‘Deal.’
He walked me to the check-in desk. ‘You’re flying to Frankfurt?’ he said. ‘Why the hell would you want to go there?’
‘It’s the transport hub of Europe, mate. Connecting flight to Pisa.’
He looked at me in astonishment. ‘You’re going to see Dad?’
TWENTY-NINE
MY FATHER’S HOUSE was an hour’s drive from the airport. He had a big villa that looked out over olive terraces. I suppose the landscape had been chopped out of the hillside by the Etruscans, but the depth of my historical reference is such that winding roads and hills and vineyards mainly evoke a mythical location which I think of as Car Advert Country.
I parked on the verge and walked through the front gate. The housekeeper indicated in signs that Signor March was round the back, tending to his garden somewhere.
I found him at the foot of the slope, among his beehives. He wore one of those veiled hats and was moving an object that might have been a wooden tray, but that was obscured with teeming black bodies. Around him, the bees seemed to make solid shapes in the air, like translucent curtains being pulled this way and that by the wind.
‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘I’m moving the queen.’
‘No gloves, Dad? Don’t they sting you?’
‘They sting me — but it prevents arthritis, so I’m happy to put up with it.’ His voice was slightly muffled through the layers of cloth around his face. ‘I forgot where you said you were staying.’
‘A schoolfriend of Laura’s has got an old mill outside Lucca,’ I said. I decided it wasn’t really a lie, since the statement was true, even though the inference I expected him to draw was false. Laura and I had spent the New Year there ten years earlier, but I hadn’t seen the woman since.
‘Woman friend?’ asked my father.
‘Yup.’
‘You should have brought her along. Is it a romantic entanglement?’
For some reason I thought of the moustachioed dragon who had studied my passport photo like a chess puzzle before giving me a room in her guest house. I smiled. ‘No. Unfortunately not.’
When my father took off his hat, I noticed he had lost weight. It made his features more prominent. His hair had been cropped into an unintentionally fashionable style, and with his beaky nose and beady eyes I thought he bore a striking resemblance to a baby eagle.
‘Vivian told me you’d been ill,’ I said.
He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Nothing worth bothering with.’ Then he changed the subject. ‘You’ve never been here before, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you have time for the tour of the house?’
He showed me round briefly. His living rooms were plain and sparely furnished. His tiny study was dominated by a wall of legal textbooks. A big photograph of Vivian and me jumping off a sand dune in Truro hung above his desk.
I had come to take my father to dinner. He chose the restaurant, a local place called Il Vecchio Pazzo. I had made it clear that I would be paying, over his protestations. It made me feel more up to the task at hand to be in the driver’s seat in this way. The power of being the giver amounted to a slight equalling of our respective positions. Although, when I worked it out, I realised that his dead brother’s mistress’s husband was the real sponsor of our reunion. But money’s weird like that.
My father insisted on changing for dinner. I waited in his tiled sitting room, worrying that he would appear in an opera hat and tails as though dressing for the captain’s table on some prewar Atlantic liner, but he put on nothing more formal than a navy-blue, brass-buttoned blazer.
The waiters clearly knew my father. I overheard one of them referring to him affectionately as ‘Il Ingles’, and he seemed pleased when I mentioned it. He introduced me to the maître d’ and chatted away to him about the menu in Italian. Once his detailed inquiries had been satisfied, he turned to me and said, ‘You could follow that, couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t speak Italian, Dad.’
‘Well, it’s all basically Latin.’
‘Never my strong suit, I’m afraid.’ I helped myself to water from the bulbous carafe. My father was turning over the napkin in his lap slightly nervously. I remembered that there was always something distracted in his manner — he had a restless energy that was only still when he was at his desk working. But he seemed a little more twitchy than usual. He probably thought I wanted to interrogate him about his illness. Still, he was handling the situation with great aplomb.
He broke up a piece of bread and used it to sop up some olive oil. ‘How’s life at the Beeb? It’s terrible what they’re doing to the World Service.’
‘It doesn’t really apply to me,’ I said.
‘Well, of course, I know you work for the TV part.’
‘I mean, I haven’t been in London for a while. I’ve been on Ionia.’
‘Ionia?’ As he said it, I was struck by what a beautiful word it was. He repeated it softly; his surprise gave it a sense of wonderment and his sonorous voice lingered on the vowels. I remembered the sound the breeze made when it sprang up to rustle the pine trees in the late afternoon. ‘Is the water still as cold as it used to be?’
‘Most definitely.’
‘I remember taking you and Vivian to the beach there before either of you could swim and having to watch you both like a hawk.’ He pronounced ‘hawk’ hock; it was one of the Medfordisms he could never shake off.
‘I saw Vivian a few days ago.’
‘You saw Vivian there?’
I nodded. ‘He told me about your operation.’
‘How is he?’
‘Strength to strength, I gather. I was staying at Patrick’s.’
My father raised his eyebrows, but it could have been in surprise, or because, at that moment, the waiter was sliding a plateful of ravioli under his nose. I was having the same: it had a delicious, indefinably meaty filling.
‘What is this, pork?’ I said.
‘Coniglio.’
I shook my head.
‘Bunny rabbit.’
‘It’s good.’ I tore up some bread and swirled it in the garlicky sauce. ‘I figured I’d spend the summer there — swim every day — reminisce. Do a spot of painting. I couldn’t think why else he would have left me the house.’
‘He was a truly strange man, Damien. I say that as his brother. I could show you letters I got from him that would make your hair curl — abusive, deranged, cruel.’
‘I know, I know. But I was talking to his lawyer about it. Apparently he told the guy that I’d know what to do with it. But what? After about ten minutes I realised I’m sure as hell not supposed to live in it. But I figured it out. It’s a museum. It’s an unofficial museum, and I was supposed to be the curator.’
‘You’re not eating your ravioli.’
I spooned a couple into my mouth and the waiter took my plate away. ‘Tell him they were great.’ I said. ‘Delicioso.’
My father murmured something to the waiter, who seemed to retire through the swing doors satisfied.
‘I brought you something, by the way,’ I said, passing him the envelope of photos I’d found in Patrick’s library.
‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ he said. ‘This is from before your mother and I were married.’ He went through the photos twice, pausing on each shot as though in front of a painting in a gallery, absorbing details of the figures, the composition, the relationship of the figures to one another. I sensed he was a million miles away.
‘Well,’ he said, passing them back to me.
‘Keep them, Dad. I brought them for you.’
‘I’m touched, Damien.’ He sounded slightly abashed. I looked down at the crumbs on the table in front of me.
My father had chosen the wine for the main course, which was some kind of slow-braised lamb — shanks, I think. The wine was a deep, deep red and sat shimmering in the glass. The flavour was so full, it made me think of arterial blood — if that can be a pleasant quality in a wine.