‘You’re hurting me, Mummy.’ Chloë wriggled out of my grasp and promptly fell over.

I bent down to soothe her smarting knees. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ I said. ‘Nothing terrible.’

Chloë snuggled into me and I lifted her up. As I did so, Liz turned and caught sight of me. She went white and, within a few seconds, left the room.

Chloë raised her face for a kiss and I gave one, passionately and with more love than I could possibly describe.

I have no idea what Liz made of that encounter, but I could imagine a little of her feelings. She would never guess my reaction. I did not hate her, nor did I despise her for taking Will (after all, I had taken him, just like that). Those emotions were redundant. No, what intrigued me was the realization that Liz had been instrumental in pushing Will and me further on. She had shown me that, for good or ill, I had left the fellowship of the single girls to which she belonged. My curved haunch was no longer an invitation to other men, for now a child sat snugly on it. A new set of templates had replaced the old ones. Unlike Liz, if I left a room, it was no longer an isolated gesture. Anything, anything, I did was connected to Will and Chloë.

Years and years of jumble sales, Rotarian dinners, evergreen outings. Four elections… and now I had arrived here.

I checked my notebook and, in the light thrown by the inadequate candle, reread my assessment of the Brunello. ‘A clone of the Sangiovese grape, capable of great richness. Concentrated and brilliantly tannic.’

If I had not pushed Raoul away all those years ago. If I had not been confused, embarrassed, aghast at the business of sex, and at the desperate way in which he had helped himself to me, and my anguished, ignorant response, my life might have been different.

Something rustled in the clump of marjoram at the edge of the loggia. A mouse with dampened fur from the heat? A mosquito bit in the crease of my elbow where sweat gathered. I knew exactly what Will would say if he could see me writing up my notes: ‘Wine is only wine. People’s lives are much more important.’ He truly believed it. Of course; and he had no reason to admire alcohol.

The phone rang.

Are we not talking to each other?’ asked Will. ‘Why haven’t you been in contact? What’s happening?’

I scratched the mosquito bite. ‘Plenty of winged biting things.’ My voice sounded overbright. Are you OK?’

‘OK-ish.’

‘Will?’ This was the moment to say: ‘Guess who turned up? Raoul. He happened to be in the area.’

‘You know politics, Fanny.’ Yes, I did know politics. ‘I can’t persuade you to come home?’

I squeezed my eyes shut. ‘No.’

His voice quickened with the anger that he had, no doubt, been nurturing. ‘I don’t know what’s happening and it’s probably my fault, but should the Stanwinton Glee Club’s salmon supper, or whatever, suffer because you feel like playing truant?’

‘You’re the one they want, not me.’

‘It seems so sudden,’ he countered. ‘You gave no warning. It was as if I had woken up and found I’d been living with someone I didn’t know.’

This confession pleased me. It suggested that our lives were not quite so predictable and tame as I had thought. I slapped at yet another mosquito. ‘Should keep you on your toes, then.’

‘Stop it.’

‘Will, the other day I worked out that I have spent approximately five thousand seven hundred and forty-five days of my life working for you. This was predicated on the assumption of one commitment per day of our marriage, minus two hundred and sixty-six days for childbirth and holidays.’

‘As much as that?’ he shot back. ‘Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?’

Before I could help myself, I snorted with laughter.

‘That’s better,’ he said.


*

Benedetta seemed tired and low at breakfast the next morning. I protested that I was giving her extra work, but she would have none of it. ‘It’s my son in Milan,’ she said. ‘I think he has bad habits. I worry that he spends too much money. Never saves. I tell him to come home. I tell him he needs his mama.’ She spread her hands out in a gesture of appeal. ‘He says he should come home to his mama. But how to do it?’

Che fare? A question we all ask of ourselves.

I sat at the table, drank her coffee and ate a hunk of bread and apricot jam. The sun speared through the kitchen window and illuminated the framed picture of the Madonna, the array of well-used saucepans on the single shelf. ‘Benedetta,’ I asked, ‘how was the fattoria destroyed?’

Benedetta folded her hands on the table. ‘It was bad. You don’t want to know. There is no point.’

‘Please tell me.’

She heaved herself to her feet. ‘I must see to the tomatoes.’

I followed her outside. It was nine o’clock, but the sun was already like a power drill on the skin. Benedetta fussed away over the trusses and nipped out the leaders. ‘Lucilla was your grandmother’s sister,’ she admitted at last.

‘I didn’t know she had one.’

Benedetta shrugged. ‘When she was nineteen, she married a Fascist and went to live in Rome. I was still small, but the gossip… The Fascists made people volunteer to fight and they sent out people from Rome who beat you or put you in prison if you refused.’

By the law of averages, there’s an awful similarity in war stories and I had a good idea of what might come next.

‘This man arrived with Lucilla in a big car and demanded that all the men in Fiertino join up. None of the family would speak to Lucilla and we, the children, were forbidden to go anywhere near her. I remember coming down the road with my brother and she was standing outside the fattoria, crying and wailing. Eventually her husband put her back into the car and drove away.’

Benedetta harvested two ripe tomatoes from a plant and held one out to me. ‘Eat, Fanny.’

The lush red was almost the colour of blood. ‘Did they come back?’

‘They did. Towards the end, after your grandmother and your father had gone away over the hills. The Germans had blown up some of the houses over there,’ Benedetta pointed in the direction of the fattoria, ‘to make it difficult for the Allies to get through on the roads, and they ambushed them when they took the route over the hills. Every house in the village had been damaged. It was bad. They came back because I don’t think Lucilla knew what else to do. This time it was she who was driving the car. He sat in the back, very pale, very fat, hugging a bottle of brandy. She helped him out and took him into the fattoria to beg help from her sister, your grandmother. She didn’t know she had left.’ Benedetta flapped the material at the neck of her print dress to cool herself. ‘Yes.’ Sweat glistened in the folds of her neck. ‘But it was the night when nobody was there, and nobody knows what happened. In the evenings, you see, we used to take shelter in one house or another, never in the same place.’

I had heard some of these stories from my father; they had been told to him by my grandmother. Stories are usually improved in the telling, but these had the directness and simplicity that came from having to face the worst. At night, the women piled the prams high with the hoarded provisions, and the children carried what they could to the safe house. It was a lottery. Often they picked the wrong house, and the shelling did its worst. ‘By then,’ my father had told me, ‘we were used to secrets. Where to hide the oil, a ham, half a cheese, where the chickens had been taken.’

Having nipped the final truss, Benedetta levered herself upright. ‘No one was willing to tell Lucilla and her husband where that night’s safe house was. The Partisans sent word down from the hills that the Germans were planning to use the road running north of the valley so everyone made for the church. But in the end it wasn’t the Germans. It was… A Partisan came down from the hills and demanded to know where Lucilla’s husband was. No one said anything, for whatever her politics Lucilla was still one of us.’

‘And?’

‘It was me.’ Benedetta spoke so softly that I almost didn’t catch her confession. ‘I heard the Partisan ask, “Where is this man?” and I ran up to him. “I know, I know,” I shrieked, in my little-girl voice. “In the fattoria.”’

Back in the kitchen, Benedetta stood in front of her picture of the Madonna and crossed herself. ‘I had been taught always to tell the truth. The next time we looked, the fattoria was ablaze. We could see it from the church… but they must have been already dead.’

I sat down. ‘We must think so,’ I said.

What seemed like an hour later, but was only a minute or two, Benedetta added, ‘Lucilla was a good wife, faithful unto death.’

Later, I walked up to the cemetery outside the village. The graves were a garish mix of coloured marble, white stone, plastic-embossed photographs and soiled plastic flowers. It took me a while to locate Lucilla’s for she had not been buried with the other Battistas, her family. She had been laid to rest in the extreme edge of the north corner. Her stone was meagre, and badly carved, its inscription terse: ‘Lucilla Battista. Born 1919. Died 1944’. Behind it a Cupressus sempervirens grew straight up into the brazen blue sky. There was no mention of her married name, or her husband, and no sign of his grave.

Raoul picked me up from Casa Rosa at ten o’clock. He was dressed in well-cut linen trousers and shirt, but there were dark circles under his eyes. ‘We will eat in Cortona. Afterwards we will drive to Tarquinia and look at Etruscan objects.’ He peered over his sunglasses. ‘I know your father was always interested. Then I will bring you back to Fiertino and you can change. I will attend to some business in the next village. Then we will head up to La Foce where my friend Roberto will give us dinner.’