A Funeral in Fiesole (2 page)

‘Sorry, Nigel. It was a long drive. I’m all in a … a blue funk.’

‘Mama died, Paola.
Mama died
. It’s to be expected. We’ll all be better after the funeral.’

How could he know? ‘Thank you for arranging everything.’

He straightened his mouth, lowered his eyes, surprised to find a wooden spoon in his hand. He placed it in a little puddle of tomato sauce on the counter. ‘I’m making a mess.’ He ripped a sheet of kitchen towel and swiped at the red smear, making it worse at first, and then managing to scoop and wipe it all off.

I watched, bewildered. The first mention of the funeral. I had by then been there a quarter-hour, considering the house, matching memories with the remnants of what once was.

‘It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be. She …’ He wrestled with an enormous tea towel, and proceeded to fold it carefully, corner to exact corner. ‘It was … Paola, listen – she left written instructions. We knew what to do, the people to contact. Most things were previously paid for. We even know what music we are to play. Everything.’

‘What music!’ Surprised at Mama’s final foresight, I moved back a step and leaned against the table, knowing it was there without having to look. Our big scarred heavy immovable kitchen table, whose top someone had once painted red. Its edge, its surface, its texture were so familiar to my hands I paused, realizing how easy it was to be thrown mentally, bodily, psychically, into the past.

‘
Ombra mai fu
. Also, the Arvo Pärt piece, and other works … you know.’

‘The prelude from …’

‘Yes.’ Nigel smiled, which pulled his eyes downward. ‘Yes. All that.’

‘And no Verdi Requiem.’

He laughed. ‘No – no.
Ave verum corpus
, if there’s time.’ He pushed a mug of tea towards me.

‘What!’ Mama chose Mozart?

‘Sit. Rest.’

It was starting to dawn on me that it would be hardest for Nigel. No. No – it would be most difficult for Brod.

‘And no Palestrina.’

‘Paola …!’

‘Okay. Okay. The twins and I will read at the service, I suppose?’

My little brother, my baby brother, now fifty-three, blinked. ‘You’re the oldest, Paola. Of course you’ll read. We’ll all read. Have you prepared anything? Suzanna and Brod don’t have real choices.’

‘Don’t forget we have written directions.’ Harriet came around the big table, pulled out a chair and sat lightly, gracefully, crossing long legs. ‘The sauce, Nige.’

Her husband swivelled quickly and twisted a knob, which made the simmer subside. ‘Have you noticed how hot tomato can get?’

‘Suzanna and Brod can read … the bit out of St Paul Mama liked, and the letter Papa …’

‘No! No letters. Too private. Not out of the dim distant past. Besides, we have her suggestions to choose from. She left a list.’

Harriet drummed perfect fingers on the scratched red tabletop. ‘All right, Nige. Your father died when you were little children. He was out of …’

‘He was never
out of the picture
.’ I was not about to let her tell me about my own father. ‘I was fourteen, Harriet. Nigel was nine. The twins were eleven – eleven? – something of the sort. We all have good, live, vivid memories of … of Papa.’

Nigel filled an enormous pot with water at a tap with a goose neck.

I changed the subject. ‘When was
that
installed?’

Harriet tilted her head to see what it was I had noticed. ‘Oh, the new taps. We had to have them put in when we lived here … you know, all the plumbing essentially needs a good check. Taps were like,
urgent
.’

‘Essentially?’

‘Paola, please. Um … no reading from a letter from Papa, then.’ Nigel placed the pot on the stove and lit a flame. ‘I feel I’m cooking for the entire population of Fiesole. How many will we be?’ He started to count on his fingers. ‘You and I. Paola. Suzanna and Lewis. Brod.  Lori and … Tad, perhaps.’

‘Perhaps?’

Nigel lifted an eyebrow so pointed, and Harriet produced a sigh so loud, so protracted and dramatic, it was plain they were having issues with their son. I walked over to the fridge and pulled its old handle.

Inside, neatly arranged in categories, were obvious recent purchases intended to cater for a large crowd over a number of days. ‘Is Brod bringing anyone?’

‘It’s not a party, Paola.’

I turned to my brother’s wife. ‘I know. It’s a funeral. Is Brod seeing someone right now, I mean.’

‘Grant. His name’s Grant and he’s an artist or something.’ She seemed pleased there was something I didn’t know. Filling me in was a pleasure. I could see it in her eyes. She continued with a bit less dryness in her tone.  ‘We’ve never met him, but they’ve … it’s been a year or more, on and off.’

‘Goodness – a year?’

‘He said he and Grant would stay down at the
Ponte Guisto
, even though I said they’d be welcome to his old room.’ Harriet’s sharp statement was more potent than the aroma from Nigel’s sauce pot.

It was evidently because she put it like she did that Brod refused her vicarious hospitality. Her proprietary way. Her ownership of all that was ours. She stood and shook out a brightly coloured checked tablecloth over the round table.

‘We’re not eating in here?’

‘Why not, Paola?’ Her black hair curtained one side of her face when she raised her eyes. ‘It’s only family.’ She straightened her back. And her mouth. ‘I said only a minute ago it’s not a party.’

Noise and disruption

We ended up eating in the big dining room, of course. The fact Paola thought it was silly to eat in the kitchen got on my nerves, but I think I managed to hide it. Harriet, patient and calm, unfolded another tablecloth, a rectangle of threadbare white damask, which had not been used in years, and draped it over a third of the long dining table. So we all pushed together at the end closest to the door to the passage and the kitchen.

They all found fault with everything. Well, almost. It was mostly Paola. I put up with it, like I always did, and smiled, smiled, smiled, even with the smell of garlic still on my fingers. Even with Paola examining all our expressions. She was so transparent. She was so ruthlessly calculating. She was waiting for an opportunity to say something momentous. It was there in her eyes. Sad, sad eyes, but with sharpness in them I recognized. She was after something.

‘We could have eaten in the kitchen, you know.’

‘This place is falling to pieces.’

‘It’s so cold in here.’

‘Where are the lace curtains?’

‘Is that the garden door slamming?’

‘What, no red wine?’

‘Mama would have used the good cutlery.’

Later, someone praised the food, which made Harriet smile. I knew her cooking secrets and shortcuts, and often copied them. She could be quick and efficient, and clean and everything, but she cut corners with recipes, used packets and pouches to boost her flavours and sauces, so some of it was faux. Still, she believed in spending time with people rather than chopping-boards, as she so funnily expressed her lack of desire to spend too much time standing at a counter with a sharp knife in hand. Well, I thought she was funny, but I doubt my oldest sister ever found my wife the least bit amusing.

Paola helped to carry out crockery and glasses, stopping from time to time to study our body language, our expressions, what we were wearing, and paused meaningfully at the end of some of our sentences. She weighed and measured everything in her head, my eldest sister, and could not wait, it was obvious, for the twins and their respective partners to arrive.

But it was our daughter who got there first, running around from the servants’ quarters at the back. Damp from the rain even from the brief dash from the garden, Lori chose her words, as I expected. She was reticent and patient with the whole
Gramma’s funeral
thing, and restricted what she said to pleasantries and small talk. My children were fascinating to Paola. As the only nephew and niece in the family, it was no wonder.

‘I left the cello in the back house. I’ll bring it up when it’s stopped raining. I guess you guys won’t mind if I play, but I’m setting down a new piece for the festival. Luckily it’s here. The timing is excellent.’

I raised an eyebrow at my daughter, without a word. I slid meaningful eyes toward her aunt Paola.

Lori responded immediately. ‘Oh – I know. Funerals are hardly expected to fit around other events, but it so happens we’re playing at the
Maggio Musicale
, in Florence.’

Harriet beamed.

Paola would see pride in her eyes, even past my wife’s long black hair. I waited for my sister to say something about playing, or instruments, or music. Or even the funeral. She simply examined Lori with those impassive eyes. Blank eyes which did not quite hide the sentiments and thoughts written into the lines on her face. She was approaching the last years of her fifties, and could still not completely mask her reactions and feelings. It was plain envy I saw there. I could see she wondered how she would have raised a daughter of her own.

I doubted Paola had ever been present to hear Lori’s cello in the house. She cocked her head to catch sounds of another arrival in the hall. We all heard keys and things thrown onto the table, and Brod’s high voice.

He entered the dining room talking. ‘… and here you all are! Hello, hello. Paola – good drive? Nice flight?’ He inclined his head at Harriet and me. ‘Hello Nige … hello, hello.’ He put his head back out through the hall door and called. ‘Come in, Grant, for heaven’s sake.’ His smile was so broad it widened his long face at the mouth in a cartoonesque way. The moustache – something new – did not help. ‘Grant?’ Breathless, he was, and very nervous, for a reason we all guessed. ‘Paola – have you and Grant ever met?’

Introductions, explanations, recounts of their drive. Paola’s reaction to Grant’s appearance was predictable. Handsome, too handsome, he gave the impression he should be on the big screen, or on the stage, or a model at the very least. Nothing like it. Grant was an architectural draftsman, or engineer, or designer, or something; arresting grey eyes and all. What he ever saw in Brod – well, it was obviously Brod’s wit and slap-dash ways … so very attractive and winning. Possibly the only gregarious soul in the family. No, no – Suzanna was our extrovert. There was also his caring personality, a feminine sympathy we all earlier on thought was part of being a twin. The empathy of being half of something, we all thought, before we could guess. Mama grasped it immediately. For Mama, things tended to fall into place when they happened, even if they were a shot out of the blue.

I remembered how Paola took Brod’s sexuality the first time he walked in with an obviously camp university boyfriend. Chilly, she was; aloof and supercilious. Analytical more than accepting. So many years ago, before she left for Australia. She went off so young. Where had all those years gone?

Harriet had to get used to my strange family from the start, I supposed. From my mother who was an heiress, who painted a little, whose money allowed her many mistakes and privileges, and much enviable leisure. Mama, with her small house in Cornwall and a sizeable villa in Tuscany. This predictable summer house, where we spent all school holidays in a warm cultural sun-bath. Yes, from Mama, to all four of us siblings.

We grew up half Italian simply because of where we lived our summers. My wife never met our father, of course. We four all had different, if vague, memories of his attempts at opening small cafés and bistros. Abandoning projects through premature sales; he did that a lot. Once or twice he surprisingly made more money than anyone ever imagined. The stuff of family legend.

Paola, because of her age, remembered more than any of us about Papa’s misguided forays into the hospitality industry. Even renovating this house with the view of turning it into a B & B was part of his whole energetic idea-driven exploits.

Mama had easily laughed it off. ‘Do you think we could have guests among the children’s mess and noise all summer, darling?’ Her calm amused question, at the time Papa was thinking of applying for permits and things, stopped everything in its tracks.

He came to see she would never cooperate. That was when he saw it for the first time; or so Paola tells it. Evidence remains of his efforts. Some of the bigger bedrooms up in the far wing were redone.

And now here we were, all coming together for Mama’s funeral. All wondering when the conversations – for now so superficial and cordial – would come down to the greedy. Paola, and her use of complicated vocabulary, would say the
pecuniary
, the
acquisitive
. My older sister uses words like weapons, and her face betrays her emotional state when she does. Her lean frame and her short primly parted dark hair loudly announced her methodical personality.

If only we, Harriet and I, could be choosey – about words or feelings. We had no choices. We needed money, and we needed it fast. Frankly, we had put so much towards caring for Mama we deserved at least as much as a quarter of everything.

Losing my job in the spring was something we never bargained for. How could I, such a competent programmer, suddenly find myself unemployed at fifty-three, with apparently little prospect of finding anything else immediately to provide the all-important income? How could Harriet cope? Realistically speaking, her work never made enough for anything else apart from the upkeep of our cars and the expenses of two rather demanding children and their high maintenance lives; musical instruments and all that. We were getting deeper in debt with each passing week. The mortgage on our London flat was eating us alive.

Being the youngest meant I had to be most generous with time and money to Mama. Well – Harriet had not always thought so, but her sarcastic flippancy was something I could take. She came around in the end. We spent time and a lot of money moving Mama from the Cornwall house to this crumbling place because she said for months she wanted to die here.

She died in hospital after all, a full ten months after the move, most of which time she spent in a home; and although one cannot with any confidence say a Tuscan hospice is the same as an English one, she could not have known the difference during those last few weeks. The last four days were packed with confusion and sorrow I could hardly stand. On top of it all, I was the only one of the children here to endure it. The only one. I would never forget it.

Now, we gathered in the old house, several numb days later, for the very important funeral. Harriet made some very pointed remarks to me in private about my siblings’ headlong rush to Fiesole, simply to hear the will read, but I understood Harriet very well. She expressed grief in a funny way. She always seemed closer to Mama than my own sisters.

There, I thought it, even if I never said it. Mama loved Harriet for her clever cynicism, her way with a sharp sentence. Her efficiency, too. My wife had a special frugality with time and money Mama understood, even if she could not practice it herself. Harriet was acutely aware of our precarious finances, and was as anxious as I was to find out how the contents of the will would change our fortunes.

There was Suzanna’s entrance. Late, noisy, disruptive, like she always was. You could never tell she was half of something, unlike with Brod, who was so easily seen by everyone to be her twin. She was unique – insistently so – and made it a point to stay that way. If Papa had lived, she would have been his foil. It was what Mama always said about Suzanna. ‘My business-minded daughter … such an entrepreneuse!’ With the difference, of course, that her schemes and plans worked. She saw things through, unlike Papa. But then, she had Lewis.

Lewis, the model husband. He came in behind her, carrying their bags straight into the dining room, where we were all sitting, before I had time to bring in the large platter. The commotion was tremendous. I stood at the doorway and waited, debating whether to slide everything in the oven to keep it warm. Luckily, it was a gelid kind of day, and the salad in the glass bowl on the round table would not wilt.

‘There you all are, already! How clever to get here before us! Driving up our hill was something in the rain! Listen everybody – we’ve done it! Haven’t we, Lewis? We sold the new franchise!’ Her acknowledgments were breezy, staccato. Suzanna always spoke in exclamations. Always about her own affairs first. Something that would have seemed selfish to an outsider. Grant watched her with curious eyes.

If she were a writer like Paola, Suzanna would have run out of exclamation marks a long time ago. ‘Everything’s settled! We got what we asked, or very nearly precisely. Now we can buy a new boat! Can’t we, Lewis?’

Lewis’s mild lopsided smiles went around, face to face to face, then he pulled a chair up for himself at the distant unclothed end, hidden by the tarnished silver centrepiece. His salutations were hardly audible. This was a man who longed to disappear at the earliest opportunity. A man more at home with spreadsheets, with organizing our sister’s life, than with conversation.

His wife was belatedly hugging her twin. Lewis watched from behind the silver epergne, obviously not the only one to be struck once more by the similarities in her appearance and Brod’s. His collar-length hair, his dark blue eyes, his mouth crammed with teeth, his large ears; they were all repeated identically in Suzanna, who managed – with expert make-up and a gifted hairdresser – to turn the dubious features into assets. She oozed style, even after a long drive in the rain. The tiny dog under her arm was as mute and awe-struck as her husband, who hid behind the centrepiece and waited for the chance to escape. Did he hate all company, or was it only this family that set his teeth so on edge he could hardly speak?

‘So … so sad about Mama, hmm? We can’t get over it! Can we, Lewis?’ She sat in my chair, removed a scarf, plonked the little dog in her lap so its snout came to rest on the table, and sighed audibly. ‘I guess you guys have made all the arrangements. I saw the announcements in the papers. Anyone thought of the service … and things?’