Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
The kitchen was tiny, the architect had followed instructions to be economical, and it was cluttered with religious pictures, church magazines, papers, tomatoes piled on plates, some with skins hardening and splitting from a scale disease. A Formica-topped table occupied most of the space but we squeezed round it and ate Benedetta’s famed
spaghetti con verdura
and veal fried with sage in butter.
The valley was changing, they told me. For one thing, the olives were now big business and everyone was hurrying to put in for subsidies. For another, the English had invaded, snapping up the older, more picturesque houses. ‘No matter,’ said Silvio, whose son was working on a conversion of a big house on the Rome road. ‘The English have the problems and pay the bills. We have the jobs.’
I told them I planned to walk up on the hills in the early
morning. Signora Berto looked alarmed. ‘Be sure to wrap up warmly,’ she said. ‘You might catch a cold.’
The temperature in the kitchen must have been twenty-six degrees Celsius at least. I tried to catch Benedetta’s eye, but she was agreeing with her sister-in-law. ‘You can borrow my scarf.’ She patted my arm. ‘Tomorrow you will drive me around and I will show you everything.’
Benedetta was as good as her word. Talking non-stop, she piloted me around the village. I was shown the church, the piazza with its colonnade and fountain, and the ancient tethering stone where the merchant trains used to halt. Benedetta introduced me to the shop, which sold rosaries and prayer cards, the mini-supermarket, which operated from the ground floor of the bell tower, which was stocked with local olive oil, tubes of garlic pesto, dried tomatoes and out-of-date boxes of Baci chocolates, and the delicatessen, which sold bottled artichoke hearts and a mortadella sausage the size of a side-plate.
Afterwards we drove along the valley in bright, hot sun. ‘There,’ Benedetta said eventually, as I nosed the car between an avenue of chestnuts. ‘There is the
fattoria where
your father’s family used to live.’
‘Oh,’ I said, which was all I could manage.
The heat slapped at my flesh as I got out of the car. ‘The
fattoria
was old, very old,’ my father told me, ‘and the brick was the softest colour you can imagine. Surrounding the house was a garden with a statue and a box maze. I thought it the most beautiful place on earth.’
So what was this ill-proportioned, mean-spirited building? Grimy net-curtain tongues hung out of the
windows; there was no garden, and the outbuildings were of the same prefabricated material.
‘Did your father not tell you, Fanny, that the old house was destroyed in the war?’
‘No, he didn’t.’
I circled the house. The sun reddened the skin on my arms while I considered the crude, blind execution. This was not the ancestral home of the Battistas but a substitute after war had done its worst. That was the best that could be said – this attempt to put a face, any face, on the violence and disorder.
I retraced my steps and my eye was caught by traces of a stone arch that had been incorporated into the concrete wall. A beautiful, graceful reminder of what had been lost.
Benedetta did her best to shore up my disappointment. ‘The bombardment was very bad.’
‘Who lives there, now?’
‘Strangers.’ Her tone was hostile. After the war, they came up from the south. We don’t know them very well.’
‘That was over
fifty
years ago, Benedetta.’ I started up the engine and headed back to the village. After a while, I asked, ‘Benedetta… do you think it would be possible to stay on at Casa Rosa?’
Benedetta’s face creased into a big smile. ‘Of course. We make the telephone calls now.’
When I discussed my decision with Meg to stay on in Fiertino for the rest of the month, she was her usual frank self. ‘It’s not like you to desert your post, Fanny. Will is quite upset.’
‘He’d better talk to me, then.’
‘I’m sure he will. I’m just repeating what he said. It’s been tricky for him. He got blasted in the press for refusing to appear on
Newsnight
. Accusations of cowardice, et cetera.’
‘Poor Will. I didn’t know. But he’ll survive. It’s the silly season, and everyone will be on holiday.’
‘I can’t imagine what’s keeping you out there that’s so important.’
A house,’ I confessed, savouring my rush of pleasure. ‘It’s called Casa Rosa.’
A house? I’ve never heard you express interest in a house before. If you had said
wine
, I would have understood. What’s this house got that’s so marvellous?’
‘It has rooms,’ I wanted to say, ‘beautiful rooms, each requiring contemplation, my utmost attention, the seriousness of rapt observation.’
Meg signed off with ‘I suppose I’ll have to stand in for you.’
Will was not happy. He rang as I was preparing to walk down to the village square to eat, on Benedetta’s recommendation, at Angelo’s café.
I tried to explain to him that I had fallen in love with the Casa Rosa and tried to point out – gently – that some time off would be good, perhaps for both of us.
‘You’re probably right,’ he conceded, ‘but… Fanny… is there something I don’t know, something we should talk about?’
‘I’m sorry. I know it will be a bit inconvenient.’
‘I don’t really get it.’
‘Try.’
‘Why now? You can go back any time.’
I felt as though we were at opposite ends of a large room, straining to make ourselves heard, but I was not going to move.
‘What’s this house got that’s so marvellous?’
‘I’ll bring you back photos and show you.’
‘I’ve checked with Mannochie. There are a couple of things that you really should be at.’
‘Does Mannochie ever give up? Get Meg to stand in for me. She would like that.’
He sounded doubtful. ‘It’s not ideal.’
‘It’s the first time, Will.’
There was an uneasy silence. ‘Fanny, am I losing you?’
Then I felt guilty, and guilt generally succeeded in making me lose my temper. ‘Will,’ I hissed down the phone, ‘I have looked after Chloë, run your house and… put up with Meg. I have smiled my way through endless charity functions, thousands of suppers, teas, meetings, and endless bloody surgeries. I gave up a job I loved to do so, not to mention my time, my weekends, and great chunks of my life. All I’m asking for is a few weeks off-duty. My father has died and I want to think about him. I
need
to think about him. I am tired and sad. I am missing our daughter.’ I might have added,
‘I am lost.’
I heard the snap of the cigarette lighter. ‘I didn’t know you felt like that.’
‘Well, you do now’
When I was fourteen, the dentist had removed the braces from my teeth. For years, it seemed, my mouth had been weighed down with metal and every day the sharp edges had nagged another area of tender gum into an ulcer.
Smiling had been painful and never for one minute did I forget that I was ugly and awkward. The moment of release from their torture was to experience a miraculous airborne quality in my mouth.
I put down the phone, only to relive that miraculous airborne quality of pure release.
Of course I was sad, but the sadness was twisted into other strands – and to feel sadness was a part of being intensely alive. I sat on the stairs in the Casa Rosa and propped up my chin in my hands. How often do we have time to seek out our secret selves and bring them into the light? To examine and say, with delighted recognition, so this is what I am? This is what I might be? This is where I will go?
I had brought my wine books and embarked on a programme of study. I immersed myself in local history. I read about Punic wars, and of the chestnut woods which had supplied the timber for Roman galleys. Of Popes passing through, of civil wars, and of the pilgrim road – the
via francigena
– which connected Fiertino with the whole of Europe.
In the cool of the early morning, I walked the hills until I knew that Benedetta would be waiting to give me breakfast. In the evenings, I strolled along the road still pulsing with the day’s heat, with the cicadas at full cry, and ate at Angelo’s in the piazza.
By degrees, I explored the town, plunging into the noise-filled network of streets and houses where past and present muddled agreeably along side by side. In the church, modern stained glass sat uncomfortably in the fifteenth-century stonework and I went over to look at the frescos
on the north wall, which were famous, and squabbled over pleasurably by art historians.
But if I had expected the glowing, gentle Christ of Bellini, or a massively reassuring Masaccio Divinity, I could not have been more wrong. The paintings depicted the erring human at the mercy of violent passions. A cauldron boiled a rich man and his wife. A stern angel speared a man in an obvious state of lust. Naked, screaming women clustered in the foreground. The corpses of children and babies were strewn upon the earth. A second angel bore down, sword in hand, upon a fleeing priest. Behind the scenes of retribution, this landscape of terror, an unforgiving desert stretched into infinity.
A notice on the wall informed the reader that the frescos, painted at the time of a plague visitation, ‘depict God’s displeasure for man’s eternal state of sin’.
Definitely not a God of love, then.
I went out into the sunlight, in no hurry to return.
Thirstily, I absorbed the shapes and nuances of this landscape. It was strange to me but, yet, it took only a trick of light, a glimpse of a building out of the corner of my eye, a snatch of a song, and a shutter in my mind folded back… and I was in bed at Ember House, slipping deeper into sleep folding over me to the sound of my father’s voice.
In the old days, Benedetta told me, the women beat their washing on the flat stone by the bridge. On St Anthony’s day, the men brought in hay to church and asked the statue of the saint to make their crops yield and the perpetual Tuscan rose,
le rose d’ogni mese
, flourished unimpeded everywhere. ‘It’s not like that now,’ she said. ‘Obviously’
Up in the churchyard, surrounded by the cypresses, lay generations of the Battista family, my family. They had names like Giovanni, Maria-Theresa, Carolina, Bruno, and I wrote them down in my notebook.
The week slipped by.
One morning I sat down to rest on the slope above Casa Rosa. The sun made me drowsy. I closed my eyes. From somewhere I could hear my father.
Once upon a time, there was a family who lived in a bigfarmhouse
.
I opened my eyes. For the first time, I noticed a line of pylons which marched through the farms and fanned out across the valley, then on into the distance. The heat haze shimmered above the house, giving it a trembling, insubstantial quality. I was afraid that, if I reached out to touch it, it would disappear.
It was going to be another scorching day.
I rubbed a sprig of thyme between my fingers, and sniffed, I saw a car drive slowly along the road and come to a halt outside Casa Rosa.
17
When I gave birth to Chloë, Elaine gave me her old baby clothes. A good quantity, to start me off, she said. They were a little worn, and stiffened from constant washing. The hem of one tiny dress needed mending, a button from a pair of dungarees was missing. But I loved that testimony to their previous life. In giving them, Elaine had welcomed me into the domestic pilgrim train. In time, I passed them on again.
It struck me then that, one way or another, the past has a way of keeping pace. Or, rather, it kept its hooks pretty firmly dug into the present.
Raoul, presenting himself at my front door, was definitely from the past. He did not offer any detailed explanations, saying only that he and Thérèse had been house hunting in Rome, Thérèse had returned to France and he had stayed on. ‘So here I am, Fanny.’
He had changed very little over the years, except to become – naturally – more assured; he fitted, as the French say, into his skin. He had always dressed well and taken care of his appearance, but never at the cost of the important things.
‘I’m so pleased to see you.’ I kissed him on the cheek.
‘I’m taking you to lunch,’ he said. ‘We are eating in a hotel owned by a friend of mine.’
We drove north towards Montepulciano. Raoul talked
knowledgeably about the wine, its history, and, more importantly, its future. The hotel was a modest house tucked away in the village of Chianciano. ‘Don’t be fooled by the paper tablecloths,’ Raoul said, as we were ushered into a room filled with diners. ‘This place is a local legend.’
We fussed pleasurably over the menu but there was no debate about the choice of wine. We ordered a Prosecco with the rocket salad and plumped for a 1993 ruby Brunello di Montalcino to accompany our onion tart. It was complex and almost flawless. ‘The fruit of a perfectionist,’ I said, after the first mouthful.
‘But of course,’ Raoul said. ‘He dares everything; waits until the very last moment of ripeness before harvesting.’
Noses in our wine glasses, we paused. I breathed in summer and fruit, sun and mist – a voluptuous, lazy exchange – and searched for the words with which to describe it precisely.
There was a familiar concern in Raoul’s eye. ‘You haven’t lost your zest for the business.’
I shook my head and grinned. ‘I’m my father’s daughter.’
‘Who can predict what man and the elements can rustle up between them?’ he said. ‘Magic. And who could resist it?’
I put down my glass. ‘Sometimes it’s not the magic we seek,’ I said.
He gave the smallest of frowns.
‘Sometimes, I suppose, it is change. Diversion. A different way of looking at things.’ I found myself telling him about Meg, and some of the more difficult moments at Stanwinton. The sun, the wine were loosening my
tongue and it was not unpleasant. ‘She once said she hated me for knowing when to stop…’
‘Lucky you. Knowing when to stop is one of the secrets of survival, Fanny. And knowing when not to. Speaking of which, tell me about Battista’s Fine Wines? What are your plans?’
‘I haven’t talked to Will yet. Dad’s assistant is holding the fort for the time being, but when I get back…’ I looked across at Raoul. ‘I couldn’t let his business go.’