Read A Funeral in Fiesole for Free Online

optimist. In a way, she was a bit like Grant. Positive, knowing a positive change would eventually come. All one had to do was wait … and not fight.
    ‘Look – this was where I’d read and do stuff in the holidays.’ The lump in my throat was enormous. I pointed around the oddly-shaped room. She was there; her chair, her tapestry stool, her shelf of gardening books and seed catalogues, but I did not mention the feeling to Grant.
    ‘Oh – a cellar.’
    ‘Not a basement, wait. Well, yes and no.’ We moved further into the room and there were the wide glass doors with the back view of the hills, and the bumpy mountains in the distance, all purple and black in the rain. ‘See? The house is built into the hill, see? Our hill, we call it. So there are views on each side, and stairs and steps in odd places.’
    ‘It’s enormous, Brod. Why are we staying in the village, or whatever it is? Why did we book a room? Everyone’s so …’
    ‘Welcoming?’ I laughed. I knew he’d soon see how my siblings were.
    We stared out at the damp landscape together, and I thought how Mama often came down there to sit in the big brown chair to get away from what was happening in the house and catch her breath. I’d come down too. We wouldn’t talk. We would ignore each other and listen to each other’s breathing, and take in the view. It was like I heard her thoughts then. She would always know the first rain would come when it was time for us all to head back to school. She would stay and rest a few days longer, after we were all packed off, and eventually head to winter in Cornwall.
    ‘So what’s down there?’
    ‘If it weren’t raining so hard I’d take you down those steps – they’re cut into the bank, see? – and descend to the next terrace. It’s a bit of lawn surrounded by large pots, flower borders, you know the sort of thing. It’s the ideal place for a pool, you’ll see that for yourself – but we never had one.’
    I had sat on the steps down there with Mama summer after summer, and talked about how glorious it might be to have a pool right on that grassed terrace. She would get me to pace it out; seven metres one way, four metres the other way. Perfect , we would say together, knowing it was a dream. Since Papa died she had to be careful. Her own mortality must always have been on her mind, not knowing she would live into her eighties. Knowing her caution was simply that. We feasibly could have had the pool. I didn’t think it ever was money that stopped her.
    I wondered about her last days at the hospital. Nigel and Harriet wouldn’t say much. It would have had to be harrowing for Nigel. Harriet too. Mama loved her in a way, and one could not know someone for years on end and not be saddened by their death.
    One expected to find Donato and Matilde here too. They were part of the furniture and we grew up with them in the background. Donato fixed things, even bandaged knees with the same patience he would lag a hot-water pipe. He could do a lot with his funny cloth bag of tools and wooden folding ladder, which seemed part of him. Donato wasn’t Donato without his paint-stained ladder.
    Matilde fixed everything else with pasta, pieces of cheese, her pickled olives, and those magical cantuccini baked from a recipe from her home town of Prato. ‘Make no mistake, Broderick. These are Prato biscuits, and they have conquered the world.’ Oh, that accent. Her clear Florentine dialect, which we all got to patter in by the time we grew to teenage.
    Matilde was right. I remember dunking her biscuits into milky coffee in a bowl. I remember the big red round table and how she would wring out a dishcloth and vigorously rub it all clean while I sat there eating. The squeak of the cloth, the smell of yellow soap, the presence of someone silent there, active but silent, doing things around me; it all still made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I thought I learned about pleasure, and from where it can come, and