The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

19

‘Just what are you doing here?’ I demanded after Raoul had driven away.

‘Arriving in the nick of time, it would seem,’ she said drily.

There was no answer to that.

Meg followed me into the kitchen and dropped her suitcase on to the floor.

‘If I said, Fanny, that it seemed a little greedy of you to have all this space in a lovely house in Italy and not to share it… or I could say, that I missed you. So does Will. He does love you, you know. And…’ She bit her lip, but spoke with her usual mockery, ‘I love whoever Will loves…’

Her eyes shifted away, and I knew she was frightened as to my reaction.

Meg commandeered the single chair in the kitchen, leaving me to stand. ‘He was nice. My darling brother is always nice to me. But he made it plain that he didn’t wish me to appear at his side. He said…’ She grimaced. ‘He said it was your place, not mine. But before you go all dewy, he had probably calculated that if I stood in for you people would talk.’

‘Meg -’

‘Will never gives up. When he dies you’ll find “percentage swing” engraved on his heart.’

‘Who taught him to be like that in the first place?’

‘I suppose it might have had something to do with me.’ Meg nudged her suitcase with a foot. ‘I’m sorry to have surprised you, Fanny, it was not nice of me, but you can make room. We’ve lived together long enough.’

My energy had returned and I knew I had to confront Meg. The compromises were over. ‘Go home,’ I said. ‘I won’t have you here. This is my breathing space.’

Meg’s lips quivered. ‘Don’t be nasty, Fanny. I’m not sure I can bear it.’

‘Try.’

‘I have tried, and I need you.’

It was close to midnight. It was hot, I was bone tired, the airport was miles away and, as usual, Meg had brought her baggage of the funny, the sad and the monstrous with her, and there was nothing much to be done.

We cleared a space in the second bedroom. Inhaling camphor, I knelt down by the chest of drawers in the corridor and searched among its contents for extra sheets. Eventually, I found a pair with embroidered initials, MS, at the corner and we made up Meg’s bed.

‘Clearly, this was meant,’ she said.

Heated with the effort of dragging furniture around, we went outside and walked up the road.

‘What will you do with me in the morning?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

Our feet stirred up a wake of white dust as we passed. Cicadas sang in the undergrowth. The darkness was scented – basil and marjoram, a hint of lemon – and far, far removed from the cool, rain-laden, sodden air of Stanwinton.

I broke the silence. ‘I’ve been out of touch. Is there any news?’

‘The polls show that support is slipping,’ Meg sounded troubled, ‘but what can you expect? Everyone needs a change. People get fed up with continuity and good intentions.’

We walked past the clump of olives and the vineyard where the vines grew straight and disciplined. At the end of each row there was a rosebush.

‘Nice detail,’ observed Meg.

I pinched a leaf or two of wild thyme between my fingers and sniffed. ‘Smell this. You’ll never buy herbs in a bottle again.’

At the point where the road divided, we halted. One fork led down into Fiertino, whose lights, a bright contrast against the dark sky, were strung in a necklace of brilliants. The other snaked up past Casa Rosa and over the hill. Meg pushed back her hair. ‘It’s hot.’

‘That’s its point, to be as different from Stanwinton as possible.’ I spoke more passionately than I’d intended.

‘Poor you, you’ve got it bad.’

‘I have. But I’ve sorted out a few things while I’ve been here.’

‘If you call Raoul sorting out,’ she said.

We walked on. ‘Raoul and I are good friends. I knew him long before I met Will.’

‘If you say so, Fanny.’ Meg scuffed at a stone with a sandalled foot. ‘I have been good, Fanny,’ she said. ‘I’m as clean as a whistle. I have tried.’

I was touched by the halting admission.

‘I wish I’d been different, Fanny. I wish I’d done things differently. I would never have ended up so… wanting. So under the spell of a substance.’ Meg tugged at her hair so hard it must have hurt.

I sighed deeply and Meg heard. She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Drink destroys. A girl fetches up with no friends, no husbands, no lovers. Only… only a son, and he has grown up and gone away. That leaves you and Will.’ She paused. ‘You managed it better. As you always do, Fanny… the good Fanny.’

‘OK, Meg,’ I said. ‘We’ve had this conversation before.’

Meg did a swift volte-face. ‘Two old lags, then.’

‘Less of the old.’ In the moonlight, Meg’s face looked odd, strained. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m trying to frown. I’ve had Botox shots. I reckoned if I couldn’t frown, life wouldn’t seem so dreadful. But I keep forgetting.’

I found myself standing – an adulteress manquée - on the dusty, moonlit road with the lights of Fiertino blazing in the distance, helpless with laughter.

‘You should have some too, Fanny,’ Meg suggested, when she could get a word in edgeways. ‘You’re getting a few lines.’

I tucked my hand under her brittle elbow. ‘Meg, why don’t you consider doing that university course you once talked about?’

She froze but did not draw away. ‘I’m not clever enough for that.’

‘Actually, you are.’

We walked back up the path to Casa Rosa. ‘I’m frightened of not winning my particular battle,’ Meg admitted, in a rush. ‘For the rest of my life, I will be on twenty-four hour watch. But the demon will try to slip under my defences, in the dark, when I’m sleepy and sad. It will try to outwit me in the sunshine, and the boredom of the day when nobody minds if I’m there or not.’

‘Sacha minds. Will minds… I mind.’

‘Sacha is… a son. Not a husband, or a lover, or a companion.’

During the night, I heard Meg call out. I threw back my sheet and felt my way across the room over the cool floor. Meg was hunched on her side and the sheets were twisted and bunched. I bent over her and she muttered something unintelligible: a troubled, sad sound. Inadequate to console, and guilty that I did not want her here, I did my best to straighten the sheets. ‘Meg?’

Her eyes flicked open but she looked through me, and beyond.

After she had quietened, I went downstairs and took out the two bottles of wine – Vigna L’Apparita (the merlot grape) – which had been given to me by our host at La Foce, from where I had racked them in the kitchen. These were worth dying for, and I hid them under a cache of cardboard.

Upstairs, I searched for aspirins for my aching head and upended the contents of my handbag on the bed. My new mobile phone dropped out and I switched it on. A text message flashed up: ‘I LV U Mum Cxxx’.

I sat down and wept tears for my father and Chloë’s absence. Tears of confusion and-more than a little-of regret.

The next morning I left Meg, still asleep, in Casa Rosa.

It was market day in Fiertino, and the square was choked with vans and stalls selling cut-price kitchenware, mounds of vegetables and raffia baskets. I bought a bucket from a stall and rubber gloves, a broom, disinfectant, cream cleanser, descaler and polish in the supermarket.

‘Signora.’ The dark-eyed woman serving me spotted the red bumps on my arm and tossed a tube into the purchases. ‘Per i morsi,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Grails.’

I thanked her and trudged back to the house in the now broiling sun. I tied a scarf round my head, boiled water and began the cleaning.

I scrubbed the table. The kitchen floor. The bathroom. I brushed every nook and cranny of the house and the dead insects piled into heaps. I cleaned the windows, chipped away at the fur-encrusted taps, washed the walls, erasing with scourer and chemical the stain of doubt on myself.

Perhaps, in life, one regrets more the things that one did not do than those one did?

What would my father have thought?

Surely what was important was the affirmation of passionate feeling? The resolve never to have an empty heart?

The chemicals and the immersion in water puckered my fingers into pink prunes. My back grew stiff from stooping, and I was soaked with sweat from head to foot. To clean Casa Rosa properly was a hopeless task, but I was going to do it.

‘Looks to me like a bad conscience,’ Meg commented, when she eventually appeared. ‘Scrubbing away the sins. Don’t ask me to join in.’ There was a red mark on one cheek where she had slept on it and her fair hair was mussed. ‘Any hot water?’

‘I’ve used it up.’

Meg looked thoughtful. ‘It’s very frontier,’ she said. ‘Still, if that’s what’s required, Fanny, I’ll wash in cold to join you in spirit.’

From where I knelt on my hands and knees, I said, ‘Ring up the airport, Meg, and book a flight home.’

‘Please Fanny. Let me stay. Please.’

‘Why is she here?’ Benedetta whispered to me when, later in the morning, I took Meg over to see her. ‘To make the trouble?’

‘I hope not.’

Benedetta opened her dark eyes wide and I saw how beautiful they still were and remembered how my father had once loved them. ‘Big nuisance, Fanny.’

Meg was on her best behaviour, but she was not offered a fresh tomato from Benedetta’s crop and I took the hint.

Strangely enough, Meg was still in situ at Casa Rosa the following morning and we ate breakfast at Angelo’s.

‘Amore!’ Maria, who was busy at the coffee machine, called.

‘That’s what mothers call their sons in Italy,’ I informed Meg.

‘A mummy’s boy?’ Meg smiled winningly at Angelo, who blushed, and watched his well-covered form as he hastened inside to answer his mother.

‘No more than Sacha.’

Meg tried to frown and failed. ‘Sacha does not always obey his mummy’

Meg’s brioche had been reduced to crumbs, but not much had been eaten. ‘You should eat,’ I said. ‘Eat breakfast like a king.’

‘Funny how we repeat the same things. I used to say that to Will. He was bullied at school and it took away his appetite.’

‘Will? Bullied?’

Meg seemed surprised. ‘Didn’t he tell you? No, well, I suppose he wouldn’t. He’d probably die rather than admit he’d been frightened. But he was.’

‘Go on.’

Meg wet the tip of her finger, picked up a crumb on it and put it into her mouth. ‘I was frightened of the grandparents. Not that they were evil or anything, but just so old and boring, and they preached all the time. I was always terrified I’d go home and find two dead bodies. That’s why Will always waited for me after school. That was one of the reasons he was bullied. Loves his sis.’

‘And the others?’

Meg sounded impatient. ‘There were so many.’

A horn tooted. It was Raoul. He parked under a tree and walked over to join us. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye. As it turns out, I can’t stay.’

Meg searched in her bag and produced a lipstick, which she proceeded to apply. Its dark pink glistened on her mouth.

Raoul’s departure did not surprise me. There was no point in his staying. We both needed a polite gap and to make the readjustments. I thought with a flash of bitterness and regret of how I would miss our conversations.

When Raoul got up to go, he bent over and kissed me. ‘I will be in the UK later in the year,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I will ring you. I would like to talk to you about the business.’

‘Have you decided where to bury Alfredo’s ashes?’ Meg watched Raoul’s car negotiate the traffic around the piazza and vanish.

‘No.’

‘I thought that was why you came here,’ she remarked innocently. Her attention was now drawn to a van unloading pallets of spinach and melons. Are you planning changes, Fanny? I didn’t quite buy the burying-my-father’s-ashes story. Especially when I saw that Raoul had put in an appearance. This little escape is more of a not-waving-but-drowning gesture, which must be to do with my brother.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps you’re thinking that the marriage has run its course. Marriages do. You start out full of good intentions, the best intentions, and life gets in the way’ She flicked me a look. ‘You’re well rid of Raoul. What’s it worth for my silence?’

‘I’ll tell Will. Of course.’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ she said.

I fiddled with a packet of sugar. ‘I bought myself some time.’

‘I’m sorry I cramped your style.’

‘No, you’re not.’ I gave Angelo the money for the bill. ‘Go home, Meg and don’t interfere.’

‘Consider me warned.’ Meg got to her feet. ‘Other people’s lives are just that. Other people’s lives. And a complete mystery’

Meg did not go home after a few days. Of course, she didn’t. Initially, there were difficulties in changing her ticket. Then it appeared there were no available seats to London for a couple of weeks. Then she said. ‘Look, I might as well stay on until you leave. It’s only one more week.’

Each day that I spent in the valley, I grew more detached from my former life. I looked back at it, dim and blurred, through the glass, without nostalgia, only half remembered, imperfect in detail. An inner sleepiness folded around me, almost smothering, and I was happy to sit and do nothing as the light deepened, turned brassy and the heat set in.

I thought about Chloë, the thick rope of feeling that bound me to her, and how, after she was born, I was no longer a separate person. I thought of Raoul, my first lover, from whom I had fled – for a second time. Of Will, my great love. The shapes of our lives and the spaces between them.

When Meg woke, we walked into Fiertino, took a table overlooking the piazza at Angelo’s and ordered coffee. Sometimes, the piazza was almost deserted. Sometimes, summoned by a mysterious force, there was an influx of the puttering vans the Italians favoured, and fumes mixed with the odour of coffee and vegetables from the supermarket next door.

I drank my coffee and worked through my wine books while Meg read a novel or gazed at nothing much. I liked it there, and I think Meg did too – she seemed content. Our only major expenditure of energy was to move our chairs into the shade as the sun shifted.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘Will would like this.’

‘Will?’

‘Don’t you see? He’s never had a chance to sit and do nothing. He has always been so driven. Right from the word go.’ She cupped her chin in her hands. ‘My brother’s a brave man and it’s not his fault that the world is so difficult and awful. Anyway, Will wasn’t going to let it get the better of us.’ The eyelids closed on the dark eyes. ‘See?’

Each day, from either the shop or the market, we selected a different vegetable as the main ingredient for lunch. Tomato or aubergine? Zucchini or big fat mushrooms? I did the chopping. Meg confected the dressings. (She had a knack for balancing the balsamic vinegar, oil and mustard.)

In the afternoons we took a siesta, and in the early evenings we braced ourselves to get into the car and do some sightseeing. More often than not, we drank iced coffee in a nearby village.

I took Meg to the museum in Tarquinia and asked her if she recognized the couple. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘of course I do. The happy couple.’ She peered at the inscription. ‘They died so young that there wasn’t time for hatred and boredom.’

‘No,’ I said.

Then I took her to see the frescos in the Fiertino church. She stared at them for a long time. Finally, she moved away – ‘Too hellfire for me,’ she said.

After that, by mutual agreement, we dropped the cultural trips.