Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  ‘You really overdo it,’ she said, ‘the way you suck up to these people.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were sucking up to that man just because he was a count and had a nice car and it was so obvious really.’

  Morris was suddenly boiling, furious, and at the same time uncomfortable.

  ‘I was talking to Count Vera and his wife because I found them very cultured and courteous,’ he said coldly, ‘which is more than I can say for some people.’

  And suddenly he remembered that letter of hers :’ …but he does it because he feels inferior …’ The bitch.

  ‘But don’t you see you were making a fool of yourself? I didn’t know where to put my face, I mean …’

  ‘And I suppose sitting there silent with your thumb in your mouth is the best way to behave in society?’

  Morris ordered two coffees. It was almost eleven.

  ‘Morri, don’t be angry, I just thought …’

  ‘Shut up. I have to go and phone this guy now who’s going to take us out there. Okay? And I don’t want to hear another word of this crap.’

  If only she knew the kind of fire she was playing with she wouldn’t come out with shit like that.

  Roberto arrived at eleven thirty and was not at all what Morris had imagined. Tall, athletic, with a lively step, Gregorio’s friend was a big lad with huge shoulders, thick reddish hair brushed stiffly back and a proud, slightly hooked nose. His eyes, as he hunted about for them on entering the café, were deep-set, quick and sharp. On appreciating that it was Massimina who was with Morris, he did for a moment seem just faintly surprised, but was neither put off nor ill at ease. He sat down at their table in the warm evening air, spread his arms wide and lazily across the table top, drummed a little beat with long fingers, sized Morris up at a glance that ended in a wink, and then shouted out loud to the barman:

  ‘Enrico, three peach grappas, house special here,’ and he turned and gave them a big smile. His lips, Morris noted, were slightly loose and extraordinarily wide, his smile was friendly, sensuous and mischievous all together.

  ‘Massimina,’ Massimina said.

  Roberto took her slim little hand from the table and lifted it laughing to his lips. Winking again, this time at her, he said, ‘Piacere, Signorina,’ and made a little mock bow.

  Morris had meant to be cold-shoulderish to him, lovey dovey to her. He had meant to demand that they be taken out to Gregorio’s place immediately. But after the flare-up with Massimina he had no desire at all to be left alone with her or show her any affection whatsoever. And then he was immediately attracted to Roberto who was full of good humour and ready to make their acquaintance thoroughly and immediately. So he didn’t object to the grappa, not at the first round nor the second, and he found after a while that he was having a good time, even going out of his way to shine for the boy, to show he could liven up a party as well as the next man, Massimina was giggling already holding her nose to down the grappa. Morris had never seen her so lively, nor so willing to drink. Reaction to their little argument perhaps. Roberto, meanwhile, was poking fun at her, mimicking her little pouts, her sudden righteous frowns and she had realized but didn’t mind it seemed. Morris joined in and found himself feeling at the same time contented and protective. Was this what mellowing out was?

  Not that alarm bells didn’t ring from time to time to spoil things. When the Trevisans realized that they weren’t going to get the girl back. When they told the police. What then? Would they be able to trace the two people who had had reservations in that compartment? Would they find the holdall on the platform? They’d know then he’d picked it up in Rome. Or if the elderly man actually managed a description of him, which meant another photofit that would correspond perfectly with the Rimini one, not to mention with Inspector Marangoni’s knowledge of Morris. (Were all incoming calls to the police station automatically traced? Because if so, they’d know he’d called from Rome, from the station, and it would all add up. What a fool he’d been to call, an idiot.) And just from the routine point of view, wasn’t it crazy to expose Massimina to someone for such a long time like this, to let an imprint of her face sink into his memory? Yes, Morris heard the alarm bells ringing, but he chose, to ignore them. He chose to ignore them because he was weary of worry and alarms. And what was the use of 800 million if you couldn’t sit back and enjoy it. Have a joke, a laugh, for God’s sake. The boy was fun.

  Roberto had taken off his clogs now. He put his hands in them and made them do a little dance on the table, after which he told Massimina the joke about the woman who showed her breasts to a gorilla, and so then Morris told the one about the woman who wouldn’t say a word in the sperm donors’ queue -’one of Dad’s worst - and Massimina spluttered her grappa all over the table and said she’d never have started going out with him at all if she’d known he could be so disgusting. But she was enjoying it.

  It was two o’clock before they rolled in drunk to Gregorio’s place after a hair-raising ride across the cliffs. And nearly four before Roberto went home.

  In bed he said experimentally, 'I'm sorry, Mimi, snapping like that.’

  And she kissed him and said no, it was her in the wrong.

  (Oh, he was adaptable Morris was!)

  18

  Morris liked to see the children well dressed. Their knee-length pants and brightly coloured shirts, carefully groomed hair, made a picture that contrasted strongly with his own childhood of dirty shorts and torn T-shirts. The fact was, they were rich of course, otherwise they wouldn’t be holidaying in Sardinia, but all the same you had to hand it to these Italians, they had a flare for things like this.

  ‘When I have children,’ he remarked, ‘I’d like them to be as well dressed as that.’

  Massimina was solemn, cross-legged, her skirt spread between her knees, slicing tomatoes into a sandwich. She lifted the knife to scratch carefully under her chin.

  ‘It may be sooner than you think.’

  ‘What?’

  She smiled and then blushed faintly through the tan of the last few days.

  ‘Don’t play innocent, Morri. Come on.’

  ‘Come on what?’ he smiled.

  ‘Well, we didn’t use anything, did we?’

  Morris glanced up sharply to find that faint puckered serene smile spreading like melted butter all over her face. Why hadn’t he thought? He’d been so surprised to find himself doing it at all, he’d never thought of the much publicized precautions. He picked up a round pebble and tossed it into the postcard Sardinian sea, careful to avoid the group of children near the water. They were sitting in a tiny stony cove at the bottom of the cliff beneath Gregorio’s villa. Only two other families from another luxury holiday home shared the space, their well-behaved, well-dressed children playing a game of tag.

  ‘You can’t be late already,’ he said coolly, realizing as he spoke that he didn’t know the Italian word for period. 'It was only a week ago.’

  ‘No, but I'm sure I will be,’ And she smiled gravely. Oh so very gravely. She thought this was romance par excellence obviously. She thought this beat the pants and underpants off I Promessi Sposi and you could see she was dying to be perfectly sure, just dying to dash out for her predictor test the moment her period was ten seconds overdue, so that then she could phone Signora Mamma with the fait accompli that would leave the two nunnish sisters howling with jealousy. And send Morris scurrying off to complete the matrimonial documentation tout de suite.

  On the other hand, he really wouldn’t mind. A child, a rich wife, the well-dressed afternoons in the square, at the theatre, the passeggiata, and with his own private income now so they could never hold him to ransom or accuse him of sucking the family dry.

  Except there seemed no way to reproduce the girl without hanging himself.

  (Take the money and run’s Morris. Get out!)

  They ate a picnic lunch - the one o’clock radio news was the thing to avoid - then climbed steeply back up the rocky path to Gregorio’s v
illa and an hour’s siesta on the big double bed in the parents’ room, Roberto was coming over at three to take them along the coast to Porto Torres, where Morris hoped he would be able to find at least some sort of newspaper. He hadn’t had any news for three days now.

  He lay in the half-dark of lowered blinds, Massimina dozing naked beside him, and tried to force himself to face up to things seriously. The point was of course he shouldn’t need any news at all. This hankering after news was just another way of marking time. News couldn’t help him at all now. He had the money. And the longer he delayed his re-entry to Verona, the worse things would be. Plus, Massimina was extremely dangerous. Any moment she might hear something on the radio, see her own portrait photograph on TV, or simply pick up the phone and call home. Morris had told her that Gregorio had left a note saying they absolutely mustn’t make any calls to the mainland as these were all registered and would give away to his parents that he had let friends use the place in his absence. But actually the note Gregorio had really left had said that he, Gregorio, would probably be back in Sardinia around July ist, less than a week away. Morris felt caught in a trap that didn’t seem somehow entirely of his own making.

  He really hadn’t foreseen this problem with Massimina at the beginning. He honestly hadn’t. He hadn’t planned for it.

  He could try to persuade her to run off to South America of course. But she would want to know why, and with whose money. At a push he might get her to England, but she would be determined to see Mamma and sissies first. If only to gloat. Unless he could forge an extraordinarily negative letter from Mamma. Disinherited, never-want-to-see-you-darken-our-doorway-again stuff. But it was too far-fetched, and anyway, she would know her mother’s handwriting to the last dot and comma.

  Or he could run off to South America on his own. This was a serious possibility. Except that Morris didn’t want to go to South America. Or any other far-flung, half-civilized place if it came to that. (Australia, for example, no desire whatsoever to see Australia.) It would defeat the whole object of the enterprise after all, which was to establish himself in some civilized cultural centre living a civilized cultural and tasteful life. And if he had to run off and hide in the jungles of Bolivia or swamps of Paraguay with a troupe of ex-Nazis and mafia fugitives, then it wouldn’t have been worth doing the whole thing in the first place.

  Plus he didn’t actually want to leave her. Christ, he really didn’t.

  If only he had kept it to an elopement. He could have married her and got the money that way.

  Morris lifted her slim arm off his chest, tucked it under her a little where her breasts were squashed against the sheet, and eased himself out of bed. The floor was tiled white and pleasantly cool. He slipped on his shorts and padded through the spacious rooms. Incredible they could be so kind as to let somebody like Morris stay. He must send a thank you letter. Everything was rich, sumptuous, down to the last detail; the television on a corner of raised floor, the white touch-button telephone, ornaments, paintings, a tapestry on one wall in deep reds and blues, a sense of stillness, of sound suffocated and nothing stirring. Why couldn’t it stay this way for ever?

  Morris picked up the paperweight on the desk in the second bedroom, Gregorio’s room. He weighed it in his hand, a great glass globe, big as a cricket ball and quite solid apparently. In the centre a tiny bubble of twisted colour seemed to revolve as you moved the thing round. But his eyes were filling with tears. He turned abruptly to the window which looked back away from the sea over a rugged countryside of gorse and rocky outcrops. Caves? He must check up on that.

  In Gregorio’s wardrobe, behind piles of clothes (Morris had helped himself to an exceptionally well-cut pair of linen summer trousers), was the plastic bag with the money. He undid the knots - the thing was still smelling faintly of orange peel - slipped a rubber band off one of the wads and took a couple of fifty thousand notes to be getting on with. With inflation running at 16 per cent though, he thought, the stuff was losing 16/365 per cent of its value every day. Which was - he would have to buy a calculator- about a twenty-fifth of a per cent every day. Yes. One per cent of 800 million was 8 million and a twenty-fifth of that was about, let’s see, three hundred, maybe three hundred and twenty thousand. So that not doing anything with the stuff he was losing about the same amount every day as he had been earning in two weeks last year. And if he delayed the return to Verona untill just before Gregorio came, that meant a loss of two million and more - two months’ salary for the average man. No, you had to invest and you had to do it quick. There was no point at all in having money rotting in the back of a wardrobe tied up in a plastic bag. A day in Milan, find a good stockbroker and unload a hundred million of it right’ away, that would be a start at least. This afternoon he would buy a calculator and some new batteries for the dictaphone and in the night he would talk it through and through on the tape untill he came to some firm and final decision.

  ‘Morri, where are you Morri?’

  She was in the hall. You couldn’t hear anybody when they moved barefoot on these tiles. Morris shoved the plastic bag back behind a pile of folded sweaters and stood up sharply, catching his head on an upper shelf.

  ‘Morrees,’ she was already at the door. 'You shouldn’t really look through his things you know.’

  She smiled and frowned together as if to say, I do love you, but this is a part of your character that will have to change, like the way you suck up to people sometimes. She stood in the doorway in a white T-shirt and panties, fingering the St Christopher round her neck. And then she said:

  ‘Where on earth did that money come from?’ Because the coloured bank notes were still held between the finger and thumb of his left hand.

  The paperweight was only a couple of feet to his left, arm’s length; and even if there were no caves out there, the countryside was one empty mile after another of gorse, gorse and more gorse. But Morris stayed calm. He loved her, didn’t he? If ever he had loved anybody. He might still find a way out. Anyway, Roberto was due any minute.

  ‘I was trying on a pair of Gregorio’s trousers and I found it in his pocket.’

  ‘Oh, but you shouldn’t,’ she said. 'I mean, trying on his things is a bit …’

  ‘Gregorio is a very close friend of mine,’ he said coldly. ‘He’d be happy for me to use his clothes. And the money if I need it.’ He was aware of almost wanting her to make him angry.

  'I'm sorry,’ she said, biting her lower lip. But he had hurt her now. ‘Morrees, why do you have to talk to me in that tone of voice?’ She stopped and stared at him and he stared back, struggling to keep his expression normal. He must blink to stop the eyes from going glassy. ‘And this morning, when I said I might be pregnant, I didn’t expect you to jump for joy or anything; I know it’s a problem; but you might have been a bit more supportive. You haven’t even talked about it. You act as if … Oh Morris what’s happening, one moment you’re so friendly and loving and the next you seem so peculiar, so distant, I …’ She burst into tears.

  Morris hesitated, stepped towards her, but indecisively, lifted an arm to the warm flesh of her shoulder, her neck.

  ‘Massimina,’ he said, ‘Mimi, honestly I …’ Her neck and shoulders were beautifully angular and proud: you would photograph them from a forty-five degree angle and then slightly above (if she knelt a little now for example) to give a sense of the length, the firmness. ‘Honestly, I didn’t mean to...’

  Perhaps it was like this for all lovers, the affection, the warmth, friendliness, sex, and then those unspeakable things hidden beneath, the attraction growing alongside the horror, the desire to…

  ‘Mimi, I …’

  And then somebody hit a horn outside and it was Roberto.

  Roberto’s father was a hotelier with three hotels all along the coast north of Palau. Roberto helped in the office sometimes in summer and very occasionally in the restaurant of the largest hotel, but otherwise he made no contribution at all and none was expected of him. His studies in
medicine at the University of Rome, where he spent most of the year, were progressing steadily but slowly and he seemed in no particular hurry to finish. He had excellent contacts in the hospital in Sassari, he said, and was bound to get a job there when he did finish, so what on earth was the use of hurrying? He smoked a thin cigar and the car he drove was a white Golf convertible which bowled merrily along the balmy cliffside roads with steep hills of gorse to die left and a sudden rocky drop never far away to the right. Precisely the kind of car he would like to have, Morris thought. He had always admired the Golf convertible. Style with a usefully low profile.

  Massimina was a shade sombre and said she was worried her perm was going to blow out altogether in the wind that swept over the windscreen, and after all the effort she’d made not to let her hair get wet when they went swimming. She sat next to Roberto and turned round occasionally with a pouting anxious frown, probably thinking how embarrassed she was going to be, asking after the pregnancy test in the pharmacist’s, Morris thought. And he leaned forward and whispered that he would go and get it for her himself. She smiled and kissed him and was obviously relieved.

  ‘Oh no!’ Morris said then when they were twenty safe kilometres on their way. ‘I forgot my passport. I can’t sort out my documents at the Questura without my passport.’

  ‘But Morrees, I told you,’

  ‘Look, I can pick up the forms at least and then have them all ready for the next time,’

  ‘What documents are those?’.Roberto asked and Morris appreciated his mistake at once: he should have whispered it.

  ‘We’re getting married,’ Massimina came out promptly. Oh she really enjoyed saying that. Roberto was amused, he was delighted even and now Morris saw he was going to ruin the whole afternoon by ribbing them about it at every possible opportunity.

  ‘I wouldn’t marry him,’ he began at once.

  ‘And why not?’ She was immediately playing his game, having fun.

  ‘Well, he looks a hell of a suspicious character to me.’