Mimi's Ghost Read online

  Morris asked: ‘Where are the others?’

  Forbes was tired and clearly out of sorts. His paper was full of blottings and erasures. He explained that Azedine and Farouk had disappeared yesterday night. The Senegalese had taken fright when the police came and searched the place. The others were now upstairs packing and trying to decide what to do.

  Morris asked where Forbes intended to place the ad.

  ‘Various publications,’ he said rather vaguely, ‘in the, er, private education sector.’

  Tut the name of the school in caps,’ Morris told him, with that tone of authority that was coming so naturally these days. ‘You can say that the starting date is July. We should have the place ready by then. Meanwhile‘ I’d be grateful if you could get everybody downstairs for breakfast and have a fire lit in the study. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

  He then went out to the car again, drove to Quinto, bought twenty croissants from the pasticceria, a new pack of coffee, milk, sugar, , butter and jam. He already had his hand on the ignition key, when the kind of indulgent, generous idea he could never resist crossed his mind. He got out of the car, walked back to the local tobacconist’s and asked for two hundred of the best cigarettes they had. ‘Not for myself, you understand,’ he explained, for he hated to be thought of as a smoker. Smoking was so ugly. The sleepy young woman, however, was clearly entirely indifferent to Morris’s habits. She climbed on her chair and tugged at packets on a top shelf, allowing him to see a fair way up the skirt of what was no more than a flimsy night-dress with woollen jacket worn over. People, he reflected as he watched, were so used to each other’s shortcomings, each other’s shamelessness, that he might perfectly well have picked up one of the awful pornographic magazines they were selling (something he had never dared to do), or even told her he was a serial killer, and she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. What could you expect of people in such an age? Any kind of respectability had to be fought for tooth and nail.

  Ten minutes later, when he had those destitute immigrants all gathered round a smoky fire with their caffe latte, croissants and Phillip Morris cigarettes, he explained that he was now personally in control of the company. Everything depended on him. They were thus being immediately taken on again, and this time officially. Their papers would be put in order, taxes and contributions would be paid and they would have proper contracts of the standard union-subscribed variety. So long as they behaved themselves, they would have permanent jobs and need not fear for the future.

  Sitting on the corner of the room’s big table, informally, like the teacher who likes to eliminate the distance between himself and his eager students, Morris was moved in the silence after he had spoken to observe the incredulity on their dusky faces, the faintness of the smiles on sullen black and brown cheeks, the extent to which they were clearly so used to things going wrong they couldn’t actually believe their good fortune, their having found a benefactor.

  ‘Permanent jobs,’ he repeated. Already it was as if killing Bobo had been the right, no, the necessary thing, and terribly worth while, and if they arrested him it would be them committing the real crime, putting a spoke in the wheel of interracial co-operation.

  After a short pause, Kwame asked: ‘What if Mr Posenato, he come back?’

  Some of the others nodded and muttered, but Morris was thinking: how brilliant, what a perfect accomplice the boy was, and he said that they would deal with that problem when it arose. Tor the moment the police are working on the theory that he has been killed or kidnapped by Azedine and Farouk.’

  It was remarkable how lightly one could say this kind of thing.

  Forbes, however, who had been sitting a little to one side, staring dreamily at the fire, started quite violently: ‘But that’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Morris was a little ruffled.

  ‘Farouk is such a gentle boy, he would never . . .’

  ‘Well,’ Morris came in hard, ‘I would never have imagined he was a raving homosexual who would let himself be buggered over his boss’s desk.’

  Forbes winced.

  ‘Once you know that somebody’s perverse,’ Morris insisted, ‘they are clearly capable of anything, aren’t they? I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that people like that had killed Bobo. I’m just sorry we ever let them in here, or didn’t weed them out after that business with the septic tank.’

  Forbes opened his mouth, whether purely in disbelief or intending to object wasn’t clear. In any event nothing came out. His eyes were wide with a moist mixture of concern and amazement. Then it was as if he muttered something in Latin, but nobody heard. Anyway, Morris-was already ploughing on, because it was so important all of a sudden to have a plan and a sense of purpose. Otherwise he might just lose the will to go through with all the gruesome details ahead. Like those cancer patients who need something to live for before they can make a miracle recovery, and so go and climb Kilimanjaro or open a handicapped children’s home in Bucharest.

  ‘From here on,’ he was saying in a voice now noticeably louder, ‘I am in charge of Trevisan Wines, and as long as the company can make money, I will be guaranteeing you all a decent job. As for the practical details, you will be housed here in Villa Caritas until the end of March, when major renovations will take place and you will be expected to find your own accommodation and take your rightful places in Italian society.’

  Upon the mention of major renovations, Forbes’s anxious features smoothed. The blacks and Slavs were dumbstruck.

  ‘So, you go back to work this evening. OK? Because we have quotas to meet.’ If necessary the Doorways truck could stay overnight.’Meanwhile . . .’-but here Morris hesitated. When he began to speak again his voice had become quieter and more intimate. ‘Meanwhile, I would like to share a piece of happy news with you. My wife, Paola, told me this morning that she is pregnant with our first child.’

  Forbes immediately said: ‘Oh, my good fellow, I’m so happy for you!’

  ‘Good news, man!’ Kwame shouted. The others just murmured incoherently amongst themselves, cross-legged on stone flooring in the smoky room. But Morris was not the kind of person who expected a formal display of gratitude or congratulations (though doubtless he would have offered those things himself had he been in their position). ‘Kwame, come with me, please,’ he said briskly and, turning on an almost military heel, left the room.

  There were faxes to be sent to England. There were the workers to talk to. There were papers to be got in order, sums to be calculated, the last details of tomorrow’s funeral to arrange. At last Morris was a legitimately busy man.

  19

  The will said nothing more than that Signora Luisa Trevisan’s goods and chattels should be divided evenly between her surviving daughters and that she herself wished to be buried in the family tomb along with her dear husband, Vittorio, and her much-mourned daughter, Massimina.

  Could anyone have ever imagined otherwise?

  Morris folded the two sheets of protocol paper and looked up gravely. Antonella had her face in her hands on one of the antique chairs by the crystal-topped dinner-table of only two evenings before. The dusty old priest, always ready to collect cast-off clothes, stood beside her holding her hand, rather awkwardly, Morris felt, for someone who should be used to this role; while Kwame, erect in the corner against waxed pink stucco, looked for all the world like the kind of primitive statue that has become so popular amongst the thinking bourgeoisie: a sort of appropriation and exorcism of that alien world that suffers on the television and threatens you in the street.

  As long as Morris could formulate thoughts that were intelligently redundant, then he needn’t think of himself as merely the creature of his farcical crime. That was the struggle that lay before him: always to be more than what he had merely been obliged to do.

  He said: ‘I suppose, since the funeral is early tomorrow, they will have to open the family tomb today?’

  Antonella began to weep again. Beside her were a stack o
f freshly printed copies of Famiglia Cristiana, which presumably it was her duty to deliver to the other luxury flats. But now she simply put her face on them and shook with emotion.

  The priest moved softly over the parquet. ‘She’s very upset,’ he whispered to the brother-in-law. The police just came and asked some very unpleasant questions.’

  In what sense unpleasant?’ Morris had no difficulty feigning alarm.

  ‘About her husband being out at night.’

  ‘Ah.’ Morris could now nod understandingly, and did indeed feel very sorry for her. Though in a sense he had done her a huge favour relieving her of a creep like Bobo. Presumably having a sordid affair with some factory girl - your Bimbetta indeed! ‘Yes, yes, I see. It’s just that someone has to, er, think of the practical side,’ he explained. ‘And unfortunately I don’t know how things work vis-à-vis graveyards here. I mean, what the family’s supposed to do and what the authorities do.’

  The priest led him to a window that looked out over one of those views one can only hope console the rich for the heavy responsibilities they have to bear: blue covers over the swimming pool, lavender hedges and rosemary, the wistful statuettes gesturing in the shrubbery, and beyond that a cypress-lined drive framing the city’s finest towers and campanili: Sant’ Anastasia, il Duomo, La Torre dei Lamberti. The sort of view that might more successfully have tempted Christ, Morris thought, had it been available at the time.

  ‘The cemetery authorities do it all,’ Don Carlo was saying. They remove the other coffins in the grave today and put the new one on the bottom tomorrow. It will all be looked after.’

  ‘Why put the new one on the bottom?’ Morris asked what he already knew, hoping he would be told more than he had asked.

  ‘So that when it’s time to remove the oldest defunto to make room for another, they’ll be on top.’

  ‘Ah, when they put them in the ossuary?’

  ‘Yes.’ But the priest would say no more.

  ‘By the way,’ Morris continued, as Antonella could be heard blowing her nose behind, ‘I’m trying to get the extra-comunitari, you know, the immigrant boys at the hostel, er, in regola. Papers and everything. I haven’t had time till now, but with the police suddenly, you know, on the scene, I’ll have to do it, otherwise the poor boys will be back on the streets again, starving and thieving.’

  He paused. Don Carlo politely said: ‘I understand.’

  ‘Anyway I was wondering,’ Morris went on very quickly, as if it were difficult for him to ask this, ‘if you could help, padre*, when it came to, well, smoothing things over with the powers that be. I mean, explaining to them that we’re talking about an act of charity.’

  How Italian Morris had become! ‘Un atto di carità’ sounded so exactly right in Italian.

  The bespectacled Don Carlo disturbed the wrinkles round his mouth with a smile and said of course. He would put in a word.

  All Morris would have to do now would be to make the expected contribution to the roof repair fund.

  ‘A proposito), the priest went on, moving back toward Antonella. ‘I met your Signor ‘Orbes when we took the clothes out to your hostel. Un uomo meraviglioso!’

  ‘Yes,’ Morris agreed and immediately warmed to the fellow.

  ‘Very cultured. He said he would come to Mass at San Tommaso just as soon as he has some form of transport.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll bring him myself, if that’s all the problem is,’ Morris said, and he and Don Carlo exchanged the kind of warm, mutually respectful smile he had never been able to share with his father. The truth was he should have started regular church attendance ages ago.

  ‘Wonderful idea he has for a scuola di cultura,’ the priest said. ‘He asked me if I wanted to conduct some of the lessons.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Morris enthused.

  ‘Palmam qui meruit ferat,’ the cleric said modestly.

  ‘Quite,’ Morris agreed at random.

  The priest had to go now. Very gently, the older man asked Antonella if he should give the copies of Famiglia Cristiana to someone else to deliver. She found a snuffle of a voice to say no, no, it would distract her a little delivering them, and it had been so kind of him to visit and pray with her.

  Morris moved over and sat opposite the young widow. Their reflections hovered on the glass-topped table between them, as if in a wishing-well, and when she looked up from another attack of tears he took her pudgy hands across the polished surface, remembering how small and quick and white they had seemed when she had arranged the flowers on her father’s grave in November.

  He said: ‘Listen, Tonia’ - and it was the first time he had called her that - ‘the only reason Bobo went out at night was to check that all was well on the night shift. Va bene? He frequently told me he felt it was his duty to put in an appearance every few nights.’

  She lifted her rather blowsy face and half smiled through her tears. Morris smiled back. Again, he was thinking how there was something exquisite about her dowdiness, her obvious honesty: an emerging quality, if there was such a word, of ‘genuinity’. So that not only had he done her a favour in ridding her of an inferior and unfaithful partner, but also in giving her the suffering that would bring her best qualities to maturity. Already she was a finer woman than she had been forty-eight hours ago.

  Gently, he said: ‘Now, let me just give you the practical details. The wreaths will be arriving in Quinzano this afternoon. Somebody will have to be there to receive them. I’ve got the authorities to put up death notices round the village, so don’t worry about that. The hearse will be at the house at nine tomorrow morning. In the meantime, frankly, I would just tell the police to leave you alone. I’m sure you’ve told them all they need to know.’

  She nodded. Her fingers were torturing a small crucifix round her neck now. Otherwise she wore a black blouse with a very serious brassiere injudiciously white beneath.

  ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he remembered, ‘Stan called me earlier on. Apparently he tried to call you yesterday evening. He said he’d have to suspend the lessons for a while because somebody’s given him a course to teach in Vicenza. I said I’d pay him whatever you owed.’

  Antonella stared at Morris blankly.

  ‘When you want to go on I could always do the lessons myself,’ the brother-in-law said.

  Again she could only nod, but as Morris turned away and signed to Kwame to go, she got enough control of herself to say: ‘Grazie, grazie, Morris. Sei davvero sirnpatico. Truly sweet.’ She stood up, and came round the table and kissed him softly on each cheek, holding him a little, as one who finds comfort above all in the gesture of comforting others.

  ‘Grazie,’ she repeated. Her plum-dark eyes glistened.

  All qualities, of course, invite you to possess those who embody them, but Morris found this trustfulness of hers quite the supreme attraction. It reminded him of Mimi. Whereas Paola didn’t trust anyone an inch. Let alone her husband.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it will all work out.’

  For a moment he almost wished he could have given the woman her husband back. No, he did wish it. He was profoundly sorry. Not to prolong the poignancy, he gave her rounded shoulders one small squeeze, gestured to Kwame, and was off.

  In the car, Morris told Kwame to drive. Which gave the Englishman a chance to observe his Third-World accomplice with more care. That curiously grainy skin real Negroes have, a cortex almost. Thicker, surely, than his own too-delicate peach-drying-to-parchment. Though he had begun to use Paola’s formidable array of moisturisers; not purely out of vanity, but because of the small thrill he always got from fiddling through the mysteries of a woman’s cosmetics bag.

  He thought again of Mimi’s darned pants that he had found in Signora Trevisan’s sewing basket. Could he reasonably ask Paola to wear them sometime? Would she get off on that?

  Then he remembered she was pregnant now, and this made him feel calmer and more respectful. All could yet turn out for the best with Paola. It was pointle
ss hankering after Antonella’s piety. Perhaps it was his appointed duty to make a good woman out of Paola. A sort of trial. Life might yet settle into something decent and honourable.

  From now on you drive me everywhere I need to go.’

  ‘OK, boss.’

  Taking a bend coming down from Avesa, the car wandered dangerously into the middle of the road. Kwame had to swerve to avoid an oncoming motor bike. His round cheeks remained impassive, as though nothing had happened. Morris’s likewise, though the blood had clearly drained from his face. And when Kwame simply ran the light where the country road joined the main statale from Trento, Morris realised that this was the right thing. This humble submission to contingency must guarantee one luck.

  ‘You will also become my secretary and learn how to run the company when I’m busy elsewhere,’ Morris went on determinedly. ‘In particular you will be responsible for the other boys at Villa Caritas, you will refer any needs to me and above all you will make sure that none of them is involved in the kind of behaviour that could cause trouble with the Italian workers or in any way pollute the atmosphere. I don’t want a repeat of the Farouk-Azedine business. I find that kind of thing disgusting.’

  Even as he was speaking, Morris reached forward, picked up the phone and, in an extraordinary act of memory , phoned the number he had last phoned from Roma Termini almost two years ago when he was about to pick up the ransom, about to run into Stan.

  ‘Inspector Marangoni here.’

  Not unsurprisingly, the man had not been promoted in the meantime. The office was the same, the phone number the same.

  ‘Sono Morris,’ he said. ‘Morris Duckworth.’

  There was the kind of brief pause that suggests that a call is unwelcome.