Mimi's Ghost (5 page)

I
blame myself sometimes,' he heard Bobo saying solemnly behind him. ‘I should have realised something of the kind might happen.'

‘Caro,'
Antonella said. ‘Don't torment yourself. Who would have thought?'

Morris laid the wreath delicately so that the petals were almost brushing her cheeks. He was just straightening to get back on his feet when the dead girl winked.

He froze. But there was no mistaking it. It was just the wink she would give him when she was a student in his class and their eyes met. The only student ever to wink at him. Or again when they were in Sardinia and she would say: ‘Come and make love, Morree,
per favore,'

And she did it again. From out of the solemn oval of the photo, screwed into the marble below which her precious body must already have rotted in its coffin, she winked.

‘O
Dio santo!'
a female voice shrieked behind him.

So they had seen! Morris whirled round, his body filling with a sudden dangerous heat. The flush prickled up in his face. His buttocks were tight. He was ready to defend himself. Turning, his eyes met the atrocious stare of Signora Trevisan, head twisted unnaturally to one side, an audible wheezing in her throat.

‘Un dottore!'
Antonella cried, ‘
Bobo, un dottore!'

But neither the grim-faced factory-chicken heir, nor the elegant Paola beside him so much as moved. It was thus left to English in-law Morris Duckworth to run off along the porticoes screaming and shouting for the help that perhaps everybody hoped would come too late.

Morris was trying to explain to Forbes about the immigrants. The older man was sunk into the white leather of the passenger seat, his eyes half closed against the winter glare of the autostrada. First at catechism, where they came to ingratiate themselves with the local priest in the hope of getting into some of the accommodation the Church controlled. Then in the queue at the office that dealt with health insurance for foreigners. On both occasions Morris had been appalled by the way the blacks were treated, and had said as much to the officials involved. It was the complacent arrogance of these people that so upset him. The way acquired position and relative wealth were flaunted as superiority pure and simple. Much the same as with this fellow Polio Bobo he had to work with: all birth and presumption, not a shred of merit. Except it wasn't just that. How could he explain himself? It was the way you couldn't feel such people had ever really suffered, or even had the quality required to suffer. Sometimes you felt they hardly deserved to live. If they were to disappear tomorrow the world would be a better place. Whereas there was a quiet nobility about the Ghanaians and Senegalese he'd talked to. They put up with so much and never complained. They had that sort of sublime resignation you saw in food queues in Ethiopia, or in a Giotto Crucifixion. It was quite beautiful.

‘I feel I'd quite like to help them somehow,' Morris finished simply.

Forbes didn't so much as stir. He was wearing his customary grey suit, white shirt, flowery tie. His face, upturned, looked the kind of surface one dusted rather than shaved. Deep wrinkles where dirt must collect. His hair was a silky, perhaps perfumed, silver.

‘I've always felt, if I came into some money I should use it to help people.'

As he spoke, Morris enjoyed hearing his mother's voice echo in his own, her endless involvement in local church charities, despised by his father of course, though it had given the pig the freedom he needed for his philandering, while she was out helping the handicapped or collecting for the blind. And Massimina had been involved with the
Giovani cattolici,
taking clothes to the poor and so on. Yes, Massimina had been a busy, well-meaning, humble-shall-inherit-the-earth girl. Massimina would not have been lying in bed smoking Rothmans when she was supposed to be doing her final university exam. Morris suddenly felt furious. Though not a tremor came through in his voice.

‘I mean, I always give them a few thousand lire when they clean my windscreen at the traffic lights and things like that. But I feel it's not enough. A few thousand lire isn't going to solve anything, is it?'

Nor a few million, he privately thought. What it took was a job, a steady source of wealth. And his wife was coolly throwing up a position as an architect with all the opportunities that entailed. He hadn't realised how angry he was.

‘So I was wondering,' he went on evenly, ‘if perhaps we couldn't somehow work these poor people in with your little project.'

Forbes finally opened his eyes, shifted in his seat.

‘I beg your pardon, Morris, I, er . . .'

But quite on impulse Morris had picked up the phone from the dashboard. He pressed a single button and the instrument dialled from memory.

‘Sorry, be with you in a moment,' he told Forbes, then was immediately afraid he might have irritated the man, whose superior culture he needed, something to still his whirring mind. These lapses of concentration were disturbing.

The phone trilled. They were approaching the intersection for Florence and Rome, travelling at 130 kilometres per hour, right on the speed limit. A law-abiding Morris kept his left hand lightly on the wheel, his right gripping the Valentino receiver. Came a very laid-back
‘Pronto',
and clearly she was eating something.

It's me,' Morris said. Then using a formula he never had before, he added: ‘Your husband.'

‘Oh, is anything the matter?'

He left the briefest pause. Then his voice was dutiful. ‘I was wondering about Mamma.'

‘I haven't heard anything yet this morning.'

‘Are you going to visit?'

There hardly seems to be any point if one can only look in through the glass.'

‘No.'

As he was overtaking some slow-moving Fiat or other in the central lane, a Saab came racing up behind him, way over the limit and flashing his headlights aggressively. Morris immediately adjusted his speed down to that of the car he had been passing.

‘So you may as well go and do the exam,
cam.
What time is it? Two o'clock?'

The car behind began to honk. Morris gave his brake the lightest tap. He was enjoying the division of consciousness involved in doing two things at once. Or rather three, since in the back of his mind he was still wondering how best to present his grand idea to Forbes.

‘Mo, per I' amore di Dio, I
_{, I}
can hardly go and do my exam when my mother might die at any moment. How could I ever concentrate?'

Well, the same way she had been concentrating on the morning TV Morris could hear in the background. One of those local channels that sold fur coats, lingerie, lucky charms and mountain bikes, twenty-four hours a day.

The honking was continuous now as Morris played with brake and accelerator pedal. Doubtless the idiot would be gesticulating. Then the first sign for the intersection was racing towards them.

‘Well, as you wish,
cam.'
He had long since learnt that you couldn't actually force people to do what was best for them.

But unexpectedly his wife said: ‘Are you upset, Mo?' in such a sweet voice it almost took his mind off the road.

Forced to think, he answered: ‘You know I only want the best for you, cam, that's all.'

He stabbed his foot on the brake and, as the furious Saab all but exploded in the rear mirror, steered fiercely right to slip between the Fiat in the central lane and a van behind, then across the slow lane between two trucks carrying livestock, and so off onto the tightly curving slip-road. A deeply pained look crossed Forbes's face, but Morris sensed an inkling of admiration too. And he hadn't actually broken the law, had he? Just taught a hog a lesson. At the same time he managed to register the confiding voice in his ear saying: Tact is. Mo, I feel I should be around because I wouldn't like anything odd to happen with the will, or for Mamma to wake up and make a new one. If you get me? There was a look on Bobo's face yesterday that I didn't like at all.'

Morris hadn't actually thought of that. He steadied the car and kept his eye on the signs. You imagined you were wise to everything, you had seen it all, then some mere girl turned out to be light-years ahead, and you realised you were only a poor amateur, an ever-ingenuous Morris. You had no chance of keeping up with all the sick perversions other people were capable of. Getting an old woman to change her will on the very point of death indeed!

‘I' call you later,' he said brusquely.

But she didn't want him to hang up. Her voice changed again, became husky and soft. ‘Are you alone, Mo?'

‘Of course. Who would I be with?'

‘Mmm.'

There was a brief silence. Forbes had sunk down in his seat again, a faint smile on his aristocratic face.

‘Will you do something for me?' The voice was vulgarly seductive. Ashamed, Morris jammed the receiver to his ear.

‘What?'

Im feeling very . . . mmm,' Paola said. ‘Here all on my own. You know how I get.'

Morris knew.

‘I mean, if someone very sweet told me to unzip my pants and do something that they like doing too, I think I might just have to obey.'

Morris closed his eyes for a moment, then remembered to blink them open as they came racing out onto the other autostrada, Florence-bound. His body had filled with an exciting prickly heat. At the same time there was that strong feeling of distaste. If he didn't watch out he'd be nothing more than a sex toy to her.

‘If you stopped for a while, little Mo could obey orders too. What are car phones for after all?'

Morris said: ‘I was supposed to see a client at ten-thirty and I'm already late.'

‘Come on, Mo,
Hi dolce!'

‘Veramente,
I can't.'

‘Antipatico!'
she whispered fiercely. ‘Spoil-sport, I'll make you pay for that later.'

It was unclear whether this was meant as a promise or a threat.

‘Paola?' he said. Was he slightly in awe of her?

‘Dio,
will I make you pay!' She hung up.

Morris clicked back the receiver, put both hands firmly on the wheel. You phoned your wife of six months standing to try to get her to take a responsible attitude towards her life and career, and what did she do? First she pleaded the excuse of a dying mother, a predatory brother-in-law, and then she tried for mutual masturbation over the car phone. There were times when dismay was the only proper response. Morris drove on for quite some while in bitter silence.

The car rode up into the browns and dull greens of the Apennines, a rollercoaster landscape of olives and cypresses, bare vines reduced to fields of gnarled crucifixions against the stone-speckled soil. Morris tried to concentrate on the aesthetic pleasure of taking every curve at exactly the right speed while always leaving the same distance between wheel and white line. Forbes, meanwhile, seemed in no hurry to return to their previous conversation, despite the delicate point at which they had left it. And Morris appreciated that. Forbes was the kind of intelligent man who would be sensitive to his temporary discomposure. Morris had done the right thing in escaping from the feckless crowd of younger expats who had tormented and humiliated him in his earlier days in Verona, the ex-hippies and would-be artists, their coercive mateyness and empty dreams (not to mention the rather unnerving fact that community leader Yankee Stan had actually seen him that day at Roma Termini with Massimina: there was a danger!). No, the wisdom of an earlier generation was so much more gratifying. Indeed it occurred to Morris that if he had met Forbes earlier on perhaps, when he first arrived in Italy, yes, if he had frequented someone like Forbes, rather than the Stans of this world, then there would have been no need for the extraordinary aberration of two summers ago. Or, better still, if he had had Forbes as a father, if . . .

‘Siste viator!'

They had just passed a sign for a service station. Interrupting Morris's promising train of thought, the older man's voice pronouncing one of his endless Latin tags had a gravelly, emphatically upper-class texture.

‘Sorry?' Morris said. He had decided never again to pretend to understand something when he didn't. Only people with an abject self-image did that kind of thing.

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,' Forbes explained with a deprecating smile. ‘Stop.'

It was the second time in only an hour's driving.

Morris pulled in at the service station and watched as Forbes's tall, spindly figure shambled over to the
servizi.
Inevitably, as he watched the flapping grey suit in the cold winter light, the word ‘Gents' sprang to mind. Morris felt calm and happy again. In the end he had good friends, exciting projects. His psyche was not irremediably damaged. All would work out.

He was just lifting the phone to ask dear Mimi whether she mightn't confirm yesterday's sign with something more concrete today, some indication that she approved of his plan, when a movement beside the car startled him.

‘Vu cumpra'?'

A squat Moroccan was grinning through the window Morris had unwisely buzzed down. The man's bad breath came through despite freezing air and diesel fumes.

‘Vu cumpra'?
Wanna buy? Very good video camera.
Molto economico.'

Morris stared at him.

‘Economico, molto
cheap,
molto buono.'

‘Davvero?'
His mind moved rapidly. Paola had talked about doing some videotaping, and it wasn't the man's fault if society had reduced him to this illicit trade and parlous state of personal cleanliness. There had been a time when Morris rather feared he was headed that way himself.

A long scar snaked down from the bloodshot corner of the Moroccan's left eye.

‘Quanto?'
the Englishman asked.

‘Two hundred.'