Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  4

  Morris was trying to explain to Forbes about the immigrants. The older man was sunk into the white leather of the passenger seat, his eyes half closed against the winter glare of the autostrada. First at catechism, where they came to ingratiate themselves with the local priest in the hope of getting into some of the accommodation the Church controlled. Then in the queue at the office that dealt with health insurance for foreigners. On both occasions Morris had been appalled by the way the blacks were treated, and had said as much to the officials involved. It was the complacent arrogance of these people that so upset him. The way acquired position and relative wealth were flaunted as superiority pure and simple. Much the same as with this fellow Polio Bobo he had to work with: all birth and presumption, not a shred of merit. Except it wasn’t just that. How could he explain himself? It was the way you couldn’t feel such people had ever really suffered, or even had the quality required to suffer. Sometimes you felt they hardly deserved to live. If they were to disappear tomorrow the world would be a better place. Whereas there was a quiet nobility about the Ghanaians and Senegalese he’d talked to. They put up with so much and never complained. They had that sort of sublime resignation you saw in food queues in Ethiopia, or in a Giotto Crucifixion. It was quite beautiful.

  ‘I feel I’d quite like to help them somehow,’ Morris finished simply.

  Forbes didn’t so much as stir. He was wearing his customary grey suit, white shirt, flowery tie. His face, upturned, looked the kind of surface one dusted rather than shaved. Deep wrinkles where dirt must collect. His hair was a silky, perhaps perfumed, silver.

  ‘I’ve always felt, if I came into some money I should use it to help people.’

  As he spoke, Morris enjoyed hearing his mother’s voice echo in his own, her endless involvement in local church charities, despised by his father of course, though it had given the pig the freedom he needed for his philandering, while she was out helping the handicapped or collecting for the blind. And Massimina had been involved with the Giovani cattolici, taking clothes to the poor and so on. Yes, Massimina had been a busy, well-meaning, humble-shall-inherit-the-earth girl. Massimina would not have been lying in bed smoking Rothmans when she was supposed to be doing her final university exam. Morris suddenly felt furious. Though not a tremor came through in his voice.

  ‘I mean, I always give them a few thousand lire when they clean my windscreen at the traffic lights and things like that. But I feel it’s not enough. A few thousand lire isn’t going to solve anything, is it?’

  Nor a few million, he privately thought. What it took was a job, a steady source of wealth. And his wife was coolly throwing up a position as an architect with all the opportunities that entailed. He hadn’t realised how angry he was.

  ‘So I was wondering,’ he went on evenly, ‘if perhaps we couldn’t somehow work these poor people in with your little project.’

  Forbes finally opened his eyes, shifted in his seat.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Morris, I, er . . .’

  But quite on impulse Morris had picked up the phone from the dashboard. He pressed a single button and the instrument dialled from memory.

  ‘Sorry, be with you in a moment,’ he told Forbes, then was immediately afraid he might have irritated the man, whose superior culture he needed, something to still his whirring mind. These lapses of concentration were disturbing.

  The phone trilled. They were approaching the intersection for Florence and Rome, travelling at 130 kilometres per hour, right on the speed limit. A law-abiding Morris kept his left hand lightly on the wheel, his right gripping the Valentino receiver. Came a very laid-back ‘Pronto’, and clearly she was eating something.

  It’s me,’ Morris said. Then using a formula he never had before, he added: ‘Your husband.’

  ‘Oh, is anything the matter?’

  He left the briefest pause. Then his voice was dutiful. ‘I was wondering about Mamma.’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything yet this morning.’

  ‘Are you going to visit?’

  There hardly seems to be any point if one can only look in through the glass.’

  ‘No.’

  As he was overtaking some slow-moving Fiat or other in the central lane, a Saab came racing up behind him, way over the limit and flashing his headlights aggressively. Morris immediately adjusted his speed down to that of the car he had been passing.

  ‘So you may as well go and do the exam, cam. What time is it? Two o’clock?’

  The car behind began to honk. Morris gave his brake the lightest tap. He was enjoying the division of consciousness involved in doing two things at once. Or rather three, since in the back of his mind he was still wondering how best to present his grand idea to Forbes.

  ‘Mo, per I’ amore di Dio, I, I can hardly go and do my exam when my mother might die at any moment. How could I ever concentrate?’

  Well, the same way she had been concentrating on the morning TV Morris could hear in the background. One of those local channels that sold fur coats, lingerie, lucky charms and mountain bikes, twenty-four hours a day.

  The honking was continuous now as Morris played with brake and accelerator pedal. Doubtless the idiot would be gesticulating. Then the first sign for the intersection was racing towards them.

  ‘Well, as you wish, cam.’ He had long since learnt that you couldn’t actually force people to do what was best for them.

  But unexpectedly his wife said: ‘Are you upset, Mo?’ in such a sweet voice it almost took his mind off the road.

  Forced to think, he answered: ‘You know I only want the best for you, cam, that’s all.’

  He stabbed his foot on the brake and, as the furious Saab all but exploded in the rear mirror, steered fiercely right to slip between the Fiat in the central lane and a van behind, then across the slow lane between two trucks carrying livestock, and so off onto the tightly curving slip-road. A deeply pained look crossed Forbes’s face, but Morris sensed an inkling of admiration too. And he hadn’t actually broken the law, had he? Just taught a hog a lesson. At the same time he managed to register the confiding voice in his ear saying: Tact is. Mo, I feel I should be around because I wouldn’t like anything odd to happen with the will, or for Mamma to wake up and make a new one. If you get me? There was a look on Bobo’s face yesterday that I didn’t like at all.’

  Morris hadn’t actually thought of that. He steadied the car and kept his eye on the signs. You imagined you were wise to everything, you had seen it all, then some mere girl turned out to be light-years ahead, and you realised you were only a poor amateur, an ever-ingenuous Morris. You had no chance of keeping up with all the sick perversions other people were capable of. Getting an old woman to change her will on the very point of death indeed!

  ‘I’ call you later,’ he said brusquely.

  But she didn’t want him to hang up. Her voice changed again, became husky and soft. ‘Are you alone, Mo?’

  ‘Of course. Who would I be with?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  There was a brief silence. Forbes had sunk down in his seat again, a faint smile on his aristocratic face.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ The voice was vulgarly seductive. Ashamed, Morris jammed the receiver to his ear.

  ‘What?’

  Im feeling very . . . mmm,’ Paola said. ‘Here all on my own. You know how I get.’

  Morris knew.

  ‘I mean, if someone very sweet told me to unzip my pants and do something that they like doing too, I think I might just have to obey.’

  Morris closed his eyes for a moment, then remembered to blink them open as they came racing out onto the other autostrada, Florence-bound. His body had filled with an exciting prickly heat. At the same time there was that strong feeling of distaste. If he didn’t watch out he’d be nothing more than a sex toy to her.

  ‘If you stopped for a while, little Mo could obey orders too. What are car phones for after all?’

  Morris said: ‘I was supposed
to see a client at ten-thirty and I’m already late.’

  ‘Come on, Mo, Hi dolce!’

  ‘Veramente, I can’t.’

  ‘Antipatico!’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Spoil-sport, I’ll make you pay for that later.’

  It was unclear whether this was meant as a promise or a threat.

  ‘Paola?’ he said. Was he slightly in awe of her?

  ‘Dio, will I make you pay!’ She hung up.

  Morris clicked back the receiver, put both hands firmly on the wheel. You phoned your wife of six months standing to try to get her to take a responsible attitude towards her life and career, and what did she do? First she pleaded the excuse of a dying mother, a predatory brother-in-law, and then she tried for mutual masturbation over the car phone. There were times when dismay was the only proper response. Morris drove on for quite some while in bitter silence.

  The car rode up into the browns and dull greens of the Apennines, a rollercoaster landscape of olives and cypresses, bare vines reduced to fields of gnarled crucifixions against the stone-speckled soil. Morris tried to concentrate on the aesthetic pleasure of taking every curve at exactly the right speed while always leaving the same distance between wheel and white line. Forbes, meanwhile, seemed in no hurry to return to their previous conversation, despite the delicate point at which they had left it. And Morris appreciated that. Forbes was the kind of intelligent man who would be sensitive to his temporary discomposure. Morris had done the right thing in escaping from the feckless crowd of younger expats who had tormented and humiliated him in his earlier days in Verona, the ex-hippies and would-be artists, their coercive mateyness and empty dreams (not to mention the rather unnerving fact that community leader Yankee Stan had actually seen him that day at Roma Termini with Massimina: there was a danger!). No, the wisdom of an earlier generation was so much more gratifying. Indeed it occurred to Morris that if he had met Forbes earlier on perhaps, when he first arrived in Italy, yes, if he had frequented someone like Forbes, rather than the Stans of this world, then there would have been no need for the extraordinary aberration of two summers ago. Or, better still, if he had had Forbes as a father, if . . .

  ‘Siste viator!’

  They had just passed a sign for a service station. Interrupting Morris’s promising train of thought, the older man’s voice pronouncing one of his endless Latin tags had a gravelly, emphatically upper-class texture.

  ‘Sorry?’ Morris said. He had decided never again to pretend to understand something when he didn’t. Only people with an abject self-image did that kind of thing.

  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,’ Forbes explained with a deprecating smile. ‘Stop.’

  It was the second time in only an hour’s driving.

  Morris pulled in at the service station and watched as Forbes’s tall, spindly figure shambled over to the servizi. Inevitably, as he watched the flapping grey suit in the cold winter light, the word ‘Gents’ sprang to mind. Morris felt calm and happy again. In the end he had good friends, exciting projects. His psyche was not irremediably damaged. All would work out.

  He was just lifting the phone to ask dear Mimi whether she mightn’t confirm yesterday’s sign with something more concrete today, some indication that she approved of his plan, when a movement beside the car startled him.

  ‘Vu cumpra’?’

  A squat Moroccan was grinning through the window Morris had unwisely buzzed down. The man’s bad breath came through despite freezing air and diesel fumes.

  ‘Vu cumpra’? Wanna buy? Very good video camera. Molto economico.’

  Morris stared at him.

  ‘Economico, molto cheap, molto buono.’

  ‘Davvero?’ His mind moved rapidly. Paola had talked about doing some videotaping, and it wasn’t the man’s fault if society had reduced him to this illicit trade and parlous state of personal cleanliness. There had been a time when Morris rather feared he was headed that way himself.

  A long scar snaked down from the bloodshot corner of the Moroccan’s left eye.

  ‘Quanto?’ the Englishman asked.

  ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty,’ Morris said, since of course this was what was expected. They didn’t want charity.

  Two hundred.’

  I said a hundred and fifty.’ He was rather enjoying this. Forbes appeared, and so would see the aplomb with which Morris carried it off.

  ‘A hundred and eighty.’ The Moroccan’s leathery smile was forced. But Morris was used to forced smiles.

  ‘A hundred and fifty and it’s a deal,’ he said.

  The Moroccan scowled. As he must. Forbes climbed stiffly into the car, one dusty eyebrow raised. ‘Caveat emptor, m’boy,’ he said wryly. But Morris felt he was on a winning streak. ‘I said a hundred and fifty, not a lira more.’

  Already he had half a vague idea of videotaping Massimina’s winking eye on the tomb photograph. Might she eventually be sanctified if one could prove something like that?

  Reluctantly, the Moroccan gave in. ‘OK. You have the money ready. You stop by that white van.’ He pointed to a decrepit VW beyond the petrol pumps, where a small boy was apparently filling a flat tyre from the air stream. Morris duly drove over, wallet in hand. Then a few moments later, on the road again, box with video on the back seat, he was enjoying such a high that he went and explained his whole plan to Forbes in just a few well-chosen sentences. His main aims being, he insisted, first to help out his friend, Forbes, and second, not to let this Polio Bobo merely exploit the poor immigrant folk in his bid to increase production. If one had to be an industrialist, Morris said, he would like to think of himself as being in the benevolent Cobden tradition, rather than a Gradgrind.

  Forbes was clearly surprised. If not floored. It wasn’t exactly what he had had in mind, he said. He fiddled in his jacket pocket for pipe and tobacco, a look of prim concern on his face. ‘What I was planning to do, as you know, was to bring over public-school children from England, teach them a little Italian and art history in pleasant surroundings, and give them an opportunity to see the country firsthand. As a means of earning my daily bread, of course. I wasn’t intending to, er, set up a hostel for Ghanaians and Senegalese on shift work.’

  Morris hated smoking in the car, but let it pass. He was mature enough to appreciate that everybody had their shortcomings. For two or three minutes he drove steadily, letting his idea sink in, waiting for any further objections to surface. Then, with a businesslike frankness he was consciously cultivating these days, he set about persuading Forbes as to which side his bread was buttered.

  The point is you’ll need a fair slice of capital to set up this school, correct?’

  ‘Res angusta dorni,’ agreed the old man.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I was merely accepting your premise.’

  Well, Morris of course had access to that capital through the Trevisan family. Say, four or five hundred thousand a month to rent an old farmhouse somewhere, plus a few million to make it functional. The problem being, he explained, that the selfish Trevisans would never make an investment like that just for Forbes. There would have to be something in it for them. Immediately if possible. Hence the idea of using the place to house the immigrants for shiftwork in bottling and packing. In fact it was rather fortunate that Forbes had spoken to him just when Polio Bobo had got this bee in his bonnet about stepping up production and using the machines at night. Then if Forbes could teach them, the immigrants, a little Italian and art history into the bargain, for which he would of course be paid, he would not only be carrying out an act of charity, but they would also be willing to accept, lower wages. ‘Maybe the local government would even give us a grant or something. Everybody would be happy.’ And since bottling was seasonal, as soon as the immigrants were gone, Forbes would have the building ready and could get over the kind of people he wanted, the public-school children. It was a way of setting up. Within a couple of years he’d have exactly the kind of institution h
e wanted: a gentlemanly live-in school of culture. ‘Hopefully with a couple of scholarship places for people from my own kind of background,’ Morris added complacently. He did have this genuine feeling of needing to repay a debt.

  Forbes was silent. They were descending the far side of the Apennines now, picking up the first signs for Florence.

  The only trouble, as I see it,’ Morris admitted, ‘is that they’ll all be boys. You know? They don’t seem to have any of their women with them as yet.’

  ‘Ah.’ Forbes paused, brow knitted over a packed pipe. He sighed heavily, then spoke with that generosity Morris had come to associate with true class: ‘I suppose if it really is the only way, I shall have to let you twist my arm.’

  5

  Mother had been interested in art. Father was a piss artist. Morris was aware of a Lawrentian banality in this analysis, this antithesis. But if things were banal it was presumably because they did indeed happen a lot. As caricature also had its unmistakable authenticity. So, his case had been no different from thousands of others. But what could you expect? Indeed it was precisely that lack of uniqueness, the sheer number of those united by a common cultural poverty, that gave his childhood its poignancy. Though by the same token, the anonymity of that starting line must render his later distinctions all the more remarkable.

  Mother had been interested in art. She had encouraged him to read, draw, play the violin. Drawing he had never been any good at (his instinct was for the succession of events in time, not the deployment of objects in space), and then Father had trampled all over his jumble-sale violin when the boy’s practising had coincided - but it was hardly an improbable coincidence - with a particularly dire hangover. But nobody had been able to stop Morris reading. Indeed there were times when it seemed he had read every book Acton library had to offer, from Aachen: Her history to Stefan Zweig’s not unformative The Tide of Fortune (Jewishness was something Morris had often found himself deeply attracted to). Father told him that only idlers and wankers read all the time, because reading was the only ‘activity’ which allowed you to keep your hands in your pockets. Morris had been aware of a certain crude veracity in Father’s observations. There was the rub.