The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back Page 3

  Will’s clothes from the previous week were stacked on the chair and, working automatically from long practice, I set about sorting them – laundry basket, shelf, cupboard. Nowadays his ties were silk, and his shirts were soft and expensive, made in subtle colours with battens inserted into the collar points. Sometimes I remembered to remove them, sometimes not.

  A shirt in hand, I sat down on the bed and buried my face in its folds. It smelt of Will, the Will I had always loved.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Fanny, are you there?’ Without waiting for an answer, Brigitte stuck her head round the door. ‘Yes, you are.’

  Guiltily, I dropped the shirt. Although she was only a temporary feature of the Savage household, Brigitte had that effect on me and I was so thoroughly in awe of her that I was never sure if I employed her or she me.

  Brigitte, who came from deepest Austria, disapproved of the Savage set-up – Meg’s oddness, Sacha’s coming and going, Chloë’s truculence – and she had a way of conveying this that made it matter. As a tactic, I admired it.

  She glanced at the photograph on the dressing-table of a family group. Today, it appeared to draw particular disapproval. ‘The shopping list, Fanny, I cannot find it.’

  ‘Sure.’ I reached for the notebook, which was always beside the bed, tore off the top page and handed it to her. Brigitte scanned it. ‘You forgot the polish.’ She tapped her nose with a finger. ‘I don’t forget. Or the bread.’

  She gestured with her large, capable hands in a way that expressed her desire to ensure that the Savage ménage remained provisioned. It was a task that appeared to give her authority and purpose. Back home, Brigitte was an ardent, paid-up member of the Green Party and washed her hair in soap, never in harmful shampoo. It was a sacrifice worth making, she had explained. Observing the state of her hair, I am sorry to say that I did not agree.

  ‘I’ll take the laundry.’ She brushed past me, swept up the clothes and marched downstairs. The sound of raised voices informed me that she and Maleeka were agitating for space in my home.

  Bearing a tray with a breakfast of mashed banana, toast and tea, I knocked on Meg’s bedroom door. There was a muttered ‘Come in’.

  The room stank of whisky. Meg was lying on her side and I drew back the curtains.

  She flung an arm across her eyes. ‘I suppose yet another apology is needed.’

  ‘Only if you wish.’

  ‘I don’t.’ She struggled upright.

  I handed her a cup of tea. ‘Get that down you.’

  Between mouthfuls, she asked, ‘Is Sacha OK?’

  ‘He kept watch. He’s probably asleep.’

  Meg gave a wry smile. ‘Sacha says he writes his songs late at night. He says his mind is more receptive and fertile then.’

  ‘Does he?’ I knew what Sacha meant. When I was feeding Chloë as a baby, those small hours of the night provided strange, heightened interludes where, the baby at my breast, I was free from busyness, and at liberty to try and grope my way towards clarity and knowledge.

  ‘Why do I do it to him, Fanny?’

  It was not the first time Meg had asked the question: nor, if both of us were honest, was it likely to be the last. I followed the uneven progress of the cup to her lips. ‘Would you like more help? We can organize it.’

  She cut me off. ‘Nope. Done it. It’s up to me now. Battered, unreliable old me.’

  ‘Please don’t, Meg.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said quickly. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  I sat down at the end of the bed. ‘What about Sacha and Will?’

  She grimaced.

  ‘Shouldn’t be drinking tea on an empty stomach. It doesn’t like it.’ I cut the toast into squares and handed her one.

  Meg edged the cup on to the bedside table. ‘So many people to fuss and worry over, Fanny. It must positively warm your heart.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean it.’

  At times like this, Meg took pleasure in driving me, or whoever was coping with her, to the edge, but we both knew the boundaries of our co-existence. Meg wanted love and a place in the family. Like Will with his passion to change the world for the better, I wanted to help, and somehow, muddling along, we had managed to keep a balance.

  She looked up and said softly, ‘I’m a good cause, the kind you like. The best, because I’m unredeemable. So none of you can blame yourselves when the worst happens.’ She dropped the half-eaten toast back on the plate. ‘Go away, Fanny. Go and be busy and keep everything in order.’

  I removed the tray from her lap. ‘Rob rang this morning.’

  ‘So? I talked to him yesterday.’

  ‘He forgot to remind you that it’s Sacha’s birthday at the weekend. He wanted to know what you were doing about it.’

  Meg buried her face in her hands. ‘What have I done?’

  I bent down, picked up her discarded jumper and trousers and placed them on the chair. ‘I’m busy today. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘It’s all Rob’s fault,’ she muttered. ‘If he’d stayed married to me, I might have got through.’

  At my wits’ end, I whirled round. ‘Meg, you drove him to it. He fell in love with Tania out of the exhaustion.’

  ‘I’m sick,’ she said flatly. ‘He should have tried harder. You shouldn’t give up on sick people.’

  ‘Have I ever given up on you?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve wanted to. Be honest.’

  We stared at each other. Meg was the first to drop her gaze but only because she knew she was the victor. She knew she had made it impossible for me to walk out of the room.

  I drew up a chair, manipulated the banana on to the spoon and handed it to her. ‘Eat.’

  A smile hovered at the corner of her mouth, but her eyes darted towards the whisky bottle in the wastepaper basket, before she parted her lips.

  I used to dream of a big, generous, blowsy household where children rustled and muttered in the bedrooms – two, three, even four. And every night I would go round and count them. ‘This is Millie’, I would say, smoothing fair tangles away from her face. ‘This is Arthur’, removing the thumb from his mouth. And this… this one is Jamie, the terror.’

  But it had not happened that way. After Chloë there were no more babies. My body pulled and strained to obey my longings, but it could not do what I asked of it. They haunt me, my non-children. Those warm, sleeping, rosy bodies, the children-who-never-were. Sometimes, I listen out for them playing under the eaves of my ugly house.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Will said to me once. ‘We have Chloë, that’s enough. We look after her. I look after you. You look after me, Fanny. Be content,please’

  ‘Don’t you mind at all?’ I asked.

  He touched my cheek. ‘I mind for you. I mind anything that hurts you.’

  Yet my household was full and we had been happy. First Chloë was born, and I was catapulted into the terror and mystery and exultation of a love that would never die. Then Meg came to live with us; Sacha too, after his sixteenth birthday. The au pairs came and went; the party workers slipped in and out; each leaving a ghostly imprint on the atmosphere, their rustles and murmurs dissolving into the general murmur of our lives.

  3

  ‘Is anything wrong Francesca?’

  My father was the only person who ever called me by my full name, and very little of what I felt or did escaped his scrutiny which was sometimes critical, but always loving.

  ‘Not really.’ I looked up from our scratch lunch of mushroom soup and cheese in the dining room at Ember House. It was only five miles from our house and I wrestled him into the diary at least once a week.

  The clock ticked reassuringly on the walnut sideboard and the blurred reflection of the blue and white fruit bowl beside it had the depth and stillness of a painting.

  The electric light emphasized the lines on my father’s face. New lines? And his tweed jacket seemed looser than I remembered. He had always been bony: all his energy had
gone into running his wine business – and into me, his only child. I don’t know what he thought about my situation, for there were some things about which he was guarded, but his pride in Battista Fine Wines was immense. It was a highly respected, idiosyncratic operation, catering to a growing number of wine lovers who were prepared to trust my father to select their wines, rather than the supermarket.

  I speared a gobbet of dolcelatte on my knife. ‘Once Chloë’s exams are over, things will settle down.’

  How did one admit to the feeling that a crossroads had been reached? How did a girl – no, a woman come to terms with the fact that her daughter was about to leave home? How could I argue that the choices I had once made no longer offered me surety and comfort, or gave me validation. I forced a smile. ‘I’m fine, Dad. Just a cloud passing over the sun. And talking of which, I think you could do with some vitamins.’

  ‘Stop fussing,’ he said happily.

  A hem of the curtains that Caro, my father’s ex-mistress, had chosen so long ago required repair and I added that, along with the vitamins, to my mental list of Things To Do.

  My father tapped a finger against a bottle of Le Pin Pomerol – the gentlest, richest of clarets. ‘Think about this instead. Raoul put me on to it.’

  Raoul Villeneuve was the son of one of my father’s closest business contacts – not that ‘business’ adequately described the perfection with which trade and a lifestyle had been blended. Raoul was a friend. He had also been my first lover – but I don’t think about that.

  Yes, I do. Sometimes. I strain to catch the exact sensation, recapture the sear of my startled reaction. Not because I want Raoul, but because I had not worked out what went wrong exactly.

  ‘How is Raoul? I haven’t spoken to him lately’

  ‘Expanding the business. Busy with the family. Enjoying his reputation.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. In material terms, Raoul had done better than Will, but he had had an advantage: his family’s wine empire had been waiting for him to assume command. It had been different for Will, whose background had been bare of luxuries.

  ‘What does “Ah” mean?’ asked my father.

  ‘Nothing.’

  My father was an Italian refugee, brought to England from the village of Fiertino, north of Rome, by his widowed mother who fled the war and settled in the Midlands. The Villeneuves were wine aristocrats who lived in an historic château. They made contact during the fifties and a close friendship developed despite their differences. That was the way with wine people.

  After I had Chloë, and found it difficult to juggle all my commitments, Raoul took my place at my father’s side for a while before returning to his family business. We still kept in touch. We still talked on the phone… oh, about many things.

  We discussed why the French drank their vintages young and hopeful. We discussed oak casks, sandy soil, the amount of sun for that year, the use of technology in Australian and American wine-making. The results? ‘Simplistic,’ concluded Raoul, the Frenchman. But perhaps that was not a bad thing. Clean, stable, sediment-free wine suited our age better than the muddy, sometimes fractious, yields of the Old World.

  We agreed that the finest wine defied categorization. Any reasonably intelligent observer, we said, could point to the best soil, position and climate, the necessity of keeping vigil until the grape trembled at the peak of ripeness and say, yes, that was the formula. But good wine, great and successful wine, like a marriage, was a glorious fusion of nature, substance and will. It was a product of patience, understanding and knowledge, of great passion and love, which could never be quite regulated or predicted. One sniff, one drop balanced on the tongue, is all it takes to exult the mind and flood the senses with the delirium of discovery.

  My father poured two glasses of the Pomerol (the creation of an inspired Belgian vintner and the merlot grape) and waited for me to ready my palate.

  Rich ruby. Dark garnet. Depth and sweetness. I saw through the glass darkly, held its ravishments on my tongue.

  ‘Describe,’ ordered my father.

  ‘Fleshy… concentrated. It has a rich inner life.’

  My father was amused. ‘I hope you do, too, Francesca.’

  When I first began to work for him, travelling and learning, talking to clients, wine represented a mysterious combination of provenance, production and perception; I yearned to unlock its secrets and become proficient in its lore. But then I fell in love with it, and learned that wine was life, and for life. It was sun and warmth – it could be bitter, unfair, disappointing, but the possibilities of greatness always remained.

  ‘You must come back to work properly,’ said my father, ‘now that Chloë is leaving home. I need the help and you must be ready to take on the business.’ He looked at me lovingly across the table. ‘After all, it is in your blood.’

  I felt the answering beat of excitement. I could best describe it as the quiver that accompanied the wakening from long sleep. My father was right. Wine was in my blood.

  *

  When I was three, my mother, Sally, absconded with Art, an estate agent from Montana, where she still lived and where I had visited her every other summer until I married Will. Unless it was absolutely necessary, my father never mentioned her. ‘She went,’ he said, ‘and that is that.’

  Like it or not, and for years I picked over the imperfectly healed scars, my mother took with her far more than the clothes she had stuffed into two suitcases: my belief that things were strong and permanent, I suppose. She left my father (and me) warier, more fragile.

  In place of a mother, my father summoned Benedetta from Fiertino (home to generations of Battistas) to help him look after me, and she lived with us until Caro took up residence in Ember House. Benedetta, a third cousin by marriage in a complicated Battista family tree, dark-haired, and not as slender as she would have liked, held my father in check, which few could. It was Benedetta who decreed on my tenth birthday that there should be no more bathtimes with my father. That puzzled me. Perhaps ten was a magic number. Perhaps it was secret, like my mother was a secret. But if I had questions, I had not yet learnt how to ask them. On my tenth birthday then, washed and brushed within an inch of my life, tied into a thick, old-fashioned dressing-gown with a cord belt, I was escorted downstairs by Benedetta to the door of my father’s study.

  He was at his desk, surrounded by wine books, writing up the day’s business. Conscious that ‘ten’ hung over me, I went to stand beside him. When he patted his knee, I shook my head.

  ‘I was forgetting,’ he said sadly. ‘You’re a big girl now and we must talk about grown-up things.’

  I was more interested by the framed photograph on my father’s desk. It was of a man and a woman carved in stone, lying together on an ornate couch draped in material. He had a square face and a beard; she had curls falling down her back and dangling earrings. His arm was round her, and she leant back against him.

  I swivelled to look at my father. Greatly daring, I asked, ‘Is that Mummy?’

  There was a short, tense silence. No, it was not, he answered, and, if my question hurt him, he did not betray it by so much as a flicker. No, the picture was of an Etruscan funerary couch. Fifth century BC.

  ‘Was that when I was eight?’ I asked, for time had no meaning.

  My father laughed. ‘The Etruscans were a people who, long, long ago, lived in the Fiertino area where the Battistas come from. They made such a lot of things that people are always digging up bits and pieces and putting them in museums. I like this one particularly because he and she will never be… parted.’

  Bedtimes were usually reserved for my father’s inexhaustible supply of Fiertino stories which, it must be said, were a little different each time he told them. I enjoyed pouncing on the discrepancies. ‘But, Dad, you said the oxen were grey, not white.’ At which point he would tap my hand and say, ‘Don’t be too clever, my darling,’ and continue.

  ‘Fiertino is only a little town, but a town all the same. It is in a valley
north of Rome which was originally lived in by the Etruscans, an ancient people who loved the good things in life. Chestnut trees grow on one slope; on the other, wheat, olives and vines. It has a square with a large church at one end, and a beautiful colonnaded walk around it, which gives very necessary shade from the sun. Our family, the Battistas, lived in the fattoria, the farm, just outside the town, and your grandfather was the fattore. He supervised the granaries and cellars, the oil presses and the dairy. We had our own vineyard and grew the Sangiovese grape.’

  Like the horn of plenty, the stories never appeared to be finished and Fiertino became synonymous for me with drowsiness and sleep. I heard about hot sun and the harvesting of olives, of the huge family house, the fattoria, which echoed to the shrieks and exchanges of a large, extended, uninhibited family. I knew that the town had suffered badly in the war. I heard the story of the three-legged goat, the miraculous olive tree, the runaway Battista bride, and of the young wife who was murdered by her much older husband for taking a lover.

  ‘You see, there is the code,’ my father said. He spoke in the present tense.

  He was clever, my father. He knew how to plant a footprint in a child’s mind. Images crept into mine and put down long, tough, fibrous roots – just like the vine.

  ‘It’s time I went back to Fiertino,’ said my father. ‘We have left it too long.’

  Curiously, we had not been there together. In fact, my father had returned only once, as a young man. We travelled everywhere else in the world and we did business in the north of Italy but my father had never cared to go south to Fiertino. Partly, I suspect, this was because of Benedetta, who had wanted to marry him. But that was another story.

  ‘How many times have you said that?’

  He looked a little sheepish. ‘I mean it this time.’

  I rose to leave. ‘How about September when Chloë is in Australia? Then I’ll be free.’ I corrected myself. ‘Or I can negotiate with Will and Mannochie. I’m due time off.’

  My father brightened in a way that caught at my heart. ‘If you think it is possible, there is nothing I would like more.’