A Funeral in Fiesole (5 page)

‘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.’

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 would 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, and 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.

Such hope in numbers, people placed, several times a week. I never believed in luck, and neither did John, I had thought. Yet here was evidence he had bought at least one, and disappointed with the outcome, had balled the offending thing and chucked it to the bottom of his wardrobe. An act of frustration I had never seen him commit, and yet, here it was.

It stayed on my dressing table for two days; physical proof of how we never truly get to know someone, even if we lie next to them each night, and rise with them in the morning. How we discover – sometimes too late – an aspect of a person we were too blind or too blasé to notice. So John did believe in luck; did believe he could change his life with money. When money didn’t come to facilitate change, he ran off anyway. Such was the level of his disappointment with our life together.

I looked and looked at a framed photo of us, taken a short time into our marriage, all those years ago, searching his face and seeing it very nearly unchanged. Or so I thought. John was like Brod – a bit of grey in his hair, a couple of greys in his eyebrows, which was a source of jokes, a couple of lines on his forehead, and it was about all. Both boyish, both with smiles in their eyes, which hid true feelings. One had to wonder whether they were ever touched deeply by anything.

It was startling to note the similarities in my brother and husband, and how they were so real. Was it why I was attracted to John in the first place – that he had the same eternally youthful Peter Pan appearance?

Those young aspects were accompanied by behaviours equally juvenile; buying a lotto ticket and throwing it to the bottom of his wardrobe when his dreams did not come true. It showed me he had dreams outside our marriage, which I was surprised at because they did not match mine. Because they did not include me.

Humiliation and disappointment – some of the most affecting emotions in life – were conceivably what prompted me to gaze at the revealing ticket longer than I should have. Only to see the draw date was not months or weeks ago, but the previous day. The day Nigel said Mama died. When John was well on his way to Brisbane, to take his leave of a marriage without notice.

I tucked it into my handbag, and only remembered at the time of booking my flights to Florence it was there. Checking it at the newsagent’s – even if only to make sure I had the date right – was only a reflexive thing. I went about my errands like an automaton, remembering to buy John his reflux medicine at the chemist’s. Oh. Oh – I stopped just in time. He would have to get his own from now on. I pulled myself out of auto-pilot and had a quick coffee at a mall café I had never before sat at, determined to start changing things. The sad, miserable, futile determination of a woman on the far side of fifty.