The Good Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

unfair, disappointing, but the possibilities of greatness always remained.
    ‘You must come back to work properly,’ said my father, ‘now that Chloë is leaving home. I need the help and you must be ready to take on the business.’ He looked at me lovingly across the table. ‘After all, it is in your blood.’
    I felt the answering beat of excitement. I could best describe it as the quiver that accompanied the wakening from long sleep. My father was right. Wine was in my blood.
    *
    When I was three, my mother, Sally, absconded with Art, an estate agent from Montana, where she still lived and where I had visited her every other summer until I married Will. Unless it was absolutely necessary, my father never mentioned her. ‘She went,’ he said, ‘and that is that.’
    Like it or not, and for years I picked over the imperfectly healed scars, my mother took with her far more than the clothes she had stuffed into two suitcases: my belief that things were strong and permanent, I suppose. She left my father (and me) warier, more fragile.
    In place of a mother, my father summoned Benedetta from Fiertino (home to generations of Battistas) to help him look after me, and she lived with us until Caro took up residence in Ember House. Benedetta, a third cousin by marriage in a complicated Battista family tree, dark-haired, and not as slender as she would have liked, held my father in check, which few could. It was Benedetta who decreed on my tenth birthday that there should be no more bathtimes with my father. That puzzled me. Perhaps ten was a magic number. Perhaps it was secret, like my mother was a secret. But if I had questions, I had not yet learnt how to ask them. On my tenth birthday then, washed and brushed within an inch of my life, tied into a thick, old-fashioned dressing-gown with a cord belt, I was escorted downstairs by Benedetta to the door of my father’s study.
    He was at his desk, surrounded by wine books, writing up the day’s business. Conscious that ‘ten’ hung over me, I went to stand beside him. When he patted his knee, I shook my head.
    ‘I was forgetting,’ he said sadly. ‘You’re a big girl now and we must talk about grown-up things.’
    I was more interested by the framed photograph on my father’s desk. It was of a man and a woman carved in stone, lying together on an ornate couch draped in material. He had a square face and a beard; she had curls falling down her back and dangling earrings. His arm was round her, and she leant back against him.
    I swivelled to look at my father. Greatly daring, I asked, ‘Is that Mummy?’
    There was a short, tense silence. No, it was not, he answered, and, if my question hurt him, he did not betray it by so much as a flicker. No, the picture was of an Etruscan funerary couch. Fifth century BC .
    ‘Was that when I was eight?’ I asked, for time had no meaning.
    My father laughed. ‘The Etruscans were a people who, long, long ago, lived in the Fiertino area where the Battistas come from. They made such a lot of things that people are always digging up bits and pieces and putting them in museums. I like this one particularly because he and she will never be… parted.’
    Bedtimes were usually reserved for my father’s inexhaustible supply of Fiertino stories which, it must be said, were a little different each time he told them. I enjoyed pouncing on the discrepancies. ‘But, Dad, you said the oxen were grey, not white.’ At which point he would tap my hand and say, ‘Don’t be too clever, my darling,’ and continue.
    ‘Fiertino is only a little town, but a town all the same. It is in a valley north of Rome which was originally livedin by the Etruscans, an ancient people who loved the good things in life. Chestnut trees grow on one slope; on the other, wheat, olives and vines. It has a square with a large church at one end, and a beautiful colonnaded walk around it, which gives very necessary shade from the sun. Our family, the Battistas, lived in