A Funeral in Fiesole Read online

  How drab and decrepit those murals had become! Someone should have had them painted over in some nice pearl grey paint, long ago. The whole house needed a facelift. It was nothing – nothing – compared to the cosy little house in Cornwall. These gardens were awful, and the whole place smelled of mildew and mould.

  On one side of the hall, the stairs spiralled upward, taking the frescoes upstairs to the landing. I remembered my little fingers tracing each ruined floral twist, each faded and flaking sprig of leaves, each washed-out hidden bird and all the peeling detaching snails and insects the forgotten artist worked into the grand design. Oh, it was grand once, but I looked and looked, and found nothing worth saving. The worn little birds in the foliage all along the bottom, in the frieze of climbing roses, were crumbling away. White, crimson, salmon pink birds, whose painted colours turned, over the years of my childhood, to paler versions of themselves, with feathers yellowing. They would never ever take flight.

  Paola, sentimental Paola, thought they were constant, perpetual, like Donato and Matilde, who attended to the place – and us – every summer of our lives. Well – painting over the semi-perpetual birds would not be such a great loss. The motionlessness of a mural was nothing like the loyalty of servants. They cared for us and spoiled us, watching us grow. We used to wonder, as children, what they did during the winter when we were at school, and when Mama was in Cornwall.

  ‘Mama – where do Donato and Matilde fly to in the winter, when we fly back to school?’

  ‘They’re not migratory birds, my darling. They stay in Fiesole.’

  I was a bird! So we were migratory birds, and always had Christmas in Cornwall. A red and green and silver Christmas with very few variations. Also, we forgot all about our caretakers in Fiesole until the following June, when we descended upon the big echoing house. A noisy crowd of four, all tumbling out of the big car and up those grey stone steps to the front door, shouting and running up and down!

  ‘Where are the skates I left behind?’

  ‘Oh – see? My orange cardigan is still on a hook!’

  ‘There’s a new cat, did you notice?’

  ‘I wish Donato would hurry with the bags!’

  ‘I’m hungry. When is lunch?’

  And Mama, who had been there for days before our arrival from boarding school in England, would come down the stairs with arms outstretched, like she had been waiting forever. They had bought the villa for a song, when Papa was still alive. Oh, Papa! He dreamed of turning it into a pensione, with celebrities arriving for what he termed sojourns.

  It never happened, of course. We were far too noisy and messy as children. Besides, we took up a lot of room, four of us. The boys had the two back bedrooms at the end of the wing, on either side of the passage, one facing the view over Florence, and the other the back dip in the hills, with the church spires bursting through the rooftops like toothpicks on a tray of cheese. The boys did not care for views.

  Paola and I had two rooms with a central bathroom closer to the main bedrooms on the grand landing, where the ornate grandfather clock ticked away the interminable minutes of our childhood and youth. How we fought! That bathroom was a battlefield – my jumbled stuff and damp towels, and her obsessively neat rows of bottles and tubes and boxes and brushes and jars and things!

  She was always observant and quiet, and I was always bursting with energy. She could have been different if she wanted. She could have teased Papa about his clock too!

  Paola was not the only one with memories. Mine were of Papa, and how close we were. How well I remembered opening the beautifully carved door of that clock, holding the pendulum still for a while, releasing it and setting it swinging again, about a minute slow! Papa would eventually notice and set it right, checking it against his accurate wristwatch with the brown strap, which Mama said he bought in Switzerland, on their honeymoon.

  He would take me on his lap and explain how there was advantage in keeping good time, how wonderful it was to have such an accurate clock, and how there was snow on Swiss mountains even in June. Also, how there was no sea in Switzerland; something I could only imagine if I tried very hard. So how did they sail their yachts? Papa would laugh, and go on to talk of lakes, and sails, and wooden boats.

  What stories, what memories we all had to share! Some of them admittedly happy, in my opinion, but most collapsing, like the balustrades on the balconies outside the windows of the upstairs sitting room. Fading, like the garlands of raised plaster flowers on the double doors up there. The place was crumbling to the ground!

  ‘Nothing, but nothing, is nicer than a grand Italian villa furnished in the English way,’ Mama would say, to anyone who would listen. She brought furniture and fittings out in crates from Cornwall, and took a lot of enjoyment decorating the house and arranging the gardens. I liked the furniture. It was the only thing I loved. Solid English furniture. It lasted. It did not date, and was always stylish, always. English furniture made me happy.

  Oh, what sadness was to come! But the grief when Papa died did not touch Fiesole. He went to heaven from Cornwall, Mama would say. He rose from the dinner table one night, clutching his chest, and never sat there again. The story broke my heart, every time it was told.

  We were all at school, even ‘little Nigel’ who had just started along with Brod, and who took to being a boarder at St Clements without batting an eyelid. I remember the fuss Brod had made – tears and tantrums and more tears! – but it was because I could not go to the same school as he, and we were very close twins. Inseparable, at ten years old.

  And now we were all here, waiting, waiting, for something to happen, getting on each other’s nerves in the same way as we started doing the instant Paola turned twenty and it was about time, she said, that we all went our separate ways and did not bother to return to Fiesole for the holidays. Her suggestion hurt Mama, I do remember the expression in her eyes.

  Paola did not come the following summer, and neither did Nigel, thinking we would all stay away. Brod and I came, of course, and cheered Mama up, while we helped her plant what seemed like several thousand bulbs among the trees at the back! Wonderful. I could not remember now what they were; gladioli? Daffodils? Irises? I had no clue! It would be nice to walk out there later with Otto, and see how time obliterated everything she did.

  How time changed us! Brod had grey hairs. Thank goodness my hairdresser was so good and so affordable. I would hate to think my forehead was as corrugated as his. They were happy corrugations, Nigel said. Happy! He wasn’t always. Brod was happy now, with Grant. Could he be, at last?

  Having a gay twin made one wonder about oneself. What if I were a boy – what if we’d emerged from the same sac? I often wondered what it would be like to be identical rather than fraternal. It would either have made me male and gay; or Brod female and … and whimsical. Lewis called me capricious, which was something I could not agree with. How could I be capricious, in business? I thought he used the word instead of cold. Instead of ruthless. He regarded me so strangely when I went ahead and took Carmody & Beck to court. Perhaps Lewis thought me heartless. Well, I might very well appear to be – but I won, and came away with a settlement that gave me more than half the deposit on my next investment. Capricious!

  Papa did not think me whimsical. He knew I was the only one he could teach how to sail; the only one who would join him on the spotless deck of his boat in Cornwall. It might have been winter, but I was always there, listening to him talk about treacherous tides. He taught me my knots, how to turn a winch, and to ‘feel the wind’ by closing my eyes and turning my face to it. I learned how to find the wind’s direction before I was seven.

  ‘Suzanna, look – I’ve tied a short length of yarn to this shroud. What’s it for, do you think?’

  ‘To see how the breeze is blowing, Papa! I can tell from the way it flutters.’

  ‘Good girl. A sailor’s life revolves …’

  ‘… around the wind!’

  He would smile and light another
cigarette. ‘And that’s a fact.’

  I would have liked this family to face a few facts. Not by being capricious, but by being blunt. Realistic! All my siblings were adults – goodness! Nigel was the baby at fifty-three. We had all been through hell at some point. Now was the time to gather our wits, break with the past, sell both Mama’s old crumbling properties, and do something worthwhile with any money we could get.

  Brod would agree, if I gave him a dig in the ribs. Hah! An elbow in the side from me got him out of the clutches of a jealous possessive boyfriend a few years ago. It was a similar dig – even though given on the phone – which motivated him to take a very lucrative job a few summers ago, which he still had. He never thanked me, but he came to me for advice! He did. Brod would never admit it, but he did.

  Nigel and Harriet always talked, talked, talked things over until neither of them could make their minds up about what to do about anything. It took them months to resolve to care for Mama. When they finally did, though, they went the distance, even bringing her here from Cornwall, which must have been difficult in all senses of the word. Money! Time! Their own affairs had to go on hold for a while, and the children had to be patient. Patient and resentful, in all likelihood.

  Well, everyone says Tad and Lori are great kids. Still, they weren’t always. I used to doubt the effectiveness of raising kids the way Nigel and Harriet did it. The outcome – I had to admit – was not so terrible.

  What to do about Paola was the biggest hurdle. She always dug her heels in, always examined everyone with those impassive eyes, always calculated everything mathematically and precisely, and quietly disapproved of everything. We were going to have to combine forces to persuade our big sister to sell this old pile.

  The murals, the crumbling masonry, the moisture stains on all the ceilings. The pervading horrible mildew smell!

  Brod

  Potential in the rain

  Bringing Grant to my mother’s funeral irked Nigel’s wife, even if she knew we had been together a year. Harriet is a bit like my eldest sister Paola, a person so infinitely easy to annoy, even if one tried hard not to do it. Harriet was so annoyed to find Grant so good-looking. I expected her to come out with an inane observation such as, ‘The boys always get the longest eyelashes.’

  She also reacted like a straight man – no wonder she and Nigel were so well suited to each other. They both seemed irritated, again, by Grant’s ability to keep calm and cordial no matter what was going on. Not a brooding silence; no, it was not his way at all. It was calm anticipation something would happen, either to release him from a situation, or to present a general improvement of things. Patience for change. Something that drew me and my impulsiveness to him.

  They always called me impulsive and rebellious, and I guess I behaved as they expected. I made sure I did. Late in life, I found someone who told me I didn’t have to. A touch too late, for some things.

  Grant always said, ‘Change comes, Brod. You can’t stop change. You don’t have to push anything with such force.’ And he was always right.

  Even when I said I could not stay in the house. It was much too painful for me. All the holidays here with Mama. All the fights with Papa. It was Mama’s absence I could not bear to ignore, or let go. Or abandon the possibility of meeting her, in her dirty gardening gloves and fraying straw hat, banging her feet on the side door grating and mat, grumbling at the amount of soil she would track into the passage behind the kitchen. Pushing a broom before her over the old tiled floor; an impatient Don Quixote tilting a domestic lance.

  I could not possibly take it.

  ‘Okay – we’ll stay in Florence or something,’ he said. ‘Easy.’

  And it was.

  I could not bear to walk around the side bedrooms without hearing her walk up to my door, tapping with a knuckle. ‘Brod, I made pancakes.’ It was impossible to stay there, sleep there, wake up in the morning knowing Mama was not downstairs, fighting with the coffee filter machine. It was like being seventeen all over again; but if I examined this closely enough – had I ever grown out of the mixed up, juvenile stage?

  I fought it – I struggled with it all my life. A rebellion so strong I went into banking, of all staid and steady things. Lucrative, but not special. It was the type of career that was more successful than I needed it to be. Entirely the trajectory I was not expected to take, took anyway, and excelled at, to my own detriment. There was no excitement in my life. I spited myself, a kind of mock rebellion, which I could do nothing to fix, now I was in my fifties.

  Mama might have felt it. I could not possibly walk around the grounds and not return to being a child again, a teenager again; spotting some project of hers, finished or not, or the way she got all the bulbs mixed up before they were planted among the trees, resulting in a higgledy-piggledy jumble of irises, daffodils, crocus, jonquils, and gladioli the following year. How she laughed. I could have been like that too, but I fought it. I battled with it all.

  I wasn’t here when she died, and I’ll never forgive myself. How could I be here? It was such a sudden announcement from Nigel, on the phone. I anticipated what he would say and tried to stop him. I didn’t want to hear the words Mama’s dying. She was weak and frail and befuddled the last time I was with her, holding her hand in the hospice, but when Nigel phoned, and I picked up in the middle of an important conference in New York, I imagined her as she was when we all jumped out of the car at holiday time, when Donato drove us up to the house and we spilled out, quarrelling, laughing, loud and childish, with our gear, onto the gravel at the front, and ran up the grey steps to her widespread arms.

  I had a terrible time at boarding school, and Nigel was no help because he was the archetypical perfect schoolboy, a star scholar with no hurdles and obstacles to do with his sexuality. He was younger, but he was everything I could not be. I was never the older, perfect Larkin boy. I was a startling comparison, a Larkin let-down. Always an eleventh-hour essayist, with permanent confusion in my heart about some fifth or sixth former with perfect teeth. Always enamoured of some drawling voice in the low register that struck at one’s stomach, and a particular adolescent male ability to shoot glances that killed one on the spot.

  I died many times before sixth form, and finally fell into the predatory arms of Fletcher Blancbaston – he with the medieval name and the medieval cheekbones, who signified wealth to the teachers and headmaster; he who could get away with anything because of the way he tossed his over-long hair. Through him I learned many things about myself, about other boys, and about gender confusion. About denial and rebellion.

  ‘You’re too soppy, Broderick Larkin – it’s what’s wrong with you,’ he said once in his alarming voice. He climbed back into his pants and smiled so disarmingly it negated his harsh words for years before I saw true meaning in them. ‘Don’t be such a nancy. Stand up for yourself and wear the pants for gossake. Only idiots will want you to girl it around, asking for abuse, asking for your heart to be broken. Stand up for yourself and be a gay man.’

  I thought at the time he was getting at me for being young. It took a few years before I found my style, my way of being, and a couple of decent guys. I think it was only because of Mama.

  There was a place on the back stairs where she and I collided once – what was I, seventeen? – and it was a bit of a dance because she was carrying a big tray laden with a lemonade jug and many stacked glasses. I yelped and stood out of the way, and she stopped.

  ‘Brod, take this tray from me. Will you manage?’

  And in that ebullient holiday mood, I said, ‘I can manage anything, Mama!’

  Her face grew serious. ‘Good. Do it. Be yourself. Manage it. Don’t try to pretend anything else. Don’t fight stuff all the time. Some things simply are. I know how you feel. I know who you are, all right, Brod? And it’s …’ She smiled so brightly and seemed so proud and accepting of me the tray very nearly slipped out of her hands and mine. ‘Ooops. There, got it?’

  I got it. I got more
than not smashing a tray full of glasses. I understood she accepted the fact I was queer, and she didn’t mind one bit. I didn’t have to hide or fight it. It was the most revealing summer of my life.

  And now this place was empty. Empty. Everyone was here, but it was empty because Mama was gone. I took Grant down the back way to try and lay her ghost, but she was there. ‘Come, I’ll show you something.’

  Grant followed me all the way down the back way, where the light was dull because of the high windows, to the back steps. ‘What?’

  She was there, dusting garden soil from her hands, eyes twinkling, head nodding, ever the optimist. In a way, she was a bit like Grant. Positive, knowing a positive change would eventually come. All one had to do was wait … and not fight.

  ‘Look – this was where I’d read and do stuff in the holidays.’ The lump in my throat was enormous. I pointed around the oddly-shaped room. She was there; her chair, her tapestry stool, her shelf of gardening books and seed catalogues, but I did not mention the feeling to Grant.

  ‘Oh – a cellar.’

  ‘Not a basement, wait. Well, yes and no.’ We moved further into the room and there were the wide glass doors with the back view of the hills, and the bumpy mountains in the distance, all purple and black in the rain. ‘See? The house is built into the hill, see? Our hill, we call it. So there are views on each side, and stairs and steps in odd places.’

  ‘It’s enormous, Brod. Why are we staying in the village, or whatever it is? Why did we book a room? Everyone’s so …’

  ‘Welcoming?’ I laughed. I knew he’d soon see how my siblings were.

  We stared out at the damp landscape together, and I thought how Mama often came down there to sit in the big brown chair to get away from what was happening in the house and catch her breath. I’d come down too. We wouldn’t talk. We would ignore each other and listen to each other’s breathing, and take in the view. It was like I heard her thoughts then. She would always know the first rain would come when it was time for us all to head back to school. She would stay and rest a few days longer, after we were all packed off, and eventually head to winter in Cornwall.