Mimi's Ghost (7 page)

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 stomach-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 of 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.

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.

‘I've made a fool of myself,' he announced on walking back into the flat. Paola was tummy down on the sofa in just the kind of underwear he found at once exciting and in awful taste. She beckoned with a finger. Morris almost shouted: Tor Christ's sake, I've been a complete and utter prick!'

‘Mmm,' she said.

‘I hate myself.' He began to tear at the Sellotape around the package with its photo of a Sony Videomaster. ‘I meant it as a present for you and instead I just wasted a hundred and fifty thousand lire. A hundred and fifty thousand!'

Suddenly, but not entirely unexpectedly, he could feel the tears coming to his eyes, such a welling of conflicting emotions: self-abasement, anger, forgiveness, humiliation. His nails finally tore open the package, allowing a brick in a polythene bag to slither out and crash down on the tiled floor.

Paola burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Mo, you idiot. You didn't buy it from a m
arocchino,
did you? Everybody knows they're all fakes.'

The tinkling of her voice seemed to coincide with a sort of bubbling behind his eyes as if blood were flooding to the boil. For a moment even his pyjamas and dressing-gown felt tight around a swelling body. He was so full of rage. He could have picked that brick right up from the floor and smashed it straight down on her sneering, sluttish head. Massimina would never have behaved like this.

‘I bought it for you!' he screamed. To film ourselves. I was kind to the guy and he let me down!'

Paola got up and came to hold him, trapping his arms in hers. Irritated, he pushed her away, but she came right back and repeated the gesture, arms folding tightly round him, pushing her face into his neck. ‘Mo, take me,' she whispered, ‘take me. I love it when you're angry. You're so naive and sweet and strong and violent all together.'

He made a half-hearted attempt to resist, not unaware of the gratifying intensity of these emotions, the pornographic aspect of her sheeny underwear on the dark petite body.

‘I love it, I love it,' she insisted, and pulling open his dressing-gown began to tug him by the two lapels.

Later, when she was quietly sleeping, Morris lay awake in a sort of massacred consciousness where every element of his humiliation was kaleidoscopically alive and vivid. Until it occurred to him to get up and go back into the sitting-room. He switched on the light, picked up the brick in its polythene bag and set it down carefully on a rug by the sofa. Then, examining the floor, he found that there was indeed a severe chip in one of the tiles, an ugly, grainy white patch in what was a Bertelli design of delicate geometric greens. So that now the scenario was even worse. Not only had he been fool enough to give money to a man who, due to the way society had treated him, was bound to be a fraud, but then in his foolish hothead anger on realising his mistake, he had allowed himself to damage a tile that had cost in the region of forty thousand lire and would now cost at least twice that to remove and replace.

Returning to bed, it was to find that Paola had invaded his space as she so often would. There was something childish about her luxurious slantwise sprawl under the heavy quilt. The kind of spoilt child who is used to having and taking everything. Morris put on his dressing-gown and sat in the room's one armchair. For about an hour he stared into the dark. Once again he allowed vivid images of his humiliation to pass before his mind's eye: the Moroccan's practised scowl as he squatted down by the car window; his own foolish flush of triumph as he ‘brought the man down' to one hundred and fifty thousand; Massimina's painted wryness later on in the gallery, as though looking down on a poor, flailing enmired Morris from the great height of redeemed martyrdom; and then his wife's pealing laughter, her animal grunts and satisfactions, as if her husband were no more than a source of pleasure, something to be enjoyed rather than understood and comforted. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,' Morris remembered from his Moralist Paper Tripos Part Two, and repeated it to himself over and over for much of the night. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.' He almost envied his mother-in-law, so close to the blissful threshold.