channels.
Annabelle’s hands were splayed into her hair on either side of her face, reminding Delia of the way, when she was a small child afraid of monsters, she used to peek at the cinema screen through her fingers. On the low table before them, the pizza from the Neapolitan place in the street below congealed, untouched, into what looked like vomit. No-one was going to eat that tonight. Delia gathered the plates, walked to the kitchen door where she tipped the triangles into the bin from on high, threw the box onto the bench and picked up another bottle of wine. It was going to be a long night. She should have cooked something. At the best of times neither Delia nor Annabelle was very interested in cooking, and this was not the best of times. It was not yet the worst of times but it was shaping up that way.
Delia followed Italian politics closely but they did not affect her except as an onlooker. She was resolutely Australian. She loved the orderly nature of Australian politics and civic life. She loved the way her Australian history was so close to her: so recent, newly formed, still evolving. White settlement was concurrent with the French Revolution; Achille, her grandfather, was born only fourteen years after Ned Kelly’s trial in Beechworth. Although a Republican, she loved the ceremony of the old ways. The Queen and her aunt Annabelle came to Australia for her, the year she was born, she told a school friend in first grade …
In the bluish flickering from the screen, Delia observed, almost as if she had not noticed before, the knotted joints of Annabelle’s slender fingers and the vertical crevices at the sides of her face – suddenly she looked every one of her eighty-three years. It hurt Delia in her heart to see it, made her afraid. In Italy, Delia often found herself feeling like an indulged only child, in that country of only children. Annabelle was her rock, her mentor, her image of everything strong and dependable. She did not want to see fragility and vulnerability in her adored aunt. The ravages of time. Where on earth did that expression came from? Shakespeare? She wasn’t strong on Shakespeare.
In the half-light, Delia 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
