The Good Wife (30 page)

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.’

Sally protested. ‘And a person could die of coughing here before they get any sympathy.’

‘Art not paying you enough attention?’

‘Ouch,’ Sally exclaimed. ‘He’s just pinched my butt.’

After the final session at Ember House, I returned home exhausted and filthy. Sacha insisted on making supper. I watched him boil up the pasta and open a bottle of ready-made sauce. ‘Sacha, I want you to know that you’re wonderful.’

He placed a heaped plate in front of me and sat down with his. ‘This looks disgusting.’

I ate a mouthful, then a second. It
was
disgusting, and I was hit by such a longing for Benedetta’s fragrant sauces, for wine, olives and sun, that I almost cried out. Sacha stared at his plate. ‘I wish Mum was here.’ Then he pushed away the plate and cried.

I waited until the storm had died down. ‘It will get better, I promise you.’

‘At least you don’t say, “It’ll be all right.’” His voice was muffled. ‘I couldn’t bear that. It’ll never be all right. It
was awful, horrible. Mum’s story, I mean, and she’s left behind such complicated feelings and muddle.’

This was the closest Sacha would ever come to criticism of his mother, and I loved him all the more for his loyalty. ‘It’s not complicated for her any longer.’

‘No.’ He raised his drenched face. ‘But I feel… as though she didn’t love me enough to stick around.’

‘Oh, Sacha…’ I got up and put my arms round him. His hair was wild and – so unlike him – in need of a wash. I kissed his wet cheek. ‘Meg loved you better than she loved herself.’

Sacha thought about it, then asked, ‘Is life so exhausting all the time?’

I shook my head. ‘Not all the time. You’ll have moments of great joy, I promise. And contentment. And pleasure in small things.’

He ducked his head. ‘I wish.’

‘But you have to make up your mind to look for the moments.’

‘You think?’

I said, as steadily as I could, ‘It’s taken me a bit of time, but I do think.’

‘Fanny, you’re not going to leave Will, are you?’ He stumbled over the words.

Shocked, I stared at him. ‘What makes you ask that?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t think I could bear it if you did. And it would kill Chloë.’

‘
Chloë?
’

‘She said as much to me.’

*

Sacha left to go up north before I attempted to do anything with Meg’s things. Before he left, he gave me permission. ‘Please… please will you do it? I trust you.’

Meg’s bedroom smelt unused and stagnant, but the mess was as if she had walked out just a few seconds ago. Not surprisingly, her presence felt stronger here than anywhere else. I picked up a scarf from the floor, bright pink silk, one of her favourites. Traces of her scent lingered on the fabric – and I sat down, abruptly, on the bed. We had been so mixed up, Meg and I, so entwined. She had been part of me: the dark, tangled side but something else, too.

I pleated the expensive silk this way and that.

The door to Meg’s cupboard was partially open, revealing her clothes bunched up like anxious spectators. A photograph of Sacha in his leather jacket grinned down at the empty bed. A book lay on the bedside table and I picked it up: self-help psychology, with a message that to feel the fear was to defuse it. A postcard marked Meg’s place. It was from Chloë in Australia. ‘It’s cool,’ she wrote. ‘Hope you’re well. Looking forward to seeing you.’

I longed for my daughter. For her mess, her occasional rudeness, the glimpses I caught of Chloë’s private, interesting inner life. Her ‘Oh, Mum, you’re so sad.’ I hated to think of her so far away and, no doubt, feeling left out of the family business.

Sacha had owned up to the mess and muddle of his own feelings and I should do so too. When it came to Meg, mine were as painful and as disturbing as his. They always would be. Yet, I must do my best not to remember her in a negative way. Nor should I for, in her own way,
Meg had struggled so hard not to allow the negative to overwhelm her.

Her room transformed – clean, aired, sterile – I twitched back the curtain and said aloud, ‘I’ll miss you, Meg. Do you believe that?’

I was folding up her favourite cotton blouse, ready for the charity pile, when Will walked unexpectedly into the kitchen. He was dressed in his dark grey suit and immaculately polished shoes and he was carrying – of course – the red box.

‘Fanny, the election is on. It’s battle stations.’ I tucked the blouse into a bag and spread tissue paper on top. ‘Can I count on you?’ He dumped the box on the table, moved too abruptly and knocked over a carrier-bag with a clunk. ‘What on earth…?’

‘Her lifeline bottle. She always kept one.’

When everything had been sorted and stowed, Will suggested a walk.

It was fresh up on the ridge and a breeze shook the leaves in the trees, like impatient strokes of a hairbrush. Rabbit spoor peppered the rough grass on the slope and, under the beeches, there was a faint imprint of deer tracks. We traversed the ridge and dropped down alongside the hedgerow, which still bore the scars of a recent swiping. Tucked under the blackthorn was the tiny body of a fledgling. It had been dead for a long time, and had dried and stretched almost out of shape.

Will walked on ahead and I watched him.

I was trying to puzzle out what, in the end, I was doing here, with Will.

Then I remembered.

‘Mama…’ whined three-year-old Chloë, during the sermon of one of the innumerable church services we had had to attend, ‘Mama… I was tired, so tired that I felt almost dead. Will swooped down, picked up his troublesome daughter and held her close. Enchanted, Chloe ran her tiny hands over his face, exploring every plane, every angle of his chin and poked at his eyes. And Will, gazing with pure love on his fair-haired, minxy daughter with an expression that was as far removed from ambition and striving as it was possible to be, let her do so
.

That was
what it was about.

Will waited for me to catch up. ‘You will be able to spare time to climb on the batde bus,’ he asked anxiously.

There was an edge to his tone – a reprise of the doubting Will of the Casa Rosa – and I knew, for certain, that they were all frightened that they would lose.

‘I can manage without you,’ he said. ‘But I’d rather not.’

‘That’s something, after all these years.’ I would have liked to have raised a smile, at least, if not a laugh. ‘It’s that bad?’

His reply was dragged out of him. ‘It’s that bad.’

I braced myself mentally. ‘I’d better get going then, hadn’t I?’

The tea-and-cake session for the party workers was, of course, well attended. There was nothing like an election for galvanizing the sheep and the goats, the supporters and the detractors, even if the press had already rushed to print its doubts about the party.

Mannochie came over. ‘Glad to see you back.’