Two Envelopes

The bank’s discharge came up in the post on the twenty-ninth of December. One sheet, no heading, the account number, the words saldato ed estinto, and a stamp.

Two hundred and fourteen thousand euros that had been sitting on this hill since the April of 2019, and it goes off it in a franked envelope with a second-class stamp on it, and you stand in your own yard in the cold holding a piece of paper and feel nothing whatsoever. I had expected to feel something. I had been planning to feel something since the twenty-second of September.

What I did instead was walk down to the bottom of the meadow, which was not mine any more, and stand on somebody else’s grass looking at somebody else’s boathouse, which I was entitled to do in perpetuity by clause two.

Ettore found me there. He had a spirit level and a bad temper and eleven objections to the state of the cottage roof.

“You are on my land,” he said.

“I’ve got a right of way.”

“You have a right of way to the water. You are standing on the grass.” He put the level down. “Nine days and he has not been up that track once. Nadia asked me on Sunday whether Rinaldi was ill.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that Rinaldi has never been ill in his life and that people who want to know things should walk up hills,” said Ettore, and picked the level back up, and that was the whole of his opinion about it, which he had told me in November I would not enjoy.

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The valley took about four days to settle on a version, and the version it settled on was that Piero Bianchi’s daughter had sold her father’s boathouse to her own cellar master for less than it was worth, and that Rinaldi had walked away in the middle of it, and that the whole business had gone wrong at San Martino when a man got up on the church steps and said something nobody had asked him to say.

Two people came and told me it to my face, which I would like recorded, because they were both men of my father’s generation and neither of them had spoken to me about anything but the weather since the funeral. One of them wanted to know what I had got for it. The other one wanted to tell me that a woman on her own on a hillside is a thing that ends one way, and he had a cousin who could look at the cottage roof.

Nobody in Pianello knows about the house in via Costa. Nobody ever will, if I can help it. It is the only secret I am keeping for him and I am aware of the shape of that.

I had Christmas at Signora Amadei’s with her sister and her sister’s husband who does the filing at Menaggio, which was a room with three people in it who all knew exactly what had happened and had agreed in advance to discuss the chestnuts.

She got me on the way out, at the door, with my coat half on, which is where that woman has conducted the important business of her life for thirty-one years.

“Vallese have offered him a cellar.”

I had my arm in a sleeve. I left it there.

“Sorico. The old Bregonzi place, which she bought on the eighteenth because she could not have yours, and it has nine hectares and no boathouse and she wants a winemaker for three years.” Signora Amadei straightened my collar, which she has never once done. “Seventy-eight thousand euros, they are saying, and a flat.”

“Who’s saying?”

“Everybody. It is the twenty-fifth of December and there is nothing else.” She stepped back. “He answered her on the twenty-seventh.”

“That hasn’t happened yet.”

“He will answer her on the twenty-seventh,” said Signora Amadei, “because that is the day he goes to Sorico for his aunt, and he will not make a woman wait for a no over Christmas. I am telling you on Friday what I will know on Sunday. I have earned that.”

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On the thirty-first of December Serena rang me at ten past eleven.

“He is in my waiting room,” she said. “He has been since ten. He has brought a deed of release of the clause eleven option, executed, and he would like it delivered and receipted today, and he has asked me to do it before he sees you rather than after.”

I sat down on the arm of my father’s chair.

“He can exercise it until midnight.”

“He can. It is a quarter past eleven in the morning on the thirty-first of December and he is sitting in my waiting room in a coat, and in about four minutes I am going to put a stamp on this and it will not be capable of being undone by either of you.” A pause, and then Serena Nardi said the only sentimental thing I have ever heard out of her, and she said it like a complaint. “He is giving away a hundred and fifty-eight thousand euros before lunch and he has asked me for a receipt.”

I did the arithmetic afterwards, because I do. Forty per cent of the last valuation anybody put on this place is three hundred and thirty-eight thousand euros. The price my father fixed in the March of 2019, when the frost had taken the lower blocks, is a hundred and eighty. In the cellar on the fourteenth of October I had offered that man twenty thousand a year over eight years at two per cent, which is seven hundred and seventy euros a fortnight, which is less in a year than the invoices he stopped sending us.

It was reachable. That is the thing. It was not a fantasy and it was not charity and it was the only structure left in the world that would have obliged me to keep him, and at ten o’clock in the morning on the last day of the year he sat in a waiting room in a coat and waited for a stamp.

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He came up the track on foot at three, with the van left down at the bottom by the road, which he did on purpose and which I noticed from the kitchen window and did not forgive him for immediately.

I met him in the yard. I did not ask him in.

He had two envelopes. He gave me both and then put his hands in his pockets, which is the only nervous thing that man does.

The first was the receipt from Serena’s office, timed eleven twenty-four.

The second was a copy of a letter to Vanoli at the co-operative and to the Consorzio, four lines, dated that morning, withdrawing his consent to the use of his name on any label, bottle, back label or technical filing of the Le Rive estate, in this vintage or any other, and asking that the January filing be accepted from the producer alone.

“That’s mine,” I said. “The label’s mine. You don’t get to take yourself off it.”

“You can put anything you like on a bottle,” he said. “You can’t put my name on it without me, and now you haven’t got me.”

“I wanted it there.”

“I know you did.”

“You wanted it there. Don’t stand in my yard and tell me you didn’t, I watched you want it.”

“I have wanted my name on a bottle on this hill since I was ten years old,” he said. “That’s the point of doing it. If I give away things I don’t want, I’ve given away nothing.”

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Then he said the rest of it, and I am going to put it down as exactly as I can, because I have had it in my head every day since and I do not entirely trust myself with it any more.

“You asked me a question in the cellar on the fourteenth of October and I said that if I answered it honestly I couldn’t stay. I’ve now got nothing to stay for, so I can answer it.”

And he looked at me.

I want to be understood about this. For two years that man had looked at the netting, the wire, the top of the ridge, the lake, the middle distance down the row, the gauge on a tank, his own hands. He stood in my gravel on the last afternoon of the year with his hands in his pockets and he looked at my face the entire time he was speaking and he did not look away once, and it was almost impossible to be on the other end of.

“If he had died on that terrace without ever coming down to the press house, I would have waited until the vintage was in and his year was up, and then I would have put on a clean shirt and come to your door in the evening like a man from the village and asked you to have dinner with me in Menaggio, and given you the whole of a winter to say no.

“And I’d have been wrong. That’s the part I couldn’t say in October, and it isn’t the part you think.

“In the November after he died I was your supervisor. I was your father’s partner. I was the registered signature on your file, I was the man the bank telephoned about your own file, and I knew to the euro what was in your account and you did not know what was in mine. If I had stood on your step in a clean shirt, you could not have said no to me without it costing you something. You’d have had to weigh it. You’d have weighed the harvest and the co-operative and whether I’d still come at six.

“A woman who cannot afford to refuse hasn’t agreed to anything. Your father asked me for the wrong reason and he got the right answer, and I have spent two years being proud of keeping a promise when what I should have been doing was getting rid of the reasons you couldn’t refuse me.

“So: as of twenty past eleven this morning I have no option, no share, no supervision, no signature on your file, no name on your bottle, no money of yours and nothing at that bank. There is nothing left of me that you need. That is the only condition under which I have any business standing in this yard, and it took me until the last day of the year to work it out, and I had to be made to. You made me. I’d like that said out loud on my own account and not yours.”

The tivano was coming up the lake. You could hear it in the wires before you could feel it.

“Vallese offered you Sorico,” I said.

“On the twenty-third. I answered on the twenty-seventh.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d be making somebody else’s wine on somebody else’s hill for seventy-eight thousand a year,” he said, “and I’ve done a version of that for twenty years and it turns out I only ever did it to be necessary. I don’t want to be necessary. I’ve been necessary since I was nineteen and it is the loneliest way there is to be loved.”

“Then what do you want?”

“One harvest.”

He took his hands out of his pockets.

“Put me on the co-operative’s day rate with the pickers, in the book, with the others, from the pruning to the pressing. No contract, no share, no title, nothing on any piece of paper anywhere that says what I am to this place. If I’m worth the money by September you’ll know, and if I’m not you’ll tell me, because you’re the only person in this valley who does. Nothing promised. Nothing owed. And I’m not asking you for anything else, today or any other day, and I’ll not ask twice.”

· · ·Scene break

Here is what I did not do.

I did not cross four metres of gravel and put my hands on him. I had wanted to since the moment he came round the corner of the press house, and I had wanted to through every word of it, and there is a version of me that did it and I do not think she was wrong.

I stood where I was, with a receipt in one hand and a letter in the other, and I let a man stand in the cold at the end of the worst fortnight of his life and wait for an answer from me, which is a thing nobody had ever asked him to do.

“We start the pruning on the eleventh,” I said. “Seven o’clock, the bottom terrace. Ettore’s ordered the wire.”

“All right.”

“That’s not an answer to the other thing.”

“No,” he said. “I know it isn’t. It wasn’t a question.”

He went back down the track. It takes about four minutes to the road from the top of our gravel, and I watched the whole of it, and he did not once turn round, and at the bottom he stopped and shut my gate behind him because it had been open all day.

I went in and stood in my kitchen and did the sums again, out loud, in an empty house, on the last evening of the year. A hundred and fifty-eight thousand euros. Eleven twenty-four. Twenty-six months and fifteen days, and thirteen days left to do anything about it. Four lines to the Consorzio. Sixty rows, twenty-nine vines, two hundred plants at Colico by the winter after next, three thousand bottles a year for two years under my own label with nobody’s name on it but my father’s and mine.

It is the only time in my life the numbers have been no use to me at all.