Sacha was clearly feverish and I ordered him to remain where he was, then went down to take charge of Will, who was wrestling with the stove. ‘Poor Sacha. He’ll feel he’s letting Meg down.’
We drank our coffee on the loggia. Unable to sit still, Will paced about. ‘I like it here, and I like this house. We should have come here with your father.’ He looked away. ‘But I would have invaded the private club of two.’
Surprised, I looked up. ‘You minded. I’m sorry.’
Will decided to view Meg’s body alone, and emerged composed. We negotiated with the police and struggled to short-cut delays. Once the suggestion of foul play had been eliminated, the doctor signed the relevant certificates and we made arrangements for the body to be flown home. Then, it was a question of waiting for the authorities to release it.
Meg was to be buried at Stanwinton. As Sacha pointed out, it had been her home. Working together, Will and I shared the endless phone calls back to England. Mannochie. The funeral director. The vicar. Will had a knack of dealing with emergencies, but with this one he was too tired and sad. Once or twice I had to intervene when he lost the thread.
Will also phoned Chloë and, having told her the news, passed the phone to me. Chloë was almost incoherent. ‘You won’t die on me, Mum, will you, or Dad? Promise.’
I did my best to calm her, and wondered if we should encourage her to get on a plane, but Will anticipated what I was thinking and shook his head.
‘Poor, poor Sacha,’ cried Chloë. ‘I can’t bear it for him. Tell him I love him.’
‘He’ll ring you,’ I said, ‘when he’s feeling better. I promise.’
Rob rang several times and Sacha staggered downstairs to talk to his father. Will and I retreated out of earshot. When I broached the subject of his father, Sacha said only, ‘He’s left it all up to me. He says he doesn’t feel he should interfere.’
I urged him back into bed and dosed him up. ‘Your father’s trying to make it easier for you by not getting in the way.’
I reported this conversation to Will, who went straight upstairs and spent over an hour talking to Sacha. When I took up more tea, I discovered him sitting on the edge of the bed and a red-eyed Sacha propped up on the pillows. Both of them looked dreadful. I stood over them, and fussed and bullied them into drinking it. After a couple of mouthfuls, Sacha grimaced. ‘Give me the stuff the spoon will stand up in.’
In the morning, Sacha was better but still weak, and agreed without too much argument to remain in bed. I fed him more tea, made him change out of his sweaty T-shirt and insisted on brushing his hair.
‘Thanks,’ he said, leant back on the pillows and closed his eyes.
The police told us, ‘Only two days.’ But this was Italy and two days stretched into three, then four. Meg would have appreciated the joke.
The convalescent Sacha was content to sit it out on the loggia at Casa Rosa. ‘I need to get my head straight,’ he said, and it was clear that he preferred to be on his own.
In contrast, Will was restless, had not eaten much and was sleeping badly. I said to him, ‘There’s something I would like to show you if you’d like to come.’
He showed only a polite interest. ‘Let’s do it, then.’
We left Sacha well supplied with iced drinks and a cold pasta salad. Armed with maps and guidebooks, I drove Will to Tarquinia. The car skidded a little as I forced it up the slope leading out of the valley and down the other side, past poppies, clumps of herbs, wild lavender and the olive trees, their bases plastered with summer dust.
Will slumped back in the passenger seat and wiped his sunglasses. ‘Italy’s too hot.’
‘You get used to it,’ I said.
‘For God’s sake,’ he said, and fell silent.
The museum in Tarquinia was cool and almost empty. We did not linger over the exhibits – I suspected Will’s concentration was not good. Eventually, I led him up to the funerary couch. ‘There. Do you recognize it?’
He looked blank. Then he said, ‘It was on your father’s desk. He was very fond of it.’
‘The real thing is better.’
‘She’s no beauty.’
I nudged him gently. ‘Nor is he.’
I went to inspect an exquisite bronze candelabrum, worked with bunches of grapes and vine leaves. ‘Will… come and see this.’
But Will was rooted in front of the funerary couple, eyes narrowed, his face a mask of distress.
We returned to the car and consulted the maps, for I was anxious to visit the Etruscan tombs. Chloë and I always teased Will about maps but, truth be told, his skill had got us places. Now I waited for him to say that women have no spatial awareness and for me to reply, ‘Women are better team players.’ But he didn’t and I didn’t.
On his instructions, I drove far up into a maquis of rock and scrub. Here the land had a blind, bitter, cussed feel. Yet the books reported that, all those centuries ago, the Etruscans had made it fertile and fruitful with trees, pasture and crops. Their lovely Paradise. Their Elysium.
We drove into a clearing and parked close to the remains of an Etruscan town, which didn’t amount to much – a hint of a mosaic pavement and the suggestion of a stone wall running at an angle up the hill. Drinks were being sold under a cluster of umbrellas, and an overflowing rubbish bin was sited next to an ancient brick arch. Otherwise the scene had an abandoned, desolate quality.
We followed the track up into the hills. The going became precipitous and it was very hot. In my sandals, my feet grew slippery with sweat, and Will was panting. An arrow indicated a steep incline and a second pointed yet further up. The heat seared into our backs.
‘Over there.’ I pointed to a dark opening, partly obscured by vegetation.
Will smiled grimly. ‘This had better be worth it.’
He pushed back the vegetation to let me through, and we found ourselves in a large rock chamber lined with stone shelves on which the Etruscans had laid out their dead.
There was no mistaking an odour of semi-stagnant water and rock that never saw the sun. The smell was the essence of extinction. I laid a hand on a cold shelf. The ghosts of the Etruscan dead were locked into this place, far, far removed from the banqueting and harvesting, the wine, lovemaking and married love depicted in their painting and sculpture.
‘I don’t know why we make such a fuss about the afterlife,’ said Will. ‘Once you’ve gone, that’s it. Meg has gone, so has your father. What’s left?’ he reached for my hand.
But I fled from the tomb and scrambled back down the path. I heard Will come after me and, by the time he caught up, I was breathless. I gasped for air and the heat whistled painfully into my lungs but I welcomed it. Far better to be here in the open, burning hot but alive.
I lifted my face to the sun. To emerge from the dark cave into the light was to know that I was free.
On the way back, Will asked, ‘Alfredo’s ashes… have you decided?’
‘No. Silly isn’t it?’
‘You can’t put it off for ever.’
‘I know.’
Over supper of grilled veal chops and roasted peppers, Sacha told us that he would be moving on. ‘To Manchester. I think,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of gigs lined up. After that… well, I’ll go and see Chloë in Oz. Hitch around a little. Take a look.’
‘That would be nice.’ I kept my voice neutral.
‘I miss her,’ he said simply.
‘So do we.’ Instinctively, I glanced at Will and our eyes locked. ‘Don’t’ was the message in his. A mental nudge, I suppose.
After supper, Will said to me, ‘Fanny, go and get your father’s ashes.’ I stared at him. ‘Go on.’
I went upstairs, retrieved the small wooden casket and carried it down to the loggia. ‘May I?’ asked Will. I nodded and he took it from me. ‘Now we’ll find a place for Alfredo.’
Holding the casket under one arm, he propelled me out of the house with the other.
We walked up the dust road, and the residual heat cradled ou
r feet. ‘I should have paid more attention to the descriptions of Fiertino,’ Will said, in a conversational way. ‘Then I would know where I was. Where did your father’s family live?’
The moon was as bright as burnished silver as I pointed down the road to the ugly replacement fattoria. ‘It was burnt down at the end of the war,’ I explained.
‘I see.’ Will considered. ‘I don’t think that would be right. Nor, I think, is the churchyard. I think your father would prefer to be free.’
I blinked back tears. ‘Yes, he would.’
At the fork in the road, Will ignored the route into the village and we picked our way up the rise where the cypresses and chestnuts grew in clumps and the vines swept past them down into the valley. It was a mystery to me how anyone slept in the deep, perfumed Italian nights, and I said so to Will. He smiled.
‘I don’t believe you said that.’
Down below, the lights of the village were tucked into the slope of the hillside under a starred palanquin. The moonlight worked its usual deceptions and Fiertino seemed to spring out of the landscape, untouched and complete. ‘I love this place,’ I confessed.
‘I know you do. But, Fanny…’ He was hesitant. ‘You do know you’re only a visitor?’
It would have been so easy to say, ‘No, I belong here.’ But that would be to ignore many particulars and the evidence against. I was a visitor – a special one, but a visitor. I knew that now.
‘Your father never liked me,’ Will remarked, in the same conversational tone. ‘I wish he had.’
‘He didn’t say that,’ I replied. ‘You were different. You use politics to deal with difficult questions and difficult problems – how to conduct ourselves in society before death and… extinction. Dad thought it was a waste of time. He relied on himself.’
‘But I liked him.’
‘So did I,’ I said, with a half-sob.
Will gestured towards the vines. ‘What’s the grape?’ he asked.
‘Sangiovese.’
‘Was that a favourite?’
‘He admired it.’
‘Why don’t you settle him among the vines?’ Will offered me the urn. ‘Don’t you think he would like that?’
I knew he had got it right.
I picked my way between the swollen grape trusses and came to a halt. With a little painful thud of my heart, I upended the casket and watched my father’s ashes drift towards the earth.
His terroir.
By the time I returned to where Will waited, I was shivering with emotion and he held me very close.
The following days were waiting days. When it got too hot, we retreated to the loggia at Casa Rosa and ate green bean and tomato salad from Benedetta’s harvest for lunch and grew sleepy on a glass of Chianti. At night we ate at Angelo’s, and Sacha sometimes remained to drink coffee in the square. I was glad to see a little colour returning to his face.
Naturally, Will was preoccupied, and very quiet. I waited until we were alone in our bedroom at the Casa Rosa before I finally coaxed him to talk.
‘Meg’s death has pulled everything into focus. What’s so important as that? Nothing.’ He sat down on the bed. ‘I can only explain it as a loss of nerve,’ he said. ‘I find I’m not so sure any more. Facing things and fighting battles feels more difficult to me now than it did at the beginning. I used to be so certain about the things we needed to achieve. Now I wonder whether we do any good at all.’ He looked up at me ruefully. ‘I don’t know why I should feel that now, at the grand old, battle-hardened age of forty-eight.’
I looked at him and saw for the first time that it was only after blazing desire has turned to tenderness and familiarity, that true knowledge – the knowledge which I sought – was possible. And I thought with a little flutter of nerves of the degree of risk which I had taken. Not that I regretted it, but it was worth considering the destruction of what might have been.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘What else.’
‘You disappeared out here and seemed so absorbed in a quite different world, and I didn’t think I could catch up. I thought you would vanish. Then I thought I had kept you against your will. No, I don’t mean against your will exactly, but caged, and when you had the first chance to fly away, you did.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘I suppose I was jealous of Fiertino, and of you in Fiertino.’
I felt a pang of sympathy. ‘So the minute I go away you develop a first-class case of nerves?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that exactly.’
A little later, he said. ‘You really love this place… the Casa Rosa, and the town. Don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do. It’s in my bloodstream. But that is not to say it is my father’s Fiertino. That was different.’
Will stood by the window and looked out across the valley. ‘I wish I didn’t have to go back.’
I did not have any illusions. I understood perfectly that once Will got back within sound and scent of the Westminster arena, his ears would prick up and his nose would twitch.
‘Listen to me,’ I said and came and stood beside him and gave the gentlest of nudges. ‘You are fine. Absolutely fine.’
He bent over and kissed me.
The following day, I went to the priest and arranged for a small stone to be placed, with my father’s name and dates, among the rest of the Battistas. And then I turned my face homeward. We spent the last few hours at Casa Rosa setting it in order. I swept floors, stacked china, dusted the bedrooms. Together Sacha and I packed up Meg’s things and talked about her.
When evening came, and the sun flooded the valley with shadows, I sat by the window of the bedroom and drank in the last moments until Will called, ‘Fanny, please come.’
I loved Casa Rosa, and never more so than when I was saying goodbye to it. The last task was to fasten the shutters and I had insisted that I did it.
Will and Sacha waited in the car. I gave it a final, lingering inspection before we drove down to Benedetta, who had a present for me. It was a small, blurred photograph of a house whose roof had fallen in and whose blackened beams pointed burnt fingers to the open sky. I could just make out a fountain in the garden, which was filled with rubble and churned-up earth. I turned the photograph over: on the back was written, ‘1799-1944’.
‘The fattoria,’ she said. I put it into my handbag and kissed her goodbye. ‘Santa Patata’ she said, ‘you will be back.’
I looked back only once as we took the road for Rome, and the view shimmered into a brilliant radiance of olive tree, scarlet poppy and vine. I thought of Meg.
How cross she would be that she was not here to climb into the hot car and say, ‘Poor me, I’ve got the worst seat.’
I pictured the vines pushing their roots deep into the terroir and the sun on the grapes. ‘Allow the sun to shine on the grapes,’ my father would say, ‘until the last possible moment, and it will seduce the fruit into such richness and flavour.’
22
We brought Meg home and buried her in the Stanwinton churchyard. Will said he wanted time to think about a gravestone and I was to leave it to him. So I did.
Reclaimed by the charity suppers, the good works and the regular journeys to London, I went back to work. Mannochie had almost – but not quite – forgiven me for my defection. ‘Train tracks, Mrs S,’ he whispered into my ear at the Glee Club’s annual fund-raising evening when I had the misfortune to laugh after an excruciating rendition of ‘London’s Burning’. The eyelash-dye appointment was booked the next morning.
I was glad of it when, a couple of days later, I blinked back tears as POD artists in clowns’ motley wooed the children in the cancer ward into laughter. ‘Look,’ said a mother, who was standing beside me, pointing out her bald daughter. ‘She’s laughing, she’s really laughing.’ She pulled out a photograph from her bag and showed it to me. ‘Carla used to have the longest plaits,’ she said.
‘So did mine,’ I replied – and I was the lucky one: the lucky, lucky mother.
Elaine rang up. ‘So you didn�
��t: leave Will,’ she said. ‘I had an idea that you might.’
‘I did think about it,’ I said.
‘I’m leaving Neil,’ she said, ‘and setting up my knitwear business. Will you wear my jumpers, Fanny?’
I breathed in deeply. ‘Always.’
Probate for my father’s estate came through. There was little money and it was clear that there was no option but to sell the house. As for the business, I had plans for it. As I explained to Will, I would have less time for his side of things but I would do my best not to let him down.
He listened quietly. ‘I don’t have a problem with that,’ he said.
I touched his cheek. ‘Nor should you.’
He flashed his old grin at me. ‘It’s your turn. And while you are at it, Fanny, do you think you could make us some money?’
I rang Raoul and told him I was taking over Battista’s, and could we still do business his end?
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I look forward to it. And, Fanny…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘Yes.’
Armed with cardboard boxes and cleaning equipment, Maleeka and I drove over to Ember House and began the task of packing up my father’s things.
‘Izt good mans,’ she said, as she cleared out the saucepan cupboard. ‘I know.’
As always, Maleeka was oddly comforting. ‘I know, too, Maleeka.’
It took us several days, and as the furniture – except for the pieces carefully chosen for Chloë – was removed, Ember House assumed the peeled, denuded aspect of a dwelling in which life had gone away somewhere else. I went through my father’s papers and sorted out the business files. The rest I burnt – letters from my mother and Caro, tax returns going back twenty years… anything. I was keeping his desk, the blue and white fruit bowl, the framed photograph of the Etruscans and a selection of books.
I rang my mother and asked if she wanted anything sent over. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I left it all behind.’ She was coughing. ‘A cold. I’ve been quite sick with it.’
It struck me that I could do more to breathe the mother-daughter relationship into existence, but there did not seem any point. My mother had made that choice years ago. ‘Get better soon.’
The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back Page 23
