Читать книгу The Dolce Vita Diaries - Cathy Rogers - Страница 27

This time we were taking no chances—we were going to come back with our future home. We had arranged three separate days with three different estate agents and had told them to fit in as many houses as it was feasible to see in a day. By the end of this trip we’d have seen about seventy houses in all.

This time around, we had hooked up, for no particular reason, with property places further south in Le Marche. It’s funny how quickly one develops fixed ideas. We had one that leaving Ancona airport, we had to go north. We were smitten with Urbino and San Leo and Serra de Conti and the valleys around Corinaldo—and all of these were to the northwest. But now we found ourselves heading south to poorer (or so we thought, Italy tending to get more so as you go south) and uncharted lands.

First stop was Gualdo, located in a place we have since discovered is nicknamed ‘Gualdoshire’ for its prevalence of English expats. It certainly seemed tuned in to the desires of the English, with arrangements where agent, lawyer and architect are often thick as thieves and will, if you wish and pay for it, oversee everything from the purchase of your property until moving in, making all decisions about light switches and toilet positioning along the way. The agent drove us first to show us some of the properties his company had already done up—to help us visualize how these dilapidated wrecks could be turned into perfect homes.

Except we weren’t sure we liked these perfect homes. They were so of a type, they screamed out ‘ENGLISH INHABITANTS’ for miles around. For a start, all the pretty brickwork was always sandblasted to within an inch of its life, which meant that the houses looked new. How ridiculous. They were pale and gleaming and, like a Hollywood star with too much botox, unconvincingly hid their life and experience with bland smoothness. Inside, the walls were all plastered, so again the joy of the bricks was lost—except they didn’t want to lose it altogether, so at random intervals there would be an amorphous blob of plaster missing so that the bricks could show through. It was like a wedding cake that had rubbed up against the roof of a tin and taken off a big chunk of icing, leaving the cake nakedly showing below. There was always a swimming pool—a boon for the owners but a vile lurid blot in the view for everybody else. And they were always down miles of windy rocky track in the middle of nowhere, as if people moved here not to move to Italy but to move away from the rest of the world.

It didn’t quite feel like us.

So we schlepped around lots of nonetheless very pretty wrecks with very pretty views and were sort of tempted but not quite enough. We had a feeling that there was something we were missing, but we’d seen so many places and with so many different agents that we couldn’t really convince ourselves we weren’t being thorough enough.

We sat in the office of the trim and efficient Monica, purveyor of houses to nearly all the English in an area covering a good 100 square miles (well, you would look trim on that wouldn’t you?). She thumbed through her files, throwing out the odd place here and there. Then she paused and looked at us sidelong and said, ‘You mentioned olive trees, didn’t you?’

We replied it was very important we were in an olive-growing region, and ideally we’d get some olive trees with the house, too.

‘There is this one house,’ she started, without conviction, ’but I don’t think it’s what you want. It’s quite a modern house.’

We gave her a look to say tell us more.

‘It does have a lot of olive trees.’

‘How many?’ we asked.

‘Well, the last owner had registered…let me see…about 900.’

‘Take us there,’ we said.

The journey there was so wiggly and windy that you’d never remember it again even if your life depended upon it. Monica, clearly accustomed enough to Italian entranceways to know not to risk them, parked the car at the top, barely off the road on what seemed a pretty deadly bend. We walked down the short driveway to a big square red-brick modern house.

‘Horrible roof,’ Jason said.

I could see he was right, though I think I could have gone there a hundred times before I’d have really noticed by myself. I was looking the other way, at the breathtaking view that stretched on and on and on. In Le Marche the views are often quite closed in because the hills have so many little tucks and folds, but here there were two quite separately beautiful views. One which was tucked in: the hill opposite, with a pretty painted campanile tower and a cluster of houses rising out of a picturesquely farmed hillside. The other was one that never appeared to end. It stretched down along the line of a valley seemingly all the way to the sea, which you could imagine there at the end even if you couldn’t really quite in all honesty see it. And peeping up every couple of miles along the valley was a little village, always perched on top of a pointy hill and every time with a turret or a tower poking up from the other buildings. It was gorgeous. It was the sort of view you wanted to soak yourself in. I did reverse blinking to try and make it stick.

Estate agents being estate agents, we didn’t get too long to stand being whimsical before keys were whisked out for our appointment with the house.

It wasn’t the sort of house you would fall in love with. At least, if I imagine the kind of person who might fall in love with this sort of a house it makes me like it less, so I prefer not to. It’s not that there was anything wrong with it, but neither was there anything particularly right—it was just sort of a blob of house, just sort of there. Jason likes houses with tacked-on bits and a little ramshackle and he was right and there was none of that. It was quadratic. It was made of functional bricks, not the pretty old Italian ones that the English fall in love with. The roof did not have an aesthetic dimension; its job was to keep out the rain and that was what it did.

Nonetheless, as soon as we saw the house, we knew that it was going to be ours. We even decided that we quite liked that it wasn’t the sort of house that English people who move to Italy fall in love with. It made us feel that we were different and that we were coming here for sensible reasons, not for some daft and naïve dream. We liked the fact that it was functional and wouldn’t mean sinking all our savings and more into rebuilding magnificent archways or restoring frescos buried under years of plaster and wallpaper. But, of course, in thinking that we were beginning to start our own little dream, to create our own world of expectation and our own sense of place.

I’m omitting, of course, the most crucial element. The house, as Monica had promised, had a very, very large garden—about eight hectares or 20 acres—most of which was planted with olive trees. It had 881 or 977 trees depending on whether you believed the document that went with the house or the form that goes to the local board to claim subsidy on olive trees, which Monica had unearthed and which was, strangely, higher. One day soon, we thought, we’ll count those trees ourselves and know for sure. More than that, we will give each one a name or at least a number, and register it on a map with GPS coordinates and write down every detail about it, from how many olives it produces annually, to how much manure we put on it, to the date we prune it each year.

But before that, there was a lot of work to do. When we’d done the tour of the house and were finally allowed a wander round the grove, it was obvious this was not a perfect one, like the covers of pretty Italian photography coffee-table books, with olive trees in neat lines and matching shapes. This grove presented all the ramshackle-ness and chaos that the house didn’t. The lines were mostly not even straight. The trees had been pretty much abandoned, with only the ones right at the top of the very steep hill having even been harvested for probably a decade. Worse, the bleak, bleak winter the year before had done some serious damage to the trees. A properly pruned tree can take snowfall because the snow just falls through the branches. But a great big ’70s Afro of a tree leaves nowhere for the snow to fall through and it just sits there. Add that to a really cold winter where that snow sits for weeks and even months and the result is broken branches and in some cases even split trunks.

Of course, we didn’t know most of that then: we saw lots and lots of olive trees. And we knew we wanted lots and lots of olive trees. The fact that they needed a bit of a love-up was actually almost a plus, in that it would give us something to get stuck into and would immediately help us form a sort of bond with the grove. It would be thanks to us that it would be healthy and productive again. We’d feel that we’d done a bit of good in a little corner of our new world.

We spent about an hour in the grove, frolicking about in the wild flowers and running down the hills and thinking about people thinking how lucky we were. And feeling pretty lucky, even when Jason, who (in contrast to me) is a very unjumpy person, jumped at least two feet in the air with a loud shriek.

‘Oh my God, what is it?’ I yelled, certain that he must have broken a leg at least.

‘A massive snake,’ he said. ‘Like this long’ (he held his arms at full stretch) ‘and jet black. It just went right across the grass in front of me, almost over my feet!’

Yikes. I’m not sure I like snakes. Though these ones are harmless, according to Monica.

There was another beautiful piece of perilous wildlife. On one of the upstairs windows, attached to the outside of it and protected by the shutter on the other side, was a nest of calabroni. They’re sort of giant wasps, like hornets but bigger—twice the size of a big bumble bee each, and apparently it only takes a handful to kill a horse. Babies have been killed by a single sting, apparently. I realize that we are going to use the word ‘apparently’ a lot. It’s a slim cover for ignorance. The nest spread over almost the whole window and was an intricate work of practical art—tunnels carved out and passing over each other in all directions to make a crazy and complex lattice of waspy dwellings.

We didn’t mind the feeling of sharing our future home with some worthy other dwellers but apparently (you see?) we’d have to call the firemen out for these fellas.

We had planned to make another trip to the house before we committed, but when we tried to return on our own a few days later there was a rainfall so heavy that big chunks of road were gushing away down the hill. I was driving and it was quite nerve-racking, swerving around and skidding all over the place, with flumes of gravel and mud rushing past and round the car. It was almost a relief when the road ahead was closed and meant we couldn’t heroically battle on to get there. What this rainfall meant is that we were about to decide to commit our money and our future to a place that we had seen for less time than I would interview someone for a temporary assistant’s job. But commit we did.

Back in Los Angeles, the process of idealizing the house began in earnest. Our photos of mouldy cellars and wild flowers running riot evoked in viewers a mixture of cheesy images culled from the vile and legion films romanticizing Italy. In most people’s minds, we would have a beautiful room with a view where we would ponder life’s mysteries under the Tuscan sun. We half hated their schmaltzy idealization of our future life, but allowed ourselves the odd enigmatic smile, because who is immune to a bit of romance?

A few days after being back, we phoned Monica to tell her that we wanted to buy the house. Slightly chary after our Upupa experience, we made an offer of 215,000 euros, a little less than the asking price of 225,000 euros. Within a few hours, she had phoned back to say that the owners had accepted our offer. And that was that! It seemed too easy. We had a house in Italy. It was in a place called Loro Piceno which we’d learned to pronounce properly. And we had enough olive trees—God, I couldn’t wait to count them myself—with which to start our new life.

Life continued as normal in LA. We were in the middle of filming the umpteenth series of Junkyard Wars, the American version of Scrapheap Challenge, and it was boiling. On several days, the temperature in the valley where our salubrious junkyard lay reached 120·F. It was relatively fine for us, the production team, but the poor on-screen teams would be slaving away against the clock to finish their machines with welding torches and grinding discs, lugging cars and machinery all over the place and working their backsides off. We had a few cases of heatstroke, all dealt with calmly by our medic Roy, who had no nose (a result of diving in toxic polluted waters).

A house in Italy with lots of olive trees couldn’t have seemed further away.

Then one day I found out I was pregnant. I say it as if it was a shock but it wasn’t really. We’d been to see a fertility ‘dude’ in LA, who was one of those doctors who sees it as his moral duty to bring more children into the world. All around his office—his baby shrine—were pictures of beautiful smiling babies of every colour and shape, offerings to the gods of procreation.

We went to see him because we wanted some more facts about this whole business of ageing and having children. There’s so much written about it by a slightly disapproving media, and so many prejudices about older mums, that we just wanted to know the truth. His speech went along these lines. ‘Well, you guys seem happy. You’ve probably been together a while—you’ve had lots of fun together, right? I mean you’ve had enough fun, haven’t you? You can’t play about all your lives. Have kids! Get on with it! I swear to God you’ll regret it if you don’t.’

Then he drew a chart on a blank piece of paper—I was impressed because it was really good even though he drew it upside down so that it was facing us on the other side of the desk. On the horizontal axis was ‘woman: age’ and on the vertical ‘fertility: odds of getting pregnant’. The line just went down and down till it almost hit the line at the bottom. He then drew a cross where I, at the age of 35, sat on the graph and I felt uncomfortably close to where the line stopped being a graph line and started being an axis. It was one of those pictures that spoke at least a hundred words.

‘Do you want more than one child?’ he asked.

We’d never really talked about that—it was a big enough thing to think about having one. But, on the spot, we both thought that we probably did.

‘Well, then, you really need to get on. This graph doesn’t stop just because you have one under your belt. So think about how old you’d be by number two or number three or number—’

‘No more than three!’ we both yelped.

‘Well, whatever, you’ve still got to think that by then you’ll be what 38, 39, maybe even in your forties by number three.’

It was a clear and resounding ‘Go forth and multiply’, in American.

So we did. And here, astonishingly efficiently and with a distinct V-sign to that maudlin graph, was a tiny growing baby.

I think pregnancies are nine months long not because that wee thing needs that time to get its act together but because the carrier does. Nine months to get your head around the idea, nine months to work out how it might affect your life decisions, nine months to make plans about the future.

In many people’s cases, these nine months are a time to nest and to settle and to move house and prepare for a life as more than two. And so it was with us. Before the pregnancy, we hadn’t made a definite plan about leaving LA, but as soon as it was there, we did. We both felt we wanted to be at home in London for when the baby was born, near friends and family—so that gave a very clear schedule for our departure. It also gave enough time for our company to make plans for our replacements—another great reason for this nine-month preparation time, clever babies.

As to our bigger future plans, the fact that there would be a baby in among them only made them seem more right. Even from afar, I had always dreaded having that sort of London frenetic motherhood where I was constantly rushing from work to be with baby or rushing from baby to be with work. I am more than prone to feeling guilty about not doing enough, even when I am, and the idea of this constant emotional pull one way or another did my head in, even as a theory.

But equally, the idea of being tied to a house and tied to a routine which everyone tells you a baby needs filled me with terror. The idea of a life with a bit more flexibility, one which included working and finding fulfilment beyond nappies, but without some of the strictures of a more-than-full-time job, had an appeal that felt very tangible.

We didn’t really make a definite plan but in our heads we’d be in London for a while, have the baby, hang around for a bit, then head off to Italy a year or so later.

In the meantime, life was busier than ever. So much so that we couldn’t make it to Italy to sign the documents on the house purchase as we were in the midst of filming. Instead, my sister Madeleine went over with her boyfriend Dan to do it on our behalf. We had signed power of attorney over to her. It was she who had to rush around finding our lovely lawyer Furio, to get the right documents and open bank accounts on our behalf, and it was she who had to sit through the arcane and archaic process of handing over a house from old owner to new. Compared with the British set-up it’s a very formal process, with a notary presiding over the whole thing and making dramatic speeches (all in Italian, of course). But Italy being Italy, there is also the entrenched desire to beat the system, a desire that is not only recognized but facilitated by the authorities.

And so it was that Madeleine came to experience on our behalf our first and rather dramatic example of Italian corruption at first hand. We were anxious to be putting her in such a position though also, if we’re honest, a bit jealous. Italian corruption is by now a high art. It has been practised for centuries, its processes refined and perfected, its challengers only serving to propel it onto further cunnings and refinements, its protagonists by now accomplished professionals. It is truly an art. For this, as much as for any other reason, it is almost impossible to stop. As unimaginable as someone in England one day suggesting that the Sunday roast should be stamped out.

In our case, what the corruption meant was that there were two prices that had been agreed for the house. The first amount was the actual sum we would pay to the current owners. The second amount was the one that would be declared on all the official documents—and on which the owners and we would be liable to pay tax.

We’d had huge deliberations beforehand about whether to go along with all this. We are generally very law-abiding and, on a practical note, it seemed rather foolhardy to be letting the best part of 100,000 euros disappear into the Italian ether. But a combination of Furio telling us the owners were insisting on it—and that the sale could therefore be off if we didn’t agree to this—and a naïve excitement about learning to play by Italian rules eventually led us to decide that we would.

In practice, what all this meant was some nerve-racking minutes for my poor sister. All of a sudden, the handover proceedings stopped. The notary got up and left the room, ‘In order,’ he said, ‘that the owners, past and present, can talk.’ These were the code words to hand over the real money. So Madeleine, nudged on by Furio, had to whip out her sticky bundles of the cash needed to make the sum up to the agreed sale price and pass them under the table to the ex-owners. After a decent interval, the notary re-entered and the rest of the business of signing the official papers was completed without fuss.

And so it was that we were now the official owners of a house on the other side of the world, and Madeleine had had her first lesson in the ducking and diving ways of the Italian ‘grey market’ as they like to call it. It’s not really bad, it’s just sensible, common sense, practical. If you had a man like Berlusconi as your leader and paragon, wouldn’t you have a sceptical view of national honesty?

By the time it came to have our LA leaving party, I was so pregnant that I needed one of those stretch limos to drive me around all day. Actually, it was stretch Hummers that were the in thing in LA by now. Let’s not forget that, despite his latter-day greening, it was Arnie who inspired the purchase of these misanthropic tools of all-American one-upmanship. Our party was all-American glamour. We had been nominated for an Emmy award for Junkyard Wars in the first year of a new category called ‘Best Reality TV Show’. We despised the label but liked the idea of the invite so swallowed our reservations. It did seem the perfect setting for a Hollywood farewell.

Eloise, our wardrobe genius, made me an amazing dress out of bluey green shimmery silk, festooned with beautiful rusting nuts and bolts and rivets—it was the attire of a junk mermaid and quite lovely. Everyone else looked fantastic, too, like snakes emerging from their skins of filthy T-shirts and jeans to squeaky shoes and perfectly tied bow ties.

Our arrival was a small moment of glory. Everyone else, by tradition, arrives in stretch limos, black and sleek. We’ve all watched them on TV, the starlets and the vamps poking a perfectly tanned leg from a black limo straight onto the red carpet, met by the firework flashes of a thousand paparazzi. We knew we couldn’t compete on that level of glamour so decided instead to go our own way. We’d commandeered the Junkyard Wars truck—a massive whitish transit van with (probably) ‘Also available in white’ and ‘Clean me’ daubed in fingertip on the back door. The faces of the butterfly-tied bouncers lining the entrance route were priceless as two, five, ten of us emerged in our finery from this scabby half-broken down van. The creaky door was held open by Dominic, who, wearing white lab coat, steel toecaps, hard hat and huge red ear defenders, looked to be lodged in some uncomfortable nether region between mad scientist and mental health nurse.

I had prepared a speech which was to honour no one in television but instead everyone outside of it who has year-round dirty fingernails and a car chocked up on bricks in the front yard. But, of course, I never got to say it because Survivor won.

Goodbye LA.