My father believed in angels. He named me after one of the archangels and in honour of an Italian Contessa called Gabriella who wore emeralds on every finger and lived in a Renaissance villa overlooking Lake Nemi. The Contessa found him charming and became his patroness: ‘You are a famous poet. You will write your greatest work here in Italy,’ she insisted, and she gave him a little cottage in her garden. A friend, a young painter called Graham Kingsley, sent him a telegram: ‘Patrick, I’m bringing you a present.’ My father wrote back, ‘To hell with the present. Bring me a future.’
Kingsley arrived with my mother, Eleanor. She was twenty-two and wore straw hats; she had black hair and luminous white skin. She skulked in the shade of the hot Italian summer dreaming of Scottish moors, mauve skies and rain. Kingsley left after three days. Eleanor stayed for ever. She was Patrick’s future, and she had brought her wellington boots.
The myths of my family, favourite fables told again and again, are brought out like battered photographs, nostalgia-scented and made alive by scrambled memory. They are fairy-tales, fantasies grown from a seed of truth into something wild and overblown. Only the house, Mildney, and the five children – me, then Brodie, Flook, Dan and finally Poppy – remain as constants in my mind. And of course, my parents, Patrick and Eleanor. The lives they led before I was born move in my head with my own memories until I cannot distinguish truth from legend. Perhaps there is no difference.
Patrick loved memories and myths. He leaned his elbows on the arms of his favourite red velvet chair and pressed his fingers together, a vaulted arc through which his voice fell slowly towards me from long ago.
Patrick and Eleanor went to a piano recital at the Contessa’s villa. Eleanor made herself ready with wellington boots and goggles of mascara. They traipsed up the garden path, Eleanor sulking a little as Chopin sprinkled from an open window. In the music-room a young German, his pate bright bald, milked the Steinway. Eleanor ate macaroons and removed one wellington to scratch at her instep while the other hand hogged more biscuits. Five minutes into the recital she leaned over and whispered, ‘Very soon you will have to excuse me. I am tone deaf to all instruments except the bagpipes.’
They left. Eleanor pocketed a last macaroon as she rose from her chair.
Patrick and Eleanor furnished themselves with two typewriters; Patrick’s was strewn with papers, Eleanor’s with roses, and they conceived their first baby. They returned to London as winter began and Gabriella Laura was born. Eleanor was entranced. Patrick found a tiny flat in Islington and its one room was a talcum-powdered temple to the baby. Eleanor spent hours each day mooning by the cradle where Gabriella slept, watching her tiny hands unclench and float like seaweed against her shawl. In awe and incredulous at the baby’s ability to survive, she leaned over the cradle night after night, prodding the child until an angry yell verified the miracle of existence. Patrick, thirty years older, had sired three children by the time he met Eleanor, but had never been given or taken the time to be with them. They were grown-up now, the same age as Eleanor, and he found himself enraptured by his new daughter, beguiled into family life.
Patrick found it impossible to write in the cramped flat and longed to take Eleanor and Gabriella back to the sun. He borrowed a house on the borders of France and Italy, and in the spring they drove off into the snowbound Apennines. Patrick loved driving. He wore leather gloves stippled with holes and glasses with green lenses. He had a navy-blue Mercedes with a bench front seat and a steering wheel as white as bone. In this car, which he and Eleanor christened Sadie Benz, they sped through tiny French villages, the baby’s clean nappies streaming like wedding bunting from the windows as Eleanor attempted to dry them.