Trompe l’oeil
When I was ten, my father woke me in the middle of the night and said we were going on an adventure. My mother laughed and fetched clothes and toys and stuffed them into two large holdalls. My brothers and I got dressed, then lay in the back of our station wagon under a quilt while my father drove us all to Dover. On the ferry, a huge man with inky arms burped and then winked at me. My father leant over and whispered that the man was a pirate.
We drove and drove through fields and tunnels until we arrived at a broken down villa in the Po valley. It was years ago now, before anyone minded that those Palladian buildings were crumbling into the mists. So my brothers rode bicycles indoors beneath Tiepolo skies, watched by the beady eyes of painted monkeys that peeped through a trickery of balustrades. The frescoes captured a noble family forever in the act of sharing a meal, but while their guests lounged around the walls pointing at fruit, small trickles of dust would spill from their plates.
My father told us he was on a secret mission and disappeared for weeks on end. When he returned, there were shouts and silences and my mother retreated to their bedroom and grew grey circles under her eyes. As the year rolled on and the air grew damper, rain drops slid down from the leaky roof and pushed the plaster away from the walls. My brothers fought for attention and wormed their fingers into the cracks, prodding at the frailty. I decided I was an artist and tried to restore the paintings by colouring in the bits that were flaking to the floor. But as I tried to mend the damage, I noticed that there were other outlines emerging underneath. At the centre, a man stood with the same confident pose, though this time he seemed to be surrounded by a different group of people, set against a blurry background of ancient city streets.
When a smart woman with a headscarf and pearls turned up at our door and asked to see my father, my mother gasped, stooped down to the pieces of fallen mural, picked up a large slab and hurled it at her. The woman ducked, reached for a chunk that had shattered behind her and threw it back at my mother. The missile hit the wall and dislodged the last area of fresco still clinging there. It fell away to reveal the dim figures of a woman and a baby standing alongside the faded patriarch.
Just at that moment, my father arrived back from his travels and stood in the doorway. His face turned to the colour of chalk dust as the two women flailed amongst the debris. Behind them, all that was left on the pock-marked wall were a few patches of paint that were now well beyond the art of restoration.
Caroline Greene enjoys writing to shorter and shorter word counts. She lives in London with her family.
