A Funeral in Fiesole Read online

  ‘Hmm – the radiator in my room is just warm to the touch.’

  ‘And mine.’

  ‘It was converted to electricity at some point.’ Nigel poured wine. ‘I can turn it up a notch if you like.’

  ‘We never needed it in summer. We ran around in t-shirts, barefooted, for nearly three whole months.’

  ‘And jumped on the train again in September, feeling scratchy, trussed and trapped in school clothes.’ I pulled a face and everyone laughed again.

  ‘Mama heaved a sigh of relief, I’m very sure, when everyone got on the train.’ Harriet’s voice was starchy.

  ‘No, she didn’t! She was nothing like that.’ Paola’s eyes were hard. ‘She absolutely adored having us here all summer, and always said she wanted it to last at least another month. It was what she always said.’

  Nigel’s wife made a face. So – all Paola’s memories; they irked Harriet. She resented her having such an accurate recollection of the family’s past. Was it because Harriet was a sort of orphan? I would never know.

  Harriet put down her fork. ‘She was patient. With four of you here creating havoc, she must have had to be as patient as Job.’ She meant it as a joke, and I laughed, but it was not a great success. The room fell silent.

  I tried to steer us toward a neutral topic. ‘Where did you get the wine, Nigel? You must let Grant and me get some wine. We’ll … we can drive into Florence, couldn’t we, and …’

  ‘After the funeral, I guess. Yes – thank you. I mean … no, Brod, no – there’s no real need, I suppose.’ Nigel pinched his nose. It was a nervous gesture of his I recognized. He took off his glasses and examined them for smudges. He seemed to be dreading the funeral the next day. We all were, but there was more. My baby brother seemed bothered about something.

  It was very clear to me there was nothing wrong with his marriage. He exchanged smiles and gazes with Harriet, meaningful glances, which spoke of closeness. Grant had taught me how to watch couples in cafés, picking the ones whose relationships were intimate and sweet, those who had met recently, and those from whom contempt and resentment oozed visibly, simply from reading their body language. He called it watching the world go by, and it made us laugh.

  I watched Nigel and Harriet, and from the number of times their eyes met at the table, it was clear they still got on famously, and could converse using silent subtle eye movements. There was something else bothering Nigel, which none of us might ever get to know. I hoped his health was fine.

  I also watched Suzanna and Lewis, and surprisingly enough, they seemed fine too. Lewis was more than happy to take a backseat in my twin’s life; seemed not to mind being a wallpaper husband, minding the dog, carrying her things. He seemed inordinately proud of her. He might have had more reason than any of us could guess. It could have been more than just about money. Or being an introvert. Or wanting her to himself. Who could tell?

  ‘The wine, Brod?’ Nigel spoke at last. ‘It’s from underneath the scullery. There’s …’ He seemed to have made a decision. Could he have considered keeping it all to himself? I doubt it. He was not the greedy sort. It was Suzanna and me who Matilde called greedy. I gemelli golosi.

  I remembered. It came to mind quite naturally. ‘The trapdoor and the little wooden steps!’

  ‘Su e giù, su e giù!’ We all sang together, the four siblings. It was automatic, the way Matilde had taught us to sing Up and down, Up and down when we took those wooden steps to the cellar.

  Lewis, Harriet and Grant sat and watched us, with three completely different expressions on their faces.

  ‘So there’s still some wine down there, amazing!’ Suzanna thawed out a bit and smiled.

  ‘There’s more than some wine.’ Nigel rucked both eyebrows. I saw what it was – he had contemplated keeping it all to himself.

  Paola attempted a smile too, after joining in the one loud verse we all sang at once. ‘Lots? I do remember the racks Donato installed. They were diagonal boxes, sort of thing. Goodness – it must be nearly a half-century ago. Perfect for laying down bottles.’

  ‘Yes, it must be some time,’ I said. ‘It is ages ago. I’m surprised there’s any left to be had. I don’t remember the racks going up. Lots, Nigel?’

  He finished his veal. ‘Hundreds of bottles, literally hundreds. I remember Mama buying part of the year’s vintage from the fellow down near San Girolamo … or was it near the Roman baths? In July, she would do it. And she bought some recently, before she became so frail, and Donato stacked the bottles. Not long before he died, and not long before she got … unwell.’

  Paola’s turn to nod. ‘Yes, and also from the old man up at the chapel, she used to buy wine. By the chapel, remember? He’d bring it down our hill in a van. Is it still all down there? No wonder it’s so fabulous.’ She sipped from her glass, and peered at the label on the bottle. ‘Enoteca Bramduardi. Aren’t we lucky? This stuff is not bad.’

  Talk drifted to plans for the following day, the order in which we would read, what everyone was wearing, and how we all would drive down to the church, and afterwards, onward to the cemetery.

  ‘I still can’t understand why it’s all so … why in a church?’ I found it difficult to figure out.

  Paola pursed her lips, like it was obvious.

  ‘No, Paola – I don’t understand.’ Suzanna pushed a finger forward in front of her, wanting an explanation.

  ‘She left instructions. Nigel said so – he told us. It’s all written down. Time, place, music, readings …’

  Suzanna was still not content with the answer.

  Paola went on, after casting around at each of us, in the way we were used to. ‘Besides, we all remember Mama’s fondness for ceremony. She delighted in ceremony, celebration – don’t you remember our Christmases in Cornwall?’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘Yes – she meant it to be. She wants us all to go along to church tomorrow. And to sing.’

  Paola

  Curtains

  Ceremony, in a little Fiesole church. Ceremony; a sea of unrelieved grey and black. Except for a blur of cut flowers. Aside from their scent held inside the dome, the combination of churchy scents; stone, dust, incense. Must and mould; grey and black, black, black. Except for Suzanna’s red shoes.

  If she’d asked me, I suppose I’d have said she could wear what she liked. My young sister always did what she liked. That was the difference between us: I always felt I had to do the right thing and fade into the surroundings, like some silent camouflaged moth, and she burst into rooms expecting everyone to be waiting with bated breath for what she was yearning to tell. The brilliant imago.

  After Papa died, everyone changed a little. Nigel wanted to take over and ‘do things for Mama’, Suzanna grew more noisy and demanding, and Brod gardened, getting mud on his shoes and dust in his eyes. I retreated into my books and music, carrying my heavy transistor radio around on its leather strap. The batteries were expensive.

  ‘What is it, Paola?’ Mama was patient with me.

  Should I ask? ‘My …’

  ‘Your radio? Batteries? You can ask for batteries, darling. Come here. It’s not a problem. Donato will bring you batteries when he goes down to Florence for things.’

  And he did.

  But Suzanna would burst into the kitchen, already talking, talking, talking. Demanding a new bathing suit and sunglasses, like she saw in a magazine, without waiting to think, without pausing. Mama would smile and promise to get her some things too.

  ‘But I’ll have to wait all summer!’ Her young plaintive voice. Always pulsing through the house.

  Mama put down whatever she was holding, beamed with love and patience, and explained that a few days was not all summer.

  One of those hot and sultry summers, for some feast day which took place in Florence, we were all given confectionary. The boys had sticky boiled sweets packed into wooden pencil boxes. Suzanna and I received chocolates in little cases, which converted into jewellery boxes when everything was
eaten and the wrappings were taken out. I wanted the blue one, but Suzanna got it, and I had to be content to take the red one. I treasured it, for some reason, and kept my bead bracelets and funny little necklace charms in it. I kept it. I remembered packing it away to take to Australia after I met John, almost twenty years later. I would have to ask Suzanna what happened to her perfect little blue box.

  The church pews were hard and cold, the scent of flowers a stain on the memory – one I knew would not be erased in a hurry. I could not smell cut flowers again without thinking of this sparsely peopled yellow-walled church with its over-elaborate crucifix and damp guttering candles.

  The coffin on its ornate trestle was an emotional cross we all bore in silence. A horrible silence broken by music over a bad sound system someone should have tried to moderate to our purposes. Too loud, too tinny, it would spoil the way I thought about those orchestral pieces forever. I suppose Nigel had enough to organize, and could not attend to every single detail.

  I winced as I waited for the end of the Pärt recording. The church bells over our heads rang while it was playing, which robbed the bell in the orchestration of its mournful effect. Something, I had to concede, which was on balance not the end of the world.

  I heard a hissed whisper to my left. It was Suzanna. ‘I can’t believe you left Papa off the card, Nigel!’

  He peered at her blankly. I could feel him thinking, It’s Mama’s funeral. He’d be blaming himself for something he didn’t do, because I searched inside the card, scanned the lines of small print, and yes, there it was; Widow and loving companion of Roland Larkin.

  I felt like turning to hush my sister, and tell her to read the card properly, but it would have been too rude. I sat still and steady, filling my mind consciously with stuff of the past.

  Radio batteries coursed through my head before the readings began, and jewellery boxes, and shoes caked with garden soil, and missing gloves, and curtains, and a painting. A very special painting. Curtains again.

  Curtains. I swallowed back a lump in my throat when I remembered what happened earlier that day. I stumbled in on Brod, an hour before we all started for the church, standing in Mama’s sitting room. He was sobbing into a bunched-up handful of curtain.

  I stopped where I stood and wondered whether I should slowly and as silently as possible back out again, but he looked up. ‘So damn … so abominably sad, Paola.’

  I felt for him, and was choked up myself. What a terrible thing this was. How cruelly it brought back all that was wonderful about Mama. What we had lost. How it showed us all up for what we essentially were. Sentimental Broderick, hard-as-nails Suzanna, belligerent Nigel, and … what did they think I was? Silent? Contemplative?

  Nigel

  Suppressed anger

  A funeral is not the occasion to have an explosive tantrum, but it was undeniably what I felt like doing. I could have howled to the vaulted stone roof of the yellow church in annoyance. So I avoided Paola’s eyes. I averted my face from Harriet’s questioning glances. I dodged Brod’s clearly mystified gaze, and cast my eyes away from Suzanna’s direct stares. They all knew I was upset at the way the flowers had been placed, the positioning of the trestle, which I had asked specifically to be placed to one side, and which stood directly in the centre, in front of the altar. I recoiled when I heard the crude recorded music, which emerged from an ancient system in a harsh metallic high-pitched whine; and at how everyone placed themselves completely out of the order I had described the previous night. Did they do it on purpose? Annoying Nigel was becoming a family sport, exactly as it was when we were children.

  Paola was especially exasperating. All she wanted to do was talk about the inheritance, and I had to stop her the previous evening. Talking about money at the table was not something we did. Mama was always elegant and circumspect about such matters. It was crass, materialistic, and vulgar, and Paola knew it. She insisted on saying, on repeating, that we all needed to discuss what might happen after the will was read.

  Well – how could we discuss anything before we knew what Mama intended? It was highly likely she would leave everything to be neatly divided into four. The fairest and most equitable way to go. Harriet and I knew we deserved more than a quarter, but who were we to argue with Mama’s wishes, if that’s what they were? Who were we to enter everyone into a contestation against their will?

  ‘But what about inheritance tax?’

  I glared at her and her small bobbing head, afraid to open my mouth. I might blurt out something to regret later.

  ‘What about it?’ Suzanna never failed to respond when the subject was money.

  I began to despair of my siblings. They were not what they were when we were young. They were worse. Suzanna more materialistic, Brod more lackadaisical and uncertain, and Paola … ah, Paola! She defied description and comprehension. Fastidious and fussy, she looked down her nose at me and Harriet, making us feel we did everything wrong and organized everything badly. I did not even bother to stop and think what they all thought I was capable of.

  Coming close to growling at Paola, I spotted Harriet’s gaze – a plea to contain myself – and retired to the kitchen, where I fiddled with dessert and opened another two bottles of wine. Alcohol might mellow them, even though they were all beyond hope. Why did Lewis not get Suzanna to be a bit more sensible? Why did Grant not influence Brod – who could have done with a bit more sense? And Paola, all alone, without John to nudge her into a more positive outlook, put a damper on the entire event. I would be glad when the week was over and Harriet and I were back in England to attend to our sorry financial situation. It was becoming more urgent by the day. What I was to inherit – no matter its value – was to be without a doubt a quarter share of fuss and bother. The sooner divided and finished, the better it would be.

  I would be the first one to sign the acceptance, to show the way. The sooner we all got out of any dealings with each other the better. I would have to keep a tight lid on my volatile mood for as long as possible.

  But it was not to be. We emerged from the church and all made our way to the cars. Mama was to be interred at the Cimitero degli Inglesi, down the hill in Florence.

  ‘I don’t know why it wasn’t arranged for her to be buried at the villa.’ Paola was heard by all, even though I felt she tried to keep her voice low.

  I moved to face her.

  ‘Nige!’

  I ignored Harriet.

  ‘Dad!’

  I turned away from Lori, who extended a hand to hold me back. She grimaced hopelessly at her mother.

  ‘Paola – Mama left her wishes on paper. She wished to be buried at the English cemetery. She wrote it down! She arranged it. All I did was manage it. Time it. Book it. But it was she who wished it to be done so!’

  She looked at me strangely, but said nothing.

  ‘I wish you’d stop criticizing everything I do.’

  ‘I don’t.’ She seemed as prissy as a sixteen year-old. The sixteen year-old who watched primly from the upstairs terrace balustrade when we three clowned around on the grassed terrace. The same one who refused to join us when we cycled down to the shop for ice cream.

  My voice rose, filling the church forecourt, making even passers-by look round to see what could be causing such a fuss at a funeral. ‘Find something nice to say, for once in your life.’ I regretted the words the instant they were out of my mouth.

  ‘I’m going to forget you said that, Nigel,’ she whispered. Her smile was neither condescending nor humorous. What was it? What was she thinking? I stood there until Harriet tugged me into the car by my sleeve.

  And she did. Paola did seem as if she’d forgotten, and was cordial and impassive at the cemetery, where I wondered what strings Mama had pulled with the Swiss church that ran the place, to get herself buried in that historic place. I would have liked to be there on a less emotional day, to read the place like a history book, to try to make out all the inscriptions in so many languages.

  It would ha
ve been peaceful and healing to gaze up into the faces of those mortified stone skeletons, those angels racked by loss and remembrance, and recover alone. The stone they were carved out of was a paradox. Everything crumbled, but some things were eternal, like guilt. I had put my family in an untenable financial bind, and I wished I was there alone, or alone with Harriet.

  As it was, I quickly became overcome by the sadness of the reason I was there. For a moment, I felt totally alone. Everyone evaporated, a silence fell about me, and I was rid of all my money problems, all my siblings’ dilemmas, all my children’s expenses. Alone in a bubble – a silent space, where no one existed apart from me and Mama, who was going away forever.

  I didn’t feel foolish when I waved at the coffin, which was lowered faster than I anticipated into the dark hollow. The rain started again as we all got into the cars and made our way upward from Florence. I could not wait for the dreaded reception to be over, so we could ascend back all the way along Via San Domenico, to the villa.

  Brod

  Singing in church

  Grant looked splendid in his dark suit and gunmetal grey shirt and tie. They all stared at him, disbelief plain on their faces that he was there with me, my partner. How could Brod possibly land someone so statuesque, so handsome, they must have thought. What’s more, in my fifties – incredible. It was about time they thought I did something great. Something only I could do. Mind you, it was still surprising to me, and I sometimes pinched myself that someone so calm and successful and good-looking was interested in me.

  He was supremely tactful and kept to one side, both in the church and at the cemetery. The long drive between the two places was quiet. Too long, too bright, with the watery afternoon sun in my eyes as I drove. We had Tad with us in the car. He sat at the back and didn’t say a word. Still in his tight school blazer, he wore a thin black tie as a concession to the occasion. I saw in the rear view mirror he hung his head often, lolling forward as if dozing off, and starting up again when his head nodded. It could have been the warmth and motion of the car, an endearing thing.