Free A Funeral in Fiesole by Rosanne Dingli

walled streets, the yellow-painted houses with green shutters, and ascended among the poderi – the vineyards and untidy olive groves. The greyness of grouped olive trees always meant home to me, but I only could name the feeling on the drive up. Strange. It was nostalgia. First time I noticed I was nostalgic.
    The smell, too, the dank heavy wet rainy smell coming from the soaked fields surprised me with its wallop of memory. We were always there in the summer as children, and it was mostly dry and dusty, but we often got a good downpour before we went back to school in September, so we could distinguish the smell of doused citrus leaves, the olive scent, the laurel fragrance rising to our windows at the house, and the musty subtle but unmistakeable smell of drenched grapevines.
    Even the purple hills in the distance, the terracotta tiled roofs of the farmhouses, and the straggly trees which seemed to lean over and hold the roadside banks from tumbling to the bitumen had their own special mental smell for me, depending on when we drove those roads.
    ‘Turn your window down,’ I said.
    ‘What, in this rain?’ But he did.
    ‘See? That scent.’
    ‘Ah, yes.’
    An end-of-summer smell, or a beginning-of-autumn scent, which spelled the end of weeks of lounging around, reading. Wishing for a swimming pool; or wishing the house was somewhere closer to the sea.
    Through Grant’s eyes I could see we had a magical privileged childhood, the four of us. But time had passed. We no longer were Silent Paola, Angry Nigel, Greedy Suzanna and … did they think I was still Hesitant Broderick? Indecisive? Dithering? Irresolute?
    I wished some of us were less bitter, less inclined to remember the self-indulgent juvenile tendencies we had than the real people we evolved into in the end. The end … well, it was the end for Mama. How cruel it was that I could not be here. Grant was right when he tried to reason with me, but there would always be the feeling I could have been present. I hoped the funeral itself would eventually give me some sort of closure. I realized I didn’t definitely need to be at the New York conference, but I did go. How was I to know? Now, I needed closure. A cliché, if ever there was one.
    ‘Brod, Brod – the bookcase is missing!’ Suzanna was flustered. Impeccably turned out, but flustered. Her exclaimed words tumbled out.
    ‘Oh – now I remember it. Yes. Ask Nigel … but I know what he’ll say. Riddled with woodworm and had to be burnt.’
    She tossed a perfectly coiffed head.
    Now I had a few grey hairs, she didn’t, and I had great sticky-out ears, and so did she, but she appeared like she jumped straight out of a fashion … no, a business magazine. She would not have seemed out of place up in the boardroom at my bank.
    She tossed her head again. ‘Incinerated? The beautiful Chippendale … it had glass doors and everything!’
    ‘What you remember best is getting on a chair and tracing the glass frames and mullions with your little fingers. Matilde would ask you to be careful not to fall, and not to get sticky fingerprints on the glass.’ I could feel what was forming in her mind. She wanted it. She wanted the bookcase badly. Suzanna was like that.
    Well, I could want it too. Not as badly as she did. I certainly wanted something from this house – to remember it by. What did I remember liking? All I could think of was tracing the design in the library rug, tracing the pattern as I lay on my stomach, listening to Mama read. I did it so long I still remember the border pattern. I was mad about those rugs, but it was too late. They had been replaced by others. Cheap synthetic ones without a nice pattern, which refused to lie flat.
    Surely we could all find something nice to take away. Value was not an issue, although it would be nice to have something whose quality would endure. I saw my sister still stood there, waiting for an answer. ‘Isn’t that what you recall, Suzanna?’
    ‘No it’s not!