This second conducted tour led to the discovery of an amazing room at the back of the premises, at the far end, yet another part of the domain of Attilio. It was a room roofed with stone slabs and it had a door which could be only opened by inserting a hand in a hole in a wall and groping around until you could grasp a baulk of timber which acted as a lock, and pull it from left to right.
This room extended the whole height of the building and had originally been constructed for the purpose of drying chestnuts. They were laid out and dried over a fire that had a chimney which extended up to the height of the roof. When they were dry they were ground into a pale, brownish flour and used to make a rather sickly, sweetish sort of bread called castagnaccia which, until long after the last war, was a staple food in many parts of mountain Italy.
It contained a great collection of tools, a forge with bellows, several ladders, a couple of wine barrels, rather the worse for wear, some of the heavy tubs called bigonci, from which the grapes were poured into the grape crusher, various agricultural instruments, wooden mousetraps that looked like miniature lockup garages and were fitted with a sort of portcullis made of tin that would come down on the necks of the unfortunate mice if they tripped the trigger, axes, hammers, crowbars, scythes and sickles, leather clogs with wooden soles, boxes of hand-forged iron nails and racks of empty wine bottles of ancient manufacture, very heavy and black – all this to enumerate just some of the contents. Miraculously, it was as dry as a bone.
And even after all these preliminaries, getting Signor Botti up to the starting line, so far as selling his house was concerned, was about as easy as bringing a reluctant bride to the altar. Although he had, apparently, agreed to accept two and a half million, which was what he asked for in the first place, he was not going to do so before the whole business had been gone over again with Signor Vescovo.
There followed what turned out to be an entire hour of rumbling, rambling dialogue conducted between Signor Botti who, I regret to say, I was beginning to have a desire to strangle, notwithstanding his disability, and Signor Vescovo whom we were both beginning to admire profoundly for his almost inhuman self-control. In the course of these exchanges Signor Botti, rather like the Grand Old Duke of York, at one moment advanced to take up a certain position, the next retreated from it, then advanced again to re-possess himself of it, while we all got wetter and wetter, having re-emerged for no apparent reason into the open air.
Then, suddenly, their dialogue ceased and Signor Vescovo seized Signor Botti’s right hand, at the same time contriving to bring our two right hands together with his, with the words, ‘Dunque, siamo d’accordo!’
It was done. At least we thought it was done. Nothing was as I had imagined it would be: no repairing to some snug hostelry, such as the Arco, for drinks all round, while we dried out. Only the four of us on an only too convincing Italian equivalent of a blasted heath. No sign of Attilio, whom I would not have been at all surprised to find lying in state in his bedroom, waiting for the weather to improve, or for that matter of Signora Angiolina, either.
What became only too apparent immediately, and something that put an additional damper on the proceedings, was that, as Signor Vescovo had predicted, Signor Botti didn’t like the look of Wanda’s cheque, or rather it was Wanda’s mother’s (she was paying for it), one little bit.
He took it gingerly in both hands as if it might have been about to explode and after holding it up to what light there was, getting it nice and damp in the process, and generally behaving as if it was something the cat had brought in, rejected it.
We were in a spot. We needed the money in cash, not next week or the week after, but now, if we were going to be sure of getting I Castagni. If we didn’t produce it Signor Botti might quite likely succumb to another attack of the dithers and we would be back where we came in.
It was at this moment that Signor Vescovo who, so far as we were concerned, was getting nothing out of all this, showed himself worthy of his name and offered to cash a cheque himself for two and a half million and give the money to Signor Botti, which we didn’t want him to do.
But first there had to be a meeting with Signor Botti’s notary in Sarzana to finalize everything.
So we all tramped across the bridge over the torrent which was in spate, up the hill past Signora Angiolina’s place in the hissing rain, from which she waved encouragingly when we gave her the thumbs up sign, piled into the Land Rover and set off for Sarzana.
There in the office of the notary in the main square, we were told that a declaration would have to be made that Wanda was the only surviving child of her parents’ marriage. She was, in fact by now, the only survivor of a family of eleven children, only two of whom, Wanda and an elder brother, had survived beyond birth.
To do this we would have to go to Monfalcone, near Trieste, where Wanda’s mother’s notary carried on his business and would do what was necessary.
We took a night train to Monfalcone, got the document, spent the next night with Wanda’s mother, got the money in cash and returned to find that Signor Vescovo had already come up with the money and handed it over to Signor Botti.
Now, apart from a few formalities, we were the owners of a small place in Italy called I Castagni.
The winter that followed our acquisition of I Castagni was a bitter one. Our house, which was near Wimbledon Common, was colder than most, due to the fact that we hadn’t been able to afford to have central heating installed. All our resources had been consumed in stemming a disastrous outbreak of dry rot which had necessitated the removal of the entire façade of the building, so that while repairs were being carried out, looking at it from outside, having lifted the tarpaulin which covered it, was like peering into a doll’s house.
Sometimes, when working at home on some piece for the Observer with a title such as ‘The Best Bistros in Martinique’, written by someone I had commissioned who complained of the heat in the Caribbean, to restore my circulation, long before jogging was invented, I used to go running on Wimbledon Common and across Richmond Park.
There, while pounding up the long snowy rides in the dusk, between the giant oaks that had been planted centuries ago, with the rooks like black rags scattering on the wind high above them, I thought of the little house in Italy, as full of holes as the sieve in which the Jumblies put to sea, and Attilio, its diminutive occupant, and wondered if they were both still standing. The house was not even insured. In the excitement we had forgotten to insure it. Should we now be thinking of insuring Attilio, in case the house collapsed on top of him?
One thing was certain: no one except Signor Vescovo, and he had his own troubles what with his ristorante and his produzione propria, or our friend Valeria at Tellaro would think of letting us know if anything untoward happened.
The only other persons even faintly interested would be Signora Angiolina and Attilio and all that one was likely to get out of him would be a series of ‘Heh! Heh! Heh!’ noises, which was what it sounded like when he went through the motions of chuckling to himself, while Signora Angiolina’s contribution would probably be a ‘Ma!’
All we could do now was to wait until the following Easter when, all being well, I would be able to have some more time off in which we could take possession of our newly acquired property. It was fortunate that by this time our children were sufficiently grown up to be at universities and no longer reliant on us for amusement during the holidays.
Easter Sunday fell almost as late as it possibly could, and when we set off for Italy on the Tuesday of Easter week, it was in a Land Rover crammed with everything we could think of that might help us to survive in what was little more than the shell of a house.
All the way across France and northern Italy it poured and poured, except at the Mont Blanc Tunnel where it was snowing at both ends, as it had been the previous time. As Wanda said, ‘When it comes to travelling we are some pickers!’