Elizabeth Buchan: The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

He showed only a polite interest. ‘Let’s do it, then.’

We left Sacha well supplied with iced drinks and a cold pasta salad. Armed with maps and guidebooks, I drove Will to Tarquinia. The car skidded a little as I forced it up the slope leading out of the valley and down the other side, past poppies, clumps of herbs, wild lavender and the olive trees, their bases plastered with summer dust.

Will slumped back in the passenger seat and wiped his sunglasses. ‘Italy’s too hot.’

‘You get used to it,’ I said.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, and fell silent.

The museum in Tarquinia was cool and almost empty. We did not linger over the exhibits – I suspected Will’s concentration was not good. Eventually, I led him up to the funerary couch. ‘There. Do you recognize it?’

He looked blank. Then he said, ‘It was on your father’s desk. He was very fond of it.’

‘The real thing is better.’

‘She’s no beauty.’

I nudged him gently. ‘Nor is he.’

I went to inspect an exquisite bronze candelabrum, worked with bunches of grapes and vine leaves. ‘Will… come and see this.’

But Will was rooted in front of the funerary couple, eyes narrowed, his face a mask of distress.

We returned to the car and consulted the maps, for I was anxious to visit the Etruscan tombs. Chloë and I always teased Will about maps but, truth be told, his skill had got us places. Now I waited for him to say that women have no spatial awareness and for me to reply, ‘Women are better team players.’ But he didn’t and I didn’t.

On his instructions, I drove far up into a maquis of rock and scrub. Here the land had a blind, bitter, cussed feel. Yet the books reported that, all those centuries ago, the Etruscans had made it fertile and fruitful with trees, pasture and crops. Their lovely Paradise. Their Elysium.

We drove into a clearing and parked close to the remains of an Etruscan town, which didn’t amount to much – a hint of a mosaic pavement and the suggestion of a stone wall running at an angle up the hill. Drinks were being sold under a cluster of umbrellas, and an overflowing rubbish bin was sited next to an ancient brick arch. Otherwise the scene had an abandoned, desolate quality.

We followed the track up into the hills. The going became precipitous and it was very hot. In my sandals, my feet grew slippery with sweat, and Will was panting. An arrow indicated a steep incline and a second pointed yet further up. The heat seared into our backs.

‘Over there.’ I pointed to a dark opening, partly obscured by vegetation.

Will smiled grimly. ‘This had better be worth it.’

He pushed back the vegetation to let me through, and we found ourselves in a large rock chamber lined with stone shelves on which the Etruscans had laid out their dead.

There was no mistaking an odour of semi-stagnant water and rock that never saw the sun. The smell was the essence of extinction. I laid a hand on a cold shelf. The ghosts of the Etruscan dead were locked into this place, far, far removed from the banqueting and harvesting, the wine, lovemaking and married love depicted in their painting and sculpture.

‘I don’t know why we make such a fuss about the afterlife,’ said Will. ‘Once you’ve gone, that’s it. Meg has gone, so has your father. What’s left?’ he reached for my hand.

But I fled from the tomb and scrambled back down the path. I heard Will come after me and, by the time he caught up, I was breathless. I gasped for air and the heat whistled painfully into my lungs but I welcomed it. Far better to be here in the open, burning hot but alive.

I lifted my face to the sun. To emerge from the dark cave into the light was to know that I was free.

On the way back, Will asked, ‘Alfredo’s ashes… have you decided?’

‘No. Silly isn’t it?’

‘You can’t put it off for ever.’

‘I know.’

Over supper of grilled veal chops and roasted peppers, Sacha told us that he would be moving on. ‘To Manchester. I think,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of gigs lined up. After that… well, I’ll go and see Chloë in Oz. Hitch around a little. Take a look.’

‘That would be nice.’ I kept my voice neutral.

‘I miss her,’ he said simply.

‘So do we.’ Instinctively, I glanced at Will and our eyes locked. ‘Don’t’ was the message in his. A mental nudge, I suppose.

After supper, Will said to me, ‘Fanny, go and get your father’s ashes.’ I stared at him. ‘Go on.’

I went upstairs, retrieved the small wooden casket and carried it down to the loggia. ‘May I?’ asked Will. I nodded and he took it from me. ‘Now we’ll find a place for Alfredo.’

Holding the casket under one arm, he propelled me out of the house with the other.

We walked up the dust road, and the residual heat cradled our feet. ‘I should have paid more attention to the descriptions of Fiertino,’ Will said, in a conversational way. ‘Then I would know where I was. Where did your father’s family live?’

The moon was as bright as burnished silver as I pointed down the road to the ugly replacement fattoria . ‘It was burnt down at the end of the war,’ I explained.

‘I see.’ Will considered. ‘I don’t think that would be right. Nor, I think, is the churchyard. I think your father would prefer to be free.’

I blinked back tears. ‘Yes, he would.’

At the fork in the road, Will ignored the route into the village and we picked our way up the rise where the cypresses and chestnuts grew in clumps and the vines swept past them down into the valley. It was a mystery to me how anyone slept in the deep, perfumed Italian nights, and I said so to Will. He smiled.

‘I don’t believe you said that.’

Down below, the lights of the village were tucked into the slope of the hillside under a starred palanquin. The moonlight worked its usual deceptions and Fiertino seemed to spring out of the landscape, untouched and complete. ‘I love this place,’ I confessed.

‘I know you do. But, Fanny…’ He was hesitant. ‘You do know you’re only a visitor?’

It would have been so easy to say, ‘No, I belong here.’ But that would be to ignore many particulars and the evidence against. I was a visitor – a special one, but a visitor. I knew that now.

‘Your father never liked me,’ Will remarked, in the same conversational tone. ‘I wish he had.’

‘He didn’t say that,’ I replied. ‘You were different. You use politics to deal with difficult questions and difficult problems – how to conduct ourselves in society before death and… extinction. Dad thought it was a waste of time. He relied on himself.’

‘But I liked him.’

‘So did I,’ I said, with a half-sob.

Will gestured towards the vines. ‘What’s the grape?’ he asked.

‘Sangiovese.’

‘Was that a favourite?’

‘He admired it.’

‘Why don’t you settle him among the vines?’ Will offered me the urn. ‘Don’t you think he would like that?’

I knew he had got it right.

I picked my way between the swollen grape trusses and came to a halt. With a little painful thud of my heart, I upended the casket and watched my father’s ashes drift towards the earth.

His terroir .

By the time I returned to where Will waited, I was shivering with emotion and he held me very close.

The following days were waiting days. When it got too hot, we retreated to the loggia at Casa Rosa and ate green bean and tomato salad from Benedetta’s harvest for lunch and grew sleepy on a glass of Chianti. At night we ate at Angelo’s, and Sacha sometimes remained to drink coffee in the square. I was glad to see a little colour returning to his face.