The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

20

Instead, Meg and I were perfectly happy to shop. When the sun dropped behind the hill, and it grew cooler, we browsed through boutiques and markets, tried on neat Italian jumpers, discussed handbags. We bought pretty straw baskets and silk scarves for Meg.

Maria tipped us off about a shoe-shop tucked away in a street behind the church. ‘All the shoes from Rome,’ she said, and winked. ‘But not the prices.’ Meg and I agreed that we had a duty to shore up the local economy.

The shop was in the medieval quarter of the town. Hot, dark and womb-like, its interior smelt pleasingly of leather and varnish – a craftsman’s smell. We spent a good half-hour hunting through the racks. Meg pounced on a pair of cunning high heels and I hovered between delicious red-leather sandals, which spoke to me, and a utilitarian black pair with ‘Stanwinton’ written all over them, which did not.

Meg slotted her feet into her shoes and turned a full circle. She seemed excited, alight with joy, almost a girl again, and I could see why Rob had fallen in love with her. Rocking on the heels, she said, ‘Will bought me my first pair of nice shoes. He took a job stacking supermarket shelves and saved up. He wanted to say thank you to me. I kept them for years.’

Our stay in Fiertino had had an unexpected consequence: it had loosened Meg’s tongue. She had dropped quite a few bits of information into my lap. ‘Take them,’ she appeared to be saying. ‘They are my present to you.’

She was trying to tell me about the unknown Will: the one who had existed before I knew him. Scratch me for the facts, and I could tell you that Will’s favourite breakfast was fried bacon. I knew what kind of shirts he favoured, the way he turned over in his sleep and flung an arm over his head. I knew that he loved his daughter, that he had been unfaithful to me. I knew we had had many years together.

But I was ignorant about the slice of his life when Meg had held the reins in hands that must have trembled often – with fear and anxiety.

I replaced the red sandals on the shelf. ‘It’s too hot in here. Another time.’

‘More fool you,’ said Meg, and paid for hers.

At the end of the week Will rang. ‘Fantastic news, Fanny. Chloë’s got her results. Two As and a B. I phoned her and she was so pleased.’

A lump sprang into my throat. ‘Clever, wonderful Chloë.’

We discussed her university plans and which of her friends had got what. While we were talking, I entertained a vision of Chloë, now properly grown up, graduating in a black gown, getting married, coming home with a trio of grandchildren. Time was slipping this way and quickly, and I had to catch up with it.

‘Did you send her my love?’

‘Of course. How are you both?’

‘Practically comatose.’

‘Good.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The house seems very empty. But I have been in London quite a lot. The flat’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I’m sorry you were invaded by Meg. I know you wanted a bit of a breathing space. But these last few weeks have been hell.’ He continued in the same vein. Dreadful weather. Tedious boxes. Finally he said, wistfully, ‘You seem a long way away.’

I brushed a dead fly on to the floor. Did I miss it in my cleaning frenzy? ‘Guess who turned up? Raoul. We went out for a marvellous dinner with his friends and talked vineyards and vintages.’

‘How nice,’ he said guardedly. ‘By the way, there’s a stack of papers from the lawyer waiting for you here.’

‘Yes, I know.’ I made an effort. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

‘The polls are gloomy,’ he said, ‘but perhaps that’s to be expected…’

While Will talked, I stared out of the window at an olive tree which grew precariously but defiantly on the slope above the house. The undersides of its leaves appeared white in the sun.

I heard the rustle of a cigarette packet. ‘Fanny… as I feared, the second-car tax is to be dropped. It’s too sensitive. With an election coming up… so, very politely, I’ve been told to bugger off, keep my head down and someone will fling me a bone if I am very good. End of story. I suppose, after all this, I don’t care very much.’

This would not be true. ‘Then we needn’t waste any more time on it, Will.’

‘I thought you’d be a bit more sympathetic.’

‘I am sympathetic. Very. I’m sorry you’ve been disappointed, but it’s over.’

In the hall of the Casa Rosa, I turned myself round and the telephone cord twisted across my leg, but I wanted to look at the vines the other side of the road. How curious. Why had I had failed to notice that a pylon sat precisely between two cypresses on the hilltop?

‘Fanny, when are you coming home?’

I heard myself say, ‘I don’t want to come back. I feel at home here.’

Meg was not stupid and she had cottoned on that Benedetta did not like her. ‘Look,’ she said, later that evening, as we prepared to walk over to her for a pasta supper, ‘on second thoughts, I’ll leave you two to talk over old times. I’ll have something to eat at Angelo’s. I’d prefer it.’

It was agreed.

Dressed in her best print frock, over which she had tied a lace apron, Benedetta was in a cheerful mood. Radio Vatican provided a background commentary. ‘My son,’ she smiled broadly, ‘he has phoned to say that he is coming in the winter.’ She handed me a knife. ‘Make the salad, please, Fanny.’

Red and luscious, the tomatoes fell away from my knife. I snatched up a piece and crammed it into my mouth. It tasted of sun and earth. I arranged the slices on a plate, and scattered basil over them. The Madonna smiled down from her vantage-point on the wall. Cramped and cluttered it might have been, but Benedetta’s kitchen was a comfortable place, far more comfortable than my kitchen in Stanwinton, for all its modern conveniences.

We carried our food out on to the back porch, and while we ate we talked about my father.

Benedetta pressed another slice of her apricot tart on to my plate. ‘He never forgave himself that your mother left’

‘Why do you think he would never marry again? I never understood.’

‘And give you a stepmother? No. Alfredo told me he never wanted that for you.’

Best not to pursue the subject.

Back in the bedroom at Casa Rosa, I addressed the casket that held his ashes. ‘Where shall I put you, Dad? Where would you like to be? Will you tell me?’

An hour or so later Meg returned, and I sat on the stairs in my nightdress while she chatted away to me from the kitchen.

‘Tea?’ There was a clatter of water as she filled the kettle. ‘I had a good meal.’ The gas popped and she appeared in the kitchen doorway. There was a faint colour in her cheeks and her hair looked soft and shiny. ‘Sure you don’t want some tea? Angelo’s is fun at night, full of young bloods who make a lot of noise. I enjoyed it, even picked up a word or two of Italian, so you don’t have to worry about me.’

On the loggia the next morning, I was dreaming over my first cup of coffee when Benedetta puffed up the road. I sat her down and fetched her a glass of iced water. She drank noisily. ‘Fanny, you must be aware that foreigners in particular are noticed. And there are many eyes in Fiertino.’

‘I’m not a foreigner,’ I protested. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Santa Patata. I lived for ten years in England and I was still a foreigner.’

I took a sharp breath and picked up her hand. ‘You were my mother.’

Benedetta rubbed her finger over my wrist. ‘I was and I wasn’t.’

‘How have I sinned?’

‘Not you. Meg. She was seen by Angelo going into the Bacchus with a couple of the younger men. Bacchus is not a good place. The women don’t go there. You must tell her.’

By the time Meg woke up Benedetta had long gone. I tackled her at once. ‘You’ve been spotted.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Meg slapped at an ant on her arm. She was pale and groggy with sleep, and her hair straggled sweatily over her shoulders. ‘It’s none of your business where I end up. I had a peach juice, that’s all. I just wanted some company. Is that so odd, or wicked?’

‘No, but why didn’t you mention it?’

She gave me a level look. ‘Think about it.’

My own hair felt hot and heavy and I scraped it back. ‘Angelo’s nice. He just wanted to warn you. It’s probably nothing much but they know things that we can’t. We are, as Benedetta has just reminded me, foreigners.’

Meg’s ravaged face was unreadable. ‘Angelo thinks I’m worth bothering about?’

‘Obviously.’

‘It’s just a bar with a few chairs, and a naughty picture stuck up on the wall.’ Her mouth tightened disagreeably. ‘Who cares?’

She was willing me to say, ‘I care’. But I could not bring myself to say it.

Meg’s curious, hopeful expression faded. ‘Perhaps your behaviour doesn’t bear too much examination either, Fanny.’

Perhaps it didn’t. There was no answer to that.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Point taken. But I’m not promising anything.’ She looked down the valley. ‘I suppose it is a very small town. Very Dark Ages.’

‘It was just a friendly warning. Benedetta was concerned.’

‘Yes, dear.’ She shot me a look. I didn’t know what it meant – except that I was uneasy, and the knot that tied Meg and me together was as tight as it had ever been.

We patched things up and decided to go to Siena. We swept the floors, brought in the washing from the garden and went round the house closing the shutters.

Meg was wearing a red skirt and a white blouse and huge sunglasses. I put on the dress which I had worn to the dinner in La Foce. She linked her arm in mine. ‘We do credit to each other.’

In the car, she asked me. ‘Did I really interrupt something with Raoul?’

‘I had already sent him away.’

‘But why?’

I glanced at her. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was looking straight ahead. ‘I don’t need a lover.’

‘You don’t need a husband.’

‘Ah,’ I replied, ‘but I have one.’

She turned away abruptly but not before I spotted tears running down behind the large sunglasses.

When I married Will, I thought only of him: my hunger to know him, my delight and pride in his ideas and ambition to help, and my excitement that we had chosen to be together. He felt the same. Only later did I understand that I was required to pick up other lives and carry them as well as my own.

We spent the afternoon exploring the city, and wandering the streets to no great purpose. We bought salami, olive oil and raffia mats, and Meg insisted on presenting me with a blue and white plate for the kitchen at home. ‘A corner of a foreign field,’ she said, ‘for Stanwinton.’

We agreed that the cathedral looked like a black and white humbug and decided to give it a miss, heading instead for a café on the edge of the piazza where we ordered pistachio ice-cream and coffee.

‘This is nice,’ said Meg, softly. ‘Pity Will isn’t here.’ I made no comment. ‘You know what I think? I suspect mid-life crisis with my brother. It happens, and Will would never say. He’s not like that.’ She dug down into the frozen mixture: pale green, glossy and grainy with the nuts. ‘I might tackle him.’

At a stroke, the peace and accommodations between us were ruptured. An old jealousy caught me by the throat. No doubt Meg was right. But I could no longer bear – I could not bear - her prowling around my life. The inner, intimate life, which, for all its tatters and tears, for all its precariousness, belonged to Will and me.

Meg spooned ice-cream into her mouth and swallowed. The sun had shifted. A shadow lay across the piazza. Birds wheeled around the campanile uttering shrill cries.

‘Meg,’ I said, ‘when we get back to Stanwinton you must find somewhere of your own.’

Her spoon clattered against the metal ice-cream bowl. ‘Christ,’ she said, and went pale under her tan.

‘I think it would be best.’

‘I can’t,’ she said calmly. ‘I’m no good at just me.’

‘You don’t have to go far away. You tell me that you’re managing to keep on track.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s not the point.’

Meg stumbled to her feet. ‘I’ve just thought of something.’ She picked up her leather bag, swung the strap over her shoulder and disappeared into the nearest street opening.

‘Meg! Come back.’

Angry with her, furious with my ineptness, yet relieved in the way one feels after a boil is lanced, I sat for five minutes or so, and I thought: this is an end.

I paid the bill and set off in search of her. The via Duomo was lined with boutiques selling beautiful objects – scarves, leather handbags, pearls of a size and whiteness that were startling in the comparative gloom of the narrow street. In one shop I admired a particularly lustrous string. Beside them, there was a large ruby and diamond ring balanced on a velvet cushion. It struck me that it required a home.

And Meg required a home.

On the opposite side of the street there was a shop whose long glass doors were thrown open to reveal rows of shelving stacked with hundreds of bottles of wine. I slipped inside, breathing the familiar smell of wooden crates and the must that grows on the bottles. The wine was arranged by continent and country: Chile, Italy, the US… The reds glowed with dark greens and browns. The whites reflected a spectrum of pale yellow, gold and amber.

An expert hand had made the selection: Château de Fonsalette Cuvée Syrah, Monte Antico Russo and, incredibly, a Beringer Private Reserve from the Napa Valley in California, a personal, idiosyncratic choice by a wine lover who had honed discrimination to the finest pitch.

I ran my hand along a shelf. Years of thinking, tasting, making mistakes were racked up in these shelves. A lifetime of inching forward towards true understanding, true knowledge, true feeling.

I wanted to do the same.

A movement behind me made me turn round. Leading off the main shop was a second, even more dimly lit room with no window. A woman was holding a bottle – carefully, almost tenderly.

It was Meg.

‘A good one,’ she held it out for my inspection, ‘but not outstanding. I think that is what your father would conclude.’

I glanced at it. A 1988 Pomerol. ‘I disagree. This is outstanding.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Trust me. I know.’

How can I trust you, I wanted to throw at her, when you step so carelessly on what is mine? My husband, my wine, even my daughter. How can you trust a trespasser?

Meg raised an eyebrow. Even that was Will’s.

I turned away. In the street, the tourists plodded up and down, clutching plastic bags with interesting bulges. They were taking home olive oil and local pottery and, some of the better-off, jewellery. They would take with them the scent and taste of Italy. Afterwards they would go to a supermarket or shop, hunt out inferior oil or sugo di pomo-doro, take it home but it would not be the same.

Behind me, Meg was saying. ‘Your father was right about most things. Would he have advised me to find somewhere else to live?’