Painting Death Read online

  For a moment there was silence. Like all the other rooms in the palazzo the salotto was as spacious as it was austere. Silver-framed photos gleamed on a massive credenza; portraits from the Trevisan past loomed in the shadows; old books and bottles stood on their allotted shelves, rigorously unopened. Every carefully dusted surface emanated the sense of a promise too long and too scrupulously unrealised to be in danger of disappointing, like an invitation to a ball that should have taken place many centuries before. Made up with handsome logs, the great fireplace was eternally unlit, hence in no danger of requiring replenishment. In the ordinary way of things, Morris loved it. But now, once again, he smelled danger; once again he was obliged to reflect that a murderer’s job is never done.

  ‘Forbes went back to England, didn’t he?’ Massimina asked. The girl was sprawled on the sofa with the cat, her pink blouse the one splash of life defying the decorous embalming all around.

  ‘That’s right,’ Morris agreed, hoping his face made clear how worried he was, about his son.

  ‘It’s weird, because he was writing to me pretty regularly,’ Stan said, the wrinkling around his great nose a caricature of perplexity. ‘Snail mail, of course. He never got himself a computer. Wouldn’t have been Forbes, would it? Then one day, out of the blue, nothing.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Morris asked. ‘Is that the case?’

  Stan’s head made a side-to-side movement, rehearsing his amazement. ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘Out of the blue?’ Morris repeated quizzically ‘. . . nothing?’

  ‘Right.’

  Morris flashed a baffled smile, ‘Stan, surely, the celebrated blue is itself that nothing out of which unexpected things surprise us when they come. Lightning bolts for example.’ Or visits from unwanted crime witnesses. ‘You can’t say, or am I wrong, one day, out of the nothing, nothing. Get me?’

  ‘Per l’amore del cielo, Papà!’ Massimina cried.

  Antonella’s face was set in an expression of dismayed embarrassment. Stan seemed genuinely perplexed, as if trying to grasp what Morris meant, what he was trying to convey about Forbes’s disappearance. On returning from the loo, the ageing American had stayed on his feet and his still-scrawny body in jeans and shapeless sweater seemed unchanged from twenty and more years before. Bald and beardless, his head perhaps looked somewhat smaller than it had been, but with, to compensate, larger ears, one of which Stan now tugged in perplexity.

  ‘You got me there, man,’ he eventually laughed. ‘Yep, you got me.’

  ‘Forbes used to copy paintings for you, didn’t he, Morris?’ Antonella tried to help. ‘I remember you saying he had a drink problem.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘That’s weird. He didn’t mention that in his letters.’

  What on earth, Morris wondered, could the ageing Etonian gay and the hip Californian Jew have been writing to each other about? Had they perhaps been lovers at some point? Morris had thought Stan a ladies’ man, but nobody knew better than he not to trust appearances. Even if they had been lovers, though, what would they still have to write to each other about fifteen years on?

  What, if not me? Morris asked himself, with growing alarm.

  ‘Uncle Michael used to help me with my drawing when I was in the scuola media,’ Massimina sighed.

  ‘He did?’ Uncle Michael?

  ‘He was so sweet, and he had a really good eye. He used to lean over my shoulder and guide my hand with the pencil.’

  If the girl’s mother had the slightest inkling how dangerous Forbes had been around children, she would have had a heart attack.

  ‘I remember about five years ago,’ Morris announced as if making a huge effort to tear his mind away from graver matters, ‘he started talking about going back to England. He’d given up the summer school you know. There’d been some, erm, unpleasant accusations and he was getting on in years. He felt nostalgic. I think he was hoping to pick up a state pension and live out in Wales, somewhere cheap, not too far from his ex-wife. That was the last I heard of him. He didn’t leave an address. I felt a bit let down to be honest, after all I’d done for him.’

  ‘Weird,’ Stan shook his head. Evidently this was the American’s favourite word. He pronounced it as if it had two syllables. Morris had always thought it a crime to allow Stan to teach English. The American sighed. ‘Well, I guess I’ll ask around, in case anyone knows. See if I can smell the old charmer out.’

  They all embraced and said goodbye, Stan tripping over the cat and scratching his baldness with a rueful smile. Hopefully, Morris thought, there should be nothing left to smell under the roof of Santi Apostoli del Soccorso where Forbes’s body had been keeping the company of the proverbial church mice for some long time now. It was a shame because he would have been a most useful consultant for Painting Death.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Morris turned on the others the moment they were alone, ‘is why you’re not more concerned about talking some sense into Mauro.’

  With the guest gone, Antonella has taken up her usual position at the big mahogany table, with her embroidery. Her lips puckered and eyes squinted as she wove in the golden thread that blinded Saul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus. Finished and expensively framed, her Bible scenes adorned the church hall where Don Lorenzo held prayer meetings and charity raffles.

  ‘The truth is,’ he accused, ‘you always spoiled him, gave him the impression he was untouchable. And now he’s in deep trouble.’

  Antonella held her peace.

  ‘So I’ll have to do everything, will I?’ There was a slight frisson in assuming this tone of voice with his wife. They hadn’t argued in a decade.

  ‘Come on, Papà!’ Massimina protested. ‘Don’t be childish.’

  ‘As a consequence he thinks he can confess to attacking the police and be shriven with a couple of Hail Marys.’

  ‘Mousie hasn’t confessed himself in years,’ Massimina chuckled.

  ‘I forbid you to call him Mousie.’

  Antonella smiled. ‘For heaven’s sake, Morris, we’ve called him Mousie since he was two and twitched his little nose the way he did.’

  But Morris was staring at his daughter. ‘And who is it you are always firing texts to?’

  Lithe and coltish, the tall girl was crouched beside the sofa, stroking the cat with one hand and texting with the other. In this position her low-slung jeans revealed a good hand’s breadth of primrose panties. There was a happy negligence about her sexuality that boded ill.

  ‘Not always,’ she said.

  ‘Beppe Baguta?’

  ‘Don’t you wish!’

  ‘He’s a nice enough boy.’

  ‘He’s thirty, Papà! You just want me to get off with someone old and rich.’

  ‘If you’d prefer poverty, of course . . .’

  Massimina liked to plunge both hands under the cat’s furry armpits and splay it out on the floor like a cartoon figure.

  ‘I prefer love,’ she told the cat. ‘Don’t I, pussy, pussy?’ She nuzzled her snubbed nose into the creature’s black fur. ‘Lovey love love!’ She used her huskiest voice.

  Morris shook his head. More and more these days the family seemed alien to him, as if he were forever the fall guy for others to make fun of. Curiously, the more successful he became, in a business way, the more they made fun of him. Perhaps there was something he hadn’t understood. In the normal way of things he would simply have given up at this point and retired to The Art Room to chat to Madonna Massimina. She respected him. But tonight there was an emergency.

  ‘Why aren’t we talking about Mauro?’ Morris demanded.

  ‘How did you find him?’ Antonella enquired.

  ‘A black eye, a torn ear, a broken wrist. Toothache.’

  ‘O poverino!’

  ‘Severe toothache.’

  ‘Povero Mousie.’

  Morris was bewildered. Where was the anxiety that had had her shrieking across the piazza at the cardinal this morning?

  ‘And that’s nothing co
mpared with the charges that will be brought. Somebody has to persuade the boy to offer a less damning account of his behaviour.’

  Texting as she spoke, Massimina said: ‘Tell him, Mamma.’

  Morris’s wife set down her embroidery. Her mouth was surprisingly small and round in her large pale face and she had a habit of making it smaller still by pursing the lips in a tense little bud of concentration.

  ‘If you had let me get a word in earlier, Morris, I could have given you the good news that just before you got home . . .’

  She paused, studying the embroidery where the dazzled Saul knelt on the stony road.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just before you got home there was a phone call.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t know who from.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I mean, I don’t know his name. But I think it was the Curia.’

  ‘The Curia? You think?’

  ‘I have that feeling.’

  ‘So what did the mystery Curia caller say?’

  Antonella looked up. ‘He said: Signora Trevisan, do not worry about your son, Mauro. He is in God’s hands. He will come home soon.’

  Morris stared at his wife. She was such a wholesome, middle-class creature, a woman who made purity seem as ordinary and achievable as a dull Sunday on the sofa. All the same, when she came out with stuff like this, how could one not wonder for her sanity?

  ‘I assume the number was withheld?’ Morris asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we can’t phone back?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to.’

  ‘And as a result of this, er, anonymous phone call, you feel quite relaxed now about your son being charged with the assault of ten police officers. You don’t feel the need to take any legal action to protect him, from himself as much as anything else?’

  ‘I believe the man was telling the truth when he said the boy was in God’s hands.’

  ‘We’re all in God’s hands!’ Morris said sharply. ‘And they’re not always the safest of pairs, are they?’ If there was one thing that sometimes threatened his own faith, it was his wife’s.

  ‘One reason I believe him is that as soon as he rang off, Mauro phoned.’

  Now Morris was impressed.

  ‘Mauro phoned ? You’re joking. From a police cell?’

  ‘He said he was feeling better and expected to be home tomorrow or the day after.’

  ‘He’s mad.’

  ‘He said that’s what the police had told him.’

  Massimina yawned. ‘Papà, Mamma spent all day phoning every priest she knows and every organisation you’ve ever given money to. Seems her prayers have been answered.’

  ‘Prayers!’ Morris paced up and down the uneven parquet of the grand salotto. One day he would have it all torn out and a fitted Axminster put in from some carpet warehouse, if there were carpet warehouses in Italy, if there wasn’t some obscure government regulation that prohibited fitted carpeting in fifteenth-century housing.

  ‘So I went to Brescia for nothing,’ he said. ‘With all the work I’m supposed to be doing. And missing the morning too for that stupid ceremony.’

  Suddenly Morris felt overcome by a near suicidal frustration. What should have been one of the best days of his life had gone from the sublime to the tragic, and now, inevitably, the ridiculous. Italy was a stupid stupid place, that was all there was to it.

  ‘You went to Brescia to see Mauro, caro. How can that be a waste of time?’

  Antonella had picked up her embroidery again. She wore glasses for needlework and the light of her table lamp gleamed off the lenses. Framed on a shelf beside her, her own buxom mother smiled down in black and white. Without looking up, Antonella added: ‘You were right to go alone. Sometimes poor Mousie gets the impression that it’s only me who cares for him. It must have cheered him up no end to see his father.’

  ‘The idiot didn’t need cheering up. He was so proud of himself for having attacked a policeman. No, ten policemen.’

  ‘Papà, aren’t you pleased it’s not so bad after all?’ Massimina asked. ‘He won’t even miss his flight back.’

  ‘He’s not going back,’ Morris said sharply. ‘I’m withdrawing him from Tonbridge. I refuse to go on spending a fortune to breed a thug.’

  There was a short silence. Eventually Antonella nodded and said, ‘I’m sure that’s a wise decision, Morris.’

  But this only made Morris feel madder. The truth was that Antonella had never wanted to send their son to England in the first place, or even to have him learn English probably. She wanted the boy to be Veronese, as local as gloomy old sideboards and pompous tombs. Suddenly it was all too much. Declining to join his lady-folk for dinner, Morris withdrew in a huff and spent the evening in The Art Room trawling the net for the best representation of Othello seeing off Desdemona. There was a Chinese company that promised full-size, hand-painted copies of a rather bizarre work by Alexandre-Marie Colin for just $250. Only after he was quite sure that Antonella would already be in bed and sound asleep, did Morris kiss Mimi goodnight and follow, finding his wife snoring lightly under the covers, apparently snug and safe, though in reality, as Colin’s picture so charmingly demonstrated, tremendously vulnerable.

  Despite these piquant thoughts, Morris had fallen asleep the moment his head hit the pillow and was enjoying the deep sleep of the just, when, quite unfairly, this miserable nightmare stabbed him into wakefulness, the hands fastening on his body, the hard feel of the table beneath back and buttocks, the whispering, the cold steel in his throat, the sawing, then his voice yelling out just before his head must surely be severed. Going over it now in the chill of the early hours, because even a nightmare could be turned into something pleasurable if you went back over it sensation by sensation, he was bound to realise that what Antonella must have heard in the agitated seconds before she had woken him, was his cry of Mimi, Mimi, why have you forsaken me? Something like that. So the question had to be, should he say something to her, anything, invent some story, to explain that cry? Perhaps he could say that he had dreamed of their daughter letting him down? It did seem terribly unlikely, and maybe more dangerous than leaving things be. What could his wife ever really make of an exclamation like that? How could she ever know what lurked behind it? The horror (and triumph!) of marriage, Morris reflected, was that you each lay in the same bed year in year out without the slightest inkling of what was going on inside your partner’s skull. Rather than shrinking with time, that distance grew. It began to seem impossible that two people could be so together and so very apart. The thoughts must burst out and overwhelm them.

  As if sensing his anxieties, Antonella’s foot pushed towards him under the bedclothes and their toes touched, then their ankles, their calves. Her left, his right. She was seeking reassurance, he thought. Or offering it, perhaps. Who could tell? If she didn’t know what was in his head, he certainly had no idea what was in hers. Who had she phoned yesterday afternoon, for example, who did she know, who was this person who had assured her Mauro would soon be home? Why hadn’t she called him at once? Was he really supposed to believe that she didn’t know who had phoned her from the Curia? There was definitely a part of his wife’s old Veronese social life that she kept strictly under wraps, even though she denied this. ‘My old paranoid,’ she would laugh if ever Morris accused her of secrecy. As if paranoids were necessarily wrong. Then what had passed between her and Stan before he returned? In The Art Room of all places! How could you ever know these things, without perhaps keeping hidden microphones all over the house? Had Forbes been writing to the American about the murderous paintings Morris was getting him to copy, about their playful plans for a spot of forgery? Was it even possible that Antonella knew the truth about her husband, perhaps the whole truth—imagine!—and had known it all along even, but had nevertheless decided to stay with him. Why? Out of love? Out of trust? Could such an angelic thing ever
be?

  Morris’s eyes filled with tears. He reached across the bed and twined his fingers into hers.

  Man and wife lay like that for some time, foot over foot, hand in hand. After a while, as their fingers moistened together in silent communion, Morris’s mind shifted tack and he found himself pondering the sad and sizeable crucifix just visible, albeit in dramatic foreshortening, above his head. Antonella was determined that there should be a crucifix in every room of the palazzo, indeed every room of every property they owned. All sizeable and very sad. It was quite a collection. There were crucifixes in the children’s rooms, the bathrooms, the cubbies. Against the grain, Morris had even allowed one into The Art Room, a late Botticelli, copied, simply to keep his signora happy. Massimina hated it. Understandably so, with the Christ child in her arms.

  More imagining than really seeing, Morris began to picture the thorny head on the dark wall above him, its expression of suffering, acceptance and love. Love despite all, he thought with a sudden thrill. Such a rare quality. It must be quite a challenge to paint an emotion like that. Quite a challenge to feel it! In general with paintings, Morris reflected now, and this was certainly the case in his murder paintings, it was the relation between facial expression and action that determined the quality of the picture, the expression of the murderer striking the blow, and the expression of the victim receiving it.

  Suddenly, lying in this poignant silence between himself and his wife, it struck Morris with extraordinary force that murder was the moment when the dam broke and the truth about your nearest and dearest burst forth. Two people—Cain and Abel, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Othello and Desdemona—who had lived together in growing tension and distance, were finally revealed to one another. The horror on the victim’s face was not just the horror of one about to die, that was nothing, but of someone who finally understands what has lain hidden for so long in his beloved’s psyche. Yes! Or there was Romney’s Medea where she is sitting looking at her children and you can see what she’s thinking. They are playing innocently, naked of course, and she is full of fury, full of murder. And the dam is cracking. The inhibitions are going. If I can’t kill my husband I’ll kill them! Good! Any moment now she’s going to jump up and strike.