The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

I could have explained how I felt to Will. I could have said: ‘When I married you and I was swept up by the tempestuous emotions of early passion, of coming together in love, it was irrelevant (apart from the obvious physical mechanics) who belonged to which sex. It was a meeting of souls and minds. But once the marriage was made, the duties allocated, it mattered very much to which sex I belonged.’

What was more, when he had taken Liz into our bed Will taught me that to be a wife was separate and distinct from being a woman.

I looked down from the plane window at the green and brown of the Italian peninsula. I wanted a rest from that part of my life.

As the plane began its descent, I uttered a silent thank-you to my father.

‘Fanny… Fanny!’ To make up for not getting to the funeral, Benedetta had insisted on travelling from Fiertino on the train to meet me. She carved a swathe through the clumps of spectators gathered around Arrivals and folded me into an embrace. It combined the sensations of plump arms, sweat, heat, and a base note of garlic – and I was transported back to the child with plaits, wadded in a Chilprufe vest against the cold.

We queued for a long time at the car-hire desk. ‘Let me look at you,’ she demanded, and looked long and hard, laid a hand on my arm, touched my shoulder, caressed my cheek. The gestures were careful, loving and, like the best cough medicine, soothing and sweet.

Her English had deteriorated. So had my Italian, but some important facts were soon established. Her arthritis was bad, her son never wrote from Milan, where he now lived, much of the hillside surrounding Fiertino – which had been open and free – had been carved up by city-dwellers for summer residences, and you never knew who you would stumble across in the valley. But I was not to worry – she grabbed my hand: the house where I was staying was old, a strange preference she knew my father and I shared. For herself, she was happy in her modern bungalow.

On the drive out of Rome, past dusty oleanders and fields of mass-produced tomatoes and courgettes, Benedetta chattered. Casa Rosa had been bought by an inglese couple who, failing to secure the money to repair it properly, had retreated back to England. Now it was empty, except for an odd letting or two during the summer. Not that the agent knew her job – ‘Santa Patata, she was born with no brain.’ Anxious in the unfamiliar traffic, I listened with only half an ear.

Two hours later, Benedetta instructed me to turn right into a valley running from north to south and we drove between fields of corn and of vines. They were small and immaculate, cherished pockets of maize and grapes. Even so, it was noticeable that the machinery being used in them was elaborate and expensive.

Olive trees shimmered silver-white in the heat. The road wound through the valley and, on the slopes above it, the crete sensesi, the ridges on top of the hills, were dusty brown -‘old leather that has done good service,’ said my father – and the river, which dropped into the valley, was a twisted ribbon of smoothed, burning rock.

The gearstick was slippery under my hand. I coughed a little and Benedetta clucked. ‘You are low from Alfredo’s death. It is to be expected.’

I turned and smiled at her. ‘Probably. It was a great shock.’

‘It is best for him,’ she said, and tapped my thigh. ‘Slow down, Fanny. We are coming to Fiertino.’

Stomach contracting a little with nerves, and frightened that Fiertino would not match up to all those years of thinking about it, I obeyed.

And… yes, there was the church, and the piazza, hemmed by dusty-looking plane trees, and the jumble of narrow streets that radiated out from the centre.

And… no. The Fiertino of my father’s childhood almost certainly had no traffic, no garish adverts, or the sprawl of squat, modern housing that pressed for space up against the elegant architecture and stone of the old centre.

No matter.

We drove past the church and skirted the piazza, and Benedetta did not let up with her stream of information. The builders had cheated the inglese - anyone could have told them: the new wall they built developed cracks and fell down, and most of the plants in the garden died during an exceptionally hot summer. Her worst scorn was reserved for their sin of failing to ask the locals for help. ‘They ran back home and, now, the house is in trouble.’

Casa Rosa was set back from the road about quarter of a mile out of Fiertino to the north. A dusty track sloped steeply upward and I was concentrating so hard on negotiating the rough surface that I missed the first sight of the house. This I regretted, for I would have known five seconds earlier what I knew the minute I got out of the car and walked up to the front door.

Painted a pink-orange, which had weathered in soft, subtle streaks, Casa Rosa was a flat-fronted two-storey house. Nothing magnificent, nothing special – except that it spoke to me in a manner that made me catch my breath. It said, I should be yours.

OK, I thought. At least that’s clear. It’s a little inconvenient since I live somewhere else, but at least it’s quite clear.

It had long, shuttered windows on the ground floor and smaller echoes upstairs. The tiled roof had weathered as subtly as the stucco, and they matched each other for disrepair. There were ugly holes in the stonework, telltale scars from damp and missing tiles, and a plant grew out of the masonry by the chimney. Even the kindest eye could not ignore the raw, unfinished look, its air of desperation and need.

Benedetta shrugged. ‘You need la passione to make it good.’

I shaded my eyes and counted the windows. It seemed a good thing to do, a good first thing to have under my belt.

The front door needed persuasion to yield. ‘Alloral,’ said Benedetta, ‘it is the pig.’

As we went in, there was a rustling of insects and our feet kicked up dust. Benedetta clicked her tongue. ‘Very bad. But no worry. I shall come and clean.’

‘No, you won’t.’ I slipped my arm round her shoulders. I sounded proprietorial. ‘I will.’

‘No good,’ said Benedetta flatly, when we inspected the kitchen.

‘There is hope,’ I contradicted her. If the cooker was both ancient and well used, it was clean; and if the taps were fur-encrusted, the sink was usable. A selection of crockery had been stacked on a shelf, and a box of matches with a saucer full of spent ones had been placed beside the cooker. A candle had been wedged into a Chianti bottle and the wax had splashed over the wooden kitchen table.

Upstairs, there were three bedrooms and a bathroom, which was little more than a basin and a drain in the floor. The main bedroom was in a reasonable condition and the bed was positioned so that the occupant could derive full advantage of the view that swept beyond Fiertino to the other side of the valley.

My vision filled with the vividness of a blazing blue sky, the bosomy line of hills dipping into purple and brown, the sylvan grey-green of olive leaves and, to the west, the vines, which travelled in matching lines up the slope, and I caught my breath.

Benedetta took the state of the house as a personal affront and apologized with tears in her eyes.

I hefted my suitcase up to the bedroom and lifted my hand luggage carefully on to the bed. ‘Benedetta…’ I extracted the casket and unwrapped it. ‘You will have to help me find the right place for my father.’

‘Ah…’ She touched the lid. ‘Alfredo. Yes, we must think. That is important.’ Her fingers rested on the casket. ‘Perhaps the priest… I think Alfredo would prefer to be out on the hillside.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but I shall have to look carefully. I must get it right.’

Benedetta laughed a deep belly laugh. ‘Your father was a wonderful man.’

16

‘Poor you,’ said Meg.

I had rung to report my arrival and thrown in a few details about the state of the house. There was no point in explaining to Meg that the state of the house was the point. Its quasi-dereliction and the suggestion of redemption