Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  But he would not talk to his father about it any more. No, no and no! There would be no more self-justificatory hours with the dictaphone. Absolutely not. No more postcards with boastful allusions. After that brief summer with Massimina he need prove his manhood no more.

  Due to the difficult circumstances at home, Morris had done his reading in the library’s reference room amongst diligent schoolboy Sikhs and the unemployed rustling their Suns and Mirrors. Happy, happy days. Knowledge of the visual arts, on the other hand, had mainly been limited to visits to provincial museums when climatic conditions on their unfailingly coastal holidays finally made the beach too grim a prospect even for Father’s pioneering spirit. Or rather, Father would roll his towel round still-damp swimming trunks and announce that they were off for their dip anyway, come hell or high water, and Mother would at last rebel and weep, gesturing at the bowing poplars round the caravan site, the racing clouds, the drizzle spotting their view of the communal toilets. Courageously, she called attention to Morris’s cough, his weak chest. So while Father eventually agreed to sit out the long wait till opening time in one of the seafront amusement parlours, she would take the boy to the local art gallery, or, better still, on a country bus ride to the nearest stately home where a cap-in-hand aristocracy had just begun allowing the likes of Morris to savour their wealth the better to be able to keep it for themselves.

  Above all he remembered the steady eyes of powdered faces in high white neck ruffs, and the kind of gothic, angst-torn romantic landscapes that only the well-off could afford to contemplate with equanimity. Yet the ten-year-old Morris loved it. He loved the smell of polished parquet, the flower-patterned chaises longues, the tall windows with their sash-tied velvet curtains looking out on manicured slopes cradling dainty fish-ponds. He loved the hush and echo of spacious interiors whose designers had always put abundance before necessity. And he knew he had been bora into the wrong class.

  And quite probably into the wrong race too. For after Mother’s death, when West London became so alien he was all but forced to spend his weekends at the Victoria and Albert, the National Gallery, the British Museum or the Tate, a restless, adolescent Morris had slowly begun to appreciate that the sort of elegance he felt most attracted to, even akin to,- did not originate in the glorious military and meteorological past of his native land: the Wellingtonian battle scenes. Constable skies, Turner seas. But in Italy.

  It was an undistinguished triptych by Cespo di Garofano that finally brought the idea to the surface of his consciousness. There were Santa Cecilia, the Madonna, and San Valeriano. They stood so straight, yet at the same time with such ease and enjoyment. They were dressed so well, but not with that strait-laced English constriction of ruffs and bodices, as if correct presentation were some kind of social curse. No, these people took pleasure in their clothes, the soft swathes of red and blue, the glittering brooches, elegant sandals. And what senuousness about lips and eyes! The Madonna no less than the others. Sensuousness expressed through formality. Formality growing out of sensuousness. So that Morris saw for the very first time how the rude pleasures of his father and the piety of his dear dead mother need not always be at odds.

  Also, despite the darker hair colour, San Valeriano bore a definite resemblance to himself.

  Hence, when events conspired - and there really could be no other word for it - to get him thrown out of Cambridge, it had seemed only natural for Morris to head for Italy.

  ‘Do you ever look for people you know in paintings?’ he enquired of Forbes now, as they drove round Piazza della Libertà a second time. As always in this chaotic country, parking was proving impossible. There were cars on the pavement, cars on the central reservation, cars double parked even at the bus-stops. But Morris did not wish to break the law. Surely there must be a car park somewhere. He was perfectly willing to pay.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Forbes enquired.

  ‘People you know, who are dear to you, do you ever look for them in paintings?’

  ‘You mean for portraits which resemble them?’ Forbes specified.

  ‘Yes.’ For the sake of the conversation Morris chose to accept this loss of meaning, niggling though it was.

  ‘Not really my line in art history.’

  ‘I know. I appreciate that. But out of curiosity. You’ve never found a face in a picture? Your wife, for example.’

  ‘No.’ Forbes was emphatic now. ‘Neither found nor looked for.’

  Morris was silent, his eye searching the car-cluttered twentieth-century pavements beneath the majestic elegance of Renaissance palazzi. Forbes was watching him from small green eyes. Then the phone trilled.

  Morris was so engrossed in the rich pleasures of thought and the tribulations of parking he almost made the mistake of picking it up. But no, he had told her he would be seeing a client at ten-thirty and it was only ten to eleven. He wasn’t such a greenhorn as to make a slip like that.

  Forbes watched. After exactly ten trills and another turn round another piazza the phone stopped.

  ‘You know, you are a curious chap, Morris,’ Forbes told him.

  Morris turned and flashed him his most brilliant smile from beneath the blond thatch. He could almost feet the blueness of his own eyes, he felt so flattered, and in a gesture of anarchical flamboyance he stopped the car on a pedestrian crossing right outside Palazzo dei Signori.

  The gallery was certainly a great improvement on the street. Yet curiously a reflection of it too, Morris thought, performing one of those sudden penetrative turns of mind that always pleased him. There were the same colours, but frozen here in the dull pink of the marble, the cream of frothy travertine. There was the same sensuality of the men and women in the piazza, but stilled into perpetual contemplation by brush and chisel, a sort of shadowy distillation of the intense and too often vulgar world outside, a cool simulacrum, purged of urgency and appetence. He decided he would extend this visit as long as was reasonably possible. Massimina was on the third floor in Room VIII, but she could wait. Morris had always been a great believer in the deferment of pleasure.

  After a brief trip to the loo, Forbes took him by the elbow and began to guide him through the Vasariano corridor, then the Hermaphrodite’s Room. The man was so knowledgeable , so intelligent. He invited Morris to touch the smooth thighs of an Apollo, to feel the volume, the muscle-bound fullness of the stone. This was the kind of thing he wanted to teach his young students, he said, when the school was finally set up. To appreciate the pleasure of art, rather than just being in awe of it. Children should be invited to copy and then to create. It was really the only way to learn the gratia placendi.

  Which meant? How Morris loved that Latin! His hand ran down the stone across a perfect knee that might have been his own but for the lack of reflex.

  The delight of pleasing.’ Forbes’s voice was plummier than ever.

  ‘Attenzione, signore!’ The attendant appeared from nowhere. A firm hand pulled at Morris’s elbow. ‘Non si tocca, not to touch. Or out! Is very bad! Capito?’

  Morris whirled round. Why did authority always make him so nervous? That sense of being caught doing something he shouldn’t. Immediately he was ready to run. And at exactly the same moment he remembered he was supposed to have sent a fax to Doorways stores to confirm their order. The trip was ruined, the mood he had been so carefully nurturing gone.

  ‘Philistine mentality masquerading as protector of the arts,’ Forbes commented with a sad shake of the head as the attendant returned to his seat. ‘Surely he could see we weren’t doing any harm.’ In a rare moment of self-revelation, he added: ‘One of the reasons I left England actually.’

  But Morris was too shaken to pick up on this. All he wanted to do now was to see Massimina and get out of here. All at once the tapestried walls and frescoed ceilings and all the glories of Renaissance art and harmony had become no more than a dangerously enclosed space. He waited until about halfway through the Tuscan School before telling Forbes that he had the most awful st
omach-ache and would have to leave. If they could just take a look at that Filippo Lippi first.

  In Room VIII they had to hang on for a few minutes while a noisy crowd of poorly dressed East Europeans stood in front of her. A guide spoke incomprehensibly. But even looking through the gaggle of grizzled, unkempt, blockish heads Morris could see that it was definitely Massimina, right down to the fleshy nose and milky cheeks. At once an extraordinary excitement flooded downwards through his body. ‘As of a man returning to his lover.’ He mouthed the words with silent lips, then found Forbes was looking at him with growing concern.

  ‘You seem terribly tense, old boy.’

  ‘I just can’t see why these bloody Polacks have to hog my picture for so long.’

  ‘All in good time,’ Forbes smiled. ‘Relax. Even the plebs must have their day.’ Then he asked politely: ‘This is, er, one of those resemblances to someone you know? Or a purely aesthetic interest?’

  There was such a lump in Morris’s throat he couldn’t reply.

  ‘Ah,’ Forbes remarked, his face a mask of philosophy.

  The Poles, if they were Poles, moved away now and Morris stepped quickly right up to the canvas. Very simply, a blue-and-red-robed Virgin was being crowned by two delightfully fleshy cherubs. The face looked downward. And there was exactly that demure, somehow seductive (seductive because demure) cocking of the head, dipping of the chin, which was one of Massimina’s characteristic expressions. Quite unmistakable. And even, incredibly, unless it was just a fleck of dirt on the canvas, the tiny mole she had under her left ear. Which he had kissed with such tenderness once. Since nothing aroused his tenderness so much as vulnerability, blemishes.

  But above all there were her eyes. Those great liquid brown eyes were looking straight at him. The sense of her presence was so much more intense than in the tiny photograph at the cemetery. Simply, this was Mimi.

  ‘Famous for the vividness of his colours and the sensuous epidermis of his figures,’ Forbes was informing him, ‘though clearly rather limited in scope and ambition when set alongside his master, Masaccio, or immediate successors, like da Vinci and Michelangelo.’

  Morris just couldn’t get over that tilt of the chin, the way the hair framed the face exactly as Mimi’s had, at least until the day he had made her get it permed to avoid recognition.

  ‘Old girlfriend?’ Forbes enquired with gentle amusement. ‘Mother, aunt, cousin?’

  ‘My one and only love,’ Morris croaked, at once thoroughly anguished and at the same time sensing the quality of this melodrama. Other people wouldn’t be able to suffer like this.

  ‘La donna è mobile ,’ Forbes commiserated. The fairer sex they may be, but lighter and flightier too, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No,’ Morris muttered, still staring. Any moment now she would give him her sign. He was sure of it. ‘No, she died.’

  ‘Ah. I am sorry.’

  There was a long pause before Morris said tragically: ‘We were going to be married.’

  ‘No one ever seems actually to marry the person they love most,’ Forbes said gently. ‘It’s almost a natural law. Like the impossibility of alchemy or perpetual motion.’ The old man became elegiac. ‘Life would be too wonderful, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Morris appreciated this participation. Indeed although there were plenty of people milling around them, it was as if the two of them were cut off somehow, in a different dimension, standing before this young woman with the naked boys floating about her. The faintest wryness played across the Virgin’s lips.

  She’s making me wait, Morris thought. She’s teasing.

  ‘Car accident?’ Forbes asked. ‘Or illness?’

  ‘They bloody well kidnapped her and killed her,’ Morris said fiercely. ‘Can you imagine that? The only person I ever loved. They killed her!’

  Forbes was taken aback. ‘Good heavens!’ he said, with an old-fashionedness that again Morris, for all his tension and emotion, was able to appreciate. Out loud he breathed to the painting: ‘Mimi!’ When was she going to give him her sign? Sometimes she could be so stubborn! As when he had pleaded and pleaded with her to cover the whole thing up with him, not to make him do it, to live happily together for the rest of their lives. Certainly he had never wanted it to end as it had. For a moment then he half wondered if he mightn’t confess the whole business to Forbes. Hear the man tell him that it was all quite understandable. He had acted as anybody would.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Forbes was saying. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  They stood there. The painting was irksomely frozen in its exact resemblance. Morris felt Forbes might be becoming impatient. To spin it out, he asked: ‘Did he use a model, do you think? I mean, was there a real flesh-and-blood girl?’

  ‘Lippi? Well, yes, some of the painters did, for a basic anatomic outline. Though the result was highly idealised of course.’

  Of course nothing, Morris thought. It was the spitting image.

  'Funny thing about Lippi,’ Forbes now remarked, apparently trying to take his young friend’s mind off things, ‘although he was a monk and did all these devotional paintings, he then went and abducted a nun and later married her.’

  ‘Abducted?’ Morris said aghast.

  ‘So the story goes.’

  ‘He abducted her and she was his model?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. But I suppose she could have been.’

  ‘A nun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As Mimi too had been so desperately Catholic! No sooner had he taken all this in than Morris thought it extraordinary that the usually sensitive Forbes had not noticed the obvious parallels. As if he himself had painted her virgin portrait, then married her, which must be a kind of death for a nun. Or not? His mind seemed about to boil. Still the wry smile wouldn’t move.

  Had she really loved him? Or was it just a ploy to get away from home? Her convent.

  ‘There’s a rather jolly poem about the fellow, by Browning, apologising for his lusty instincts,’ Forbes went on. ‘Somewhat overpraised by Ruskin.’

  Quite suddenly Morris had had enough. He had stood there ten minutes and more. He must be going out of his mind, waiting for signs. And if he wasn’t, then he was being snubbed. That knowing smile. Damn her! She was only a girl in the end. Madonna or no. He swung round, took Forbes by the arm and headed for the door. ‘My stomach,’ he complained. ‘I can’t believe this.’

  The voice called exactly as they crossed the threshold into the Botticelli Room. Morris froze. Forbes was clearly afraid his young friend might be going to faint, or vomit, and tried to put a supporting arm round him. Morris turned his head. The room was filling up with a gaggle of schoolchildren, calling to each other in shrill tones. But it was definitely his own name he had heard, and with that unmistakable inflection: ‘Morri!’ Nobody else had ever called him Morri. The great brown eyes stared across the room. Morris raised a hand to his lips, blew a kiss, turned and, hardly aware that Forbes’s arm was still round his shoulder, stumbled down the stairs.

  In the car he would have liked to have spoken to her on the telephone, but that was clearly impossible in Forbes’s presence. The old man wanted to stop for lunch, but warned that he had forgotten his wallet. Morris felt sorry to see his noble friend reduced to this sort of pathetic scrounging and gallantly insisted they order the most expensive dishes on the menu, his stomach-ache having miraculously disappeared. Afterwards, on the way back, despite his growing impatience to be alone, he generously told Forbes that if ever he needed a loan to tide him over between pensions, he need only ask. Forbes accepted a couple of hundred thousand.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ Morris went on, ‘but do you think it might ever be possible to buy a picture like that from a gallery like the Uffizi? I mean, they must have about thirty coronations of the Virgin.’

  Forbes thought not, but agreed that art was something one needed to have around in one’s own environment, rather than merely visit in museums. As with all beauty, the element o
f possession was important. He frequently felt nostalgic for his old house back in Cambridge and the paintings he had there. But not for the company. Would that he had left earlier and younger.

  Again Morris was too engrossed in his own thoughts to accept the invitation to enquire about the older man’s private life. Anyway, it was Forbes’s culture that interested him, not his personal vicissitudes. When the phone rang he hesitated a moment, wondering if he would ever experience the miracle of her phoning him.

  But it was Paola.

  ‘Mamma’s come to,’ she said tersely. Tor God’s sake, it seems she’s going to recover. I can’t believe it!’

  Nor could Morris. Still, It did seem tasteless to show one’s disappointment so openly.

  The only consolation,’ his wife was remarking, ‘is that Bobo is more furious about it than we are.’

  Putting the phone down, Morris wondered how furious his brother-in-law would be when he realised Morris had confirmed, as he would the moment he got back to Verona, an order for four thousand cases with the tightest possible delivery dates. Quite suddenly he was determined to bring matters to a head.

  6

  Towards midnight, when they had commiserated together over a good bottle of prosecco and Paola was exploiting Morris’s weakness for frozen chocolates to engage in some oral foreplay, the young Englishman remembered his purchase of that morning. Paola pouted around a melting praline. ‘A present, my dear,’ Morris insisted. In dressing-gown and slippers he walked down the stairs and out into the icy fog of the November night. Quite brazen, the builder had left his excavator parked outside the main gate, making entrance to drive and garages difficult. But some day Morris would find a way to make him pay. There was no hurry. He pulled the package from the back seat of the Mercedes. - It was stopping by his first-floor neighbour’s door to listen a moment to the television, that it occurred to Morris that the thing was too heavy. He was hearing the strip music from Channel 7’s late show. Surprise, surprise! And yes, it was distinctly audible on the stairs. Which was useful to know. Lifting the package and shaking it slightly, his self-satisfaction began to bleed away into swooning anxiety. Something had shifted inside with an unconvincing thud.