The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

16

‘Poor you,’ said Meg.

I had rung to report my arrival and thrown in a few details about the state of the house. There was no point in explaining to Meg that the state of the house was the point. Its quasi-dereliction and the suggestion of redemption suited my mood. No point telling Meg that Casa Rosa was the perfect outward setting for the curious inner landscape in which I found myself.

Anyway, there is nothing quite like running away. No points out of ten for this Girl Guide. Not a trouper. But I did not care. I tossed and turned in a strange bed, and yet I was perfectly, gloriously happy. Later, a hard, unEnglish light from the unshuttered window nudged me awake just after dawn and I uttered aloud into the cool air: ‘Yes.’

‘Chloë rang,’ Meg informed me, finally. ‘She’d forgotten you’d done a runner. We talked and she’s fine. Sacha had a long talk with her, too. Actually, Sacha’s thinking of joining her for a while.’ When I failed to rise to the bait, Meg plunged in the needle, as only she knew how. ‘You know, Fanny, there was no need to hide the left-over bottles of wine from your lunch with Elaine. It just shows you don’t trust me an inch.’

Weeping Eros might have goaded me into building a city, but when it came to the question of Meg, I suspected I had never got past digging out the foundations. I glanced up. Through the doorway into the sitting room, light and sun pooled across the floor, and I thought, I am here and she is there.

‘Enjoy yourself, Fanny,’ she said, an admonition designed to make me feel worse.

I kept my eyes fixed on the sun and the light.

The phone was tucked into a niche by the front door, surrounded by an audience of dead insects. I brushed them on to the floor and rang Will. Our initial conversation was strained and difficult. Will was hurt by the manner in which I had shaken him off, and I was sorry – but not sorry enough to lie. ‘I love it here,’ I told him, but failed to add, ‘I wish you were here.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of.’ He sounded distracted and uncharacteristically low. ‘Fanny, I’ve been asked on to Newsnight to talk about future plans. I’m in two minds. What do you think?’

‘Any news on progress?’

‘The wheels grind on. The car lobby is raging out of control. So, it’s a case of I’m damned if I do appear and damned if I don’t.’

We reflected on this for a second or two.

‘The balance has shifted, as it does. I have an awful feeling that this one is going… pear shaped.’

My body was irradiated with warmth, right down to the tips of my varnished toes, and Will’s distress was powerless to touch me. I felt almost insane with the novelty of stepping back. Should I tell the truth and say, ‘Will, I’m off the case’, and confess a great, burdensome distaste for the ins and outs, the double-dealing and the stratagems, the straitjacket of politics into which Will and I had been laced?

‘Be honest,’ Will begged. ‘Tell me what you think I should do.’

I wheeled out the old tactics. ‘What’s happened to the man who said that a project should be fought over because it meant it had been tried and tested?’

‘Perhaps I’m tired. Perhaps I’ve had enough.’

I wasn’t fooled. Will’s doubts and fear might be black, but he hadn’t given up. He was still in there, sharp on the scent. ‘Don’t go on the programme,’ I said. ‘You’ll be a hostage to fortune.’

‘You think that’s best?’

‘I do,’ I said – guiltily, for I did not care what he did.

Because I had neglected to close the shutters, the sun drove past the defences of the house and invaded, throwing a nimbus of light into the corner, a pretty crescent on the bottom stair, a diffuse, painterly wash at the top of the flight. Light-headed and dazzled by its splendour and novelty, I hurried round to close them and the interior was instantly shrouded.

The outer walls of Casa Rosa were built of thick stone. A beautifully cool passage, with doors opening off it, ran from front to back. I kicked off my sandals and, leaving damp imprints on the cotto, padded into the long sitting room, which I was convinced held faint traces of herbs and sandalwood. The windows gave on to a view that swept across the valley to the ridge of hills in the far distance.

The sunlight fractured into different colours and depths on the walls and spilled on to the floor. A couple of faded and disgusting armchairs stood at either side of the fireplace. No doubt the impoverished English couple had sat here and mulled over their plans – Let’s take the wall down here, replaster there, can we afford central heating? I felt pity for them too – in fact, I felt pity for anyone who had not had the luck to be in this house, in this country.

The fireplace was splattered with ash and cigarette ends, and on the shelf above there was an arrangement of dried flowers in a jam jar. I touched one, and brittle petals fell to the floor. I picked the jar up, padded out to the rubbish bin and dumped it. Then I found a dustpan and brush roosting in the back of the cupboard and swept up the ash and butts.

In the kitchen, the whitewash on the walls was stained and, in places, rubbed down to the original limewash. Grease rimed the ceiling beams, which had turned black. Bunches of dried herbs had been hooked on to them – a small offering to the kitchen god.

I dragged up a chair and took them down, which made the kitchen look naked. Arms folded, I stood back and took stock. How was it possible that, having escaped from all I resented, I desired nothing so much here as to assemble paints and an army of astringent cleaning tools? Byron wrote, ‘I regained my freedom with a sigh,’ and I thought he had been talking rubbish. Yet if this were my kitchen, I would love it so tenderly. I would make it glow with white and yellow, and the table would shimmer, bleached and virgin, under fresh herbs hanging from the beams, while blue and white plates sat on clean shelves.

On cold evenings, it would certainly be the place to make Benedetta’s mushroom risotto, and lash it into perfection with Parmesan and butter. On hot ones, when the sun had slithered down the horizon and the air panted with aromas of herbs and plants, it would be clever and cooling to rustle up grilled chicken and lemon, garnished with fresh basil, and take it out to the loggia to eat. I knew the place, too, where Mrs Scott’s beaded cover would do its job: on a jug of fresh lemonade.

Upstairs, I would make up the beds with old, thick linen sheets, polish the floorboards with beeswax and tuck sachets of lavender into the cupboard – as the women who lived here must have done when Casa Rosa’s fortunes were high and it sheltered a family.

In spring, no doubt, the shutters had been thrown open and the vegetable plot behind the outhouse planted with chard, spinach and potatoes. On cold days, a fire warmed the room with huge windows, but I dare say the family would have longed unsentimentally for central heating.

I would burnish and polish each room in Casa Rosa. Each would hold a special trove of things – books, a table, a picture. Each would have its smell, its different function. Each had its window that looked down on the landscape, whose intimacies would only be gradually revealed.

The loggia ran along the back of the house, and a wooden colonnade created a shaded area where it would be possible to sit for the whole day. I dragged a chair into it and sat down. The aspect faced away from the village and, apart from a large concrete building, the olive store, at the crook of the valley, and the road, which dropped over the furthest hill, it looked over an unimpeded sweep.

Sweat pooled at the base of my spine and soaked the back of my thighs. An ant ran over my big toe. The heat shimmered above the road, above the vines, above the hill. I felt warmth flow into my bones, fill my veins, irradiate me. I raised a finger and flicked it against the arm of the chair and told myself that that was all the movement I needed to make.

Forget that I was sensible and organized, forget that my life was arranged on practical lines. Forget the brown leather diary, the lists, the precooked meals stockpiled in the freezer, the clutch of sanitized topics I deployed at official dinners. Who was I now, this girl… no, woman, who smelt faintly of sweat? Fresh-sloughed of dull skin that had grown over me, still grieving – my father should be here – but filled, too, with a new and greedy curiosity and impatience.

Benedetta’s bungalow was squeezed alongside ten others on the slope above the bridge at the southern quarter of Fiertino. There was no garden, just a rectangular plot that contained a row of tomatoes, which had been trained up bamboo stakes, a couple of olive trees and a plastic oil-storage tank. The houses, Benedetta said, had been built on the site of the old school, which, like so much in the valley, had been destroyed by the bombardment during the Second World War when the Allies chased the Germans north.

She introduced me to her dead husband’s sister, a large woman quite a few years older than her, with false teeth and hair dyed almost purple. Her brother, Silvio, also put in an appearance and he sat and observed me with an unfaltering, gimlet regard, but it was impossible to take offence.

Signora Berto’s accent was difficult and I struggled to follow. But I think I caught, ‘Your grandmother was fine-looking. She was brave too. She worked in the fields, even when the guns were going, to bring in the harvest when there was no one else left to do it.’

‘My grandmother did that? My father never mentioned it.’

‘He was only a small boy. He could not know everything. We took good care to hide things from the children.’

My grandmother. Dodging mines, driving oxen, diving for cover when the shelling became impossible. Tengo famiglia, I muttered silently, to the shade of my father – which was as much to do with holding memory as with anything else.

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.