Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  Morris was suffering from that mixture of horror and speech paralysis that so often filled his nightmares. There was a moment’s pause, which Stan’s vigorous plate-scraping only tensed. Paola had now stood up herself and obviously couldn’t understand why Morris was allowing himself to get engaged in this mindless conversation about when he’d been to Turkey, rather than heading for the door and the sack. So little, Morris thought bitterly, did she care, or had ever cared, about Mimi that rather than putting two and two together her whole miserable brain power was concentrated on her cunt. This bitter reflection seemed suddenly to return him to himself. With one of those sudden flashes of the coolest intelligence and a splendid recovery of composure, like a sailboat jerking upright just before the point of no return, Morris said: ‘Yes, I did go to Ankara, of course. Just that I never told you,’ he turned to Stan, ‘because I thought you might be offended, you know, that I had decided to go, but not with you and all the others. There were one or two of them I couldn’t stand.’

  ‘Hey,’ Stan began to say, mixing Italian with English, ‘you went davvero? How about that! But you shouldn’t have been preoccupato, man. Come on!’

  Already Morris could see Bobo losing interest.

  ‘I can’t advise it for a holiday, though.’ Morris turned back to Antonella. The place was really filthy and burning hot and I had my bag stolen. Not to mention the trouble trying to get through to Italy on the phone.’

  That should sound convincing, and as if to make it more so a phone did in fact begin to trill somewhere. Bobo pulled a receiver from his pocket. His brow knitted in concern. ‘I’ll have to take this in the study,’ he said. ‘Arrivederci.’

  They had all said their hurried goodbyes and Morris and Paola were already on their way out, lifting their coats from the pretentious nineteenth-century wood-panelled coat-hanger in the entrance, when Stan, still stuffing himself at table, called laughingly: ‘It was that chick, wasn’t it?’ He was speaking with his mouth full. ‘You wanted to be alone with that chick, the one you were with at the station. Hey, kid, I would have understood. That’s so funny you didn’t tell me. What do you take me for?’

  Morris was just about to run back into the room and throttle the fool, hack him to pieces - because if one was going to serve a life sentence for one murder, one might as well serve it for two, or two thousand, and certainly with more satisfaction - when he realised that Stan had spoken in English. Yes, English. Or his version of it. And the only person in present company who might have been capable of understanding Stan’s twangy West Coast drivel, shouting obscure words like ‘chick’ from a mouth full of mascarpone across a space where people were clattering plates and putting coats on, was Paola, but she already had a hand tightly round him and was steering him to the door. While Bobo had retired to the study with his phone call.

  In a joke that was not a joke, Morris called back: ‘Careful what you say in front of my in-laws, buddy.’ Stan burst into giggles, and then they were out.

  ‘Caro, caro, Paola was all over him on the stairs, you sexy thing, faking like that. God! Do you want me to blow you in the car? Come on, let’s.’ She was already unbuttoning his shirt.

  Morris, experiencing a huge wave of relief, felt he might do worse than treat himself.

  13

  Towards eight the following morning, somewhere between Ponte Florio and Verona, a phone trilled in an expensive car. The driver laid a kid-gloved hand on the receiver but didn’t pick up. He was driving slowly today, enjoying the glassy clarity of the morning, the firm grip of expensive gloves, the delightful sense he had had, ever since walking out of the previous evening’s dinner party, of having defused what might have been a nuclear device at the eleventh hour and then some. So that he was able to think that perhaps it was rather fun in the end to have this volcano of a past which gave life a grand sense of drama, kept you on your toes. Why did people live on the slopes of Etna after all? The danger made life more intense. Just as it could be rather fun on occasion to have a perverse little hussy like Paola for a wife, who blew you in the car and then brought herself off on the leather-clad gear stick. He must check to see if the thing smelled.

  ‘Pronto?’ Having let the phone ring a little, he slowly picked up. It would be Forbes, he thought, with the newly installed phone at Villa Caritas. Or Bobo with some technical detail. There had been problems with the feed device on the labeller which could slow down the next Doorways delivery. Bobo was very strict about warning clients of possible delays.

  ‘Mo!’ His wife’s voice at the other end was excited and breathless.

  Taola!’ He’d imagined that after last night she wouldn’t be up till lunchtime.

  ‘Mo, Mo, listen, Antonella phoned. It seems the nurse has just phoned her. Mo, Mamma’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ Morris immediately geared down and pulled over to the side of the road, hazard lights flashing. The nurse phoned Antonella? But why her? Why not you?’

  ‘Cristo!’ The voice was exasperated. ‘It’s no time for worrying about details like that.’

  Meaning she didn’t want to admit to not having spent the necessary time talking to the woman. Which was what wives did, surely, especially when they refused to study or work.

  ‘Mo, look, you’ve got to drive over to the house in Quinzano, pay your respects and get the will.’

  ‘I’ll come back and pick you up.’

  ‘No, you’ve got to get over there before Bobo does. So get moving. Don’t let him see it before you.’

  ‘Hang on!’ A brief glance in the mirror showed the local bus approaching far faster than it should have been. But Morris managed to shoot out in front. If the passengers were thrown off their feet it was hardly his fault. The Mercedes picked up speed and hurtled at the morning traffic.

  ‘But do we actually know where the will is?’

  ‘Well, you can try the writing desk in her little study. But the most important thing is the key to her safety deposit box at the Cassa di risparmio. It’s in a locket in the bottom of the sewing basket in the corner of the dining-room. The will is almost bound to be in the box. Just get hold of the key so we can go to the bank for the first look, to be quite sure that there’s no hokey-pokey.’

  Morris hit the horn when a van driver in front didn’t move the split second the light changed.

  ‘Va bene?’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’

  As he was trying to overtake the van, the idiot deliberately accelerated, so that Morris found himself head on with an old Fiat coming the other way. He never flinched. He saw the sleepy felt-hatted face of an elderly peasant fill with shocked surprise, then the car swerved away into the kerb. Glancing in his mirror, he saw the van driver waving a fist. So much aggression in the world just waiting to be awoken! He took the next light on red and turned up on the road that snaked over the hills to the north of the city in a long series of hairpins.

  ‘Mo?’

  ‘Just a little trouble with the traffic,’ he explained. ‘Allora, ciao.’

  ‘No, hang on, what if Bobo’s already there?’

  ‘He shouldn’t be. He’s usually at work at this time, and he obviously wasn’t there when Antonella called. You have a head start.’

  ‘But what if he is?’

  ‘You just insist on seeing the will together.’

  ‘It would be easier if you were here,’ Morris said.

  ‘But I’m not.’

  They signed off. Morris was definitely happy now. The adventure and the new sense of complicity with his wife were invigorating. Perhaps in the end it was a perfect partnership. And he wondered at the speed with which he could change his mind, with which the whole shape of that mental landscape that was his life could be transformed from desert to garden, mountain to plain. What a splendid chameleon he was, a maverick, multicoloured, moody Morris.

  He drove hard on the tail of work-bound traffic climbing the hill along the city’s sprawling walls. His overtaking was more expert than rash now. He even had the presen
ce of mind to spot a carabiniere a few cars ahead and slow down. Then the phone rang again and it was Forbes.

  ‘Bad moment, I’m afraid,’ Morris said. ‘I’m trying to get somewhere in a desperate hurry.’

  ‘Ah,’ the voice seemed hesitant.

  On a steep downslope now, Morris overtook a stream of traffic, then had to brake fiercely for the hairpin where the road met the city’s medieval walls climbing up. Tyres shrieked and the car strained on its bearings. Then he was back in the suburbs, but on the other side of town.

  ‘Old woman Trevisan just died,’ he explained, then thought that this was the kind of thing his father would have said. Thoroughly coarse. But his father couldn’t have been wrong all the time.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yep, I’m going to check out the corpse and the will before Bobo gets there.’

  He ran a light on rosso fresco,

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Forbes was clearly taken aback. I’m sorry.’

  The line was crackling with interference. Unless the older man was now clearing his throat rather elaborately.

  ‘Hm, it’s just that, er, something rather dramatic has happened this end.’

  ‘If it’s the septic tank again,’ Morris said brusquely, ‘the bloke’s name is Checchinato. Get it from the directory.’

  ‘No, rather more serious, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Look, keep it brief. I’m nearly there, I’ll have to fly.’

  ‘Well, your friend Bobo, er, he dismissed everybody last night.’

  ‘What?’

  Morris was too surprised at this turn of events even to be angry.

  ‘He came in in the early hours, it seems, during the night shift, and dismissed everybody. Paid them all off too. The Senegalese boys have already packed up and gone.’

  ‘But what on earth for?’

  ‘I gather there was some kind of argument. Something, er, that’s been going on for a while. But, er, nobody seems eager to tell me.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake . . . I . . . I . . . What am I going to say to . . .’He was speechless for some thirty seconds, intimidating pedestrians on the crossing by the hospital,

  Finally Forbes said: ‘Aequam memento rebus in arduis , . .’

  But Morris was in no mood to listen to stupid bloody Latin. ‘Let me think!’ he interrupted curtly.

  ‘I’m sorry, old chap, I . . .’

  ‘Just tell them,’ Morris snapped, ‘not to leave until I get there and sort things out. Bobo can’t fire people without consulting me. I’m part of the family.’

  He hung up.

  The road slalomed quite steeply away from the town now to the small village of Quinzano, a huddle of peeling stucco in the icy morning light. Morris drove through the central piazza, ruined by its 1950s war memorial, a vertical panel with a stylised and now weather-stained mosaic of an expiring soldier, the kind of thing a suitably benevolent dictator with the right sort of aesthetic sense (himself perhaps) would have had removed immediately so as to keep Italy the perfect place it very nearly was.

  Morris had just about a split second to admire himself formulating this kind of punchy, by-the-way reflection at such a dramatic moment in his life, when he found the narrow road up to Casa Trevisan blocked by a furgoncino unloading firewood into a cellar window. He hit the horn, then immediately wished he hadn’t. It might be unwise to draw attention to oneself. For though he wasn’t actually doing anything wrong, he somehow felt as if he was, or as if he might. Morris shook his head - this kind of neurosis wouldn’t get him anywhere. Very deliberately, he hit the horn again. The inevitable grizzled peasant head appeared, expressing the inevitable and infuriating unconcern in a shrug of bovine shoulders. ‘Porti pazienza, Signore? Five salami fingers were held up to indicate as many minutes. Morris reversed sharply, parked in the piazza and began to walk up to the house.

  It was two or three hundred undeniably steep metres. His breath clouded thickly in the glassy winter air. But he was lightfooted, full of energy. Perhaps the walk would do him good, straighten him out. Indeed it was a pleasure to feel the air stabbing deep into the lungs, the blood in one’s cheeks meeting the chill head on; the sort of moment (ignoring a barking dog straining its chain) when one congratulated oneself for neither smoking nor drinking in any serious way. He said a jaunty buom dì to a woman scrubbing at stains in an outdoor sink. Paola, he thought, would have been left gasping, that was for sure. As likewise his father, for all the macho crap Morris had had to put up with on seaside holidays.

  Not for the first time (bending virtuously into an ever-steepening road) Morris reflected on this curious fact: that his wife and his father had any number of things in common, and both seemed destined to torment and provoke him. While Massimina on the other hand had had a great deal in common with his mother, who on the contrary had always soothed. Though the most pertinent distinction of all perhaps was the fact that, whereas the first two were alive, dear Mother and Mimi were dead. Quite dead.

  As now Signora Trevisan. . .

  The big wrought-iron gate stood on the inside of a hairpin. Walking up here reminded him of that first time he had come to court Massimina, frisky and full of hope, of how he had lied about having a car and said he’d left it in the piazza, when in fact he’d waited almost half an hour for the bus. Well, the time was rapidly coming when he wouldn’t have to lie any more, when he might even be able to allow himself a little patriarchal nostalgia for the old penny-pinching mendacious days. Morris smiled the able, maturer-man’s smile he had been noticing in mirrors of late.

  ‘Chi è?’ the nurse enquired through the intercom.

  You’d have thought that with the old woman dead and the family obviously on their way up to pay respects, the girl would simply have opened to his buzzing. This instinctive caution on the part of Italians always amazed and unnerved Morris. Feeling unnerved he was also suddenly reminded of what he had momentarily forgotten, the news Forbes had phoned through. With disturbing volatility, he now felt extremely anxious, even alarmed, a thousand miles from the cool self-confidence he had always longed for in himself. What if the will left everything to Antonella, if old Signora Trevisan had never accepted his marrying into the family? Was that why Bobo, knowing somehow of the death in advance, had felt free to fire his boys? Could Morris suddenly find himself without a source of income: a potentially penniless Duckworth with a gauche and good-for-nothing wife?

  ‘Sono Morris, the son-in-law.’ Other people, he was aware, never needed to explain themselves.

  The gates swung open, creaking and clanking, eighteenth-century ironwork forced along by two remote-controlled, electrically powered hydraulic cylinders. It was important to register these things. He slipped through and concentrated on the simple pleasure of his even pace crunching on carefully raked white stones.

  The nurse was petite and dark and might have done well to have oxygenated the hair on her upper lip. Sardinian probably. Her small quick hands reattached the chain on the door behind him, surely unnecessarily. In a crumpled green uniform she looked exhausted and attractively fragile, a fragility wonderfully set off by improbably large breasts.

  ’ . . . Towards seven o’clock,’ she was saying. ‘Or that’s when I found her. I must have dozed off for an hour or so. It was a difficult night.’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’ Morris respected nurses, their practicality and busy modesty. ‘Perhaps you should have phoned earlier.’

  ‘I didn’t wish to disturb.’

  Crossing the hall to the stair, Morris drank in the fusty smell of polished wood and stone, the splendidly straight-backed provincial conservatism that had so thrilled him on that first visit two years ago: lace doilies, coffin-quality furniture, silver-framed photographs, a great pietra serena fireplace, and then, between drape curtains, the view of a travertine balustrade festooned in dark ivy. Yes, it thrilled him precisely because of its archaisms, its theatricality, as if this was a place for acting in, for being melodramatic, in an entirely conventional, predictable way, and with n
o more responsibility than a melodramatic actor had. His hands ran up a mahogany rail. They were the sort of carved banisters ghosts laid a white finger on as they walked down stone stairs, or lovers hanged themselves from. The gazebo glimpsed through a small window as they turned the corner of the stairs was a set for a romantic rendezvous, the little writing desk in Paola’s old bedroom to the left would have the kind of secret drawers where Signora or Signorina kept an elegant gun, or a will. And it suddenly occurred to Morris that if the more yuppie-minded Bobo was happy in his Casa bella-inspired duplex, then he and Paola would move in here themselves! With Kwame as a servant perhaps. There was an idea! It was just the kind of tradition-oozing place he would love his children to grow up in.

  The small nurse pushed the door. Morris stepped by her, saw the corpse and drew an audibly sharp breath that must have impressed the girl behind. Again it was the marvellous theatricality of the scene that so pleased him: the waxen, open-mouthed face in the four-poster bed, the knotty, thickly ringed fingers at the end of white sleeves resting quietly on a linen sheet. ‘I have to wait for the doctor to come before I can tie up the jaw,’ the nurse was explaining by way of apology, but Morris was thinking how Mimi had used to sleep here in the same bed with Signora Trevisan, all her life, right up to the day when she had run away with him. In fact, aside from himself, this dreadfully hook-nosed, sunken-eyed, heavy-fleshed corpse was the only other person on this living earth Massimina had ever slept with. ‘Mimi,’ he breathed. For a moment he had a vivid mental image of her laid out there, dead on the bed beside her dead mother, but in the rich gowns Lippo Lippi had painted her in, deep blue and red. Not Giotto’s Death of the Madonna at all. ‘Mimi, I shall never forget you,’ he said.

  ‘Mi scusi?” the nurse asked.

  ‘Er, yes, I have to go downstairs and make a phone call,’ Morris said. ‘Could you please wait here with her until I come back. I wouldn’t like for her to be alone, so, er’ - he hesitated -’so soon.’

  ‘Sì, signore, anche se . . .’