Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
Will’s knuckles whitened. ‘I’m a bit nervous,’ he confessed.
Now I was in charge. ‘Just don’t pretend to know about wine, that’s all.’
He grinned. ‘Political suicide.’
Father was waiting for us in the sitting room with Caro, his mistress of ten years. After she had come into his life, which had been the cue for a thunderous-browed, red-eyed Benedetta to pack her bags and return to Fiertino, the interior of the house took a turn for the better. Caro had given it a more settled touch: a cushion, the repositioning of a chair, a pot of white hyacinths in spring, a lamp that
cast a subtler light. They were only minor changes, but so effective.
‘I hope you don’t mind?’ Caro had asked, when she first arrived. I was thirteen, almost feral in my dislike – my terror at how things could change overnight. And I was in mourning for Benedetta. Caro had laughed and flipped back her hair, which had been long and naturally blonde then. She was so sure of her position as the woman likely to marry my father that she was careless of my reply.
Five years or so later, when we had become friends and Caro was no nearer her goal, she turned to me and said bitterly, ‘Alfredo never notices what I do.’
I saw myself reflected in her large, pleading eyes and I was angry with my father, sick at the thought that I had made her unhappy in the past. ‘You know my feelings on the subject,’ he had said, with his guarded look when I tackled him.
‘This is Will.’ I led him up to my father, who was standing in front of the fire.
‘Ah,’ he said, in his driest fashion, and my father could be very dry – my heart sank, ‘the politician.’
In reply, Will could have said – might well have said, ‘Ah,’ the self-made man,’ which would have described my father perfectly, but his polite rejoinder managed to include Caro, who was sitting on the sofa. It was, I had noticed, a trick he had:
bring everyone in
.
At dinner, we drank a sauvignon blanc from Lawson’s Dry Hill in New Zealand. Will barely touched his, prompting a slight frown to appear on my father’s face. We had coffee in the sitting room. Caro returned to her
seat on the sofa and I sat beside her. My father took up his stance by the fire. ‘The papers are not very flattering about your party. They consider you a wily lot.’
Will brightened. ‘That makes for the best battle,’ he said, at home on this territory. ‘In the end the voters will see that we have the right policies.’
‘Really,’ said my father. He looked up at me. ‘I never knew you were interested in politics, Francesca.’
‘I am now,’ I said.
The fire flickered. I heard Caro’s cup rattle back into the saucer. I was so proud of Will that I almost wept. Instead I took refuge in the practical: I reached for the coffee-pot and refilled the cups. As I bent over my task, I asked myself why I had been singled out by the gods to be blessed in this way. Why had I, Fanny Battista, been lucky enough to find my other half?
Will came over to stand by me and held out his hand. ‘Fanny?’
I took it and sprang to my feet. Will turned to my father. ‘We would like to tell you something. Fanny and I have decided to get married.’
My father rocked back on his feet, as if he had been dealt a blow. He looked at me and I knew that I had hurt him by not letting him into my confidence.
‘We decided last night,’ I explained.
‘It’s too quick,’ said my father. ‘You barely know each other.’
Will slid his arm around me. ‘Swift, but sure.’
Will sneaked into my bed in the small hours and I spent a wakeful night. It was still early when I decided to get up. I slid out of bed, leaving Will folded on to one side, one
hand flung out. Foolishly, lovingly, I bent over and checked his breathing.
On the way down to the kitchen, I had to pass Caro’s bedroom, which was opposite my father’s. The door was open, the light on, and I put my head in to ask if she wanted some tea.
Clothes were littered over the bed and Caro was packing. We stared at each other. I, rumpled and sated, she beautifully dressed but desolate.
‘Why are you packing?’ I closed the door behind me.
Caro picked up a green jumper and folded it. ‘Fanny, the one good thing in this mess has been our friendship. That has been…’ She blinked back tears. ‘It helped. Otherwise…’ she shrugged helplessly ‘…it has been a waste of my time.’
I removed a pile of shirts from the bed and sat down. ‘Why now?’
She fiddled with the jumper. ‘Put it this way. You’re getting married and I’m not. I know it’s stupid to worry about a piece of paper, but I do. A lot of people do. That’s the trouble with being pretty ordinary.’
I snatched the jumper away from her and pleated it between my fingers. The material was soft and expensive. ‘Caro, you’ve been together for such a long time.’
She raised an anguished gaze to me. ‘All good things come to an end.’
‘Would you like me to talk to him?’
She shook her head. ‘No point.’
‘But you’ve been happy. I know you have.’
‘Let’s see…’ she ticked off the points. ‘Your father is kind enough to allocate me a very nice bedroom and a
place at the table. I can order groceries and ask Jane to hoover the carpets. But that is it, Fanny.’ She repossessed the jumper. ‘You won’t understand yet, but it is not enough to look decorative when your father entertains. I want a real, live, working partnership. So…’ She got up and packed the green jumper. ‘I am drawing a line under the last ten years. I am relying on you to tell him.’
‘But
you
must tell him.’
At that, she sparked with anger. ‘No, you can give him chapter and verse.’ She wrenched one of her suitcases shut. ‘What’s more, I am giving you your most useful wedding present.’
I had no idea what she meant.
With a foot, she nudged the suitcase towards the door. ‘I’m showing you how to leave, Fanny. It’s a good lesson.’
On honeymoon in the Loire valley only six months after our first meeting, Will laid his head on my breast and said, ‘Your heartbeat is louder than a drum.’
‘And how many heartbeats have you listened to this closely?’
‘Very few’ He smiled. ‘Promise. Apart from my own, of course.’
‘That’s good,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I don’t want to have shared you with too many.’ I luxuriated in the feeling and the smell of him on my skin. ‘Do you think our heartbeats match?’
‘Of course.’ He wrapped his arms tighter around me and said he had known they would as soon as he spotted me. ‘Five seconds is all it took. All right, perhaps
ten.
.’
‘I saw you first.’ I kissed the damp, faintly salty hollow of his neck.
‘Hussy,’ he said and made me lie still, and I looked up into the dark eyes and saw a life ahead filled with possibilities, and thought how lucky I was.
On the third day of our honeymoon, we had lunch in one of those plush, well-manicured but sleepy villages by the Loire. It was hot for early June and the heat shimmered off the stone streets. The big, sleepy, shiny river murmured beneath the clatter of cutlery and chink of glasses.
Will did not eat much. Eventually, he dug into his pocket for his cigarettes. Officially he was a non-smoker, and would never do so in public – except in France, which was ‘different’. In fact, he was very fond of white-filtered American cigarettes and it made me smile then that a testament of our intimacy was having smoke blown in my face.
I fussed with the waiter over the wine – I had never rated the Chinon red which colonized most of the list. Will watched me and then said, ‘I love seeing you with your wine. You know such a lot, and you know exactly what you want. You’re your father’s daughter.’
We had agreed that if Will was elected to Parliament then he would give up the law and I would continue to work with Dad at Battista Fine Wines. The finances seemed to work, at least on paper, and I was looking forward to trips to Australia and America with my father.
The waiter poured out the wine – a raspberry red, which looked pretty enough.
‘I love you, Mrs Savage.’ Each time Will said that to me, and he did so often, it was as if he had only just thought
of the idea which made it the most delicious, the most delightful, the most necessary thing in the world for me to hear.
I turned away and gazed at the river. I did not know Will very well yet. Yet I knew beyond any doubt that our marriage was right. This absolute certainty made me feel both old and tremblingly young.
‘Will you think about going to the Val del Fiertino with me sometime, to see where my family came from?’
He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more.’ His expression clouded for a moment. ‘I don’t have much family, except Meg and Sacha, of course.’ He brightened. ‘I’m looking forward to adopting yours.’
I caught the echoes of his past distress. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
He lit a second cigarette. ‘My grandparents were too old and bewildered by what happened to really get a grip on things. They blamed themselves for letting my mother marry my father, and blamed themselves even more when she began to drink too. I’m glad they never knew about Meg’
This was delicate territory, and one we had not yet fully explored. ‘When did Meg…?’
‘I don’t know. She kept it secret. I never smelt it on her. I never suspected. It probably wasn’t a problem until she married Rob. Just a drink at the end of the day. But I was busy with other things, school, exams, the desire to get away. I’m ashamed to say it, but I didn’t think much about Meg. She was just there. It was only afterwards that I realized how much she’d done for me; and what it had done to her.’
I remember… what exactly? A tiny ripple of unease; the merest suggestion of a shadow, to dull the vivid quality of our companionship. The glasses on the table, the sun on the white stones, river sounds… us, together… all this happiness, and yet?
‘Will,’ I said, and the breath caught in my throat, ‘we must never turn into Pa and Ma Kettle.’
He grinned. ‘Do we look like Pa and Ma Kettle?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I’ve just had a thought.’
‘What sort of thought?’
‘It involves going back to the hotel… now.’
But, when we got there, there was a message waiting for him. Will read it and then he put his arms around me and said excitedly. ‘Mrs Savage, we have to pack. The election is on July the fourteenth and there’s no time to waste. Not even a day, not a minute. If we drive fast we can be home by midnight.’
In our room, I looked down at a pile of unsent postcards on the table under the window. Virgin postcards of pretty French villages and sleepy French rivers. ‘I haven’t even written these,’ I said.
He snatched them up. ‘You can write them in the car.’
I sat down on the bed. I thought I had prepared myself very carefully for a moment like this. I had known that if I married Will I would be called on to make these kind of sacrifices. But disappointment made me temporarily speechless.
He took on board my stricken expression and his own grew anxious. ‘Fanny… I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but this means everything… well, not everything
exactly.
You
mean everything to me, of course… but we have worked for this moment. You do see that?’
He looked so anxious, so determined, so serious, that I could not protest. How could I possibly make a fuss on this most important occasion of Will’s life? When all was said and done, what was a honeymoon? Not vital, compared to what Will was setting out to do – which, to put it at its simplest and boldest, was to solve the problems of the nation.
‘Fifty-fifty deal,’ he said. ‘I promise, the first moment we can, we’ll have a second honeymoon.’
More than anything, I wanted Will to be happy. I held his hand and agreed: ‘Fifty-fifty.’
Before we left the hotel, I sat down and wrote on one of the postcards: ‘Dear Fanny, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. Love, Fanny’ When we checked out, I asked the concierge for a stamp and dropped it into the post box in the lobby.
On the drive north, Will jiggled frantically with the car radio. Once he insisted that we stop at a motorway service station and leapt out to phone Mannochie. I watched him from the car. He placed his free hand on the glass, and leant against it, leaving a cloudy imprint. After a moment or two, he took it away and wrapped his arm across his stomach.
That little display of nerves affected me more than I could say, and I was shaken by just how precious he was to me, and by how important it was that he achieved what he wanted.
5
Meg asked, as a special favour, if she could fetch Chloë from school on the day of her final exam. Chloë burst through the kitchen door. ‘Mum – ? They’re over. Finished.’ She was pale, shaking and elated.
I wrapped my arms round her and held her tight. Then I led her upstairs, made her take a bath and fetched her a mug of tea.
Face turning pink in the steam, she slumped back in the water. ‘My nice mummy.’ She was silent for a minute. ‘I can’t do anything. I can’t move. I can’t think.’
It was cold for the end of June and I put the towel to warm on the rail. ‘Shall I wash your hair?’
The shape of her skull was so familiar, so beloved. The shampoo made the strands feel curiously wiry. Very carefully, I rubbed and rinsed, wiped teardrops of foam away from her eyes.
‘Now my life begins, Mum,’ she said, as I towelled her dry the way I used to when she was tiny, unformed, still all mine. ‘How about that?’
When I woke a few days later, I put out my hand. If Will was there, my fingers encountered a warm back, the curve of his shoulder. It was an early-morning memorandum to myself: a reminder to be kind to one another, which I too often neglected.
Today, Will’s side of the bed felt particularly empty and cold.
I got up, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, drew back the curtains and watched as a summer day shook itself damply into life. It was a moment or two before I noticed the two figures walking down the road. They moved slowly, dreamily, seemingly transfixed by each other.
Chloë stopped by the laurel hedge and I could see there was nothing childlike about her any more. Sacha bent over and whispered in her ear. She replied and turned to him, her arms snaking up round his neck. Sacha threw back his head and laughed. I had not seen or heard him laugh for a long time.