Mimi's Ghost (11 page)

‘Ah, Kwame! All right?' Morris took the huge meaty arm and squeezed it. There was something wonderfully convincing about the Negro's mere physical presence.

Kwame, however, made it clear that all was not right. Then Forbes appeared in a flurry on the steps.
‘Res ipsa loquitur,'
he mysteriously explained. ‘The thing speaks for itself.'

When Morris just looked blankly at the foggy house, counting the misty statues on the roof (all still there?), Kwame said: ‘It don't speak, man, it stinks.'

He was led across the patio to the edge of the terrace, and now Morris became aware of a fierce stench of sewage in the air. Kwame took him by the arm and steered him away from a dark stain on the paving. Looking over the wall which supported the terraced garden above the road, he was shown two long black and clearly unpleasant streaks dribbling down through patches of ivy and capers.

Morris was upset. As with his own house, no sooner had you got hold of something you'd always wanted than you found all kinds of defects. He was reminded of the roguish builder, a score still unsettled.

The toilet facilities are unusable,' Forbes said rather primly, as of one who wanted to make it perfectly clear that he didn't feel his duties extended in this direction.

They is overflowing,' man,' Kwame said. There is nowhere for us to shit.'

‘And unfortunately we are, urn, without a phone here.'

Morris paced about the stain where the septic tank must be. Azedine and Farouk came out, the Egyptian boy with a cigarette in his mouth, grimacing and laughing. Certainly the stench was awful, but already Morris's annoyance was fading. For the fact was that ten or twelve people were standing around waiting for him, Morris Duckworth, to act; a dozen people relying on him, on his munificence, his astuteness in resolving the small practical problems that inevitably kept one on one's toes in this life. And just as when he sat with the boys by the fire listening to Forbes talking about Palladio and the reinterpretation of the classical, so now, facing the contingency of a clogged septic tank, he felt at home, and what's more, the head of that household, a role that suited him. He prodded experimentally at a paving stone, as if septic tank diagnosis were one of his many talents. What a long way he had come from the pathetic figure of his childhood, the loner of his youth! In the end, perhaps, it suddenly occurred to him, in the end he might just decide to do without Paola and move in here. That would teach somebody a very big lesson. Doing nothing but watch mtv all day and wanting him to lick yoghurt off her fanny.

Morris the patriarch (though still childless) went over to his Mercedes, took his address book out of a handsome Gucci bag, found the address of the man they had rented the place from, called him and got the number of a local mason who had apparently reorganised the plumbing some fifteen years before.

His adoptive family and the ambiguously avuncular Forbes stood in a motley huddle round the car listening to his calls. Really, it was all most gratifying. ‘Sì,
subito,'
he insisted, ‘at once.'

Then they went in to lunch. There was a huge pan of water boiling away on the stove for the pasta, a great brown carrier-bag bulging with bread on the table. Morris placed his own contributions of a kilo of parmesan and two litres of decent Valpolicella beside it. ‘No Trevisan Superiore for us,' he laughed.

The windows steamed. Forbes tied aprons round the giggling young Ramiz, the more solemn Farouk, and began to explain about condiments. A wiry little Senegalese with a surprisingly pointed nose and cracked spectacles scrubbed at the wooden table. From the next room came the wail of Azedine's Moroccan pipes meandering through the kind of tuneless Arab music that has neither beginning nor end, but just a sort of urgent, aimless vitality, so healthy, Morris pleased himself by thinking, compared with that Western obsession for getting from A to B, then on to something else. And as Kwame pulled up the biggest chair for him at the head of the table, he smiled straight into the boy's great, soft African eyes. Indeed, he could have washed the lad's big black feet at the thought of how wonderfully biblical it all was, and how New World too, how marvellously post-imperialist and Utopian. Had he been a latter-day saviour, these were just the people he would have chosen as his disciples. Salt of the earth. He didn't even say anything when Azedine came down and lit a fierce cheroot. On the contrary, he almost loved him for it.

‘Splendid!' he exclaimed as Ante ladled the pasta. Now he was exchanging warm glances with Forbes. For all the older man's slight woodenness and primness, the curiously stiff way he moved and the occasional impression of suppressed disdain, Morris thought he had never seen him so happy. It was as if looking after these young men had been a kind of revelation to him. Even his usually dusty cheeks had a faint glow to them in the smoky bustle of the kitchen. Perhaps in the end Morris would be able to get him to drop the rich schoolboy business altogether. The upper classes would never have the simple vitality and gratitude these lads had. For a moment he was almost going to ask him to say grace, in Latin perhaps, but then changed his mind.

‘Solemn announcement!' he suddenly proclaimed, interrupting the general hubbub. Five or six of the boys were already attacking their pasta, heads down. Morris raised his hands and repeated: ‘I have a solemn announcement to make.' The boys looked up, watched him, chewing with unshaven jaws, eyes bright under unkempt hair, woolly or wiry. ‘I just want to tell you all,' Morris said very slowly, aware of the language problems, ‘how grateful I am. Yes, grateful. The whole project, your living here and working for Trevisan Wines, has been an unqualified success.' He paused. To cap it all, we signed a contract today that'll keep you here, fed and paid, for at least another three months. Cause for celebration, I think.'

The Senegalese translated for one of his friends. Kwame's smile was brilliantly white, but for a staining of tomato puree. ‘No, everybody thank
you,
boss,' he said. ‘Everybody goin' to thank you so much.' Forbes bent to whisper something in Ramiz's ear and the boy beamed.

‘Now, as far as the toilet is concerned,' Morris continued, brushing aside the chorus of gratitude, ‘the mason is coming about the sceptic tank at three. In the meantime I suggest we dig a hole in the bushes away from the drive. Anyone who wants to use a proper toilet will have to wait until he goes to work.'

He had said this with good humour and was surprised at the short silence that followed. Ante said darkly: ‘What toilet?'

‘At work, of course. The one in the bottling plant.'

Kwame shook his head. ‘That toilet is locked for us, boss. Mr Bobo say we dirty it. We hide in it not to work. And the cleaners not clean black shit.'

There was another silence, tensed by the irritating click of Azedine picking his teeth with a fingernail. Morris was genuinely shocked, then appalled at the thought that nobody had mentioned this to him before, that they had somehow imagined he was a party to this decision.

‘You mean you have to go out in the freezing cold?' he asked.

‘But no, there is the
chien,'
the Senegalese said excitedly. ‘The
chien,
on ne pent pas.'

The dog,' corrected Ante, ‘We can't go out in the yard. The dog, he eat us before we have our pants down.'

The dog is a demon,' one of the Ghanaians said. ‘An evil spirit.'

‘So what do you do?'

Kwame explained: ‘We use the bottles, boss, to piss in. And no shit.'

‘What, but that's barbaric!' Morris turned to Forbes: Tor heaven's sake, did you know about this?'

‘I imagined . . .'the older man muttered vaguely. He looked more incongruous than ever with pasta sauce spilt on a tie of silk lilacs.
‘Volenti non fit injuria
, if you see what I mean.'

Morris didn't. Nor did he have time to ask. He was furious. The heat flooded through his body. That this outrage should have been perpetrated on his boys without his even knowing! He felt the blood throbbing in his neck. Getting up from the table he went straight out of the house to the car and drove at breakneck speed through the fog to tell Bobo that he, Morris, would clean the loos himself if necessary , but this racism had to stop. It was a question of the merest sense of fellow-feeling, the absolutely most basic level of
civiltà.
And when Bobo said that one or two of the day workers had protested at using the same bathroom as a bunch of dirty immigrants, Morris went straight down to the bottling line and talked to the workers one by one at their positions in the din of the machines: four middle-aged and elderly women, a Mongoloid, a younger man with a limp who fixed things when they went wrong, a boy in a wheelchair and five girls giggling together who couldn't have been a day over sixteen.

In a stupefying steam of wine, the bottles jerking on the conveyor, the cheap plastic tops snapping rhythmically down, Morris had to shout to tell them they should be ashamed of themselves. Hadn't one of the three kings been black? Yet Christ had accepted his gift. Hadn't he told Paul to eat the gentiles' food? Everybody had to be accepted: red and yellow black and white. He could almost hear his mother's voice teaching him the Sunday school chorus now. His mind was buzzing, boiling. Father had been a miserable racist. Of course they knew to do it in the bowl and leave the seat clean. They weren't animals. The continuity of your jobs,' he wound up, suddenly determined to punish, ‘to a great extent depends on the money we are making from the night shift. These are hard times, and don't you forget it. Other companies are collapsing all around us.'

Then, in his eagerness for her approval, he ran back out to the car to talk to Massimina. Surely she would back him up. He may have been a monster on occasion, he might despise bad taste and obscenity, sometimes he had been guilty of unpleasantness and certainly of rashness, but he had never, never, never sunk to this kind of moral squalor.

He poured his heart out into the phone. Massimina was her usual silent self, yet Morris was not discouraged. He sensed that when the time came she would give him her seal of approval. He was not a man whose affection waned merely because not immediately requited.

On arrival back at Villa Caritas, as Forbes had now christened it, a fat figure in his late fifties, dressed in battered hunting jacket and leggings, was using a pickaxe to pull up the paving. He scratched at the bristles on a square head. He could remember, he said, at least within a yard or two, where they had put the septic tank, though why it should have got blocked, he couldn't imagine. The system had been planned for a family of a dozen and more. It was a big house.

They stood around in a circle, watching the man heave and grunt as he pulled up flagstones. Insects fled like refugees in some aerial photograph. Finally the cement top of the septic tank was uncovered. Kwame and another Ghanaian helped the man to prise it up. They got a plank underneath and slid it away, revealing, in the round hole, along with an amazing and quite overpowering stench, a curious surface of shiny bubble-gum pink, scores of bloated rosy swellings in a brown scum. Everybody stared. Azedine and Farouk exchanged glances. Then the young Ramiz burst out laughing. But the mason was shaking his head. ‘You don't,' he said, ‘put those rubber things down the toilet.
Va bene!'
Looking up, it was clear his gaze was directed at the two blacks present, as if only they could have been so lascivious and so ignorant. ‘Not in the toilet!' he said louder, as though volume might help them understand his fierce Italian. ‘Not those rubber things in the toilet!'

' You're joking,' Paola said later when Morris told her this and she laughed loudly. Those old peasant guys are so Catholic! I bet he's been crossing himself ever since, thinking of all that sin.'

Well, it certainly seemed to be getting her excited, Morris thought, and he remembered noticing a sort of faint awe on her face the day he had got Kwame to help him up the stairs with a rather attractive eighteenth-century dresser he had bought.
‘Bel ragazzo,
she had said,
‘bello grande!'

They were watching television. The lira was falling, the government debt blossoming, a minor politician had been decapitated in a butcher's shop somewhere down south, a major politician arrested up north. Now the announcer was reading out the names of the referees for next Sunday's first-division games. Apparently, some of the choices were controversial. But Morris was still back there with the devaluation and the public debt. Perhaps he should be getting what personal funds he had into Deutschmarks as soon as possible?

‘So?' Paola asked. ‘Did anyone own up?'

‘What?'

‘To the condoms.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't presume on their privacy.'

She put an arm round him and kissed a blond cheek. ‘I do love the way you talk, Mo.'

Morris found this irritating. Watching an advert now for a local purveyor of talismans (but how could people be so ingenuous?), he told her that what he found gratifying was that in just a short space of time they had obviously found local girls who had fallen in love with them, who didn't disdain them, the way that unpleasant bunch of cripples and morons at the factory did. The younger generation, he said, seemed more willing to accept diversity, indeed welcome it.

‘Mo!'

‘What?'

‘Mo, you've got to be kidding. No, you're wonderful.'

He was perplexed.

‘Mo, those immigrants would never find a girl in a place like Quinto. The country girls never even touch a southerner, never mind a Negro.'

Morris stared. In the flickering light of the TV there was something fearfully will-o'-the-wispish about her. At once sexy and frightening.

They're doing it with each other, Mo. I thought you'd realised that. The only thing that amazes me is that they have the good sense to use condoms.'