Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  Not so much as a speck of dust stirred in Forbes’s deep wrinkles. His old blue eyes were clear, tied violets impeccable.

  ‘Your coat?’

  ‘My wallet was in the pocket,’ Morris explained.

  Entirely inappropriately, knowing nothing about the affair, Stan said: ‘Yeah.’

  Could he be on drugs?

  Forbes shook his head. ‘I remember Kwame and one of the carabinieri bending over you, after they shot the dog. Maybe they pulled your coat off. But afterwards . . .’ He pouted what were surprisingly damp lips in the papery old face. ‘Nec scire fas est omnia .’

  Stan burst out laughing. ‘Oh boy, isn’t he just a darling with his Latin?’ Again the American gave the older man a squeeze. Morris hurried off, more thoroughly disconcerted than he could have explained.

  30

  It was twelve o’clock. Walking across the splendid square, the porphyry fans spreading before his feet, the well-dressed children pedalling their tricycles among tourists bewildered to find themselves in a place so beautiful, it occurred to Morris that really the best thing would be to go to Fendtsteig and confess it all. For now that he had become so ugly, within and without, what could freedom possibly mean? It was freedom only to be spurned and condescended to. For of course that was the only conceivable reason why Forbes was replacing his friendship with Stan’s? Wasn’t it, Mimi? Wasn’t it? Should he confess?

  His guardian angel was silent. No point even in pulling his phone out. Morris stopped by the statue of Vittorio Emanuele. How volatile his moods were becoming! On impulse he hailed a taxi. Before confessing, before deciding whether to confess, he would go home and have it out with Paola. He would demand to know why she was pretending she wasn’t pregnant. He would demand to know how much she knew. Perhaps he would even tell her what she didn’t know. Most of all, he would demand to know himself whether she planned to abandon him, what future lay before him should he escape their clutches. Perhaps, he thought, at the root of his depression lay the fact that his marriage was a burden to him. Hospital, and even prison, without her, had proved such a wonderful release.

  But he could hardly confess to Paola, then ask for a divorce so that he could marry Antonella.

  The taxi snaked up to Quinzano, took the first hairpin after the village, stopped at the iron gate. Utterly confused, dangerously excited, poised more delicately than ever between sanity and madness, rain and triumph, Morris went in to clear things up with Paola once and for all, perhaps to tell her he was about to give himself up, perhaps to enlist her help on his behalf. He really didn’t know.

  Taola!’ He stood in the hallway and called her, but got no answer. He went into the sitting-room, where the local paper was open on a solid oak table. At the headline: still more mysteries in posenato case. Morris didn’t even bother to read it. The days of caring what the papers said were over. He was older and wiser now.

  At a loss for a moment, looking around the room, he was struck by its polished peacefulness of chequered tiles and antique furniture, filtered sunlight on elegant surfaces, dark plants. It was exactly the kind of conservative place he would have chosen to live in, to be part of, to construct his identity around. If only he hadn’t had to do everything he had done to get it.

  Unthinking, he crossed the room and opened old Signora Trevisan’s sewing basket, still rather picturesquely decorating the hearth. The patched underwear was still there, where he had returned it after twisting and torturing it in his pocket for days. Pulling it out again now, holding it up to the light, he tried, not for the first time, to imagine Mimi’s adolescent body wriggling into it. How black her pubic hair had been! How glossily mussed and bushy!

  Five minutes later, stretched on the old double bed where she had always slept, glazed eyes fixed on the Madonna incoronata Morris was approaching orgasm, courtesy of Forbes’s brush-work and the patched underwear, when the telephone rang in the hallway. Immediately his hand was stayed. For although there was no question of his answering the thing, it was clearly a message from Mimi that she didn’t want him to do that. He had never done that before, thinking of her. He had never allowed himself. Closing his eyes Morris experienced a tortured voluptuousness in letting pleasure subside, a curious mastery in denial.

  Then quite unexpectedly, a voice began to speak.

  ‘Ci displace, ma siamo momentaneamente fuori casa. . . . I’m sorryj but we’re out at the moment. . . .’

  Morris was already on his feet, pulling up his pants and stuffing Massimina’s into his pocket, when he recognised his wife’s false tones made more brittle than ever through the cheap electronics of an answering machine. He stopped and breathed. That was a novelty, an answering machine. Why hadn’t she told him about that? He stood still in the hallway listening. Came the beep, followed by a faint crackle. ‘Paola?’ There was a pause. ‘You there, signora bella?’ Another pause. ‘Guess I’ll hang on a bit longer, baby.’ Then the machine was beeping and whirring again on its own.

  Morris stared. He put a knuckle in his mouth and bit it. For heaven’s sake! Then buckling up his belt, he simply flew downstairs and out of the front door. He fiddled with the key and lifted the huge door to the garage, where sure enough both the Mercedes and Paola’s Lancia were missing. Leaving only Signora Trevisan’s ancient Fiat Seicento. That bizarre snobbery of the genetically rich, driving the oldest possible pieces of junk. But at least the keys were in the ignition. ‘Fiat lux,’ he muttered grimly, climbing in.

  It wouldn’t start. The battery was dead, if not exactly buried, like its owner. Morris had to push the old rust box across the white stones to the gate and then jump in to steer it round the hairpin and down the steep hill. It exploded into life, thank God, just before he had to brake for a tractor toiling with a trailer of dung. What a country! Morris revved the thing mercilessly, whether it meant being noticed or not, and found, as he crossed the city, that in traffic the combination of his reorganised face and the ancient car was most effective indeed.

  Ten minutes later, he had just cleared the last lights the other side of town, when the phone in his jacket rang.

  ‘Pronto, Morris?’ Forbes’s voice, so far as Morris could make out in the roar of the small saloon, was unusually tense. But he had no time for nuances now. He didn’t even try to pretend he was back in hospital, just demanded point-blank what the matter was.

  Before Forbes could continue, he added acid: ‘Stan Albertini will not make a good teacher at your or any school. I’m amazed that you’re wasting time with him. In fact, seeing that I have a considerable investment in the place, I’d be grateful if you consulted me before you made any firm appointments.’

  Forbes said: ‘Look, Morris, I’ve found the car. Just this minute.’

  Attacking the bend at Ponte Florio, halfway there, Morris didn’t understand. ‘I’ve always said you needed a car,’ he conceded. Though, if you’ve called to tell me I’m paying for it I think you should at least put it at the disposition of the boys when they want to go out for a night on the town.’

  Forbes needed reminding who was boss.

  ‘No, Morris, I’ve found the car.’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Listen, I was showing Stan round the place, the school. Just now. And I opened, I don’t know why, you know the old stable thing round the back of the house, with the derelict tractor.’

  Morris could hardly be bothered to follow, so eager was he to get the confirmation of her Lancia parked outside number six.

  ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that behind the tractor there was a car. And I think it must be Bobo’s.’

  ‘Bobo’s!’ Immediately, Morris pulled the Seicento over to the side of the road, but remembered to keep his foot softly on the accelerator. The ancient bodywork rattled.

  ‘What colour was it, what make?’

  Forbes told him.

  ‘Did you mention it to Stan?’

  ‘No, it was just in there beside the tractor. He had no reason to comment on it.’

&n
bsp; ‘But surely the police must have searched the place.’

  ‘In the first few days,’ Forbes said. ‘But not afterwards. Somebody must have brought it here afterwards.’

  Morris’s mind was working so rapidly now, he barely knew what he was thinking.

  Forbes said: ‘I fear it means they did do it, Farouk and Azedine. They must have hidden the thing here when they came back, or they were in collusion with the others.’

  His voice seemed to be both asking for and fearing confirmation. But it was curious then how Morris immediately saw and rejected this apparently convenient construction without needing to pass through any conscious lucubration whatsoever. Perhaps it was simply that anything offered by way of an obvious solution he had learnt to treat as a trap.

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘it looks to me as if somebody is setting them up.’

  There was a pause on the line, which, Morris was perfectly aware, might be bugged. Though the peculiar thing about the police, he had often thought, was how little, for all their vehemence when they questioned you, they really tried. Not checking that stable every now and then, for example. All he could assume was that, unlike the detectives in films and books, the poor fellows had other, easier cases to be getting on with, or were more interested in their sex lives and broken marriages than in Bobo Posenato’s disappearance. Quite reasonably so, when one came to think of it.

  ‘Who though?’ Forbes asked in a whisper.

  Morris said very pointedly: ‘Are you sure you don’t remember who took my coat that morning? Because it seems to me it must have been Kwame.’ When Forbes appeared to be struggling to come out with the inevitable confession, he immediately went on: ‘Anyhow, for the moment, don’t say anything to anybody. OK? I’ll come over myself as soon as I can.’

  ‘Splendide mendax,’ Forbes muttered.

  “Ciao, Morris said. He thought that, in the end, even if he had to spend the rest of his life saving souls behind bars, nobody could say he hadn’t enjoyed himself, hadn’t stayed in the saddle of one of the wildest horses for some considerable time.

  31

  The cherry trees were in bloom on the hills above Montorio. Their white blossoms gave a fluffiness to the landscape’s dull continental greens. As Morris quietly closed the car door some fifty metres from the house, the only sounds were the thick buzzing of bees and sharp croaks of the frogs descending the slopes to the valley’s ditches.

  Another beautiful place, Morris thought, appreciating his ability to appreciate things at such a harrowing moment. For, yes, her Lancia was there. It was true. All true.

  Suddenly the rural peace was shattered by some piece of equipment starting up. Building work was proceeding behind the house. Morris’s entry would not be heard.

  Arriving at the gate, he noticed that one of the line of six letter-boxes on the railings was no longer brushed stainless steel but charred black. Yet a fresh piece of white paper had been stuck into it. Morris pulled the paper out and read. The recipient was accused of being as out of place in number six as was the one charred letter-box in the neat row of winking bright steel. The message finished with a vague but nonetheless unpleasant threat. Beautiful surroundings, evidently, did little to civilise, and replacing the paper in the box, Morris stored this information in his mind, as one puts to one side a jigsaw piece that as yet has no partner to make it part of the whole. ‘Very soon,’ he said out loud in a flash of intuition. ‘Very soon, this will all be over,’ and as his lips moved he had the impression that this was not his voice speaking, nor Mimi’s either, but as it were something, somebody, they were both listening to.

  Morris was close to a solution, a resolution,

  The piece of machinery - it was an excavator - clattered just beyond the fence. Morris opened the gate quietly, walked up the path and gained the door. The supposedly marble stairs, he noted, were already chipping in several places. Nothing more than polished limestone. Key in hand, he listened, but the only sound was the throb of the building site. This was problematic, since the door opened directly into the front room. How could he know if they weren’t right behind the door?

  Still, it was his front room. Even if they were doing no more than exchanging useful information about company business, it was Morris’s prerogative surely to enter at will, there where his legal and pregnant wife was talking to a man he had employed, clothed, fed and housed.

  At the same time, Morris knew from the heat in his body, the sweat trickling between his buttocks, the trembling of his fingers as they slotted key into lock, that they would not just be chatting. Also, he sensed that Mimi was close beside him, and obscurely, once again, that the whole affair was almost over.

  The door opened on perfect domesticity, furniture as neatly aligned as tombstones. The only alteration in the place since Morris had lived there was a small woodcarving of an African tribesman with spear in hand and a ludicrously large erect penis. On the floor by the sofa Morris noticed the chip in the tile caused by his dropping the brick sold to him by a man he had tried to help. This time, he thought, the damage had been much more severe. No wonder his marriage wasn’t working.

  Now his ears were accustomed, he caught the sound of music in the lulls of the excavator. From upstairs. He recognised the appalling Sade. Or ‘come music’ as his wife called it. The case was closed. Even the phone, under her Gustav Klimt poster, was off the hook. What more evidence could one need? Yet Morris’s disgust and curiosity were so intense that he couldn’t stop here, even though it was ludicrous, even though he was planless.

  Softly, he climbed the spiral staircase. He hesitated, listening, treading softly on the step that creaked. Then as his head poked out above floor level between banister supports, the first thing he saw was his wife’s brown eyes staring straight into his own.

  In the centre of the room, under four skylights, and arranged so that it faced away from the stairs and toward the television, was a fashionable low red sofa. The black’s naked shoulder-blades and woolly head rose massively, unshakeably, above the back. Bobbing fiercely beside that head, face toward Morris, features unpleasantly distorted as on her knees she rapidly approached the last station of the libido’s via crucis, was Paola.

  Immediately her eyes fastened on his, but with no indication of surprise, either at his presence or his redesigned face. Instead her greedy gaze seemed just to be begging him not to interrupt, at least until it was over. Morris stood transfixed, watching, together with Mimi he felt, this rape of his marriage. And while at one level he had never been more deeply shocked, at another and deeper level he felt profoundly satisfied, liberated. He need make the effort no more. The family was dead.

  Sade crooned in that bitch-in-heat way she had. A bee buzzed about the open skylight. The riggish wench’s face broke up in a howl of pleasure, as though torn from the very heart of life itself, followed by nothing more than a few bass grunts from the man.

  Climbing to the top of the stairs, Morris said: ‘I trust you both enjoyed that.’

  Paola was panting hard.

  Kwame turned his head, lifting the slight woman to one side. ‘Boss,’ he said. Then without lowering his head or in any way expressing shame, he explained: ‘We thought you is still at the hospital, boss. God, your face is bad.’

  There was a short silence, in which Sade moaned about Frankie’s first affair, while the excavator could be heard attacking the hill again. Kwame had twisted round, but his nakedness was hidden behind the sofa. Only the powerful chest was evident, muscles glistening. Morris hesitated. Perhaps because there was clearly no way of killing two people at once, one of whom was infinitely stronger than himself, he found himself icily calm. Though his gelid outrage, he sensed, was Mimi’s too, and thus pregnant with purpose. Pregnant . . .

  He said: ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if she wasn’t pregnant with my child.’ My daughter, he should have said. Your reincarnation, Mimi!

  Having got her breath back, Paola folded her arms on the back of the sofa, pert breasts pee
ping over slender forearms. She cocked her head to one side and her features settled in a sly smile. ‘Your poor face,’ she said. Then she said: ‘Mo, instead of filling your head with these crazy ideas, why don’t you just get your clothes off and join us?’

  It was one-thirty. Back in the hospital, Dionisio would be collecting lunch trays, wondering where on earth his English patient had got to, where the next exchange of views on suburban London was coming from. And how could Morris ever know whether Fendtsteig or Marangoni would be able to demonstrate that he had left the hospital? And where he had gone. But clearly this was the end. Paola had touched bottom now.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  He stared at her.

  She laughed. ‘Mo, I know it must seem bad, but in the end, why not? I’ve always wanted to suck and fuck at the same time. Come on. Mo, treat yourself. Enjoy it. Don’t make life such a tragedy.’

  Kwame said: ‘Yeah.’

  Morris was seeing red. But at the same time and at another level, he continued to experience an extraordinary lucidity and calm, as if another were thinking for him. For it wasn’t like the old days, in the hotel in Rimini, the villa in Sardinia, when he had been so desperately alone. In his mind’s eye he saw her round calm face, with the holy crown, La Vergine incoronata.

  ‘After all, we know all about you, Mo.’ Paola’s voice was wheedling now. ‘Kwame told me what happened. And we’re not going to let you down. What more faithfulness could you ask for than that?’

  Morris opened his mouth. But it was premature. Mimi still hadn’t spoken.

  Paola held out her arms. Kwame was smiling his healthy, strong-teethed smile. ‘Coragg’io, Mo. Don’t be shy now. Why should we limit ourselves to just one partner in the end? Otherwise life is just a bore! You know you’ve felt that yourself.’