I’D VISITED CORTONA in Tuscany, near the Umbrian border, before, in the northern autumn of 2001, and had not liked it much. Then I was part of a couple and with close friends. It was August, fiendishly hot, the ancient walled hill town packed with tourists like ourselves. The art museum was full of women with painted toenails in expensive sandals, and red-faced men in shorts, all elbowing to get a glimpse of the Roman sarcophagus, the Lorenzetti frescoes, the Fra Angelico Annunciation. The other important museum, Il Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca, with its renowned collection, ranging from classical archaeology of the region to modern art, was, aggravatingly, closed, for renovation or repairs.
I had had no premonition that six years later I would be sitting in a restaurant above the Piazzale Garibaldi with Helen Wire, and Lyndall Passerini, a tall, handsome woman whose neck was in a brace. Lyndall had emailed me, in response to Carmen’s SOS, saying she had a small apartment in Cortona that she sometimes let to friends of friends and would I like to meet her in November?
Helen was with me in Cortona to help me think straight and not just fall for the view. Also with us was Rennie Airth, a crime writer, who had lived, as Lyndall had, in Cortona for many years. All Carmen had told me about Lyndall was that she was the daughter of Antonia White, whose semi-autobiographical Frost in May was the first title in the Virago Modern Classics list. So, over lunch, I told Lyndall how much my mother, drawn to but eventually rejecting Roman Catholicism, had loved Antonia White’s book. My mother often quoted what she called the best first line in any novel—’Nanda was on her way to the convent of the Five Wounds.’
We were all vetting each other, and exchanging news of a few London friends we had in common. Lyndall was curious about my Jordanian ‘writing project’, mentioning a friend in Oxford whose husband was writing a big biography of King Hussein. She thought he’d nearly finished; if they came to Cortona next summer as they often did, she’d introduce us.
Neither Lyndall nor Rennie had been to Australia, or had ever wanted to. It was too far, its politics too ugly. The Howard government’s rough handling of the refugees taken aboard the Tampa had had wide coverage in Italy.
Lyndall had spent time in southern Italy with Caroline Moorehead, helping her research her book, Human Cargo, which documented the refugee crisis Italy was attempting to deal with. With a coastline of 7000 kilometres, Italy was the first country of arrival for refugees fleeing North Africa by boat, or coming overland from Afghanistan through the former Yugoslavian border to the north. ‘More than 20,000 arrived last year,’ she told us. ‘Your Prime Minister Howard is as harsh as our Berlusconi.’ The Catholic Church was now the principal source of food and shelter for Afghanis, Iraqis and North Africans who could not return. Any leniency towards them had vanished with Berlusconi’s election in 2001. Migrants arriving in Italy could no longer seek work without a permit from consulates in their own country. And those arriving illegally were held in detention for up to sixty days, their applications processed according to the danger rating of their country of origin. Released into the community, unable to work and without a sponsor, most made their way north to the Scandinavian countries.
The opposition to refugees was growing in Italy. Even in Cortona, Lyndall told us, a comune in the Arezzo province, young blackshirts had recently organised a pilgrimage by bus to Mussolini’s tomb in Predappio. She’d gone to the bus stop to identify them, so she could stop frequenting their parents’ shops, she said.
‘You’ll be staying for periods longer than three months,’ Lyndall told me, ‘so you, too, will have to present yourself to the questura in Arezzo for a permesso di soggiorne, a residential permit, then to the anagrafe of the comune for residency’—as if I had made a decision to stay. I had, but we still hadn’t discussed money and dates, and I was yet to climb the steep slope of Via Santa Margherita to see Lyndall’s little appartamento.
When I did, I found that, like most of Cortona, it was in a 16th-century building facing south-east over the town wall, and the rooftop and bell tower of San Domenico. There was a sitting room, which, Lyndall told me, the sun entered in the early morning; a miniature kitchen and bathroom at one end; a bedroom with a curtained bed big enough for three; bookshelves and a desk by the window; and, under a black-beamed roof sloping deep into the side of the hill at the back, another two small bedrooms. The front windows opened to a view of skies and trees, and wild weather out over the Valdichiana plain towards Lake Trasimeno. I didn’t know how to make Lyndall an offer on the spot, and, in any case, Helen was there to help me make a calm decision, so we agreed to exchange emails.
Before leaving Florence in our hire car, Helen and I had made a shortlist of three or four possible places for me in the vicinity of Arezzo in the Valdichiana. I wanted easy access by train to Rome and Florence; a place with a spare bedroom for visitors, so that, perhaps, my 15-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, clever at languages, could spend a January at a local high school. I needed a place where I could work in peace on the Hashemite book once the interviews were done, and where I could manage the rent and the weather. Two of the houses we looked at were too remote, and there was mention of snow ploughs and chains on wheels in the winter. Another was an exquisite farmhouse in an olive grove below Pienza, which was owned by the family of a teacher from the local school that I hoped would welcome Sophie. The dining table there was huge and inviting, and the view across the plains to the Apennines almost too beautiful.
I sent emails to friends back home: I have to choose between a small characterful flat in ancient Cortona and an exquisite remote farmhouse near tiny Pienza. Reality check needed. And back came advice and glimpses of how they imagined my life would be—one suggesting bars on the windows for peace of mind at night, and reminding me about Extreme Loneliness when the holidays were over; another sensibly pointing out that what my visitors would most prize in a farmhouse in a picturesque olive grove, might be better served by me in a small flat, with guests staying in the groves or a hotel nearby. Helen Wire left the choice to me, saying she’d visit no matter which one I took. My youngest son and my stepdaughter, both working in London, said the same. Carmen simply emailed You will just know—which made me cross.
This was exactly a year after my mother died and only then was I starting to feel her absence, no longer a responsibility, and my painful love for her started to surface. We drove to Monterchi, so Helen could see Piero della Francesca’s Pregnant Madonna, on behalf of her daughter, who was hoping for a child, and so I could revisit his great painting of The Resurrection in Sansepolcro. This was the most powerful spiritual image I had ever seen—the oblivion of the slumbering soldiers, the sheer force of the risen Christ. I lit a candle for the anniversary of my mother’s death, in Santa Maria dei Servi, a small and beautiful church nearby, with an altarpiece of Mary holding the pale, limp dead Christ across her lap. I am motherless, fatherless, husbandless, cracked wide open, my diary says. I felt something like wild joy beneath the pain.
Later, back in London, I saw that Caroline Moorehead’s book Human Cargo was dedicated to Lyndall, and I realised she had, as she always would, downplayed her role and her generosity. Her injuries the day of our first meeting, I learned later, had been caused when she’d been teaching an Iraqi refugee, Ayad, to drive. She had given Ayad shelter in a high room in a stone tower connected to Il Palazzone where she lived outside Cortona, having agreed to act as his sponsor, so that he could get a permesso di soggiorne giving him the right to work in Italy. Occasionally, she managed to persuade some hard-nosed Cortonese to employ him in their restaurant or hotel. But most of the time, he was unemployed and she supported him.
I saw Ayad at his most handsome and charming the following summer, when he was trying to date Ellie, my very gorgeous stepdaughter, who was visiting from London. At his worst, he refused to help Lyndall unload heavy shopping because Arab men don’t carry women’s bags, and only occasionally and, then resentfully, helped her in the garden, downing his spade long before the job was finished. Maybe some Arab men don’t help women, but she had walked over much rough ground for more than a decade because of her concern for Ayad and to honour an undertaking she had given his mother in Syria.
Lyndall spoke briskly about how difficult the winters were in Cortona; how the town emptied out, and deep loneliness set in, and how her cats were the main reason she stayed. Ayad would not feed them for long, she said; he’s far too grand for that.
She was trying to write Ayad’s story when I arrived. It was difficult, because of his reticence, and the interruptions from her many friends who came to stay with her in the summer.
Lyndall’s life was, and is, extraordinary and, gradually, as we became friends, she told me more about it. At the age of twenty-one, officially engaged to a rich, upper-class Englishman, she fled to Rome on a one-way ticket when her fiancé refused to listen to her plea they delay their marriage. In Rome, she survived by working as a proofreader in a UN agency. Then she re-met a man she had known slightly since the age of fourteen. Lionel (Bobby) Birch had been assistant editor to her father when he was editor of Picture Post. Twice her age, Bobby was then the editor, and holidaying in Rome, having just divorced his fourth wife. She married him but it was a disaster and, in less than a year, Lyndall was back in Rome, which she had been missing horribly. It was 1956, and she found work in the fashion and film worlds—a small part in Fred Zimmerman’s The Nun’s Story and as an extra in La Dolce Vita. Then she wrote film scripts with Wolfgang Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt’s son.
A decade later, Lyndall met Lorenzo Passerini, a left-leaning Italian count who never used his title, and was in the process of donating, complete with furniture and a valuable library, his vast Renaissance villa, Il Palazzone—about 2 kilometres outside Cortona, near springs that irrigate the olive trees and cypresses—to a prestigious Italian university, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The Palazzone had been commissioned by Silvio Passerini in 1521, a few years after he was made a cardinal by his close friend Giovanni Medici, Pope Leo X. Its tiny chapel was frescoed by Signorelli; its huge salone by one of his pupils. Through the generations, many precious paintings, art treasures and Etruscan urns had been added to the original Renaissance furnishings.
Lorenzo kept a large apartment, with a 30-metre tower and an unkempt garden, to live in for the rest of his life. In his middle years, he spent much time in Africa, flying out in his own secondhand Cessna aeroplane, until he lost everything, including the plane, when a revolution broke out in Angola, where he had a coffee plantation, forcing him to return to Italy by boat.
He was twenty years older than Lyndall and, like her, had had a very brief marriage many years before, but unlike her, was not able to be divorced. When divorce became legal after a referendum in Italy in 1972, Lorenzo and Lyndall married. They lived in shabby grandeur, in un-modernised rooms, handsomely frescoed, with uneven floors and all the shutters too rickety to close. Lorenzo had died over thirty years before; Lyndall, as his widow, was still there. Her domain was now the tower, and a frescoed apartment where her friends and family visited her throughout the year. Eventually, that apartment, too, will go to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
Lyndall and I had more in common than I could have ever imagined. Politics, of course, but also reading and films. Friends brought her books from London and she had a vast collection of DVDs to get her through the winters. And we spoke sometimes of difficult mothers, her stories putting mine in the shade. As a young woman, Antonia White had gone temporarily out of her mind and been incarcerated for almost a year in Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) in Southwark, now the Imperial War Museum. Besides Frost in May, the best known of her books, one of her other three novels and some short stories describe her madness.
Antonia White also left behind a journal of more than a million words, which would be edited to a much reduced form by her eldest daughter, Lyndall’s half-sister, Susan Chitty. The publication of these edited diaries had exacerbated a rift between her daughters—both of whom had written biographies of their mother. Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White by Susan Chitty was followed by Lyndall’s Nothing to Forgive, an attempt to soften and correct her sister’s portrait of their difficult and neurotic mother, who had battled bouts of depression, existing precariously by translating French authors, including Colette and Maupassant. Antonia White died in 1980, having lived on her own for forty years after the last of her three marriages ended in divorce in 1938. And Carmen gave Antonia the huge pleasure of being republished in Virago’s Modern Classics.
I would make Lyndall’s little apartment in the town almost mine for much of the next four years, moving a desk under a window, so I could see out over the wall and the rooftops to the Valdichiana plain towards Lake Trasimeno. On warm evenings, I would sit outside on that wall, partly concealed in the leaves, a book and glass of wine beside me, legs dangling over the 10-metre drop to the stone churchyard of San Domenico below. And the windowsills in the apartment were high and deep enough for me to sit on when the sun slanted perfectly into the sitting room, cheering me, and ripening my summer tomatoes and autumn pears.