‘Well, we’d best be going,’ I told my dad that evening, refusing his offer of a night in the spare room, which was crammed with cardboard boxes, a single bulb overhead. ‘I’ll turn the radiator on,’ he offered as an incentive. ‘No, it’s a long drive back,’ I said, though we all knew that it wasn’t. Perhaps I imagined this to ease my conscience, but he seemed relieved and turned the news back on before we left.
My father died six weeks later. Of course I have no belief in an afterlife, least of all the one depicted in newspaper cartoons, but if he was looking down from some cloud on to the Siena train, he might, I suppose, be allowed one of his old favourite remarks:
I fell into something of a low.
It was not merely the loss of my belongings — they were, after all, perfectly safe and retrievable — but my increasing loss of control. It had been some time since I’d spoken to Connie. I missed hearing her voice but did not quite trust my own. I was sure Siena would mark some kind of turning point, and I would speak to her when there was good news. But if there was no good news, how could I go home?
At Empoli, I was joined at my table by a little boy in a striped vest, three years old, perhaps, travelling with his grandparents who were large and jovial, full of proud smiles as they watched the boy lay out the contents of a small bag of sweets, twelve artificially coloured jellies, four red, eight blue, sprinkled with the tartaric acid that causes them to fizz on the tongue. He counted them, then counted them again. He divided them into rows and columns, three by four, two by six, showing that instinctive pleasure in play that seems to disappear as soon as we call it mathematics. He licked the tip of his finger and dabbed at the sweet-sharp sugar that had become detached, making a great show of choosing which sweet to eat first. I watched him quite openly, perhaps a little too openly for this day and age. He was aware of giving a performance and when he finally settled on a red sweet, popped it into his mouth and puckered his lips at the tartness of it, I laughed and we both laughed together, his grandparents too, nodding, smiling.
He said something to me in burbling Italian. ‘
Because he really was a charming little boy, like a kid from a comic, full of benign mischief. There were difficult days, of course, particularly in the early months. Croup! He caught croup, a disease designed by nature specifically to terrify parents, and there were further panics to come, over mysterious rashes or inexplicable tears, our nerves perpetually jangled from lack of sleep. But we bore all of this gladly and with only the occasional loss of composure, because hadn’t we yearned for this disruption in our lives? I returned to work, half regretful, half grateful for some respite, then came home and did my bit to bathe and feed him, and the days and weeks and months went by.
At some point around this time, he must have begun acquiring first memories. I hope so, anyway, because it’s hard to imagine a child who was more adored and cared for by parents who, for the most part, got on incredibly well. The inability to control a child’s recollections is a frustrating one. I know my own parents did their best to provide sun-dappled days of picnics and paddling pools, but mainly I remember advertising jingles, wet socks on radiators, inane TV theme tunes, arguments about wasted food. With my own son, there were times when I definitely thought ‘remember this’ — Albie toppling through the high grass of a summer meadow, the three of us lolling in bed on a winter Sunday or dancing around the kitchen to some silly song — wishing there was some way to press ‘record’, because the three of us were, for the most part, pretty good together, a family at last.
