The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

He held me by my shoulders and searched my face. He seemed puzzled by what he saw, which irritated me. Was it so puzzling to be grieving for my father? ‘If you want me to think about it, of course I will. It’s just not what we planned.’

‘Oh, the plan.’ I shrugged him off, and witless with misery, slammed the coffee mugs into the sink.

‘Fanny, what is it?’

I stared out of the window and bit down on my knuckle. ‘I can’t get over the fact that Dad did not have me there when he died. It haunts me and I’ll never forgive myself.’

Will stood behind me and put his arms around me. ‘Hush, Fanny, hush.’

His mobile rang in the hall. Instinctively, he moved towards the sound. I leapt to my feet and blocked him. ‘No. Just this once, Will. No phones. Nothing.’

The phone fell silent. Will put his arms round me. ‘You think I don’t understand, Fanny, but I do…’ The old smile flashed, sweet and loving, and my sore heart lifted a trifle.

Now that I paid proper attention, I sensed a suppressed excitement in Will, a new tension. ‘What are you up to?’

‘This and that.’

‘You’d better tell me.’

‘OK.’ He went and sat down again. ‘Robert stopped me in the corridor. He said that in the next reshuffle the Exchequer was a definite possibility. But, Fanny, I have to get the car tax through.’

Just in time, I stopped myself laughing and pressed my hand to my mouth. I noticed it was trembling.

‘The deal was that if I backed the government on the National Health Bill I opposed, then…’

‘But as a minister you have to support the government. It doesn’t matter what you think.’

‘There’s support and support,’ he said.

Once or twice, Elaine and I had discussed power. What was it? In what sort of shape did it come? How did a wife fit around it? Very snary, we agreed. Power wraps a person up, as tight as liquor in a bonded store. Very snary are the courtiers, the adulation, the chauffeured cars, and the handing over of ideals in return for the commodity called power. Ideals are so much more uncomfortable than sitting warm and snug in the back of the limousine.

‘Well?’ He did not sound as sure as he looked. ‘What do you think?’

I struggled to assemble my thoughts. ‘Can we talk about this later?’

I abandoned Will and the kitchen and fled into the study. My father’s fountain pen rested on the desk where he had last put it down. The red light winked on the answer-machine. I picked up a book from a pile on a chair under the window, A Disquisition on the Grand Wines of Bordeaux, and dropped it back.

I grasped the edge of the curtain between fingertips that felt numb. Years ago I had got it wrong. Grief was not like a blade slicing into flesh. No, grief was dull, heavy: it made your limbs drag, your head ache. It mocked those who drooped under its weight, for I could swear my father was in the room. I could have sworn I could hear his voice.

‘After 1963,’ he was saying, and we are talking Bordeaux here, of course, ‘with its vintage of rain and rot and worthless wines, came 1964, badly undervalued because of the previous year. Nature, having taken away with one hand, now gave its lovely rich rounded elegant wines with the other…’

A tiny movement alerted me to Will’s presence behind me. With my back to him, I said, ‘There are so few people to whom one is joined, cell for cell, understanding for understanding. Far too few to lose or to betray.’

‘Fanny, darling, we’d better check over the papers,’ he said quietly.

We bundled up most of them, and conveyed them back to our house. Together, we worked through the obvious ones, stacking urgent bills and letters into one basket, less urgent into another. Finally, we came to a file with ‘Francesca’ written on it.

‘I’ll look at this later.’ I let my hand rest on top of it.

An eyebrow flew up. ‘I see.’

Will was not stupid. He invited me to share his work, his ambition, and I did not want to share the contents of a file belonging to my father.

Even so, I made sure that I opened the file in the privacy of our bedroom. I don’t know what I expected – legal or financial instructions, perhaps – but certainly not a child’s drawing of a house with a tiled roof, a large front door and pathway leading up to it. In front of the house were three figures: a stick man with a black hat, a stick woman with a bright red skirt and, suspended between them, a stick child with a bow in her hair.

It was a drawing I had done at nursery school.

The file also contained an essay written on lined paper. ‘Show the effect on European foreign policy of America’s isolationist stance during the 1930s, giving at least two examples.’ The mark had been C. There was also a poem, handwritten on pale pink paper: ‘Your absence grates on my skin/Which breaks into scarlet rubies/Until a red river slides towards the sea of my grief.’

I pressed my fingers to hot cheeks. The poem, a relic from a failed love affair – all right, the failed love affair with Raoul – was unutterably bad, but my father had chosen to keep it. Leafing through the remainder of the file’s contents, I discovered a wedding photograph of Will and me, an invitation for my father and me to the Chevalier du Tastevin dinner, which, once upon a time, I had coveted above all else, and a tiny curl of baby hair taped on to a photograph of Chloe at six months.

Eyes brimming, I shuffled them back into order – those small, telling pieces from my past had been carefully assembled by my father, my unsentimental father. As I replaced them in the file, I noticed another piece of folded paper. It was a sketch, made roughly in pencil, not professional. Whoever had been the artist had been impatient, stabbing the pencil far too hard on the paper. But the shape was obvious enough. It was of a house planned round a central courtyard with a loggia at one end. Underneath the sketch were the words ‘Il Fattoria. Val del Fiertino’.

Will was watching the television news.

‘Will…’ I sat down beside him on the sofa. ‘Will, I’ve decided to take my father’s ashes to Fiertino – as soon as I can get a flight. I know that’s where he wants to be. I’d rather not wait till September.’

The newscaster continued to talk.

‘Without me?’

‘Without you.’

‘And…’

‘I would like to go away. Just for a while.’

‘Of course you must, Fanny.’ He did not look at me. ‘If that’s what you want.’

15

Early on the Monday morning, I was almost ready.

I was saying goodbye to Will. A plumber banged away at a dripping pipe in our bathroom. Maleeka’s cleaning materials littered the hallway. The radio in the kitchen was at full blast. Will’s car was in the drive and the driver had kept the engine running. Will had lost his wallet and was rampaging upstairs in the search. In short, everything was perfectly normal – except that the following day I would be driven to the airport to catch a plane, and the scent of an unusual freedom in my nostrils was almost unbearable.

Will clattered downstairs, his briefcase half open. ‘Got it. What time are you flying?’

I tucked a copy of my flight schedule into the briefcase and zipped it shut. My husband’s mouth was set in a tight line, but it was not anger. It was something deeper and more worrying. Will was bracing himself against my going. I kissed him tenderly but with an almost palpable sense of relief, and he kissed me back, almost angrily. ‘Take care,’ he said. ‘You will phone?’

‘Promise.’ I brushed my fingers over the set mouth. ‘Do your best.’

‘For what?’ he said, which was unlike him. ‘Is it worth it?’

I placed my hands lightly on his shoulders. ‘You know what for.’ As I had asked for comfort over my father, he had asked me to shore up his confidence and optimism. It was the least I could do.