Power of a fleeting memory

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 06, 2007 

Back in August, I opened a newspaper to see the face of a woman I didn't know - a striking face, amused, intelligent, ever so slightly uncompromising but probably kind, fiftyish, with an unruly cloud of hair, a string of pearls. I liked her straight away. And I felt I knew her, even though it was impossible. I didn't recognise the name and didn't know the face. I just felt myself respond to it. More curious than moved, I read on. It was an obituary.

Magdalen Nabb was English - born in Lancashire - but for much of her life had lived and worked in Florence. Best known for writing a series of successful crime novels set in the city, she moved to Italy in the 1970s and at first worked as a potter, before starting to write. She lived in the pensionewhere EM Forster had written A Room with A View and for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s had been the curator of Casa Guidi, the poet Robert Browning's house. Though paralysed down her left side by a stroke 12 years previously, she'd refused to give up riding or ballet. She died aged 60, after suffering another stroke.

I read all of this quickly and then my heart jumped. Casa Guidi. I'd never have remembered the name had I not just read it in the paper. But I'd never forgotten that dark, hot afternoon in 1979.

I am sitting in Florence in a tiny, sweaty kitchen with just one murky skylight, stoning cherries for jam. On the radio is Mahler's First Symphony. I sit on a high stool while Anna, the elderly maid who looks after the family for which I'm an au pair, stirs a sauce on the stove. Now and then she mutters something to me, something I don't understand. We communicate with smiles. When I first came here, she barely looked at me. Now she's decided la ragazza inglese is all right.

I sit on my stool and stone the cherries, popping them into a bowl. My fingers are purple, blue, nails rimmed with black. It is late June and already the city is half asleep. In 10 days everyone, us as well, will abandon the city for la spiaggia - the beach, the sea, two months of sun, sand and shady pines. Our bags are packed.

The kitchen sweats sugar. When the cherries are done, I yawn. Anna looks at me. "Go on," she says, "take a break. Come back at four." She means a siesta. But I don't want to sleep. I am 19 and I don't yet know how people sleep in the day. Instead, I walk past the grey-trousered man at the gatehouse - mouth open, eyes closed, head flung back in his chair - and find myself out there in the piazza.

The sky is sour with the threat of thunder. It's so hot you could take handfuls of air in your fingers. The man at the newspaper kiosk who normally stays open has shut up shop. The sky's getting darker every second.

The strange thing is I can't tell you much more. Memory does funny things. I was 19 years old. I was in love with life, with love, with poetry and yet I'd barely read the Brownings. So I crept up into Casa Guidi. Why? Who'd told me it was there, just around the corner from our apartment? Did I have to knock? Did I buy a ticket?

All I know is I crept up what I remember as a flight of grey stone stairs, dim and hushed, and into rooms that I recall as brown, musty, barely lit. Or was it just that as I stepped through those rooms the sky outside was so drained of light that it was like walking into night?

I don't know. Maybe I was the only visitor to Casa Guidi that late June afternoon. It's quite likely. But the oddest thing of all is that now, sitting here and screwing my memory into knots trying to recall, I remember no one else there - not a single soul, no curator, just the sensation of being completely alone in that brown dark house where two poets whose work I barely knew had lived, and then the crash of thunder, the zig zag of lightning, and then the rain: relief.

And yet another flash of memory comes back to me. Waiting on some dark and twisty stairs for the rain to stop, I sense someone else with me. Who? But my mind's gone dark and however hard I strain, I still can't quite see that person.

I look again at Magdalen Nabb. Did we meet, even only for one minute? Did she say something to me? Why does her face bother me so much? Did our lives collide on that afternoon?

After the rain stops - or when it has at least eased - I run back to the apartment and help Anna make the jam. We boil the black liquid until it coats the back of a wooden spoon. The kitchen, the whole apartment, fills up with the smell of sugar and black cherries. There is sweat on my face, in my hair, poetry in my mouth. Back then, 19 and just back from the poets' house, I decide - I assume - that I'll always make cherry jam in June from now on. Just like that I'll become that kind of person. And, of course, I didn't. I never have again.