A Funeral in Fiesole (4 page)

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.

‘So what’s down there?’

‘If it weren’t raining so hard I’d take you down those steps – they’re cut into the bank, see? – and descend to the next terrace. It’s a bit of lawn surrounded by large pots, flower borders, you know the sort of thing. It’s the ideal place for a pool, you’ll see that for yourself – but we never had one.’

I had sat on the steps down there with Mama summer after summer, and talked about how glorious it might be to have a pool right on that grassed terrace. She would get me to pace it out; seven metres one way, four metres the other way.
Perfect
, we would say together, knowing it was a dream. Since Papa died she had to be careful. Her own mortality must always have been on her mind, not knowing she would live into her eighties. Knowing her caution was simply that. We feasibly could have had the pool. I didn’t think it ever was money that stopped her.

I wondered about her last days at the hospital. Nigel and Harriet wouldn’t say much. It would have had to be harrowing for Nigel. Harriet too. Mama loved her in a way, and one could not know someone for years on end and not be saddened by their death.

One expected to find Donato and Matilde here too. They were part of the furniture and we grew up with them in the background. Donato fixed things, even bandaged knees with the same patience he would lag a hot-water pipe. He could do a lot with his funny cloth bag of tools and wooden folding ladder, which seemed part of him. Donato wasn’t Donato without his paint-stained ladder.

Matilde fixed everything else with pasta, pieces of cheese, her pickled olives, and those magical
cantuccini
baked from a recipe from her home town of Prato. ‘Make no mistake, Broderick. These are Prato biscuits, and they have conquered the world.’ Oh, that accent. Her clear Florentine dialect, which we all got to patter in by the time we grew to teenage.

Matilde was right. I remember dunking her biscuits into milky coffee in a bowl. I remember the big red round table and how she would wring out a dishcloth and vigorously rub it all clean while I sat there eating. The squeak of the cloth, the smell of yellow soap, the presence of someone silent there, active but silent, doing things around me; it all still made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I thought I learned about pleasure, and from where it can come, and the unexpected things that give pleasure, in that kitchen.

I could tell Grant fell in love with the house. Not only its size. ‘It’s massive, Brod. It’s more than big – it’s absolutely lovely. Where does the passage behind us lead?’

I took him up and back down the vaulted corridor and we ascended the back stairs to the wing, where some of the rooms were renovated. Papa’s B & B plans, schemes, and dreams never came true, but a lot of work and expense had gone into the house. Mama admired some of the improvements. The rooms down this way were smaller than the bedchambers upstairs in the main block of the mansion, but they were pretty.

‘It’s because this part of the house was built much later, I think. Successive owners added, took away, renovated … you know.’

Grant walked on. ‘It’s what’s so lovely about it. I like organic houses where the changes happen through the years, where you can see the pauses and the re-takes. There’s nothing more maddening than a house all built and decorated to one instant plan.’ He opened double doors and peeked into a bedroom whose walls were butter yellow. Even on a dull rainy day it was a bright sunny room. Even with an English ticking mattress rolled up on a metal bed base, curtains hanging to an expedient knot in their ends, and crates of things piled in corners; even with a door standing ajar showing a dated bathroom, it was attractive. I saw it too.

‘What’s happening to the house, Brod? It’s not being sold, is it? It would be such a shame.’

I could see what he was thinking. ‘I could never afford to buy Suzanna, Paola, and Nigel out, Grant – it can’t happen.’

‘Would a mortgage …? Would …? No, I guess not, but it would be wonderful if it stayed in the family so we could visit. Can you see us in this yellow room, eh, can you?’ He smiled, charming, his beautiful face twisted into a playful grimace.

‘I can. What we should do is talk Paola into buying us out – our share at least. Paola is most likely the only one who can afford it … she’s an author. I told you.’

‘I thought Suzanna and Lewis …’

‘They’re buying an enormous yacht. Their heart is set on it. It can only be Paola, my sister the author.’

‘Not a household name author, though.’

‘No – but she’s written something like … what? Thirty mystery novels? Paola Larkin, and her special detective, Emanuele Bondin. It should mean something – she does sell books. How do we get her to buy us out? I’d rather she had it than either of the others. Oh – look, it’ll never happen.’ I walked to the next double doors and opened them to reveal a small bedroom whose walls were a shade of rust. The ceiling cornice was decorative, and there were French windows to a small balcony, drenched with rain. The balustrade out there was not safe. ‘It would take a fortune to fix the place, Grant. Even you can see it.’