His mouth softened, and he smiled down at me. I’m sorry about your father. I’ll miss him too. I’m sure you will find the best… the appropriate place to bury the ashes.’
I watched Will trudge towards the waiting car, fling his briefcase into the back and climb in after it.
Almost immediately, the phone rang.
‘Raoul, I’ve missed you.’
‘I’m sorry, Fanny, that I did not make the funeral, but you knew why.’
‘You were in Australia. Did it go well?’
‘I’ve got a nice deal shaping up that I will tell you about at a better time.’
‘How are the family?’
‘Larger and much more expensive. Therese says she feels a hundred but she doesn’t look it.’ His laugh was full of energy and conveyed deep admiration. ‘My wife is a beautiful woman.’
‘If I was very nice to her do you think she would tell me her secret?’
‘Living with me, clearly. We are going to Rome for a couple of years. Did I tell you?’ Like the Rothschilds of old, the Villeneuves frequently despatched their family members all round the wine world to consolidate business contacts.
‘Wonderful.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I need not ask if you miss your father. I want to tell you that I will very much. He was a good friend and I valued him the more because he was from an older generation. One does not have many such friends, and I am grateful for the trouble he took with me.’
‘Actually, tomorrow I’m taking his ashes back to Fiertino. I think that is where he would wish to be.’
To my surprise, Raoul did not endorse the plan – and, in the scheme of things, only Raoul, because of his friendship with my father, had the right to question my decision. Are you quite sure? Alfredo was a great romantic in many ways, Fanny, but his life was in Stanwinton. Perhaps… you are right. It will give you time. Give yourself a moment to investigate the wine. I would like your thoughts on the super Tuscans.’ He paused. ‘I would like to talk to you about the business. Will you contact me when you feel better?’
I promised I would.
The plumber called me, and I went upstairs to find out the worst, which was nothing much, but he charged royally for it. I wrote him a cheque and ushered him out of the house.
I was searching in the chest in the hall for my passport and came across a bundle of out-of-date ones roosting under a selection of scarves no one ever used. I had a particular fondness for Chloe’s old passports because I loved the photographs. The first was of a tiny minx with plaits. Then the half-formed teenager who glowered and sulked at the camera. Chloe had taken the up-to-date model with her, of course.
‘If you want to be a real friend,’ I begged Elaine, who had driven over the day before to console me over my father (Elaine had understood when I explained that, with my father’s death, I had been ordered up from the rear to the front line), ‘help me clean Chloe’s room. Please I couldn’t face it after she left.’
After lunch we went upstairs. As a pile of discarded clothes hindered complete access, I had to push hard on the door. I dumped them on the landing. Elaine surveyed the blasted heath. ‘Seen it before,’ she said. ‘It’s probably radioactive. Can’t Maleeka do it?’
‘She could, but she wouldn’t emerge for at least a year.’
Elaine picked up one of the Barbies that had migrated into a Barbie gene pool on a shelf stuffed with childhood objects that Chloe refused to relinquish. This one had long blonde hair, cone breasts, a wasp waist and nothing on. Elaine manipulated one leg up above the head. ‘I could sort of do that once,’ she said wistfully.
I laughed. ‘Chloe cherished great hopes of the Barbies, but they let her down. She never got over the fact that their legs wouldn’t bend into ballet positions.’
Elaine leant against the window-frame and looked out across the sunny lawn and the border, in which a few opportunistic delphiniums raised their plumes. ‘I am nearly forty-two,’ she murmured, ‘and I keep asking myself, “What else is there? Is this… me as I am now, is this
‘All’ is a big word and a foxy one. Ever since the Liz episode I had been wary of it. What did Elaine or I or Will expect from ‘all’? I don’t know. ‘All’ can mean soft, funny and silly memories placed side by side, like pieces of mosaic, which make up a picture that adds up to a great deal. They are precious, those memories. Chloe singing in her cot. Chloe winning the egg-and-spoon race at school. My father holding a glass of wine up to the light and asking, ‘What do you think, Francesca?’ Will lying with his head in my lap, at peace and drowsy…
I dropped a kiss on the minx in the earliest passport and tucked it away under a dark blue scarf patterned with red cherries that Chloe had once treasured and pulled out my own.
A movement made me turn round, passport in hand. It was Meg. ‘Fanny? Fanny, I’ve been thinking. Can I come too? I need a holiday. I wouldn’t mind seeing this place you and your father talked about so often. This
I was checking my passport details, and not paying much attention. ‘If you don’t mind, Meg, I think not.’
‘I wouldn’t be any bother.’
‘No,’ I said, with only a hint of panic.
‘I think it would be a good idea.’
I shoved my passport into my pocket. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to go alone.’
‘That’s quite clear, then.’ She pulled at a finger until the joint cracked. Her eyes narrowed and darkened.
To my astonishment, Will turned up at the airport. ‘I didn’t think we’d said goodbye properly.’
Weak with relief that I had got this far, I leant against him. ‘Must be a first.’
‘I’ve run away from school and the diary secretary was not amused.’
He felt warm, firm and, despite everything, reliable. The uncertainty had vanished and he was under control. Here was the embodiment of a successful politician who had come to see off his wife at the airport; the well-cut suit symbolized the fusion between his energy and achievements. It was Will at his most attractive and I never failed to respond.
‘Go carefully with the car tax, won’t you? Don’t lose patience and make a muddle,’ I said, then added, ‘If that’s what you want. If that’s what you still believe.’
‘I do.’ His gaze fixed on the bookshop behind me. ‘Why
‘My father… I would like some breathing space. I want to get away.’
He frowned. ‘Oh, well, then,’ he said.
A family group, pushing two trolleys with suitcases wrapped in plastic sheeting, shot past us. Will stepped back. I watched as he detached himself mentally from me and what I might be feeling. That was the way he survived. The mobile phone shrilled in his pocket and, with obvious relief, he dived for it. ‘Sorry, darling.’
I picked up my hand luggage. Inside, wrapped in bubblewrap, Sellotape and one of my father’s jumpers was the casket containing his ashes. ‘’Bye,’ I mouthed, and moved towards Departures.
‘Fanny,’ he called sharply.
‘No,’ I said, panic-stricken that I might be persuaded to stay, and guilty that I did not wish to. ‘Please… let me go.’
And I shook him off and fled in a manner that – clearly – shocked him.
I was too tired to read on the plane and for the first slice of the journey I dozed and woke with a start from a dream where dank grass and grey mud clotted my shoes. I waded into a river of dead leaves, fighting for breath as the level went over my head. A little later, I found myself wreathed in a white river mist and its cold slid deep into my bones. In that dream, I cried out for the sun.
I woke and the Mediterranean coastline, vividly coloured and fringed by a bright blue sea, came into view and I breathed in deeply with relief. The stewardess dumped a tray of food in front of me. ‘Enjoy,’ she said.
I inspected a plastic lump, a roll attached to some dubious cold meat, drank the orange juice and found myself thinking of Caro. Her final words to me – her wedding present, which had been so crude and hurtful at the time – made better sense with experience. Nails screeching against the surface, wincing at the sound, Caro had attempted to wipe the blackboard clean of my father to begin again.
