Mimi's Ghost Read online

  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.

  Reckoning he had about half an hour, he switched on the computer on the production manager’s desk and one after the other slipped in the disks he found in the top drawer. Unfortunately he had no experience of computers, nor any desire to gain any; thus when finally he found the file. Safari e stipendi, 1990, he was unable to access it. It was too infuriating, especially since this was precisely the kind of information that should have been freely available to a member of the family. Another file on another disk promised to tell him about Fornitori - uvalvini, but again he couldn’t get at it. Still, there was something odd there just in that title, ‘Suppliers - grapes/ wines’. Morris stared at the unpleasantly glowing green letters, the irritating wink of the cursor that seemed to mesmerise thought rather than encourage it. Suppliers?

  “Ciao, said a voice.

  Morris swung round on the rotating chair. The pale young man stood in the doorway.

  ‘Ciao,’ Morris said warmly. ‘Benvenuto. How are you?’

  It’s a holiday,’ Polio Bobo said. ‘And this is not your office.’

  ‘Just doing a little homework,’ Morris said. ‘It’s difficult selling a company when you don’t know enough about it. I got wind of a big order this week and I wanted to know if you could meet it.’

  ‘Ask me,’ Bobo said. He came and sat on the edge of the desk, reached over and switched off the computer. Morris was surprised to see that the boy was tense, if not actually trembling. This somehow made Morris feel more friendly.

  ‘I didn’t want to appear stupid,’ he said. ‘You know, always having to run to ask you. You’ve got enough on your plate.’ Then briefly he said what he had said before: how impressed he was by Bobo’s grasp of the business, and how growing up in a business family had no doubt helped him a great deal, whereas Morris was still very much learning the ropes.

  Bobo appeared to relax a little. ‘How much was the order for?’

  ‘Four thousand cases,’ Morris told him coolly. ‘Doorways, an English chainstore.’

  ‘Four thousand. We can’t possibly do that.’

  ‘I know,’ Morris agreed, ‘but what if we buy out?’

  ‘We have a policy of never buying out.’

  Morris gave his colleague a sunny, just faintly inquisitive stare, allowing the boy a full thirty seconds to change his tack.

  ‘Ah,’ he sighed. But then overcome by a sudden desire to be friendly, to gain confidence by giving it (why shouldn’t they be friends - were they so unalike in the end?), he rather ingenuously (but there were these moments when he liked to think of himself as ingenuous, innocently generous) began to explain his plan. Listen, he said, did Bobo realise how full the city was of illegal immigrants? Of labour of the cheapest possible kind? Yes? And far from being uncultured or anything like that they were all, and especially the Senegalese, quite well behaved, probably from the upper middle classes in their own country, honest, hard-working, not unintelligent. Now if Trevisan Wines were to take on some of these people on the most casual, under-the-table basis to bottle and package the sort of plonk they could buy out almost anywhere - God knows the country was swimming in wine no one wanted to drink -then Morris was pretty sure he could place most of it on the British market, where frankly they wouldn’t know the difference between the rubbish they had been drinking to date and the rubbish they would be drinking from now on, if Bobo saw what he meant. And if things went wrong, well, they wouldn’t have any serious overheads, the immigrants would melt away as rapidly as they had materialised.

  About halfway through this spiel Morris realised that Polio Bobo thought he was joking. Or lying. There was an expression on his waxy boy’s face in which incredulity and suspicion were mixed in more or less equal proportions.

  Morris asked: ‘But you have seen them on the streets?’

  ‘Certo. Bothering me to buy cigarette lighters and pirated cassettes and the like.’

  ‘I just felt I wanted to help them,’ Morris said candidly. Then with a brutally deliberate allusion to their first meeting, when Mimi had brought Morris to the Trevisans’ house as a prospective fidanzato, he added: ‘I mean, I’ve been an outsider myself. I know what it’s like to have people always suspecting you.’

  He looked this rich sibling straight in the fishy eyes. A look, as Bobo obviously registered, of naked challenge.

  3

  Signora Trevisan was in her wheelchair, with that unpleasant tic she had developed at the corner of the mouth. Morris thus faced the problem of choosing between pushing her chair and carrying the very large wreath of flowers he had bought. But would they imagine Paola had bought the flowers? Morris knew there was no limit to people’s inattention. Sometimes it was useful and sometimes it wasn’t.

  Fog had melted into rain and the cemetery car park was overcrowded. Antonella was fussing hopelessly with the chair’s brake release; she couldn’t get the thing to move. Bobo had apparently mislaid the remote control to his Audi I oo in one of his tailored pockets. Morris stepped forward, seeing the solution. ‘May I?’ he offered, and handed the wreath to Signora Trevisan. ‘I thought perhaps you might like to put this on Mimi’s grave.’ Then, without waiting to decide whether the twisted mouth meant a grimace or a smile, he bent down to release the brake. After all, if the stiff-necked woman had welcomed him into the family in the first place, Mimi would never have met the end she had, there would never have been any register-office marriage, because Mimi would have settled for nothing less than the Duomo, so there would have been no stroke and no corpse to visit. Or rather, they could have walked together,
arm in fashionable arm, to lay a couple of token chrysanths beside old Signor Trevisan, dead these fifteen years and more.

  There was quite a crowd flowing through the gate, past the gloomily hooded statues, the confidently engraved resurrecturis on the arch above. Impeccably dressed mourners strutted slowly beneath sober umbrellas, their voices suitably low, greeting friends, muttering sensible cliches. Inside, the porticoes offered a precise geometry of well-swept colour. The grave niches up on the walls were festooned with flowers and there was the pleasant click of expensive patent leather echoing on flags of provincial stone.

  Immediately Morris felt a sense of quiet satisfaction. The ritual formality of it all was so exhilarating, so right. Where would you find such an exquisitely poised communion of the living and the dead in grimy, pragmatic old England, such a sensual mix of extravagant furs and wine-warm marble, a whole population turning out to tip their hats to the industrious ancestry that had generated all this wealth and then so decorously departed? Son-in-law Morris was desperately delicate, easing Signora Trevisan’s chair down travertine steps to where the more pompous family tombs offered a competitive range of albaster Madonnas, guardian angels and stony Crucifixions. Suddenly he felt so pleased with himself, he turned to smile intimately at Polio Bobo, and thoroughly enjoyed the boy’s discomfort, the ripple of incomprehension passing over his mask of sobriety. Did he think Morris was homosexual or what?

  Pious Antonella picked up the smile and returned it, though coloured now by a sort of sad propriety, the consolations of religion playing unmistakably across her goosy cheeks. Could she be pregnant again? An heir to the Trevisan fortune? That would be most unfortunate. Sharing an umbrella with him, Paola was feeling down her fur on the left side to check that it wasn’t getting wet. Ten million lire’s worth, of course, and one had to be careful, but there were moments when a proper sense of occasion was even more important. Morris nudged his wife sharply as he swung the wheelchair into a small avenue of crushed white stones.

  non fortuna, sed labor, the letters were six inches high, gold-edged in a slab of white carrara, and the angel above had not come cheap either. Labor no doubt there must have been. All the same, Vittorio Trevisan had apparently been unable to work his way around a doubtless deserved cirrhosis. Now his photo stared bleakly from an oval blimp screwed into the marble, a respectable square-jawed man in a collar and tie that must have been too tight. Obviously the family had plumped for black and white to. hide the broken veins. Morris smiled at his own ingenuity, non calamitas, sed vinum would have been more appropriate. And putting the brake on Signora Trevisan, he stepped out from under Paola’s umbrella, took the red handkerchief from his jacket pocket and carefully wiped the beads of rain from the image of his defunct father-in-law. If even this didn’t win a nod of acknowledgement from the old witch, then quite simply he could rest his case. They had got no more than they deserved.

  But Morris knew that the real reason his heart was racing was because of Massimina round the other side. The only woman who had ever loved him, whom he had ever loved. And life had forced him to . . . but he must not think about it. He must not and would not dwell on the past, weep over spilt milk. Yet what could one do with spilt milk if not weep over it?

  For a moment then he was almost afraid of seeing her photograph. Why hadn’t this occurred to him? This confrontation. And in company. Would something flicker across his face? Some expression of self-betrayal. Or would he burst into tears? Really he ought to have come here ages ago on his own to get the measure of the thing, see which picture they had chosen. But at the same time he relished his anxiety. Tomorrow, at the Uffizi, he could contemplate her transformation into art. Today he would have to suffer the immediacy of a photograph. So be it.

  Signora Trevisan’s tic had speeded up at the sight of her dead husband. The corner of her mouth twitched obscenely as she tried to say something. In the portico beyond, two old women were exchanging insults over the use of the step-ladder for placing flowers in the higher burial niches. Apparently Paola wasn’t the only one with a poor sense of occasion. Antonella stepped forward and began to arrange a spray of flowers in the vase by the photo of her father. Crouching down, her small pale hands worked quickly, picking stalks from cellophane wrapping. Back behind Signora Trevisan again, Morris watched, trying to still his beating heart. He forced himself to observe what a perfect image of devotion it was: the curved back of the young woman in white seal fur against the rain-wet tomb behind, the quick hands fiddling amongst the flowers. The fingers had that same pudginess tapering to delicate pink that Massimina’s had had. Perhaps Morris had been too hard on Antonella. Perhaps her gestures were not naked hypocrisy, but carried some genuine cultural resonance, the nobility of her race. An intelligent person was always willing to revise an opinion, n’est-ce-pas? In his ear, Paola whispered: ‘Cristo santo, Mo, push Mamma round the other side, dump the wreath and let’s get out of here. It gives me the creeps.’

  The wheels crunched on the stones. The rain stiffened. It was the first time they had all come to visit her. Last year he and Paola had still been in London for i morti. And the curious thing was that Morris was thinking more about Mimi now than he had then. Or in all the months in between. Far more. As if his real mourning had only just begun. Only now had he begun to want to see her grave. Only now was he ready to face the truth: that he had loved Massimina and lost her; that he had let life slip through his fingers, or rather, tossed it violently away. Sometimes the girl was so intensely present to the inner senses, he would have to bite his tongue and clench his fists. And Morris had an inkling that this new and precarious state of mind could only be presageful. Certainly he felt incredibly nervous and excited now. What kind of photo would they have chosen? What effect would it have on him? Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Bobo checking his watch.

  They waited for an old man wobbling by with a stick, then Morris negotiated the chair round the other side. But he deliberately didn’t look down at where the photograph would be. Instead he lifted his eyes to the angel above. A trite saccharoid rendering of feathers and flesh, as if the sculptor hadn’t really been able to imagine how they might go together. He heard Antonella say: ‘Perhaps she was too good for this world.’ A heavy sigh. ‘She was always so innocent.’ Bobo grunted some sort of appropriate male agreement. ‘Povera Mimi,’ Paola said mechanically. Signora Trevisan, to her great credit, was crying softly.

  They stood in the rain, making this public gesture of paying respect, other people walking slowly past. Morris let his eye move down to the inscription, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away. He rather liked this. Paola sometimes accused him of being critical about everything, whereas nothing could have been wider of the mark. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. There was no question of feeling guilty when one reflected on a simple truth like that: appearance, disappearance.

  A noise of crinkling cellophane made him aware that Signora Trevisan was fiddling with the wreath on her lap, trying to lean forward on her chair. Still without looking at the photo, Morris walked round the chair, took the wreath from her hands, stepped over the little rail that served to keep passers-by at a respectful distance, and crouched down by the tomb.

  He thus saw Massimina from only inches away, in intimacy, his own face safely invisible to the others. It was the first time he had looked her in the eye since the day he had brought down the paperweight on her precious skull.

  The family had chosen the same photo they’d used in the papers after her disappearance: the intensely black hair, the radiant breadcrumbs-in-cream complexion, great hazel eyes, a winning smile. Immediately he sensed all the old complicity flooding back. They were lovers and the rest of the family disapproved. The bond was still there. Caught by a tidal wave of emotion, Morris suddenly appreciated what a truly tragic figure he was. He had to fight back the tears. If only she would give him some sign of forgiveness!

  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.