Life and death under the Tuscan sun

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Mar 01, 2008 

His stepmother was dying. Looking back, that was exactly how they put it. No vague euphemisms. No one tried to imply she was ill but might get better. It was definite, an unquestionable fact. She was dying and that was that. Dying! In some mysterious and vivid way, it was almost something to celebrate: the Italian way of death.

We went to visit her. She lived up in the hills, just beyond Fiesole, in a lonely, crumbling villa with yellow walls and bougainvillea clambering up the side. And I was the English au pair, 19 years old, looking after her stepson's three-year-old boy and, so far, the job had been a success. They all seemed to like me. They said I was bella, simpatica. Before my arrival, the grandson had been a nervy, upset child, frequently wetting the bed. Now he played and laughed and slept through the night. He snuggled on my lap. I was part of the family. It went without saying that I would come too, up to the villa, to see the dying stepmother.

I remember a hot car journey out of Florence. Late spring, the trees waxy with blossom. The car seats smelling of new leather, the plaid car blanket rolled neatly on the back windowsill, the travel sweets in a tin. We rolled out of the hazy bowl of the city, past the blank white face of San Miniato al Monte and up into the hills. Blue cypress like candle flames. A shrine of flowers at the roadside.

Up at the villa, dogs were barking and smoke curled from a chimney. The sky blazed but inside it was cool and dim: long, tiled corridors and statues of the Madonna - or were they saints? Vases of flowers relaxing in the shadows, the pink arc of a petal on the polished floor. We went upstairs. Creaking up into darkness. I'm trying to think if there were servants - maybe one quiet manservant in a dull green uniform? Or a housekeeper, elderly and toothless. But I'm making it up now. I don't remember anybody, really, except her. The dying stepmother.

She lay alone in a room hung with lace and rosaries. Mirrors, rugs, furniture so dark and shiny you could see yourself moving in it. Pills on the side table, a jug of water and on the huge white pillows of the huge, high bed, a face so thin and pale and tired it could have been made of tissue paper.

I hung back at the edge of the room, unsure of how I belonged in this scene. And was the child with us or did we leave him downstairs, to be fussed and cuddled by the housekeeper? It's hard to remember now. But I do know that in that room of death, I somehow turned from the au pair, with her keen sense of responsibility and servitude, back into myself: a 19-year-old on the edge of her own real life, hungry for each new experience.

Outside, the Tuscan afternoon blazed and the sun moved over the hills, while in there we all stood in the shadows around the bed. I don't recall many words being spoken but I know that I discovered that the stepmother - married and widowed, alone here in Fiesole more than 40 years - was originally from Kensington, London.

An English face, an English voice.

So what happened? Did they tell her I was English too and did she turn her tired face to talk to me about Kensington -- a place that, back then, being from Nottingham, I barely knew? I am scraping back into my deepest memory now, struggling to remember. I would like, more than anything, to know exactly what was said. But all I see is her white face on the pillow, the parted hair, the hands with their blue ropes of veins, pulling and fidgeting with the sheets.

We must have drunk tea because I can see the cups - shallow, the thinnest, palest porcelain. Earl Grey with slivers of lemon dropped in. And the afternoon must have slid into evening because I also remember the woodsmoke smell of dusk outside - a chorus of barking and the sound of a vehicle crunching up the drive, only to turn and move away again.

We only visited once. She must have died soon after, weeks or maybe days later. But I still have something of hers, something she gave me: a small, black satin evening bag, the kind of bag you'd put your lipstick in if you went to a dance. I don't remember whether she gave it to me on that afternoon or whether I was handed it later, after she died. I only know it was hers and that she wanted me to have it. For some reason, she let me have it. Why? Was it just because I was English?

I've never used it. I'm not sure why, because it's nice, actually, timeless enough that it almost belongs to now. Not that I go to many dances. I don't go to dances now but back then I was a disco girl. That night back in Florence, the grandson bathed and put to bed, I would almost certainly have been picked up by some boy on a Vespa and zoomed off to the piazza to eat ice-cream before going on to some place on the edge of the city where we'd dance until the sky grew yellow with dawn.