Mimi's Ghost (15 page)

Walking down to the square, Morris Duckworth could have hugged the old peasant still offloading his wood into the cellar window half an hour on. Oh, this Wedgwood-blue sky, these sharp, sharp horizons of cypresses and campanili, the silver green of the olives and rose pastel of pitted stucco! Italy, oh Italy! Tiled red roofs and Roman walls higgledy-piggledy in a sparkling Ferrarelle distance! He stopped and breathed deeply. In a yard below the curving road a shawled woman swept at cobble-stones with a twig broom while hens clucked about her. ‘
Buon giorno!'
Morris shouted down.
‘Buon giorno!'
he called to a felt-hatted relic of the peasantry fighting his way up the hill with a stick, dead cigar clamped between wrinkled lips. A dog barked, joyfully it seemed despite its chain, and the bus down in the piazza honked gaily to announce imminent service. Upon which sharp and sudden sound, a cloud of sparrows rose from intertwined persimmon trees. Orange fruit quivered against shiny black bark. Then smells of wood smoke on the breeze. Yes, God is in His heaven, Morris thought, and all is right with the world.

Or rather, Morris was in his heaven. Or Morris was God? In the sense that he was in everything and everything was in him: the delicious wood smoke, the grimly wholesome faces of the peasant folk, the winter tracery of the vines, the pitted road. In everything and accepted by it, as he reciprocally accepted everything. Wholly himself, exactly as he overflowed and emptied into everything else. Rich now and thus free to be happy and generous, a rightful heir to the wide world's abundance.

‘Mimi?' As soon as he was in the car, he lifted the phone again, and the number to dial for her, he suddenly decided, was 321 for the circles of the Inferno backwards, then 789 for the slow prosaic ascent of purgatory, and at last a single zero, which was the mystical shape of perfection, of the crown that excludes everything profane - the garland of a soul in paradise. And the shape of a kiss too, her full lips forming a perfect round.

‘Mimi, yes,' he got through almost at once, ‘no, sorry, I'll have to be dreadfully brief. I just wanted to say thank you. I mean, I know you've been helping me. I know I owe this to you, this inheritance, your inheritance. I want to promise that the money, your money, will be used to help others, to make other people's lives that much happier. I know it is your sign that I must stay with Paola and the company, to point them in the right direction. Thank you, Mimi, thank you.'

Morris shifted on the white leather seat in the stationary car, smiled indulgently at loud adolescents reading
La Gazzetta dello Sport
at tables outside the bar, buzzed down the window to let in some fresh air, then dialled again: the more arbitrary code for England this time.

‘Dad? Yes, Dad, it's me.'

There was the problem with this call, of course, that the old man could and no doubt would answer back, that one couldn't, as it were, simply deliver the
fait accompli
of one's message and escape untainted.

‘Me, Morris!'

There was a sharp groan. ‘Christ, what time is it? Do you realise what bloody time it is?' Morris had forgotten the hour's difference. Still, it was eight-thirty here. He said contritely: ‘I thought you were an early riser. Dad. I wanted to catch you before you were up and out.'

There was a fairly long and, at cellular-phone rates, decidedly expensive silence. ‘God, Christ, no, heavy night on the boozer, you know. Bugger me, what a razzle!'

Behind the exaggerated tones of morning-after suffering, Morris immediately picked up the bragging subtext: Here I am still living a real man's life, even in retirement, which is more than my wimp of a son ever managed. But rather than irritating, let alone humilating him, as it might have in the past, the mature Morris found his father's misplaced bravado almost endearing. The way one might be endeared to a dog's wagging pride at having stupidly retrieved a flung stick from filth.

‘Dad,' he said, at his most demurely respectful. ‘I just wanted to say that Paola and I will shortly be moving into a rather larger, er, residence, so if you'd like to come and visit in, say, a month or two, please do feel free.'

Sipping whisky on the wistaria-draped terrace of Casa Trevisan, it would be somewhat difficult for old Mr D to continue to think of his son as a failure.

Nothing. The radio connection crackled.

‘Meantime' - for some reason Morris's accent always moved sharply up-market when he talked to his father, as if in necessary compensation - ‘meantime, if your pension should need topping up at some point, please don't feel ashamed to ask.'

When his father was still silent, Morris added: ‘I was saying to Paola only the other day, I think you've worked hard enough in your life to deserve a comfortable retirement.'

‘Oh, bloody Christ!' his father immediately objected. ‘Aren't we la-di-da!'

Morris reflected that the man's expletives had never been anything but repetitive. Even in his coarseness there had never been anything to admire. Perhaps that was where he and Paola parted company.

‘Beg pardon?' he asked. Pretty well hamming it now. Riding the crest.

Another expensive crackle, unless the man was belching.

‘I've said it before' - his father now sucked in catarrh - ‘and I'll say it again: it was the ruin of you when your mother wouldn't have it any other way but to call you Morris. The ruin. I could never take a person seriously that got himself called Morris.'

How remorselessly his father always played on this imagined transfer of femininity from mother to son! Morris, however, had skin scaly centimetres thick against this kind of assault now. He fingered the satisfyingly bulbed head of the gear stick and waggled it affectionately, in complete control.

‘Well, Dad, the invitation is quite serious, I can assure you, and ditto the offer of funds if you should find yourself in a spot of difficulty. I just wouldn't like you to think,' he added quickly, ‘that your son had, er, abandoned you in your old age.' Then before his father could object to this nail so elegantly whammed into his coffin, Morris finished: ‘I'm afraid I'll have to leave you to your aspirins and raw eggs now. ‘I've got a pretty busy day ahead of me here.' With fingertip pressure on a delightfully oval button, violet against the subtly contoured whiteness of the receiver, he cut his father off, sent him plunging back down into the outer darkness of east Acton, surely at least the second circle, if not worse.

Then the phone began to ring, or rather trill. Morris looked at it, but decided that Paola perhaps deserved to wait a little longer for the good news. He got out of the car and, jingling various important keys in his pocket, sauntered over to the bar, sat at a table beneath the pergola and, doing his best to ignore the dying soldier in grimy mosaic across the piazza, ordered a cappuccino and brioche.

‘Sprinkling of cocoa on top,
per favore.'

Quite pixily pretty, the waitress, he thought, despite a down-market tightness of the skirt on plump thighs. Nice. And there was something most voluptuous about deliberately wasting time like this when he should have been rushing off to tackle Bobo over this firing business. Bobo, who hadn't even had the good grace to go and pay his prompt respects to his dead mother-in-law. Well! Mmm. Morris savoured time's passing to the taste of sweet coffee in his mouth. With any luck the boy would actually be intimidated by the unexpected delay, for he must be expecting his brother-in-law to rush out there in a rage.

The brioche had apricot marmalade inside, which was pleasant enough. Morris politely had himself passed the local paper. He decided he would not think about his acned in-law at all. No, he wouldn't plan any strategy or even remotely speculate on the coincidence of this unpleasantness of Bobo's firing his boys, his family, cropping up the very night Signora Trevisan had died, the very night after their little dinner party. Because he was home and dry now, co-heir, through Paola, of the whole estate, on absolutely equal terms. If the government had had to devalue the lira again, as the newspaper's headlines made plain, then who gave a tinker's curse (not to stoop to his father's language)? Who gave a beggar's tithe (that was good)? Because exports to Doorways (prices quoted in sterling) would only be all the more profitable. Indeed, Italy might well be witnessing the birth of a great new commercial empire. The truth was that every magnate played hard and fast to begin with, then little by little became respectable as wealth snowballed and culture followed in its wake.

Morris felt he was already on the home straight. Soon it would merely be a question of learning how to accept congratulations with the right poise and grace.

Driving back around the north of the city, sedately now, he called Paola at his leisure with the excellent news.

‘Everything equally? Are you sure?'

‘Sure I'm sure. I mean, the way she said it, it was as if it was something everybody had known for years. Written into the natural order.'

‘Mo,' there was a brief pause, then his wife's voice had thrilled to a whisper, ‘Mo, I'm going to give you hell tonight. That's a promise. I'm going to make somebody's cock pay and pay and pay for being so rich and fat. Oh, this is such good news!'

Very casually, Morris suggested: ‘So, how about making love in her bed?'

‘Cosa!
Whose?'

‘Your mother's.'

‘Mo!'

Finally, he thought, he had gone one better than her.

‘Antonella's going to have the coffin set up in the living-room, for the wake. Somebody's going to have to spend the night there. Our turn to show filial respect, I think. All we have to do is change the sheets.

Paola appeared to hesitate. ‘You know, sometimes you're really strange, Mo. I mean, what turns you on.'

‘I could say the same of you sometimes,' he said evenly. But what he was thinking was how Mimi had said the exact same words into his dictaphone shortly before she died:
‘Che strano che sei, Morri che strano!
How strange you are sometimes!'

Suddenly he felt desperately excited by the idea that he would be making love in the bed she had always slept in, right where he had felt her presence most strongly. Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, there was the underwear that must have been hers. He clenched it tight in his fist.

‘Va bene, caro mio,'
Paola was saying.
‘Va bene.
Mamma was always so strait-laced about sex. Let's do something really outrageous. It'll be like a revenge.'

It would also be the first step in getting his wife to agree to move in there, Morris thought, when he thankfully got the phone down. Or maybe he could even get her pregnant tonight. Hole in the johnny job. Why not? His instincts were so perfectly honed today, it was as if he were snipping out the future with a pair of new scissors (in leather-gloved hands). He would be so thrillingly erotic, he'd be able to get her to agree to anything.

For a moment Morris wondered whether, if he let go of the steering wheel and just closed his eyes, the car wouldn't all the same take him exactly where he ought to be going, so in tune did he feel with the universe round about, the stars, the circling spheres.

Morris drove up the Valpantena, turned off at Quinto and pulled in at Villa Caritas. But a sense of urgency was returning now and it wasn't a moment for hanging around and listening to Forbes spouting Latin, however appropriate his maxims might mysteriously be. Fortunately, he found Kwame sprawling on the swing couch in the cold sunlight. Morris told him to put out his cigarette and hop in at once, then immediately was reversing fast back down the drive to the gate. Not that he needed company, quite the contrary, but Kwame, he felt, was the kind of presence who could only be persuasive.

Why had Bobo acted like that?

The bottling plant was humming. The dog was on his chain. So successful was Morris feeling this morning, so sure that everything could simply be worked out by forthright expression of commonsense and legal entitlement, that he decided he might not poison the brute after all. ‘Here, Volfi!' he called to the creature, though he had no idea what its baptismal name might be. ‘Here, Volfi-Volfi!' He held out a hand as if to caress.

But there must have been something in Morris's voice, genuinely friendly as he meant to be, that gave him away, something that irritated or mocked, as if he could never quite convince anybody, even the dumbest animal, of his good intentions. The same way, despite a certain blond charm and handsome suavity, he had never in the end managed to persuade anybody to give him a regular job. In response to his blandishments, the animal leapt to the furthest reach of its chain, went up on its hind legs, pawing, then bayed quite horribly in a red-grey slaver of teeth and strangled fur. Kwame cowered back, clearly frightened. Morris stood just beyond the animal's range, smiling. In the end, given the robustness of the chain, it was not the kind of relationship one need feel unhappy with.

‘Evil, man,' Kwame said. ‘He got an evil spirit in him, that dog.'

Morris was wondering if Bobo would put up the same display of animosity, despite the now established chain of legitimate inheritance. With an expression that he hoped balanced sobriety and insouciance while still catching the essential, willing-to-help-but-determined-not-to-sell-himself-short Morris, he pushed open the office door without knocking.

Bobo was on the phone. The unpleasant boy sat round-backed over piles of neatly clipped, tissue-pink-and-blue papers marshalled across the gun-metal desktop in the prosaic glow of the Apple Mac. With his correct but, for an Italian, ill-cut suit and one hand both holding the receiver and tugging the lobe of a protruding ear while the other scribbled figures in blunt pencil, the whole scene (right down to the Fratelli Ruffoli bottle squidged between a model's sunbathing buttocks) reeked of tawdry commerce, seemed impossibly far removed from the tasteful setting of yesterday evening's dinner. Morris, thought Morris, would move all the company's offices into the centre of town and spruce them up; that designer look of lush efficiency Italians were so good at. Some expensive furniture from Milan perhaps.