Mimi's Ghost (3 page)

What, Morris often dreamed, if it had been one of the Bolla family's girls had run off with him, and not Massimina Trevisan? He could then have become the respected export manager of a major company with a vast international distribution network. He could have been responsible for sponsoring small cultural ventures, workshop theatres, local exhibitions of Etruscan art, sober books of artistic photography. Or again, what if he had taught English in more exclusive circles in Milan (as why the hell shouldn't he with his educational background)? Then only the sky would have been the limit: the Berlusconis, the Agnellis, the Rizzolis, quite unimaginable wealth and
signori-
lità
. . . . Given that he had pulled it off with the suspicious and decidedly refractory Trevisans, was it so unfeasible that he could have done the same with the more generous industrial nobility? Could still do it perhaps, if only he put his mind to it.

But there lay Morris's snag. Morris didn't, except in emergencies, put his mind to practical things. And sometimes not even then. He allowed himself to be drawn into aesthetic considerations, existential dialogues. His brain was incredibly fertile territory, but it seemed that what had been planted there was exotic and ornamental, rather than practical. He prided himself on flying off at tangents, on making acute observations, but he could never plan anything more than a day or two ahead. (Would he ever have started the Massimina business had he had the faintest inkling of how it must end? Surely not. That had been an appalling discovery of the very last hour.) He was like a novelist who could never remember what his plot was supposed to be, or more appropriately, a miserable opportunist, picking up crumbs wherever they fell.

Hadn't it been the same with his marriage? The situation had presented itself; it was Paola had made the offer, just as two years ago it had been Massimina approached him, rather than he her. And Morris had been unable to hold off and play for higher stakes, unable to see that he was made for better things.

Of course, there had been certain alleviating circumstances on the second occasion: the euphoria arising from his having survived a major police investigation had doubtless played its part. In the happy-go-lucky mood he'd been in, the surprise invitation to accompany sister Paola to England had had a smack of destiny about it. Riding high, he had accepted, plus of course there had been that prurience, that perverse poignancy of remaining, socially and emotionally, so close to the scene of the crime. Ostensibly Paola had been going on an extended holiday to help her get over the family bereavement, and this again was the kind of pathos that attracted Morris, rich as it appeared to be with noble emotion and dignity. In the event, however, it all too soon emerged that the real reason for her English trip was her need to avoid her friends until such time as she could get over the snub of having been dropped by her long-time dentist fiance.

Be that as it may, when they had arrived at the airport and were sitting in a taxi (the very first taxi of Morris's life as it happened), her cosy suggestion that he stay in the expensive Notting Hill flat which family friends had provided for her had been nothing if not explicit. Still excited, understandably, by his newly acquired wealth (certificates for 800 million lire's worth of Eurobonds in his suitcase), lulled by the excellent Barolo they had drunk with their snack on the plane, and by no means averse to pursuing the sexual experiments which had so pleasantly if poignantly brightened up his abduction of Mimi, Morris did not even look for reasons for not agreeing. He was riding the crest of a wave. He could do nothing wrong. And it had been particularly good fun, one London afternoon to invite his dumb, proletarian, carping father over to the Pembroke Villas address and flaunt an ambience of Persian rugs and Mary Quant curtains that even the pigheaded Mr Duckworth must have recognised (in money terms if nothing else) was a definite step up.

Shrewd herself, Paola had quickly developed a fatal attraction for Morris's own particular brand of shrewdness, his curiously polite stiffness and reservation, which she found a ‘terrific turn-on' (and imagined was exquisitely English and fashionable, not realising, as Morris himself was all too painfully aware, that on the whole Anglo-Saxons were an uncouth and violent lot). For three, four, five months they had thus lodged together, enjoying a sex life as ambitious as it was exquisitely free from sentimental complications. Paola had learned not a word of English and spent a great deal of money. Unlike dear Mimi, it turned out that she shared, more than shared, Morris's interest in expensive food and drink, with the result that Morris had made the mistake, for the first and hopefully the last time in his life, of succumbing to an almost constant state of inebriation, something that had doubtless blurred his awareness of other, less attractive sides to her personality.

Returning to Italy together in the spring of the following year, it had been to find that as a result of an unplanned pregnancy elder sister Antonella was being hurried into marrying the ugly heir to a battery chicken empire, Bobo Posenato, or Polio (chicken) Bobo, as Paola disparagingly called him (one of the few things Morris genuinely liked about Paola was her ability to be wittily disparaging). All kinds of extravagant arrangements were under way. Mamma Trevisan was over the moon with the expediency of this marriage, which obviously far outweighed the tawdry circumstances that had precipitated it. Very large sums of money were being spent. A beautiful apartment had been bought, designer wedding clothes were even now being made. The Due Torri, Verona's most expensive hotel, had been booked for the reception.

With all this extravagance and festivity, sharp Paola had not unnaturally felt herself being upstaged by her blander, rather goosy elder sister. For his part, Morris, having vaguely wondered in London if he mightn't set himself up as the man of the family, had felt his previous antagonism for Bobo reinforced if not doubled or trebled. Hadn't this arrogant boy with his nosiness and enquiries been responsible after all for the rejection of Morris's initial attempt to court Massimina in a traditional fashion, and thus, in the long run, for forcing Morris to become a criminal? And surely it wasn't right that a taciturn, acned young man with no imagination and less manners should be so extraordinarily well set up in terms of wealth and power? It was the kind of naked injustice that fed Morris's insatiable appetite for resentment. Of course, he did have some wealth himself now, enough to buy - what? - two or even three apartments perhaps (why hadn't he asked for more when he'd had the knife by the handle?), but absolutely nothing like the
miliardi
available to Polio Bobo and his ilk; and to make matters worse, Morris, at that time, still had to be painstakingly careful that nobody noticed him spending this money, whose existence he would never be able to explain. Like a fool, he must continue to play the pauper, the poor mouse of the family, even when he wasn't. It was infuriating. Because you weren't rich until you had your hands on the means of producing wealth - Marx had been right about that. With just a few hundred million (lire!) in Eurobonds you were barely hedging against inflation. So that when one evening Paola had very coolly remarked how upset the others would be if she and Morris got in on the act by making it a double marriage, he had immediately said yes, wouldn't they? Plus, if they didn't watch out, Paola had further observed, there was every danger that Polio Bobo, still kept out of his own family business by Father and elder brother, would worm his way into Trevisan Wines and even further into Mamma's good graces, no doubt with the intention of annexing the company to his own family empire. Whereas if they married immediately. Mamma would have to give Morris a position of some, and hopefully equal, importance.

Of course in retrospect Morris saw now what a sad, sordid poverty-stricken kind of opportunism it had been which had made him agree to this: surrendering his privacy to a creature he barely knew out of the sack or in various states of intoxication (because she was keen on marijuana too), committing his very considerable brain power to the promotion of a few plonky vineyards, and above all entering (for there seemed no alternative if he was to make a go of the Trevisan clan) into a partnership with a gawky, spoilt, chinless young man who was as unworthy of Morris's opposition as he was of his collaboration.

But one was who one was in the end. Wasn't this what Morris had been trying to tell his father in spool after spool of dictaphone tape these past five years and more? One was who one was. Character was destiny. This was the kind of thing that Morris Duckworth did (still afraid of ending up on the street despite that 800 million). And if he had recently stopped trying to explain himself to Dad after a cupboard full of cassettes stretching over six or seven years, wasn't it precisely because he had at last realised that by that very same token - character destiny - his father could and would never understand anything Morris tried to tell him? The uncouch old goat was an uncouth old goat. How could you expect him to be otherwise? Morris was Morris, and thus he would remain, locked into his own skull, his own inadequacy, to the bitter end: an underachieving, desperate, somehow pantomime Morris. Wisdom meant accepting this.

Though sometimes he felt quite different about life. Sometimes he felt there was nothing could stop him. Or at least that he might as well enjoy himself.

Events had moved with soap-opera rapidity. The apartment had been bought (with his money, in his name - leaving less than 400 million - but he would never be held to ransom by his wife). Morris had attended a catechism course for adults and turned Catholic (interestingly enough it was here that he first came up against those Third World sufferers whose fate so often occupied his mind these days). A summer date had been set for the wedding. All had appeared to be going well. But then, despite this considerable effort on Morris's part to conform with local mores, Paola, with typical instability, had at the very last moment changed her mind and decided she wanted to be married in the register office so romantically, albeit ominously, located on the supposed site of Juliet's tomb. This was, and was intended as, a deliberate snub to her mother, a punishment for her being so syrupily ingratiating with the Posenato clan and so offhand if not actually cold with Morris.

In the event it turned out to be a brilliant idea. Not only was Mamma furious (for the Posenato family would be upset by the idea of down-market, register-office in-laws), but Morris was actually able to gain ground with the old lady, and even with the fiercely pious (despite her pregnancy) Antonella, by presenting himself as the wise and reserved Englishman ostensibly struggling to have capricious young Italian Paola see reason. Indeed, the ruse worked so marvellously that, come the great day. Mamma's frustration at being crossed like this had been too much for her and she was struck down by a thrombosis precisely as Morris turned from signing the papers to smile at the small gathering of Paola's friends (including, rather disturbingly, the dentist).

Mamma collapsed and was rushed off to
rianimazione.
Hearing the news during a last-minute dress-pinning session for her own ceremony later in the afternoon, Antonella had tripped on her train while hurrying down the stairs and, after much panic, ambulance-calling and toing and froing at the hospital, was found to have lost her child. When Morris had tried (and he had cancelled his honeymoon flight to the Azores, for God's sake) to express his quite sincere condolences to Bobo, the unpleasant young Veronese had scowled at him as if it must somehow be his fault. But there was no limit, Morris sometimes thought, to people's desire to find a scapegoat. Nobly he decided not to bear a grudge against the boy. Perhaps in time and against all the odds they would learn to like each other.

After three months' intensive treatment. Mamma had still not regained the use of the left side of her body. Without having any specific instructions, Bobo simply stepped in and took over Trevisan Wines, inviting Morris, after a couple of violent arguments with Paola, to open a small commercial office for the company in town. And of course what Morris should have said was no. He was not cut out for trade and commerce. Fundamentally, he had a delicate, aesthete's personality, and no desire at all to engage in the hurly-burly of commercial life. He should have been a photographer, a fashion designer, a theatre critic. Yet the opportunist in him wouldn't pass it up. Perhaps because in another department of his mind he had always wanted to be who he wasn't, always wanted to please macho Dad as much as darling Mum. And then because he wanted to be Italian of course, a real member of a real Italian family, and because he felt strangely drawn to the surly Bobo. Either he would make the boy like him, or make him pay for not doing so. In any event, he was given an office two metres by two in the centre of town and invited to find new buyers for a company he knew nothing about. That was six months ago.

Morris slammed the door on the barking dog outside. He was in a small grey office which nothing could redeem - certainly not the cheap gun-metal desks, nor the fifties filing cabinets, nor the squat computer, the smeared windows with their sad view of two large trucks tucked between dirty trees, the shelves with their manuals on vinification and piles of brochures on Trevisan Wines (published in 1973 and far from being exhausted). One of the first things Morris had done on joining the company had been to flick through the English translation of this brochure, which told the unsuspecting buyer that: ‘Born of moronic soils and famous stock of vineyard plants, this nectar of the pre-Alps cannot not satisfy the updated gusto for palette harmony and a fragrance that entices.' His suggestion that the piece be rewritten had been met with scepticism. The company had only a handful of foreign clients and none of them was English. It wasn't worth the printing costs. So that there the brochures still sat in dusty piles, unused and unusable. Indeed, the only new thing around was a down-market pornographic calendar, free gift of the Fratelli Ruffoli bottle-producing company, where the said company's product was presented in intimate proximity to what most men presumably thought of as the great focuses of pleasure. A small plastic crucifix hung opposite the calendar over the door that led through to the bottling plant proper. Morris found both decorations equally distasteful.