The simple duties of Guiseppe Toscano

Joe calmly dusted the flour from his creased hands, set them down on the hardwood surface before him, and watched the dust float in the sunlight that crashed in through the open double doors. The unmistakable aroma of freshly buttered toast rose from his plate to meet him, and he closed his eyes and breathed it in, let it relax him. Chewed his last mouthful thoughtfully. No giveaways – tasted fine as ever. There was a breeze coming off the canal, but it brought no cool in with it, just picked up the heat of the big room and whirled it around a bit. Joe liked the heat, loved it in fact – it lessened some of his many aches and pains, and he shifted contentedly on the hard plywood seat of his tall stool. He could just about hear Mia back near the ovens somewhere, singing softly to herself.

It was raining when I met you,

And you were searching for the light,

The youth in her voice rang out clear and bright as she repeated the words and went in and out of earshot, and Joe wondered for a moment if he’d imagined it – if he’d fooled himself again, part of this ever-increasing trend he was on. This one-way street. Grasping at the threads of a thought, at a memory, a daydream, making it real for himself without knowing. The ultimate treachery – who can you trust, when you can’t even trust yourself? Old age was a bad business.

It was raining when I met you,

And you were searching for the light,

Ethereal and on the edge of his hearing, she was echoing beautifully in the high rafters, and this time Joe did give himself over to memory. Indulgently let himself imagine it was Nicole back there singing. Nicole, his daughter, the only one he ever had or ever would have. Singing as she swept up, singing as she mixed, her high voice always in motion, never still. He remembered he used to sit there – right there, in the seat he sat in now, more times than he could count, and gaze out of the big doors on sunny days like this and listen to the soft beauty of her voice. Resting his weary bones. He’d felt old at the time, but hadn’t really known what age was. No-one could, Joe believed – no-one can claim to know what age is, until it visits them personally. Lives with them rather. Age comes to live with you, bit by bit, whether you want it to or not, whether you’re ready and waiting, or living in denial. Reject it or welcome it, it’s coming to stay. In the little scene he’d conjured up, Nicole was with child, and the version of him that sat on the little wooden stool in his head was already feeling a little old, but smiling, and very content at the thought of the forthcoming arrival. Joe was able to feel a small, struggling, rebellious joy at the memory, until, as he knew it always must, the vast, oceanic swell of grief rose up and attempted to sweep him away for good.

He was an old hand at it now though. Old, and hardened. After so long, he met grief like an old, familiar foe, whose moves he knew all too well. You endure, tolerate, because you must. What else is there?

His head ached. Tired now, even so early in the day. He used to be so vital. The verse turned out to wrap up with,

Well in the dawn we fell together,

And tucked away the night,

Which Mia sang gently as she passed behind him, taking him by surprise as he realised he’d lost time again. Just a little, but lost nonetheless, gone forever. What must he be doing, while the world carried on and he just stopped – sitting open-mouthed like an imbecile? She squeezed him on the shoulder lightly, absent-mindedly, as she passed. The warmth of her hand felt good, and he felt the emotion, the care transmitted through it. Outwardly, he didn’t react. It would be an emotional day, that much was guaranteed.

Eighty-one years, and now it was done. Toscano Bakehouse was finished. One final, behemoth batch of white farmhouse cooling in the racks, and once it was gone the big doors would close forever. Three generations of Toscanos–

Joe stopped, sat up, and frowned to himself. Who’d had a problem with that? Who had he spoken to recently that had a problem with him saying that the bakehouse had passed through the hands of three generations of Toscanos? Well, not so much a problem, but… he remembered feeling a hot spike of outrage, at someone correcting him about the lineage of his own family business. Someone who…. Ah, yes – the newspaperman.

It had been him, with the problem.

Great, overwhelming oceanic swells of grief were one thing, but there were more difficult manifestations to deal with. Over the years, following the initial, earth-shattering shock, Joe had picked up a kind of background grief like a man walking through a patchy, sporadic fog. It clung to him, increment by increment until finally he was drenched in it. Where he thought it might fall upon him from above in a great, drowning deluge, he found it hovering, waiting patiently in his everyday life – in the quickly extinguished thought ‘can’t wait to tell Nicole’ or in the slower melancholy of ‘wish she could see this…’ It grew on him like a moss, until it seemed all he had left, and he clung to it, as it to him.

And just the other day, he’d walked unsuspectingly into large patch of said hovering grief-fog, in the form of a sophomoric newspaperman.

Well, unsuspecting was technically the wrong word – he’d actually been highly suspicious of the whole affair from the get-go, but at Mia’s gentle insistence, and partly out of a nagging guilt, formless and as-yet unarticulated, at the bakery’s closure and her impending redundancy, he’d agreed to the interview. Mia was becoming involved with a form of journalism that Joe didn’t understand, something free, casual – something completely alien to him, to the strictures of the world he’d moved in, as a child and as a man. In truth, Joe didn’t want to understand, he was just happy she was finding some kind of path to tread, something away from the bakery, away from the Toscano family trade, and the baggage that came with it. A by-product of this new pursuit was an association with like-minded people, or more specifically like-minded person, one Peter Keightley, common interest man for the Standard.

From what he’d heard about the man, Joe wasn’t actually all that sure how like-minded Peter and Mia actually were, but it was clear Mia had him on some kind of pedestal, had told him all about the upcoming closure of the bakery, and that together they had cooked up a plan for a nostalgia piece to come out on the day the Toscano Bakehouse doors swung shut for the last time. Although it struck him as a little undignified, on the face of it, it was hard to see what harm it would do. It could serve as a kind of thank you present to Mia.

Thank you and goodbye.

There had followed something of a shaky start, at Peter’s suggestion the interview take place over video-link, with him then visiting the bakery out of hours with Mia, and Mia providing any further background info Peter might need.

This, he’d loftily made clear to Joe over the phone one morning last week, was the way he usually proceeded with “this type of piece”. The call had the echoing boom of a speaker phone, and it was obvious that Peter was doing something else while on the call – couldn’t even give Joe and the bakery his full attention for the few minutes the call would take. A little brusquely, Joe broke in,

‘You can come here any day this week at about half eight, and we can talk, if you like. ‘Bye.’

So ended the call. Two days later, at eight forty-five, a caricature of a journalist walked in as though he owned the place, flung his arms around Mia and performed a little pantomime of happiness to see her, before leaving a hand on the small of her back a little too long.

Surprise, surprise.. Joe thought, and then instantly admonished himself. Assuming Peter’s interest in Mia had to be something vulgar, something unwholesome was as much an insult to her as to the man himself.

They stood together in the narrow passage that led into the bakery proper, Mia excitedly chattering about a post she’d seen that morning, gesticulating in her sweet, pseudo-Italian way, Peter staring down at her through his horn-rims from his six-foot-whatever, just the awkward side of suave in cords and brogues, and Joe wearily saw it the way it was. He knew he should be happy for Mia – but then he’d been happy for Nicole. They didn’t notice him approaching, and to Joe’s immense satisfaction the newspaperman jumped slightly when he passed behind them and gruffly muttered,

‘Mia will show you around. I’ll be in the café next door when you’re ready.’

Joe spent the next twenty-five minutes in the shade outside the café next door, nursing a cappuccino and idly watching late-running commuters hurry past, squinting, into the morning sun. Trying to remember the last time he’d been late for work – or even any time he’d been late for work. Habits built up over a lifetime ran deeply through him, the early starts that felt so natural, so innate to him after such a passing of time. The constant work – the constant service. He wondered what he might have turned out to be, were it not for the immutable influence of his father, the great Giuseppe Toscano senior, with his firm ideals of duty and servitude, his stoicism, his rigidity.

‘To serve is everything, Giuseppe. There can be no merit to your life without the service of others. We prepare their bread, the bringer of life. When you stand in this great room, and you gaze on your daily labours, the simple sustenance upon which so many will feed, will thrive, remember my boy – this is the completion of a task you share with noble Christ himself…’

When his mother would overhear the likes of this, she would clout the old man about the head with her rugged palms, shouting down his hubris and his blasphemy, his conceit. How could he presume to stand alongside Christ, how could he compare his vain pursuits with the deeds of the saviour? How could he serve himself, and claim common ground with the Lord?

His mother, Rosaria Toscano, first of the three great female tragedies of his life. All her admonishments were issued in bouncing, musical Italian – Rosaria never spoke a word of English in her entire life, despite her perfect comprehension of the language, as a point of pride. Giuseppe senior would answer her in his heavily-accented English, for he stubbornly insisted that they speak in the language of their new nation. They made a characterful couple, her stout, dark and southern, him tall and thin, blond and northern. She would jump to clobber him, and he would weave up and out of her way, laughing to himself, her keeping the smile just barely off her face. Throughout Joe’s childhood he was accompanied by surreal half-English-half-Italian conversations, and whenever he was dragged into some raging debate, the language he spoke in response would imply whose side he was on.

‘Tu servi solo te stesso!’

‘A man who breaks bread must break a little for himself.’

‘Giuseppe –‘

‘Giuseppe, talk some sense into your mother, she’s gone crazy…’

And so on, and so on. The love they shared was a weathered, journeyed thing, brought with them from the dusty poverty of the mezzagiorno to the rain-slicked streets of wartime London. A true, life-defining bond of affection, dressed up in a pantomime costume of constant bickering and jibing. Consistent good humour and unwavering support for each other. Hidden love.

Rosaria had died, suddenly, when Joe was thirteen.

His father, to Joe’s continued astonishment, had taken the blow like it was nothing.

‘Your mother’s work is over now. She is free.’

Those were the words he’d spoken to Joe, on the day she’d left them, collapsing undignified on the floor of the grocer’s, heart failure like her own mother before her, a continent and a world away. His father’s perfect acceptance of the loss had had a strange effect on Joe himself, and he’d felt like he was watching things unfold from far away, watching the happenings of someone else’s life. Now, looking back, there was a huge distance to it all. He’d lost her as a boy, had never known her as a man. His man’s mind couldn’t relate to the idea of her in any real way – he saw only the genesis of the warmth, love and beauty borne out in Nicole, so many years later.

His father had died much later, an old man, but younger than Joe was now. How odd, to be older than your father. He’d gone to his grave with the same detachment he’d shown when Rosaria had left him as a younger man.

‘To live is to suffer, Giuseppe, to serve is to lessen the suffering. When my service is over, I will greet death as a friend.’

He’d said it all his life, and in the end he had done exactly as he said he would. Joe had absolute respect for, and belief in his father, at the time he died they’d worked side-by-side for over thirty years, and he’d seen his father’s ideals lived out as faithfully as was humanly possible. There had been a tiny, treacherous part of Joe however, deep inside behind his ordinary thoughts, that had thought he would quail somehow, at the end. Surely he would shy in the face of his own destruction, when the end came, when his failing mind could govern his failing body no more and no amount of desperate clinging, no pleading or grasping would or could save him. Surely he would…

But he hadn’t. He’d gone to his grave in a lucid moment, and had gone as though it was nothing at all, as though he was merely leaving one room for another.

Joe had spoken at his funeral. The one time in his life he’d heard his father speak Italian, was two lines of fine poetry he’d delivered at the edge of Rosaria’s grave, and Joe had stood up and delivered the same two lines at Giuseppe senior’s committal.

And now, insult of insults, tragedy of tragedies – Joe reached out in his mind, and could not remember the words. The same dreadful fate that had overtaken his father, the loss of his faculties, the decay of the mind. He groped for the words, the words he’d thought he’d never forget, never could forget – now formless, obscured. Scraping at the memory, he remembered frost underfoot, the bite of cold at his ungloved hands clasped before him as he spoke the beautiful words at the graveside. It was as though the words were in his mouth, but he couldn’t feel the shape of them. Like he knew their substance, but not their names. With something between horror and resignation, he realised that he could no longer recall the date of the funeral either. What an insult – what terrible disrespect to Guiseppe and Rosaria Toscano, side by side at rest, with an ignorant, forgetful son, and a granddaughter departed. Who would remember them now? The words spoken over both their bodies, lost forever.

For a long moment, Joe felt thankful for the scant cover offered by the canopy of leaves between himself and the heavens above.

So lost in thought, Joe didn’t notice Peter arrive, and jolted a little when the younger man pulled out the chair opposite and flung himself into it, calling out,

‘Two more?’

To the waitress, and pointing at Joe’s near-finished cappuccino. Emily, the waitress, whose parents owned the café, and who Joe had known as a toddler, a girl and a woman, looked to Joe, who nodded his assent.

Peter took his phone out of his satchel, fiddled with it, and put it on the little table between them, face up.

‘You don’t mind if I record this? Easier than trying to jot it all down, innit?’ he said with a grin, and sat back in his chair.

Easier. Innit.

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said Joe with a shrug.

Peter didn’t seem to hear, he was busy peering about the place, eyes everywhere, fidgeting.

‘Nice little place, this, innit? Lovely in fact…’

Eyes everywhere, apart from on Joe. Joe realised he was nervous. Maybe he’d read the situation wrong – maybe the young man wasn’t ignorant, maybe he was just a little shy. Hadn’t Joe ever been shy? He couldn’t remember – if he had been, it was a very long time ago indeed. Hadn’t Joe ever been smitten, gone out of his way to pursue a young woman?

Of course he had. Great female tragedy number two, which he didn’t even allow himself to think about. Didn’t make it any less real though. Maybe Joe should give this newspaperman a chance…

He cleared his throat.

‘It’s a family place. Been coming here for coffee since I was younger than you are now. It’s nice to know it can still appeal to you lot…’

His tone was friendly, not sarcastic, and he saw the tension go out of Peter. God, what must Mia have said about him?

Peter made to cross his enormously long legs, and then uncrossed them quickly as the coffee arrived, nearly sending the table flying.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he smiled at Emily, who gave him a quick, blank smile back, and set down the two plain cups.

‘Awright, Mister Toscano?’ she asked, with a bigger question in her eyes.

‘Fine thanks Em, all good. You, love?’

‘I’m always good thank you. You want anything to eat?’

Joe shook his head with a little smile, which Emily returned brightly before disappearing back inside.

‘Food good here?’ Peter asked.

‘So I’m told – I only ever take the coffee. She does ask every day though…’

Peter gave a little laugh, and stirred his cappuccino. For a moment, they both sipped in silence, until Joe broke it,

‘So,’ he said, and drew the foam off his lips, ‘Where do you want to start then? And before we do start – I’m not sure how much Mia has told you, but I’m in the unfortunate habit of repeating myself…’

‘She uh,’ Peter looked uncomfortable, ‘mentioned something along those lines…’

From the look on his face, she’d mentioned a fair bit about it. Going off his rocker maybe, or Doesn’t know what day it is. Incoherent. Moronic. That awful scene in the big room the other day – her staring at him, him rabbiting on, “Poison isn’t ‘alf a tough thing to get hold of, despite what you might think. We’ve got all the self-indulgent toxic substances under the sun in ready supply around here, but you go looking for something useful and just see how far you get…” Who knew you might lose your handle on what should and shouldn’t be said? What would he come out with next? The idea had him afraid to open his mouth in company. Joe could handle getting old – aches and pains, immobility, fatigue. Irritability. But the idea of himself as a rambling old man, going round in circles and losing the thread of a conversation, losing his grip on reality, filled him with shame and disgust. He bit it down, now, washed it back with good humour.

‘The things I say are still pretty worthwhile – you’ll probably just have to hear them a few times.’

He said it with a smile, but it came out sounding much sadder than it had done in his head.

‘Happy to hear them however they come. I suppose the heart of the story is the fact that the bakery is about to shut down, and that it’s not for lack of business, aggressive re-development or anything like that – it’s because of your own philanthropy. Shall we start there?’

‘I think you just did.’

‘Okay – can you tell me how the charity work began, and why it became what it has done over the last few years?’

Joe sighed, and rubbed at the stubble on his chin thoughtfully. Just when Peter thought he’d drifted off, he spoke.

‘My old man, was a peculiar fellow – certainly by modern standards he was peculiar. You see, the part of Italy he’d spent most of his youth in, the part where he met my mother, was incredibly poor. The people there made ends meet by helping each other constantly, sometimes in tiny ways, sometimes in big. They’d do a thing where they’d leave stuff in “suspension,” like coffees and suchlike. You’d stop for two coffees, and buy three, idea being that someone else who was struggling could take the third when they needed it. So, it might be a coffee, a meal, you might pay some small amount towards the funeral of someone who’d died penniless. You might do some little handyman job for a family in need. There was a constant focus on what you could, and should do for someone else. Didn’t matter if it was someone you knew personally, or it was a stranger – in fact, it seemed a little better if it were a stranger, and if you never saw it happen, or took any satisfaction from it, if you just gave because that was the system, that was the done thing. If you took satisfaction out of it, then you were doing it for the wrong reason – that was pretty much the opposite of the idea. Now at some point, this all managed to burrow into his mind, my old man, burrowed right deep inside there, deep where it couldn’t be pried back out, while him and my mother were struggling along there, relying on the kindness of strangers when they needed it, and giving their own kindness when they didn’t.

‘And when they eventually fled the country for a better life, and arrived here in sunny London, he brought it with him. And it became an obsession for him, became literally his reason for life. He would examine everything he did, and I do mean everything, to find the service in it, to find the tenuous little ways that it served another person somehow. And if he couldn’t find it, if he couldn’t find the service – it didn’t happen, simple as.’

Joe laughed, surprising himself,

‘It was a source of great, great consternation in our house, let me tell you. If he couldn’t boil down the logistics of a new set of crockery for the house, couldn’t find a way in which someone was helped in an honest way, without artifice, then we did without until one of us – me or my mum – convinced him otherwise. But it worked for him, it brought meaning into his life. He would lecture me constantly as a boy,

‘"Whatever you do with your life, Giuseppe, it absolutely must be of benefit to others in some way – this is non-negotiable, where the soul is concerned. You can choose to live in some other, self-serving way, but you will never find peace, you will never find succour. For that, you must be of some service to others in the world, and it should be the main focus of what you do. No-one is saying you can’t be paid – but that shouldn’t be the main goal of it, that should be a necessary thing, not your objective. Your aim should be higher than wealth for the sake of itself."

‘He considered that to be a mortal sin, the pursuit of wealth for it’s own sake. If I’d have been a banker, he’d have disowned me.

‘It was important too, that what a person did should be constructive. He’d say The world is constantly falling apart, it doesn’t need any help from us, it can do that on it’s own. It rots, it decays, it takes itself apart, breaks itself down – we people are required to put things together. If you worked in some destructive way, breaking things down for parts, scalping sales or fabricating value where there was none, something like that, then that was considered a similar sin. You had to be constructive, you had to put something into the world. You can see, from all this theorising, why baking was the perfect fit. And, of course, why he started the free bread deliveries to the poorhouses, back in his day.’

‘How much did he give away?’

‘It was roughly an eighth of total produce that went to the needy. I don’t actually recall him explaining that part to me to be honest, whether there was any real science to it, but as far as I can work out, back then it was basically the portion of the bakery output that would’ve otherwise generated profit.’

‘The bakery didn’t make a profit? How did the family live?’

‘Frugally,’ Joe laughed.

‘We lived in the adjacent quarters that you must’ve seen when Mia showed you ‘round this morning. To be clear, when I say profit, I mean financial gain as the difference between amount earned and amount spent in buying operating and producing, with wages as an operating cost.’

Peter blinked.

‘So, he took a wage?’

‘”A man who breaks bread must break a little for himself.” He took wages, enough to get by on.’

‘And how did you feel about this endless giving?’

Joe paused. In all his life, he didn’t think anyone had ever asked him that question. Everyone assumed, everyone simply took it as read that his father’s philosophy had been instilled in him also, that a call to philanthropy shaped his every thought. How did he feel about giving to the needy? How did he feel about the personal cost? He stared, for a moment, at Peter’s hand, cradling the coffee cup in his lap. A finely cared-for hand, long-boned and elegant, uncalloused. A hand you might expect to find attached to a concert pianist. Joe considered his own, blunted fingers, his rough, damaged palms, the arthritis in his knuckles brought to him by his daily labours.

How did he feel about making bread, the calling of his family, and delivering it daily into the mouths of countless ingrates?

‘I felt that it was part of my service, part of what I had to do to keep the service in my life.’

Not, technically, a lie.

There was a moment’s pause in the conversation, while Peter worked up the nerve to broach the topic they both knew had to be discussed.

‘And your daughter, she took the philanthropy very seriously too, didn’t she? Nicole?’

Joe realised he’d been holding his breath, and released it as a long, heavy sigh. Felt his heart turn, deep in his chest at the sound of her name. How could he discuss Nicole with this man? How could he describe the pure, honest goodness that she had radiated from the moment she was born? The way he felt about her, he would never have the confidence to put into words – would never be able to say aloud that she’d had an aura, an energy about her that was inherently good, perfectly kind, open, approachable – magnetic even. A femininity to her that affected every man around her deeply. Compassion that could only be described as saintly. Physical beauty made up of seemingly equal parts Joe’s mother and Joe’s father – skipping the plainness of Joe himself and his ex-wife (the thought of whom he immediately pushed down out of his conscious thoughts), and inheriting classically Italian genetics, features that deserved to be carved in carrera marble and set in repose for eternity, enjoyed by thousands.

Giuseppe senior’s philosophy, like his looks, had seemed pre-destined for Nicole. It was as though his ideas had been implanted in her before birth, ready to emerge when she learned to talk and to think for herself. She’d taken to the concepts he presented to her early in life, and in her teens, when she should’ve been studying, she was helping in any way she could at the local shelters, going through the accounts at the bakery to find ways that they could produce more to give. She brought the idea of “suspension” all the way from 1930s Napoli to modern day London, parcelled it up and fed it into the local collective consciousness. Customers would buy two loaves, take one away and the extra money would be ringfenced into charitable production.

Joe had fretted over the what he saw as the loss of her youth, of her freedom. He urged her to follow her own path, to find something else to do, something fulfilling, something she really wanted for herself. Her response had been something you’d have expected from the old man himself;

People are always telling me to find out what I really want, saying things like “You’ve got to do the things you want to do in life” or “You’ve got to put yourself first.” Well, that’s only true if you think that whatever you want is the most important thing there is. If you don’t think there’s anything more worthwhile than your own desires, well then yes, you have got to do the things you want to do in life, and you have got to put yourself first. Another thing they’ll push on you is this “You’ve got to have the things you want, otherwise what’s the point?” Well, you’re actually right on that one, love, what is the point? Take away this thing, this object, or whatever it is that you “want”, and what would be the point in your life? Maybe it’s worth finding the point, finding the purpose to your life, before you start going after the “things you want”.

He considered himself told. But then, after all, Nicole seemed to get the same satisfaction out of the whole thing that his father had. More even. Joe sometimes wondered if deprivation had become a form of indulgence for them. Some kind of grim satisfaction at leaving nothing left for themselves, as if the process of giving formed it’s own goal, it’s own reward.

And she shared this with the man who came into her life when she was twenty years old, and set her on the path that would lead them all to ruin. Ryan Warnock, full-time volunteer at Roof, which Joe had known as Mare Street Reception Centre – a shelter hostel for un-housed families. He had her heart, from the moment they met, and Joe had known it, known it just to look at her, although she’d played the whole thing down at first. Ryan had slowly grown into her life – conversations you had with her would inevitably lead to the mention of him, he’d start to appear around the bakery, she’d start to spend more and more time at the re-branded Roof. Joe had known from day one how she’d felt about him, he’d recognised the look from first-hand experience. The dimming of enthusiasm for everything else – the unconcealable, irresistible shock of the moment when you realise you’d put a match to everything else in your life to stay close to this one thing…

Peter coughed, politely, and Joe realised he’d drifted off into thought. How embarrassing. He fumbled after the thread of the conversation.

‘Yes, to put it like that is a bit of an understatement, to tell you the truth. She threw herself into it, just like the old man –‘

‘And just like you, of course.’

Yes, just like him, for all anybody knew.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that. The old man, he lived for it, and Nicole did too – me, I just kept the home fires burning while they went out and did all the giving. It’s like the gauntlet kinda got passed over my head, direct from him to her. Like it skipped a generation.’

Peter looked confused.

‘But you’ve given more than anyone else, Joe. You’ve given so much that there’s nothing left – your business is shutting down, because you’ve given so much away. How can you say it skipped a generation, skipped straight over you?’

Joe looked at him squarely. Couldn’t he see, even that much?

‘I just do my bit, like anyone else. Not like what they did.’

He thought of all the hungry mouths they’d fed over the years. All the hungry, ungrateful mouths. The insatiable hunger of those who would cling to, depend upon and eventually use up the virtuous – his incredible daughter, his heroic father. Used up, depleted, discarded. So much given, so much taken – such appalling waste. Giuseppe and Nicole had believed their service was to fill as many of those mouths as possible. Joe wondered if it wouldn’t be better to shut them.

‘I find my own way to serve. I suppose we all do, in a way.’

‘Mia said it was childbirth.’ Peter said, after a pause.

Death, born of love.

Joe froze in his seat.

‘And that her daughter didn’t survive.’

‘You’ll have to speak to Mia about that – I won’t discuss it.’

‘Mia said – ‘

‘Mia knows as much about it as anyone – she knew Nicole better than she knows me.’

Peter looked abashed.

‘Ok,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll speak to her about it later on. We’ll need the details for the crowd-funding page.’

‘The – the what?’ Joe couldn’t believe his ears.

‘The crowd-funding page – Mia and I were discussing it the other day, has she not mentioned?’

Joe could feel the blood slowly rising into his face.

‘We think once we get the story out there, y’know, how your daughter gave everything to feed the needy, how after she died you carried on her work – well we think you’ll have a decent shot at keeping the doors open, especially once – ‘

‘There won’t be any crowd-funding page. Toscano Loaves is finished.’ Joe’s voice was level, and low, and belied the pounding of his heart in his ears. Crowd-funding – how could they think he’d want that?

‘But it doesn’t have to be – you could carry on giving – ‘

‘There won’t be any crowd-funding page. Toscano Loaves is finished.’

‘You’re repeating yourself.’

‘Yes well this time it’s on purpose!’ Joe spluttered a little as he said it, and hated the way it sounded, ‘Toscano Loaves is finished. It’s all…. finished.’

Joe felt the finality of it all, then and there, like something closing off inside him, deep within his chest. Like a little valve, or something. Sitting on that little wooden chair in the shade, in the company of a bright young man who understood nothing, he felt it all reduced to zero. The part he’d played here on earth winding up, the sum of his worldly worth expended, the whole, huge, impossible thing that was life – made small. He felt breathless, dizzy, but kept it off his face. Kept some small dignity back for himself.

Things fall apart.

‘Eighty-one years, and finished. Three generations, finished.’

‘Three?’ Peter said, hesitantly.

And the fog of grief swept across the little table and stuck to Joe as though it would be the last of it’s kind. He stared at Peter in frank disbelief.

‘Oh, right…I just thought – your dad, and then you, you know? I suppose – right, three generations, your dad, you, and her, of course. Of course.’

And I thought I was the imbecile.

That had been the interview – Joe sat through another few minutes of chatter without really even being there, stunned and glazed over by the scale of the insult, the sheer mass of the disrespect.

She was dead, that much was true. And her own tiny, nameless daughter too, dead along with her. Both killed by some unfathomable complication, further complicated in turn by Nicole ignoring her own discomfort – pushing her own suffering aside to ease that of others. Killed by her own stoicism, killed by love – her own for others, and her lover’s for her.

Dead, and now disregarded.

Joe’s wife, whose name he would not allow into his mouth or his mind, had moved on from the loss, had gone out of his life to find something else, to get past it somehow – unwilling to lean in, to go through it instead, as he had done all these years. He didn’t even know where she was now, whether she was even in the country. Ryan Warnock, who’d brought Nicole willingly to her doom, had moved on also. Heartbroken though he was, he was young, and obviously felt he had to start again elsewhere. Guiseppe and Rosaria, long-dead, Nicole, dead. All this death, destruction and abandonment, and now the grave yawned also for him. He felt it suck at his back like a hungry thing, where he sat on the high stool in the great room at the bakehouse, in the calm heat of the present day. As though if he were to tip backwards off his perch, he would tumble right into it’s gaping mouth.

And the fine words of Eugenio Montale, as delivered decades apart by two generations of Toscanos, would be lost forever.

‘That’s it!’ he cried aloud, slapping the palm of his hand down hard on the top, raising fantastic swirls of dust and flour up into the clear light, ‘it was Montale!!’

Mia stared into his face from across the bench, flabbergasted.

Joe’s elation turned to embarrassment, as he realised they’d been talking about something else, and he’d gotten lost. A sharp pain shot across his shoulders at the sudden motion, and a wave of nausea rolled in his midriff. He sat down, abruptly, and tried for a moment to somehow blend his outburst with a conversation that some part of him had been having, but that he had zero knowledge of.

Dizzy. Sick. Incoherent.

She coughed, politely.

Mia, who had known Nicole, and had loved Nicole as a child. Mia, who knew the selfishness and destructiveness of those who would take whatever would be given better than anyone. She’d seen it first-hand, and growing up, she’d bonded with Nicole in a way that she couldn’t with her degenerate mother. And when Nicole died, she was drawn to the bakehouse, drawn to carry on the work Nicole had given herself to. Just like Joe, she had stayed connected to Nicole in the only way she found possible.

She stared at Joe, scrutinising him for any clue that he might actually know what they’d been talking about just a moment before.

‘I was saying,’ she said, kindly, ‘that it’s not the first time you’ve been in the papers.’

‘Hmmm?’ He scrabbled for detail, found none, and decided as usual just to go with the flow.

‘You know…. Sandy Thompson. You remember her, don’t you?’

‘Sandy Thompson…’ Joe made a show of wracking his brains, ‘the thief?’

Mia rolled her eyes.

‘Sandy Thompson the plaintiff actually – but yes, that’s the one. Don’t you remember it being in the papers? She had a relative, or something, who pushed the story?’

He remembered it well, but absolutely did not want to talk about it. Sandy Thompson, middle-aged charity volunteer cliché, who lived alone, gave her time and her care freely to the needy – and sometimes took home a loaf for herself from the batch of bread given to the shelter she worked at. She’d mentioned it in passing to Joe, one time, casually, as if it were the most harmless thing imaginable to help herself to bread made specially for the homeless. By the end of the day, she’d been asked to leave, and told not to come back. Joe had pulled every string he could to make sure she never set foot in any shelter again in that part of London, unless it was as a service-user. He’d even contacted the police and tried to press charges – in fact he’d made such a noise about it, such a song and dance about Sandy’s “theft” that she’d ended unsuccessfully suing him for defamation. Her humble, service-filled life had been left in tatters. It had been a point of disagreement with Mia, to put it lightly. It stung him a little to remember the affair.

How could he have explained it?

Joe couldn’t care less about the extra bread, and certainly didn’t consider Sandy’s actions theft, nor anything near it. It was, however, of utmost importance that no-one, ever, take any of the bread that had been baked and prepared for the many mouths of the so-called needy. Not even a slice. That a person like Sandy – worse, even a person like Nicole, might take home some left-overs and then…

No - it didn’t bear thinking about. And that was the point – it was unthinkable, and it would have to be made unthinkable for anyone in Sandy’s position to take bread for themselves.

Joe didn’t know what Sandy was doing now. Mia might do. For a moment, he considered asking her, but decided against it. He’d probably rather not know. He fastened on a smile, for Mia, sitting opposite him at the bench, looking at him with kind concern.

‘Never mind all that, my dear,’ he said softly, ‘isn’t your debut piece on the stands this morning?’

She’d ended up co-writing the nostalgia piece with Peter Keightley, due out today.

‘And didn’t you threaten to bring me a paper copy?’

Mia’s face split in her trademark, slightly goofy grin, and she jumped up from her seat.

‘Wait right there!’ she said, excitedly, and skipped off across the room, scooped her handbag from a hook behind the door, and disappeared out into the street.

‘Don’t worry love,’ Joe sighed, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Which in one sense was the truth, and in another was a total lie. There was a growing heaviness in his limbs, and a fuzziness in his thoughts, that reminded him of what he was about. Reminded him of his father, the great Giuseppe Toscano, gone to his grave without a shred of regret, without a moment of clinging. Could Joe do the same?

How exactly does a person face the grave with such dispassion? Joe thought he knew. Giuseppe had spent his life in service of something other than himself – in a way, he’d sacrificed it, but piecemeal. Not in one great indulgent display of virtue, but incrementally over the course of his entire life. Instead of looking back with any regret at what he could have done, he could look at his life, his deeds, with complete satisfaction. Like Nicole herself might have said, the common perception is that if you go through life depriving yourself of materialism, or of hedonistic pleasure, one day you’ll look back with regret. The truth is, in fact, more or less the opposite – if you spend your life in self-indulgence, or in some vainglorious pursuit, then at the end, the flashes of pleasure will have passed, and left behind only a profound lack of meaning. You’ll get to the end, and wish you’d cared more about the bigger issues, and less about yourself.

If you want to get out without fear, you have to give everything away. Leave nothing on the table. You have to look at yourself, at your means, at your abilities and figure out the best possible thing that you can do with it all. What has the most benefit – how could you put your mind and your body to the best use? How could you extract the most service? What if your own death itself, could be an act of service?

Did the short years during which Giuseppe senior had become a burden to others offset his many years of service in some way? Were they subtracted them from his lifetime grand total, like some luxury tax that he could’ve avoided paying?

Joe’s head swam, and to think became an effort. The thudding in his chest felt insistent, but distant. The odd calm he felt, he took as a sign that he’d satisfied his own requirements, if not those of anybody else.

Was this it? He spoke the question in his mind as he looked around the great room, the room in which he’d spent so much of his long life, changing so much while the bakehouse changed so little. Was this the point of it all? He realised he was asking them all, and deliriously half-expecting an answer – Giuseppe, Rosaria and Nicole. To reduce the whole thing down to nothing? To take decades of work, of dedication and run it all aground – to extinguish that resilient pilot light of skill that had been passed from person to person in the oldest, purest manner, to destroy it all in the name of support for those who wouldn’t even acknowledge it? Four lives given – soon to be five.

Things fall apart. They don’t need our help to do so, he thought.

Starkly, he saw how he would have disappointed his father entirely. How he had become a destroyer, the opposite in every way to his father, the creator. How his birth had been a perfect gift, and his death, a final theft. That would be his true sacrifice then – the approval of his father, sacrificed along with everything else in the name of Joe’s own meagre service.

Joe closed his eyes, and the memory of his hands at work preparing the last batch arose in his mind. The batch that would go out to the needy, that would form his final act of service. Blindly he grasped the knife he’d used to butter and slice the bread, and his aged fingers traced the words carved into it’s wooden handle, the same words inscribed beneath The Toscano Bakehouse on the signboards outside the old building.

Vivo ut serviam