A Funeral in Fiesole (14 page)

A few changes

I drove down to Prato on my own, leaving the other three gathered on the back terrace, in the sun. They had pulled some kitchen chairs out there, and a small table, and Harriet brought a tray laden with things.

I was pleased to have the zippy little rental at my disposal, over the moon about the will, but still wondered how I would manage the obvious negotiation required, to get specifically what I wanted from the bequest. Also, importantly, without telling anyone about my lotto win. I could imagine Harriet’s face if she got to know about the events crowding the days around Mama’s death. I can imagine her mouth forming the words,
What? I don’t believe it. It can’t be true.

But it was. I was coming to terms with it all, but I must have appeared pale and stunned to her that first day, when I climbed out of the car and she asked why John was not with me. Stunned, numb, and still in a state of shock. Still awed by the amount of money in my bank account. Still dazed, trying to get used to the fact Mama was no more. It was more than one person could handle. Now I had the will to consider.

Mama did it all very cleverly, I had to admit. I had to admire her retention of brain power, fairness, intellect, control; everything we remembered her for. She did it all in a way I would have liked to run my life. I never had four children – and I was never a widow. Neither did I have houses in two places. Our lives were nowhere near the same. I still dearly wished for what she had, however, for years. Something ineffable – but she had it. For years going about knowing I had a less crowded life, more freedom, was what I thought was most satisfying. I supposed it was, of course.

No – what was I thinking? I went for years wanting what she had – a house crowded with the laughter of children. Which never came.

The bitterness rising as I wound down to Prato, though, was a new brand of resentment brought on by something other than my own causes. I did not create my current predicament. I wasn’t the one who chose to be suddenly single and very nearly lost.

I had to deal with it, though. I had to handle it all with some sort of calm integrity. Not my words. Funnily enough, it was Harriet who, to my surprise, provided the words. After I stormed past her a couple of times, wanting to stick a Neptune trident tine in her eye, and also in one of Nigel’s, she stopped me, right in front of the big windows near the brown armchair Mama would sit in when she came in from the garden, her shoes caked with soil. I was in the dark about what my sister-in-law wanted, but I simply could not be rude. It was too late in life for my wall god to come to the rescue.

‘Paola. Nigel’s told me. I won’t say I’m sorry, because no one’s been hurt or killed or anything.’ She paused, in a breathless gap in which she tried to gauge my reaction.

I gave none.

‘I know you will cope, with your amazing calm integrity.’

Surprise kept me on the spot, with sunshine in my eyes, with my mouth open. I had to look her in the eye and thank her. ‘I couldn’t say anything, Harriet, when I drove up the first day, and you asked about John. I couldn’t speak about him. I was completely … absolutely … livid.’

She gave a half-smile. What did she know about wretched anger? What could she possibly know about paralytic fury?

I went on. ‘And yes – I have a sort of plan. Well – I’m forming a plan, and it feels good to be able to do things independently.’

‘You of all people … of course. You have your writing and your wonderful world. Solitary, you can be, integral, successful. You should know you are envied by many.’ And she walked off towards the kitchen, and her husband and children.

Tad had reappeared from somewhere, still in his threadbare blazer, which he apparently could not bring himself to abandon, and Lori was talking about the festival in Florence again.

I was transfixed to the spot. My wonderful world, she called it. This was how she regarded what I did. Years went by and we fixed in our minds what others might think of us. We were so often wrong.

I was wrong about Harriet. She was not supercilious and arrogant. She seemed a touch envious and admired my life as a writer. I had never thought of myself as calm, or integral. Or solitary and successful – but I could be so. If I appeared so to her, there had to be an element of truth in it. We would never see eye to eye about life, and we could never be real friends, but I could not dismiss her out of hand.

Calm and integral. Hah! I drove downhill to the Via Sestese and took it all the way into Prato. The traffic was quite incredible. I had to keep my head. The address the notary supplied did not appear to be a hospice or home. It was not easy to find. I should not have volunteered to be the first to visit Matilde, after all, and would have done better to wait until someone else had found the place and could give me directions. Driving on the right was not what I would have called comfortable, and with no one else in the car, I felt on edge and constantly scared something would happen. If driving was on the right, did one give way to the left? Hm. Give way – Italian drivers did not
give way
. There was not enough room on the road, for a start.

Everything made me jump. Come on. I had driven in Europe so much in the past. Was this a sign of age? Was I growing old? Even one instance of a back wheel riding the curb rendered me shaky.

‘Concentrate!’ Speaking to myself was permissible now I was completely alone and getting used to it. This was no time to check in the mirror for tell-tale lines around my mouth. There was no comfort in bright light and heavy traffic. There was no longer the comfort of turning to John at every juncture for confirmation of a feeling, or some advice about something I already had decided. There was a dawning knowledge it was the case, though, through at least the last five years of our long marriage. I more and more often made things out myself. I knew what I wanted, yet deferred to him out of what – politeness? Reassurance? Companionship? Habit? Too hard to work out. Dubious, random analysis was without question best kept out of the car in complicated Italian traffic. They drove like demons, never batted an eyelid, and terrified the wits out of this driver, used to Australian traffic and drivers in larger cars, who obeyed signs and signals, rules and everything, as a matter of course.

Here, they charged onward, missing each other, and me, by a hairsbreadth, with a margin of seconds, quite happily breaking road rules, but merging like magic, and never interrupting the flow. Yes, magic. I could get used to it. Could I? Could I abandon everything I had in Australia and live in Italy? Among these brinkman drivers? With fine lines around my mouth?

It was a question I had to ask myself, because of the bequest. Also, there was the combination of feelings aroused by John’s departure, and all the reawakened memories of a childhood spent more or less in an Italian way.

There were of course a number of bureaucratic hurdles to leap. I still held my UK citizenship, but without a passport. I could possibly obtain the right papers to reside in Italy. The European Union and the Schengen Agreement allowed it, without much difficulty, I was told. The prospect of weeks of form-filling and interviews, though, was not attractive.

I did have weeks. I had as much time I liked. I did not have to be anywhere for anyone. There was no one to share things with either. I could do what I pleased, but would it please me?

Before bureaucracy, I had to address my mental and financial situation. Money, now – since finding the crumpled lotto ticket – was not a real issue. So time, age, desires, plans, energy, and ability; these were the aspects I had to address. Not for me a breakneck dash into a future full of doubt and unknowns, despite a gradual getting used to having cash in the bank. One or two of my siblings would doubtless have raced impulsively towards their fate, if I remembered their personalities well, and if they still acted in the same precipitous, devil-may-care attitudes of their childhood.

It was fortunate my writing could be done anywhere I pleased. A literary career is fully portable. Turning a new page at fifty-eight – or thereabouts – was not something someone like me did without the necessary contemplation of all the pros and cons. Would I still have been this cautious twenty years ago?

My heart was not broken twenty years ago. I had to pull myself up. I drew up abruptly behind a delivery van and thought about
my heart
. Like anybody else, I did have my share of adolescent pangs which seemed like the end of the world as I knew it, when boyfriends came and went. Still, the way a heart is broken at fifty-eight is not the same as when it gets fractured at nineteen.

But where on earth was Via Pietro Mascagni? I found myself going past one orange building for the third time. Going round in circles, I was, slowly; infuriating someone behind me now, who beeped his strident horn and vroomed around my little rental. All right, all right. Ah, there – the inviting and rare opportunity of a vacant diagonal parking space was not to be ignored. Not in Italy. I took it, easily and with some relief.

I found her.

I found her in a little ground floor apartment in a big block of putty-coloured flats with balconies. Not as old or decrepit as I expected.

‘It’s me. It’s Paola, Matilde.’

‘
O cielo!
It is you.’ She made such a fuss of me. It was so heartening to be welcomed so warmly. I placed a bunch of flowers in her arms, and we crushed it between us in a hearty embrace.

‘
Tesorin! Tesoro!
’ She called me her treasure, her little treasure, like she always did, and I thought back to the last time I saw her. It could have been some time after my second series was published, I thought. Too long.

The changes were few – although thinner and greyer, she seemed sprightly, and led me to a little sitting room, where a younger woman sat. ‘This is my niece, she looks after me, now I need looking after!’ She gazed directly at the pale woman in a pink cardigan. ‘Say hello to Paola, Anna – she has come to visit and chat. All the way from Australia. Her mother … ah! Her mother is now with the angels.’

All I could do was nod in agreement and salutation, at once. Matilde took my hand, hooked it under her arm and patted it, like she would do when I was little.

It was a pleasant enough room, and while I was settled into an easy chair, Matilde went to hers, and creaked into an upright position which obviously favoured her back.

‘It’s been many years, Matilde.’

‘Eh? It’s like yesterday, my dear. How easily you slip into the old language with me. You were always clever with languages. I don’t imagine you can speak much Italian in Australia.’

Someone had said she was very deaf, but she seemed to understand everything I said. ‘It all comes back to me.’

‘You have a lovely voice. Very clear. Very sharp. Hear this, Anna?’ She regarded her niece, who was arranging my flowers in a too-small vase. ‘I hear everything she says, everything my Paola says.’  She smiled at me, eyes clear and happy. ‘Now let me tell you why I was not there on the day …’

‘At the funeral.’

‘Yes – you must have wondered. Your mother and I … ha ha! We prepared ourselves, you see. We made plans. We agreed with one another. So we said our goodbyes in our way, our way. We always agreed about things.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘She was lovely. A real lady. A real angel. Given to strange impulses, but lovely, lovely.’

Strange impulses? I did not remember Mama behaving impetuously at all.

‘You see, one needs to be impulsive as a woman. One has to do things quickly, when the time and opportunity present themselves. One must be prepared ... to jump! She understood what she wanted to do, and she did it. Her motto was
festina lente
.’

I had an idea what it meant. ‘Hasten slowly?’

‘You were always a bright girl. Yes. Do you still have your phenomenal memory, eh?’

I had to smile. Phenomenal. ‘I remember things, yes. Matilde – you planned with Mama we should all come to see you.’

‘Eh? Eh?’ She faced me, tilting her head. It meant her hearing was erratic, not always sharp.

I went on. ‘I would have come to see you anyway, you know.’

She rotated her head, and I saw why. It was her left ear. I went round to sit on her right, and she wagged a finger at me. ‘How quick you are, Tesorin. What a treasure you always were. Now, promise me …’

‘Yes.’

Matilde gave a high-pitched laugh and slapped palms on knees. ‘Wonderful! Wonderful – it’s a sign of real generosity. You say
yes
, not ask
what
.’ She beamed again. ‘Be careful to whom you give this delightful generosity.’

‘Matilde – I’m nearly sixty.’

‘You are fifty-eight.’

‘It might be a bit too late for it to matter.’

‘Never. Never too late. It always matters – down to the last five minutes of your life. Your mother had it. She knew it. Her generosity was the clever kind.’

Anna, the busy niece, brought in a tray laid with an embroidered cloth. And yes – there was a plate of
cantuccini
next to the coffee pot and little cups.

‘You still bake.’