That was different. ‘You can’t, then,’ I said flatly. ‘It might endanger Chloë. They’d find out where she goes to school. She’d be a target. We’d be a target.’
The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back Page 19
