spread her own hands before her, examining the slender, slightly squared fingers with deep, regular nails. A little on the large side for a woman but nice, capable hands all the same. The scarlet polish was not the only difference between her hands and Annabelle’s. No sign of the inflammation and swelling at the joints that plagued Annabelle. Or not yet. Perhaps sixty was the turning point. Oh well, she still had a few years. Had to watch those kilos too. A kilo or two didn’t matter now, but … Delia was a bit apprehensive about sixty – it could hardly still be called middle age. The other milestone birthdays had come and gone without a blip on the graph but sixty … Shouldn’t you have more to show for sixty? A few books about dead Italians suddenly did not seem like all that much.
No husband? No children? Old ladies always asked that. The long and colourful procession of men had not turned up one who would have made husband material, or perhaps she was just not wife material. Certainly Marcus could not have been a father. As for children, she could have had them all the same; people did. Only it had never occurred to her. She saw a greeting card once with a woman, hand to mouth, saying, ‘Oops, I forgot to have children’. Most of her friends did not have children. Were they friends though, or more colleagues, acquaintances? Annabelle regarded most of the people she knew as acquaintances. She seemed perfectly happy with that situation but she was much more self-contained than Delia. Her cousins, Enrico’s daughters, Clare and Diana, were good company, but she could not recall ever having an intimate conversation with either of them.
Delia leaned to her father’s side, sharing her emphatic nose and the deepening horizontal lines of her forehead with all her Italian family. The Albizzi strain was geometric – spare, angular. Delia and Annabelle had Bert’s square jaw, thank God. It held things up well. Maddie tended to the curved and portly, her outline gently diffused as she aged, as if softly backlit, her waistline drowned in the ebbing tide of oestrogen. Maddie still looked like an hourglass, Bert joked, only with more hours in it. Delia worried about her weight and whether she should stop colouring her hair, but she could not be bothered worrying too much.
Bert radiated goodwill, though not given to conversation of any sort unless it was the price of sheep and wool. Maddie’s chatter turned largely on the doings of the Royal family and their own circle. They were happiest now at the homestead, pottering arm in arm, admiring the camellias. In a recent photo, they reminded her of Malcolm and Tammie Fraser. Or the Queen and Prince Phillip. They drank cups of tea with their dinner, ignoring Delia’s eye-rolling. They only occasionally went to Sydney these days and every couple of years, to London. They still loved London. Delia was born in London in the days when Bert and Maddie travelled by sea and stayed a year. They did not stay so long now and went less, as age overtook them. Maddie and Bert were fond, indulgent parents and she knew they loved her and were proud of her, even if she was a mystery to them, a bit of a cuckoo at times.
The boys, Tom and Frank, were made of the same prosaic stuff as their father. Both married girls from the country, settled on the family properties, wore RM Williams boots and lived exemplary lives. Neither of them had ever seen the need to learn Italian and their only overseas travel was to London. A bit suspicious of ‘The Continent’, they were. They were fond of Aunt Annabelle, but were amused and bemused by Delia’s deep attachment to Italy. Their sons attended Knox, where they played Rugby and cricket. Their friends were from their own schooldays, as if they had all set in aspic in that formative period of their lives and lived there ever since. Decency and convention dictated that they avoided any form of thought or conversation deeper than the weather, sport and the local news.
Delia was very fond of all of them … Fond, odd word. Was fond enough? she wondered. The word was used a lot in the family, as if they were afraid of anything deeper, wilder. The only person she was passionately attached to was Annabelle. How dare she show signs of mortality. The thought of Annabelle dying was like looking over the edge of an ice crevasse, into the endless blue depths of nothingness. It caused a pain in her chest: indigestion, heartburn. A burning of the heart.
Annabelle uncoiled from her chair and turned on two more lamps at the back of the study. At once the buttery light dispelled the ghostly pallor of the TV. Tensed and leaning forward to the screen, her thumbnail in the corner of her mouth, Annabelle was once again the fit, vibrant woman of daytime. She was still tall, straight, spare, and there was still as much goldish chestnut in her thick unruly hair as there was grey – testimony, as she put it, to the advantages of red wine and HRT. But Delia was unsettled. She had seen the skull at the bottom of the painting and the image was indelible. She could not unsee it.
Outside, beyond the milky glass of the ancient windows, Florence settled into evening. The Leap Year Florence of today. Florence, the modern city within the caul of a medieval one. Modern bars and restaurants vied with the Renaissance on every corner. Experimental art flourished alongside Botticelli, Brunelleschi and Masaccio. It was a city of jazz and modernity, where the past and the present and the future existed at once, within each other, like Calvino’s Invisible Cities. At her gym, Delia endured the drudgery of the electronic treadmill beneath the pale blue and gold of vaulted, frescoed ceilings from the sixteenth century and voluptuous Venuses who certainly did not need to bother with gymnastics.
On the screen, the news ground to a conclusion. Throughout the election campaign Berlusconi had adopted fascist symbolism, attacked democracy as outdated, derided the Euro and EU and even claimed ‘Mussolini never killed anyone, he just sent them on holiday’. Now, as his victorious leer filled the screen, both women stilled. Delia’s jaw actually dropped and Annabelle’s hand flew to her mouth. Wearing a black shirt and a hand-knitted hairline, his surgically reinvented face bulging with hubris, Silvio Berlusconi raised his arm to the nation in the fascist salute. Viva l’Italia!
‘Noooo! This is too much!’ Annabelle flung the remote control to the floor where it skidded across the tiles and shattered against the wall. The back flew off and the batteries rolled under the sofa. She launched herself across the room and gave a vicious jab to the off button of the TV. In the stillness, the batteries rocked back and forth, a metronome … The crisp April air carried the waft of shades passing. Delia shivered. Stop it, she told herself. It’s because Enrico has died. It has spooked all of us. The End of an Era – historians could not help thinking in epochs and eras.
Annabelle collected the pieces of the remote and clattered them onto the side table. ‘He did not have to see this. I cannot stay in this country any longer.’
Dealing with the past was much easier for Delia than for her aunt. Delia could simply decide not to revisit scenes of past pains or sadnesses, or indiscretions. She was good at moving on, leaving behind the past and all its accoutrements when it had outlived its usefulness, without a backward glance. Here in this old, old country, it was not so easy. For Annabelle, every day was lived on the same earth, beneath the same sky, on the same streets as the moments of her past, with all its tragedy and plangent memory. For Annabelle, Enrico, and all Italians, life had to be lived in all its quotidian mundaneness within the caul of a history of blood, passion, loss, love and hatred.
How do they bear it? she wondered. Does the power of the past leach slowly away when you walk its path every day? She could see that for Annabelle, the past existed in a dimension other than the physical and geographical, in a part of the mind and heart and memory having nothing to do with the external world. This, Delia realised, was yet another of the endless differences between Australians who roam the world and feel at home anywhere, and Italians with their visceral, atavistic attachment to soil and place. Much harder to escape the past here. It could very easily strangle you.
Annabelle’s brothers, Giacomo and Umberto, arrived in Australia by ship in 1938. Giacomo hated it from the first moment. He would have refused to disembark if he’d had any choice. Umberto, on the other hand, felt the weight of centuries lift from his shoulders and rise into that illimitable sky. He had never actually had a job, after doing a half-hearted degree in architecture. He knew all about Palladian form and nothing about how to actually build a house. He knew immediately though, he wrote, that here he could be anything he wished. He could breathe