A Funeral in Fiesole (3 page)

‘I emailed you, Suzanna.’

She lifted her chin at me. ‘Oh yes, Nigel. You know me and my memory!’

She had perfectly good recall. But the others were talking, so she shifted her attention to what was going on in the room, and I was left to organize it so Lewis joined us on the tablecloth, so dinner was served hot, and that there was enough to drink.

Someone asked, above the chatter, where Tad was. My son was always late, and meeting the uncles and aunts, preparing for
Gramma’s funeral
, the hubbub of having everyone in the house was not Tad’s idea of an enjoyable time. He would most probably saunter in, unobtrusive, simmering with something he never spoke about, after dinner, when everyone’s overtures had been well and truly sung.

Ruthless and blunt?

What a fuss they all made, when we were only an hour late! Lewis was driving, so we had to take our time, and taking the ring road around Florence in the rain was not his idea of a fun drive. On top of it all, Otto needed a pit-stop or two.

‘Not again!’ Lewis loves the dog, but occasionally forgets he is a live and sentient being with needs and desires similar to ours. Poor Otto – he has to put up with Lewis’s concept of what’s right and proper, even when it comes to toilet stops on a very long drive in Italian traffic. A very long drive from the ferry, for Mama’s funeral in Fiesole. She died less than a fortnight ago, and I’m only now used to the idea she is no longer there. No longer pottering about in the garden of the old villa, no longer arranging flowers on the round hall table, watched by our wall gods.

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!